Timelike Infinity

Chapter 12

Michael Poole followed Jasoft Parz, the strange bureaucrat from the future, through the entrails of the dead Spline.

They worked their way through gravity-free darkness broken only by the shifting, limited glow of the light globe Parz had rescued from his bizarre eyeball capsule; the semisentient device trailed Parz, doglike. The corridor they followed was circular in cross-section and a little more than head-high. Poole’s hands sank into walls of some grayish, oily substance, and he found himself worming his way past dark, floating ovals a foot or more wide. The ovals were harmless as long as he avoided them, but if he broke the crusty meniscus of any of them a thick, grainy blood-analogue flowed eagerly over his suit.

"Jesus," he muttered. "This is disgusting." Parz was a few yards ahead of him in the cloying darkness. He laughed, and spoke in his light, time-accented English. "No," he said. "This is life aboard the finest interstellar craft likely to be available to humans for generations to come — even after my time." Parz was a thin, dapper man of medium height; his receding hair was snow-white and his face was gloomy, downturned, his chin weak. He looked, Michael thought, like a caricature of an aging bureaucrat — a caricature saved only by his striking green eyes. Parz, in his clear, skintight environment suit, moved more easily through the claustrophobic, sticky conditions than did Poole in his bulky space-hardened gear; but Poole, watching Parz slide like a fish through the cloacal darkness, found himself relishing the cool dryness inside his suit, and would not have exchanged.

A fleshy flap a yard square opened in the floor of this tu

The drone, jets sparkling, hurtled off down the passageway and out of sight.

Poole found himself trembling.

Parz laughed, irritatingly. "You shouldn’t worry about the drones. That one was just a simple maintenance unit—"

"With lasers."

"It was only using them for ranging information, Mr. Poole."

"And they couldn’t be used for any more offensive purposes, I suppose."

"Against us? The drones of this Spline are thoroughly used to humans, Mr. Poole. It probably thinks we’re part of a maintenance crew ourselves. They wouldn’t dream of attacking humans. Unless specifically ordered to, of course."

"That cheers me up," Poole said. "Anyway, what was it doing here? I thought you said the damn Spline is dead."

"Of course it is dead," Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. "Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUT-drive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command cha

Poole frowned, studying Parz’s round, serious face. He found Jasoft Parz oddly repellent, like an insect; his humor was too dry for Poole’s taste, and his view of the world somehow oversophisticated, ironic, detached from the direct, ordinary concerns of human perception.

Here is a man, Poole thought, who has distanced himself from his own emotions. He has become as alien as the Qax. The world is a game to him, an abstract puzzle to be solved — no, not even that — to be admired dustily, as one might marvel at the recorded moves of some ancient chess game.

No doubt it had been an effective survival strategy for someone in Parz’s line of work. Poole found a grain of pity in his heart for the man of the future.

Parz, proceeding ahead of Poole along the tu

Poole laughed. "A whole flotilla of them, flying every flag in the system. A damn lot of use they’ve been." But the key battles had been over in minutes, long before most of the i

"Oh, I think it’s safe," Parz said dryly. "If the Spline could still strike at you, be assured you’d be dead by now. Ah," he said, "here we are."

Abruptly the veinlike tu

But there was damage. In the dim light cast by the globe lamp, Poole made out a spear of metal yards wide that lanced across the chamber, from one ripped wall to another: the spine of the embedded Crab. The lining of the chamber had done its best to seal itself around the entrance and exit wounds, so that a tide of flesh lapped around the Crab spine at each extremity. And even now Poole could make out the fleeting shadows of drones — dozens of them — drifting around the spine, sparking with reaction jets and laser light as they toiled, too late, to drive out this monstrous splinter. Poole stared up at the immense intrusion, the huge wounds, with a kind of wonder; even the spine’s straight lines seemed a violation, hard and painfully u