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  But Darya’s mind was spinning. She could not give her opinion. Not because Bloom’s suggestion that the Builders were time travelers from humanity’s own future was unthinkable.

  No. Because Darya had considered that possibility herself, long ago — and rejected it, for reasons too subtle to present off the cuff, and in public. She shook her head at Quintus Bloom, turned and began to push her way back toward the entrance. She had to think. If there really was a new artifact, as he had suggested, she had to find out all there was to know about it; then she had to re-evaluate everything she had ever thought and done in her whole blessed career.

  “So that was it. The talk by Quintus Bloom left Darya fit to burst. Anyone could tell that by looking at her. After she’d had a session or two with Bloom she took off. Left Sentinel Gate.”

  Hans Rebka stopped speaking. He showed no signs of starting again.

  Louis Nenda, who had been offering pheromonal simultaneous translation for the benefit of Atvar H’sial, glared at him. The transition had been abrupt, from detailed description to a sudden two sentence cut-off. It was certainly not a logical end point.

  “Are you saying that’s it? That’s all you’re going to say about what happened, and where and why she went?”

  Rebka shrugged. “I’ve told you all I know.”

  “And you let her go, just like that. Didn’t try to talk her out of it, or stop her, or go with her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “He is lying, Louis.” The pheromonal message from Atvar H’sial came quickly. It was not necessary.

  “Damn right he’s lying. But why?” Out loud he said, “Were you in on the sessions she had with Quintus Bloom?”

  Rebka shrugged. “I sat in on the seminar, until it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to understand more than three words.” He looked Nenda straight in the eye. “I don’t know what they said to each other.”

  Nenda stared right back. “I believe you.” He added to Atvar H’sial, “In a pig’s eye. I can lie with a straight face as well as anybody. What now, At?”

  “We have something of a problem, Louis. I do not wish to reveal to him that Bloom’s prediction, of changing and vanishing artifacts, appears to be coming true.”

  Hans Rebka snapped his fingers. “Oh, there was one other thing that will interest you, Nenda. Soon after we arrived at Sentinel Gate, J’merlia and Kallik rolled up at the institute.”

  As a distraction, it was first-rate. Nenda went pop-eyed. “Kallik is here now? And J’merlia? Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

  “Because they aren’t here now. Darya took them with her.”

  “She can’t do that! They don’t belong to her. They belong to me and Atvar H’sial.”

  “Not any more. They have the rights of free beings.”

  “Nuts. I have their slave cubes, right here.” Nenda began to fumble at his tight head-to-toe clothing, which proved almost as hard to get into as it was uncomfortable.

  “Louis, what is going on?” The exchange between Nenda and Rebka had been too fast for Atvar H’sial to receive a pheromonal translation.

  “J’merlia and Kallik. Been here — and gone. With Darya Lang.”

  “My J’merlia!”

  “And my Kallik. I know what I said, At, but we better be ready for more than a day’s stay. You and me got lots of work to do before we can leave Sentinel Gate.”

  Chapter Six

  Hans Rebka had told the truth about Darya’s first encounter with Quintus Bloom, and what happened afterwards (even if it was not, for reasons that Hans preferred to keep to himself, the whole truth).

  She had run from the lecture hall, so swamped with emotions that her mind refused to function. But ten minutes later she was pushing her way back in, barging past the same angry people as on her first entrance. Wrong or right, Quintus Bloom had not finished, and she had to hear the rest of it.

  She knew there had to be more, if Quintus Bloom was to retain his plausibility with Professor Merada and the institute. Merada, whatever his faults, was scrupulously honest and painstakingly thorough.

  Darya herself had long ago noted — and remarked on — the mastery of time and space exhibited in the Builder artifacts. It was easy to form a theory around the idea that the Builders had time travel. But theories were a dime a dozen. The partition that separated science and wishful thinking was evidence: observations and firm facts.

  The odd thing was that Quintus Bloom had facts, more than Darya would have believed. As he spoke she became convinced. The artifact near Jerome’s World, whether it was new or not, certainly existed. Bloom had visited Labyrinth, and found a way to penetrate its coiled and re-entrant geometry. He had taken recording equipment with him. At the key moment of his presentation, the darkened stage of the research institute filled with scenes of Labyrinth: the scan from all angles, and the bizarre interior where nothing remained still and nothing followed straight lines.

  Quintus Bloom kept his comments to a minimum. He allowed the images to speak for themselves, until at last he said, “This is the innermost chamber of Labyrinth. The scenes that follow are taken directly from polyglyphs contained within that chamber. I have performed no editing, no adding to or subtracting from. I merely display what I found revealed on the chamber walls.”

  The scene at first was static, a fixed panorama of points forming a rough crescent. Every audience member knew it well. It was the local part of the spiral arm, complete with bright stars and diffuse clouds of dark or glowing gas. Builder artifacts were shown as minute flecks of vivid magenta. Nothing moved on the image, and the tension in the lecture hall grew steadily. When a green point flared suddenly into existence, there was a sigh from the whole audience.

  “I suggest that you ignore that for the moment, and concentrate your attention here.” Bloom indicated a region of the spiral arm far from the green point, which had now spread to become a close-set pattern. Soon an orange speck of light flickered into existence, to spread in its turn and swallow up the green.

  “Now, if you please, watch closely where the cursor is set. A new point — now! And its location: Earth, the original home of the human clade.” But Quintus Bloom had little need to speak. That source location was familiar to all.

  So was the sequence that followed. One by one, other points brightened, moving out from Earth and Sol in a roughly spherical pattern. “Centauri, Barnard, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni, Procyon, Tau Ceti, Kapteyn, 70 Ophiuchi…” The names were spoken, not by Quintus Bloom but by the audience. It was little more than a whisper in the darkened hall, the ritual recital of the nearest stars that humans had explored at crawlspeed, before the discovery of the Bose Network.

  The display continued: millennia of human exploration, shown in a couple of minutes. Bright sparks of a new color appeared, far off in the spiral arm. They too grew in numbers, until suddenly a thousand stars burst into light simultaneously.

  “The discovery of the Bose Network, and the Bose Drive.” Again, Bloom’s comment was unnecessary. Everyone recognized the moment when humanity had exploded into the spiral arm at a rate limited only by the available ships and explorers, and human space had become linked with the sprawling worlds of the Cecropia Federation.

  The dance of the lights continued. The orange points, which had winked out one by one, reappeared. But now the appearance of the spiral arm was no longer familiar. Myriads of stars glowed, in many colors. They extended across thousand of light-years, far beyond the boundaries of the Fourth Alliance, beyond the Cecropia Federation, past the farthest reaches of the Zardalu Communion. Suddenly everything was new, the familiar star maps swallowed up within a larger panorama.

  “No longer our past. Our future, and the future of the other clades of the arm.” Bloom allowed the display to go on, spreading through the Arm and beyond, until at a gesture from him it suddenly vanished. He was left alone at the front of the stage.

  “I know some of you had trouble with the idea, when I proposed a few minutes ago that t
he Builders are our own distant descendants.” His voice was conversational, even casual. “That’s all right. I had trouble myself, when it first occurred to me. But rather than trying to persuade you that I am right, I want to point something out to you, and let you make your own decision.”

  Darya had the feeling that he was speaking directly to her. Certainly he was looking her way.

  “The scenes you have just seen showed the spiral arm as it was long ago,” he went on, “and as it appears to be far in the future. Those images were taken from within Labyrinth itself. Now, is Labyrinth truly a new artifact, as I have suggested? Or is it merely one that we have managed to overlook for all these years? That is not beyond possibility, since it is small, and a free-space structure. Jerome’s World is the closest inhabited planet, but we are still over half a light-year away.

  “We then have two possibilities: Labyrinth is new, and recently appeared; or Labyrinth has, like the rest of the Builder artifacts, been present for millions of years.

  “Which one is the more likely? I began equally happy with either. But then I asked a question. Was it plausible that, three million years or more in the past, the Builders had been able to make a prediction — a precise prediction — of the way in which the clades would move out into the spiral arm? I do not think so. Ask yourselves the same question, and see what conclusion you reach.”

  Behind Quintus Bloom, the moving tableau began again from the beginning. Earth was illuminated, then the neighboring stars. The Zardalu came and went; the Cecropians appeared. The audience could again follow that precise historical pattern of interstellar travel and development. The familiar expansion through space had a soothing, almost a hypnotic effect.

  “If you believe that the Builders were, millions of years ago, able to make such devilishly accurate predictions, that’s fine.” Bloom was an invisible voice, lost within a sea of stars. “If not, take your thinking a little farther. Suppose that Labyrinth appeared recently — as recently as yesterday. Now, do you believe the development patterns we saw for the future? If you do, then we again face the same question: How can the Builders, today, know the precise pattern of expansion through the spiral arm as it will be hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of years in the future? It is the same problem, merely displaced through time.”

  The whole spiral arm was aflame with stars again. Earth had vanished, the Fourth Alliance was lost in an overwhelming sea of light.

  “If you answer that the Builders had that magical power to predict the far future, then you assign to them talents that strain my belief past bearing. But if your answer is, the Builders are able to show such a pattern because it forms a part of their own past, then your thoughts agree with mine. The Builders are not three million years in the past; they are who-knows-how-many years in the future.”

  * * *

  Darya listened to the applause that filled the lecture hall at the end of Quintus Bloom’s seminar. She said not a word, in spite of the many heads turned in her direction. She knew what they wanted. Either a fight between her and Bloom, or agreement that his ideas explained what hers could not. She would not humor them. Science wasn’t a show-business talent search, conducted in large halls and decided by audience applause. Her time would come later, when she had the opportunity to probe Bloom for details and ask the subtle questions denied in the thirty-second sound bite of a public forum.

  That chance would not be long in coming. Professor Merada always hosted a private dinner for visiting scholars after a seminar. Darya would be invited, even though she had just arrived at the institute. Her mouth watered at the prospect — and not because of the food.

  Darya arrived a few minutes early. Professor Merada was already there, sitting as usual at the head of the table, with Quintus Bloom on his right. Normally Carmina Gold would sit on Merada’s immediate left. Tonight that had been changed. Darya circled the long table, seeking her own name card, and was surprised to find it right next to Merada, directly across from Quintus Bloom.

  Bloom nodded to Darya, smiled at her reaction to the seating plan, and said, “At my request.” He went on talking to Merada.

  Darya sat down uncertainly. Already, in some vague way, she was on the defensive. She studied the man across the table.

  Seen close up, Bloom was not the attractive figure he had seemed on the stage. His face and neck were marred by some kind of skin disease, with coin-sized red sores only partly concealed by ointment and powder. His tongue seemed far too long. Darya watched with a revolted fascination as the pink tip flicked out far past his white teeth at every pause for breath.

  “Well, Professor Lang?” Merada was addressing her. “What do you think?”

  I think I’m an idiot. But Darya did not say it. She, who had mixed with Zardalu and a dozen other alien forms, had been so put off by minor human variations that she had not even been listening! For all she knew, everyone on Jerome’s World looked like Quintus Bloom.

  “I’m sorry. What was that again?”

  Professor Merada, heavy and humorless, nodded as though confirming some private suspicion. “Our guest was suggesting that perhaps it is a mistake to issue the fifth edition of the Artifact Catalog. It might be out of date, even before it appears.”

  That was enough to grab Darya’s attention — all her attention. The Lang Catalog — her catalog! — was the Institute’s most respected publication. If Merada was considering withdrawing it, the influence of Quintus Bloom went far deeper than Darya had realized.

  “It’s certainly not out of date! The new theory is wrong.” Darya noticed the change in the room as she spoke. Others had arrived while she was preoccupied with Quintus Bloom. She glanced along the table. Every face was familiar to her; even E. Crimson Tally’s, although it was anyone’s guess as to how the embodied robot had found his way in to what was supposed to be an invited dinner. And all those faces were turned in her direction, with every other conversation at the table abandoned.

  Darya had had four hours between the end of the seminar and the start of the dinner. Not long, but enough to go back to her notes and review her own analyses.

  “I say that the Builders are from the past, and existed millions of years ago. Whether they ceased to exist, or whether they now exist on some other plane that is beyond our senses, is not important. They were here, in the spiral arm. They made the artifacts. The Builders were certainly far different from us, in ways that we may never understand. They were masters of both space and time, and perhaps they could predict future events as we cannot. Furthermore, their artifacts call for a technology beyond our own, and possible changes to our understanding of the laws of physics. But that is all.”

  Darya glanced again along the table. She had everyone’s attention. Quintus Bloom was smiling slightly, and Carmina Gold was nodding. E. Crimson Tally seemed slightly puzzled, as though what Darya had said was self-evident.

  “Now compare that with what you are suggesting.” Darya glared at Bloom. “The Builders, you say, are from the future. But that is not an explanation of the Builders, it is merely a source of paradox. Let me make my point simply, by asking: Which future? If you say that they are from, say, Future A, then by coming back and planting the artifacts they will have created a different future for the spiral arm, say, Future B. If you reply that they did not create a different future, then Future A must be unaffected by the appearance of the artifacts; if it is unaffected, then there was no point to introducing the artifacts. Time travel as an explanation always has this fatal flaw: it contains the seeds of its own logical destruction. My ideas may require changes to the laws of physics. Yours are inconsistent with the laws of logic, and that is a far more serious problem.”

  It was not coming out quite right. Somehow her clear thoughts were being twisted on the way from brain to lips.

  Quintus Bloom was still smiling, and now he was shaking his head.

  “But my dear Professor Lang, why are you so convinced that our present understanding of logic is any better th
an our understanding of physics? You asked us all a question. Let me now ask you a couple. First, does anything in your ideas explain the appearance of the new artifact, Labyrinth?”

  “I don’t know that it’s new. I have had no chance to inspect it.” That was a weak answer, and Darya knew it.

  “But I have done so, in detail. However, since you have not seen Labyrinth, let us omit it from consideration. Will you admit that there are changes in other artifacts, profound changes, more than there have ever been before?”

  “I agree that there have been some changes. I’m not sure how great they are.”

  “And do your theories explain why there have been changes?”

  “Not yet. I came back to the institute to start a new investigation, precisely to explore those anomalies.”

  “Ah. A worthy objective. But I can explain them now, without that research program. You say there have been ‘some’ changes. Professor Lang, when did you last visit an artifact?”

  “I came here directly from the Torvil Anfract. It is an artifact.”

  “Indeed?” Bloom’s eyebrows raised, and he glanced along the table. “But it is not listed in the famous Lang Catalog, the volume which we all take as our final authority.” He turned to Merada. “Unless someone with greater knowledge can correct my memory…”

  “It’s not in the Catalog,” snapped Darya.

  “Not even in the upcoming fifth edition? The new edition?”

  “It is not in the Catalog,” Merada said. “Distinguished guest—”

  “Please. Call me Quintus.”

  “If you prefer it. Quintus, the Torvil Anfract had never been proposed as an artifact, until Professor Lang did so a moment ago. And it will never be listed as an artifact, without my personal review of the evidence.” Merada glanced reproachfully at Darya.

  Bloom was still smiling benignly. “Very well, let us leave the Anfract for the moment. I want to ask Professor Lang: When did you last visit any Builder artifact other than the Torvil Anfract? One that is in the famous Lang Catalog.”