TWO NERI WERE waiting near the entrance to the room, and they both looked nervous as hell. They reported that they had lost sight of the lander, but thought it had come this way.
"You don't know if it's in there?" asked L'Kell.
"We think it is. We saw something move in there. But we didn't want to go in," murmured one of the swimmers. "We didn't know what might happen—"
"Very well," said L'Kell, with a glance at Bandicut, who thought, /This is it, Char./ With L'Kell, Ik, and S'Cali, Bandicut moved cautiously past the swimmer and peered into the chamber opening.
The room was oval and about the size of a small gymnasium, and completely flooded. It was hard to see clearly, with only the Neri lanterns for light—and one other, tiny light source visible on the far side of the room. The lander, with a stolen Neri lantern? If so, it wasn't moving. Bandicut and his friends hovered just outside the entrance, taking a careful look. In the center of the egg-shaped room, a dark mass hung suspended like a petrified yolk; there was nothing but water where the white would have been. Bandicut could not tell, in the dim light, what supported the yolk. But there were definitely invisible forces active in the room. Even at the entrance, he could feel an indescribable tingle somewhere at the edges of his senses. He couldn't put a name to it, or even say which sense was affected, but it made him jittery in a physical way, like the effects of too much caffeine.
He took a slow breath to steady himself, and surveyed the perimeter of the room—the inner surface of the eggshell. It was not smooth, he realized, but festooned with spiky, spiral-shaped structures that looked almost like antennas. Was the whole thing some kind of space-time transformer? It was possible he was completely wrong; but it seemed to him that there was more visual distortion than could be accounted for by the water alone.
/// I feel resonances— ///
/Of—?/
/// Ancient memories . . . transformations . . .
long voyages, before I knew you. ///
Bandicut held his breath. /So you think—?/
/// Your guess may be right. ///
With a grunt, Bandicut turned in the water to face the others. "I'll go in. I think the quarx and I can handle it."
L'Kell's huge eyes peered at him. "That would be very dangerous. I question whether—"
"I know, but I think it's worth the risk. L'Kell, if that's the lander over there, I might be able to bring it out, save it." He turned to Ik. "Can we use your rope as a lifeline?"
Ik's voice was weak and distorted without a comm. "Hrahh." He began stretching out the rope, attaching it to Bandicut.
When the rope was secure around his waist, Bandicut called to L'Kell. "I can't swim very fast, so I need all of you to give me a good, solid push, straight toward that light. Okay?"
"John Bandicut, I don't know—"
"Let's just do it, okay?"
"Very well," said L'Kell, waving to S'Cali and another Neri to help. "Be careful, my friend."
Bandicut nodded, double-checked the rope, then caught Ik's eye and raised a circled thumb and forefinger. The Hraachee'an returned the gesture, and Bandicut turned to face the open chamber. He stretched his body so that he was floating horizontally, arms straight ahead. His heart pounded. "Ready!"
The Neri, with a long thrust, propelled him forward. "Let go!" he cried, then realized that they already had. He held himself rigid, stretching his momentum as he sailed through the water, across the open space, to the left of center. The tingling grew stronger around his head and shoulders and waist. As he felt his momentum failing, he gave a breaststroke kick and raised his head to check his position.
At least, that was what he'd intended. But instead of confirming his long, smooth glide, he found himself tumbling. /Wait—that's not right—/ Where he'd expected to see the central mass, he glimpsed a spinning array of spines, rapidly drawing closer. With a muffled cry, he tried to tuck, to change direction.
/// Don't make any sudden movements! ///
the quarx cried, applying just enough inhibition to slow his actions.
/What are you doing? We're going to hit—/
/// I don't think so!
It's an illusion!
Try turning your head—slowly. ///
He swallowed hard, turning. A spinning dizziness came over him, the world flipping . . . flipping again. Something was disrupting his equilibrium. He caught a sharp breath, reaching for his flight skills in spatial disorientation: When feelings contradict reality, ignore the seat-of-the-pants, suppress the instinct, follow the instruments. But there were no instruments here—just vision, and Ik's rope to pull him back. Ik's rope! He felt it slithering loose from his waist, and grabbed for it—too late. Gone! The spines and spirals were growing before his eyes. It was like silence-fugue, bad—but it wasn't silence-fugue, it was real.
/Charlie, help me!/ he whispered.
/// Working—the stones— ///
The answer was breathless, but the quarx was true to her word, and an instant later, he saw a spidery grid superimposed over his vision. /What's that—?/
/// The stones are
tracking your course changes.
I'll interpret— ///
He tried to answer, but his breath went out and he couldn't do anything except let go and allow the knowledge of the stones to flow through the quarx into his muscles.
He rotated slightly and stroked once, hard, with his arms. The deadly outer shell of the room ballooned and distorted, and opened up like a billowing curtain. In the center of the opening was the central mass, the egg yolk quivering like gelatin in zero gravity. A wave of dizziness passed through him. And along with it a feeling of another kind, a feeling that something or someone was nearby.
The lander?
The feeling was indistinct, reminding him of the neurolink. But there was a sense of disconnectedness, as if a gulf of space, or wavelength, or phase separated the someone-else from him, like a silent wall. He probed the surroundings with his thoughts, as he might have probed a neuro, trying to find the source of the feeling.
He felt a stirring in response, but couldn't identify it as animate or inanimate. He was losing his visual connection to this place, as if the dark mass had softened and surrounded him; he felt as if he were probing, falling through a wall of smoke, or something wispier yet firmer, light as smoke but solid, like an aerogel. He felt a boundary layer between where he was and where the something-else was. There was nothing humanlike about it; but it was aware of him, reacting to him, making ripples through some level of space-time to which he was sensitive.
/// I feel a sense of something long . . .
very long. ///
/Long, like in local terms?/
/// Long, like . . . cosmic.
Like a thread, or a tunnel,
stretching to infinity. ///
Bandicut shivered, suddenly wishing that he had not come here, had not made this connection. He felt utterly impotent, and ignorant, in the face of these forces. What did he think he was going to do, remake them? He thought he knew what this was now, thought it was a kind of reactor—or no, not really a reactor, it was a—
/// Stardrive, ///
the quarx murmured.
/Yes,/ he answered. And maybe it was disabled, or broken, maybe it no longer had the power to move a spacecraft—but it was not dead, not yet. He vividly remembered "threading space" with Charlie-Two aboard Neptune Explorer, and though it had seemed mind-bogglingly strange at the time, he suspected that this thing was more exotic, perhaps more like the "spatial transformation" that had propelled him from the solar system to the cold darkness of intergalactic space.
/// Possibly. Possibly true.
But . . . ///
The quarx was uncertain, and he knew she was trying to piece together his old memories with her old memories, trying to weave in whatever understanding the stones were able to give her.
/// The tunnel I feel here is more like . . .
the star-spanner, I think.
Not driving you, exactly, but firing you
through the light-years. ///
Char's words gave him a sudden, cold fear. /This thing is a star-spanner?/ Was it about to hurl him across interstellar space, ripping him from his friends and his last vestiges of—?
/// No, I don't think so.
It doesn't seem on the verge of that.
But if it is a star-spanner,
the stones think it's not from Shipworld. ///
/Then—/
/// And here's the other thing:
you're not actually in its presence—not yet.
It's not here with you. ///
Not in its presence? Bandicut thought. Then whose presence was he in? He felt himself rotating slowly in the water, and had a vision of the room's core, the central mass, curved around him like a doughnut. There was some serious bending of space-time happening here, and he didn't know whether to be fascinated or terrified.
/// John, I find this very confusing—
and yes, terrifying.
I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to. ///
Bandicut peered around anxiously, remembering with a jolt that he had come in here looking for the escaped lander. But his eyes were wavering, and he wasn't sure he would recognize the lander even if he saw it.
/// John, whatever we're directly in the presence of
is connected to something far more powerful,
and dangerous. ///
Bandicut drew a breath of dank air—and suddenly knew what the quarx was referring to. /The Maw of the Abyss? Are you telling me that this spaceship is connected to whatever's down there in the bottom of the ocean?/ He reeled at the thought.
Char didn't answer, didn't have to.
/I will be b'joogered,/ he whispered. And his thoughts began spiraling off in a way that might have led to silence-fugue or worse, but somehow stayed controlled. Maybe it was Char's influence, but whatever the reason, his thoughts were spinning in an uncanny convergence of rationality and intuition. He was coming to an understanding, and not by the usual route; it felt like speeding in an airplane around racing pylons, and scooping up words and data and clarity in a whirl that left no time for breath or articulation of thought.
He came to, with a shivering intake of breath—and a realization that he was rotating physically. He was peering down the barrel of a long, faintly glowing tube, and moving slowly toward it. That was what Char feared. He was not in the Maw, but he was close to it in some terrifying fashion; this thing surrounding him was intimately connected to the Maw, and had been since its arrival on this world.
/That's it,/ he whispered.
/// What's it? ///
The quarx had been trying to keep him together all this time, and she was dazed.
/That's what happened to the ship—I think./
/// You mean . . . ?
Wait—the stones are getting
some kind of data download. ///
/Data download?/ He waited, not speaking. As Char gathered the data, he let his mind fill with the resulting images, and slowly realized . . . were they downloading from some interstellar blackbox recorder the events that had brought this craft down? The images formed quickly and bewilderingly, but he caught the central event:
The stardrive, its tendrils extended into whatever tortured reality defined its operating regime, was caught in intersecting space-time fields projected by something deep in a distant planet. It should not be possible, but it was; it was trapped in a tightening web, unable to free itself. From orbit, unable even to turn itself off, it was being drawn into a deadly, spiraling descent . . .
The landing was cushioned by the same forces that caused it. The spaceship, half in and half out of normal space-time, did not so much crash as materialize at the bottom of the atmosphere, meters above the ocean surface. The impact, though hard enough to shatter critical stardrive components, was not so hard as to kill most of the passengers. It remained on the surface awhile, sinking slowly enough to allow for evacuation of living inhabitants and some hardware and supplies; and then it sank beneath the waves, leaving a scattered armada of rafts and makeshift boats to struggle toward shore.
The stardrive remained locked in the deathgrip of the strange thing that had doomed it. It moved a little, by fits and starts, closer to the thing. And its people, those it had carried across the stars in search of a new home, vanished over the waters and made themselves known only by whispering, half audible transmissions. Soon they did not even seem like the same people. They seemed even less so when they returned later, much later, to begin stripping the wreck, without so much as an attempt to speak to the soul of the stardrive.
There seemed a note of . . . regret? . . . or more like sadness . . . in the images. Was that a reflection of the beings who created the machine, or was it merely Bandicut and Char's interpretation?
Bandicut thought he heard something—a voice. Char?
/// Not me. ///
Then it spoke again. Not in words. The stones seemed unable to translate, or even put an overlay of meaning upon it. But he felt the stones' increasing desire to understand it. It was a thrumming kind of sound, like a string bass simulating a human voice. At first he'd thought he had heard it in his mind; now it seemed to be vibrating through the water, surrounding him, making his skin tingle.
And then it faded away.
/Did you hear that? Do you know what it was?/
/// I tried. But I couldn't—
wait, I feel something closer.
Do you feel it? ///
Bandicut strained, let his awareness drift back from its focus on the stardrive. There was something out there, something much smaller and weaker. Not a part of the stardrive connection. But it felt alive: confused, frightened.
/// Can you see it . . . with your eyes? ///
He blinked. He had become so engrossed in the inner contact that he had nearly lost his sense of the physical. The light was uneven, wavering, warped by the distortions of the stardrive core. He slowly turned. One instant, the stardrive seemed an archway surrounding him; the next, it was a strangely glimmering pinpoint in front of him.
And then he saw it, floating just beyond the pinpoint: a dark shape, bent and curled. It took him a moment to realize what it was, helpless in the fields of distortion. /Char—/
/// Yes, that's it.
It's the lander, the one we came for. ///
Bandicut nodded slowly; he'd had trouble remembering how this sojourn had begun—in an effort to capture, or rescue, the lander. /What now? I don't know if I can get over to it./ He moved his arms and legs, not so much to propel himself as to establish whether he could propel himself. He quickly found that his movement in the water was almost uncontrollable; there were invisible, and turbulent, currents here that he could not compete with.
/// Arms out—hold them still. ///
/Uh?/ He did as Charlie requested, but without understanding.
/// If we can't control the currents,
maybe we can ride them. ///
After a few moments of using his arms as vanes, he saw that it was indeed having an effect. He felt the current turning him and carrying him downward, but away from the lander. /Ride them where?/ he asked worriedly.
/// Toward the lander, I think. ///
/But this isn't—/
/// The currents do not move in straight lines.
The stones have been trying to track them.
If we can sweep around . . . ///
He was, in fact, drifting below the core now, in a slow arc that perhaps would take him toward the lander, after all. At the same time, the shape of the room had begun changing around him, in a slow, elastic twisting. He steadied his nerves, and waited for the stones' grid to reappear in his vision; and it did, but just for a moment, and then the grid distorted and dissolved.
/// They're losing track . . .
they're not sure anymore. ///
He grunted, and blinked in a slow, methodical rhythm, taking in the surroundings each time his eyes opened, but taking care not to keep them open long enough for the blurring to make him any dizzier. He must have drifted into a more active zone of the space-time-altering fields. Now how the hell was he going to get out of it?
/// Try to descend, ///
murmured Charlene's voice, as though from a very great distance.
Descend? How could he possibly even know which way was down?
/// Exhale . . . streamline . . . ///
Of course; he had forgotten his basic diving skills. He expelled all the air from his lungs, pressed his arms to his sides. He felt himself beginning to sink.
A rainbow flashed around him once, twice.
And then he heard the voice of the stardrive, a chime singing to him.
/Please, stones—what are they saying?/
He was descending out of the field, he thought . . . or perhaps not. Something was propelling him forward, a current. He drew in a shallow breath and expelled it, trying to keep his negative buoyancy. Was the stardrive core over his head now? He could see only a haze of sparkling things that, for a startling moment, reminded him of the colony creatures called the Maksu. He called out silently, Can you hear me? Can you stop this madness?
The current carried him forward, and then he began rising in an arc that no amount of breath control would affect. And he heard a voice that was a little like the husky voice of Ik, and a little like the impossible metallic groan of the Maksu, and a little like a dozen other kinds of voices, saying, "This one needs you. Can you help him to freedom?"
And in that instant of uncertainty, he suddenly saw the curled, crippled shape of the lander directly before him. He reached out and caught the lander in his hands, and an instant later felt the current coiling about him, pulling him into a slow half-somersault. He struggled for a moment to slip out of the current, but it was hopeless. Ik, pull me in! he thought—then remembered that Ik's rope was gone. He drew a slow, even breath, and allowed himself simply to tumble with the disorienting movement of the current.
Lights seemed to sparkle and flash around him again, and then they went out; and he was lost in the darkness, the alien helpless in his arms.