He touched a final command sequence, and the capsule started them back out along the narrow corridor.
Hans Rebka lay back in his seat and stared ahead, waiting for the first sight of Quake as they emerged from Midway Station.
He felt tense, yet oddly satisfied. His instincts had not let him down. The blow that he had been waiting for since Max Perry told the others that Quake was off-limits had been delivered.
Or at least, one blow had been struck.
His feeling of impending revelations had not gone away completely. The old inner voice assured him that there was more to come.
ARTIFACT: PHAGE
UAC#: 1067
Galactic Coordinates: Not applicable
Name: Phage Star/planet association: Not applicable
Bose Access Node: All Estimated age: Various. 3.6 to 8.2 Megayears.
Exploration History: The first Phages were reported by humans during the exploration of Flambeau, in E. 1233. Subsequently, it was learned that Phages had been observed and avoided by Cecropian explorers for at least five thousand years. The first human entry of a Phage maw was made in E. 1234 during the Maelstrom conflict (no survivors).
Phage avoidance systems came into widespread use in E. 2103, and are now standard equipment in Builder exploration.
Physical Description: The Phages are all externally identical, and probably internally similar though functionally variable. No sensor (or explorer) has ever returned from a Phage interior.
Each Phage has the form of a gray, regular dodecahedron, of side forty-eight meters. The surface is roughly textured, with mass sensors at the edge of each face. Maws can be opened at the center of any face, and can ingest objects of up to thirty meters’ radius and of apparently indefinite length. (In E. 2238, Sawyer and S’kropa fed a solid silicaceous fragment of cylindrical cross-section and twenty-five meters’ radius to a Phage of the Dendrite Artifact. With an ingestion rate of one kilometer per day, four hundred and twenty-five kilometers of material, corresponding to the full length of the fragment, were absorbed. No mass change was detected in the Phage, nor any change in any other of its physical parameters.)
Phages are capable of slow independent locomotion, with a mean rate of one or two meters per standard day. No Phage has ever been seen to move at a velocity in excess of one meter per hour with respect to the local frame.
Intended Purpose: Unknown. Were it not for the fact that Phages have been found in association with over three hundred of the twelve hundred known artifacts, and only in such association, any relationship to the Builders would be questioned. They differ greatly in scale and number from all other Builder constructs.
It has been speculated that the Phages served as general scavengers for the Builders, since they are apparently able to ingest and break down any materials made by the clades, and anything made by the Builders with the single exception of the structural hulls and the paraforms (e.g., the external shell of Paradox, the surface of Sentinel, and the concentric hollow tubes of Maelstrom).
CHAPTER 12
Summertide minus eleven
Darya Lang had the terrible suspicion that she had wasted half her life. Back on Sentinel Gate she had believed it when her family told her that she lived in the best place in the universe: “Sentinel Gate, half a step from Paradise,” the saying went. And with her research facilities and her communications network, she had seen no need to travel.
But first Opal, and now Quake, taught her otherwise. She loved the newness of the experience, the contact with a world where everything was strange and exciting. From the moment she stepped out of the capsule onto the dry, dusty surface of Quake, she felt all her senses intensify by a factor of a hundred.
Her nose said it first. The air of Quake held a powerful mixture of odors. That was the scent of flowers, surely, but not the lush, lavish extravagances that garlanded Sentinel Gate. She had to seek them out — and there they were, not five paces in front of her, tiny bell-shaped blooms of lilac and lavender that peeped out from a gray-green cover of wiry gorse. The plants hugged the sides of a long, narrow crevice too small to be called a valley. From their miniature blossoms came an urgent midday perfume, out of all proportion to their size. It was as though flowering, fertilization, and seeding could not wait another hour.
And maybe it can’t, Darya thought. For overlaid on that heady scent was a sinister, sulfurous tinge of distant vulcanism: the breath of Quake, approaching Summertide. She paused, breathed deep, and knew she would remember the mixture of smells forever.
Then she sneezed, and sneezed again. There was fine dust in the air, irritant powdery particles that tickled the nose.
She raised her eyes, looking beyond the miniature valley with its carpet of urgent flowers, out beyond the plain to a smoky horizon fifteen kilometers away. The effects of dust were easy to see there. Where the nearby surface stood out in harsh umbers and ochres, in the distance a gray pall had darkened and softened the artist’s palette, painting everything in muted tones. The horizon itself was not visible, except that to the east her eye traced — or imagined — a faint line of volcanic peaks, cinnamon-hued and jagged.
Mandel stood high in the sky. As she watched, it began to creep behind the shielding bulk of Opal. The brilliant crescent shrank, moment by moment. At the present time of year there would be no more than partial eclipse, but it was enough to change the character of the light. The redder tones of Amaranth bled into the landscape. Quake’s surface became a firelit landscape of subterranean gloom.
At that moment Darya heard the first voice of Summertide. A low rumble filled the air, like the complaining snore of a sleepy giant. The ground trembled. She felt a quiver and a pleasant tingle in the soles of her feet.
“Professor Lang,” J’merlia said from behind her. “Atvar H’sial reminds you that we have far to go, and little time. If we might proceed…”
Darya realized that she had not yet completed her first step onto Quake’s surface, and Atvar H’sial and J’merlia were still standing on the ladder from the capsule. As Darya moved out of the way the Cecropian crept past her and stood motionless, broad head sweeping from side to side. J’merlia came to crouch beneath the front of the carapace.
Darya watched the trumpet-horn ears as they swept across the scene. What did Atvar H’sial “see” when she listened to Quake? What did those exquisite organs of smell “hear,” when every airborne molecule could tell a story?
They had talked about the world as it was perceived by echolocation, but the explanation was unsatisfying. The best analogy that Darya could create was of a human standing on the seabed, in a place where the water was turbid and the light level low. Everything was monochrome vision, with a range of only a few tens of meters.
But the analogy was inadequate. Atvar H’sial was sensitive to a huge range of sound frequencies, and she could certainly “see” the distant mutter of the volcanoes. Those signals lacked the fine spatial resolution offered by her own sonar, but they were definite sensory inputs.
And there were other factors, perhaps even other senses, that Darya was only vaguely aware of; for instance, at the moment the Cecropian was lifting one forelimb and pointing off to the middle distance. Was she sensing the waft of distant odors, with olfactory lobes so acute that every trace of smell told a story?