Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

“What’s wrong, you hairless coward?” S’larbo was gloating.

“Is that the honor of the kzinti, to hunt with overwhelming force? I thought you hunted with bare claws.”

“Your gibbering spews like bandersnatch dung. Too long have my people faltered at the lies of you bony worms.”

Flex could not keep his position so high up the wall, and slid down. As he sought better footing, two strange things happened. First, he felt the entire cylinder roll slightly under his foot. While the cylinder hung stable over the ground, it was free to rotate on its long axis without friction. And Flex’s weight was enough to set it in motion. Second, as it moved, some hidden mechanism must have awoken, because a dull amber light emanated from an area at the center of the structure.

Jarko-S’larbo grunted with surprise, not knowing that Flex had triggered the device. Flex stepped higher up the rounded wall, and the tube cooperated, rolling down under his weight.

Time to shake things up a bit, Flex thought.

S’larbo fired two bolts down the center of the tube, missing Flex, who continued to climb up the wall. He heard the kzin grunt again, and guessed that the ratcat had momentarily lost his balance.

“Is it true,” said Flex, stopping the roll and reversing it as hard as he could, “that cats always land on their feet?”

“ Grrraaarr! ”

Flex again turned around and treaded hard up the opposite wall. Once the tube got going, he stopped it, and ran the other way. More bad shots from S’larbo, but they were getting better. Sooner or later, one would connect, and that would be it. Not content to die at the hands of this fur ball, Flex pounded full-bore up one wall, to get the cylinder spinning as fast as he could. It was more fun getting the kzin dizzy, storming him, and fighting hand-and-claw. He wanted to beat the shit out of that bastard before boring a hole in him.

The cylinder rolled at a good clip, so that if Flex stopped too long, his feet would be swept out from under him. Not a problem; at a mere meter and a half, he’d have a better time of it than a knock-kneed feline twice his height.

“Let’s go even faster!” he said.

“You’re doing this?” S’larbo hissed, unable to suppress his astonishment.

Flex worked his way to the center, but slowly, because he wanted to reverse the direction at unpredictable intervals. An image from history formed in his mind: that of two men rolling on a floating log, until one fell into the water. No doubt a competition from the Olympic games of ancient Greece.

Meanwhile, the light at the center of the tunnel was growing, and Flex feared that the keen eyes of the kzin would have no trouble seeing him now. Yet, in the growing light, an object seemed to descend from the ceiling, blocking most of the tunnel at its center. It made no sense, since the “ceiling” was constantly rolling around. When the object-or group of objects, as they now appeared to be-reached the “ground,” the light shot back upward. The beam seemed to reach through the cylinder, forming a shaft of light reaching up at a right angle to the tunnel, extending beyond it, where there was once a curved ceiling. The new shaft appeared to be another cylinder like the first, but Flex could see only a little way up into it.

The objects under the new tunnel were bathed in the amber light. They were solid rectangles of differing sizes, open on their tops. Where the two tunnels joined above, a series of armatures hung, perhaps waiting to re-hoist the empty boxes, or to bring new ones.

“Hey, Slobbo!” Flex said, to see if the kzin saw what he was seeing. No answer. He tried again, but the changes to the cylinder seemed to have cut off their communication.

Flex stopped revving up the cylinder, letting it coast. He had to keep walking up one side, or side-stepping to avoid falling down. He turned his lights back on and did a quick query of his knowledge well. Nothing was forthcoming until he correlated “Zeno’s Wormhole” with “stasis box.” This produced an obscure monogram with the intriguing title: “The Spontaneous Generation of a Quasi-Quantized Stasis Field inside a Rotating, Non-Traversable Wormhole: A Proposal on How the Slaver Stasis Boxes Might Have Been Manufactured.” It was not a quick read.

Wisely, Flex had been studying related material, and as a professional collector and collator of information, he got the gist of it while skimming his display and side-stepping at the same time.

Finagling mist demons, he thought. This artifact is a factory for stasis boxes, and I’ve turned the damn thing on!

While he was coming to grips with that, he was slow to notice something else. His lower legs tingled, from the feet up past his knees, and he found difficulty in walking toward the intersecting tunnel. He took a step with his right leg, to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. He wasn’t. There was an unmistakable increase in resistance as he progressed toward this small wormhole’s pinch point.

Flex scanned some basic material on “the dichotomy paradox,” whereby ancient Earth mathematicians such as Zeno noted that for an object to move from point A to point B, it first had to reach the midpoint between the two. But to reach that midpoint, the object first had to reach the quarter point, and so on. The paradox was that if one had to overtake an infinite number of intermediate points, one could never reach the destination. The mystery took thousands of years for mankind to unravel, by the invention of calculus.

One speculation about non-traversable wormholes that caught Flex’s attention concerned time traps. One theory supposed that because space was squashed inside, time literally slowed as one progressed inward, until it stopped completely at the pit of the wormhole. So, he concluded, this was how the Slavers built and stocked the variety of stasis boxes found scattered throughout known space. This could be the most important technological advance since the conquest of hyperspace.

Thank you Institute of Knowledge, he thought.

The wormhole was only about ten meters in diameter, so there was a distracting sort of Coriolis effect-a differing temporal disparity between his head and feet. It was manageable but caused the tingling in his legs. He felt bloated, and his heart raced to pump blood to feet that plodded through congealing time.

Flex heightened his awareness of things unseen ahead, but doubted the kzin could make it to the stasis boxes, much less past them. The cylinder was open on both ends, and its contents symmetrical, so it was logical to assume that a mirror wormhole stretched out in the opposite direction.

Flex stumbled as he turned back to face the center, and he realized that the spin of the tunnel had slowed. The kzin! He was running himself, trying to de-spin the thing. As the cylinder slowed, Flex helped it, blindly running the same way around as his opponent. The rolling slowed, then picked up rapidly in the other direction.

The phantom tunnel above widened, and then another one opened up at an odd angle to it. Tempted, Flex ran as hard as he could, spinning the cylinder to a breakneck pace, clockwise. As if on cue, three more lighted tunnels opened up, each at an equal angle of separation from the others, forming five spokes of a wheel around the axle spun by Flex and S’larbo.

“Tabam!” said Flex to himself. This isn’t just a Zeno’s Wormhole, or even two or three. It’s a roulette of wormholes meeting at the hub, feeding into the machine. But feeding from where? He wanted to get nearer to the center to be able to peer into one of the adjoining tunnels-he’d be the first to see into them in over a billion years-unless the expedition that had discovered the artifact had already been sucked into eternity.