Enough of this, he thought.

He slowed down after a particularly bruising collision with an invisible partition. It would be too easy to knock himself out, and he could not afford that.

The good news was that he could track her, infallibly. The Zardalu augment had been designed for pheromonal speech, with all its subtleties, so simply following another’s scent through Glister’s sterile interior was ridiculously easy. Even if she crossed and recrossed her own path, the strength of the trail would show him exactly where she had gone.

The corridors of Glister turned and twisted, apparently at random. He patiently followed the unmistakable airborne molecules of Cecropian physiology, turn by turn, wherever they led. The only thing he could be sure of was that they were descending, following a gravity gradient to regions of steadily increasing field. But the stronger field increased the danger of injury from a fall. He slowed his pace still further, confident that Atvar H’sial could not get away from him. As he walked he began to make plans.

One word with Graves had been enough to convince him that telling the truth to the councilor would be a terrible idea. He had fought back his own initial urge on awakening — violent flight — because Atvar H’sial was still trapped in the Lotus field. At that point it made sense to blame the field itself and “forget” anything that had happened back on Quake.

Of course, he remembered it all perfectly: the wild ascent from the planet’s surface, the capture of the Have-It-All by the dark sphere, the giddy plunge through space, their arrival at Gargantua and the little planetoid that orbited it — and, finally, the release of the ship onto the surface, while the sphere that had captured and held them moved inside. He had been aware of events right up to the moment on the planetoid’s surface when the orange cloud surged up around them. He even had a vague memory after that, of being carried down, down, down through multiple levels of the interior. Then came a blank, until he had wakened to find Julius Graves crouched over him.

Graves’s mention of the Lotus field allowed him to piece together most of the rest. He and Atvar H’sial had been locked in the field — but why, when it would have made more sense just to kill them — until the others had come along. And finally that crazy robot with the human body and the pop-top skull case had dredged them out.

Pity that Atvar H’sial had run wild before E. C. Tally had been able to get Kallik, too. Nenda missed his Hymenopt servant. No matter. There was plenty of time for Tally to pull Kallik free now — if ever they could stick Tally’s popout brain back in his dumb head and connect it so it worked.

Louis Nenda paused. He was standing in an unlit passageway, but the pheromonal scent was increasing in strength. He concentrated and generated his own message, sending it diffusing out from his chest nodules. “Atvar H’sial? Where are you? I can’t see you — you gotta steer me in.”

As usual, he found it easiest to speak his message at the same time as it was generated chemically. It was not necessary to identify himself. If the Cecropian received any message at all, Nenda’s individual molecular signature would be built into it.

“I am here. Wait.” The messenger molecules drifted in through the darkness. A few seconds later, Atvar H’sial’s hard claw took Nenda’s hand. “Follow. Tell me if the thermal source ahead is also for you a source of seeing radiation.”

“Why’d you take off like that?” Nenda allowed himself to be led through the darkness, until he saw a glimmer of light ahead. “Why didn’t you wait until they got Kallik out? She’s my Hymenopt — she shouldn’t be doin’ work for them.”

“Just as J’merlia is mine, and he should not be serving humans. But he is.” The Cecropian led them into a long rectangular room, warmed and dimly lit by a uniform ruddy glow from the walls. “The failure to recover J’merlia and Kallik is, I agree, regrettable, but I judged it necessary. As soon as I became conscious I smelled danger to you and me. Councilor Graves was dominant in that group. He had a clear intention to restrict our freedom at once. I was not sure we could prevent that. With an imperfect understanding of events, it is always better to remain unimpeded in one’s actions. Therefore, we had to escape.”

“How’d you know I’d follow you?”

There was no explicit message of reply, but the chemical messengers of grim humor wafted to Nenda’s chest receptors.

“All right, At. So I don’t like the idea of being locked up, any more than you do. What now? We’re not safe. Graves and the rest of them can come after us anytime. J’merlia can track you, easy as I could. We’re still in deep stuff.”

“I do not disagree.” The Cecropian crouched in front of Nenda, lowering herself so that the blind white head was on a level with his. The open yellow trumpet horns quivered on either side of the eyeless face. “We must pool information, Louis Nenda, before we make a decision. I lack data items that you perhaps gained from Julius Graves. For example, where are we now? Why were we brought here? How much time did we spend unconscious? And where is our ship, the Have-It-All, and is it in working condition for our escape?”

“I can take a shot at answering some of those.”

Nenda rubbed at his cheek and chin as he provided Atvar H’sial with a summary of his own experiences since waking from the Lotus field. There was a three-or four-day stubble there, but that did not tell him much; he had no idea how fast hair grew inside the field. Some of what he told Atvar H’sial had to be guesswork.

“So if you believe Graves,” he concluded, “we’re still inside a hollow planetoid, goin’ round Gargantua. Same one as we were brought to after Summertide, for a bet. Graves says he’s got no more idea than we have as to why we were dragged here, or why we were stuck in the middle of that room like two drugged flies. You can be damn sure it wasn’t done for our benefit, though. I don’t know how long we were held there. Enough for Graves and the rest of ’em to get their hands on a ship after Summertide and fly it out to Gargantua. Don’t ask me where that computer with the strung-out brainbox came from. I never saw him before, or anything like him. Mebbe they brought him from Opal. I think they went back there before they started for here, because Birdie Kelly is with ’em, too.”

“I registered Kelly’s presence. Do not worry about him. Graves is the principal danger; also perhaps the embodied computer, but not Birdie Kelly.”

“Yeah. And Graves told me he wants to take us back home and charge us with lethal assault. He’ll do his best to keep us in one piece till then, otherwise he’d never have stopped me going back into the Lotus field for Kallik. Graves seems pretty sure he can take us back for trial, so there has to be at least one ship available — the one they came in, or the Have-It-All, or maybe both of ’em. We should be able to escape, if we can just find our way back to the surface.”

The great blind head was nodding, a foot from Nenda’s face. “Very good, Louis. So I have one more question: When should we choose to escape?”

“As soon as we can. It won’t be more than a couple of hours before Graves is on our trail again. Why hang around?”

“For one excellent reason.” Atvar H’sial swept a jointed forelimb in a long arc, covering the room they stood in. “Examine. I have not had time for a complete survey, but as I moved through the chambers of this planetoid I saw evidence of Builder technology unlike anything known to the spiral arm. This is a treasure house, a cornucopia of new equipment with a value too great to estimate. It can be ours, Louis.”

Nenda reached out and patted the Cecropian’s wrinkled proboscis. “Good old At. You never give up, do you? Ever. And people tell me I’m the greedy one. Got any ideas how we prevent interference from Graves?”