Rebka saw the final meters of approach as a blur on the forward screen. He felt a shock, but it was no more than a moderate jolt that threw him forward against his restraining belt. Then the screen was a chaos of flying fragments.
He cut the power in the same instant. The ship could not reverse its thrust, there was not time for that. They were flying on, with the same velocity as at impact. How fast? Forty meters, accelerating at five standard gravities. E.C. Tally would know, but there was no time to ask.
Too fast, at any rate. Much too fast for finesse. Rebka could see again; the cloud created by the disintegrating wall was dispersing. The ink-black swirl of the vortex was almost dead ahead. He had time for a lateral thrust, enough to aim them a little more squarely at the center. That was his last act before the vortex took control.
The sensation was familiar. It would never be pleasant. Hans felt the vortex close in on him, a tightening spiral that shrank until it felt no wider than his body. The torsion began, forces that racked his body in sections, twisting from head to neck to chest to hips to legs to feet. It increased steadily, shearing him until the pain was unbearable. Rebka had no breath left to scream. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was no comfort to imagine what Maddy, Katerina, and Lissie must be thinking about him at this moment.
It was impossible to say how long the pain lasted, but it ended abruptly. Rebka opened his eyes and stared around him, relieved to see that the ship and its contents were unaffected by the crippling forces that he had felt. Maddy and her sisters were bulging-eyed and gasping, but that was just psychological after-effects. The Builder transport systems, if they delivered you at all, did so leaving you physically intact and unharmed.
But delivered you where? It could be in the Anfract, or inside some other distant Builder artifact, or even in Serenity, thirty thousand light-years outside the plane of the galaxy.
Rebka peered at the screen in front of him. There was not much information to be gained from that. He was seeing a pattern of near-parallel lines like an optical illusion, a streaming glow of white on a dense black background.
“Tally?” The embodied computer was the best bet, with every major feature of the spiral arm stored away in his head. “Do you know where we are?”
“Unfortunately, I do not.” E.C. Tally sounded very cheerful. Rebka recalled, with some envy, that pain in Tally’s case offered warning signals without discomfort. “However, it is almost certain that we are no longer within Paradox.”
“I can tell that much. What about the other artifacts? Do any of them look like that, on the inside?” Rebka gestured at the screen.
“Not remotely like that. The pattern we are observing would be considered striking enough to have been reported, even if images of it were unobtainable. Might I suggest that you record it on the imaging equipment of this ship?”
“Never mind the scenery.” Maddy Treel had her breath back. “You can study that any time. What about the whosit out there? I want to know if it’s dangerous.”
Rebka and E.C. Tally turned. Maddy was staring at a different screen, one that showed a view to the rear of the Misanthrope. The pattern of lines was there too, no longer parallel but curving away and apparently slightly converging. But in front of those, much closer to the ship and rapidly approaching it, was something else. A black, spindly figure, its body twisted a little to one side.
Rebka stared in disbelief. He opened his mouth to speak, but E.C. Tally was well ahead of him. The embodied computer had done a rapid comparison of every feature of the dark figure, from number of legs to suit design to antennas and probable frequencies.
“If you will permit.” He turned, reached across Lissie — still stunned to silence by the transition through the Builder vortex — and flipped four switches. “Our general communication channel is now open. This is E. Crimson Tally. Do you wish to come aboard?”
The speaker system of the Misanthrope clicked and whistled. “With respect, I would like that very much. I recently suffered a most unpleasant impact, and I wish to perform certain repairs.”
“You can’t let that thing onto our ship!” Maddy Treel grabbed E.C. Tally’s right arm as he reached forward to activate the airlock. “You’re crazy! That’s an alien out there. I don’t care if it is hurt — it could kill us all if it got inside.”
“Oh, no.” E.C. Tally leaned forward, and with his left hand pressed the lock control. “You do not have to worry. He is an alien, true enough, but he would never hurt anybody. You see, it is only J’merlia.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Experience makes everything easier. Darya had struggled hard to interpret the first series of images that she and Kallik had obtained from the wall of the hexagonal chamber. Now, as she examined the second series, she wondered what she had found so difficult.
Blue supergiant stars served as references, fixing the scale and overall geometry of the spiral arm. Their movement in space also made them into celestial clocks, measuring how far before or after the present a particular image was set. Without knowing stellar velocities, the time scale was relative rather than absolute, but it was enough to judge the progress in spiral arm colonization.
The second image set proved similar to the first, except that this time the orange markers of Zardalu control spread across the arm, engulfed the worlds of the earlier green clade, and then suddenly vanished.
That matched Darya’s understanding of history. Instead of going on to dominate the spiral arm, the Zardalu had themselves been annihilated in the Great Rising.
After a dozen images with no colonized worlds at all, a dull red spark appeared at Sol’s location. The red markers spread, and were joined by the yellow of another clade. Darya noted the location. Cecropians. The two clades grew until their boundaries met. After that the boundary line remained steady, while both clades grew rapidly in other directions.
Darya nodded to herself. This was the past shown by Quintus Bloom. And presumably the future, also.
Darya waited. Suddenly yellow points of light began to surround the region of red ones. Finally, when englobement was complete, the yellow markers spread inward. Red points of light flickered out one by one, and yellow took their place. Finally yellow lights alone were visible through the spiral arm. Cecropians ruled the spiral arm. And then, far enough in the future that the supergiant reference stars had moved to noticeably different positions, there was a final change. The yellow lights began to blink out, one by one, until almost all were gone. For a long period the spiral arm showed just one yellow point, close to the original clade world of the Cecropians. Then it too winked out. The arm had lost all evidence of intelligent life.
This was not the future displayed by Quintus Bloom — far from it. In this series of images, as in the last set that Kallik had displayed, the final sequence showed an end point for the spiral arm with no inhabited worlds.
Darya puzzled over the display for a long time, running and rerunning the image sequences. They were false pasts and futures for the spiral arm. Could she be seeing an entertainment, a fictional presentation? The Builders were so remote, so enigmatic, it was difficult to accept them as having recreations of any kind. But maybe all thinking beings needed a break now and again.
Finally she nodded to Kallik to move to an image sequence drawn from a different wall.