Transmat World: Chapter 12, Episode 2
Aboard the Harbinger of Light and Justice; 218,570 B.C.
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Light from Harbinger’s wrapped star streamed through rectangular breaks in the photovoltaic Membrane. Filtering media conditioned the light to match the luminance and wavelength of a native race’s original star. Electronic filters adjusted themselves for each of the six different planet’s species as it swept over each divider wall. The Membrane became a dark, opaque fabric around the huge skylights. This provided the Rim with twelve hours of night between the huge windows as the Mercury-orbit-sized Membrane fell forever further behind at its inexorable 400,000 mile per hour differential velocity. The Harbinger was 600,000 years into its 800,000-year journey to the Milky Way — sixteen and a half million rotations and counting. Earth was in the Middle Pleistocene. Homo sapiens compete with Homo neanderthalensis hunting mastodon and sloth during a period of warming between ice ages.
Wundee studied debris around the plastic lenses — a few scraps of circuit, chunks of enduraplast, and parts of robotic limbs. The memory unit lay nearby, half-buried in powdered rock. The backside of the memory unit attached to a broken bit of circuit board, and a short curl of jagged, ripped optical ribbon cable stuck up from one end. Wundee reached out with a forward arm and plucked the memory unit from the powdered limestone, tucking it into a storage cavity.
Wundee wondered what happened here. He knows he is a tough little robot with his enduraplast body. It would take something quick, powerful, and rugged to take an inspection robot by surprise and break it apart so thoroughly. Wundee spun around to see what was behind him, eye camera lenses swiveling independently in all directions. No monster. No predator with huge teeth and enormous claws.
Not that I’m afraid of such. Just being cautious, thinks Wundee.
Limestone cascaded into the jungle far below — a jungle he now feels obliged to inspect for reasons of self-preservation and, perhaps, a little excitement. Small powder slides accompany Wundee down the slope, gravitonic beams disturbing long recumbent material. The inspection robot leveled off fifty feet above the treetops. Wundee’s lenses swept back and forth. It was 6 million miles to the front retainer wall. The machine decided to fly a couple of hundred before returning to regular duties.
Deposited in this area of Section 28 was an imprisoned civilization frozen in time. What seemed like huge, mirrored lawn ornament balls littered the landscape. The timeless, never-changing stasis field cages contained the members of an intelligent race accused of a heinous crime. They were at the top of their food chain preying on those below. A simple circle of wire formed the spheres. Using the least amount of metal to enclose the most space was an important design consideration in a galaxy as metal-starved as the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Kolpak used rectangular box designs for stasis fields to save space. Space was not a problem on Harbinger, but lack of metal was. So stasis fields became spherical and economical. Maxlux strives to be thrifty.
Everything seems normal. There is blue-green jungle for mile after mile. An occasional stasis field peaks out from vines, mute monuments to the Lantee, a bipedal race of mammalian origin. Maxlux thought it fitting that previous prey of the Lantee cavorted around their predators with impunity. The jungle teemed with such “prey”, and they seemed to get bigger and more numerous as rotations went by.
The Lantee were a few light years from the planetary system of the Kolpak and had just entered their steam age when the Prime’s disk-shaped scout ships discovered their planet. It took a week to package the 800 million Lantee into stasis fields. It was another two years before a section could be prepared with atmosphere, soil, and water to receive the rest of the planet’s vegetation and the poor, terrorized prey, which would be kept aboard Harbinger for their own protection for the rest of eternity. Giant machines stripped the Lantee’s planet to its mantle. The sterile rock circled a now sterile planetary system. Even that became basic elements stored in the bowels of Harbinger along with its moons and several other planets in the system.
From then on, Maxlux ordered all of the thirty-two sections of the Rim prepped with air, water and subsoil for receiving guests should they run across another such system before reaching their destination. A herculean task, it had been completed some 3 million rotations ago. The massive disk-shaped concentration of stars and planets taking up a quarter of the sky in the beginning — the Milky Way — now surrounded Harbinger.
Leather-like wings and bared fangs are everywhere. Gravity generators pop Wundee another fifty yards from the Rim’s surface in less than four seconds. Ghaslins were four inches long when Harbinger started its journey. Now ten times that size, they clung to the hairline cracks of his appendage cavities and the holes in the speaker grill with needle-sharp claws and teeth. Wundee started spinning and accelerating, breaking them loose. They soon abandoned prey that did not smell right.
Pink flowers opening and closing punctuate the green canopy. Wundee uses a telescopic lens to see it is the mouths of animals leaping from treetops in vain attempts to latch on to him.
Wundee aimed for a curiously unnatural shape in the distance. From archived information, Wundee knew it was shaped like an antique timer the Kolpak called a centok glem which was two cones of glass connected by a narrow neck and partly filled with granulated nest egg shell. Kolpak hunters used it for timed hunts. As he passesdover the edge of a copse of tall trees forming a large circle around the shape, he saw there was no bottom to the centok glem. Where the constricting neck should be there was a fountain of water rising from a circular lake flowing to the apex of an inverted cone of jungle landscape.
Wundee stopped and examined this curious contraption for a few seconds, an eternity for such a wonderfully crafted thinking machine. The inspection bot had never seen anything like it. Wundee issued an involuntary ick ick ick from his auditory grill. An unexpunged robot laugh track added by the Kolpak centuries ago, it was his emotive circuit’s reaction to a paradoxical situation. The large flat top of the cone was covered with typical jungle growth except for a hole in the middle. The inverted sides were also covered with plants growing downward.
Where is the water going?
Around the lake a manicured sward of native grass a hundred yards in width extended to a circular stand of trees and a large fence. Assemblies of material in various forms and sizes dotted the lawn. Upon consultation with his database, Wundee correlated these to a cultural phenomenon of sentient beings called “art”. These were sculpture. They incorporated the flow of water in unusual manners like the two floating cubes in front of him. One cube floated three feet off the grass and the other fifteen. Water flowed out of the top face of the bottom cube into the bottom face of the top cube. Wundee went to investigate this phenomenon. The water column was two feet in diameter. Wundee stuck an appendage into the water. It was flowing up, but as he penetrated deeper, he felt the inner column of water flowing down. A gravitonic generator in the top cube sucked the outer ring of water up. It fell back to the bottom cube through ambient gravity, which was a little less than standard Nebule in this section of the Rim. It was a clever illusion.
Turning his attention back to the lake and its floating cone, Wundee aimed for the water falling up in the center of the lake. Upon closer inspection, he can see the round column of water merged with a circular pool at the tip of the inverted cone. From this pool it entered a spiral gorge and wound its way up the inverted hill. It disappeared into a cavity just before reaching the edge of the flat plateau at the top.
Most likely uses the same principle as the sculpture, just larger in scale, thought Wundee.
As he got closer, he felt the tug of gravity upwards. He also noticed the bright sunlight underneath the overhang, hardly a shadow to be seen. It was a puzzle until he saw the abnormal shapes of reflections in the water. Artificial gravity deformed part of the surrounding lake into thousands of flat reflective surfaces. These directed sunlight onto plants growing from the underside of the cone.
Wundee positioned himself above the upside down stream’s surface and followed it. The vegetation looked normal for this section except for growing straight down. The plants did not seem to care. Aquatic animals leaped into the air above the stream, swimming upstream down to the lake. Wundee followed the stream to the opening where it disappeared. With trepidation he accompanied the water into the darkness. It flowed through a horizontal trough to the center of the cone five hundred feet away and dropped back down to the lake.
