Transvergence (53 page)

She decided that Bloom was right again, this time in his naming of the artifact.
Labyrinth
was better than any snail or spinning-top analogy.

Which entry point should she use from the
Myosotis
? In the long run it might not matter; every interior could lead to any other. But the "pictorial gallery" of the spiral arm that Quintus Bloom had described might be present in only one of the regions. It was not at all obvious which one they wanted, or that they could reach it by at most thirty-six jumps through a moving door. The region-to-region linkages probably depended, critically, on timing.

Darya stared at a plot of scores of cross-connection notations recorded by Quintus Bloom, and struggled to visualize the whole interlocking system. Here was a mental maze, a giant gastropod merry-go-round in which different layers turned—or
seemed
to turn—at different speeds: thirty-seven co-rotating and interacting three-dimensional Archimedean spirals, sliding past each other. It was like one of those infuriating math puzzles popular at the Institute, where the trick to the solution was a translation of the whole problem to a higher number of dimensions. Twice Darya felt that she almost had it, that she was on the point of grasping the whole thing in her mind as a coherent entirety; twice it slipped away. Like so many things associated with the Builders, the interior of Labyrinth seemed to surpass all logic.

She decided there was one acceptable answer: Close your eyes. Pick an entry point. And get on with it, playing the hand you were given.

Darya emerged from her reverie over that problem, and at once faced another. She must make a decision she had been putting off since leaving Jerome's World. Someone must remain aboard the
Myosotis
. Who?

It was unfair to ask Kallik or J'merlia to enter Labyrinth. They had not chosen this mission, and any new artifact could be dangerous. That argued for Darya, and Darya alone, to make a visit to the interior. Unfortunately, Kallik had her own intense interest in Builder artifacts, and a knowledge of them that matched Darya's. She was quite fearless, and would want to be part of any exploration party. As a final point, Kallik's years with Louis Nenda had given her more practical experience than Darya.

So that left just J'merlia. J'merlia would remain on the
Myosotis
.

If Darya was any judge, he would hate it.

She sighed, and drifted aft to find the two aliens. They had been strangely quiet for the past hour.

She found them squatting on the floor of the main control room in a tangle of sixteen legs, heads close together. They were chatting, in the clicks and whistles of Hymenopt speech that Darya had so far found quite unintelligible, but they became quiet as soon as she entered.

"I think we're ready to proceed." Darya kept her voice brisk and neutral. "It's time to explore the interior of Labyrinth. J'merlia, I want you to remain here, at the controls of the
Myosotis
."

"Of course." The Lo'tfian's eyes bobbed on their stalks, in firm agreement. "With respect for your abilities, I am the most experienced pilot."

Darya hid her relief. "You certainly are. So Kallik, you and I had better get into our suits."

The Hymenopt nodded. "And J'merlia also."

The reply was made so casually, Darya almost missed it.

"J'merlia?"

"Of course. After all, should the ship be breached in some way, so that our suits are needed, J'merlia as pilot will need suit protection no less than we." Kallik stared blandly at Darya with twin circles of unblinking black eyes. "Into which entry point of Labyrinth, Professor Lang, do you wish J'merlia to direct the
Myosotis
?"

It was so obvious—once it had been pointed out. Darya wanted to hang her head in shame. Labyrinth was forty kilometers long. The coiled spiral tubes that composed it must each be several times as long as that. There were thirty-seven of them, making endless miles of interior tunnels. Anyone in a suit would run out of air and supplies before they had explored a hundredth part of the interior.

Every one of those dark entrances ahead was at least a couple of hundred meters across, more than big enough to admit a vessel four times the size of the
Myosotis
. In his notes, Quintus Bloom had emphasized the massive scale of the artifact's interior. Use of a ship, with its almost unlimited supplies of air, food, and energy, was the logical way—maybe the only way—to roam the inside of Labyrinth.

Darya cleared her throat. "I'll point out the entrance we want, as soon as we all have our suits on and are a little closer."

"Very good."

Kallik's dark eyes remained inscrutable. All the same, Darya was sure that J'merlia and Kallik both
knew
. Like the conscientious former slaves that they were, they had deliberately allowed her to save face.

Not for the first time since the beginning of their journey, Darya wondered who was really in charge.

"Thirty-seven entrances. Why
thirty-seven
? Is there anything interesting about the number thirty-seven?"

Darya had not expected a reply; it was just nervous talk. But Kallik replied solemnly: "Every three-digit multiple of thirty-seven remains a multiple of thirty-seven when its digits are cyclically permuted."

Which left Darya to try an example in her head (37 times 16 is 592, and 259 and 925 are both divisible by 37); and to wonder: Was Kallik's a serious answer that deserved thought, or just a Hymenopt's idea of a good joke?

In any case, the decision had to be made. Darya pointed at a circular opening, as it came into view over the righthand horizon of Labyrinth, and said: "That one."

J'merlia nodded. "Prepare for possible sudden acceleration after entry." He matched velocity vectors with the opening, and popped the
Myosotis
inside with casual skill.

Bloom's warning that Labyrinth only appeared to rotate was valuable advice. As the ship passed through to the interior, J'merlia had to apply a hard and sudden thrust to kill their sideways movement. Darya, suited and strapped into her seat by the control board, released a breath that seemed to have been trapped inside her since she had made the choice of entry point. She tried to examine all the external displays at once.

Behind them, every sign of the entrance had vanished. The ship sat within a gigantic coiled horn, a twisted cone whose walls were visible as writhing streamers of phosphorescence. The gleaming lines converged beyond the ship, growing closer and closer until they were hidden at last by the curve of the wall itself. But the convergence below was more than an effect of perspective, for
above
the
Myosotis
the bright streamers kept the interval between them constant, any decrease due to distance cancelled by an increase in true separation.

The way to go was
down
. In that direction, if Quintus Bloom's records could be used as a guide, the seamless walls would finally give way to a series of connected chambers. If you reached the innermost chamber, there, according to Bloom, you would find the series of glyphs that recorded the past and future history of humanity in the spiral arm. Or rather, a series of
polyglyphs
. A
glyph
was a term she understood, it was a sign or an image marked on a wall. But Bloom had not explained what he meant by a polyglyph. Was that one of his secrets, something to protect his own priority of claim?

As Darya pondered that she considered another major problem. Quintus Bloom had found his chamber in
one
of the interiors of Labyrinth. Since Darya's choice of entry point had been quite random, there was just a one in thirty-seven chance that they would reach the chamber that Bloom had explored.

Well, that was going to be her worry, not J'merlia's. He knew which way to go and the
Myosotis
was already descending, easing its way down the center line of an apparently bottomless curved shaft. After five minutes of steady progress, Darya saw a dark oval drifting into view on one side. It was a moving doorway, a portal to one of the other interiors. Easy enough to access, according to Quintus Bloom, but there was no reason to take it until they knew what lay deeper within this one. Darya fixed the portal's direction from them in her mind and labeled it as
clockwise
from this interior. Five minutes more, and a second oval appeared on the counter-clockwise side. It might be a wasted mental effort to think in terms of direction of travel, if the successive interiors that one encountered by moves in one direction did not form a regular sequence. Could you make thirty-seven clockwise jumps, and return to the starting point? Bloom had believed that there was no way to guarantee it.

The conical nature of the tube was at last revealing itself. The cylinder they traveled was narrowing, the wall becoming noticeably closer. Darya stared at the streaming ruled lines of phosphorescence, trying to estimate how long it would be before the tube became too narrow to admit the
Myosotis
. At that point they would have to resort to suits. She was interrupted by the soft touch of one of Kallik's forelimbs. "Excuse me, but unless you have already noticed . . ."

Darya turned, and found herself looking on a screen at a swirling black vortex. It was no more than thirty meters from the ship, a roiling whirlpool of oil and ink that curved and tumbled constantly in upon itself. She knew the nature of
that
singularity very well, from her own experience. It was a Builder transportation system, able to convey people and materials from anywhere in the spiral arm or beyond. It was also a two-way system, sending objects with equal facility.

"Steer wide of it!" Her warning was unnecessary. J'merlia was easing them well clear. The others had their own familiarity with the ways of the Builders.

The vortex was a feature of Labyrinth unmentioned by Quintus Bloom. Had his exploration, through some other interior region, failed to discover it? Or had he, reluctant to describe what he could not explain, seen the spinning darkness but failed to record it?

The gleaming walls were nearer. If they met another vortex, the
Myosotis
would not be able to maneuver safely clear of it. The displays of the way ahead made it clear that was soon going to be irrelevant. The smooth tube was ending, narrowing to a circular opening through which no ship could ever pass.

Darya had to make another decision, but this one was easy since she had no choice. J'merlia would have to stay with the ship while she and Kallik went through the opening. He would be alone in the deep interior, facing a tricky and dangerous escape if the other two did not return. But Darya saw no alternative.

All three of them were already in their suits and equipped with maximum life-support supplies. J'merlia halted the ship about thirty meters short of the circular opening. A nod of Darya's head was all it took for Kallik to open the forward hatch, lead the way through the opening, and continue into the first chamber.

Quintus Bloom had described a series of rooms, decreasing steadily in size like matched pearls on a necklace and connected each to the next by a single narrow passageway. According to Bloom there should be six of them, including the final chamber. That one was shaped differently and ended in a narrow-angled conical wedge.

He had said little—too little—about intermediate chambers, beyond the fact that in the third one lay a moving dark aperture, which he believed led to another of the thirty-seven interiors. He had offered no recordings of any chamber except the last one. Staring about her as she entered the first room, Darya began to understand why. She and her two companions were shrouded at once by a billowing fog, a shifting gray mantle that changed constantly and held within it dozens of ghost images. Darya glimpsed another vortex ahead, pale and diminished. Beside it hovered a pair of spectral dodecahedra, like the omnivorous Phage artifacts that she had encountered on Glister. Before she could examine them, or wonder how to avoid them, they had vanished into the mist. A drifting haze to the left drew her attention. It was no more than cloud imprinted on cloud, but she sensed a thousand-tendriled Medusa like a miniature Torvil Anfract. Next to it stood another whirling vortex, drawing all those writhing tendrils toward its dark embrace. A moment later both were fading, dissolving, merging into the restless swirl of the background.

Darya's only certainty was the walls of the chamber. She could sense their solidity, even if she could not see them through the mist. She was sure that she was still moving relative to them, and convinced that ahead of her lay the opening that would lead to the next room. The range sensors on her suit confirmed what she already knew, deep inside her.

The fog disappeared as they entered the second chamber. It was dark, but when Kallik, still leading the way, switched on her flashing suit lights the whole chamber turned into a meaningless kaleidoscope of colors. Again, Darya understood why perhaps there had been no recordings made here. The chamber walls formed perfect mirrors, light reflecting and re-reflecting a thousand times. She tried to visualize how light leaving their three suits would appear when it at last returned to them. It was impossible. A dark spot, dead ahead, pointed the way into the next chamber.

In that chamber, their experience diverged again from what had been reported by Quintus Bloom. The walls showed curving lines of light, running from where they had entered to converge and surround a dark circle at the far end. This was certainly the third chamber. There was, however, no sign of a portal leading to another of the many interiors. Labyrinth had changed, or more likely the one-in-thirty-seven long shot that they had entered Labyrinth at the same place as Quintus Bloom had not paid off.

Kallik paused at the entrance to the fourth chamber. Coming up level with her, Darya saw why. The whole inside was filled with a driving orange sleet, tiny pelting particles that blanketed the interior and ran from the entrance down toward the far end.

While Darya stood dismayed, Kallik and J'merlia backed up along the passage between the chambers. After a little more than forty meters, they halted and Kallik made small adjustments to their final positions. While J'merlia remained stationary, Kallik then drove forward and shot past Darya with her suit set to maximum thrust. At the moment of entry into the new chamber she turned off the suit's power and sailed on in free fall. Her rate of progress matched that of the storm of orange particles. J'merlia watched closely, and at last he nodded.