But how much time could she really buy before the Zardalu brought lights inside and followed them? This was a Zardalu building; they would know every hiding place. Wouldn’t it be better to agree on the place for a last stand?
“Nenda!” He spoke softly into the darkness. “Where are we going? Does Atvar H’sial know what she’s doing?”
There was a grunt ahead of him. “Hold on a second.” And then, after a pause for pheromonal exchange, “At says she don’t actually know what she’s doing, but she prefers it to bein’ pulled to bits. She don’t see no end to this stupid tunnel” — they had been descending for half a minute in a steady spiral — “but she’s ready to go down for as long as it does. We’ve passed five levels of chambers and rooms. There were signs that the Zardalu lived on the first three; now she’s not seeing so much evidence of ’em. She thinks we’re mebbe gettin’ down below the main Zardalu levels. If only this damn staircase would branch a few times, we might make a few tricky moves and get ’em off our track. That’s At’s plan. She says she knows it’s not much, but have you any other ideas?”
Rebka did not reply. He did have other ideas, but they were not likely to be helpful ones. If the Zardalu used only the first few belowground levels, then why did lower ones exist? Were they even the work of the Zardalu? This would not be the first planet with a dominant aboveground species and a different dominant belowground species, interacting only at one or two levels. If Genizee had spawned a subterranean species powerful enough to stop Zardalu access, what would they do to a blind and defenseless group of strangers?
Rebka, still clutching the back of Louis Nenda’s shirt, tried to estimate a rate of descent. They must have come through a score of levels, into darkness so total and final that it made his straining eyes ache. He itched for a look around, but he was reluctant to show a light. The huge eyes of the Zardalu were highly sensitive, designed by evolution to pick up the faintest underwater gleam.
“Time to take a peek an’ see what we got here.” Louis Nenda had halted, and his whisper came from just in front. “At can’t hear or smell anythin’ coming down behind us, so she thinks we’re deep enough to risk a bit of light. Let’s take a look-see.”
The space in front of Rebka filled with pale white light. Louis Nenda was holding a flat illumination disk between finger and thumb, rotating it to allow the center of the beam to scan in all directions.
They were standing on a descending sideless pathway like a spiral staircase with no central shaft or guardrail, looking out onto a high-ceilinged chamber. Nenda played the beam in silence on the fittings and distant walls for a few seconds, then he whistled. “Sorry, Professor Lang, wherever you are. You were right, and we should have listened.”
Hans Rebka heard Nenda and was baffled. They were at least three hundred feet underground. All evidence of Zardalu existence had vanished, and the surroundings that replaced the furnishings of the upper levels were totally unfamiliar. He stared again, at a great arch that rose at forty-five degrees, swept up close to the ceiling, then curved gracefully back down all the way to the floor.
Almost. Almost to the floor. The far end stopped, just a foot short. The abrupt termination made so little sense that the eye insisted on trying to continue it to meet the level surface. But there was a space at the end. Forty centimeters of nothing. Rebka wanted to walk across and sweep his hand through the gap to prove it was real. The stresses on the support at this end must be huge. Everything else in the chamber was equally strange and unfamiliar. Wasn’t it?
His subconscious mind was at work while his conscious mind seemed to be giving up. One area where organic intelligence still beat inorganic intelligence, and by a wide margin, was in the subtlest problems of pattern recognition. E.C. Tally, with his eighteen-attosecond memory cycle, could compute trillions of twenty-digit multiplications in the time of a human eye-blink. If he had been present in the chamber he might have made the correct association in five minutes. Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial had done it in a few seconds, aided by their weeks of examining — and pricing for future sale — the masses of new Builder technology on Glister and Serenity. Kallik, with the advantage of her long study of the Builder artifacts, was almost as quick. It was left for Hans Rebka, least familiar with Builder attributes, to stand baffled for half a minute. At the end of that time his brain finally connected — and he felt furious at his own stupidity and slowness.
His anger was typical, but unjustified. The evidence of Builder influence was indirect, absence more than presence, style more than substance. There were no constructs obviously of Builder origin. It was more a subtle lack of the up-and-down sense that permeated all lives and thinking controlled by gravitational fields. The chamber stretched off into the distance, its airy ceiling unsupported by pillars, arches, or walls. It should have collapsed long since. And the objects on the floor lacked a defined top and bottom, sitting uneasily as though never designed for planetary use. Now that Rebka examined his surroundings more closely, he saw too many unfamiliar devices, too many twelve-sided prisms of unknown function.
The light went off just as he reached his conclusion. Rebka heard a soft-voiced curse from Louis Nenda: “Knew it. Too good to last! Grab hold.”
“What’s the problem?” Rebka reached out and again seized the shirt in front of him.
“Company. Comin’ this way.” Nenda was already moving. “At took a peek up the tunnel — she can see round corners some — and she finds a pack of Zardalu on our tail. May not be their usual stamping ground, but they’re not gonna let us off that easy. Hang on tight and don’t wander around. At says we’ve got a sheer drop on each side. A big one. She can’t sense bottom.”
Rebka stayed close, but he looked up and back. The descending ramp was not solid, it was an open filigree that looked frail but did not give a millimeter under their weights. And far above, through the grille of the stairway’s open lattice, Rebka saw or imagined faint moving lights.
He crowded closer to Nenda’s back. Down and down and down, in total darkness. After the first minute Rebka began to count his own steps. He was up to three thousand, and deciding that his personal hell would be to descend forever through stifling and pitchy darkness, when he felt a hand on his. It was Louis Nenda, reaching back.
“Stay right there and wait. At says don’t move, she’ll get you across.”
Across what? Hans Rebka heard a scuffle of claws. He stood motionless. After half a minute the pale light of an illumination disk cut through the darkness. It was in Louis Nenda’s hands, ten meters away and pointing down. Rebka followed the line of the beam and flinched. Between that light and his own feet was nothing, an open space that dropped away forever. Atvar H’sial was towering at his side. Before he could move, the Cecropian had seized him in her forelimbs, crouched, and glided away across the gulf in one easy spring.
She set Rebka down a step or two away from the far edge. He took a deep breath. Louis Nenda nodded at him casually and pointed the beam again into the abyss.
“At says she still can’t sense bottom, an’ I can’t see it. You all right?”
“I’ll manage. You might have kept that light off until after I was over.”
“But then Kallik couldn’t have seen what she was doing.” Nenda nodded across the gulf, to where the Hymenopt was hanging upside down, holding on to the spiraling stairway by one leg. “She has the best eyes. Anything down there, Kallik?”
“Nothing.” She swung herself onto the upper side of the stair and launched casually across the ten-meter gap. “If there is another exit point it is at least a thousand feet down.” She moved to the very edge and leaned far out to stare upward. “But there is good news. The lights of the Zardalu are no longer approaching.”