Chapter Sixteen

Darya hated the idea of slavery, but now and again she could see some advantage to being a slave. For one thing, you didn’t have to make decisions.

J’merlia and Kallik had followed her — and sometimes led her — to the middle of nowhere. Now, floating in the innermost chamber of Labyrinth, they were patiently waiting until she told them what to do next.

As if she knew.

Darya stared around at the flat walls of the hexagonal chamber, seeking inspiration in their bland, marbled faces.

“We made it here safely, which is exactly what we wanted.” (Think positive!) “But eventually we must find a good way to return to our ship, and then back into free space.”

The two aliens indicated agreement but did not speak.

“So you, J’merlia.” Darya cleared her throat to gain thinking time. “I’d like you to take another look at the way we came. See if there’s some way to reach another interior, one that’s easier to travel. And J’merlia!” — the Lo’tfian was already nodding and ready to go — “Don’t take risks!”

J’merlia’s head turned, and the lemon eyes on their short stalks stared reproachfully at Darya. “Of course not. With respect, if I became damaged I would be of no further value to you.”

Except that his and Darya’s ideas of risk were unlikely to coincide. He was already zooming happily off toward the entry tunnel and the chamber filled with terrifying dark vortices.

“And don’t stay away too long!” Darya called after him. “No more than three or four hours.”

There was no reply, just a nod of the suit’s helmet.

“And I?” Kallik was staring at J’merlia’s vanishing form. Darya thought she could detect a wistfulness in her voice. There was nothing the little Hymenopt would have liked better than to go racing off with J’merlia.

“You and I will examine this chamber more closely. I know it seems as though there’s absolutely nothing of interest here, though Quintus Bloom said otherwise.”

Darya did not look at Kallik as she led the way to peer at the nearest wall. The multicolored, milky surface seemed to stare back at her. Close up, the wall showed a lot more detail. The pastel shades that Darya saw from a distance were not composed of flat washes of pale color, but were created by many narrow lines of bright color set in a uniform white background. It was as though someone had begun with a wall of plain white, then drawn on that surface with a very fine pen thousands of intersecting lines of different colors. And drawn them sequentially, because wherever two lines crossed, one of them was broken by the other.

But it was still nothing like a picture. Darya wondered again about Bloom’s term: polyglyphs. She glanced at Kallik. The Hymenopt was standing just a few feet from the wall. She was staring at it with bright black eyes, and swaying her head from side to side. After a few moments she began to do the same thing with her whole body, shifting first a couple of feet to the left and then moving back to the right.

“What’s wrong?”

Kallik paused in her oscillation. “Nothing is wrong. But this wall shows parallax.”

It was not something that Darya had thought to look for. She followed Kallik’s example and moved her own head, first to the left and then to the right. As she did so, the line patterns moved slightly relative to each other. It was as though she could see down into the surface, and the lines were at different depths. When she changed her viewing position, the nearer lines moved more than the distant ones. Also, she noticed that no single line was at a uniform depth. One end was always deeper than the other, as though the line met the surface at a shallow angle and continued below it.

The whole wall looked like a bewildering set of lines embedded in open space above a white background. That was a three-dimensional effect, produced by the super-position of many different layers. If you imagined that the wall you saw was built up from a set of nearly transparent plates, stacked one beneath the other behind the surface, what would a single plate look like?

Darya went up to the wall and reached out to touch it. The surface was smooth and hard. The wall was continuous, and met seamlessly with other surfaces of the hexagonal chamber.

“With respect, I do not think that will be possible.”

Kallik, at her side, had been following Darya’s thoughts. Drilling, or somehow splitting the wall into layers, would not give the information they needed.

That was just as well; Darya had an instinctive reluctance to damage any element of an artifact. “Any ideas?”

“None, I am ashamed to say. But subtle and non-destructive methods will be needed.”

Darya nodded. It was infuriating, but little by little she was being forced to conclude that Quintus Bloom was her master when it came to practical research. He had examined the walls before which she and Kallik floated, and understood their three-dimensional nature. He had somehow “unpacked” that information to create a set of two-dimensional pictures, without in any way damaging the wall. But how had he done it?

The answer came to Darya as she again moved her head, first to the left and then to the right, and watched the lines move relative to each other because of parallax. She suddenly knew a method — and it was irritatingly simple. Any practical surveyor would have seen it at once. It needed an imaging system and a good deal of computer power, but their suits could provide that.

“Kallik, we have to take pictures.” She paused and thought for a moment. Two images would fix position in a plane, three in space. “From at least three different positions. Let’s make it more than that, and build in some redundancy. Then we’ll need a rectification program.”

“I can certainly construct such a program. And I will also include a parameter that allows for the refractive index of the wall’s material.” Kallik responded without a pause — it confirmed Darya’s opinion; the Hymenopt was quick. She understood exactly what Darya was proposing. “The program will perform a resection and provide point positions in three-dimensional space. The primary computer output will consist of the depth below the surface of every point on every line. However, that is perhaps not what you would like to see.”

“No. I’d like the output as a set of two-dimensional images. Each different image should correspond to a prescribed depth below the wall surface. Label each one of them” — recognition of Quintus Bloom’s accomplishment and priority was no more than his due — “as a glyph.”

Kallik was quick and able as a programmer. In this case, though, she was not nearly quick enough to suit Darya. Once the digital images had been recorded and registered to each other, Darya’s role disappeared. She roamed the chamber impatiently, knowing that the worst thing she could do was to interrupt the Hymenopt while she was working. The temptation to kibitz was enormous.

For lack of anything better to do, Darya made stereo sets of digital images of the other five walls of the chamber, then wandered down toward the place where the hexagonal pyramid terminated. There was no sign of wear inside this artifact, none of the pitting and crumbling and scarring that told of a three-million-year history. Score another one for Quintus Bloom. Labyrinth must be new, the only known new artifact in the whole spiral arm.

At the very end, the shape of the room changed to a narrow wedge. Darya placed her gloved hand in as far as it would go. She tried to estimate the angle, and decided it was about ten degrees. That was consistent with the notion of thirty-seven interiors terminating in the sharp point of Labyrinth. If this formed, as Bloom had suggested, the very end of the artifact, then where her hand was resting should be only inches away from the other interiors — and only a few feet away from open space. If J’merlia’s search for a safe way out was unsuccessful, maybe they could smash through the wall to freedom.