Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  She found them squatting on the floor of the main control room in a tangle of sixteen legs, heads close together. They were chatting, in the clicks and whistles of Hymenopt speech that Darya had so far found quite unintelligible, but they became quiet as soon as she entered.

  "I think we're ready to proceed." Darya kept her voice brisk and neutral. "It's time to explore the interior of Labyrinth. J'merlia, I want you to remain here, at the controls of the Myosotis."

  "Of course." The Lo'tfian's eyes bobbed on their stalks, in firm agreement. "With respect for your abilities, I am the most experienced pilot."

  Darya hid her relief. "You certainly are. So Kallik, you and I had better get into our suits."

  The Hymenopt nodded. "And J'merlia also."

  The reply was made so casually, Darya almost missed it.

  "J'merlia?"

  "Of course. After all, should the ship be breached in some way, so that our suits are needed, J'merlia as pilot will need suit protection no less than we." Kallik stared blandly at Darya with twin circles of unblinking black eyes. "Into which entry point of Labyrinth, Professor Lang, do you wish J'merlia to direct the Myosotis?"

  It was so obvious—once it had been pointed out. Darya wanted to hang her head in shame. Labyrinth was forty kilometers long. The coiled spiral tubes that composed it must each be several times as long as that. There were thirty-seven of them, making endless miles of interior tunnels. Anyone in a suit would run out of air and supplies before they had explored a hundredth part of the interior.

  Every one of those dark entrances ahead was at least a couple of hundred meters across, more than big enough to admit a vessel four times the size of the Myosotis. In his notes, Quintus Bloom had emphasized the massive scale of the artifact's interior. Use of a ship, with its almost unlimited supplies of air, food, and energy, was the logical way—maybe the only way—to roam the inside of Labyrinth.

  Darya cleared her throat. "I'll point out the entrance we want, as soon as we all have our suits on and are a little closer."

  "Very good."

  Kallik's dark eyes remained inscrutable. All the same, Darya was sure that J'merlia and Kallik both knew. Like the conscientious former slaves that they were, they had deliberately allowed her to save face.

  Not for the first time since the beginning of their journey, Darya wondered who was really in charge.

  "Thirty-seven entrances. Why thirty-seven? Is there anything interesting about the number thirty-seven?"

  Darya had not expected a reply; it was just nervous talk. But Kallik replied solemnly: "Every three-digit multiple of thirty-seven remains a multiple of thirty-seven when its digits are cyclically permuted."

  Which left Darya to try an example in her head (37 times 16 is 592, and 259 and 925 are both divisible by 37); and to wonder: Was Kallik's a serious answer that deserved thought, or just a Hymenopt's idea of a good joke?

  In any case, the decision had to be made. Darya pointed at a circular opening, as it came into view over the righthand horizon of Labyrinth, and said: "That one."

  J'merlia nodded. "Prepare for possible sudden acceleration after entry." He matched velocity vectors with the opening, and popped the Myosotis inside with casual skill.

  Bloom's warning that Labyrinth only appeared to rotate was valuable advice. As the ship passed through to the interior, J'merlia had to apply a hard and sudden thrust to kill their sideways movement. Darya, suited and strapped into her seat by the control board, released a breath that seemed to have been trapped inside her since she had made the choice of entry point. She tried to examine all the external displays at once.

  Behind them, every sign of the entrance had vanished. The ship sat within a gigantic coiled horn, a twisted cone whose walls were visible as writhing streamers of phosphorescence. The gleaming lines converged beyond the ship, growing closer and closer until they were hidden at last by the curve of the wall itself. But the convergence below was more than an effect of perspective, for above the Myosotis the bright streamers kept the interval between them constant, any decrease due to distance cancelled by an increase in true separation.

  The way to go was down. In that direction, if Quintus Bloom's records could be used as a guide, the seamless walls would finally give way to a series of connected chambers. If you reached the innermost chamber, there, according to Bloom, you would find the series of glyphs that recorded the past and future history of humanity in the spiral arm. Or rather, a series of polyglyphs. A glyph was a term she understood, it was a sign or an image marked on a wall. But Bloom had not explained what he meant by a polyglyph. Was that one of his secrets, something to protect his own priority of claim?

  As Darya pondered that she considered another major problem. Quintus Bloom had found his chamber in one of the interiors of Labyrinth. Since Darya's choice of entry point had been quite random, there was just a one in thirty-seven chance that they would reach the chamber that Bloom had explored.

  Well, that was going to be her worry, not J'merlia's. He knew which way to go and the Myosotis was already descending, easing its way down the center line of an apparently bottomless curved shaft. After five minutes of steady progress, Darya saw a dark oval drifting into view on one side. It was a moving doorway, a portal to one of the other interiors. Easy enough to access, according to Quintus Bloom, but there was no reason to take it until they knew what lay deeper within this one. Darya fixed the portal's direction from them in her mind and labeled it as clockwise from this interior. Five minutes more, and a second oval appeared on the counter-clockwise side. It might be a wasted mental effort to think in terms of direction of travel, if the successive interiors that one encountered by moves in one direction did not form a regular sequence. Could you make thirty-seven clockwise jumps, and return to the starting point? Bloom had believed that there was no way to guarantee it.

  The conical nature of the tube was at last revealing itself. The cylinder they traveled was narrowing, the wall becoming noticeably closer. Darya stared at the streaming ruled lines of phosphorescence, trying to estimate how long it would be before the tube became too narrow to admit the Myosotis. At that point they would have to resort to suits. She was interrupted by the soft touch of one of Kallik's forelimbs. "Excuse me, but unless you have already noticed . . ."

  Darya turned, and found herself looking on a screen at a swirling black vortex. It was no more than thirty meters from the ship, a roiling whirlpool of oil and ink that curved and tumbled constantly in upon itself. She knew the nature of that singularity very well, from her own experience. It was a Builder transportation system, able to convey people and materials from anywhere in the spiral arm or beyond. It was also a two-way system, sending objects with equal facility.

  "Steer wide of it!" Her warning was unnecessary. J'merlia was easing them well clear. The others had their own familiarity with the ways of the Builders.

  The vortex was a feature of Labyrinth unmentioned by Quintus Bloom. Had his exploration, through some other interior region, failed to discover it? Or had he, reluctant to describe what he could not explain, seen the spinning darkness but failed to record it?

  The gleaming walls were nearer. If they met another vortex, the Myosotis would not be able to maneuver safely clear of it. The displays of the way ahead made it clear that was soon going to be irrelevant. The smooth tube was ending, narrowing to a circular opening through which no ship could ever pass.

  Darya had to make another decision, but this one was easy since she had no choice. J'merlia would have to stay with the ship while she and Kallik went through the opening. He would be alone in the deep interior, facing a tricky and dangerous escape if the other two did not return. But Darya saw no alternative.

  All three of them were already in their suits and equipped with maximum life-support supplies. J'merlia halted the ship about thirty meters short of the circular opening. A nod of Darya's head was all it took for Kallik to open the forward hatch, lead the way through the opening, and continue into the first c
hamber.

  Quintus Bloom had described a series of rooms, decreasing steadily in size like matched pearls on a necklace and connected each to the next by a single narrow passageway. According to Bloom there should be six of them, including the final chamber. That one was shaped differently and ended in a narrow-angled conical wedge.

  He had said little—too little—about intermediate chambers, beyond the fact that in the third one lay a moving dark aperture, which he believed led to another of the thirty-seven interiors. He had offered no recordings of any chamber except the last one. Staring about her as she entered the first room, Darya began to understand why. She and her two companions were shrouded at once by a billowing fog, a shifting gray mantle that changed constantly and held within it dozens of ghost images. Darya glimpsed another vortex ahead, pale and diminished. Beside it hovered a pair of spectral dodecahedra, like the omnivorous Phage artifacts that she had encountered on Glister. Before she could examine them, or wonder how to avoid them, they had vanished into the mist. A drifting haze to the left drew her attention. It was no more than cloud imprinted on cloud, but she sensed a thousand-tendriled Medusa like a miniature Torvil Anfract. Next to it stood another whirling vortex, drawing all those writhing tendrils toward its dark embrace. A moment later both were fading, dissolving, merging into the restless swirl of the background.

  Darya's only certainty was the walls of the chamber. She could sense their solidity, even if she could not see them through the mist. She was sure that she was still moving relative to them, and convinced that ahead of her lay the opening that would lead to the next room. The range sensors on her suit confirmed what she already knew, deep inside her.

  The fog disappeared as they entered the second chamber. It was dark, but when Kallik, still leading the way, switched on her flashing suit lights the whole chamber turned into a meaningless kaleidoscope of colors. Again, Darya understood why perhaps there had been no recordings made here. The chamber walls formed perfect mirrors, light reflecting and re-reflecting a thousand times. She tried to visualize how light leaving their three suits would appear when it at last returned to them. It was impossible. A dark spot, dead ahead, pointed the way into the next chamber.

  In that chamber, their experience diverged again from what had been reported by Quintus Bloom. The walls showed curving lines of light, running from where they had entered to converge and surround a dark circle at the far end. This was certainly the third chamber. There was, however, no sign of a portal leading to another of the many interiors. Labyrinth had changed, or more likely the one-in-thirty-seven long shot that they had entered Labyrinth at the same place as Quintus Bloom had not paid off.

  Kallik paused at the entrance to the fourth chamber. Coming up level with her, Darya saw why. The whole inside was filled with a driving orange sleet, tiny pelting particles that blanketed the interior and ran from the entrance down toward the far end.

  While Darya stood dismayed, Kallik and J'merlia backed up along the passage between the chambers. After a little more than forty meters, they halted and Kallik made small adjustments to their final positions. While J'merlia remained stationary, Kallik then drove forward and shot past Darya with her suit set to maximum thrust. At the moment of entry into the new chamber she turned off the suit's power and sailed on in free fall. Her rate of progress matched that of the storm of orange particles. J'merlia watched closely, and at last he nodded.

  "Perfect." He beckoned to Darya. "Come, if you please, Professor Lang, and we will proceed together. With respect, it is better if I control the moment when we turn the suits' power on and off."

  Darya was in a daze as she floated by J'merlia's side and allowed him to control her movements as well as his own. However, she did not lose her instinct as an observer. As they moved through the fourth chamber she examined the orange particles closest to her helmet, and saw that each one was like a tiny blunt dart, a miniature rocket pointed at the forward end and fluted into a four-part tail at the other. Just before they reached the tunnel at the far end of the chamber, the orange darts disappeared. They did not hit anything, but simply seemed to vanish. Darya and J'merlia went coasting on in darkness, toward the gleam of Kallik's suit lights.

  Darya paused as the three met, and she took a long, deep breath. Could anything be more unpleasant than what they'd just been through?

  Maybe. By the look of it, the fifth chamber was a candidate.

  The space ahead was filled with transportation entry points, hundreds and hundreds of them. The ominous black vortices did not remain at rest, but skated through and past each other, rebounding from the chamber walls in a complicated and unpredictable dance. Darya did not even try to count them, but she shuddered at the prospect of weaving a way through. Hovering at the entrance, she watched in disbelief as Kallik and J'merlia set off to run the gauntlet.

  Didn't anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it an instinct for self-preservation).

  The swirling vortices blocked a view of the other end. It was impossible to tell if Kallik and J'merlia had made it through the chamber. It was also impossible for Darya to remain forever where she was, poised nervously at the entrance.

  She took a long last breath, waited until she could see a space which for at least a moment was clear of the dark whirlpools, and plunged forward. In what felt like milliseconds the open space ahead had gone and vortices came crowding in on her. Darya envied Kallik, with her rings of eyes that could see in all directions. She jigged to the right, waited another moment, shot forward, waited again for a heartbeat, then did a quick combined up-and-left maneuver. A vortex zooming up from behind was almost on top of her before she knew it. She could feel the sideways drag of its vorticity as she spurted away, down and to the left again.

  The biggest danger of all would be to be trapped close to the chamber wall, with her freedom to move automatically halved. She had been moving mostly to the left, so the wall might be near. She glanced that way, just in time to see a monster vortex bouncing straight at her. She had no choice but a maximum thrust, forward and to the right. She dived that way, then gritted her teeth when she saw yet another dark shape immediately ahead.

  It was too late to change direction. The new vortex was going to get her. When it seemed just inches away she was grabbed by both her arms and a violent jerk pulled her clear. There was another dizzying moment, a spinning out of control. Then in front of her she saw a dark opening.

  It was the exit to the chamber. Kallik and J'merlia floated on each side of her, holding her as she sagged against the safe and solid tunnel wall of the next chamber.

  "A unique experience," said a thoughtful voice. "And an exhilarating one."

  It was not clear whether Kallik was talking to her or to J'merlia, but Darya made no attempt to respond. Her own unvoiced comment, This had better be the last damned chamber, no longer seemed appropriate. She could already see that this was the last room. Instead of a sphere she was facing into a hexagonal pyramid. It narrowed at the far end to a closed wedge, and Darya saw no other exit. Looking at it positively, they had made it unharmed all the way to their destination. Their suits would support them for many days. Looked at otherwise, the only way out of this place would be to go back through the terrors they had just left. The orange hail of the fourth chamber, if nothing else, would make a return doubly difficult.

  The other two were moving forward. Kallik, Darya noticed, was even cracking open her suit.

  "Breathable air," she said, before Darya could protest. The Hymenopt gestured to her suit monitors.

  Darya glanced at her own and saw that Kallik was correct. The final room held breathable gases, at acceptable pressure—in spite of the fact that the five previous chambers had shown on the monitor as hard vacuum, and there was no sign of any sealing barrier between them and this. Well, there had also been no sign of a barrier that could stop or absorb the sleet of orange darts, but they
had vanished just the same.

  Darya opened her own suit, with just two thoughts in her head. The first was that Builder technology would be forever beyond her. The second was that she was not cut out to be a bold and brave explorer. If she escaped from this alive, she would go back to doing what she did best: analysis and interpretation of other people's wild leaps into the unknown.

  She wished, not for the first time, that she had not been so quick to leave Hans Rebka on Sentinel Gate. He thrived on this sort of madness. If he were beside her now, her pulse might be coming down from its two-a-second thumping.

  And then all those thoughts vanished. She was able, for the first time, to take a good look at the six flat walls of the hexagonal room. She stared and stared. The walls were wrong. Each was covered with multicolored, milky patterns, interspersed with diffuse streaks and smears in pale pastel shades.

  Not a beautiful series of time-sequenced images of the spiral arm, as Quintus Bloom had reported. Not a single comprehensive image of the region, as Darya had been half expecting. Not, in fact, a recognizable picture of any kind; just a hazy, confused blur, something that the eye had trouble looking at.