"To my viewing it appeared entirely featureless."
"To me, too. But it was a lot cooler than everything around it."
"Which should be physically impossible."
"That's why we want it. Impossible gadgets are always the most valuable. I've no idea how it works, an' I don't care. But I can tell you a dozen places that would pay a lot for it, looking to maybe find a closed infinite heat sink. Number four—"
"Enough. I am persuaded. I accept your list. but there is one more thing that I would like to do, before we collect the items of choice and seek egress from the planetoid." Atvar H'sial motioned in front of her with one forelimb. The yellow horns faced ahead, open as wide as they would go and scanning slowly from side to side. "There is another chamber ahead; a huge, open one, possessing anomalous acoustical properties. At certain frequencies, it appears completely empty. At others, I detect a spherical object at its center."
"You think we might find something specially valuable? No point taking risks, just to be nosy."
"I cannot estimate the value. I will only say that an object transparent at certain acoustic frequencies is as potentially valuable to Cecropian society as glass, transparent to certain frequencies of light, is to humans. I know exactly where we could sell such a discovery. To me, it might be the most precious thing on this world."
Atvar H'sial was advancing slowly as she spoke, to a place where the tunnel ended in a blind drop. Nenda moved to her side and took a look down. After one startled glance he swore and stepped back. She had an indifference to heights that came from her remote flying ancestors, but he did not share it. They were on the brink of a twenty-meter drop, slowly curving away below to a bowl-shaped floor.
Atvar H'sial was pointing to the middle of the chamber. "There. Do you sense anything with your eyes?"
"Yeah. It's a silver sphere." Nenda took another step back. "I don't like this, At. We oughta get out of here."
"In one moment. To my senses, that sphere is
changing
. Do you observe it, also?"
Nenda, set to retreat, stood and stared in spite of himself.
Atvar H'sial was right. The sphere was changing while he watched. And in a way that tricked the eye. The whole surface began to ripple, like oscillations on a ball of mercury. Those vibrations became a pattern of standing waves, growing in amplitude until they changed the whole shape. A five-sided flowerlike head was sprouting above, while a slender barbed tail extended down toward the floor of the chamber.
Ahh.
A sighing voice echoed through the whole chamber.
Ahhh. At last.
A green light flickered from an aperture in the deformed sphere's center. It shone on Atvar H'sial, lighting up the crouched, insectile form and the great blind head. Louis hid away behind her.
At last
, the voice said again. It sounded as old as time itself. A strange, pungent aroma came drifting across the room.
At last . . . we can begin. You are here. The testing is complete. The duties of The-One-Who-Waits
are ending, and the selection process can begin. Are you ready?
The creature poised in the center of the chamber was unlike anything that Louis Nenda had met in thirty years of travel around the spiral arm. But what was Atvar H'sial seeing? The Cecropian seemed frozen, her long antennas unfurled and bristling. The being in the middle of the chamber had been partially invisible to her sonar. Did she see it at all now, and recognize the danger?
"At!" Nenda sent the pheromonal signal with maximum urgency. "I don't know if you're getting the same message as I am from that thing, but believe me, we're in trouble. It wants us. Don't reply to me, just back up."
You are the form,
the voice was saying, and the green light had focused on the Cecropian.
The third awaited form. Do not move
—Atvar H'sial had finally taken a step backward, bumping into Louis Nenda—
the transition is ready to begin.
Louis Nenda reached forward, grabbing one of the Cecropian's forelimbs. "At! No messing about. Let's get out of here!" He turned and took one step.
Too late.
Before his second step the floor vanished. He was falling freely, plummeting down a vertical shaft. He looked down. Nothing, only darkness that baffled the eye. He looked up. Above him was Atvar H'sial, wing cases fully extended, vestigial wings wide open, all six legs tensed. She was poised for a hard landing—on top of Louis Nenda.
He looked down again, seeking the bottom of the shaft. He could not see a thing, but given the small size of the planetoid, the end of the fall had to be no more than a second or two away.
And then what? Nothing pleasant, that was for sure.
Nenda fell and swore. Hindsight was wonderful. They had been a little bit too greedy. He and Atvar H'sial should have left when they could, as soon as they had picked out all they needed.
He stared down into a rolling, viscous blackness and had time for a final thought: They would have been better off staying with Julius Graves. At the moment, a formal trial for lethal assault seemed positively inviting.
When Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial went scurrying into the darkness, Birdie Kelly was not at all sorry to see the back of them. Graves might want to arrest the pair, but the Karelian human Nenda had always struck Birdie as crude and violent, and the silent, winged Cecropian gave him the creeps.
Good riddance to both. Birdie pushed Julius Graves off him, struggled to his feet, and looked around.
Things were a mess. He was not sure where to begin.
Graves was winded and gasping for breath, but otherwise he seemed all right. Birdie ignored him. Kallik was unconscious, lying on the floor halfway to the center of the room, and Birdie could do nothing for her.
The body of E. C. Tally, a little closer, was in the worst shape. It lay motionless, with the cable trailing from the bleeding head and ending in a bare plug a few feet from where Birdie stood. There was nothing to be done for Tally, either, because his body was deep in the Lotus field.
Birdie looked for J'merlia. The Lo'tfian was lying on the curved floor, just inside the pattern of concentric rings, and he was still holding E. C. Tally's disconnected brain firmly in two of his forelimbs. If he had been knocked out, too, or affected by the Lotus field . . .
But as Birdie watched, J'merlia began to move, crawling out toward the perimeter of the outer circle. Birdie took the loose end of the neural connect cable and went around to meet him.
"Where is Atvar H'sial?" J'merlia asked as soon as he crossed the boundary of the yellow ring.
"Ran for it. With Louis Nenda. We'll worry about them later. Here." Birdie held out the connector. "Turn Tally's brain around this way, and let's see if we can plug him in again."
The connection was supposed to be handled delicately, but it had been yanked free with great force. Now the neural bundles refused to mesh easily into position. The plug slipped out of the socket when it was released. Birdie knew nothing about the care and maintenance of embodied computers, but he said a prayer, placed the connector into position again, and pushed—this time a lot harder.
Down on the curved bowl of the floor, the body of E. C. Tally jerked and spasmed. There was a grunt and a
whoosh
of lungs violently expelling air.
"Tally!" J'merlia called. "Can you hear me?"
The battered figure with its bloody head was on hands and knees, struggling to stand up. It failed on half a dozen tries, supporting itself on its bruised forearms each time it fell forward. At last the body stayed upright.
"I hee-ar . . . poo-erly." The speech was garbled. "It is diffigult . . . to speag. Some of my gonnegtor interfaces were des-troyed when they were pulled out. Others are . . . degraded. I am seeging to gompensate. Do not worry, I was designed with high-cirguit redundancy. I am . . . improving. I will be all right. I will be
fine
."
Birdie was not so sure. As Tally said those last words, he had fallen flat on his face again.
"Take it
slowly
, E.C. We have plenty of time."
"Brr-err," E.C. Tally replied. "Grarr-erff." But he was making progress. He was standing again, shaky but upright. As Birdie and J'merlia watched, he took two tentative steps—in exactly the wrong direction.
"No. E.C.!" Birdie shouted. "Wrong way. Come toward the outside. You're heading for the middle of the room."
"I am well . . . aware of that." The head turned slowly, to look back at them. The voice was reproving. "Since it will be necessary at some point to retrieve the Hymenopt Gallig, surely it is more efficient to do so now, and thereby egonomize on both time and motion."
E. C. Tally was improving all right, Birdie thought—if a return to his usual wrongheadedness could be considered an improvement. But he carefully paid out neural cable while Tally limped forward until he reached Kallik. Blood streamed from the open skull as Tally bent down and laboriously cradled the little Hymenopt in his arms.
"We are goming out now. Prepare to restore me . . . to the granial gavity, as soon as I reach you. Sensory inputs via the gonnegt gable are degenerating. Please geep talging, so that I gan sense your diregtion. I gan no longer see."
"This way—this way—this way—" J'merlia called, but he did not wait. When Tally was still inside the yellow ring the Lo'tfian rushed forward, took part of Kallik's weight, and led the way back to Birdie Kelly. As Kallik was released, E. C. Tally groaned and sank to the floor beside her.
"Quickly." Julius Graves had finally recovered his wind enough to be helpful. He was removing the bandage from Tally's skull. "Steven says that there will be permanent damage if an impaired neural connector is used for more than a minute or two. We are close to that limit already."
As the bandage came off Birdie turned the cranium on its hinged flap. "All right, E.C., here we go. We'll have you back online in a few seconds.
"Now!" he said to J'merlia, who stood ready. The connector came free of the disembodied brain, at the same moment as Birdie pulled the cable out of the hindbrain socket. Tally's body slumped against Birdie. The blue eyes closed.
Julius Graves took the short connecting spiral of the computer's hindbrain connection and set it carefully into its usual position. There was a brief spasm of Tally's limbs, but before anyone had time to worry the eyes had flickered open.
"Very good," E. C. Tally said. "We suffered a loss of interface for only two-point-four seconds. All sensory and motor functions appear to be normal. Now, the closing of the cranial cavity is something that I prefer to do for myself. So if you do not mind—"
He reached up, pushed away Graves's supporting hands, and grasped the open top of the skull. He turned it backward on its hinge. Birdie, standing behind him, had another quick view of a red network of blood vessels in the skull's lining; then the cranium tilted to fit snugly over the protective membranes of Tally's spherical brain. Tally exerted vertical pressure. There was a faint click. The skull was again a battered but seamless whole.
As E. C. Tally calmly reached up a forearm to wipe blood from his eyes, the other three could begin to attend to other worries. Birdie realized that Kallik was conscious and silently watching.
"Are you feeling all right?"
The Hymenopt shook her head. "Physically, I am functioning normally. But mentally, I am very confused. Confused as to how I came to be here, but even more as to how
you
came to be here. The last thing I remember was going down there." She pointed toward the center of the chamber. "My master was at the center. Now he has vanished, and so has Atvar H'sial. Where are they?"
"Good question." Birdie was automatically coiling up the neural cable. Old habits of neatness died hard. "J'merlia, can you bring Kallik up to date, while the rest of us decide where we go from here?"
He turned to Julius Graves. "I'm not in charge, never have been. But I want to find Professor Lang and Captain Rebka as much as you do, and help them if they need help. And I know you want to get your hands on Nenda and that Cecropian, and give 'em what's due. But don't you think it's time we forgot all that and started acting rational? I mean, like getting out of here and going someplace where we know what's happening to us."
Listening to himself, Birdie was amazed at his own nerve. Here he was, a real nobody, telling a resentative of the central council what he ought to do. But Graves did not seem annoyed. The bald head was nodding slowly, and the radiation-scarred face wore a serious expression.
"Commissioner Kelly, I cannot argue with you. You, as well as J'merlia, Kallik, and E. C. Tally, have been drawn into a situation of great danger, for no better reason than my desire to bring Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial to justice, and to satisfy my own curiosity. That is unfair, and it is also unreasonable. I intend to continue to explore Glister. I hope to find Nenda and H'sial, and also Hans Rebka and Darya Lang. But that is not your responsibility. As of this moment you are officially relieved. You, E. C. Tally, J'merlia, and Kallik are all free to return to the surface. Take the
Summer Dreamboat
, go back to Opal, and report. Leave the other ship for my use, and for the others if I can find and rescue them."
It was a better answer than Birdie dreamed of getting. He stood to attention. "Yes,
sir!
Kallik, J'merlia. E.C.? All ready to go?"
But the embodied computer was shaking his head. "Go, Birdie Kelly, as soon as you are prepared. However, I cannot accompany you. I was sent to the Dobelle system with a mission: Find out what happened at Summertide, and learn why Captain Rebka and the others elected to remain there afterwards. Full answers have not been provided, and my query registers remain unfulfilled. I must go with Councilor Graves."
Which left the two aliens. Even as Birdie turned to them, he suspected that he was going to be disappointed. Kallik was hopping up and down, emitting the chirps and whistles that told of high excitement.
"The masters are alive! The masters are alive! J'merlia says that they are conscious, and somewhere within Glister. Honored humans, please grant us permission to seek them and offer again our services."