Convergence

And then do what?

That was the point where Darya’s thinking stuck. She was supposed to stand just where she was, and conclude — what? It was like some sort of super-intelligence test, but one that she was failing.

She sighed, and came back to reality. Kallik had been ready long ago, patiently waiting.

“All right.” Darya nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve got in the other three.”

At first it seemed nothing but more mystery and disappointment. The fourth sequence showed a very simple progression. The green clade, the one that Darya had never managed to identify, arose far away in the spiral arm. The green tide spread, sun after sun, until the arm was ablaze with green. No other clade ever appeared. At a time not long after the present, the green points of light began to pop out of existence. Finally all were gone, and the spiral arm remained empty to the end of the display. No Zardalu, no humans, no Cecropians. And never a sign of the bright magenta that had marked the Builder artifacts in Bloom’s display.

Darya hardly had the heart to ask Kallik to continue. It felt like someone else who nodded, and said. “Let’s try the next one.”

The sequence began. And Darya moved suddenly, totally, into mental high gear. The display in her suit visor seemed to become twice as bright. Artifacts! Points of vivid magenta were scattered in among the supergiant reference stars.

And now the green clade was appearing, soon followed by the orange of the Zardalu. At last, here came the red of the human clade. Clades grew, met, intermingled, traded off regions among them. Finally the spiral arm was filled. It continued to be filled, thousand after endless thousands of stars. This was Quintus Bloom’s display. The only difference was that during his presentation he had focused the attention of the audience on the spread of the human clade. The earlier spread and collapse of the Zardalu, and its subsequent reappearance, had been deliberately ignored.

Why would Bloom have done such a thing?

Darya could answer that: he had ignored what he could not explain. At the time of his presentation he had no idea that the Zardalu were once more in the spiral arm, repopulating on their original clade-world of Genizee. Bloom wanted all his evidence to support his conclusions.

The sixth sequence started, but it no longer contained surprises. It was another “false history” of the spiral arm, where the Zardalu came and went; Cecropians and humans fought for star systems with the green clade, and finally conquered. Yellow then battled ruby-red, and finally won. The spiral arm filled with Cecropians; and, after a short period, began to empty. The yellow points of light blinked out. At last the arm again showed no sign of intelligent occupation. At no time was there any evidence of Builder artifacts.

Darya was sure that Bloom had reconstructed image sequences for all six walls. She had great respect for his intelligence and his thoroughness as an investigator. But having examined all of them, he had selected just one.

And who could blame him? Only one contained Builder artifacts, which certainly in the real world were scattered through the spiral arm. It was reasonable to reject the other five, as nothing more than a strange invention for an unknown purpose.

Reasonable, but Darya could not do it. Her i

It was a crucial moment, one that needed all her concentration. Instead, to her huge a

But it was not magical power. Not at all. It was a different physical nature, one which changed the definition of prediction. The idea came into her head again. A species able to see the future. Not predict, she thought dreamily, as Bloom would have it, but see.

The fact that she was falling asleep no longer upset her. She knew the way her mind worked. When it had a problem, sleep was impossible. She could not rest until the problem was solved.

So now…

Her thoughts as she faded into sleep carried a perverse comfort. She could stay awake no longer, therefore something deep inside her subconscious said that all necessary data were now in place. The problems of the Builders and of Labyrinth were solved.

Everything clarified to a pleasant simplicity. When she awoke, she would persuade her subconscious to behave honorably, and reveal to her its solution. Then they would find J’merlia, and return to the ship.

And then, at last, they could go home.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Two days in the hiatus were disturbing, but not really dangerous. In a well-equipped ship all you had to do was sit tight, endure darkness and silence, and wait to emerge. Sometime. Somewhere.

The rest of the Anfract offered no such assurance. The difference between a hiatus and the Anfract main body was something that Louis Nenda did not define in words, but had he done so, “passive danger” and “active danger” would have served well enough to separate the two of them.

Active danger, unfortunately, was on the menu for today.

Two hours after they emerged from the final night-long hiatus, Louis was sitting pale, red-eyed, and exhausted at the controls of the Gravitas. He would much rather have been sleeping, but sleep had to wait. They were in more trouble. Entry into the Torvil Anfract was always a risky business, but the Anfract had once possessed at least a few constant features that an explorer could rely on.

Not any more. In the past there had been a consistent thirty-seven lobes. Now that number had decreased to eleven. The internal geometry of the place used to be fixed. It had recently changed — and was still changing. Boundaries between the lobes slid one way and another, shifting, merging, vanishing. The regions of macroscopic Planck scale had become unpredictable.

All of which told Nenda that his old flight plan could be thrown out of the airlock. He would have to fly the Anfract using a combination of experience and good luck. Judging from the past year, he was long on the first but rather short on the second.

He concentrated his attention on the feature directly ahead of the Gravitas. In a region of space-time not noted for its welcome to approaching ships, the Maw was nobody’s favorite. Explorers with a taste for metaphor described it as a hungry, merciless mouth, waiting deep within the Anfract to crush and swallow any ship that mistimed the passage through. Nenda, after his last night’s experience, favored a rather different description, but he had no illusions about the danger they were in. The Maw showed ahead as a grim, black cavity in space. There was no point in getting Quintus Bloom or Gle

If they passed through successfully, on the other side they ought to find a dwarf star that burned with an odd, marigold light. Around that star orbited Genizee, the home world of the Zardalu. And around Genizee… Darya?