“I still say we kill it,” Cas said.
“No.” Bryn smiled; he believed that he was in command again. “Once this is over, we will be masters of all the regulators. The crew will look to us for help instead of to them. That is my price, Yama, for the hurt you have caused. We should make a start on our quest at once. It will be night soon, I have no liking for this place anymore, and it is a long way to the docks.”
The regulator stirred. “There is a shorter route,” she said, and repeated her message. “My master commands you to descend to the surface of the world below. I will lead you to where he waits with your people. If you come with him, they may go free.”
Cas began to curse the regulator in a dull monotone. Yama said, “I will avenge the hurt done to you all in my name. I swear it.”
Yama was as fearful as the others as the little glass room fell along the length of the ship; like the others he tried to hide his fear as best he could. Wery and Cas leaned against each other, holding onto the rail which ran at waist height around the room’s cold, transparent walls; Bryn clung there too, aiming his wand at the regulator, which hung like a silvery-gray statue in the center of the room, its flat, toeless feet a span above the floor.
Only Yama watched the view. The long track down which the glass room fell was a thread laid across the solid geometries of the ship’s segments. The ship dwindled away above and below, although neither direction had much meaning here, where there was no gravity. Clusters of lights cast stark shadows over the surfaces of enormous cubes and pyramids and tetrahedrons strung together and studded with hundreds of green or brown or indigo blisters—wilds clinging to the surfaces of the huge ship’s segments like fish lice to an eel.
As the ship turned about its long axis, the bulging disc of the red world slowly rose above it. Yama glimpsed the terminus of the elevator far beyond the end of the ship, a blob of light sliced in half by its own shadow. The elevator itself was a broken line defined by lights scattered along its length, dwindling away toward the world.
Bryn was able to answer some of Yama’s questions. The ship turned on its axis so that all sides would be exposed to the light of the sun of this system, evening out temperature differences. The elevator was woven from strands which were each a single giant molecule of neutronium, stabilized by intensely steep gravity fields. The mines delivered phosphates and iron. In thirty days the ship would leave this system and pass through the shortcut to its next destination.
The regulator stirred and said, “They spy on the crew.”
Bryn tapped his eye-patch, which was flipped up on his wrinkled forehead. “I am allowed revelations,” he said. “This is one of the greatest treasures of my people.”
“You interrupt data flow,” the regulator said.
“As is our right,” Bryn said, “earned by tribute.”
“You have no rights,” the regulator said. “You are parasites.”
“You be quiet,” Cas told her. “Speak only when spoken to.”
Yama knew that neither Bryn nor the regulator could answer his most urgent questions. How had Prefect Corin followed him here? Why had he descended to the surface of the world? How was he able to control the regulators?
He thought long and hard on these questions as the glass room sped toward the end of the ship. The world’s huge red disc slowly revolved above them and set on the far side of the ship, and then Yama forgot for a moment all his questions and anxieties.
For the stars had come out.
There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, a field of hard, bright stars shining everywhere he looked, crossed by a great milky river that seemed to wrap around the intensely black sky. The sun of this world must lie deep within one of the arms of the Galaxy; that milky river was the plane of the arm, the light of its billions of stars coalesced into a dense glow. Here and there structures could be seen—star bridges, tidy globes, a chain of bright red stars that spanned half the sky—but otherwise the patterns made by the Preservers were less obvious than when viewed from the orbit of Confluence, many thousands of years beyond the rim of the Galaxy. And yet every star he could see had been touched by the Preservers: their monument, their shrine, was all around him.
Then the sun rose. Although it was smaller and redder than the sun of Confluence, its light banished all but the brightest of the stars.
Yama had expected the glass room to reenter the ship and deliver them to some kind of skiff or lighter which would transfer them to the elevator terminus. But instead it simply shot off the end of its track into the naked void. Cas roared, half in amazement, half in defiance; Wery pressed the length of her body against his. The ship fell away. The terminus of the elevator slowly grew larger in the void below their feet.
It was an irregular chunk of rock, its lumpy surface spattered with craters. One side was lit by the sun, the other, where the elevator cable was socketed in a complex of domes and haphazardly piled cubes, by ruddy light reflected from the world.
“It is one of the moons of the world,” Bryn said. He had lowered the silver patch over his left eye. “Its orbital velocity was increased to move it from a lower orbit and to synchronize it with the world’s rotation.” He added, “This world was moved, too, displaced across half the diameter of the Galaxy. There is a legend that it came from the original system of the Preservers, although some maintain that it is merely a replica of one of the worlds of that system.”
The little moon grew, slowly eclipsing the sun, and the glass room swung through ninety degrees—Cas roared again—and extruded huge curved grapples made of stuff as thin as gossamer. Contact with the elevator cable happened very quickly. The pocked red-lit moonscape swelled below their feet and the room spun on its axis and one element of the cable, not much thicker than an ordinary tree trunk, was suddenly snug against its grapples. The moon began to dwindle and Yama felt his weight increase; now they were falling toward the world, which hung above their heads like a battered orange shield.
The journey took less than an hour. The cable blurred past, a silver wall occasionally punctuated by flashes as rooms very much larger than theirs shot past in the opposite direction. Below their feet, the tiny moon was lost in the glare of the sun; only a few leagues of the elevator cable was visible above, a shadowy thread dwindling toward the world. Midway in the journey, their weight slowly vanished until they were in freefall. The room swung around so that the world was below their feet, and their weight came back.
The black void gained a pinkish tinge and a faint whistle fluted and moaned around them; they were entering the atmosphere. The world flattened and spread, became a landscape. Their weight dwindled; this world’s gravity was a gentle tug about a third the strength of the ship’s, which had been exactly as strong as that of Confluence. The room was falling toward a rumpled red plain crossed by straight dark lines. The sun was setting.
Bryn said that the lines were canals. They had once carried water from the south pole to the agricultural lands of the equator. He was staring raptly at the desolate plain below; Cas and Wery had taken out their wands. A range of broken hills made a half curve around an enormous basin which held a shallow, circular sea. Yama saw a huge flock of pink birds fly up from the shoreline. Millions and millions of birds, like a cloud of pink smoke blowing across the black water.
The elevator cable fell toward a complex of structures beyond the sea’s shore, in the middle of a dark forest. Stepped pyramids rose above the trees, gleaming like fresh blood in the last light of the sun; beside them, like a mask discarded by a giant, a carving of a human face wearing an enigmatic smile looked up at the sky.