For a long time he hung there, bent over, hearing faint sounds of conversation echoing over the horizon, but uncaring to listen. Then, gradually, shame overtook him. Here he was in one of the most incredible alien artifacts of all time and he wasn't even looking at it. He was hardly here at all, in fact, so preoccupied was he with his own problems. No wonder he couldn't sense any kami; he hadn't formed any connection with this place.
Maybe. But if I did, would the kami help me?
He stared upward for several minutes, deliberately taking note of the fine details of the metal walls, the drifting models. Then he shook his head, shrugged at the marine who had watched this performance, and jetted back to the campsite.
"Did you get it?" asked the professor.
"No," he said. He tried to say more, but the words wouldn't come. Finally he just shook his head. "No, I failed."
"Failed at what?" asked Rue.
"It doesn't matter." He drifted down slightly apart from the others. Rue cast him a puzzled look, but didn't say anything more.
Herat also looked over. "Let's turn in," he suggested. "Tomorrow will probably be a long day."
They retreated to the interior of the tent; Barendts hung by the door, obviously not intending to sleep. Michael curled up and tried to dispel the sensation of falling. He could hear Rue breathing a few centimeters away.
For some reason, he thought about Rue's tale of the Supreme Meme. What would happen if he applied that little test to his beliefs? Would they come up short? Probably. Probably.
How would you have to feel? The words seemed to bounce around inside his skull, like a catchy advertising jingle. How would you have to feel, to want it all again?
17
THEY ENTERED ONE of the newly opened chambers after breakfast and then to Rue's intense frustration, Herat called a halt to proceedings.
The scientists had analyzed the composition of the «mudballs» that had appeared in the second set of chambers. Most were toxic in one way or another: saturated with cadmium, sulphur or PAHs. Rue had wanted them to flip the door switch in the chamber full of PAH and tholin mud; it was the nearest thing to the material that made up Allemagne's trapped comet. Herat had refused and so they had gone into a cylinder whose mudball was full of complex hydrocarbons, hydro-cyanides and other nasty volatile chemicals that Herat thought most closely resembled the constituents of the early Earth environment.
"It's asking about us, starting with the most elementary questions, literally," he said. "This is what we're made of. We say yes here."
Once again the stoic marine Barendts had gone into the chamber and tripped the switch inside. Again the other open doors had closed and a new configuration gaped seconds later.
The problem was, what was behind these doors was so unnerving that even the normally adventurous Herat was stopped dead by it.
"Looks like… meat," observed Crisler as they clustered around one of the doorways. A large red quivering sphere hung several meters below them. It was joined to the walls of its chamber by veinlike threads. Worst, Rue could smell it, a reek like an open wound.
"We need specimens," muttered Herat. "Is this their kind of life or…"
"Or what?" asked Rue. "What else would it be?"
He just shook his head. The other open chambers contained even more bizarre things; one of them looked like a kind of leafless bush that seemed to hum with electricity. Another was an immense solid sphere, apparently of cuticle.
"You know what really annoys me?" Herat asked no one in particular. "It's that." He pointed at the innermost wall of one of the new chambers. Where there had been a single switch next to the inner airlock of the previous chambers, in this and the other new chambers, there were two switches.
"Before we just had 'yes, " he said. "Now what do we have? Yes or no?"
"Let's find out," she said.
He shook his head. "Not until we know more."
"How are we going to know more if we don't try something?"
The professor looked down his nose at her. "We analyze the data we've collected so far, of course."
"Data?" She laughed. "What data?"
He ignored her. She appealed to Mike, who was wrinkling his nose at the smell of the chamber. "We have to continue. We have to know how this place works!"
"In time," he said.
"We don't have time!" Finally she had their attention. "Crisler, tell them about the cracked stacks."
The admiral winced. "Our life-support situation's a bit more dire than we thought," he admitted. "Nothing to panic about. But we're going to go critical in just a few days unless we cut down the awake personnel again."
"Cut down?" Mike cable-walked his way over to the admiral. "To what?"
"Well, a full complement of ten seems likely," said Crisler. The marines received this news with no reaction, but the scientists were visibly dismayed.
"We can't work under these—" and "Why didn't you tell us?" were two of the themes she extracted from the babble of scholarly voices. Crisler crossed his arms and waited; she realized with an uneasy start that she was doing the same thing.
"This could be our only chance," Rue said when the talk had died down a bit. "If we don't figure this place out in the next day or two, we're all going to have to go back in storage and it'll be too late."
Herat glowered into the middle distance. "A bad break," he admitted. "The problem remains that this… interface… with the Lasa system only seems to work in one direction. If we go down the wrong alley, we can't turn around and start over. Like it or not, this place expects us to know what we're doing. And we don't."
"So we do nothing?"
"No," he said with exaggerated patience. "We analyze our data. Like I said."
"Damn it!" She jumped off the inner sphere and bounced herself off the outer hull, then over the horizon— just like she used to do in the Gallery back home.
She heard them all talking again, somebody laughed, doubtless at her antics. Rue didn't care. She found a doorway on the opposite side of the interhull and perched on its lip, looking inward. Slowly rotating inside was something like a big ball of bark. It wasn't at all attractive, but certainly wasn't threatening.
Eventually they were going to have to choose a switch next to one of these live things. It might take Herat days to analyze this stuff; the problem was nobody could tell how many more close/open sequences like this there might be before the habitat got to where ever it was going. Or had answers to whatever questions it was asking.
It didn't help that she couldn't decide which one was best either. The most tantalizing was a green thing like a giant cabbage; it smelled lovely. But were the Lasa asking if this was what she liked to eat, or were they asking if this was what she was made of? There seemed no way to know.
After a time, solitude and reflection calmed her down. She still had nothing to say to anyone, though, so she hung out by the chambers on this side of the sphere, speculating. About an hour after she'd left the main party the little mesobot scooted around the horizon and began nosing around the open airlocks.
She watched as it glided up to her and stopped, a meter away. "Hi. How are you?" it asked in Mike Bequith's voice.
She laughed. "I'm fine. Sorry about the display back there. Your boss just knows how to push my buttons, that's all."
"It's not just that, is it?" asked Mike. Somehow he made the mesobot tilt itself in a quizzical gesture. "The success of your own mission is riding on what we find here."