“No,” Julius Graves said before Birdie could get out another word. “Not me. That would be totally inappropriate. My task is not complete. I must determine what happened to Professor Lang and Captain Rebka. And I must seek to arrest Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial and return them to the Alliance for justice. Pass me along also, if you would be so kind.”

It had to be one of the most stupid statements that Birdie had ever heard in his whole life. Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda had been shipped off to nowhere, with any luck all the way to hell, and instead of saying bye-bye, good riddance, and let’s all go home, Julius Graves wanted to chase after them!

“Then—” The-One-Who-Waits said. But it had waited a second too long. E. C. Tally jumped in.

“May I speak? I cannot possibly return to Sol with my own task so incomplete. I was charged to learn what happened at Summertide, and why. I am no nearer to an answer now than the day I left the tank on Persephone. Logic suggests that the answer must involve the actions of Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda. It is appropriate that I also be ‘given passage,’ whatever that expression may signify, to join the others.”

That confirmed Birdie’s view that E. C. Tally was a robotic idiot. If the embodied computer was half as smart as he ought to be, he would have headed for home and made up some yarn about Summertide when he got there. Any six-year-old on Opal could have managed that. But Tally must have had bad training, so he only knew how to tell the truth.

When J’merlia and Kallik moved forward, Birdie had been left at the back of the group. Now he stepped to the front, too close to the edge for comfort. He knew just what he wanted — to be sent to Opal, home, and beauty, nice and safe, the way The-One-Who-Waits was promising.

“I’d like—” he began.

But still he had no chance to say it, because the teapot started vibrating like a struck gong. Birdie was convinced that it was getting ready to do something drastic, and he jumped smartly backward. While he was doing it, Graves hopped in and started talking again. From the tone of voice it was Steven.

“Before we are all passed along to join the others,” he said, “I have questions. About this planetoid, and the Builders, and why they need humans and Cecropians. And where we will be going. And who you are, and what your own role is in all this. And what are the three species you mentioned. Those are questions that I feel sure you can answer, as perhaps no one else can. So if you would be so kind…”

Birdie was sure that Steven would be told to shut up. But instead The-One-Who-Waits gave another of those rude noises that would discourage Birdie from ever inviting it to parties. It stopped vibrating all over and hung in the air for a while. Finally it came drifting closer.

“Questions,” it said. To Birdie it sounded exhausted, as though it had been planning to go off somewhere quiet and take another six-million-year nap, and Graves was interfering with the scheme. “That is perhaps… predictable. And not unreasonable.”

The-One-Who-Waits kept moving forward until it was actually crowding them back on the ledge. No one touched it, but Birdie could tell that the silver surface was cold, cold enough to put a chill into the air all around it. Close up, he still could not see what the other was made of, but there were teeny little ripples running over the surface, no more than a millimeter or two high. The-One-Who-Waits had to be at least partly liquid. As it settled down on its tail, Birdie could see its shape sag, bulging out at the bottom.

“Very well,” it said at last. “I will talk to you. It is best if I begin with my own history…”

Birdie groaned to himself. Wouldn’t you just know it! Six million years old, and more alien than anything in the whole spiral arm — but no different in some ways from the rest of them.

Given a choice of subjects, The-One-Who-Waits was going to talk about himself.

A flag buried deep in Rebka’s brain told him what he was looking at in the tank. He had never seen anything like it before, but the skin of his arms tingled and hair stood up on the back of his neck.

“Hans?” Darya said again. “Move over. It’s my turn.”

She tugged at the sleeve of his suit. Then something in his rigid posture told her that this was nothing trivial, and he was not going to move. She crowded closer to him and again peered in through the tank’s transparent port.

It took a while for her eyes to adapt to the reduced light level. But while she was still making that visual adjustment, her brain objected loud and clear: Alert! This is a stasis tank! There should be no light inside, none at all. Not while the tank was preserving the stasis condition. What was going on?

But by then she could see, and all rational thinking had stopped. No more than three feet from her face was a great, lidded eye, as big across as her stretched hand. That cerulean orb was almost closed. It sat in a broad, bulbous head of midnight blue, over a meter wide. Between the broad-spaced eyes was a cruel hooked beak, curving upward, easily big enough to seize and crack a human skull.

The rest of the body sprawled its length seven meters along the tank; but Darya needed to see no more.

“Zardalu.” The word came from her lips as a whisper, forced out against her will.

Hans Rebka stirred beside her. The soft-spoken word had broken his own trance.

“Yeah. Tell me I’m dreaming. There’s no such thing. Not anymore.”

“And it’s alive — look, Hans, it’s moving.”

And with that remark, Darya’s own sense of scientific curiosity came flooding back. The Zardalu had been exterminated in the spiral arm many thousands of years earlier. Although they were still the galactic bogeymen, everything about them was theory, myth, or legend. No one knew any details — not of their physiology, their evolution, or their habits. No one even knew how the cephalopods, originally a marine form, had been able to survive and breathe on land.

But Darya suddenly realized that she could answer that last question. She saw a sluggish ripple of peristalsis running along the length of the great body. The Zardalu must be breathing using a modification of the technique employed by ordinary marine cephalopods for propulsion — except that instead of drawing in and expelling water like a squid, the Zardalu employed that same muscular action to take in and expel air.

And for locomotion?

She stared at the body. The upper part was a round-topped cylinder, with bands of smooth muscle running down it. The eyes and beak were placed about one meter down. Below the beak sat a long vertical slit, surrounded by flexible muscular tissue. There was no difference in width between head and torso, but below that long gash of the mouth was a necklace of round-mouthed pouches, about six inches wide and circling the whole body. Darya could see pale blue ovals of different sizes nestled within the pouches. Stretched out along and beyond the main body was a loose tangle of thick tentacles, also pale blue. They were amply strong enough to walk on, though a set of broad straps wrapped around their thickest parts. Two of the tentacles ended in finely dividing ropy tips.

If those thin filaments were capable of independent control, Darya thought, a Zardalu would have manipulative powers beyond any human — beyond any other being in the spiral arm.

She felt an uncomfortable awe. The Zardalu might fill her with dread, but at the same time she knew that they were beautiful. It was a beauty that came from the perfect matching of form and function. The combination of muscular power with delicate touch could not be missed. The only anomaly was the webbing that girded the upper part of the tentacles.