Hansen braced himself. When the pink glow touched him, a voice in his mind said, “There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen.”
Other stalagmites were scaling away drifts of color as weak as the nimbus of sunlight about a butterfly’s wings. Each was a separate pastel, each so pale that only by comparison could they be differentiated.
“I don’t belong here!” Hansen cried. “If there’s been a crime, let me out of here and I’ll deal with it.”
Hansen could see that there was no door behind him now, nothing but vacancy and a plain like a mirror.
Green ambiance washed over him. “There was a world,” said a different voice in his mind, mellifluous and a trifle arch. “It had been charted. Humans could live there, we thought—”
Orange light. A voice like a whip. “The Consensus thought. Captain Rolls led a unit to do a final examination. They—”
Pink neutrality again: “They vanished. A crime has been committed.”
Motes of light drifted upward like fog without finding a ceiling. Hansen tested the floor with his toes. It was solid, unyielding. It felt cold, even through his boots and the double insulating layers of his airsuit.
Almost all of the cones were glowing now as they discharged their burdens of thought and near-light.
“Listen and learn, Commissioner Hansen,” said blue certainty in the Commissioner’s mind. “We sent another team under Captain North, trusted personnel who had dealt with crises on a dozen other worlds to be colonized. Faithful—”
“Faithful servants of the Consensus,” quivered a red voice. It reminded Hansen of the lip-smacking tones of politicians who demanded tough measures but who’d never stood in an alley after a firefight and realized how little there was to a human being after the life goes out of him. “North had cleansed worlds, seeded them—changed weather patterns, raised continents, crushed all opposition to the Con—”
“The Consensus,” whispered violet. “North reported that he had succeeded again, that we should send a colony at once, that all was prepared for settlement. He said that we should call the planet Northworld, that it was his right that the planet receive his name.”
Blue fog drifted over Hansen. “We sent the colony, because—”
“—because he was a faithful servant,” rejoined the red tones. “Ruthless and skillful, a servant to the needs of the Consensus. But North and his team had not returned from the planet, as they reported, and the new colony—”
“The planet vanished,” said pink light. “There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen. The colony has been stolen, the planet has been stolen.”
“Northworld has been stolen,” thundered Hansen’s mind in the organ tones of all dozen shades of light at once. “You will determine why, and you will cure the problem.”
The plain on which Hansen stood was boundless, but he no longer thought it was empty. There were shapes in the far distance, hinted bulks as huge as storms on a gas giant.
“This is nothing to do with me,” Hansen cried with fatalistic recklessness. “The colony wasn’t sent from Annunciation, North wasn’t—was he?—from here. I have my duties. Let me return to my duties.”
Light like yellow sunshine washed over him. If glaciers could laugh, the sensation in Hansen’s mind would have been that cold laughter. “Your duties are to the Consensus, Commissioner Hansen,” said a voice. “The Consensus demands that you deal with this event. You have been chosen from among—”
“From among many,” said violet light. “From among all the planets of the Consensus, from all the peoples. . . .”
“Records have been searched,” said the cold blue voice. “The Lomeri settled the world in past ages—”
“The lizardfolk settled Northworld in past ages,” said pink, “but no Lomeri were there when the exploration unit arrived. There has been—”
“There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen,” purred a pastel so faint that it might have been either brown or mauve. “When Rolls’ exploration unit landed, they found a waterworld with necklaces of islands—”
“Island necklaces and no other land,” the yellow light said. “But North reported a world with 46% of the surface area land.”
“And now the world is gone and North is gone, and they have taken with them the colony,” said pink. “There has been a crime, and you must solve it—”