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.”
“They can. But I think this place is really big, no matter what tricks are being performed.”
Hans Rebka had not raised his voice, but Darya’s stomach tightened at the sudden tension in it. Hans was not supposed to get nervous. That was her privilege.
“It’s certainly big,” he went on, “if that is anything to judge by.”
He was pointing off to their left. Darya at first saw nothing. Then she realized that above the twinkling sea of orange spangles shone the steadier light of a bright sphere. It was tiny at first, no more than a shiny marble of silver, but as she watched it grew steadily. It was advancing across the level plain, apparently at a constant speed. There was no way to judge its distance, or to tell if it was rolling or traveling by some other method.
“Welcoming committee,” Rebka said, almost under his breath. “Everybody smile.”
It was not rolling. Darya was somehow sure of that, even though she could see no signs of surface marking. She had the feeling that it was flying or floating, its bottom only a fraction of a millimeter above the orange cloud of sequins.
And it was not small at all. It was sizable. It was growing. It was huge, three times the size of The-One-Who-Waits. It towered over them, and still it was not close.
Twenty paces away it halted. A steady series of ripples moved across the spherical surface, like waves on a ball of mercury. As they grew in amplitude the globular form bulged up to form a stem. On top of it a familiar pentagonal flowerlike head drooped to face them. Five-sided disks were extruded from the front of the sphere, while a silver tail stretched down to moor the object to the floor. A flickering green light shone from a newly formed aperture in the central belly.
There was a long silence.
“All right, sweetie,” Rebka said in a gruff whisper. “What now?”
“If this is like The-One-Who-Waits, it needs to hear us speak a few words before it can key in to our language.” Darya raised her voice. “My name is Darya Lang, originally from the planet Sentinel Gate. This is Hans Rebka, from the planet Teufel. We are human, and we arrived from the star Mandel and the planet Gargantua. Are you like The-One-Who-Waits?”