Transcendence

Chapter Twenty

Darya was learning the hard way. There was no way of knowing just how much discomfort and fatigue a person could stand, until she had no choice.

The irritating little black bugs that crawled into her eyes, nose, and ears were nothing. Limbs that cried out with fatigue were nothing. Hunger and thirst were nothing. All that mattered was the disappearance of the Indulgence, the only escape from the surface of Genizee.

As the sun rose higher she sat down on a flat stone, filled with despair that changed little by little to annoyance and then at last to rage. Someone — someone of her own party, not a Zardalu — had stolen the ship, just a couple of minutes before she and Tally were ready to board it. Now they were hopelessly stranded.

Who could have done it? And finally, with that thought, Darya’s head cleared. The answer was obvious: the survivors, whoever they were, of the first group that had flown down to the surface of Genizee. They had arrived on the seedship, but it had not been there when they wanted to leave. With that gone, they must have seen the Indulgence as their only way off the surface. But if that was so, once they realized that they had left people behind on Genizee, surely they would return. Hans Rebka would come for her. So would Louis Nenda. She was absolutely sure of it.

The problem — and it was a big one — was to be alive and free when that return took place. And one way that would certainly not work was to remain on the surface. When she peeked over the sheltering line of vegetation between her and the shore she could see the water bubbling with activity. Now and then a great blue head would break the surface. The Zardalu might not like the rocky, broken terrain where she and Tally were hiding as much as they liked the sea and shoreline, but by now they would have realized that the escaped prisoners had taken to the air ducts. It would surely not be more than another hour or two before a systematic examination of the surface vents began.

She rubbed flies from the corners of her eyes and crawled across to where E.C. Tally was sitting in front of a little bush bearing fat yellow leaves.

“E.C., we have to go back. Back into the ducts.”

“Indeed? We went to considerable trouble to remove ourselves from them.”

“The ship will come back for us” — she told herself she believed that, she had to believe it — “but we can’t survive on the surface while we wait.”

“I am inclined to disagree. May I speak?” Tally raised a bunch of the yellow leaves, each bloated at its extremity to a half-inch wrinkled sphere. “These are not good in taste to a human palate, but they will sustain life. They are high in water content, and they have some food value.”

“They might be poisonous.”

“But they are not — I already consumed a number.” A considerable number, now that Darya’s attention had been drawn to it. While she had been sitting and thinking, two or three bushes in the little depression had been denuded of foliage and berries.

“And although I am an embodied computer,” Tally went on, “and not a true human, the immune system and toxin reactions of this body are no different from yours. I have suffered no adverse effects, and I am sure you will also feel none.”

Logic told Darya that Tally could be quite wrong. He had direct control over elements of his immune system, where she did not, and the body used for his incorporation had been carefully chosen to have as few allergic reactions as possible. But while her mind was telling her that, her hands were grabbing for a branch of the bush and plucking off berries.

Tally was right. Too tart and astringent to be pleasant, but full of water. The juice trickled down her dry throat like nectar when she crunched a berry between her teeth. She did the same to a dozen more before she could force herself to stop and speak again. “I wasn’t thinking of food when I said we couldn’t stay here. I was thinking of Zardalu.”

The embodied computer did not reply, but he raised himself slowly from a sitting position, until he was able to look out toward the shore. “I see nothing. If any are close-by, they are still in the water.”

“Do you want to bet on their staying there? The air vent we came up is more than a mile from here and we don’t know of a nearer one. If the Zardalu came out of the sea farther along the shore, between us and the vent, it would be all over. We have to get back there.”

Tally was already pulling whole branches off the bushes. Darya began to do the same, eating more leaves and berries as she did so. Tally had the right idea. On the surface or under it, the two of them would still need nourishment. There might be bushes closer to the vent, but they could not take the risk. Collection had to be done now, even though it meant an added burden. She broke off branches until she had an armload. She would need the other arm free to help her over rough spots. She nodded to Tally. “Let’s go.”

The trip to the air-duct exit was surprisingly easy and quick — good light made all the difference over broken ground. And the light was more than good — it was blinding. Darya paused a few times to wipe sweat from her face and neck. Here was another reason why the surface might be intolerable. Genizee close to noon promised to be incredibly hot. She turned and went uphill, far enough to peer uneasily at the shore over the ragged line of plants. The water was calm. No towering forms of midnight blue rose to fill her with terror. Did the Zardalu keep fixed hours, for water and land living? She knew so little about them, or about this planet.

As they came close to the vent Darya noticed what she had not seen in the half-light of dawn: the whole region was covered with low bushes, similar to the ones whose branches they were carrying but with fruit of a slightly lighter shade of yellow. She broke off half-a-dozen more branches and added them to her load, popping berries into her mouth as she did so to quench her increasing thirst. These seemed a little sweeter, a little less inclined to fur her teeth and palate. Maybe the fruit was an acquired taste; or maybe these new berries were a fraction riper.

At the vent itself Darya hesitated. The aperture was dark and uninviting, heading off at a steep angle into the rocky ground. Its only virtue was its narrow width, barely enough for a human and far too small to admit an adult Zardalu. But it represented safety… if one were willing to accept an unconventional definition of that word.

“Come on, E.C. No point in hanging around.” She led the way, wondering what to do next. They did not want to be too far below-ground in case the ship came back. But they also had to reach a certain depth, to be sure that groping Zardalu tentacles could not pull them out.

What they really needed — the thought struck her as she took her first steps down — was a vent closer to the place where the Indulgence had rested. One of the only sure things in this whole mess was that anyone who came back for her would try to land at the same point where they had taken off.

“E.C., do you remember all the turns and twists we made on the way up?”

“Of course.”

“Then I want you to review the last few branch points before we came out on the surface, and see if any of the alternative paths that we didn’t take might lead to an exit duct closer to where the Indulgence lay.”

“I did that long ago. If the directions of the ducts at those branch points were to continue as we saw them, then a duct at an intersection before the final one would run to the surface about a hundred yards inland from where we watched the Indulgence take off. A little more than a mile from here.”

Darya swore to herself. People could say what they liked about how smart embodied computers were, but something fundamental was missing. E.C. Tally must have had that information hours before; it had not occurred to him that it was important enough to pass on at once to Darya.

Well, use the resources you have. Don’t waste time pining for ones denied to you. That was one of Hans Rebka’s prime rules. And E.C. Tally’s memory was, so far as Darya could tell, infallible. “Lead the way back to that intersection. Let’s see where it takes us.”

Tally nodded and went forward without a word. Darya followed, one arm full of laden branches, eating from them as they walked. The descent was far easier than their ascent. At this time of day the sun’s rays lay close to the line of the entrance, so that the glassy walls of the tunnel served as a light trap, funneling sunlight deep below-ground. Even a couple of hundred feet down, there was ample light to see by.

That was when they came to the first complication.

Tally paused and turned. “May I speak?”

But he did not need to. Darya saw the problem at once. The tunnel widened at that point to a substantial chamber, with one downward and three upward exits. Each would admit a human. But one of those upward corridors was more than wide enough for an adult Zardalu. If they went beyond this point and found no other exit, their one road back to the surface could be blocked.

“I think we have to take the risk,” Darya started to say. And then the second complication arrived. She felt a spasm across her middle, as though someone had taken her intestines and pulled them into a tight, stretching knot. She gasped. Her legs would not support her weight, and she slid forward to sit down suddenly and hard on the chamber floor.

“Tally!” she said, and then could not get out another word. A second cramp, harder than the first, twisted her innards. Sweat burst out onto her forehead. She hung her head forward and panted, widemouthed.

E.C. Tally came to her side and lifted her head. He raised her eyelid with his finger, then moved her lips back to peer at her gums.

“Tally,” she said again. It was the only sound she could make. The spasms inside her were great tidal waves of pain. As each one receded, it washed away more of her strength.

“Unfortunate,” Tally said quietly. She struggled to focus her eyes and see what he was doing. The embodied computer had picked up a branch of the bush that she had dropped and was examining it closely. “It is almost the same as the first one, but almost certainly a different species.” He squeezed a pale yellow berry in his fingers and touched it carefully to his tongue. After a moment he nodded. “I think so. Similar, but also different. A medium-strength emetic in this, plus an unfamiliar alkaloid. I do not believe that this is a fatal poison, but it would, I think, be a good idea if you were to vomit. Do you have any way of inducing yourself to do so?”

Darya was half-a-second ahead of him. Every berry that she had eaten came out in one awful, clenching spasm of her stomach and esophagus. And then, although the leaves and berries were surely all gone, her stomach did not know when to quit. She was racked by a continuing sequence of painful dry heaves, doubly unpleasant because there was nothing inside her for them to work on. She supported herself on the chamber floor with both hands and sat hunched in utter misery. Being so sick was bad enough. Being so stupid was even worse.

“May I speak?”

It was a few seconds before she could even nod, head down.

“You should not seek to continue at this time, even if you feel able to do so. And it is surely unnecessary. You can wait here, and I will proceed to explore the tunnel system. Upon my return, we can decide on the next best course of action. Do you agree?”

Darya was trying to throw up what was not there. She made another series of dreadful sounds, then produced a minuscule up-and-down motion of her head.

“Very good. And in case you become thirsty again while I am gone, I will leave these with you.”

Tally placed the fronds of leaves and berries that he had carried down the tunnel on the floor beside Darya. She gave them a look of hatred. She would not bite one more of those berries to save her life. And it needed saving. As Tally went away across the wide chamber, she fought off another agonizing fit of retching.

She lay forward with her head on the cool glassy floor of the chamber, closed her eyes, and waited. If the Zardalu came along and caught her, that was just too bad. The way she was feeling, if she was killed now it would be a pleasant release.

And it was all her own fault, a consequence of her sheltered upbringing on the safe garden planet of Sentinel Gate. No one else on the whole expedition would have been stupid enough to eat — to guzzle — untested foods.

And no one else on the expedition would give up so easily. To come so far, and then to stop trying. It would not do. If somehow she survived this, she would never be able to look Hans Rebka in the eye again. Darya sighed and lifted her face away from the floor, straightening her arms to support her. She made a supreme effort and forced herself to crawl forward on hands and knees, until she was out of the chamber and ten yards into the narrowest of the ducts. Then she had to stop. The clenching agony in her stomach was fading, but her feet felt cold and her hands and forehead were damp and clammy.

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.”