“Of what?” He interrupted her gently, nodding out the port at the immense mass of cloud, metal, and who knew what else. “Weapons? I've told you what the Krang can do. This world-sized ship is probably capable of generating a big enough discontinuity to swallow a whole system. At least, that's what we're hoping. Otherwise there's no point to this encounter. What would you suggest as a defense if it decided we were deserving of a hostile response?”
She considered his words, then nodded slowly. “Faint praise, maybe. I see your point.”
As a tiny portion of the swirling, dense, synthetic atmosphere was sucked away by gigantic intakes, a portion of the surface of the weapons platform became visible to those huddled in the control room of the Teacher. There were no gasps of incredulity, no mutterings of astonishment at the sight thus revealed. The relic was simply too big, too overwhelming, to inspire any more than an abiding, awed silence. External edifices of metal and ceramic, crystal and metallic glass, and other exotic materials came into view. Some of the structures were the size of cities, others as big as bits of continents. Illuminatories in all colors and hues flashed to life where the veiling methane haze was drawn away.
“It's not just big,” Sylzenzuzex murmured. “It's beautiful. To think that somebody built it, that it's a construct and not a natural object, would try belief if I wasn't looking at it myself.”
On Flinx's shoulder, Pip was stirring. “Don't forget that it's a weapon,” he reminded her. “Quite possibly the biggest weapon ever built.”
Standing at his right side, Clarity eyed the artifact as the Teacher began to descend. “I once saw a picture of an ancient Terran weapon, a metal projectile gun that dated from an era well before Amalgamation. It used combustible powder to propel a piece of lead toward a target. What struck me was not the primitive technology; it was the ornamentation. Gold filigree, gemstones, and ivory inlay.” She studied the view outside. “Why do so many sentient species find weapons worthy of decoration?”
A curious Flinx pondered her question as he turned to lead the way to the shuttle bay. “What's ivory?”
Bolts of lightning kilometers high slashed through the thick atmosphere in the vicinity of the downward-spiraling vortex that was clearing a path through the clouds down to the surface. As the Teacher's shuttlecraft descended, jostled and rocked by the surrounding synthetic cyclone, an opening appeared below it as a portion of the surface irised open to welcome the diminutive arrival. The aperture was more than wide enough to admit the visitor. It was more than ample enough to admit any city on Earth, had one possessed the means and the inclination to embark on such a visit.
“If the solitary Krang on Booster is powered by the energy of the planetary core itself,” Tse-Mallory was speculating aloud, “then what could possibly drive an artificial world of these dimensions? Not to mention the multiplicity of comparable destructive devices it supports.”
“Plainly an energy source beyond our limited ability to engineer, kissaltt.” Truzenzuzex was gazing raptly out the foreport. “Some sort of matter-antimatter drive, which has long been theorized and sought after. Or perhaps the vessel is able to channel the energy of a small white hole for which its builders were somehow able to devise containment.” The valentine-shaped head inclined toward his old friend. “We hardly have the theoretical mathematical underpinning from which to begin to envisage such technology.”
A miracle of alien engineering itself, the vast acreage of alloy that comprised the portal began to close behind and above them as the shuttlecraft dropped down onto a vast, open, and otherwise unoccupied deck. The Teacher promptly informed those on board that outside gravity was tolerable and the external air pressure was rising rapidly.
“There are some unusual trace gases here,” Flinx informed his companions, “but it's essentially the same atmosphere we breathed on Booster. The Tar-Aiym may have looked nothing like us, but they sucked the same air.”
Truzenzuzex fixed his inflexible gaze on his young associate. “How do you know what the Tar-Aiym looked like, Flinx?”
“I found out last year. On Repler. It was an awkward time for me. Part of my journey to learn about my fellow man and to find myself. Turned out I found out about some other things as well.” He shrugged. “That always seems to be the way of it.” As he spoke he was careful not to look in Clarity's direction.
“Ah,” murmured Tse-Mallory, “you came across some sort of hypothetical reconstruction of the Tar-Aiym themselves.”
“Something like that.” Uncomfortable with the line of questioning, Flinx indicated their immediate surroundings. “I don't know if this is the same portal I entered through the last time I was here, so I don't know how soon it narrows down, but we should be able to set down close to one end of the landing area. After that there should be corridors and then …” His words trailed off as he remembered.
“And then?” Clarity prompted him.
He finally looked over at her. “Then we have to find another operator's platform like the one I utilized on Booster. So I can try and make contact.”
They touched down without incident. Outside the shuttle, the vast empty expanse of the landing deck seemed to reverberate ever so slightly with the echoing roar of hundreds of long-vanished craft. When the shuttle's AI announced that the atmospheric pressure outside had reached normal levels, they shouldered daypacks stuffed with supplies and disembarked via the ship's unloading ramp.
Standing together at its base, Clarity and Sylzenzuzex marveled at the distant metal sky. The airlock was spacious enough to accommodate every ship in the Commonwealth with plenty of room to spare. It was big enough to hold its own weather. There was none because, as with every other aspect of the artifact, conditions within were carefully programmed.
As Sylzenzuzex confronted her Eighth and Tse-Mallory, Clarity joined Flinx. “You told Tse-Mallory that you know what one of the beings who made this looked like.” She hesitated. “I'm going to hazard a guess that they didn't resemble mammalian bipeds.”
He nodded in agreement. As he studied the nearest of the multiple, branching, high-ceilinged corridors that led away from the landing deck and into the bowels of the alien craft, he was already reaching out with his Talent. He sensed nothing, but that did not mean they had landed in an area devoid of accessibility. They would just have to don packs and commence a physical search. At least this time when he found himself in unfamiliar passageways and tunnels he would be able to proceed safe in the knowledge that he was in the company of friends and not fleeing from those who wished him dead.
“They were bigger than us,” he told her. “Impressively but not monstrously big. Much tougher of body and build, too.” Remembering the survivor Peot with whom he had worked to defeat the Vom on Repler, he tried to build an image for her. “Cross a giant super-intelligent crab with a bear, give it four eyes and silvery fur, projecting tusks, and a permanent air of melancholy, and you have a Tar-Aiym.”
“Sounds intimidating,” she commented when he had finished.
“When evaluating another sentient you always have to get past appearance.” Settling on a corridor, he shouldered his pack and started forward. “That's what humankind had to deal with when we first made contact with the thranx.”
“Not to mention,” Sylzenzuzex observed dourly as she followed behind him on all six legs, “the shock and disgust we had to overcome subsequent to our first encounters with human beings.”
The passage Flinx had chosen was high and wide enough to accommodate several large cargo skimmers traveling in tandem. Despite Flinx's assertion that the Tar-Aiym themselves had not been all that much bigger than humans, Clarity found herself intimidated by their surroundings. Some of her concern was mitigated by the harsh alien splendor they encountered. Tar-Aiym technology was not so alien that the inherent elegance of its design went unappreciated.
From time to time the walls flanking them were made up of sweeping curves, while in others the corridor contracted into a quilt of sharp angles. Though much of
the material of which their surroundings were fashioned reminded her of metal, Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex assured her that it was something else entirely. Carbonate or silicate alloys, perhaps, or ceramics of a kind unknown. A good portion of it appeared more organic than inert. There were tubes and conduits, protrusions and concavities whose function the visitors could only guess at. Flinx was as ignorant of their purpose as his erudite mentors.
They did not have to advance in darkness or by artificial illumination. Light was everywhere, much more than Flinx remembered. Of course, on his earlier visit the gigantic vessel had undergone a return to life after half a million years of relative dormancy. Now that it was once more entirely awake, full functionality had been restored.
Not only was the interior illuminated, it was agitated with constant noise. Squeaks and squirps, buzzing and humming, whistles and crackles and pops accompanied the visitors as they trekked deeper into the ship. Clarity entertained herself trying to match unfamiliar sound to imaginary function. Her inventions owed more to fantasy than physics.
Flinx had no time for such amusements. The story of my life, he reflected as he led the way onward. Despite his concerns he was careful to moderate his pace, aware that his stride was significantly longer than that of any of his companions with the exception of the burly Tse-Mallory. Even as he led the hunt for a point of contact he knew the possibility existed that they could walk for the rest of their lives and explore only the tiniest fragment of the ship's interior without ever coming across one of the sought-after operator's platforms.
Now and then they would find themselves confronted by free-floating congruencies of light. “Ambient lambent,” a buoyant Tse-Mallory called them. These wandering luminosities randomly manifested all colors of the spectrum. Some were so pale as to be little more than blinking wraiths. Others sustained an intensity that verged on the solid. Discussing the nature of the perambulating phenomena, Flinx and the two scientists felt confident that the corridor also enjoyed visits from similar entities that dwelled in the infrared and ultraviolet and were therefore invisible to human or thranx sight. The role of the dynamic drifting lights remained unknown, though for reasons Flinx could not fathom he found himself shying away from the occasional floating sphere of a particular blue hue.
Corridors led to rooms, and rooms to chambers without any sight or sign of the kind of contact dais Flinx had utilized before. One such passageway led to a gigantic cavern that Tse-Mallory characterized as a “circus for domesticated lightning.” Even with face guards or goggles on it was difficult to gaze for more than a minute or two directly at the dazzling display of prodigious electrical discharges that were continuously erupting across a vast open expanse the size of a large city. Even more astounding than the sight itself, all the clashing, flaring energy went about fulfilling its unknown purpose in near-complete silence. Unable to glimpse a safe way through or around the awesome yet mystifying display, they were forced to retreat slightly and turn down another corridor that led in a different direction.
The longer they walked, the deeper they penetrated into the artifact and the farther they found themselves from the immense airlock. Attuned to the location of the shuttlecraft, their equipment kept them from losing their way. The problem, as Truzenzuzex pointed out, was that they had no “way.” They were simply probing and poking, hoping to find a domed platform of the kind Flinx had managed to activate previously. Undoubtedly there existed other methods and means of communicating with the gargantuan Tar-Aiym vessel, but neither Flinx nor the scientists had any idea what such instrumentation might consist of or how they might identify it. For all they knew they might already have passed a hundred beckoning perceptive communicators without recognizing a single one of them.
In place of a setting sun or the timer on board the Teacher, exhaustion told them when it was time to stop for the day. They made camp (strange, Flinx mused, to think of “making camp” inside a starship) in the middle of a long corridor that in contrast to many they had explored was almost dark. The gently bowed ceiling and floor were as black as space while the opposing walls were shot through with shimmering coppery veins that surged and flowed like animate glycerin. Humming softly to themselves, these supple embedded streaks supplied the only illumination from one end of the otherwise dark corridor to the other. Reaching out to touch one such glistening stripe, Clarity avowed that it felt warm to the touch, like gilded blood.
Duplicating the action, Sylzenzuzex declared she could feel no such thing. To Tse-Mallory's touch each of the pulsating sinuous lines felt as cold as ice. Alternately hot and frigid, ductile and wending their way through the ebony material of the walls, the mesmerizing contours might have been carriers of energy, communications, or scrolling Tar-Aiym script. To the visitors, one supposition was as good as another. Regardless of their true function, the mystery of the radiant stripes served at least one useful purpose: they kept the two scientists occupied as everyone else prepared for sleep.
All they needed was some dry wood with which to build an open fire, Flinx mused, and the incongruity of their situation would be complete.
The hard ceramic floor was not accommodating, but everyone was so tired it didn't matter. While Flinx would rather have gone to bed in his cabin on board the Teacher, at least he had Clarity, Pip, and Scrap for company. Settling on a spot beside one wall, he slid his daypack beneath his head and did his best to convince himself it was a pillow. Laying her head on his chest, Clarity benefited from padding that was considerably softer but less immobile. The two minidrags made out best of all, each curling up atop a soft, warm, familiar human.
“I was just thinking,” Clarity whispered thoughtfully as she closed her eyes against the reddish glow from the enigmatic lines that veined the nearby black wall.
“Dangerous in a place like this,” he riposted in the half dark.
Her closed fist playfully thumped his sternum. Mildly irritated, a disturbed Pip glanced over at her for a brief moment before settling back down within her pink and blue coils.
“I'm serious! What if we can't find one of those operator's platforms, or something else that can be used to make contact with this relic? Calling it here to the outskirts of this system will have been a waste of time. Do we go back to Booster and try to get the Krang to do something?”
“I don't know.” He shrugged underneath her. “I haven't thought that far ahead.”
She knew he was telling the truth. His whole life had been predicated on not thinking too far ahead because every moment of it had been fraught with danger or conflict, uncertainty or confusion. Still, she told herself, there was always a first time.
After all, he had never stopped thinking of her.
“If we can't make contact,” she went on, “and we have to give up and return to New Riviera, what happens then?”
She could feel him shifting beneath her, trying to get comfortable. “You and I get married, move somewhere the Order of Null can't find us, raise a family, have a life, grow old together, and die. Depending on how and if the Great Evil continues to accelerate toward the Milky Way, some time after our death it impacts on the outermost fringes of the galaxy and begins to devour one star system after another. Eventually this galaxy disappears and the entity, in all probability, moves on to the next.”
Lying against him in the dim red light, she was quiet for a while. “I never thought that if my happiness was guaranteed, I wouldn't be happy. Is that too much of a contradiction?”
“Not if you care about the fate of humanxkind, the Commonwealth, and every other sentient creature regardless of shape, size, or culture. Sometimes I wish I didn't care. Wish that I could forget all this and for a change be entirely selfish.” In the diffuse glow he raised his head slightly to look down at her. “I've tried, you know. For a little while I was so disgusted with everything I saw around me that I actually worked at it. At being selfish.”
“You failed,” she told him perceptively.
The rise and fall of his chest gently
lifted and lowered her head. Resting against him, she found the steady movement oddly comforting.
“I'm afraid so,” he admitted. “It's what comes of realizing that in the scheme of things, a single individual is utterly unimportant. Your own life is meaningless. What matters is the survival of sentience, of the continuation of conscious thought somewhere in the cosmos.”
Something small, pointed, and slightly damp struck her cheek several times.
“We'd better shut up. Scrap is getting tetchy with me.” In the feeble luminosity cast by the flowing, radiant lines running through the black walls she could just make out Flinx's faint smile.
“Then it's likely Pip will be telling me to be quiet any minute now, too. Good night, or good whatever it is, Clarity.”
“Good night, Flinx.” Reaching up with her right hand, she drew it affectionately down his cheek and then closed her eyes, sighing against him. Lulled by the purring walls and her own exhaustion, she was asleep almost instantly, as were the two minidrags.
As he lay contemplating their impossible surroundings, Flinx felt his own eyes growing heavy. His head did not hurt. It was enough. Very soon he was as sound asleep as his love.
Not long thereafter, a drowsy hard-shelled shape moving on multiple legs bumped up against him. In searching for her avuncular Eighth, Sylzenzuzex had come across a human instead. She was not displeased. Humans radiated more heat than thranx. When Flinx did not stir or push her away, she was more than satisfied to tuck all six legs underneath her abdomen and thorax, entwine her antennae for safe sleeping, and lie down beside him. The press of her body against his caused Flinx to stir restlessly for a few moments before quieting. A thranx was as hard as the floor.
Other than the mellifluously humming walls, it was silent in the lengthy corridor.
Time passed. Tired from hours and hours of hiking and searching, human and thranx did not stir. So they did not notice the tiny lights, each no bigger than a pinprick, that began to emerge from the lambent lines in the surrounding walls. Flashing as many colors as their elongated corridor-traversing brethren, they drifted toward the two groups of sleeping figures like so many sentient dust motes. They were few at first.
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