CHAPTER 21
Revelation
Quaid saw the Pyramid Mountain rising like the Matterhorn from one side of a canyon. He floated, seeming disembodied, contemplating it.
“Go inside,” Kuato said, from somewhere in another reality.
Quaid discovered that he could move simply by willing it. He jumped to the side of the mountain, then traveled into the tunnel in its side, as in his dream. The tunnel went deep inside, then dead-ended at a hole in a stone wall. He glided through that hole and into an abyss.
A gigantic metal structure seemed to fill the central core of a dark pit. His dream-pit—but somehow different. The structure—it was in its fashion alive, not dead, and dynamic rather than passive. He had seen it before and thought it defunct; now he knew it was not.
He floated to it. There were huge metal trusses, like the arched understructure of a bridge.
He moved on toward the center of the structure and saw a forest of gigantic corroded metal columns.
Kuato’s voice came again. “What is it?”
Quaid didn’t answer. He didn’t need to; Kuato was reading his mind. The questions were merely to focus his attention.
He dropped down, down, down, as if on a tether, as he had in the dream. But as he passed the point where the dream had ended—
His hands, of their own accord, found the line at his waist and closed about it. They clamped automatically, and suddenly were jerked up as they tried to break his fall. His arms were wrenched almost out of their sockets as they took the full falling weight of his body. Even in the lesser gravity of Mars, it was a shock. He swung, hurting—and smashed into the wall of the pit. The shock was transmitted through his suit, stunning him. His gloves slipped on the line, starting him down again. He knew he couldn’t afford that; he was still a long way from the bottom.
He willed his hands to hang on, whatever the cost. But the cost was his consciousness. He felt himself swinging again, into…
The galaxy was crisscrossed by lines of communication and trade. Lightspeed limited both, on the interstellar level, but species that took the long view prospered. They sent out missionary ships, knowing that they would not see any results in the lifetimes of those aboard, or in the lifetimes of any of the creatures extant. But they continued, for that was the nature of the long view.
The galaxy was actually the debris being drawn into the monstrous black hole that was its center. It had started as a cloud, formed into a quasar, and swept the gas and dust of its vicinity into itself, its appetite insatiable. In the course of billions of years it had dimmed somewhat, for the substance around it was thinning, but it remained a well-organized system.
Hauser recovered consciousness. He was at the bottom of the pit. He had suffered a brief vision of a black hole, but while his mind was out, his hands had evidently eased him on down safely.
He detached himself from the cord. He needed freedom to explore. Then he would climb back up and—
And what? Melina had heard him fall. She would know that something had gone wrong, and would head back for help. He should have told her he was all right, only he had gotten knocked partway senseless. He wasn’t sure how long he had been out. So his mission—
What was his mission? He couldn’t quite remember. That disorientation—
But it was coming back. He was trying to find out about this alien artifact. What it was, what it did, who had left it, anything. So that Melina—
Whatever thought had started was preempted by another. He loved Melina. He closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his forehead. How could he have allowed this to happen? He was an experienced professional, not some lovesick trainee. His love for her had been a pose, a means to an end, the oldest trick in the book. He had used her to infiltrate Kuato’s rebel forces and he had succeeded in that, though he had not succeeded in locating Kuato himself. Now it was time for the rest of the plan to go into action. It was time for him to return to Cohaagen, to the world of intrigue and double-cross and cold calculation.
But it looked as though he had been double-crossed, by his heart. He had sensed the loss of control, of detachment, a while ago, but he had ignored it, suppressed it, tried to forget it. He could do so no longer. Melina’s courage and determination had pierced his amoral armor—and awakened feelings in him that he had never experienced before.
He loved Melina. He could deny it no longer. And if betraying the rebels meant losing her, then he could not betray them. He didn’t care what Cohaagen thought his mission was. He was doing this for her.
He set out to explore the alien device whose struts towered above him in the near-darkness. He had for a moment seemed to understand the aliens, their missionary ships, their long view—or was that something he was about to learn? His memories were jumbled, with chronology seeming to be something other than a straight line. The memory implants, laid over each other, one, two, three of them, synaptic turbulence where they interfered with each other at the fringes—how could he be sure what was real? Focus on the lowest level, exclude what hadn’t yet happened…
He found what might be a footpath, but for other feet than human. The surface was rough, almost like sandpaper, with crisscrossing corrugations. It was like a tape, curving around on the contour, without guardrails, and he had to duck to pass under other tapes that crossed above it. It dead-ended in a drop-off into a hole, and picked up again a few feet below. It was as if the tape had been folded at right angles, then straightened out again at the lower level. Whoever had walked this hadn’t been much concerned about continuity.
He jumped down and resumed his walk, determined to find out where this path went. It stood to reason that it went somewhere, and that it might offer some hint about the alien structure. He had no better notion how to proceed than this.
The path seemed determined to thwart him. It made a right-angle turn up, proceeded along a low ceiling, then turned the corner to the top of a substructure within the giant complex. If this really was a path, the creatures who used it must have feet like those of flies, so that they could walk up walls or upside down on ceilings. Did that make sense?
He persevered, managing to climb back to the level surface so that he could walk normally again. There was always a clear way forward; sometimes he had to proceed on hands and feet, but it never blocked up completely. From this he judged that the aliens had been about half the height of a man. They were also unafraid of heights, for some paths he passed extended straight up the sides of towering columns. The image of a fly was growing stronger, distressing as he found it. Could flies be builders? What would they build for? Some titanic framework for the airing of carrion?
At last he came to a kind of central plaza where a number of paths converged. There was a squat column in the center, covered with what looked like carvings in relief. They were of all types, from straight geometrical designs to weird blobs.
He walked around it, looking at the figures. Many of them were reminiscent of ants.
Ants! Ants could walk on walls and ceilings, and were longer than they were tall. They built mounds, and tunneled through wood. They had quite an organized society, and even made war, in the fashion of man. Could the aliens be ants?
Then he spied a picture of a man. Immediately he concentrated on it, suspecting he had misinterpreted it, too eager to spy something familiar. But it was definitely a man—and beside it, definitely a woman.
The figure was naked, and the female reminded him of Melina in her perfection of form.