Finally the green man stopped at a dead end. A ladder was set into the wall of the tunnel here. It led upward.
"We'll wait for you here," said Arless as Michael and the professors moved to the ladder. "Say hi to the 'trophs when you see 'em."
They followed their guide up the stairs, which rang loudly under their feet. Michael shaded his eyes and looked ahead to try to make out their destination. He could see a triangular network of girders, mist, and, somewhere in the distance, a rich red surface like a theater curtain. The light was too bright to make out more.
The steps passed through the girders and let onto a large concrete surface. To Michael's left, the geodesics of girder-work swept up and into obscurity, at least half a kilometer overhead. Blue and green ice brooded outside the triangles. Where sight foundered in dim mist overhead, the eye met glowing crimson, which swept down inside the geodesics to become a second wall to Michael's right. This space— outside a wall of girders and inside a wall of billowed crimson— curved away to either side. The girders must form a geodesic sphere and inside that sphere was another, this one of the red material. Michael and the others stood at the bottom, in between the two walls.
There were more green humans here, striding back and forth or riding small carts, carrying supplies and tools. A few stared in their direction. The concrete floor was a maze of stacked boxes and pillowed tarpaulins. It was damp in here, the air heavy, but no longer cold.
"Phages are not allowed beyond this point," said the guide. He scowled at Michael and the professor. "They must not know that you are here. Walk only where I say."
"Are the autotrophs afraid of us?" asked Herat casually. Michael stared at him— how could he be so tactless? But the guide simply shook his head.
"Fear is an emotion. Emotions are a pollution of phages, not autotrophs."
"That doesn't sound very attractive," said Herat. "Why do you admire them so much if they have no concept, say, of love?"
"There are… affects… that autotrophs have, but phages cannot." The guide was proving to be positively chatty. Michael was once again surprised at Herat's ability to ferret out information from seemingly impossible sources.
"But do these affects correspond to states like fear or attraction?"
"This way." The guide started walking again. In the distance, Michael could see a slit of bright light in the crimson wall.
They rounded a stack of huge crates and came to the slit in the curtain. The red material was at least two meters thick, Michael now saw, and rubbery. As they approached he put his hand out to touch it. It felt like a leaf— alive and delicate. He snatched his hand back.
The slit rose a good ten meters above them, narrowing gradually.
The green man gestured to a rack of pressure suits. "Dress." He picked one off its hangar and began suiting up. Michael grabbed another; it was an unfamiliar design, with markings in a language he had never seen before on its metal cuffs and wrist pad. He tried to imitate the green man's actions. Getting a suit properly sealed was a matter of life and death; because he couldn't read the suit's HUD display, he wasn't sure if he'd done it right. Did green lights mean safe or danger to these people?
Waldt had reached for a suit, but the green man stopped him. "Only three may safely enter at a time," he said. Waldt started to protest, then shook his head in obvious disappointment and stepped back.
The now-suited green man walked over and checked Michael's suit, then Herat's. Michael's earphones crackled and he heard the voice of the green man say, "Good. Come." Their guide walked over to the glowing slit in the wall and pressed himself into it. The material gave slightly. The suited man pushed and wriggled his way deeper into it.
"You don't suppose the whole place is like that?" asked Waldt. "Solid, I mean?"
"You don't know?"
Waldt shook his head. "I've never been allowed beyond this point," he said.
Michael went up to the slit and tentatively pressed his hand into it. It gave like rubber. He pressed forward into crimson glowing material; this was much less pleasant than the Lasa airlocks had been. Like being born, in reverse, he thought. He got about a meter in without difficulty; then he began to encounter a strong pressure. The light was changing, becoming brighter and what he could see of the arm extended ahead of him was beaded with moisture.
Abruptly his hand was free of the material and with relief he pushed himself out, into a realm of dazzling light and noise.
As his eyes adjusted he made out a vast space, at least a kilometer across, carved out of the ice and draped with the folds of this red stuff. No— not draped, he realized as he began to see more. The red material rose up in petals, like a cyclopean rose, with the glassed-over shaft leading down to icewater at its base. At its crown, banks of arc lights lit everything in shadowless, blue-white. The color of this light darkened the red of the huge flower to a bruised purple. The radiance was hot on Michael's skin even through the faceplate.
Narrow catwalks crossed the open space in a profusion of bright lines and rising up from around the circular water shaft were numerous scaffolds, upon which bright machines twirled and roared. The whole space echoed with noise, in fact— an industrial bedlam completely at odds with the strange and opulent flower that cradled the machinery.
Michael now stood on a nexus of scaffolds; five radiated away from this spot and ladders and odd spiral poles rose up from the railing. In the nearby air tiny black flecks— insects? — danced distractingly.
"One thing we do know," said Herat. "The autotrophs like a temperature of about a hundred Celsius, at high pressure. Their atmosphere is mostly compressed steam with a bit of nitrogen in it. Look— you can see the air ripple with the heat."
Michael looked about for some sign of the autotrophs. He saw things moving— strange, looping tetrahedrons that rolled to and fro, sometimes stopping to balance on two legs while the other two grabbed some piece of machinery or piping and passed it off to the spidery metal robots that swarmed over the scaffolds. At least he assumed they were robots.
"Are those the autotrophs?" he asked, pointing to the distant tripod shapes.
The guide simply gestured for them to follow. He headed out along one of the narrower catwalks, which passed over the dark pit of the water shaft.
Looking out, Michael could now see a few glassed-in platforms suspended over the shaft. One of them was a broad dome joined to the catwalk by an ordinary looking airlock. There were what looked like beds inside this dome and green forms on many of them. He did a double take and realized he was looking at almost a hundred green men and women, apparently asleep in the blazing light.
"We have provided an interface to the autotroph information net," said the green man. "You will use that to ask your questions." He pointed and Michael, following his gaze, at first could not see what he was pointing at. There was a thing like an inscape terminal, but it was covered with a dense crawling carpet of bugs.
Then he got it. The autotroph AI was a cloud of black metal beads, each about the size of a bee. They had wings and were distributed throughout the vast space of the enclave. Here, though, the green people had built a device to attract them. So were they going to speak to the autotrophs through this device— or only to it?
"Visitors," said a voice in Michael's earphone. It seemed human, male, nondescript. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that this was probably the voice of an AI, not that of an autotroph.
"Hello," continued the voice. "We are with you now."
"Who are you?" asked Herat. "Who speaks? The autotrophs? Or their agent?"