you.”
Cheers lifted from the hoons and urs, but Lark felt no stirring.
They weren’t the ones who would have to go the rest of the way.
Water transformed the cavities and grottoes. Flippers kicked up clouds of silt, filling the phosphor beams with a myriad of distracting speckles. Lark’s trusty rewq pulled tricks with polarization, transforming the haze to partial clarity. Still, it took concentration to avoid colliding with jagged limestone outcrops. The guide rope saved him from getting lost.
Cave diving felt a lot like being a junior sage of the Commons — an experience he never sought or foresaw in his former life as a scientist heretic.
How ungainly swimming humans appeared next to the graceful young qheuens, who seized the rugged walls with flashing claws, propelling themselves with uncanny agility, nearly as at-home in freshwater as on solid ground.
His skin grew numb where the skink coverings pulled loose. Other parts grew hot from exertion. More upsetting was the squirmy traeki tentacle in his mouth, anticipating his needs in unnerving ways. It would not let him hold his breath, as a man might do while concentrating on some near-term problem, but tickled his throat to provoke an exhalation. The first time it happened, he nearly retched. (What if he chucked up breakfast? Would he and the ring both asphyxiate? Or would it take his gift as a tasty, predigested bonus?)
Lark was so focused on the guide rope that he missed the transition from stony catacombs to a murky plain of sodden meadows, drowned trees, and drifting debris. But soon the silty margins fell behind as daylight transformed the Glade of Gathering — now the bottom of an upland lake — giving commonplace shapes macabre unfamiliarity.
The guide rope passed near a stand of lesser boo whose surviving stems were tall enough to reach the surface, far overhead. Qheuens gathered around one tube, sucking down drafts of air. When sated, they spiraled around Lark and the humans, nudging them toward the next stretch of guide rope.
Long before details loomed through the silty haze, he made out their target by its glow. Rann and Ling thrashed flippers, passing Jeni in their haste. By the time Lark caught up, they were pressing hands against a giant slick sarcophagus, the hue of yellow moonrise. Within lay a cigar-shaped vessel, the Rothen ship, their home away from home, now sealed in a deadly trap.
The two starfarers split up, he swimming right and she left. By silent agreement, Jeni accompanied the big man — despite their size difference, she was the one more qualified to keep an eye on Rann. Lark kept near Ling, watching as she moved along the golden wall.
Though he had more experience than other Sixers with Galactic god machines, it was his first time near this interloper whose dramatic coming so rudely shattered Gathering Festival, many weeks ago. So magnificent and terrible it had seemed! Daunting and invincible. Yet now it was helpless. Dead or implacably imprisoned.
Tentatively, Lark identified some features, like the jutting anchors that held a ship against quantum probability fluctuations … whatever that meant. The self-styled techies who worked for Lester Cambel were hesitant about even the basics of starcraft design. As for the High Sage himself, Lester had taken no part in Lark’s briefing, choosing instead to brood in his tent, guilt-ridden over the doom he helped bring on Dooden Mesa.
Despite the crowding sense of danger, Lark discovered a kind of spooky beauty, swimming in this realm where sunlight slanted in long rippling shafts, filled with sparkling motes — a silent, strangely contemplative world.
Besides, even wrapped in skink membranes, Ling’s athletic body was a sight to behold.
They rounded the star cruiser’s rim, where a sharp shadow abruptly cut off the sun. It might be a cloud, or the edge of a mountain. Then he realized—
It’s the Jophur ship.
Though blurred by murky water, the domelike outline sent shivers down his back. Towering mightily at the lake’s edge, it could have swallowed the Rothen vessel whole.
A strange thought struck him.
First the Rothen awed us. Then we saw their “majesty” cut down by real power. What if it happens again? What kind of newcomer might overwhelm the Jophur? A hovering mountain range? One that throws the whole Slope into night?
He pictured successive waves of “ships,” each vaster than before, matching first the moons, then all Jijo, and — why not? — the sun or even mighty Izmunuti!
Imagination is the most amazing thing. It lets a ground-hugging savage fill his mind with fantastic unlikelihoods.
Churning bubbles nearly tore the rewq off his face as Ling sped up, kicking urgently. Lark hurried after … only to arrest himself moments later, staring.
Just ahead, Ling traced the golden barrier with one hand, just meters from a gaping opening. A hatchway, backlit by a radiant interior. Several figures stood in the portal — three humans and a Rothen lord, wearing his appealing symbiotic mask. The quartet surveyed their all-enclosing golden prison with instruments, wearing expressions of concern.
Yet, all four bipeds seemed frozen, embedded in crystal time.
Up close, the yellow cocoon resembled the preservation beads left by that alpine mulc spider, the one whose mad collecting fetish nearly cost Dwer and Rety their lives, months back. But this trap was no well-shaped ovoid. It resembled a partly melted candle, with overlapping golden puddles slumped around its base. The Jophur had been generous in their gift of frozen temporality, pouring enough to coat the ship thoroughly.
Like at Dooden Mesa, Lark thought.
It seemed an ideal way to slay one’s enemies without using destructive fire. Maybe the Jophur can’t risk damaging Jijo’s ecosphere. That would be a major crime before the great Institutes, like gene raiding and illegal settlement.
On the other hand, the untraeki invaders hadn’t been so scrupulous in scything the forest around their ship. So perhaps the golden trap had another purpose. To capture, rather than kill? Perhaps the g’Kek denizens of Dooden Mesa might yet be rescued from their shimmering tomb.
That had been Lark’s initial thought, three days ago. In hurried experiments, more mulc-spider relics were thawed out, using the new traeki solvents. Some of the preserved items had once been alive, birds and bush creepers that long ago fell into the spider’s snare.
All emerged from their cocoons quite dead.
Perhaps the Jophur have better revival methods, Lark thought at the time. Or else they don’t mean to restore their victims, only to preserve them as timeless trophies.
Then, night before last, an idea came to Lark in the form of a dream.
The hivvern lays its eggs beneath deep snow, which melts in the spring, letting each egg sink in slushy mud, which then hardens all around. Yet the ground softens again, when rainy season comes. Then the hivvern larva emerges, swimming free.
When he wakened, the idea was there, entire.
A spaceship has a sealed metal shell, like the hivvern egg. The Rothen ship may be trapped, but its crew were never touched.
Those within may yet live.
And now proof stood before him. The four in the hatchway were clearly aware of the golden barrier surrounding their ship, examining it with tools at hand.
Just one problem — they did not move. Nor was there any sign they knew they were being observed from just a hoon’s length away.
Treading water, Ling scrawled on her wax-covered note board and raised it for Lark to see.
TIME DIFFERENT INSIDE.
He fumbled with his own board, tethered to his waist.
TIME SLOWER?
Her answer was confusing.
PERHAPS.
OR ELSE QUANTIZED.
FRAME-SHIFTED.
