“No,” Hork said briskly. “No, I don’t. They’ve gone.”
She frowned. “How do you know?”
He grinned. “For one thing, that’s what your precious legends tell us. But the clincher is this seat.” He patted its arms. “The Ur-humans set up this place so that we could work their machines. If I move the chair I can mimic anything an Ur-human could have done… Dura, they have made me as powerful as any of them. Do you see?” He probed at the unyielding surface of the chair. “If we had the wit we could operate other devices.” He looked around the ghostly chamber greedily. “There must be wonders here. Weapons we’ve never dreamed of.”
The Ur-humans had meant Star people to come here, to work the devices they left behind, maybe when the Glitches got too bad. Perhaps there was something they were meant to do now… But what?
“Your arrow device doesn’t have an analogue, in the Ur-human chair,” she said slowly, pointing up. “See? So the arrow-thing must be something meant for us alone. Maybe to help us see what’s going on.” She frowned. “It only turned one quarter. What if you turned it again?”
“Only one way to find out.”
He reached for the arrow.
At first he turned it back toward the darkest sector of the scale. Reassuringly the walls of smooth gray material congealed around them, shutting out the chamber of the Ur-humans. And when Hork twisted the arrow the other way the walls vanished, to reveal the vast devices.
“All right,” he said. “Going from the black to the dark gray allows us to see a little more. A little further. And what if I turn it another quarter, to the light gray?”
Dura shrank back despite herself. “Just turn it,” she said hoarsely.
Confidently he twisted the arrow to the third of the four quarters.
Light seemed to bleed out of the Air.
The devices of the Ur-humans, the walls of their ghostly chamber, became still more translucent. And there was darkness beyond those distant walls, darkness which settled on the two humans, huddled as they were within layers of immensity.
Points of light hung in that darkness.
Dura twisted in the Air, staring around. “I don’t understand. I can’t see the walls of the next chamber. And what are those lights?”
“There are no more walls,” Hork said gently. “Don’t you see? No more chambers. We’re looking out into space, Dura, at volumes even the Ur-humans couldn’t enclose.”
She found her hand creeping into his. “And those lights…”
“You know what they are, Dura. They’re stars. Stars and planets.”
“Wake up, Bzya, you useless asshole.”
Hosch was slapping him. Bzya shook his head, blinking to clear his eye. He was surprised to be alive; the Bell should have imploded.
His bad eyecup blazed with pain. He raised a tentative fingertip to it to find the cup filled with sticky matter. His back ached, right at the base, where it had been bent backward against the curve of the Bell.
“So we’re not dead,” he said.
Hosch grinned, his thin face drawn tight with fear. “We aren’t that deep in the underMantle. We can’t be, or the Bell would have collapsed already.” He was kicking at the rim of the hatch frame, trying to splinter it with his heel.
Bzya flexed his hands and toes. He felt a vague disappointment. Fishing wasn’t the safest of occupations; he’d always known it would finish him one day. But not today — not so close to home, and after such a futile, wasted dive. “You’ll make the hatch collapse in if you keep that up.”
“That’s…” Kick “…the idea.” Kick. Kick.
“And what then? Wave for it?”
“You’ve got it.” Kick, kick. “We’ve lost the cable. We haven’t any better options.” The frame was already starting to splinter. The hatch was a disc of wood, held in place by external pressure against the flanged frame. Once Hosch damaged enough of the flange, the hatch would fall in easily.
Bzya glanced out of the window. “We’re not deep enough to crush the Bell, but we’re surely too deep for us. No one’s ever come so deep unaided. We must still be ninety centimeters.”
“Then we’ll become damn legends. Unless you’ve a better idea, you useless jetfart. Help me…”
But Bzya didn’t need to.
With a thousand tiny explosions all around the frame the flange splintered. Bits of wood rattled across the cabin; they flew into Bzya’s face and he batted at them dimly. Then the hatch fell forward, yielding in a moment. Bzya had an instant’s impression of a mass of fluid — dense, amber and incompressible — crowding into the breached cabin.
The wood-lamps died, overwhelmed.
Then it was on him.
It washed over his limbs, forced its way into his mouth and throat and eyecups; it was a hard physical invasion, like fists pushing into him. He could not see, hear or taste anything. He panicked, and twisted his head back and forth, trying to spew the vile stuff out of his lungs. But he could not expel it, of course; he was embedded in this dense, unlivable material — in a layer of it ninety centimeters deep.
His lungs expanded, tearing at the material.
…And they found Air. Fragments, splinters of Air which stung as they forced their way out of his lungs and into his capillaries. His chest heaved, dragging at the fluid around him. There was Air here, but with just a trace of its normal fractional density.
Damn it, maybe I can make it out of this…
Then the burning started.
It was all over his body, like a thousand needles. And inside him too — by the Wheel! — scorching into his lungs and stomach; it flooded the capillaries that coursed through his body, turning the network of fine tubes that permeated him into a mass of pain, every threadlike capillary electric-alive with it.
Too dense. Too dense…
In these extremes of density and pressure the tin nuclei at the surfaces of his body were seeking a new stable configuration. The nuclei were breaking apart from each other and crumbling into their component nucleons, which were then swarming into the fire-Air in search of the single, huge nucleus which filled the heart of the Star… Bzya was dissolving.
He kicked at the fluid, driving his legs through it. He felt a dull impact as his head struck something. It must be the wall of the Bell. He felt vaguely surprised to find that there was anything left of the familiar, external universe, beyond this pain-realm of dissolution. But he’d managed to move himself. He’d Waved.
He dragged his hand through the fluid, made a sign of the Wheel against his chest. He couldn’t see, but he could breathe, and he could Wave. He was going to get out of here.
He’d bumped his upper face. He must be facing the rear wall of the cabin, then; he must have been spun around by the incoming underMantle fluid. He turned around, spread his hands behind him across the wall. The pain eclipsed his touch, but he could feel the curve of the wall, the round profile of a window. He pictured the cabin, as it had been in that last instant before the hatch came in. Hosch had been somewhere to his right.
He pushed away from the wall and Waved that way, groping ahead of him.