Darya fixed her eyes on that familiar sight — and realized, with a shiver, that it was beginning to move. She was plunging downward, out of the galactic plane. The globular clusters of the Magellanic Clouds were in front of her. They had emerged from the clutter of the spiral arm to form glittering spheres of stars.
How fast? How far?
She could not say. But in order for her motion relative to the whole Galaxy to be noticed, she had to be skipping hundreds of light-years in each transition. Another minute, and much of the Galaxy’s matter lay below her. She was far below the spiral arm and catching a hint of a monstrous flattened disk. Below her feet she could see the sweeping curve of the spiral itself. Individual stars were disappearing, moment by moment, into a sea of spangles that glittered around dark dust clouds and lit the filaments of gaseous nebulas with multi-colored gemstones.
As she watched the stars faded again, merging to become the hazy light of distant millions. Far off to her left the disk had swelled up and thickened. She was far enough from the main plane to be clear of obscuring gas and dust clouds. She gazed in wonder at the glowing bulge of the galactic center. Hers were surely the first human eyes to see past the spiral arm to the densely packed galactic nucleus and to the massive black hole that formed the hub of the Galaxy.
How far? How fast?
She seemed to be moving straight away from the galactic disk, and now the blaze of the central hub was off at an angle of forty-five degrees to her direction of motion. With her lungs frozen and her heart stopped in her chest, Darya made her estimate. The Phemus Circle territories were about thirty thousand light-years from the center of the Galaxy, so she must be about that far from the galactic plane. And the angle of the hub was changing, at maybe ten degrees a minute. That gave her a speed of a hundred and seventy-five light-years a second.
Ten thousand light-years a minute. A million light-years in an hour and a half. The Andromeda Galaxy in twice that time.
Even as that thought came, the mad drive ended. The universe stopped its giddy rush and clicked into a fixed position.
Ahead of Darya in the open void sat a great space structure, agleam with internal lights, sprawling across half the sky, of a size impossible to estimate. Darya had the sense that it was huge, that those trailing pseudopods of antennas and twisting tubes of bright matter, spinning away into space from the central dodecahedron, were millions of kilometers long.
Before she could confirm that impression, there came a final transition. Stars, galaxies, and stellar clusters vanished. Darya found herself standing on a level plain. Overhead was nothing. At her feet, defining the level surface itself, were a billion twinkling orange lights.
And next to her, his suit open so that he could scratch his chin, stood Hans Rebka.
“Well,” he said. “We-ell, that’s one for the record books. Try and describe that in your trip report.”
He was silent for a few moments, breathing deep and staring around him. “Maybe we ought to trade ideas,” he said finally. “If either of us has any. For a start, where in the hell are we?”
“You opened your suit!”
“No.” He shook his head. “I never had time to close it when we dropped — nor did you.”
To Darya’s astonishment she saw that he was right. Her own suit was fully transparent. “But we were out in open space — airless vacuum.”
“I thought so, too. I don’t remember needing to breathe, though.”
“How long were we there? Did you count heartbeats?”
He smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I don’t know if I even had heartbeats. I was too busy trying to figure out what was happening — where you had gone, where I was going.”
“I think I know. Not what was happening, but where we went and where we are now.”
“Then you’re six steps ahead of me.” He gestured out at the endless plain in front of them. “Limbo, didn’t it used to be called? A nowhere place where lost souls went.”
“We’re not lost. We were brought here, deliberately. And it was my fault. I told The-One-Who-Waits how keen I was to meet the Builders. It took what I said at face value.”
“Didn’t work, though, did it? I don’t see any sign of them.”
“Give them time. We only just got here. Do you remember flying down into the Eye of Gargantua?”
“Until the day I die. Which I’d like to think is a fair way off, but I’m beginning to wonder.”
“The eye is the entry point to a Builder transportation system. It must have been there as long as humans have been in the Mandel system, maybe long before that; but it’s no surprise that no one ever discovered it. A ship’s crew would have to be crazy to fly down into it.”
“Explorer ships’ crews are crazy. People did plenty of mad things when this system was first being colonized. I know that ships went down deep into Gargantua’s atmosphere and came back out — some of them. But I don’t think that would be enough to do what we did. We had to be given that first boost from Glister, to rifle us exactly down the middle of the vortex. When I was in there it seemed to just fit my shoulders. There wasn’t room for another person, let alone a ship.”
“I had the same feeling. I wondered where you’d gone, but I knew there wasn’t room for both of us. All right. So we had a first boost from the gravity generator on Glister, then a second boost from a shearing field in the Eye of Gargantua. That put us square into the main transportation system, and then right out of the spiral arm. Thirty thousand light-years, I estimate.”
“I wondered about that. I looked around, and I could see the whole damned galaxy, spread out like a dinner plate — though the way I’m feeling, I hate to even mention the word ‘dinner.’ ”
“And then one final transition, to bring us in here.” Darya gazed around, up to the segmented dark ceiling, and then across the glittering plain of the floor.
“Where we can stand and stare until we starve. Any more ideas, Professor?”
“Some.” Now that the mind-numbing journey was over she was beginning to think again. “I don’t believe we were brought all this way to starve. The-One-Who-Waits sent us, so something must know we’re here. And although this is part of the Builders’ own living place, I’ll bet it has been prepared for us, or beings like us.” Darya swung her hand around a ninety-degree arc of the level floor. “See the flat surface? That’s not natural for a Builder structure.”
“We don’t know how Builders think. Nobody ever met one.”
“True. But we know how they build. When you’ve studied Builder artifacts as long as I have, you begin to form ideas about the Builders themselves. You can’t prove things, but you learn to trust your instincts. We don’t know where the Builders evolved, or when, but I’m sure it was in an aerial or free-space environment. At the very least, it was a place where gravity doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to us. The Builders work naturally in all three dimensions, every direction equal. Their artifacts don’t provide any feel for ‘up’ or ‘down.’ A level plain like this is something that humans like. You don’t encounter it in the artifacts. You don’t expect a gravity field close to one gee in a structure like this, either — complete with a breathable atmosphere. And look at that.” She pointed to the ceiling, apparently kilometers above them. “You can see it’s built of pentagonal segments. That’s common to many Builder structures. So I think we’re inside a dodecahedron, a shape you find over and over in Builder artifacts, and I think they just added a flat floor and air and gravity for the benefit of beings like us. I’m not sure this plain is anything like as big as it looks, either. You know the Builders can play tricks with space that confuse our sense of distance.”