“But my companions are there now. They are in danger, or even dead.”
“If what you have told me is true, and if other criteria are satisfied, than I will admit the possibility of a misunderstanding. Do you wish this situation to be corrected, and your companions assisted in their attempt to leave True-Home?”
“I do.” Even someone as naturally subservient as J’merlia had trouble giving a restrained answer to something as obvious as that. “Of course I do.”
“Then we can begin at once. There must be direct verification. Are you ready?”
“Me!” J’merlia was suddenly aware of his own insignificance and ineptitude. He was the idiot whose brain-frozen incompetence had allowed the seedship to be caught by the amorphous singularity, while he sat and did nothing. He was the fool who had launched the battered drone back to the Erebus — without even mentioning in its message the fate of Captain Rebka and the others. He was a male Lo’tfian, a natural slave who was happiest taking orders from others. He was inadequate.
“I can’t help. I’m nothing. I’m nobody.”
“You are all that can help. You are organic intelligence. You are not nothing. You are manything. You are manybody. You have many components. You must use them.”
“I can’t do it. I know I can’t.”
But the Guardian was not listening. An oval opening had formed in the middle of the fat silver body, and J’merlia was being drawn into it along a green beam of light. He opened his mouth to protest again and found that he could not speak. Could not breathe. Could not think. He was being dismembered — no, disminded, in exquisite torture.
The entry of the seedship into the outskirts of the amorphous singularity had been painful, but that had been physical pain, physical disruption, twisting and tearing and stretching. This was far worse, something he had never experienced before or heard described. J’merlia’s soul was being fractionated, his mind splitting into pieces, his consciousness spinning away along many divergent world lines.
He tried to scream. And when he at last succeeded, he heard a new sound: a dozen beings, all of them J’merlia, crying their agony across the universe.
Chapter Thirteen
The Zardalu had been breeding — fast.
The original group released from the stasis field on Serenity had consisted of just fourteen individuals. Now Hans Rebka, retreating into the building after Atvar H’sial, Louis Nenda, and Kallik, could see scores of them already on land. Hundreds more were rising from the sea. And these were only the larger specimens. There must be thousand after thousand of babies and immature forms, hidden away in breeding areas.
Escape along the spit of land that led to the seedship?
Impossible. It was blocked by Zardalu, with more of them arriving ashore every second.
Then escape to sea?
Even more hopeless. The Zardalu had always been described as land-cephalopods, and they were fast and efficient there, but it was clear that they had not lost mastery of their original ocean environment. They were land-and-sea-cephalopods.
Add that fact to the descriptions in the Universal Species Catalog — if you’re lucky enough to live so long, thought Rebka. He grabbed the back of Louis Nenda’s shirt and stepped across the threshold. The sun outside had almost set, and the building they were entering was unlit. Ten paces inside, and Rebka could see nothing. He blindly followed Nenda, who was presumably holding on to Atvar H’sial and Kallik. The Cecropian was the only one who could still see. She provided the sonic bursts used by her own echolocation system, and she was as much at home in total darkness as in bright sunlight.
But how much time could she really buy before the Zardalu brought lights inside and followed them? This was a Zardalu building; they would know every hiding place. Wouldn’t it be better to agree on the place for a last stand?
“Nenda!” He spoke softly into the darkness. “Where are we going? Does Atvar H’sial know what she’s doing?”
There was a grunt ahead of him. “Hold on a second.” And then, after a pause for pheromonal exchange, “At says she don’t actually know what she’s doing, but she prefers it to bein’ pulled to bits. She don’t see no end to this stupid tunnel” — they had been descending for half a minute in a steady spiral — “but she’s ready to go down for as long as it does. We’ve passed five levels of chambers and rooms. There were signs that the Zardalu lived on the first three; now she’s not seeing so much evidence of ’em. She thinks we’re mebbe gettin’ down below the main Zardalu levels. If only this damn staircase would branch a few times, we might make a few tricky moves and get ’em off our track. That’s At’s plan. She says she knows it’s not much, but have you any other ideas?”
Rebka did not reply. He did have other ideas, but they were not likely to be helpful ones. If the Zardalu used only the first few belowground levels, then why did lower ones exist? Were they even the work of the Zardalu? This would not be the first planet with a dominant aboveground species and a different dominant belowground species, interacting only at one or two levels. If Genizee had spawned a subterranean species powerful enough to stop Zardalu access, what would they do to a blind and defenseless group of strangers?
Rebka, still clutching the back of Louis Nenda’s shirt, tried to estimate a rate of descent. They must have come through a score of levels, into darkness so total and final that it made his straining eyes ache. He itched for a look around, but he was reluctant to show a light. The huge eyes of the Zardalu were highly sensitive, designed by evolution to pick up the faintest underwater gleam.
“Time to take a peek an’ see what we got here.” Louis Nenda had halted, and his whisper came from just in front. “At can’t hear or smell anythin’ coming down behind us, so she thinks we’re deep enough to risk a bit of light. Let’s take a look-see.”
The space in front of Rebka filled with pale white light. Louis Nenda was holding a flat illumination disk between finger and thumb, rotating it to allow the center of the beam to scan in all directions.
They were standing on a descending sideless pathway like a spiral staircase with no central shaft or guardrail, looking out onto a high-ceilinged chamber. Nenda played the beam in silence on the fittings and distant walls for a few seconds, then he whistled. “Sorry, Professor Lang, wherever you are. You were right, and we should have listened.”
Hans Rebka heard Nenda and was baffled. They were at least three hundred feet underground. All evidence of Zardalu existence had vanished, and the surroundings that replaced the furnishings of the upper levels were totally unfamiliar. He stared again, at a great arch that rose at forty-five degrees, swept up close to the ceiling, then curved gracefully back down all the way to the floor.
Almost. Almost to the floor. The far end stopped, just a foot short. The abrupt termination made so little sense that the eye insisted on trying to continue it to meet the level surface. But there was a space at the end. Forty centimeters of nothing. Rebka wanted to walk across and sweep his hand through the gap to prove it was real. The stresses on the support at this end must be huge. Everything else in the chamber was equally strange and unfamiliar. Wasn’t it?
His subconscious mind was at work while his conscious mind seemed to be giving up. One area where organic intelligence still beat inorganic intelligence, and by a wide margin, was in the subtlest problems of pattern recognition. E.C. Tally, with his eighteen-attosecond memory cycle, could compute trillions of twenty-digit multiplications in the time of a human eye-blink. If he had been present in the chamber he might have made the correct association in five minutes. Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial had done it in a few seconds, aided by their weeks of examining — and pricing for future sale — the masses of new Builder technology on Glister and Serenity. Kallik, with the advantage of her long study of the Builder artifacts, was almost as quick. It was left for Hans Rebka, least familiar with Builder attributes, to stand baffled for half a minute. At the end of that time his brain finally connected — and he felt furious at his own stupidity and slowness.