Rebka nodded. As soon as he had seen the little drone, the question of a message to Darya and the others had come again to his mind. But what message? The more he thought about their situation, the more difficult it became to know what should be said. What did they know?
“J’merlia, ask Atvar H’sial to come outside. We need to brainstorm for a few minutes.”
“She is already on the way.”
The Cecropian was squeezing through the hatch, to drop lightly onto the soft moss. The great white head with its sonic generator and yellow receiving horns scanned the shoreline and the inland tangle of rocks and vegetation. She stretched to her full height, and the six-foot-long cephalic antennas unfurled.
“You sure, At?” Nenda asked. He was picking up her pheromonal message before J’merlia could translate for the others.
The blind head nodded.
“Zardalu,” J’merlia said.
“She can smell ’em,” added Nenda. “Long way off, and faint, but they’re here. That settles that.”
“Part of it,” Rebka said. He waited until Atvar H’sial had turned back to face him and J’merlia had moved for easy communication into the shelter of the Cecropian’s carapace. “Even if we could send the drone this minute, I’ve still got real problems about what we ought to say.”
“Like what problems?” Nenda had picked up a shred of moss and was nibbling it thoughtfully.
“Like, we know we’re not in charge here. Somebody else brought us down. But who’s doing what? What should we tell Darya and the others? My first thoughts for a message were probably the same as yours: We got through the singularities all right, this planet is Genizee, and there are live Zardalu here though we haven’t seen them yet. We can’t get back, because somebody forced our ship to make a crash landing on Genizee and we have to fix it.
“So who forced us down? We were shaken up a bit when we hit, but we’re in fair shape and so is our ship. Now, you know the Zardalu. If they were in charge, they’d have blasted us right out of the sky — no way we’d have survived a landing if they were running the show.
“But let’s be ridiculous and suppose they did want us to land in one piece, because they had other plans for us.”
“Like eating us.” Nenda spat out the bit of moss that he was chewing and made a face. “They’d like us better than this stuff. I’ve not forgotten their ideas from last time. They like their meat super-fresh.”
“Whatever they want to do with us, it would only make sense for them to bring us to a landing place where they are. So where are they?”
“Maybe they’re worried about our weapons,” Nenda offered. “Maybe they want to have a look at us from a distance. They wouldn’t think we were dumb enough to fly here in a ship that didn’t have weapons.”
“Then why not land us hard enough to make sure that all our weapons were put out of action?” Rebka ignored Nenda’s crack about coming weaponless, but he stored it up for future reprisal. “It doesn’t make sense, soft-landing us and then leaving us alone.”
“With respect,” J’merlia said softly. “Atvar H’sial would like to suggest that the source of your perplexity is in one of your implicit assumptions. She agrees that we were surely landed here by design, although her own senses did not allow her to detect the presence of the beam that tore the seedship from its trajectory and deposited it at its present location. But according to what you have told her, the beam came from the moon — that hollow, artificial moon of which you spoke — not from Genizee itself. What does that suggest? Simply this: the unwarranted assumption that you are making is that the Zardalu who are here also brought us here.”
J’merlia paused. There was a long silence, broken only by the ominous sigh of strong wind across gray moss. It was close to sunset, and with the slow approach of twilight the weather was no longer the flat calm that had greeted their arrival.
“That don’t help us at all,” Louis Nenda said at last. “If the Zardalu didn’t grab our ship and bring us here, then who the blazes did?”
“Atvar H’sial does not know,” J’merlia translated. “However, she suggests that what you are asking is a quite different — though admittedly highly significant — question.”
The seedship’s computational powers had not been affected by impact with the surface of Genizee. From the planet’s size, mass, orbital parameters, and visible features, the computer readily provided an overview of surface conditions.
Genizee rotated slowly, with a forty-two-hour day, about an axis almost normal to its orbital plane. The atmospheric circulation was correspondingly gentle, with little change of seasons and few high winds. The artificial moon, circling just a couple of hundred thousand kilometers away, looked huge from Genizee’s surface, but its mass was so tiny that the planet’s tides came only from the effects of its sun; again, the slow rotation rate decreased their force.
The climate of mid-latitude Genizee was equable, with no extremes of freezing or baking temperatures. Surface gravity was small, at half standard human. As a result the geological formations were sharp and angled, sustaining steeper rock structures than would be possible in a stronger field; but the overall effect of those delicate spires and arches was more aesthetic than threatening, as abundant vegetation softened their profiles. The final computer summary suggested a delicate and peaceful world, a cozy environment where native animals needed little effort to survive. There should be nothing to fear from the easygoing native fauna.
“Which proves just how dumb a computer can be,” Louis Nenda said. “If Zardalu are easygoing and laid back, I’ll — I’ll invest everything I have in Ditron securities.”
He and Atvar H’sial had lagged behind Rebka and Kallik as they walked along the shore. With three hours to go to planetary nightfall, Hans Rebka had decreed that before they could rest easy they needed to take a close look at the structures that Kallik had found. He was particularly keen to have Atvar H’sial’s reaction. Given her different suite of sensory apparatus, she might perceive something where others did not.
J’merlia had been left behind in the seedship. He had already begun work on the repair of the hull and the message drone, and he had insisted that the work would go fastest with least interference. If they stayed away for three hours or more, he said, he would have the ship ready for takeoff to orbit.
“Investment in securities of any kind begins to appear as an attractive alternative to our own recent efforts for the acquisition of wealth.” The pheromonal message diffused across from Atvar H’sial, who was crouching low to the ground and reducing her speed to a crawl to match Nenda’s pace. “It is never easy to be objective about one’s own actions and one’s accomplishments, but it occurs to me that our recent history has not been one of uninterrupted triumph.”
“What you mean?”
“You and I chose to remain on Serenity to acquire an unprecedented and priceless treasure of Builder technology. When we were returned to the spiral arm by the Builders’ constructs — for whatever reason — our new objective became the planetoid of Glister, for the purpose of the acquisition of Builder technology there, and the repossession of your ship, the Have-It-All. To that end, we agreed that we would need the use of some other ship, and we set out for Miranda with that in mind. But see where our fine strategy has taken us. We find ourselves deep in the middle of one of the spiral arm’s least understood and most dangerous regions, on a world we believe to be native to the arm’s most ferocious species, with a ship that is presently incapable of taking us to orbit. One wonders if our record is much superior to a suggested Ditron investment.”