Divergence

CHAPTER 15

At the last moment the swirling void below turned blood-red. Darya felt herself stretched from head to toe, while forces of compression rippled their way along her body. Just as they became intolerable she flashed into the heart of the red glare. Before she could record any new sensation she was through, falling in open space.

Hans was at her side, still holding her arm. Straight ahead, rushing toward them, was the bloated sphere of Gargantua.

It filled half the sky. There was no way they could avoid collision with the planet. In one heartbeat it doubled in apparent size, and from the way that the gas-giant’s appearance was changing Darya could determine their exact impact point. They were accelerating into the unwinking Eye of Gargantua. The Eye had become a huge spiraling swirl of orange and umber, with a point at its center as black and lifeless as intergalactic space.

What was that dark pupil? Darya could not guess, but she knew that she would never find out. They would not get that far. They would burn up in one flash of light, human meteors consumed by the outer atmosphere of the planet. As they came closer Darya saw that they were heading right into the empty pupil of the Eye, following the center line of another dark vortex that narrowed all the way in.

As Hans vanished from her side, Darya entered the tunnel of the vortex. Within it she could feel nothing — no air, no light, no forces. On all sides were the cloudy orange swirls of the Eye, but she heard and felt no touch of atmosphere.

The vortex was closing, a tightening spiral that shrank until it became no wider than her body. Darya was plunging along the centermost line, deep into the maelstrom of the Eye. Forces again racked her body, but now they were twisting, from head to neck to chest to hips to legs to feet. As they became unbearable there was a final agonizing shear, and she found herself again in open space.

She felt no acceleration, but she could see that she was moving.

Faster and faster. As she watched, Mandel was in front of her… was off to the left… was shining from behind… was no bigger than a pinpoint of light when she turned her head.

After half a minute of total confusion, the analytical part of her brain asserted itself. She was seeing the universe as a series of still images, but there was no force of acceleration and there was no sign of an external gravity field. She must be pausing at each location for a fraction of a second before undergoing an instantaneous translation to another position. It was the universe in stop-motion, experienced as a series of freeze-frames. Although she was not traveling faster than light through ordinary space-time, she was certainly reaching each new location in less time than light would take. And since there was no sign of Doppler shift in the starscape around her, she must be sitting at rest between transitions, until the next one transported her to a new place.

It was a series of Bose Transitions, but without the Bose Network stations needed for all human interstellar travel. Each jump must have been a least a few million kilometers — and increasing. Mandel was no brighter now than any other star in the sky.

How fast was she moving in inertial space? She would have to estimate her rate of change of position. Darya looked around for a reference frame. She could see a blue supergiant, off to her right. It was surely no closer than a hundred light-years. Yet it was changing its apparent position at maybe a degree a second. Which meant she was moving at close to two light-years a second.

And still accelerating, if that word could be applied to her series of instantaneous translations. As she watched, the constellations ahead were beginning to change, to melt, to reconfigure themselves into unfamiliar patterns.

The blue supergiant was already drifting away behind her. Darya stared all around, looking for some new reference point. She could find only one. The gauzy fabric of the Milky Way was a band of light, far away to her left. It had become the single constant of her new environment.

Darya fixed her eyes on that familiar sight — and realized, with a shiver, that it was beginning to move. She was plunging downward, out of the galactic plane. The globular clusters of the Magellanic Clouds were in front of her. They had emerged from the clutter of the spiral arm to form glittering spheres of stars.

How fast? How far?

She could not say. But in order for her motion relative to the whole Galaxy to be noticed, she had to be skipping hundreds of light-years in each transition. Another minute, and much of the Galaxy’s matter lay below her. She was far below the spiral arm and catching a hint of a monstrous flattened disk. Below her feet she could see the sweeping curve of the spiral itself. Individual stars were disappearing, moment by moment, into a sea of spangles that glittered around dark dust clouds and lit the filaments of gaseous nebulas with multi-colored gemstones.

As she watched the stars faded again, merging to become the hazy light of distant millions. Far off to her left the disk had swelled up and thickened. She was far enough from the main plane to be clear of obscuring gas and dust clouds. She gazed in wonder at the glowing bulge of the galactic center. Hers were surely the first human eyes to see past the spiral arm to the densely packed galactic nucleus and to the massive black hole that formed the hub of the Galaxy.

How far? How fast?

She seemed to be moving straight away from the galactic disk, and now the blaze of the central hub was off at an angle of forty-five degrees to her direction of motion. With her lungs frozen and her heart stopped in her chest, Darya made her estimate. The Phemus Circle territories were about thirty thousand light-years from the center of the Galaxy, so she must be about that far from the galactic plane. And the angle of the hub was changing, at maybe ten degrees a minute. That gave her a speed of a hundred and seventy-five light-years a second.

Ten thousand light-years a minute. A million light-years in an hour and a half. The Andromeda Galaxy in twice that time.

Even as that thought came, the mad drive ended. The universe stopped its giddy rush and clicked into a fixed position.

Ahead of Darya in the open void sat a great space structure, agleam with internal lights, sprawling across half the sky, of a size impossible to estimate. Darya had the sense that it was huge, that those trailing pseudopods of antennas and twisting tubes of bright matter, spinning away into space from the central dodecahedron, were millions of kilometers long.

Before she could confirm that impression, there came a final transition. Stars, galaxies, and stellar clusters vanished. Darya found herself standing on a level plain. Overhead was nothing. At her feet, defining the level surface itself, were a billion twinkling orange lights.

And next to her, his suit open so that he could scratch his chin, stood Hans Rebka.

“Well,” he said. “We-ell, that’s one for the record books. Try and describe that in your trip report.”

He was silent for a few moments, breathing deep and staring around him. “Maybe we ought to trade ideas,” he said finally. “If either of us has any. For a start, where in the hell are we?”

“You opened your suit!”

“No.” He shook his head. “I never had time to close it when we dropped — nor did you.”

To Darya’s astonishment she saw that he was right. Her own suit was fully transparent. “But we were out in open space — airless vacuum.”

“I thought so, too. I don’t remember needing to breathe, though.”

“How long were we there? Did you count heartbeats?”

He smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I don’t know if I even had heartbeats. I was too busy trying to figure out what was happening — where you had gone, where I was going.”

“I think I know. Not what was happening, but where we went and where we are now.”

“Then you’re six steps ahead of me.” He gestured out at the endless plain in front of them. “Limbo, didn’t it used to be called? A nowhere place where lost souls went.”

“We’re not lost. We were brought here, deliberately. And it was my fault. I told The-One-Who-Waits how keen I was to meet the Builders. It took what I said at face value.”

“Didn’t work, though, did it? I don’t see any sign of them.”

“Give them time. We only just got here. Do you remember flying down into the Eye of Gargantua?”

“Until the day I die. Which I’d like to think is a fair way off, but I’m beginning to wonder.”

“The eye is the entry point to a Builder transportation system. It must have been there as long as humans have been in the Mandel system, maybe long before that; but it’s no surprise that no one ever discovered it. A ship’s crew would have to be crazy to fly down into it.”

“Explorer ships’ crews are crazy. People did plenty of mad things when this system was first being colonized. I know that ships went down deep into Gargantua’s atmosphere and came back out — some of them. But I don’t think that would be enough to do what we did. We had to be given that first boost from Glister, to rifle us exactly down the middle of the vortex. When I was in there it seemed to just fit my shoulders. There wasn’t room for another person, let alone a ship.”

“I had the same feeling. I wondered where you’d gone, but I knew there wasn’t room for both of us. All right. So we had a first boost from the gravity generator on Glister, then a second boost from a shearing field in the Eye of Gargantua. That put us square into the main transportation system, and then right out of the spiral arm. Thirty thousand light-years, I estimate.”

“I wondered about that. I looked around, and I could see the whole damned galaxy, spread out like a dinner plate — though the way I’m feeling, I hate to even mention the word ‘dinner.’ ”

“And then one final transition, to bring us in here.” Darya gazed around, up to the segmented dark ceiling, and then across the glittering plain of the floor.

“Where we can stand and stare until we starve. Any more ideas, Professor?”

“Some.” Now that the mind-numbing journey was over she was beginning to think again. “I don’t believe we were brought all this way to starve. The-One-Who-Waits sent us, so something must know we’re here. And although this is part of the Builders’ own living place, I’ll bet it has been prepared for us, or beings like us.” Darya swung her hand around a ninety-degree arc of the level floor. “See the flat surface? That’s not natural for a Builder structure.”

“We don’t know how Builders think. Nobody ever met one.”

“True. But we know how they build. When you’ve studied Builder artifacts as long as I have, you begin to form ideas about the Builders themselves. You can’t prove things, but you learn to trust your instincts. We don’t know where the Builders evolved, or when, but I’m sure it was in an aerial or free-space environment. At the very least, it was a place where gravity doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to us. The Builders work naturally in all three dimensions, every direction equal. Their artifacts don’t provide any feel for ‘up’ or ‘down.’ A level plain like this is something that humans like. You don’t encounter it in the artifacts. You don’t expect a gravity field close to one gee in a structure like this, either — complete with a breathable atmosphere. And look at that.” She pointed to the ceiling, apparently kilometers above them. “You can see it’s built of pentagonal segments. That’s common to many Builder structures. So I think we’re inside a dodecahedron, a shape you find over and over in Builder artifacts, and I think they just added a flat floor and air and gravity for the benefit of beings like us. I’m not sure this plain is anything like as big as it looks, either. You know the Builders can play tricks with space that confuse our sense of distance.”

“They can. But I think this place is really big, no matter what tricks are being performed.”

Hans Rebka had not raised his voice, but Darya’s stomach tightened at the sudden tension in it. Hans was not supposed to get nervous. That was her privilege.

“It’s certainly big,” he went on, “if that is anything to judge by.”

He was pointing off to their left. Darya at first saw nothing. Then she realized that above the twinkling sea of orange spangles shone the steadier light of a bright sphere. It was tiny at first, no more than a shiny marble of silver, but as she watched it grew steadily. It was advancing across the level plain, apparently at a constant speed. There was no way to judge its distance, or to tell if it was rolling or traveling by some other method.

“Welcoming committee,” Rebka said, almost under his breath. “Everybody smile.”

It was not rolling. Darya was somehow sure of that, even though she could see no signs of surface marking. She had the feeling that it was flying or floating, its bottom only a fraction of a millimeter above the orange cloud of sequins.

And it was not small at all. It was sizable. It was growing. It was huge, three times the size of The-One-Who-Waits. It towered over them, and still it was not close.

Twenty paces away it halted. A steady series of ripples moved across the spherical surface, like waves on a ball of mercury. As they grew in amplitude the globular form bulged up to form a stem. On top of it a familiar pentagonal flowerlike head drooped to face them. Five-sided disks were extruded from the front of the sphere, while a silver tail stretched down to moor the object to the floor. A flickering green light shone from a newly formed aperture in the central belly.

There was a long silence.

“All right, sweetie,” Rebka said in a gruff whisper. “What now?”

“If this is like The-One-Who-Waits, it needs to hear us speak a few words before it can key in to our language.” Darya raised her voice. “My name is Darya Lang, originally from the planet Sentinel Gate. This is Hans Rebka, from the planet Teufel. We are human, and we arrived from the star Mandel and the planet Gargantua. Are you like The-One-Who-Waits?”

There was a ten-second silence.

“One — Who — Waits,” a groaning voice said. Its tone was deeper than that of the sphere on Glister, and it sounded even more tired. “The One Who… Waits. Human… human… hu-u-man… hmmm.”

“Needs a pep pill,” Rebka said softly. “Are you a Builder?” he called to the horned and tailed nightmare floating in front of them.

The being drifted a few paces closer. “Human, human, human,… At last. You are here. But two are the same. Where is… the other?”

“The other,” Rebka said. “What’s it mean?”

Darya shook her head. “There is no other,” she said loudly. “We do not understand. We are the only ones here. We ask again, are you like The-One-Who-Waits?”

The silver body was humming, with a low tone almost too deep for human ears. “There must be… another… or the arrival is not complete. We have two forms only… but the message said that the third one was on the way and would soon arrive…” There was another long silence. “I am not like The-One-Who-Waits, although we were created in the same way.”

“Not a Builder,” Darya said in a quick whisper. “I knew it. We’re seeing things that the Builders made, just like The-One-Who-Waits. Maybe some kind of computers, incredibly old. And I don’t think that they’re — well, that they’re working quite right.”

That was a new thought for Darya, and one hard to accept. Usually Builder artifacts seemed to perform as well after five million years as the day they were made. But The-One-Who-Waits, and now this new being, gave Darya an odd feeling of disorganization and randomness. Perhaps not even the Builders could make machines last forever.

“I am not… a computer.” The being’s hearing must have been more sensitive than a human’s, or it was directly reading their minds. “I am Inorganic, but a grown Inorganic. The-One-Who-Waits stayed always close to Old-Home, but I was grown here. I am… I am… a Speaker-Between. An Interlocutor. The one who must… interface with you and the others. The task of The-One-Who-Waits is done. But the task of Speaker-Between cannot start until the third one is here.” The weary voice was slowing, fading. “The third one. Then… the task of Speaker-Between can begin. Until then…”

The surface of the great silver body began to ripple. The five-sided flower on top was shortening.

“Hey! Speaker-Between! You can’t stop there.” Rebka ran forward across the surface, his shoes kicking up sprays of glittering orange. “And you can’t leave us here. We’re humans. Humans need food, and water, and air.”

“That is known.” The body was swelling at the base and descending toward the flat surface, while the silver tail withdrew into it. “Do not worry. The place has been prepared for your kind. Since the third is already on the way, you will have no need for stasis. Enter… and eat, drink, rest.”

The silver globe of Speaker-Between had deformed to a bulging hemisphere with a wide arched aperture at the center. “Enter,” the fading voice said again. The opening moved around to face the two humans. “Enter… now.”

Rebka swore and backed away. “Don’t go near it.”

“No.” Darya was moving forward. “I don’t know what’s inside, but so far nothing here has tried to hurt us. If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it easily. Come on. What do we have to lose?”

“Other than our lives?” But he was following her.

The opening that they entered was filled with the green glow of hidden lights. From the outside it could have been of any depth. One step inside, and Darya realized that she was actually in a small entrance lock, three meters deep. When she went across to the inner door and pushed it aside, an open chamber with slate-gray, somber walls and a high ceiling was revealed.

Too high. She walked through and stared upward. Forty meters, to that arched, pentagonal center? It had to be at least that — which meant that she was in a room taller than the outside dimensions of Speaker-Between. And that was physically impossible. Before she could move there came a sighing, slithering noise. Sections of the chamber’s level floor in front of her began to buckle and lift. Partitions and furniture grew upward, thrusting like strange plants though a soft, springy surface.

“A place prepared for us? I’m not so sure of that.” Hans Rebka advanced cautiously past her, toward a cylindrical structure that was still emerging from the floor. It had a bulbous, rounded upper end, and it was supported on a cluster of splayed legs. “Now this is really interesting. It’s a food-storage unit and food synthesizer. I’ve seen one like it, but not in use. It was in a museum.”

“It’s not typical Builder technology.”

“I’m sure it’s not.” An oddly perplexed expression crept into Rebka’s eyes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d start wondering…”

The top of the cylinder was surrounded by a thin fog, and a layer of ice crystals covered its surface. Rebka touched it cautiously with one fingertip, then jerked away.

“Freezing cold.” He turned up the opacity level of his suit to provide thermal insulation and reached out with a protected hand to pull a curved lever set into the upper part of the cylinder. It moved reluctantly to a new position. Part of the cylinder body turned, revealing the interior. Three shelves stood inside, loaded with sealed white packages.

“You’re the biologist, Darya. Do you recognize any of these?” Rebka reached in and quickly lifted out a handful of flat packages and smooth ovoids, placing them on the saucerlike beveled top of the cylinder. “Don’t touch them with your bare hand or you may get frostbite. They’re really cold. We can’t eat yet, but you can tell your stomach we may be getting close.”

Darya set her suit gauntlet to full opacity and peeled open a rounded packet. It was a fruit, mottled green and yellow, with a thin rind and a fleshy stalk at one end. She turned it over, examining texture and density and scraping a thin sliver from the surface, then allowed the gauntlet to heat it. When it grew warm in her hand she sniffed it, tasted it, and shook her head.

“Fruit aren’t my line, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. And I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about it, either. It could be from an Alliance world, but it’s not a popular fruit, because they tend to be grown everywhere. Do you really think it’s edible?”

“If it’s not, why would they have stored it here? I’m using your logic, Darya — if they want to kill us, they can find easier ways. I think we can eat this, and the other food. Speaker-Between didn’t seem too happy to see the two of us, because it was expecting something else. But we’re part of the show, too. We have to be fed and watered. And you don’t bring somebody thirty thousand light-years and then let them accidentally poison themselves. My worry is a bit different.” He rapped the bulging side of the cylinder. “I know construction methods in the Phemus Circle and the Fourth Alliance, and I’ve been exposed to the way they do things in the Cecropia Federation. But this isn’t like any of them. It’s—”

He was interrupted by the creaking sound of long-neglected hinges. Thirty meters away, the whole side of the room was sinking ponderously into the floor. Beyond it stood another chamber, even larger, with a long bank of objects like outsized coffins at its center.

Darya counted fourteen units, each one a pentagonal cylinder seven meters long, four wide, and four high.

“Now those are Builder technology,” she said. “Very definitely. Remember Flambeau, near the boundary between the Alliance and the Cecropia Federation? That artifact is filled with units just like this, a lot of them even bigger. They’re all empty, but they’re in working order.”

“What do they do? I’ve never seen anything like these before.” Rebka was walking cautiously forward toward the nearest of the fourteen. Each of the monster coffins had a transparent port mounted in its pentagonal end. He put his face close to it, rubbed at the dusty surface with his gauntleted hand, and peered in.

“No one is sure what they were intended for originally.” Darya rapped the side of the unit, and it produced a hollow booming sound. “But we know they can be used to preserve things pretty much indefinitely — objects, or organisms — and we assume that was their main purpose. There’s a stasis field inside each unit, externally controlled. You can see the settings on the end there. Clock rates in the interior have been measured for the Flambeau units, and they run an average of sixty million times slower than outside. Spend a century in one of those stasis tanks, and if you remained conscious you’d feel as though one minute had passed.”

Rebka did not seem to be listening. He was still poised with his face against the port.

She tapped his shoulder. “Hey, Hans. Come up for air. What’s so fascinating in there? Let me take a peek.”

She moved to his side. The stasis tank did not seem to be empty, but its inside was almost dark. Darya could see vague outlines, but for details she would have to wait a couple of minutes until her eyes had adjusted to the interior light level.

She took his arm and squeezed it. “Can you see what’s in there? Come on, if it’s interesting don’t keep me in suspense.”

Still he did not speak, but at Darya’s words and touch he finally turned to face her.

She looked at his twitching face, and her grip on his arm slackened. Her hand dropped to her side.

Nothing shocked Hans Rebka. Nothing ever touched his iron self-control.

Except that now the control had gone. And behind his eyes lurked an unreasoning terror that Darya had never expected to see.