That, she supposed, was the good news: Quintus Bloom’s home could have been on the other side of the planet, rather than a mere couple of thousand kilometers away. The bad news was that the aircraft stopped at half-a-dozen places on the way.
The plane that Darya boarded was big enough to carry twelve people. The flight had exactly two passengers, Darya and an obese man who overflowed his seat. She studied his thick neck and close-shaved head from behind as the craft prepared for takeoff. He looked a good candidate for a research center. He was certainly too fat for any form of manual work.
Sitting next to him was not a possibility. After take-off Darya went forward, to the seat in front of him. She turned to peer over the seat back. Talking to strangers was something that she hated — she knew how much she resented the invasion of her own thinking space by other people — but she needed information.
“Excuse me. Do you happen to be going to the Marglom Center?”
The fat man apparently shared Darya’s view of gratuitous interruptions from strangers. He glanced up and scowled at her.
“I’m going there myself,” Darya went on, “and I’m hoping to visit a man named Quintus Bloom. I wondered if you know him.”
The scowl was replaced by the smile of a man pleased to deliver bad news. “I know him. But you won’t find him. He’s away from the Center. In fact, he’s off-world.” He pushed the knife a little deeper. “He’s in a different stellar system, giving some invited talks.”
“That’s a shame. I’ve seen some of his work, and I think it’s brilliant.”
Darya waited. The man said nothing, and turned his eyes down.
“I wonder if there’s anyone else,” Darya continued. “Anyone at the Center who could discuss his work with me. Is there?”
He sighed in irritation. “Quintus Bloom is the most famous person at the Center. Almost anyone there can discuss his work with you, from the Director on down. If they choose to. Which I do not.”
“The Director?”
“Kleema Netch. And now, if you don’t mind…” He turned his eyes determinedly away from her.
“Sorry that I interrupted your work.”
The man grunted. Darya went back to her seat. It was progress, of a sort. Bloom was famous, and his work was well-regarded. It surely must include research performed before the discovery of Labyrinth, and before his new theory about the Builders.
The flight would take another two hours, and her companion was likely to explode if she tried more conversation. Darya’s thoughts went back to her one and only discussion with Quintus Bloom. She had not liked what he had to say, but she could not dismiss it. She did believe, as he had asserted, that there had been recent and unprecedented changes in the artifacts of the spiral arm. But nothing in her own theories could explain the appearance of the new artifact, Labyrinth. Worst of all, Bloom’s discoveries on Labyrinth seemed to demolish the idea that the Builders had left the spiral arm millions of years ago, and never returned. How, at a time when humans were no more than primitive hominids, could the Builders make a precise prediction of the way in which humanity would achieve space travel and move out to explore the spiral arm?
Very well. Suppose that the Builders had not left. Suppose that they were still around in the spiral arm, in a form or a place that humans and the other clade members were unable to contact or even to perceive. Bloom had also provided, with his evidence from Labyrinth, an apparently impossible obstacle for that idea. He had shown future development patterns for the spiral arm, and asked the question: How could the Builders, today, know the pattern of expansion through the spiral arm for tens of thousands of years into the future? Unless, as Bloom insisted, the Builders were time-traveling humans from the future, placing the artifacts back in their own past.
Darya rejected that explanation as contrary to logic. It was also contrary to her own instincts about the Builders. They were, in every sense that Darya could describe, too alien to be humans, even future humans. They were far more alien than Cecropians, or Hymenopts, or Ditrons, or Lo’tfians, or even Zardalu. They had probably developed in an environment where no human or other clade could survive. Their relationship to space, and even more to time, was mystifying.
So time-traveling humans were not the answer. But then she could not escape the challenge laid down by Quintus Bloom. She had to conceive of a race of beings who could somehow know what humans and the other clades would be doing a thousand or ten thousand years from now. It was not a matter of looking at the past, and extrapolating it. Humans could do that easily enough, but all such extrapolations failed horribly after a few hundred years. The Builders didn’t just predict the future of the spiral arm, as humans might. They could somehow see the future, as clearly as Darya could look forward out of the aircraft window and see an approaching line of snow-capped hills. She could not make out detail there, as she would when she was closer; perhaps the Builders also could not distinguish long-term future detail, but they perceived the overall picture of the spiral arm’s future, as Darya could see the large-scale sweep of the landscape beyond her.
The hills were approaching. Darya could indeed see detail now, including a sizeable town standing amid the snow. The aircraft was descending, heading for a clearing a mile or two to the west of the town.
Darya watched as more and more detail became visible in the scene ahead. She could see buildings, and a line of stunted trees.
To see in time, as she saw in space? Faint in the distant future, with only the largest features visible. Then the near future would be clearer, with more visible specifics.
It felt right. The persistent little voice deep inside her insisted that it was right. In some incomprehensible way, Darya sensed that she had penetrated one level deeper into the mystery of the Builders.
Darya didn’t like to lie. Sometimes, though, it made things so much easier.
“From Sentinel Gate, yes, and doing a feature article on Quintus Bloom. Naturally, I want to meet people who know him well, and understand his work.”
Darya smiled deferentially. Kleema Netch leaned back in her reinforced chair and nodded. The director of the Marglom Center was huge, enough to make Darya revise her opinion of the man on the plane. Compared to Kleema, her traveling companion had been a mere shadow. Almost everyone she had met so far was fat. Maybe there was something in the diet on Jerome’s World? Anyway, once it became clear to Darya that her own name meant less than nothing to Kleema Netch (so much for fame!) the lie had come easily.
“Do not quote me to the other staff members.” Kleema cushioned her folded hands on her great belly. She spoke in an absolute monotone, never varying her voice in pitch or inflection. “But Quintus is by far our most brilliant star and the Marglom Center is fortunate to have him. You know him, I assume, for his work on Labyrinth. If you want to take a look at that artifact, you can visit the observatory while you are here.”
“You mean Labyrinth is visible — from the surface of Jerome’s World?”
“Of course I mean that. Otherwise, how could I offer to show it to you? Our telescope is not the largest on the planet, but I think it is fair to say that in terms of its daily use and its research value for unit investment…”
Darya blanked out. If Labyrinth were easily visible from the surface, it must be even more visible from space. Which meant that it would have been discovered long, long ago, had it always been there. So at least one of Quintus Bloom’s assertions must be true.
“ — in many different fields.” Kleema Netch was grinding on, with what sounded like a much-rehearsed statement. Darya forced her attention back to the speaker. “I will summarize only three of them to you, then I suggest that I introduce you to some of Quintus’s fellow workers. They will provide you with the details that you need for your article. First, in his early years at the center, Quintus Bloom pioneered the idea that Jerome’s World had supported an indigenous population of possibly intelligent beings, who did not survive the arrival of humans on the planet. That is today
a subject of great controversy, but Quintus did not remain involved. His own interests had moved on, to the mapping of all major orbiting bodies in the Tetragamma system; here, too, he offered a new and startling hypothesis, which in the long history of Jerome’s World, over the many centuries of colonization…”
Kleema Netch was just hitting her droning stride. Darya tightened her jaw muscles and reminded herself that she had come here voluntarily. She had no one but herself to blame.
By late afternoon, Darya sat alone and exhausted in the central library of the Marglom Center. In the past seven hours she had met with twenty-three members of the research staff. Everyone had spoken in glowing terms of Quintus Bloom’s brilliance, his erudition, his quickness of mind; they accepted everything that he said, wrote, or thought.
So. He was Mister Wonderful. It was time to return to the Myosotis, and continue the journey to Labyrinth.
There was just one problem. Everyone that Darya had met at the center had also been so mediocre (Darya chose the most charitable word she could think of), it would not take much to impress them. Or, if it came to that, to snow them completely.
Faced with a maze of suspect opinion, Darya did what came to her as second nature. She went to her usual sources: the library banks. Words could lie, or mislead, as easily as people. But statistical records of background and achievement were hard to fake.
She called up Bloom’s biography, along with his list of publications. It was impressive. He had started research work at a young age, and had produced papers prolifically ever since. All his evaluations were in the file, and every one of them referred to him in the most glowing terms. He had advanced within the Marglom Center at the maximum possible pace.
Darya went back to the very beginning of the record. Jerome’s World employed an early education system in which human teachers formed an integral part of the teaching process. Quintus Bloom had been born in the small town of Fogline, lying halfway on a direct line between the Marglom Center and the spaceport. His parents had been killed in an industrial accident when he was five years old, and he had been raised by his grandparents. He had attended elementary school in that same town. The name of his teacher appeared in the record, but there were no detailed reports. All his grandparents were now dead.
If the town had been in any other direction, Darya would not have bothered. Her decision to stop at Fogline on the way back to the Myosotis was hardly more than pure impulse.
Amazingly, Bloom’s first teacher had not died, or retired, or disappeared. What he had done, as Darya learned late the next morning, was to leave Fogline and take a position in another small town, Rasmussen, about forty kilometers away.
There was no air service to Rasmussen. Now it was surely time to give up and press on to Labyrinth. Except that no aircraft flew to the spaceport from Fogline for another whole day. By mid-afternoon Darya, her impressions of Jerome’s World as a primitive place confirmed, found herself on a slow shuttle creeping toward Rasmussen. She did not feel optimistic. She would arrive long after school was over, and tracking down Orval Freemont might be difficult.
She peered out of the window. Labyrinth was below the horizon at this hour, but off to the east, according to the Marglom Center library, the artifact would appear as a seventh magnitude object in the evening sky. It would be just too faint to be seen with the naked eye. There was no way that Labyrinth could have remained undiscovered, if it had been there since Jerome’s World was first colonized. Darya sank back in her seat, deep in gloomy introspection. Apparently Quintus Bloom was right again: Labyrinth was a new Builder artifact. The first new artifact in three million years.
It was dusk when Darya emerged from the bus and stood gazing around her. Fogline had been electronics, Rasmussen was genetics. Both towns were at the minimum threshold size for automated factory production, so that although round-the-clock processing was performed, some elements of the work were still done by human effort. There were people on the streets, going to and from work.
When in doubt, ask. Rasmussen couldn’t have that many teachers.
“I’m looking for Orval Freemont. He works at the school.”
The third try produced results. A woman in a sable fur coat over a sheer silk lamé dress with golden thread — maybe not everyone on the street was an industrial worker — pointed to a building whose red roof was just visible along a side street.
“Better hurry,” she said. “Orval lives by himself, and he’s an early-to-bed type.”
The woman seemed sure of herself, but the man who opened the door to Darya’s knock made her wonder if she had the right house. Darya had imagined an elderly, stooped pedant. The cheerful, robust figure who stood in front of her didn’t look any older than Quintus himself.
“Orval Freemont?”
The man smiled. “That’s me.”
Darya went into her speech — a lie came easily, the twenty-fifth time around. Five minutes later she was sitting in the most comfortable chair of the little house, drinking tea and listening to Orval Freemont’s enthusiastic reminiscences of Quintus Bloom.
“My very first class, that was, when I was just a youngster in Fogline and none too sure of myself. Of course, your first class is always special, and you never forget the children in it.” Freemont grinned at Darya, making her wish he had been her first teacher. “But even allowing for that, Quintus Bloom was something special.”
“Special how?”
“I’ve probably taught other children as smart as Quintus, but never, then or since, have I had anyone who wanted so much to be Number One. He wouldn’t have heard of the word ambition, that first day in my class. But he already had it. Did you know, that very day he changed his own name? He came to class as John Jones, but he’d already decided that was too ordinary for what he intended to be. He wanted a special name. He announced that from now on he was Quintus Bloom, and he refused to answer to anything else. And he tried so hard, it was frightening. He’d do anything to be top, even if it meant cheating a little and hoping I wouldn’t notice.” Orval Freemont noticed Darya’s expression. “Don’t be shocked; all children tend to do that. Of course, part of the reason in his case was that he was a bit of an outcast. You know how cruel little kids can be. Quintus had this awful skin condition, big red sores on his face and on his arms and legs, and nothing seemed to clear them up.”
“He has them still.”
“That’s a shame. Nerves, I suspect, and I bet he still picks at them when he thinks nobody’s looking. Whatever the cause, it didn’t make his sores and scabs any less real. The other kids called him Scabby, behind my back. He didn’t say much, poor little lad, just put his head down and worked harder than ever. If you had come to me, even then, and asked me which of my pupils over the years was most likely to succeed, I’d have said Quintus Bloom. He needed it, the others didn’t.”
“Had he any other special talents that you noticed?”
“He sure did. He was the best, clearest writer for his age that I’ve ever met. Even when he got something wrong, I’d sometimes give him a little extra credit just for the way he said it.”
“I don’t suppose you kept anything that he wrote, back from his first years in school?”
Orval Freemont shook his head. “Wish I had. It didn’t occur to me that Quintus would become so famous, or maybe I would have. But you know how it is; the little kids grow older, and the next class of young ones comes in, and your mind is suddenly all on them. That’s what keeps you young. I remember Quintus, and I always will, but I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about him.”
Darya glanced at her watch and stood up. “I have to get back to Fogline, or I’ll be away another whole day. I really appreciate your time. You know, I’ve dealt a lot with teachers, and I’ve learned to appreciate the good ones. If you wanted to, you could be teaching in a university instead of an elementary school.”
Freemont laughed, took Darya’s cup as she handed it to him, and walked with her to the door. “You mean, if I were w
illing to make the sacrifice, and give up the rewards.” He smiled gently at her bewildered look, “By the time that you reached university age, Ms. Lang, you were already formed as a person. But come to me as a little girl of five or six, and I can have a real say in what you’ll become. That’s my reward. That’s why I say I have the best job in the universe.”
Darya paused on the threshold. “Do you think you did that with Quintus Bloom — shaped him?”
Orval Freemont looked thoughtful, more than he had at any point in their whole meeting. “I’d like to think so. But, you know, I suspect that Quintus was formed long before I ever had a chance to work with him. That drive, that urge to be first and to succeed — I don’t know where and when it came, but by the time I met him it was already there.” He took Darya’s hand, and held it for a long time. “I hope you’ll write something nice about Quintus. Poor little devil, he deserves his success.”
Darya hurried away, through the cold night streets of Rasmussen. She had just a few minutes to make the last shuttle. As she slipped and skated on the thin coat of ice that covered the sidewalks, she tried to measure the value of her trip to Fogline and Rasmussen. She knew Quintus Bloom much better now, that was certain. Thanks to Orval Freemont she had confirmed his strengths, and learned a little of his weaknesses.
As Darya arrived at the terminal, just in time, she realized that her visit to Jerome’s World had given her something else, something she might have been happier not to have. She had seen Bloom through Orval Freemont’s eyes: not as the self-confident and arrogant adult, but as a driven child, a small, lonely, and sad little boy.
Maybe the visit to Orval Freemont had been a big mistake. From now on, no matter how obnoxious he was, Darya would find it harder to hate Quintus Bloom.
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