The Great Rising, from species still undegraded, saved more than their own worlds. If the Zardalu had gone on spreading, their sphere of domination would long ago have swallowed up Earth. And I might be sitting naked and mindless in the ruins of some old Earth monument, not smart enough to come in out of the rain, chewing on a raw turnip, and waiting to be given my next order.
And at that point in my thinking, I reach my main conclusion about the Zardalu: if they are extinct, then thank Heaven for it. The whole spiral arm can sleep better at night.
Chapter Eleven
Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.
“No, no, and absolutely no,” Julian Graves said. He had reappeared in response to Darya’s call over the ship’s address system, but he had offered no reason for his absence. He looked exhausted and worried. “Even if what you say is true, it changes nothing. So what if the Anfract and the nested singularities are Builder creations? We cannot afford to risk the Erebus and additional members of our party.”
“Captain Rebka and his team are in more danger than we realized.”
“More danger than what? None of us had any idea at all of the degree of danger to the seedship when they left. And we agreed that until three days had passed we would do nothing.”
Darya began to argue, claiming that she had never agreed to any such thing. She called on Dulcimer to support her, but the Polypheme was too far gone, a long unwound corkscrew of apple-green giggling on the hard floor. She tried E.C. Tally. The embodied computer played his visual record of the actual event through the display system of the Erebus, only to prove that Darya had nodded agreement along with everyone else.
“Case closed,” Graves said. He sat there blinking, his hands cradling his bald head as though it ached almost too badly to touch.
Darya sat and fumed. Julian Graves was so damned obstinate. And so logical — except when it came to understanding the complicated train of her own analysis of the Anfract. Then he didn’t want to be logical at all.
She was getting nowhere. It took the unexpected arrival of the message drone to change the mind of the former Alliance councilor. Graves opened it carefully, lifted out the capsule, and hooked it into the Erebus’s computer.
The result was disappointing. There was a continuous record showing the path that the seedship had taken through the uncharted region of the annular singularities, a trip which had been accomplished in less than twenty-four hours. But then there was nothing, an inexplicable ten-hour gap in the recording with no information about the ship’s movements or the activities of its crew.
“So you see, Professor Lang,” Julian Graves said. “Still we have no evidence of problems.”
“There’s no evidence of anything.” Darya watched as the capsule ran to its uninformative end. “Surely that in itself is disturbing.”
“If you are hoping to persuade me that the absence of evidence of a problem itself constitutes evidence of a problem—” Graves began. But he was interrupted.
“Mud,” said a vague, croaking voice. “Urr. Dirty black mud.”
When the message capsule had been removed, the useless outer casing of the drone had been discarded on the control-room floor. It had rolled to rest a couple of feet in front of the open, staring eye of the Chism Polypheme. Now Dulcimer was reaching out with his topmost arm, scratching the side of the drone with a flexible and scaly finger.
“What’s he mumbling about?” Graves asked.
But Darya was crouched down at the side of the Polypheme, taking her first close look at the casing of the drone. All they had been interested in when it reached the Erebus had been the messages it was carrying. The drone itself had seemed irrelevant.
“Dulcimer’s right,” she said. “And so am I!”
She lifted the cylinder and carried it across to Julian Graves. He stared at it blankly. “Well?”
“Look at it. Touch it. When the seedship left the Erebus, all its equipment was clean and in good working order — have Tally run the record, if you don’t believe me. Now look at the antenna and drone casing joints. They’re filthy, and there has been repair work done on them. That’s a replacement cable. And see here? That’s mud. It was vacuum-dried, on its flight back, but before that the whole drone plunged into wet soil. Hans and the others not only found a planet — they landed there.”
“They agreed, before they left, that they would not do that.” Graves shook his bald and bulging head reprovingly, then winced. “Coating material can occur anywhere, even in open space. Anyway, why cover a drone with mud?”
“Because they had no choice. If the drone was battered and muddied like this in landing, the ship must have been damaged.”
“You are constructing a case from nothing.”
“So let me make you one from something. Sterile coating material picked up in space is quite different from planetary mud. I’ll bet if I dig some of this dirt from the drone’s joints and run an analysis, I’ll find microorganisms that don’t exist in any of our data banks. If I do, will you accept that as proof that the seedship landed — and on an unfamiliar world?”
“If. And it is a big if.” But Julian Graves was taking the drone wearily from Darya, and handing it to E.C. Tally.
Darya saw, and understood the significance of that data point. She had won! She moved on at once to the next problem: how to make sure that she was not, for any reason, left behind on the Erebus when others went through the singularities to seek Hans Rebka and his party.
In parallel, Darya’s mind took satisfaction in quite a different thought: She had changed an awful lot in one year. Twelve months before in faculty meetings at the Institute, she would have wasted an hour at that point, presenting more and more evidence to buttress her arguments; and then the subject would have been debated endlessly, on and on, until everyone in the meeting was either at the screaming point or mad with boredom.
Not anymore, though, at least for Darya. Somehow, without ever discussing such things, Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had taught her a great truth: Once you win, shut up. More talk only makes other people want to argue back.
There was a corollary to that, too: If you save time in an argument, don’t waste it. Start work on the next problem.
Darya admired her own new acuity as she left the control room and headed for the cargo bay that housed the Indulgence. It was time for work. When E.C. Tally returned with an analysis of that soil sample and Graves made up his mind what to do, Darya wanted to be second only to Dulcimer himself in knowledge of the Polypheme’s ship.
Before she even reached the cargo bay, Julian Graves was calling her back. He had already made up his mind. He knew what had to be done: Darya would fly into the nested singularities. E.C. Tally would accompany her, with Dulcimer as pilot of the Indulgence. Julian Graves would remain on the Erebus. Alone.
Baffling. But say it again: Once you win, shut up.
She grabbed Tally and Dulcimer, hustled them onto the Indulgence, and was heading the ship out of the cargo bay of the Erebus — before Julian Graves had a chance to change his mind.
In her eagerness to leave, Darya did not apply another of Hans Rebka’s survival rules: If you win too easy, better ask what’s going on that you don’t know about.