Convergence

And then, in an instant, the pain vanished. Salvation went bounding forward, free, into open space. Behind it the vortex began to dwindle and die. Stars were visible, shining dimly through it. Shining brighter. Shining bright. Shining clear. Suddenly there was nothing but space between the stars and the racing ship.

“Now comes the real test.” Rebka had opened his helmet and was taking deep breaths of ship’s air. He knew how nervous he had been, even if no one else did. “But what the devil is this?”

He was querying the ship’s data base for instructions to take it superluminal, and an unrequested message had appeared on the display.

Whoever you are, you can have this one to keep. Me and Chinadoll have decided to try something different. She tells me that her name, Pas-farda, means the day-after-tomorrow in the old Earth Persian language, and that’s where we’re going. We hope. May the Great Galactic Trade Wind be always at your back.

“Two old mysteries explained — after a fashion.” Hans was racing through the superluminal protocol. “You might want to pray on this one, Darya. I’m going to take us superluminal and hope I can hit a Bose point. If it works, we’ll be on the way home.”

Darya leaned back and closed her eyes. And if it doesn’t? Suppose the Bose Network has gone, too?

It had to work. It would be just too ironic to go through all this, only to discover that you were restricted to subluminal travel and were going to spend the rest of your life in open space, or on Jerome’s World.

If they did make it home safely, though, Darya swore to return to Jerome’s World. She would personally make sure that a statue was erected there, in honor of the planet’s most famous scientist. Quintus Bloom had certainly earned it — even if future generations might not quite know for what.

But they would know for what. It was Darya’s responsibility to make sure that they did. She must write the whole history of the Builders, from the discovery of the first artifact, Cocoon, to the vanishing of the last one, Labyrinth, along with its enigmatic displays and their implied warning. She would present every theory that had ever been proposed concerning the nature of the Builders — including her own ideas, and certainly Quintus Bloom’s. She would document what the Builders, wherever they might be now, had left behind as their heritage to the rest of the universe.

And if, a thousand years or five thousand years in the future, people thought of that heritage as no more than a work of epic fiction, that would be acceptable. Myths and legends endure when bare facts are forgotten. Think of Homer, his works remembered when no one today knew the names of any king or queen of the times. King Canute tried to hold back the tide, but who recalled who ruled before him, or after him?

The legend of the Builders.

Darya smiled to herself, as the cabin air glowed blue. Salvation was going superluminal.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The atmosphere on board the Salvation was somewhere between numbed satisfaction and manic glee. Hans Rebka, sitting in the pilot’s chair, knew the cause. Nothing in life produces a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death. Their lives had been threatened in the days before Labyrinth vanished, to the point where Rebka would have taken no odds on survival. Yet here they were, alive and on the way home (except for Quintus Bloom, whose present location was anyone’s guess but no one’s worry).

Hans felt that he was the odd man out, the single exception to the general cheer. He ought to be enjoying the moment, even if in his case it would be no more than a brief interval of peace before the next task. That task would be the most difficult one of his life, if he was any judge, but he could not avoid it — because this time he was assigning it to himself.

The final minutes on Labyrinth had taught him something of profound importance. He had not just endured their troubles, he had enjoyed wrestling with and beating them. He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot. Trouble was always dangerous. But it was addictive and stimulating, thrilling and energizing, the ultimate roller-coaster, more exciting than anything else in life. And he was the best damned trouble-shooter he had ever met.

That formed the root of his current problem. He could do this job. Maybe no one else could. But how was he going to break the news to Darya? He could produce plausible but bogus reasons: that he would never be able to stand her sedentary lifestyle; that she could never bear to live in the Phemus Circle. But the two of them had been too close for too long to permit lies and half-truths. So he was going to make her miserable.

Hans realized that, unusual for him, he was procrastinating. At the moment Darya certainly didn’t sound miserable. She was standing behind him, humming tunelessly to herself and massaging his neck and shoulders. She probed stiff-fingered into his trapezius muscles, hard enough to hurt. It felt great.

“Relax, Hans,” she said. “You’re too tense. What has you so knotted up?”

“I was thinking that we fit really well together.”

“Mm.” The grip on his shoulders tightened. “The men from Phemus Circle. One-track minds. I don’t believe you, you know.”

“You don’t think we fit well?”

“Sure we do. But I don’t believe that’s what you were thinking about when I asked you.”

Which only proved that he had been right. He couldn’t fob Darya off with false reasons. It had to be the bald truth.

“I’m going back to the Phemus Circle, Darya. I have to.”

Her fingers froze on his back. “You’ve received orders?”

“No. Worse.” He turned to face her. “I made the decision for myself.”

Her hand came up again to touch his cheek. “Can you tell me why?”

He could hear her uncertainty. “I want to explain, Darya, but I don’t know if you’ll understand. Maybe no one can understand who isn’t from the Phemus Circle.”

“Try me.”

“You think you know the Phemus Circle, because you’ve visited it. But you don’t really know the Circle at all. Maybe you have to be born there. When I was stuck inside Paradox, I started thinking about my childhood on Teufel in a different way. Half my friends died before they were ten years old, from predators and drought and malnutrition, or while we were on water and food duty. It seemed inevitable at the time. I’ve finally realized it’s anything but. It doesn’t have to be that way — on Teufel, or anywhere else. Since I became an adult I’ve been sent to one world after another, wherever and whenever a bad problem appeared. I study the situation, and I solve the problem — every time. The infant deaths on Styx, the encephalo-parasite on Subito, the runaway biosphere on Pelican’s Wake, infertility on Scaldworld, the crop die-off on Besthome, the universal sleep on Mirawand, the black wave on Nemesis — there isn’t one that has beaten me. It’s a great feeling, shipping home and thinking: that’s another one in the bag.

“I had to leave the Phemus Circle completely before I could recognize a different truth. I haven’t been solving problems, you see, not in any final sense. I’ve been plastering over them. The real difficulty lies higher, in the government that runs the Phemus Circle. There are excellent ways of modifying planetary biospheres, small changes that don’t cost a fortune and don’t harm native stock, but translate into enormous lifestyle improvements for human colonists. Hell, I’ve done terraforming, myself, on loan in Alliance territory. We’ve known the techniques for thousands of years. But I’ve never once applied those methods in the Phemus Circle. Teufel remains as it was the day I left it. So do all the other god-forsaken Circle worlds.”