Nightfall_at_Algemron

The stone flared in his hand, not with heat but light. The light pierced right through his hand, too bright to see. The images flamed in the fire of it, impossible radiance filtered through flesh and blood and shattered. A great cry like half the windchimes of a world being murdered went up, and all the light and the terror
went out of the air before him and fell ringing and glittering to the ground in bright shards.
Gabriel stood there in the darkness, shaking with fury and astonishment, and looked around him, completely confused. Pillars and slabs of glass lay everywhere, broken, ruined.
Slowly the others scuffed through the splinters and fragments, gazing around. "Boy," Helm said as he looked around with some satisfaction, "when you chuck your toys out of the pram, you do it proper."
"I'll do it again, too," Gabriel growled. He turned toward the deeper darkness and yelled, "It's me! It's me, for gods' sakes! Will you cut it out?"
The others looked around them, waiting for some response. None came. "Maybe they're just checking," Angela said quietly.
"Maybe they are. Well, they can stop checking!" Gabriel yelled.
The echoes said checking! checking! checking!. and died away. All around them glass and crystal chimed in peculiar harmonies to the words. Enda began to shiver.
Gabriel looked at her with some concern then turned away, for the harmonics he was hearing were beginning to bother him, too. All around him, the crystalline structures of the cavern shivered with sound, partly of his own making, partly rogue harmonies generated by his shout. Slowly the sound died away.
Behind them, the arachnons moved forward, pushing Gabriel and the others forward again.
Around them, to Gabriel's eyes anyway, the light was brighter now. How much of that did they see? he wondered. Must ask later. For the moment he concentrated on walking, while inside his hand the stone pulsed, pulsed stronger. They were going the right way. Up ahead was what he had come to see.
The cavern narrowed into a glassy thoroughfare about ten meters wide then suddenly widened out again. The light ahead was stronger. As they stepped through, Gabriel saw what it was coming from. He simply stopped and stared in amazement.
The whole place was full of great long glittering filaments of glass, interlaced, spun thin as silk or thick as cable, and all intricately interwoven in what Gabriel knew were patterns, though their symmetries were too subtle for him to grasp. Some of the strands shone with their own light, some with light reflected from the others. The immensity of this cavern dwarfed the last one, and everywhere it was hung with curtains and cables of glass running with light. Here and there, pathways through the great pattern were obvious, but Gabriel was chary of entering any of them. He wanted to be surer of his welcome.
At the same time, he was having to deal with the strange sensation of something inside his head. Well, something different inside my head, Gabriel thought, for there had been enough alien presences and voices and whatnot in him that he was beginning to feel like some kind of tourist attraction. This presence, though, was footing it very delicately among the strands of his thought, picking them up, matching them against each other, trying to make something of the color and the gauge. It seemed friendly. At least, nothing it was doing at the moment was precisely painful. That might be a misdirection, but Gabriel doubted that at the moment. Anything that could have killed him twenty minutes ago but had not would likely not be thinking seriously about it now.
"Uh, hello?" Gabriel said, a little more loudly than he might usually have spoken, like a guest announcing himself in the airlock. "I'm here now! Can we get on to specifics, please, before it gets dark? Really dark? That dark?"
He showed whatever was stepping carefully around in his mind that particular image, the strange one he
had experienced in Charlotte. Falling into the abyss, not just a physical fall but an emotional and ethical and historical one as well. All those things that made life worth living for humans, fraal, weren, t'sa and all the rest of them, lost, gone into the darkness, lost for millennia.
"I understand what we're playing for here," Gabriel said. "Won't you come meet me, so we can talk about it?"
Out from among the shining, woven webwork, something came stepping on five, ten, fifteen legs. It looked at Gabriel with about thirty hot blue eyes.
Its body was an oblate spheroid around which the many legs were spaced, some of them in contact with the ground, some of them held higher for manipulatory uses. The upper limbs worked together busily, doing something delicate that Gabriel could not easily see. The creature wore all those eyes in a cluster atop its head and a belt of them around the waist of the spheroid. All those eyes were blue. The creature looked at Gabriel, inclining its body to help the top eyes get a better view, and spoke to him in his mind in a voice that glittered.
Identification, it said in his mind.
I am a man, Gabriel said replied, concentrating on answering the same way. He was finding this communication hard to bear. He thought from his brief looks inside Enda's mind that he knew what a dispassionate mind was like, a cool assessment of the outer world. Now he saw that he was much mistaken and that he and Enda were, from this creature's standpoint, enough alike to be easily mistaken for one another, all runny passions and wet biological mindsets. Here was coolness apotheosized, the genuine mineral mindset, rational, crystalline, organized, and curious. Curious. He would not have believed that anything so mineral could have been so ravenously curious about its surroundings, but then, it was perhaps crystals that had first learned how to grow.
Man, the creature said, as if it was not the deeply defining term that Gabriel knew but just another name for just another thing, yet the curiosity made that judgment less painful than it might have been. The creature was genuinely interested in him.
"Your species is known in the classifications," it said.
The thought now sounded like speech, at least to Gabriel. Apparently, the creature had decided to directly access Gabriel's speech center for communications.
"You look a little like the creature my people would call an orbweaver," Gabriel said, "but very different, too."
"There are likenesses," replied the creature, "but I am not one of the orbweavers. I began from the same design, but many more features were added, tending toward a far more sophisticated level of interaction, communications, and control. I am a prototype." Was that a touch of pride he heard in that voice? "One of only three."
"How should I call you?" Gabriel said. "I am the Patterner," the creature said.
He looked over his shoulder at the others. "Are you hearing this?" he said. Enda said, "I hear whispers and chiming. Nothing else."
The others shook their heads.
Gabriel turned back to the Patterner. "I'm sorry we blew up your arachnon," he said.
"That does not matter," the Patterner said. "Their function is to protect this facility." Its thought indicated the webwork all around it, and Gabriel realized that this was all one huge computer, which the Patterner had built and programmed to maintain this facility. "It was tasked to attack you to observe your reaction."
"Oh?"
"You responded when it was appropriate to do so," said the Patterner. "You did not overrespond. This has been evaluated."
"Good," Gabriel said. He was enjoying the glitter and the aural shimmer of its thought and voice twined together, interwoven. It apparently did its weaving in more than one idiom. "That other business back there. that was part of the testing, too?"
"That last proving was the second-most important aspect being evaluated," the Patterner said. "Timebinding. What use in giving weaponry to one who cannot tell the past from the future, even under stress? Both are important. Discard one and the other is lost as well. One must be able to choose between the old and the new response and see which one will work better for the task at hand."