Transcendence

“Trouble?” Nenda asked.

“I think so.” The Hymenopt was not even out of breath. “There are structures along the shoreline about three kilometers away, hidden by the rocks. I approached them and went briefly inside two of them. It was too dark to see much within, but it is clear that they are artificial. However, there was no sign of the inhabitants.”

“Could they be Zardalu dwellings?”

“I believe they are.” Kallik hesitated, while Rebka reflected on the little Hymenopt’s courage. Thousands of years had passed since her species had been slaves of the Zardalu, but the images of the land-cephalopods were still strong in Kallik’s race memory. On her last encounter with the Zardalu they had torn one of her limbs off, casually, to make a point to humans. Yet she had entered those unknown structures alone, knowing there might be Zardalu inside.

“For several reasons,” Kallik continued, “not least of which is my conviction that this planet is indeed Genizee. Look at this.”

Before Rebka or Nenda could object she was off again, racing down to the water’s edge and continuing into it. The beach fell away steeply, and within a few feet Kallik vanished beneath the surface. When she reappeared she was holding a wriggling object in her two front claws and blurring back toward them.

Hans Rebka could not see her prize clearly until she was again at his side. When she held it out to him he took a step backward. Irrational fear and alarm began to eat at the base of his brain. He stopped breathing.

The two-foot-long creature that Kallik grasped so casually was a mille

“A precursor form, surely,” Kallik was saying. “Already this is amphibious, able to function on both land and water. Observe.” She placed the creature on the ground. It rose onto splayed tentacles and blinked around it with big lidded eyes.

“Allow evolution to proceed,” Kallik went on, “and from this form a land-cephalopod would be quite a natural result. With emergence onto land, a substantial increase in size and intelligence would also not be surprising.” The creature at her feet made a sudden snatch at her with its cruel hooked beak. She swatted it casually before it made contact. It flew ten meters to land on the soft moss, and scuttled off for the safety of the water. Its speed on land was surprising.

“Another reason I’m glad we didn’t land in the water a mile further on,” Nenda said cheerfully. “How’d you like a dozen of them chewing your butt when you’re tryin’ to swim?”

But he was not as cheerful and relaxed as he tried to appear. Rebka had not been the only one to step away instinctively when that Zardalu-in-miniature had been dropped at their feet.

“We need to go to those buildings,” Rebka said. “And if—”

Before he could complete his thought, there was a clattering sound from inside the seedship. J’merlia stood at the edge of the hatch. His compound eyes swiveled from the soaking-wet Kallik to Hans Rebka.

“With respect, Captain Rebka, but Atvar H’sial has bad news.”

“The ship is past repairing?”

“Not at all. The drive is intact. With a few hours work the hull can be sealed adequately and the ship readied for space takeoff. I am prepared to begin that work at once. The bad news is that this is the only surviving drone, and even it will need repair before it can be used.” He lifted a small and buckled cylinder, covered with black mud. “The rest were crushed on impact. If we wish to send a warning message back to the Erebus, this single unit is our only hope. And it ca

Rebka nodded. As soon as he had seen the little drone, the question of a message to Darya and the others had come again to his mind. But what message? The more he thought about their situation, the more difficult it became to know what should be said. What did they know?

“J’merlia, ask Atvar H’sial to come outside. We need to brainstorm for a few minutes.”

“She is already on the way.”

The Cecropian was squeezing through the hatch, to drop lightly onto the soft moss. The great white head with its sonic generator and yellow receiving horns sca

“You sure, At?” Nenda asked. He was picking up her pheromonal message before J’merlia could translate for the others.

The blind head nodded.

“Zardalu,” J’merlia said.

“She can smell ’em,” added Nenda. “Long way off, and faint, but they’re here. That settles that.”

“Part of it,” Rebka said. He waited until Atvar H’sial had turned back to face him and J’merlia had moved for easy communication into the shelter of the Cecropian’s carapace. “Even if we could send the drone this minute, I’ve still got real problems about what we ought to say.”

“Like what problems?” Nenda had picked up a shred of moss and was nibbling it thoughtfully.

“Like, we know we’re not in charge here. Somebody else brought us down. But who’s doing what? What should we tell Darya and the others? My first thoughts for a message were probably the same as yours: We got through the singularities all right, this planet is Genizee, and there are live Zardalu here though we haven’t seen them yet. We can’t get back, because somebody forced our ship to make a crash landing on Genizee and we have to fix it.

“So who forced us down? We were shaken up a bit when we hit, but we’re in fair shape and so is our ship. Now, you know the Zardalu. If they were in charge, they’d have blasted us right out of the sky — no way we’d have survived a landing if they were ru

“But let’s be ridiculous and suppose they did want us to land in one piece, because they had other plans for us.”

“Like eating us.” Nenda spat out the bit of moss that he was chewing and made a face. “They’d like us better than this stuff. I’ve not forgotten their ideas from last time. They like their meat super-fresh.”

“Whatever they want to do with us, it would only make sense for them to bring us to a landing place where they are. So where are they?”

“Maybe they’re worried about our weapons,” Nenda offered. “Maybe they want to have a look at us from a distance. They wouldn’t think we were dumb enough to fly here in a ship that didn’t have weapons.”

“Then why not land us hard enough to make sure that all our weapons were put out of action?” Rebka ignored Nenda’s crack about coming weaponless, but he stored it up for future reprisal. “It doesn’t make sense, soft-landing us and then leaving us alone.”

“With respect,” J’merlia said softly. “Atvar H’sial would like to suggest that the source of your perplexity is in one of your implicit assumptions. She agrees that we were surely landed here by design, although her own senses did not allow her to detect the presence of the beam that tore the seedship from its trajectory and deposited it at its present location. But according to what you have told her, the beam came from the moon — that hollow, artificial moon of which you spoke — not from Genizee itself. What does that suggest? Simply this: the unwarranted assumption that you are making is that the Zardalu who are here also brought us here.”

J’merlia paused. There was a long silence, broken only by the ominous sigh of strong wind across gray moss. It was close to sunset, and with the slow approach of twilight the weather was no longer the flat calm that had greeted their arrival.

“That don’t help us at all,” Louis Nenda said at last. “If the Zardalu didn’t grab our ship and bring us here, then who the blazes did?”