There was nothing else remotely like it in the whole universe. The first long hours of learning, all apparently futile and unproductive. Then the inexplicable conviction that there was something hidden away in what you were studying, some unperceived reality just beyond reach. Then the creeping-skin sensation at the back of the neck — the lightning flash as a thousand isolated facts flew to arrange themselves into a pattern — the coherent picture that sprang into sharp focus. The bone-deep pleasure of other ideas, apparently unrelated, hurrying into position and becoming parts of the same whole.
She had felt that satisfaction a dozen times in as many years, in her work on the ancient Builder artifacts. One year earlier she had lost touch with that life, consumed by the excitement of pursuing evidence of the Builders themselves across the spiral arm and beyond. And less than a month ago, sure that her cerebral contentment was gone forever, she had gladly agreed to go with Hans Rebka.
Well, she had been wrong. Once a research worker, always a research worker. She didn’t have a hundredth the interest in the Zardalu that she was finding in the study of the Torvil Anfract. It was the most fascinating object in the universe.
And then, the paradox: as Darya tried to focus harder and harder on the Anfract, she found her mind turning away from it, again and again, back to her old studies of the Builders. It seemed like a lack of control, an irritating mental foil. The Builders were a distraction, just when she did not need one.
And then it hit her. The revelation.
The Anfract was a Builder artifact.
It was of a scale that dwarfed any other artificial structure in the spiral arm. The Anfract was a bigger project than the reconstruction of the Mandel system, bigger than the Builders’ out-of-galaxy creation of Serenity itself. Improbably big, impossibly big.
But the analogies with other artifacts, once seen, became undeniable. The light-focusing properties of Lens were here. So was the multiply-connected nature of Paradox. She recalled the Builder-made singularity in the Winch of the Dobelle Umbilical, and the knotted topology of Sentinel. They all had a correspondence with the structure of the Anfract.
And that meant—
Darya’s mind made the intuitive leap that reached beyond hard evidence. If the Anfract was a Builder construct, then the “natural” set of nested singularities around which the Erebus was orbiting was surely an artifact, too. But within it, according to Darya’s own analysis, lay the original Zardalu homeworld. If that was true, it could not be coincidence. There must be a far closer relationship than anyone had ever realized between the vanished Builders and the hated Zardalu.
A connection, between the Builders and the Zardalu.
But what connection? Darya was tempted to reject her own logic. The time scales were so incompatible. The Builders had disappeared millions of years ago. The Zardalu had been exterminated from the spiral arm only eleven thousand years ago.
The link: it had to be the sentient Builder constructs. The only surviving specimens of the Zardalu had been captured by the constructs during the Great Rising and preserved in stasis on Serenity far out of the galactic plane. Now it seemed that the world of Genizee had itself been shielded from outside contact, by barriers designed to discourage — or destroy — approaching expeditions. And only the Builders, or more likely their sentient creations, could have constructed those guarding walls.
Darya thought again of Hans Rebka, but now in very different terms. If only he were there. She desperately needed someone to talk to, someone who could listen with a cool head and demolish logical flaws or wishful thinking. But instead Hans was—
Dear God! She was jerked out of her intellectual trance by a dreadful thought. The seedship party was flying into something more complex and potentially dangerous than anyone on board had imagined. They believed that they were entering a set of natural singularities, with a natural planet inside. Instead they were entering an artifact, a lion’s den of uncertainty, filled with who-knew-what deliberate booby traps. There could be other barriers, designed to frustrate or destroy all would-be explorers of the region inside the singularities.
They had to be warned.
Darya waded out through the mess in the observation bubble — the floor was littered with her hard-copy outputs — and ran back to find Julian Graves. There was no sign of him in the control room, the galley, the sleeping quarters, or anywhere that he would normally be.
Darya cursed the huge size of the Erebus, with its hundreds of chambers of all sizes, and ran on along the main corridor that led to the cargo holds and the engine rooms.
She did not find Graves, but along the way she encountered E.C. Tally. The embodied computer was standing by the shield that surrounded one of the power kernels.
“Councilor Graves expressed a desire for privacy,” he said. “I think he wished to avoid further conversation.”
So Darya was not the only one who found Tally and Dulcimer’s yammering intolerable. “Where did he go?”
“He did not tell me.”
Any more than Darya had. He did not want them to know. “We have to find him. Has there been any word from the seedship?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, then. We’ll need Dulcimer, too, to do some tricky flying. He should be thoroughly cooled off by now. But first I must see Julian Graves. We’ll search the whole ship if we have to.” She started back toward the engines, examining every chamber. E.C. Tally trailed vaguely along behind.
“You take the rooms along that side of the corridor.” Darya pointed. “I’ll handle these.”
“May I speak?”
Gabble, gabble, gabble. “Do you have to? What is it now, E.C.?”
“I merely wish to point out that if you wish to talk to Julian Graves, there is a much easier method than the one you are employing. Of course, if as you said, you wish to see him, with your own eyes, or if it is also necessary that he talk to you…”
Darya paused with a doorlatch in her hand. “Let’s stop it right there. I want to talk to him.”
“Then might I suggest the use of the public-address system? Its message is carried to every part of the Erebus.”
“I didn’t even know there was a public-address system. How did you find out about it?”
“It is part of the general schematics of the Erebus, which naturally I transferred from the ship’s data bank to my own memory.”
“Take me to an input point. We can talk to Dulcimer, too, and find out where he is.”
“That will not be necessary. I already know where Dulcimer is. He is back at the power kernel, where you found me.”
“What’s he doing there? Didn’t Graves tell you to keep him away from the kernels?”
“No. He told me not to release another radiation beam from within a kernel. I have not done so. But as Dulcimer pointed out, no one said that he was not to be allowed inside the kernel shield itself.” Tally looked thoughtful. “I think he should be ready to come out by now.”
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BUILDERS?
I don’t think I’ll ever understand Downsiders, though I’ve spent enough time with them. The pattern never changes. As soon as they learn that I’ve done a deal of space-wandering, they’ll sit and talk to me quiet enough, but you can see there’s only one thing on their minds. And finally they ask me, every one of them: You must have visited a lot of Builder artifacts, Captain. What do you think happened to them? Where did the Builders go?
It’s a fair question. You’ve got a species that was all over the spiral arm for fifty million years or more, scattering their constructs over a couple of thousand locations and a few thousand light-years, all of them huge and indestructible and three-quarters of them still working fine — I’ve seen scores, close up, ranging from the practical and useful, like the Dobelle Umbilical, to the half-understandable, like Elephant and Lens, and on to the absolutely incomprehensible, like Succubus and Paradox and Flambeau and Juggernaut.
Builders, and artifacts. And then, bingo, about five million years ago, the Builders vanish. No sign of them after that. No final messages. In fact, no messages of any kind. Either the Builders never discovered writing, or they were even worse than programmers at documentation.
Maybe they did leave records, but we’ve not yet found out how to decipher them — some say that the black pyramid in the middle of Sentinel is a Builder library. But who can tell?
Anyway, I claim that the Downsiders don’t really care what happened to the Builders, because nothing that the Builders left behind makes much difference to planet-grubbers. I’ve watched a man on Terminus cut a Builder flat fabricator — something priceless, something we still don’t come close to understanding — in two, to patch a window. I’ve seen a woman on Darien use a section of a Builder control device, packed with sentient circuits, as a hammer. A lot of Downsiders think of Builder artifacts just the same way they think of a brick or a stone or any other ancient material: in terms of what they can be used for today.
So I don’t answer the Downsiders, not directly. Usually I ask them a question or two of my own. What happened to the Zardalu, I say?
Oh, the Great Rising wiped them out, they say, when the slave races rebelled.
Then what happened to the dinosaurs, back on Earth?
Oh, that was the March of the Mitochondria. It killed them all off — everyone knows that.
The answers come pat and fast. You see, what the Downsiders want isn’t an explanation; it’s a catchphrase they can use instead of an explanation.
And suppose you tell them, as I used to tell them until I got fed up, that there were once other theories? Before the paleomicrobiologists discovered the Cretaceous mitochondrial mutation that slowed and weakened every land animal over seventy pounds to the point where it didn’t have the strength to carry its own weight, there were explanations of dinosaur extinction ranging from drought to long-period solar companion stars to big meteors to nearby supernovas. Suppose you tell them all that? Why, then they look at you as though you’re crazy.
Now the odd thing is, I do have the explanation for what happened to the Builders. It’s based on my own observations of species all around the arm. It’s logical, its simple, and no one but me seems to believe it.
It’s this:
There’s a simple biological fact, true of every life-form ever discovered: although a single-celled organism, like an amoeba or one of the other Protista, can live forever, any complex multicelled organism will die of old age if nothing else gets it.
Any species, humans or Cecropians or Varnians or Polyphemes (or Builders!), is just a large number of individuals, and you can think of that assembly as a single multicelled organism. In some cases, like the Hymenopts and the Decantil Myrmecons, the single nature is a lot more obvious than it is for humans or Cecropians — though humans seem like a swarm when you’ve seen as many worlds as I have from space, with cities and road nets and superstructures spreading over the surface like mold on a ripe fruit.
Anyway, species are organisms, and here’s my simple syllogism:
Any species is a single, multicelled organism. Every multicelled organism will over the course of time grow old and die. Therefore, any species will at last grow old and die.
That’s what happened to the superorganism known as the Builders. It lived a long time. Then it got old. And it died.
Convincing? If so, you shouldn’t expect anything better for humans. I certainly don’t.