The result of all this was a great decrease in tension. The cramped quarters of the Savior no longer felt like an overcrowded box, too small for its crew. Rebka, Blesh, and Quistner were off by the communications console, and although she could not hear their conversation, an occasional laugh suggested that it was friendly and relaxed. If some of the laughter was a reaction to the sight of ugly death, that was no more than natural. The fact that they were talking together at all suggested a major adjustment. And it was no huge surprise when Lara Quistner wandered over to Darya and sat down by her side.
“Professor Lang, I’ve been thinking.” She sounded tentative. “I want to bounce an idea off you. We’ve all heard a lot about the Builders, ever since we were kids, but it was always secondhand information. Everybody says that you are the ultimate authority on the Builders.”
“If there is any such thing. And it’s Darya, please, not Professor Lang. When you get right down to it there is no such thing as an authority on the Builders. What we know is simple. Something built and left behind a set of structures that we label as artifacts. All of them were very old—at least three million years—and most of them employed technology that we still do not understand. A few years ago, one new artifact appeared. Soon after that every one of them vanished. That’s it. There you have our complete knowledge of the Builders. Everything else is speculation.”
“But Professor Lang—Darya—surely there must be theories?”
“You’ve got it exactly right. Theories, not theory. You name it, someone had it. Maybe the Builders were entities whose consciousness extended over a finite dimension in time, so that they could literally see through time the way we can see through space. They could examine possible futures and direct the course of the spiral arm. That idea was mine, but I don’t believe it anymore. Or the Builders are still alive, lying idle on the deep gravity slope that surrounds the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, where time slows so that an hour there is a century or a millennium for us. That was Professor Carmina Gold’s, at the Research Institute on Sentinel Gate, and she keeps looking for a way to travel to the center of the galaxy and back in a human lifetime. Maybe this expedition will help—we came to the Sag Arm in just a few days; there could be a chain of Bose nodes leading all the way to the galactic center. Or another theory: the Builders are actually human beings from our own future, coming back to direct the course of spiral arm development, including their own. That was Quintus Bloom’s idea, and it made the embodied computer E.C. Tally go into a logical loop so bad we had to cold-start him.”
“Quintus Bloom?”
“He was a big name at the Institute a few years ago. He stayed on Labyrinth when it disappeared, and no one to this day knows what happened to him. Then there was the theory that nothing cataclysmic happened to the Builders. They were just like any other species, they grew old, and since they didn’t change they slowly died out. That idea was a kind of orphan, no one knows who had it first. Most people attribute it to Captain Alonzo Sloane, an old space wanderer who went off looking for the Lost Worlds, Jesteen and Skyfall and Petra and Primrose and Paladin and Midas and Rainbow Reef. He never came back, though we did find his ship near Labyrinth.”
“People with ideas about the Builders seem to disappear rather often.”
“Oh, most of them don’t—we just remember the ones who did. I’ve had a dozen ideas of my own to explain who the Builders were and what happened to them, and I’m still here. And I must have read a hundred or a thousand papers by other people. Only one of them could be right, and chances are, all of them are wrong. If you have thoughts of your own, don’t be ashamed of them. Maybe they are new, and maybe they are better than anyone else’s.”
“If you don’t mind listening?”
“As I said, I’ve listened a thousand times, but I’m ready to listen ten thousand more. Hans Rebka tells me that the Builders are an obsession with me. I won’t go quite that far, but I will admit they have been my life’s consuming interest. Go ahead.”
“Well.” Lara glanced across at the two men, making sure that they were still deep in conversation. “I knew that the Builders were around for a very long time, and a few million years ago they disappeared. That never seemed to make much sense to me. If they died out, wouldn’t you expect to see evidence of where and how they died? When I heard about this expedition, and found out where we were going, it occurred to me that perhaps the Builders didn’t die out at all. Perhaps they just moved. Perhaps they decided to make a home in the Sag Arm, instead of in the Orion Arm. I know that they have some way of moving across great distances, because one of the artifacts is supposed to be far out of the galactic plane.”
“Thirty thousand lightyears out of it. Lara, I was there. We called it—or the beings that inhabited it, who claimed to be servants of the Builders, called it—Serenity. Our party included Julian Graves. We were not sure what carried us out there, or what carried us back. We called them transportation vortices, but that was just a name. How a vortex worked was a total mystery. They seemed to appear anywhere, and carry you hundreds or thousands of lightyears instantly without involving Bose nodes at all.”
“Then if they wanted to, they could easily have moved here.”
“Without a doubt. The Builders have—or had—enormous powers, able to do things that still look like magic to us. We’re millennia behind them in our most advanced technology, if not millions of years. But I’m convinced of one thing, Lara. I can’t prove this, but I feel it in my bones: whoever and whatever killed this star system and all the life within it was not the Builders. For that to be true, they would have had to change much more than their location. They would have had to change their whole attitude toward other living creatures. It’s not generally accepted, but I believe that the Builders guided the development of our own local arm. It’s thanks to them that we have a stable civilization involving many species and three major clades. If Captain Rebka were listening, I would say four major clades in deference to his feelings. Even though everyone outside the Phemus Circle regards it as a backward place of no great importance.”
“I’ve heard something about that.” Lara Quistner glanced across to Hans Rebka and lowered her voice. “They say that all the planets of the Phemus Circle are poor and primitive, and all the men are totally sex-mad. Is it true?”
If you’re asking about my recent experience, forget it. Hans and I haven’t looked each other in the eye for weeks. And if you have ideas about him, get in line. “The worlds I’ve seen in the Phemus Circle were certainly poverty-stricken compared with some rich planet like Miranda.” It was a good, neutral answer. Darya wondered what rumors Lara Quistner might have heard. “As for the men, you’d have to find out for yourself. Someday, maybe you will. In my experience, they are sex-mad—and so are the women of the Phemus Circle. On some of the planets they have to reproduce whenever and however they can, in order to maintain a population at all. But at the same time the men can be prudish. Sometimes the slightest detail will turn off their interest in sex.”
Which was quite as far as Darya intended to go on that particular subject, regardless of her personal data base. She had been keeping an eye on the two men, and saw that they had wrapped up their conversation and were over by the autochef. They were poking at the controls. Darya winced. Maybe Ben Blesh knew what he was doing, but Hans Rebka’s attempts at food programming were disastrous. Being raised on Teufel a man couldn’t afford to be picky. She went on, “I think that the big planet, Iceworld, proves that the Builders were once here in the Sag Arm. It has all the earmarks of a Builder artifact—too light for its size, far too cold to be natural. What you are proposing, that the Builders might still be here and still be active, is another matter. This star system suggests to me that some other group—the ones I called the Voiders—came along after the Builders and did their own dirty work.”