Kyle laughed.
Cheetah sounded inordinately pleased. “You’re laughing!”
“Well, it’s pretty good.”
“Maybe someday I will get the hang of being human,” said Cheetah.
Kyle sobered. “If you do, be sure to let me know.”
The stage lights were set up: three big lamps with Fresnel lenses on tripods, and barn doors to limit their beams. They were providing a constant source of power to the alien construct, letting it do whatever it was supposed to do.
And so far, all that seemed to be was to stay rigid. Heather could think of niche markets for such a product—a thought of Kyle darted through her mind—but she assumed that the aliens wouldn’t have spent ten years just telling her how to make something stay stiff.
And yet, maybe that was indeed all the aliens had wanted to convey: a way to make materials stand up to great stresses, so that high-speed spaceships could be built. After all, fast voyages between Earth and the Centaur’s world would require substantial accelerations.
But that didn’t make sense. If the Centaurs had ships capable of even half the speed of light, they could have sent a working model faster than they could have transmitted the plans. Granted, broadcasting information would always be cheaper than shipping physical objects, but it did make her question whether the stiffening was the point of the construct or just a byproduct of what it was really intended to do.
Heather sat and stared at it, trying to fathom its real purpose. She didn’t like science fiction the way Kyle did, but they both loved the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and she was haunted now by the final line spoken in that film: “Its origin and purpose,” Heywood Floyd had said of the monolith, “still a total mystery”—although Heather always suspected it was the box the United Nations had come in.
She kept thinking about the missing data—about how big she should have made the construct. Maybe it was never intended to be built this large. The promised revolution in nanotechnology had never occurred, at least partly because quantum uncertainty made extremely small machines impossible to control. Perhaps the field generated by the tiles was supposed to overcome that; maybe the Centaurs had intended her to make the construct at a billionth of its current size. She sighed. You’d think they would have said how big the damned thing was supposed to be.
Unless, she thought again, it was supposed to be a matter of choice. She kept coming back to the idea of scale: a human would naturally build it at one size; an intelligent slug would have made it a smaller size; a sentient sauropod would have constructed it on a grander scale.
But why make it human-sized? Why would the Centaurs allow the builders, whoever they might be, to construct it at whatever scale they wished?
Unless, of course, as Paul had suggested, the builders were meant to go inside it.
A silly thought; it probably had more to do with her memories of that garbage-can Concorde than with the object in front of her. Or maybe it was that darned Freudianism sneaking up again—Why, of course, Mein Frau, zometing always has to go inside ze tunnel.
It was a crazy notion. How would one go inside? Indeed, where would one go? There were eight cubes, after all.
In that cube there, she thought at once, mentally pointing at the third one along the shaft, the one with the four additional cubes attached to it. It was the only special cube, the only one with none of its faces exposed.
That one there.
She could unclip one of the projecting cubes—removing both of the panels that made up the concealed face—and clamber inside. Of course, if the power to the lamps went off, soon enough the whole construct would collapse and she’d end up on her ass.
Crazy idea.
Besides, what did she expect? That the thing would take off, like that Concorde used to do in her imagination? That she’d be whisked across the light-years to Alpha Centauri? Madness.
Anyway, she probably couldn’t remove one of the cubes with the structural-integrity field active. And with it off, the whole thing would collapse the moment she put any weight on it.
She moved over to the construct and grabbed the cube projecting from the right side. Damned if it didn’t come cleanly off when she pulled on it, the clamps that had been holding it there falling to the floor. And as she looked, she saw that the two panels that made up the inner face had come off, as if they had already bonded somehow, exposing the empty hollow of the central cube.
Heather put the cube she’d removed back on again, and it locked into place. She tried to pull it off once more and found that unless she pulled straight out, with no sideways motion at all, it wouldn’t disengage. It was tricky, but she did manage to get if off again. She repeated the process a couple more times, and tried it with other cubes as well. They reconnected easily, regardless of the angle at which they were pressed in, but they all required a deft touch to remove; she’d been lucky the first time.
She removed the side cube again and looked at the hollow space within. Actually, she should have made it a bit bigger—it looked like she’d be a tight fit. Not that she was really going to climb in, of course.
Heather looked at her desk, started toward it, stopped, then started again. Once she reached it, she removed a pad of paperite and a pen and began to write, feeling awfully silly: “I’m inside the third cube along the central shaft. Turn off the lights and keep the construct out of the sun and it will fall apart, releasing me.”
She took a piece of tape from her desktop dispenser and stuck the notice to the wall.
And then she approached the cube again. It wouldn’t hurt to climb in, she supposed, as long as she didn’t reattach the cube she’d removed to gain access. She took off her shoes, rested her bum on the edge of the central hollow, brought her legs up, and tucked herself inside, in a sort of sitting fetal position.
Nothing. Of course.
Except—
That was strange.
Except that air was coming through the walls. She held her palm near one of the flat surfaces and could feel a gentle breeze. The piezoelectric paint was doing more than providing structural integrity; it was either manufacturing air or cycling it through from outside.
Incredible.
It had to be cycling air through—that was the only sensible answer. The aliens surely couldn’t have known what sort of atmosphere humans required.
Heather sagged back as much as the cramped quarters would allow. It was indeed the only sensible answer—but it was also the most depressing one. She laughed at herself. She had indeed thought that maybe, just maybe, the aliens had told her how to build a starship—a starship that would whisk her away from Earth, away from all her troubles, and take her to Alpha Centauri.
But if all it was doing was pumping air in from outside, it wouldn’t make much of a spaceship. She contorted herself inside the hollow cube so that she could get her nose up against the green substrate wall. She could feel the gentle breeze, but the air had no odor at all.