Convergence hu-4

by Charles Sheffield

  Darya’s trance was complete. She sat at the brink of revelation, its message tantalizingly beyond her grasp. She saw in her mind the blurred, milky wall of the chamber, with its clear (but cryptic) three-dimensional message. Humans and Hymenopts could not grasp that message all at once, in its entirety. They needed to have it broken down into single frames, to see it a thin slice at a time.

  But perhaps the Builders had no such need…

  Darya sensed the first faint ghost of a different kind of being, one so alien in nature that humans, Cecropians, Hymenopts, and Lo’tfians — even Zardalu — were all close cousins.

  If she were right, every one of her questions would be answered. The logical pieces were there. All she needed was confirmation — which meant more data.

  She turned her visor to external viewing. “Kallik!”

  She started, as the Hymenopt popped up right in front of her. Kallik had been waiting, eight legs tucked neatly beneath the round furry body.

  “I am here. I did not wish to disturb your thoughts.”

  “They were disturbing enough by themselves. Did you process the other five walls?”

  “Long since. Like the first one, they exist now as sequences of images.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “Assuredly. I have reviewed one of them already. But with respect” — Kallik sounded apologetic — “I fear that it is not what you are hoping to see.”

  “You mean it’s not a set of images of spiral arm clade evolution, the way that the first one was?”

  “No. I mean that it is just such a set. It shows a representation of the spiral arm. However, it suffers the same problem as the one which we previously examined. By which I mean, it does not resemble what Quintus Bloom reported, and it is also quite inconsistent with what we know to be the true history of arm colonization.”

  They were deep within Labyrinth, with no idea how, when, or if they would ever escape. Darya decided that she must be crazy. There was no other way to explain the sense of satisfaction — of delight — that filled her at Kallik’s words. She could not justify her conviction that she was going to achieve her life’s ambition. But she felt sure of it. Before she died, however soon that might be, she was going to fathom the nature of the Builders. She was already more than halfway there.

  Darya laughed. “Kallik, what you have is exactly what I’m hoping to see. As soon as you are ready, I want to take a look at every one of those sequences.”

  Any male Lo’tfian who has been removed from the home world of Lo’tfi and its breeding warrens is already insane. If a Lo’tfian slave and interpreter is also deprived of his Cecropian dominatrix, he becomes doubly mad. J’merlia, operating far from home and without orders from Atvar H’sial, had been crazy for some time.

  Added to that, he now faced an impossible problem: Darya Lang had ordered him to look for a way out of Labyrinth. He had to obey that command. But it forced him to exercise freedom of choice, and to make decisions for himself.

  A direct command to leave the others — and one that obliged him, for as long as he was absent, to operate without commands!

  J’merlia was a mightily distressed Lo’tfian as he started out from the innermost chamber of Labyrinth. And, before he had gone very far, he was an extremely confused one.

  In the short time since they had entered, Labyrinth had changed. The way back from the inner room should have led through a short tunnel into the chamber that teemed with the whirling black vortices. Vortices there certainly were, but only two of them, floating sedately against opposite walls. Neither one moved. Return through the chamber was trivially easy, as J’merlia quickly demonstrated.

  The next one ought to have been as bad, with its fierce sleet of orange particles opposing any returning traveler. But when he got there, the storm had almost ended. The handful of little flecks of orange that hit his suit bounced harmlessly off and drifted on their way.

  Logically, J’merlia should have been pleased; in fact, he became more worried. Even the walls of the third chamber did not look the same. They had dark windows in them, beyond which other rooms were faintly visible. There was also a translucency to the walls themselves, as though they were preparing to dissolve into gray vapor and blow away.

  J’merlia went on. And then, just when he was wondering what unpleasant surprise he might find in the next room, he emerged from the connecting tunnel and saw a very familiar sight. Right ahead was the Myosotis, floating in the great helical tube, just as they had left it.

  The remaining chambers had not changed; they had vanished. Six chambers had collapsed into four. A dangerous escape had become a trivially easy one, and J’merlia’s task was apparently completed. He was free to turn around, go back, and tell Darya Lang that they could leave Labyrinth any time they felt like it.

  Except for a small detail. One form of insanity bears the name curiosity. J’merlia floated up toward the ship to make sure that it was intact, and found that not far ahead was one of those strange dark apertures in the wall of the tube.

  He moved closer until he could see through it, into another chamber. There was a suited figure there, moving slowly away from him. J’merlia stared, counted suit appendages, and made his helmet resonate with a hundred-thousand cycle whistle of relief. Eight legs. Thin, pipestem body. Narrow head. A suit identical to his. It was J’merlia himself, and what he had taken for an opening in the wall was no more than a mirror.

  Except that — curiosity seized him again. He was moving toward the opening, and the suited figure was moving away from it. He was staring at the back of the thin body.

  J’merlia kept moving forward, slowly and cautiously, until he was within the opening. The figure he was following moved, too, floating toward a window on the opposite side of the chamber. J’merlia went on through to the second chamber. His double went ahead also, apparently into a third room.

  J’merlia paused. So did his quarry. He back-tracked toward the opening into his original chamber. The figure ahead of him reversed and did the same.

  The mystery was solved. He was pursuing himself. Somehow this region of Labyrinth must include a mirror, but a three-dimensional mirror, one that exhibited an exact copy of the chamber in which he was moving.

  Like any sensible being, J’merlia preferred to have someone else doing his thinking for him and making his decisions. All the same, he had plenty of intelligence of his own. Wandering the arm with Atvar H’sial had also given him much experience of what technology can do. He had never heard of a three-dimensional mirror like this, but there was no great magic to it. He could think of three or four different ways that such a mirror-room might be built.

  He was at the aperture, that comforting notion still in his head, when the angular figure in front of him turned its body, stared off to the left, and began to move rapidly in that direction. It was heading toward the central chamber of Labyrinth.

  Now there was something new. The anomaly brought to J’merlia a new awareness, that he was playing a game in which he did not know the rules. He turned also, to head back to the middle of Labyrinth.

  Again he halted in amazement. The bulk of the Myosotis should have been hanging right in front of him. There was absolutely no sign of it — no sign of anything in the whole chamber.

  J’merlia realized, too late, that he had done something horribly stupid. What made it worse, he had been warned. Quintus Bloom had pointed out that an explorer could “cross over” into another one of the thirty-seven interiors of Labyrinth, but there was a built-in asymmetry. When you went back through the same window, it might be to a new interior region, different from the original point of departure.

  Which new interior?

  J’merlia remembered the strange cross-connection charts plotted out by Quintus Bloom, and how Darya Lang had puzzled over them. Neither Bloom nor Lang had been able to specify a rule. If they could not do it, what chance for a mere Lo’tfian?

  That was a question J’merlia could answer: No chance at all. He was lost
and alone in the multiply-connected, strangely changing interior of Labyrinth, without a ship, without a map, without a dominatrix, without companions. Worst of all, he would be forced to disobey a direct order. He had been told to return to Darya Lang and Kallik after just a few hours.

  J’merlia had only one hope. If he kept hopping through the connecting windows, no matter how much the interiors might keep changing, nor how many jumps he might have to make, he had an infallible way of knowing when he reached the one he wanted. For although the interior of one chamber might look much like another, only one of them could contain the Myosotis.

  No more useless thought. Time for action. J’merlia headed for the first window between the chambers. No Myosotis. And the next. Still no ship.

  He kept track of the number of chambers as he went. The first eight were empty. The ninth was worse than empty. It contained a dozen black husks, dusty sheets of ribbed black leathery material thickened along their center line. J’merlia went close and saw wizened faces, fangs, and sunken cheeks. Chirops. A not-quite intelligent species, the favored flying pets of the Scribes. What were they doing here, so far from their own region of the arm? And where were their masters?

  The shriveled faces were mute. The bat-wings were brittle, vacuum dried, their ages impossible to determine.

  J’merlia left that room at top speed. The twenty-first chamber had him screeching and whistling a greeting. Two suited figures came drifting toward him. Not until he was close enough to peer into the visors did he realize that they too were victims of Labyrinth. Humans, without a doubt. Empty eye sockets stared out at him, and naked teeth grinned as at some secret joke. They had died hard. J’merlia examined their suits, and found the oxygen had been bled down to the last cubic centimeter. The suit design was primitive, abandoned by humans a thousand years ago. They had floated here — or somewhere — for a long, long time.

  But not as long as the contents of the thirtieth chamber. Seven creatures floated within it. Their shapes suggested giant marine forms, with swollen heads bigger than J’merlia’s body. The glass of their visors had degraded to become completely opaque. How many millennia did that take? J’merlia carefully cracked open one helmet and peered inside at the contents. He was familiar with the form of every intelligent species in the spiral arm. The spiky, five-eyed head before him was unrelated to any of them.

  J’merlia pondered the contradiction as he went on: Labyrinth, according to Quintus Bloom and Darya Lang, was a new artifact. It had not been here one year ago, much less a thousand. Yet it contained antique relics of bygone ages.

  When the chamber count passed thirty-seven he wondered if he might be missing some other vital piece of information. He kept going, because he had no other real option. At last the rooms began to seem different, the windows between them becoming steadily larger. There was still no sign of the ship.

  A male Lo’tfian, according to the Cecropian dominatrices, had no imagination. It did not occur to J’merlia that he too might move from chamber to chamber until he died. After the eighth hour, however, he began to wonder what was happening. He had been through more than three hundred chambers. His procedure in each was the same, developed for maximum speed and efficiency. He made a sideways entry, so that he could glance with one eye down toward the center of Labyrinth, seeking his ship; at the same time he noted the location of the window that would lead him to the next chamber. Dead aliens, of recognizable or unrecognizable form, were no longer enough to halt his progress.

  He was so far into a routine procedure that he was almost too late to catch the change when it finally came.

  The ship! He could see it. But he was already zooming on toward the window for the next chamber — and if he went through there was no knowing how long it would be before he again found this one.

  J’merlia hit maximum suit deceleration, and realized in the same moment that it would not be enough. He would sail right out through the aperture on the far side of the chamber before he could stop.

  There was only one thing to do. He switched the direction of the thrust, to propel himself laterally rather than slowing his forward speed. The sideways jump was enough for him to miss the opening and smash straight into the chamber wall.

  A Lo’tfian was tough, and so was J’merlia’s suit, but the impact tested them both to the limit. He bounced back, two of his thin hindlimbs broken and his torso bruised all along its length. His suit hissed suddenly with lost air, until the smart sensors detected and repaired the small stress rupture at a joint.

  J’merlia turned end over end, too breathless to produce a desired whistle of triumph. He had succeeded! He was many hours late, but at last he was back in the same chamber with the Myosotis.

  He righted himself with some difficulty — one of his attitude controllers was also broken — and found that his thrustors still operated. He drove toward the waiting ship.

  That was when he was glad he had produced no triumphant whistle.

  It was a ship, certainly. Unfortunately, equally certainly, it was not the Myosotis.

  Chapter Nineteen

  By the end of the second day trapped in the hiatus, three of the four travelers on board the Gravitas were not at all happy.

  The absence of ship’s lights was an inconvenience, but it was the lack of power that would eventually be fatal. Louis Nenda had already done the calculation. The air circulators were not working, but natural thermal currents plus the ship’s own steady rotation would provide enough convection to keep a breathable atmosphere in the ship. However, after about six days the lack of air generators and purifiers would become noticeable. Carbon dioxide levels would be perceptibly higher. Five days after that, the humans on board would become lethargic. Four days more, and they would die of asphyxiation. Atvar H’sial would survive maybe a week longer.

  Quintus Bloom was not afraid of dying. He had a different set of worries. He was convinced that Darya Lang was far ahead of him, scooping discoveries that should rightfully be his. A dozen times a day, he pestered Nenda to do something, to get them moving. Twice he had hinted that Louis had arranged all this on purpose, deliberately slowing their progress as part of a conspiracy to aid Darya Lang. Nenda wondered if somehow Atvar H’sial had managed to communicate her own paranoia about Darya to Quintus Bloom.

  The blind Cecropian was in some ways the least affected by their plunge into the hiatus. She could tolerate carbon dioxide levels that would kill a human, and her own seeing, by echolocation, was independent of the interior lights on the Gravitas. But the loss of power meant that communication with Glenna Omar through the terminals was no longer possible. Atvar H’sial had again become completely dependent on Louis Nenda and his pheromonal augment for anything that she wished to say to or hear from the others.

  The exception in all this was Glenna. Logically she, pampered by a life on Sentinel Gate where every wish and whim could be satisfied, should have been most affected by the drastic change to life aboard the Gravitas. But it was a continuing oddity of the spiral arm that the inhabitants of the richest worlds played the most at primitivism. So about once a year, the fortunate dwellers on Sentinel Gate would deliberately head out to their forests and prairies, equipped with sleeping bags, primitive fire-lighting equipment, barbaric cooking tools, and raw food. After a few days in the wilds (but never more than three or four), they would return to abundant hot water, robotchef meals, and insect-free lodging. There they assured each other that they could “rough it” as well as anyone, if ever they had to.

  Glenna had played that game a dozen times. She was trying a new variation of it now. The luxurious passenger suites of the Gravitas were equipped for cozy and candle-lit evenings, where dining tête-à-tête was often a tasteful prelude to romance. Glenna went from suite to suite and took the candles from every one. She used them all to provide subdued lighting for her own suite only, and invited the others to attend the soirée. Atvar H’sial’s invitation had to be transmitted through Louis Nenda. The Cecropian received it, and r
eplied with a pungent pheromonal combination that Nenda had never before encountered. It felt like the Cecropian equivalent of a Bronx cheer. He took it to be a rejection of the offer.

  Louis Nenda arrived first, wondering if it was a mistake to show up at all. He did so only from a long-held principle: that he needed to know everything that happened on any ship he was piloting. And if he were absent, who knew what Quintus Bloom and Glenna Omar might plot between them?

  Nenda stared gloomily at fifteen candles, arranged strategically around the boudoir. The oxygen used in their burning would shave several hours off their lives, but in the circumstances that didn’t seem like a big deal.

  Glenna obviously thought this was going to be one swell party. She had her blond hair piled high on her head, to show off to advantage her long, graceful neck. The clinging cotton dress that she was wearing, cut hair-raisingly low at front and back and with a split from ankle to hip, showed a good deal more than that. She pirouetted in front of Louis, revealing what appeared to be several yards of leg.

  “How do I look?”

  “Astonishing.” That at least was the truth. He heard with relief the sound of footsteps behind him. Quintus Bloom appeared, wearing an expression that Louis could interpret exactly. I’d rather be some place else, but there is nowhere else. And anyway, I can’t afford to miss something important.

  Wafting in with Quintus Bloom came something else. A hint of pheromones, too weak to be caught by anyone but Nenda.

  “At. I know you’re there, waiting outside. I thought you decided not to come.”

  “I have no desire to attend what I suspect to be designed as a human multiple mating ritual. However, I wish to know what is said about other matters. Like you, I am opposed to any conspiracy of which I am not a part.”