His heart was beating faster. It was not fear, but anticipation. Hans Rebka had never thought of himself as a hero, and he would have denied any such suggestion. Some jobs carried danger with them, some did not. He just happened to be a man with a dangerous job. But it was one with its own rewards — like seeing what no human or alien had ever seen before.
“I almost have the tangle loosened.” Outside Paradox, Tally sounded calm and confident. “However, it would make my task rather easier if you were to back up this way a few meters.”
“Very good. Backing up.”
Rebka used his suit controls to reverse the direction of his movement. He turned his head, to judge by the slackness of the cable when he had moved far enough. The fiber was still taut, a clear straight line running back to the shimmering colors of the Paradox wall.
“Are you reeling in the line back there?”
“Not yet. I am waiting for you to back up a little. Please do so.”
“Wait a moment.” Rebka used the suit thrusters again. The line behind him remained taut as ever. He had apparently not moved backward even a millimeter. “Is any line reeling in at your end?”
“No. Why are you not moving toward me?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I can’t move that way at all. Try something for me. Move everything, reel and all, a couple of meters this way, closer to the surface of Paradox.”
“That is about all I can move it, without encountering the surface. I am doing it now.”
The line slackened.
“Good. Now don’t move.” Hans Rebka eased forward, very carefully and slowly, until the line at his back was once more taut. He watched it closely, then operated his suit thrustors to reverse the direction of his motion. The line remained bow-string taut and straight.
Rebka hung motionless, thinking. No one before, in the recorded history of Paradox, had ever had the slightest trouble in leaving the artifact. On the other hand, no one had ever before penetrated the interior and not been affected by the Lotus field.
“E.C., I think we may have a little problem. I can move forward fine, toward the center. But I don’t seem able to back up toward you.”
“You have a problem with your reverse thrustors?”
“I think not. Here’s what I want you to do. Wait a couple of seconds, then pull on the cable — not too hard, but hard enough for me to feel it.”
Rebka turned to grip the cable close to where it met the tether ring on his suit. By taking it between gloved thumb and forefinger he could tell how much tension was in the line. It was increasing. Tally was tugging at the other end. Rebka should now be pulled toward the surface of the Paradox like a hooked fish. He was not moving.
“It’s no good, E.C. I don’t think I can travel outward at all. Listen to me carefully before you do anything.”
“I am listening,”
“We have to face the possibility that I may be stuck inside permanently. I’m going to try something else, but if you lose contact with me, I want you to make sure that a full report on everything that has happened here goes to the Artifact Institute. Address the message to both Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom. Is that clear?”
“Completely.”
“All right. Now I want you to try more force on the cable. At the same time I’m going to use my suit’s thrustors, just as hard as they will push. Wait until I give the word.”
“I am waiting.”
Outside Paradox, E.C. Tally crouched over the reel.
“Now!”
Tally moved the whole reel backward to increase the tension in the line, tentatively at first, then with steadily greater force. “Are you moving?”
“Not a micron. Pull harder, Tally. We have nothing to lose. Pull harder. Harder! Hard—”
E.C. Tally and the reel went shooting backward, turning end over end in space. Tally twisted to keep the line in sight. It was clearly free to move, whipping rapidly out of Paradox, meter after meter of it. It was also clear from its movement that there could be nothing substantial on the other end of it.
Hans Rebka was deep inside Paradox, as planned. Not as planned, he seemed to be stuck there.
The designers of E.C. Tally had done one other thing that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It stemmed from their own conviction that an embodied computer could think better than a human.
It stood to reason. E.C. Tally had attosecond circuits, capable of a billion billion calculations a second. He could absorb information a billion times as fast as a human. He forgot nothing, once it was learned. His thinking was logical, unclouded by emotion or prejudice.
The designers had incorporated all that information into E.C.’s memory bank. It provided him with overwhelming confidence. He knew, with a certainty that no human could ever approach, that he was smarter than any organic mind.
And Hans Rebka had an organic brain.
Therefore…
The whole thought process within E.C. Tally occupied less than a microsecond. It took another microsecond for him to construct a message describing the entire sequence of events since their approach to Paradox. He went back to the ship, transferred the message at once to the main communications unit, and selected the Sentinel Gate coordinates for transmission through the Bose Network. He checked the node delays as the message went out. The signal would reach Sentinel Gate in four to five days. Darya Lang or Quintus Bloom, even if they received the message at once and set out immediately for Paradox, could not possibly arrive in fewer than ten days.
Ten days. Enough time for Hans Rebka to run low on air in his suit, but not really a lot of thinking time for a human’s slow brain.
But ten days was close to a trillion trillion attoseconds. Time enough for the powerful brain of an embodied computer to analyze any situation, and solve any conceivable problem.
E.C. Tally waited for the confirmation that his message was safely on its way to the first Bose Transition point. Then he set the ship’s controls so that it would hover a fixed distance from the surface of Paradox. He turned on the ship’s beacon, so that anyone approaching the artifact would be able to home in on it.
And then he went outside and turned to face the artifact.
E.C. Tally to the rescue!
He switched to turbo mode on his internal clock, set the suit for maximum thrust, and plunged into the iridescent mystery of Paradox.
Chapter Fourteen
Why Labyrinth?
Why not “Spinning Top” or “Auger” or “Seashell” or “Cornucopia”? That’s what the artifact resembled, turning far-off in space. Darya’s first impression had been of a tiny silver-and-black humming top, drilling its way downward. Closer inspection showed that Labyrinth stood stationary against its backdrop of stars. The effect of downward motion was created by Labyrinth’s form, a tapering coiled tube that spiraled through five full turns from its blunt top to its glittering final point. Imagination transformed that shape to the polished shell of a giant space snail, many kilometers long. A row of circular openings spaced regularly around the broadest part of the shell appeared and disappeared as Labyrinth rotated.
Or, according to Quintus Bloom, seemed to rotate. Darya glanced from the artifact to the notes and back again. Anyone examining Labyrinth from the outside would be sure that this was a single three-dimensional helix, narrowing steadily from top to bottom and rotating in space around a central axis. The openings appearing and disappearing around its upper rim merely confirmed what was obvious to the eye.
Obvious, and wrong, according to Bloom. Labyrinth did not rotate. Bloom reported that laser readings reflected from the edges of Labyrinth showed no sign of the Doppler shift associated with moving objects. The openings on the upper edge moved around the perimeter; yet the perimeter itself was stationary.
Darya performed the laser measurement for herself, and was impressed. Bloom was right. Would she have sought to confirm what appeared to be a totally obvious rotation by an independent physical measurement, as he had done? Probably not. She f
elt awed at his thoroughness.
Darya returned again to the study of Bloom’s notes. They had occupied her since she and her companions left the surface of Jerome’s World. Each of the thirty-seven dark openings in Labyrinth was an entry point. Moreover, according to Bloom, each one formed an independent point of entry and led to an interior unique to each. The thirty-seven separate interiors were connected, one to another, through moving “windows,” rotating inside Labyrinth just as the outside openings rotated. An explorer could “cross over” from one interior to another, but there was an inexplicable asymmetry; if the explorer tried to return through the same window, the result was an interior region different from the original place of departure.
Quintus Bloom had done his best to plot the connectivity of the inside, and had produced a baffling set of drawings. Darya puzzled over them. The problem was, every connection point in Labyrinth was moving, so every portal from a given interior might lead to any one of the other thirty-six possible regions. And as one descended into the tighter parts of the spiral, the region-to-region connections changed.
She decided that Bloom was right again, this time in his naming of the artifact. Labyrinth was better than any snail or spinning-top analogy.
Which entry point should she use from the Myosotis? In the long run it might not matter; every interior could lead to any other. But the “pictorial gallery” of the spiral arm that Quintus Bloom had described might be present in only one of the regions. It was not at all obvious which one they wanted, or that they could reach it by at most thirty-six jumps through a moving door. The region-to-region linkages probably depended, critically, on timing.
Darya stared at a plot of scores of cross-connection notations recorded by Quintus Bloom, and struggled to visualize the whole interlocking system. Here was a mental maze, a giant gastropod merry-go-round in which different layers turned — or seemed to turn — at different speeds: thirty-seven co-rotating and interacting three-dimensional Archimedean spirals, sliding past each other. It was like one of those infuriating math puzzles popular at the Institute, where the trick to the solution was a translation of the whole problem to a higher number of dimensions. Twice Darya felt that she almost had it, that she was on the point of grasping the whole thing in her mind as a coherent entirety; twice it slipped away. Like so many things associated with the Builders, the interior of Labyrinth seemed to surpass all logic.
She decided there was one acceptable answer: Close your eyes. Pick an entry point. And get on with it, playing the hand you were given.
Darya emerged from her reverie over that problem, and at once faced another. She must make a decision she had been putting off since leaving Jerome’s World. Someone must remain aboard the Myosotis. Who?
It was unfair to ask Kallik or J’merlia to enter Labyrinth. They had not chosen this mission, and any new artifact could be dangerous. That argued for Darya, and Darya alone, to make a visit to the interior. Unfortunately, Kallik had her own intense interest in Builder artifacts, and a knowledge of them that matched Darya’s. She was quite fearless, and would want to be part of any exploration party. As a final point, Kallik’s years with Louis Nenda had given her more practical experience than Darya.
So that left just J’merlia. J’merlia would remain on the Myosotis.
If Darya was any judge, he would hate it.
She sighed, and drifted aft to find the two aliens. They had been strangely quiet for the past hour.
She found them squatting on the floor of the main control room in a tangle of sixteen legs, heads close together. They were chatting, in the clicks and whistles of Hymenopt speech that Darya had so far found quite unintelligible, but they became quiet as soon as she entered.
“I think we’re ready to proceed.” Darya kept her voice brisk and neutral. “It’s time to explore the interior of Labyrinth. J’merlia, I want you to remain here, at the controls of the Myosotis.”
“Of course.” The Lo’tfian’s eyes bobbed on their stalks, in firm agreement. “With respect for your abilities, I am the most experienced pilot.”
Darya hid her relief. “You certainly are. So Kallik, you and I had better get into our suits.”
The Hymenopt nodded. “And J’merlia also.”
The reply was made so casually, Darya almost missed it.
“J’merlia?”
“Of course. After all, should the ship be breached in some way, so that our suits are needed, J’merlia as pilot will need suit protection no less than we.” Kallik stared blandly at Darya with twin circles of unblinking black eyes. “Into which entry point of Labyrinth, Professor Lang, do you wish J’merlia to direct the Myosotis?”
It was so obvious — once it had been pointed out. Darya wanted to hang her head in shame. Labyrinth was forty kilometers long. The coiled spiral tubes that composed it must each be several times as long as that. There were thirty-seven of them, making endless miles of interior tunnels. Anyone in a suit would run out of air and supplies before they had explored a hundredth part of the interior.
Every one of those dark entrances ahead was at least a couple of hundred meters across, more than big enough to admit a vessel four times the size of the Myosotis. In his notes, Quintus Bloom had emphasized the massive scale of the artifact’s interior. Use of a ship, with its almost unlimited supplies of air, food, and energy, was the logical way — maybe the only way — to roam the inside of Labyrinth.
Darya cleared her throat. “I’ll point out the entrance we want, as soon as we all have our suits on and are a little closer.”
“Very good.”
Kallik’s dark eyes remained inscrutable. All the same, Darya was sure that J’merlia and Kallik both knew. Like the conscientious former slaves that they were, they had deliberately allowed her to save face.
Not for the first time since the beginning of their journey, Darya wondered who was really in charge.
“Thirty-seven entrances. Why thirty-seven? Is there anything interesting about the number thirty-seven?”
Darya had not expected a reply; it was just nervous talk. But Kallik replied solemnly: “Every three-digit multiple of thirty-seven remains a multiple of thirty-seven when its digits are cyclically permuted.”
Which left Darya to try an example in her head (37 times 16 is 592, and 259 and 925 are both divisible by 37); and to wonder: Was Kallik’s a serious answer that deserved thought, or just a Hymenopt’s idea of a good joke?
In any case, the decision had to be made. Darya pointed at a circular opening, as it came into view over the righthand horizon of Labyrinth, and said: “That one.”
J’merlia nodded. “Prepare for possible sudden acceleration after entry.” He matched velocity vectors with the opening, and popped the Myosotis inside with casual skill.
Bloom’s warning that Labyrinth only appeared to rotate was valuable advice. As the ship passed through to the interior, J’merlia had to apply a hard and sudden thrust to kill their sideways movement. Darya, suited and strapped into her seat by the control board, released a breath that seemed to have been trapped inside her since she had made the choice of entry point. She tried to examine all the external displays at once.
Behind them, every sign of the entrance had vanished. The ship sat within a gigantic coiled horn, a twisted cone whose walls were visible as writhing streamers of phosphorescence. The gleaming lines converged beyond the ship, growing closer and closer until they were hidden at last by the curve of the wall itself. But the convergence below was more than an effect of perspective, for above the Myosotis the bright streamers kept the interval between them constant, any decrease due to distance cancelled by an increase in true separation.
The way to go was down. In that direction, if Quintus Bloom’s records could be used as a guide, the seamless walls would finally give way to a series of connected chambers. If you reached the innermost chamber, there, according to Bloom, you would find the series of glyphs that recorded the past and future history of humanity in the spiral arm. Or rather, a ser
ies of polyglyphs. A glyph was a term she understood, it was a sign or an image marked on a wall. But Bloom had not explained what he meant by a polyglyph. Was that one of his secrets, something to protect his own priority of claim?
As Darya pondered that she considered another major problem. Quintus Bloom had found his chamber in one of the interiors of Labyrinth. Since Darya’s choice of entry point had been quite random, there was just a one in thirty-seven chance that they would reach the chamber that Bloom had explored.
Well, that was going to be her worry, not J’merlia’s. He knew which way to go and the Myosotis was already descending, easing its way down the center line of an apparently bottomless curved shaft. After five minutes of steady progress, Darya saw a dark oval drifting into view on one side. It was a moving doorway, a portal to one of the other interiors. Easy enough to access, according to Quintus Bloom, but there was no reason to take it until they knew what lay deeper within this one. Darya fixed the portal’s direction from them in her mind and labeled it as clockwise from this interior. Five minutes more, and a second oval appeared on the counter-clockwise side. It might be a wasted mental effort to think in terms of direction of travel, if the successive interiors that one encountered by moves in one direction did not form a regular sequence. Could you make thirty-seven clockwise jumps, and return to the starting point? Bloom had believed that there was no way to guarantee it.
The conical nature of the tube was at last revealing itself. The cylinder they traveled was narrowing, the wall becoming noticeably closer. Darya stared at the streaming ruled lines of phosphorescence, trying to estimate how long it would be before the tube became too narrow to admit the Myosotis. At that point they would have to resort to suits. She was interrupted by the soft touch of one of Kallik’s forelimbs. “Excuse me, but unless you have already noticed…”
Darya turned, and found herself looking on a screen at a swirling black vortex. It was no more than thirty meters from the ship, a roiling whirlpool of oil and ink that curved and tumbled constantly in upon itself. She knew the nature of that singularity very well, from her own experience. It was a Builder transportation system, able to convey people and materials from anywhere in the spiral arm or beyond. It was also a two-way system, sending objects with equal facility.
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