“No. You go anywhere you like. But I stay here, and I wait.” Darya did not like to be in the chamber any more than the Polypheme; but she was not about to abandon Tally.
Dulcimer produced a low, shivering moan. He made no attempt to leave and finally crouched back on the floor, tightly spiraled. Darya could not see his color in the dim light, but she was willing to bet that it was the dark cucumber green of a fully sober and nervous Polypheme.
“It will only be a little while,” she said, in her most confident tone, and forced herself to remain seated calmly on the floor. Dulcimer hesitated, then moved close to her.
Darya took a deep breath and actually felt some of her nervousness evaporate. It helped to be forced to set a good example.
But it helped less and less as the minutes wore on. Where the blazes was Tally? He had had time to go to the surface and back three or four times. Unless he had been captured.
Dulcimer was becoming more restless. He was turning his head, peering around the room. “I can hear something!”
Darya stopped breathing for twenty seconds and listened. All she heard was her own heartbeat. “It’s your imagination.”
“No. It’s coming from there.” He pointed his upper two arms in different directions, one at the duct that Darya and Tally had used to reach the surface, the other at the narrow opening from which he himself had emerged.
“Which one?”
“Both.”
Now Darya was convinced that it was Dulcimer’s imagination. She would barely be able to squeeze into that second gap herself. He had gone across to peer into it, and his head was a pretty tight fit.
“That’s impossible,” Darya started to say. But then she could hear a sound herself — a clean, clear sound of hurrying footsteps, coming from the duct that Tally had left through. She recognized that sound.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s E.C. Tally. At last! Now we can — thank heaven — get out of here.”
“And I know a better way,” Tally said. He had emerged crouching from the air duct just in time to catch Darya’s final words, and now he was staring at the corkscrew tail of the Chism Polypheme, sticking out of the round opening to the other tube. “Why, you found him. That was very clever of you, Professor. Hello, Dulcimer.”
The Polypheme was wriggling back out of the duct, but he took no notice of E.C. Tally. He was groaning and shaking worse than ever.
“I knew it,” he said. “I just knew it. They’re coming. I told you they were coming. Lots of them. Hundreds of them.”
“But they can’t be,” Darya protested. “Look how small that duct is. You’d never get a great big Zardalu—”
“Not the adults.” Dulcimer’s eye was rolling wildly in his head, and his blubbery mouth was grinning in terror. “Worse than that. The little ones, the Eaters, everything from tiny babies to half-grown. Small enough to go anywhere we can go. Those ducts are full of them. I saw them before, as I was running, and they’re hungry all the time. They don’t want slaves, they won’t make deals. All they want is food. They want meat. They want me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Hans Rebka glared at the image of the Erebus in the forward display screens. The appearance of the ship suggested a derelict hulk, abandoned for millennia. The vast hull was pitted by impact with interstellar dust grains. Observation ports, their transparent walls scuffed by the same microsand, bulged from the ship’s sides like rheumy old eyes fogged by cataracts.
And for all the response to Rebka’s signals, the Erebus might as well be dead! He had fired off a dozen urgent inquiries as the Indulgence rose to orbital rendezvous. Why was there an emergency distress signal? What was the nature of the problem? Was it safe for the Indulgence to dock and enter the cargo hold? No reply. The ship above them drifted alone in space like a great dead beast, silent and unresponsive to any stimulus.
“Take us in.” Rebka hated to go into anything blind, but there was no choice.
Kallik nodded, and her paws skipped across the controls too fast to see. The rendezvous maneuver of scoutship and Erebus was executed at record speed and far more smoothly than Rebka could have done it himself. Within minutes they were at the entrance of the subsidiary cargo hold.
“Hold us there.” As the Indulgence hovered stationary with respect to the other ship and the pumps filled the hold with air, Rebka scanned the screens. Still nothing. No sign of danger — but also no one awaiting their return and warping them into the dock. That was odd. Whatever had happened, the Erebus, everyone’s way home, should not have been left deserted.
He turned to order the hatch opened, but others were ahead of him. Nenda and Atvar H’sial had given the command as soon as pressures equalized, and already they were floating out toward the corridor that led to the control room of the Erebus. Rebka followed, leaving Kallik to turn the scoutship in case they had to make a rapid departure.
The first corridors were deserted, but that meant nothing. The inside of the Erebus was so big that even with a thousand people on board it could appear empty. The key question was the state of the control room. That was the nerve center of the ship. It should always have someone on duty.
And in a manner of speaking it did. Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial had hurried far ahead of Rebka. When he arrived at the control room he found them at the main console, leaning over the crouched figure of Julian Graves. The councilor was hunched far down with the palms of his hands covering his eyes. His long, skinny fingers reached up over his bulging forehead. Rebka assumed that Graves was unconscious, but then he realized that Louis Nenda was speaking softly to him. As Rebka approached, Graves slowly withdrew his hands and crossed them on his chest. The face revealed was in constant movement. The expression changed moment to moment from thought to fear to worry.
“We’ll take care of you,” Nenda was saying. “Just relax an’ try an’ tell me what’s wrong. What happened?”
Julian Graves showed a flash of a smile, then his mouth opened. “I don’t know. I — we — can’t think. Too much to think.”
His mouth snapped closed with a click of teeth. The head turned away, to gaze vaguely around the room.
“Too much what?” Nenda moved so that Graves could not avoid looking at him.
The misty gray eyes rolled. “Too much — too much me.”
Nenda stared at Hans Rebka. “That’s what he said before. ‘Too much me.’ D’you know what he’s gettin’ at?”
“No idea. But I can see why the distress signal is going out. If he’s on duty, he’s certainly not able to control the ship. Look at him.”
Graves had returned to his crouched position and was muttering to himself. “Go lower, survey landing site. No, must remain high, safe there. No, return through singularities, wait there. No, must leave Anfract.” With every broken sentence his facial expressions changed, writhing from decision to uncertainty to mind-blanking worry.
Rebka had a sudden insight. Graves was torn by diverging thoughts — exactly as though the integration of Julius Graves and his interior mnemonic twin Steven to form the single personality of Julian Graves had failed. The old conflict of the two consciousnesses in one brain had returned.
But that idea was soon overwhelmed in Rebka’s own mind by another and more pressing concern.
“Why is he on duty alone? It must be obvious to the others that he’s not fit to make decisions.” He bent over, took Julian Graves’s head between his hands, and turned it so that he could stare right into the councilor’s eyes. “Councilor Graves, listen to me. I have a very important question. Where are the others?”
“Others.” Graves muttered the word. His eyes flickered and his lips trembled. He nodded. He understood, Rebka was sure he did, but he seemed unable to force an answer.