Convergence

Chapter Eighteen

Another half-day, and still no sign of J’merlia. Darya was worried. Kallik clearly was not. The little Hymenopt was systematically making three-dimensional reconstructions of the other five walls of the hexagonal chamber, using her new computer program on the images that Darya had made earlier.

She did not ask for help. Darya did not offer any. Each had her own obsessions.

Darya kept running the first picture sequence, over and over. All data on stellar velocities was back on board the Myosotis, and without that information she lacked an absolute means of measuring time. But the general pattern of the sequence was clear. Somewhere, far in the past and far from the worlds of the Fourth Alliance, an unidentified species had achieved intelligence and space flight. The spreading green points of light showed the stars that the clade had reached. Later, probably thousands of years later, another clade had escaped their home world and set off to explore and colonize. The second clade, judging from the location of the orange points of light, was the Zardalu.

They had spread also, speedily, aggressively. Finally they met and began to swallow up the worlds of the green clade.

So far, so good. Not much was known about the Zardalu expansion, but there was nothing in the display at variance with recorded history.

But now came a third clade, shown on the display in deep ruby-red. This one, according to its point of origin, represented humanity. It started out from the home world of Sol, and began a tentative spread outward. It never stood a chance. The expanding tide of Zardalu-orange caught and swallowed the first scattering of red points. It swept past Sol and on through the spiral arm, swamping everything else. Finally every green and red light was replaced by a point of orange flame.

That was the situation when the supergiant reference stars seemed to be in their present-day positions. Darya halted the progression of images. According to what she was seeing, the spiral arm was supposed to be, today, what it clearly was not: a region totally under Zardalu domination.

Darya stared and pondered. This was a picture of the spiral arm as it would have been had the Great Rising against the Zardalu never occurred. If the Zardalu outward drive had continued unchecked, every habitable planet of the spiral arm would have eventually come under the dominion of the land-cephalopods. The worlds of humans were gone, destroyed or confiscated. Humanity was enslaved or exterminated, together with all other species operating in space.

And the future?

There were more frames in the image sequence. Darya ran it onward. The stellar positions began to change again, to an unfamiliar pattern. Time advanced, by many thousands of years. But the pattern of color never altered. Every star remained a steady orange. Zardalu, and Zardalu alone, ruled. At last the orange points of light began to vanish, snuffing out one by one. The spiral arm became empty. It remained devoid of intelligent life, all the way to the final frame of the sequence.

Darya turned off the display in her helmet. She did not switch her visor to outside viewing. It was better to stare into blackness, and disappear into a maze of thought.

Here was not one mystery, but two.

First, how had Quintus Bloom been able to show on Sentinel Gate a realistic display of the spiral arm’s colonization — past, present, and future? He did not show the false pattern of Zardalu domination. Darya could not believe that he had invented that display. He had found it somewhere within Labyrinth, in this inner chamber, or more likely in some other of the thirty-seven.

Second, what was the significance of this display of spiral arm evolution, so clearly contrary to reality? The Builders were an enigma, but Darya could see no possible reason for them portraying on the walls of Labyrinth a fictitious history of the arm.

Now to those mysteries, add a third:

What was the nature of beings for whom the natural way to view a series of two-dimensional images was to stack them on top of another, in three dimensions?

Darya’s mind felt clear and clean, her body far away. Her suit was unobtrusive, quietly monitoring her condition and making automatic adjustments for heat, humidity, and air supply. She might have been back in her study in Sentinel Gate, staring at the wall and not seeing it, oblivious to sights and sounds outside the open window. At last a faint voice began whispering its message to her inner ear: Invert the process. Solve the third mystery, and its solution will answer the other two questions.

Darya cast her thoughts back over the years, to gather and sieve all the theories she had ever read, heard, or thought, about the Builders.

Old theories…

…they vanished over three million years ago, ascending to a higher plane of existence. The artifacts are mere random debris, the trash left behind by a race of super-beings.

…they became old, as any organism must grow old. Knowing that their end was near, and that others would come after them, they left the artifacts as gifts to their successors.

…they left over three million years ago, but one day they intend to return. The Builder constructs are no more than their caretakers, preserving artifacts on behalf of their once and future masters.

…the Builders are still here, in the spiral arm. They control the artifacts, but they have no desire to interact with other species.

And new theories…

…according to Quintus Bloom: The Builders are not part of the past. They are from the future, and they placed their artifacts in the spiral arm to affect and direct the course of that future. When key events reveal that the future is on the right course, the artifacts will change. Soon after that, the artifacts will return to the future from which they came. Those key events have occurred. That time of change is here now.

…according to Darya Lang: An idea sprang into existence, full-formed in her mind as though it had always been there. The Builders are not time travelers from the future. They lived in the past, and perhaps they live in the present. We cannot perceive them, and communication between them and us is difficult, perhaps impossible. But they are aware of us. Perhaps they also have sympathy for us, and for the other clades — because they are able to see the future, see it as clearly as humans see a scene with their eyes, or Cecropians with their echolocation.

They lived in the past… a race able to see the future…

Except that at any moment of time there could be no single, defined future. There were only potential futures, possible directions of development. Present actions decided which of those potentials would realize itself as the future, one among an infinite number of alternatives. So what did it mean, to say that the Builders were able to see the future? Was it more than a refined ability to perform extrapolation?

Put the question into more familiar terms: What did it tell you about the structure and nature of Darya Lang, that she was able to see? What physical properties of her eyes made her able to look close at a nearby flower (as the Builders were able to see tomorrow, in time), and then far off to a distant landscape (as the Builders could see a thousand years hence)?

Darya’s trance was complete. She sat at the brink of revelation, its message tantalizingly beyond her grasp. She saw in her mind the blurred, milky wall of the chamber, with its clear (but cryptic) three-dimensional message. Humans and Hymenopts could not grasp that message all at once, in its entirety. They needed to have it broken down into single frames, to see it a thin slice at a time.

But perhaps the Builders had no such need…

Darya sensed the first faint ghost of a different kind of being, one so alien in nature that humans, Cecropians, Hymenopts, and Lo’tfians — even Zardalu — were all close cousins.

If she were right, every one of her questions would be answered. The logical pieces were there. All she needed was confirmation — which meant more data.

She turned her visor to external viewing. “Kallik!”

She started, as the Hymenopt popped up right in front of her. Kallik had been waiting, eight legs tucked neatly beneath the round furry body.

“I am here. I did not wish to disturb your thoughts.”

“They were disturbing enough by themselves. Did you process the other five walls?”

“Long since. Like the first one, they exist now as sequences of images.”

“Can I see them?”

“Assuredly. I have reviewed one of them already. But with respect” — Kallik sounded apologetic — “I fear that it is not what you are hoping to see.”

“You mean it’s not a set of images of spiral arm clade evolution, the way that the first one was?”

“No. I mean that it is just such a set. It shows a representation of the spiral arm. However, it suffers the same problem as the one which we previously examined. By which I mean, it does not resemble what Quintus Bloom reported, and it is also quite inconsistent with what we know to be the true history of arm colonization.”

They were deep within Labyrinth, with no idea how, when, or if they would ever escape. Darya decided that she must be crazy. There was no other way to explain the sense of satisfaction — of delight — that filled her at Kallik’s words. She could not justify her conviction that she was going to achieve her life’s ambition. But she felt sure of it. Before she died, however soon that might be, she was going to fathom the nature of the Builders. She was already more than halfway there.

Darya laughed. “Kallik, what you have is exactly what I’m hoping to see. As soon as you are ready, I want to take a look at every one of those sequences.”

Any male Lo’tfian who has been removed from the home world of Lo’tfi and its breeding warrens is already insane. If a Lo’tfian slave and interpreter is also deprived of his Cecropian dominatrix, he becomes doubly mad. J’merlia, operating far from home and without orders from Atvar H’sial, had been crazy for some time.

Added to that, he now faced an impossible problem: Darya Lang had ordered him to look for a way out of Labyrinth. He had to obey that command. But it forced him to exercise freedom of choice, and to make decisions for himself.

A direct command to leave the others — and one that obliged him, for as long as he was absent, to operate without commands!

J’merlia was a mightily distressed Lo’tfian as he started out from the innermost chamber of Labyrinth. And, before he had gone very far, he was an extremely confused one.

In the short time since they had entered, Labyrinth had changed. The way back from the inner room should have led through a short tunnel into the chamber that teemed with the whirling black vortices. Vortices there certainly were, but only two of them, floating sedately against opposite walls. Neither one moved. Return through the chamber was trivially easy, as J’merlia quickly demonstrated.

The next one ought to have been as bad, with its fierce sleet of orange particles opposing any returning traveler. But when he got there, the storm had almost ended. The handful of little flecks of orange that hit his suit bounced harmlessly off and drifted on their way.

Logically, J’merlia should have been pleased; in fact, he became more worried. Even the walls of the third chamber did not look the same. They had dark windows in them, beyond which other rooms were faintly visible. There was also a translucency to the walls themselves, as though they were preparing to dissolve into gray vapor and blow away.

J’merlia went on. And then, just when he was wondering what unpleasant surprise he might find in the next room, he emerged from the connecting tunnel and saw a very familiar sight. Right ahead was the Myosotis, floating in the great helical tube, just as they had left it.

The remaining chambers had not changed; they had vanished. Six chambers had collapsed into four. A dangerous escape had become a trivially easy one, and J’merlia’s task was apparently completed. He was free to turn around, go back, and tell Darya Lang that they could leave Labyrinth any time they felt like it.

Except for a small detail. One form of insanity bears the name curiosity. J’merlia floated up toward the ship to make sure that it was intact, and found that not far ahead was one of those strange dark apertures in the wall of the tube.

He moved closer until he could see through it, into another chamber. There was a suited figure there, moving slowly away from him. J’merlia stared, counted suit appendages, and made his helmet resonate with a hundred-thousand cycle whistle of relief. Eight legs. Thin, pipestem body. Narrow head. A suit identical to his. It was J’merlia himself, and what he had taken for an opening in the wall was no more than a mirror.

Except that — curiosity seized him again. He was moving toward the opening, and the suited figure was moving away from it. He was staring at the back of the thin body.

J’merlia kept moving forward, slowly and cautiously, until he was within the opening. The figure he was following moved, too, floating toward a window on the opposite side of the chamber. J’merlia went on through to the second chamber. His double went ahead also, apparently into a third room.

J’merlia paused. So did his quarry. He back-tracked toward the opening into his original chamber. The figure ahead of him reversed and did the same.

The mystery was solved. He was pursuing himself. Somehow this region of Labyrinth must include a mirror, but a three-dimensional mirror, one that exhibited an exact copy of the chamber in which he was moving.

Like any sensible being, J’merlia preferred to have someone else doing his thinking for him and making his decisions. All the same, he had plenty of intelligence of his own. Wandering the arm with Atvar H’sial had also given him much experience of what technology can do. He had never heard of a three-dimensional mirror like this, but there was no great magic to it. He could think of three or four different ways that such a mirror-room might be built.

He was at the aperture, that comforting notion still in his head, when the angular figure in front of him turned its body, stared off to the left, and began to move rapidly in that direction. It was heading toward the central chamber of Labyrinth.

Now there was something new. The anomaly brought to J’merlia a new awareness, that he was playing a game in which he did not know the rules. He turned also, to head back to the middle of Labyrinth.

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.