After five centuries without contact, someone was leaving the lifedome. She tried to grasp the reality of Mark’s statement, to envisage it. Someone was coming.
“Turn off the projection,” she told Mark wearily. “I’m ready.”
Neptune collapsed suddenly, like a burst balloon; Triton shriveled into a billion dwindling pixels, and the light of Sol flickered out. For a moment there was only the Great Britain, the undeniable reality of Brunel’s old ship hard and incongruent at the center of this infinity of grayness, of the absence of form; Mark stood before her on the battered deck, his too-real face fixed on hers, reassuring.
Then the Universe returned.
Arrow Maker was falling out of the world.
He sat in the craft — this pod, as Uvarov had called it — with his bow and quiver piled neatly on the seat next to him. His bare legs dangled over his chair’s smooth lip. There was a simple control console, just within his reach before him.
The pod’s walls were transparent, making the cylindrical hull almost invisible. The pod was nothing, less sheltering than an insubstantial dream; the four seats, with Maker and his incongruous, futile bow, seemed to be dropping unsupported through the air.
Uvarov had pointed out the pod to him. Maker had barely been able to see it — a box of translucent strangeness in a world of strangeness.
Uvarov had told him to get into the pod. Maker, without thought, it seemed, had obeyed.
Through the floor of the pod he could see the port approaching. It was a rectangle set in the base of the lifedome, bleak and unadorned, bordered by a line of pale brilliance. He could still see stars through the lifedome base, but he realized now that it wasn’t perfectly transparent. It returned some reflection of the sourceless inner light of the lifedome, making it a genuine floor across the world. Perhaps a layer of dust had collected over the base during the long centuries, spoiling its pristine clarity.
By contrast there was nothing within the expanding frame of the port — nothing, not even Uvarov’s stars. The frame was rising toward him, preparing to swallow him and this foolish craft like an opening mouth.
The port was a doorway to emptiness.
He felt his bowels loosen. Fear was constantly with him, constantly threatening to erupt from his control…
Spinner’s voice sounded small, distorted, emanating from the air. “Maker? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
He cried out and gripped the edges of his seat. His throat was so tight with tension he couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes, shutting out the huge, bizarre unrealities around him, and tried to get some control. He lifted his hands to his waist; he touched the liana rope Spinner had wrapped around him as a good luck talisman, just before his departure.
“Maker? Arrow Maker?”
“…Spinner,” he gasped. “I can hear you. Are you all right?”
She laughed, and just for a moment he could visualize her round, sardonic face, the way she would push her spectacles up her short nose. “That’s hardly the point, is it? The question is, are you all right?”
“Yes.” He opened his eyes, cautiously. The invisible engines of this bubble-pod hummed, almost silently, and below him the exit from the lifedome was a floor of gray emptiness, expanding toward him with exquisite slowness. “Yes, I’m all right. You startled me a bit, that’s all.”
“I’m not surprised.” The voice of the tall, dry man from the Decks — Morrow was rendered even more flat than usual by the distortions of the hidden communications devices. “Maybe we should have spent more time showing you what to expect.”
“Is there anything you want?”
“Yes, Spinner-of-Rope.” Arrow Maker felt small, fragile, isolated, like a child in a vehicle made for adults. All around him there was a sharp, empty smelclass="underline" of plastic and metal, an absence of life. He longed for the rich humidity of the jungle. “I wish we could go home,” he told his daughter.
“For Life’s sake, stop this babbling.” The voice of Garry Uvarov was like a rattle of bone against glass. “Arrow Maker,” Uvarov said. “Where are you?”
Maker hesitated. The lifedome exit was huge beneath him now — he was so close to it, in fact, that its corners and edges were foreshortened; the semi-transparent surface of the lifedome turned into a rim of distant, star-spangled carpet around this immense cavity. He felt himself cringe. He reached out blindly for his bow and clutched it to his chest; it was a small token of normality in this world of strangeness. “I can’t be more than a dozen feet from the exit. And I — ”
The lip of the port, brightly lit, slid upwards around the pod, now; Arrow Maker felt as if he were being immersed in some bottomless pool.
When she understood the birds were trying to feed her, she tried to pick out individuals among the huge flocks. She told herself she wanted to study the birds: learn more of their lifecycle, mediated as it was by baryonic matter, and perhaps even try to become empathetic with the birds, to try to comprehend their individual and racial goals.
But making friends with photino birds — forming contact with individuals in anything like a conventional human sense — simply wasn’t a possibility for her, it emerged. They were so nearly alike — after all, she reflected, given their simple reproductive strategy the birds were very nearly clones of each other that it was all but impossible for her to tell them apart. And, on their brief orbits around the Sun, they flashed past her so quickly. She certainly couldn’t identify them closely enough to follow individuals through consecutive orbits past her.
So — though she was surrounded by the birds, and bathed in their strange, luminous generosity — Lieserl remained, still, fundamentally alone.
She felt intense disappointment at this. At first she told herself that this was a symptom of her limited understanding of the birds: Lieserl, as the frustrated scientist.
But this was just a rationalization, she knew.
She forced herself to be honest. What some part of her really wanted, deep down, was for the photino birds to accept her — if not as one of their own, then as a tolerable alien in their midst.
When she first diagnosed this about herself, she felt humiliated. For the first time she was glad there was nobody observing her, no latter-day equivalent of Kevan Scholes studying her telemetry and deducing her mental state. Was she really so pathetic, so internally weak, that she needed to cling to crumbs of friendship — even from these dark-matter creatures, whose alienness from her was so fundamental that it made the differences between humans and Qax look like close kinship?
Was she really so lonely?
The subsequent embarrassment and fit of self-loathing took a long time to fade.
Individual contact with the birds would be meaningless anyway. Since they were so alike, their behavior as individuals so undifferentiated, racial goals seemed far more important to the birds than individual goals. Personality was subsumed beneath the purpose of the species to a far greater extent than it ever had been with humans — even at the time of the Assimilation, she thought, when opposition to the Xeelee had emerged as a clear racial goal for humanity.
She watched the birds breed, endlessly, the swarms of clumsy young sweeping on uncontrolled elliptical orbits around the Sun’s core in pursuit of their parents.
The birds’ cloning mode of reproduction seemed to shape the course of their lives.
At first the cloning seemed restrictive — even claustrophobic. Racial goals, downloaded directly from the mother’s awareness into the young, overrode any individual ambitions. The young were robots, she decided, programmed from birth to fulfill the objectives of the species.