Transcendence

Chapter Thirteen

The Zardalu had been breeding — fast.

The original group released from the stasis field on Serenity had consisted of just fourteen individuals. Now Hans Rebka, retreating into the building after Atvar H’sial, Louis Nenda, and Kallik, could see scores of them already on land. Hundreds more were rising from the sea. And these were only the larger specimens. There must be thousand after thousand of babies and immature forms, hidden away in breeding areas.

Escape along the spit of land that led to the seedship?

Impossible. It was blocked by Zardalu, with more of them arriving ashore every second.

Then escape to sea?

Even more hopeless. The Zardalu had always been described as land-cephalopods, and they were fast and efficient there, but it was clear that they had not lost mastery of their original ocean environment. They were land-and-sea-cephalopods.

Add that fact to the descriptions in the Universal Species Catalog — if you’re lucky enough to live so long, thought Rebka. He grabbed the back of Louis Nenda’s shirt and stepped across the threshold. The sun outside had almost set, and the building they were entering was unlit. Ten paces inside, and Rebka could see nothing. He blindly followed Nenda, who was presumably holding on to Atvar H’sial and Kallik. The Cecropian was the only one who could still see. She provided the sonic bursts used by her own echolocation system, and she was as much at home in total darkness as in bright sunlight.

But how much time could she really buy before the Zardalu brought lights inside and followed them? This was a Zardalu building; they would know every hiding place. Wouldn’t it be better to agree on the place for a last stand?

“Nenda!” He spoke softly into the darkness. “Where are we going? Does Atvar H’sial know what she’s doing?”

There was a grunt ahead of him. “Hold on a second.” And then, after a pause for pheromonal exchange, “At says she don’t actually know what she’s doing, but she prefers it to bein’ pulled to bits. She don’t see no end to this stupid tunnel” — they had been descending for half a minute in a steady spiral — “but she’s ready to go down for as long as it does. We’ve passed five levels of chambers and rooms. There were signs that the Zardalu lived on the first three; now she’s not seeing so much evidence of ’em. She thinks we’re mebbe gettin’ down below the main Zardalu levels. If only this damn staircase would branch a few times, we might make a few tricky moves and get ’em off our track. That’s At’s plan. She says she knows it’s not much, but have you any other ideas?”

Rebka did not reply. He did have other ideas, but they were not likely to be helpful ones. If the Zardalu used only the first few belowground levels, then why did lower ones exist? Were they even the work of the Zardalu? This would not be the first planet with a dominant aboveground species and a different dominant belowground species, interacting only at one or two levels. If Genizee had spawned a subterranean species powerful enough to stop Zardalu access, what would they do to a blind and defenseless group of strangers?

Rebka, still clutching the back of Louis Nenda’s shirt, tried to estimate a rate of descent. They must have come through a score of levels, into darkness so total and final that it made his straining eyes ache. He itched for a look around, but he was reluctant to show a light. The huge eyes of the Zardalu were highly sensitive, designed by evolution to pick up the faintest underwater gleam.

“Time to take a peek an’ see what we got here.” Louis Nenda had halted, and his whisper came from just in front. “At can’t hear or smell anythin’ coming down behind us, so she thinks we’re deep enough to risk a bit of light. Let’s take a look-see.”

The space in front of Rebka filled with pale white light. Louis Nenda was holding a flat illumination disk between finger and thumb, rotating it to allow the center of the beam to scan in all directions.

They were standing on a descending sideless pathway like a spiral staircase with no central shaft or guardrail, looking out onto a high-ceilinged chamber. Nenda played the beam in silence on the fittings and distant walls for a few seconds, then he whistled. “Sorry, Professor Lang, wherever you are. You were right, and we should have listened.”

Hans Rebka heard Nenda and was baffled. They were at least three hundred feet underground. All evidence of Zardalu existence had vanished, and the surroundings that replaced the furnishings of the upper levels were totally unfamiliar. He stared again, at a great arch that rose at forty-five degrees, swept up close to the ceiling, then curved gracefully back down all the way to the floor.

Almost. Almost to the floor. The far end stopped, just a foot short. The abrupt termination made so little sense that the eye insisted on trying to continue it to meet the level surface. But there was a space at the end. Forty centimeters of nothing. Rebka wanted to walk across and sweep his hand through the gap to prove it was real. The stresses on the support at this end must be huge. Everything else in the chamber was equally strange and unfamiliar. Wasn’t it?

His subconscious mind was at work while his conscious mind seemed to be giving up. One area where organic intelligence still beat inorganic intelligence, and by a wide margin, was in the subtlest problems of pattern recognition. E.C. Tally, with his eighteen-attosecond memory cycle, could compute trillions of twenty-digit multiplications in the time of a human eye-blink. If he had been present in the chamber he might have made the correct association in five minutes. Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial had done it in a few seconds, aided by their weeks of examining — and pricing for future sale — the masses of new Builder technology on Glister and Serenity. Kallik, with the advantage of her long study of the Builder artifacts, was almost as quick. It was left for Hans Rebka, least familiar with Builder attributes, to stand baffled for half a minute. At the end of that time his brain finally connected — and he felt furious at his own stupidity and slowness.

His anger was typical, but unjustified. The evidence of Builder influence was indirect, absence more than presence, style more than substance. There were no constructs obviously of Builder origin. It was more a subtle lack of the up-and-down sense that permeated all lives and thinking controlled by gravitational fields. The chamber stretched off into the distance, its airy ceiling unsupported by pillars, arches, or walls. It should have collapsed long since. And the objects on the floor lacked a defined top and bottom, sitting uneasily as though never designed for planetary use. Now that Rebka examined his surroundings more closely, he saw too many unfamiliar devices, too many twelve-sided prisms of unknown function.

The light went off just as he reached his conclusion. Rebka heard a soft-voiced curse from Louis Nenda: “Knew it. Too good to last! Grab hold.”

“What’s the problem?” Rebka reached out and again seized the shirt in front of him.

“Company. Comin’ this way.” Nenda was already moving. “At took a peek up the tunnel — she can see round corners some — and she finds a pack of Zardalu on our tail. May not be their usual stamping ground, but they’re not gonna let us off that easy. Hang on tight and don’t wander around. At says we’ve got a sheer drop on each side. A big one. She can’t sense bottom.”

Rebka stayed close, but he looked up and back. The descending ramp was not solid, it was an open filigree that looked frail but did not give a millimeter under their weights. And far above, through the grille of the stairway’s open lattice, Rebka saw or imagined faint moving lights.

He crowded closer to Nenda’s back. Down and down and down, in total darkness. After the first minute Rebka began to count his own steps. He was up to three thousand, and deciding that his personal hell would be to descend forever through stifling and pitchy darkness, when he felt a hand on his. It was Louis Nenda, reaching back.

“Stay right there and wait. At says don’t move, she’ll get you across.”

Across what? Hans Rebka heard a scuffle of claws. He stood motionless. After half a minute the pale light of an illumination disk cut through the darkness. It was in Louis Nenda’s hands, ten meters away and pointing down. Rebka followed the line of the beam and flinched. Between that light and his own feet was nothing, an open space that dropped away forever. Atvar H’sial was towering at his side. Before he could move, the Cecropian had seized him in her forelimbs, crouched, and glided away across the gulf in one easy spring.

She set Rebka down a step or two away from the far edge. He took a deep breath. Louis Nenda nodded at him casually and pointed the beam again into the abyss.

“At says she still can’t sense bottom, an’ I can’t see it. You all right?”

“I’ll manage. You might have kept that light off until after I was over.”

“But then Kallik couldn’t have seen what she was doing.” Nenda nodded across the gulf, to where the Hymenopt was hanging upside down, holding on to the spiraling stairway by one leg. “She has the best eyes. Anything down there, Kallik?”

“Nothing.” She swung herself onto the upper side of the stair and launched casually across the ten-meter gap. “If there is another exit point it is at least a thousand feet down.” She moved to the very edge and leaned far out to stare upward. “But there is good news. The lights of the Zardalu are no longer approaching.”

Good news. Hans Rebka moved a few steps away from the sheer drop and leaned on a waist-high ledge of solid green, an obviously artificial structure. Good news was relative. Maybe they were not being pursued, but they were still thousands of feet below the surface of an alien world, without food or water. They could not return the way that they had come, without surely meeting Zardalu. They had no idea of the extent or layout of the underground chamber where they stood. And even if — unlikely event — they could somehow find another way to the surface, the chance was slim that the seedship was there to take them away from Genizee. Either J’merlia had left, as ordered, or he had been captured or killed by Zardalu.

Kallik and Nenda were still standing at the edge of the shaft. Rebka sighed and walked across to them. “Come on. It’s time to do some hard thinking. What next?”

Nenda dismissed him with a downward chop of one hand and turned off the illumination disk. “In a minute.” His voice was soft in the darkness. “Kallik can’t see any lights up there anymore, nor can I. But At insists there’s something on the path — a long way up, but coming this way. Fast.”

“Zardalu?”

“No. Too small. And only one. If it was Zardalu, you’d expect a whole bunch.”

“Maybe this is what we need — something that knows the layout of this place.” Rebka stared up into the darkness. He was useless without light, but he imagined he could hear a rapid pattering on the hard surface of the spiraling tunnel. “Do you think Atvar H’sial could hide quietly on this side, and grab whatever it is as it comes by?”

There was a moment’s silence for pheromonal contact. The scuffling above became clearer. Rebka heard a grunt of surprise from Louis Nenda, followed by a laugh. The illumination disk again lit the chamber.

“At could do that,” Nenda said. He was grinning. “But I don’t think she’s going to. She just got a look at our visitor. Guess who’s coming to dinner?”

There was no dinner — that was part of the problem. But Rebka did not need to guess. The beam from the disk in Nenda’s hand was directed upward. Something was peering out over the edge of the stairway, eyestalks extended to the maximum and worried lemon-yellow eyes reflecting the light.

There was a whistle of pleasure from Kallik, and a relieved hoot in reply. The pipestem body of J’merlia came soaring across the gulf to join them.

Lo’tfians were one of the underprivileged species of the spiral arm. The use of their adult males as interpreters and slaves of Cecropians was seldom questioned, because the male Lo’tfians themselves never questioned it; they were the first to proclaim Cecropian mental and physical superiority.

Hans Rebka did not agree. He believed that male Lo’tfians, left to themselves, were as bright as any race in the arm, and he had said so loud and often.

But he was ready to question it now, on the basis of J’merlia’s account of how he came to be deep inside Genizee. Even with not-so-gentle nudging from Louis Nenda and direct orders from Atvar H’sial, J’merlia didn’t make much sense.

He had repaired the seedship, he said. He had flown it up to altitude, to make sure that the air seal was perfect. He had decided to bring the ship back close to the buildings that Hans Rebka and his group were exploring. He had seen them near the building. He had come lower. He had also seen Zardalu.

“Very good,” Louis Nenda said. “What happened next? And where’s the seedship now? That’s our ticket out of here.”

“And why did you come into the building yourself?” Rebka added. “You must have known how dangerous it was, if you saw the Zardalu follow us in.”

The pale-lemon eyes swiveled from one questioner to the other. J’merlia shook his head and did not speak.

“It’s no use,” Nenda said. “Look at him. He’s bugger-all good for anything just now. I guess Zardalu can do that to people.” He walked away in disgust to the edge of the great circular hole and spat over the edge. “The hell with all of ’em. What now? I could eat a dead ponker.”

“Don’t talk about food. It makes it worse.” Rebka walked across to Nenda, leaving Atvar H’sial to question J’merlia further with pheromonal subtlety and precision, while Kallik stood as a puzzled bystander and close observer. The Cecropian could read out feelings as well as words, so maybe she and the Hymenopt would do better than the humans had.

“We have a choice,” Rebka went on. “Not much of one. We can go up, and be torn apart by the Zardalu. Or we can stay here, and starve to death. Or I suppose we could plow on through this cavern, and see if there’s another way up and out.” He was speaking softly, almost in a whisper, his head close to Louis Nenda’s.

“There must be.” The cool, polite voice came from behind them. “Another way out, I mean. Logically, there must be.”

Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda swung around in unison with the precision of figure skaters.

“Huh?” said Nenda. “What the hell—” He stopped in mid-oath.

Rebka said nothing, but he understood Nenda perfectly. “Huh?” and “What the hell—” meant “Hey! Lo’tfians don’t eavesdrop on other people’s private conversations.” They didn’t interrupt, either. And least of all did they stand up and walk away from their dominatrix when she was in the process of questioning them. And Nenda’s sudden pause meant also that he was worried about J’merlia. Whatever the Lo’tfian had been through on his way to join them, it had apparently produced in him a serious derangement, enough to throw him far from his usual patterns of behavior.

“Look at the way you came here,” J’merlia continued as though Nenda had not spoken. “Through a building by the seashore, and down a narrow shaft. And then look at the extent of these underground structures.” He swept a front limb around, taking in the whole giant cavern. “It is not reasonable to believe that all this is served by such mean access, or even that this chamber itself represents a final goal. You asked, Captain Rebka, if we should go up, or stay here, or move through this cavern. The logical answer to all your questions is, no. We should do none of those things. We should go down. We must go down. In that direction, if anywhere, lies our salvation.”

Rebka was ready for his own “Huh?” and “What the hell—” The voice was so clearly J’merlia’s, but the clarity and firmness of opinions were a side of the Lo’tfian that Hans, at least, had never seen. Was that what researchers meant when they said a Lo’tfian’s intellect was masked and shrouded by the presence of other thinking beings? Was this how J’merlia thought all the time, when he was on his own? If so, wasn’t it a crime to let people near him? And if it was true, how come J’merlia could think so clearly now, with others around him?

Rebka pushed his own questions aside. They made no practical difference, not at a time when they were lost, hungry, thirsty, and desperate. The idea expressed by J’merlia made so much sense that it did not matter how or where it had originated.

“If you have light,” J’merlia went on, “I will be more than happy to lead the way.”

Louis Nenda handed over the illumination disk without another word. J’merlia leaped across to the spiral stairway and started down without waiting for the others. Kallik was across, too, in a fraction of a second, but instead of following J’merlia she stood and waited as Atvar H’sial ferried first Louis Nenda and then Hans Rebka across the gap. As the Cecropian moved on down the spiral, Kallik hung behind to position herself last in the group.

“Master Nenda.” The whisper was just loud enough for the human to catch. “I am gravely concerned.”

“You think J’merlia’s got a few screws loose? Yeah, so do I. But he’s right about one thing — we oughta go down rather than up or sideways.”

“Sanity, or lack of it, is not my worry.” Kallik slowed her pace further, to put more space between her and J’merlia. “Master Nenda, my species served the Zardalu for countless generations before the Great Rising. Although my race memory carries no specific data, there is instinctive knowledge of Zardalu behavior ingrained deep within me. You experienced one element of that behavior when we were on Serenity: the Zardalu love to take hostages. They use them as bargaining chips, or they kill them as stern examples to others.”

Rebka had fallen behind, too, listening to the Hymenopt. “Don’t worry, Kallik. Even if the Zardalu get us, Julian Graves and the others won’t trade for us. For one good reason: I won’t let them.”

“That is not my concern.” Kallik sounded as though the idea that anyone would consider her worth trading for was ridiculous. “J’merlia’s behavior is so strange, I wonder if he was already captured by the Zardalu. And if he is now, after conditioning by them, simply carrying out their orders.”