Resurgence

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Iceworld again

One of Ben Blesh’s survival trainers had offered a warning: Be extra careful if you are ever forced to operate when sick or injured, because in such circumstances your senses provide a distorted view of reality. A familiar setting may seem to change beyond recognition.

Sound advice, but the converse situation had not been addressed. Suppose that you returned to a place you had only seen before when in shock and in pain?

Ben looked around, and felt certain that this setting was new to him. He had few clear memories of the interior of Iceworld, but surely he had never been in any place remotely like this.

He stared the length of the great chamber in which he stood, then looked side to side and at last overhead. He realized in that moment that he was wrong. He was standing at the base of a gigantic horizontal cylinder, hundreds of meters long and broad in proportion. The sides, studded with “light fixtures” from which no light emerged, curved away and up to meet far above his head. Suspended from that distant ceiling hung a familiar shape: a medusa’s head of tubes, wires, and tentacles, all grossly enlarged. He was standing within a robodoc, exactly like the one on the Have-It-All. Either it was expanded hundreds of times, or Ben had been reduced to the size of a fly. In his mind, the robodoc stood as a symbol of healing and security. How could anything else in the universe know that?

But this confirmed his conviction that he had never been here before. It also increased his confusion as to what to do next. When Hans Rebka had been in charge and Ben was injured, all decisions had been made for him. Now he had to act for himself.

His suit sensors showed reduced pressure and an unbreathable atmosphere, but as he watched it climbed to a density and composition that he could live with. Apparently something knew he was here—wherever “here” might be—and it did not intend to kill him.

He opened his faceplate and began to walk along the floor of the giant cylinder. It was probably wasted effort, since anything that knew he was here could presumably find him no matter where he went. The walk was for his benefit alone. He needed to do something, after that interminable wait in the snow when he had wondered if he would ever move again.

His first impression of the cylinder had been that it went on forever, but as he walked he could see that he was approaching a place where everything—floor, walls, ceiling—abruptly ended. He walked on, to the point where one more step would take him into space, and looked down. An endless sea of gray lay below, without any reference point to provide a sense of scale. For all he knew, the fog might be one meter from his feet, or a thousand kilometers. The cylinder hovered over a void of indeterminate extent.

Ben could take that final step out over the edge and see what happened. All his survival training—which admittedly had so far been of no use whatsoever—argued against it. He turned, intending to walk back the length of the cylinder.

Lara Quistner stood waiting, maybe thirty meters away. She was wearing her suit, as he had last seen her in life. An equal distance behind her was an identical Lara, with another behind that. A whole line of Laras waited on the central axis of the cylinder, diminishing away into the distance.

Ben would accept the reality of the cylinder. He had little choice, since he was standing on it. Lara, or an infinite line of Laras, was another matter. They must be the products of his imagination.

He walked forward to the nearest waiting figure, reached out, and touched his gloved hand to her faceplate. The shape in front of him rippled and started to change. At the same time, the long line of image figures moved in rapidly to coalesce with the first one. The surface he had touched brightened. In less than a minute Ben stood before a shining spherical body. As the last ripples died away on the silver surface, a slender neck with a pentagonal head emerged from the topmost part.

Ben drew in his first deep breath since leaving the surface of Marglot. If every journey began with a single step, he had just completed a second one. Now to try for a third. Was the object in front of him Guardian of Travel, or would he have to start everything over from the beginning?

“Can you hear and understand what I am saying?”

The initial reaction was not encouraging. The silver globe sank into the surface of the cylinder, until only a small upper part was visible.

“I have returned from the world to which you sent us. You said that we might return.”

The long-necked sphere remained silent, but it slowly began to reemerge from the floor. That had to count as progress of sorts.

“I would like to learn more about the planet to which you sent us.”

“A special world.”

At last, words.

“Did you say that a super-vortex lies at the center of that world?” This would be one hell of a time for Ben to learn that in his shocked and injured condition he had dreamed up the whole previous conversation.

“A super-vortex exists at the center. That is correct.”

“Is it a transport vortex?”

“No. There is no way that it can be used as such. It was placed there long, long ago by our creator, to serve a quite different purpose.”

“Will it work now, as it did then?”

“We do not know.”

Not so good. “If it can still work, is it controlled at the planet I just came from?”

“It is controlled from here, and only from here.”

Fifty-fifty on the answers he hoped for. As good as it was likely to get. But the difficult part lay ahead. Guardian of Travel seemed friendly enough to humans, but all its allegiance must lie with the Builders. Also, its sentience was inorganic and presumably completely logical. You had to imagine that you were trying to persuade E.C. Tally—and hope you remembered at least some of the facts correctly from the last time you were here.

“As servant to the Builders you once provided access to many worlds, including the surface of this one. Little by little, the service that you provide was diminished; not because the Builders wished it so, but because another group has been at work, destroying what the Builders made. Now you have access to only one world.”

“One world; but a special world to the Builders.”

“Special, but not special enough to save it. Unless you take action, that last world will suffer the same fate as all the others.” This was the trickiest piece of what Ben had to say. From most points of view Marglot was already a dead world. “That world is not yet in the hands of the Builder adversaries. It can perhaps be saved from possession by them, if you take the right action here.”

“If it can be saved by such action on our part, do you wish to return to it?”

That was a question to which Ben had given not one moment’s thought. Go back? It was his turn to say, “I do not know. Why do you ask?”

“Because connection to the super-vortex at the heart of the world can be made at any time, while use of a transport vortex to the surface is possible only at precise times, when the configuration of other events permits it.”

Die here of eventual starvation and dehydration? Or return to die on Marglot, in whatever strange condition that planet might be at the time of his transfer?

“May I postpone a decision on that?” Ben felt a paradoxical sense of exhilaration. Sure, he was going to die. But he had taken another step toward his goal, and he would keep stepping as long as he had breath. “Let me tell you what must be done to save the world from possession by the adversaries of the Builders.”

“We will listen.” The pentagonal disk bobbed up and down on its long silver neck. “Be aware, however, that we too may postpone a decision.”