“Please get out, Commissioner Hansen,” said the voice in Hansen’s skull. The aircar bobbled a few centimeters above the floor instead of settling with the shut-down fans.
“This way, please, sir,” said the handsome android. He had to shout to be heard over the racket the car made.
The android was speaking with his mouth. At least that was a change for the better. . . .
Hansen got out of the vehicle. It sped off into—through—another doorway.
The spindles who’d escorted the Commissioner had shrunk to hand’s breadth height. They were giving off sounds of sizzling, fiery anger as they disappeared.
The rotunda was almost silent when they and the aircar were gone.
“This will only take a moment, sir,” said the misshapen android, raising the flared nozzle of the apparatus he carried. “Please hold still.”
“What are you—”
“Please hold still,” said the handsome android as the nozzle hissed an opalescent bubble which wobbled and grew without detaching itself from the apparatus. The android reached around Hansen and guided the edges of the bubble like a couturier with a swatch of cloth.
“Now, sir,” said the ugly android, “if you’ll step carefully onto this . . . ?”
Hansen lifted his feet so that he was standing on the doubled thickness of the bubble’s lower edge.
He understood, now. They were blowing him a temporary atmosphere suit, a membrane of polarized permeability. Oxygen could pass in, while carbon dioxide and other waste gasses passed out no matter what the composition of the encircling atmosphere.
A useful tool for chemical emergencies or even fires, though the membrane didn’t block heat. Temporary suits could keep people alive in hard vacuum for as long as the oxygen level within the bubble remained at a breathable level.
The hideous android smiled as he continued to extrude the material. Hansen supposed the expression was meant to be friendly.
The handsome attendant took a palm-sized device from his belt. He gathered the flattened bubble over Hansen’s head in his slim hands and touched the edges with the tool, mating them with a faint sputter.
The seam was a quiver of light when Hansen moved and made the bubble tremble. His mind told him falsely that his lungs had to struggle to breathe. He controlled his expression, but he could feel his heart rate rise.
“That’s right, sir,” said the ugly attendant. “Now, if you’ll just walk this way . . . ?”
The attendant had shut off his apparatus. Now he gestured toward one of the archways. His skin had the utter pallor that some androids tried to conceal with cosmetics; but whatever his skin color, this creature couldn’t have been anything that sprang from a human womb.
Hansen obeyed, walking deliberately so that the flexible membrane could billow ahead of his motion. He could see and hear normally, except for a slight shimmer in the air and the hint of distortion at the seam.
The Commissioner’s senses were overloaded with hormones from the gunfight, from the capture that should have been the crown of his career no matter how much longer he served the Consensus—
From all that had happened since.
“Why is this happening to me?” Hansen shouted. “Why are you doing this?”
The handsome attendant shook his head blandly. He’d put the sealing device back into its belt pouch. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “Just step through the portal.”
Would the bronze doorleaves open, or would—
Hansen stepped through what had seemed to be solid metal. There was an instant of chill. He thought he saw the crystalline pattern of the atoms themselves, but then he was through the door and standing in a darkness more intense than that of the core of his brain.
Light bloomed, a flush of pink so faint that for an instant Hansen thought the illumination was an accident of his optic nerves—synapses tripping to relieve the oppressive black.
The color was real. He could see again.
Almost-color sublimed in all directions from a stalagmite of ice that grew out of a floor as smooth as a bearing race. Hansen couldn’t see any walls, but the ball of light—fading as it expanded—swelled across a dozen other cones of ice.