Hans Rebka had been there for a couple of minutes, staring into one of the alcoves of the huge room. His shoulders were bowed with fatigue — but he straightened up quickly enough when he saw Nenda’s arm around Darya.
She knew that expression. To avoid an argument she pulled free and hurried across to the alcove herself — and received the biggest shock of all. Atvar H’sial was there, sitting crouched by J’merlia’s limp and silent body.
J’merlia. Darya had seen him vanish, down on Genizee. He could not be here, lying on the floor of the control room.
“J’merlia…” she began, and then subsided. Her head was full of cotton. She didn’t know where to begin.
“At says J’merlia’s doin’ all right,” Nenda said. He had followed her over to the alcove. “She’s in communication with him. She says he’s not quite conscious yet, but his condition’s improving. We just hafta be patient and wait a minute.”
J’merlia was beginning to groan and mutter. Darya leaned closer. It was a language that she could not understand. She looked around the group. “Anyone recognize that?”
“Recognize, yes,” E.C. Tally said. “Understand, no. That is J’merlia’s native tongue; the language of an adult male Lo’tfian. Unfortunately there is no dictionary in the central data bank. I suspect that no one in this party speaks it.”
“But that don’t matter,” Nenda added. “There’s some sorta trauma in J’merlia for human speech, but everything’ll come out anyway in the pheromones. Atvar H’sial can tell me what J’merlia’s tryin’ to say, and I can tell you. She says it might be a couple of minutes more before we get sense, but she wants us to be ready for it. Kallik, gimme a computer recording mode.”
The Hymenopt nodded, and her paws flew across the console. She had apparently recovered from her earlier meeting with the vanishing J’merlia. Now she was perched on the rail of the console, staring intently down at the Lo’tfian and at Atvar H’sial hovering worriedly over him.
Darya noticed that Kallik was using her middle paws. One forelimb was missing. What had happened to it? No one bothered to mention it. Her eyes went on to Louis Nenda; his arms were covered with blister burns from contact with some hot or corrosive liquid. Those two were the worst off physically, but no one else was much better. Every face and body was lined with fatigue and covered with grime.
Darya must look as bad herself. And her inside was worse than her outside. She felt a thousand years old.
The ridiculous nature of the whole effort struck her. To take this motley, wounded, and exhausted bunch of cripples, slaves, and misfits, and expect them to make progress in understanding anything, let alone the mysteries of Genizee and its shrouded belt of singularities…
That was some joke. Except that she could not laugh at it. She could not even feel angry anymore. And she had not faced up to the biggest mystery of alclass="underline" J’merlia’s very presence.
“How can he be here?” Darya found herself blurting out her questions and pointing at the Lo’tfian. “He was on Genizee with me and Tally. And then he vanished — into the air.”
They did not mock her statement, which would have been perfectly justified. “J’merlia was on the Erebus with Julian Graves, too,” Hans Rebka said, a sigh in his voice. “He vanished here. He was with our party on Genizee. And he vanished there. And then a few hours ago he came back in the seedship — unconscious. Don’t ask me, Darya. You’re the one who’s good at theories. What’s your explanation?”
Optical illusion. Mirrors. Magic. Darya’s thoughts were running out of control. “I don’t have one. It’s impossible.”
“So wait another second, an’ mebbe we’ll hear J’merlia speak for himself.” Louis Nenda pointed to Atvar H’sial. The Cecropian’s pleated proboscis was trembling its way across J’merlia’s body, touching his pale-lemon eyes on their short stalks, caressing the sensing antennas and the narrow head. J’merlia was jerking and mumbling in response to her touch. Darya and the other humans heard nothing intelligible, but suddenly Louis Nenda began to talk.
“Goin’ to give it verbatim if I can.” He placed the infant Zardalu on one of the control chairs, where it clamped itself firmly with multiple suckers and bit an experimental beakful of soft seat cushion. “At’ll ask the questions, say what J’merlia says exact to me, I pass it on exact to you. Get ready, Kallik. Any second now.”
The smell of complex pheromones was strong in the air of the cabin, their message tantalizingly hidden from most of the watchers.
“I, J’merlia, hear, and I reply,” Nenda said, in a flat, unnatural voice. “It began with the seedship. I was left alone to repair that ship, whilst Dominatrix Atvar H’sial, Captain Rebka, and Master Nenda went to explore the shore buildings of the Zardalu. I completed the repair ahead of schedule and decided to test the seedship in flight. It performed perfectly. I therefore flew it back to the buildings, where I found that large numbers of Zardalu were emerging from the water…”
The room was totally silent except for J’merlia’s harsh breathing and Nenda’s gruff, emotionless voice. He might have been reading from a parts list when he spoke of the escape to space after the Zardalu had forced the others underground, of J’merlia’s unplanned rendezvous with the amorphous singularity, of the agonies of physical distortion on the edge of that singularity, of the improbable rescue and transfer to Hollow-World. The description of J’merlia’s awakening, and the meeting with Guardian, produced an irrepressible stir of interest and muttered comments.
“Sounds exactly like World-Keeper,” Rebka said softly. “Nenda, can you ask Atvar H’sial to probe for a fuller physical description of that Builder construct?”
“I can ask her to try. I don’t think she got good two-way talk yet, though.”
The recital continued: of Guardian’s message-probe survey of the spiral arm; of Guardian’s increasing conviction of its own unique role as preserver and protector of Genizee for the return of the Builders. And finally — Atvar H’sial’s proboscis writhed, and Louis Nenda’s voice cracked as he spoke — J’merlia’s own pain began. He had been split, his mind shattered to fragments, his body sent far away on multiple assignments.
He had been nowhere and everywhere, simultaneously; with Guardian on Hollow-World, with Julian Graves on the Erebus, and with both parties on and under the surface of Genizee. He had died in the roaring column of plasma, he had vanished from the grasp of the Zardalu, he had been cross-examined by Guardian, and later he in turn had asked his programmed questions of World-Keeper. And at the end, the worst agony: J’merlia’s loss of selves and final collapse.
The Lo’tfian had been lying cradled in four of Atvar H’sial’s limbs. As Nenda said the word “collapse” he sat up and stared around him. The pale-yellow eyes were puzzled, but they were rational.
“Collapse,” he repeated in human speech. His tone was perplexed. “When that collapse was over, Guardian told me that my task was now complete. I was again on Hollow-World, but I was told that I must leave there. And now I am again on the Erebus. How did I come here?”
Darya glanced at each of the others in turn. They all seemed calm, even relaxed. Yet J’merlia’s “explanation” of how he had been in many places at once, and vanished instantaneously from each of them explained nothing.
Why weren’t the rest as upset and confused as she was? Was she unique in the way that things contrary to physical laws disturbed her? All her life she had sought rationality and shunned mysticism or magic. But now, faced with flagrant violation of what she believed possible… could she be seeing evidence of a whole new physics, radically different from everything that she had ever learned?