Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  Again he halted in amazement. The bulk of the Myosotis should have been hanging right in front of him. There was absolutely no sign of it—no sign of anything in the whole chamber.

  J'merlia realized, too late, that he had done something horribly stupid. What made it worse, he had been warned. Quintus Bloom had pointed out that an explorer could "cross over" into another one of the thirty-seven interiors of Labyrinth, but there was a built-in asymmetry. When you went back through the same window, it might be to a new interior region, different from the original point of departure.

  Which new interior?

  J'merlia remembered the strange cross-connection charts plotted out by Quintus Bloom, and how Darya Lang had puzzled over them. Neither Bloom nor Lang had been able to specify a rule. If they could not do it, what chance for a mere Lo'tfian?

  That was a question J'merlia could answer: No chance at all. He was lost and alone in the multiply-connected, strangely changing interior of Labyrinth, without a ship, without a map, without a dominatrix, without companions. Worst of all, he would be forced to disobey a direct order. He had been told to return to Darya Lang and Kallik after just a few hours.

  J'merlia had only one hope. If he kept hopping through the connecting windows, no matter how much the interiors might keep changing, nor how many jumps he might have to make, he had an infallible way of knowing when he reached the one he wanted. For although the interior of one chamber might look much like another, only one of them could contain the Myosotis.

  No more useless thought. Time for action. J'merlia headed for the first window between the chambers. No Myosotis. And the next. Still no ship.

  He kept track of the number of chambers as he went. The first eight were empty. The ninth was worse than empty. It contained a dozen black husks, dusty sheets of ribbed black leathery material thickened along their center line. J'merlia went close and saw wizened faces, fangs, and sunken cheeks. Chirops. A not-quite intelligent species, the favored flying pets of the Scribes. What were they doing here, so far from their own region of the arm? And where were their masters?

  The shriveled faces were mute. The bat-wings were brittle, vacuum dried, their ages impossible to determine.

  J'merlia left that room at top speed. The twenty-first chamber had him screeching and whistling a greeting. Two suited figures came drifting toward him. Not until he was close enough to peer into the visors did he realize that they too were victims of Labyrinth. Humans, without a doubt. Empty eye sockets stared out at him, and naked teeth grinned as at some secret joke. They had died hard. J'merlia examined their suits, and found the oxygen had been bled down to the last cubic centimeter. The suit design was primitive, abandoned by humans a thousand years ago. They had floated here—or somewhere—for a long, long time.

  But not as long as the contents of the thirtieth chamber. Seven creatures floated within it. Their shapes suggested giant marine forms, with swollen heads bigger than J'merlia's body. The glass of their visors had degraded to become completely opaque. How many millennia did that take? J'merlia carefully cracked open one helmet and peered inside at the contents. He was familiar with the form of every intelligent species in the spiral arm. The spiky, five-eyed head before him was unrelated to any of them.

  J'merlia pondered the contradiction as he went on: Labyrinth, according to Quintus Bloom and Darya Lang, was a new artifact. It had not been here one year ago, much less a thousand. Yet it contained antique relics of bygone ages.

  When the chamber count passed thirty-seven he wondered if he might be missing some other vital piece of information. He kept going, because he had no other real option. At last the rooms began to seem different, the windows between them becoming steadily larger. There was still no sign of the ship.

  A male Lo'tfian, according to the Cecropian dominatrices, had no imagination. It did not occur to J'merlia that he too might move from chamber to chamber until he died. After the eighth hour, however, he began to wonder what was happening. He had been through more than three hundred chambers. His procedure in each was the same, developed for maximum speed and efficiency. He made a sideways entry, so that he could glance with one eye down toward the center of Labyrinth, seeking his ship; at the same time he noted the location of the window that would lead him to the next chamber. Dead aliens, of recognizable or unrecognizable form, were no longer enough to halt his progress.

  He was so far into a routine procedure that he was almost too late to catch the change when it finally came.

  The ship! He could see it. But he was already zooming on toward the window for the next chamber—and if he went through there was no knowing how long it would be before he again found this one.

  J'merlia hit maximum suit deceleration, and realized in the same moment that it would not be enough. He would sail right out through the aperture on the far side of the chamber before he could stop.

  There was only one thing to do. He switched the direction of the thrust, to propel himself laterally rather than slowing his forward speed. The sideways jump was enough for him to miss the opening and smash straight into the chamber wall.

  A Lo'tfian was tough, and so was J'merlia's suit, but the impact tested them both to the limit. He bounced back, two of his thin hindlimbs broken and his torso bruised all along its length. His suit hissed suddenly with lost air, until the smart sensors detected and repaired the small stress rupture at a joint.

  J'merlia turned end over end, too breathless to produce a desired whistle of triumph. He had succeeded! He was many hours late, but at last he was back in the same chamber with the Myosotis.

  He righted himself with some difficulty—one of his attitude controllers was also broken—and found that his thrustors still operated. He drove toward the waiting ship.

  That was when he was glad he had produced no triumphant whistle.

  It was a ship, certainly. Unfortunately, equally certainly, it was not the Myosotis.

  Chapter Nineteen

  By the end of the second day trapped in the hiatus, three of the four travelers on board the Gravitas were not at all happy.

  The absence of ship's lights was an inconvenience, but it was the lack of power that would eventually be fatal. Louis Nenda had already done the calculation. The air circulators were not working, but natural thermal currents plus the ship's own steady rotation would provide enough convection to keep a breathable atmosphere in the ship. However, after about six days the lack of air generators and purifiers would become noticeable. Carbon dioxide levels would be perceptibly higher. Five days after that, the humans on board would become lethargic. Four days more, and they would die of asphyxiation. Atvar H'sial would survive maybe a week longer.

  Quintus Bloom was not afraid of dying. He had a different set of worries. He was convinced that Darya Lang was far ahead of him, scooping discoveries that should rightfully be his. A dozen times a day, he pestered Nenda to do something, to get them moving. Twice he had hinted that Louis had arranged all this on purpose, deliberately slowing their progress as part of a conspiracy to aid Darya Lang. Nenda wondered if somehow Atvar H'sial had managed to communicate her own paranoia about Darya to Quintus Bloom.

  The blind Cecropian was in some ways the least affected by their plunge into the hiatus. She could tolerate carbon dioxide levels that would kill a human, and her own seeing, by echolocation, was independent of the interior lights on the Gravitas. But the loss of power meant that communication with Glenna Omar through the terminals was no longer possible. Atvar H'sial had again become completely dependent on Louis Nenda and his pheromonal augment for anything that she wished to say to or hear from the others.

  The exception in all this was Glenna. Logically she, pampered by a life on Sentinel Gate where every wish and whim could be satisfied, should have been most affected by the drastic change to life aboard the Gravitas. But it was a continuing oddity of the spiral arm that the inhabitants of the richest worlds played the most at primitivism. So about once a year, the fortunate dwellers on Sentinel Gate wou
ld deliberately head out to their forests and prairies, equipped with sleeping bags, primitive fire-lighting equipment, barbaric cooking tools, and raw food. After a few days in the wilds (but never more than three or four), they would return to abundant hot water, robotchef meals, and insect-free lodging. There they assured each other that they could "rough it" as well as anyone, if ever they had to.

  Glenna had played that game a dozen times. She was trying a new variation of it now. The luxurious passenger suites of the Gravitas were equipped for cozy and candle-lit evenings, where dining tête-à-tête was often a tasteful prelude to romance. Glenna went from suite to suite and took the candles from every one. She used them all to provide subdued lighting for her own suite only, and invited the others to attend the soirée. Atvar H'sial's invitation had to be transmitted through Louis Nenda. The Cecropian received it, and replied with a pungent pheromonal combination that Nenda had never before encountered. It felt like the Cecropian equivalent of a Bronx cheer. He took it to be a rejection of the offer.

  Louis Nenda arrived first, wondering if it was a mistake to show up at all. He did so only from a long-held principle: that he needed to know everything that happened on any ship he was piloting. And if he were absent, who knew what Quintus Bloom and Glenna Omar might plot between them?

  Nenda stared gloomily at fifteen candles, arranged strategically around the boudoir. The oxygen used in their burning would shave several hours off their lives, but in the circumstances that didn't seem like a big deal.

  Glenna obviously thought this was going to be one swell party. She had her blond hair piled high on her head, to show off to advantage her long, graceful neck. The clinging cotton dress that she was wearing, cut hair-raisingly low at front and back and with a split from ankle to hip, showed a good deal more than that. She pirouetted in front of Louis, revealing what appeared to be several yards of leg.

  "How do I look?"

  "Astonishing." That at least was the truth. He heard with relief the sound of footsteps behind him. Quintus Bloom appeared, wearing an expression that Louis could interpret exactly. I'd rather be some place else, but there is nowhere else. And anyway, I can't afford to miss something important.

  Wafting in with Quintus Bloom came something else. A hint of pheromones, too weak to be caught by anyone but Nenda.

  "At. I know you're there, waiting outside. I thought you decided not to come."

  "I have no desire to attend what I suspect to be designed as a human multiple mating ritual. However, I wish to know what is said about other matters. Like you, I am opposed to any conspiracy of which I am not a part."

  "What I thought we would do is this." Glenna, unaware of the exchange of pheromonal messages going on around her, was playing hostess. "Since we're here, in such primitive conditions, I thought we ought to tell stories to each other the way our ancestors did, thousands and thousands of years ago, sitting terrified around their camp fires."

  Dead silence. Louis didn't know about Quintus Bloom, but he had sat terrified around a camp fire a lot more recently than that.

  Oblivious to the lack of response, Glenna went on. "Sit down, both of you." She waited until the two men were in place on the divan, half a yard of space between them. "Now, I'll be the judge, and the one of you who tells the best story will get a special prize."

  She squeezed into the space between them and placed a warm hand on each man's thigh. "Since we're almost in the dark, we ought to talk about scary or romantic things. Who wants to start?"

  Blank silence.

  "Did I not warn you?" The message drifted into the room with an overtone of satisfied humor. "If I may offer advice, Louis, I say: Beware the special prize."

  Nenda glared at the door. As if things weren't bad enough, Atvar H'sial was laughing at him.

  "Oh, come on, Louis!" Glenna squeezed his leg to bring his attention back to her. "Don't play hard to get. I know from what Atvar H'sial told me that the two of you actually met live Zardalu, when everybody else thinks they've been extinct for eleven thousand years. That must have been frightening, even for you. What are they like?"

  "You don't want to know."

  "Oh yes I do!" She slid her hand along the inside of his thigh, and added breathily, "You know, I find this sort of thing just makes me tingle."

  That, and everything else. Nenda admitted defeat. Glenna was as single-minded in her own way as Quintus Bloom.

  "We said we wouldn't talk about the Zardalu, At, but I'm going to. Maybe a touch of them will slow her down."

  Nenda turned to Glenna. "You wouldn't find a Zardalu exciting if you ran into one. You won't, of course, because they live only on Genizee, here inside the Anfract. But they're enough to make anybody jump. For starters, they're huge. Seven meters long when they're at full stretch. The head of a full-grown Zardalu is as wide across as this divan. They are land-cephalopods, so they stand or slither along on half a dozen thick tentacles. Fast, too, faster than a human can run. The tentacles are pale blue, strong enough to snap a steel cable. The head is a deep, deep blue, as blue as midnight on Pelican's Wake. A Zardalu has two big blue eyes, each one as wide across as my outstretched hand. And under that is a big beak."

  Glenna's hand had stopped moving on his thigh. Nenda glanced across to see her expression. She was staring at him with wide, avid eyes, mopping it up. So much for his theory that she would be frightened. The surprise came from the other side of her. Quintus Bloom was also staring at Nenda. He looked puzzled. His hand reached out to form a shape in the half-light.

  "A beak with a hook on it," he said slowly. "Like this." His hand turned to curve downward. "Hard and blue, and big enough to seize and crack a human skull. And under it a long slit of a mouth, vertical. The head runs straight down to the torso, same width, but separating the two is a thing like a necklace of round openings, each one a bit bigger than your fist and running all around the body."

  "Breeding pouches." Nenda stared across at Quintus Bloom, his annoyance with Glenna forgotten. "How the devil do you know all this? Have you been reading reports about the Zardalu that we took to Miranda?"

  "Not a word. I'd never in my whole life read or heard any physical description of one."

  "You mean you've actually seen a live Zardalu?"

  "No. A dead one. But I had no idea what it was." Quintus Bloom's eyes were wider than Glenna's. "When I was exploring Labyrinth, I came across an interior chamber with five creatures in it. Each one had started out huge, but when I got to them they were shrunken and wizened. They had been vacuum-dried, and they looked like enormous desiccated plant bulbs. I didn't even realize they were animals, until I came close and saw those eyes. That's when I decided to hydrate one—pump warm water into each cell, until it came back to its original size and shape and color." His gaze moved to Nenda. "Seven meters long, head and torso of midnight blue. Eyes with lids, like human eyes but a hundred times the size. Tentacles pale blue, ending in fine, ropy tips. Right?"

  "Exactly right. That's a Zardalu to the life. Or to the death." Nenda caught a quick question from Atvar H'sial, who was following the conversation as best she could from Nenda's scraps of pheromonal translation. He passed it on to Bloom. "What's your interest in the Zardalu?"

  "I care nothing for Zardalu—living or dead." Bloom's beaky nose jutted superciliously at Nenda. "My interest is in the Builders, and only the Builders. But you have raised a question that I cannot answer."

  "An unforgivable sin." But Louis sent that remark only to Atvar H'sial, along with his translation of Bloom's arrogant comments.

  "You assert that the Zardalu live only in one place," Bloom went on. "On Genizee. What makes you think that your statement is true?"

  "I don't think it, I know it. At the time of the Great Rising, the Zardalu were just about exterminated from the spiral arm. Only fourteen specimens were saved, and they were held in stasis until a year ago. They went straight from there to Genizee. I know all that, because I was there when it happened. The only one not on Genizee today is a
baby, brought back to Miranda by Darya Lang and her party. Why does that get you so upset?"

  Bloom glared back at Nenda. He seemed quite unaware of the flicker of the ship's lighting, or the tentative moan of electrical systems returning to power. "Because, you ignoramus, of the implication of your words. Think, if you are at all capable of such a thing, of these facts. First, every Zardalu except one infant is to be found on Genizee, and only on Genizee. Second, I discovered the dried corpses of five Zardalu floating in an interior chamber of Labyrinth. Third, Labyrinth is a new artifact. It did not exist eleven thousand years ago, or a century ago, or even a year ago. Put those items together, and what do you get?"

  One thing you got, very clearly, was that Glenna's romantic evening was not going quite according to plan. But that was unlikely to be what Quintus Bloom had in mind for a conclusion. In any case, Nenda's thoughts were moving to other things. He knew what the flicker of light meant: the Gravitas was emerging from the hiatus.

  "What do you get?" His question was automatic. Whatever it was, it was less important than regaining control of the ship.