Transcendence

Something rose from its crouching position on the gray-green moss and sailed toward her in a long, gliding leap. She gasped with shock, tried to jump away, and tripped over her own feet. Then she was sprawled on the soft turf, staring at eyes that seemed as wide and startled as her own.

“Tally!” She could feel her heart pounding in her throat. “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t you tell me…”

“You gave specific instructions.” The embodied computer was all wounded i

“There was evidence of Zardalu presence,” J’merlia said. “But when Captain Rebka and the others entered the buildings, they were all empty.”

The Lo’tfian was leading the way, with E.C. Tally and Dulcimer just behind. A few minutes cuddled up next to the main reactor of the Indulgence, added to J’merlia’s assurance that the members of the party who had landed earlier were all alive and well, had worked wonders. The Chism Polypheme was three shades lighter, his apple-green helix was less tightly coiled, and he was bobbing along jauntily on his muscular spiral tail.

Darya was walking last, uncomfortable about something she could not put a name on. Everything was fine. So why did she feel uneasy? It had to be the added sense that Hans Rebka insisted any human had the potential to develop. It was a faint voice in the i

As they approached the cluster of five buildings Darya realized that the structures must actually be visible from the place where the Indulgence had landed. It was their odd shapes, matching the natural jutting fingers of rock, that made them easy to miss. They were built of fine-grained sandy cement, the same color as the beach and the rock spurs. One had to come close to see that they rose from a level, sandy spit of land and must be buildings.

“I went into orbit with the seedship and launched the message drone that told the path through the singularities,” J’merlia went on. “The others remained here.”

“And they are in the buildings now?” They were halfway along the projecting point of land; still Darya could find no cause for her uneasiness.

“I certainly have not seen them emerge.”

Darya decided that it must be the ma

J’merlia had paused by the first of the buildings. He swiveled his pale-yellow eyes on their short stalks and stabbed one forelimb at the entrance. “They went in there.”

As though the word was a signal, a blue flicker moved in the dark recesses of the building. Darya went past Dulcimer and E.C. Tally and craned forward for a better look. As she did so, there was a scream from behind and something banged hard in her back and clung to her. She managed to keep her feet and turn. It was the Chism Polypheme, collapsing against her.

“Dulcimer! You great lout, don’t do that.”

The Polypheme was blubbering and groaning, wrapping his nine-foot length around her and clinging to her with his five little arms. Darya struggled to break loose, wondering what was wrong with him, until suddenly she could see past Dulcimer and E.C. Tally, along the spur of land that led back to the beach.

Zardalu.

Zardalu of all sizes, scores of them, still dripping with seawater. They blocked the return path along land, and they were rising on all sides from the sea. And now she also knew the nature of that blue flicker inside the building behind her.

Impossible to run, impossible to hide. Darya felt sympathy with Dulcimer for the first time. Blubbering and groaning was not a bad idea.

Humans, Cecropians — maybe even Zardalu — might entertain the illusion that there were things in the universe more interesting than the acquisition of information. Perhaps some of them even believed it. But E.C. Tally knew that they were wrong — knew it with the absolute certainty that only a computer could know.

Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; it was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E.C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

Here was an excellent example. Back on Miranda he had learned from Kallik the language she used to communicate with the Zardalu. It was an ancient form, employed back when the Hymenopts had been a Zardalu slave species. Most of the spiral arm would have argued that learning a dead language used only to speak to an extinct race was an idiotic waste of memory capacity.

But without it, E.C. Tally would have been unable to communicate with his captors in even the simplest terms.

The Zardalu had not, to Tally’s surprise, torn their four captives apart in the first few moments of encounter. But they had certainly let everyone know who was boss. Tally, whisked off his feet and turned upside down in the grasp of two monstrous tentacles, had heard an “Oof!” from J’merlia and Darya Lang on one side, and a gargling groan from Dulcimer on the other. But those were sounds of surprise and disorientation, not of pain. Tally himself was moved in against a meter-wide torso of midnight blue, his nose squashed against rubbery ammoniac skin. Still upside down, he saw the ground flashing past him at a rare rate. A moment later, before he had time to take a breath, the Zardalu that held him was plunging under the water.

Tally overrode the body’s reflex that wanted to breathe. He kept his mouth closed and reflected, with some a

The breathing reflex grew stronger and stronger. His lips were moving — parting — sucking in liquid. Don’t breathe!

In midgulp he was turned rapidly through a hundred and eighty degrees and placed on his feet.

He coughed, spat out a mouthful of brackish water, and blinked his eyes clear. He glanced around. He stood at the edge of a great shallow upturned bowl, forty or fifty meters across, with a raised area and a gray circular parapet at its center. Two tentacles of the Zardalu were loosely wrapped around him. Another pair were holding Dulcimer, who was coughing and choking and seemed to have taken in a lot more water than Tally. The wall of the bubble was pale blue. Tally decided that it was transparent, they were underwater, and its color was that of the sea held at bay outside it.