There was a ten-second silence.
“One — Who — Waits,” a groaning voice said. Its tone was deeper than that of the sphere on Glister, and it sounded even more tired. “The One Who… Waits. Human… human… hu-u-man… hmmm.”
“Needs a pep pill,” Rebka said softly. “Are you a Builder?” he called to the horned and tailed nightmare floating in front of them.
The being drifted a few paces closer. “Human, human, human,… At last. You are here. But two are the same. Where is… the other?”
“The other,” Rebka said. “What’s it mean?”
Darya shook her head. “There is no other,” she said loudly. “We do not understand. We are the only ones here. We ask again, are you like The-One-Who-Waits?”
The silver body was humming, with a low tone almost too deep for human ears. “There must be… another… or the arrival is not complete. We have two forms only… but the message said that the third one was on the way and would soon arrive…” There was another long silence. “I am not like The-One-Who-Waits, although we were created in the same way.”
“Not a Builder,” Darya said in a quick whisper. “I knew it. We’re seeing things that the Builders made, just like The-One-Who-Waits. Maybe some kind of computers, incredibly old. And I don’t think that they’re — well, that they’re working quite right.”
That was a new thought for Darya, and one hard to accept. Usually Builder artifacts seemed to perform as well after five million years as the day they were made. But The-One-Who-Waits, and now this new being, gave Darya an odd feeling of disorganization and randomness. Perhaps not even the Builders could make machines last forever.
“I am not… a computer.” The being’s hearing must have been more sensitive than a human’s, or it was directly reading their minds. “I am Inorganic, but a grown Inorganic. The-One-Who-Waits stayed always close to Old-Home, but I was grown here. I am… I am… a Speaker-Between. An Interlocutor. The one who must… interface with you and the others. The task of The-One-Who-Waits is done. But the task of Speaker-Between cannot start until the third one is here.” The weary voice was slowing, fading. “The third one. Then… the task of Speaker-Between can begin. Until then…”
The surface of the great silver body began to ripple. The five-sided flower on top was shortening.
“Hey! Speaker-Between! You can’t stop there.” Rebka ran forward across the surface, his shoes kicking up sprays of glittering orange. “And you can’t leave us here. We’re humans. Humans need food, and water, and air.”
“That is known.” The body was swelling at the base and descending toward the flat surface, while the silver tail withdrew into it. “Do not worry. The place has been prepared for your kind. Since the third is already on the way, you will have no need for stasis. Enter… and eat, drink, rest.”
The silver globe of Speaker-Between had deformed to a bulging hemisphere with a wide arched aperture at the center. “Enter,” the fading voice said again. The opening moved around to face the two humans. “Enter… now.”
Rebka swore and backed away. “Don’t go near it.”
“No.” Darya was moving forward. “I don’t know what’s inside, but so far nothing here has tried to hurt us. If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it easily. Come on. What do we have to lose?”
“Other than our lives?” But he was following her.
The opening that they entered was filled with the green glow of hidden lights. From the outside it could have been of any depth. One step inside, and Darya realized that she was actually in a small entrance lock, three meters deep. When she went across to the inner door and pushed it aside, an open chamber with slate-gray, somber walls and a high ceiling was revealed.
Too high. She walked through and stared upward. Forty meters, to that arched, pentagonal center? It had to be at least that — which meant that she was in a room taller than the outside dimensions of Speaker-Between. And that was physically impossible. Before she could move there came a sighing, slithering noise. Sections of the chamber’s level floor in front of her began to buckle and lift. Partitions and furniture grew upward, thrusting like strange plants though a soft, springy surface.
“A place prepared for us? I’m not so sure of that.” Hans Rebka advanced cautiously past her, toward a cylindrical structure that was still emerging from the floor. It had a bulbous, rounded upper end, and it was supported on a cluster of splayed legs. “Now this is really interesting. It’s a food-storage unit and food synthesizer. I’ve seen one like it, but not in use. It was in a museum.”
“It’s not typical Builder technology.”
“I’m sure it’s not.” An oddly perplexed expression crept into Rebka’s eyes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d start wondering…”
The top of the cylinder was surrounded by a thin fog, and a layer of ice crystals covered its surface. Rebka touched it cautiously with one fingertip, then jerked away.
“Freezing cold.” He turned up the opacity level of his suit to provide thermal insulation and reached out with a protected hand to pull a curved lever set into the upper part of the cylinder. It moved reluctantly to a new position. Part of the cylinder body turned, revealing the interior. Three shelves stood inside, loaded with sealed white packages.
“You’re the biologist, Darya. Do you recognize any of these?” Rebka reached in and quickly lifted out a handful of flat packages and smooth ovoids, placing them on the saucerlike beveled top of the cylinder. “Don’t touch them with your bare hand or you may get frostbite. They’re really cold. We can’t eat yet, but you can tell your stomach we may be getting close.”
Darya set her suit gauntlet to full opacity and peeled open a rounded packet. It was a fruit, mottled green and yellow, with a thin rind and a fleshy stalk at one end. She turned it over, examining texture and density and scraping a thin sliver from the surface, then allowed the gauntlet to heat it. When it grew warm in her hand she sniffed it, tasted it, and shook her head.
“Fruit aren’t my line, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. And I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about it, either. It could be from an Alliance world, but it’s not a popular fruit, because they tend to be grown everywhere. Do you really think it’s edible?”
“If it’s not, why would they have stored it here? I’m using your logic, Darya — if they want to kill us, they can find easier ways. I think we can eat this, and the other food. Speaker-Between didn’t seem too happy to see the two of us, because it was expecting something else. But we’re part of the show, too. We have to be fed and watered. And you don’t bring somebody thirty thousand light-years and then let them accidentally poison themselves. My worry is a bit different.” He rapped the bulging side of the cylinder. “I know construction methods in the Phemus Circle and the Fourth Alliance, and I’ve been exposed to the way they do things in the Cecropia Federation. But this isn’t like any of them. It’s—”
He was interrupted by the creaking sound of long-neglected hinges. Thirty meters away, the whole side of the room was sinking ponderously into the floor. Beyond it stood another chamber, even larger, with a long bank of objects like outsized coffins at its center.
Darya counted fourteen units, each one a pentagonal cylinder seven meters long, four wide, and four high.
“Now those are Builder technology,” she said. “Very definitely. Remember Flambeau, near the boundary between the Alliance and the Cecropia Federation? That artifact is filled with units just like this, a lot of them even bigger. They’re all empty, but they’re in working order.”
“What do they do? I’ve never seen anything like these before.” Rebka was walking cautiously forward toward the nearest of the fourteen. Each of the monster coffins had a transparent port mounted in its pentagonal end. He put his face close to it, rubbed at the dusty surface with his gauntleted hand, and peered in.