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SEVENTY Icarus Was a Pisces

Together, in a figurative sense, they took another brief high-speed subway ride.

From the way he felt pushed back into the cushioned floor of the vehicle—which had been the rear wall to begin with—Eichra Oren estimated that the car's acceleration was about five times the normal force of gravity. After weeks of one tenth gravity, the pressure on his lungs alone was almost unbearable. In only a few seconds they'd exceeded the speed of sound and in a few more, twice that velocity.

"That's just about what I make it, too, Boss," Sam agreed. From the vantage of his presence in a world that was real in a different way than the one Eichra Oren and Model 17 currently inhabited, the dog had been plotting their swift progress into the depths of the artificial asteroid, employing the highly sophisticated calculating and mapping facilities of the cerebrocortical implant network. "Those trilobite babies were tough customers!"

Pinned flat on his back by acceleration, Eichra Oren glanced over at the stolid, armor-plated creature who had volunteered to act as his guide and partner, indicating silent but sincere agreement with Sam. He never figured out how they wound up arriving at the next subway terminal with the rear of the vehicle now in front. He certainly hadn't felt the car flip, which it ought to have, before it began decelerating. All he knew was that the apparent five gravities never let up. However it had been accomplished, the ride was soon over with and they exited into a facility identical to the one they'd just left.

He spent some minutes massaging feeling back into his upper arms and thighs. On foot again, they soon reached the dead end of a broad trilobite thoroughfare, where they ran into a bulkhead of a different style and much heavier construction than anything they'd seen so far. Huge beams crisscrossed the metal panel, which was at least five meters square, and there was an elaborate, massive locking mechanism featuring a small panel with a row of multicolored lights.

"We near the end of our voyage, gentlebeings," Model 17 told them, extending a built-in cable to the controls set into the bulkhead. The cable plugged into a socket. "My sensors don't extend into this area, but it's the only place the Injured One could have wanted to go. Among other things, it is a place of great healing. I haven't been here myself since a brief orientation shortly after I was constructed. And I've never been all the way to its center."

"What's down here?" Sam demanded.

There was an unaccustomed dramatic tone in the robot's voice. "You have but to wait, my cybernetic friend, and you will see such wonders as you have never beheld." Suddenly the bulkhead boomed, creaked, and began sliding, very slowly at first. Beyond it, all they saw was a metal chamber filled with the same oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon that filled the rest of the asteroid.

Eichra Oren felt Sam stoically suppress one of his sarcastic remarks as they stepped in and let the bulkhead close behind them, plunging them into absolute darkness.

In just a moment, a tiny pinpoint of light sprang into existence as a miniature gooseneck worklamp sprouted from between the robot's eyes. They heard her fumbling at the far wall as she'd done with the bulkhead outside and felt a dull thump and a creaking sound.

The inner door began to slide aside.

A golden illumination flooded the chamber.

Eichra Oren gasped and felt a similar reaction from Sam.

Before his conscious mind could gain control, his most basic reflexes took over, screaming that they were standing in midair over a drop of at least forty kilometers!

Model 17 moved quickly. Somehow sensing the man's panic—with a liquid medium surrounding him, Eichra Oren, and Sam right along with him, were suffering attacks of claustrophobia and agoraphobia (or was it acrophobia?) at the same time—she pushed him toward the lip of the door, which he clung to like a frightened child.

"My apologies, dear friends, for startling you. I merely wanted you to be surprised."

Eichra Oren was incapable of a coherent response. "We were surprised, all right!" Sam told her. His tone quavered. He was in nearly as bad shape as the man. "I swear I'll never give anybody a hard time again for being afraid of heights!"

"That's quite all right, Model 17, I understand perfectly." The Antarctican took a long, deep breath, and then another. "What is this place, anyway?"

He'd never suffered fear of heights or enclosed spaces before this and his mind was under control again—and utterly fascinated. At that, his first impression had been correct. He seemed to be looking straight down no less than forty kilometers through the crystalline synthetic waters to the brilliantly glowing heart, obscured by sheer distance as much as any liquid haze, of 5023 Eris.

"Here, in effect" she explained, "is the residential area of the great ship you call 5023 Eris. It is the reason, I believe, that my Creators, whom you call the Predecessors, never became especially fond of their day-to-day working quarters nearer the surface. Perhaps it is also their reason for having constructed me, so that they were not required to leave this place more often than necessary."

Clinging to an outsized doorjamb, Eichra Oren peered out into the waters, wondering what it was, in the asteroid's center, that lit the enormous liquid-filled cavern so brilliantly.

"My dear friends," Model 17 announced, "we stand upon the one shore, so to speak, of the Great Communal Sea, which is the Daughter to the Mother of us all!"

 

Mustering all his courage and determination, Eichra Oren pulled himself up over the edge—the real direction was down, of course, toward the center of the asteroid—and onto the "bottom" of the sea, which was actually its ceiling. What had been an open door in the wall before him now resembled a large hole in the floor.

"This reminds me of the way you kill a polar bear," Sam told him, "with a can of peas."

Not accustomed to being frightened of anything or anybody, Eichra Oren grunted and kept his eyes locked determinedly on the sandy ocean bottom lying "beneath" him, attempting desperately to reorient his much-abused sense of direction.

"For p'Na's sake, not now, Sam!"

"Touchy, touchy, Boss."

"Please understand," Model 17 continued meanwhile, swimming along beside the man with delicate fluttery motions of her countless appendages, "that I had no responsibility for this area, myself. It is a perfectly balanced ecology, self-contained and self-maintaining, as it has been for a billion years."

Having convinced himself that the surface he lay across was down, Eichra Oren levered himself to his elbows and looked around. It might as well have been a landscape from an alien planet, he thought, but it was Earth, all right—of a billion years ago. To his inexpert eye, it looked just like one of those museum holoramas he'd loved as a kid, but it was all around him, and it was real.

The Midcambrian period of a billion years ago, he knew, was supposed to have been dominated by arthropods—above all, trilobites, but also crabs and shrimp of a thousand different varieties, including the primitive ancestors of sea-scorpions.

To Eichra Oren, it looked like the Age of Sponges.

It also seemed to be the Age of Animals Masquerading as Plants. There were huge ground-covering collections of complicatedly branched porifera in shades of yellow, red, and orange. Some clung to the sand like moss, while others reached toward the distant light like trees and bushes. The delicate glass sponges looked more like transparent balloons than living things. There were skeletal organisms which reminded him of the mesquite growing around his mother's house, and others that occupied niches ultimately taken over by coral on Earth.

It was the sponges which gave the underwater scene such an alien look. To the modern eye, the colors were all wrong. There was very little of the green and blue which made free-diving in the Elders' version of the Mediterranean such a cool and relaxing experience.

One item the museum holoramas seemed to have omitted, probably for the same reason that displays of Precambrian life were sometimes so misleadingly barren-looking, was the algae. Everything he saw around him now was matted with it, including any number of the animals that moved. Apparently algae-eating animals had not yet evolved to their present level of efficiency. In any case, it, too, was the wrong color. It had taken a mass extinction—not the one that eradicated the dinosaurs, but an earlier and even bigger one—to change the look of algae.

There were also jellyfish—now why hadn't the Elders ever run across a sapient species of jellyfish?—and elaborately fringed worms that looked like caterpillars bred for show, and snails, millions of snails. Something struck the Antarctican as extremely peculiar about the snails. One species resembled a five-sided pyramid, another was like a Chinese hat half a meter in diameter.

"Snails! Why did it have to be snails!"

"Lay off, Sam, I'm trying to think!" The man picked up a handful of sand, colored yellow and pink and black in layers, let it strain through his fingers to resettle on the bottom, leaving a cloud of tiny shrimp suspended, darting off to find new hiding places.

"Those clam things over there are brachiopods, Boss, a type of shellfish thought to be extinct!"

The man shook his head, concealing a grin. It wouldn't be the first time that the dog's annoying and persistent sense of humor had salvaged his sanity. "Yes, Sam, I'm just as well acquainted with paleobiology as any member of the Elders' civilization, and I can even retrieve cerebrocortical implant data as well as you can."

"Not quite—" came an electronically simulated sniff fully as insincere as one of Mister Thoggosh's sighs. "I am cerebro-cortical implant data, after all, Boss."

"It takes one to know one." He laughed. "Of course you realize what's missing here, don't you?"

"A decent supply of horseradish—okay, okay, I'll cut it out! Of course I do: it was as broad and populous a group as mammals, and even in a ghost town where there aren't any people, you'd expect to see a kangaroo rat or a prairie dog."

"That's right, Sam. There are no trilobites down here of any size or description. Which brings me to another point I wanted to ask about, Model 17."

"Yes, Eichra Oren?" A shadow flowed across the man as the robot settled to the sand without disturbing it.

"Did I hear you right, that this area wasn't shut down with the rest of the ship, but has been warm, active, and alive like this for the whole billion years?"

She would have blinked had it been possible. "You heard correctly. That is what I said."

He stood up, completely oriented now, his mind comfortably at work on a problem. "Life on Earth evolved over the same billion years, Model 17. How come it hasn't here?"

There was a long silence. "An intriguing question, now that you mention it. It had never occurred to me before, although, as I say, this area lay outside the range of my normal responsibilities. I'm afraid that I don't care for what it implies."

Eichra Oren raised his eyebrows, wondering whether Model 17 had come to the same somewhat disturbing conclusion he just had. "And what might that be?"

Sam interrupted the robot before she could answer. "For one thing, Boss, an absolute lack of radiation capable of producing mutations. Remember the way the hull of this asteroid even strains out neutrinos? Mutation is kept at a standstill here."

For once, Model 17 was ahead of the cybernetic animal. "Excuse me, Sam, but that was not my idea. It is a very good idea until you measure the radiation coming from whatever that thing is up there." She pointed an antenna at the apparent sun.

For once the virtual animal was taken aback. "You mean that you don't know what it is?"

"Did I not say only a few minutes ago," she grumbled, "that I had never been all the way to the center? If not, then I say it now. Please record and save it for future reference this time. I don't know what that object above our heads is, except that it is reputed to be the center of the healing powers of this place."

"You don't mean . . . ?"

"Yes, Sam," she interrupted, "I do mean. In order for Eichra Oren and me to capture and revenge ourselves upon Nikola Deshovich, we must now swim up to the center—and the Sun."

 

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Framed