Anyway,
species are organisms
, and here's my simple syllogism:
Any species is a single, multicelled organism. Every multicelled organism will over the course of time grow old and die.
Therefore
, any species will at last grow old and die.
That's what happened to the superorganism known as the Builders. It lived a long time. Then it got old. And it died.
Convincing? If so, you shouldn't expect anything better for humans. I certainly don't.
—from
Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:
Jetting Alone Around the Galaxy;
by
Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)
Hans Rebka's job as a Phemus Circle troubleshooter had taken him to a hundred planets. He had made thousands of planetary landings; and because by the nature of things his job took him only to places where there were already problems, scores of those landings had been made in desperate circumstances.
The first thought after a hard impact was always the same:
Alive! I'm Alive.
The questions came crowding in after that: Am I in good enough shape to function? Are my companions alive and well? Is the ship in one piece? Is it airtight? Is it intact enough to allow us to take off again?
And finally, the questions that made the condition of the ship and the crew so important:
Where are we?
What is it like
outside
?
By Rebka's standards, the seedship had made a soft landing—which is to say, it had been brought down at a speed that did not burn it up as it entered the atmosphere and the impact had not killed outright every being on board. But it had not made a
comfortable
landing. The ship had driven obliquely into the surface with force enough to make the tough hull shiver and scream in protest. Hans Rebka had felt his teeth rattle in his head while a sudden force of many gravities rammed him down into the padded seat.
He had blacked out for a few seconds. When he swam back to consciousness his eyes were not working properly. There was a shifting flicker of bright lights, interspersed with moments of total darkness.
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. If sight failed, he would have to make do with other senses. The key questions still had to be asked and answered.
Concentrate.
Make your brain work, even though it doesn't want to.
Hearing.
He listened to the noises around him. First answer: some of the others on board had survived the crash. He could hear cursing and groaning, and the clicks and whistles of conversation between Kallik and J'merlia. The groans had to be Louis Nenda. And anything that had left humans alive was unlikely to have harmed a Lo'tfian, still less a Hymenopt. Atvar H'sial, most massive of the ship's occupants, might be in the worst shape. But that fear was eased when Rebka felt a soft proboscis touching his face, and heard Nenda's voice: "Is he alive? Lift him up, At, let me get a look at him."
Smell.
The ship had fared less well. Rebka could smell an unfamiliar and unpleasant odor, like cloying damp mold. The integrity of the hull had been breached, and they were breathing the planet's air. That disposed of any idea of testing the atmosphere before exposing themselves to it. Either it would kill them, or it wouldn't.
Touch.
Someone was poking his chest and belly, hard enough to hurt. Rebka grunted and opened his eyes again, experimentally. The flicker was fading, reduced to a background shimmer. His head ached horribly. Louis Nenda had finished his abdominal poking and was moving Rebka's arms and legs, feeling the bones and working the joints.
"Don't need to do that." Rebka took a deep, shuddering breath and sat up. "I'm good as new. The ship . . ."
"Should probably fly atmospheric with no problem. But we can't leave for space till that's fixed." Nenda was pointing forward. Hans Rebka saw a spray of black mud right in front of his seat, squirted in through a caved section of the seedship's hull. "Atvar H'sial and J'merlia are checking it out, seein' how big a job we got before we'd be ready for a space run."
"If we're
allowed
to leave." Rebka was trying to stand and finding that his legs did not want to cooperate. It did not help that the floor of the seedship remained at ten degrees to the horizontal. Rebka came upright in the cramped space and leaned on the wall. He noticed a deep bleeding gash on Nenda's muscular left arm. The Karelian was calmly suturing it with a needle and thick thread—and, of course, without anesthetic.
Rebka registered that without comment. Whatever Nenda's defects, he was tough and he was not a whiner. A good man to have at your back in a fight—but watch your own back, afterward.
"We didn't have any control coming in," Rebka said. "If we leave, that same beam could drop us right back—less gently next time."
"Yeah. We were lucky," Nenda mumbled through clenched teeth. He had finished his stitching and was biting through the coarse thread. He finally spat out the loose end, went to the open hatch, and peered out. "Soft mud. If you have to hit, best possible stuff to land on. Kallik!" he called outside, adding a click and a loud whistle. "Damn that Hymenopt. I said to take a peek outside, but I don't see her nowhere. Where's she got to now?"
With the ship tilted as it was, the bottom of the open hatch was five feet above the ground. Rebka followed Louis Nenda as the Karelian sat on the sloping floor and swung himself out of the hatch to drop onto the surface of the planet. The two men found themselves standing on a flat, gray-green moss that gave an inch or two beneath their weight. The skidding arrival of the seedship had gouged a straight black furrow, a few hundred yards long, in that level surface.
"Lucky," Nenda said. "We could have landed in
that
." He pointed to the ship's rear. Half a mile away the flat ground gave way to a patchwork of tall ferns and cycads, from which twisted fingers of dark rock were projecting. Their serried tops were sharp as dragon's teeth. "Or in
that
."
Nenda turned and pointed the other way, ahead of the ship. The gray-green moss on which they were standing formed a shoreline, a flat between the jutting rocks and a silent, blue-gray sea. "If we'd flown one mile farther, right now we'd be trying to breathe water. Lucky again. Except I don't believe it was luck."
"We were
brought
here," Rebka agreed. The two men moved farther from the crippled ship, searching the surface from horizon to horizon. There was an unspoken thought in both their heads. Every planet carried its own life-forms and its own potential dangers. But if this world was in fact Genizee, there was a formidable
known
danger to worry about: the Zardalu.
Rebka was cursing the decision—
his
decision, he made himself admit—to penetrate the singularities using the nimble but unarmed seedship. They could not have brought the
Erebus
, bristling with weapons, without risking the loss of the whole party if the ship was unable to negotiate the encircling singularities; but they could have brought Dulcimer's ship, the
Indulgence
, well-armed enough to allow adequate self-defense. With only the seedship, they were reduced to fighting with their bare hands—and they knew how hopeless that was against the Zardalu. True enough, they had never
intended
to land; but Rebka would not excuse his error.
"I don't see 'em," Nenda offered. He did not need to specify
what
he did not see.
"And we don't want to. Maybe we can repair the ship and take off for orbit before they know we're here. This is a whole planet. We're seeing maybe a millionth of the whole surface."
"Don't bet on whether anyone knows we're here.
We
didn't pick where we landed—something else did. Mebbe we're about to find out
who
." Nenda pointed to the straggling rocks, curving away in a half circle beyond the ship. "Here comes Kallik—an' in a hurry."
Rebka stared at the dark, distant blur with a good deal of curiosity. He had never seen a Hymenopt at full stretch. The rotund, barrel-shaped body with its short, soft fur and eight sprawling legs looked too pudgy and clumsy for speed. But Kallik's nervous system had a reaction speed ten times as fast as any human's. The wiry limbs could carry her a hundred meters in less than two seconds.
They were doing it now, each leg moving too fast to be visible. All that Rebka could see was the central speeding blur of the black body. Kallik skidded to a halt at their side in less than ten seconds. Her coat was covered with wet brown mud.
"Trouble?" Nenda asked.
"I think so." The Hymenopt was not even out of breath. "There are structures along the shoreline about three kilometers away, hidden by the rocks. I approached them and went briefly inside two of them. It was too dark to see much within, but it is clear that they are artificial. However, there was no sign of the inhabitants."
"Could they be Zardalu dwellings?"
"I believe they are." Kallik hesitated, while Rebka reflected on the little Hymenopt's courage. Thousands of years had passed since her species had been slaves of the Zardalu, but the images of the land-cephalopods were still strong in Kallik's race memory. On her last encounter with the Zardalu they had torn one of her limbs off, casually, to make a point to humans. Yet she had entered those unknown structures alone, knowing there might be Zardalu inside.
"For several reasons," Kallik continued, "not least of which is my conviction that this planet is indeed Genizee. Look at this."
Before Rebka or Nenda could object she was off again, racing down to the water's edge and continuing into it. The beach fell away steeply, and within a few feet Kallik vanished beneath the surface. When she reappeared she was holding a wriggling object in her two front claws and blurring back toward them.
Hans Rebka could not see her prize clearly until she was again at his side. When she held it out to him he took a step backward. Irrational fear and alarm began to eat at the base of his brain. He stopped breathing.
The two-foot-long creature that Kallik grasped so casually was a millennia-old nightmare in miniature. Multiply its size by ten times, and the tentacled cephalopod became a Zardalu, seven deadly meters of midnight-blue muscle and intelligent ferocity.
"A precursor form, surely," Kallik was saying. "Already this is amphibious, able to function on both land and water. Observe." She placed the creature on the ground. It rose onto splayed tentacles and blinked around it with big lidded eyes.
"Allow evolution to proceed," Kallik went on, "and from this form a land-cephalopod would be quite a natural result. With emergence onto land, a substantial increase in size and intelligence would also not be surprising." The creature at her feet made a sudden snatch at her with its cruel hooked beak. She swatted it casually before it made contact. It flew ten meters to land on the soft moss, and scuttled off for the safety of the water. Its speed on land was surprising.
"Another reason I'm glad we didn't land in the water a mile further on," Nenda said cheerfully. "How'd you like a dozen of
them
chewing your butt when you're tryin' to swim?"
But he was not as cheerful and relaxed as he tried to appear. Rebka had not been the only one to step away instinctively when that Zardalu-in-miniature had been dropped at their feet.
"We need to go to those buildings," Rebka said. "And if—"
Before he could complete his thought, there was a clattering sound from inside the seedship. J'merlia stood at the edge of the hatch. His compound eyes swiveled from the soaking-wet Kallik to Hans Rebka.
"With respect, Captain Rebka, but Atvar H'sial has bad news."
"The ship is past repairing?"
"Not at all. The drive is intact. With a few hours work the hull can be sealed adequately and the ship readied for space takeoff. I am prepared to begin that work at once. The bad news is that this is the only surviving drone, and even it will need repair before it can be used." He lifted a small and buckled cylinder, covered with black mud. "The rest were crushed on impact. If we wish to send a warning message back to the
Erebus
, this single unit is our only hope. And it cannot be launched until the seedship itself is again in space."
Rebka nodded. As soon as he had seen the little drone, the question of a message to Darya and the others had come again to his mind. But
what
message? The more he thought about their situation, the more difficult it became to know what should be said. What did they
know
?
"J'merlia, ask Atvar H'sial to come outside. We need to brainstorm for a few minutes."
"She is already on the way."
The Cecropian was squeezing through the hatch, to drop lightly onto the soft moss. The great white head with its sonic generator and yellow receiving horns scanned the shoreline and the inland tangle of rocks and vegetation. She stretched to her full height, and the six-foot-long cephalic antennas unfurled.
"You sure, At?" Nenda asked. He was picking up her pheromonal message before J'merlia could translate for the others.
The blind head nodded.
"Zardalu," J'merlia said.
"She can smell 'em," added Nenda. "Long way off, and faint, but they're here. That settles that."
"Part of it," Rebka said. He waited until Atvar H'sial had turned back to face him and J'merlia had moved for easy communication into the shelter of the Cecropian's carapace. "Even if we could send the drone this minute, I've still got real problems about what we ought to say."
"Like what problems?" Nenda had picked up a shred of moss and was nibbling it thoughtfully.
"Like, we know
we're
not in charge here. Somebody else brought us down. But who's doing what? What should we tell Darya and the others? My first thoughts for a message were probably the same as yours: We got through the singularities all right, this planet is Genizee, and there are live Zardalu here though we haven't seen them yet. We can't get back, because somebody forced our ship to make a crash landing on Genizee and we have to fix it.