Transvergence (38 page)

"Twelve meters." Atvar H'sial was touching the button. "I think it is time."

"Hold just another tick." Louis Nenda leaned forward to stare out the sea-facing port. "If that's what I think it is . . ."

The Zardalu had stopped moving. The long vertical slit below the beak had opened, to produce an odd series of sighs and clicking whistles.

"We request to speak." The language sounded like a clumsy attempt at Hymenopt. "We request that you listen."

"What is it saying, Louis?" Atvar H'sial could detect the sonic stream, but she could not interpret it. "I am ready to fire."

"Not yet. Keep your paw on the button, but hold it there till I say. Mebbe we're not dead yet. I think it wants to parley." Nenda switched to simple Hymenopt. "I hear you, Zardalu. What you wanna tell me? And keep it short an' simple."

"I speak for all Zardalu, new-born and old-born." Thick tentacles writhed to slap the mossy ground, while the main torso held its recumbent posture. "It is difficult to say . . . to say what must be said, and we beg your patience. But since we returned here, we have learned that before our reawakening we few survivors were held dormant for many millennia. While we slept, much changed. In times past, we in our travels around the spiral arm had little contact with humans, or with their great slaves." The blue eyes turned to regard Atvar H'sial.

Nenda had been giving the Cecropian a simultaneous pheromonal translation, but he kept the last phrase to himself. He did not want the envoy gone in a puff of steam.

The prone Zardalu inched closer. "But now we have met your kind in four separate encounters: one on Serenity, and three on this world. Each time, you seemed helpless. We were sure—we
knew
—that you could not escape death or slavery. Each time, you won free without effort, leaving us damaged. More than that, since our return to this world we have been unable to leave it. Yet you come and go from here as you choose."

"Damn right." Don't I wish! he added to himself. "We do anythin' we like, here or anywhere."

"Louis, what is it
saying
?" One more gram of pressure from Atvar H'sial's paw, and the Zardalu would go up in smoke. "It is moving still closer. Should I fire?"

"Relax, At. I think I'm startin' to enjoy this. Lookatit. It's gettin' ready to
grovel
."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. It's not talkin' regular Hymenopt, see, it's talking Zardalu Communion
slave-talk
. Anyway, I've done enough grovelin' myself in my time to recognize the signs. Look at that tongue!"

A long, thick organ of royal purple had emerged from the slit in the Zardalu's head and stretched four feet along the beach. Nenda took three paces forward, but he paused a few inches short of the tongue. He glared down into the wide blue eyes. "All right. You lot are finally learnin' what we knew all along. You're a pack of incompetent slimebags, an' we got you beat any day of the week. We know all that. But what are you proposin'?"

The tongue slid back in. "A—a
truce
?"

"Forget it."

"Then—a surrender. On any terms that you demand. Provided only that you will guide us, and teach us the way that you think and function. And help us to leave this planet when we wish to do so. And in return, we are willing to give you—"

"Don't worry your head about that.
We'll
decide what you'll give us in return.
We
got some ideas already." The slimy tongue had come out again. Nenda placed his right boot firmly on top of it. "If
we
decide to go along with your proposal."

"We?" with a tongue that could not move, the Zardalu garbled the word.

"Yeah.
We.
Naturally, I gotta consult my
partner
on a big decision like this." Nenda gestured to Atvar H'sial, and read the look of horror in the bulging cerulean eyes of the Zardalu. The great body wriggled, while a gargling sound of apology came from the mouth slit.

Nenda did not lift his foot a millimeter, but he nodded thoughtfully.

"I know. She may be so mad at bein' called a
slave
that she'll just decide to blast you all to vapor, and that'll be that."

"Master—"

"But I'm a nice guy." Louis Nenda removed his foot from the Zardalu's tongue, turned, and headed casually back to the
Indulgence
.

"You stay right there, while I try to put in a good word for you," he said over his shoulder. "If you're real lucky, mebbe we can work somethin' out."

It was a sobering thought: to contemplate a whole world, with all its diverse environments and its swarming life-forms. And then to reflect that you were apparently the only one of those myriad forms who
sweated
—or needed to.

Louis Nenda wiped his forehead with a fuzzy piece of cloth, and as a second thought mopped his bare chest and his dripping armpits. Although it wasn't yet noon in Genizee's forty-two-hour day, the temperature had to be around a hundred. Humid, hot, and horrible, like the inside of a steam boiler. Nenda looked up, seeking the disk of Genizee's orange-yellow sun. He couldn't see it. The annular singularities that shielded the planet were strong today. Louis saw nothing more than a swirl of colors, shifting in patterns that defeated the eye's attempt to track them.

A whistling grunt brought his attention back to more mundane concerns. Half-a-dozen Zardalu were dragging a ten-meter cylinder along the flat sandy shore for his inspection. No sign of discomfort in
them
. The midnight-blue bodies of the land-cephalopods, protected by their waxy outer leather, seemed impervious to either heat or cold.

The Zardalu paused respectfully, half-a-dozen paces from Louis Nenda, and bent to touch their broad heads to the beach.

"The Great Silent One found this in one of the interior tunnels."

Nenda stared down at the prone figures stretching their tentacles six meters and more along the beach. The leading Zardalu was using the clicks and whistles of the old language, the ancient Zardalu Communion slave talk. It lacked a decent technical vocabulary, but Louis was willing to put up with that. The master-slave relationship was all that mattered.

"She told you to bring it here?"

"The Great Silent One
indicated
that to us. I am sorry, Master, but we are still unable to understand the Great Silent One's speech."

"Atvar H'sial's not easy to understand. Maybe you'll catch on one day, when you get a bit smarter."

Louis prayed, not for the first time, that this particular day would be a long time coming. If the Zardalu ever really caught on . . .

"Do you think, Master, that this might be the missing component?"

"Could be. Have to study it before I can be sure. Leave it here. Now get back inside, and help the Great Silent One."

"Yes, Master. Let us pray that this is indeed the necessary component. For all our sakes."

Nenda watched them as they retreated toward one of the holes that led to the interior. They weren't groveling as much as usual. And that last crack hadn't sounded quite as subservient as it should. "For all our sakes." Maybe it was his imagination, but it sounded more like a threat than a prayer.

Even so, he was glad to see them go. Those huge beaks were big enough to bite him in half. The great tentacles could tear a human limb from limb. Louis had seen it done.

And some day soon, he might see it done again. Or
feel
it.

How long had it been? He squinted up again toward the invisible sun. Nearly two months. He and Atvar H'sial had stalled the Zardalu for all that time, pretending that they had the know-how to take the
Indulgence
out to space and away from Genizee. When the Zardalu found out that Nenda and Atvar H'sial were as trapped on the planet as they were, it would all be over.

It wasn't the ship; he was sure of that. The
Indulgence
was perfectly spaceworthy. It was those damned annular singularities, the eye-twisting glow that he was peering at now, and the Builder constructs that controlled them. They made space off-limits to anything that started up from the surface of Genizee. How long before the Zardalu latched on to the fact that Louis was as helpless as they were?

Louis went across to the cylinder that they had dumped on the beach, and sat down on one end of it. He inspected it, bending over with his head tucked down between his knees to examine its hollow inside. An old piece of air circulation ducting, by the look of it. About as able to fly into space as Louis himself.

The sweat was trickling down his inverted face and into his eyes. Louis straightened up and mopped again with the sodden cloth. The sea, a hundred yards away across the beach, was cool and tempting. Louis would have been in for a dip hours ago, if he hadn't long since learned of the fanged horrors that swam beneath the calm surface. They made the Zardalu seem tame.

He might as well head for the tunnel system and see how Atvar H'sial was doing. It would be dark there, and clammy, but it would be cooler.

Louis eased his way off the air duct and stood for a moment in thought. Something felt a little bit different. What was it? Maybe sitting with his head down had made him dizzy. It sure wasn't any improvement in the weather. It was hotter than ever. Even the top of his skull felt as though it was burning up.

He put up a hand to rub at his dark matted hair. He
was
burning up. His hair felt
hot
. Maybe he was getting sick. That would be just what he needed, to catch some alien planet's bug, out in the ass-end of nowhere, where the native drugs and painkillers didn't work unless you happened to have a beak and blue tentacles.

Louis removed his hand from his head. As he did so he caught a flicker of movement on the ground in front of him. He stared, blinked, and stared again. He was seeing something there: something that could not be. He was seeing a
shadow
.

His own shadow. Louis spun around and stared up. The unshielded sun was visible, bright and glaring. For the first time since he and Atvar H'sial set foot on Genizee, the swirling light of the annular singularities had vanished.

Louis gazed directly at the marigold sun for at least two seconds—long enough so that when he stopped he saw nothing but dark, pulsing circles. Even before they faded, he was running.

He had to get to the interior tunnels. He had to find Atvar H'sial, and bring her to the surface before any of the Zardalu saw what had happened and realized its possible significance.

The sun's after-images blinded him to what lay ahead. Close to the entrance of the tunnel he ran full tilt into a springy surface that bounced him away onto the sand. Nenda heard a deep grunt. Three jointed limbs reached down and raised him effortlessly to his feet.

"Louis Nenda, save your energy for the future." The pheromonal message diffused across to him from Atvar H'sial, with a subtext of concern and warning. "I fear we have troubles ahead."

The giant Cecropian set him gently onto the sand. The creature towering over Nenda inclined her white, eyeless head, with its pair of yellow open horns below two six-foot fanlike antennas. Beneath the head was a short neck banded in scarlet-and-white ruffles, leading to the dark-red segments of the underbody. The whole effect, propped up on six jointed bristly limbs, was the stuff of nightmares.

But not to Louis Nenda. He did not give the Cecropian's anatomy a second thought. He had seen too many aliens to go by appearances. "Trouble? What kind?" Nenda's pheromonal augment went into action, even though he was too winded to speak.

"The interior of Genizee is changing, in ways that I cannot explain." The pheromonal language of the Cecropian, unlike the slave talk of the Zardalu Communion, possessed degrees of subtlety and shading denied to even the richest of human tongues. Atvar H'sial's speech included images of collapsing walls, closing tunnels, and vanishing chambers, deep within the planet. "If this continues, our pretence of the need for interior exploration will be destroyed. The Zardalu will demand that we demonstrate to them the powers that we have so long claimed, and take them to space."

"It's not just the inside that's changing." Nenda pointed upward, knowing that the pleated resonator on Atvar H'sial's chin was bathing him with ultrasonic pulses, and the yellow horns were using the return signal to provide a detailed image. The Cecropian could "see" Louis's gesture perfectly well—but what she could not see was the vanishing of the annular singularities, and the emergence of the naked sun. No Cecropian could sense light, or other electromagnetic radiation shorter than thermal wavelengths.

"Up there, At," Nenda continued. "The singularities have gone. They just vanished, a couple of minutes ago."

"Why?"

"Damned if I know. Or care. But we've got to get over to the
Indulgence
, and take her up."

"And if we are returned once more to the surface, as we were before?"

"Then we're in deep stuff. But we're in that anyway if the interior tunnels are closing."

"Everywhere. As far as my signals could penetrate, the interior constructions of Genizee are vanishing. It is as though the work of the Builders there never existed."

While Atvar H'sial was still speaking, she acted. Without asking for approval from Louis Nenda, she picked him up and curled him tightly in a pair of forelimbs. She went springing away across the surface in long graceful bounds, her vestigial wing cases wide open behind her. Louis had his breath knocked out of him at every leap, but he did not complain. A Cecropian in full flight was much faster than any human.

The
Indulgence
lay midway between a twisted thicket of gigantic moss plants and five jutting towers of sandstone that formed homes for the senior Zardalu. Nenda rubbed his aching ribs as Atvar H'sial placed him on the ground—Didn't she realize her own strength?—and glanced across at the towers. At this time of day most of the Zardalu should be working in the ocean or the interior tunnels. Just his luck, if today they had decided to take a vacation.