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." He suited up and flew from his vessel on a backjet, to walk about and examine.The metal being nonferrous, magnetic soles didn't aid him, but he'd slipped on a pair of sticky-coated asteroid miner's overshoes.Through a camera in his fist Joelle saw the huge curve to his left, the unknown constellations to his right, toppling past the edge of the pier.Excitement vibrated in his voice."It's our bad luck nobody's around just now, but they have been and they will.This place feels used."Nothing was quite fitted to Williwaw.Nevertheless he found a niche into which the boat could ease.Probably one of the machines alongside would secure her, did he only know how to operate it.He settled for leaving Dozsa on unwilling watch, and led the rest off on foot and by personal rocket.A cavernous opening the "bow" was the entrance to a tunnel which ran three-quarters the length of the station (for station of some kind it must be).Lesser passages led off, branching and rebranching.Every wall shone, a soft light that spectrometers declared ranged from the near ultraviolet to the far infrared.for a variety of eyes? Rails gave an opportunity to pull oneself along.At intervals were frameworks which might be rest stops or observation booths or -? Doors of assorted outlines were so smoothly fitted as to be nearly invisible, and no way appeared for opening them."Each tenant has his key," Brodersen hazarded.He said that because not every door was a silvery blankness.For whatever reasons, a number were transparent.A few did not even seem to be material, though if they were force-fields they acted harder than steel.Looking, photographing, taking spectra, the humans glimpsed half a score of separate environments.Red murk or blue glare or mildly in between, illuminations revealed austere cell, swirling mist, conservatory a-riot with many-hued vegetation through which jewel-like flyers darted, hologrammic scene of a stony land where yellow dust scudded beneath an orange sky, moving mechanisms, sights less nameable than these.Indications were of atmospheres thick, medium, tenuous, which contained free oxygen or free hydrogen or neither, at temperatures anywhere between the boiling point of nitrogen and the melting point of lead.In every case, what the humans saw was obviously an antechamber to a rich complex of living quarters, laboratories, God knew what else.(The users did, the Others did.) Brodersen said he felt sure a centrifuge room was always included, unless something more elegant was available, in order that visitors could enjoy home weight when they wanted.Visitors! speared through Joelle.A galactic confraternity of minds, cultures, races, whom the Others have found worthy and have prepared this mansion for.We are not among them.The hurt of that exceeded the hurt of having been human female.She cast it from her and immersed her consciousness, baptized it, in what else she was discovering.For actually the apartments were almost incidental to the explorers, found piecemeal as they wandered about in the labyrinth.What counted, what stunned was the thing at its heart.There the main corridor swelled to form a kilometer-wide spherical space.A three-dimensional web of wires provided ready access to its inner surface.Upon this were emplaced subtly contoured devices, across which played glows and rainbows.There were views of exterior space too, not framed in any tangible screens.And there were displays.Displays- They were not pictures or dioramas, but moving, solid images made of light which was not confined to the humanvisible octave.They portrayed no species, but were wholly abstract: shapes, hues, motions.A line, for instance, would flash into being to point at a number, which in turn was showed by an array of sparks.The nearest that any exhibit came to realism was in schematics of the pulsar.Or thus Joelle supposed.Most of what she saw was incomprehensible, nothing but streaks, curtains, vortices, ribbands, cataracts.Probably they were intended for races whose visual conventions, maybe whose whole world-views, were totally different from hers.She concentrated on the one that made the most sense.Before long it made an enormous amount of sense [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]