Convergence hu-4

by Charles Sheffield

He paused for a long time when that sample was identified. Drink me. Except that in this case he almost certainly could, and with no ill-effects. His suit pronounced the water pure and potable.

  Far more purposefully, he headed for the cabinets and nozzles. It was no particular surprise to find that he could travel freely in that direction, even though it took him away from the center of Paradox. Something had restricted his movement before, but apparently it now had him where it wanted him. It was also no surprise to find that the things that looked like supply cabinets and feeding nozzles were exactly that. The variety of foods dispensed was bewildering, and most of it was certainly not to human tastes. But that was natural. Somewhere along these walls he could probably find a food supply suitable for any species in the spiral arm. It was just a matter of seeking out the ones designed for humans.

  Rebka didn’t bother. He had suit supplies for several days. He hovered in position close to the wall and banged on it with a gloved fist. Solid, although without the resonant feeling of the inner wall.

  Time to start thinking again, and of more than mere survival. The “old” Paradox had permitted explorers to enter or leave, but wiped their minds clear of all memories before they left. The “new” Paradox did not affect the mind, since Rebka certainly felt normal, but it steered anyone entering to the central region. Where, unless something changed, they would stay.

  And do what?

  The ways of the Builders were a mystery, even to specialists like Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom. But who could accept the idea of carefully herding a man to the middle of an artifact, providing all the physical necessities of life, and then leaving him alone until he died? That was not merely not logical, it was anti-logical.

  Assume that the Builders, even if they recognized a different set of physical laws, followed the same laws of logic. Assume that the events within Paradox had been designed using those laws of logic. Then what was happening now? More important, what would happen next?

  Curiously enough, Hans could think of one possibility.

  Paradox was millions of years old, but it had not always been like this. A year ago, or half a year ago, or sometime recently, it had changed dramatically. Now it captured anyone who entered, and brought them to the central region. But not to die. The chamber walls showed that any creature of even modest intelligence could survive here for a very long time.

  And then?

  One of two things. The prisoner would remain here, until something else happened. A disquieting thought, given the huge time scales over which the Builders had operated. Or the prisoner, suit recharged, would be free to leave this chamber, and perhaps fulfill some other function within Paradox.

  The second possibility meant that Hans might be able to exit the room that he was in. He wandered slowly along the supply lines, dumping used air and wastes from his suit into disposal hoses, and taking on air, food, reaction mass, and water. When his suit was charged to its maximum level, he headed for the diamond of the entrance. He could see, far off, the shimmering outer barrier of Paradox. A tiny step, in terms of normal space distances. A long, long way, if the restraining field still operated outside this room.

  No point in waiting. Hans launched himself toward the opening. He went sailing outward, feeling for a second the tug of the membrane at the entrance. Then he was through, outside and floating free.

  Except that he wasn’t. He felt no force on him, but after a few seconds he glanced back to the surface of the torus and knew that he was not moving outward. Instead, he was slowly, very slowly, beginning the slide back in toward the waiting diamond.

  Cross that one off. Rebka took a last yearning look at the outside before he dropped back into the interior. He saw the glowing surface of Paradox — the shimmering rainbow background — the stars beyond; and outlined there, like a black silhouette, a suited figure.

  A suit designed for occupancy by humans. A suit that was diving at enormous speed in toward the center.

  A suit that surely didn’t — did it? — hold a half-witted, numbskull, embodied computer known as E.C. Tally.

  “Hey!” Rebka was shouting and waving, as he slid slowly back down into the depths of the torus. “Tally, is that you? This way. Slow down! I said, this way, you idiot!”

  The suit communicator was not working — could not be working. Certainly the approaching figure showed no sign of seeing or hearing anything. It went zooming in, on maximum thrust, toward an opening farther around the disk. While Rebka was still screaming and waving and sinking slowly into the diamond entrance, the newcomer vanished from view.

  Ten seconds later, Rebka was back inside. E.C. Tally, in terms of physical distance, might be no more than a hundred meters away. In terms of meeting, or even communicating, he could as well have been in another galaxy. And Hans Rebka was face to face with his first alternative: he himself would remain, stuck in this one chamber, until something else happened.

  Or?

  Or he must somehow find his own way out.

  Rebka had been in difficult situations before. To get out of them, you had to think at the extreme limit of your abilities. To make such thinking possible, you began with a few simple rules.

  He ate some of the new food. Tolerable. Drank a little water. Perfectly acceptable.

  And now the hard part. Relax. Impossible! No. Hard, but you can do it.

  Rebka dimmed his suit visor. He turned his mind inward, and listened to the beat of his own pulse. Three minutes later he was asleep.

  E.C. Tally had strangely mixed feelings about his body. On the one hand, he absolutely needed it, otherwise his embodied brain could neither communicate nor move. On the other hand, he recognized that the body itself was an sadly frail vessel. The essential E.C. Tally, contained within the matrix of his computer brain, could function in an acceleration of a thousand gravities, a field which would squash his human form into a shallow pool of mashed bones and liquids. He could handle temperatures of a couple of thousand degrees, enough to leave behind only a few teeth from his surrounding body.

  And this was, of course, his second body. The second one would never be quite the same. He could not admit it to anyone, but he had felt far more committed to the preservation of his first embodiment. He would treat this one well, of course, and maintain it in working order if he possibly could, but if and when it failed…

  Which it might well be about to do. The durability of his brain had left him too insensitive to his body’s danger. E.C. Tally, in his zeal to help, had entered Paradox at maximum thrust and concentrated his attention on an unsuccessful attempt to locate Hans Rebka. He had not considered the problem of deceleration, until the central disk was increasing rapidly on his display. By that time it was too late to do much. He quickly set his suit thrust for maximum reverse, but the inward force field was working against it, delaying his slowdown.

  He reviewed options:

  Option 1. He could head for the open center of the disk, brave the swirling dark in the middle, and hope that the force that prevented anything from leaving Paradox would slow him down gradually as soon as he was beyond the central point. He did not have high hopes of that. More likely, the field would stop his motion firmly and finally in a few millimeters. That could be enough to destroy even his hardened brain.

  Not promising.

  Option 2. He could aim instead for one of the diamond-shaped openings in the wall of the disk. What lay within was anybody’s guess, but he judged that Hans Rebka was more likely to have headed there than for the central region.

  Option 3. There was no Option Three.

  Tally simulated a human sigh, made up his mind, and angled for the nearest opening in the disk. He shot inside, feeling a sharp tug from the membrane at the entrance, and at once became aware of a difference. His suit’s thrustor — at last — was working as it was supposed to work. He slowed down rapidly, and smashed into the inner wall with no more than a bruising collision.

  His pseudo-pain circuits cut in, but all they offered was a stern
warning to take good care of his valuable body. Tally ignored that, and turned to look around for Hans Rebka.

  And there he was! No more than twenty meters away in a big, curving chamber more stuffed with furnishings and equipment than any room that Tally had ever seen.

  He turned toward Rebka. In fractions of a millisecond, he became aware of several strange facts.

  First, Hans Rebka was no longer wearing a suit of any kind. Second, there were three of him, all female. And third, not one of the three was Hans Rebka.

  The three women did not seem at all surprised by his arrival.

  “Two months,” the shortest one growled, as soon as Tally was out of his suit. She was black-haired, big-muscled — a female version of Louis Nenda. Tally guessed that she hailed from a high-gravity planet. “Nearly two damn months since we arrived here.”

  “And twenty-one days since I came in to rescue them.” The second speaker, hawk-nosed and sharp-cheekboned, pulled a face at E.C. “Hell of a rescue, eh?”

  “Not your fault,” the dark-haired woman said gruffly. “We were all fooled. Thought we’d cracked Paradox, all ready to go out big heroes.” She waved her hand at the pair of tiny exploration vessels hovering near the entrance to the chamber. “None of us had any idea that the damn thing was changing, so we might not be able to get out. Same for you, I guess.”

  “Oh, no.” Tally had at their urging removed his suit. The chamber was filled with breathable air and felt a little on the chilly side of pleasant. Gravity was low but not uncomfortably so. The women had somehow pulled fixtures from the walls, and were using them as furniture. The result was odd-looking, but formed a comfortable enough living area.

  “We knew,” he went on. “Hans Rebka and I, we knew Paradox had changed.”

  The three woman exchanged glances. “A right pair of Ditrons you two must be,” said the woman with the prominent cheekbones. “If you knew it had changed, why did you come in?”

  “We thought it would be safe.”

  The looks this time were a lot less veiled. “Actually,” Tally went on, “I did not enter because I thought it was safe. I knew it was not. I came in to rescue Hans Rebka.”

  “That’s different.” The short, dark-haired woman shook her head. “Well, we sure know how that works. What happened to your buddy?”

  “I have so far been unable to locate him.”

  “Maybe we can work together.” The third woman, tall, blond, and skinny, waved a hand to Tally, inviting him to sit at a table constructed from two food cabinets laid on their sides. “I don’t normally think much of men, but this is a case where we need all the help we can get.”

  “Ah.” E.C. Tally sat down carefully at the table, and lifted one forefinger. “In order to avoid a crucial misunderstanding, I should make one point perfectly clear. I am not a man. And now, to begin at the beginning—”

  “Not a man?” The blond woman leaned across the table and gave Tally a careful head-to-toe inspection. “Not a man. You sure could have fooled me.”

  “I am not a woman, either.”

  The woman flopped down on the seat opposite Tally. “And I thought we were in trouble before. All right, we’ll do it your way. Begin at the beginning, like you said, and take your time. We’ve got lots — and it sounds like we’ll need all of it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Another half-day, and still no sign of J’merlia. Darya was worried. Kallik clearly was not. The little Hymenopt was systematically making three-dimensional reconstructions of the other five walls of the hexagonal chamber, using her new computer program on the images that Darya had made earlier.

  She did not ask for help. Darya did not offer any. Each had her own obsessions.

  Darya kept running the first picture sequence, over and over. All data on stellar velocities was back on board the Myosotis, and without that information she lacked an absolute means of measuring time. But the general pattern of the sequence was clear. Somewhere, far in the past and far from the worlds of the Fourth Alliance, an unidentified species had achieved intelligence and space flight. The spreading green points of light showed the stars that the clade had reached. Later, probably thousands of years later, another clade had escaped their home world and set off to explore and colonize. The second clade, judging from the location of the orange points of light, was the Zardalu.

  They had spread also, speedily, aggressively. Finally they met and began to swallow up the worlds of the green clade.

  So far, so good. Not much was known about the Zardalu expansion, but there was nothing in the display at variance with recorded history.

  But now came a third clade, shown on the display in deep ruby-red. This one, according to its point of origin, represented humanity. It started out from the home world of Sol, and began a tentative spread outward. It never stood a chance. The expanding tide of Zardalu-orange caught and swallowed the first scattering of red points. It swept past Sol and on through the spiral arm, swamping everything else. Finally every green and red light was replaced by a point of orange flame.

  That was the situation when the supergiant reference stars seemed to be in their present-day positions. Darya halted the progression of images. According to what she was seeing, the spiral arm was supposed to be, today, what it clearly was not: a region totally under Zardalu domination.

  Darya stared and pondered. This was a picture of the spiral arm as it would have been had the Great Rising against the Zardalu never occurred. If the Zardalu outward drive had continued unchecked, every habitable planet of the spiral arm would have eventually come under the dominion of the land-cephalopods. The worlds of humans were gone, destroyed or confiscated. Humanity was enslaved or exterminated, together with all other species operating in space.

  And the future?

  There were more frames in the image sequence. Darya ran it onward. The stellar positions began to change again, to an unfamiliar pattern. Time advanced, by many thousands of years. But the pattern of color never altered. Every star remained a steady orange. Zardalu, and Zardalu alone, ruled. At last the orange points of light began to vanish, snuffing out one by one. The spiral arm became empty. It remained devoid of intelligent life, all the way to the final frame of the sequence.

  Darya turned off the display in her helmet. She did not switch her visor to outside viewing. It was better to stare into blackness, and disappear into a maze of thought.

  Here was not one mystery, but two.

  First, how had Quintus Bloom been able to show on Sentinel Gate a realistic display of the spiral arm’s colonization — past, present, and future? He did not show the false pattern of Zardalu domination. Darya could not believe that he had invented that display. He had found it somewhere within Labyrinth, in this inner chamber, or more likely in some other of the thirty-seven.

  Second, what was the significance of this display of spiral arm evolution, so clearly contrary to reality? The Builders were an enigma, but Darya could see no possible reason for them portraying on the walls of Labyrinth a fictitious history of the arm.

  Now to those mysteries, add a third:

  What was the nature of beings for whom the natural way to view a series of two-dimensional images was to stack them on top of another, in three dimensions?

  Darya’s mind felt clear and clean, her body far away. Her suit was unobtrusive, quietly monitoring her condition and making automatic adjustments for heat, humidity, and air supply. She might have been back in her study in Sentinel Gate, staring at the wall and not seeing it, oblivious to sights and sounds outside the open window. At last a faint voice began whispering its message to her inner ear: Invert the process. Solve the third mystery, and its solution will answer the other two questions.

  Darya cast her thoughts back over the years, to gather and sieve all the theories she had ever read, heard, or thought, about the Builders.

  Old theories…

  …they vanished over three million years ago, ascending to a higher plane of existence. The artifacts are mere rand
om debris, the trash left behind by a race of super-beings.

  …they became old, as any organism must grow old. Knowing that their end was near, and that others would come after them, they left the artifacts as gifts to their successors.

  …they left over three million years ago, but one day they intend to return. The Builder constructs are no more than their caretakers, preserving artifacts on behalf of their once and future masters.

  …the Builders are still here, in the spiral arm. They control the artifacts, but they have no desire to interact with other species.

  And new theories…

  …according to Quintus Bloom: The Builders are not part of the past. They are from the future, and they placed their artifacts in the spiral arm to affect and direct the course of that future. When key events reveal that the future is on the right course, the artifacts will change. Soon after that, the artifacts will return to the future from which they came. Those key events have occurred. That time of change is here now.

  …according to Darya Lang: An idea sprang into existence, full-formed in her mind as though it had always been there. The Builders are not time travelers from the future. They lived in the past, and perhaps they live in the present. We cannot perceive them, and communication between them and us is difficult, perhaps impossible. But they are aware of us. Perhaps they also have sympathy for us, and for the other clades — because they are able to see the future, see it as clearly as humans see a scene with their eyes, or Cecropians with their echolocation.

  They lived in the past… a race able to see the future…

  Except that at any moment of time there could be no single, defined future. There were only potential futures, possible directions of development. Present actions decided which of those potentials would realize itself as the future, one among an infinite number of alternatives. So what did it mean, to say that the Builders were able to see the future? Was it more than a refined ability to perform extrapolation?

  Put the question into more familiar terms: What did it tell you about the structure and nature of Darya Lang, that she was able to see? What physical properties of her eyes made her able to look close at a nearby flower (as the Builders were able to see tomorrow, in time), and then far off to a distant landscape (as the Builders could see a thousand years hence)?