“I could accept this idea conceptually, but I still had a major problem: We talk about ‘the future’ as though it is a well-defined thing. But it isn’t. The future is a potential, it can take many different forms. Depending on what we do — and what the Builders did — many different futures might be possible for the spiral arm. And at last I understood. The Builders see — and illustrated, for our benefit — potential futures. That’s what the polyglyphs showed. Different walls, different possible futures. And of all those possibles, only one permits stable growth and continued civilization. It is the one where the arm is populated and dominated by multiple clades. And the Builders, with the use of artifacts planted long ago, have created the possibility of that future.”
Darya, struggling to make her points as clearly as she could, hardly saw her surroundings. Her mind was filled with the vision of the Builders, performing actions in the past and present, then peering out far ahead to watch the shifts and changes of a misty set of futures. They could not guarantee a future, they could only increase its chances. How did those options look, to the strange Builder senses? Did alternatives fade or sharpen, as different actions were taken or considered that would vary the future? How much detail were they able to see? The rise and fall of a clade, yes. But what about the smaller options, of economic power and influence?
Someone was tugging impatiently at her arm. She glared, expecting it to be Quintus Bloom. Instead it was Hans Rebka. Bloom himself was pushing his way into a crush of other people, all milling around the cabin.
Darya turned her annoyance onto Rebka. “What a nerve. I was talking to him!”
“No.” He began to pull on her arm, dragging her after the others. “You just thought you were. For the past thirty seconds you haven’t been talking to anybody. You’re as bad as he is, you know, when you get going. Come on. We have to find a way out of here. Everything is falling apart. You can tell us all about the Builders some other time — if we’re that lucky.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was like being engaged in a public debate — at the moment when the stage falls out from under you. Darya had been pumped up for a verbal duel-to-the-death with Quintus Bloom. She had no illusions; the fight was far from over. But now, without warning, both Bloom and audience had departed.
Darya, glancing at the screens for the first time in many minutes, could see why. Labyrinth was becoming unrecognizable. The walls were dissolving. Darya could see right through them. She could observe, as through a fine gauze curtain, the whole of the helical structure right down to the tightest innermost chamber.
And Labyrinth was simplifying. One spiral now, not thirty-seven. One great coiled tube, filled with novelties.
The bulging vortices had vanished, leaving in their place a horde of new arrivals. The spiral arm, revealing its diversity…
…ships, from the newest design of the Fourth Alliance to the ponderous and ancient bulk of the legendary Tantalus orbital fort. The corrugated surface of the fort crawled with a thousand identical vessels like twelve-legged metallic spiders. Nothing in today’s spiral arm remotely resembled them. Beyond the fort was a transport vessel for Hymenopt slaves, with next to it the disk and slim spike of an original McAndrew balanced drive. Most of the ships in the whole mismatched flotilla were drifting in one direction, toward an exterior wall of Labyrinth.
…writhing free-space Medusae, Torvil Anfracts in miniature, rainbow lobes shimmering like sunlit oil on water.
…alien creatures, familiar and strange, suited or naked to space, dead or alive, fresh or mummified. Some of the beings without suits were leaping easily through space from ship to ship. Some of the others were legless, eyeless forms. Far from their homes in deep oceans or on gas-giant planets, they twisted helpless in the gulf. The interior of Labyrinth could support life unassisted, although it was strange that everything could breathe the same air. But how had those giants ever been carried to the interior of an artifact?
Moving through the whole mass, guiding and shepherding, were thousands of miniature Phages, small twelve-faced solids no bigger than Darya’s hand. They showed every sign of intelligent behavior.
Darya recalled the common wisdom of the Fourth Alliance: Intelligence was not possible in an organic structure below a minimum mass. That mass far exceeded the size of these mini-Phages.
Did that mean these were remotely controlled, or were they built of inorganic components? Or could a finite size in time more than make up for a reduced size in space? What Darya was able to see might be not a whole Builder, but a mere flat projection of it, the tiny slice apprehensible to the senses in what humans described as “the present.” Perhaps total space-time volume was the important parameter for intelligence. From a Builder point of view, humans and their alien colleagues must occupy an infinitesimal region of space-time, with body size in space multiplied by the width of a vanishingly small section of time. Such a small space-time volume, the Builders might argue, did not permit the development of intelligence.
The mini-Phages darted energetically to-and-fro. But that was not what had caused the excitement on the Misanthrope. Darya turned and saw, for the first time, the dark shape hanging beyond the translucent outer walls of Labyrinth.
Another vortex. And not just a vortex. The whole of the space on one side of Labyrinth was occupied by the Grand Panjandrum of all vortices, bigger than the artifact itself. It was slowly swelling. Either it was truly growing in size, or Labyrinth was creeping steadily closer to it. Whichever was true, the end point would be the same. Labyrinth would be engulfed.
Rebka was still gripping Darya’s arm, steering her closer to the hatch. She resisted.
“Why not stay here with them? They’re getting ready to leave Labyrinth.” She pointed to Katerina Treel, suit closed and in place at the ship’s controls. Her two sisters were trying to push people out of the lock. There was too much noise to hear what they were shouting.
“Who?” Rebka had to shout, too, leaning close to Darya’s helmet. A deep, booming noise like the tolling of a gigantic bell filled the cabin with a regular tone. It was coming from somewhere outside the Misanthrope. “Who could stay here? You, me, Tally? What about Nenda, or Atvar H’sial and the other aliens? What about Glenna or Quintus Bloom? There isn’t room in this ship for everyone.”
“My ship!” Darya found herself screaming. “We can use my ship — the Myosotis.”
“You want to bet on finding it, with that lot out there?” Rebka’s gesture took in the swarming chaos beyond the lock. “There isn’t much room on the Myosotis, even if you were sure you could get us there. And Nenda’s ship can’t fly superluminal.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“The same as everyone else.” They had finally reached the lock and struggled through it, Rebka still firmly attached to the arm of Darya’s suit. He pointed to the periphery of Labyrinth, on the side away from the monster vortex. The ships from the interior now hung there in space, a strange mixed fleet that had somehow passed right through Labyrinth’s external wall. “All the ships with no crews seem to have been steered out there. We pick a type that we know how to fly — one with a Bose Drive on it.”
“Those ships weren’t there when we came to Labyrinth!”
“Nor were a lot of other things. They are now.”
“Hans.” She stopped dead, shaking her arm free. “Don’t you see, it proves I’m right. The Builders are here, now — and they are helping. They want anything alive and intelligent to be able to escape before Labyrinth vanishes completely. That’s why they are taking the ships outside, ready for use.”