"But the fast one, too," Rebka said. "By the look of it, you and Atvar H'sial left Glister days after us. We thought we were only on the way for a few minutes, but it could have been a lot more—we don't know how long we were stuck in nowhere, between transitions."
"Well, I thought we were on the way for weeks." Nenda belched again. "Gar. That's better. Thirty thousand light-years, you said? Long way from home. Let that be a lesson to you, At. Greed don't pay."
"Can she understand you?" Darya had been staring at the pitted and nodulated area of Nenda's bare chest, watching it quiver and pulse as Nenda spoke.
"Sure. At least, whenever I use the augment she can. I speak the words at the same time, usually, because that way it's easier to know what I want to say. But At picks it all up. Watch. You hear me, At?"
The blind white head nodded.
"See. You ought to have an augment put in, too, so you can chat with At an' the other Cecropians." He stared at Darya's chest. "Mind you, I'd hate to see them nice boobs messed up."
Any sympathy that Darya might have had for the Karelian human evaporated. "If I were you, Louis Nenda, I'd save my breath to plead with the judge. You have formal charges waiting for you, as soon as we get back to the spiral arm. Councilor Graves already filed them."
"Charges for what? I didn't do a thing."
"Your ship fired at us." Rebka said. "You tried to destroy the Summer Dreamboat after Summertide."
"I did?" Nenda's face was blandly innocent. "You sure it was me, Captain, and not three other guys? I never even heard of no Summer Dreamboat. I don't remember firing at anything. Doesn't sound like the sort of thing I'd do at all. Do you think we fired at a ship, At?" He paused. The Cecropian did not move. "No way. See, she agrees with me."
"She's as guilty as you are!"
"You mean as innocent."
Rebka's face had lost its usual pallor. "Damn you, I don't think I'll even wait until we get back home. I can file charges on you right here, just as well as Graves can." He took a step closer to Nenda.
The other man did not move. "So you're feeling mad. Big deal. Go on, try to arrest me—and tell me where you'll lock me up. Maybe you'll shut me away with your girlfriend here. I'd like that. So would she." He grinned admiringly at Darya. "How about it, sweetie? You'll have more fun with me than you've ever had with him."
"If you're trying to change the subject, it won't work." Rebka moved until he and Nenda were eyeball to eyeball. "Do you really want to see if I can arrest you? Try a few more cracks like that."
Nenda turned to Darya and gave her a wink. "See how mad he gets, when anybody else tries for a piece?"
He had been watching Rebka out of the corner of his eye, and he batted away the hand that grabbed for his wrist. Then the two men were standing with arms braced, glaring at each other.
Darya could not believe it. She had never seen Rebka lose his temper before—and Louis Nenda had never been anything but cool and cynical. What was doing it to them? Tension? Fatigue?
No. She could see their expressions. They were trying each other out, testing to see which rooster was top of the dunghill.
So that was how people behaved on the primitive outworlds. Everyone would think she was making this up if she told them all about it back on Sentinel Gate.
The two men were still standing with arms locked. Darya reached over and tugged at Rebka's right hand. "Stop it!" she shouted at them. "Both of you. You're acting like wild beasts."
They ignored her, but Atvar H'sial reached out with two jointed forelimbs, grabbed each man around the waist in one clawed paw, and lifted them high in the air. She pulled them effortlessly away from each other. After a second or two she allowed their feet to touch the ground, but she still held them far apart.
The blind head turned toward Darya, while the proboscis unfurled and produced a soft hissing sound.
"I know," Darya said. "They are like animals, aren't they? Hold them for a minute or two longer." She spread her arms wide, as though pushing the men farther apart. Atvar H'sial might not understand her words, but she surely could take her meaning.
Darya went to stand between them. "Listen to me, you two. I don't know which of you is more stupid, but you can have your idiocy contest later. I want to say just one word to you." She paused, waiting until they turned their attention fully to her. "Zardalu! D'you hear me? Zardalu."
"Huh?" Louis Nenda's hands had still been reaching out toward Rebka. They dropped to his sides. "What are you talking about?"
Darya gestured at the doorway behind her. "In there. Fourteen Zardalu."
"Crap! There's not been a Zardalu in the spiral arm for thousands of years. They're extinct."
"You're not in the spiral arm anymore, boy. You're thirty thousand light-years out of the plane of the galaxy. And back in that room there's fourteen stasis tanks, with a Zardalu in each one. Alive."
"I don't believe it. Nobody's ever seen a Zardalu, not even a stuffed or a mummified one." Nenda turned to Hans Rebka. "You hear her? She trying to make a joke?"
"No joke." Rebka straightened his suit, where Nenda had pulled it half off his shoulders. "She's telling the truth. They're in stasis tanks, but I don't know how long that will last. The stasis was beginning to end when we saw them."
"You mean you stood there and picked a fight with me, when there's Zardalu waking up in there? And you call me dumb! You have to be crazy."
"What do you mean, I picked a fight!"
Darya stepped between them again. "You're both crazy, and you're both to blame. Are you going to start over? Because if you are, I hope Atvar H'sial understands enough to crack your heads together and knock some sense into you."
"She does. She will." Nenda stared at the closed door. Suddenly he was his old calm self. "Zardalu. I don't know what you're smoking, but maybe we better get in there. I'll tell At what's been happening. She's like me, though—she won't really believe it until she takes a peek for herself."
He turned to Atvar H'sial. "You're not gonna like this, At." The gray pheromone nodules on his chest pulsed in unison with his human speech. "These two jokers say there's Zardalu in there. You heard me. Fourteen of 'em, in stasis but alive and gettin' ready to trot. I know, I know."
The Cecropian had squatted back onto her hindmost limbs, furled the antennas above her head, and tucked her proboscis into its pleated holder.
"She don't like to hear that," Nenda said. "She says a Cecropian ain't afraid of anything in the universe, but Zardalu images are part of her race memory. A bad part. Nobody knows why."
Hans Rebka was sliding open the first of the two doors. "Let's hope she doesn't find out. I'd suggest that you and Atvar H'sial hang back a bit—just in case."
He opened the second door. Darya held her breath, then released it with a sigh of relief. The great pentagonal cylinders lay exactly as they had left them, silent and closed.
"All right." Hans Rebka moved forward. "You wanted proof, here it is. Take a look in there."
Rebka walked cautiously to the transparent port in the end of the stasis tank and peered in through it. After a few seconds he gave a long sigh.
"I know," Rebka said softly. "Impressive, eh? And scary, too. We have to find a way to turn that stasis field back on, before they wake up and try to get out."
But Louis Nenda was shaking his head. "I don't know what game you're playing, Captain Rebka and Professor Lang. I just know it's a stupid one."
He stepped away from the long casket.
"There's thirteen more to look at, but I'll bet money they're all like this one." He turned to face Darya. "It's empty, sweetheart. Empty as a Ditron's brainbox. What do you have to say about that?"
ENTRY 42: DITRON.
Distribution: Never having achieved an independent spaceflight capability, Ditrons are found in large numbers only on their native world (Ditrona, officially Luris III, Cecropia Federation, Sector Five). Transported Ditron colonies can also be found on the neighboring worlds of Prinal (Luris II) and Ivergne (L
uris V). In the early days of the Cecropian expansion, Ditrons were taken to the other stellar systems, but generally they did not thrive there. Diet deficiencies were blamed at the time, but more recent analyses make it clear that psychological dependencies were as much a factor. Ditrons, at the third stage of their life cycle, fail to survive if the group size dwindles below twenty.
Physical Characteristics: It is necessary to consider separately the three stages of the Ditron life cycle, conventionally designated as S-1, S-2, and S-3. The Ditrons are unique among known intelligent species in that their highest mental levels are achieved not in their most mature form, but rather in their premature and premating (S-2) stage.
The larval form (S-1) is born live, in a litter of no less than five and no more than thirteen offspring. The newborn Ditron masses less than one kilogram, but it has full mobility and is able to eat at once. It is near-blind, possesses sevenfold radial symmetry, is asexual, herbivorous, and lacks measurable intelligence.
S-1 lasts for one Ditron summer season (three-fourths of a standard year) at the end of which time a body mass of twenty-five kilos has been achieved and metamorphosis begins. S-1 moves below ground, as a flat, pale-yellow disk about one meter in diameter. It emerges in the spring as S-2, a slender, dark-orange, many-legged carnivore with bilateral symmetry and a fierce appetite. An S-2 Ditron will prey on anything except its own S-1 and S-3 forms. It possesses no known language, but from its behavior patterns it is judged to be of undeniable intelligence. Consideration of the S-2 Ditron first led to that species' assignment as an intelligent form.
In this life stage the Ditron is solitary, energetic, and antisocial. Attempts to export S-2 Ditrons to other worlds have all failed, not because the organism dies but because it never ceases to feed voraciously, to attack its captors at every opportunity, and to try to escape. A confined S-2 will solve within minutes a maze that will hold most humans or Cecropians for an hour or more.
S-2 lasts for fourteen years, during all of which time the Ditron grows constantly. At the end of this period it masses twelve tons and is fifteen meters long. No more formidable predator exists in the spiral arm (archaeological workers on Luris II have discovered an ancestral form of the Ditron S-2 that was almost twice the S-2's present size, and apparently just as voracious; it probably, however, lacked intelligence).
The transition to S-3 arrives suddenly, and apparently without warning to the S-2 itself. It is conjectured that the first sign of a change to S-3 state is a substantial fall in Ditron S-2 intelligence, and a sudden urge for clustering. The formerly antisocial creature seeks out and protects the cocoon clusters of other changing S-2's. Up to a hundred Ditrons tunnel deep into sites by soft riverbanks, where each spins its own protective cocoon. New arrivals protect the site from predators, before themselves beginning to tunnel. Metamorphosis takes place over a two-year period. Emerging S-3's have dwindled to a body mass of less than one ton. The material of the residual cocoon is a valuable prize, for anyone able to thwart the guardianship offered by the protective S-2's.
The form of the S-3 is a large-headed upright biped, brownish-red in color, two-eyed, and with bilateral symmetry. Its alert appearance and large brainbox persuaded early explorers of Luris III that the S-3 must be a more intelligent and certainly more friendly form than its S-2 progenitor.
Unfortunately, the head of the S-3 is employed mainly as a resonance cavity. It enables the creature to produce mating calls that can be heard over large distances, but the skull contains mostly air. The brain itself is little more than the couple of hundred grams of material required to allow an S-3 to find a mate, to copulate, and to bring forth the S-1 larval form.
The attempt to use Ditrons as a slave species has been made many times, because the S-3 is undeniably docile and tractable and enjoys company; but the main result has been frustration to the Ditron owners. Only the Cecropians continue to cultivate S-3 slaves, either as pets or for purposes that remain obscure.
History: Ditrons possess no written or oral history. Paleontological research shows that these beings have changed little in form, though considerably in size, over the past three million years.
Culture: None. S-1 and S-3 Ditrons are mindless. S-2 Ditrons, undeniably intelligent, build no structures, use no tools, wear no clothing, and keep no records. All attempts at communication with S-2's have been ignored.
—From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients).
CHAPTER 20
The period before the coming of intelligence had been quiet, peaceful, and eons long. The final emergence was a miracle in itself; and like all miracles, nothing before it presaged its arrival.
The nutrients in the middle atmosphere of the gas-giant were rich and abundant; the climate was unvarying; a total absence of competition removed any stimulus to evolution.
The dominant life-form drifted idly in its buoyant sea of high-pressure hydrogen and helium, loose aggregations of cells that combined, dissociated, and recombined with endless variety. The results were sometimes simple, sometimes complex, and always without self-awareness. They had persisted unchanged for eight hundred million years.
When it came, the pressure was provided from without, and from far away. A supernova, nine light-years from the Mandel system, sent a sleet of hard radiation and superfast particles driving into the upper atmosphere of Gargantua. The dominant life-form, tens of thousands of kilometers down, was well protected; it drowsed on. But small and primitive multicelled creatures, eking out their own existence almost at the edge of space, felt the full force of the incident flux. They had been harmless, unable to compete with the loosely organized but more efficient assemblies of life below; now they mutated in the killing storm of radiation. The survivors grew voracious and desperate, and expanded their biosphere—downward. Like vermin, they began to infest the deep habitats and to modify the food chains there.
The Sleepers below had to quicken—or die. At first their numbers dwindled. They mindlessly sought refuge in the depths, down in the unfathomable abyss near the rocky solid core, where living conditions were harsh and food less plentiful.
It was not enough. The vermin followed them, gnawing at their evanescent structures, interfering with their placid drift at the whim of currents and temperature gradients.
The Sleepers had a simple choice: adapt or die. Since permanence of form was essential to survival, they became unified structures. They formed tough skins to protect those structures, integuments hard enough to resist the vermin's attack. They developed mobility for escape. They learned to recognize and avoid the swarms of starving nibblers. They themselves became rapid and aggressive eaters.
And they developed cunning. Not long afterward came self-awareness. In a few million years, technology followed. The Sleepers pursued the vermin back to the upper edge of the atmosphere, for the first time claiming that domain as their own.
Now they found themselves familiar with and at home in environments ranging from million-atmosphere pressures at the interface with Gargantua's rocky central core, to the near-vacuum of the planet's ionosphere. They developed materials that could endure those extremes of pressure, and as great extremes of radiation and temperature. Finally they decided to move to a place where the still-annoying vermin could not follow: space itself.
The technology went with them. The Sleepers became the Builders. They spread with no haste from star to star in the spiral arm. Never again would they occupy a planet. Their homeworld became Homeworld, and finally Old-Home, abandoned but not forgotten. It remained the central nexus of the Builders' transportation system.
They were Sleepers no more; and yet in one essential way they were as they had always been. The active and aggressive behavior patterns forced upon them by the vermin were only a few millions years deep. They were overlaid like a thin veneer on a deeper behavior, one derived from that idyllic and near-infinite era of idle drifting.
The Builders made their great spaceborne artifacts, with a communication network that
stretched across and beyond the spiral arm; but they did so almost absentmindedly, with no more than a small part of their collective consciousness. They were Builders, certainly; but more than that they were Thinkers. For them, contemplation was the highest and the preferred activity. Action was a sometimes necessary but always unwelcome digression.
The new stability persisted for almost two hundred million years, while the Builders busied themselves in a leisurely analysis of the nature of the universe itself. Then came a new Great Problem, more troublesome even than the vermin. And further change was forced upon them . . .
The-One-Who-Waits fell silent. At some hidden command the lights in the great chamber dimmed further. The alien lifted a few centimeters above the surface of the tunnel, where in front of it sat Julius Graves, with J'merlia and Kallik on each side. E. C. Tally and Birdie Kelly were just behind, cross-legged on the hard tunnel floor and stiff-jointed from two hours of silent attention. When it had finally become fluent in human speech, the voice of The-One-Who-Waits had proved to be slow and hypnotic, forcing the listeners to ignore their surroundings and their own physical needs.
Birdie stirred and inspected each of the others in turn. E. C. Tally was in the worst shape of anyone. The embodied computer was leaning forward and supporting himself wearily on his hands and elbows. Apparently the need for rest and recuperation had not been sufficiently explained to him; before long, by the look of it, Tally would collapse from simple exhaustion.
At the front, Graves sat with his face invisible to Birdie. The two aliens by his side had expressions unreadable at the best of times. The only thing they seemed to care about was finding Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial, so that they could grovel again to their old masters. They were sprawled on the floor, all jointed legs, staring up at the shining body a few feet away from them.
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