Divergence

“I hope they’re right,” Rebka said. “Be thankful if they are.”

“But that’s why they are so absolutely determined to escape from here, and to lie low while they recuperate. Their strength has always been their breeding powers. Given a quiet planet and a century or two, there will be hundreds of millions of Zardalu. They will again be organized, and ready to start over.”

The tall form of Atvar H’sial had crouched silent through all the talk. Now she stirred and turned the open yellow trumpets on each side of her head toward Louis Nenda.

“I agree with that,” he said. He turned back to the others. “I’ve been filling At in as we went along on what Tally’s been saying. She makes a good point. If the Zardalu were captured and put in stasis back near one of their home planets, and they only just came out of it, it’s possible they don’t have any idea where they are now. Me and At never spoke to Speaker-Between, but I get the idea he’s a bit obscure. And the Zardalu must be confused as hell, just coming out of stasis. Maybe they think they can jump into a ship and take off, and find a place to hide within a few light-years. That ain’t’ so, but let’s make sure that we’re not the ones who tell ’em. At says the smart thing to do is let ’em have ship, help ’em take off out of here — and then let the blue bastards find they’re thirty thousand light-years from anywhere, and screw ’em six ways from Tuesday.”

“That’s fine,” Rebka said. “Assuming that Speaker-Between goes along with it. But I don’t see why he would. If he hasn’t told them already where they are, he’ll probably tell them next time he meets them.”

“We can’t stop that. But we can make sure it doesn’t come from us. And maybe steer the conversation in other directions if we get the chance. Might not be hard, if these Zardalu aren’t the brightest specimens.” Louis Nenda stared at E. C. Tally, whose head was drooping forward onto his chest. “Go on. What else?”

Tally did not speak.

“Leave him alone,” Darya said. “He’s on his last legs.”

“How do you know?”

“Just look at him. He’s swaying.”

“He may be worse later.” Nenda bent down and peered at Tally’s drooping eyelids. “The body’s resting, but he’s not asleep. And this could be our last chance. Give him a jab, Professor, get him going.”

“No.” This time it was Hans Rebka who spoke. “You’re not an expert on embodied computers, Nenda. Neither am I. Tally knows the condition of that body better than any human ever could. If he thinks he has to have rest, he rests. We don’t argue.”

“So what are the rest of us supposed to do? Sit around here, and wait till the Zardalu ring the di

“More or less.” Rebka moved forward and dragged E. C. Tally along the smooth floor, until he could prop him up against a wall.

“We’ve been on the go for days. Every one of us looks ready to drop. We need rest. I’m going to follow Tally’s example and take a short nap. If you have any sense you’ll do the same. We can take turns to keep watch. And if you all want to be ready for action when the Zardalu come back, better make sure you’re not exhausted.”

He sat down by Tally’s side. “Otherwise… Well, otherwise when that bell rings, you may find you’re the first course on the menu.”

CHAPTER 22

Two hours later Darya Lang was alone and prowling the space behind the stasis tanks. Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had eaten; then Rebka had said with no sign of emotion, “Nice and quiet now. Better get some sleep.”

He and Nenda lay down next to Atvar H’sial. All three dropped off at once, apparently without a care in the world.

Sleep. Darya could no more sleep than she could have breathed fluorine.

She glared at the snoring Hans Rebka. She had been having an affair with a robot, a being who lacked all normal fears and feelings. And Nenda was just as bad, if not worse, lying there flat on his back with his mouth open.

E. C. Tally had remained in an upright position, but the embodied computer was also silent. Darya did not dare to try to talk to him. His brain might be engaged in computation, but his body was resting as best it could. Tally was too far gone for rest to extend to restoration.

The bad thing was that Rebka was quite right, and she knew it. It was important to rest and keep up one’s strength. She had managed to force down a little food, so that was a success. But whenever she closed her eyes the memory of those towering blue-black forms came rushing back, along with a jumble of frightening thoughts. Where were the Zardalu, right now? What was happening to Graves, Birdie Kelly, Kallik, and J’merlia? Were they all still alive?

Finally she gave up any attempt to relax. She left the chamber and went wandering into the surrounding labyrinth of corridors. Even with an imagined Zardalu behind every partition, walking around was better than sitting and watching the others sleep. Her earlier search for Speaker-Between had produced no clear sense of place, and that made her feel uncomfortable. She was a person who needed a sense of spatial context, and now she had a chance to establish one.

It took a couple of hours of systematic search to build up an architectural sense of location. The three-dimensional picture that finally formed in her brain was disconcerting. Darya found that she would reach the end of a corridor, or come out into a broad open chamber, and find viewports set into the walls. They looked out onto vast, open-space structures, long cylinders and spirals and graceful cantilevers of unguessable purpose, arching out beyond the limits of vision. As Nenda said, it would take thousands of years to explore all that complexity — and even longer to understand its function.

But as she walked, the possibility of real exploration also became less and less likely. She could certainly see hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of kilometers of the Builder artifact known as Serenity. But she could not reach them. When she plotted out in her mind the places that she had been able to visit before she came to some kind of blind end, the accessible region shrank to modest proportions. She had been able to move only a couple of kilometers in any direction. Maybe that was the reason Speaker-Between was so confident that their little group could easily be contacted whenever the alien chose to do so.

The other side of that thought was more disturbing: if their movements were so constrained, escape from the Zardalu also became impossible. For if she and her companions could not move freely through the whole of Serenity, no matter where they hid they would be discovered by any determined pursuer.

Darya tried to bury that thought and keep on walking. Another point had been nagging at her subconscious, but for a while she had trouble pi

Gravity. The chamber with the stasis tanks had a field of maybe three-quarters of a standard gravity; but now that she was walking “downhill” she realized that for the past half hour she had been traveling through a region of weaker gravitational force. Carry that thought a little further, and it suggested that there had to be some source of gravitational field in the direction that she was now headed.

When Darya came back to the chamber with the stasis tanks she did not stop. Instead she went straight on through, heading toward the region of strongest gravity field.

She squashed another disquieting thought: This is the direction taken by the departing Zardalu. She wished that Tally had told them just where the Zardalu had set up their camp, but she forced herself to keep moving. In less than a kilometer, the field strengthened substantially. The tu