Divergence

Darya paused. The air within all the chambers remained fresh, through a gentle circulation from unknown sources. But now she could feel a stronger breeze blowing. She licked the back of each hand and held them out in front of her, palms facing and a couple of feet apart. The back of her left hand felt noticeably colder. The light wind was coming from that direction.

Darya went forward more cautiously than before. The moving air was strong enough to ruffle her exposed hair. Already she had a suspicion of what she would find. As she followed the curve of the tu

It was a relief to find something familiar — and yet it was still frightening. The dark, swirling vortex ahead of her, no more than thirty or so steps down the sloping path, was a close relative of the one into which she and Hans Rebka had fallen on Glister. It had the same eye-frustrating property as the circulation pattern that had, while she watched, bodied forth Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial and then vanished.

Darya was convinced that she was staring into one end of a space transportation system. But she had no idea where she would be taken if she allowed herself to drop into it, or even if there was any way that she could survive the transition. It did not represent what she now realized she had been hoping to find when she began her wanderings: an escape route from the Zardalu.

The whirling vortex had a hypnotic quality, tempting her to move closer. Darya resisted and backed away. The slope became rapidly steeper, the gravity field stronger and stronger. Half a dozen more steps, and she would be sucked in, no matter how hard she tried to drag herself away.

Would it really take a traveler back to the spiral arm? Or did it lead on to somewhere unknown, and still farther afield? Perhaps at its end lay a true space-time singularity, a maelstrom that would reduce the doomed voyager to independent subnuclear components.

Darya was not willing to find out. But that dark vortex might be a possible last resort, a preferred final alternative to dismemberment by a Zardalu beak. She headed for the chamber where the others lay sleeping.

She went cautiously. The Zardalu were firmly in her mind, to the point where she could think of little else.

No one had said it, but Darya was quite sure that the Zardalu would not leave peacefully, even if they got what they asked for. They would want to be sure that no one could follow them — that no one knew any Zardalu still existed; the safest way to make sure of that was to get rid of anyone who had met them.

A sudden deep chuckle from behind her made her muscles tense and her heart leap in her chest. She spun around as something gripped her arm.

“Hey, there,” a soft voice said.

It was Louis Nenda. She had heard nothing of his silent approach.

“Don’t you ever do that again!”

“Nervous?” He chuckled again. “Calm down, Professor. I won’t eat you.”

“What are you doing here? Couldn’t you sleep, either?”

He shrugged. “Little bit. Then I woke up. Too mad to get much rest.”

“Too mad?”

“Mad. Angry. Pissed. As I’ve ever been. You saw what that Zardalu did to Kallik.”

“I did. But I’m surprised you feel that way. She was your faithful slave, and you left her to die, down on Quake; and you fired at a ship with her in it, at Summertide.”

“I told Graves and the others, I don’t remember firing on no ship.” He gri

“But you admit that you left her to die on Quake.”

“Hell, no. I’d have picked her up before things got too hot. Anyway, that’s not the point. Kallik is my Hymenopt; she belongs to me. What I do with her, that’s one thing. What that blue bastard did to her, that’s something else. It had no right to touch her.” He frowned. “What was its name?”

“Holder.”

“Right. Well, let me tell you, when we have it out with ’em, nobody else touches Holder. That one’s mine. And it’s dead meat. I’m go

“You talk big when they’re not here. You were as quiet as the rest of us when they were.”

“I was. And so was Atvar H’sial. Me and her, and Rebka, too, we know how you play this game. You don’t rush in, you don’t act hasty. You watch, and you wait, and you pick your time. Don’t confuse caution with cowardice, Professor.”

Darya looked down at the squat, glowering figure. “You talk a good line, Nenda, but it won’t help when the Zardalu come. They’re three times the size of you, and ten times as strong. And they probably have weapons, and you have none.”

Nenda was turning, getting ready to move on. He gave her a pitying smile. “Sweetie, you may be a smart professor, but you don’t know much about the real world. You think I don’t have weapons? That’ll be the first time, then, since I was a little kid.” He reached down to his calf, and pulled out a long, thin-bladed knife. “This is just for starters. But it’ll do a pretty good to make sausage skin out of Zardalu guts. And if you think that I’m carrying weapons, go take a look at what Atvar H’sial carries around under her wing cases. She’s a real believer in self-preservation. She’s smart, though. She knows you use it at the right time, and not before.”

He winked at her. “Gotta go. Sleep well, now, and sweet dreams. Remember, me and At are here to look after you.”

Darya glared at him as he went on, around a bend in the corridor.

“Watch where you’re going,” she called after him. “There’s a vortex and maybe a field singularity, a few hundred meters that way. I’d be really heartbroken if you fell into it.”

He did not answer. Darya continued to the chamber, oddly comforted by the encounter. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka had at least one thing in common: so many awful things had happened to them already in their lives, nothing broke their spirit.

E. C. Tally had not moved. But Hans Rebka was awake and sitting up — and Atvar H’sial had disappeared.

“No idea,” Rebka said in answer to her question. “Don’t know about her, or Nenda either. Or you, until you just appeared.”

“I saw Nenda.” Darya gave him a quick recap of her meeting with Louis Nenda, and of her own travels. “But it’s not a safe way out,” she said, when she came to the vortex, and her conviction that it was the entry point to a transportation system. “It’s not useful at all, until we know if it’s meant to take living objects. And it can’t be used even then, until we discover its termination points.”

“I’m not so sure of that. Things are what people think they are. Don’t rule out that vortex.”

He refused to explain. And he said nothing more on the subject, except to add thoughtfully, when Darya complained that Speaker-Between had talked with them just once and then deserted them completely, “Speaker-Between and your vortex have one thing in common, and it’s something we’d better not forget. They are alien, both of them. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to think we understand alien thought patterns — even when it’s a familiar alien. We think it’s hard to know what motivates Atvar H’sial or Kallik or one of the Zardalu; but it’s a thousand times as difficult to know what a Builder or its constructs is trying to achieve.”

“Do you think we and Speaker-Between are misunderstanding each other?”

“I’m sure we are. Let me give you just one example. We’re all feeling angry because we’ve been left here alone, with no idea what comes next from Speaker-Between. We’re upset because we know no way to reach him. But he has been in existence, sitting and waiting, for millions of years! From his point of view, a day — or even a year — is like the blink of an eye. He probably has no idea we’re chafing over his absence.”