Convergent Series (45 page)

"Why not? Uh oh. Damnation. Is it listening to me? Here we go again."

As though responding to his words, an orange shimmer was flowing up and around them from the smooth gray surface. Darya resisted the urge to run. She was sure it would do no good. Instead she reached for Hans Rebka's hand and held it tightly. This time when the twinkling points cut off all light, sound, and mobility, the result was far less disturbing. She waited, sensing the faint throb of her own pulse and counting steadily.

One hundred and forty-one . . . two . . . three. The fog was dispersing. One hundred and fifty-eight . . . nine. It was gone. She was free, still gripping his hand hard enough to hurt.

At her side, Rebka grunted in surprise. "Well, it may be no better, but at least it's
different
."

They had sunk through to another level. The curvature of the surface was no longer noticeable, because there was no visible horizon against which to check it. They stood in a connected series of chambers. All around them structures ran in an eye-baffling zigzag of webs, pipes, nets, and partitions, from slate-gray floor to glowing ceiling. The "windows" between the chambers were set at random heights, and there were few openings at floor level. Whatever inhabited these chambers did not move like humans.

Nor did they walk through walls. Darya noticed that the retreating fog of orange lights did not penetrate the new structures. Instead it crawled around and over them, to wriggle its way through the small openings in nets and webs.

She glanced down to her feet. The outer layers of Glister had been unnaturally clean and totally dust-free, but here there were fragments of broken pipe and long lengths of cable. Everything had the neglected and disused look of a room that had not seen a cleanup in a million years. And yet the walls themselves seemed perfectly solid.

Rebka had been making his own inspection. He walked to one of the partitions, and as soon as the twinkling lights had left it he slapped his palm hard against the flat surface. He did the same thing to one of the fine-meshed webs and shook his head.

"Perfectly solid, and strong. We won't push those aside. If we want to go anywhere, we'll have to follow the holes in the walls—if we can climb up to them."

Since their arrival on Glister, Darya had felt increasingly useless. She just didn't know what to
do
. Whereas Hans was so used to trouble, he took it all in stride. She could contribute nothing. Unless it was information . . .

"Hans! What would you say the gravity field is here?"

He stopped his careful inspection of the walls and webs. "A standard gravity, give or take twenty percent. Why? Is it giving you trouble?"

"No. But it's
more
than it was, back on the surface. If Glister had a uniform density, or most of the mass was near the outside, then the field would
decrease
as you went closer to the center. So there has to be a big field source down near the middle. And it can't be a normal mass; nothing natural is that dense."

"So it's something new. Let's go and take a look below." Rebka began to walk slowly down one of the corridors, a hallway wide enough for the local vertical to change appreciably across its width.

Darya followed, pausing often to examine the wall materials and the complicated interlocking nets that covered most of the "windows." Her nervousness disappeared as she realized that this was truly a new Builder artifact—the first one discovered in more than four hundred years. And she was the first scientist ever to examine it. Even if she could escape, she should first give the place the most thorough examination of which she was capable. Otherwise she would never forgive herself—and neither would a thousand other Builder specialists.

So it was panic button off, observation hat on. What else could be said about their surroundings?

Many of the partitions slanted up all the way from floor to glowing ceiling. With their help she could judge the height of the chamber. It was
high
—maybe sixty meters. Nothing human needed that much space; but it was consistent with the enormous chambers found on other Builder artifacts.

She stepped to one wall and examined the material. Close up, it displayed a fine, grainy structure like baked brick. From the appearance it seemed brittle, as though one sharp blow would shatter it, but she knew from experience with Builder materials that that was an illusion. The structure would possess a material strength beyond anything else in the spiral arm. Left to stand for a million years in a corrosive atmosphere of oxygen, chlorine, or fluorine, it would not crumble. Bathed in boiling acids for centuries, it would not dissolve. Darya had no idea how long this chamber had been unoccupied, but the surfaces should have been as dust-free as if they were polished daily. And they were not. There was dust
everywhere
.

Maintenance on Glister was sloppily done, if it was done at all.

Darya took the knife from her suit belt and jabbed at the gray wall. The tip was a single crystal of dislocation-free carbon-iridium, the hardest and sharpest material that human technology could create. And yet the blade did not make even a nick. She moved to one of the tight-drawn nets and tried to cut through a thin strand. She could see no mark when she was done. Even the thinnest web would be an impossible barrier to anything that could not, like the cloud, dissolve to small individual components. It was hard to believe that the dust all around them had come from gradual flaking away from the walls. There had to be some other source. Somewhere on Glister there had to be other materials, not built to Builder standards of near-infinite permanence.

Hans Rebka had been waiting impatiently as she chipped at the wall and sawed at the net. "It'll take you a long time to cut your way out like that," he said. "Come on. We have to keep moving."

He did not say what Darya had already thought. The air here might be breathable—though why, and how? There was nothing to create or maintain an atmosphere acceptable to humans—but beyond air, they needed other things to stay alive. Twelve hours had passed since their last meal, and although she was too nervous to feel hungry, Darya's throat was painfully dry.

They walked on, side by side, taking any floor-level connection between chambers and slowly descending through a long succession of sloping corridors. At last they came to a room containing the first sign of working equipment inside Glister—a massive cylinder that began to hum as they approached. It took in air and blew it out through a series of small vents. Rebka placed his hand and then his face close to one of the apertures.

"It's an air unit," he said. "And I think we just started it going. Somehow it reacted to our presence. Here's something for you to think about: If units like this maintain a breathable atmosphere
inside
Glister, what does it
outside
?"

"Probably nothing. There's nothing up there to do anything, no machinery at all. The surface must be permeable, at least sometimes and somewhere. That's how we were carried in here. Right through the floor."

"So all we have to do is work out a way to make the ceilings permeable again, and out we go. Of course, we need a way to jump straight up about a hundred meters." He stared upward. "The hell with it. I'd still like to know how the unit knew the atmosphere is good enough for both humans and Hymenopts."

"Right. Or what kind of atmosphere Glister had, before the
Have-It-All
arrived. Why would it need one, until we got here? Maybe it didn't have one at all."

Rebka gave her a startled glance. "Now that's what I call
real
custom service. Air designed to order. Now you're making
me
nervous."

They walked on past the air unit and half a dozen other constructs whose purpose Darya could only guess at. She itched to stay and examine them, but Hans was urging her forward.

The eighth device was a waist-high cylinder with a surface like a honeycomb, riddled with hexagonal openings each big enough to accommodate a human fist. The outside of the panel was cold and beaded with drops of moisture. Rebka touched one, sniffed his finger, and touched it to his lips.

"Water. Drinkable, I think, but it tastes flat."

Darya followed his example. "Distilled. It's a hundred percent pure, with no salts and minerals. You're just not used to clean water. You can drink it."

"Just now I'll drink anything. But we won't get much from panel condensation." He peered into one of the openings. "I'm going to try something. Don't stand too close."

"Hans!"

But already he was reaching his arm deep into the aperture. He drew out a cupped handful of water and took a cautious sip. "It's all right. Come and take some. At least we won't die of thirst.

"And following up on your earlier line of thought," he added as they reached in to fill the bottles attached to their suits, "I wonder what liquid
that
was producing a week ago. Ethanol? Hydrochloric acid?"

"Or liquid methane. What do you think the
temperature
was on the surface of Glister, when Gargantua was a long way from Mandel?"

They moved on, to reach a point where the uniform curvature of the convex floor was broken by a descending ramp. Rebka stood on the brink and stared down.

"That's pretty steep. Looks slick, too. More like a chute than a corridor, and I can't see the bottom. Once we go down there, I'm not sure we'll be able to climb back up."

"We need food. We can't get back to the surface, and we can't stay here forever."

"Agreed." He sat down on the edge. "I'm going to slide. Wait until I call back and tell you it's all right."

"No!" Darya was surprised at the strength of her own reaction. She came forward and sat next to him. "You're not leaving me up here by myself. If you go, I go."

"Then hold tight." They eased side by side over the edge.

The chute was less steep than it looked. After a sheer start it curved into a gentle spiral. They skidded down and soon reached terminal velocity of no more than a fast walking pace. As they descended, the light changed. The cold orange that mimicked Gargantua's reflected glow was replaced by a bright yellow-white that came from ahead of them and reflected from the smooth walls of the chute. Finally the gradient became so shallow that they could no longer slide forward.

Rebka stood up. "The free ride's over. I wonder what this was intended for originally. Unless you think
it
wasn't here, either, until we came along and needed it."

They had emerged to stand at the edge of a domed chamber, a giant's serving dish fifty meters across. The floor ahead formed a shallow bowl, gently sloping all the way into the center, and above them stood an arched ceiling in the form of a perfect hemisphere. Hans and Darya stared around the chamber, adjusting to the white dazzle. To eyes accustomed for the last few hours to cold hues and dusty slate-gray, the new environment was sheer brilliance. The circular floor of the room was marked off like an archery target, in bright concentric rings of different colors. From the boundaries of those gaudy rings rose hemispheres, faintly visible, forming a nested set. Corridor entrances, or perhaps the delivery points of chutes like the one that they had just descended, stood at intervals around the outer perimeter of the chamber. A single dazzling globe at the room's apex provided illumination.

And in the middle of the chamber, at the central depression directly below the light . . .

Darya gasped. "Look, Hans. It's
them!
"

The smallest translucent dome stood around the bright blue bull's-eye of the innermost ring. At its center was a raised dais, a meter and a half tall; upon that, facing outward, stood a dozen transparent structures like great glass seats.

Side by side in two of those seats, held by some invisible support, sat Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial.

Darya began to move forward, but she was restrained by Hans Rebka's hand on her arm.

"This is the time to be most careful. I think they're both unconscious. Look at them closely."

Darya stood and stared. Between them and the central dais rose the half-dozen translucent nested hemispheres. They interfered with her view of Nenda and Atvar H'sial, but Darya could still see enough detail to prompt new questions.

Louis Nenda's overall appearance was at first sight no different from the last time she had seen him. The arms of the short, swarthy body rippled with muscle, and the shirt was wide open at the neck to show a powerful and thickly haired chest.

Or
was
that hair? It looked wrong, discolored and uneven. She turned to Rebka.

"His chest—"

"I see it." Hans Rebka was blinking and squinting, having the same problem with perspective as Darya. The hemisphere introduced a subtle distortion to the scene. "It's all covered with moles and pockmarks. Did you ever see his bare chest before?"

"No. He always kept it covered."

"Then I don't think it's a recent change. I bet he was like that when he arrived on Opal."

"But what is it?"

"A Zardalu-technology augment. The first records on Nenda when he requested access to Opal said he was augmented, but they didn't say how. Now we know. Those nodules and pits are pheromone generators and receptors. It's a rare and expensive operation—and it's painful, like all the Zardalu augments. But that's how he could work directly with Atvar H'sial. They can
talk
to each other, without needing J'merlia." Rebka studied the other man for a few seconds longer. "My guess is that he's physically unchanged, and just unconscious. It's a lot harder to tell about Atvar H'sial. What do you think?"

Darya moved her attention to the Cecropian. She had spent more time with Atvar H'sial, so her estimate of condition ought to be better. Except that the Cecropians were so alien, in every respect . . .

Even seated, with her six jointed legs tucked away underneath her, Atvar H'sial towered over the Karelian human Louis Nenda. A dark-red, segmented underside was surmounted by a short neck with scarlet-and-white ruffles, and above that stood a white, eyeless head. The thin proboscis that grew from the middle of the face could reach out and serve as a delicate sense organ, but at the moment it was curled down to tuck neatly away in a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin.