Transcendence

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hans Rebka could find no trace of a wound on J’merlia’s body. He had watched the Lo’tfian fling himself into that roaring pillar of plasma so hot that it had instantly seared off the pursuing Kallik’s leg. Now that wiry limb was just beginning to grow back, but on J’merlia’s whole body there was no slightest trace of burn marks.

Rebka and Louis Nenda carried J’merlia back to the bridge of the Erebus. There Atvar H’sial was able to perform an untrasonic scan on the unconscious Lo’tfian’s body and confirm that his internal condition was apparently as intact as his exterior appearance. “And the brain seems to be no more damaged than the body,” the Cecropian said to Nenda. “The source of his unconsciousness remains a mystery. One suspects that it arises more from psychological than physical causes. Let me pursue that approach.”

She crouched by J’merlia and began to send powerful arousal stimuli to him in the form of pheromonal emissions. Rebka, to whom Atvar H’sial’s message was nothing but a complicated sequence of odd and pungent odors, looked on for only a minute or two before he lost patience.

“She can do that all she wants to,” he said to Louis Nenda, “but I’m not going to sit and sample the stinks. I’ve got to get down to the surface of Genizee. You come or stay, it’s all one to me.”

Nenda glared at him, but he did not hesitate. When Rebka headed back to the Indulgence, Nenda was hurrying at his side. “I’ll tell you another thing,” he said, as they prepared to soar free of the Erebus for the first phase of descent from orbit. “J’merlia may not want to wake up, but At says he feels better to her than he did the last time she saw him. She says he’s all there now.”

“What does that mean?” Rebka was aiming the scoutship for exactly the same spot on Genizee’s surface from which they had taken off, and only half his attention was on Louis Nenda. It was not just a question of navigation. At any moment he was half-expecting a saffron beam of light to spear out of the sky and carry them willy-nilly to some random place on the surface of Genizee. It had not happened so far, but they had a way to go before touchdown. He was losing height as fast as he dared.

“Beats me.” Nenda could not hide his frustration. “I tried to get her to tell me what she meant, an’ she said you don’t explain things like that. If you don’t feel the difference in J’merlia, she says, you won’t know what she means even if she tells you.” He rubbed his pitted and noduled chest. “She comes up with that, after all I went through gettin’ this augment put in just so I could gab Cecropian!”

The Indulgence was finally at two thousand meters and still descending fast. Already the screens revealed the familiar curve of the shoreline, with the spit of land to the north jutting out into blue water. Inland, the dark scars in a carpet of gray-green moss showed Hans Rebka just where the seedship and Dulcimer’s scoutship had landed. Those scars looked subtly different from when he had left. But how? He could not say. At seven hundred meters he took complete manual control and brought them in to hover over their previous landing site.

“See anything?” His own eyes moved to the cluster of buildings where their party had first been trapped. Nothing had changed there. No sign of disturbance in the calm waters. It was Louis Nenda, scanning the broken masses of rock and scrubby vegetation a couple of hundred yards farther inland, who grunted and pointed.

“There. Zardalu. Can’t see what they’re doin’ from here.”

There were scores of them, clustered in a circular pattern around a dark chasm in the surface. They were in constant motion. Rebka flew the Indulgence across to hover directly overhead, where the downward display screens under high magnification showed upward-turning heads of midnight blue and staring cerulean eyes.

“Full-size adults, most of that lot.” Nenda moved to the Indulgence’s weapons console. “Let’s give ’em somethin’ to think about.”

“Careful!” Rebka warned. “We don’t know who else is down there in the middle of them.”

“No worries. I’ll just tickle ’em a bit.” But Nenda selected a radiation frequency and intensity that would fatally burn a human in ten seconds. He projected it downward, choosing the spread so that it covered the whole group below them. There was an instant reaction. Zardalu jerked and jumped in pain, then fled in flurries of pale-blue tentacles across the shore, heading for the safety of the water.

Nenda followed them with the radiation weapon, pouring it onto the stragglers. “Don’t die easy, do they?” he commented thoughtfully. He was burning them with a higher-intensity beam, yet every Zardalu managed to reach the water and swim strongly before plunging under. “Tough beggars, they eat up hard radiation. They’d be right at home with Dulcimer in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap. Or maybe not. I guess they can take it, but they sure don’t seem to like it.”

The last Zardalu had vanished underwater. Hans Rebka hesitated. The easy piece was over, but what now? Was it safe to land the Indulgence, even with its sophisticated weapons system? He had learned the hard way an old Phemus Circle lesson: It’s a poor civilization that can’t learn to defend against its own weapons. The trouble starts when you have to defend against somebody else’s.

The last Zardalu Communion had at one time extended over a thousand worlds. They could not have maintained their dominion without something to help them.

He brought the Indulgence to a hover thirty meters up, exactly above the scar in the moss left earlier by its mass. When all continued quiet, he cautiously lowered the ship to the surface. If Darya and any other survivors of her party were trying to escape from the surface of Genizee, there was no more logical place for them to seek. And if there were no survivors…

That was a thought that Hans Rebka did not care to pursue.

“Steady. Somethin’s going on.” Nenda’s gruff voice interrupted his thoughts.

“What?”

“Dunno. But don’t you feel it? In the ship?”

And Hans Rebka did. A minor tremor of the planetary surface, changing angles slightly and sometimes imparting a faint jitter to delicately balanced items of the ship’s interior. Rebka instinctively lifted the ship to hover a couple of feet clear of the mossy ground cover, but further action on his part was overwhelmed by another input.

He had been watching the screens that displayed the seaward view, but now and again he switched his attention to one showing the land side. What he saw there filled him with strong and unfamiliar emotions.

It took a second to recognize them. They were relief and joy.

Running — staggering — across the uneven surface came Darya Lang. Right behind her was E.C. Tally, moving with the gait of a drunken sailor. And behind him, bounding along with a horde of dwarfed and apricot-colored young Zardalu snapping at his corkscrew tail, came a miserable, cucumber-green Dulcimer.

At the rate Darya and the others were moving they would be at the scoutship in less than thirty seconds. That was wonderful, but Rebka had two problems. The Zardalu were gaining — fast. They might catch Darya and the other two before they reached the safety of the ship.

And the shuddering of the Indulgence was growing. Accurate aiming of the weapons system to pick off the Zardalu was impossible.

Lift to safety, with Darya and the others just seconds away? Or wait for them, and risk the ship?

Hans Rebka placed his finger on the ascent control. Thirty yards to go, maybe ten seconds before they were inside the open hatch.

The ship lurched. He stopped breathing.

Those high-pitched, excited squeaks were the thing that had changed the Eaters from awful concept to Darya’s worst reality.

The voices of the baby and adolescent Zardalu were quite different from the clicks and whistles of the parents. They had come echoing along the tunnel behind Dulcimer, rapidly increasing in volume. With those in her ears, decision-making had moved from difficult to trivial.

“Tally, are you sure you know a better way to the surface?”

“Certainly. I followed it all the way, and I even emerged onto the surface of Genizee itself. May I speak?”

“No. You may move. Get going.”

For once, the embodied computer did not stop to give her an argument. He went scrambling up the steep incline of the duct, using the ribbed hoops of bracing material that supported the wall every few feet as a primitive set of steps.

Darya managed to stay close behind him for the first forty paces, but then she felt her legs beginning to tighten and tire. Even for someone in tip-top condition the steep ascent would be exhausting. But she had had no rest for days, no real food for almost as long, and she had spent a good part of the past few hours vomiting what little she had been able to eat. She had to stop. Her heart was ready to burst from her chest, and the muscles of her thighs were cramping into agonizing knots.

Except that the sound of the Eaters was louder. The young Zardalu were entering the duct that she was climbing. Close on her heels came Dulcimer. He was sobbing for breath and gasping over and over again, “They’ll eat me, they’ll eat me. They’ll eat me alive. Oh, what a terrible way to go. They’ll eat me alive.”

Not just you, Darya thought with irritation. They want to eat me as well. And then: Irritation is meant to be used. Build it to anger, to fury.

The Zardalu would not get a living Darya. Never. She would force herself upward along the lightening tunnel until she died of exhaustion. Then, if they liked, they could have her lifeless body.

She clenched her fists and moved faster, propelling herself up the narrow tunnel until suddenly she ran into the back of E.C. Tally. He had stopped a few feet from the end of the duct and was peering upward to the brightly lit surface.

“Keep going!” Darya’s voice was a breathless croak. If Tally was going to stop now and start a discussion…

“But there may be Zardalu — above us — I thought I heard them.”

Tally was as out of breath as she was. Darya did not have the strength to argue. She pushed right past him. Possible Zardalu on the surface could not compete with certain Zardalu ten yards behind them.

She scrambled the final few feet of the duct, pulled herself over the edge, and sat on skinned hands and knees. The sunlight was painfully bright after the tunnels.

She blinked around her. No Zardalu, not that she could see. But her nose crinkled with their ammoniac smell. Tally was right, they had been here. But where were they now?

She stood up and turned quickly to look at her surroundings.

Tally had been right about another thing. This was much closer to the place where they had landed the Indulgence. She glanced that way. And saw the most wonderful sight that she had ever seen.

The ship was there, just as though it had never left the surface of Genizee. It was no more than a couple of hundred yards away, and she could see that its main hatch was open.

A booby trap?

Who cared? No future danger could be worse than what they faced here and now. Tally and Dulcimer were out of the duct, and Tally was picking up big loose rocks and hurling them down the entrance. But it was not doing any good. The approaching high-pitched squeaks of immature Zardalu were louder and angrier than ever.

“Come on. We’ll never stop them with rocks.” Darya began to run toward the ship, across a broken terrain of stony fragments and low, ankle-snaring bushes. She thought that progress would be easier as soon as she came to the level stretch of moss, but when she reached it her desperate dash became a dreadful slow motion. She felt as if she were running through thick, viscous air; she was so tired that the whole shoreline and the sea seemed to tilt and roll in front of her. The sky darkened. She knew it had to be her own exhaustion and failing balance.

Just a little farther. Just a few more seconds, a few more steps. Quickly. The Zardalu were catching up with her. She dared not turn to look. She concentrated all her attention on the ship ahead. It must have weapons — so why didn’t it fire them at the young Zardalu behind her, and to hell with Julian Graves and his pacifist views? Fire, dammit, fire. Or were the Zardalu so close that any shot would hit her, too?

And then she realized that there was something wrong with the ship itself. It had risen a few feet clear of the surface, but instead of hovering smoothly it was rocking and shuddering. There was something beneath it, something rising from the dark mud.

Tentacles. The pale-pink tentacles of gigantic subterranean Zardalu, curling up to grasp the whole forty-meter length of the ship.

And then, still staggering forward, Darya realized her mistake. Those were not Zardalu. They were not tentacles. They were the tiny perfumed flowers of the gray moss, on their delicate hair-thinstalks, as she had seen them when she first set foot on Genizee. But now they were enlarged to monstrous proportions and growing faster than anything could ever grow.

At last, and at the worst possible moment, the Zardalu were revealing their full mastery of biological science. In the time it took Darya to struggle five steps, the body-thick stalks had sprouted another three meters. They were curling up around the smooth convex hull of the Indulgence. The ship sank a fraction, tugged downward by the web of tendrils.

Louis Nenda was at the open hatch, four feet off the ground. He shouted to Darya and reached down past a thick pink growth that reached into the hatch itself. She held up her hand, felt it gripped in his, and was lifted into the air and into the lock in one arm-wrenching heave.

She lay flat on the solid floor. A moment later E.C. Tally was panting and grunting next to her. Darya lifted her head.

“Dulcimer!” she gasped. He was too heavy; Louis Nenda could never lift him in. She tried to struggle to her feet to help, but it was beyond her strength.

She heard a croaking scream from outside the ship. A dark-green body came soaring past her, the corkscrew tail fully uncoiled by one great leap. Dulcimer flew right across the hatch and into the ship’s interior, wailing as he went. She heard the bouncing-ball sound of rubbery Polypheme hide against metal bulkhead, and another anguished scream.

“All aboard. Take us up!” Nenda was kicking at the thick pink tendril. It was still growing.

“The hatch is still partway open.” Rebka’s voice came from the intercom at the same moment that Darya felt the ship rise and strain against its closing cage of vegetation.

“I know.” Nenda had pulled out a wicked-looking knife and was stabbing at the tendril. The blade bounced right off it. “I can’t close the damned thing. Give us maximum lift, and hope.”

Darya suddenly understood Nenda’s problem. The Indulgence had a powerful weapons system, but it was intended for longer-range use. The weapons had never been designed for anything that coiled around the ship itself.

The scoutship lifted a few more feet. There was a jerk, and the upward motion ceased. The whole hull groaned with sudden stresses. A few seconds later Darya felt another downward lurch.

“No good.” Nenda was leaning dangerously far out of the hatch, stabbing at something out of sight. “We’re at about ten meters, but we’re bein’ pulled down an’ the Zardalu are comin’ up. You hafta give it more stick.”

“I hear you,” Rebka’s calm voice said over the intercom. “But we have a slight problem. We are already at full lift. And I don’t think whatever’s holding us is even trying yet.”

The ship creaked all over, shivered, and descended another few inches.

“Wrong way, Captain,” Nenda said. If he and Hans Rebka were in the same screaming panic as Darya, one would never have known it from their voices. “An’ if we don’t get out of here soon,” he added, in the same conversational tone, “we’re gonna have ourselves some visitors.” He stamped on a pale-blue groping tentacle and booted it clear of the hatch.

Rebka’s voice came again. “Get where you can grab something and hold on. And move away from the hatch.”

Easy to say. But there was nothing within easy reach for anyone in the lock. Darya and E.C. Tally scrabbled across to the interior door of the lock itself and wedged themselves together in the opening.

“Hold on now,” Rebka said, while Darya wondered what he planned to do. If they were already at maximum lift, how could Hans hope to do better?

“I’m going to try to rock us out,” Rebka continued, as though he had heard Darya’s unvoiced question. “Might get rough.”

The understatement of the century. The Indulgence began to roll from side to side. The floor beneath Darya’s feet rose to the right until it was close to vertical, then before she could adjust to that it was swinging back, to roll as far the other way. Cascades of unsecured objects came bouncing past, everything from flashlights to clothes to frozen foods — the galley storage cupboards must have been shaken loose.

“Not working.” Nenda had ignored Rebka’s command to stay away from the hatch. By some impossible feat of strength and daring he had braced himself by one hand and one foot against its sides and was leaning far outside to hack and kick at the climbing Zardalu. He hauled himself back in to speak into the intercom. “We’ve been pulled another half-meter downward. Gotta do somethin’ else, Captain — sharpish, I’d say.”

“Only one thing left,” Rebka said. “And I hate to try it. Away from the outer hatch, Nenda — and this time I mean it.”

Louis Nenda cursed, threw himself across to the inner door, and braced his stocky body across Darya. “Hold onto your guts.”

The ship moved. It dropped like a stone and hit the surface of Genizee with bone-jarring force as Hans Rebka canceled all lift. From below came the groan of buckled hull plates.

The cage of swathing pink tendrils was looser, opened at the bottom by the weight of the Indulgence and at the top by the ship’s sudden fall. Before it could tighten again, Rebka had put the ship into maximum forward thrust. The pointed nose pushed aside the two stalks that were growing there, and the Indulgence shot forward across the gray moss.

Darya could see out the open hatch. The pink arm of vegetation whisked away out of sight. But then they were heading for the jagged inland fingers of rock, too fast to stop.

Spaceship hulls were not built for structural strength. Impact with one of those jutting rocks would split the ship wide open.

Hans Rebka had returned to maximum lift the moment they were free of the enfolding growths. The Indulgence flew toward the rocky outcrops, straining upward as it went.

Upward, but too slow. Darya watched in terrified fascination. Touch and go. They were heading right for one of the tallest rock columns.

There was a horrible sound of scraping metal and a glancing blow all the way along the bottom of the ship. Then Darya heard a strange noise. It was Louis Nenda. He was laughing.

He released his hold on the inner lock door and walked across to the still-open outer lock, balancing himself easily on the shifting floor. As Darya watched he leaned casually out to look far down at the receding surface, then slammed the lock shut with one heave of a muscular arm.

He came back to where Darya and E.C. Tally were still wedged in the doorway, clutching it — in Darya’s case at least — with the unbreakable grip of pure terror. He lifted them, one in each hand, and set them on their feet.

“You two all right?”

Darya nodded, as a wail of anguish rose from beyond the lock. “I’m all right.” It was the wrong time for it, but she had to ask the question. “You were laughing. What were you laughing at?”

He grinned. “To prove to myself I ain’t dead.” And then he shook his dark mop of hair. “Naw, that’s not the real answer. I was laughin’ at myself. See, when I come down here this time I told Atvar H’sial that I was fed up of gettin’ close to the Zardalu, an’ then comin’ back without any blind thing to show they even existed. It happened on Serenity. It happened last time I was down on Genizee. An’ damned if it didn’t just happen again, though I swore to myself it wouldn’t. I didn’t collect even a tentacle-tip. Unless you wanna go right back down an’ look for keepsakes?”

Darya shivered at the thought. She reached out and put her hand on Nenda’s grimy, battered forearm. “I knew you’d come back to Genizee and save me.”

“Not my idea,” he said gruffly. He looked away, toward the interior of the ship where Dulcimer was still moaning and screaming. “Though it would have been,” he added, so softly that Darya was not sure she heard him correctly, “if I were brighter.”

He eased away from her in Dulcimer’s direction. “I’d better go an’ shut up that Polypheme, before he wakes up everybody on board who’s tryin’ to sleep. You’d think he was the only one anythin’ ever happened to.”

Darya followed him through to the main cabin of the Indulgence, E. C. Tally close behind her. Hans Rebka was sitting at the controls. Dulcimer was a few feet away, rolling around the floor in panic or agony.

“Shut him up, will you?” Rebka said to Louis Nenda. He gave Darya a wink and a grin of pure delight when she moved to stand next to him. “How did you like that takeoff?”

“It was awful.”

“I know. The only thing worse than a takeoff like that is no takeoff at all. My main worry now is the scrape on the hull, but I think we’re fit for space.” He glanced away from Darya to where Nenda and Tally were down on the floor next to the moaning Dulcimer. “You’re not shutting him up, you know — he’s making more noise than ever.”

“He is. An’ I don’t see why, he looks just fine.” Nenda grabbed hold of the Chism Polypheme, who appeared to be trying to form himself into a seamless blubbering sphere of dark green. “Hold still, you great streak of green funk. There’s not a thing wrong with you.”

“Agony,” Dulcimer whimpered. “Oh, the sheer agony.”

“Where do you say you’re hurtin’?”

Five little arms waved in unison, pointing down toward Dulcimer’s tail. Nenda followed the direction, probing down with his hands into the tight-coiled spiral.

“Nothing here,” he muttered. And then he gave a sudden hoot of triumph. “Hold it. You’re right, an’ I’m wrong. Jackpot! Dulcimer, you’re a marvel, bein’ smart enough to grab this with your rear end. Relax, now, I’ve got to pull it off you.”

“No! It’s in my flesh.” Dulcimer gave a whistling scream. “My own flesh. Don’t do that.”

“Already did. All over.” Louis Nenda was bending low at the Polypheme’s tail and chuckling with satisfaction. “Think of it this way, Dulcimer. You got a contract with us that gives you twelve percent of this. An’ not only that, I think mebbe there’s others will give you their share of it, too.”

While Darya stared at him in total confusion, Louis Nenda slowly straightened up. He raised his right hand.

“Look-see. They’re not gonna be able to say we made the whole thing up this time.”

And finally the others could see it. Held firmly between Nenda’s finger and thumb, wriggling furiously and trying to take a bite out of him with its tiny razor-sharp beak, was a pale apricot form: the unmistakable shape of an angry infant Zardalu.