“I must trust you,” he said.
He stepped back, and his chest — his entire torso — opened like a great blossom of steel. And it opened upon emptiness, revealing nothing.
“I don’t understand,” I told him. “How may I help you?”
“Look.” With his remaining hand, he pointed to the inner surface of one of the petallike plates that had made up that empty chest. “Do you see writing?”
“Lines and symbols, yes, in many colors. But I can’t read them.”
Then he described a certain complex symbol and the symbols surrounding it, and after some searching I discovered it.
“Insert sharp metal there,” he said. “Twist to the right, one quarter turn and no more.”
The slot was very narrow, but my hunting knife had a needle point, which I had wiped clean on Idas’s shirt. Now I wedged this point into the place Sidero had indicated and twisted it as he had told me. The seeping of the dark liquid slowed.
He described a second symbol on another plate; and while I hunted for it, I ventured to tell him I had never heard or read of any such being as he.
“Hadid or Hierro could explain us to you better. I perform my duties. I do not think of such things. Not often.”
“I understand,” I said.
“You complain that I pushed you off. I did it because you did not attend to my instructions. I have learned that men like you are a hazard to the ship. If they are injured, it is no more than they would do to me. How many times do you think such men have tried to destroy me?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said, still scanning the plate for the symbol he had described.
“Nor do I. We sail in and out of Time, then back again. There is only one ship, the captain says. All the ships we hail between the galaxies or the suns are this ship. How can I know how often they have tried, or how often they have succeeded?”
He was growing irrational, I thought, and then I found the symbol. When I had fitted the point of my hunting knife into the slot and turned it, the seepage of fluid dropped almost to nothing.
“Thank you,” Sidero said. “I have been losing a great deal of pressure.”
I asked whether he would not have to drink new fluid to replace that he had lost.
“Eventually. But now I have my strength again, and I will have full strength when you make the last adjustment.” He told me where it was and what to do.
“You asked how we came to be. Do you know how your own race came to be?”
“Only that we were animals who lived in trees. That is what the mystes say. Not the monkeys, since the monkeys are there still. Perhaps something like the zoanthropes, though smaller. The zoanthropes always make for the mountains, I’ve noticed, and they climb trees in the high jungle there. At any rate, these animals communicated with one another, as even cattle do, and wolves, by certain cries and motions. Eventually, through the will of the Increate, it came to be that those who communicated best survived while those who did so poorly perished.”
“Is there no more?”
I shook my head. “When they communicated well enough that they could be said to speak, they were men and women. Such are we still. Our hands were made to cling to branches, our eyes to see the next branch as we move from tree to tree, our mouths to speak, and to chew fruit and fledglings. So are they still. But what of your own kind?”
“Much like yours. If the story is true, the mates wanted shelter from the void, from destructive rays, the weapons of hostiles, and other things. They built hard coverings for themselves. They wanted to be stronger too, for war and work on deck. Then they put the liquid you saw into us so that our arms and legs would move as they wanted, but with greater force. Into our genators, I ought to have said. They needed to communicate, so they added talk circuits. Then more circuits so we could do one thing as they did another. Controllers so we could speak and act even when they could not. Until at last we spoke in storage and acted without a mate inside. Are you unable to find it?”
“I’ll have it in a moment,” I told him. The truth was that I had found it some time before, but I had wanted to keep him talking. “Do you mean the officers of this ship wear you like clothing?”
“Not often now. The mark is like a star, with a straight mark beside it.”
“I know,” I said, debating what I might do and judging the cavity inside him. My belt, with the knife and my pistol in its holster, would never fit, I thought; but without those I might go in well enough.
I told Sidero, “Wait a moment. I’m having to work in a half crouch to find this thing. These are digging into me.” I slipped my belt free and laid it down, with the sheath and holstered pistol beside it. “This would be easier if you’d lie down.”
He did so, and more quickly and gracefully than I would have thought possible, now that he was no longer bleeding so much. “Be quick. I have no time to waste.”
“Listen,” I told him, “if somebody were after you, he’d have been here by now, and I can’t even hear anyone.” While I pretended to dawdle, I was thinking furiously; it seemed a mad idea, yet it would give protection and a disguise, if it succeeded. I had worn armor often. Why not better armor?
“Do you think I fled them?”
I heard what Sidero said, but I paid little attention to it. I had spoken a moment before of listening; now there was something to listen to, and after listening I recognized it for what it was: the slow beating of great wings.
Chapter IX — The Empty Air
MY KNIFE point had already found the slot. I twisted it as I snatched off my cloak and rolled into Sidero’s open body. I did not so much as try to see what creature those wings bore until I had thrust my head, with some pain, into his and could look out through his visor.
Even then I saw nothing, or almost nothing. The air-shaft, which had been fairly clear at this depth earlier, now seemed filled with mist; something had carried the cool upper air lower, mixing it with the warm, moist, reeking air we breathed. Something that roiled that mist now, as though a thousand ghosts searched there.
I could no longer hear the wings, or anything else. I might as well have had my head locked in a dusty strong-box, peeping through the keyhole. Then Sidero’s voice sounded — but not in my ear.
I do not know just how to describe it. I know well what it is to have another’s thoughts in my mind: Thecla’s came there, and the old Autarch’s, before I grew one with them. This was not that. And yet it was not hearing, either, as I had known it. I can come no nearer to it than to say that there is something more that hears, behind the ear; and that Sidero’s voice was there, without having passed through the ear to reach it.
“I can kill you.”
“After I repaired you? I have known ingratitude, but never such depths as that.” His chest had closed tightly, and I struggled to get my legs into his, pushing with hands braced against the hollows of his shoulders. If I had been able to take a moment more outside, I would have removed my boots; then it would have been easy. As it was, I felt I had already fractured both ankles.
“You have no right in me!”
“I have every right. You were made to protect men, and I was a man in need of protection. Didn’t you hear the wings? You can’t make me believe there is supposed to be a creatures like that loose in this ship.”
“They have freed the apports.”
“Who has?” My sound leg had at last straightened itself. My lame leg ought to have been easier, because its muscles had shrunk; but I could not summon strength enough to force it down.
“The jibers.”
I felt myself bent forward, as one sometimes is in wresting; Sidero was sitting up. He stood, and in standing shifted my position just enough for my lame leg to straighten. It was easy then to thrust my left arm into his. My right entered what had been his own right arm equally easily, but emerged from the damaged brassard, protected only at the shoulder.