Convergence hu-4

by Charles Sheffield

  The sight induced in Darya a strong feeling of irritation, not all directed toward Hans Rebka.

  “We can’t talk now,” she said. “Maybe later.”

  “If there is a later.” Hans took her hand in both of his. “If not, I want to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  “There won’t be a later, unless we stop talking and do something.” But Darya did not pull her hand away. Instead she focused her attention on Quintus Bloom, who alone in the cabin seemed to be on a real energy high.

  “You claim you predicted all this?” She interrupted Bloom’s stream of words to Lissie Treel. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Then you were not paying attention.” The beaked nose turned aggressively in her direction. “And despite my explanation on Sentinel Gate, I suspect that you still do not accept the nature of the Builders. Why, otherwise, would you have come to Labyrinth uninvited?”

  Uninvited. As though Bloom personally owned the artifact. But he was sweeping on.

  “Recent events provide ample confirmation of what is happening. Consider the evidence. Fact: Paradox shrinks and vanishes, and Rebka and the rest of them are shipped to Labyrinth through a Builder vortex. Fact: The Torvil Anfract changes beyond recognition, and while that change is still occurring my party is sent here through another vortex.”

  Darya studied Bloom’s gleaming smile and unnaturally bright eyes, and realized a great truth about herself. She and Quintus Bloom were both ambitious, both smart, both hard-working, and both dedicated. To most observers, they must appear very similar. But there was one difference, and it was the crucial one. Darya was on the right side of the line between great enthusiasm and total obsession. She would always have doubts about herself and the correctness of her ideas. Bloom, somewhere on the way from his childhood on Jerome’s World to his appearance on Sentinel Gate, had crossed the line. He was crazy. Nothing in his life was as important as being right. The idea that he might be wrong was impossible for him to accept psychologically.

  The child is father to the man. Orval Freemont, Bloom’s first teacher long ago on Jerome’s World, had read the young John Jones/Quintus Bloom exactly.

  Darya compared his expression again with all the others. They were in trouble, with danger and perhaps death awaiting them in the next few hours. Some people might say that Quintus was uniquely brave, because he was so cheerful and self-confident. The truth was quite different. Bloom felt no fear, because he had no sense of danger; he could not, because danger was irrelevant to him. All that mattered was the confirmation of his theories about the Builders.

  Which, in Darya’s opinion, had one fatal problem: the theories were wrong. She might never persuade Bloom of that, but her own self-esteem insisted that he must at least be told that there were other ideas in the world. It was still the worst time and place for an argument. On the other hand, as Hans had pointed out, there might never be another chance.

  Darya stepped closer, edging Lissie Treel out of her position right in front of Quintus Bloom. “The artifacts are changing, no one disputes that. I even agree that they seem to be disappearing. But those are observations. They do not provide an explanation of why things are happening.”

  “My dear Professor Lang.” Bloom made the title into an insult. Incredibly, despite the chaos around them, he was deep into his condescending lecturer’s mode. “I can provide that explanation, even if no one else can. Everything forms part of one simple, logical sequence of events. As I told you once before, the Builder artifacts were all planted in the spiral arm from the future, by our own descendants. When their purpose has been served, the artifacts will vanish — as they are now vanishing. And what, you may ask, of Labyrinth itself? It is a new artifact. Why then was it created, and why have we been brought here? I will tell you. Our descendants have their own curiosity. They are not content to learn of our times as part of history. They wish to see things for themselves. Labyrinth is the final artifact, a transit terminus to which the interesting contents of all other, older artifacts are being transferred. I knew this, as soon as I saw my first live Zardalu. The only living Zardalu are on the planet Genizee, but I had seen mummified forms before — on Labyrinth. Those corpses must have originated in some other artifact, where they arrived at least eleven thousand years ago, before the Great Rising. The same process is at work in all the artifacts. And once the transfer process is complete — which will be very soon now — Labyrinth will return to the far future. Whoever and whatever is here on Labyrinth at that time will go with it. I intend to go with it. I will meet the Builders — our own distant descendants! Is that not the most thrilling prospect in the whole universe?”

  It was thrilling. Darya could feel her own positive response. Standing next to her, Lissie Treel was nodding enthusiastically. Quintus Bloom was one hell of a salesman. He was dreadfully plausible.

  He was also dead wrong.

  Darya would never be as persuasive a speaker as Quintus Bloom, but her stay in Labyrinth had provided plenty of time to organize her thoughts.

  “What you say sounds good, but it leaves too many questions.”

  “Indeed? I challenge you to name even one of any relevance.” Bloom was still smiling, eyebrows arched and prominent white teeth flashing to show his over-long, pink tongue. But his attention was now all on Darya. In a cabin crowded with noisy people and aliens, the interaction had become an intensely personal one.

  “Right.” Darya took a deep breath. “I’ll do just that. First question: Everyone admits that the Builder artifacts have been around for at least three million years. Some of them are much older than that. Humans and the other clade species have been in space for only a few thousand years. If the Builders are our descendants, what was the point of planting their artifacts so long ago? They had no relevance to humans for almost all of their lifetime.”

  “There is no doubt—”

  “It’s still my turn. Second question — and this is the big one. You found your way into the central chambers of Labyrinth, and you discovered how to read the polyglyphs. I give you all the credit in the world for that — it was a staggering accomplishment. I don’t know if Kallik and I would ever have figured out that we were seeing potential messages, without your lead. But knowing it could be done, we deciphered the walls ourselves. I didn’t say wall, you will notice, but walls. Every one of them portrayed a different series of images of the spiral arm, past, present, and future. Now, I suspect that you were not in the same central chamber as we were. But you still had a hexagonal room, and six walls. My bet is that five of them revealed a history different from the history that we know. So here’s my question, and it’s actually two of them: Why didn’t you show the alternate histories, along with the real one, in your presentations? And second, what is the point of those other histories? And while I’m at it, let me throw in a third question: Why did the Builders choose such a strange way to display information, building the image sequences into the walls in three dimensions?”

  Darya paused for breath. Once the questions started it was difficult to cut them off. She noticed, with shameful satisfaction, that the smile had vanished from Quintus Bloom’s bony face. He was finally frowning.

  “Additional research will of course be needed to answer those questions. Or, if we remain here, we will soon be in a position to ask questions directly — of the people who created artifacts, Labyrinth, and polyglyphs.”

  Bloom gestured to the ship’s display screens, which Darya had for the past few minutes been ignoring. The interior structure of Labyrinth had broken down further. Walls were vanishing, windows between chambers enlarging. Darya could see through into half a dozen other chambers, as they collapsed into each other like a connected series of soap bubbles. Within each one was a confusing blur of activity. She saw three new swelling vortices, dozens of small dots that could be figures in suits, and a trio of ships of unfamiliar design.

  “Do you doubt,” Bloom continued, “that Labyrinth itself is still changing? That it is preparing to return t
o the future?”

  “It’s changing, yes. But Labyrinth is not from the future, or going there.” Now came the critical moment. “I can answer every one of my questions that you insist will need ‘additional research.’ And I can do it now. Because I understand the nature of the Builders.”

  Suddenly, the intense personal dialogue had changed. Hans Rebka was listening hard, and so were Louis Nenda and Glenna Omar. Kallik and J’merlia had ended their conversation with Atvar H’sial, and were looking Darya’s way. J’merlia, crouched beneath the Cecropian’s carapace, was sure to be offering a pheromonal translation of everything. Darya became aware of her own doubts, as surely as she had felt Bloom’s overwhelming certainty. But it was not the time to back off.

  “Let’s begin with the easy one. You did discover alternate histories of the spiral arm on the other walls of the inner chamber. You chose not to present them in your seminars, because they conflicted with the theory that you were offering. Do you want to deny that?”

  Quintus Bloom’s stony stare was enough of an answer.

  “So I’m sure you know the main point displayed in all those alternate histories,” Darya went on, “even though no one else does. I have half-a-dozen of the image sequences with me, if we ever get out of all this and anyone wants to see them. But I can summarize. In every alternate history, a clade or group of clades arises to colonize and populate the spiral arm. Sometimes the clade is one that we know well, sometimes one we have never encountered. Sometimes the development happened far in the past, long before humans came on the scene. But in every case, as we go on into the future, some single clade achieves dominance. And after that, no matter which clade rules, the colonization at last collapses. The spiral arm is left empty, with no populated and civilized worlds.

  “Now, my first thought was the simplest one. We were examining not alternative histories that were rooted in reality, but some kind of fiction. It seemed unlikely, but who knows? Perhaps the Builders had their own idea of entertainment. Fiction seemed more probable than the alternative: that what Kallik and I were looking at was in some sense real.”

  “Which it clearly was not.” The supercilious sneer was back. “I examined the other image sequences, of course I did. However, I saw no point in burdening my audience or my argument with palpable fantasies. Alternative contrived histories, or fictitious imagined futures, have no relevance or interest to serious researchers.”

  “If the image sequences contained nothing else, I would probably agree with you.” Darya could feel her own competitive juices bubbling. “But there was something else, something that you either did not notice or did not want to mention. One past and future of the spiral arm portrayed our past, and perhaps our present and future. That one, alone of all pasts and futures, shows the growth and continued presence of multiple clades. Many species, not just one, share the future of the arm. And unlike all other cases, that sequence does not end in the collapse of civilization. It shows a far future in which the arm is populated, healthy, and stable. And there is one other point, the most important of all: Our version of history, and our version alone, contains Builder artifacts. There is no sign of artifacts in any other alternative history.”

  “Stop right there.” Bloom held up his hand, palm facing Darya. “Do you realize that you have just destroyed whatever minimal credibility your argument might have had? You accept a scenario that shows the future of the spiral arm. There is no way to know such a future, unless it is shown to us by beings who themselves are from that future.”

  “Wrong. That’s what stopped me, for the longest time. I asked myself: how could any being, no matter what it was like, know the future? It might make predictions; we do that all the time. But this would have to go far beyond prediction. I wondered. Could a being exist who saw the future, as we see things around us? If such an entity did exist, what would be its essential properties?

  “I didn’t have an answer — until I saw the polyglyphs on the walls of Labyrinth. Normally a picture is a two-dimensional idea. These were three-dimensional pictures, and the third dimension represented time. I asked myself, What kind of being would find it natural to treat time as a dimension no different from any other? And I found an answer: A being with finite extension in time.”

  “Gibberish!” Bloom glanced around, seeking support from the others in the cabin. “What she is saying is physically ridiculous and implausible.”

  “To us, maybe. But to the Builders, we are implausible. We are totally flat, living within an infinitely thin slice of time. No wonder the Builders find us difficult to communicate with. We perceive space as three dimensions, but we move through time always trapped in the moment of the immediate present. We have no direct experience of anything else, past or future. A being with finite size in time as well as space will move forward through time, just as we do, but it will also have direct experience of what we perceive as the immediate past and the immediate future. To see in any dimension, it is necessary to have a finite size in that dimension. They see the future, as we see things in space. And, like our vision, their time-vision can see detail close up, but only the broad outlines farther off.”

  Darya could sense a change in the atmosphere within the cabin, people moving and turning away from her and Bloom. But she was too absorbed to stop, and in any case he was the one who had to be convinced. She spoke faster.

  “I could accept this idea conceptually, but I still had a major problem: We talk about ‘the future’ as though it is a well-defined thing. But it isn’t. The future is a potential, it can take many different forms. Depending on what we do — and what the Builders did — many different futures might be possible for the spiral arm. And at last I understood. The Builders see — and illustrated, for our benefit — potential futures. That’s what the polyglyphs showed. Different walls, different possible futures. And of all those possibles, only one permits stable growth and continued civilization. It is the one where the arm is populated and dominated by multiple clades. And the Builders, with the use of artifacts planted long ago, have created the possibility of that future.”

  Darya, struggling to make her points as clearly as she could, hardly saw her surroundings. Her mind was filled with the vision of the Builders, performing actions in the past and present, then peering out far ahead to watch the shifts and changes of a misty set of futures. They could not guarantee a future, they could only increase its chances. How did those options look, to the strange Builder senses? Did alternatives fade or sharpen, as different actions were taken or considered that would vary the future? How much detail were they able to see? The rise and fall of a clade, yes. But what about the smaller options, of economic power and influence?

  Someone was tugging impatiently at her arm. She glared, expecting it to be Quintus Bloom. Instead it was Hans Rebka. Bloom himself was pushing his way into a crush of other people, all milling around the cabin.

  Darya turned her annoyance onto Rebka. “What a nerve. I was talking to him!”

  “No.” He began to pull on her arm, dragging her after the others. “You just thought you were. For the past thirty seconds you haven’t been talking to anybody. You’re as bad as he is, you know, when you get going. Come on. We have to find a way out of here. Everything is falling apart. You can tell us all about the Builders some other time — if we’re that lucky.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was like being engaged in a public debate — at the moment when the stage falls out from under you. Darya had been pumped up for a verbal duel-to-the-death with Quintus Bloom. She had no illusions; the fight was far from over. But now, without warning, both Bloom and audience had departed.

  Darya, glancing at the screens for the first time in many minutes, could see why. Labyrinth was becoming unrecognizable. The walls were dissolving. Darya could see right through them. She could observe, as through a fine gauze curtain, the whole of the helical structure right down to the tightest innermost chamber.

  And Labyrinth was simplifying. One spi
ral now, not thirty-seven. One great coiled tube, filled with novelties.

  The bulging vortices had vanished, leaving in their place a horde of new arrivals. The spiral arm, revealing its diversity…

  …ships, from the newest design of the Fourth Alliance to the ponderous and ancient bulk of the legendary Tantalus orbital fort. The corrugated surface of the fort crawled with a thousand identical vessels like twelve-legged metallic spiders. Nothing in today’s spiral arm remotely resembled them. Beyond the fort was a transport vessel for Hymenopt slaves, with next to it the disk and slim spike of an original McAndrew balanced drive. Most of the ships in the whole mismatched flotilla were drifting in one direction, toward an exterior wall of Labyrinth.

  …writhing free-space Medusae, Torvil Anfracts in miniature, rainbow lobes shimmering like sunlit oil on water.

  …alien creatures, familiar and strange, suited or naked to space, dead or alive, fresh or mummified. Some of the beings without suits were leaping easily through space from ship to ship. Some of the others were legless, eyeless forms. Far from their homes in deep oceans or on gas-giant planets, they twisted helpless in the gulf. The interior of Labyrinth could support life unassisted, although it was strange that everything could breathe the same air. But how had those giants ever been carried to the interior of an artifact?

  Moving through the whole mass, guiding and shepherding, were thousands of miniature Phages, small twelve-faced solids no bigger than Darya’s hand. They showed every sign of intelligent behavior.

  Darya recalled the common wisdom of the Fourth Alliance: Intelligence was not possible in an organic structure below a minimum mass. That mass far exceeded the size of these mini-Phages.