Transvergence (17 page)

J'merlia was fifty yards from the spit of land, all set to descend and looking forward to their surprise when they saw the carefully repaired and functioning seedship, when the nightmare began: he saw Zardalu, dozens of them, seething up from the dark water. They were on shore—standing upright—advancing fast on Atvar H'sial and the others. And his master and companions had nowhere to go! The Zardalu were in front of them; the steep-sided beach and deep water were on all sides. J'merlia watched in horror as Atvar H'sial turned and led the trapped group into the dark interior of one of the buildings.

They were only thirty or forty paces ahead of the Zardalu. The land-cephalopods came gliding with ghostly speed on their powerful tentacles, rippling across the dark sand. Within a few seconds they, too, had crowded into the first of the buildings.

J'merlia lowered the ship to thirty feet and waited, hypnotized with horror. No one emerged. No sound rose up to his straining ears. The buildings and the sandy promontory remained empty and lifeless, while the sun fell its last few degrees in the darkening sky.

And then there was nothing but darkness. J'merlia wanted to land, but Rebka's instructions had been quite specific.

Get the ship up to space, where it's safe. And get that drone back to the Erebus.

A Lo'tfian found it almost impossible to disobey direct orders. J'merlia miserably initiated the ascent command to take the seedship up into orbit, away from the surface of Genizee. He stared down at the world that was fast diminishing beneath him to a tiny disk of light, and wondered what was happening to the four he had left behind. Were they fighting? Captured? Already dead? He felt terrible about leaving.

He launched the little drone without adding to its message, and sat slumped at the seedship control console. What now? Rebka had given no further instructions. He had only told J'merlia what
not
to do:
Don't try heroics.
But J'merlia
had
to go back and try to rescue Atvar H'sial—except that was in conflict with Rebka's command.

J'merlia sat locked in an agony of indecision. He longed for the good old days, when all he had had to do was to follow Atvar H'sial's orders. Why did Julian Graves and the others keep pushing freedom on him, when all it did was make him miserable?

He scarcely noticed when the seedship raced past the artificial moon of Genizee. He was only vaguely aware of Genizee's sun, off to one side, and the all-around glow of the annular singularities that surrounded the system. And he did not see at all the great swirl of light in space, its vortex moving into position directly ahead of the trajectory of his speeding ship. The first that J'merlia knew of the shifting whirlpool was an unpleasant shearing sensation through his whole body.

Singularity.
No time for thought, no time for action. His body flexed, twisted in an impossible direction, turned to smoke.

Isolated essential singularity. Amorphous, physically divergent.
J'merlia felt himself stretching, expanding, dissociating. His problems were over now. He would obey Rebka's command . . . because the decision had been made for him . . . because return to Genizee was no longer an option . . . because he was . . .

. . .
because he was . . . dead.
With that thought, J'merlia popped out of existence.

THE ZARDALU

You'd think that the spiral arm would have dangers and horrors enough, God knows, without people having to go on and
invent
new ones. But human (and inhuman) nature being what it is, we're not satisfied with natural bogeymen, so every world you go, you hear the local tales of terror: of free-space vampires, ship-eaters that suck every living essence from a vessel as it goes by and leave an empty mechanical shell flying on through the void; of computer-worlds, where every organic being that ever approaches them is destroyed; of the Malgaians, baleful sentient planets who so hate large-scale development that when the surface changes become large enough, the Malgaian modifies its environment to kill off the intruders; of the Croquemort Time-well, where a ship can fall in and stay there in stasis until the end of the universe, when planets and stars and galaxies are gone and everything has decayed to a uniform heat-bath; of the Twistors, shadowy forces that live in the strange nonspace occupied by ships and people when they undergo a Bose Transition, performing their Twistor distortions in ways so subtle that you never realize that the "you" going in on one end of a transition and the "you" coming out at the destination are quite different beings.
And then, in a class by themselves, there are the Zardalu.
I say in a class by themselves, for one good reason: unlike all the others, there's no doubt that the Zardalu are
real
.
Or rather, they
were
real. The reference texts tell you that the last Zardalu perished about eleven thousand years ago, when a handful of subject races of their thousand-world empire rose up against them and exterminated them.
That's the references. But there's a rumor you'll find all around the spiral arm, as widespread as greed and as persistent as sin, and it says otherwise. It says: not every Zardalu perished. Somewhere in some hidden backwater of the arm, you may find them still. And if you do, you'll live (but not long) to regret it.
Now, I'm not a man who can resist a temptation like that. I've been bouncing all over the arm for over a century, poking into all the little backwater worlds. Why not gather the scraps of information from all over the arm? I said to myself. Then make a patchwork quilt out of them, and see if it looks like a map with a big X saying "Here be Zardalu."
I did just that. But I'll spare you the suspense, right now, and say I never found them. I'm not saying they're not there; only that I never ran them down. But in the course of searching, I found out a lot of mixed facts and rumors about what they were—or are—like.
And I got scared. Forget their appearance. They were supposed to be huge, tentacled creatures, but so are the Pro'sotvians, and a gentler, milder life-form is hard to imagine. Forget their legendary breeding rates, too. Humans can give them a run for their money, in
intention
and devotion to the job at hand, if not in speed of results. And even forget the fact that they ruled over so many worlds. The Cecropians call it the Cecropia Federation, not Empire, but they control almost as many worlds as the Zardalu did at their peak.
No. You have to look at what the Zardalu
did.
It's not easy to see that. If you've ever gone on a fossil hunt for invertebrate forms, you'll know that you never find one. They decay and vanish. All you ever find is an
inverse
, an imprint in the rock where the life-form once sat in the mud. It's a bit like having to look at a photographic negative, with the photograph itself never available.
The Zardalu were supposed to be invertebrates, and in searching for their deeds you have to examine their imprint: what is
missing
on the worlds that they ruled.
Even that takes an indirect approach. We don't know where the Zardalu homeworld was, but it is reasonable to assume that they spread outward through a roughly spherical region, because that's the way that every other clade has spread. So it is very plausible to assume that the
edges
of the region of the Zardalu Communion were the most recently conquered, while places a bit farther in were conquered earlier. On hundreds of worlds around the Zardalu Communion, we find evidence of wonderful civilizations—the arts and sciences of intelligent species, but all long-vanished. And if you look at the age when those cultures disappeared, you find that the
closer
to the middle of the Zardalu Communion territory the planet lies, the
longer ago
its civilization vanished.
The obvious conclusion is not terribly alarming: when the Zardalu conquered, they insisted that the subject races abandon their own culture in favor of that of the Zardalu. There are precedents for that in human and Cecropian history.
It's two
other
facts that frighten: first, there are marginally intelligent species on most worlds of the Zardalu Communion, but there are
far fewer
true intelligences than you would expect, based on the statistics for the rest of the spiral arm. And second, all the evidence suggests that the Zardalu were highly advanced in the biological sciences.
And this is what they did: They conquered other worlds. And as they did so they
reduced the intelligence of the inhabitants
, bringing them down to a level where a being was just smart enough to make a good slave. No capacity for abstract thought, so no ability to plan a revolt, or cause trouble. And, of course, no art or science.
The Great Rising, from species still undegraded, saved more than their own worlds. If the Zardalu had gone on spreading, their sphere of domination would long ago have swallowed up Earth. And I might be sitting naked and mindless in the ruins of some old Earth monument, not smart enough to come in out of the rain, chewing on a raw turnip, and waiting to be given my next order.
And at that point in my thinking, I reach my main conclusion about the Zardalu: if they
are
extinct, then thank Heaven for it. The whole spiral arm can sleep better at night.

—from
Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:
Jetting Alone Around the Galaxy;
by
Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.

"No, no, and absolutely no," Julian Graves said. He had reappeared in response to Darya's call over the ship's address system, but he had offered no reason for his absence. He looked exhausted and worried. "Even if what you say is true, it changes nothing. So what if the Anfract and the nested singularities are Builder creations? We cannot afford to risk the
Erebus
and additional members of our party."

"Captain Rebka and his team are in more danger than we realized."

"More danger than
what
? None of us had any idea at all of the degree of danger to the seedship when they left. And we agreed that until three days had passed we would do nothing."

Darya began to argue, claiming that she had never agreed to any such thing. She called on Dulcimer to support her, but the Polypheme was too far gone, a long unwound corkscrew of apple-green giggling on the hard floor. She tried E.C. Tally. The embodied computer played his visual record of the actual event through the display system of the
Erebus
, only to prove that Darya had nodded agreement along with everyone else.

"Case closed," Graves said. He sat there blinking, his hands cradling his bald head as though it ached almost too badly to touch.

Darya sat and fumed. Julian Graves was so damned obstinate. And so logical—except when it came to understanding the complicated train of her own analysis of the Anfract. Then he didn't want to be logical at all.

She was getting nowhere. It took the unexpected arrival of the message drone to change the mind of the former Alliance councilor. Graves opened it carefully, lifted out the capsule, and hooked it into the
Erebus
's computer.

The result was disappointing. There was a continuous record showing the path that the seedship had taken through the uncharted region of the annular singularities, a trip which had been accomplished in less than twenty-four hours. But then there was nothing, an inexplicable ten-hour gap in the recording with no information about the ship's movements or the activities of its crew.

"So you see, Professor Lang," Julian Graves said. "Still we have no evidence of problems."

"There's no evidence of
anything
." Darya watched as the capsule ran to its uninformative end. "Surely that in itself is disturbing."

"If you are hoping to persuade me that the
absence
of evidence of a problem itself constitutes evidence of a problem—" Graves began. But he was interrupted.

"Mud," said a vague, croaking voice. "Urr. Dirty black mud."

When the message capsule had been removed, the useless outer casing of the drone had been discarded on the control-room floor. It had rolled to rest a couple of feet in front of the open, staring eye of the Chism Polypheme. Now Dulcimer was reaching out with his topmost arm, scratching the side of the drone with a flexible and scaly finger.

"What's he mumbling about?" Graves asked.

But Darya was crouched down at the side of the Polypheme, taking her first close look at the casing of the drone. All they had been interested in when it reached the
Erebus
had been the messages it was carrying. The drone itself had seemed irrelevant.

"Dulcimer's right," she said. "And so am I!"

She lifted the cylinder and carried it across to Julian Graves. He stared at it blankly. "Well?"

"Look at it.
Touch
it. When the seedship left the
Erebus
, all its equipment was clean and in good working order—have Tally run the record, if you don't believe me. Now look at the antenna and drone casing joints. They're filthy, and there has been repair work done on them. That's a replacement cable. And see here? That's
mud
. It was vacuum-dried, on its flight back, but before that the whole drone plunged into wet soil. Hans and the others not only found a planet—they
landed
there."

"They agreed, before they left, that they would not do that." Graves shook his bald and bulging head reprovingly, then winced. "Coating material can occur anywhere, even in open space. Anyway, why cover a drone with mud?"

"Because they had no choice. If the drone was battered and muddied like this in landing, the ship must have been damaged."

"You are constructing a case from nothing."

"So let me make you one from
something
. Sterile coating material picked up in space is quite different from planetary mud. I'll bet if I dig some of this dirt from the drone's joints and run an analysis, I'll find microorganisms that don't exist in any of our data banks. If I do, will you accept
that
as proof that the seedship landed—and on an unfamiliar world?"