Martin could not speak for a moment. Eye on Sky swiveled his broad head, cords held tightly together in a defensive posture, and said to Martin, "We we are ready."
"All right," Martin said, ant in kitchen, diapered infant on a diplomatic mission. "Let's meet them."
* * *
The white walls bent inward and sank out of sight.
The five representatives moved closer to the humans and Brothers.
"This is not dangerous," the babar said in its high, irritating voice, "but it is difficult to fold one's thoughts around, even if you have witnessed it before."
"This fourth world is a home and reservoir," Salamander said. Martin much preferred listening to the bishop vultures. "Our creators live inside, in layers around the dense core, where there is much flow of energy."
"Did they always live here?" Paola asked.
"Since we have existed," Frog said.
"How long is that?"
"Two thousand years by your measure," Salamander said.
The killer probes may have been made long before that, Martin thought.
The red circle appeared again, larger this time, and gracefully dropped to the floor of the tunnel. The edge of the circle rested less than two meters from Martin's feet.
"I reassure you, there is no danger," Salamander said. "We will witness a part only of one of our creators."
The floor vibrated as if with the passage of a train. Something shimmered within the red circle. The shimmer extended into a tube rising to the top of the tunnel. The red circle vanished. Within the shimmer lifted a multi-colored brightness, dazzling in the tunnel's obscurity.
The brightness took a helical form, like a staircase of light. Along its length dripped brilliant colors, yellows and oranges dominant, as if the light itself congealed and condensed and evaporated again.
The sight was intense and beautiful, but Martin was far beyond being impressed. He stifled urge upon insistent urge to laugh.
He could see little more than the brightness. It became a staircase with dancing beetles. His vision faded in and out. He wondered how much time he had before he fainted or lost control…
The next voice shocked him to full alertness. Richly feminine, fully human, it sounded like Theresa, but the similarity was more his making than real. He stood straight in the skeletal suit and saw the others motionless around him, all but Silken Parts, who swung to look in Martin's direction, head cords drawn almost to a point with fright.
"Only you and I we," Silken Parts said. "Others…"
Their companions were all frozen, locked into immobile fields. Ariel and Paola had become posed mannequins within the still white cages of their suits.
The voice again, without age, smooth as ice and equally cold. Not unfriendly. Not friendly. Not caring. Not aloof.
A voice to be described only in negatives and absences.
"Tell me why you are here."
Martin could not summon enough spit to answer. Silken Parts made no effort to speak English. Martin faced the helical staircase of light and saw jeering faces ascending its twist.
"Why are you here?"
"We were invited," Martin finally managed. Silken Parts' cords had reached their limit and struggled in elemental panic, hanging from the ribs of the skeletal suit; the braid, no longer connected, would not witness or answer.
Martin was alone now, fully accountable to whatever this was.
"Where are your superiors, your other vessels?"
"There are no other ships."
"Imagine if you will all the minds you have ever known, speaking to each other without animosity and without interruption, leaving out accumulated error. I speak to you as something of that scale. You must realize that disguises and lies are easy to penetrate."
"I'm not lying," Martin said hopelessly. His fear was not enough to keep him from fading.
"You are part of a force of ships sent to destroy this system. More correctly, you have been sent to destroy people who designed and built certain robots. You are not the first. There will be others."
Martin could hardly see.
"Those who made the robots have all died. Their direct descendants long ago became part of larger forces you could not hope to understand. I am not one of the descendants; I, too, am a creation, but they have left us their history."
"History," Martin said. He raised an arm with great effort, pointed to the bishop vultures, sharks, and babar. "They think you created them."
"We did not create them. That is their chosen delusion, their faith." Pause. "You are in physical distress."
"Yes."
"What do you need?"
"Rest. Time to think. Sleep. Water."
That was all he could manage, and he felt shame at saying so much, at being so weak before his enemy.
"I will adjust your surround to make you lighter. Is that better?"
Martin seemed to float. Blood began to flow again, and he could see again, but his body still ached.
A fountain of water rose before him, and his suit leaned forward, dashing his face into it. Despite his apprehensions, he drank deeply. Strength seemed to radiate from his tongue and cheeks, from his throat.
"Better," he said.
"Can you listen now?"
"Yes."
"These representatives know a little, but for their sake, they do not know all. Are you a hunter?"
"Yes," Martin said, eyes fixing on the helix.
"You hunt to avenge the death of others?"
"My world."
"It was destroyed by robots?"
"Yes."
"We sympathize. Those who made us are distant descendants of those who made the machines that probably destroyed your world. But they are gone, enlarged. They have packed their minds into massless forms that will last beyond the end of the universe.
"They have left us here, greater than you, but still limited, because creating us pleased them. My kind live within this world, surviving in deep energy flows. I do not think there is time to explain our existence to you. We number in the tens of trillions.
"We did not make the machines that destroyed your world."
"The makers aren't here?" Martin asked.
"No. There are many more trillions of created intelligences in this system, none of them responsible for the destruction of your world."
Martin watched images of species upon species flash before him, stacking like cards, filling the tunnel; more forms than he could have ever imagined.
"Kill them, and you kill innocents. I am one."
The helix of light descended through the glimmer. The glimmer sank into the red circle. The red circle faded.
The others began to move again. Silken Parts' cords squirmed, grasped by his suit; only a few had fallen to the floor, where they curled like threatened millipedes. The bishop vultures swiveled their miters, eyes sinking and rising within their fleshy noses.
"You have been visited," Salamander said. "Who was chosen?"
The twenty gathered on the bridge of Double Seed, where Martin floated with eyes closed, still exhausted. Ariel and Paola squatted in mid-air nearby, sucking juice from squeeze bulbs.
The journey back had followed the same tortuous procedures, leaving Martin more confused, and finally angry at everything, a thick, clogging anger that seemed to reach back to the Ark and before, to Earth, to his childhood.
He had finished explaining what he had seen less than an hour before, and the twenty surrounded him in silence, as if in mourning.