Darya was walking last, uncomfortable about something she could not put a name on. Everything was fine. So why did she feel uneasy? It had to be the added sense that Hans Rebka insisted any human had the potential to develop. It was a faint voice in the inner ear, warning that something — don’t ask what — was not right. Hans Rebka swore that this voice must never be ignored. Darya had done her best. The defense systems of the Indulgence were intelligent enough to recognize the difference in appearance of different life-forms. Darya had commanded the ship to allow entry of any of the types present in their party, but to remain tight-closed to anything that remotely resembled a Zardalu. J’merlia had said that the buildings were empty, but who knew about the rest of the area?
As they approached the cluster of five buildings Darya realized that the structures must actually be visible from the place where the Indulgence had landed. It was their odd shapes, matching the natural jutting fingers of rock, that made them easy to miss. They were built of fine-grained sandy cement, the same color as the beach and the rock spurs. One had to come close to see that they rose from a level, sandy spit of land and must be buildings.
“I went into orbit with the seedship and launched the message drone that told the path through the singularities,” J’merlia went on. “The others remained here.”
“And they are in the buildings now?” They were halfway along the projecting point of land; still Darya could find no cause for her uneasiness.
“I certainly have not seen them emerge.”
Darya decided that it must be the manner of the Lo’tfian’s answers. J’merlia was usually self-effacing to the point of obsequiousness, but now he was cool, laconic, casual. Maybe it was freedom from slavery, at last asserting itself. They had all been wondering when that would happen.
J’merlia had paused by the first of the buildings. He swiveled his pale-yellow eyes on their short stalks and stabbed one forelimb at the entrance. “They went in there.”
As though the word was a signal, a blue flicker moved in the dark recesses of the building. Darya went past Dulcimer and E.C. Tally and craned forward for a better look. As she did so, there was a scream from behind and something banged hard in her back and clung to her. She managed to keep her feet and turn. It was the Chism Polypheme, collapsing against her.
“Dulcimer! You great lout, don’t do that.”
The Polypheme was blubbering and groaning, wrapping his nine-foot length around her and clinging to her with his five little arms. Darya struggled to break loose, wondering what was wrong with him, until suddenly she could see past Dulcimer and E.C. Tally, along the spur of land that led back to the beach.
Zardalu.
Zardalu of all sizes, scores of them, still dripping with seawater. They blocked the return path along land, and they were rising on all sides from the sea. And now she also knew the nature of that blue flicker inside the building behind her.
Impossible to run, impossible to hide. Darya felt sympathy with Dulcimer for the first time. Blubbering and groaning was not a bad idea.
Humans, Cecropians — maybe even Zardalu — might entertain the illusion that there were things in the universe more interesting than the acquisition of information. Perhaps some of them even believed it. But E.C. Tally knew that they were wrong — knew it with the absolute certainty that only a computer could know.
Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; it was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E.C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.
Here was an excellent example. Back on Miranda he had learned from Kallik the language she used to communicate with the Zardalu. It was an ancient form, employed back when the Hymenopts had been a Zardalu slave species. Most of the spiral arm would have argued that learning a dead language used only to speak to an extinct race was an idiotic waste of memory capacity.
But without it, E.C. Tally would have been unable to communicate with his captors in even the simplest terms.
The Zardalu had not, to Tally’s surprise, torn their four captives apart in the first few moments of encounter. But they had certainly let everyone know who was boss. Tally, whisked off his feet and turned upside down in the grasp of two monstrous tentacles, had heard an “Oof!” from J’merlia and Darya Lang on one side, and a gargling groan from Dulcimer on the other. But those were sounds of surprise and disorientation, not of pain. Tally himself was moved in against a meter-wide torso of midnight blue, his nose squashed against rubbery ammoniac skin. Still upside down, he saw the ground flashing past him at a rare rate. A moment later, before he had time to take a breath, the Zardalu that held him was plunging under the water.
Tally overrode the body’s reflex that wanted to breathe. He kept his mouth closed and reflected, with some annoyance, that a few more minutes of this, and he would have to be embodied yet again, even though the body he was wearing was in most respects as good as new. And it was becoming more and more determined to breathe water, no matter how much he tried to block the urge. Tally cursed the designers of the computer/body interface who had left the reflexes organic, when he could certainly have handled them with ease. Don’t breathe, don’t breathe, don’t breathe. He sent the order to his body with all his power.
The breathing reflex grew stronger and stronger. His lips were moving — parting — sucking in liquid. Don’t breathe!
In midgulp he was turned rapidly through a hundred and eighty degrees and placed on his feet.
He coughed, spat out a mouthful of brackish water, and blinked his eyes clear. He glanced around. He stood at the edge of a great shallow upturned bowl, forty or fifty meters across, with a raised area and a gray circular parapet at its center. Two tentacles of the Zardalu were loosely wrapped around him. Another pair were holding Dulcimer, who was coughing and choking and seemed to have taken in a lot more water than Tally. The wall of the bubble was pale blue. Tally decided that it was transparent, they were underwater, and its color was that of the sea held at bay outside it.
Of Darya Lang and J’merlia there was no sign. Tally hoped they were all right. So far as he could tell, the treatment he had received was not intended to kill or maim — at once. But there was plenty of time for that.
And he could think of a variety of unpleasant ways that it might happen.
One of them was right in front of him. At first sight the space between Tally and the raised center of the room was a lumpy floor, an uneven carpet of pale apricot. But it was moving. The inside of the chamber was a sea of tiny heads, snapping with sharp beaks at anything in sight. Miniature tentacles writhed, tangling each with its neighbor.
They were in an underwater Zardalu breeding ground. A rapid scan counted more than ten thousand young — up from a total of fourteen just a few months earlier. Zardalu bred fast.
He was recording full details of the scene for possible future use by others when the Zardalu lifted him and Dulcimer and carried them effortlessly forward, on through the sea of waving orange tentacles. The little Zardalu made no attempt to get out of the way. They stood their ground and snapped aggressively at the base of the adult Zardalu as it passed. In return, the infants were swatted casually out of the way by leg-thick tentacles, with a force that sent them flying for many meters.