The procession entered a tunnel, angled steeply down into the colony’s interior. As the density of sprites dropped, the scape experimented with the other ambient information-carrying vendeks. No single species could come close to matching the details of the probe images, but taken together they provided a fair description of the surroundings. From the Colonists' point of view, the Bright might well have been horribly misnamed; the conditions down here stood a far better chance of providing useful illumination, and the colony could have been perceived to lie in a somber landscape of permanent twilight.
Out of the full force of the wind, the geometry of both the Colonists and their architecture became more stable. The walls of the tunnel were formed from a basic layer population, but hundreds of other structures adorned them. Apart from the “air-conditioning” and “light sources,” Tchicaya couldn’t guess what purpose most of the structures served. They looked too complex to be decorations, but mere endurance required sophistication here; the air-conditioning wasn’t perfect, and anything incapable of responding to the weather risked being scoured away by the Bright.
The tunnel branched; the procession veered left. The air-conditioning was becoming more aggressive about removing impurities; the ship and the toolkit had to work harder than ever to keep the hull intact and the probes viable in the presence of all the new cleaning vendeks. Tchicaya had contemplated a number of unpleasant fates since the anachronauts had blown him out of the Rindler, but being scrubbed from the environment like an unwelcome speck of dust was one of the most insulting.
After a second fork, and a section that zigzagged and corkscrewed simultaneously, the tunnel opened out into a large cave. The physics here was more stable than anything they’d seen since the honeycomb; the weather had not been banished, but the turbulence had been subdued by an order of magnitude compared to the open Bright.
A stream of vendeks crossed the cave, rendered pitch black by the scape for most of its length, where the probes found it impenetrable. Near the center, the stream mingled with the surrounding free vendeks, expanding and becoming diluted before contracting back to its original width and continuing on its way. The probes could enter this region, which they portrayed as a sphere of gray fog; not all of them were coming back, though, and those that did reported that they’d almost lost control over their trajectories. Moving through the Bright had been difficult from the start, but some extreme, systematic distortion here was interfering with their attempts to navigate.
The toolkit collated all the evidence and reached its own conclusion. “There’s curvature engineered into the graphs here. You can invade these vendeks where the current opens out, but in the process they reorient your time axis.”
It took Tchicaya a moment to digest this. Patterns in a quantum graph persisted by replicating themselves in future versions of the graph, but “the future” could only be defined by the orientation of the pattern itself. If you sliced the space-time foam one way to find a graph with vendek A in it, but needed to take a slice at a different angle to find vendek B, the two vendeks would see time as lying in different directions, and mere persistence, on their own terms, would put them in relative motion.
So “reorient your time axis” was toolkit-speak for “change your velocity.” The vendek current couldn’t sweep anything along the way a river did, with pressure and momentum, but it could twist the local definition of being “stationary” progressively further away from its original orientation. In a sense it was like ordinary gravity, but on the near side the symmetries of the vacuum imposed a rigid austerity on the possibilities for space-time curvature. Here, the curvature had been tailored on the spot, woven directly into the graphs by the choice of vendeks.
“These people engineer space-time the way we do polymer design,” he marveled. “Choose the right monomers, get their shape and reactivity right, and you can create whatever properties you desire.”
Mariama smiled. “Except that they’re more like microbes than monomers. Everything comes down to breeding and blending the right vendeks.”
“So what is this? A waste-disposal system?” If they wanted to toss the banner away, they could have done that from the surface with their towing bubble, but this accelerated sewer might send it further, faster.
The Colonists had paused at the entrance to the cave, but now they began to move along a shallow spiral, inching their way down toward the velocity gradient. They weren’t discarding the banner in the black river. They were going with it.
Tchicaya groaned. “I know what this is! We saw the rest of it, from the outside. It’s a transport system. We’re on the entry ramp to a highway.”
Mariama agreed. “Maybe this whole place is just a tiny outpost, and the artifact is such a big deal that they’re rushing it straight to the nearest expert.”
The conga line of Colonists was winding its way toward the axis of the cave, actively fighting the effect of the black vendeks in order not to get dashed against the wall where the current exited. The Sarumpaet was still obediently following the towing bubble; if they wanted to break away from the convoy, they’d have to do it in the next few seconds.
There was no way of knowing how long the journey would take. They’d seen this highway disappearing into the haze, into the depths Xof the far side. This outpost was where the danger would strike first, where the people needed to be told what was coming so they could fight it, or evacuate.
But if the banner was being taken to the Signalers themselves, that could be the expedition’s one opportunity to meet people with the knowledge and motivation needed to understand the warning at all.
Mariama said, “You don’t want to back out?” Perhaps she was afraid that if this turned out to be the wrong choice, he’d hold her responsible for urging him down here in the first place.
Tchicaya said, “No. We have to trust these people to take us to someone who’ll work hard to communicate with us. If that’s not what they’re planning, then we’re screwed — but if we hang back and miss the chance to meet the experts, we’re screwed anyway.” Ahead of them, the banner was blinking feebly; undamaged still, but it had never been designed to modulate all the forms of illumination that filled the cave.
The bubble arced smoothly down into the gray fog of the entry ramp. As they followed it, the fog around them actually seemed to grow thinner; once the Sarumpaet began to surrender to the highway’s demands, the probes had an easier task finding their way back to it — though the rest of the cave rapidly vanished from sight. Tchicaya felt a pang of frustration that he was insulated from any sense of the dynamics at play here. What would it feel like, for a native, to be whisked into motion like this? Would there be something akin to tidal effects, as different parts of your body were brought up to speed? It was a trivial thing to ponder, but he needed to cut through the barriers that separated him from the Colonists. He needed to imagine himself inside their skins, any way he could.
The convoy straightened out. They were in the center of the highway now, portrayed by the probes as a narrow tube of clarity surrounded by fog. The Colonists themselves had begun emitting some of the parasprites that had illuminated the tunnels and the cave; the bubble and its cargo blocked the view ahead, but Tchicaya could still catch glimpses of them, shy luminescent starfish waving their four legs lethargically. They were probably relaxing, free from the arduous demands of the Bright — or if those demands were trivial, perhaps this trip was so dull for them that they’d entered something close to suspended animation. The Sarumpaet was doing absolutely nothing to keep up with them; as far as it was concerned, everyone was motionless. The highway had them all free-falling effortlessly toward their destination.