And for locomotion?
She stared at the body. The upper part was a round-topped cylinder, with bands of smooth muscle running down it. The eyes and beak were placed about one meter down. Below the beak sat a long vertical slit, surrounded by flexible muscular tissue. There was no difference in width between head and torso, but below that long gash of the mouth was a necklace of round-mouthed pouches, about six inches wide and circling the whole body. Darya could see pale blue ovals of different sizes nestled within the pouches. Stretched out along and beyond the main body was a loose tangle of thick tentacles, also pale blue. They were amply strong enough to walk on, though a set of broad straps wrapped around their thickest parts. Two of the tentacles ended in finely dividing ropy tips.
If those thin filaments were capable of independent control, Darya thought, a Zardalu would have manipulative powers beyond any human — beyond any other being in the spiral arm.
She felt an uncomfortable awe. The Zardalu might fill her with dread, but at the same time she knew that they were beautiful. It was a beauty that came from the perfect matching of form and function. The combination of muscular power with delicate touch could not be missed. The only anomaly was the webbing that girded the upper part of the tentacles.
“What are the straps for, Hans?” she whispered. “They can’t be for physical support. Do you think they’re for carrying — offspring, or supplies and weapons?”
But Rebka was still staring at the slow ripple of movement along the body. “Darya, this shouldn’t be happening. It’s impossible. Remember, this is a stasis unit. Everything’s frozen, just like time has stopped. But that thing in there is breathing — slow, but enough to see. And look at that eye.”
There was a flicker of movement in the heavy lid. While they watched, the tip of one thick tentacle twitched and curled a few centimeters.
Rebka stepped sharply away from the tank. “Darya, that Zardalu isn’t in stasis. It may have been, a few hours ago. But now it’s starting to wake up. I’ve no idea how long reanimation will take, but Speaker-Between must have started the process as soon as we arrived. He said that there were ‘two forms only’ here, and I assumed that he meant the two of us. But now it looks as though he meant two species, Human and Zardalu. We have to try to find him and warn him. He probably has no idea what the Zardalu were like.”
He was already moving from one stasis tank to the next, peering in for only a moment at each.
“They’re all the same. All starting to wake.”
He hurried back to the food-supply unit, grabbing handfuls of still-frozen packets and stuffing them into his pockets. Darya marveled that at a time like this he could still think of food. She remembered how hungry she had been feeling, but at the moment she could not have eaten a thing.
He turned impatiently to her. “Come on.”
She obeyed — reluctantly. It was against all her instincts, to leave something so novel, about which so many students and experts on the cultures of the spiral arm had expended so much speculative effort. Hans might be right when he said that Speaker-Between might have no idea what the Zardalu were like; but that was just as true of human knowledge of the Zardalu. There was speculation and theory, but no one knew anything. And here she was, with a perfect opportunity to determine a few facts.
Only one thing made her follow right after Rebka: the fear that had crept up her spine unbidden, like a capillary flow of ice water, when she first saw that dark-blue skin and bulky body. She did not want to be alone with a Zardalu, even an unconscious one.
According to all expert knowledge, humans had never encountered Zardalu. The Great Rising had happened before humanity moved into space. But there could be deeper wisdom than anything in the data banks. The submerged depths of Darya’s brain told her that there had been encounters, back before human recorded history.
And they had been bloody and merciless meetings. Sometime, long before, the Zardalu scouts had taken a close look at Earth. They had been stopped before they could colonize. Not by any action of early humans, but by the Great Rising. Dozens of intelligent races and scores of planets had been annihilated in that rebellion. And Earth had benefitted, unknowing, from their sacrifice. The Zardalu had been exterminated.
Or almost exterminated.
Darya found herself shaking all over as she went after Hans. He was right. They had to find Speaker-Between and warn him, even if they were not sure what they were warning him about.
Reaching the Interlocutor should in principle be trivially easy. They had entered the sphere of his body and never left it. Therefore they must still be inside Speaker-Between.
But Darya did not believe it. She did not trust the evidence of her senses anymore. The chambers containing the stasis tanks and the Zardalu were just too big to fit inside Speaker-Between. The Builders had a control of the geometry of space-time beyond anything dreamed of by the current inhabitants of the spiral arm. For all she knew, Speaker-Between could be very far away — thousands of light-years, as humans measured things.
She glanced behind her as she followed Hans Rebka to the two doors of the chamber — the same doors through which they had entered, less than an hour before. The great coffins still sat silent. But now that she knew their contents, that silence had become ominous, a calm that heralded coming activity. She was strangely uncomfortable about leaving that chamber, and even more uneasy about staying there.
As they passed through the first sliding door and then the second one, Darya knew at once that her instincts had been correct. The outside had changed. They were emerging not into the level and infinite plain where they had encountered Speaker-Between, but to a somber gray-walled room. And instead of high-ceilinged emptiness, or the webs, cables, nets, and partitions of Glister, Hans and Darya were standing before hundreds of ivory-white cubes, ranging in size from boxes small enough to tuck easily under one arm, to towering objects taller than a human. The cubes were scattered across the floor of the rectangular room, like dice cast by a giant.
Nothing moved. There was no sign of Speaker-Between.
To Darya’s surprise, after Rebka’s careful inspection of their surroundings he walked forward to look at a couple of boxes. They stood side by side and came about up to his knees. He sat down on one of them, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a packet. As she stared he opened it and started to peel the thin-skinned fruit that it contained.
“It’s still a bit cold on the inside,” he said after a few moments. “But we can’t afford to be too picky.”
“Hans! The Zardalu. We have to find Speaker-Between.”
“You mean we’d like to.” He bit off a small piece of the fruit, chewed it, and frowned. “Not too great, but it’s better than nothing. Look, Darya, I want to find Speaker-Between and talk to him as much as you do. But how? I hoped we’d find that we were still inside him, so coming out would bring us back to talk to him. It didn’t work. This place is stranger than anything I’ve ever seen in my life, and I doubt if you’re any more at home than I am. You saw the size of this artifact when we were approaching it. We could spend the rest of our lives looking for somebody, but if he doesn’t want to be found, we’d never get near him.”
Darya visualized the monstrous space construct that they had seen on the final transition of their approach, its delicate filaments stretching out millions of kilometers. Rebka was right. Its size was too big to contemplate, let alone search. But the idea of not searching…
“You mean you’re just going to sit there and do nothing?”