"I'd like—" he began.
But still he had no chance to say it, because the teapot started vibrating like a struck gong. Birdie was convinced that it was getting ready to do something drastic, and he jumped smartly backward. While he was doing it, Graves hopped in and started talking again. From the tone of voice it was Steven.
"Before we are all passed along to join the others," he said, "I have questions. About this planetoid, and the Builders, and why they need humans and Cecropians. And where we will be going. And who you are, and what your own role is in all this. And what are the three species you mentioned. Those are questions that I feel sure you can answer, as perhaps no one else can. So if you would be so kind . . ."
Birdie was sure that Steven would be told to shut up. But instead The-One-Who-Waits gave another of those rude noises that would discourage Birdie from ever inviting it to parties. It stopped vibrating all over and hung in the air for a while. Finally it came drifting closer.
"Questions," it said. To Birdie it sounded exhausted, as though it had been planning to go off somewhere quiet and take another six-million-year nap, and Graves was interfering with the scheme. "That is perhaps . . . predictable. And not unreasonable."
The-One-Who-Waits kept moving forward until it was actually crowding them back on the ledge. No one touched it, but Birdie could tell that the silver surface was cold, cold enough to put a chill into the air all around it. Close up, he still could not see what the other was made of, but there were teeny little ripples running over the surface, no more than a millimeter or two high. The-One-Who-Waits had to be at least partly liquid. As it settled down on its tail, Birdie could see its shape sag, bulging out at the bottom.
"Very well," it said at last. "I will talk to you. It is best if I begin with my own history . . ."
Birdie groaned to himself. Wouldn't you just know it! Six million years old, and more alien than anything in the whole spiral arm—but no different in some ways from the rest of them.
Given a choice of subjects, The-One-Who-Waits was going to talk about himself.
CHAPTER 19
A flag buried deep in Rebka's brain told him what he was looking at in the tank. He had never seen anything like it before, but the skin of his arms tingled and hair stood up on the back of his neck.
"Hans?" Darya said again. "Move over. It's my turn."
She tugged at the sleeve of his suit. Then something in his rigid posture told her that this was nothing trivial, and he was not going to move. She crowded closer to him and again peered in through the tank's transparent port.
It took a while for her eyes to adapt to the reduced light level. But while she was still making that visual adjustment, her brain objected loud and clear: Alert! This is a stasis tank! There should be no light inside, none at all. Not while the tank was preserving the stasis condition. What was going on?
But by then she could see, and all rational thinking had stopped. No more than three feet from her face was a great, lidded eye, as big across as her stretched hand. That cerulean orb was almost closed. It sat in a broad, bulbous head of midnight blue, over a meter wide. Between the broad-spaced eyes was a cruel hooked beak, curving upward, easily big enough to seize and crack a human skull.
The rest of the body sprawled its length seven meters along the tank; but Darya needed to see no more.
"Zardalu." The word came from her lips as a whisper, forced out against her will.
Hans Rebka stirred beside her. The soft-spoken word had broken his own trance.
"Yeah. Tell me I'm dreaming. There's no such thing. Not anymore."
"And it's alive—look, Hans, it's moving."
And with that remark, Darya's own sense of scientific curiosity came flooding back. The Zardalu had been exterminated in the spiral arm many thousands of years earlier. Although they were still the galactic bogeymen, everything about them was theory, myth, or legend. No one knew any details—not of their physiology, their evolution, or their habits. No one even knew how the cephalopods, originally a marine form, had been able to survive and breathe on land.
But Darya suddenly realized that she could answer that last question. She saw a sluggish ripple of peristalsis running along the length of the great body. The Zardalu must be breathing using a modification of the technique employed by ordinary marine cephalopods for propulsion—except that instead of drawing in and expelling water like a squid, the Zardalu employed that same muscular action to take in and expel air.
And for locomotion?
She stared at the body. The upper part was a round-topped cylinder, with bands of smooth muscle running down it. The eyes and beak were placed about one meter down. Below the beak sat a long vertical slit, surrounded by flexible muscular tissue. There was no difference in width between head and torso, but below that long gash of the mouth was a necklace of round-mouthed pouches, about six inches wide and circling the whole body. Darya could see pale blue ovals of different sizes nestled within the pouches. Stretched out along and beyond the main body was a loose tangle of thick tentacles, also pale blue. They were amply strong enough to walk on, though a set of broad straps wrapped around their thickest parts. Two of the tentacles ended in finely dividing ropy tips.
If those thin filaments were capable of independent control, Darya thought, a Zardalu would have manipulative powers beyond any human—beyond any other being in the spiral arm.
She felt an uncomfortable awe. The Zardalu might fill her with dread, but at the same time she knew that they were beautiful. It was a beauty that came from the perfect matching of form and function. The combination of muscular power with delicate touch could not be missed. The only anomaly was the webbing that girded the upper part of the tentacles.
"What are the straps for, Hans?" she whispered. "They can't be for physical support. Do you think they're for carrying—offspring, or supplies and weapons?"
But Rebka was still staring at the slow ripple of movement along the body. "Darya, this shouldn't be happening. It's impossible. Remember, this is a stasis unit. Everything's frozen, just like time has stopped. But that thing in there is breathing—slow, but enough to see. And look at that eye."
There was a flicker of movement in the heavy lid. While they watched, the tip of one thick tentacle twitched and curled a few centimeters.
Rebka stepped sharply away from the tank. "Darya, that Zardalu isn't in stasis. It may have been, a few hours ago. But now it's starting to wake up. I've no idea how long reanimation will take, but Speaker-Between must have started the process as soon as we arrived. He said that there were 'two forms only' here, and I assumed that he meant the two of us. But now it looks as though he meant two species, Human and Zardalu. We have to try to find him and warn him. He probably has no idea what the Zardalu were like."
He was already moving from one stasis tank to the next, peering in for only a moment at each.
"They're all the same. All starting to wake."
He hurried back to the food-supply unit, grabbing handfuls of still-frozen packets and stuffing them into his pockets. Darya marveled that at a time like this he could still think of food. She remembered how hungry she had been feeling, but at the moment she could not have eaten a thing.
He turned impatiently to her. "Come on."
She obeyed—reluctantly. It was against all her instincts, to leave something so novel, about which so many students and experts on the cultures of the spiral arm had expended so much speculative effort. Hans might be right when he said that Speaker-Between might have no idea what the Zardalu were like; but that was just as true of human knowledge of the Zardalu. There was speculation and theory, but no one knew anything. And here she was, with a perfect opportunity to determine a few facts.
Only one thing made her follow right after Rebka: the fear that had crept up her spine unbidden, like a capillary flow of ice water, when she first saw that dark-blue skin and bulky body. She did not want to be alone with a Zardalu, even an unconscious one.
According to all exp
ert knowledge, humans had never encountered Zardalu. The Great Rising had happened before humanity moved into space. But there could be deeper wisdom than anything in the data banks. The submerged depths of Darya's brain told her that there had been encounters, back before human recorded history.
And they had been bloody and merciless meetings. Sometime, long before, the Zardalu scouts had taken a close look at Earth. They had been stopped before they could colonize. Not by any action of early humans, but by the Great Rising. Dozens of intelligent races and scores of planets had been annihilated in that rebellion. And Earth had benefitted, unknowing, from their sacrifice. The Zardalu had been exterminated.
Or almost exterminated.
Darya found herself shaking all over as she went after Hans. He was right. They had to find Speaker-Between and warn him, even if they were not sure what they were warning him about.
Reaching the Interlocutor should in principle be trivially easy. They had entered the sphere of his body and never left it. Therefore they must still be inside Speaker-Between.
But Darya did not believe it. She did not trust the evidence of her senses anymore. The chambers containing the stasis tanks and the Zardalu were just too big to fit inside Speaker-Between. The Builders had a control of the geometry of space-time beyond anything dreamed of by the current inhabitants of the spiral arm. For all she knew, Speaker-Between could be very far away—thousands of light-years, as humans measured things.
She glanced behind her as she followed Hans Rebka to the two doors of the chamber—the same doors through which they had entered, less than an hour before. The great coffins still sat silent. But now that she knew their contents, that silence had become ominous, a calm that heralded coming activity. She was strangely uncomfortable about leaving that chamber, and even more uneasy about staying there.
As they passed through the first sliding door and then the second one, Darya knew at once that her instincts had been correct. The outside had changed. They were emerging not into the level and infinite plain where they had encountered Speaker-Between, but to a somber gray-walled room. And instead of high-ceilinged emptiness, or the webs, cables, nets, and partitions of Glister, Hans and Darya were standing before hundreds of ivory-white cubes, ranging in size from boxes small enough to tuck easily under one arm, to towering objects taller than a human. The cubes were scattered across the floor of the rectangular room, like dice cast by a giant.
Nothing moved. There was no sign of Speaker-Between.
To Darya's surprise, after Rebka's careful inspection of their surroundings he walked forward to look at a couple of boxes. They stood side by side and came about up to his knees. He sat down on one of them, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a packet. As she stared he opened it and started to peel the thin-skinned fruit that it contained.
"It's still a bit cold on the inside," he said after a few moments. "But we can't afford to be too picky."
"Hans! The Zardalu. We have to find Speaker-Between."
"You mean we'd like to." He bit off a small piece of the fruit, chewed it, and frowned. "Not too great, but it's better than nothing. Look, Darya, I want to find Speaker-Between and talk to him as much as you do. But how? I hoped we'd find that we were still inside him, so coming out would bring us back to talk to him. It didn't work. This place is stranger than anything I've ever seen in my life, and I doubt if you're any more at home than I am. You saw the size of this artifact when we were approaching it. We could spend the rest of our lives looking for somebody, but if he doesn't want to be found, we'd never get near him."
Darya visualized the monstrous space construct that they had seen on the final transition of their approach, its delicate filaments stretching out millions of kilometers. Rebka was right. Its size was too big to contemplate, let alone search. But the idea of not searching . . .
"You mean you're just going to sit there and do nothing?"
"No. I could make a case for that—when you don't know what to do, do nothing. I'm going to sit and eat. And you should do the same." He patted the box beside him. "Right here. You're the logical one, Darya. Think it through. We have no idea where Speaker-Between is, or how to go about looking for him. And we don't know our way around here—I mean, we don't even know this place's topology. But if you were to ask the most likely place for Speaker-Between to show up, I'd say it's right here where he left us. And if you were to ask me the best way for us to spend our time, I'd say we should do two things. We should eat and rest, and we should stay where we can easily keep an eye on what's happening back in that other room, with the Zardalu. We really ought to eat in there, too, but staring at those tanks I know I couldn't manage a bite."
Signs of human frailty in Hans Rebka? Darya did not know if she approved of that or not. She sat down on a white box with a fine snowflake pattern on its sides. The top was slightly warm to the touch. It gave a fraction of an inch under her weight, just enough to make it comfortable.
Maybe it was not weakness in Rebka at all. When you don't know what to do, do nothing. One might think that would be her philosophy, the research worker who had lived in her study for twenty years. But instead she felt a huge urge to do something—anything. It was Rebka, the born troubleshooter who had lived through a hundred close scrapes, who could sit and relax.
Darya accepted a lump of cool yellow fruit. Eat. She ate. She found it slightly astringent, with a granular texture that encouraged hard chewing. No aftereffects. Rebka was right about that, too. They surely would not have been brought all this way only to be poisoned or left to starve. Except—what right did they have to make any assumptions about alien thought processes, when everything that had happened since they arrived at Gargantua had been a total mystery?
She accepted three more pieces of unfamiliar food. Still her stomach was making no objections, but she wished that what they were eating could be warmed. She felt chilled. Shivering, she set her suit at a higher level of opacity. She was ready to ask for more fruit when she noticed that Rebka was sitting up straighter on his seat and staring around him. She followed his look and saw nothing.
"What is it?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. Only . . ." He was focusing his attention on the far side of the room. "Feel it? It's not my imagination. A draft—and getting stronger."
A cold draft. Darya realized that she had been feeling it for a while, without knowing what it was. There were chilly breezes blowing past them, ruffling his hair and tugging gently at her suit.
"What's causing it?" But Darya knew the answer, even as Hans was shaking his head in bewilderment. She could see a swirling pattern forming on the far side of the room. A rotating cylinder of air had darkened there, streaked horizontally like muddy water on glass. It formed a vortex column that ran from floor to ceiling. She stood up and grabbed Rebka's arm.
"Hans. We have to get out of here and back to the other chamber—it's getting stronger."
The circulation pattern created by the vortex was becoming powerful enough to generate a minor gale, driving around the whole inside of the room. Who could say how fierce it would get? If it continued to strengthen, she and Hans would be swept off their feet.
He was nodding, not trying to speak over the scream of wind. Holding on to each other, they fought their way back to the shelter of the doorway. Rebka turned in the entrance.
"Wait for a second before we go through." He had to shout in her ear to be heard. "It's still getting stronger. But it's closing—look."
The spinning cylinder of air was drawing in on itself . From a width of five meters, it tightened as they watched to become no wider than a man's outstretched arms. Its heart became an oily, soft-edged black, so dark and dense that the wall of the chamber could not be seen through it. The scream of wind in the room grew to a new intensity, hurting Darya's ears.
She backed farther into the doorway. The force of the wind was terrifying. The vortex loomed darker, more and more dangerous. She reached out to pull Rebka back—he was leaning into the ro
om, even while gusts tore at his hair and buffeted his body. Her fingers grabbed the back of his suit. The wail of rushing air rose higher and higher.
She tugged. Rebka fell off balance backward. She bumped into the closed door.
In that same instant, everything stopped. The wind dropped, the sounds faded.
There was a moment of total silence in the chamber; and then, in that uncanny stillness, there came a soft pop no louder than a cork being removed from a bottle. The vortex changed in color to a blood-red, and began to fade.
Another moment, and the silence was broken more substantially. Out of the thinning heart of the spinning column staggered a form. A human form.
It was Louis Nenda. He was greenish yellow in complexion, stripped to the waist, and cursing loudly and horribly.
The little black satchel that he always carried with him flapped against his bare chest. Two steps behind him, creeping along miserably with all six limbs to the ground, came the giant blind figure of Atvar H'sial.
Back on Quake they had been enemies. Nenda and Atvar H'sial had tried to kill Darya Lang and Hans Rebka, and Rebka, at least, would have been happy to return the compliment.
Thirty thousand light-years made quite a difference. They greeted each other like long-lost brothers and sisters.
"But where in hell are we?" Nenda asked when his nausea had eased enough to allow any form of speech beyond swearing.
"A long way from home," Rebka said.
"Ratballs, I know that. But where?"
As they exchanged information—what little of it they had—Darya learned that her own journey here had been a pleasure trip compared with what had happened to the two new arrivals.
"Stop an' go," Nenda said. "Go an' stop, all the way." He belched loudly. "Jerkin' around, turned ass-over-teacup, right way up one minute and wrong way up the next. Went on forever. I'd've puked fifty times, if I'd had anything in my guts." He was silent for a few moments. "At says it was just as bad for her. And yet you come so easy. There must be more than one way to get here. We traveled steerage class and got the rough one."
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