They did.
Next they would find themselves in free fall, and lose all light and power on the ship.
They did.
And in just ten seconds or so, the power and lights and gravity would return.
They didn't.
Nenda and Bloom sat side by side in silence as the seconds wore on. And on.
Finally, Bloom's voice came in the darkness: "How long did you say before we have power again?"
"Just a few more seconds. What we've hit is called a hiatus. It won't last. Ah!" A faint glimmer of light was appearing in the control room. "Here we go."
Power was creeping back. The screens were again flickering toward normal status. An image appeared on the main display, showing space outside the Gravitas.
Nenda stared no less eagerly than Quintus Bloom. He put the ship into steady rotation, so that they could examine all directions in turn. He had expected them to be surrounded by the overall multilobed Anfract, and closer to them should be the nested annular singularities that shielded Genizee. If the earlier disappearance of those singularities was permanent, the ship would have a distant view of Genizee. They would be far enough away that the Zardalu inhabitants could do no harm.
Nenda kept his eye on the screen as the turning ship scanned the outside. There was no sign of the characteristic shimmering lobes of the Torvil Anfract—of any Anfract lobe. No nested annular singularities appeared anywhere on the display. Nothing remotely resembling a planet could be seen.
All the lights suddenly went out again. The murmur of the ship's engines faded to nothing.
"Another hiatus?" Bloom was more irritated than alarmed. This time the ship's rotation provided enough artificial gravity to prevent physical discomfort. "How many of these things are there?"
"Damned if I know." Louis was more alarmed than irritated. "I only expected one."
They waited, sitting in absolute darkness. Seconds stretched to minutes.
"Look, I'm in a big hurry. I'd have thought you would know that by now." Bloom's face was not visible, but his voice said it all. "You'd better get us out of here, Nenda—and quickly."
Louis sighed, closed his eyes, and opened them again. Nothing had changed. For all he knew, the hiatus might last forever. Nothing he did to the ship's controls could make any difference.
"Did you hear me?" Bloom spoke again from the darkness. "I said, get us out. If not, you can forget your pay."
"I'm forgetting it already." But Nenda kept that thought to himself. He stared hard at lots of black nothing, and wished that Genizee would appear ahead and the ship would drop him back among the Zardalu. At least you knew where you were with Zardalu.
Loss of pay seemed the least of his worries.
Chapter Sixteen
Darya hated the idea of slavery, but now and again she could see some advantage to being a slave. For one thing, you didn't have to make decisions.
J'merlia and Kallik had followed her—and sometimes led her—to the middle of nowhere. Now, floating in the innermost chamber of Labyrinth, they were patiently waiting until she told them what to do next.
As if she knew.
Darya stared around at the flat walls of the hexagonal chamber, seeking inspiration in their bland, marbled faces.
"We made it here safely, which is exactly what we wanted." (Think positive!) "But eventually we must find a good way to return to our ship, and then back into free space."
The two aliens indicated agreement but did not speak.
"So you, J'merlia." Darya cleared her throat to gain thinking time. "I'd like you to take another look at the way we came. See if there's some way to reach another interior, one that's easier to travel. And J'merlia!"—the Lo'tfian was already nodding and ready to go—"Don't take risks!"
J'merlia's head turned, and the lemon eyes on their short stalks stared reproachfully at Darya. "Of course not. With respect, if I became damaged I would be of no further value to you."
Except that his and Darya's ideas of risk were unlikely to coincide. He was already zooming happily off toward the entry tunnel and the chamber filled with terrifying dark vortices.
"And don't stay away too long!" Darya called after him. "No more than three or four hours."
There was no reply, just a nod of the suit's helmet.
"And I?" Kallik was staring at J'merlia's vanishing form. Darya thought she could detect a wistfulness in her voice. There was nothing the little Hymenopt would have liked better than to go racing off with J'merlia.
"You and I will examine this chamber more closely. I know it seems as though there's absolutely nothing of interest here, though Quintus Bloom said otherwise."
Darya did not look at Kallik as she led the way to peer at the nearest wall. The multicolored, milky surface seemed to stare back at her. Close up, the wall showed a lot more detail. The pastel shades that Darya saw from a distance were not composed of flat washes of pale color, but were created by many narrow lines of bright color set in a uniform white background. It was as though someone had begun with a wall of plain white, then drawn on that surface with a very fine pen thousands of intersecting lines of different colors. And drawn them sequentially, because wherever two lines crossed, one of them was broken by the other.
But it was still nothing like a picture. Darya wondered again about Bloom's term: polyglyphs. She glanced at Kallik. The Hymenopt was standing just a few feet from the wall. She was staring at it with bright black eyes, and swaying her head from side to side. After a few moments she began to do the same thing with her whole body, shifting first a couple of feet to the left and then moving back to the right.
"What's wrong?"
Kallik paused in her oscillation. "Nothing is wrong. But this wall shows parallax."
It was not something that Darya had thought to look for. She followed Kallik's example and moved her own head, first to the left and then to the right. As she did so, the line patterns moved slightly relative to each other. It was as though she could see down into the surface, and the lines were at different depths. When she changed her viewing position, the nearer lines moved more than the distant ones. Also, she noticed that no single line was at a uniform depth. One end was always deeper than the other, as though the line met the surface at a shallow angle and continued below it.
The whole wall looked like a bewildering set of lines embedded in open space above a white background. That was a three-dimensional effect, produced by the super-position of many different layers. If you imagined that the wall you saw was built up from a set of nearly transparent plates, stacked one beneath the other behind the surface, what would a single plate look like?
Darya went up to the wall and reached out to touch it. The surface was smooth and hard. The wall was continuous, and met seamlessly with other surfaces of the hexagonal chamber.
"With respect, I do not think that will be possible."
Kallik, at her side, had been following Darya's thoughts. Drilling, or somehow splitting the wall into layers, would not give the information they needed.
That was just as well; Darya had an instinctive reluctance to damage any element of an artifact. "Any ideas?"
"None, I am ashamed to say. But subtle and non-destructive methods will be needed."
Darya nodded. It was infuriating, but little by little she was being forced to conclude that Quintus Bloom was her master when it came to practical research. He had examined the walls before which she and Kallik floated, and understood their three-dimensional nature. He had somehow "unpacked" that information to create a set of two-dimensional pictures, without in any way damaging the wall. But how had he done it?
The answer came to Darya as she again moved her head, first to the left and then to the right, and watched the lines move relative to each other because of parallax. She suddenly knew a method—and it was irritatingly simple. Any practical surveyor would have seen it at once. It needed an imaging system and a good deal of computer power, but their suits could provide that.
"Kallik,
we have to take pictures." She paused and thought for a moment. Two images would fix position in a plane, three in space. "From at least three different positions. Let's make it more than that, and build in some redundancy. Then we'll need a rectification program."
"I can certainly construct such a program. And I will also include a parameter that allows for the refractive index of the wall's material." Kallik responded without a pause—it confirmed Darya's opinion; the Hymenopt was quick. She understood exactly what Darya was proposing. "The program will perform a resection and provide point positions in three-dimensional space. The primary computer output will consist of the depth below the surface of every point on every line. However, that is perhaps not what you would like to see."
"No. I'd like the output as a set of two-dimensional images. Each different image should correspond to a prescribed depth below the wall surface. Label each one of them"—recognition of Quintus Bloom's accomplishment and priority was no more than his due—"as a glyph."
* * *
Kallik was quick and able as a programmer. In this case, though, she was not nearly quick enough to suit Darya. Once the digital images had been recorded and registered to each other, Darya's role disappeared. She roamed the chamber impatiently, knowing that the worst thing she could do was to interrupt the Hymenopt while she was working. The temptation to kibitz was enormous.
For lack of anything better to do, Darya made stereo sets of digital images of the other five walls of the chamber, then wandered down toward the place where the hexagonal pyramid terminated. There was no sign of wear inside this artifact, none of the pitting and crumbling and scarring that told of a three-million-year history. Score another one for Quintus Bloom. Labyrinth must be new, the only known new artifact in the whole spiral arm.
At the very end, the shape of the room changed to a narrow wedge. Darya placed her gloved hand in as far as it would go. She tried to estimate the angle, and decided it was about ten degrees. That was consistent with the notion of thirty-seven interiors terminating in the sharp point of Labyrinth. If this formed, as Bloom had suggested, the very end of the artifact, then where her hand was resting should be only inches away from the other interiors—and only a few feet away from open space. If J'merlia's search for a safe way out was unsuccessful, maybe they could smash through the wall to freedom.
Where was J'merlia?
He had been away nearly four hours. Another few minutes and he would be past his deadline.
"With respect." Kallik's voice came over Darya's suit communicator. "The results are now ready for final formatting. How would you like them to be presented?"
"Can you show them as a sequence on my suit display? The surface itself first, then images showing how the plane looks at different depths below the surface. Make one for every millimeter, going gradually deeper. And can you display a couple of images each second?"
"It can be done. Anything else?"
"One more thing. Reverse the polarity, so that white on the wall shows as black on the images."
Kallik said nothing, but the visor on Darya's suit darkened to become an output display device. An image formed. Darya was seeing just the top fraction of a millimeter of the wall's surface, with light and dark reversed. She caught her breath. It was a familiar sight: a blackness deeper than any night, and superimposed on it the white star pattern of the spiral arm.
And then it was suddenly not so familiar. "Freeze it there!"
The display sat unmoving on the visor. It was the spiral arm as seen from above the galactic plane, but not quite as it should have been. The familiar locator stars, the bright blue supergiants used by every species as markers, had been subtly moved in their relative positions.
"Are you sure you didn't change the look angle? The star positions are wrong."
"I did not make any change. With respect, may I offer a suggestion?"
"Sure. It looks wrong to you, too, doesn't it?"
"It does. It is not an accurate portrayal of the spiral arm as it is today. But I suggest that the scene may well be of the past or the future. Then the differences that we are seeing would be no more than the effects of stellar long-term movement. Thus."
The image held for a moment. There was a flicker, then successive image frames took their place on the display. Tiny changes became visible. The luminous locator stars of the spiral arm began to creep across the screen, all moving at different speeds. It seemed to Darya that the pattern became increasingly familiar, but without a reference set of current stellar positions she would not know when the display showed the arm as it was today.
No wonder the chamber wall had been confusing, filled with sets of lines and smears. It was the image of a myriad of stars, their movements plotted over thousands or millions of years, and all added and portrayed together in one three-dimensional structure.
A bright point of green light suddenly appeared on the display, a new star where none had been before.
"What's that—"
Darya had the answer before she could complete the question, just as another glint of green appeared close to the first. Then another. The green must be showing stars where some species had reached a critical intelligence level—maybe achieved space flight. And those stars were never the blazing supergiants, which were far too young for intelligent life to have developed on the planets around them. That's why the green points seemed to spring into existence from nowhere.
They were increasing in number, spreading steadily outward from the original marker. Far off to the right, a point of orange suddenly flared into view.
"A new clade?" Kallik asked softly. "If so, then one would expect . . ."
And indeed, the first point of orange served as the nucleus for many more bright sparks, spreading out from it. The regions of orange and green spread, finally met, and began to overlap each other. The orange predominated. At the same time a third nucleus, this one showing as a single point of ruby-red, came into existence farther along the arm.
The three colored regions grew, changed shape, and merged. The orange points spread most rapidly, consuming the green and red regions, but Darya was hardly watching. She was feeling a strong emotion—not triumph, but relief. It would have been terrible to go back home and admit that where Quintus Bloom had led, she had not even been able to follow.
She leaned her head on the soft back of the helmet and neck support, and closed her eyes.
"We did it, Kallik!"
The Hymenopt remained silent.
"We figured out the polyglyphs. Didn't we?"
"Perhaps so." Kallik did not sound satisfied. "With respect, Professor Lang, would you please look once more at your display."
Darya's helmet visor showed the spiral arm, positively ablaze with flecks of light. She frowned at it. All the bright sparks were orange, and the geometry of supergiant star positions looked right. The time shown had to be close to the present day.
"Is there more? Can you see what the future tableau looks like?"
"I can indeed." Kallik was polite as ever. "I chose to halt the display at this point intentionally. You will note that the stellar array appears close to what we perceive it to be today."
"Right. Why did you stop it?"
"Because the stellar colonization pattern that we see is totally at odds with what we know to be true, and with what Quintus Bloom reported that he found. This image indicates that almost every star is colonized by a single clade, the species represented by orange on the display."
"That's ridiculous. At the very least, there should be humans and Cecropians."
Ridiculous, but right. Darya struggled to interpret the pattern in terms of what she knew to be true. The numerically dominant species in the spiral arm were humans and Cecropians. Their colony worlds should appear in roughly equal numbers. But everything showed as gleaming orange.
Orange, orange, orange. Sometimes it seemed that the Builders were obsessed by orange, the color showed up so often in their creations. Was it a clue to the Builders themselve
s—eyes that saw in a different spectral region from human eyes, organs most sensitive at longer wavelengths?
If that were a clue, it was a singularly useless one. Who even knew if Builders had eyes? Perhaps they were like the Cecropians, seeing by echolocation. The one thing that humans knew for certain about the Builders was that they knew nothing for certain.
"Kallik, can you run the display backwards? I'd like to take a look at how each clade started out."
"I did so already, for my own information. With respect, I think that the frame most likely to interest us is this one."
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