Lio announced, “We have perhaps only a few minutes to get inside and find something to breathe before every door in the Daban Urnud is locked against us.”
“What about the Valers?” Arsibalt said.
“I think it would be wisest to assume that they and everyone working on the World Burner are as good as dead,” Lio said, after a moment’s thought.
“They are attacking now?” I asked.
“They are boarding it now,” Lio said.
Or—technically speaking—reminded me. For we had discussed this eventuality. “What if, when we come in sight of the World Burner, we see evidence that the Geometers are just about to launch it?”
“Ah, well, of course that would change everything, we’d have to fork to a completely different branch of the plan, not a moment to spare!” I knew we’d gone over it. But I had filed it, in my head, under the category of “things very unlikely to happen, hence safely forgotten.” Lio, however, had not forgotten. “If the Valers can manage to get aboard the World Burner covertly, they’ll hide, and take no further action until just before their air supply runs out. That’s to give the rest of us time to find a way in. But if the World Burner launches—or if someone sees them, and raises the alarm—well—”
“Bad things will happen,” Jesry snapped.
“So we might or might not have a little time,” I said.
“Which means, we should act as if we have none at all,” Lio returned. “Jules?” For the Laterran had been silent for a long time. “You still with us?”
“Pardon me,” Jules returned. “I am amazed, thinking of the havoc that our friends of the Ringing Vale are about to unleash. It is an inconceivable nightmare for the Pedestal, the worst embarrassment they will have suffered in one thousand years. My loyalties are torn several ways, you know.”
“No matter how much conflict is in your soul,” I said, “you can’t possibly object to the destruction of the World Burner, can you?”
“No,” said Jules softly, but distinctly. “In that my feelings are unalloyed. What a shame, if some of those working on it are slain! But to work on such a horrible device—” He did not finish the sentence, but I knew that, inside his space suit, he was shrugging.
“So mainly you just don’t want to introduce Everything Killers to the Daban Urnud,” I said.
“That is certainly correct.”
Lio broke in: “I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but: take us to your leader,”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Point us to the Urnudans. Then your work is done. You can go home and get a decent meal.”
“Which is more than we can say for ourselves,” Arsibalt pointed out. “Yes,” Jules said, “the irony. No food for you. Not here!”
“So then,” Lio said, “what is your decision?” All of us shared his impatience, if for no other reason than that we were running out of air. I’d like to report that I was still thinking coolly, applying the Rake to everything that was clattering through my mind. But in truth I was stunned and bewildered and—if this made sense—hurt by the sudden departure of Osa, Vay, Esma, and Gratho. I’d known, of course, that there were various contingency plans. Had never fooled myself that I could know all of them. But I’d been telling myself all along that the Valers would always be with us. When I’d first seen them on the coach at Tredegarh I’d been horrified by the idea that I was about to be sent off on the kind of mission where such persons might be needed. But over the days since, I had grown used to—and proud of—being on just such a mission. Now, here we were, at its most critical moment, and the Valers were suddenly gone, without explanation, without even a “goodbye and good luck!” The logic of the decision they’d made was unassailable—what could be more important than disabling the World Burner? But where did it leave the rest of us?
“Is it possible,” I heard myself saying, “that we are a spent delivery mechanism? Like those boosters that threw us into space—to be dumped into the sea?”
“That’s totally plausible,” Jesry said without hesitation. “We did our lessons well and played some clever tricks to get the four Valers here. That job is done. Now, here we are. No food, no oxygen, no communications, and no way home.”
“You overestimate the importance of the World Burner,” Jad announced. “It is a bluff. Its existence forces our military to act in ways it would not otherwise. Its destruction would give Arbre back a measure of freedom. But what use the Sæcular Power would make of that freedom is yet to be known, and our actions may yet be of some importance. We go on.”
“Jules?” Lio said. “How about it?”
“It is tempting to drop through this opening before us, no?” Jules said. For we had instinctively turned our backs on the World Burner, as if this would protect us from whatever was about to erupt there. Once more we were gazing down into the gap, watching Orbs 6 and 7 rotate past, glimpsing the Core in the cleft between them. “But then we are in the light, where we may be seen. And the Orbstack rotates with too much velocity for us ever to catch it. No. We must go in via the Core. But to enter the Core, we must first go in at a vertex.” He toddled around until he was gazing at the vertex that, as we faced the shock piston, was to our left. “That is the observatory. You’ve studied the pictures.” He toddled right. “That one is a military command post.”
“Does the observatory have airlocks?” Arsibalt asked. For all of us were now looking leftward—no one felt up to invading a military command post, not after we’d lost our Valers.
“Oh yes, you are looking at one,” said Jules, and began walking toward it. We fell in step.
“Er—I am?”
“The dome that houses the telescope is, itself, a great airlock,” Jules explained.
“Makes sense,” Jesry said. “To work on the telescope, they’d want to flood the dome with air. Then, when they were ready to make observations, they’d evacuate it and expose it to space.” Which is where I normally would have become irritated with Jesry for lecturing the rest of us. But it went by me. I was fascinated, dumbfounded, by an idea I had not dared to think of for a week: taking my suit off. Being able to touch my face.
Arsibalt was on the same track: “The way I smell will probably seem funny when I reminisce about it years hence.”
“Yes,” Lio said, “if odors can travel between cosmi, everything down-Wick of us is about to die.”
“Thanks for the preview,” Jesry said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I suggested.
Sammann asked, “Is anyone going to be on duty in this observatory?”
“Perhaps not physically there,” Jules said. “The telescopes are controlled remotely on our version of the Reticulum. But the big one will be in use, certainly—making a survey of your lovely cosmos, which is all new to us.”
The vertex was looming mountainously as we carried on this conversation. Old instincts warned me that we had an exhausting climb ahead of us. But, of course, it was no climb at all, because we were weightless. Without having to discuss it we made for the “highest” and largest of the domes, which, as Jules had promised, was open. It was a spherical shell, split into two hemispheres, which had spread apart on tracks to expose a multi-segmented mirror with a diameter of some thirty feet. We all clambered through the gap between the hemispheres, which was wide enough to throw a three-bedroom house through, and hand-over-handed ourselves “down” to the level of the trusses and gimbals that supported the mirror—all following, I think, a sort of instinct to get indoors, under cover, away from the terrible exposure we had been living with for so long. Jules pointed out a hatch by which we could gain entry to the pressurized regions of the vertex once the dome had been closed and filled with air. There was even a nice big red panic button that we could slam to emergency-pressurize the dome. But he advised us not to use it, because this would trigger alarms all over the Daban Urnud. Instead he pulled himself up on the struts that held the telescope’s objective suspended at the mirror’s focal point. He peeled the reflective blanket off his chest and stuffed it in there, then clambered “down” to rejoin us. Meanwhile, the rest of us tried to stay calm and control our breathing. Arsibalt, who used more oxygen than anyone else, was down to ten minutes. Sammann had twenty-five; the two of them swapped oxygen tanks. I had eighteen. Lio suggested we all try to eat as much as possible; if we were separated from our suits, we’d have no food left except for a few energy bars that we could carry with us. So I sucked more gruel from the nozzle and made a prolonged and labored effort not to throw it right back up into the scupper.