Rebka gave her a startled glance. “Now that’s what I call real custom service. Air designed to order. Now you’re making me nervous.”
They walked on past the air unit and half a dozen other constructs whose purpose Darya could only guess at. She itched to stay and examine them, but Hans was urging her forward.
The eighth device was a waist-high cylinder with a surface like a honeycomb, riddled with hexagonal openings each big enough to accommodate a human fist. The outside of the panel was cold and beaded with drops of moisture. Rebka touched one, sniffed his finger, and touched it to his lips.
“Water. Drinkable, I think, but it tastes flat.”
Darya followed his example. “Distilled. It’s a hundred percent pure, with no salts and minerals. You’re just not used to clean water. You can drink it.”
“Just now I’ll drink anything. But we won’t get much from panel condensation.” He peered into one of the openings. “I’m going to try something. Don’t stand too close.”
“Hans!”
But already he was reaching his arm deep into the aperture. He drew out a cupped handful of water and took a cautious sip. “It’s all right. Come and take some. At least we won’t die of thirst.
“And following up on your earlier line of thought,” he added as they reached in to fill the bottles attached to their suits, “I wonder what liquid that was producing a week ago. Ethanol? Hydrochloric acid?”
“Or liquid methane. What do you think the temperature was on the surface of Glister, when Gargantua was a long way from Mandel?”
They moved on, to reach a point where the uniform curvature of the convex floor was broken by a descending ramp. Rebka stood on the brink and stared down.
“That’s pretty steep. Looks slick, too. More like a chute than a corridor, and I can’t see the bottom. Once we go down there, I’m not sure we’ll be able to climb back up.”
“We need food. We can’t get back to the surface, and we can’t stay here forever.”
“Agreed.” He sat down on the edge. “I’m going to slide. Wait until I call back and tell you it’s all right.”
“No!” Darya was surprised at the strength of her own reaction. She came forward and sat next to him. “You’re not leaving me up here by myself. If you go, I go.”
“Then hold tight.” They eased side by side over the edge.
The chute was less steep than it looked. After a sheer start it curved into a gentle spiral. They skidded down and soon reached terminal velocity of no more than a fast walking pace. As they descended, the light changed. The cold orange that mimicked Gargantua’s reflected glow was replaced by a bright yellow-white that came from ahead of them and reflected from the smooth walls of the chute. Finally the gradient became so shallow that they could no longer slide forward.
Rebka stood up. “The free ride’s over. I wonder what this was intended for originally. Unless you think it wasn’t here, either, until we came along and needed it.”
They had emerged to stand at the edge of a domed chamber, a giant’s serving dish fifty meters across. The floor ahead formed a shallow bowl, gently sloping all the way into the center, and above them stood an arched ceiling in the form of a perfect hemisphere. Hans and Darya stared around the chamber, adjusting to the white dazzle. To eyes accustomed for the last few hours to cold hues and dusty slate-gray, the new environment was sheer brilliance. The circular floor of the room was marked off like an archery target, in bright concentric rings of different colors. From the boundaries of those gaudy rings rose hemispheres, faintly visible, forming a nested set. Corridor entrances, or perhaps the delivery points of chutes like the one that they had just descended, stood at intervals around the outer perimeter of the chamber. A single dazzling globe at the room’s apex provided illumination.
And in the middle of the chamber, at the central depression directly below the light…
Darya gasped. “Look, Hans. It’s them!”
The smallest translucent dome stood around the bright blue bull’s-eye of the innermost ring. At its center was a raised dais, a meter and a half tall; upon that, facing outward, stood a dozen transparent structures like great glass seats.
Side by side in two of those seats, held by some invisible support, sat Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial.
Darya began to move forward, but she was restrained by Hans Rebka’s hand on her arm.
“This is the time to be most careful. I think they’re both unconscious. Look at them closely.”
Darya stood and stared. Between them and the central dais rose the half-dozen translucent nested hemispheres. They interfered with her view of Nenda and Atvar H’sial, but Darya could still see enough detail to prompt new questions.
Louis Nenda’s overall appearance was at first sight no different from the last time she had seen him. The arms of the short, swarthy body rippled with muscle, and the shirt was wide open at the neck to show a powerful and thickly haired chest.
Or was that hair? It looked wrong, discolored and uneven. She turned to Rebka.
“His chest—”
“I see it.” Hans Rebka was blinking and squinting, having the same problem with perspective as Darya. The hemisphere introduced a subtle distortion to the scene. “It’s all covered with moles and pockmarks. Did you ever see his bare chest before?”
“No. He always kept it covered.”
“Then I don’t think it’s a recent change. I bet he was like that when he arrived on Opal.”
“But what is it?”
“A Zardalu-technology augment. The first records on Nenda when he requested access to Opal said he was augmented, but they didn’t say how. Now we know. Those nodules and pits are pheromone generators and receptors. It’s a rare and expensive operation — and it’s painful, like all the Zardalu augments. But that’s how he could work directly with Atvar H’sial. They can talk to each other, without needing J’merlia.” Rebka studied the other man for a few seconds longer. “My guess is that he’s physically unchanged, and just unconscious. It’s a lot harder to tell about Atvar H’sial. What do you think?”
Darya moved her attention to the Cecropian. She had spent more time with Atvar H’sial, so her estimate of condition ought to be better. Except that the Cecropians were so alien, in every respect…
Even seated, with her six jointed legs tucked away underneath her, Atvar H’sial towered over the Karelian human Louis Nenda. A dark-red, segmented underside was surmounted by a short neck with scarlet-and-white ruffles, and above that stood a white, eyeless head. The thin proboscis that grew from the middle of the face could reach out and serve as a delicate sense organ, but at the moment it was curled down to tuck neatly away in a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin.
Neither the Cecropian nor the Karelian human had the empty look of death. But was Atvar H’sial conscious?
“Atvar H’sial!” Darya called as loudly as she could.
If the alien was at all aware of her surroundings, that should produce a response. Originating on the clouded planet of a red dwarf star, the Cecropians had never developed sight. Instead they “saw” by echolocation, sending high-frequency sonic pulses from the pleated resonator in the chin. They received and interpreted incoming signals through yellow open horns set in the middle of the broad head. As one result Cecropians had incredibly sensitive hearing, all through and far beyond the human frequency range.
“H’sial! Atvar H’sial!” Darya shouted again.
There was no reaction. The yellow horns did not turn in her direction, and the pair of fernlike antennas above them, disproportionately long even for that great body, remained furled. With hearing usurped for vision, Cecropians “spoke” to each other chemically, with a full and rich language, through the emission and receipt of pheromones. The unfurled antennas could detect and identify single molecules of many thousands of different airborne odors. If Atvar H’sial were conscious, those delicate two-meter-long fans would surely have stretched out, sniffing the air, seeking pheromones from the source of the sound.