With Nenda's body set over his right shoulder in a fireman's lift, Tally began to walk slowly back from the center of the chamber. Another minute, and he was by the side of Julius Graves. Together they lowered Louis Nenda to the floor.
Birdie Kelly stared at the pitted and noduled chest, gray and disfigured. "Look at that. What did they do to him?"
Graves bent low, studying the roughened skin. "Nothing was done here, according to Steven. This is a Zardalu augment, designed to permit a human to speak to a Cecropian via pheromonal transfer. We thought this was a lost technology, and a banned one. There must be places in the Communion where the old slave races had mastered and retained parts of the Zardalu sciences."
Tally had already turned and was heading back toward the middle of the vaulted chamber. Cable was pulling through J'merlia's too-tight grip. He began to pay it out again just as Louis Nenda grunted and his lips twitched.
"Where the hell am I?" The eyes opened and glared around. The squat figure began trying to sit up.
"That's a good sign," Graves said. "He can speak, so at least he hasn't been wiped totally clean." He turned to Nenda. "You're inside a planetoid near Gargantua. Do you remember coming here?"
Nenda shook his dark head and struggled to his feet. "Not a glimmer." His speech was labored and swollen-tongued.
"So what's the last thing you do remember?"
Nenda ignored the question. He was too busy staring at the others. "How about that. Fancy you showing up. Julius Graves. And Birdie Kelly. And J'merlia. And all alive."
"All alive, and no thanks to you." Graves leaned close. "Come on, Nenda, this is important. What's the last thing you recall, before you went unconscious?"
Nenda rubbed his hand over his unshaven jaw. "Last thing I remember?" He gave Graves a cautious look. "Mmm. Last thing I remember, Atvar H'sial an' me were lifting off Quake in the
Have-It-All
. Summertide was nearly there. I guess it came, and I guess it went."
"You don't remember firing on another ship?"
"Firing? Me?" Nenda cleared his throat. "No way. I didn't fire on anything."
"Remember it or not, you'll have to answer for that when we get back to Opal. You've already been formally charged with lethal assault."
"Won't be the first time someone's accused an innocent man." Nenda was recovering fast, the black eyes blinking furiously. "What happened to At? She was with me on the ship."
"Atvar H'sial?" Graves turned toward the middle of the great chamber. He nodded. "In there. Good. I see they're on the way out now."
J'merlia was squeaking with excitement. While Graves and Nenda were talking, E. C. Tally had returned to the dais, pulled Atvar H'sial clear, and was staggering back toward them. He was doubled over with the weight of the great Cecropian body. Nenda followed Graves's gesture, taking in the bandaged, tottering form, the cable leading from its head to where they stood, the recumbent figure of Kallik four paces behind, and the backdrop of the great, vaulted chamber.
"Hey, what's going on here? What'd you do to At?"
"We did nothing, and we're not sure what's going on. All we know is that you and Atvar H'sial were unconscious in the middle of the chamber, and we have been trying to rescue you."
"And Kallik? What did you do to my Hymenopt?"
"She became unconscious, trying to get you out."
J'merlia was jumping up and down with excitement as Tally emerged from the outermost ring. As the Lo'tfian helped to lower Atvar H'sial to the floor, Tally staggered a couple of paces farther and sat down suddenly. The blue eyes closed, and his hands went up to touch his bandaged head.
"This body is regrettably close to its physical limit." He spoke in a whisper. "I must rest for a few moments. However, we can be pleased with our progress. I am confident that the difficult part is all over. Kallik weighs little. I will take a brief pause to recuperate, and then I will carry her out of the chamber. She is ready to be moved."
"Hell, I can get her." Nenda was pushing forward. "You sit down, take it easy. She's mine, and she's my responsibility."
"No." Graves caught his arm. "Go in there and you'll be in the same condition as she is in—as
you
were in. The chamber contains a Lotus field. That is why it was necessary to disembody E. C. Tally before he entered." He pointed at the rough-surfaced sphere that Kelly was handing to J'merlia. "His brain remained here."
Nenda took another and more thoughtful look at the crouched body and the cable running from its bandaged head. "Good enough," he said after a few moments. "I'd better look after At, though—she'll be coming round in a minute, from the look of her, and she might get violent. Don't worry, I know how to handle her."
The Cecropian's black wing cases had opened to reveal four delicate vestigial wings marked by red and white elongated eyespots. The end of the proboscis was moving out from its home in the pleated chin, and the yellow trumpetlike horns on the head were lifting.
At the same time, the brain-empty body of E. C. Tally was struggling to its feet. His eyes opened slowly. "I must go now and recover Kallik."
"It's too soon." Graves moved to Tally's side.
"No. It must be soon. The interface is beginning to be affected by seepage of cerebrospinal fluid. The performance of the neural connect is diminishing, and I am receiving worsening sensory inputs. I will go to Kallik while I am still able to see her. Otherwise, we must begin all over again."
Tally did not wait for approval. The body gave a stuttering step forward, then leaned to one side. It began a crablike shuffle down the slope, heading for the unconscious Hymenopt. Tally's body had taken ten steps and had almost reached Kallik when Atvar H'sial gave a shrill, earsplitting scream, rose fully upright, and leapt toward Julius Graves.
In the next second Birdie Kelly saw everything and could do nothing.
The Cecropian ran into Graves first and sent him sprawling. Then the councilor and the Cecropian together collided with Birdie. One of her legs knocked him flying and sent the reel of cable spinning away to the periphery of the room. At the same time the brain of E. C. Tally, too securely held by the Lo'tfian, jerked free of the cable and rolled away with J'merlia inside the yellow ring and toward the chamber's center. As the neural connect was broken, Tally's body, moving toward Kallik, crumpled and fell to the floor. Another of Atvar H'sial's legs came sweeping across Birdie and knocked him flat on his back.
He lay staring up at the ceiling. He could not move. All that he could see was a part of the chamber's domed ceiling, Julius Graves's equally domed bald head, and part of one of Atvar H'sial's wing cases. A big weight was sitting on his chest. He was half-stunned from the bruising impact of the back of his head on the floor, his nose was bleeding, and half his teeth felt as though they had been jarred loose.
If E. C. Tally had not assured them that the difficult part was all over, Birdie would never have guessed it.
At the last moment the swirling void below turned blood-red. Darya felt herself stretched from head to toe, while forces of compression rippled their way along her body. Just as they became intolerable she flashed into the heart of the red glare. Before she could record any new sensation she was through, falling in open space.
Hans was at her side, still holding her arm. Straight ahead, rushing toward them, was the bloated sphere of Gargantua.
It filled half the sky. There was no way they could avoid collision with the planet. In one heartbeat it doubled in apparent size, and from the way that the gas-giant's appearance was changing Darya could determine their exact impact point. They were accelerating into the unwinking Eye of Gargantua. The Eye had become a huge spiraling swirl of orange and umber, with a point at its center as black and lifeless as intergalactic space.
What was that dark pupil? Darya could not guess, but she knew that she would never find out. They would not get that far. They would burn up in one flash of light, human meteors consumed by the outer atmosphere of the planet. As they came closer Darya saw that they were heading right into the empty pupil of the Eye, following the center line of another dark vortex that narrowed all the way in.
As Hans vanished from her side, Darya entered the tunnel of the vortex. Within it she could feel nothing—no air, no light, no forces. On all sides were the cloudy orange swirls of the Eye, but she heard and felt no touch of atmosphere.
The vortex was closing, a tightening spiral that shrank until it became no wider than her body. Darya was plunging along the centermost line, deep into the maelstrom of the Eye. Forces again racked her body, but now they were
twisting
, from head to neck to chest to hips to legs to feet. As they became unbearable there was a final agonizing shear, and she found herself again in open space.
She felt no acceleration, but she could see that she was moving.
Faster and faster. As she watched, Mandel was in front of her . . . was off to the left . . . was shining from behind . . . was no bigger than a pinpoint of light when she turned her head.
After half a minute of total confusion, the analytical part of her brain asserted itself. She was seeing the universe as a series of still images, but there was no force of acceleration and there was no sign of an external gravity field. She must be pausing at each location for a fraction of a second before undergoing an instantaneous translation to another position. It was the universe in stop-motion, experienced as a series of freeze-frames. Although she was not traveling faster than light through ordinary space-time, she was certainly reaching each new location in less time than light would take. And since there was no sign of Doppler shift in the starscape around her, she must be sitting
at rest
between transitions, until the next one transported her to a new place.
It was a series of Bose Transitions, but without the Bose Network stations needed for all human interstellar travel. Each jump must have been a least a few million kilometers—and increasing. Mandel was no brighter now than any other star in the sky.
How fast was she moving in inertial space? She would have to estimate her rate of change of position. Darya looked around for a reference frame. She could see a blue supergiant, off to her right. It was surely no closer than a hundred light-years. Yet it was changing its apparent position at maybe a degree a second. Which meant she was moving at close to two light-years a second.
And still accelerating, if that word could be applied to her series of instantaneous translations. As she watched, the constellations ahead were beginning to change, to melt, to reconfigure themselves into unfamiliar patterns.
The blue supergiant was already drifting away behind her. Darya stared all around, looking for some new reference point. She could find only one. The gauzy fabric of the Milky Way was a band of light, far away to her left. It had become the single constant of her new environment.
Darya fixed her eyes on that familiar sight—and realized, with a shiver, that it was beginning to move. She was plunging downward, out of the galactic plane. The globular clusters of the Magellanic Clouds were in front of her. They had emerged from the clutter of the spiral arm to form glittering spheres of stars.
How fast? How far?
She could not say. But in order for her motion relative to the whole Galaxy to be noticed, she had to be skipping hundreds of light-years in each transition. Another minute, and much of the Galaxy's matter lay below her. She was far below the spiral arm and catching a hint of a monstrous flattened disk. Below her feet she could see the sweeping curve of the spiral itself. Individual stars were disappearing, moment by moment, into a sea of spangles that glittered around dark dust clouds and lit the filaments of gaseous nebulas with multi-colored gemstones.
As she watched the stars faded again, merging to become the hazy light of distant millions. Far off to her left the disk had swelled up and thickened. She was far enough from the main plane to be clear of obscuring gas and dust clouds. She gazed in wonder at the glowing bulge of the galactic center. Hers were surely the first human eyes to see past the spiral arm to the densely packed galactic nucleus and to the massive black hole that formed the hub of the Galaxy.
How far? How fast?
She seemed to be moving straight away from the galactic disk, and now the blaze of the central hub was off at an angle of forty-five degrees to her direction of motion. With her lungs frozen and her heart stopped in her chest, Darya made her estimate. The Phemus Circle territories were about thirty thousand light-years from the center of the Galaxy, so she must be about that far from the galactic plane. And the angle of the hub was changing, at maybe ten degrees a minute. That gave her a speed of a hundred and seventy-five light-years a second.
Ten thousand light-years a minute. A million light-years in an hour and a half. The Andromeda Galaxy in twice that time.
Even as that thought came, the mad drive ended. The universe stopped its giddy rush and clicked into a fixed position.
Ahead of Darya in the open void sat a great space structure, agleam with internal lights, sprawling across half the sky, of a size impossible to estimate. Darya had the sense that it was huge, that those trailing pseudopods of antennas and twisting tubes of bright matter, spinning away into space from the central dodecahedron, were millions of kilometers long.
Before she could confirm that impression, there came a final transition. Stars, galaxies, and stellar clusters vanished. Darya found herself standing on a level plain. Overhead was nothing. At her feet, defining the level surface itself, were a billion twinkling orange lights.
And next to her, his suit open so that he could scratch his chin, stood Hans Rebka.
"Well," he said. "We-ell, that's one for the record books. Try and describe
that
in your trip report."
He was silent for a few moments, breathing deep and staring around him. "Maybe we ought to trade ideas," he said finally. "If either of us has any. For a start, where in the hell are we?"