It was an academic question. He was certainly in free-fall, but certainly not in limbo. For one thing, he was breathing. For another, he hurt. He had been pulled apart, and now he could feel his body re-forming, settling back into place atom by atom. His sight was returning, too. As the whirlpool of rainbow colors around him subsided, J’merlia found himself hovering in the middle of an empty enclosure. He was surrounded by a million points of sparkling orange, randomly scattered in space. He stared in every direction and found nothing to provide a sense of scale. The glittering points could be feet away, or miles — or light-years. He moved his head from side to side, trying for parallax. Nothing. The lights were all at the same distance, or they were all very remote.
So he would hang there in the middle of nothing, until he starved to death.
J’merlia pulled his limbs in close to his body, retracted his eyestalks, and slowly rotated in space. As he did so he noticed a just-perceptible change in his surroundings. A small part of the orange glitter had been obscured by a tiny circle of more uniform orange light. Staring, he watched the occulting disk grow steadily in size.
It was coming toward him. And it was not small. As it came closer he realized that it must be many times as big as he was. By the time it stopped, it was obscuring a third of the field of orange spangles. Its surface was a uniform silver, a soft burnished matte that diffused the light of the orange sparkles falling on it.
There was a sighing whistle, like a gentle escape of steam. Undulations grew on the surface of the sphere, ripples on a great ball of quicksilver. It changed shape, to become a distorted ellipsoid. As J’merlia watched he saw a frond of silver grow upward from the top, slowly developing into a five-petaled flower that turned to face him. Open pentagonal disks extruded from the front of the ball, and a long, thin tail grew downward. In a couple of minutes the featureless sphere had become a horned and tailed devil, with a flowerlike head that looked directly at J’merlia.
He felt a sense of relief for the first time since the seedship had flown into the heart of the singularity. He might not know where he was, or how he had come here, or what would happen to him. But he knew the nature of the entity that had just arrived, and he had a pretty good idea what to do next.
He was facing a sentient Builder construct, similar to The-One-Who-Waits, on Glister, or Speaker-Between, on Serenity. It might take a while to communicate with it — the other two had been out of action for three million years, and a little rusty — but given time they had both understood speech. They had just needed a few samples, to get the ball rolling. J’merlia’s concentration and will had weakened when the other being had first approached. Now, as he realized that he was dealing with no more than an intelligent machine, his own intelligence seemed to rise to a higher level.
“My name is J’merlia.” He spoke in standard human. He could have used Lo’tfian or Hymenopt, or a pheromonal language, but human had worked well with the Builder constructs before.
There was a soft hissing, like a kettle coming to the boil. The flower-head quivered. It seemed to be waiting for more.
“I came to this system with a group of my fellow beings, from far away in the spiral arm.” Was that even true? J’merlia was not sure what “this system” was — for all he knew he had been thrown ten million light-years, or into a completely different universe. Except that the air around him was certainly breathable, and his body was unchanged. The being in front of him still seemed to be waiting. “My ship encountered a singularity. I do not understand why that event did not kill me. But I am alive and well. Where am I? Who are you?”
“Amm-m-m I… am-m I… am I,” a wheezing voice said. “Where am I? Who am I?”
J’merlia waited. The sentient Builder constructs took a while to warm up. Some long-dormant language-analysis capability had to be retrieved and used.
“J’merlia?” the hoarse voice said at last.
“I am he. My name is J’merlia, and I am a Lo’tfian, from the planet Lo’tfi.”
“A Lo’tfian. Is that a… a live intelligence? Are you a… sentient organic form?”
“Yes.”
“Then that is the reason for your preservation. The singularity that sought you out and captured you is part of the system under my care. It functions automatically, but it was not designed to kill organic intelligence. To confine, yes, but not to kill. It therefore transferred you here, to Hollow-World.”
Language contained so many subtleties. Just when J’merlia was convinced that they had established clear communication, the other came up with something baffling. To confine, but not to kill. Was Hollow-World the artificial moon of Genizee?
“How big is the system under your care? Does it include the planet from which I just came?”
“It does. True-Home is in my care. Had you not entered the singularity, you would have been returned there, as all ships bearing organic intelligence and seeking to leave this region are returned to True-Home. That is part of my responsibility. You ask, who am I? I tell you, I am Guardian.”
“Guardian — of what?”
“Of True-Home, the world within the singularities. The closed world that will — one day — become the true home of my designers and makers; the home of the Builders.
J’merlia felt dizzy, and not only because of the wrenchings of his passage to Hollow-World. According to Guardian, Genizee was to become the home of the Builders. But Serenity, the great artifact thirty thousand light-years out of the galactic plane, was also destined to become the home of the Builders, if Speaker-Between could be believed. And even little Quake, back in the Mandel system, was supposed to be the home of the Builders, too — despite the fact that Darya Lang, who knew more about the Builders than anyone J’merlia had ever met, insisted that they must have developed on a gas-giant planet like Gargantua and would live only there or in free-space.
“I sense an anomaly,” Guardian continued, while quicksilver ripples crisscrossed its body. “You say that you are from the planet Lo’tfi. Are you telling me that you did not originate on True-Home? That you came from elsewhere?
“I did — we did, my whole party. I told you, we are from outside the Anfract, from far away in another part of the spiral arm.”
“Tell me more. I sense a possible misunderstanding, although I am not persuaded without more direct evidence. Tell me all that has happened.”
It was a direct command, but one that J’merlia felt poorly equipped to obey. Where was he supposed to begin? With his own birth, with his assignment to Atvar H’sial as his dominatrix, with their trip to Quake? Whatever he told Guardian, would the other being really understand him? Like the other sentient Builder constructs, Guardian must have been in standby mode for millions of years.
J’merlia sighed and began to talk. He told of the original home planet of each member of the party; of their convergence on the twin worlds of Opal and Quake, for Summertide Maximum; of their move to the gas-giant Gargantua and their passage through the Eye of Gargantua and a Builder transportation system to Serenity; of their successful fight with the surviving Zardalu, who had been set free from stasis fields by the Builder construct Speaker-Between; and then of how the Zardalu had returned to the spiral arm and to the planet Genizee — True-Home, as it was known to Guardian.
J’merlia and some of his companions had followed, seeking the surviving Zardalu. And at that point their ship had been plucked from the sky and deposited against their will on the surface of True-Home.
“Naturally,” Guardian said when J’merlia was finally silent. “The system in operation about True-Home assumes that any ship within the nested singularities is seeking to leave, and that is forbidden unless the organic intelligences within it have passed the tests. True-Home is a quarantined planet, under my stewardship. It was not anticipated that organic intelligences would arrive here through the protecting singularities, seek to explore within, and then hope to leave.”