“I had the same feeling. I wondered where you’d gone, but I knew there wasn’t room for both of us. All right. So we had a first boost from the gravity generator on Glister, then a second boost from a shearing field in the Eye of Gargantua. That put us square into the main transportation system, and then right out of the spiral arm. Thirty thousand light-years, I estimate.”

“I wondered about that. I looked around, and I could see the whole damned galaxy, spread out like a dinner plate — though the way I’m feeling, I hate to even mention the word ‘dinner.’ ”

“And then one final transition, to bring us in here.” Darya gazed around, up to the segmented dark ceiling, and then across the glittering plain of the floor.

“Where we can stand and stare until we starve. Any more ideas, Professor?”

“Some.” Now that the mind-numbing journey was over she was beginning to think again. “I don’t believe we were brought all this way to starve. The-One-Who-Waits sent us, so something must know we’re here. And although this is part of the Builders’ own living place, I’ll bet it has been prepared for us, or beings like us.” Darya swung her hand around a ninety-degree arc of the level floor. “See the flat surface? That’s not natural for a Builder structure.”

“We don’t know how Builders think. Nobody ever met one.”

“True. But we know how they build. When you’ve studied Builder artifacts as long as I have, you begin to form ideas about the Builders themselves. You can’t prove things, but you learn to trust your instincts. We don’t know where the Builders evolved, or when, but I’m sure it was in an aerial or free-space environment. At the very least, it was a place where gravity doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to us. The Builders work naturally in all three dimensions, every direction equal. Their artifacts don’t provide any feel for ‘up’ or ‘down.’ A level plain like this is something that humans like. You don’t encounter it in the artifacts. You don’t expect a gravity field close to one gee in a structure like this, either — complete with a breathable atmosphere. And look at that.” She pointed to the ceiling, apparently kilometers above them. “You can see it’s built of pentagonal segments. That’s common to many Builder structures. So I think we’re inside a dodecahedron, a shape you find over and over in Builder artifacts, and I think they just added a flat floor and air and gravity for the benefit of beings like us. I’m not sure this plain is anything like as big as it looks, either. You know the Builders can play tricks with space that confuse our sense of distance.”

“They can. But I think this place is really big, no matter what tricks are being performed.”

Hans Rebka had not raised his voice, but Darya’s stomach tightened at the sudden tension in it. Hans was not supposed to get nervous. That was her privilege.

“It’s certainly big,” he went on, “if that is anything to judge by.”

He was pointing off to their left. Darya at first saw nothing. Then she realized that above the twinkling sea of orange spangles shone the steadier light of a bright sphere. It was tiny at first, no more than a shiny marble of silver, but as she watched it grew steadily. It was advancing across the level plain, apparently at a constant speed. There was no way to judge its distance, or to tell if it was rolling or traveling by some other method.

“Welcoming committee,” Rebka said, almost under his breath. “Everybody smile.”

It was not rolling. Darya was somehow sure of that, even though she could see no signs of surface marking. She had the feeling that it was flying or floating, its bottom only a fraction of a millimeter above the orange cloud of sequins.

And it was not small at all. It was sizable. It was growing. It was huge, three times the size of The-One-Who-Waits. It towered over them, and still it was not close.

Twenty paces away it halted. A steady series of ripples moved across the spherical surface, like waves on a ball of mercury. As they grew in amplitude the globular form bulged up to form a stem. On top of it a familiar pentagonal flowerlike head drooped to face them. Five-sided disks were extruded from the front of the sphere, while a silver tail stretched down to moor the object to the floor. A flickering green light shone from a newly formed aperture in the central belly.

There was a long silence.

“All right, sweetie,” Rebka said in a gruff whisper. “What now?”

“If this is like The-One-Who-Waits, it needs to hear us speak a few words before it can key in to our language.” Darya raised her voice. “My name is Darya Lang, originally from the planet Sentinel Gate. This is Hans Rebka, from the planet Teufel. We are human, and we arrived from the star Mandel and the planet Gargantua. Are you like The-One-Who-Waits?”

There was a ten-second silence.

“One — Who — Waits,” a groaning voice said. Its tone was deeper than that of the sphere on Glister, and it sounded even more tired. “The One Who… Waits. Human… human… hu-u-man… hmmm.”

“Needs a pep pill,” Rebka said softly. “Are you a Builder?” he called to the horned and tailed nightmare floating in front of them.

The being drifted a few paces closer. “Human, human, human,… At last. You are here. But two are the same. Where is… the other?”

“The other,” Rebka said. “What’s it mean?”

Darya shook her head. “There is no other,” she said loudly. “We do not understand. We are the only ones here. We ask again, are you like The-One-Who-Waits?”

The silver body was humming, with a low tone almost too deep for human ears. “There must be… another… or the arrival is not complete. We have two forms only… but the message said that the third one was on the way and would soon arrive…” There was another long silence. “I am not like The-One-Who-Waits, although we were created in the same way.”

“Not a Builder,” Darya said in a quick whisper. “I knew it. We’re seeing things that the Builders made, just like The-One-Who-Waits. Maybe some kind of computers, incredibly old. And I don’t think that they’re — well, that they’re working quite right.”

That was a new thought for Darya, and one hard to accept. Usually Builder artifacts seemed to perform as well after five million years as the day they were made. But The-One-Who-Waits, and now this new being, gave Darya an odd feeling of disorganization and randomness. Perhaps not even the Builders could make machines last forever.

“I am not… a computer.” The being’s hearing must have been more sensitive than a human’s, or it was directly reading their minds. “I am Inorganic, but a grown Inorganic. The-One-Who-Waits stayed always close to Old-Home, but I was grown here. I am… I am… a Speaker-Between. An Interlocutor. The one who must… interface with you and the others. The task of The-One-Who-Waits is done. But the task of Speaker-Between cannot start until the third one is here.” The weary voice was slowing, fading. “The third one. Then… the task of Speaker-Between can begin. Until then…”

The surface of the great silver body began to ripple. The five-sided flower on top was shortening.

“Hey! Speaker-Between! You can’t stop there.” Rebka ran forward across the surface, his shoes kicking up sprays of glittering orange. “And you can’t leave us here. We’re humans. Humans need food, and water, and air.”

“That is known.” The body was swelling at the base and descending toward the flat surface, while the silver tail withdrew into it. “Do not worry. The place has been prepared for your kind. Since the third is already on the way, you will have no need for stasis. Enter… and eat, drink, rest.”

The silver globe of Speaker-Between had deformed to a bulging hemisphere with a wide arched aperture at the center. “Enter,” the fading voice said again. The opening moved around to face the two humans. “Enter… now.”