Resurgence

“Ah.” Graves nodded. “Professor Darya Lang. Of course. I should have anticipated this difficulty. A vortex of emotional disturbance surrounds you still, as ever. Welcome to this assembly. Better late than never, though in truth you are not the last. I am expecting one more participant, who will, I am informed, be arriving within the next half-day. Given that, and the present state of disruption, I feel it will be to everyone’s advantage if I postpone further discussion and explanation until then.” Julian Graves glanced—glared?—around the chamber. “Study the displays. I will leave you now. For the remainder of the day you are free to resume old acquaintances in any way that you choose.”

* * *

Julian Graves spoke as though Darya was somehow responsible for ruining his meeting. All she had done was come in and quietly sit down, at a point when the meeting was in any case almost over.

Darya stared around her. She had come here expecting to know almost no one, but to be surrounded mostly by humans. In fact, she thought she recognized every one of the half dozen beings in the room—and most of them were aliens.

Still crouched at her feet in an eight-legged sprawl of limbs was the stick-figure form of J’merlia, the Lo’tfian who interpreted the pheromonal speech of his Cecropian mistress, Atvar H’sial. J’merlia stared up at Darya, and in greeting rolled his lemon-colored compound eyes on their short eyestalks. Darya liked J’merlia, although she objected strongly to his insistence on voluntary servitude to Atvar H’sial. And she had grave suspicions about the honesty and intentions of the latter.

Which made her fondness for Louis Nenda even harder to explain. Nenda was Atvar H’sial’s business partner. He had told Darya, in so many words, that he was a man with an awful and criminal past. He was a native of Karelia , in the far-off reaches of the Zardalu Communion, and others had hinted to Darya of monstrous acts which meant he could never return there. He even possessed his own Hymenopt slave, Kallik, and unlike Atvar H’sial he could not offer the excuse that he needed an interpreter.

Kallik sat at Louis Nenda’s feet, on the other side of Atvar H’sial. The Hymenopt was short and barrel-shaped, her meter-long body covered with short black fur. With her small round head, set with a ring of bright black eye pairs, she looked mild and defenseless.

Darya knew better. Invisible was the yellow sting, retracted into the end of the rounded abdomen. That hollow needle could deliver squirts of neurotoxin with no known antidote. At will, Kallik could vary the composition from mild anesthetic to instant kill. Also invisible was the Hymenopt nervous system. It provided Kallik with a reaction speed ten times as fast as a human’s. The eight thin legs would carry her a hundred meters in two seconds, or let her leap fifteen meters into the air under a standard gravity.

The miracle was that Kallik regarded Louis Nenda as her absolute master and allowed herself to be led around with a collar and leash. Nenda bullied and blustered. Sometimes he even carried a whip. However, Darya had direct proof that the master/slave relationship was more complex than it seemed. She had been on board Nenda’s ship, the Have-It-All. Nenda’s private quarters were opulent, even by the standards of a rich world like Sentinel Gate. But Kallik’s were just as large, and just as well-furnished. The little Hymenopt even had her own additional private area, equipped with powerful computers and scientific instruments.

Kallik squeezed past Atvar H’sial, whose great body was blocking Louis Nenda, and came scuttling over to Darya. The Hymenopt and J’merlia exchanged a brief burst of clicks and whistles, then Kallik said, “Greetings. With your arrival we will perhaps begin to receive some explanation for our presence.”

It was an embarrassment to Darya that J’merlia and Kallik, whom she had thought mindless pets when she first met them, could pick up languages with such ease. In the time that it had taken Darya to comprehend a few basic Hymenopt clicks, Kallik had achieved fluency in half a dozen human languages.

Darya shook her head. “You won’t get explanations from me. I have no idea why I was summoned.”

“Master Nenda says that it is a meeting which involves the Builders, and Builder artifacts.”

“So I was told. But the Builders vanished from the spiral arm more than three million years ago, and now all their artifacts are gone, too.”

“You sure of that?” Louis Nenda must have done an end run on Atvar H’sial, moving round the back of the row of seats. He had appeared now on Darya’s right-hand side.

“Sure as anyone can be.” Darya quietly pushed his hand away from her shoulder. “The Artifact Research Institute is the clearinghouse for all activities or information concerning the Builders or Builder artifacts. I examine the data bases every day, personally. Absolutely nothing new has come in for the past few months—not for years, in fact.”