Where was J’merlia?

He had been away nearly four hours. Another few minutes and he would be past his deadline.

“With respect.” Kallik’s voice came over Darya’s suit communicator. “The results are now ready for final formatting. How would you like them to be presented?”

“Can you show them as a sequence on my suit display? The surface itself first, then images showing how the plane looks at different depths below the surface. Make one for every millimeter, going gradually deeper. And can you display a couple of images each second?”

“It can be done. Anything else?”

“One more thing. Reverse the polarity, so that white on the wall shows as black on the images.”

Kallik said nothing, but the visor on Darya’s suit darkened to become an output display device. An image formed. Darya was seeing just the top fraction of a millimeter of the wall’s surface, with light and dark reversed. She caught her breath. It was a familiar sight: a blackness deeper than any night, and superimposed on it the white star pattern of the spiral arm.

And then it was suddenly not so familiar. “Freeze it there!”

The display sat unmoving on the visor. It was the spiral arm as seen from above the galactic plane, but not quite as it should have been. The familiar locator stars, the bright blue supergiants used by every species as markers, had been subtly moved in their relative positions.

“Are you sure you didn’t change the look angle? The star positions are wrong.”

“I did not make any change. With respect, may I offer a suggestion?”

“Sure. It looks wrong to you, too, doesn’t it?”

“It does. It is not an accurate portrayal of the spiral arm as it is today. But I suggest that the scene may well be of the past or the future. Then the differences that we are seeing would be no more than the effects of stellar long-term movement. Thus.”

The image held for a moment. There was a flicker, then successive image frames took their place on the display. Tiny changes became visible. The luminous locator stars of the spiral arm began to creep across the screen, all moving at different speeds. It seemed to Darya that the pattern became increasingly familiar, but without a reference set of current stellar positions she would not know when the display showed the arm as it was today.

No wonder the chamber wall had been confusing, filled with sets of lines and smears. It was the image of a myriad of stars, their movements plotted over thousands or millions of years, and all added and portrayed together in one three-dimensional structure.

A bright point of green light suddenly appeared on the display, a new star where none had been before.

“What’s that—”

Darya had the answer before she could complete the question, just as another glint of green appeared close to the first. Then another. The green must be showing stars where some species had reached a critical intelligence level — maybe achieved space flight. And those stars were never the blazing supergiants, which were far too young for intelligent life to have developed on the planets around them. That’s why the green points seemed to spring into existence from nowhere.

They were increasing in number, spreading steadily outward from the original marker. Far off to the right, a point of orange suddenly flared into view.

“A new clade?” Kallik asked softly. “If so, then one would expect…”

And indeed, the first point of orange served as the nucleus for many more bright sparks, spreading out from it. The regions of orange and green spread, finally met, and began to overlap each other. The orange predominated. At the same time a third nucleus, this one showing as a single point of ruby-red, came into existence farther along the arm.

The three colored regions grew, changed shape, and merged. The orange points spread most rapidly, consuming the green and red regions, but Darya was hardly watching. She was feeling a strong emotion — not triumph, but relief. It would have been terrible to go back home and admit that where Quintus Bloom had led, she had not even been able to follow.

She leaned her head on the soft back of the helmet and neck support, and closed her eyes.

“We did it, Kallik!”

The Hymenopt remained silent.

“We figured out the polyglyphs. Didn’t we?”

“Perhaps so.” Kallik did not sound satisfied. “With respect, Professor Lang, would you please look once more at your display.”

Darya’s helmet visor showed the spiral arm, positively ablaze with flecks of light. She frowned at it. All the bright sparks were orange, and the geometry of supergiant star positions looked right. The time shown had to be close to the present day.

“Is there more? Can you see what the future tableau looks like?”

“I can indeed.” Kallik was polite as ever. “I chose to halt the display at this point intentionally. You will note that the stellar array appears close to what we perceive it to be today.”

“Right. Why did you stop it?”

“Because the stellar colonization pattern that we see is totally at odds with what we know to be true, and with what Quintus Bloom reported that he found. This image indicates that almost every star is colonized by a single clade, the species represented by orange on the display.”

“That’s ridiculous. At the very least, there should be humans and Cecropians.”

Ridiculous, but right. Darya struggled to interpret the pattern in terms of what she knew to be true. The numerically dominant species in the spiral arm were humans and Cecropians. Their colony worlds should appear in roughly equal numbers. But everything showed as gleaming orange.

Orange, orange, orange. Sometimes it seemed that the Builders were obsessed by orange, the color showed up so often in their creations. Was it a clue to the Builders themselves — eyes that saw in a different spectral region from human eyes, organs most sensitive at longer wavelengths?

If that were a clue, it was a singularly useless one. Who even knew if Builders had eyes? Perhaps they were like the Cecropians, seeing by echolocation. The one thing that humans knew for certain about the Builders was that they knew nothing for certain.

“Kallik, can you run the display backwards? I’d like to take a look at how each clade started out.”

“I did so already, for my own information. With respect, I think that the frame most likely to interest us is this one.”

An image popped into existence within Darya’s helmet. It was one she had seen before, presumably representing the arm as it had been some time in the past. Green and orange points of light were plentiful. Far off to one side glowed a single mote of baleful red.

Kallik highlighted it with a cursor on the image. “Here we have the first frame in which the third clade — the human clade, from the position of this point — has appeared. With respect, the green and orange lights do not, I feel sure, correspond to the clade colonization patterns.”

“Then what are they?”

“That, I cannot say.” Kallik did not raise her voice, but Darya heard a rare discomfort in it. “But let us go backward again, to the time when orange showed only at a single location in the spiral arm.” The display changed, to show a scene with one solitary point of orange light. The blinking cursor moved under Kallik’s control to stand beside it on the display.

“Here is the origin of our mystery clade. And here” — the cursor hardly moved — “here is a world that we already know all too well. It is Genizee, the home world of the Zardalu. If this display represented reality, we would conclude that the spiral arm is now completely colonized — by Zardalu alone.”