Hu knelt and touched the beginning of the shininess. "It seems to be a frictionless surface," she said. Krzakwalooked over her at the others, who seemed quite far away now, and said, "That's interesting, but I think we'd better go after them. I don't think it would do to get separated in here."
"Agreed." She braced herself, pushed hard with her feet, and sailed off on her hands and knees. The Selenite let her get a safe distance ahead, then crouched down and, with a movement common to low-g wrestlers, launched himself forward, electing an upright, seated mode of travel. They accelerated fairly quickly along the declivity of their inertial frame and Krzakwa found himself thinking, This is sort of fun. He imagined a sort of giant amusement park on the Moon, with the tunnel twisted into a giant slide . . . andtransparent. Suspended above the surface somehow. His lips worked into a wry smile. It was the kind of brief dream he'd had often as a child—but the Lunar authorities had never been interested in anything that might be characterized as "fun." One day, perhaps, that government might be overthrown by a furious rabble of amusement-starved hedonists, but until then they would still be gray men, living somberly and industriously beneath the lusterless gray stone. It was one of the many reasons behind his decision to leave. Noble ideals were all very well, in their place, but fun . . .
"Hey, I think we're coming to the end of it," said Sealock. "The floor's about to . . ." He and Methol suddenly went tumbling as friction grabbed at them. Hu curled herself into a ball and halted much more gracefully. When his turn came, Krzakwa tensed his leg muscles and simply slid to a stop on the seat of his suit.
They stood up and looked around. It was another almost featureless chamber, but this one had an open hatch overhead, and they could see much brighter light shining down on them.
"Careless," said Methol. "Somebody forgot to shut the door when they left. No wonder they got their ship stuck inside an ice moon."
Sealock nodded at that and, with vague surprise, found himself understanding the urge to make these sorts of inane statements. He was beginning to feel strong surges of unreality, as if prowling about this huge structure were depriving him of some capacity for rational thought. Fragmenting . . . One at a time, they jumped up at the hole, which caught them and pulled them through to rest on the far wall. The room in which they found themselves was not featureless. If anything, it contained too many details. Though not large, it had bristles erupting from almost every surface, with no regard for a preferential orientation. It almost looked as if some misbegotten moss had spread across the walls of the room and erected its sporophytes , up, down, and from both sides. It was a forest of poles of varying heights, and even pole was surmounted by a different-sized globe. The globes were stippled like golf balls, marked by the little nodes they'dcome to recognize as controls and thought of as "buttons." The only empty area was the small section on which they had landed.
Sealock stepped up to the nearest of the poles and took its globe between his gloved hands, peering at it closely. A moment later he shrugged and began tapping the buttons on it at random.
"We're going to get killed at this yet," murmured Krzakwa .
"So what?" Hu picked a globe of her own and began prodding it with a finger. The Selenite watched them, feeling very strange, and thought, There's something wrong with us. Maybe we shouldn't be out here on our own.
KHAAAAAAAHHHH.
Suddenly their heads filled with a crash of static, white noise tuned to a deep F-sharp. It seemed to blank their perceptions and lock their muscles into an almost tetanus-like rigidity. Whatever it was reached through the control elements of their suits, right into their brains, and began activating the various centers . . . senses and ideas swirled in flux.
They were immersed in a deep, deep blue sea.
Kinesthetic suspension, in an unending void.
Cool currents flowed across their exoskeletons, their rigid, hinged exteriors. Though they had no eyes, a hard squid swam into view, jetting along point foremost. Anophagomotorapparatus ...
Though it had no mouth it spoke to them.
Baajood, it said. Baajood and awaah .
Little bubbles of gray-green oil broke on their armless, legless cephalothoraxes. Somehow the bubbles were meaning incarnate, and they saw the lifting body ship move through a series of animation frames as it detached from something that was much larger.
"Oh, God," the squid shattered, burbling their names one by one. The sea turned black.
"Where the fuck are we?" gasped Krzakwa .
"Shut up!" screamed Sealock, agony trailing along his nerve fibers. Then, quieter, "I'm trying to regain control."
Silence, sore-kara, "Ahhh, help me, Tem." They could feel the water spilling from beneath his lids.
"What?"
"Push,God damn you!"
Krzakwapushed.
And the black sea burst into flame, licked up red around their bodies, and burned away. They were still standing in the control room, in the clearing among the sporophytes , of course, but everything had changed. Where this world had been a maze of interwoven mysteries, now there was an overlay of functionality. This was the control room for the entire ship, and the globes were the heart of the vast communication network that linked virtually every function in it.
"Well . . ." began Hu.
"Look," said Methol. "What happened to the control nodes?" They looked around them and saw that the globes were now quite featureless. In their new, incomplete knowledge they understood that this could only mean something extremely bad, a malfunction wrought by some near-total failure of the system. Suddenly the portal through which they had entered began to shut, but it only closed halfway, then fell open, a relaxing sphincter, opening at the moment of death. The light seemed to grow dimmer, then dimmer still.
Krzakwafancied he could hear the sounds of machinery, gradually slowing down. " Ummm. I think we'd better get out of here."
They ran.
Animals and plants usually die one cell at a time, in an orderly sequence. An explosion may blow them apart, a fire may burn them up fast, but the standard is one cell at a time, in a logical progression. The cells of consciousness are usually the first to go. The heart stops, the brain blacks out and turns to a nasty soup, and the man is dead, but it's quite a while before the last ATP cycle turns over and grinds to ahalt. The chemical reactions in his intestines go on to equilibrium.
Technological items tend to mimic natural processes. An amoeba dies fast and so does a lawn mower, but then it's an interesting trip up the crooked ladder of evolution. . . . The four of them went through the dying spaceship as fast as they could, scanning the remote overhead for signs of a door, and nothing worked quite right anymore.
Somewhere, far ahead, something exploded with a radio-bang and threw its liquid contents to the floor in a quick eruption of globules. They were multicolored and made a wonderful low-g splash, oscillating as they sailed through space, in-out and in again. The ambient light continued to dim on an arithmetic decline and their suit rectifiers had to work for them.
The four climbed to a structural high point and stood scanning the sky. "There," said Sealock, pointing about half a kilometer away. "A traverse node. Let's hope the system is still functioning."
"And what if it isn't?" said Methol.
"Then we die in the dark," said Hu.
Krzakwagrinned. "Imagine how that'll confuse the next people who manage to get in here." Sealock turned and stared at them. "There must," he said, "be some evolutionary advantage to being an asshole. Let's go." He turned and strode in the direction of the machine that somehow he knew was used to launch "people" to the door nodes on the far side when the central cavity was evacuated. It was very dark now, and he activated a microwave emitter and played it over the corridor in front of them. Finally they reached the place, which looked just like the dais upon which they had first landed. Holding his breath in suspense, he stepped onto the circular spot and jumped for the other side. Miraculously, it worked. Brendan found himself reversing the long ballistic arc between sides. Apparently Aello's gravity was being compensated for, and he landed, hands first, on the gently cradling game board opposite. The others followed, landing in their own peculiar ways. Looking"up" at the dying world below, Krzakwa said, "Good thing the field still works."