does, so shut up. I'm here.' She relayed an image to them. The 'floor' grew patiently, broken platforms pulling apart to reveal a bit of smooth floor decorated with another of the mysterious circles. Just before she struck, a force pushed at her and decelerated her into a soft landing. 'Wow,' she said. 'There's a field down here too.'
'You're OK, then?' asked Ariane, receiving a noncommittal 'Unh' in return. Brendan and Tem had meanwhile been exploring in the vicinity of the nearest of the 'bishops.' It was set in a dark circle and looked as if it had been turned on a lathe, widening and shrinking in an unpredictable way until it swelled and then tapered to a minaret crown. Sealock reached out and stroked it. 'I've heard of queen games, but this is a new one on me.'
'No squares, either, Bren . No markings at all, in fact.'
'If there are any answers here they're down where Jana is. Sorry, over where Jana is. . . .' Ariane joined them. 'Well, what is it? A dildo?'
Brendan laughed, and it sounded unreal.
'Hey,' said Jana, from afar, 'you need to see this.'
'Stay there,' said Ariane. 'I'm coming over.' She leaped up, expecting to fly away, but the floor held on resolutely, and she just managed a little hop. She looked at Sealock. ' Bren, we're stuck here . . . how do we get to the other side if this field won't let go?'
'Think about it, Ari,' he said. 'That's what the hole is for —it's evidently a transport device disguised as a portal. Which probably indicates that there aren't many reasons to hang around here.' Krzakwanodded, walked over to the opening, and stepped into it. Instead of being launched outward, however, he disappeared back into the airlock. 'Whoops!' they heard him say. 'Obviously it's a two-way device.' A moment later he appeared, feet first, launched along the same trajectory as Hu had followed. Ariane was next and in a minute was arcing, spread-eagled, toward the other side. Sealock stood on the ceiling, watching them sail off, and felt a slow dawning of his sense of wonder, a returning of some of the lost sensations of his distant childhood. He suddenly remembered a week spent camping in the Roan Mountains, living a blood-crimson life under a burning blue sky, and remembered feeling this way before: a gnawing happiness reacting against 'what will happen next' imagery. What, he wondered, am I going to see? Anything. He walked to the edge of the opening, squatted slightly, and fell down, being deposited softly on the former ceiling of the other room. Then, grinning, he bunched the heavy muscles of his thighs and leaped into space.
The fall took a very long time, during which he had ample opportunity to try to make sense of the mountings and cablings that crisscrossed the surface. What had he expected? he wondered. A big cabin with endless kilometers of plush seats arranged in orderly rows, like a commercial space-liner? This was certainly not that. The real question, interrelated with the size of the thing, was, why build a craft this big and then leave it empty? Could this just be a cargo hold of some sort? It made a certain amount of sense. In the end, the four of them were standing on a two- hectare raised platform, nine hundred meters below the nowalmost invisible tiny hole that had been their entrance. Krzakwa and Methol stood examining a large dais covered with thousands of dark spots, what they assumed to be a control panel of sorts, while Sealock and Hu wandered off together, reconnoitering in the area, trying to get an overview of the machinery around the 'landing circle' to determine if there were any logical inferences to be made about function.
'What do you think of this thing so far?' Brendan had enacted a face-to-face image mode between them, and Hu looked at him through darkly slitted eyes, her small head protruding from the collar of the worksuit and the image of her ponytail hanging down her back.
'Leave me alone,' she said, and the optics image of her cylindrical helmet reappeared. 'Why are you such a fucking bastard?'
He laughed. 'I like being a fucking bastard. You ought to try it sometime.' They walked on, silent for a while, then he said, 'I wasn't trying to ride you. I'm asking for some kind of professional opinion from you
... as a scientist.'
She stared at him for a moment, then said, 'You want to know what I think? I think that what we're seeing is not the whole story. There was something in this cavity at one time. And the purpose of it all may be impossible to figure out without a clue as to what it was. The thing that's got me is, what kind of cargo does this carry?'
'That's just what I was thinking. It may not be so mysterious, though. Those nodes on the far side—could it be that some kind of field held the cargo in a matrix within the space?'
'The strange thing is this—if it's for bringing a cargo up from the surface of a gas giant, say, then where's the offloading equipment? It can't all be done with fields.'
'Maybe the cargo was liquid. . . .'
'We don't have any data yet. The time for 'impressions' is later, when we know more.' He nodded. 'Yes, but guesswork can sometimes help.' They came to the edge of the platform and stopped. This interior world stood mostly at a level about one hundredmeters below them. There were other platforms in the distance, and they could see a large number of such structures below them. It looked almost like a cityscape, a scale model on a tabletop, and everything was linked together by a maze of curving cables. The microwave emitter, which had been set on the tallest nearby structure, sharply delineated the staggered blockiness of the scene by throwing long, dense shadows. Here and there cables reached toward the 'sky.'
There was a sudden change in the texture of the objects they were seeing and Sealock looked back toward Methol and Krzakwa . They were gazing about. He shifted his suit optics from microwave to visible light and the vast chamber was bathed in blue-green radiance. 'Looks like you got the lights turned on. . . .' They turned and
