Darya rejected that explanation as contrary to logic. It was also contrary to her own instincts about the Builders. They were, in every sense that Darya could describe, too alien to be humans, even future humans. They were far more alien than Cecropians, or Hymenopts, or Ditrons, or Lo’tfians, or even Zardalu. They had probably developed in an environment where no human or other clade could survive. Their relationship to space, and even more to time, was mystifying.
So time-traveling humans were not the answer. But then she could not escape the challenge laid down by Quintus Bloom. She had to conceive of a race of beings who could somehow know what humans and the other clades would be doing a thousand or ten thousand years from now. It was not a matter of looking at the past, and extrapolating it. Humans could do that easily enough, but all such extrapolations failed horribly after a few hundred years. The Builders didn’t just predict the future of the spiral arm, as humans might. They could somehow see the future, as clearly as Darya could look forward out of the aircraft window and see an approaching line of snow-capped hills. She could not make out detail there, as she would when she was closer; perhaps the Builders also could not distinguish long-term future detail, but they perceived the overall picture of the spiral arm’s future, as Darya could see the large-scale sweep of the landscape beyond her.
The hills were approaching. Darya could indeed see detail now, including a sizeable town standing amid the snow. The aircraft was descending, heading for a clearing a mile or two to the west of the town.
Darya watched as more and more detail became visible in the scene ahead. She could see buildings, and a line of stunted trees.
To see in time, as she saw in space? Faint in the distant future, with only the largest features visible. Then the near future would be clearer, with more visible specifics.
It felt right. The persistent little voice deep inside her insisted that it was right. In some incomprehensible way, Darya sensed that she had penetrated one level deeper into the mystery of the Builders.
Darya didn’t like to lie. Sometimes, though, it made things so much easier.
“From Sentinel Gate, yes, and doing a feature article on Quintus Bloom. Naturally, I want to meet people who know him well, and understand his work.”
Darya smiled deferentially. Kleema Netch leaned back in her reinforced chair and nodded. The director of the Marglom Center was huge, enough to make Darya revise her opinion of the man on the plane. Compared to Kleema, her traveling companion had been a mere shadow. Almost everyone she had met so far was fat. Maybe there was something in the diet on Jerome’s World? Anyway, once it became clear to Darya that her own name meant less than nothing to Kleema Netch (so much for fame!) the lie had come easily.
“Do not quote me to the other staff members.” Kleema cushioned her folded hands on her great belly. She spoke in an absolute monotone, never varying her voice in pitch or inflection. “But Quintus is by far our most brilliant star and the Marglom Center is fortunate to have him. You know him, I assume, for his work on Labyrinth. If you want to take a look at that artifact, you can visit the observatory while you are here.”
“You mean Labyrinth is visible — from the surface of Jerome’s World?”
“Of course I mean that. Otherwise, how could I offer to show it to you? Our telescope is not the largest on the planet, but I think it is fair to say that in terms of its daily use and its research value for unit investment…”
Darya blanked out. If Labyrinth were easily visible from the surface, it must be even more visible from space. Which meant that it would have been discovered long, long ago, had it always been there. So at least one of Quintus Bloom’s assertions must be true.
“ — in many different fields.” Kleema Netch was grinding on, with what sounded like a much-rehearsed statement. Darya forced her attention back to the speaker. “I will summarize only three of them to you, then I suggest that I introduce you to some of Quintus’s fellow workers. They will provide you with the details that you need for your article. First, in his early years at the center, Quintus Bloom pioneered the idea that Jerome’s World had supported an indigenous population of possibly intelligent beings, who did not survive the arrival of humans on the planet. That is today a subject of great controversy, but Quintus did not remain involved. His own interests had moved on, to the mapping of all major orbiting bodies in the Tetragamma system; here, too, he offered a new and startling hypothesis, which in the long history of Jerome’s World, over the many centuries of colonization…”
Kleema Netch was just hitting her droning stride. Darya tightened her jaw muscles and reminded herself that she had come here voluntarily. She had no one but herself to blame.
By late afternoon, Darya sat alone and exhausted in the central library of the Marglom Center. In the past seven hours she had met with twenty-three members of the research staff. Everyone had spoken in glowing terms of Quintus Bloom’s brilliance, his erudition, his quickness of mind; they accepted everything that he said, wrote, or thought.
So. He was Mister Wonderful. It was time to return to the Myosotis, and continue the journey to Labyrinth.
There was just one problem. Everyone that Darya had met at the center had also been so mediocre (Darya chose the most charitable word she could think of), it would not take much to impress them. Or, if it came to that, to snow them completely.
Faced with a maze of suspect opinion, Darya did what came to her as second nature. She went to her usual sources: the library banks. Words could lie, or mislead, as easily as people. But statistical records of background and achievement were hard to fake.
She called up Bloom’s biography, along with his list of publications. It was impressive. He had started research work at a young age, and had produced papers prolifically ever since. All his evaluations were in the file, and every one of them referred to him in the most glowing terms. He had advanced within the Marglom Center at the maximum possible pace.
Darya went back to the very beginning of the record. Jerome’s World employed an early education system in which human teachers formed an integral part of the teaching process. Quintus Bloom had been born in the small town of Fogline, lying halfway on a direct line between the Marglom Center and the spaceport. His parents had been killed in an industrial accident when he was five years old, and he had been raised by his grandparents. He had attended elementary school in that same town. The name of his teacher appeared in the record, but there were no detailed reports. All his grandparents were now dead.
If the town had been in any other direction, Darya would not have bothered. Her decision to stop at Fogline on the way back to the Myosotis was hardly more than pure impulse.
Amazingly, Bloom’s first teacher had not died, or retired, or disappeared. What he had done, as Darya learned late the next morning, was to leave Fogline and take a position in another small town, Rasmussen, about forty kilometers away.
There was no air service to Rasmussen. Now it was surely time to give up and press on to Labyrinth. Except that no aircraft flew to the spaceport from Fogline for another whole day. By mid-afternoon Darya, her impressions of Jerome’s World as a primitive place confirmed, found herself on a slow shuttle creeping toward Rasmussen. She did not feel optimistic. She would arrive long after school was over, and tracking down Orval Freemont might be difficult.