Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

Darya was trying to throw up what was not there. She made another series of dreadful sounds, then produced a minuscule up-and-down motion of her head.

“Very good. And in case you become thirsty again while I am gone, I will leave these with you.”

Tally placed the fronds of leaves and berries that he had carried down the tunnel on the floor beside Darya. She gave them a look of hatred. She would not bite one more of those berries to save her life. And it needed saving. As Tally went away across the wide chamber, she fought off another agonizing fit of retching.

She lay forward with her head on the cool glassy floor of the chamber, closed her eyes, and waited. If the Zardalu came along and caught her, that was just too bad. The way she was feeling, if she was killed now it would be a pleasant release.

And it was all her own fault, a consequence of her sheltered upbringing on the safe garden planet of Sentinel Gate. No one else on the whole expedition would have been stupid enough to eat — to guzzle — untested foods.

And no one else on the expedition would give up so easily. To come so far, and then to stop trying. It would not do. If somehow she survived this, she would never be able to look Hans Rebka in the eye again. Darya sighed and lifted her face away from the floor, straightening her arms to support her. She made a supreme effort and forced herself to crawl forward on hands and knees, until she was out of the chamber and ten yards into the narrowest of the ducts. Then she had to stop. The clenching agony in her stomach was fading, but her feet felt cold and her hands and forehead were damp and clammy.

She lay down again, on her back this time, chafed her cold hands together, and tucked them into her long sleeves. Before she knew it she was drifting away into a strange half-trance. She realized what was happening, but she could do nothing to prevent it. The alkaloid in the berries must have mild narcotic effects. Well, good for it. Maybe what she needed was a good shot of reality-suppressant.

Her mind, released from physical miseries, triggered and homed in on the single fact of the past forty-eight hours that most deeply disturbed her.

Not the capture by the Zardalu. Not the uncertain fate of Dulcimer. Not even the ascent of the Indulgence , when she and Tally had seemed so close to safety.

The big upset had been the vanishing of J’merlia . Everything else might be a misfortune, but to someone with Darya’s scientific training and outlook, J’merlia’s disappearance into air was a disaster and a flat impossibility. It upset her whole worldview. It was inexplicable in any rational way, inconsistent with any model of physical reality that she had ever encountered. The Torvil Anfract was a strange place, she knew that. But how strange? Even if the whole Anfract was a Builder artifact, as she was now convinced it must be, the only differences had to be in the local space-time anomalies. Surely the laws of physics here could be no different from those in the rest of the universe?

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?