“Come on, Kallik, we’ve learned all we’re going to learn in this place. Time to get out.”
Don’t stop to wonder about the condition of the outer chambers, or of the ship that she had left behind there. Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer.
If you were lucky enough to have a bed. Did the Builders sleep, eat, laugh, and cry? Did they feel hope and despair? Darya paused at the narrow exit from the innermost chamber. Follow the streaky white lines. The Myosotis, complete with beds and bunks and all the other niceties that she had not seen for days, lay in that direction.
“With respect.” Kallik had come up close behind and was edging ahead of Darya. “My reactions are faster than yours. It is logical that I lead.”
Logic again. But Darya found this point difficult to argue. With Hymenopt reaction times, Kallik could be fifty meters away while Darya was still wondering if there might be a danger.
“Be careful. Things in here are changing.”
As if Kallik needed to be told. Her senses were more acute than Darya’s, her reasoning powers in no way inferior. She was already away, shooting along the tunnel to the next chamber. Darya followed, expecting when she arrived to see Kallik far ahead and fighting her way through the moving maze of vortex singularities that they had faced on the way in. To Darya’s surprise she found that the Hymenopt had not progressed beyond the end of the tunnel. Kallik was floating with folded limbs, obviously waiting.
“Too dangerous?” Darya approached the end of the tunnel. She expected to see the energetic vortices, zipping back and forth past the tunnel entrance. What she saw instead was one great pool of swirling black, as though a single vortex had taken up station at the chamber entrance and waited for them there.
That impression faded as she moved to Kallik’s side. The usual circulation pattern was visible, sure enough, and it came from a bloated monster of a vortex. However, it did not fill the whole chamber. There was room for a human — or a Hymenopt — to squeeze past on either side. It might be safe enough, provided that the dark whirlpool did not increase again in size.
“What’s the problem?”
Kallik did not reply in words. Instead she pointed to the black heart of the pool. At first Darya saw nothing, a darkness so complete that instead of delivering illumination the vortex center seemed to draw light away from the eye. After a few moments a faint ghost of an image rippled into that darkness, then just as quickly vanished. Darya was left with the subliminal impression of a distorted cylinder, a long ellipsoid with each end sheared off and replaced by flat planes.
Before she could speak the spectral image came again, and again slipped away.
Again. And again, lingering a moment longer.
“Next time, I think.” But even before Kallik’s quiet comment, Darya knew what she was seeing. It was a Builder transportation system, in the very act of giving birth. Something or someone was being squeezed and corkscrewed through a narrow space-time canal — Darya would never forget the feeling — and any moment now would be delivered into the chamber ahead.
The vortex trembled. Smooth blackness became in an instant a dazzling flash of blue and white. Darya’s suit visor cut out with photon overload. When the visor again admitted light, Darya saw that the chamber in front of her contained something more than the whirling singularity. A dull gray ship of unfamiliar design floated beside the dark whirlpool. And the vortex itself was changing. With delivery over, it was dwindling, tightening, shrinking back to normal size. After a few seconds it faded to gray. At last it became an insubstantial fog, a wraith through which the chamber beyond was visible. And then it was gone.
Darya started forward. She halted when the ship in front of her began to change. Hull plates slid aside, and the smooth gray surface was broken by open dark circles. Darya froze. Even someone from the peaceful worlds of the Fourth Alliance knew enough to recognize weapons ports.
“Ristu ’knu’ik. Utu’is’s gur’uiki.” A blare of warning came from the ship ahead, accompanied by supersonics that raised the skin on Darya’s arms to goose pimples. Something within the ship had recognized what Darya herself had forgotten — that the chamber was filled with air. Breathable or unbreathable, the gases would carry sound signals.
“Can you understand that gobbledygook?” Darya spoke on the private suit channel.
“No. But I think I recognize it.” Kallik was moving slowly to one side, studying the swollen cylinder ahead from different angles. “It is a language peculiar to the worlds of the Cecropian Fringe, where the Federation meets the Communion. I have heard it spoken, but regrettably I have had no prior opportunity for study. J’merlia would surely understand it.”
Perfect. Come in, J’merlia, wherever you are. “Keep still, Kallik. Those are weapons ports.”
“I know.” Kallik had stopped the sideways crabbing, but now she was moving forward. “Permit me to ask something. What is the nearest artifact to the Cecropian Fringe?”
It was an odd time for such a question, but this particular one didn’t call for any thought. Information on all the Builder artifacts was so ingrained in Darya that the answer came as second nature. “It’s the Kruskal Extension — what most people call Enigma.”
“Thank you. Are there inhabited worlds close to Enigma?”
“Three of them. Humans call them Rosen, Lao, and Nordstrom, after the original human explorers of Enigma. But as I recall, there are no humans on any of the three. High mass, all of them, and I don’t think we could breathe the air on Lao.”
“Which is one way of avoiding territorial conflict. But with thanks to you, we perhaps have what we need.” Kallik was still drifting forward, tracked by blunt nozzles protruding from the weapons ports. She switched to external suit broadcast and produced a piercing series of audible but near-supersonic howls. To Darya’s ears it was a painful scream of buzz-saws, nothing like the knotted speech pattern that had greeted them from the ship.
There was a long silence, during which Darya waited to be dispersed to atoms. At last an answering set of screeches came from the ship.
“Excellent. That is Tenthredic, or a variant of it in which I have at least rudimentary speech capability.” Kallik gestured to Darya to move forward with her. “The inhabitants of Lao are Tenthredans. They qualify, at least biologically, as remote cousins of mine.”
“Cousins! But they’re all set to shoot at us.” The threatening nozzles had not moved from their targets, and Darya could see glowing cross-hairs within them. Another awful howl, to her ears like a final warning, came from the ship.
“With respect, I think not. They are merely expressing their own sorrow, alarm, and confusion. I told them who we are, and where they are. That news is distressing to them. Less than half an hour ago, they and a sister ship were entering Enigma to explore it — six hundred light-years from here.” Kallik was heading directly for a hatch on the ship’s side. “A certain apprehension on their part is not perhaps too surprising.”
The stages of Kallik’s logic, as soon as she explained them to Darya, seemed absurdly simple:
One: The original message was in a language used in the Cecropian Fringe.