He looked east through his goggles, to where Cavesson’s morning rays were barely clearing the jagged upthrust fingers of the cliffs. The sun’s bright point was diffused by the atmosphere, and the breeze on his face was actually chilly. He knew better than to be misled by either of those. Even thinned by dust and cloud and ozone, Cavesson was delivering to the surface of Bridle Gap a hundred times as much UV as a human’s eyes and skin could tolerate. The air smelled like a continuous electrical discharge. The flowers on the vegetation at water’s edge confirmed the deadly surroundings. Drab gray and sable to Rebka’s vision, they would glow and dazzle out in the ultraviolet, where the tiny winged pollinators of Bridle Gap saw most clearly.
It was also a low-gravity world, well-suited to Atvar H’sial’s physiology. While Rebka was still staring around, the Cecropian floated past him in a gliding leap that carried her to Louis Nenda’s side. He had reached a long, low building built partly on the spaceport’s rocky surface and partly in the black water beyond it. Together, the Cecropian and the Karelian human waded through shallow water to reach the entrance to the Sun Bar.
Hans Rebka took a quick glance back at the seedship. There was still no sign of E.C. Tally, but it would be a mistake to let Nenda and Atvar H’sial begin a meeting alone. Rebka had heard their explanation of what they had been doing on Serenity that led to their expulsion and return to the spiral arm. He did not believe a word of it.
He splashed forward, entered a dark doorway of solid obsidian, and took off his goggles to find himself confronted by a waist-high circle of bright black eyes.
The neurotoxic sting of a Hymenopt was deadly, and the chance that this one understood human speech was small. Rebka pointed to the backs of Nenda and Atvar H’sial, visible through another stone doorway, and walked steadily that way without speaking. He followed them through three more interior rooms, then set his goggles in position again as he emerged into a chamber that was open to the glaring sky, with a ledge of rock across its full width, ending at oily black water.
A dozen creatures of all shapes and sizes lay on the ledge, soaking in Cavesson’s lethal rays. Louis Nenda advanced to speak to one of them. After a few seconds it rose to balance on its thick tail and came wriggling back into the covered part of the room.
“Hello there.” The voice was a croaking growl. The blubbery green lips of a broad mouth pursed into an awful imitation of a human smile. “Honored to meet you, sirs. Excuse my bare condition, but I was just having myself a bit of a wallowbake. Dulcimer, Master Pilot, at your service.”
Rebka had never met a Chism Polypheme, but he had seen too many aliens to consider this one as anything more than a variation on a theme, one who happened to lack both radial and bilateral symmetry. The alien was a nine-foot helical cylinder, a corkscrew of smooth muscle covered with rubbery green skin and topped by a head the same width as the body. A huge eye of slaty gray, shifty and bulging, leered out from under a scaly browridge. The lidded ocular was half as wide as the head itself. Between that and the pouting mouth, the tiny gold-rimmed pea of a scanning eye continuously flickered across the scene. As Rebka watched, five flexible three-fingered limbs, all on one side of the pliant body and each just long enough to reach across it, picked up a corsetlike pink garment from the ledge, wrapped it around the Polypheme’s middle, and hooked it in place. The five arms poked through five holes, to lodge comfortably into broad lateral slings on the corset. The alien tightened its corkscrew body and crouched lower onto the massive, coiled tail to match Rebka’s height.
“At your service,” the croaking voice repeated. The scanning eye on its short eyestalk roved the room, then returned to stare uneasily at the towering blind form of Atvar H’sial, twice the size of the humans. “Cecropian, eh. Don’t see too many of you in these parts. You’re needing a top pilot, do you say?”
Atvar H’sial did not move a millimeter. “We are,” Rebka said.
“Then you need look no farther.” The main eye turned to Rebka. “I’ve guided ten thousand missions, every one a success. I know the galaxy better than any living being, probably better than any dead one, too. Though I say it myself, you couldn’t have better luck than getting me as your pilot.”
“That’s what we’ve heard. You’re the best.” And the only one crazy enough to take the job, Rebka thought. But flattery cost nothing.
“I am, sir, the very best. No use denying it, Dulcimer is the finest there is. And your own name, sir, if I might ask it?”
“I am Captain Hans Rebka, from the Phemus Circle. This is Louis Nenda, a Karelian human, and our Cecropian friend is Atvar H’sial.”
Dulcimer did not speak, but the great eye blinked.
A silent message passed from Atvar H’sial to Louis Nenda: This being seems unaware of his own pheromones. I can read him. He recognizes you, and Rebka was a fool to mention that you are in his party. This may cost us.
“And now, Captain,” said Dulcimer, “might I be asking where it is that you want to be taken?”
“To the Torvil Anfract.”
The great eye blinked again and rolled toward Louis Nenda. “The Anfract! Ah, sir, that’s a bit different from what I was given to suppose. Now, if you’d told me at the first that you were wanting to visit the Anfract—”
“You don’t know the region?” Rebka asked.
“Ah, and did I say that, Captain?” The scaly head nodded in reproof. “I’ve been there dozens of times, I know it like I know the end of my own tail. But it’s a dangerous place, sir. Great walloping space anomalies, naked singularities, Planck’s-constant changes, and warps and woofs that have space-time ringing like a bell, or twisted and running crossways…” The Polypheme shivered, with a spiraling ripple of muscle that ran from the tip of his tail up to the top of his head. “Why would you ever want to go to place like the Anfract, Captain?”
“We have to.” Rebka glanced at Louis Nenda, who was standing with an unreadable expression. They had not discussed just how much the Polypheme would be told. “We have to go there because there are living Zardalu in the spiral arm. And we think they must be hiding deep within the Anfract.”
“Zardalu!” The croak rose an octave. “Zardalu in the Anfract! If you’d excuse old Dulcimer, sirs, for just one minute, while I check something…”
The middle arm was reaching into the pink corset, pulling out a little octahedron and holding it up to the bulging gray eye. There was a long silence while the Polypheme peered into its depths, then he sighed and shivered again, this time from head to tail.
“I’m sorry, sirs, but I don’t know as I can help. Not in the Anfract. Not if there might be Zardalu there. I see great danger — and there’s death in the crystal.”
He is lying, Atvar H’sial told Nenda silently. He shivers, but there is no emanation of fear.
Louis Nenda moved closer to the Cecropian. Rebka’s telling him about the Zardalu, he replied.
Then Dulcimer does not believe it. He is convinced that the Zardalu are long-gone from the spiral arm.
“But see for yourself, in the Vision Crystal.” The Polypheme was holding the green octahedron out to Hans Rebka. “Behold violence, sir, and death.”
The inside of the crystal had turned from a uniform translucent green to a turbulent cloud of black. As it cleared, a scene grew within it. A tiny Dulcimer facsimile was struggling in the middle of a dozen looming attackers, each one too dark and rapidly-moving to reveal any details as to identities.
“Well, if you can’t help us, I guess that’s that.” Rebka nodded causally, handed the octahedron back to the Polypheme, and began to turn away. “I’m afraid we’ll have to look elsewhere for a pilot. It’s a pity, because I’m sure you’re the best. But when you can’t get the best, you have to settle for second best.”