The voice was whispering to Rebka now. He had learned from experience that he could not afford to ignore it.
As the seedship crept along a spiral path that promised to lead through the shell of another singularity, he probed for the source of his worry.
The composition of the seedship's crew?
No. He did not trust Nenda or Atvar H'sial, but he did not doubt their competence—or their survival instincts. J'merlia and Kallik's desire to be given orders, rather than acting independently, was a nuisance more than a threat. It would have been better if Dulcimer could have been on board and flying the seedship—Rebka knew he could not compete with the Chism Polypheme on the instinctual level where a great master pilot could operate. But it was even more important to have Dulcimer back on the Erebus, to take it out of the Anfract.
Rebka had learned not to expect optimal solutions for anything. They existed in Darya Lang's clean, austere world of intellectual problems, but reality was a lot messier. So he did not have the ideal seedship crew. Very well. One took the crew available and did with what one had to do.
But that was not the problem that nagged at his subconscious. It did not have the right feel to it.
Was the world inside the shell of singularities actually Genizee, and would the Zardalu be found there?
He considered that question as the adaptive control system sensed a way through the next singularity and delicately began to guide them toward it. Rebka could override if he saw danger, but he had no information to prompt such action. His warning flags were all internal.
It might be the planet Genizee inside there, or it might not. Either way, they were going in. Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn't waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice—and live or die with whatever you had thrown.
So his worry had to be arising from somewhere else. Something unusual that he had noticed, and lost when he was interrupted. Something . . .
Rebka finally gave up the struggle. Whatever was troubling him refused to show itself. Experience told him that it was more likely to return if he stopped thinking about it for a while, and now there were other things to worry about. The ship had turned again and was crawling along a path that to Rebka's eyes led only to a white, glowing wall. He tensed as they came closer. They were heading straight for that barrier of light.
Should he override? If only human senses included a direct sensitivity to gravity waves . . .
He forced himself to trust the ship's sensors. They reached the wall of light. There was a faint shiver through the seedship's structure, as though an invisible tide had swept along it, and then they were through.
Right through. The innermost shell singularity was behind them. The front of the ship was suddenly illuminated by the marigold light of a dwarf star.
Louis Nenda had been crowded into the rear of the seedship, deep in pheromonal conversation with Atvar H'sial. He squeezed quickly forward past the sixteen sprawled legs of J'merlia and Kallik, to stand crouched behind Rebka.
"Planet!"
Rebka shrugged. "We'll know if there's one in a few minutes." Then he would release a tiny drone ship, designed to retrace their path from the Erebus and provide information of their arrival to the others waiting outside. Whatever happened, Julian Graves and Darya should be told that the singularities were navigable. Rebka ordered the onboard sensors to begin their scan of space around the orange-yellow sun, masking out the light of the star itself.
"I wasn't askin', I was tellin'." Nenda jerked his thumb to the display that showed the region behind the ship. "You can see the damn thing, naked eye, outa' the rear port."
Rebka twisted in his seat. It was impossible—but it was true. The rear port showed the same blue-white world with its big companion moon that Darya Lang and Kallik had displayed, back on the Erebus. They were both in half-moon phase, no more than a few hundred thousand kilometers away. Large landmasses were already visible. Rebka turned on the high-resolution sensors to provide a close-up view.
"Do you know the odds against this?" he asked. "We fly through the whole mess of singularities, we emerge at least a hundred and fifty million kilometers away from a star—and there's a planet sitting right next to us, close enough to spit on."
"I know a good bit about odds." Nenda's voice was an expressionless growl. "This just don't happen."
"You know what it means?"
"It means we found Genizee. An' it means you oughta get us the hell out of here. Fast. I hate welcomes."
Rebka was ahead of him. He had taken the controls of the seedship even before Louis Nenda spoke, to send them farther away from the planet. As the ship responded to Rebka's command, high-resolution images of both planet and moon filled the screen.
"Habitable." Nenda's curiosity was competing with his uneasiness. He was flanked by Kallik and J'merlia. Only Atvar H'sial, unable to see any of the displays, remained at the rear of the ship. "Five-thousand-kilometer radius. Spectrometers say plenty of oxygen, classifiers say eighteen percent land cover, forty percent water, forty-two percent swamps, imagers say three main continents, four mountain ranges but nothin' higher than a kilometer, no polar caps. Wet world, warm world, flat world, plenty of vegetation. Looks like it could be rich." His acquisitive instincts were awakening. "Wonder what it's like down there."
Hans Rebka did not reply. For some reason his attention had been drawn not to the parent planet, but to the images of its captive moon. The view that Darya Lang and Kallik had provided on the Erebus was from a long distance, so that all he had seen then was a small round ball, gleaming like a matte sphere of pitted steel. Now that same ball filled the screen.
His mind flew back to focus on Darya's accelerated-time display, with the moon whirling around and the planet steady against a fixed background. And he realized what had been puzzling him then, below his threshold of awareness: any two freely-moving bodies—binary stars, or planet and moon, or anything else—revolved around their common center of gravity. For so large a satellite as this, that center of gravity would lie well outside the planet. So both bodies should have been moving against the more distant background, unless the moon had negligible mass, which would have to mean—
He stared at the image filling the screen, and now he could see that the pits and nodules on its surface were regularly spaced, its curvature perfectly uniform.
"Artificial! And negligible mass. Must be hollow!" The words burst out of him, though he knew that they would be meaningless to the others.
No matter. Soon they would learn it for themselves. Part of the moon's surface was beginning to open. A saffron beam of light speared from it to illuminate the seedship. Suddenly their direction of motion was changing.
"What the hell's going on here?" Nenda was pushing forward, grabbing at the controls.
Hans Rebka did not bother to stop him. It would make no difference. The ship's drive was already at its maximum setting, and still they were going in the wrong direction. He stared out of the rear port. Instead of moving away from the moon and planet, they were being drawn toward it. And soon it was clear that this was more than a simple tractor beam, drawing them in to a rendezvous with the gleaming moon. Instead their trajectory was turning, under the combined force vector of the beam and the drive, taking them to a different direction in space.
Rebka looked and extrapolated, with the unconscious skill of a longtime pilot. There was no doubt about the result.
Wonder what it's like down there, Louis Nenda had said. They were going to find out, and very soon. Like it or not, the seedship was heading for a rendezvous with Genizee. All they could do was sit tight and pray for the long shot of a soft landing.
Soft landing, or good-bye, life.
He thought of Darya Lang and felt sorrow. If he had known that this was coming, he would have
said a decent farewell to her before he left the Erebus.
While Hans Rebka was remembering Darya and imagining their last good-bye, she was thinking of him and Louis Nenda in much less favorable terms.
They were self-centered, overbearing bastards, both of them. She had tried to tell them that she might be on the brink of a major discovery. And what had they done? Brushed her aside as though she were nothing, then at the first chance dashed off in search of Genizee—which she and Kallik had found for them—leaving her behind to fester on the Erebus and endure the babbling of E.C. Tally and the groveling of Dulcimer.
The Chism Polypheme was desperate to have another go at the power kernel. Julian Graves had ordered E.C. Tally not to release another radiation beam, so Darya was Dulcimer's only hope. He pestered her constantly, ogling and smirking and offering her the unimaginable sexual delights that according to him only a mature Chism Polypheme could provide. If she would just crack open a kernel for him and let him soak in the beam for a few hours—a few minutes . . .
Darya retreated to the observation bubble and locked herself in. All she sought was solitude, but once that was achieved her old instincts took over. She went back to her interrupted study of the Anfract.
And once started, again she could not stop. With no Kallik to interrupt her work, she entered her own version of Dulcimer's radiation high.
Call it research addiction.
There was nothing else remotely like it in the whole universe. The first long hours of learning, all apparently futile and unproductive. Then the inexplicable conviction that there was something hidden away in what you were studying, some unperceived reality just beyond reach. Then the creeping-skin sensation at the back of the neck—the lightning flash as a thousand isolated facts flew to arrange themselves into a pattern—the coherent picture that sprang into sharp focus. The bone-deep pleasure of other ideas, apparently unrelated, hurrying into position and becoming parts of the same whole.
She had felt that satisfaction a dozen times in as many years, in her work on the ancient Builder artifacts. One year earlier she had lost touch with that life, consumed by the excitement of pursuing evidence of the Builders themselves across the spiral arm and beyond. And less than a month ago, sure that her cerebral contentment was gone forever, she had gladly agreed to go with Hans Rebka.
Well, she had been wrong. Once a research worker, always a research worker. She didn't have a hundredth the interest in the Zardalu that she was finding in the study of the Torvil Anfract. It was the most fascinating object in the universe.
And then, the paradox: as Darya tried to focus harder and harder on the Anfract, she found her mind turning away from it, again and again, back to her old studies of the Builders. It seemed like a lack of control, an irritating mental foil. The Builders were a distraction, just when she did not need one.
And then it hit her. The revelation.
The Anfract was a Builder artifact.
It was of a scale that dwarfed any other artificial structure in the spiral arm. The Anfract was a bigger project than the reconstruction of the Mandel system, bigger than the Builders' out-of-galaxy creation of Serenity itself. Improbably big, impossibly big.
But the analogies with other artifacts, once seen, became undeniable. The light-focusing properties of Lens were here. So was the multiply-connected nature of Paradox. She recalled the Builder-made singularity in the Winch of the Dobelle Umbilical, and the knotted topology of Sentinel. They all had a correspondence with the structure of the Anfract.
And that meant—
Darya's mind made the intuitive leap that reached beyond hard evidence. If the Anfract was a Builder construct, then the "natural" set of nested singularities around which the Erebus was orbiting was surely an artifact, too. But within it, according to Darya's own analysis, lay the original Zardalu homeworld. If that was true, it could not be coincidence. There must be a far closer relationship than anyone had ever realized between the vanished Builders and the hated Zardalu.
A connection, between the Builders and the Zardalu.
But what connection? Darya was tempted to reject her own logic. The time scales were so incompatible. The Builders had disappeared millions of years ago. The Zardalu had been exterminated from the spiral arm only eleven thousand years ago.
The link: it had to be the sentient Builder constructs. The only surviving specimens of the Zardalu had been captured by the constructs during the Great Rising and preserved in stasis on Serenity far out of the galactic plane. Now it seemed that the world of Genizee had itself been shielded from outside contact, by barriers designed to discourage—or destroy—approaching expeditions. And only the Builders, or more likely their sentient creations, could have constructed those guarding walls.
Darya thought again of Hans Rebka, but now in very different terms. If only he were there. She desperately needed someone to talk to, someone who could listen with a cool head and demolish logical flaws or wishful thinking. But instead Hans was—
Dear God! She was jerked out of her intellectual trance by a dreadful thought. The seedship party was flying into something more complex and potentially dangerous than anyone on board had imagined. They believed that they were entering a set of natural singularities, with a natural planet inside. Instead they were entering an artifact, a lion's den of uncertainty, filled with who-knew-what deliberate booby traps. There could be other barriers, designed to frustrate or destroy all would-be explorers of the region inside the singularities.
They had to be warned.
Darya waded out through the mess in the observation bubble—the floor was littered with her hard-copy outputs—and ran back to find Julian Graves. There was no sign of him in the control room, the galley, the sleeping quarters, or anywhere that he would normally be.
Darya cursed the huge size of the Erebus, with its hundreds of chambers of all sizes, and ran on along the main corridor that led to the cargo holds and the engine rooms.
She did not find Graves, but along the way she encountered E.C. Tally. The embodied computer was standing by the shield that surrounded one of the power kernels.
"Councilor Graves expressed a desire for privacy," he said. "I think he wished to avoid further conversation."
So Darya was not the only one who found Tally and Dulcimer's yammering intolerable. "Where did he go?"
"He did not tell me."
Any more than Darya had. He did not want them to know. "We have to find him. Has there been any word from the seedship?"
"Nothing."
"Come on, then. We'll need Dulcimer, too, to do some tricky flying. He should be thoroughly cooled off by now. But first I must see Julian Graves. We'll search the whole ship if we have to." She started back toward the engines, examining every chamber. E.C. Tally trailed vaguely along behind.
"You take the rooms along that side of the corridor." Darya pointed. "I'll handle these."
"May I speak?"
Gabble, gabble, gabble. "Do you have to? What is it now, E.C.?"
"I merely wish to point out that if you wish to talk to Julian Graves, there is a much easier method than the one you are employing. Of course, if as you said, you wish to see him, with your own eyes, or if it is also necessary that he talk to you . . ."
Darya paused with a doorlatch in her hand. "Let's stop it right there. I want to talk to him."
"Then might I suggest the use of the public-address system? Its message is carried to every part of the Erebus."
"I didn't even know there was a public-address system. How did you find out about it?"
"It is part of the general schematics of the Erebus, which naturally I transferred from the ship's data bank to my own memory."
"Take me to an input point. We can talk to Dulcimer, too, and find out where he is."
"That will not be necessary. I already know where Dulcimer is. He is back at the power kernel, where you found me."
"What's he doing there? Didn't Graves tell you to keep him away from the kernels?"
"No. He told me not to release another radiation beam from within a kernel. I have not done so. But as Dulcimer pointed out, no one said that he was not to be allowed inside the kernel shield itself." Tally looked thoughtful. "I think he should be ready to come out by now."
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BUILDERS?
I don't think I'll ever understand Downsiders, though I've spent enough time with them. The pattern never changes. As soon as they learn that I've done a deal of space-wandering, they'll sit and talk to me quiet enough, but you can see there's only one thing on their minds. And finally they ask me, every one of them: You must have visited a lot of Builder artifacts, Captain. What do you think happened to them? Where did the Builders go?
It's a fair question. You've got a species that was all over the spiral arm for fifty million years or more, scattering their constructs over a couple of thousand locations and a few thousand light-years, all of them huge and indestructible and three-quarters of them still working fine—I've seen scores, close up, ranging from the practical and useful, like the Dobelle Umbilical, to the half-understandable, like Elephant and Lens, and on to the absolutely incomprehensible, like Succubus and Paradox and Flambeau and Juggernaut.
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