Convergence hu-4

by Charles Sheffield

  “That is a procedure fully consistent with the scientific method.”

  “Let’s try to keep it that way. First, Bloom’s image sequence. It was consistent with our past, and what we know of the past of the other clades. It showed a future with all clades present, and it showed a spiral arm full of colonized worlds. Now for a question: Was that the only image sequence that Bloom found?”

  “We lack the data to provide an answer.” Kallik stared all around her with her rings of eyes. “However, we do know that Quintus Bloom came to a hexagonal chamber like this one, even if it was in a different interior.”

  “Which is very probable. But you mean, he must have wondered what was on the other five walls, wherever he was? I agree. He seems a thorough research worker. He must have examined all six walls. But now let’s talk about what we found. Three different histories of spiral arm colonization. The past in two of them was plausible, but in every case the far future was different. Agreed?”

  “Certainly. Different from each other, and also different from what Quintus Bloom reported.”

  “Good. Now I’ve got my own ideas, so I don’t want to lead you on this. What do you see as the single biggest difference between what Bloom reported, and what we have been finding?”

  Kallik’s exoskeleton did not permit her to frown, but her perplexity showed in the delay before she responded. “With respect, I see two major differences.”

  That remark was not one that Darya had been expecting. “Two differences?”

  “Yes indeed. First, we find that the spiral arm in the far future is empty. There are no populated and colonized worlds. Quintus Bloom found the opposite, an arm where some clade occupied every world.”

  “That’s the difference that hit me. So what’s the other one?”

  “The image sequence displayed by Quintus Bloom showed Builder artifacts. The sequences that we have seen so far offer no evidence of such artifacts. In fact, they show no sign whatsoever of the existence of the Builders, now or in the past. But this” — Kallik waved a jointed forelimb around her — “is certainly a Builder artifact. It is proof that the Builders, whether or not they exist today, certainly existed at one time.” Kallik stared unhappily at Darya. “With respect, Professor Lang. It appears to me that our very presence here, in an artifact, proves that Quintus Bloom’s claim must be correct. Only a spiral arm containing artifacts can be the real spiral arm.”

  During her scientific career, Darya had developed immense respect for experimental data. One little fact was enough to destroy any theory ever constructed, no matter how beautiful and appealing it might seem.

  Now she was facing one ugly and very big fact: Builder artifacts appeared in Bloom’s images, as Kallik had pointed out, but not in the ones that they had seen. There was no way of arguing around that, no way of dismissing it as irrelevant or unimportant.

  The smart action at this point was also the simple one: accept that Quintus Bloom’s images represented reality, while the new ones, whatever they might be, did not. With that full acceptance, Darya would at last be able to relax and get some sleep.

  She might have to do that — but not quite yet. One of her ancestors must have passed along to her a good slug of stubbornness. She was almost ready to quit, but first she had to see the other three image sequences.

  Kallik, at her direction, patiently prepared to run them. During the setup period, Darya’s tired brain took off on a new line of thought.

  Labyrinth was a new artifact. On that, she and Quintus Bloom agreed one hundred percent. Not only did it look new, with none of the long-deserted appearance of every other artifact that Darya had ever encountered, it was also too close to the populated planet of Jerome’s World to have escaped detection through thousands of years of exploration and observation.

  There was more. Not only was Labyrinth new, it was not in any way hidden. Whoever built it, intended it to be found. Darya felt sure of that, although her thinking was now far indeed from the testable, provable world of hard evidence.

  Don’t stop yet. If Labyrinth were found, it would also be explored. The designers of Labyrinth expected that at some time, an intelligent being — human or alien — would reach this very chamber. Someone would stand here, as Darya was standing, and stare at the milky, streaky walls. They would puzzle over their meaning and significance. Once you accepted that such discovery and exploration were inevitable, then the idea that the sequences Darya and Kallik had seen so far were no more than Builder fantasies became ridiculous. The three sets of images — the spiral arm past, present, and future — were solid, important data, as real and meaningful as what Bloom had discovered. Whoever found the inner chamber of Labyrinth was supposed to deduce what it all meant.

  And then do what?

  That was the point where Darya’s thinking stuck. She was supposed to stand just where she was, and conclude — what? It was like some sort of super-intelligence test, but one that she was failing.

  She sighed, and came back to reality. Kallik had been ready long ago, patiently waiting.

  “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 shoulder 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. Th
ey 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.