Darya paused for breath. Once the questions started it was difficult to cut them off. She noticed, with shameful satisfaction, that the smile had vanished from Quintus Bloom’s bony face. He was finally frowning.
“Additional research will of course be needed to answer those questions. Or, if we remain here, we will soon be in a position to ask questions directly — of the people who created artifacts, Labyrinth, and polyglyphs.”
Bloom gestured to the ship’s display screens, which Darya had for the past few minutes been ignoring. The interior structure of Labyrinth had broken down further. Walls were vanishing, windows between chambers enlarging. Darya could see through into half a dozen other chambers, as they collapsed into each other like a connected series of soap bubbles. Within each one was a confusing blur of activity. She saw three new swelling vortices, dozens of small dots that could be figures in suits, and a trio of ships of unfamiliar design.
“Do you doubt,” Bloom continued, “that Labyrinth itself is still changing? That it is preparing to return to the future?”
“It’s changing, yes. But Labyrinth is not from the future, or going there.” Now came the critical moment. “I can answer every one of my questions that you insist will need ‘additional research.’ And I can do it now. Because I understand the nature of the Builders.”
Suddenly, the intense personal dialogue had changed. Hans Rebka was listening hard, and so were Louis Nenda and Glenna Omar. Kallik and J’merlia had ended their conversation with Atvar H’sial, and were looking Darya’s way. J’merlia, crouched beneath the Cecropian’s carapace, was sure to be offering a pheromonal translation of everything. Darya became aware of her own doubts, as surely as she had felt Bloom’s overwhelming certainty. But it was not the time to back off.
“Let’s begin with the easy one. You did discover alternate histories of the spiral arm on the other walls of the inner chamber. You chose not to present them in your seminars, because they conflicted with the theory that you were offering. Do you want to deny that?”
Quintus Bloom’s stony stare was enough of an answer.
“So I’m sure you know the main point displayed in all those alternate histories,” Darya went on, “even though no one else does. I have half-a-dozen of the image sequences with me, if we ever get out of all this and anyone wants to see them. But I can summarize. In every alternate history, a clade or group of clades arises to colonize and populate the spiral arm. Sometimes the clade is one that we know well, sometimes one we have never encountered. Sometimes the development happened far in the past, long before humans came on the scene. But in every case, as we go on into the future, some single clade achieves dominance. And after that, no matter which clade rules, the colonization at last collapses. The spiral arm is left empty, with no populated and civilized worlds.
“Now, my first thought was the simplest one. We were examining not alternative histories that were rooted in reality, but some kind of fiction. It seemed unlikely, but who knows? Perhaps the Builders had their own idea of entertainment. Fiction seemed more probable than the alternative: that what Kallik and I were looking at was in some sense real.”
“Which it clearly was not.” The supercilious sneer was back. “I examined the other image sequences, of course I did. However, I saw no point in burdening my audience or my argument with palpable fantasies. Alternative contrived histories, or fictitious imagined futures, have no relevance or interest to serious researchers.”
“If the image sequences contained nothing else, I would probably agree with you.” Darya could feel her own competitive juices bubbling. “But there was something else, something that you either did not notice or did not want to mention. One past and future of the spiral arm portrayed our past, and perhaps our present and future. That one, alone of all pasts and futures, shows the growth and continued presence of multiple clades. Many species, not just one, share the future of the arm. And unlike all other cases, that sequence does not end in the collapse of civilization. It shows a far future in which the arm is populated, healthy, and stable. And there is one other point, the most important of alclass="underline" Our version of history, and our version alone, contains Builder artifacts. There is no sign of artifacts in any other alternative history.”
“Stop right there.” Bloom held up his hand, palm facing Darya. “Do you realize that you have just destroyed whatever minimal credibility your argument might have had? You accept a scenario that shows the future of the spiral arm. There is no way to know such a future, unless it is shown to us by beings who themselves are from that future.”
“Wrong. That’s what stopped me, for the longest time. I asked myself: how could any being, no matter what it was like, know the future? It might make predictions; we do that all the time. But this would have to go far beyond prediction. I wondered. Could a being exist who saw the future, as we see things around us? If such an entity did exist, what would be its essential properties?
“I didn’t have an answer — until I saw the polyglyphs on the walls of Labyrinth. Normally a picture is a two-dimensional idea. These were three-dimensional pictures, and the third dimension represented time. I asked myself, What kind of being would find it natural to treat time as a dimension no different from any other? And I found an answer: A being with finite extension in time.”
“Gibberish!” Bloom glanced around, seeking support from the others in the cabin. “What she is saying is physically ridiculous and implausible.”
“To us, maybe. But to the Builders, we are implausible. We are totally flat, living within an infinitely thin slice of time. No wonder the Builders find us difficult to communicate with. We perceive space as three dimensions, but we move through time always trapped in the moment of the immediate present. We have no direct experience of anything else, past or future. A being with finite size in time as well as space will move forward through time, just as we do, but it will also have direct experience of what we perceive as the immediate past and the immediate future. To see in any dimension, it is necessary to have a finite size in that dimension. They see the future, as we see things in space. And, like our vision, their time-vision can see detail close up, but only the broad outlines farther off.”
Darya could sense a change in the atmosphere within the cabin, people moving and turning away from her and Bloom. But she was too absorbed to stop, and in any case he was the one who had to be convinced. She spoke faster.