Glenna had only one question left. "I'm sure I can make Louis forget that Darya Lang ever existed. But I wonder about you. You're not jealous of Lang, are you? I mean, I realize that you are a female, yourself. But I thought that there was no way that humans and Cecropians—that Louis Nenda and you—I mean, how do male Cecropians handle the females, anyway, in your mating?"
Maybe Glenna had gone too far. Certainly there was a long delay.
YOU HAVE THE WRONG IMPRESSION. IT WOULD BE MORE ACCURATE TO ASK: HOW DO WE FEMALE CECROPIANS HANDLE THE MALE DURING MATING? AND ALSO AFTER IT.
A pair of forelimbs began a rhythmic crushing movement, moving in toward the dark red underside of Atvar H'sial. After a few more seconds the long proboscis reached down, questing.
HOWEVER, THAT IS A PERSONAL QUESTION, WHICH I PREFER NOT TO ANSWER. LET ME SAY ONLY THIS: YOU WOULD PERHAPS BE LESS DISTURBED BY THE ANSWER THAN WOULD EITHER LOUIS NENDA OR QUINTUS BLOOM.
Chapter Twelve
Jerome's World orbits the yellow dwarf star Tetragamma, only forty light-years from Sentinel Gate. Almost directly between the two lies the bright blue star, Rigel. Rigel is a true supergiant, fifty times a standard stellar mass, a hundred thousand times standard luminosity, blazing forth with intense brilliance and dazzling power. Few observers of the night sky from Sentinel Gate would ever notice the wan gleam of Tetragamma, tucked away close to Rigel's line of sight. And no one on Sentinel Gate would see the mote of Jerome's World, gleaming faintly in Tetragamma's reflected light. Darya could not remember anyone mentioning the name of that world during all her years at the Institute, until the arrival of Quintus Bloom.
She glanced at the planet a couple of times as the Myosotis approached for landing. That Jerome's World was a thinly populated planet was obvious from the absence of city lights on its night side. It must be a poor and backward planet, too, or Darya would have heard more about it. Yet according to Quintus Bloom, this was his home world. It was also the closest inhabited planet to the artifact he had discovered and named Labyrinth.
Darya saw nothing to change her first impressions as the Myosotis completed its landing and she disembarked. The Immigration staff, all one of him, greeted Darya cheerfully enough, but he stared pop-eyed at Kallik and J'merlia. Interstellar human visitors were rarity enough. The Jerome's World entry system had no procedures at all for dealing with wildly nonhuman creatures from the Cecropia Federation and the Zardalu Communion.
While the officer scratched his head over old reference materials and kept one uneasy eye on the two aliens, Darya came to a decision. She had planned to spend only a day or two on Jerome's World before proceeding to Labyrinth. The red tape surrounding the entry of Kallik and J'merlia might take all of that, just to produce clearances.
"Suppose these two were to remain on the ship?"
The officer didn't voice his relief, but his face brightened. "No problem with that, if you follow the standard quarantine rules. Food and drink can go in, but no plants or animals"—he glanced uncertainly at the two aliens—"or anything else can come out."
Kallik and J'merlia raised no objection. It was Darya who felt bad, as she endured a meaningless entry rigmarole and was at last pronounced free to leave the port. Not long ago the two aliens had been slaves, and here again they were second-class citizens. It was little comfort to know that in the Cecropia Federation the situation would have been reversed, with J'merlia free to wander while Darya was impounded and regarded with suspicion.
Her guilt vanished within minutes of leaving the spaceport. Kallik and J'merlia weren't missing a thing—perhaps they were even the lucky ones. She didn't know who Jerome was, but if he were dead he was probably turning in his grave, having a backwater world like this named after him. The planet was right at the outer limit of habitable distance from Tetragamma. This was the winter season, and the days were short. The sun was a bright cherrystone two sizes too small in the sky; the air was thin and cold and caught in your throat, and the straggling plant life was a pale, dusty gray-green. The people that Darya met seemed equally pale and dusty, as they directed her to the air service that served the Marglom Center.
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 descri
be, 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.
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