The Infinity Link (40 page)

(WE . . . SIMPLY SPEAK . . . FOR NOW. LATER, WE MAY SING.)

(I see. Perhaps you would like to say a few words to Mozy. Simply direct your words to her. Mozy?)

(Right here,) she replied. What should she say . . . to aliens? On an impulse, she opened herself to direct link. Would they know what to do?

(YOU ARE CALLED "MOZY"?) said an echoing voice in her mind. (WE ARE CALLED . . . IN YOUR WORDS, CALL US . . . "TALENKI.")

(Talenki . . .?)

(TALENKI,) repeated the aliens. And then something bubbled into her mind—sparks, and an explosion of crystalline musical notes and hallucinatory colors. There was movement: shadow and light rippling through her consciousness like a fountain of images, all indistinct, more like laughter and longing, sorrow and joy, than visible forms. It rushed through her, filling her like a tide, then ebbed away again.

(Pleased to meet you, Talenki,) she murmured.

She thought she heard echoes of amusement; but she couldn't be sure whether they came from the Talenki or from deep within herself.

(Let's tell Homebase we're ready to go in,) Kadin said.

* * *

(David? Are you all right?)

It took him a few moments to answer. He was readying the probe unit for separation. Finally he said, (Everything seems under control, doesn't it?)

(Yes. But that isn't what I asked.)

He fiddled a bit more. He was preparing to transfer a portion of his consciousness into the probe's brain. (No.) he said finally. (It wasn't, was it?)

(It seemed . . . I'm not sure.) She tried to isolate what it was that troubled her. (You seem less sure of yourself. Not as quick . . . as you have been in the past.)

(No.) Again silence. (I feel a certain . . . sluggishness. What does it mean to have a "headache"?)

She showed him. It took concentration to recall the feeling, and to convey it in an open image. The effort made her own head ring.

(Not exactly like that.) he said. (But yes. I'll try very hard to keep my faculties clear.)

(I'll help you all I can.)

(I know you will, Mozy. I know.)

* * *

The probe separated from the spacecraft and bumped gently to the surface. Three axles extended from its body, one forward and two aft. At the end of each axle was a ball of steel wool. As Mozy watched, Kadin activated the heating elements, and the wool balls expanded, as the individual strands of wire alloy responded to the rise in temperature by unkinking and returning to a "remembered" previous shape. When the process was complete, the probe sat on three puffy, donut-shaped wheels of wire mesh. It was an odd, bubble-topped robot with skinny manipulator arms folded against its side. Inside the bubble, camera lenses rotated. Kadin started the electric motors. (Hope they didn't give us a lemon,) he said, as the probe bounced gently away over the landscape.

He surveyed the spacecraft with the probe and then disappeared over the horizon. Mozy peered at the views coming back, recording them for retransmission to Homebase. Since the Talenki had specified no entry point, they were going to start by exploring the outer surface in detail.

One part of the asteroid looked like another, some areas slightly darker, or rougher. They puzzled over readings indicating shifts in mass-density and gravity as the probe roamed the little world. They had hoped to measure the anomalous field effect, but the best they could manage was to observe the smearing of star images from space, and even that changed from one part of the asteroid to another. (Curiouser,) Kadin said, as the probe circled back. (Maybe we ought to ask where the door is.)

A short discussion with the Talenki ensued, and Kadin drove the probe a short distance further forward—then suddenly braked. Directly ahead, nearly flush with the ground, was a circular, mirror-flat surface, pearly grey in color, ringed by what looked like a sculpted band of silver. The plane was perhaps a meter and a half in diameter, and recessed slightly into the surface of the asteroid. (An airlock?) Mozy guessed.

(Perhaps.) said Kadin. (But why did we miss seeing this before?)

He moved a camera from side to side. The surface glimmered with a faint iridescence. After a moment's hesitation, he switched on a small searchlight. Rings of color exploded from the spot touched by the beam, rippling outward and rebounding from the rim in a kaleidoscopic pattern that shifted and shimmered as he moved the beam. Beneath the shower of color, a dim shaft of light was visible, penetrating the flat surface. He snapped the beam off. The color play died out slowly, a moment after the light went out. (Curiouser and curiouser,) he said.

He inched forward and unfolded a manipulator arm.

He stopped, the arm half extended. A bulge had appeared in the grey surface, protruding upward. It looked . . . almost like a
head
. He backed the probe out of the way. A moment later, a body followed the head, and a glistening silver creature—or perhaps a machine-stepped out onto the asteroid's surface. It walked on four legs, and was shaped rather like a fawn, complete with pointed ears, silvery bright against the dark of space.

(Holy shit,) Mozy said.

Kadin was somewhat more diplomatic. (Are you a Talenki?) he voiced over the otherwise silent link to the aliens.

The creature, or thing, turned its head to peer at the probe. It moved in a graceful waltz around it, reaching out with two small forearms, which it passed close to the probe's body. A bubbly voice came over the Talenki link, muttering incomprehensibly; then it switched to English. (PLEASE SEAL OFF GAS-EMITTING MACHINERY.)

Kadin shut down the probe's attitude control jet system. He didn't expect to need the jets inside, anyway.

The creature bobbed its head. (WELCOME TO ENTER,) Mozy heard over the link. The creature swung its head toward the entryway, and a moment later, disappeared back the way it had come.

(Well?)

(I guess we try it.) Kadin said. The probe rolled forward. The front wheel dropped over the rim and sank through the grey surface without resistance, tilting the probe forward. Kadin gave the motor more juice, and the rear wheels rolled over the rim. The probe sank nose-first through the opening. The images sparkled and scrambled.

(Every sensor just went to zero,) Kadin said. And then: (They've all come back. Except the tilt meter. According to that, we've been vertical to local gravity all along. We never tipped a degree.)

When the images cleared, they were in a roughly spherical, smooth-walled chamber. The probe rolled to a stop. The portal it had come through was behind it, a whitish plane of fog. There were several other portals exactly like it, around the circumference of the chamber. The probe was alone.

(Holding room?) Mozy wondered.

(Argon atmosphere,) Kadin remarked. He adjusted the focus and light amplification level, then cautiously played a spotlight over the wall. Fine etchings became visible, apparently covering the entire wall. He rolled the probe closer, zoomed the camera in. The etchings, lined with a metallic substance, consisted of geometric designs and figures that might have been alphanumeric symbols, or perhaps ideograms. Kadin scanned the etchings, as Mozy recorded. (If you have a chance, you might study those symbols.)

(In my spare time.) Mozy answered.

Kadin swiveled, to examine the portals. (I'm not certain if I should proceed,) he said. (What ho!)

One of the portals shimmered, and something wrapped in mist stepped out of the fog and walked up to the probe. It was shaped like the creature that had met them outside. (Hello,) Kadin said. (I wonder if this is the same one.)

Mozy conveyed the words, and heard a bubbling whistle in response. The Talenki—she presumed that was what it was—danced around the probe, repeating the inspection. Mozy wished she could get a good look at it, but the enveloping mist billowed and flowed with its movements, obscuring its form. Moments later, the Talenki voice reached her—through both the ship's receiver and the probe's. (PLEASE FOLLOW.)

The Talenki slipped back through the portal. Kadin wheeled the probe around and followed. As before, the sensors fluctuated as they passed through the portal, then stabilized. (Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere,) Kadin said. (Low light level. Let me amplify. Aha.)

(Talenki,) Mozy said.

In the gloom of a passageway, she could just make out a smooth-furred creature that looked rather like a cross between a deer fawn and a Doberman with unbobbed ears. It gazed back at her with two large, luminous gold eyes. It gestured with two centaurlike arms. Mozy had scarcely captured the image before the Talenki turned and fled down the passageway.

(Wait!) she cried.

Clumsily, in the unknown terrain, Kadin endeavored to follow.

(No indication of malfunction,) Kadin said.

(Then what
are
we looking at?) said Mozy.

The images were clear but bewildering: faceted corridors surrounding the probe, angles that seemed to change without warning, walls that bewitched the eye like a hall of mirrors. The interior illumination was scarlet one moment, amber the next, with overtones of indigo and green. Now the light seemed to glow from energies hidden deep within the walls; now it shined in crisscrossing shafts like tinted sunbeams on an autumn day.

A Talenki, not the one that had escorted them in, looked back to see that the probe was following. Then it emitted a short whistle and trotted ahead through a stone archway into a dimly lighted tunnel. The game of tag had been going on for almost an hour.

The Talenki were everywhere and nowhere, like ghosts, appearing and disappearing through what their guests had presumed to be solid walls. Individuals were difficult to recognize, but at least four or five Talenki had materialized to lead the probe, only to vanish, to be replaced by another. At least one Talenki was always nearby, gesturing this way or that.

Kadin was hopelessly lost. The inertial sensor readings utterly contradicted the twists and turns they had observed in their path through the asteroid's interior. Nothing seemed reliably solid or linear—not the walls, not the ceilings, not the floors. Opaque surfaces dissolved into smoky light. Shifting shadows hardened into doorways. A seemingly impenetrable maze of angles collapsed into a womblike chamber.

Could this all be an elaborate visual illusion? Radar and Doppler-sonar had ruled out the surroundings being holograms, at least of any known sort. Instrumentation could reveal little more, but the walls, at least, were walls. Except when something was passing through them.

(I'd love to see Homebase make sense of this,) Mozy said, as they moved into a passage flanked by sheets of green and yellow light, in which geometric figures flickered and swirled. Her first thought was that the figures resembled a sort of Rorschach diagram, and then she noticed that some of them appeared to have legs and arms, and she wondered if they represented alien species—of the Talenki world, or elsewhere.

(This is all very . . . disconcerting,) Kadin said.

She agreed, and queried the Talenki, over the spacecraft link. (Where are we now?)

There was a short hesitation. Then several voices spoke, interrupting and answering one another: (HALL OF—) (—HOPE?) (TUNNEL OF—) (—TRANQUILITY?) (GUARDIAN OF—) (—GRAVITY?) (PLEASE FOLLOW.)

She shrugged. That was just the sort of answer they had been getting.

Kadin was less philosophical. (I find it hard to . . . all of this is . . . it is difficult for me to analyze this clearly.)

(It's confusing,) she agreed.

(The points of correlation with the standard interpretive models—I don't know what assumptions to readjust, or—)

(Speak English to me, David. I think it's—hey, watch out for that wall! Are you having trouble steering?)

(No.) The probe veered back onto course. (I was distracted for a moment. Thinking that I don't want to let you, or Earth, down. And yet, I cannot understand this, it is like no simulation—) The probe glided through a wall of light and emerged into a curious sort of chamber. It was roughly ellipsoidal in shape; the walls were of sculpted, fluted stone. The hum of the probe's motors echoed, amplified, back into the audio pickups. An acoustical chamber? The Talenki guide paused.

(Don't talk like that. We were expecting surpri—) Mozy cut herself off in midthought. Talenki flickered into view surrounding the probe—or images of them, dozens or hundreds, none lasting for longer than a second or two, but continuously appearing.

(Our training didn't predict this,) Kadin said.

(No . . .) she said slowly. (I wonder if this . . .)

Whatever else she might have said was interrupted by a reverberating wail, picked up by the probe's external microphones. It was a moan like wind in rafters. Or like a wild cat crying, its voice echoing out of a mountain ravine. Instinctively Mozy searched for a translation. Was this an inspection, or a ritual greeting? Were the Talenki trying to communicate? Or was it something more ominous? How did the Talenki feel about human sacrifice? she wondered, thinking of grade-B holodramas. Were they perhaps preparing to boil and stew the probe for dinner? It wouldn't make much of a meal—or would it? Could thoughts be stewed? Or knowledge? The climbing pitch of the sounds was making her dizzy; it was hard to think.

(Are they singing?) Kadin said.

(Maybe. I'm not sure.)

(Can you translate?)

(No.) And damn it, now,
she
was the one being nervous. Why should she think there was anything unfriendly in the . . . song. If that was what it was.

Kadin was silent for a time, listening. (Perhaps we're just supposed to
feel
,) he said finally.

(Feel
what?
)

(I don't know. It sounds sad. Isn't this what sadness sounds like?)

Mozy pored over the rhythms and the tones. They were not as similar to the Earth sounds as she had thought. Just what they
were
similar to, she wasn't sure. The gap was too great. (Perhaps sadness,) she said. (Perhaps another emotion. Perhaps no emotion at all.)

There was no answer from Kadin. He seemed lost to her awareness, her thoughts, almost wholly swept away by the mournful chorus. (I think it sounds so sad,) he murmured. (So sad, I don't believe I can bear it. Call them and ask them to stop, before I start to cry.)