Convergence

The remaining chambers had not changed; they had vanished. Six chambers had collapsed into four. A dangerous escape had become a trivially easy one, and J’merlia’s task was apparently completed. He was free to turn around, go back, and tell Darya Lang that they could leave Labyrinth any time they felt like it.

Except for a small detail. One form of insanity bears the name curiosity. J’merlia floated up toward the ship to make sure that it was intact, and found that not far ahead was one of those strange dark apertures in the wall of the tube.

He moved closer until he could see through it, into another chamber. There was a suited figure there, moving slowly away from him. J’merlia stared, counted suit appendages, and made his helmet resonate with a hundred-thousand cycle whistle of relief. Eight legs. Thin, pipestem body. Narrow head. A suit identical to his. It was J’merlia himself, and what he had taken for an opening in the wall was no more than a mirror.

Except that — curiosity seized him again. He was moving toward the opening, and the suited figure was moving away from it. He was staring at the back of the thin body.

J’merlia kept moving forward, slowly and cautiously, until he was within the opening. The figure he was following moved, too, floating toward a window on the opposite side of the chamber. J’merlia went on through to the second chamber. His double went ahead also, apparently into a third room.

J’merlia paused. So did his quarry. He back-tracked toward the opening into his original chamber. The figure ahead of him reversed and did the same.

The mystery was solved. He was pursuing himself. Somehow this region of Labyrinth must include a mirror, but a three-dimensional mirror, one that exhibited an exact copy of the chamber in which he was moving.

Like any sensible being, J’merlia preferred to have someone else doing his thinking for him and making his decisions. All the same, he had plenty of intelligence of his own. Wandering the arm with Atvar H’sial had also given him much experience of what technology can do. He had never heard of a three-dimensional mirror like this, but there was no great magic to it. He could think of three or four different ways that such a mirror-room might be built.

He was at the aperture, that comforting notion still in his head, when the angular figure in front of him turned its body, stared off to the left, and began to move rapidly in that direction. It was heading toward the central chamber of Labyrinth.

Now there was something new. The anomaly brought to J’merlia a new awareness, that he was playing a game in which he did not know the rules. He turned also, to head back to the middle of Labyrinth.

Again he halted in amazement. The bulk of the Myosotis should have been hanging right in front of him. There was absolutely no sign of it — no sign of anything in the whole chamber.

J’merlia realized, too late, that he had done something horribly stupid. What made it worse, he had been warned. Quintus Bloom had pointed out that an explorer could “cross over” into another one of the thirty-seven interiors of Labyrinth, but there was a built-in asymmetry. When you went back through the same window, it might be to a new interior region, different from the original point of departure.

Which new interior?

J’merlia remembered the strange cross-co

That was a question J’merlia could answer: No chance at all. He was lost and alone in the multiply-co

J’merlia had only one hope. If he kept hopping through the co

No more useless thought. Time for action. J’merlia headed for the first window between the chambers. No Myosotis. And the next. Still no ship.

He kept track of the number of chambers as he went. The first eight were empty. The ninth was worse than empty. It contained a dozen black husks, dusty sheets of ribbed black leathery material thickened along their center line. J’merlia went close and saw wizened faces, fangs, and sunken cheeks. Chirops. A not-quite intelligent species, the favored flying pets of the Scribes. What were they doing here, so far from their own region of the arm? And where were their masters?

The shriveled faces were mute. The bat-wings were brittle, vacuum dried, their ages impossible to determine.

J’merlia left that room at top speed. The twenty-first chamber had him screeching and whistling a greeting. Two suited figures came drifting toward him. Not until he was close enough to peer into the visors did he realize that they too were victims of Labyrinth. Humans, without a doubt. Empty eye sockets stared out at him, and naked teeth gri

But not as long as the contents of the thirtieth chamber. Seven creatures floated within it. Their shapes suggested giant marine forms, with swollen heads bigger than J’merlia’s body. The glass of their visors had degraded to become completely opaque. How many mille

J’merlia pondered the contradiction as he went on: Labyrinth, according to Quintus Bloom and Darya Lang, was a new artifact. It had not been here one year ago, much less a thousand. Yet it contained antique relics of bygone ages.

When the chamber count passed thirty-seven he wondered if he might be missing some other vital piece of information. He kept going, because he had no other real option. At last the rooms began to seem different, the windows between them becoming steadily larger. There was still no sign of the ship.

A male Lo’tfian, according to the Cecropian dominatrices, had no imagination. It did not occur to J’merlia that he too might move from chamber to chamber until he died. After the eighth hour, however, he began to wonder what was happening. He had been through more than three hundred chambers. His procedure in each was the same, developed for maximum speed and efficiency. He made a sideways entry, so that he could glance with one eye down toward the center of Labyrinth, seeking his ship; at the same time he noted the location of the window that would lead him to the next chamber. Dead aliens, of recognizable or unrecognizable form, were no longer enough to halt his progress.

He was so far into a routine procedure that he was almost too late to catch the change when it finally came.

The ship! He could see it. But he was already zooming on toward the window for the next chamber — and if he went through there was no knowing how long it would be before he again found this one.

J’merlia hit maximum suit deceleration, and realized in the same moment that it would not be enough. He would sail right out through the aperture on the far side of the chamber before he could stop.