Ritter had become used to seeing visitors appear from the air before him, but the laughter in Hansen's eyes was a surprise to the engineer. Hansen was always grimly purposeful. For that matter, Penny had more often than not been sullenly gloomy the past several times she visited.
If he made her so miserable, why the hell didn't she stay away?
"How are we doing, Master Ritter?" Hansen asked, hitching his felt trousers around to a more comfortable position.
Hansen was not dressed to fit in with the personnel of Keep Greville, though Ritter knew he could vanish again into the Matrix as quickly as he appeared. Besides the obviously hand-sewn trousers, the slim man wore a shirt of coarse gray wool with bits of dry grass clinging to it—and a belt of flexible gold with a dragon-head buckle which combined function and artistry in a fashion that Ritter approved.
Still, the combination of coarse garments and intricate belt was as unexpected as Hansen's cheerfulness.
"I've completed the modifications," Ritter said.
Normally it didn't make him nervous to turn hardware over to users—the soldiers of Keep Greville—for testing. Ritter knew, and Lord Greville knew, that there would always be flaws in new equipment. Field testing was the only way that designs could be refined to meet actual needs—or be scrapped as certainly useless because the flaws uncovered were insuperable.
But Lord Greville didn't personally test new equipment against the weapons of his neighbors . . . and that was just what this thin, cold-eyed god intended to do.
"That was your job," Hansen said, raising a quizzical eyebrow. "That makes it a win, friend. What's the problem?"
"I wish . . . ," said the engineer.
He touched his console, idly rotating an image of the dragonfly directly above the unit itself. "I wish that someone else could test its operation. Especially after the last time. Don't you have servants?"
Hansen's face was briefly immobile. A tiny smile played at the corners of his mouth and his nostrils were flared.
Ritter had seen the look before on his visitor's face. That time it had been directed at the Lomeri, not at him.
"Send somebody where it's too dangerous for me to go, Master Ritter?" Hansen said in a whisper like whetted steel. "It was always me that they sent."
He licked his dry lips. "I'd rather die than be one of them, Master Ritter."
The engineer lowered himself to one knee and bowed his head. "Forgive me, my lord," he said.
"Hey," said Hansen, stepping around a rack of testing equipment. He gave Ritter's arm a friendly tug upward. "You're doing your job to warn of the risks. But, you know, I'll carry out my end my own way."
Ritter stood and nodded appreciatively. He gestured toward the dimensional vehicle. "Well . . . ," he said.
Hansen was lost within his memories again. "I've lived a lot longer than I ever thought I would, Ritter," the slim man said as he stared into the past. "Maybe longer than I should have, too."
His hand still lay on Ritter's left shoulder. The engineer clasped it with his right hand and said jovially, "Well, just watch yourself on your end, and I'll keep my thumb on the override button here."
Hansen's eyes focused again. "You bet," he said. "But not here, exactly. We're going to do this safely this time. I'll run you and the hardware up to Plane Seven and drop the dragonfly back to Six where there won't be any, ah, problems besides what may happen with the equipment."
"Glad to hear it," said Ritter, relieved at more than the plan of operation. He followed his visitor through the aisle and onto the examination stand where the dimensional vehicle waited.
"Climb into the saddle," said Hansen, "but don't fool with the controls. I'll take it and you both with me."
The engineer obeyed his instructions. Hansen's mouth quirked into a lopsided smile and he added, "You know, I made a pretty good choice in you."
Ritter guffawed. "I've pulled in my horns since the screw-up the last time," he said. "But—" serious again "—I don't think you were going to find a better engineer within a thousand kilometers of Keep Greville."
Hansen spread his fingers to touch the saddle and Ritter simultaneously. "Yeah," he said. "That too."
The Matrix hardened around them, turning the workroom into a memory as slight as chaff drifting through a steel cage.
Only illumination surrounded Ritter. Bars of light branched in infinite directions, each a pure color and different from every other.
His guide had vanished. The dragonfly had vanished. The light had form and power and—
The dragonfly rocked under Ritter's weight. Its feet ground into the sandy loam of a ridge above the tide line. Large-headed grass waved to the height of Hansen's chest, and a line of palms leaned their coconuts out toward the surf.
"Oh!" said the engineer, reacting to the Matrix world he now overlooked.
The atmosphere was alive in a fashion that the air of Ritter's own countryside lacked. Near the horizon, the sea changed color, gray-green replaced the inshore gray-blue.
For as far as Ritter could see from twenty meters above sea level, a great circular storm arced around the horizon. Lightning crackled silently, back-lighting the clouds, and slanted bars of rain joined clouds and sea at intervals. The sparkling tang to the air was more likely ozone from the storm than salt alone.
"Where are we?" Ritter asked.
"This was the plane that the original exploration team under Captain Rolls found," Hansen explained. "Thousands of islands but no large continents. When Rolls vanished, the Consensus of Worlds sent North and his troubleshooters to find out what had gone wrong."
The engineer shook his head. "I heard all that when I was little," he said. "And a colony was sent—"
"To the Open Lands," his guide agreed. "To Plane One, where all the other planes impinge without going through the Matrix."
It appeared that a great wave was swelling at the juncture of blue water and green. The mass grew still further; streaming seawater in all directions to assume its own dense black color.
The thing was alive. It spouted a double plume of spray which hung in the air after the beast itself had resubmerged.
"And the colony vanished too," Ritter said. He was beginning to shiver. "And we were sent, my ancestors, ten thousand years ago, in a fleet to find them."
"After you, a fleet of androids," Hansen agreed softly. "And after the androids, a fleet crewed by machine intelligences. They're all here, each on its own plane; and the Lomeri, who came before there were humans in the greater universe."
He laid his hand on the engineer's hand. After a moment, Ritter stopped trembling.
Last of all, the Lords of the Consensus sent Commissioner Nils Hansen alone, to go where fleets had disappeared to no avail. But the engineer didn't have to know about that. . . .
"But that's mythology!" Ritter shouted. "That isn't real!"
Hansen bent down and pinched up a portion of soil. He turned Ritter's hand palm-up with his own free hand and dribbled the sand and dirt into it.
Ritter rubbed the grit between his palms.
"Yeah," he said. " 'What?' is more important than 'Why?' isn't it? Sorry."
Hansen chuckled. "For people like you and me it is, friend," he said. "Now, trade me places and let's see how our noble steed—" he patted the dimensional vehicle "—handles in a nice, safe pasture like Plane Six."
Ritter swung himself off the dragonfly. His mass dwarfed that of the vehicle, but its spindly legs barely twitched when his weight came off them.
The engineer detached the control panel from the saddle. "I'm ready, my lord," he said.
Hansen waved from the saddle—left-handed by instinct, though he wasn't wearing a pistol that his right hand had to be free to grasp. "Let's do it," he said.
Ritter pressed the override switch. The vehicle and its jewel-hard rider shrank out of sight.
G G G
The veils of color that surrounded Hansen were identical when he slid down into Hell. They were not a description of the Matrix, merely an artifact of the dragonfly's passage.
Even so, Hansen flicked his eyes around him like a beast which suspects that it may be in the slaughter chute. . . .
The vehicle touched down on a gravel beach, rocking gently. The landing was soundless because there was no air here, only rock; and, motionless in the sky, a huge red sun.
So far, so good.
"Control," Hansen ordered. "Drop to Plane Five."
The dragonfly's mechanisms whirred softly within themselves, but the vehicle remained where it had been.
As expected. Ritter hadn't thought he'd be able to cure that part of the unit's problem.
Light winked on a distant corniche. There was life of a sort on Plane Six: the great crystalline descendants of machine intelligences which the Consensus had sent to Northworld within Hansen's lifetime—
Or in the unimaginably distant past, depending on the vantage from which one viewed temporal duration.
The creature on the cliff edge was too far away for Hansen to see it directly, but light striking the myriad facets of its body amplified the slightest motion.
Hansen drew a deep breath. The force bubble surrounding the dragonfly was firm. Even if that protection failed, Hansen could walk unaffected across this airless waste chilled to within a degree of absolute zero. He had the powers of a god. . . .
Hansen lifted the in-plane controls. The dragonfly lifted also, as smoothly as water spouting from a fountain.
Hansen cocked the column forward and sailed over the gravel, speeding or slowing as he chose. The bloody light transmuted all colors into shades of red and gray, but bands of texture paralleled the ancient shoreline to mark the stages by which the sea had vanished.
The skeleton of something terrifyingly huge lay on a bed of ooze which had frozen to the hardness of basalt. Most of the bones were scattered on the ground, but toothless jawplates gaped upward like some work of man. Hansen thought of the spouting creature he had watched from the beach where Ritter now waited.
The in-plane controls worked. He had learned what he came for.
Hansen sighed and swung the dragonfly back the way he had come.
"Control," he said as the frozen waste blurred past beneath him. "Plane Seven."
Hansen swam through color into sunlight that seemed brighter became there was an atmosphere to scatter it. He drew back on the control column when the surf foamed to fleck his legs.
With a dragonfly, apparent duration was the same at either end of the dimensional contact. While Hansen maneuvered over the waterless sea, the storm had swept closer to the beach on Plane Seven. The first big drops pocked the sand like miniature asteroid impacts.
The engineer released the override switch. "How did it go?" he asked anxiously.
Hansen grounded squarely on the marks from which the vehicle had lifted. "Like a charm!" he said. He hopped out of the saddle. "Now, let's get you home before we get soaked."
Ritter climbed aboard the dragonfly. His movements were graceless but adequate to his need. "So there won't be any problem with the actual operation?" he pressed.
"No hardware problem at all," Hansen said cheerfully.
But because of the limited dimensional control, the insertion would have to be made from Plane Two . . . and whoever operated the override switch from the Lomeri's home risked more than the chance of being soaked by a storm.