"Did you get it?" asked the professor.
"No," he said. He tried to say more, but the words wouldn't come. Finally he just shook his head. "No, I failed."
"Failed at what?" asked Rue.
"It doesn't matter." He drifted down slightly apart from the others. Rue cast him a puzzled look, but didn't say anything more.
Herat also looked over. "Let's turn in," he suggested. "Tomorrow will probably be a long day."
They retreated to the interior of the tent; Barendts hung by the door, obviously not intending to sleep. Michael curled up and tried to dispel the sensation of falling. He could hear Rue breathing a few centimeters away.
For some reason, he thought about Rue's tale of the Supreme Meme. What would happen if he applied that little test to his beliefs? Would they come up short? Probably. Probably.
How would you have to feel? The words seemed to bounce around inside his skull, like a catchy advertising jingle. How would you have to feel, to want it all again?
17
THEY ENTERED ONE of the newly opened chambers after breakfast and then to Rue's intense frustration, Herat called a halt to proceedings.
The scientists had analyzed the composition of the «mudballs» that had appeared in the second set of chambers. Most were toxic in one way or another: saturated with cadmium, sulphur or PAHs. Rue had wanted them to flip the door switch in the chamber full of PAH and tholin mud; it was the nearest thing to the material that made up Allemagne's trapped comet. Herat had refused and so they had gone into a cylinder whose mudball was full of complex hydrocarbons, hydro-cyanides and other nasty volatile chemicals that Herat thought most closely resembled the constituents of the early Earth environment.
"It's asking about us, starting with the most elementary questions, literally," he said. "This is what we're made of. We say yes here."
Once again the stoic marine Barendts had gone into the chamber and tripped the switch inside. Again the other open doors had closed and a new configuration gaped seconds later.
The problem was, what was behind these doors was so unnerving that even the normally adventurous Herat was stopped dead by it.
"Looks like… meat," observed Crisler as they clustered around one of the doorways. A large red quivering sphere hung several meters below them. It was joined to the walls of its chamber by veinlike threads. Worst, Rue could smell it, a reek like an open wound.
"We need specimens," muttered Herat. "Is this their kind of life or…"
"Or what?" asked Rue. "What else would it be?"
He just shook his head. The other open chambers contained even more bizarre things; one of them looked like a kind of leafless bush that seemed to hum with electricity. Another was an immense solid sphere, apparently of cuticle.
"You know what really annoys me?" Herat asked no one in particular. "It's that." He pointed at the innermost wall of one of the new chambers. Where there had been a single switch next to the inner airlock of the previous chambers, in this and the other new chambers, there were two switches.
"Before we just had 'yes, " he said. "Now what do we have? Yes or no?"
"Let's find out," she said.
He shook his head. "Not until we know more."
"How are we going to know more if we don't try something?"
The professor looked down his nose at her. "We analyze the data we've collected so far, of course."
"Data?" She laughed. "What data?"
He ignored her. She appealed to Mike, who was wrinkling his nose at the smell of the chamber. "We have to continue. We have to know how this place works!"
"In time," he said.
"We don't have time!" Finally she had their attention. "Crisler, tell them about the cracked stacks."
The admiral winced. "Our life-support situation's a bit more dire than we thought," he admitted. "Nothing to panic about. But we're going to go critical in just a few days unless we cut down the awake personnel again."
"Cut down?" Mike cable-walked his way over to the admiral. "To what?"
"Well, a full complement of ten seems likely," said Crisler. The marines received this news with no reaction, but the scientists were visibly dismayed.
"We can't work under these—" and "Why didn't you tell us?" were two of the themes she extracted from the babble of scholarly voices. Crisler crossed his arms and waited; she realized with an uneasy start that she was doing the same thing.
"This could be our only chance," Rue said when the talk had died down a bit. "If we don't figure this place out in the next day or two, we're all going to have to go back in storage and it'll be too late."
Herat glowered into the middle distance. "A bad break," he admitted. "The problem remains that this… interface… with the Lasa system only seems to work in one direction. If we go down the wrong alley, we can't turn around and start over. Like it or not, this place expects us to know what we're doing. And we don't."
"So we do nothing?"
"No," he said with exaggerated patience. "We analyze our data. Like I said."
"Damn it!" She jumped off the inner sphere and bounced herself off the outer hull, then over the horizon— just like she used to do in the Gallery back home.
She heard them all talking again, somebody laughed, doubtless at her antics. Rue didn't care. She found a doorway on the opposite side of the interhull and perched on its lip, looking inward. Slowly rotating inside was something like a big ball of bark. It wasn't at all attractive, but certainly wasn't threatening.
Eventually they were going to have to choose a switch next to one of these live things. It might take Herat days to analyze this stuff; the problem was nobody could tell how many more close/open sequences like this there might be before the habitat got to where ever it was going. Or had answers to whatever questions it was asking.
It didn't help that she couldn't decide which one was best either. The most tantalizing was a green thing like a giant cabbage; it smelled lovely. But were the Lasa asking if this was what she liked to eat, or were they asking if this was what she was made of? There seemed no way to know.
After a time, solitude and reflection calmed her down. She still had nothing to say to anyone, though, so she hung out by the chambers on this side of the sphere, speculating. About an hour after she'd left the main party the little mesobot scooted around the horizon and began nosing around the open airlocks.
She watched as it glided up to her and stopped, a meter away. "Hi. How are you?" it asked in Mike Bequith's voice.
She laughed. "I'm fine. Sorry about the display back there. Your boss just knows how to push my buttons, that's all."
"It's not just that, is it?" asked Mike. Somehow he made the mesobot tilt itself in a quizzical gesture. "The success of your own mission is riding on what we find here."
"Well, there is that." She crossed her arms. "The professor doesn't see that."
"He sees more than you might think."
"Whatever. Have you found out anything more about these things?" She gestured at the open hatch next to her.
"Yeah. They really are alive— and the DNA is derived from human DNA. Somehow we got sampled after arriving here and this place," the mesobot tilted toward the inner sphere, "has been making variations on the theme of human biology ever since. All these life-forms share the basic organic composition of humans, but put together in different ways. The one you're sitting next to is probably the one we'd consider most edible; a couple of the others are really off-putting, like that bone thing four hatches over from you."
"So what next?"
"Herat thinks these things are a gold mine. He wants to study them all."
"Damn him! Can't you make him see reason?"
"He thinks if we select one of these chambers, the others will close and he'll lose his chance to examine them."
"Yeah? So?"
"Rue, you have to face the possibility that this whole process isn't going to lead us to the information you need."
Rue reached out and grabbed the mesobot. It
let out a surprised beep. She whirled her arm and flung it away in the general direction of the horizon.
"Hey…" Mike's voice faded away as the bot receded. She watched it stop itself just short of the outer sphere's skin, then jet away indignantly.
Rue caught herself on the edge of the hatch and settled again. Mike might well be right that exploring these hatches wouldn't get her anywhere; but that was no excuse for not trying.
* * *
IT WAS OBVIOUSLY prudent to leave Rue alone when she was in this kind of mood. Michael returned the mesobot to its inspection duty, opening more and more inscape windows around himself until he was almost boxed in by them. The other scientists crowded around, starting their own analyses and soon the whole space near the main airlock was full of windows.
It was good to lose himself in work. Michael had awoken from their rest period feeling the accustomed lightness of freefall and another lightness he hadn't felt in years. He knew a part of his life was over, had ended yesterday when he failed to summon the kami of the Lasa. For months, he had agonized over this coming loss, which he could foresee but not divert. Now that it had happened, he felt… nothing. At least, no despair. Just a kind of expectancy. As he worked now, he turned that feeling over in the back of his mind, trying to figure out what it meant.
The kami had been his anchor to a meaning in life. He'd thought he would be lost without them— and he was; it was just that being lost didn't seem to mean so much all of a sudden.
There was more to it… but understanding eluded him, for now.
Crisler drifted into the constellation, eyeing the microscopic views and spectral analyses with some irony. "In your element, I see, Dr. Bequith."
"Yes, Admiral." Michael kept his tone neutral.
"I've been watching you," said Crisler. "I'm aware that you've been doing a good job with this investigation. I just wanted you to know that this information is going into my report. If it should turn out that you are not the saboteur, you'll be receiving the highest commendation for your work here."
Michael appraised the admiral; for once Crisler wasn't showing his usual hail-fellow-well-met face. He looked serious and sincere. Michael had to restrain himself from punching the man in the face.
"Thank you, Admiral," said Michael as cooly as he could. "I hope you realize that I took asylum on Rue Cassels's ship so that I would be able to continue my work unhampered by… politics."
"I reserve my judgment on that. Carry on." Crisler glided through some windows and vanished behind them.
Well, I wonder what that was all about? Michael returned to work, but his halfhearted concentration was quite broken now.
What an unbelievably clumsy attempt to be chummy! Crisler's little pep-talk had doubtless been meant to be reassuring, but to Michael it just seemed forced. How could he think that Michael would ever trust him? Which reminded him of how Rue mistrusted Crisler; that, in turn, brought his mind back to Rue and her present dilemma. Would she end up at this man's mercy, if she was unable to find a way to control the Envy?
He needed a bathroom break. Michael left the open windows where they were and headed for the cylindrical, man-sized portapot they'd set up last night. He hated performing bodily functions in freefall, so tended to wait until the last minute. As usual his need was fairly urgent by the time he got to the can.
As he was buckling up his jumpsuit again, something tumbled out of one of the pockets. It was the little camera he'd borrowed from Blair and used to photograph the outside of this habitat. The pictures were still in the camera— presumably useless since they appeared to show nothing new.
The camera had its own little preview screen. On a whim, he turned it on and brought up the first photo.
There was the black of the Lasa sphere and the writing…
The writing was different.
Michael gaped at the image in astonishment. His mind was a complete blank. He was jerked rudely out of that state when somebody knocked on the door to the can. "Hey, what are you, dying in there?" It was one of the marines.
"Hold on." He hid the camera again, finished zipping up and left the portapot.
A few meters away, the science team was poring over the results from the mesobot. They were all quite absorbed in their work, especially Herat. Even the marines were interested, since some of the inscape pictures showed the squishier parts of the life-forms under analysis.
Michael drifted off to the horizon and settled down with his back to the camp. Then he brought out the camera again and looked at the pictures.
Somehow, the camera had seen something completely different from what he— and the others— had seen as they approached the habitat. Where Michael had seen spidery Lasa writing, the camera had recorded something different, right at the spot where Linda Ophir's annotations suggested a deception in Blair's originals.
There was writing there, all right, but only one of the large paragraphs was Lasa. The other paragraph, Michael recognized as the dense, multilayered and multicolored lines of Chicxulub script.
And now he remembered how, on board the Spirit of Luna, he had been literally unable to see any part of the ship that he was not authorized to visit. Doors had been invisible; stairs had looked like walls, all due to an override on his inscape. What if… Michael called up an inscape search interface and tried to connect to the camera through it. He got no reply. Like most simple mechanisms manufactured in the halo worlds, this camera was not connected to the inscape network.
The only way that he and the others could have had the complete sensory experience of seeing Lasa writing instead of what was really there was if inscape had overridden their senses whenever they looked at the outside of the habitat.
The thought was disturbing. How could he know what was real about this place and what fake? No— everything couldn't be faked, that would place too great a burden on the inscape system. Even on the Spirit of Luna, only key items had been disguised. Nothing so magnificent as this space he was now in could be completely constructed for everyone's senses without some signs that it was unreal. But strategic information could be hidden, essentially in the open, if everything else was left alone.
Nobody could mess with inscape without massive computing power and direct control of the inscape system. Only Crisler had that control. So Crisler knew about the Chicxulub writing. Crisler— and how many of his people?
Michael quickly replaced the camera in his pocket and turned toward the camp.
As he did there was a great splashing sound and the steady light that had been ever-present in the habitat since yesterday, went out.
People started shouting. He could see the luminous inscape windows where the scientists had been working, but of course they cast no real light since they existed only in his visual cortex. After a few seconds the marines had their spotlights operating and began shining them around, casting columns of light that were multiply reflected back from the metal walls.
"Bequith!" Herat flew up just as Michael made it back to the constellation of windows. "The doors. They've all closed!"
He turned. It was true: The dozens of open portals had reverted to being solid black disks.
Something about those disks looked strange, but it must be a trick of the wobbling lights. Michael blinked and looked again.
"Professor…"
"What triggered it? Where's that damned mesobot."
Michael grabbed Herat's arm. "I think you'd better look at this, sir."
Herat looked where he pointed. "What, I… oh. Oh!"
The black airlock disks on the inner sphere were growing. Where before each had been separated from its neighbors by a good four meters, now the distance had shrunk to three. And the disks were continuing to grow, in liquid tendrils like a stain spreading through fabric— or the arms of an amoeba absorbing a meal.
"The magnetic liquid's overflowing— or being redirected," said Herat. "It's going to cover the whole surface…"
As they watched, the white metal of the inner sphere
slowly vanished under an advancing tide of black. After several minutes they were left in a space with the same dimensions as before, but the beams from their lights were now absorbed by what had come to look like a vast drop of black oil. The outer hull of the habitat was still there, still mirror-bright, but what it mirrored was as dark as a starless sky.
"Is it growing? I think it's growing," somebody said.
"Everyone fall back to the main lock," ordered Crisler. "Now!"
With a sinking feeling, Michael realized what must have happened. He counted heads, then checked the view from the mesobot just to be sure.
Then he said, with some hesitation, "has anybody seen Rue?"
* * *
THE BIG QUESTION had been, was she acting from impulsive anger like she had when she ran away to the plow sail— or was Rue right when she thought that they should open the next chamber now? She perched outside the entrance to the green ball for a long time, tugging back and forth at the issue.
She was still a bit ashamed of how she'd acted after the sabotage. Rue couldn't decide whether she'd been right about Crisler; logic and, well, everybody else said she had overreacted. He hadn't been about to lock her up with her crew, that was just a paranoid fantasy.
But it wasn't paranoia now that made her think they were at the limit of what they could do. The Banshee's life support was continuing to degrade and in a day or so it would all be over. Rue would have to go into that terrible half-sleep stupor along with Max and the others and when she awoke they would be decelerating into the empty Maenad system, from there to return to Chandaka. And Rue would be poor again and there would never be another chance to return to Jentry's Envy, or in all likelihood the halo either.
So Herat's caution be damned. I'm right, she thought as she swung herself into the narrow cylindrical chamber that held the chlorophyll-green cabbage thing.
Edging around the tangle of leaves/vanes, which looked ready to pounce, she found herself at the black disk of the chamber's inner airlock.
There were two switches here. In the earlier chambers there had only been one; logic suggested that they should open the inner airlock door, but when tripped they had made the other outside chambers open and close. Here were two switches— but one of them was right next to the door itself, the other several hand-spans distant. This time, she was sure, she could open the inner door if she wanted.
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