He turned, but before he could move, Kallik was past him. One leap took her into the heart of the blue pillar, and she was gone. Atvar H’sial followed, her wing cases tight to her body to keep them within the width of the column of light.
Louis Nenda moved forward, but paused on the brink. “How many gravities you think that thing pulls? Acceleration kills as good as fire.”
“No idea.” Rebka moved to stand next to him. “I guess we’re going to find out, though. Or stay here till we die.” He gestured to the column, palm up. “After you.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” And Nenda was gone, swallowed up in a flash of blue.
Rebka took a last look around — was this his last sight of the deep interior of Genizee? his last sight of anything? — and jumped forward. There was a moment of dislocation, too brief and alien to be called pain, and then he was standing on a flat surface. He swayed, struggling to hold his balance. He was in total darkness.
He reached out, groping all around him, and felt nothing.
“Anyone there?”
“We’re all here,” said Louis Nenda’s voice.
“Where’s here? Can you see?”
“Not a thing. Black as a politician’s heart. But At’s echolocation’s workin’ fine. She says we’re outside. On the surface.”
As they spoke, Hans Rebka was revising his own first impression. The brilliance of the light column as he entered it had overloaded his retinas, but now they were slowly regaining their sensitivity. He looked straight up and saw the first flicker of light, a faded, shimmering pink and ghostly electric blue.
“Give it a minute,” he said to Nenda. “And look up. I’m getting a glimmer from there. If it’s the surface, it has to be night. All we’ll see is the aurora of the nested singularities.”
“Good enough. I’m gettin’ it, too. At can’t detect that, ’cause it’s way outside the atmosphere. But she can see our surroundings. She says don’t move, or else step real careful. There’s rocks an’ rubble an’ all that crap, easy to break a leg or three.”
Rebka’s eyes were still adjusting, but he was seeing about as much as he was likely to see. And it was not enough. The faint glow of the singularities revealed little of the ground at his feet, just sufficient to be sure that there was no sign of the blue pillar that had carried them here. Like the doors, it had closed behind them. There would be no going back. And Rebka felt oddly isolated. Atvar H’sial could see as well by night as by day, and Kallik also had eyes far more sensitive than a human’s. Both aliens could sense their environment and talk of it in their own languages to Louis Nenda. The Karelian understood both Cecropian and Hymenopt speech. If they choose, the three of them could leave Rebka out of the conversations completely.
It was ironic. The first time Hans Rebka had seen Nenda’s augment for Cecropian speech, he had been revolted by the ugly pits and black molelike nodules on the other man’s chest. Now he would not mind having one himself.
“Any sign of Zardalu?” he said.
“At says she can’t see ’em. But she can smell ’em. They’re somewhere around, not more than a mile or two from here.”
“If only we knew where here is.”
At says “hold tight. She’s climbin’ a big rock, takin’ a peek all round. Kallik’s goin’ up behind her.”
Rebka strained his eyes into the darkness. No sign of Atvar H’sial or of Kallik, although he could hear the muted click of unpadded claws on hard rock. It added to the soft rustle of wind through dry vegetation and something like a distant, low-pitched murmur, oddly familiar, that came from Rebka’s right. Both sounds were obliterated by a sudden grunt from Louis Nenda.
“We made it. At says we’re right near where we landed — she can see the green moss an’ shoreline, right down to the water.”
“The ship?” That was the only real question. Without a ship they would become Zardalu meat and might as well have stayed in Genizee’s deep interior. According to J’merlia’s original account, he had repaired the seedship and flown it closer to the Zardalu buildings. But then he had become totally vague and random, and everything he had said after that, to the moment of his immolation suicide, had to be questioned.
“The seedship,” Rebka repeated. “Can Atvar H’sial see it?”
“No sign of it.”
Rebka’s heart sank.
“But the weird thing is,” Nenda continued, “she says she can see another ship, bigger than the seedship, sittin’ in about the same place it was.” He added a string of clicks and whistles in the Hymenopt language.
“Zardalu vessel?” Rebka asked.
“Dunno. We don’t know what one looks like.”
“With respect.” It was Kallik, speaking for the first time since they had emerged on the surface. Her soft voice came from somewhere above Hans Rebka’s head. “I have also looked, and listened with care to Atvar H’sial’s description as it was relayed to me by Master Nenda. The ship resembles one on which I have never flown, but which I had the opportunity to examine closely on our journey to the Anfract.”
“What?” That was Louis Nenda. It was nice to know that he did not understand any better than Rebka.
“The configuration is that of the Indulgence — Dulcimer’s ship. And it is an uncommon design. I would like to suggest a theory, consistent with all the facts. Those of our party left behind on the Erebus must have received the message drone describing a safe path through the singularities, and decided to follow us here. They located the seedship by a remote scan of the planetary surface, and sent the Indulgence to land near it. But there was no sign of us, and no indication of where we had gone or when we might come back. Therefore they kept one or two individuals on Dulcimer’s ship, with its heavy weapons, waiting for our possible return, and the rest returned to space in the unarmed seedship, safe from the Zardalu. If this analysis is correct, one or two members of our party now wait for us in the Indulgence. And the Erebus itself waits in orbit about Genizee.”
Kallik’s explanation was neat, logical, and complete. Like most such explanations, it was, in Hans Rebka’s view, almost certainly wrong. That was not the way the real world operated.
But at that point theory had little role to play in what they had to do next. That would be decided by facts, and certain facts were undeniable. Day was approaching — the first hint of light was already in the sky. They dared not remain on the surface of Genizee, at least not close to the shoreline, once the sun rose and the Zardalu became active. And the most important fact of alclass="underline" there was a ship just a few hundred yards away. How it got there, or who was on it, was of much less importance than its existence.
“We can all compare theories — once we’re safe in space.” Rebka peered around him. He could at last distinguish rock outcrops from lightening sky. In a few minutes he and Louis Nenda would be able to walk or run without killing themselves. But by that time he wanted to be close to the ship. “I know it will be rough going across the rocks, but we have to try it even while it’s still dark. I want Atvar H’sial and Kallik to guide Nenda and me. Tell us where to put our feet — set them down for us if you have to. Remember, we have to be as quiet as we can, so don’t take us through any patches of rubble, or places where we might knock stones loose. But we have to get to where the moss and mud begins before it’s really light.”
The predawn wind was dying, and the sound of waves on the shore had vanished. Hans Rebka moved through an absolute silence, where every tiny clink of a pebble sounded like thunder and a dislodged handful of earth was like an avalanche. He had to remind himself that human ears, at least, would not detect him more than a few feet away.
And finally they were at a point where the amount of noise they made did not matter. The gray-green moss lay level before them, soft and fuzzy against the brightening sky. All that remained was a dash across it to the ship, a couple of hundred yards away.