"All right." Darya nodded. "Let's see what we've got in the other three."
At first it seemed nothing but more mystery and disappointment. The fourth sequence showed a very simple progression. The green clade, the one that Darya had never managed to identify, arose far away in the spiral arm. The green tide spread, sun after sun, until the arm was ablaze with green. No other clade ever appeared. At a time not long after the present, the green points of light began to pop out of existence. Finally all were gone, and the spiral arm remained empty to the end of the display. No Zardalu, no humans, no Cecropians. And never a sign of the bright magenta that had marked the Builder artifacts in Bloom's display.
Darya hardly had the heart to ask Kallik to continue. It felt like someone else who nodded, and said. "Let's try the next one."
The sequence began. And Darya moved suddenly, totally, into mental high gear. The display in her suit visor seemed to become twice as bright. Artifacts! Points of vivid magenta were scattered in among the supergiant reference stars.
And now the green clade was appearing, soon followed by the orange of the Zardalu. At last, here came the red of the human clade. Clades grew, met, intermingled, traded off regions among them. Finally the spiral arm was filled. It continued to be filled, thousand after endless thousands of stars. This was Quintus Bloom's display. The only difference was that during his presentation he had focused the attention of the audience on the spread of the human clade. The earlier spread and collapse of the Zardalu, and its subsequent reappearance, had been deliberately ignored.
Why would Bloom have done such a thing?
Darya could answer that: he had ignored what he could not explain. At the time of his presentation he had no idea that the Zardalu were once more in the spiral arm, repopulating on their original clade-world of Genizee. Bloom wanted all his evidence to support his conclusions.
The sixth sequence started, but it no longer contained surprises. It was another "false history" of the spiral arm, where the Zardalu came and went; Cecropians and humans fought for star systems with the green clade, and finally conquered. Yellow then battled ruby-red, and finally won. The spiral arm filled with Cecropians; and, after a short period, began to empty. The yellow points of light blinked out. At last the arm again showed no sign of intelligent occupation. At no time was there any evidence of Builder artifacts.
Darya was sure that Bloom had reconstructed image sequences for all six walls. She had great respect for his intelligence and his thoroughness as an investigator. But having examined all of them, he had selected just one.
And who could blame him? Only one contained Builder artifacts, which certainly in the real world were scattered through the spiral arm. It was reasonable to reject the other five, as nothing more than a strange invention for an unknown purpose.
Reasonable, but Darya could not do it. Her inner voice told her that the other five histories of the spiral arm were all equally relevant. Their existence, and the way in which the two-dimensional images had been stored in three dimensions, provided a message for any visitor to Labyrinth. Understand the histories and the images, and you would understand a lot about the Builders. Or—invert the process, as before—if you fathomed the nature of the Builders, then the existence of multiple histories and the reason that the scenes were stored in such odd fashion would be explained.
It was a crucial moment, one that needed all her concentration. Instead, to her huge annoyance Darya found her thoughts drifting off. She could not rid her mind of Quintus Bloom's face, with its half-disguised red sores, and his confident and persuasive voice as he said to his audience, "If you answer that the Builders had that magical power to predict the far future, then you assign to them talents that strain my belief past bearing."
But it was not magical power. Not at all. It was a different physical nature, one which changed the definition of prediction. The idea came into her head again. A species able to see the future. Not predict, she thought dreamily, as Bloom would have it, but see.
The fact that she was falling asleep no longer upset her. She knew the way her mind worked. When it had a problem, sleep was impossible. She could not rest until the problem was solved.
So now . . .
Her thoughts as she faded into sleep carried a perverse comfort. She could stay awake no longer, therefore something deep inside her subconscious said that all necessary data were now in place. The problems of the Builders and of Labyrinth were solved.
Everything clarified to a pleasant simplicity. When she awoke, she would persuade her subconscious to behave honorably, and reveal to her its solution. Then they would find J'merlia, and return to the ship.
And then, at last, they could go home.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Two days in the hiatus were disturbing, but not really dangerous. In a well-equipped ship all you had to do was sit tight, endure darkness and silence, and wait to emerge. Sometime. Somewhere.
The rest of the Anfract offered no such assurance. The difference between a hiatus and the Anfract main body was something that Louis Nenda did not define in words, but had he done so, "passive danger" and "active danger" would have served well enough to separate the two of them.
Active danger, unfortunately, was on the menu for today.
Two hours after they emerged from the final night-long hiatus, Louis was sitting pale, red-eyed, and exhausted at the controls of the Gravitas. He would much rather have been sleeping, but sleep had to wait. They were in more trouble. Entry into the Torvil Anfract was always a risky business, but the Anfract had once possessed at least a few constant features that an explorer could rely on.
Not any more. In the past there had been a consistent thirty-seven lobes. Now that number had decreased to eleven. The internal geometry of the place used to be fixed. It had recently changed—and was still changing. Boundaries between the lobes slid one way and another, shifting, merging, vanishing. The regions of macroscopic Planck scale had become unpredictable.
All of which told Nenda that his old flight plan could be thrown out of the airlock. He would have to fly the Anfract using a combination of experience and good luck. Judging from the past year, he was long on the first but rather short on the second.
He concentrated his attention on the feature directly ahead of the Gravitas. In a region of space-time not noted for its welcome to approaching ships, the Maw was nobody's favorite. Explorers with a taste for metaphor described it as a hungry, merciless mouth, waiting deep within the Anfract to crush and swallow any ship that mistimed the passage through. Nenda, after his last night's experience, favored a rather different description, but he had no illusions about the danger they were in. The Maw showed ahead as a grim, black cavity in space. There was no point in getting Quintus Bloom or Glenna Omar agitated, but that total blackness meant something to Louis: every light cone pointed inward. The ship was already past the point of no return. They were moving at maximum subluminal speed, and they would go rushing into the Maw no matter what they did.
If they passed through successfully, on the other side they ought to find a dwarf star that burned with an odd, marigold light. Around that star orbited Genizee, the home world of the Zardalu. And around Genizee . . . Darya?
Louis wondered. It had all sounded supremely logical back on Sentinel Gate. Darya Lang had insisted that the Torvil Anfract was an artifact, but no one had believed her. Her reputation was at stake. She would have come here, seeking proof. Bloom was sure of that, and Louis had been persuaded.
Now, he had his doubts. Darya, like Louis, knew only one way into the Anfract. The Gravitas was a lot faster than Darya's ship, the Myosotis. So why had the ship trackers on the Gravitas seen no sign of Darya and her ship? It was possible that she was still ahead of them, on the other side of the Maw. But it was just as possible that the Maw had swallowed her—as in a couple of minutes it might eat the Gravitas. The Maw filled half the sky ahead, wide and gaping and infinitely menacing.
Louis felt a gentle touch on his shoul
der and jumped a foot.
"Jeets!" He turned his head. "I wish you wouldn't creep around like that. You might at least have told me you were coming."
"My apologies." Atvar H'sial's pheromonal response lacked any shred of sincerity. No Cecropian ever felt apologetic about anything. "I did not wish to disturb you at what appeared to be a crucial moment."
"Disturb away. It won't make any difference what I do for the next two minutes. We're going through that Maw, like it or not. I can't stop us."
"Then this is a good time for discussion." Atvar H'sial settled down next to Louis. "With Genizee ahead, it is time to make our detailed plans. How do we take one adult Zardalu, and avoid taking a hundred—or being taken by them? I should point out that we would have had more privacy for this meeting earlier, within the hiatus. But you were unavailable."
"You might say that. And speakin' about what went on in the hiatus . . ." Louis had his eye on the circular perimeter of the Maw. A pale violet ring had formed there. It was growing inward, a closing iris, so that the black center of the Maw was steadily shrinking. They had to pass through that central tunnel. The violet region would disintegrate ship and crew. "I'll talk plans, but first I got a question for you. I know you've been chatting with Glenna Omar through that terminal hook-up you made. What did you tell her about Darya Lang?"
There was a pause in the flow of pheromones—too long, in Louis's opinion.
"About me and Darya Lang," he added.
"It is possible that I suggested your interest in Professor Lang might be excessive. What makes you ask?"
"Something Glenna said when we were in the hiatus."
"To you?"
"More to herself. She laughed, and she said, 'I'd like to see Darya Lang do that.' "
"But what was she doing at the time?"
"Oh, nothing special. Nothing you'd be interested in." Louis cursed himself for starting this topic of conversation. "Hold tight, At. We're almost there, but this is going to be a close thing."
The Maw filled the sky. The outer annulus had spread rapidly inward. It was more like an eye ahead of the ship now, a violet iris with at its center a tiny contracted pinpoint of black pupil. The Gravitas had to pass into—and through—that narrow central tunnel before the opening closed completely.
Nenda tried to judge dimensions. They ought to clear the opening all right. But how long was the tunnel? If it narrowed and tightened while you were inside it . . .
Louis ignored the symbolism—he was feeling sensitive this morning—and kept his eyes on the displays.
The Gravitas was inside, racing along a narrow cylinder of glowing violet. He was staring at the forward screen, where a pinprick of black still showed. The end of the tunnel. Approaching fast—and closing even faster.
The sky ahead turned black. They were almost through. There was a squeal and a dull crump, shivering through the whole ship. At the same moment, half the alarms on the bridge went off simultaneously. The lights failed, as though they had entered some new hiatus. After a split second the emergency power cut in, and Nenda could again see the control board.
He swore.
"Are we through?" Atvar H'sial had heard the curse, since her echolocation picked up all sounds. But she was not able to interpret it.
"Through—with half our ship." Nenda scanned the monitors, assessing the degree of damage. "No, a bit more than half. I guess we count as lucky. But the Maw trimmed off quite a piece of the stern." He began the inventory. "Lost all the aft navigation and communication antenna. Lost the fine-guidance motors. Lost the auxiliary air supply and water supply units. And the worst news: the Bose generators are gone. No more Bose transitions. From this point on, the Gravitas has to travel at crawlspeed."
"I see." There was no hint of alarm in the Cecropian's response, but she understood the implications. "Assuming that we are able to emerge successfully from the Anfract, how far is it to the nearest inhabited planet?"
"Couple of light-years. Mebbe ten years travel time going subluminal."
"An unacceptable option."
"Not an option, though, 'less you got some ideas."
"Problems with the ship are not my province. They are yours. However, I perceive that this is perhaps not the best time to discuss the strategy of Zardalu capture." Atvar H'sial rose and made a stately departure from the bridge.
Nenda did not protest. Anyone who took a Cecropian as a business partner had to accept that race's contemptuous view of all other species. Louis admired outrageous gall in any creature, human or alien. In any case, he suddenly had a thousand things to do. Top priority was an inventory, first of everything that remained on the Gravitas, and then everything that had been lost to the Maw. This ship, like all but the smallest unit construction vessels, had been built with fail-soft design philosophy. Chop it in half, and each piece would still have some residual capability. It would be able to support life, and perhaps to fly. But the details of what was left were going to be crucial.
Mid-ship auxiliary engines would let them move. The Gravitas could make a sluggish planetary landing on anything that had less than a standard surface gravity, and achieve an even more lumbering take-off. Nenda could not advise anyone that they were coming, but he hadn't intended that anyway. The aft bulkheads would have locked automatically when the ship lost its stern. Nenda could not determine without direct inspection what might remain beyond them, but their doors were big enough to serve as an entry for a mature Zardalu.
So what had definitely been lost? Nenda studied the plan of the Gravitas.
The suits, for a start. Unless some happened to be stowed temporarily in the bows, he would be making no space-walks. Superluminal communication equipment was gone—no chance of sending a fast message of distress. Two of the three exit locks were on the lost section. One lock was left, unless you counted the hatches in the stern of the ship as possible improvised access points. What else? Much of the ship's computer equipment. And every cubic meter of cargo space.
Whatever they might find in the Anfract or on Genizee, not much of it could go back to Sentinel Gate aboard the Gravitas. A Zardalu, if they managed to snag one, would have to travel in the general passenger quarters along with the rest of them.
Nenda grinned to himself as he imagined Quintus Bloom's reaction to that. Bloom and Glenna Omar were safe enough, because they were in passenger quarters, up close to the bows of the ship. But the first sight of a live Zardalu ought to wipe that sneer off Bloom's face.
Louis was no less exhausted than ten minutes ago, but he was suddenly on top of the world. They were alive! They had come through the Maw in a closer scrape than anyone in recorded history. They still had a functioning ship. The problem of working them out of the Anfract and all the way back home was the sort of challenge—Atvar H'sial had been quite right—that Louis absolutely thrived on. And just ahead, no more than a few hours travel even at subluminal speeds, the forward screen showed a bright marigold disc.
They were heading for Genizee's sun. For Zardalu. And—just maybe—for Darya Lang.
The thought processes of a Cecropian can never be mapped precisely on to those of a human. Atvar H'sial, if pressed, would have explained that thought was conditioned by language. Human language was coarse, crude, one-dimensional, and incapable of subtle overtones compared with pheromonal speech. How could a poor human possibly be expected to express or to understand the nuances and shades of implication which were so natural to even an infant Cecropian?
The problem was nowhere more acute than in conversations with Glenna Omar.
The raw facts were not in dispute. During the hiatus Louis Nenda and Glenna Omar had spent many hours together, locked away in a single chamber. They had surely occupied themselves in the bizarre human mating ritual.
But had the ritual been successful?
Atvar H'sial struggled with the primitive human tongue, and tried to ask her that question. Success in this case had nothing to do with procreation, the production of another generation of humans
. It was rather an outcome-defined success, wherein two results had to be achieved simultaneously. First, the obsession of Louis Nenda with the human female Darya Lang had to be broken. That was unlikely to occur in a single other mating. Second, therefore, as a prerequisite of the first the willingness of Glenna Omar to continue a close interaction with Louis Nenda had to be established. The interaction must continue until that first outcome was absolutely guaranteed.
Atvar H'sial could have expressed all that, including the subtle interaction between the first and second desired outcomes, in a single, short burst of pheromones. Instead she was obliged to structure her thoughts in cumbersome human sentences—and then, no less a problem, to interpret Glenna Omar's response. Once again, Atvar H'sial mourned the loss of her slave, J'merlia.
It did not help that much of the ship's computer storage, including the on-line dictionaries and thesaurus for human speech so painstakingly developed by Atvar H'sial, had been chewed up in the Maw. What was left as backup was a mangled remnant, and she was not sure how to make use of it. To make matters worse, Glenna herself was languid, yawning, and apparently half asleep. When Atvar H'sial, laden with translation equipment, entered the boudoir, Glenna was consuming a great lump of sticky sweet confectionery. She was smiling to herself, a far-off dreamy smile of satisfaction. The passage through the Maw and the subsequent fate of the ship apparently worried her not at all.
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