"I had the same feeling. I wondered where you'd gone, but I knew there wasn't room for both of us. All right. So we had a first boost from the gravity generator on Glister, then a second boost from a shearing field in the Eye of Gargantua. That put us square into the main transportation system, and then right out of the spiral arm. Thirty thousand light-years, I estimate."
"I wondered about that. I looked around, and I could see the whole damned galaxy, spread out like a dinner plate—though the way I'm feeling, I hate to even mention the word 'dinner.' "
"And then one final transition, to bring us in here." Darya gazed around, up to the segmented dark ceiling, and then across the glittering plain of the floor.
"Where we can stand and stare until we starve. Any more ideas, Professor?"
"Some." Now that the mind-numbing journey was over she was beginning to think again. "I don't believe we were brought all this way to starve. The-One-Who-Waits sent us, so something must know we're here. And although this is part of the Builders' own living place, I'll bet it has been prepared for us, or beings like us." Darya swung her hand around a ninety-degree arc of the level floor. "See the flat surface? That's not natural for a Builder structure."
"We don't know how Builders think. Nobody ever met one."
"True. But we know how they build. When you've studied Builder artifacts as long as I have, you begin to form ideas about the Builders themselves. You can't prove things, but you learn to trust your instincts. We don't know where the Builders evolved, or when, but I'm sure it was in an aerial or free-space environment. At the very least, it was a place where gravity doesn't mean the same thing as it does to us. The Builders work naturally in all three dimensions, every direction equal. Their artifacts don't provide any feel for 'up' or 'down.' A level plain like this is something that humans like. You don't encounter it in the artifacts. You don't expect a gravity field close to one gee in a structure like this, either—complete with a breathable atmosphere. And look at that." She pointed to the ceiling, apparently kilometers above them. "You can see it's built of pentagonal segments. That's common to many Builder structures. So I think we're inside a dodecahedron, a shape you find over and over in Builder artifacts, and I think they just added a flat floor and air and gravity for the benefit of beings like us. I'm not sure this plain is anything like as big as it looks, either. You know the Builders can play tricks with space that confuse our sense of distance."
"They can. But I think this place is really big, no matter what tricks are being performed."
Hans Rebka had not raised his voice, but Darya's stomach tightened at the sudden tension in it. Hans was not supposed to get nervous. That was her privilege.
"It's certainly big," he went on, "if that is anything to judge by."
He was pointing off to their left. Darya at first saw nothing. Then she realized that above the twinkling sea of orange spangles shone the steadier light of a bright sphere. It was tiny at first, no more than a shiny marble of silver, but as she watched it grew steadily. It was advancing across the level plain, apparently at a constant speed. There was no way to judge its distance, or to tell if it was rolling or traveling by some other method.
"Welcoming committee," Rebka said, almost under his breath. "Everybody smile."
It was not rolling. Darya was somehow sure of that, even though she could see no signs of surface marking. She had the feeling that it was flying or floating, its bottom only a fraction of a millimeter above the orange cloud of sequins.
And it was not small at all. It was sizable. It was growing. It was huge, three times the size of The-One-Who-Waits. It towered over them, and still it was not close.
Twenty paces away it halted. A steady series of ripples moved across the spherical surface, like waves on a ball of mercury. As they grew in amplitude the globular form bulged up to form a stem. On top of it a familiar pentagonal flowerlike head drooped to face them. Five-sided disks were extruded from the front of the sphere, while a silver tail stretched down to moor the object to the floor. A flickering green light shone from a newly formed aperture in the central belly.
There was a long silence.
"All right, sweetie," Rebka said in a gruff whisper. "What now?"
"If this is like The-One-Who-Waits, it needs to hear us speak a few words before it can key in to our language." Darya raised her voice. "My name is Darya Lang, originally from the planet Sentinel Gate. This is Hans Rebka, from the planet Teufel. We are human, and we arrived from the star Mandel and the planet Gargantua. Are you like The-One-Who-Waits?"
There was a ten-second silence.
"One—Who—Waits," a groaning voice said. Its tone was deeper than that of the sphere on Glister, and it sounded even more tired. "The One Who . . . Waits. Human . . . human . . . hu-u-man . . . hmmm."
"Needs a pep pill," Rebka said softly. "Are you a Builder?" he called to the horned and tailed nightmare floating in front of them.
The being drifted a few paces closer. "Human, human, human, . . . At last. You are here. But two are the same. Where is . . . the other?"
"The other," Rebka said. "What's it mean?"
Darya shook her head. "There is no other," she said loudly. "We do not understand. We are the only ones here. We ask again, are you like The-One-Who-Waits?"
The silver body was humming, with a low tone almost too deep for human ears. "There must be . . . another . . . or the arrival is not complete. We have two forms only . . . but the message said that the third one was on the way and would soon arrive . . ." There was another long silence. "I am not like The-One-Who-Waits, although we were created in the same way."
"Not a Builder," Darya said in a quick whisper. "I knew it. We're seeing things that the Builders made, just like The-One-Who-Waits. Maybe some kind of computers, incredibly old. And I don't think that they're—well, that they're working quite right."
That was a new thought for Darya, and one hard to accept. Usually Builder artifacts seemed to perform as well after five million years as the day they were made. But The-One-Who-Waits, and now this new being, gave Darya an odd feeling of disorganization and randomness. Perhaps not even the Builders could make machines last forever.
"I am not . . . a computer." The being's hearing must have been more sensitive than a human's, or it was directly reading their minds. "I am Inorganic, but a grown Inorganic. The-One-Who-Waits stayed always close to Old-Home, but I was grown here. I am . . . I am . . . a Speaker-Between. An Interlocutor. The one who must . . . interface with you and the others. The task of The-One-Who-Waits is done. But the task of Speaker-Between cannot start until the third one is here." The weary voice was slowing, fading. "The third one. Then . . . the task of Speaker-Between can begin. Until then . . ."
The surface of the great silver body began to ripple. The five-sided flower on top was shortening.
"Hey! Speaker-Between! You can't stop there." Rebka ran forward across the surface, his shoes kicking up sprays of glittering orange. "And you can't leave us here. We're humans. Humans need food, and water, and air."
"That is known." The body was swelling at the base and descending toward the flat surface, while the silver tail withdrew into it. "Do not worry. The place has been prepared for your kind. Since the third is already on the way, you will have no need for stasis. Enter . . . and eat, drink, rest."
The silver globe of Speaker-Between had deformed to a bulging hemisphere with a wide arched aperture at the center. "Enter," the fading voice said again. The opening moved around to face the two humans. "Enter . . . now."
Rebka swore and backed away. "Don't go near it."
"No." Darya was moving forward. "I don't know what's inside, but so far nothing here has tried to hurt us. If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it easily. Come on. What do we have to lose?"
"Other than our lives?" But he was following her.
The opening that they entered was filled with the green glow of hidden lights. From the outside it could have been of any depth. One step inside, and Darya realized t
hat she was actually in a small entrance lock, three meters deep. When she went across to the inner door and pushed it aside, an open chamber with slate-gray, somber walls and a high ceiling was revealed.
Too high. She walked through and stared upward. Forty meters, to that arched, pentagonal center? It had to be at least that—which meant that she was in a room taller than the outside dimensions of Speaker-Between. And that was physically impossible. Before she could move there came a sighing, slithering noise. Sections of the chamber's level floor in front of her began to buckle and lift. Partitions and furniture grew upward, thrusting like strange plants though a soft, springy surface.
"A place prepared for us? I'm not so sure of that." Hans Rebka advanced cautiously past her, toward a cylindrical structure that was still emerging from the floor. It had a bulbous, rounded upper end, and it was supported on a cluster of splayed legs. "Now this is really interesting. It's a food-storage unit and food synthesizer. I've seen one like it, but not in use. It was in a museum."
"It's not typical Builder technology."
"I"m sure it's not." An oddly perplexed expression crept into Rebka's eyes. "If I didn't know better, I'd start wondering . . ."
The top of the cylinder was surrounded by a thin fog, and a layer of ice crystals covered its surface. Rebka touched it cautiously with one fingertip, then jerked away.
"Freezing cold." He turned up the opacity level of his suit to provide thermal insulation and reached out with a protected hand to pull a curved lever set into the upper part of the cylinder. It moved reluctantly to a new position. Part of the cylinder body turned, revealing the interior. Three shelves stood inside, loaded with sealed white packages.
"You're the biologist, Darya. Do you recognize any of these?" Rebka reached in and quickly lifted out a handful of flat packages and smooth ovoids, placing them on the saucerlike beveled top of the cylinder. "Don't touch them with your bare hand or you may get frostbite. They're really cold. We can't eat yet, but you can tell your stomach we may be getting close."
Darya set her suit gauntlet to full opacity and peeled open a rounded packet. It was a fruit, mottled green and yellow, with a thin rind and a fleshy stalk at one end. She turned it over, examining texture and density and scraping a thin sliver from the surface, then allowed the gauntlet to heat it. When it grew warm in her hand she sniffed it, tasted it, and shook her head.
"Fruit aren't my line, but I've never seen anything like this before. And I don't think I've ever read anything about it, either. It could be from an Alliance world, but it's not a popular fruit, because they tend to be grown everywhere. Do you really think it's edible?"
"If it's not, why would they have stored it here? I'm using your logic, Darya—if they want to kill us, they can find easier ways. I think we can eat this, and the other food. Speaker-Between didn't seem too happy to see the two of us, because it was expecting something else. But we're part of the show, too. We have to be fed and watered. And you don't bring somebody thirty thousand light-years and then let them accidentally poison themselves. My worry is a bit different." He rapped the bulging side of the cylinder. "I know construction methods in the Phemus Circle and the Fourth Alliance, and I've been exposed to the way they do things in the Cecropia Federation. But this isn't like any of them. It's—"
He was interrupted by the creaking sound of long-neglected hinges. Thirty meters away, the whole side of the room was sinking ponderously into the floor. Beyond it stood another chamber, even larger, with a long bank of objects like outsized coffins at its center.
Darya counted fourteen units, each one a pentagonal cylinder seven meters long, four wide, and four high.
"Now those are Builder technology," she said. "Very definitely. Remember Flambeau, near the boundary between the Alliance and the Cecropia Federation? That artifact is filled with units just like this, a lot of them even bigger. They're all empty, but they're in working order."
"What do they do? I've never seen anything like these before." Rebka was walking cautiously forward toward the nearest of the fourteen. Each of the monster coffins had a transparent port mounted in its pentagonal end. He put his face close to it, rubbed at the dusty surface with his gauntleted hand, and peered in.
"No one is sure what they were intended for originally." Darya rapped the side of the unit, and it produced a hollow booming sound. "But we know they can be used to preserve things pretty much indefinitely—objects, or organisms—and we assume that was their main purpose. There's a stasis field inside each unit, externally controlled. You can see the settings on the end there. Clock rates in the interior have been measured for the Flambeau units, and they run an average of sixty million times slower than outside. Spend a century in one of those stasis tanks, and if you remained conscious you'd feel as though one minute had passed."
Rebka did not seem to be listening. He was still poised with his face against the port.
She tapped his shoulder. "Hey, Hans. Come up for air. What's so fascinating in there? Let me take a peek."
She moved to his side. The stasis tank did not seem to be empty, but its inside was almost dark. Darya could see vague outlines, but for details she would have to wait a couple of minutes until her eyes had adjusted to the interior light level.
She took his arm and squeezed it. "Can you see what's in there? Come on, if it's interesting don't keep me in suspense."
Still he did not speak, but at Darya's words and touch he finally turned to face her.
She looked at his twitching face, and her grip on his arm slackened. Her hand dropped to her side.
Nothing shocked Hans Rebka. Nothing ever touched his iron self-control.
Except that now the control had gone. And behind his eyes lurked an unreasoning terror that Darya had never expected to see.
CHAPTER 16
After Atvar H'sial had knocked Julius Graves headlong into Birdie Kelly, broken the connection between E. C. Tally's brain and body, and sent J'merlia rolling and spinning into the pattern of concentric rings, Louis Nenda did not hesitate.
As the Cecropian went scuttling out of the chamber, wing cases wide open, Nenda followed at once.
Let the mess back there sort itself out!
He was cursing—silently. It was no use shouting. Atvar H'sial had astonishing hearing, but she did not understand human speech. And his own pheromonal augment was worthless when she was in full flight, because the necessary molecules had no chance to diffuse into her receptors.
The near-darkness of Glister's interior made no difference to Atvar H'sial. Her echolocation vision worked as well in pitch blackness as in bright sunlight; but it made things hellishly difficult for Louis Nenda. A Cecropian did not care where she moved, into chambers light or dark, just so long as there was air to carry sound waves. But he sure cared. He was bouncing off dark walls, tangling in nets, tripping over loose cables, diving down steep slopes without any idea what he would meet at the bottom. And all the time he had not the slightest idea where she was heading. He doubted that she knew it herself.
Enough of this, he thought.
He slowed down after a particularly bruising collision with an invisible partition. It would be too easy to knock himself out, and he could not afford that.
The good news was that he could track her, infallibly. The Zardalu augment had been designed for pheromonal speech, with all its subtleties, so simply following another's scent through Glister's sterile interior was ridiculously easy. Even if she crossed and recrossed her own path, the strength of the trail would show him exactly where she had gone.
The corridors of Glister turned and twisted, apparently at random. He patiently followed the unmistakable airborne molecules of Cecropian physiology, turn by turn, wherever they led. The only thing he could be sure of was that they were descending, following a gravity gradient to regions of steadily increasing field. But the stronger field increased the danger of injury from a fall. He slowed his pace still further, confident that Atvar H'sial could not get away from him. As he w
alked he began to make plans.
One word with Graves had been enough to convince him that telling the truth to the councilor would be a terrible idea. He had fought back his own initial urge on awakening—violent flight—because Atvar H'sial was still trapped in the Lotus field. At that point it made sense to blame the field itself and "forget" anything that had happened back on Quake.
Of course, he remembered it all perfectly: the wild ascent from the planet's surface, the capture of the Have-It-All by the dark sphere, the giddy plunge through space, their arrival at Gargantua and the little planetoid that orbited it—and, finally, the release of the ship onto the surface, while the sphere that had captured and held them moved inside. He had been aware of events right up to the moment on the planetoid's surface when the orange cloud surged up around them. He even had a vague memory after that, of being carried down, down, down through multiple levels of the interior. Then came a blank, until he had wakened to find Julius Graves crouched over him.
Graves's mention of the Lotus field allowed him to piece together most of the rest. He and Atvar H'sial had been locked in the field—but why, when it would have made more sense just to kill them—until the others had come along. And finally that crazy robot with the human body and the pop-top skull case had dredged them out.
Pity that Atvar H'sial had run wild before E. C. Tally had been able to get Kallik, too. Nenda missed his Hymenopt servant. No matter. There was plenty of time for Tally to pull Kallik free now—if ever they could stick Tally's popout brain back in his dumb head and connect it so it worked.
Louis Nenda paused. He was standing in an unlit passageway, but the pheromonal scent was increasing in strength. He concentrated and generated his own message, sending it diffusing out from his chest nodules. "Atvar H'sial? Where are you? I can't see you—you gotta steer me in."
As usual, he found it easiest to speak his message at the same time as it was generated chemically. It was not necessary to identify himself. If the Cecropian received any message at all, Nenda's individual molecular signature would be built into it.
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