“Kallik. How did you do that?”

The Hymenopt inclined her head. “With respect, Professor Lang, great intellectual power, even at the level that you possess it, is not always a substitute for humble practical experience. In service to Master Nenda, I employed the Bose Network many, many times.”

It was as close as Louis Nenda’s former slave would ever get to telling a human that she was an ignoramus and had blown the whole Network computation. Darya took Kallik’s travel plan and prepared to put it into effect.

The journey would involve a peculiar mixture of subluminal and superluminal components. That, in turn, called for the Bose Drive and the standard drive to be used in sequence, sometimes with odd delays or advance power delivery.

Darya pondered the first jump, her hands poised above the keyboard. She was wondering where to set the subluminal break-point when she became aware of J’merlia hovering at her shoulder. The Lo’tfian’s eyestalks were fully extended in different directions, so that he could monitor both keyboards and displays.

“With respect.” J’merlia reached around Darya with four sticklike limbs. Hard digits rattled against the keys, far too fast to follow. When they withdrew a few seconds later, Darya saw that ship commands had been provided for every stage of the journey of the Myosotis from Sentinel to Labyrinth.

She didn’t bother to ask how J’merlia had done it. She didn’t want to hear again that the job called for no real talent, just a little experience. Instead she retreated to her cabin, aware that she had become a supernumerary on her own ship.

Where next would her skills be found deficient? Darya did not know, but a voice in her ear kept reminding her that in all previous leaps into the unknown (like the coming exploration of Labyrinth) she had benefited from the skill and long-time trouble-shooting experience of Hans Rebka — Rebka, the rotten, faithless, lecherous, Phemus Circle swine.

She went back to where J’merlia was sitting in the pilot’s seat.

“Can you set up a superluminal circuit with Sentinel Gate?”

“Certainly. It will be expensive, because it must employ three Bose nodes.”

“Never mind that. I want to talk to Hans Rebka.”

“Very good.” Instead of beginning his task, J’merlia hesitated.

“What do you want?” Darya had dealt with him long enough to know that a pause like this usually meant a request that he was diffident in making.

“When you talk to Captain Rebka, Kallik and I would appreciate it if you would ask him a question from us.”

“Of course.”

“Would you please ask him, just why did he instruct us to seek you out at the spaceport, and accompany you on this trip? We have pondered this question, but have been unable to answer it. We are of course supposed to protect you, but from what? We are uncomfortable when we are not sure that we are correctly interpreting a command.”

“I’ll ask him.” Protect her, that irritating word again! He must think she was too stupid and naive to look after herself. “You bet I’ll ask him, the superior bastard. Get me that circuit!”

The connection took a while to set up. Darya sat and seethed. Finally it came, and she found herself staring at the face of a near-stranger, a communications operator at the institute.

“I wanted to talk to Hans Rebka.”

The head on the screen nodded. “I know. But we can’t do it, that’s why the call was passed through to me.”

“Has something happened to him?” Darya’s anger was suddenly touched with worry.

“Not so far as we know. He’s all right. But he’s gone. He left the institute this morning.”

“Damn that man. Did he say where he was going?”

“Not to me. But an embodied computer, E. Crimson Tally, left with him. And Tally told me they were going to explore an artifact called Paradox. Are you feeling all right?” The operator had seen Darya’s expression. “Can I connect you with someone else?”

In a way, the disappearance of Hans Rebka made everything simpler. Darya was on her own.

Hans had told her, more than once, “People talk about the game of life. But if it’s a game, it’s nothing like poker. In life you can’t turn back cards you don’t like and hope you’ll be given better ones. You play the hand that’s dealt, and you do your best to win with it.”

Hans hadn’t mentioned the stakes, but in his own case it had often been his life, and the lives of everyone with him. Darya wasn’t sure what the stakes were this time. At the most trivial level, it was her own self-esteem and reputation. Beyond that, it could be anything from the future of the Artifact Institute, up to the future of the spiral arm.

High stakes, indeed.

There was less question about Darya’s hand. It was herself, with all she knew about Builders and artifacts, and two aliens. Smart aliens, no doubt of that, but aliens so used to being slaves that it was hard for them to take an initiative.

There was one other thing, an asset which so far Darya had found no opportunity to evaluate. She had brought with her a complete copy of a file about Labyrinth, bestowed as a gift to the institute by Quintus Bloom. It had all his recent written work, data analysis and theory, and Darya would certainly study that; far more significant, however, were the raw data: the exact chronology of the discovery and exploration of the new artifact, all the physical measurements, and the images taken both outside and inside Labyrinth.

Everything was stored in the computer onboard the Myosotis. The journey to Labyrinth, even with Kallik’s superior travel strategy, would take days. And with J’merlia having quietly taken over all the piloting functions, Darya had nothing to do.

Nothing except real work, the work she had trained for all her adult life. The cramped cabin of the ship lacked the pleasant surroundings of an office on Sentinel Gate, but when Darya was concentrating she never noticed her surroundings. As an opportunity to study, the trip out to Labyrinth could hardly be beat.

She made herself a nook in the ship’s cabin and settled in. First came Quintus Bloom’s description and discussion of the “old” artifacts. Darya knew every one like an old friend. She expected to learn little new about them, but perhaps a good deal about the real Quintus Bloom, the man behind the affable, self-confident, seemingly omniscient authority onstage at the institute.

Universal Artifact Catalog, Entry #1: Cocoon.

Form: Cocoon is a system of forty-eight basal stalks. They connect a free-space structure of four hundred and thirty-two thousand filaments to the surface of the planet, Savalle…

Bloom was following the order that Darya had established in her own catalog of the artifacts. She read through his description of Cocoon. There was nothing new, but she formed a grudging admiration of his writing style. It was spare and exact. The only thing that brought a frown to her face was his final sentence:

Classification: Transportation system, for movement of materials to and from the surface of Savalle.

It was quite a leap from the physical fact of Cocoon’s form and structure, to that unequivocal statement of its intended purpose.

Darya went to Calliope, the second artifact in the list. Then to the baffling singularities of Zirkelloch, the third, which Quintus Bloom classified as Anomalous — meaning that his classification system could not handle it! Then to Numen, the fourth, which had been worshipped by the Varnians long before humans came on the scene with their own ideas of divinity. Darya nodded. Who knows, maybe the Varnians saw something that humans didn’t.

The task was absorbing, almost soothing — a carry back in time to the days when research meant the study of objects remote in time and space, the analysis of places where Darya never expected to go. And it was time-consuming. Hunger at last drove her back to the outside world, to discover that most of a day had passed. She had ground her way through about half of the artifact descriptions. She also realized that an idea was sitting inside her head, without her being aware of how or when it had arrived.