Chindi

“Look,” she said.

He looked. Much of the land surface was green. “It’s a living world,” said George.

And very much like Earth, as all living worlds had been, so far. Blue oceans and broad continents. Ice caps at the poles. Mountain ranges and broad forests. Great rivers and inland seas. But in the face of all that, he knew he still hadn’t understood Alyx’s point.

“The shape of the continents,” she said.

There were two of them on the side he could see, and it looked like a third partially swung around the other side. “What?” he asked.

“It’s the design on the sphere. The space guys are from this world.”

“Planting the flag,” he said.

“I think so.”

“First landing on another world?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

The blue planet was bright in the sunlight. “You know,” George said, “I’m begi

PUSH THE BLACK button, the square one, and the scenario changed. They traveled to a broken desert fortress beneath racing moons. Their chairs floated above the sand, charged the walls (“Look out,” breathed Alyx, while Tor closed his eyes), and drifted above a cobbled parade ground filled with serpentine creatures wearing war helmets, carrying shields and waving ba

“It’s almost choreographed,” said Alyx. “Set to music.”

But there was no music. “Push the button again,” said George, anxious to be away from the serpents. Tor wondered if he was begi

He complied, and the fortress faded to rich hill country. They looked down on a broad river, and Tor saw spires on the horizon. And bursts of light in the sky. Explosions.

Someone was under attack.

“Can you get us over there?” asked George, meaning the spires.

It was a matter of following the river. They passed over idyllic farm country, and saw near-humans (arms too long, hands too wide, bodies too narrow, too much height, as if someone had bred an entire generation of basketball players) in the fields. The spires grew, silver and purple in the late-afternoon sunlight. They were tall and spare, linked by bridges and trams. Fountains and pools glittered.

As they drew nearer they saw that the explosions were fireworks. And they could hear music, of a sort. Cacophonic. Discordant. Wind music. Flutes, he thought. And something that sounded vaguely like bagpipes.

And drums! There was no mistaking that sound. There was an army of them somewhere, tucked out of sight, or maybe broadcast over a sound system, but pounding away.

And the city was singing. Voices rose with the flutes and bagpipes, and more fireworks raced into the sky. Cheers rolled through the night. Squadrons of inhabitants paraded through elevated courtyards and malls and along rooftop walkways.

“They’re celebrating something,” said George, relaxing a bit.

Alyx squeezed Tor’s wrist. “What, I wonder,” she said.

After a while, Tor hit the button, and they moved on. Past a glass mosaic, a pattern of cubes and spheres atop a snowbound precipice, apparently abandoned.

To a torchlit city of marble columns and majestic public buildings, waiting by the sea as dawn crept in.

They saw battles. Hordes of creatures in every conceivable form, creatures with multiple limbs, creatures that glided across the landscape, creatures with shining eyes, engaging each other in bloody and merciless combat. They fought with spears and shields, with projectile weapons, with weapons that flashed light. They fought from vast seagoing armadas and from groundcars drawn by all ma

A fleet of airships, hurried along by sails for God’s sake, emerged from clouds and dropped fire (burning oil, probably) on a city spread across the tops of a range of hills. Smaller vessels rose from the city to contest the attackers. Ships on both sides exploded and sank, their crews leaping overboard without benefit of parachute.

“That’s enough,” said George. “Turn it off. Let’s look at something else.”

Tor hit the button.

They were in space again, adrift near the long blazing rim of a sun, watching fiery fountains rise into the skies, while solar tides ebbed and flowed. And then the surface began to expand, and Tor suspected that the images were accelerated. But he didn’t really know. How long did it take for a sun to go nova? Within moments, the solar surface became bloated as if it were about to give birth. And it exploded. The whole vast globe of the sun simply blew up.

In that moment, the magnification switched on its own, and they were far out, away from the immediate effects of the blast, where the sun looked sickly pale and the sky was full of fire. Abruptly the chamber went dark.

Tor understood that these were the products of the stealth satellites, images captured by orbiting recorders and transmitted forward, relayed through other systems circling other worlds.

“Cosmic Snoops,” said Nick, who’d been watching from the Memphis.

Alyx switched on her wristlamp. “I don’t believe this is happening. We travel all over the Arm and find a few ruins, and the Noks, while these people have all this. George, we have to find out how this works and duplicate the record.”

“Or make off with it,” Nick said.

His chair shook.

He looked at Alyx.

“What was that?” she said.

George took a deep breath.

The room trembled again, a shudder, a spasm. As if something were happening deep in the ship.

“SOMETHING’S GOING ON, Hutch.”

A cloud of objects was expanding from the underside of the chindi. Bill locked in on one. It looked like a sack. It was generally shapeless, more or less rounded, a little wider at one end than at the other. It had no visible means of propulsion.

“Where are they going?”

Below, Autumn’s upper atmosphere was calm.

“I’ve no idea. They’re all headed in different directions at the moment. I’ll track them and let you know when I have something.”

George’s voice came in over the circuit. It was weak and far away. “—Are they getting ready to leave?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Hutch. “They’ve just ejected a bunch of sacks.”

“Say again please.”

“Sacks. Packages.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you ought to get out of there. Just in case.”

“Let’s not panic,” he said. “We just got set up over here. Keep an eye open. Let us know if you see anything else.”

“HUTCH.” SYLVIA WAS so excited she could barely speak. “You’ll be interested in knowing that the Academy has had a breakthrough. We are now reading the transmissions on the star web. We’re getting pictures of previously unknown alien civilizations, we’ve got a black hole rolling through the atmosphere of Mendel 771, we’ve got a cluster of artificial bubble structures orbiting Shaula. It’s really incredible.” She brushed her hair back from her eyes and literally glowed. “We’ve unlocked the grail.”

Well, the metaphor seemed strange, but that hardly mattered.

“You’ve unlocked it,” she continued. “You and the Contact Society. Who would’ve thought? Pass my congratulations along to George.”

ALYX SMILED AT him. He could almost read her mind. They’d been inside barely ten hours and, at the first suggestion of activity, they’d run like rabbits. No, they’d told Hutch, let’s not panic. Don’t pick us up. We’re just getting started. But nevertheless they’d left the VR chamber and hurried back down Barbara Street, toward the pocket dome. One of the wheeled robots had passed them, paying no attention, just rolling past as if they weren’t there. Tor wondered where it was going.