Which she had done. And here she was, still dizzy from the Bose transition, walking unsteadily alongside the man who had greeted her.
She had traveled six hundred and twenty lightyears in a handful of days. She was late, late, late. And she had not the slightest idea why she had been summoned.
The chamber that Darya entered was almost totally dark, but she had an impression of an echoing, cavernous vastness. The man who had led her there slipped unobtrusively away, leaving Darya to fumble her way forward to a seat. As her eyes began to adjust she realized that the great room was lavishly equipped, even by the high standards of a rich world like Sentinel Gate. Directly in front of her was a personal privacy shield and Bose link connection. Did each seat have one? If so, any bewildered participant could call home, and (with luck) receive a reply soon enough for it to be useful.
A sudden flash of light right in front of her eyes ended any opportunity to see more of the room. Her seat was also provided with a large 3-D display, which had just filled with an image. The principal clade territories of the spiral arm were delineated in their characteristic colors. Within them, scattered like sown handfuls of fiery sparks, Builder artifacts stood out as brighter points of light.
There was the dull orange of the Zardalu Communion, a region that thinned out as the distance from the galactic center increased. At its outermost edge, Darya recognized the outpost of the Needle. That was an artifact she had longed to visit, but now never would. The eye of the Needle had provided an acceleration-free boost in speed to any ship that traversed it. Now it, like all the rest, was gone.
To the right of the fifteen-hundred-lightyear sprawl of the Zardalu Communion sat the dark void of the Empty Quarter , a region where stars were plentiful but artifacts were almost unknown. Darya’s catalog showed just two of them, Lens and Flambeau. Neither she nor anyone else had ever offered an explanation for the Empty Quarter .
Below the Empty Quarter showed the pale green of Darya’s own clade territory, the Fourth Alliance, where the sentient species were largely humans. Her home world of Sentinel Gate sat far off to the right, close to the artifact of Sentinel. Below and to the left of Fourth Alliance territory, stretching off toward the galactic center, the clade worlds of the Cecropia Federation showed in electric blue—a color which the Cecropians, who “saw” using sound waves and echolocation, could never experience.
Darya looked for the Phemus Circle , and found that little cluster of twenty-three suns and sixty-two habitable planets limned in muddy brown, at the point where the overlapping boundaries of the three dominant clades converged. The color seemed appropriate. The worlds of the Phemus Circle were desperately poor and primitive. “Dingy, dirty, dismal and dangerous.” “Remote, impoverished, brutish, backward, and barbaric.” It was no coincidence that the three major clades had never fought for possession of the Phemus Circle .
The stylized map was infinitely familiar to someone who had spent a lifetime studying Builder artifacts. Darya could have drawn the whole thing herself. But then the display began to shift and shrink, revealing a larger region of the galaxy. The bottom of the display no longer ended in the usual place, at the lower boundary of the Cecropia Federation. As the volume shown increased in size, more of the galaxy became visible. First the Gulf came into view, a void many hundreds of lightyears across that sat at the inner edge of the local spiral arm. Only the thinnest sprinkling of stars and solitary planets drifted there. Beyond the Gulf, the Sagittarius Arm gradually appeared. The Sag Arm was another branch of the whole spiral, the next one in from the local arm and closer to the galactic center.
Darya had never studied the Sagittarius Arm in detail and knew no one who had, although it was a region as big and star-filled as the local arm. The Gulf provided a formidable barrier. Only the most long-lived of species would invest the centuries needed for a crossing. Humans did not belong in that select company.
So why was someone bothering to show a large part of the Sag Arm? And who was that someone?
Darya realized that staring at the bright display actually hindered her eyes from adjusting to the dim light. She was aware of a crouched figure in the seat next to her, of inhumanly odd proportions, but she could see no details. A perfume—not unpleasant, an odd mixture of cinnamon and peppermint—diffused toward her. She heard a scuffling sound, like a struggle going on to her left. Then a hand patted her thigh, and she squeaked in surprise.
A hoarse voice said, “Professor Lang! It is you. I thought At was giving me the runaround.”
“Where are—who are—” Darya saw the dark figure by her feet at the same time as she pushed the hand away from her leg.
“It’s me—Louis Nenda. I had no idea you would be here.”
Darya’s rush of warm feeling surprised her. “Nor did I, until four days ago. Louis, why are we—”
That was as far as she got when Nenda was hoisted suddenly into the air and whipped away to the left. The other figure next to Darya silently unfolded, to rear high above her. From its proportions it had to be a Cecropian. She heard a hissing sound and felt something else, thin and angular and with a hard and unyielding exoskeleton, push against her knees.
“With respect,” said a voice from close to the floor, “We do not think that this is the best time for the renewal of old acquaintance.”
“J’merlia?”
“This is J’merlia’s person, but I am of course speaking on behalf of my dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, who is seated next to you.”
More scuffling sounds from Darya’s left. A hiss, a series of clicks, a thump, and a guttural curse from Louis Nenda. The display in front of Darya vanished and bright lights filled the whole chamber.
“I had intended,” said a deep, hollow voice, “that we would end today’s meeting in silent study of the Orion and Sagittarius Arms, since that knowledge will prove essential to all of us. I did not anticipate that some of us would choose to indulge in private discussion and personal squabbling.”
Darya could see the speaker now. He stood at the front of the great chamber, a lanky man with a bald and bulging cranium. She should have expected him. Julian Graves was a native of Miranda, the only one on that world whom she in fact knew personally. The Ethical Councilor’s deep-set blue eyes were staring right at her and she nodded a greeting.
“Ah.” Graves nodded. “Professor Darya Lang. Of course. I should have anticipated this difficulty. A vortex of emotional disturbance surrounds you still, as ever. Welcome to this assembly. Better late than never, though in truth you are not the last. I am expecting one more participant, who will, I am informed, be arriving within the next half-day. Given that, and the present state of disruption, I feel it will be to everyone’s advantage if I postpone further discussion and explanation until then.” Julian Graves glanced—glared?—around the chamber. “Study the displays. I will leave you now. For the remainder of the day you are free to resume old acquaintances in any way that you choose.”
Julian Graves spoke as though Darya was somehow responsible for ruining his meeting. All she had done was come in and quietly sit down, at a point when the meeting was in any case almost over.
Darya stared around her. She had come here expecting to know almost no one, but to be surrounded mostly by humans. In fact, she thought she recognized every one of the half dozen beings in the room—and most of them were aliens.
Still crouched at her feet in an eight-legged sprawl of limbs was the stick-figure form of J’merlia, the Lo’tfian who interpreted the pheromonal speech of his Cecropian mistress, Atvar H’sial. J’merlia stared up at Darya, and in greeting rolled his lemon-colored compound eyes on their short eyestalks. Darya liked J’merlia, although she objected strongly to his insistence on voluntary servitude to Atvar H’sial. And she had grave suspicions about the honesty and intentions of the latter.