“Goin’ where? Into that thing?” Nenda jerked his head toward the hovering vortex. “You outa your tiny mind? The one we come through to get here squeezed me flatter than a Sproatley smart oyster. That one’s a thousand times the size. If I never go near one of them again in my life, it’ll be too soon.”
“That settles it, then. I’m not going, either.” Glenna turned to Bloom. “Quintus, I’m not going.”
“I heard you the first time. I am not deaf. Since when does the advice of a barbarian space anthropoid dictate your actions?” Bloom glared right through Glenna, as though she had ceased to exist. “What about the rest of you? Tally? Here surely is a challenge worthy of an embodied computer’s powers. Atvar H’sial — Kallik — J’merlia? Do you not wish your own species to be represented in the future? Which of you is ready to embark with me on the greatest adventure in history?”
But Glenna’s decision had somehow turned the whole group. They had been clustered around Bloom as their center of gravity. Now, without a word, they began to drift toward Hans Rebka. He pointed to one of the ships, twice the size of any of the others.
“That’s my choice. I think I’ve even seen pictures of it before. That’s the Salvation, the ship Chinadoll Pas-farda used to roll over the darkside edge of the Coal Sack. People have wondered where she and her ship went for two centuries. Now we have to make it earn its name. But we’ll have to be quick.”
The vortex beside Labyrinth was beginning its work. The artifact was rotating faster as Rebka led his odd convoy toward the chosen ship. Behind him were Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, carefully towing the captive Zardalu. Kallik, J’merlia, and Glenna Omar followed them, as close as the wriggling Zardalu permitted. Darya brought up the rear with E.C. Tally. She found herself threading her way through a menagerie of creatures and objects, flotsam and jetsam delivered to Labyrinth from a thousand other artifacts. A group of a dozen Ditrons, abandoned by their owners, hooted like foghorns and giggled as Darya passed by. The high-domed skulls suggested plenty of intelligence, but that was an illusion. The Ditron’s head was a resonance cavity, designed to produce as much sound as possible in mating calls. The brain itself was a mere couple of hundred grams tucked away at the back.
Darya kept well clear of them. She skirted a huge creature like a spiral galaxy in miniature, thorny swirls of body with one enormous pale-blue eye the size of a child’s paddling pool set at its center. The eye tracked her as she passed by. The urge to stop and examine that alien was almost overwhelming, until she saw out of the tail of her own eye a nine-foot squirming streak of green. It was a Chism Polypheme, hurtling its corkscrew body toward one of the ships.
Dulcimer? Could that really be Dulcimer, the leering Polypheme pilot who had first taken them into the Torvil Anfract? Well, if so he would have to look after himself. He should be able to do it — anyone who was fifteen thousand years old had to be a survivor.
But what was Dulcimer doing here? Did it mean that every other artifact had already vanished from the spiral arm, its contents transferred to Labyrinth? The thought left her numb. She had devoted her whole career to the study of the Builders and their creations. If they vanished and left no evidence that the artifacts had ever existed, what would she do with the rest of her life? Future generations would probably not even believe that the Builders had existed. They would become part of the myths and legends of the spiral arm, no more accepted than fairies and trolls and the Tristan free-space Manticore, no more real than the lost worlds of Shamble, Midas, Grisel, Merryman’s Woe, and Rainbow Reef. The images that she was carrying of the Labyrinth polyglyphs would be regarded as no more than clever fakes, produced by eccentrics as hoaxes to fool gullible people.
Maybe Quintus Bloom was doing the right thing. No one could ever accuse him of not living up to his beliefs. If the artifacts went, and you had devoted your life to them, perhaps you should go with them.
Darya turned to look back. Bloom had not moved. He was staring after them. When he saw Darya looking he raised his arm to her in an ironic salute. She felt a strange sense of loss. The great debate would never continue. She would have no chance now to persuade Bloom that he was wrong, that the Builders were of the past and present, not of the future. She would never again hear that confident voice, with its hypnotically persuasive style of presentation, discoursing so knowledgeably on the artifacts. Despite all his faults, she and Quintus Bloom shared one thing that set them apart from most of the rest of humanity: they were fascinated by every aspect of the Builders.
Bloom turned and began to move toward the vortex. It dwarfed him to insignificance. Darya could not take her eyes away as the tiny figure headed for the dark swirl of its center. He seemed to hover for one moment, right at the edge of the maelstrom. One arm waved a farewell; she was sure it was to her. In her mind she saw the driven little boy again, determined to be Number One. And then, without warning, the vortex took him.
Where was Quintus Bloom now? Somewhere far in the future, a million years up the stream of time, looking back on today as an event so distant that it merged into human history with cave dwellings or the first flight into space. Or dispersed to component atoms by the shearing forces of a vortex meant to remove from the spiral arm every evidence of the artifact. Or, as Darya preferred to believe, removed to another plane of existence entirely, where the Builders could examine at their leisure whatever their collecting jar of Labyrinth had brought from the final hours of artifact operation.
There would be a time to ponder those questions. But it was not now. E.C. Tally was pulling urgently at her arm. The remaining contents of Labyrinth were streaming toward the vortex, moving under the influence of that invisible tide. The outer wall was just ahead. The others had already passed through and were heading for the Salvation.
Darya felt no more than a slight ripple through her body as she met the wall. It was all that remained of the structure that had once seemed so indestructible and impenetrable. Would the ships themselves keep a permanent form, long enough to be useful? She hurried after E.C. Tally. The hatches of Salvation were open; the others were already on board. Louis Nenda reached out as she approached, swung Darya effortlessly inside, and slammed the hatch closed with one sweep of a brawny arm. Hans Rebka was in the pilot’s seat, reviewing the unfamiliar controls. He turned to glance over his shoulder at the lock, and saw that Darya had at last arrived. The worried expression left his face and he returned his attention to the power sequence. Five more seconds, and the ship’s engines came to life.
Not before time. Labyrinth itself was going. Salvation’s screens showed it changing shape, elongating, stretching toward the mouth of the vortex. The walls had begun to glow with internal light, reacting to the stresses on them. The structure was rotating madly, faster and faster.
“Hold on.” Rebka was engaging the drive. “This could get rough.”
The force from the vortex was reaching out to the ship. As it engulfed Labyrinth it was still growing. Darya felt a painful new force on her body, adding to the thrust of Salvation’s own drive.
Combined accelerations increased. A moment stretched on and on. Labyrinth was rolling — twisting — writhing. It distorted until it was a long, thin spiral, pulling out like a strand of melted glass. Beyond it, the vortex pulsed with energy. Bloated and quivering, it was snatching at the ship at the same time as it consumed Labyrinth. The shear forces on Darya’s body strengthened, shifted, changed direction.