Rachel knew that it was some type of multiple malfunction, but even as she tried to recalibrate she called data and impressions into her comlog. Then several things happened at once.
She heard the drag of feet in the corridor above her.
All of the displays went dead simultaneously.
Somewhere in the maze of corridors a time-tide alarm began to blare.
All of the lights went off.
This final event made no sense. The instrument packages held their own power supplies and would have stayed lighted through a nuclear attack. The lamp they used in the basement had a new ten-year power cell. The glow-globes in the corridors were bioluminescent and needed no power.
Nonetheless, the lights were out. Rachel pulled a flashlight laser out of the knee pocket of her jumpsuit and triggered it. Nothing happened.
For the first time in her life, terror closed on Rachel Weintraub like a hand on her heart. She could not breathe. For ten seconds she willed herself to be absolutely still, not even listening, merely waiting for the panic to recede. When it had subsided enough for her to breathe without gasping, she felt her way to the instruments and keyed them. They did not respond. She lifted her comlog and thumbed the diskey. Nothing … which was impossible, of course, given the solid-state invulnerability and power-cell reliability of the thing. Still, nothing.
Rachel could hear her pulse pounding now but she again fought back the panic and began feeling her way toward the only exit. The thought of finding her way through the maze in absolute darkness made her want to scream but she could think of no other alternatives.
Wait. There had been old lights throughout the Sphinx maze but the research team had strung the glow-globes. Strung them. There was a perlon line connecting them all the way to the surface.
Fine. Rachel groped her way toward the exit, feeling the cold stone under her fingers. Was it this cold before?
There came the clear sound of something sharp scraping its way down the access shaft.
“Melio?” called Rachel into the blackness. “Tanya? Kurt?”
The scraping sounded very close. Rachel backed away, knocking over an instrument and chair in the blackness. Something touched her hair and she gasped, raised her hand.
The ceiling was lower. The solid block of stone, five meters square, slid lower even as she raised her other hand to touch it. The opening to the corridor was halfway up the wall. Rachel staggered toward it, swinging her hands in front of her like a blind person. She tripped over a folding chair, found the instrument table, followed it to the far wall, felt the bottom of the corridor shaft disappearing as the ceiling came lower. She pulled back her fingers a second before they were sliced off.
Rachel sat down in the darkness. An oscilloscope scraped against the ceiling until the table cracked and collapsed under it. Rachel moved her head in short, desperate arcs. There was a metallic rasp—almost a breathing sound—less than a meter from her. She began to back away, sliding across a floor suddenly filled with broken equipment. The breathing grew louder.
Something sharp and infinitely cold grasped her wrist.
Rachel screamed at last.
* * *
There was no fatline transmitter on Hyperion in those days. Nor did the spinship HS Farraux City have FTL-comm capability. So the first Sol and Sarai heard of their daughter’s accident was when the Hegemony consulate on Parvati fatlined the college that Rachel had been injured, that she was stable but unconscious, and that she was being transferred from Parvati to the Web world of Renaissance Vector via medical torchship. The trip would take a little over ten days’ shiptime with a five-month time-debt. Those five months were agony for Sol and his wife, and by the time the medical ship put in at the Renaissance farcaster nexus, they had imagined the worst a thousand times. It had been eight years since they had last seen Rachel.
The Med Center in DaVinci was a floating tower sustained by direct broadcast power. The view over the Como Sea was breathtaking but neither Sol nor Sarai had time for it as they went from level to level in search of their daughter. Dr. Singh and Melio Arundez met them in the hub of Intensive Care. Introductions were rushed.
“Rachel?” asked Sarai.
“Asleep,” said Dr. Singh. She was a tall woman, aristocratic but with kind eyes. “As far as we can tell, Rachel has suffered no physical … ah … injury. But she has been unconscious now for some seventeen standard weeks, her time. Only in the past ten days have her brain waves registered deep sleep rather than coma.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sol. “Was there an accident at the site? A concussion?”
“Something happened,” said Melio Arundez, “but we’re not sure what. Rachel was in one of the artifacts … alone … her comlog and other instruments recorded nothing out of the ordinary. But there was a surge in a phenomenon there known as anti-entropic fields … ”
“The time tides,” said Sol. “We know about them. Go on.”
Arundez nodded and opened his hands as if molding air. “There was a … field surge … more like a tsunami than a tide … the Sphinx … the artifact Rachel was in … was totally inundated. I mean, there was no physical damage but Rachel was unconscious when we found her …” He turned to Dr. Singh for help.
“Your daughter was in a coma,” said the doctor. “It was not possible to put her into cryogenic fugue in that condition.…”
“So she came through quantum leap without fugue?” demanded Sol. He had read about the psychological damage to travelers who had experienced the Hawking effect directly.
“No, no,” soothed Singh. “She was unconscious in a way which shielded her quite as well as fugue state.”
“Is she hurt?” demanded Sarai.
“We don’t know,” said Singh. “All life signs have returned to near normal. Brain-wave activity is nearing a conscious state. The problem is that her body appears to have absorbed … that is, the anti-entropic field appears to have contaminated her.”
Sol rubbed his forehead. “Like radiation sickness?”
Dr. Singh hesitated. “Not precisely … ah … this case is quite unprecedented. Specialists in aging diseases are due in this afternoon from Tau Ceti Center, Lusus, and Metaxas.”
Sol met the woman’s gaze. “Doctor, are you saying that Rachel contracted some aging disease on Hyperion?” He paused a second to search his memory. “Something like Methuselah syndrome or early Alzheimer’s disease?”
“No,” said Singh, “in fact your daughter’s illness has no name. The medics here are calling it Merlin’s sickness. You see … your daughter is aging at a normal rate … but as far as we can tell, she is aging backward.”
Sarai pulled away from the group and stared at Singh as if the doctor were insane. “I want to see my daughter,” she said, quietly but very firmly. “I want to see Rachel now.”
Rachel awakened less than forty hours after Sol and Sarai arrived. Within minutes she was sitting up in bed, talking even while the medics and technicians bustled around her. “Mom! Dad! What are you doing here?” Before either could answer, she looked around her and blinked. “Wait a minute, where’s here? Are we in Keats?”
Her mother took her hand. “We’re in a hospital in DaVinci, dear. On Renaissance Vector.”