Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“To the intake,” J’merlia called, suddenly at Darya’s side. “Quickly. It is farther along this tunnel.”

As J’merlia spoke, Dulcimer came whizzing past them, straight as an arrow down the corridor. Darya gasped with relief and ran the same way. She came to the great nozzles of the air pumps — and then realized that Dulcimer had flown right on past them. He had vanished into another and wider air duct, far along the corridor. Darya heard the cackling scream fading away in the distance. And then she could not hear it at all.

“Inside,” Tally called. He was far beyond the air-duct entrance. “If you climb a few meters farther, the tentacles will not be able to reach you. And this duct is too narrow to admit a Zardalu!”

“Wait a second. J’merlia is still back there.” Darya was worming feetfirst into the straight section of pipe, raising her head as she pushed in deeper. Progress was slow, and the Zardalu was closing fast — too fast. She could never get out of range in time.

But J’merlia was between Darya and the Zardalu, and he was making no attempt to reach the air duct. Instead he ran off to the side, drawing the Zardalu after him. He disappeared from Darya’s narrow field of view, ducking a swipe from a thick tentacle.

And then he was back. As Darya pushed herself farther toward safety she saw J’merlia leap into view and halt, right in front of the Zardalu.

Tentacles came down like a cage, enclosing the Lo’tfian on all sides. The suckered tips curled around the pipestem body, while a whistle of triumph and anger came from the slit mouth.

The tentacles snapped shut. And in that moment, J’merlia disappeared.

The Zardalu screamed in surprise. Darya gasped. J’merlia had not escaped — he had simply vanished, dissolved into nothing. But there was no time to pause and wonder about it. The Zardalu was moving forward — and Darya was still within reach.

She wriggled for her life along the narrowing tunnel. Long, prehensile tentacle-tips came groping after her, touching her hair, reaching for her head and neck. Darya was stuck too tight to move.

And then a hand was around her ankle, pulling her along. She gave one last big push, adding to E.C. Tally’s helping heave, and slid along the tube the final vital jerk to safety. The Zardalu was straining for her. It remained a few inches out of reach.

Darya lay flat on the floor of the air duct, exhausted and gasping for breath. Dulcimer was gone — who knew where? But he should be safe for the moment. He was zipping through the air ducts, and anyway it would be a very speedy Zardalu who could even get near him in his condition. J’merlia had vanished, even more mysteriously, into air, in violation of every known physical law. They were still deep below ground, on a planet where the Zardalu ruled all the surface.

And yet Darya was oddly exhilarated. No matter what came next, they had taken at least one step toward freedom. And they had done it without help from anyone.

The path to the surface was both ridiculously easy and horribly difficult.

Easy, because they could not go wrong if they followed the flow of the air. The duct they had entered was an exhaust for the chamber. It must at last merge with other exhaust vents, or bring them directly to the surface of Genizee. All they had to do was keep going.

And difficult, because the layout of the duct network was unknown. The ducts had never been designed for humans to clamber through. In some spots the tubes became so narrow that there was no way to continue. Then Darya and Tally had to backtrack to a place where the pipes divided, and try the other fork. At other nodes the duct would widen into a substantial chamber, big enough for a Zardalu. That was not safe to enter, and again they would be forced to retrace their path.

Darya was sure that she would never have made it without E.C. Tally. He kept a precise record of every turn and gradient, monitoring their three-dimensional position relative to their starting point and making sure that their choice of paths did not take them too far afield laterally. It was he who assured Darya that they were, despite all false starts and doubling back, making progress upward. His internal clock was able to assure her that although they seemed to have walked and crawled and climbed forever through dim-lit passageways, it was only six hours since they had escaped from the Zardalu.

They took turns leading the way. Darya was in front, climbing carefully on hands and knees up a slope so steep and slippery that she was in constant danger of sliding back, when she caught a different glimmer of light ahead. She halted and turned back to E.C. Tally.

“We’re coming to another chamber,” she whispered. “I can’t tell how big it is, only that the tunnel’s widening and the light looks different. Probably big enough for Zardalu. Should we keep going, or head back to the last branch point?”

“If there are no actual sounds or sight of Zardalu, I would prefer to keep moving. This body is close to its point of personal exhaustion. Once we stop, it will be difficult to restart without a rest period.”

Tally’s words forced Darya to admit what she had been doing her best to ignore: she was ready to fall on her face and collapse. Her hands were scraped raw, her knees and shins were a mass of lacerations, and she was so thirsty and dry-lipped that speech was an effort.

“Stay here. I’ll take a look.” She forced herself up the last ten meters of sloping tunnel and reached the flat, hard floor of the chamber. She listened. Nothing. And nothing to see but the glowing, hemispherical bowl of the chamber’s ceiling.

“It seems all right,” she whispered — and then froze. A soft grating sound started, no more than ten feet away. It was followed by a sighing whisper and the movement of air past Darya, as though some huge air pump was slowly beginning operations.

Darya sat motionless on hands and knees. Finally she raised her head, to stare straight up at the shining bowl of the ceiling. She began to laugh, softly and almost silently.

“What is wrong?” E.C. Tally whispered worriedly from back inside the air duct.

“Nothing. Not one thing.” Darya stood up. “Come on out, Tally, and you can have your rest. We made it. We’re on the surface of Genizee. Feel the wind? It’s nighttime, and the glow up there is the nested singularities.”

Darya had never in her whole life waited with such impatience for dawn. The forty-two-hour rotation period of Genizee stretched the end of night forever. First light bled in over the eastern horizon with glacial slowness, and it was two more hours after the initial tinge of pink before Darya was provided with a look at their surroundings.

She and E.C. Tally were half a mile or less from the sea — how even its brackish water spoke to her dry throat — on a level patch of flat rock, fifty feet high. Nothing stood between them and the waters but stunted shrubs and broken rocks. They could reach the shoreline easily. But the night wind had died, and in the dawn stillness Darya could see the sea’s surface moving in swirls. She imagined the movement of Zardalu, just offshore. The scene looked peaceful, but it would be dangerous to believe it.

She and Tally waited another hour, licking drops of dew from cupped shrub leaves and from small depressions in the flat ground.

As full light approached, Darya ascended to the highest nearby spire of rock and scanned the whole horizon. And there along the shoreline, so far away that it formed no more than a bright speck, she saw a flash of reflected light.

It was the Indulgence . It had to be. Nothing else on the surface of Genizee would provide that hard, specular reflection. But there was still the problem of how to get there.