Particularly surprising was the fact that he was alive.
The capsule had—landed?—on a promenade around the building’s roof. Behind Hansen was the quarter-sphere sheltering the audience section of a 3,000-seat odeum.
Two men and a woman came from a door in the back of the much smaller quarter-sphere intended to cover the performers. Apart from miniature figures in the fields below, these were the first living beings Hansen had seen since a trio of androids strapped him into the intrusion capsule.
“Can we help you, sir?” called the older man in the center of the group.
Hansen stepped out of the collapsing ruin of his capsule. The fallen hull plates had a porous look, and the monomolecular carbon frame members were beginning to sag under their own weight. He’d envisioned a lot of possibilities for what would happen on this mission, but not this one.
Not anything as survivable as this one, if it came to that.
He bent his mouth into a pleasant smile to match that of his questioner and said, “Ah, my name’s Hansen. Ah, this is going to sound silly, but is this Northworld?”
Hansen wore what looked like standard exploration-unit coveralls until you checked at the level of the weave and found the battery of hidden weapons and sensors. Besides the coveralls, he had a satchel holding three separate changes of clothes, each one a direct copy—in appearance—of an outfit that one of the later colonists was known to have carried to Northworld.
His options didn’t include sandals and loose, flowing robes cinched at the waist with a belt of soft fabric—which was what the three locals greeting him wore.
“Well, that isn’t our name for it, Mr. Hansen,” said the other man—still older than Hansen by a decade, if appearance was anything to judge by. “We call it Diamond, but since we believe we’re in a spacetime bubble of our own, we may well be a minority in our opinion.”
“We’re so glad to see you,” said the young woman who touched Hansen’s arm in a gesture of welcome and perhaps reassurance—for one or both of them. “We’d been afraid that it was, you know . . . something to do with the Passages.”
Her fingertips felt warm even through the cloth. She had long brown hair and was very attractive, primarily because of her lively expression.
This place might well be a bubble of phased spacetime; certainly it wasn’t Northworld, a barren wilderness until its settlement three standard months before. The crops below had been in the ground longer than that, and Hansen couldn’t even guess how long it must have taken to construct the city-sized building on which he now stood.
“You were expecting me, then?” Hansen asked, keeping his tone mild. The promenade was paved with a rubbery layer that responded comfortably beneath his boots.
“Well, not you precisely,” said the old man.
“My name is Dana, by the way,” interjected the younger man. “And these are Gorley—” the other man “—and Lea.”
“And as Lea said,” Gorley went on, “we’re delighted you’re here—”
“Both for yourself,” added Lea, “and because you’re not. . . .” Her face quirked in embarrassment, and her hand squeezed Hansen’s biceps.
“But particularly for yourself, Mr. Hansen,” the older man went on. “We never received a visitor before.”
“As to whether we knew you were coming,” said Dana, “and please—you mustn’t take this as an insult—but. . . .”
“You are disruptive, you see,” explained the woman. “Here in Diamond, because of the, ah. . . .”
“Well,” said the older man, “your weapons, Mr. Hansen.”
He pointed with the paired index and middle fingers of his left hand toward the remains of the intrusion capsule—now a silhouette in ash as if a quantity of cardboard had been burned on the promenade. “I’m afraid that the vehicle in which you arrived was itself a weapon.”
All three of the local citizens looked apologetic. “And you see,” the younger man finished, “weapons don’t exist in Diamond.”
“Anything can be—” Hansen snapped before he got control of his tongue. Even if what he’d been about to say were true—and it certainly was true where he came from that anything could be used as a weapon if the will to do so existed—that wasn’t an attitude he wanted to stress to his present hosts.