Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  She lay down again, on her back this time, chafed her cold hands together, and tucked them into her long sleeves. Before she knew it she was drifting away into a strange half-trance. She realized what was happening, but she could do nothing to prevent it. The alkaloid in the berries must have mild narcotic effects. Well, good for it. Maybe what she needed was a good shot of reality-suppressant.

  Her mind, released from physical miseries, triggered and homed in on the single fact of the past forty-eight hours that most deeply disturbed her.

  Not the capture by the Zardalu. Not the uncertain fate of Dulcimer. Not even the ascent of the Indulgence, when she and Tally had seemed so close to safety.

  The big upset had been the vanishing of J'merlia. Everything else might be a misfortune, but to someone with Darya's scientific training and outlook, J'merlia's disappearance into air was a disaster and a flat impossibility. It upset her whole worldview. It was inexplicable in any rational way, inconsistent with any model of physical reality that she had ever encountered. The Torvil Anfract was a strange place, she knew that. But how strange? Even if the whole Anfract was a Builder artifact, as she was now convinced it must be, the only differences had to be in the local space-time anomalies. Surely the laws of physics here could be no different from those in the rest of the universe?

  Darya drifted away into an uneasy half sleep. Her worries somehow reached beyond logic. E.C. Tally, totally logical, had seen J'merlia vanish, too, but the embodied computer did not seem to be affected by it as Darya was affected. All he knew was what was in his data bases. He accepted that there might be almost anything outside them. What Tally did not have—Darya struggled to force her tired brain to frame the concept—what he did not have were expectations about the behavior of the universe. Only organic intelligences had expectations. Just as only organic intelligences dreamed. If only she could make this all into a dream.

  But she could not. This floor was too damned hard. Darya returned to wakefulness, sat up with a groan, and stared around her. The tunnel had grown much darker. She looked at her watch, wondering if somehow she had been unconscious for many hours. She found that only thirty minutes had passed. She crawled back to the main chamber and found that it, too, was darker. The sun had moved in the sky. Not very much, but now its rays no longer struck straight down the line of the tunnel that they had entered. It would become darker yet, as the day wore on.

  Darya was within a few feet of the leaves and fruit that Tally had left behind. She had sworn never to touch another, but her thirst was so great and the taste in her mouth so sour and dreadful that she pulled a few berries and squeezed them between her teeth.

  These were the right ones—they had that true bitter and horrible taste. But she was so thirsty that the juice felt as though it were being directly absorbed on the path down her throat. Her stomach insisted that it had not received anything.

  She reached out to pull another handful. At that moment she heard a new sound from the wide corridor on the other side of the chamber.

  It might be E.C. Tally, returning along a different path. But it was a softer, more diffuse sound than the ring of shoes on hard, glassy floor.

  Darya slipped off her own shoes and quietly retreated to the narrow tunnel that she knew led back to the surface. Twenty yards along it she halted and peered back into the gloom. Her line of sight included only a small part of the chamber, but that would be enough for at least a snapshot of anything that crossed the room.

  There was a soft swishing of leathery, grease-coated limbs. And then a dark torso, surrounded by a corset of lighter webbing, was gliding across the chamber. Another followed, and then another. As Darya watched and counted, at least a dozen mature Zardalu passed across her field of view. She heard the clicks and whistles of their speech. And then they were circling, moving around the room and talking to each other continuously. They must be seeing the unmistakable signs of Darya's presence—the leaves and berries, and the place where she had thrown up so painfully. For the first time since she and Tally had escaped, the Zardalu had been provided with a fix on their most recent location.

  She counted carefully. It looked like fifteen of them, when one would be enough to handle two humans. If E.C. Tally chose to return at that moment . . .

  She could do nothing to help him, nothing to warn him. If she called out it would announce her own location. The Zardalu must know enough about the air ducts to realize where she would emerge on the surface.

  Five minutes. Ten. The Zardalu had settled into silence. The chance that Tally might return and find himself in their midst was increasing.

  Darya was thinking of easing closer to the room, so that if she saw him coming she could at least shout a warning and take her chances on beating the Zardalu in the race back to the surface, when the whistles and clicks began again. There was a flurry of moving shapes.

  She took four cautious steps forward. The Zardalu were leaving. She counted as they moved across the part of the room that she could see. Fifteen. All of them, unless she had made a mistake in their numbers when first they entered. To a human eye, one mature Zardalu was just like another, distinguished only by size and the subtle patterns on their corsets of webbing.

  They were gone. Darya waited, until the room was once more totally silent. She crept back along the three-foot pipe of the air duct. Tally had to be warned, somehow. The only way she could do it was to assume that he would return along the same path by which he had left, and station herself in that duct. And if for some reason he favored a different return route, that would be just too bad.

  The big room was filled with the faint ammoniac scent of the Zardalu. It reminded her of Louis Nenda's comment: "If you can smell them, bet that they can smell you." Her own recent misfortunes had swept the fate of the other party right out of her thoughts. Now she wondered who had escaped in the Indulgence. Who was alive, and who was dead? Were others, like her, still running like trapped rats through the service facilities of Genizee?

  Out on the planetary surface, the long day must be wearing on. The sun would be approaching zenith, farther from the line of the air ducts. It was darker in the room than when she had left. She could barely distinguish the apertures of the ducting, over at the other side. She tiptoed across to the widest of them, peering along it for any sign of the Zardalu and ready to turn and flee.

  Nothing. The corridor ran off, dark and silent, as far as she could see. She felt sure they would be back—they knew she had been here.

  She moved on, heading for the third corridor, the right-hand one, which Tally had taken when he left. The second corridor, according to him, angled away in the wrong direction. If it led to the surface at all it would be farther from the place where the Indulgence had rested.

  Darya hardly glanced at the round opening as she passed it. Any adult Zardalu would find it hard to squeeze more than a few feet along that narrowing tunnel.

  She took one more step. In that same moment there was a rush of air from her left. She did not have time to turn her head. From the corner of her eye she saw a blur of motion. And then she was seized from behind, lifted, and pulled close to a body whose powerful muscles flexed beneath rubbery skin.

  Darya gasped, convulsed, and tried to twist free. At the same moment she kicked at her captor's body, regretting that she had taken off her hard and heavy shoes.

  There was a rewarding grunt of pain. It was followed by a creaking moan of surprise and complaint. Darya was suddenly dropped to the ground.

  She stared up. Even as she realized that those were not tentacles that had held her, she recognized the voice.

  "Dulcimer!"

  The Chism Polypheme was crouching down next to her, all of his five little arms waving agitatedly in the air.

  "Professor Lang. Save me!" He was shivering and weeping, and Darya felt teardrops the size of marbles falling onto her from his master eye. "I've run and run, but still they come after me. I'm exhausted. I've shouted to them and pleaded with them, promising I'll be
the best and most loyal slave they ever had—and they won't listen!"

  "You were wasting your time. They don't understand human speech."

  "I know. But I thought I had nothing to lose by trying. Professor Lang, they want to eat me, I know they do. Please save me."

  A tall order, when she could not save herself. Darya groped around on the floor until she found her shoes and put them on. She patted Dulcimer on his muscular body. "We'll be all right. I know a safe way to the surface. I realize that the Zardalu could be back here anytime, but we can't go yet. We have to wait for E.C. Tally."

  "No, we don't. Leave him. He'll manage just fine on his own." Dulcimer was tugging at her, urging her to stand up. "He will. He doesn't need us. Let's get out of here before they come back."

  "No. You go anywhere you like. But I stay here, and I wait." Darya did not like to be in the chamber any more than the Polypheme; but she was not about to abandon Tally.

  Dulcimer produced a low, shivering moan. He made no attempt to leave and finally crouched back on the floor, tightly spiraled. Darya could not see his color in the dim light, but she was willing to bet that it was the dark cucumber green of a fully sober and nervous Polypheme.

  "It will only be a little while," she said, in her most confident tone, and forced herself to remain seated calmly on the floor. Dulcimer hesitated, then moved close to her.

  Darya took a deep breath and actually felt some of her nervousness evaporate. It helped to be forced to set a good example.

  But it helped less and less as the minutes wore on. Where the blazes was Tally? He had had time to go to the surface and back three or four times. Unless he had been captured.

  Dulcimer was becoming more restless. He was turning his head, peering around the room. "I can hear something!"

  Darya stopped breathing for twenty seconds and listened. All she heard was her own heartbeat. "It's your imagination."

  "No. It's coming from there." He pointed his upper two arms in different directions, one at the duct that Darya and Tally had used to reach the surface, the other at the narrow opening from which he himself had emerged.

  "Which one?"

  "Both."

  Now Darya was convinced that it was Dulcimer's imagination. She would barely be able to squeeze into that second gap herself. He had gone across to peer into it, and his head was a pretty tight fit.

  "That's impossible," Darya started to say. But then she could hear a sound herself—a clean, clear sound of hurrying footsteps, coming from the duct that Tally had left through. She recognized that sound.

  "It's all right," she said. "It's E.C. Tally. At last! Now we can—thank heaven—get out of here."

  "And I know a better way," Tally said. He had emerged crouching from the air duct just in time to catch Darya's final words, and now he was staring at the corkscrew tail of the Chism Polypheme, sticking out of the round opening to the other tube. "Why, you found him. That was very clever of you, Professor. Hello, Dulcimer."

  The Polypheme was wriggling back out of the duct, but he took no notice of E.C. Tally. He was groaning and shaking worse than ever.

  "I knew it," he said. "I just knew it. They're coming. I told you they were coming. Lots of them. Hundreds of them."

  "But they can't be," Darya protested. "Look how small that duct is. You'd never get a great big Zardalu—"

  "Not the adults." Dulcimer's eye was rolling wildly in his head, and his blubbery mouth was grinning in terror. "Worse than that. The little ones, the Eaters, everything from tiny babies to half-grown. Small enough to go anywhere we can go. Those ducts are full of them. I saw them before, as I was running, and they're hungry all the time. They don't want slaves, they won't make deals. All they want is food. They want meat. They want me."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Hans Rebka glared at the image of the Erebus in the forward display screens. The appearance of the ship suggested a derelict hulk, abandoned for millennia. The vast hull was pitted by impact with interstellar dust grains. Observation ports, their transparent walls scuffed by the same microsand, bulged from the ship's sides like rheumy old eyes fogged by cataracts.

  And for all the response to Rebka's signals, the Erebus might as well be dead! He had fired off a dozen urgent inquiries as the Indulgence rose to orbital rendezvous. Why was there an emergency distress signal? What was the nature of the problem? Was it safe for the Indulgence to dock and enter the cargo hold? No reply. The ship above them drifted alone in space like a great dead beast, silent and unresponsive to any stimulus.

  "Take us in." Rebka hated to go into anything blind, but there was no choice.

  Kallik nodded, and her paws skipped across the controls too fast to see. The rendezvous maneuver of scoutship and Erebus was executed at record speed and far more smoothly than Rebka could have done it himself. Within minutes they were at the entrance of the subsidiary cargo hold.

  "Hold us there." As the Indulgence hovered stationary with respect to the other ship and the pumps filled the hold with air, Rebka scanned the screens. Still nothing. No sign of danger—but also no one awaiting their return and warping them into the dock. That was odd. Whatever had happened, the Erebus, everyone's way home, should not have been left deserted.

  He turned to order the hatch opened, but others were ahead of him. Nenda and Atvar H'sial had given the command as soon as pressures equalized, and already they were floating out toward the corridor that led to the control room of the Erebus. Rebka followed, leaving Kallik to turn the scoutship in case they had to make a rapid departure.

  The first corridors were deserted, but that meant nothing. The inside of the Erebus was so big that even with a thousand people on board it could appear empty. The key question was the state of the control room. That was the nerve center of the ship. It should always have someone on duty.

  And in a manner of speaking it did. Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial had hurried far ahead of Rebka. When he arrived at the control room he found them at the main console, leaning over the crouched figure of Julian Graves. The councilor was hunched far down with the palms of his hands covering his eyes. His long, skinny fingers reached up over his bulging forehead. Rebka assumed that Graves was unconscious, but then he realized that Louis Nenda was speaking softly to him. As Rebka approached, Graves slowly withdrew his hands and crossed them on his chest. The face revealed was in constant movement. The expression changed moment to moment from thought to fear to worry.

  "We'll take care of you," Nenda was saying. "Just relax an' try an' tell me what's wrong. What happened?"

  Julian Graves showed a flash of a smile, then his mouth opened. "I don't know. I—we—can't think. Too much to think."

  His mouth snapped closed with a click of teeth. The head turned away, to gaze vaguely around the room.

  "Too much what?" Nenda moved so that Graves could not avoid looking at him.

  The misty gray eyes rolled. "Too much—too much me."

  Nenda stared at Hans Rebka. "That's what he said before. 'Too much me.' D'you know what he's gettin' at?"

  "No idea. But I can see why the distress signal is going out. If he's on duty, he's certainly not able to control the ship. Look at him."

  Graves had returned to his crouched position and was muttering to himself. "Go lower, survey landing site. No, must remain high, safe there. No, return through singularities, wait there. No, must leave Anfract." With every broken sentence his facial expressions changed, writhing from decision to uncertainty to mind-blanking worry.

  Rebka had a sudden insight. Graves was torn by diverging thoughts—exactly as though the integration of Julius Graves and his interior mnemonic twin Steven to form the single personality of Julian Graves had failed. The old conflict of the two consciousnesses in one brain had returned.

  But that idea was soon overwhelmed in Rebka's own mind by another and more pressing concern.

  "Why is he on duty alone? It must be obvious to the others that he's not fit to make decisions." He bent over, took Julian Graves's he
ad between his hands, and turned it so that he could stare right into the councilor's eyes. "Councilor Graves, listen to me. I have a very important question. Where are the others?"

  "Others." Graves muttered the word. His eyes flickered and his lips trembled. He nodded. He understood, Rebka was sure he did, but he seemed unable to force an answer.

  "The others," Rebka repeated. "Who else is on board the Erebus?"

  Graves began to twitch, while the tendons stood out in his thin neck. He was gathering himself for some supreme effort. His lips pressed tightly together and then opened with a gasp.