"You opened your suit!"
"No." He shook his head. "I never had time to
close
it when we dropped—nor did you."
To Darya's astonishment she saw that he was right. Her own suit was fully transparent. "But we were out in open space—airless vacuum."
"I thought so, too. I don't remember needing to breathe, though."
"How long were we there? Did you count heartbeats?"
He smiled ruefully. "Sorry. I don't know if I even
had
heartbeats. I was too busy trying to figure out what was happening—where you had gone, where I was going."
"I think I know. Not what was happening, but where we went and where we are now."
"Then you're six steps ahead of me." He gestured out at the endless plain in front of them. "Limbo, didn't it used to be called? A nowhere place where lost souls went."
"We're not lost. We were brought here, deliberately. And it was my fault. I told The-One-Who-Waits how keen I was to meet the Builders. It took what I said at face value."
"Didn't work, though, did it? I don't see any sign of them."
"Give them time. We only just got here. Do you remember flying down into the Eye of Gargantua?"
"Until the day I die. Which I'd like to think is a fair way off, but I'm beginning to wonder."
"The eye is the entry point to a Builder transportation system. It must have been there as long as humans have been in the Mandel system, maybe long before that; but it's no surprise that no one ever discovered it. A ship's crew would have to be crazy to fly down into it."
"Explorer ships' crews
are
crazy. People did plenty of mad things when this system was first being colonized. I know that ships went down deep into Gargantua's atmosphere and came back out—some of them. But I don't think that would be enough to do what we did. We had to be given that first boost from Glister, to rifle us exactly down the middle of the vortex. When I was in there it seemed to just fit my shoulders. There wasn't room for another person, let alone a ship."
"I had the same feeling. I wondered where you'd gone, but I knew there wasn't room for both of us. All right. So we had a first boost from the gravity generator on Glister, then a second boost from a shearing field in the Eye of Gargantua. That put us square into the main transportation system, and then right out of the spiral arm. Thirty thousand light-years, I estimate."
"I wondered about that. I looked around, and I could see the whole damned galaxy, spread out like a dinner plate—though the way I'm feeling, I hate to even
mention
the word 'dinner.' "
"And then one final transition, to bring us in here." Darya gazed around, up to the segmented dark ceiling, and then across the glittering plain of the floor.
"Where we can stand and stare until we starve. Any more ideas, Professor?"
"Some." Now that the mind-numbing journey was over she was beginning to think again. "I don't believe we were brought all this way to starve. The-One-Who-Waits sent us, so something must know we're here. And although this is part of the Builders' own living place, I'll bet it has been
prepared
for us, or beings like us." Darya swung her hand around a ninety-degree arc of the level floor. "See the flat surface? That's not natural for a Builder structure."
"We don't know how Builders think. Nobody ever met one."
"True. But we know how they
build
. When you've studied Builder artifacts as long as I have, you begin to form ideas about the Builders themselves. You can't
prove
things, but you learn to trust your instincts. We don't know where the Builders evolved, or when, but I'm sure it was in an aerial or free-space environment. At the very least, it was a place where gravity doesn't mean the same thing as it does to us. The Builders work naturally in all three dimensions, every direction equal. Their artifacts don't provide any feel for 'up' or 'down.' A level plain like this is something that
humans
like. You don't encounter it in the artifacts. You don't expect a gravity field close to one gee in a structure like this, either—complete with a breathable atmosphere. And look at that." She pointed to the ceiling, apparently kilometers above them. "You can see it's built of pentagonal segments. That's common to many Builder structures. So I think we're inside a dodecahedron, a shape you find over and over in Builder artifacts, and I think they just added a flat floor and air and gravity for the benefit of beings like us. I'm not sure this plain is anything like as big as it looks, either. You know the Builders can play tricks with space that confuse our sense of distance."
"They can. But I think this place is really big, no matter what tricks are being performed."
Hans Rebka had not raised his voice, but Darya's stomach tightened at the sudden tension in it. Hans was not supposed to get nervous. That was her privilege.
"It's certainly big," he went on, "if
that
is anything to judge by."
He was pointing off to their left. Darya at first saw nothing. Then she realized that above the twinkling sea of orange spangles shone the steadier light of a bright sphere. It was tiny at first, no more than a shiny marble of silver, but as she watched it grew steadily. It was advancing across the level plain, apparently at a constant speed. There was no way to judge its distance, or to tell if it was rolling or traveling by some other method.
"Welcoming committee," Rebka said, almost under his breath. "Everybody smile."
It was not rolling. Darya was somehow sure of that, even though she could see no signs of surface marking. She had the feeling that it was flying or floating, its bottom only a fraction of a millimeter above the orange cloud of sequins.
And it was not small at all. It was sizable. It was growing. It was
huge
, three times the size of The-One-Who-Waits. It towered over them, and still it was not close.
Twenty paces away it halted. A steady series of ripples moved across the spherical surface, like waves on a ball of mercury. As they grew in amplitude the globular form bulged up to form a stem. On top of it a familiar pentagonal flowerlike head drooped to face them. Five-sided disks were extruded from the front of the sphere, while a silver tail stretched down to moor the object to the floor. A flickering green light shone from a newly formed aperture in the central belly.
There was a long silence.
"All right, sweetie," Rebka said in a gruff whisper. "What now?"
"If this is like The-One-Who-Waits, it needs to hear us speak a few words before it can key in to our language." Darya raised her voice. "My name is Darya Lang, originally from the planet Sentinel Gate. This is Hans Rebka, from the planet Teufel. We are human, and we arrived from the star Mandel and the planet Gargantua. Are you like The-One-Who-Waits?"
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.