What did I learn out there?
It’s hard to sort out. I was already pretty well-educated in fear and pain and exhaustion. The animals were no stranger or more ferocious than the ones at home. Except the human animals.
I guess what finally comes out of it is something cold and dry, like The Perseverence of Institutions, or The Imperfectibility of Man.
Those Hellers were not less human than I was.
What keeps me up at night is the thought that they might be more human.
CONSTRUCT
Disclaimer
The preceding fourteen sections have outlined the various Tour stops, along with a tentative schedule. However, Starschool cannot guarantee that all of these stops will be made.
The political situation of some Confederación worlds is not stable from year to year. If prudence dictates, one or more stops may be skipped, according to the Dean’s discretion.
There is also the possibility that new stops may be added, if in the Dean’s opinion they offer unusual potential for learning …
I
Hell drew us together. After all we’d been through, we became a tight-knit little crew. It happens that way. Sometimes you have to get knocked around before you can see what was in front of you all the time. We had five different backgrounds from five different planets. We learned a lot from each other. I even came to an uneasy understanding with Miko, though there was still a little friction, on account of Alegria.
Even Dean M’bisa seemed to show a little fondness toward us. Or maybe it was just that he was keeping an extra sharp eye on us to make sure we didn’t get into any more trouble.
He needn’t have bothered. Trouble was the last thing we wanted. As a matter of fact, we took great pains to avoid it. We were model students on Odalys, the planet-fall after Hell. Except for that small incident on the algae raft, we didn’t cause any real difficulties at all. Well, hardly any.
Lately, we’d been too busy to get into trouble. Macroeconomics can get pretty complicated when you’re dealing with planetary systems and we had a battery of exams looming on the near horizon. I’d been bashing my head against economic theories so hard I even dreamed about them. What a waste of perfectly good dreams. I hadn’t been to the gym in over two weeks. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been anyplace except classes and study hall for a long time. Until today.
The Dean had called all the students to the auditorium. That in itself was unusual, since he made most of his announcements over the ship’s intercom. I’d never even seen all the students aboard Starschool in one place before, not aboard ship. As I entered the auditorium, it was impressive. And noisy. Seemed like everyone was talking at once.
I scanned the crowd, looking for familiar faces. It was easy to pick out B’oosa; he stands out almost as much as I do. He was sitting with the rest of our friends. There seemed to be an empty seat, so I pushed my way through the milling students.
“Saved you a place, Carl,” said Alegria, patting the chair beside her.
“Didn’t think you were going to make it, amigo,” said Pancho as I sat down.
“Even I know what compulsory attendance means,” I said. “I’m busy enough without working off demerits.”
B’oosa laughed. He could afford it, since he was holding up the high end of the curve in Macro. I was doing my best to keep the middle from collapsing. It was a struggle all the way.
“Any idea what the Dean’s going to spring on us?” I asked.
B’oosa shook his head. “Whatever it is, it must be important.”
“Nothing’s more important than that Macro exam next week,” I said.
“If you didn’t put everything off until the last minute, you wouldn’t have so much trouble,” Alegria said.
She had me there. What could I say? I always put things off until the last minute. A place as big as Starschool has a lot of diversions. I was as human as everyone else. More than some others, I guess.
The Dean entered and everyone took seats, quieted down. He walked purposefully to the lectern, adjusted his throat mike. Personally, I didn’t think he really needed the amplification, having been on the receiving end of more than a few loud conversations with him. He looked deadly serious.
“Students, I’ll keep this short and to the point,” he said. “There’s been an unexpected change in plans. We are no longer headed for Dimian. That stop on the tour has been cancelled due to a message we recently received. Our course has been changed. We estimate arrival at Construct in six days.”
He paused to let that sink in. Construct!
“I don’t need to tell you the importance of this. All classes are cancelled until further notice. You will begin planet-fall training immediately. Check your data-boards at your study terminals for all available information on Construct. I assure you it won’t be a long listing.” At that, he turned and left. The room was absolutely quiet as we sat in stunned silence.
Construct. An enigma wrapped in layers and layers of mystery. Proof that man was not alone in the universe.
“I guess that you can forget about that Macro exam,” whispered B’oosa.
“That’s the farthest thing from my mind right now,” I said. That was almost true.
Construct. Mankind’s touch-point with alien races, alien cultures. The Confederación kept a tight lid on whatever went on there. It was shrouded in mystery to such a degree it seemed almost a mythical place. But we were headed there! Us.
Construct.
II
The Dean wasn’t kidding when he said the listing on Construct would be short. The truth was that we just didn’t know much about it. Not even its real name.
It was an artificial planet, built maybe fifty thousand years ago. Maybe half a million. It circled a tiny red dwarf star that had no other planets. The view was stupendous, with the Orion Nebula sweeping over half the sky, but I guess nobody ever looked at it. They all lived inside.
Construct was really sort of a cross between a spaceship and a planet. Or maybe a senate and a zoo. It was a hollow sphere inside another hollow sphere inside etc., nineteen of them, the biggest six hundred kilometers in diameter, the smallest about a tenth that size.
It was built this way so as to provide economical artificial gravity by rotation. The different levels gave you higher gravity as you moved outwards, from about a one-third gee to about three gees. So everyone could be comfortable.
“Everyone” was 277 different species of intelligent life, from 246 different planets. Each had an area of Construct that duplicated the conditions of its home planet. Springworld wasn’t duplicated there, but Earth was.
There were waterworlds and baked arid places where water was poison. High-gee frigid zones where they swam around in liquid ammonia. A half-gee shell was almost vacuum, just a wisp of chlorine for the barely mobile rocks who wove sculptures there.
Some of the ones who lived on Construct were more-or-less humanoid. Most of them were something else. We were warned that some weren’t too easy to look at.
Like the Linguists, those who long ago built the planet. They were almost human; at least they had one head, two arms, two legs. But they were taller than me and impossibly skinny. Their white skin was covered with pulsing red veins. Their arms and legs had extra elbows and knees. Their eyes rolled instead of blinking; their mouths were toothless wide rubbery slits. They would be our guides.
This seemed to be what the Linguists did; introduce various species to one another and watch what happens. It was probably why they built Construct, through we couldn’t be sure. It was hard to get a straight answer out of them.
Humans were invited to set up shop on Construct about ninety years ago. We had a couple of thousand xeno-biologists, xeno-anthropologists, xeno-you-name-its living there, studying and being studied by the other creatures’ xeno-people. Except for scientists hand-picked by the Confederación, almost no humans ever got to Construct. The invitation to Starschool was a first. It was kind of unsettling.
We’d be worki
ng on Construct, but it would be an odd kind of work. Just walk around in small groups, with a Linguist, and talk — or try to talk — with the various aliens. The Linguists were slightly telepathic; they would pick up our nonverbal reactions, as well as translating back and forth.
Pancho and I went up to the observation deck to watch the docking. It was an eerie sight. At first, Construct was a dim slender red crescent hugging a circle of black. It expanded into a half-circle, blood-red, that grew larger second by second, to become a vast curved horizon. A black dot suddenly appeared, blossomed, became the mouth of a dark tunnel, and swallowed us.
After a minute of blackness we emerged into the central sphere; a weightless, airless volume of pale blue light, radiating evenly from every direction. There were hundreds of spaceships parked inside, mostly of alien design, some much larger than Starschool.
“I wish we had more time to prepare for this,” Pancho said.
“Not that much to study.”
“That is not exactly what I mean.”
“What, exactly?”
“They’ll be watching us. Closely. They haven’t had very many humans to observe before. I’m afraid we’ll do something wrong. We don’t know what they expect of us. What if we offend someone, step on some creature’s taboo?”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. We’ll just have to be careful and keep our eyes open.”
“I still wish we had a better idea of what to do.”
“I guess we’ll just have to be ourselves. They’re probably expecting that.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Pancho.
We were hovering over a docking platform that looked like it could hold five Starschools. When they built this place they sure weren’t thinking small. Everything was on a scale that made even me feel like a midget.
A bell sounded and we reluctantly left the observation deck to join up with the rest of our group. From here on in, we’d be on our own.
“Are you ready for this?” asked Miko when we arrived.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. Miko was really excited at this. B’oosa was taking it in stride, like he took everything in stride. He was unflappable. Alegria kept her feelings pretty much to herself. She seemed a little awed.
The lights flickered once and a faint background hum I had hardly been aware of stopped. We must have completed docking. We stood around nervously for a few minutes. I noticed we tended to talk in whispers. Eventually Dean M’bisa came over to us.
“They’re ready for you,” he said simply.
We left the ship through a large umbilical, pulling ourselves along in the zero-gee by grabbing what I guessed were handholds. They could have been tentacleholds for all I knew; there were lots of different shapes and sizes. Sort of a universal walkway, I suppose.
The air inside was fresh and clean, provided by Construct. I imagined it must have been the way the air once was on Earth. Mankind’s home planet hadn’t had an atmosphere that good in a long, long time.
When we emerged, we saw our first aliens. Linguists. Even though we were all as prepared as possible and they were humanoid, it was still quite a shock. Their similarities to humans only emphasized their differences. In both obvious and subtle ways they were totally unlike us. When they walked, they moved in impossible directions. They held their bodies in a position just a little off-center, a position human bone structure wouldn’t allow. One detached himself from the crowd and came our way. Seeing him up close, I shuddered. Even as I shuddered, I remembered they were telepathic and wondered if we’d made our first mistake.
“You may call me Guide,” he said in perfect Pan-swahili. Perfect, that is, except for emotion. His voice was as flat as a machine’s.
“My real name is not possible to duplicate, given the physiological parameters of your species. Half of it is ‘spoken’ on a telepathic level. I will remain with you during your stay. You may ask me questions. I will respond. At this time I will take you to the Earth level.” He turned abruptly and we followed.
His voice may have been expressionless, but his face wasn’t. The trouble was that his expressions didn’t match what he was saying and his face was inhumanly mobile; seeing him smile or frown made your own face hurt.
The Linguist led us to a line of small cars. Sleds, he called them. They seemed to be nothing more than oddly-shaped seats on a platform surrounded by a flimsy-looking shell. Each sled hovered about ten centimeters above a thin metal rod set in the floor. As we got in a transparent roof swung over us. In a pouch on each seat there were silver necklaces; Guide explained their function.
“Construct does not have many rules, but one rule never broken is the one of free access. Any being may visit any area; there are air locks to separate different environments, but anyone may pass from one to another.”
“Of course, some of the environments are dangerous, or even toxic to you. Use the key on the necklace before you pass through any door. It will tell you whether you can survive unprotected on the other side.”
“But it won’t stop you from going?” M’bisa asked. “Even if the environment will kill you?”
Guide covered his face with both hands and made a whistling sound. “Good joke,” he said. “Strap yourselves in now.”
We waited a few seconds while the stationary docking platform lined up with one of the transport tubes that were slowly rotating with the rest of Construct in front of us. They ran from the center to the edge of the artificial planet. Specific ones would take us to the Earth level. When it came by, we accelerated down it smoothly. The docking port dwindled away behind us.
“We will pass through seven levels before we reach yours,” said Guide. “You may adjust your seat to any angle by using the lever on your left. Some species find our mode of transportation disconcerting.”
Moving through the semidarkness, I couldn’t understand what he meant. The transport tube was huge and substantial, no problem there. Beyond was the exposed gridwork of the planet, massive beams in some places, spiderweb-thin wires in others. Tubes and ductwork wove in and out of the complex structure. Most of Construct was composed of open spaces like this, some for storage, some filled with the machinery necessary to operate the planet. The living sectors were actually located only in an area sliced through the sphere at the equator. Even that was huge by any standards.
Ahead I could see a dim circle of light where the tube pierced the wall. The circle grew larger, slowly at first, then more quickly. Suddenly it rushed over us and we were through it.
Instant vertigo.
The “wall” we had passed through was actually the ceiling of the first inhabited level. We were looking straight down at the rocky floor several kilometers below us. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was falling. Without hesitation, I reached for the lever. The seat swung around so that its back was to the floor of the sled and I was facing out through the tube. It was quite an improvement. I noticed the others had done the same, all except Guide.
The level we were in was gigantic. It must have been a good twenty kilometers from the roof of the sky to the floor of the ground. On the far horizon I could just barely make out another tube like ours. The ground was covered with jagged rocks, no signs of buildings anywhere, or at least nothing I recognized as a building. We were still fairly high up, but I searched the ground looking for aliens. I nearly missed them when they came. They were in the air.
They hung like faint gossamer curtains in the air around us, expanding and contracting with a regular rhythm. Their edges seemed blurred and indistinct, and they moved with a graceful undulating motion. One drifted toward the tube below us, flattened itself against the transparent surface. It extended its edges around and completely circled the tube. In an instant we were past it. All I could see was a blur of pastels rushing by. I wondered if it was trying to say hello or trying to eat us. Could have been anything.
“What was that?” asked Miko.
“They are Whisps from the planet known as K’allsón,
” said Guide. “Some say they are great composers of music, though it is not to my taste. You would not be able to hear it, as they communicate on a frequency far beyond that which you are equipped to receive.”
We were getting closer to the ground now. It seemed to be coming toward us faster. Overhead the Whisps had drifted away from the tube and were sailing across the sky like fragile pastel clouds. The ground rushed up and in an instant we had popped through to the next level.
At first there wasn’t much to see, as we were in a heavy cloud layer. But the clouds were orange and they bubbled and churned like some evil brew. Chances are it would be just as deadly, too. At least to us humans.
We broke through the clouds and a yellow crystalline world unfolded below us. As far as it was possible to see, the landscape was an uneven, jagged mass of sharply pointed crystals oriented in every conceivable direction. Some were incredibly massive, towering a kilometer or two into the air, branching off in impossible directions and angles. It looked like some complicated chemical solution left to dry. The bottom of their world resembled a petri dish covered with a sulphurous crystalline residue. I couldn’t see any aliens, nor any buildings to house them.
“You won’t be able to see the Clingers,” said Guide. Was he reading my mind? “Their body structure is that of a thin, flexible film the same color as everything else on their planet. Their lives are spent in contemplation. They are excellent theoretical mathematicians and dabble occasionally in other sorts of philosophy. They have produced no artifacts, yet their thought processes are quite interesting. Without a Linguist you would be unable to communicate with them. As it is, you cannot exist in this area without a life-support system. The atmosphere is highly caustic.”
As the ground rushed up to us, I thought I caught a glimpse of another color. It went by too fast for me to get a good look, but it seemed to be grey. Then it was gone and we were enclosed in darkness.