THE ZARDALU
You’d think that the spiral arm would have dangers and horrors enough, God knows, without people having to go on and invent new ones. But human (and inhuman) nature being what it is, we’re not satisfied with natural bogeymen, so every world you go, you hear the local tales of terror: of free-space vampires, ship-eaters that suck every living essence from a vessel as it goes by and leave an empty mechanical shell flying on through the void; of computer-worlds, where every organic being that ever approaches them is destroyed; of the Malgaians, baleful sentient planets who so hate large-scale development that when the surface changes become large enough, the Malgaian modifies its environment to kill off the intruders; of the Croquemort Time-well, where a ship can fall in and stay there in stasis until the end of the universe, when planets and stars and galaxies are gone and everything has decayed to a uniform heat-bath; of the Twistors, shadowy forces that live in the strange nonspace occupied by ships and people when they undergo a Bose Transition, performing their Twistor distortions in ways so subtle that you never realize that the “you” going in on one end of a transition and the “you” coming out at the destination are quite different beings.
And then, in a class by themselves, there are the Zardalu.
I say in a class by themselves, for one good reason: unlike all the others, there’s no doubt that the Zardalu are real.
Or rather, they were real. The reference texts tell you that the last Zardalu perished about eleven thousand years ago, when a handful of subject races of their thousand-world empire rose up against them and exterminated them.
That’s the references. But there’s a rumor you’ll find all around the spiral arm, as widespread as greed and as persistent as sin, and it says otherwise. It says: not every Zardalu perished. Somewhere in some hidden backwater of the arm, you may find them still. And if you do, you’ll live (but not long) to regret it.
Now, I’m not a man who can resist a temptation like that. I’ve been bouncing all over the arm for over a century, poking into all the little backwater worlds. Why not gather the scraps of information from all over the arm? I said to myself. Then make a patchwork quilt out of them, and see if it looks like a map with a big X saying “Here be Zardalu.”
I did just that. But I’ll spare you the suspense, right now, and say I never found them. I’m not saying they’re not there; only that I never ran them down. But in the course of searching, I found out a lot of mixed facts and rumors about what they were — or are — like.
And I got scared. Forget their appearance. They were supposed to be huge, tentacled creatures, but so are the Pro’sotvians, and a gentler, milder life-form is hard to imagine. Forget their legendary breeding rates, too. Humans can give them a run for their money, in intention and devotion to the job at hand, if not in speed of results. And even forget the fact that they ruled over so many worlds. The Cecropians call it the Cecropia Federation, not Empire, but they control almost as many worlds as the Zardalu did at their peak.
No. You have to look at what the Zardalu did.
It’s not easy to see that. If you’ve ever gone on a fossil hunt for invertebrate forms, you’ll know that you never find one. They decay and vanish. All you ever find is an inverse, an imprint in the rock where the life-form once sat in the mud. It’s a bit like having to look at a photographic negative, with the photograph itself never available.
The Zardalu were supposed to be invertebrates, and in searching for their deeds you have to examine their imprint: what is missing on the worlds that they ruled.
Even that takes an indirect approach. We don’t know where the Zardalu homeworld was, but it is reasonable to assume that they spread out advanced in the biological sciences.
And this is what they did: They conquered other worlds. And as they did so they reduced the intelligence of the inhabitants, bringing them down to a level where a being was just smart enough to make a good slave. No capacity for abstract thought, so no ability to plan a revolt, or cause trouble. And, of course, no art or science.
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.