Transvergence (52 page)

"Crazy!"

"—and found myself enveloped by rainbow colors. At that point I again used the extensor to advance the recorder another fifteen meters. And since it was not affected there by any sign of a Lotus field, I moved another dozen meters. Then another. Then another. Then another."

"Tally. Get to the point. How far did you get?"

"Not far, in terms of the whole distance to the center of Paradox. I explored only a hundred and twenty-eight meters beyond the surface. However, there was no sign of a Lotus field. Also, I was able to do what I believe no other explorer of Paradox has ever done and returned to tell of it. I went beyond the rainbow wall. I could see all the way to the center of Paradox."

The designers of E. Crimson Tally had put enormous effort into his construction. Since they were building an embodied computer, a complex inorganic brain operating within a human body, they wanted that computer to follow processes of logic that mimicked to a large extent the thought processes of a human.

Perhaps they had succeeded too well. Certainly, faced with the situation at the surface of Paradox, a totally logical entity would have had no trouble in deciding the procedure to be followed: Rebka and E.C. Tally should take their findings and return at once to Sentinel Gate. The artifact specialists there would evaluate them. They would recommend the next step of Paradox exploration.

Curiosity is an intensely human emotion. It was a measure of the success of E.C. Tally's creators that he did not try to dissuade Hans Rebka from his actual decision. In fact, Tally egged him on. The only point of disagreement between them was on who would lead the way.

"I should certainly be the one." Tally was searching his own and the ship's data banks for a record of the tensile strength of a neural cable. It was not designed to support a large load, and its strength was not recorded as part of the standard specification. "I can readily detect the onset of a Lotus field, and return unscathed."

"You have no experience at all in getting out of tough situations."

"I fought the Zardalu."

"Sure. And they pulled you to bits. You didn't exactly
get out
of that situation—we had to carry you out in pieces, and get you a new body. So no argument. I go inside, you keep an eye on me. First sign of trouble, or if I stop talking, you haul me out."

"What trouble can there be, other than the Lotus field?—with which I am better prepared to deal than you."

"The fact that you even
ask
that means you shouldn't be going in. Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That's why it's trouble." Rebka was looping the cable through a tether ring on his own suit, then attaching the end to his communications unit. He gave it an experimental tug. "There. That should do us nicely."

"If you are unsure, and wish me to go in your place . . ."

"I'm on my way. Listen at this end, but don't do anything unless I tell you to. However, if I stop talking, or seem unable to move—"

"I will use the cable to pull you out." E.C. Tally was superior to most humans in at least one respect. He lacked sulking algorithms. He had accepted that he was not going into Paradox, and now he was thinking ahead.

Hans Rebka headed straight for the wall of shifting colors. He felt no resistance as he entered, only the faint tug of the cable unreeling steadily behind him. "Ten meters, and all is well. Twenty meters and all is well. Thirty meters . . ." He was going to become very bored unless he found something better to say. There were twenty-five hundred ten-meter intervals between the outer surface and the center of Paradox. "The colors are disappearing now. Eighty meters. I can see ahead, all the way to the center."

He was not the first human to enter Paradox and see clearly to its heart. He would, however, be the first person to
return
with the knowledge of what he had seen. And Paradox from the inside was different. At least, it was different from data in the old files, gleaned from radiation emanating from the interior.

"There's a small flat torus in there at the middle. Looks like a fat donut almost side-on to me. I've never heard of that in the descriptions of Paradox. My guess is that it must be a few hundred meters across. I think I see dark spots along the outer perimeter—they may be openings. I'll give more information when I get closer to the center. I don't see any other interior structures, though there should be lots of them. I also don't see evidence of color fringes, or space distortion. I must be through the boundary layer."

Rebka felt a tug at his back, halting his inward progress.

"Wait there for a little while, if you please." E.C.'s message came clearly through the fiber-optic connection.

"Problems?"

"An insignificant one. There is a snag on the reel that is winding out the cable, and for convenience I wish to free it. Do not move."

Rebka hovered in space. Twenty-three kilometers to the center. He had said that he had no intention of going that far, but now, with the exploration proceeding so smoothly, who could bear to stop?

His heart was beating faster. It was not fear, but anticipation. Hans Rebka had never thought of himself as a hero, and he would have denied any such suggestion. Some jobs carried danger with them, some did not. He just happened to be a man with a dangerous job. But it was one with its own rewards—like seeing what no human or alien had ever seen before.

"I almost have the tangle loosened." Outside Paradox, Tally sounded calm and confident. "However, it would make my task rather easier if you were to back up this way a few meters."

"Very good. Backing up."

Rebka used his suit controls to reverse the direction of his movement. He turned his head, to judge by the slackness of the cable when he had moved far enough. The fiber was still taut, a clear straight line running back to the shimmering colors of the Paradox wall.

"Are you reeling in the line back there?"

"Not yet. I am waiting for you to back up a little. Please do so."

"Wait a moment." Rebka used the suit thrusters again. The line behind him remained taut as ever. He had apparently not moved backward even a millimeter. "Is any line reeling in at your end?"

"No. Why are you not moving toward me?"

"I don't know. I think maybe I can't move that way at all. Try something for me. Move everything, reel and all, a couple of meters this way, closer to the surface of Paradox."

"That is about all I can move it, without encountering the surface. I am doing it now."

The line slackened.

"Good. Now don't move." Hans Rebka eased forward, very carefully and slowly, until the line at his back was once more taut. He watched it closely, then operated his suit thrustors to reverse the direction of his motion. The line remained bow-string taut and straight.

Rebka hung motionless, thinking. No one before, in the recorded history of Paradox, had ever had the slightest trouble in leaving the artifact. On the other hand, no one had ever before penetrated the interior and not been affected by the Lotus field.

"E.C., I think we may have a little problem. I can move forward fine, toward the center. But I don't seem able to back up toward you."

"You have a problem with your reverse thrustors?"

"I think not. Here's what I want you to do. Wait a couple of seconds, then pull on the cable—not too hard, but hard enough for me to feel it."

Rebka turned to grip the cable close to where it met the tether ring on his suit. By taking it between gloved thumb and forefinger he could tell how much tension was in the line. It was increasing. Tally was tugging at the other end. Rebka should now be pulled toward the surface of the Paradox like a hooked fish. He was not moving.

"It's no good, E.C. I don't think I can travel outward at all. Listen to me carefully before you do anything."

"I am listening,"

"We have to face the possibility that I may be stuck inside permanently. I'm going to try something else, but if you lose contact with me, I want you to make sure that a full report on everything that has happened here goes to the Artifact Institute. Address the message to both Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom. Is that clear?"

"Completely."

"All right. Now I want you to try more force on the cable. At the same time I'm going to use my suit's thrustors, just as hard as they will push. Wait until I give the word."

"I am waiting."

Outside Paradox, E.C. Tally crouched over the reel.

"Now!"

Tally moved the whole reel backward to increase the tension in the line, tentatively at first, then with steadily greater force. "Are you moving?"

"Not a micron. Pull harder, Tally. We have nothing to lose. Pull harder. Harder! Hard—"

E.C. Tally and the reel went shooting backward, turning end over end in space. Tally twisted to keep the line in sight. It was clearly free to move, whipping rapidly out of Paradox, meter after meter of it. It was also clear from its movement that there could be nothing substantial on the other end of it.

Hans Rebka was deep inside Paradox, as planned. Not as planned, he seemed to be stuck there.

The designers of E.C. Tally had done one other thing that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It stemmed from their own conviction that an embodied computer could think better than a human.

It stood to reason. E.C. Tally had attosecond circuits, capable of a billion billion calculations a second. He could absorb information a billion times as fast as a human. He forgot nothing, once it was learned. His thinking was logical, unclouded by emotion or prejudice.

The designers had incorporated all that information into E.C.'s memory bank. It provided him with overwhelming confidence. He
knew
, with a certainty that no human could ever approach, that he was smarter than any organic mind.

And Hans Rebka had an organic brain.

Therefore . . .

The whole thought process within E.C. Tally occupied less than a microsecond. It took another microsecond for him to construct a message describing the entire sequence of events since their approach to Paradox. He went back to the ship, transferred the message at once to the main communications unit, and selected the Sentinel Gate coordinates for transmission through the Bose Network. He checked the node delays as the message went out. The signal would reach Sentinel Gate in four to five days. Darya Lang or Quintus Bloom, even if they received the message at once and set out immediately for Paradox, could not possibly arrive in fewer than ten days.

Ten days. Enough time for Hans Rebka to run low on air in his suit, but not really a lot of thinking time for a human's slow brain.

But ten days was close to a trillion trillion attoseconds. Time enough for the powerful brain of an embodied computer to analyze any situation, and solve any conceivable problem.

E.C. Tally waited for the confirmation that his message was safely on its way to the first Bose Transition point. Then he set the ship's controls so that it would hover a fixed distance from the surface of Paradox. He turned on the ship's beacon, so that anyone approaching the artifact would be able to home in on it.

And then he went outside and turned to face the artifact.

E.C. Tally to the rescue!

He switched to turbo mode on his internal clock, set the suit for maximum thrust, and plunged into the iridescent mystery of Paradox.

Why Labyrinth?

Why not "Spinning Top" or "Auger" or "Seashell" or "Cornucopia"? That's what the artifact resembled, turning far-off in space. Darya's first impression had been of a tiny silver-and-black humming top, drilling its way downward. Closer inspection showed that Labyrinth stood stationary against its backdrop of stars. The effect of downward motion was created by Labyrinth's form, a tapering coiled tube that spiraled through five full turns from its blunt top to its glittering final point. Imagination transformed that shape to the polished shell of a giant space snail, many kilometers long. A row of circular openings spaced regularly around the broadest part of the shell appeared and disappeared as Labyrinth rotated.

Or, according to Quintus Bloom,
seemed
to rotate. Darya glanced from the artifact to the notes and back again. Anyone examining Labyrinth from the outside would be sure that this was a single three-dimensional helix, narrowing steadily from top to bottom and rotating in space around a central axis. The openings appearing and disappearing around its upper rim merely confirmed what was obvious to the eye.

Obvious, and wrong, according to Bloom. Labyrinth did not rotate. Bloom reported that laser readings reflected from the edges of Labyrinth showed no sign of the Doppler shift associated with moving objects. The openings on the upper edge moved around the perimeter; yet the perimeter itself was stationary.

Darya performed the laser measurement for herself, and was impressed. Bloom was right. Would
she
have sought to confirm what appeared to be a totally obvious rotation by an independent physical measurement, as he had done? Probably not. She felt awed at his thoroughness.

Darya returned again to the study of Bloom's notes. They had occupied her since she and her companions left the surface of Jerome's World. Each of the thirty-seven dark openings in Labyrinth was an entry point. Moreover, according to Bloom, each one formed an
independent
point of entry and led to an interior unique to each. The thirty-seven separate interiors were connected, one to another, through moving "windows," rotating inside Labyrinth just as the outside openings rotated. An explorer could "cross over" from one interior to another, but there was an inexplicable asymmetry; if the explorer tried to return through the same window, the result was an interior region different from the original place of departure.

Quintus Bloom had done his best to plot the connectivity of the inside, and had produced a baffling set of drawings. Darya puzzled over them. The problem was, every connection point in Labyrinth was
moving
, so every portal from a given interior might lead to any one of the other thirty-six possible regions. And as one descended into the tighter parts of the spiral, the region-to-region connections changed.