Convergence hu-4

by Charles Sheffield

  Did that mean these were remotely controlled, or were they built of inorganic components? Or could a finite size in time more than make up for a reduced size in space? What Darya was able to see might be not a whole Builder, but a mere flat projection of it, the tiny slice apprehensible to the senses in what humans described as “the present.” Perhaps total space-time volume was the important parameter for intelligence. From a Builder point of view, humans and their alien colleagues must occupy an infinitesimal region of space-time, with body size in space multiplied by the width of a vanishingly small section of time. Such a small space-time volume, the Builders might argue, did not permit the development of intelligence.

  The mini-Phages darted energetically to-and-fro. But that was not what had caused the excitement on the Misanthrope. Darya turned and saw, for the first time, the dark shape hanging beyond the translucent outer walls of Labyrinth.

  Another vortex. And not just a vortex. The whole of the space on one side of Labyrinth was occupied by the Grand Panjandrum of all vortices, bigger than the artifact itself. It was slowly swelling. Either it was truly growing in size, or Labyrinth was creeping steadily closer to it. Whichever was true, the end point would be the same. Labyrinth would be engulfed.

  Rebka was still gripping Darya’s arm, steering her closer to the hatch. She resisted.

  “Why not stay here with them? They’re getting ready to leave Labyrinth.” She pointed to Katerina Treel, suit closed and in place at the ship’s controls. Her two sisters were trying to push people out of the lock. There was too much noise to hear what they were shouting.

  “Who?” Rebka had to shout, too, leaning close to Darya’s helmet. A deep, booming noise like the tolling of a gigantic bell filled the cabin with a regular tone. It was coming from somewhere outside the Misanthrope. “Who could stay here? You, me, Tally? What about Nenda, or Atvar H’sial and the other aliens? What about Glenna or Quintus Bloom? There isn’t room in this ship for everyone.”

  “My ship!” Darya found herself screaming. “We can use my ship — the Myosotis.”

  “You want to bet on finding it, with that lot out there?” Rebka’s gesture took in the swarming chaos beyond the lock. “There isn’t much room on the Myosotis, even if you were sure you could get us there. And Nenda’s ship can’t fly superluminal.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “The same as everyone else.” They had finally reached the lock and struggled through it, Rebka still firmly attached to the arm of Darya’s suit. He pointed to the periphery of Labyrinth, on the side away from the monster vortex. The ships from the interior now hung there in space, a strange mixed fleet that had somehow passed right through Labyrinth’s external wall. “All the ships with no crews seem to have been steered out there. We pick a type that we know how to fly — one with a Bose Drive on it.”

  “Those ships weren’t there when we came to Labyrinth!”

  “Nor were a lot of other things. They are now.”

  “Hans.” She stopped dead, shaking her arm free. “Don’t you see, it proves I’m right. The Builders are here, now — and they are helping. They want anything alive and intelligent to be able to escape before Labyrinth vanishes completely. That’s why they are taking the ships outside, ready for use.”

  “Someone is moving the ships, but that doesn’t prove you are right. Maybe the Builders are just making sure that anyone who wants off can get off. Maybe he is right, and we are heading for the future — along with anyone else who stays in Labyrinth.”

  Rebka was pointing to the tall figure of Quintus Bloom, floating at the center of a knot of people and aliens. The two Tenthredans had disappeared, but most of the others from the Misanthrope were circling around Bloom as though bound to him by some odd form of gravity. Darya looked for Louis Nenda, and at first could not locate him. Then she saw a dark-suited figure floating toward them from the Gravitas, which had begun its drift toward Labyrinth’s outer wall. A Cecropian was at Nenda’s side. They were towing behind them, trussed tightly in a clumsy, improvised suit, a gigantic tentacled creature. A Zardalu! Nenda and Atvar H’sial had risked the trip back into the other ship, while all of Labyrinth disintegrated around them, to rescue a Zardalu? Darya couldn’t believe it, but there was no time to stay and ponder.

  She left Rebka to himself and pushed her way through to the center of the cluster. “We have to get out of here fast, on one of those.” She waved at the jumble of ships. Already some of the new arrivals were heading for them, with the urging of the mini-Phages. The steady, booming, bell-like tone filled the whole of Labyrinth. It came from the region of the ships, drawing attention to them. “Look at that vortex. We don’t have more than another ten minutes.”

  “Great!” Bloom laughed like a lunatic, audible even without his suit’s transmitter. There was still plenty of air in Labyrinth. “Ten minutes more, and we will enjoy the experience of a lifetime. We will advance to the far future, and meet our own descendants. Who would want to miss that?”

  “The Builders don’t come from the future. Those are the Builders, or the servants of the Builders.” Darya pointed to the mini-Phages. “That vortex won’t take you to the future. It will kill you! Look at the way everything is being steered away from it and toward the ships.”

  “Steering is for sheep and cattle. The future doesn’t want followers — it wants leaders.” Bloom scanned the group around them. “I’m staying on Labyrinth. Who’s with me? Don’t bother to say anything, Professor Lang. I know your answer.”

  “You’re insane! The Builders live on some other plane of existence, a place where humans probably can’t survive for a second.” Darya gestured to the junkyard of ships. Some of them were already edging away from the outer wall of Labyrinth, their hulls and locks swarming with the diminutive figures of humans and aliens. “We have to go and grab a ship for ourselves, while we have time.”

  If we have time. She could see the looming vortex on the other side, a swirling mouth holding the whole artifact within its jaws.

  No one moved. Darya was in agony. What was wrong with them? Was it the force of Bloom’s personality — fascination at the idea of traveling to the future — simple reluctance to be thought afraid?

  As though reading her mind, Hans Rebka moved to Darya’s side. “Sorry, Bloom. I don’t know if you’re right, or if Darya is right. And I don’t really care. I’ve seen hard times, but I like life well enough to want to go on with it. I vote for the ships. I’ll save my trip to the future for another day.”

  He moved away from the center of the group and began to study the ships more closely. They were all different, and it wouldn’t do to select one that he did not know how to fly.

  “Don’t try to justify cowardice,” Bloom called after him. “It never works.” He turned his back deliberately on Rebka. “Miss Omar? I know that you at least are not afraid. Will you come with me?”

  Glenna hesitated. “I’d like to come. If it would please you… Only…” She turned to where Nenda was fighting to control his trussed Zardalu. Despite his previous assurances of its change in attitude, it was far from docile. He had just punched it between its glaring eyes, and it was struggling to free a tentacle big enough to squash him to bloody mush. “Louis, will you be going?”

  “Goin’ where? Into that thing?” Nenda jerked his head toward the hovering vortex. “You outa your tiny mind? The one we come through to get here squeezed me flatter than a Sproatley smart oyster. That one’s a thousand times the size. If I never go near one of them again in my life, it’ll be too soon.”

  “That settles it, then. I’m not going, either.” Glenna turned to Bloom. “Quintus, I’m not going.”

  “I heard you the first time. I am not deaf. Since when does the advice of a barbarian space anthropoid dictate your actions?” Bloom glared right through Glenna, as though she had ceased to exist. “What about the rest of you? Tally? Here surely is a challenge worthy of an embodied computer’s powers. Atvar H’sial — Kallik — J’merlia? D
o you not wish your own species to be represented in the future? Which of you is ready to embark with me on the greatest adventure in history?”

  But Glenna’s decision had somehow turned the whole group. They had been clustered around Bloom as their center of gravity. Now, without a word, they began to drift toward Hans Rebka. He pointed to one of the ships, twice the size of any of the others.

  “That’s my choice. I think I’ve even seen pictures of it before. That’s the Salvation, the ship Chinadoll Pas-farda used to roll over the darkside edge of the Coal Sack. People have wondered where she and her ship went for two centuries. Now we have to make it earn its name. But we’ll have to be quick.”

  The vortex beside Labyrinth was beginning its work. The artifact was rotating faster as Rebka led his odd convoy toward the chosen ship. Behind him were Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, carefully towing the captive Zardalu. Kallik, J’merlia, and Glenna Omar followed them, as close as the wriggling Zardalu permitted. Darya brought up the rear with E.C. Tally. She found herself threading her way through a menagerie of creatures and objects, flotsam and jetsam delivered to Labyrinth from a thousand other artifacts. A group of a dozen Ditrons, abandoned by their owners, hooted like foghorns and giggled as Darya passed by. The high-domed skulls suggested plenty of intelligence, but that was an illusion. The Ditron’s head was a resonance cavity, designed to produce as much sound as possible in mating calls. The brain itself was a mere couple of hundred grams tucked away at the back.

  Darya kept well clear of them. She skirted a huge creature like a spiral galaxy in miniature, thorny swirls of body with one enormous pale-blue eye the size of a child’s paddling pool set at its center. The eye tracked her as she passed by. The urge to stop and examine that alien was almost overwhelming, until she saw out of the tail of her own eye a nine-foot squirming streak of green. It was a Chism Polypheme, hurtling its corkscrew body toward one of the ships.

  Dulcimer? Could that really be Dulcimer, the leering Polypheme pilot who had first taken them into the Torvil Anfract? Well, if so he would have to look after himself. He should be able to do it — anyone who was fifteen thousand years old had to be a survivor.

  But what was Dulcimer doing here? Did it mean that every other artifact had already vanished from the spiral arm, its contents transferred to Labyrinth? The thought left her numb. She had devoted her whole career to the study of the Builders and their creations. If they vanished and left no evidence that the artifacts had ever existed, what would she do with the rest of her life? Future generations would probably not even believe that the Builders had existed. They would become part of the myths and legends of the spiral arm, no more accepted than fairies and trolls and the Tristan free-space Manticore, no more real than the lost worlds of Shamble, Midas, Grisel, Merryman’s Woe, and Rainbow Reef. The images that she was carrying of the Labyrinth polyglyphs would be regarded as no more than clever fakes, produced by eccentrics as hoaxes to fool gullible people.

  Maybe Quintus Bloom was doing the right thing. No one could ever accuse him of not living up to his beliefs. If the artifacts went, and you had devoted your life to them, perhaps you should go with them.

  Darya turned to look back. Bloom had not moved. He was staring after them. When he saw Darya looking he raised his arm to her in an ironic salute. She felt a strange sense of loss. The great debate would never continue. She would have no chance now to persuade Bloom that he was wrong, that the Builders were of the past and present, not of the future. She would never again hear that confident voice, with its hypnotically persuasive style of presentation, discoursing so knowledgeably on the artifacts. Despite all his faults, she and Quintus Bloom shared one thing that set them apart from most of the rest of humanity: they were fascinated by every aspect of the Builders.

  Bloom turned and began to move toward the vortex. It dwarfed him to insignificance. Darya could not take her eyes away as the tiny figure headed for the dark swirl of its center. He seemed to hover for one moment, right at the edge of the maelstrom. One arm waved a farewell; she was sure it was to her. In her mind she saw the driven little boy again, determined to be Number One. And then, without warning, the vortex took him.

  Where was Quintus Bloom now? Somewhere far in the future, a million years up the stream of time, looking back on today as an event so distant that it merged into human history with cave dwellings or the first flight into space. Or dispersed to component atoms by the shearing forces of a vortex meant to remove from the spiral arm every evidence of the artifact. Or, as Darya preferred to believe, removed to another plane of existence entirely, where the Builders could examine at their leisure whatever their collecting jar of Labyrinth had brought from the final hours of artifact operation.

  There would be a time to ponder those questions. But it was not now. E.C. Tally was pulling urgently at her arm. The remaining contents of Labyrinth were streaming toward the vortex, moving under the influence of that invisible tide. The outer wall was just ahead. The others had already passed through and were heading for the Salvation.

  Darya felt no more than a slight ripple through her body as she met the wall. It was all that remained of the structure that had once seemed so indestructible and impenetrable. Would the ships themselves keep a permanent form, long enough to be useful? She hurried after E.C. Tally. The hatches of Salvation were open; the others were already on board. Louis Nenda reached out as she approached, swung Darya effortlessly inside, and slammed the hatch closed with one sweep of a brawny arm. Hans Rebka was in the pilot’s seat, reviewing the unfamiliar controls. He turned to glance over his shoulder at the lock, and saw that Darya had at last arrived. The worried expression left his face and he returned his attention to the power sequence. Five more seconds, and the ship’s engines came to life.

  Not before time. Labyrinth itself was going. Salvation’s screens showed it changing shape, elongating, stretching toward the mouth of the vortex. The walls had begun to glow with internal light, reacting to the stresses on them. The structure was rotating madly, faster and faster.

  “Hold on.” Rebka was engaging the drive. “This could get rough.”

  The force from the vortex was reaching out to the ship. As it engulfed Labyrinth it was still growing. Darya felt a painful new force on her body, adding to the thrust of Salvation’s own drive.

  Combined accelerations increased. A moment stretched on and on. Labyrinth was rolling — twisting — writhing. It distorted until it was a long, thin spiral, pulling out like a strand of melted glass. Beyond it, the vortex pulsed with energy. Bloated and quivering, it was snatching at the ship at the same time as it consumed Labyrinth. The shear forces on Darya’s body strengthened, shifted, changed direction.

  And then, in an instant, the pain vanished. Salvation went bounding forward, free, into open space. Behind it the vortex began to dwindle and die. Stars were visible, shining dimly through it. Shining brighter. Shining bright. Shining clear. Suddenly there was nothing but space between the stars and the racing ship.

  “Now comes the real test.” Rebka had opened his helmet and was taking deep breaths of ship’s air. He knew how nervous he had been, even if no one else did. “But what the devil is this?”

  He was querying the ship’s data base for instructions to take it superluminal, and an unrequested message had appeared on the display.

  Whoever you are, you can have this one to keep. Me and Chinadoll have decided to try something different. She tells me that her name, Pas-farda, means the day-after-tomorrow in the old Earth Persian language, and that’s where we’re going. We hope. May the Great Galactic Trade Wind be always at your back.

  —Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

  “Two old mysteries explained — after a fashion.” Hans was racing through the superluminal protocol. “You might want to pray on this one, Darya. I’m going to take us superluminal and hope I can hit a Bose point. If it works, we’ll be on the way home.”

  Darya leaned back and closed her eyes. And if it doesn
’t? Suppose the Bose Network has gone, too?

  It had to work. It would be just too ironic to go through all this, only to discover that you were restricted to subluminal travel and were going to spend the rest of your life in open space, or on Jerome’s World.

  If they did make it home safely, though, Darya swore to return to Jerome’s World. She would personally make sure that a statue was erected there, in honor of the planet’s most famous scientist. Quintus Bloom had certainly earned it — even if future generations might not quite know for what.

  But they would know for what. It was Darya’s responsibility to make sure that they did. She must write the whole history of the Builders, from the discovery of the first artifact, Cocoon, to the vanishing of the last one, Labyrinth, along with its enigmatic displays and their implied warning. She would present every theory that had ever been proposed concerning the nature of the Builders — including her own ideas, and certainly Quintus Bloom’s. She would document what the Builders, wherever they might be now, had left behind as their heritage to the rest of the universe.

  And if, a thousand years or five thousand years in the future, people thought of that heritage as no more than a work of epic fiction, that would be acceptable. Myths and legends endure when bare facts are forgotten. Think of Homer, his works remembered when no one today knew the names of any king or queen of the times. King Canute tried to hold back the tide, but who recalled who ruled before him, or after him?

  The legend of the Builders.

  Darya smiled to herself, as the cabin air glowed blue. Salvation was going superluminal.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The atmosphere on board the Salvation was somewhere between numbed satisfaction and manic glee. Hans Rebka, sitting in the pilot’s chair, knew the cause. Nothing in life produces a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death. Their lives had been threatened in the days before Labyrinth vanished, to the point where Rebka would have taken no odds on survival. Yet here they were, alive and on the way home (except for Quintus Bloom, whose present location was anyone’s guess but no one’s worry).