Tally did not complain. Darya recalled, with envy, that he had control over his discomfort circuits. If things became too unpleasant he would turn them off. If only she could do the same. She struggled on for another quarter of an hour. At last she paused, left the rutted path of broken stone that she had been following, and climbed laboriously to a higher level. She peered over the edge of a stony ridge and thought that she had never seen a more beautiful sight. The ship stood there, silent and welcoming.
“Just five more minutes,” she turned and whispered down to Tally. “We can’t be more than a hundred yards from the Indulgence. We’ll go right to the edge of the flat area of moss, then we’ll stay in the shrubs and take a rest. When we have our energy back, we go for the Indulgence at a dead run. I’ll secure the hatches; you go to the ship controls and take us to space.”
They stole forward, to a point where the brush ended and they would have a straight run across gray-green moss to the ship. Darya crouched low and brushed black flies from her face. At every breath, flies swarmed at her nose and mouth. She placed her hands to her face and breathed through a filter of closed fingers.
One more minute, then this slow torture would be history. Darya rose to a full standing position and turned to nod to E.C. Tally.
“Thirty seconds.” She could see it all in her mind’s eye: the race across the moss, the ship’s rapid start-up procedure, the roar of the engines, and then that wonderful sound of a powered lift-off to a place where bloodthirsty Zardalu were just a bad memory. She could hear it happening now.
She could hear it happening now.
My God. She could hear it happening now.
Darya turned. She took a deep breath to shout, inhaled a few dozen minute bugs, and started to choke and wheeze. A hundred yards from her, the Indulgence — her only hope, the only way off this awful world — rose with a roar of controlled power and vanished into the salmon-pink morning sky of Genizee.
Chapter Nineteen
Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.
There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck — even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.
Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.
Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.
The seedship had been dragged down to the surface of Genizee and damaged. Bad luck, if you liked to think of it that way. Lack of adequate precautions, if you thought like Hans Rebka. Then they had been trapped by the Zardalu and forced to retreat to the interior of the planet. More bad luck? Maybe.
But then, against all odds, they had managed to escape the Zardalu by plunging deep inside the planet. They had encountered World-Keeper. And the Builder construct had agreed through J’merlia, without an argument, to return them to a safe spot on the surface of Genizee, a place from which they could easily make it back to the waiting seedship. If they preferred, they could even be transmitted all the way to friendly and familiar Alliance territory.
Good luck. Too much good luck. A little voice in Rebka’s ear had been muttering ever since it happened. Now it was louder, asserting its own worries.
He stared around the square chamber, which was lit by the flicker of a column of blue plasma that flared upward through its center. World-Keeper had advised them not to approach that roaring, meter-wide pillar, but the warning was unnecessary. Even from twenty meters Rebka could feel fierce heat.
They had been told to wait here — but for how long? They were still without food, and this room had no water supply. The Builder constructs had waited for millions of years; they had no sense of human time. One hour had already passed. How many more?
J’merlia, Kallik, and Atvar H’sial were crouched in three separate corners of the chamber — odd, now that Rebka thought about it, since when J’merlia was not sitting in adoring silence under Atvar H’sial’s carapace, he was usually engaged in companionable conversation with the Hymenopt. Louis Nenda was the only one active. He was delicately prying the top off a transparent sealed octahedron filled with wriggling black filaments. It floated unsupported a couple of feet above the floor as Nenda peered in at the contents.
Rebka walked across to him. “Busy?”
“Middlin’. Passes the time. I think they’re alive in there.” Nenda stood up straight and stared at Rebka questioningly. “Well?”
Rebka did not resent the chilly tone. Neither man was one for casual conversation. “I need your help.”
“Do you now. Well, that’ll be a first.” Nenda scratched at his arm, where droplets of corrosive liquid had raised a fine crop of blisters. “Don’t see how I can give it. You know as much about this place as I do.”
“I’m not talking about that. I need something different.” Rebka gestured to Louis Nenda to follow him, and did not speak again until they were out of the room and far away along the corridor. Finally he halted and turned. “I want you to act as interpreter for me.”
“All this way to tell me that? Sorry. I can’t speak to silver teapots any better than you can.”
“I don’t mean World-Keeper. I want you as interpreter to Atvar H’sial.”
“Use J’merlia, then, not me. Even with my augment, he speaks Cecropian a sight better than I do.”
“I know. But I don’t want J’merlia as interpreter. I don’t want to use him for anything. You’ve seen him. He’s been our main interface with the construct, but don’t you think he’s been acting strange?”
“Strange ain’t the word for it. You heard Kallik, when J’merlia first rolled up an’ joined us? She said she thought her buddy J’merlia might have been Zardalu brainwashed. Is that where you’re coming from?”
“Somewhere like that.” Rebka did not see it as a Zardalu brainwash, but he would have been hard put to produce an explanation of his own. All he knew was that something felt wrong, impossible to explain to anyone who did not already feel it for himself. “I want to know what Atvar H’sial thinks about J’merlia. He’s been her slave and interpreter for years. I don’t know if anyone can lie using pheromonal speech, but I’d like to know if J’merlia said anything to Atvar H’sial that sounded bizarrely different from usual.”
“You can lie in Cecropian pheromonal speech, but only if you speak it really well. You know what the Decantil Myrmecons say about Cecropians? ‘All that matters to Cecropians are honesty, sincerity, and integrity. Once a Cecropian learns to fake those, she is ready to take her place in Federation society.’ Sure you can lie in Cecropian. I just wish I were fluent enough to do it.”
“Well, if anyone understands the change in J’merlia, I’m betting it’s Atvar H’sial. That’s what I want to ask her about.”
“Hang on. I’ll get her.” Nenda headed for the other chamber, but he added over his shoulder, “I think I know what she’ll tell you, though. She’ll say she can’t talk sensibly to J’merlia any more. But you should hear it for yourself. Wait here.”
When the massive Cecropian arrived Nenda was already asking Rebka’s question. She nodded at Hans Rebka.
“It is true, Captain,” Nenda translated, “and yet it is more subtle than that. I can talk to J’merlia, and he speaks to me and for me in return. He speaks truth, also — at least, I do not feel that he is lying. And yet there is a feeling of incompleteness in his presence, as though it is not J’merlia who stands before me, but some unfamiliar simulacrum who has learned to mimic every action of the real J’merlia. And yet I know that must also be false. My echolocation might be fooled, but my sense of smell, never. This is indeed the authentic J’merlia.”