Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

Out on the planetary surface, the long day must be wearing on. The sun would be approaching zenith, farther from the line of the air ducts. It was darker in the room than when she had left. She could barely distinguish the apertures of the ducting, over at the other side. She tiptoed across to the widest of them, peering along it for any sign of the Zardalu and ready to turn and flee.

Nothing. The corridor ran off, dark and silent, as far as she could see. She felt sure they would be back — they knew she had been here.

She moved on, heading for the third corridor, the right-hand one, which Tally had taken when he left. The second corridor, according to him, angled away in the wrong direction. If it led to the surface at all it would be farther from the place where the Indulgence had rested.

Darya hardly glanced at the round opening as she passed it. Any adult Zardalu would find it hard to squeeze more than a few feet along that narrowing tunnel.

She took one more step. In that same moment there was a rush of air from her left. She did not have time to turn her head. From the corner of her eye she saw a blur of motion. And then she was seized from behind, lifted, and pulled close to a body whose powerful muscles flexed beneath rubbery skin.

Darya gasped, convulsed, and tried to twist free. At the same moment she kicked at her captor’s body, regretting that she had taken off her hard and heavy shoes.

There was a rewarding grunt of pain. It was followed by a creaking moan of surprise and complaint. Darya was suddenly dropped to the ground.

She stared up. Even as she realized that those were not tentacles that had held her, she recognized the voice.

“Dulcimer!”

The Chism Polypheme was crouching down next to her, all of his five little arms waving agitatedly in the air.

“Professor Lang. Save me!” He was shivering and weeping, and Darya felt teardrops the size of marbles falling onto her from his master eye. “I’ve run and run, but still they come after me. I’m exhausted. I’ve shouted to them and pleaded with them, promising I’ll be the best and most loyal slave they ever had — and they won’t listen!”

“You were wasting your time. They don’t understand human speech.”

“I know. But I thought I had nothing to lose by trying. Professor Lang, they want to eat me, I know they do. Please save me.”

A tall order, when she could not save herself. Darya groped around on the floor until she found her shoes and put them on. She patted Dulcimer on his muscular body. “We’ll be all right. I know a safe way to the surface. I realize that the Zardalu could be back here anytime, but we can’t go yet. We have to wait for E.C. Tally.”

“No, we don’t. Leave him. He’ll manage just fine on his own.” Dulcimer was tugging at her, urging her to stand up. “He will. He doesn’t need us. Let’s get out of here before they come back.”

“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 .”

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.