Maybe Glenna had gone too far. Certainly there was a long delay.
YOU HAVE THE WRONG IMPRESSION. IT WOULD BE MORE ACCURATE TO ASK: HOW DO WE FEMALE CECROPIANS HANDLE THE MALE DURING MATING? AND ALSO AFTER IT.
A pair of forelimbs began a rhythmic crushing movement, moving in toward the dark red underside of Atvar H’sial. After a few more seconds the long proboscis reached down, questing.
HOWEVER, THAT IS A PERSONAL QUESTION, WHICH I PREFER NOT TO ANSWER. LET ME SAY ONLY THIS: YOU WOULD PERHAPS BE LESS DISTURBED BY THE ANSWER THAN WOULD EITHER LOUIS NENDA OR QUINTUS BLOOM.
Chapter Twelve
Jerome’s World orbits the yellow dwarf star Tetragamma, only forty light-years from Sentinel Gate. Almost directly between the two lies the bright blue star, Rigel. Rigel is a true supergiant, fifty times a standard stellar mass, a hundred thousand times standard luminosity, blazing forth with intense brilliance and dazzling power. Few observers of the night sky from Sentinel Gate would ever notice the wan gleam of Tetragamma, tucked away close to Rigel’s line of sight. And no one on Sentinel Gate would see the mote of Jerome’s World, gleaming faintly in Tetragamma’s reflected light. Darya could not remember anyone mentioning the name of that world during all her years at the Institute, until the arrival of Quintus Bloom.
She glanced at the planet a couple of times as the Myosotis approached for landing. That Jerome’s World was a thinly populated planet was obvious from the absence of city lights on its night side. It must be a poor and backward planet, too, or Darya would have heard more about it. Yet according to Quintus Bloom, this was his home world. It was also the closest inhabited planet to the artifact he had discovered and named Labyrinth.
Darya saw nothing to change her first impressions as the Myosotis completed its landing and she disembarked. The Immigration staff, all one of him, greeted Darya cheerfully enough, but he stared pop-eyed at Kallik and J’merlia. Interstellar human visitors were rarity enough. The Jerome’s World entry system had no procedures at all for dealing with wildly nonhuman creatures from the Cecropia Federation and the Zardalu Communion.
While the officer scratched his head over old reference materials and kept one uneasy eye on the two aliens, Darya came to a decision. She had planned to spend only a day or two on Jerome’s World before proceeding to Labyrinth. The red tape surrounding the entry of Kallik and J’merlia might take all of that, just to produce clearances.
“Suppose these two were to remain on the ship?”
The officer didn’t voice his relief, but his face brightened. “No problem with that, if you follow the standard quarantine rules. Food and drink can go in, but no plants or animals” — he glanced uncertainly at the two aliens — “or anything else can come out.”
Kallik and J’merlia raised no objection. It was Darya who felt bad, as she endured a meaningless entry rigmarole and was at last pronounced free to leave the port. Not long ago the two aliens had been slaves, and here again they were second-class citizens. It was little comfort to know that in the Cecropia Federation the situation would have been reversed, with J’merlia free to wander while Darya was impounded and regarded with suspicion.
Her guilt vanished within minutes of leaving the spaceport. Kallik and J’merlia weren’t missing a thing — perhaps they were even the lucky ones. She didn’t know who Jerome was, but if he were dead he was probably turning in his grave, having a backwater world like this named after him. The planet was right at the outer limit of habitable distance from Tetragamma. This was the winter season, and the days were short. The sun was a bright cherrystone two sizes too small in the sky; the air was thin and cold and caught in your throat, and the straggling plant life was a pale, dusty gray-green. The people that Darya met seemed equally pale and dusty, as they directed her to the air service that served the Marglom Center.
That, she supposed, was the good news: Quintus Bloom’s home could have been on the other side of the planet, rather than a mere couple of thousand kilometers away. The bad news was that the aircraft stopped at half-a-dozen places on the way.
The plane that Darya boarded was big enough to carry twelve people. The flight had exactly two passengers, Darya and an obese man who overflowed his seat. She studied his thick neck and close-shaved head from behind as the craft prepared for takeoff. He looked a good candidate for a research center. He was certainly too fat for any form of manual work.
Sitting next to him was not a possibility. After take-off Darya went forward, to the seat in front of him. She turned to peer over the seat back. Talking to strangers was something that she hated — she knew how much she resented the invasion of her own thinking space by other people — but she needed information.
“Excuse me. Do you happen to be going to the Marglom Center?”
The fat man apparently shared Darya’s view of gratuitous interruptions from strangers. He glanced up and scowled at her.
“I’m going there myself,” Darya went on, “and I’m hoping to visit a man named Quintus Bloom. I wondered if you know him.”
The scowl was replaced by the smile of a man pleased to deliver bad news. “I know him. But you won’t find him. He’s away from the Center. In fact, he’s off-world.” He pushed the knife a little deeper. “He’s in a different stellar system, giving some invited talks.”
“That’s a shame. I’ve seen some of his work, and I think it’s brilliant.”
Darya waited. The man said nothing, and turned his eyes down.
“I wonder if there’s anyone else,” Darya continued. “Anyone at the Center who could discuss his work with me. Is there?”
He sighed in irritation. “Quintus Bloom is the most famous person at the Center. Almost anyone there can discuss his work with you, from the Director on down. If they choose to. Which I do not.”
“The Director?”
“Kleema Netch. And now, if you don’t mind…” He turned his eyes determinedly away from her.
“Sorry that I interrupted your work.”
The man grunted. Darya went back to her seat. It was progress, of a sort. Bloom was famous, and his work was well-regarded. It surely must include research performed before the discovery of Labyrinth, and before his new theory about the Builders.
The flight would take another two hours, and her companion was likely to explode if she tried more conversation. Darya’s thoughts went back to her one and only discussion with Quintus Bloom. She had not liked what he had to say, but she could not dismiss it. She did believe, as he had asserted, that there had been recent and unprecedented changes in the artifacts of the spiral arm. But nothing in her own theories could explain the appearance of the new artifact, Labyrinth. Worst of all, Bloom’s discoveries on Labyrinth seemed to demolish the idea that the Builders had left the spiral arm millions of years ago, and never returned. How, at a time when humans were no more than primitive hominids, could the Builders make a precise prediction of the way in which humanity would achieve space travel and move out to explore the spiral arm?
Very well. Suppose that the Builders had not left. Suppose that they were still around in the spiral arm, in a form or a place that humans and the other clade members were unable to contact or even to perceive. Bloom had also provided, with his evidence from Labyrinth, an apparently impossible obstacle for that idea. He had shown future development patterns for the spiral arm, and asked the question: How could the Builders, today, know the pattern of expansion through the spiral arm for tens of thousands of years into the future? Unless, as Bloom insisted, the Builders were time-traveling humans from the future, placing the artifacts back in their own past.