Which it might well be about to do. The durability of his brain had left him too insensitive to his body's danger. E.C. Tally, in his zeal to help, had entered Paradox at maximum thrust and concentrated his attention on an unsuccessful attempt to locate Hans Rebka. He had not considered the problem of deceleration, until the central disk was increasing rapidly on his display. By that time it was too late to do much. He quickly set his suit thrust for maximum reverse, but the inward force field was working against it, delaying his slowdown.
He reviewed options:
Option 1
. He could head for the open center of the disk, brave the swirling dark in the middle, and hope that the force that prevented anything from leaving Paradox would slow him down gradually as soon as he was beyond the central point. He did not have high hopes of that. More likely, the field would stop his motion firmly and finally in a few millimeters. That could be enough to destroy even his hardened brain.
Not promising.
Option 2
. He could aim instead for one of the diamond-shaped openings in the wall of the disk. What lay within was anybody's guess, but he judged that Hans Rebka was more likely to have headed there than for the central region.
Option 3
. There was no Option Three.
Tally simulated a human sigh, made up his mind, and angled for the nearest opening in the disk. He shot inside, feeling a sharp tug from the membrane at the entrance, and at once became aware of a difference. His suit's thrustor—at last—was working as it was supposed to work. He slowed down rapidly, and smashed into the inner wall with no more than a bruising collision.
His pseudo-pain circuits cut in, but all they offered was a stern warning to take good care of his valuable body. Tally ignored that, and turned to look around for Hans Rebka.
And there he was! No more than twenty meters away in a big, curving chamber more stuffed with furnishings and equipment than any room that Tally had ever seen.
He turned toward Rebka. In fractions of a millisecond, he became aware of several strange facts.
First, Hans Rebka was no longer wearing a suit of any kind. Second, there were three of him, all female. And third, not one of the three was Hans Rebka.
The three women did not seem at all surprised by his arrival.
"Two months," the shortest one growled, as soon as Tally was out of his suit. She was black-haired, big-muscled—a female version of Louis Nenda. Tally guessed that she hailed from a high-gravity planet. "Nearly two damn months since we arrived here."
"And twenty-one days since I came in to rescue them." The second speaker, hawk-nosed and sharp-cheekboned, pulled a face at E.C. "Hell of a rescue, eh?"
"Not your fault," the dark-haired woman said gruffly. "We were all fooled. Thought we'd cracked Paradox, all ready to go out big heroes." She waved her hand at the pair of tiny exploration vessels hovering near the entrance to the chamber. "None of us had any idea that the damn thing was
changing
, so we might not be able to get out. Same for you, I guess."
"Oh, no." Tally had at their urging removed his suit. The chamber was filled with breathable air and felt a little on the chilly side of pleasant. Gravity was low but not uncomfortably so. The women had somehow pulled fixtures from the walls, and were using them as furniture. The result was odd-looking, but formed a comfortable enough living area.
"We knew," he went on. "Hans Rebka and I, we knew Paradox had changed."
The three woman exchanged glances. "A right pair of Ditrons you two must be," said the woman with the prominent cheekbones. "If you
knew
it had changed, why did you come in?"
"We thought it would be safe."
The looks this time were a lot less veiled. "Actually," Tally went on, "I did not enter because I thought it was safe. I knew it was not. I came in to rescue Hans Rebka."
"That's different." The short, dark-haired woman shook her head. "Well, we sure know how that works. What happened to your buddy?"
"I have so far been unable to locate him."
"Maybe we can work together." The third woman, tall, blond, and skinny, waved a hand to Tally, inviting him to sit at a table constructed from two food cabinets laid on their sides. "I don't normally think much of men, but this is a case where we need all the help we can get."
"Ah." E.C. Tally sat down carefully at the table, and lifted one forefinger. "In order to avoid a crucial misunderstanding, I should make one point perfectly clear. I am not a man. And now, to begin at the beginning—"
"Not a man?" The blond woman leaned across the table and gave Tally a careful head-to-toe inspection. "Not a
man
. You sure could have fooled me."
"I am not a woman, either."
The woman flopped down on the seat opposite Tally. "And I thought we were in trouble before. All right, we'll do it your way. Begin at the beginning, like you said, and take your time. We've got lots—and it sounds like we'll need all of it."
Another half-day, and still no sign of J'merlia. Darya was worried. Kallik clearly was not. The little Hymenopt was systematically making three-dimensional reconstructions of the other five walls of the hexagonal chamber, using her new computer program on the images that Darya had made earlier.
She did not ask for help. Darya did not offer any. Each had her own obsessions.
Darya kept running the first picture sequence, over and over. All data on stellar velocities was back on board the
Myosotis
, and without that information she lacked an absolute means of measuring time. But the general pattern of the sequence was clear. Somewhere, far in the past and far from the worlds of the Fourth Alliance, an unidentified species had achieved intelligence and space flight. The spreading green points of light showed the stars that the clade had reached. Later, probably thousands of years later, another clade had escaped their home world and set off to explore and colonize. The second clade, judging from the location of the orange points of light, was the Zardalu.
They had spread also, speedily, aggressively. Finally they met and began to swallow up the worlds of the green clade.
So far, so good. Not much was known about the Zardalu expansion, but there was nothing in the display at variance with recorded history.
But now came a third clade, shown on the display in deep ruby-red. This one, according to its point of origin, represented humanity. It started out from the home world of Sol, and began a tentative spread outward. It never stood a chance. The expanding tide of Zardalu-orange caught and swallowed the first scattering of red points. It swept past Sol and on through the spiral arm, swamping everything else. Finally every green and red light was replaced by a point of orange flame.
That was the situation when the supergiant reference stars seemed to be in their present-day positions. Darya halted the progression of images. According to what she was seeing, the spiral arm was supposed to be,
today
, what it clearly was not: a region totally under Zardalu domination.
Darya stared and pondered. This was a picture of the spiral arm as it would have been had the Great Rising against the Zardalu never occurred. If the Zardalu outward drive had continued unchecked, every habitable planet of the spiral arm would have eventually come under the dominion of the land-cephalopods. The worlds of humans were gone, destroyed or confiscated. Humanity was enslaved or exterminated, together with all other species operating in space.
And the future?
There were more frames in the image sequence. Darya ran it onward. The stellar positions began to change again, to an unfamiliar pattern. Time advanced, by many thousands of years. But the pattern of color never altered. Every star remained a steady orange. Zardalu, and Zardalu alone, ruled. At last the orange points of light began to vanish, snuffing out one by one. The spiral arm became empty. It remained devoid of intelligent life, all the way to the final frame of the sequence.
Darya turned off the display in her helmet. She did not switch her visor to outside viewing. It was better to stare into blackness, and disappear into a maze of thought.
Here was not one mystery, but two.
First, how had Quintus Bloom been able to show on Sentinel Gate a
realistic
display of the spiral arm's colonization—past, present, and future? He did not show the false pattern of Zardalu domination. Darya could not believe that he had
invented
that display. He had found it somewhere within Labyrinth, in this inner chamber, or more likely in some other of the thirty-seven.
Second, what was the significance of this display of spiral arm evolution, so clearly contrary to reality? The Builders were an enigma, but Darya could see no possible reason for them portraying on the walls of Labyrinth a
fictitious
history of the arm.
Now to those mysteries, add a third:
What was the nature of beings for whom the natural way to view a series of two-dimensional images was to stack them on top of another, in three dimensions?
Darya's mind felt clear and clean, her body far away. Her suit was unobtrusive, quietly monitoring her condition and making automatic adjustments for heat, humidity, and air supply. She might have been back in her study in Sentinel Gate, staring at the wall and not seeing it, oblivious to sights and sounds outside the open window. At last a faint voice began whispering its message to her inner ear:
Invert the process. Solve the third mystery, and its solution will answer the other two questions.
Darya cast her thoughts back over the years, to gather and sieve all the theories she had ever read, heard, or thought, about the Builders.
Old theories . . .
. . . they vanished over three million years ago, ascending to a higher plane of existence. The artifacts are mere random debris, the trash left behind by a race of super-beings.
. . . they became old, as any organism must grow old. Knowing that their end was near, and that others would come after them, they left the artifacts as gifts to their successors.
. . . they left over three million years ago, but one day they intend to return. The Builder constructs are no more than their caretakers, preserving artifacts on behalf of their once and future masters.
. . . the Builders are still here, in the spiral arm. They control the artifacts, but they have no desire to interact with other species.
And new theories . . .
. . . according to Quintus Bloom: The Builders are not part of the past. They are from the
future
, and they placed their artifacts in the spiral arm to affect and direct the course of that future. When key events reveal that the future is on the right course, the artifacts will change. Soon after that, the artifacts will return to the future from which they came. Those key events have occurred. That time of change is here
now
.
. . . according to Darya Lang: An idea sprang into existence, full-formed in her mind as though it had always been there. The Builders are
not
time travelers from the future. They lived in the past, and perhaps they live in the present. We cannot perceive them, and communication between them and us is difficult, perhaps impossible. But they are aware of us. Perhaps they also have sympathy for us, and for the other clades—because they are able to
see the future
, see it as clearly as humans see a scene with their eyes, or Cecropians with their echolocation.
They lived in the past . . . a race able to see the future . . .
Except that at any moment of time there could be no single, defined future. There were only
potential
futures, possible directions of development. Present actions decided which of those potentials would realize itself as
the
future, one among an infinite number of alternatives. So what did it mean, to say that the Builders were able to see the future? Was it more than a refined ability to perform extrapolation?
Put the question into more familiar terms: What did it tell you about the structure and nature of Darya Lang, that she was able to
see
? What physical properties of her eyes made her able to look close at a nearby flower (as the Builders were able to see tomorrow, in time), and then far off to a distant landscape (as the Builders could see a thousand years hence)?
Darya's trance was complete. She sat at the brink of revelation, its message tantalizingly beyond her grasp. She saw in her mind the blurred, milky wall of the chamber, with its clear (but cryptic) three-dimensional message. Humans and Hymenopts could not grasp that message all at once, in its entirety. They needed to have it broken down into single frames, to see it a thin slice at a time.
But perhaps the Builders had no such need. . . .
Darya sensed the first faint ghost of a different kind of being, one so alien in nature that humans, Cecropians, Hymenopts, and Lo'tfians—even Zardalu—were all close cousins.
If she were right, every one of her questions would be answered. The
logical
pieces were there. All she needed was confirmation—which meant more data.
She turned her visor to external viewing. "Kallik!"
She started, as the Hymenopt popped up right in front of her. Kallik had been waiting, eight legs tucked neatly beneath the round furry body.
"I am here. I did not wish to disturb your thoughts."
"They were disturbing enough by themselves. Did you process the other five walls?"
"Long since. Like the first one, they exist now as sequences of images."
"Can I see them?"
"Assuredly. I have reviewed one of them already. But with respect"—Kallik sounded apologetic—"I fear that it is not what you are hoping to see."
"You mean it's not a set of images of spiral arm clade evolution, the way that the first one was?"
"No. I mean that it is just such a set. It shows a representation of the spiral arm. However, it suffers the same problem as the one which we previously examined. By which I mean, it does not resemble what Quintus Bloom reported, and it is also quite inconsistent with what we know to be the true history of arm colonization."