Lissie frowned at him, stood up, and headed across to the diamond-shaped entrance. She was back a few seconds later.
“Shrinking, and changing color. No reds any more. What’s going on?”
“It is not Paradox alone.” E.C. Tally was sitting cozily between Maddy and Katerina Treel. After he had explained to them who and what he was, the three sisters had assured him that they liked him a lot better than if he had been a real man. “According to a new theory back on Sentinel Gate, changes should be occurring in all the artifacts. It is evidence that the purpose of the Builders has at last been accomplished.”
“So what is the purpose?” Katerina asked.
E.C. Tally stared at her unhappily and blinked his bright blue eyes. It occurred to him that this was one feature of the Quintus Bloom theory which remained less than wholly satisfactory. “I have no idea.”
“It may not make much difference to us what the purpose is.” Lissie came back to sit across from Hans Rebka. “If Paradox keeps shrinking, we’ll get squished out of existence. Since it’s down to two kilometers, instead of twenty-five—”
“Two!” It was Rebka’s turn to jump up. “It can’t be. It was close to five less than an hour ago.”
“Don’t take my word, to quote you. Go see for yourself.”
Everyone rushed for the entrance, with E.C. Tally bringing up the rear.
Maddy Treel got there first. “It sure as hell looks closer.” She stood there, head tilted to one side. “Hard to judge distance when you can’t be sure the fringes haven’t changed.”
“They have not.” This, unlike the purpose of the Builders, was something about which E.C. Tally could be completely confident. “My eyes are unusually sensitive, enough to see reference stars within the rainbow fringes. Refraction has been changing their apparent positions. The outer boundary of Paradox is indeed shrinking. Assuming that the present rate of change is maintained, it will achieve zero radius in” — he paused, not for calculation but for effect. He had remained completely still to make his observations, and in the first millisecond after that he had performed all necessary data reduction — “in twelve minutes and seventeen seconds.”
“Achieve zero radius?” asked Katerina.
“That’s E.C.’s polite way of describing what Lissie called getting squished out of existence.” Rebka was on the point of asking Tally if the embodied robot was sure, until he realized that would be a total waste of what little time they had left. E.C. was always sure of everything. “We’ve got twelve minutes.”
“To do what?” Maddy had adjusted to the facts as rapidly as Hans Rebka.
“Four things. First, we all put suits on again. Second, we board your ships.” Rebka scanned the two small exploration vessels. “Just one of them, for preference. Might as well stick together. Which one has the stronger hull?”
“Katerina’s our engineering expert. Katie?”
“Not much in it. The Misanthrope’s a little bigger, and a little faster. My guess is it’s also a bit tougher.” Katerina turned to Rebka. “What are you planning on doing? Neither hull was built for strength.”
“That will be our third action.” Rebka was already half into his suit, but he paused and gestured at the inner wall of the chamber. “Once we’re aboard we send the ship full tilt at that.”
“No way. We’ll be flattened!”
“I don’t think so. Paradox isn’t just shrinking — it’s falling apart around us.”
“But suppose we do break through the inner wall?” Katerina was in her suit, and leading the way to one of the scout ships. “We’ll be just as badly off. We’ll still be inside Paradox.”
“Did you notice what was at the center of this torus of chambers when you came in?”
“You mean that black whirlpool thing?” They were inside the Misanthrope, and Lissie was already at the controls. She turned to Rebka. “We saw it all right — and we stayed well clear of it. We may be wild, but we’re not crazy. I hope your head’s not going the way I think it is.”
“Unless one of you has a better idea. I say we have no real choice. If we don’t go there under our own power, we’ll finish by being squeezed into it. I’d rather enter in this ship, with some say in how we fly.”
“He is crazy.” Katerina turned to Maddy for support. “Just like a man. All they want to do is order us around.”
“I am not a man,” E.C. Tally said quietly. “Yet I am obliged to concur with Captain Rebka. I also saw the center of Paradox as I entered, and I suspect that he and I have information unavailable to you. That vortex strongly resembles the entry point for a Builder transportation system.”
Lissie abandoned the controls and spun around in the pilot’s chair. The other two sisters moved alongside her.
“Go on,” Maddy said softly. “You can’t stop there. How would you know what a Builder transportation system looks like? So far as I know, there isn’t any such thing.”
“You pretend you know what you’re doing,” added Katerina, “but you did no better than us at steering clear of Paradox. Worse, because you told us you knew things were changing here.”
“We maybe weren’t too smart.” Rebka glanced at his suit’s clock, then toward the chamber entrance. “Four more minutes. The outer boundary of Paradox is squeezing in. Look, you’ve either got to believe us, or it will be too late to do anything. E.C. and I know what a Builder transport system looks like because we’ve been through a few of them.”
Lissie and Katerina turned to look at Maddy. She glanced at the shattered wall of the room, where Rebka had broken in. “What does a Builder transport system do to you? And where does it take you?”
“You survive, if you’re lucky, but you don’t enjoy it. As for where it takes you, I don’t know how to answer that.” Rebka shrugged. “Wherever it wants to.”
“No comfort there. I should have known better.” Maddy Treel tapped Lissie on the shoulder. “Make room, sis. Soon as we’re ready to fly, hand over to him.”
“You mean, let that man fly our ship!”
“I know how you feel. Have to do it, we’re up Drool Creek without a paddle.” Maddy glared at Rebka. “With who-knows-what for a guide. I hope you’re as good at getting out of trouble as you are at getting into it.”
“Strap in, everybody.” Rebka didn’t respond to Maddy, but he moved to the copilot’s chair next to Lissie. “It may not make a damn bit of difference, but I’ll feel better if we’re all secured. Ready?”
Lissie nodded. “Any time. Just don’t ruin my ship!”
“Not a chance.” Rebka threw the local drive to maximum and aimed directly for the chamber’s inner boundary.
With forty meters in which to accelerate, the Misanthrope took over a second to reach the wall. Plenty of time to visualize a ship with its drive set to maximum hitting an impenetrable barrier. The drive thrust would continue until everything ahead of the engines was a centimeter-thin compressed layer.
Rebka saw the final meters of approach as a blur on the forward screen. He felt a shock, but it was no more than a moderate jolt that threw him forward against his restraining belt. Then the screen was a chaos of flying fragments.
He cut the power in the same instant. The ship could not reverse its thrust, there was not time for that. They were flying on, with the same velocity as at impact. How fast? Forty meters, accelerating at five standard gravities. E.C. Tally would know, but there was no time to ask.
Too fast, at any rate. Much too fast for finesse. Rebka could see again; the cloud created by the disintegrating wall was dispersing. The ink-black swirl of the vortex was almost dead ahead. He had time for a lateral thrust, enough to aim them a little more squarely at the center. That was his last act before the vortex took control.
The sensation was familiar. It would never be pleasant. Hans felt the vortex close in on him, a tightening spiral that shrank until it felt no wider than his body. The torsion began, forces that racked his body in sections, twisting from head to neck to chest to hips to
legs to feet. It increased steadily, shearing him until the pain was unbearable. Rebka had no breath left to scream. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was no comfort to imagine what Maddy, Katerina, and Lissie must be thinking about him at this moment.
It was impossible to say how long the pain lasted, but it ended abruptly. Rebka opened his eyes and stared around him, relieved to see that the ship and its contents were unaffected by the crippling forces that he had felt. Maddy and her sisters were bulging-eyed and gasping, but that was just psychological after-effects. The Builder transport systems, if they delivered you at all, did so leaving you physically intact and unharmed.
But delivered you where? It could be in the Anfract, or inside some other distant Builder artifact, or even in Serenity, thirty thousand light-years outside the plane of the galaxy.
Rebka peered at the screen in front of him. There was not much information to be gained from that. He was seeing a pattern of near-parallel lines like an optical illusion, a streaming glow of white on a dense black background.
“Tally?” The embodied computer was the best bet, with every major feature of the spiral arm stored away in his head. “Do you know where we are?”
“Unfortunately, I do not.” E.C. Tally sounded very cheerful. Rebka recalled, with some envy, that pain in Tally’s case offered warning signals without discomfort. “However, it is almost certain that we are no longer within Paradox.”
“I can tell that much. What about the other artifacts? Do any of them look like that, on the inside?” Rebka gestured at the screen.
“Not remotely like that. The pattern we are observing would be considered striking enough to have been reported, even if images of it were unobtainable. Might I suggest that you record it on the imaging equipment of this ship?”
“Never mind the scenery.” Maddy Treel had her breath back. “You can study that any time. What about the whosit out there? I want to know if it’s dangerous.”
Rebka and E.C. Tally turned. Maddy was staring at a different screen, one that showed a view to the rear of the Misanthrope. The pattern of lines was there too, no longer parallel but curving away and apparently slightly converging. But in front of those, much closer to the ship and rapidly approaching it, was something else. A black, spindly figure, its body twisted a little to one side.
Rebka stared in disbelief. He opened his mouth to speak, but E.C. Tally was well ahead of him. The embodied computer had done a rapid comparison of every feature of the dark figure, from number of legs to suit design to antennas and probable frequencies.
“If you will permit.” He turned, reached across Lissie — still stunned to silence by the transition through the Builder vortex — and flipped four switches. “Our general communication channel is now open. This is E. Crimson Tally. Do you wish to come aboard?”
The speaker system of the Misanthrope clicked and whistled. “With respect, I would like that very much. I recently suffered a most unpleasant impact, and I wish to perform certain repairs.”
“You can’t let that thing onto our ship!” Maddy Treel grabbed E.C. Tally’s right arm as he reached forward to activate the airlock. “You’re crazy! That’s an alien out there. I don’t care if it is hurt — it could kill us all if it got inside.”
“Oh, no.” E.C. Tally leaned forward, and with his left hand pressed the lock control. “You do not have to worry. He is an alien, true enough, but he would never hurt anybody. You see, it is only J’merlia.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Experience makes everything easier. Darya had struggled hard to interpret the first series of images that she and Kallik had obtained from the wall of the hexagonal chamber. Now, as she examined the second series, she wondered what she had found so difficult.
Blue supergiant stars served as references, fixing the scale and overall geometry of the spiral arm. Their movement in space also made them into celestial clocks, measuring how far before or after the present a particular image was set. Without knowing stellar velocities, the time scale was relative rather than absolute, but it was enough to judge the progress in spiral arm colonization.
The second image set proved similar to the first, except that this time the orange markers of Zardalu control spread across the arm, engulfed the worlds of the earlier green clade, and then suddenly vanished.
That matched Darya’s understanding of history. Instead of going on to dominate the spiral arm, the Zardalu had themselves been annihilated in the Great Rising.
After a dozen images with no colonized worlds at all, a dull red spark appeared at Sol’s location. The red markers spread, and were joined by the yellow of another clade. Darya noted the location. Cecropians. The two clades grew until their boundaries met. After that the boundary line remained steady, while both clades grew rapidly in other directions.
Darya nodded to herself. This was the past shown by Quintus Bloom. And presumably the future, also.
Darya waited. Suddenly yellow points of light began to surround the region of red ones. Finally, when englobement was complete, the yellow markers spread inward. Red points of light flickered out one by one, and yellow took their place. Finally yellow lights alone were visible through the spiral arm. Cecropians ruled the spiral arm. And then, far enough in the future that the supergiant reference stars had moved to noticeably different positions, there was a final change. The yellow lights began to blink out, one by one, until almost all were gone. For a long period the spiral arm showed just one yellow point, close to the original clade world of the Cecropians. Then it too winked out. The arm had lost all evidence of intelligent life.
This was not the future displayed by Quintus Bloom — far from it. In this series of images, as in the last set that Kallik had displayed, the final sequence showed an end point for the spiral arm with no inhabited worlds.
Darya puzzled over the display for a long time, running and rerunning the image sequences. They were false pasts and futures for the spiral arm. Could she be seeing an entertainment, a fictional presentation? The Builders were so remote, so enigmatic, it was difficult to accept them as having recreations of any kind. But maybe all thinking beings needed a break now and again.
Finally she nodded to Kallik to move to an image sequence drawn from a different wall.
The now-familiar first scenes came into view. Blue supergiant marker stars, no colonized worlds. The orange sparks of the Zardalu came, and at last went. Humans appeared in a lurid red, Cecropians in yellow. They existed side by side, spreading outward for a long, long time, until a clade of glittering cyan appeared from close to the inner edge of the spiral arm.
Darya stared at the location, and could think of no species at all in that part of the spiral arm. Human exploration vessels had been there, but had found nothing. She glanced at the supergiant markers. The scene was far in the future.
The cyan clade worlds grew until they met humans. Cyan then at once began to disappear. Humans were taking over the worlds of the new clade, as glowing red swallowed up cyan. That went on until the new color had vanished completely. And then, as though a process had been started that could not be stopped, red began to consume yellow. The Cecropian worlds dwindled in number, not steadily but in sudden spasms of contraction. The clade shrank back toward the original home world of the Cecropians. A final spark of yellow gleamed there, until it was replaced at last by a gleam of red.
Humans, and humans alone, ruled the spiral arm. The millennia rolled on, the supergiant marker stars crept like tiny blue snails across the face of the galaxy. Finally, red points began to flicker out of existence. Not in a systematic pattern this time, but randomly, one by one. A handful, widely scattered across the spiral arm, hung on as dots of ruddy light. At last they began to vanish. Darya was finally staring at a spiral arm where again only the marker stars could be seen.
“Excuse me if I interrupt your thoughts, but do you wish to see the next sequence?” Kallik was standing by her side. Darya had no idea how long she had been waiting there.
She shook h
er head. Since her findings made no sense, additional data were more likely to confuse than to clarify.
Darya realized how tired she was. How long since she had slept? How long since they had entered Labyrinth, how long since they arrived in this chamber? She couldn’t even guess.
Still there was no sign of J’merlia. She and Kallik should have gone searching long since. The fascination of the polyglyphs had held her.
The worst of it was, she wouldn’t be able to sleep now no matter how she tried. And it was not because of worry over J’merlia. Darya knew her own weaknesses. She might close her eyes, but the image sequences were going to keep running, running, running, visible to an inner eye that could not be closed. They would remain until something in her brain over which she had no control permitted them to vanish. Then she would rest.
“Kallik, do you mind if I talk to you?” Hymenopts, unlike mere humans, never seemed to become weary. “I’d like to share some thoughts, think out loud at you.”
“I would be honored.”
“Did you watch all three sequences with me?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“But you didn’t see Quintus Bloom’s presentation, when he was on Sentinel Gate?”
“That was not my good fortune.”
“Pity. Did you, by any chance, examine the recording of the presentation in Bloom’s data files on the Myosotis?”
It occurred to Darya that for someone who had asked to share her thoughts, she was doing rather poorly. So far everything had been a question. But Kallik did not object.
“I examined the records on the Myosotis, and I found them fascinating.”
“Good. So you saw what Bloom says he found in Labyrinth, and we’ve both seen what we found here.”
“Some of what we found here. With respect, three image sequences remain to be displayed.”
“That’s all right. We’ll get to them. We need to think, frame a hypothesis, then use the other image sequences to test it.”
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