Divergence

CHAPTER 13

Seen from a distance with the great bulk of Gargantua as backdrop, Glister was an insignificant mote. Without the telltale signal from the Have-It-All’s beacon, the planetoid would have been too small to notice, lost amid a thousand larger fragments.

But viewed from the inside…

The floors, bulging walls, and arched ceilings of the lower levels were formed of broad interlocking hoops, each one pleated and rigid and glowing with its own faint phosphorescence. It was like walking through the curling alimentary canal of a giant alien beast. Some sections were filled with nets and cables, like those found on the higher levels, while others were totally empty; occasional areas were littered with pieces of equipment placed apparently at random.

Darya was muttering to herself as Hans Rebka led the way deeper and deeper, on through endless corridors.

“What’s that?” he asked over his shoulder as she swore more loudly than usual.

“Calculations. Depressing ones. The radius of Glister is one-point-one-six kilometers. Even if each interior level is fifty meters high, that’s a hundred and twenty square kilometers of floor. How long is it going to take us to look at it all?”

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll starve to death first.”

Hans Rebka had to be hungry, too, but he was defiantly cheerful. Starvation, or even the mention of it, did not make Darya cheerful. It made her grouchy. Back on Sentinel Gate she had not missed a meal in twenty years. That thought was no help at all. “We don’t seem to be finding anything useful. Where do you think you’re taking us?”

Hans did not answer. In spite of her grumbles, it was Darya who had insisted on stopping every few minutes to take a close look at some novel structure or machine. Every object in the interior of Glister was a product of the Builders’ technology and therefore a source of fascination to the professor in her. She could recognize many of them, devices that occurred in some of the other 1236 known Builder artifacts scattered around the spiral arm, but a number were totally unfamiliar, and she wanted to inspect them closely and estimate their function. Rebka was the one who had to drag her away, every time, insisting that they must find the control center of Glister before they did anything else. Since the planetoid was artificial and habitable, something had to be keeping it in working order.

Rebka had not mentioned his own secret fear. Gravity was increasing steadily as they wound their way down toward the center of Glister. Now it was close to two gees. Beneath their feet must be some powerful field source. They could still walk easily enough — but what would they do if it rose higher yet? No one knew what gravity field the Builders had found natural. A central control room for Glister might occupy a high-gee environment that neither he nor Darya could tolerate.

From the curvature of the floor he estimated that they were still about six hundred meters from the center of Glister. Given a choice of paths, he had always descended. It was only an instinct, the belief that the most important regions of the planetoid ought to be near the center rather than on some upper level. If he was wrong, he would have doomed both of them.

In spite of all that, Rebka was quite enjoying himself. This was what life was all about. Exploring things that no human had ever seen before, with an interesting companion — what more could a man ask, unless it was for a little food?

“I think we’re coming to something,” he said. “The light ahead is different. It’s getting fainter.”

The answering growl behind Rebka sounded skeptical. He wondered if it was just Darya’s stomach. As the illumination from walls and ceiling faded, he stepped forward more cautiously. Soon he could see nothing ahead, not even the floor, but his instincts told him they were approaching something new.

“Stay there.” He kept his voice down to the softest whisper. “I don’t know what’s ahead, but I want to feel my way for a bit before we shine a light.” Even those breathed words sounded strange, hollow and echoing.

He went down on hands and knees and felt his way forward. Five meters farther on, his left hand found itself groping into empty space. He reached out as far as he could on both sides. Nothing. The tunnel ended in a blind drop. There was no light below, or in any direction. He crawled back to join Darya and placed his mouth next to her ear.

“We’ll have to use your flashlight,” he whispered. “Take a look ahead. Be careful how you shine it — straight down on the floor first, then raise it up slowly.” He moved aside to allow her to come level with him, then paced her carefully forward.

“No farther now!” He stopped her. “There’s nothing ahead.”

Darya nodded, unseen in the darkness. The light beam shone on the floor at her feet, then moved out over the lip in front of them. As it came higher its narrow beam reflected faintly off a distant wall. Darya inched forward, shining the light downward. One more step, and she would be over the edge.

The ledge she stood on was halfway up the wall of a great open room, with a sheer drop below that plunged twenty meters before it curved around to form the bowl-shaped empty floor of the chamber.

Darya stepped back a pace. In this gravity field, any fall could be fatal. She shone the beam higher. Above them was a vaulted ceiling, confirming the spherical shape of the chamber. The domed vault was featureless, without lights or support struts. The whole room had to be at least sixty meters across.

“Something’s there.” Hans kept his voice to a whisper, but the echoes came rolling in from across the room, reluctant to die. There… there… there… there.

“Right in the middle. Shine the light in the center.”

Darya pointed the flashlight straight ahead. Hovering in the middle of the room without any visible support was a silvery sphere about ten meters across. She thought at once of the sphere that had risen from the broken surface of Quake at Summertide, but this one was hundreds of times smaller.

And it was more active. The ball had been hanging in a fixed position, but as the beam touched it the surface became a play of motion. The flashlight reflected an undulatory pattern, like slow waves on a ball of rippling mercury. The waves grew and steadied. The sphere began to deform and elongate.

There… there… there… there… A rusty, creaking voice filled the chamber, as deep and ancient as the sea. There… there… there… there. Center… center… center… center.

Darya was so excited that she could hardly hold the flashlight steady. The sphere had become a distorted ellipsoid. A frond of silver began to grow upward from the top, slowly evolving to a five-sided flower that turned to face Darya and Hans. Open pentagonal disks extruded from the front of the ball, pointing toward the flashlight beam. A long, thin tail grew down, extending to the floor of the chamber. In three minutes the featureless sphere became a horned and tailed devil-beast, with a flowerlike head that sought the source of the intrusion.

A flickering green light shone from an aperture in the body of the demon and illuminated Hans and Darya. The inside of the great chamber shimmered with its reflection. Darya turned off the flashlight.

Human form… human… human. Too soon… soon… soon… The weary voice came echoing across to them. Who… who… who… who…

Hans and Darya turned to look at each other.

He shrugged. “What do we have to lose?” He faced into the chamber and spoke at normal volume. “Can you understand me? We are humans. We were brought against our will into this planetoid. We do not know how to leave it.”

The flower head was nodding toward them. The light from the being’s body modulated in color and intensity as it bobbed up and down in the middle of the chamber.

“It’s no good,” Darya said. “You can’t expect it to understand a word.” But while she was speaking the voice began again.

Brought inside… inside. Yes, we understand human… human… human… You were brought inside to be… others, in case others were needed… you may not be needed. You were to stay there… near the outside… not come here…

Darya stepped closer to the edge. “Who are you? Where did you come from? What is this place?”

“One question at a time,” Rebka said softly, “or it won’t have any idea what you’re asking.”

But the demon figure in front of them was already speaking again, and more fluently. I am The-One-Who-Waits… The one who waited in the heart of the double world, in the Connection Zone… I came from the heart of that world, when it opened to the signal…

“From inside Quake,” Darya said. “At Summertide! It must have come in the big silver sphere, the one that grabbed the Have-It-All.”

…for which I had waited long. In human time, one fortieth of a galactic revolution. I waited…

“That’s six million years! Are you a Builder?”

“Don’t keep interrupting, Darya. Let it talk!”

— waited long for the Event. I am not a Builder, only a servant of the Builders. I am The-One-Who-Waits. Who seeks the Builders?

“I do!” Darya moved dangerously close to the edge. “All my life, ever since I was a child, I have studied the Builders, wanted to know more about them. The Builders have been my life’s work.”

The Builders are not here. The ones who fly outside are not true Builders. This is the Connection Zone… the testing place, where we wait for the question to be answered. Wait.

The green light was extinguished and the chamber plunged again into darkness. Darya was teetering on the edge of the drop until Hans Rebka seized her arm and pulled her back to safety.

She shook herself loose; she did not feel even a twinge of nervousness. “Did you hear that, Hans? The Connection Zone! The Builders aren’t here, but there’s access to them from inside Glister. I knew it. They can be reached from here!”

“Maybe they can. Darya, calm down.” Rebka grabbed her again, pulled her close, and spoke with his mouth next to her ear. “Did you hear me? Cool off, and think before you jump to conclusions. You’ve been in communication for about two minutes with something that says it’s at least six million years old, and you’re willing to take everything it says at face value. What makes you think you understand what it means, or it understands you? Lots of what it said makes no sense — ‘the ones who fly outside are not true Builders.’ That’s not information, it’s gibberish. More than that, where did it learn to speak our language? How did it even recognize the human shape, if it’s been locked away inside Quake for six million years? There were no humans anywhere that long ago.”

But the green light was pulsing again, illuminating them and the whole of the domed chamber.

The testing proceeds. The rusty voice spoke again. It comes close to completion… close enough to be sure that the modified one is a true human, and acceptable. It is not necessary for you to be here…

“Then take us back to the surface,” Rebka said.

“No!” Darya moved in front of him. “Hans, if we go back now we may as well never have come here at all. There are so many things we might be able to find out here about the Builders. We may never have as good an opportunity.”

You seek the Builders, the creaking voice went on, as though neither human had spoken. I am not a Builder, and I cannot guarantee the result. But if it is your desire to encounter the Builders—

“It is!”

Then, GO.

“No. Darya, will you for God’s sake wait a minute! We don’t know—”

Rebka’s shout was too late. They were standing on the brink of the tunnel as the edge turned suddenly to vapor.

Free-fall!

Rebka looked down to his feet. They were accelerating at a couple of gees along a featureless vertical shaft that ended half a kilometer below them in a darkness so total that the eye rejected its existence.

“What is it?” Rebka heard Darya’s despairing cry beside him.

“It’s Glister’s gravity field — whatever creates it — maybe a…” He did not finish the phrase. If they were falling toward the event horizon of a black hole they would know about it soon enough — know it for maybe a millisecond, before tidal differential forces reduced their bodies to component elementary particles.

“Hans!” Darya screamed.

Two hundred meters to go, still accelerating, faster than ever. Maybe a second left. And now the darkness possessed a structure, like a roiling whirlpool of black oil, curling and tumbling onto itself. They were heading into the churning heart of that dark vortex.

Rebka’s empty stomach was churning, too.

A fraction of a second to go.

Childhood on Teufel had taught him one thing above all others: there was always a way out of every fix — if you were smart enough.

You just had to think.

Think.

Apparently he was not smart enough. He was still thinking, unproductively, as he dropped into the depths of that writhing blackness.