“Very soon you will enter that gate, at your own request. Unless you have a final question?
“If we may not meet the Builders, even on Serenity, can’t you at least describe to us what they look like?” Graves said.
“It is not necessary for me to do so. You are already familiar with ones who wear the external appearance of the Builders: the Phages.”
“There’s a popular theory that says the Phages are artifacts,” Steven Graves said. “Are you saying that the Phages were constructed by the Builders in their own image, to look like them?”
“No. The Phages are Builders — devolved forms, debased and degenerate. Their intelligence has been lost. They are able to propagate themselves, and to perform the most elementary acts of matter and energy absorption, and that is all. For all the time that I have known, they have been a nuisance to every free-space structure in the spiral arm. Planetary interiors, like the inside of Quake, are safe, and intense gravity fields discourage their presence.”
“What happened, to turn Builders into Phages?” Graves asked.
“I cannot say.” The-One-Who-Waits was stirring, lifting higher off the floor. “I know only that it was another consequence of the Great Problem, the one that led the Builders to leave the spiral arm and seek a long stasis in the Artifact.
“Now, no more questions. It is time for you to enter the gate.”
Birdie looked all around him. All this talk about a gate. There was nothing in sight that resembled a gate, even vaguely.
“I don’t know where your gate is,” he began. “But about that safe passage that you promised us, back to our home planets—”
He was in midsentence when the floor evaporated beneath his feet. He heard a rushing sound all around him. Birdie took one look down. He was falling, dropping into nothingness.
He closed his eyes.
Looking back on what happened next, Birdie decided he must have kept his eyes squeezed tight shut until he felt firm ground again beneath his feet. Or then again, maybe he had just fainted. He was not willing to argue that point. He knew only two things for sure: First, when the others described the journey, he had no idea what they were talking about. He did not remember one thing about it.
Second, when he did finally open his eyes…
He was standing on a flat, endless plain, beneath a dull and featureless ceiling of glowing grayness.
And he was not alone. Surrounding him, looming over him, reaching out toward him with pale-blue tentacles, even before his eyes had finished opening, were—
— the stuff of nightmares.
He saw a dozen hulking bodies of midnight blue. They were closing in, sharp beaks gaping.
At that point Birdie felt more than ready to close his eyes and faint again.
Entry 16: Zardalu
Distribution: Like all information concerning the Zardalu, species-distribution data are based on fragmentary historical records and on incomplete race memory of other species. The great empire known as the Zardalu Communion is believed to have formed a roughly hemispherical region, over a thousand light-years across and centered on 1400 ly, 22 hours, 27° north (coordinates in galactic-plane angular measure, radial distances with respect to Sol; coordinate shifts to Cecropia reference frame are given in Appendix B). The face of the hemisphere comprising the Zardalu Communion is roughly tangent to the edge of Crawlspace (see HUMAN entry), and the lower part of the hemisphere itself overlaps the Cecropia Federation (see CECROPIA entry).
At its height, just before the Great Rising of approximately eleven thousand years ago, the Zardalu Communion ruled in excess of one thousand worlds. There is evidence that preliminary missions to worlds of the Fourth Alliance and of the Cecropia Federation took place just before the Rising, and that the Zardalu intended to expand into those regions.
Despite rumors today of hidden worlds inhabited by Zardalu — rumors that possess the force and persistence of multispecies legend — it should be noted that no Zardalu has been encountered since the Great Rising. It can be confidently stated that the Zardalu are extinct and have been extinct for eleven thousand years.
Physical Characteristics: No physical remains or pictures have been discovered. The Zardalu records were systematically destroyed, along with all evidence of Zardalu existence, at the time of the Great Rising. The following data represent a consensus derived from race memories, largely of the Hymenopts. They are undoubtedly subject to the distortion natural for a slave species remembering their former masters:
The Zardalu were land-cephalopods, possessing between six and twelve tentacles. Their size is not know with any precision, but it is certain that they were considerably larger than a Hymenopt (which seldom stands above one and a half meters, even with legs fully extended.) A suggested plausible height for a standing Zardalu would be three meters, although Hymenopt impressions record it as at least twice that.
Evidence suggests that the Zardalu possessed smooth, grease-coated skin ranging in color from pale powder-blue (tentacles) to deep blue-black (main torso). The head possessed large, lidded eyes, a formidable beak, and one main ingestion mouth.
Details of interior anatomy are not available. The existence of an endoskeleton, or the lack of one, is purely conjectural. Based upon their large size, and upon their ability to move and function well on land, it seems likely that the Zardalu possessed at least a rudimentary skeleton, or substantial interior sheaths and bands of semirigid cartilaginous material.
No information is available concerning Zardalu intelligence or culture level, and nothing is known about the Zardalu mating or family habits. They retain to this day the reputation of having been prodigious breeders, but that reputation is not based on scientific evidence.
History: Almost nothing can be said here with any authority, beyond this: Based on their wide distribution and integrated empire, the Zardalu must have developed space travel at least twenty thousand years before Cecropians or Humans, and possibly much longer ago than that.
The original homeworld of the Zardalu clade remains unknown, although its name, Genizee, is well established in legend. Quite likely it was one of the dozens of worlds cindered and sterilized in the bitter struggle of the Great Rising. Certainly any of the subject races able to find and annihilate the home of the Zardalu would have done so, without hesitation.
Culture: Five words summarize all recollections of Zardalu culture: imperialistic, p [Примечание изготовителя документа: часть текста потеряна]