Freemont laughed, took Darya’s cup as she handed it to him, and walked with her to the door. “You mean, if I were willing to make the sacrifice, and give up the rewards.” He smiled gently at her bewildered look, “By the time that you reached university age, Ms. Lang, you were already formed as a person. But come to me as a little girl of five or six, and I can have a real say in what you’ll become. That’s my reward. That’s why I say I have the best job in the universe.”
Darya paused on the threshold. “Do you think you did that with Quintus Bloom — shaped him?”
Orval Freemont looked thoughtful, more than he had at any point in their whole meeting. “I’d like to think so. But, you know, I suspect that Quintus was formed long before I ever had a chance to work with him. That drive, that urge to be first and to succeed — I don’t know where and when it came, but by the time I met him it was already there.” He took Darya’s hand, and held it for a long time. “I hope you’ll write something nice about Quintus. Poor little devil, he deserves his success.”
Darya hurried away, through the cold night streets of Rasmussen. She had just a few minutes to make the last shuttle. As she slipped and skated on the thin coat of ice that covered the sidewalks, she tried to measure the value of her trip to Fogline and Rasmussen. She knew Quintus Bloom much better now, that was certain. Thanks to Orval Freemont she had confirmed his strengths, and learned a little of his weaknesses.
As Darya arrived at the terminal, just in time, she realized that her visit to Jerome’s World had given her something else, something she might have been happier not to have. She had seen Bloom through Orval Freemont’s eyes: not as the self-confident and arrogant adult, but as a driven child, a small, lonely, and sad little boy.
Maybe the visit to Orval Freemont had been a big mistake. From now on, no matter how obnoxious he was, Darya would find it harder to hate Quintus Bloom.
Chapter Thirteen
Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom were not the only people speculating about changes in Builder artifacts. Hans Rebka was full of the same thoughts, and was possibly in a better position than the other two to take the idea seriously. He was the only person who had listened to Quintus Bloom’s seminar, and then heard firsthand from Louis Nenda about the changes on Genizee and the total vanishing of Glister.
But what should he do with the knowledge? He was the action type, a general purpose trouble-shooter. He was no Quintus Bloom or Darya Lang, with their encyclopedic knowledge of every artifact in the spiral arm and their ability to detect even the slightest modification of form or function. A change would have to stand up and hit Hans in the face before he recognized it.
There had been one exception. And that, oddly enough, made his decision easier when he decided to leave Sentinel Gate.
In the days before he first met Darya Lang, Hans Rebka had contracted to lead a Fourth Alliance team to the artifact known as Paradox. At the very moment he was ready to begin, he had been reassigned to Quake and Opal — and had been furious at the switch. For weeks and weeks beforehand he had been learning everything there was to know about the spherical anomaly called Paradox. All that knowledge, so painfully acquired, then just wasted.
But maybe he could use it now, to confirm or deny the ideas of Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom. Even if he found no change to Paradox, there was still a good reason for the journey. The cold-start procedure, when Hans had been forced to open E. Crimson Tally’s skull, had reminded him of another attribute of the embodied computer. This one might be the key that would unlock the mystery of Paradox.
Rebka watched the gleaming soap bubble ahead, its surface rippling in hypnotic rainbow colors. Paradox was one of the smallest of the artifacts, only fifty kilometers across. Unlike Sentinel, or many of the others, Paradox provided no impermeable barrier to an approaching ship. Exploring vessels could simply coast right through to the interior, and emerge physically unscathed. Unfortunately, as early would-be explorers of Paradox had learned (or rather, the people who found the explorers had learned) the same was not true of a ship’s crew. Paradox wiped clean all stored memories, organic or inorganic. Surviving crews emerged like new-born babies, with only the most basic instincts and reflexes left to them. Data banks and computer memory on the ships were equally affected. Their contents disappeared. Any ship function that relied on the performance of a computer — and many did — failed inside Paradox. Ships had emerged with their hatches open, their temperature down to ambient space, or their drives dead.
The effect had been named: a Lotus field. That did not, unfortunately, mean that anyone in the spiral arm had the faintest idea how or why it worked, or how to neutralize it. After the first few expeditions (the first recorded expeditions — no one knew how many times Paradox had been discovered, and how many times all memory of it had been erased), the artifact was placed off-limits to all but specially trained investigators.
Investigators like Hans Rebka, with many years of experience in the fine art of avoiding disaster.
But not like E.C. Tally. The embodied computer was staring at Paradox like a child offered a new toy. “Do you think the whole inside is a Lotus field, or is it just in a surface layer?”
“Probably in the surface. We know it starts there, and we have evidence of a lot of other interior structure in Paradox from the light that passes through it.” Rebka was distracted. He was happy with the overall plan of what he wanted to do, but now he was down to practical questions. What was the best way to unwind, and then to wind back, a reel holding thirty kilometers of thin neural cable? Where would the fiber best enter the spacesuit, if the suit was to be airtight? At what point must Rebka put on his own suit?
It was a nuisance to be forced to do everything in suits, but Rebka could see no alternative. Even if the interior of Paradox, by some improbable miracle, turned out to be filled with air breathable by humans, what would happen just before entry? And what was the interior temperature of Paradox? Instrument readings gave inconsistent results.
“Sit still.” He was standing behind Tally, who was suited except for the helmet. “I’m going to rehearse the whole thing just one more time.”
He had already passed the neural cable through a hole in the top of the helmet, made an airtight seal at the point where it entered, and attached a neural connector plug to the end of the cable inside the helmet. He let that float free and reached forward to feel the rear of Tally’s head. When he pressed on three marked points and at the same time lifted, a gleam of white bone was revealed on the back of the skull. The rear pins released, so that the upper cranium could pivot forward about the hinged line in the forehead. Tally’s brain was revealed as a bulging gray ovoid sitting snugly in the skull case.
Rebka carefully lifted it out. “You all right?”
“Just fine. Of course, I cannot see. The top of my head is covering my eyes.”
“I’ll make this as quick as I can.” Rebka felt beneath the wrinkled ball of the brain, to locate a short coiled spiral that connected the embodied computer’s brain to the upper end of the body’s hindbrain. “Doing it — now.”
He unplugged the spiral, lifted the gray ball of the brain free, and pressed the neural connector from the suit’s helmet into the plug in the hindbrain. A moment later he connected the other end of the thirty-kilometer filament to E.C. Tally’s disembodied brain.
“How’s that?”
“Perfectly fine.” E.C. Tally’s hands came up, to click the top of his skull back in position. The thin fiber ran from the back of his head to the suit’s helmet, and on into the disembodied brain. “I sense a slight transmission delay.”