Darya drifted away into an uneasy half sleep. Her worries somehow reached beyond logic. E.C. Tally, totally logical, had seen J’merlia vanish, too, but the embodied computer did not seem to be affected by it as Darya was affected. All he knew was what was in his data bases. He accepted that there might be almost anything outside them. What Tally did not have — Darya struggled to force her tired brain to frame the concept — what he did not have were expectations about the behavior of the universe. Only organic intelligences had expectations. Just as only organic intelligences dreamed. If only she could make this all into a dream.
But she could not. This floor was too damned hard. Darya returned to wakefulness, sat up with a groan, and stared around her. The tunnel had grown much darker. She looked at her watch, wondering if somehow she had been unconscious for many hours. She found that only thirty minutes had passed. She crawled back to the main chamber and found that it, too, was darker. The sun had moved in the sky. Not very much, but now its rays no longer struck straight down the line of the tunnel that they had entered. It would become darker yet, as the day wore on.
Darya was within a few feet of the leaves and fruit that Tally had left behind. She had sworn never to touch another, but her thirst was so great and the taste in her mouth so sour and dreadful that she pulled a few berries and squeezed them between her teeth.
These were the right ones — they had that true bitter and horrible taste. But she was so thirsty that the juice felt as though it were being directly absorbed on the path down her throat. Her stomach insisted that it had not received anything.
She reached out to pull another handful. At that moment she heard a new sound from the wide corridor on the other side of the chamber.
It might be E.C. Tally, returning along a different path. But it was a softer, more diffuse sound than the ring of shoes on hard, glassy floor.
Darya slipped off her own shoes and quietly retreated to the narrow tunnel that she knew led back to the surface. Twenty yards along it she halted and peered back into the gloom. Her line of sight included only a small part of the chamber, but that would be enough for at least a snapshot of anything that crossed the room.
There was a soft swishing of leathery, grease-coated limbs. And then a dark torso, surrounded by a corset of lighter webbing, was gliding across the chamber. Another followed, and then another. As Darya watched and counted, at least a dozen mature Zardalu passed across her field of view. She heard the clicks and whistles of their speech. And then they were circling, moving around the room and talking to each other continuously. They must be seeing the unmistakable signs of Darya’s presence — the leaves and berries, and the place where she had thrown up so painfully. For the first time since she and Tally had escaped, the Zardalu had been provided with a fix on their most recent location.
She counted carefully. It looked like fifteen of them, when one would be enough to handle two humans. If E.C. Tally chose to return at that moment…
She could do nothing to help him, nothing to warn him. If she called out it would announce her own location. The Zardalu must know enough about the air ducts to realize where she would emerge on the surface.
Five minutes. Ten. The Zardalu had settled into silence. The chance that Tally might return and find himself in their midst was increasing.
Darya was thinking of easing closer to the room, so that if she saw him coming she could at least shout a warning and take her chances on beating the Zardalu in the race back to the surface, when the whistles and clicks began again. There was a flurry of moving shapes.
She took four cautious steps forward. The Zardalu were leaving. She counted as they moved across the part of the room that she could see. Fifteen. All of them, unless she had made a mistake in their numbers when first they entered. To a human eye, one mature Zardalu was just like another, distinguished only by size and the subtle patterns on their corsets of webbing.
They were gone. Darya waited, until the room was once more totally silent. She crept back along the three-foot pipe of the air duct. Tally had to be warned, somehow. The only way she could do it was to assume that he would return along the same path by which he had left, and station herself in that duct. And if for some reason he favored a different return route, that would be just too bad.
The big room was filled with the faint ammoniac scent of the Zardalu. It reminded her of Louis Nenda’s comment: “If you can smell them, bet that they can smell you.” Her own recent misfortunes had swept the fate of the other party right out of her thoughts. Now she wondered who had escaped in the Indulgence. Who was alive, and who was dead? Were others, like her, still running like trapped rats through the service facilities of Genizee?
Out on the planetary surface, the long day must be wearing on. The sun would be approaching zenith, farther from the line of the air ducts. It was darker in the room than when she had left. She could barely distinguish the apertures of the ducting, over at the other side. She tiptoed across to the widest of them, peering along it for any sign of the Zardalu and ready to turn and flee.
Nothing. The corridor ran off, dark and silent, as far as she could see. She felt sure they would be back — they knew she had been here.
She moved on, heading for the third corridor, the right-hand one, which Tally had taken when he left. The second corridor, according to him, angled away in the wrong direction. If it led to the surface at all it would be farther from the place where the Indulgence had rested.
Darya hardly glanced at the round opening as she passed it. Any adult Zardalu would find it hard to squeeze more than a few feet along that narrowing tunnel.
She took one more step. In that same moment there was a rush of air from her left. She did not have time to turn her head. From the corner of her eye she saw a blur of motion. And then she was seized from behind, lifted, and pulled close to a body whose powerful muscles flexed beneath rubbery skin.
Darya gasped, convulsed, and tried to twist free. At the same moment she kicked at her captor’s body, regretting that she had taken off her hard and heavy shoes.
There was a rewarding grunt of pain. It was followed by a creaking moan of surprise and complaint. Darya was suddenly dropped to the ground.
She stared up. Even as she realized that those were not tentacles that had held her, she recognized the voice.
“Dulcimer!”
The Chism Polypheme was crouching down next to her, all of his five little arms waving agitatedly in the air.
“Professor Lang. Save me!” He was shivering and weeping, and Darya felt teardrops the size of marbles falling onto her from his master eye. “I’ve run and run, but still they come after me. I’m exhausted. I’ve shouted to them and pleaded with them, promising I’ll be the best and most loyal slave they ever had — and they won’t listen!”
“You were wasting your time. They don’t understand human speech.”
“I know. But I thought I had nothing to lose by trying. Professor Lang, they want to eat me, I know they do. Please save me.”
A tall order, when she could not save herself. Darya groped around on the floor until she found her shoes and put them on. She patted Dulcimer on his muscular body. “We’ll be all right. I know a safe way to the surface. I realize that the Zardalu could be back here anytime, but we can’t go yet. We have to wait for E.C. Tally.”
“No, we don’t. Leave him. He’ll manage just fine on his own.” Dulcimer was tugging at her, urging her to stand up. “He will. He doesn’t need us. Let’s get out of here before they come back.”