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FIFTY-THREE Eight Little Indians

Impatiently, Dr*f*rst*v rattled his claws on his equipment belt.

He was waiting for the humans to catch up—as usual.

For a while he'd hoped that the rest of those soft-bodied, slow-moving, overly fragile creatures would be left behind one by one, just as Valerian, Betal, and Jones had been, to relay communications to the asteroid's surface—until Tl*m*nch*l and Major Jesus Ortiz, jointly commanding this foray, had agreed to leave Remgar d'Nod at yet another point where the signal had begun fading. It had been a terrible decision, Dr*f*rst*v thought, and therefore probably Ortiz's idea.

Arachnids . . . now, they were worthwhile companions when going in harm's way. Despite their relative shortage of limbs they were almost as strong and adroit as his own people (whom certain unmentionable others called "sea-scorpionoids"—as if humans would enjoy being called "ape-oids" all the time). Remgar d'Nod was rather on the smallish side for a civilized spider, standing only about three quarters of Dr*f*rst*v's own height—no more than half that of a human—the majority of sapient arachnids was considerably bigger, at least twice Dr*f*rst*v's height. However, even Remgar d'Nod's modest proportions seemed to shock the humans, who had fondly imagined that kind of size impossible for invertebrates to attain.

Yet in many alternative probabilities (including that which had given rise to Dr*f*rst*v's species), an evolutionary turning point had been reached long ago when arthropods developed a better sort of carapace, composed of long-chain proteins stronger and more resilient than the crumbly calcium carbonate or brittle chitin they'd begun with. Ironically enough, it greatly resembled the fibrous silicon-petroplastics from which the humans had fabricated major sections of their three primitive spaceships. With that change, exoskeletous organisms could now grow large enough, against the pull of gravity which had elsewhere mandated internal skeletons, to support the extensive neurological complexity necessary for sapience.

Dr*f*rst*v gave the synthesizer at his belt another irritated drumroll while twiddling the small appendages that served him as thumbs on his second and third pairs of arms. It never occurred to him that he and Tl*m*nch*l found the going easier because they were the only beings who had been inside the asteroid once before—knowing the territory did confer a certain advantage—or that the organisms who had designed this place might have been a bit like sea-scorpions themselves.

It was bad enough—it was positively nauseating if he gave it any real thought—that these creatures wore their bones on the insides of their bodies, with the squishy parts outside for all the world to see. No wonder they moved so cautiously: they must be in constant fear of injury! He'd never seen the sense of being any kind of vertebrate. A person might just as well have no skeleton at all.

"Hey, Driffer-stiff!"

Ortiz's breath steamed the inside of his helmet as he waddled toward the sea-scorpionoid in his bulky spacesuit. To Dr*f*rst*v, he looked like a nonsapient primate wrapped in dough, ready for baking—one of his favorite dishes. He would have been appalled to learn that Ortiz was equally fond of broiled lobster. Major Federico Ortega y Pena, one of the human scientists, puffed along right behind him.

And that was another thing, Dr*f*rst*v thought, he was thoroughly sick of hearing his name badly pronounced. Didn't any of these mammals have an ear between them? On the other claw, to be perfectly honest, no sapient he knew of—mollusc, avian, vegetabloid, even arachnid—seemed capable of saying his name right, and not even the Elders' translation software could manage it. He and his people carried vocal synthesizers, not merely to convert their own cheery click-rattling speech for the benefit of others, but to sift and strain the mumbling of those others into something understandable by beings accustomed to decent elocution.

Shrugging to himself, he let his claws rattle over the keyboard, "That's `Dr*f*rst*v,' Major Ortiz. I'm sorry, was I traveling too fast for you and your companion?"

"Droverstove." The Yaqui officer frowned, concentrating hard. The sight of the man's expression was almost too horrible for Dr*f*rst*v, he had to acknowledge, hardened veteran though he was, even softened by the fogged plastic of the man's face-bubble. He'd never want any of his hatchlings to see it. "Drufferstuff. I'll get it right yet."

"Perhaps you will, Major, but not this time."

"Dr*f*rst*v!"

Another synthesizer sternly demanded his attention. The devices had been invented in the first place because V*bl*f*tz*r, Dr*f*rst*v's own name for the version of Earth his ancestors had been taken from some 15,000 years ago, had been broken up into thousands of—well, tribes wasn't the word, and neither was kingdoms—each with its own distinctive language. The Elders claimed that Dr*f*rst*v's species had generated more different tongues (both species speaking figuratively) than the remainder of all known sapients put together.

"Will you kindly stop giving that poor mammal a hard time and—" the speaker suddenly, and politely, switched to English, "help me find some trace of that blasted missing statue?"

"Yes sir, Tl*m*nch*l, sir." Dr*f*rst*v's touch on the keyboard, using a trade-speech their two cultures shared, was flavored with irony, "To hear is to obey. I live to grovel." In English: "Do you suppose it was stolen during the battle?"

Ignoring Dr*f*rst*v's sarcasm, Tl*m*nch*l made a gesture translatable as a shrug, "Well, it's true we haven't accounted yet for every one of the invaders, and it's possible that one or more of them managed to get down here. The airlock is larva's play to operate once you understand how it works. But if that statue was stolen, why?"

"And by whom?" Ortiz added.

"When did looters ever need a reason to loot?" asked Dr*f*rst*v.

"I don't know," replied Tl*m*nch*l, "but it makes me nervous, all the same. I wish we hadn't had to leave half of our party behind, just to retain contact with the surface."

Ortiz agreed. "Mister Thoggosh has promised that the next group will have automated relays they can place along the way. Meanwhile, we'll just have to suffer. Look, I'll check that battle-planning room Eichra Oren found, if you or Dreversteve here—" by now Dr*f*rst*v suspected the man was mangling his name on purpose, just to get under his carapace, "—want to start looking elsewhere."

And so it was.

On the previous sortie Dr*f*rst*v had done his share of cautious exploration and bemused speculating. Passageways, roundly triangular in cross section, branched interminably before them, disappearing into the unplumbed depths of the asteroid. They'd been forced to exercise extreme measures not to get lost. Corridor after endless corridor, unmarked as far as they could tell, had admitted them to countless rooms—administrative complexes, scientific facilities, janitoria, food services, surgeries—arrayed in no intelligible order, every one with massive, tightly fitting doors that swung at a touch on hinges still limber and silent after what, a billion years?

It sent an eerie flush of warmth through Dr*f*rst*v's gills just thinking about it.

Not even rooms which were unmistakably residential had locks. It was as if those who used them, unimaginable eons ago, had never developed a need for personal privacy. (Nor, to all appearances, had they invented bulkheads in case a section of the ship were damaged.) Huge chambers with long squatting rows of smoothly grotesque ceramic shapes attached to the deck reminded Dr*f*rst*v of stories humans told of communal lavatories during their military training days. His own people were fastidiously private about their eliminatory processes.

At all times, Dr*f*rst*v was careful to leave an open door between him and the remainder of his party, since signals from his implant wouldn't penetrate whatever the artificial asteroid was made of. That was another trouble with the humans. Not coming from the culture of the Elders, they were compelled to communicate through crude devices external to their bodies, built into their environmental suits. Fortunately, their signals could be received by his own equipment.

"Federico, Tlamanchal, Drafferstaff," the electronic voice of Ortiz came to him. "Be advised: Valerian at Trog Four says Remgar d'Nod just told him that Jones can't raise Betal at Trog One, so I guess we're cut off from the surface. He thinks it's just a temporary glitch of some kind, but I think we should all be ready to pull out damned fast if it isn't—and keep our powder dry in the meantime."

It had been a thousand years since Dr*f*rst*v's folk had used chemically powered weapons—and longer since they'd taken deities and damnation seriously—but he understood what the man had meant. That was his personal policy in any case. He helped search room after room again, looking for the vanished statue while preoccupied with increasingly uneasy feelings. It was a hopeless task anyway. They might poke around down here a thousand years or one hundred thousand, not just the four of them, but the entire personnel of both expeditions, human and that of the Elders, and not see a fraction of what was here to be seen.

It wasn't just the daunting volume of the asteroid. Half of what they investigated didn't have any discernible function. What was the purpose of a house-sized room, for example—its walls pierced at several levels by a dozen doors—filled to the ceiling with a resilient plastic, most of it removed again by boring millions of tiny tunnels through it, each no bigger across than his foreclaw?

And what should they make of the great free-turning cylinders—there were many more of these than of the bathroom-auditoriums—which one of the humans had aptly compared to an outsized geologist's tumbler for polishing gemstones?

Or of the enormous low-ceilinged chamber with its almost military ranks of large, polished metal cubes which could be pushed across the floor as easily as if they stood on ball bearings—but which sailed sedately back if left alone?

Absently he listened to Ortega jabber irrelevancies about the incomprehensible "artwork" decorating corridor walls. What would a soil specialist know about art? Meanwhile, Tl*m*nch*l and Ortega found what appeared to be a fresh fluorocarbon reservoir. Good: maybe they could get the place cleaned and oxygenated. Then they could stop wearing the protective suits (his own, unlike those of the humans, was of lightweight transparent film, but it chafed him and rendered him clumsy) which made exploring down here so arduous.

"Dr*f*rst*v!" This time it was Tl*m*nch*l's voice, although he could also hear Ortiz relaying the message to Ortega. "Valerian reports that Remgar d'Nod has lost contact with Jones! I don't know what's going on, but I want you to rejoin us where we first saw the statue. We're going to withdraw from this place immediately!"

"You needn't tell me twice," Dr*f*rst*v responded, consulting a map which had been growing in his memory as they explored. He'd planned to upload it onto the Elders' network for collation with his colleagues' similar maps, for use by anyone who wanted it. "I'll cut through the next chamber, since the path appears shorter."

"Hurry, Dr*f*rst*v, and be extremely wary! Now Valerian can't raise Remgar d'Nod!"

Senses on edge, Dr*f*rst*v pushed past what seemed like his hundredth door into a place he hadn't seen before but which had been described to him, a darkened hemisphere like an astronomical theater, occupied by two objects standing on a common, irregularly pentagonal base and raised about the length of his own body. Elsewhere, softly glowing walls had offered sufficient illumination. Here he must depend on what now seemed a feeble light that he carried at his belt.

Throwing bizarre shadows on the curved wall behind it, the taller of the structures, twenty or thirty times his height, was smoothly cylindrical except for a stepped section near the base. It reminded him of the observation tower at a flyport, even to the compartment at the top, a flattened cone consisting entirely of windows. What its occupants were supposed to observe here was unclear, since the walls around it were a featureless off-white, some almost indestructible synthetic laid over the same impervious metal as the asteroid's surface.

Standing beside it was something even more curious. Four or five body-lengths from the tower, a large pipe rose to twice his height, bent at a right angle, and ended in a ball joint straddled by a pair of massive bars rising to half the height of the tower. In the gloom, Dr*f*rst*v could just see that the bars were capable of lying parallel to the floor instead of standing as they did now, or of occupying any position between. At the middle they were connected by some kind of machinery. At the other end they held another ball joint forming the end of yet another angled section of pipe. This was flanged and attached off-center to the back (at least he thought it was the back) of what might have been a huge mirror, although the great disk-shape, as large in diameter as the pentagonal base it stood on, didn't reflect any frequency of light that he was capable of seeing.

"Hurry, Dr*f*rst*v," Tl*m*nch*l begged, "we've lost touch with Valerian—and Ortega no longer responds!"

"I'm almost there—another few dozen body-lengths, Tl*m*nch*l."

Silence was the only answer he received.

"Tl*m*nch*l!"

"I'm still here. Sorry to have frightened you, but Ortiz went to find Ortega, and now I can't contact either of them. Get back here as quickly as you can, my friend."

Ordinarily he might have objected to the word "frightened." Now, feeling very much alone, he crossed the chamber until he could see the blank, concave upper surface of the great mirror. On the floor behind the structures, somewhat concealed by them, lay a smaller mirror hinged at one edge to a complicated stem and a sort of streamlined collar that looked as if it might fit over the top of the tower. Close by moved a humped, oddly familiar-looking shadow.

Dr*f*rst*v shouted over his implant before he knew what he was doing and snatched his plasma weapon from its scabbard. The sighting-field above its boxy receiver rippled with the image of the small mirror and support structure which seemed to be wrenching itself across the floor. Panning to the shadow at one end, he was startled by the presence at his elbows of Tl*m*nch*l, also with weapon drawn.

"Greetings, Peerless Leader." Dr*f*rst*v had learned that from Owen. "Observe the lump over there, dragging stuff across the floor. We've found your missing statue."

"You'd entertain at your own interment." Tl*m*nch*l was annoyed. "I'd prefer to find our missing friends—and I worry that they may have found the statue before us."

"On the contrary," Dr*f*rst*v answered. "It found them."

He pointed to a place low on the wall where the vague, dripping forms of six limp bodies, five human and one arachnoid, hung upside down. Abruptly the humped object stopped its fretful tugging on the structure, turned, and started toward them.

 

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