“Stay here. I’ll take a look.” She forced herself up the last ten meters of sloping tunnel and reached the flat, hard floor of the chamber. She listened. Nothing. And nothing to see but the glowing, hemispherical bowl of the chamber’s ceiling.
“It seems all right,” she whispered — and then froze. A soft grating sound started, no more than ten feet away. It was followed by a sighing whisper and the movement of air past Darya, as though some huge air pump was slowly beginning operations.
Darya sat motionless on hands and knees. Finally she raised her head, to stare straight up at the shining bowl of the ceiling. She began to laugh, softly and almost silently.
“What is wrong?” E.C. Tally whispered worriedly from back inside the air duct.
“Nothing. Not one thing.” Darya stood up. “Come on out, Tally, and you can have your rest. We made it. We’re on the surface of Genizee. Feel the wind? It’s nighttime, and the glow up there is the nested singularities.”
Darya had never in her whole life waited with such impatience for dawn. The forty-two-hour rotation period of Genizee stretched the end of night forever. First light bled in over the eastern horizon with glacial slowness, and it was two more hours after the initial tinge of pink before Darya was provided with a look at their surroundings.
She and E.C. Tally were half a mile or less from the sea — how even its brackish water spoke to her dry throat — on a level patch of flat rock, fifty feet high. Nothing stood between them and the waters but stunted shrubs and broken rocks. They could reach the shoreline easily. But the night wind had died, and in the dawn stillness Darya could see the sea’s surface moving in swirls. She imagined the movement of Zardalu, just offshore. The scene looked peaceful, but it would be dangerous to believe it.
She and Tally waited another hour, licking drops of dew from cupped shrub leaves and from small depressions in the flat ground.
As full light approached, Darya ascended to the highest nearby spire of rock and scanned the whole horizon. And there along the shoreline, so far away that it formed no more than a bright speck, she saw a flash of reflected light.
It was the Indulgence. It had to be. Nothing else on the surface of Genizee would provide that hard, specular reflection. But there was still the problem of how to get there.
The quick and easy way was to head for the shoreline and follow its level path to the ship. Quick, easy — and dangerous. Darya had not forgotten the last incident on the shore, when the four big sea creatures had approached her as she walked along the margin of the sea. Maybe they had not been Zardalu; but maybe there were other creatures on Genizee, just as dangerous.
“We’ll go over the rocks,” she told E.C. Tally. “Get ready for more climbing.” She led the way across a jumble of spiny horsetails and sawtooth cycads, jutting rock spires, and crumbling rottenstone, struggling along a route that paralleled the shore while staying a rough quarter of a mile away from it. As the sun rose higher, swarms of tiny black bugs rose in clouds and stuck to their sweating faces and every square inch of exposed skin.
Tally did not complain. Darya recalled, with envy, that he had control over his discomfort circuits. If things became too unpleasant he would turn them off. If only she could do the same. She struggled on for another quarter of an hour. At last she paused, left the rutted path of broken stone that she had been following, and climbed laboriously to a higher level. She peered over the edge of a stony ridge and thought that she had never seen a more beautiful sight. The ship stood there, silent and welcoming.
“Just five more minutes,” she turned and whispered down to Tally. “We can’t be more than a hundred yards from the Indulgence. We’ll go right to the edge of the flat area of moss, then we’ll stay in the shrubs and take a rest. When we have our energy back, we go for the Indulgence at a dead run. I’ll secure the hatches; you go to the ship controls and take us to space.”
They stole forward, to a point where the brush ended and they would have a straight run across gray-green moss to the ship. Darya crouched low and brushed black flies from her face. At every breath, flies swarmed at her nose and mouth. She placed her hands to her face and breathed through a filter of closed fingers.
One more minute, then this slow torture would be history. Darya rose to a full standing position and turned to nod to E.C. Tally.
“Thirty seconds.” She could see it all in her mind’s eye: the race across the moss, the ship’s rapid start-up procedure, the roar of the engines, and then that wonderful sound of a powered lift-off to a place where bloodthirsty Zardalu were just a bad memory. She could hear it happening now.
She could hear it happening now.
My God. She could hear it happening now.
Darya turned. She took a deep breath to shout, inhaled a few dozen minute bugs, and started to choke and wheeze. A hundred yards from her, the Indulgence — her only hope, the only way off this awful world — rose with a roar of controlled power and vanished into the salmon-pink morning sky of Genizee.
Chapter Nineteen
Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.
There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck — even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.
Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.
Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.
The seedship had been dragged down to the surface of Genizee and damaged. Bad luck, if you liked to think of it that way. Lack of adequate precautions, if you thought like Hans Rebka. Then they had been trapped by the Zardalu and forced to retreat to the interior of the planet. More bad luck? Maybe.
But then, against all odds, they had managed to escape the Zardalu by plunging deep inside the planet. They had encountered World-Keeper. And the Builder construct had agreed through J’merlia, without an argument, to return them to a safe spot on the surface of Genizee, a place from which they could easily make it back to the waiting seedship. If they preferred, they could even be transmitted all the way to friendly and familiar Alliance territory.
Good luck. Too much good luck. A little voice in Rebka’s ear had been muttering ever since it happened. Now it was louder, asserting its own worries.
He stared around the square chamber, which was lit by the flicker of a column of blue plasma that flared upward through its center. World-Keeper had advised them not to approach that roaring, meter-wide pillar, but the warning was unnecessary. Even from twenty meters Rebka could feel fierce heat.
They had been told to wait here — but for how long? They were still without food, and this room had no water supply. The Builder constructs had waited for millions of years; they had no sense of human time. One hour had already passed. How many more?
J’merlia, Kallik, and Atvar H’sial were crouched in three separate corners of the chamber — odd, now that Rebka thought about it, since when J’merlia was not sitting in adoring silence under Atvar H’sial’s carapace, he was usually engaged in companionable conversation with the Hymenopt. Louis Nenda was the only one active. He was delicately prying the top off a transparent sealed octahedron filled with wriggling black filaments. It floated unsupported a couple of feet above the floor as Nenda peered in at the contents.