Divergence

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 expert 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 room, 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.”

“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?”