Ring

23

From the upper forest Deck to the loading bay at the base, lights blazed from the Northern’s battered lifedome. The human glow flooded over impassive Xeelee construction material, evoking no reflection.

Spinner-of-Rope sat in her cramped pilot’s cage. Her helmet was filled with urgent chatter relayed from the lifedome.

Her hands fidgeted, plucking at the seams of her gloves; they looked like nervous, fluttering birds, she thought. She rested the hands deliberately against the material of her trousers, stilling them. The crew still weren’t ready. How much of this waiting did they think she could endure?

Behind her, the smooth lines of the nightfighter’s discontinuity-drive wings swept across space, outlined in blood-red by the bloated hulk of the Sun. The lifedome of the Great Northern — severed from its columnar spine — had been grafted crudely onto the shoulders of the nightfighter, pinned within a superstructure of scaffolding which embraced the lifedome and clasped it to the nightfighter. Behind the dome a GUTdrive power source, cannibalized from the abandoned Northern, sat squat on the nightfighter, cables snaking from it and into the dome. And, cradled within the attaching superstructure. Spinner could see the short, graceful profile of the Great Britain: the old sea ship, preserved from abandonment once more by the sentimentality of Louise Ye Armonk, was a dark shadow against the life dome, like some insect clinging to its glowing face.

The lifedome was a mile-wide encrustation on the cool morphology of Xeelee technology; it dwarfed the Xeelee ship which carried it, looking like a grotesque parasite, she thought.

Spinner closed her eyes, trying to shut out the surrounding, pressing universe of events. She listened to the underlying wash of her own, rapid, breathing. Under her helmet her spectacles pinched the bridge of her nose with a small, familiar discomfort, and she could feel the cool form of her father’s arrowhead against her chest. Clinging biostat telltales clung to her flesh, sharp and cold, but the little probes had at least become familiar: not nearly as uncomfortable as she’d found them at first. The environment suit smelled of plastic and metal, and a little of herself; but there was also a sparkle of orange zest, from one of the helmet nipples.

“…Spinner-of-Rope.”

The voice emerged from the background lifedome babble like the clear voice of an oboe within an orchestra. (And that, she thought, was a metaphor which wouldn’t have occurred to her in the days before she’d poked her head out of the forest.)

“I hear you, Louise.”

“I think we’re ready.”

Spinner laughed. “Are you joking? I can’t imagine you all sounding less ready.”

Louise sighed, clearly irritated. “Spinner, we’re as ready as we’re ever going to be. We’ve been working on this for a year now. If we wait until every bolt is tightened — and until every damn jobsworth in the Decks, every antique anal retentive on every one of Morrow’s damn launch committees, is prepared to give his or her grudging acquiescence — we’ll still be sitting here when the Sun goes cold.”

“It’s a little different from your old days, Louise,” Spinner said ruefully. Spinner had seen images of the Northern’s first launch — the extravagant parties that had preceded it, the flotilla of intraSystem craft that had swirled around the huge GUTship as it had hauled itself out of the System.

Louise grunted. “Yeah, well, I guess those days are gone. Things are a little more seat-of-the-pants now, Spinner.”

Yes, Spinner thought resentfully, but the trouble is it’s my seat; my pants.

Louise said, “We’re ready technically, anyway, according to all of Mark’s feedbacks. We’ve laid the coordinates of the flight into your waldo systems… all we can do now is see if they work.”

“Right.” Sourly, Spinner asked, “Shall I do a countdown? You could relay it through the Decks; it might be fun. Ten — nine — ”

“Come on, Spinner. Don’t play games. It’s time to do it. And, Spinner — ”

Spinner stared at the Sunlight. “Yes?”

“…Be prepared.”

Spinner’s resentment grew. She knew what that meant. If anything went badly wrong with this first, full hyperdrive flight — so bad that it hadn’t been predicted by the endless Virtual scenarios, so bad that the automatics couldn’t cope — then it was going to be up to her, Spinner-of-Rope, and her famous seat-of-the-pants. And that was why she was still here, in this damn open cage: because Louise and Mark had failed to find a way to automate out that human element.

On her reactions and quick thinking, she knew, could depend — not just her own life, and the lives of her friends, the safety of the forest — but the future of the species.

I should have stuck to rope-spinning, she thought gloomily.

She reached out toward her hyperdrive waldo. She found herself staring at her own hand and arm, becoming aware of the enormity of the action she was about to take. The light of the dying Sun flooded the cage in shades of blood-red; gaudy golden highlights glimmered from the material of her glove.

She was filled, suddenly, with a profound sense of melancholy. She stifled a cry; the mood was so powerful it was almost overwhelming…

And the flood of emotion was coming from outside her. It came from her companion, she realized; her silent, invisible companion, here in the cage…

Louise sounded tense, almost unbearably so. “Spinner? We’re waiting.”

Spinner-of-Rope looked around at the empty sky of the Solar System: at the ruin of the Sun, the glistening Jovian accretion disc. Despite the alienating devastation, it was strange to think that she would be the last human to witness this aching, echoing, cathedral of space and history. “Louise — no one’s ever going to come back here, are they?”

“To the Solar System? No,” Louise replied briskly.

“It doesn’t seem right,” she said slowly.

“What doesn’t?”

“That we should simply leave like this. Louise, we’re the last humans. Shouldn’t we — ”

Louise laughed. “What? Nail a plaque to Callisto? Make a speech? ‘Last one to leave, turn off the lights’?”

“I don’t know, Louise. But — ”

“Spinner.” It was always very obvious when Louise was forcing herself to be patient. “It’s over. Just push the damn button.”

Spinner-of-Rope closed her hand around the waldo.

Sunlight imploded.

Spinner-of-Rope was switched into darkness, into a sea of shadows which flooded the cage. She glanced down at her lap. The only illumination was a dim crimson glow — far less brilliant than Sol’s — which barely revealed the outlines of her own body.

The hyperdrive transit was as sudden and seamless as the test runs. There was no internal sense of motion at all: merely a lighting change, as if all of this were no more than some shallow Virtual stunt.

She twisted in her couch. Behind her, the lifedome still sat on the frail looking shoulders of the Xeelee craft, apparently undamaged; yellow human light, aping lost Sol, still blazed from a hundred sources, pale against the emptiness of space.

And beyond the lifedome there was a star, near enough to show a globe — as red as Sol but evidently much dimmer, cooler. The star provided the little light available. Beyond the star’s glowing limb, six distant stars — a little brighter than the average — trailed across the sky in a zigzag shape. The star at one end of the compact constellation, ruby red, shone through the tenuous outer atmosphere of the nearby star globe.

The more remote constellations were an array of crimson and yellow spread across the sky. They were unchanged, as far as she could tell. Well, that was no surprise: she knew Louise hadn’t planned to come far on this first jaunt.

“How are you, Spinner-of-Rope?”

“Fine,” Spinner said briskly. “As I’m sure you know better than I do, thanks to Mark’s telltales.”

Louise laughed. “I’ve learned never to trust these damn gadgets. How did the trip feel?”

“As good as ever. As bad as ever… I take it we all survived.”

“I’m just checking my summaries. No structural damage, as far as I can see. One case of shock — ” She snorted. “A man who fell out of your big kapok tree, Spinner-of-Rope, when the Sun disappeared. The fool floated around until he could be snagged and hauled in. As we hoped, the nightfighter’s domain-wall inertial shielding protected the whole of the lifedome from any side-effects of the jump… Spinner, I don’t think many people in the Decks have even realized we’ve jumped.”

“Good. I guess it’s better that way.” Spinner-of-Rope stared around the sky. “Louise, I thought the Solar System was depressing enough. But this system is a tomb.”

“I know, Spinner. I’m sorry. But it is in our flightpath. Spinner, we’re going to head out of the plane of the Galaxy, in the direction of the Centaurus constellation: toward the Great Attractor…”

“The Xeelee Ring.”

“If that’s what it is, yes. And this star lies in Centaurus also.”

The main stars of the Centaurus constellation were ranged over distances from four light-years to five hundred light years from the Sun. Northern, piggy-backing the Xeelee nightfighter, was going to move, in a rough straight line, out through this three-dimensional layout — and then beyond, out of the Galaxy and toward the Great Attractor itself.

“Spinner, would you believe I decided we should come here, on the first hop, for sentimental reasons?”

“Sentimental? About this place? Are you kidding?”

“Spinner, that dull globe is Proxima Centauri: the nearest star to the Sun, less than four light-years out. When I was a kid, growing up on Earth, we’d barely reached the stars with the first GUTships. Systems like Proxima were places of wild romance, full of extraordinary adventure and possibility. Superet’s somber warnings of implacably hostile alien species Out There Somewhere just added to the allure for kids like me… I felt I had to get out here and see for myself.”

The presence, in the cage with her, seemed amused at this — even satisfied, Spinner thought.

Spinner grunted and picked at the material of her suit. “Well, you made it to Proxima at last. And I’m touched by these childhood reminiscences,” she said sourly.

You’re too harsh on her, Spinner-of-Rope…

Spinner went on, “This Proxima looks like a red giant. So I guess the photino birds have already done their work here…”

“No,” Louise said. “Actually, Spinner, Proxima is a red dwarf… It’s a Main Sequence star, quite stable.”

“Really?” Spinner-of-Rope twisted in her seat and stared into the dull disc of Proxima. “You mean it’s always been like this?”

Louise laughed. “I’m afraid so, Spinner. It’s just a lot less massive than the Sun, and so has always been much dimmer — twenty thousand times less luminous than the Sun, in fact. The photino birds didn’t need to turn it cool and red, like the Sun; Proxima has always been a dwarf. Stable, and harmless — and quite useless.”

“Useless for us. For baryonic life. But maybe not for the birds.”

“No,” Louise said. “I guess a red dwarf is the ideal stellar form, for them: the model toward which they are guiding every damn star in all the galaxies. Of course Proxima has its moments: it’s quite a brilliant flare star — a UV Ceti type. It can vary in brightness by up to a magnitude…”

“It can?” For a few seconds Spinner studied the bland crimson disc. “You want we should wait around and see if it does something exciting?”

“No, Spinner. Anyway, I suspect the photino birds will have put a stop to such frivolities by now… Oh. One thing. Spinner-of-Rope, turn around.”

Loosening her restraints. Spinner twisted in her seat. “What now?”

“Spinner, do you see that constellation just to the right of Proxima’s disc?”

Louise must mean the jagged row of six stars behind Proxima, Spinner decided. “Yes. What about it?”

“From Earth, that constellation used to be called Cassiopeia: named after the queen of Cepheus, the mother of Andromeda…”

“Save the fairy tales, Louise,” Spinner growled.

“But from here, the constellation looks different. From here, the pattern’s distinctive W-shape is spoiled a bit by the addition of that bright red star at the left hand end of the row.”

Spinner stared; the star was a ruby jewel glimmering through the hazy outer layers of Proxima.

“The first colonists of Proxima — or rather, of the Alpha system, of which Proxima is a part — called the new constellation the Switchback.

“Spinner, that extra star is the Sun. Our Sun, seen from Proxima. Another jump and Sol will be invisible; Spinner-of Rope, yours are the last human eyes ever to look at Sunlight…”

Giant Sol glowed through the crimson velvet of Proxima; Spinner stared at it, trying to make out a disc, until her eyes began to ache.

At last she tore her gaze away. “Enough,” she said. “Come on, Louise; no more of the past.”

“All right, Spinner…”

Spinner closed her hand around the waldo once more.

…And the brooding globe of Proxima was replaced, abruptly, without any internal feeling of transition, by a new star system. This was another red star — huge, ragged edged — but this time with a companion: a smaller yellow star, a point of light, barely a diameter away from the red globe. The giant was pulled into an elliptical shape by the dwarf companion, and Spinner thought she could see a dim bridge of material linking the two stars, an arc of red glowing star stuff pulled out of the giant.

“…Spinner?”

“Yes, Louise. I’m still here. You’re really showing me the sights, aren’t you?”

“This is Menkent — Gamma Centauri. We’re further through the Centaurus constellation: a hundred and sixty light-years from Sol, already. Menkent used to be a glorious A-class binary… But the photino birds have been at work. Now, one of the companions is going through its giant stage, and the other has already been reduced to a dwarf. Disgusting. Depressing.”

Spinner-of-Rope studied the twin stars, the lacy filaments of crimson gas reaching out of the giant to embrace its dwarf twin. “Depressing? I don’t know, Louise… It’s still beautiful.”

Yes, Spinner-of-Rope. And this is the last star we’ll visit that was significant enough to be named by Earth-bound astronomers, before spaceflight. Another gloomy little milestone…

“Don’t you get morbid too,” Spinner said.

“Spinner?”

“Nothing. Sorry, Louise.”

“All right, Spinner, we’ve established everything is functioning well enough. I’m going to cut in the main navigation sequence now, and we’ll try some major jumps… Do you think you’re ready?”

Spinner closed her eyes. “I’m ready, Louise.”

“Now, I know it’s going to be hard, but it will help if you keep in mind an understanding of what you’re going to see. We’re heading out of the Galaxy, at around twenty degrees below the plane of the disc. We’re going to attempt thirty five light-years every jump — and we’ll be trying for a jump every second. At that rate, we should cover the hundred and fifty million light-years to the Attractor in — ”

” — in around fifty days. I know, Louise.”

“I’m in the forest, Spinner. I’m looking out through the skydome, with Morrow and Uvarov, Trapper-of-Frogs, a few of the others. So you’re not alone, out there; we can see what you can see. Spinner — ”

“Another pep-talk? I know, Louise. I know.” She sighed. “Louise, you’re a great engineer, and a strong human being. But you’re a damn awful leader.”

“I’m sorry, Spinner. I — ”

“Let’s do it.”

Impulsively, Spinner slapped her hand down on the waldo.

— and the brooding coupled stars of Menkent were replaced, instantaneously, by another binary pair. This time the stars — twin red giants — seemed more equally matched, and a bridge of cooling, glowing material linked them. A wide, spreading spiral of dim gas was curled tightly around the giants, and -

— before she had time to think about it here was still another binary pair, this time much further from the ship, with a bright, hot blue star traversing the decaying hulk of a dim red giant. She saw how the giant hung behind the blue star like smoke behind a diamond -

— when she was whisked away yet again and now, before her, hung a softly shimmering globe of light: a planetary nebula, she recognized, the expanding corpse of a red giant, blown apart by its bird-induced superwind, but before -

— she could wonder if Sol would one day look like this, the nebula had gone to be replaced by an anonymous, distant star field which -

— vanished, because now she was surrounded by a dim, red smog; she was actually inside a giant star, she realized, inside its cooling outer flesh and -

— that was gone too, replaced by a huge, ragged nebula — a supernova site? — which -

— imploded and -

— a star loomed at her, swollen, ruddy, achingly like Sol, but not Sol, and -

— and — and — andandand —

The stars were a huge, celestial barrage around her head. Beyond the immediate battering of light, the more distant constellations slid across space, elegant, remote, like trees in a forest.

Spinner sat rigidly in her crash-couch, letting the silent explosions of starlight wash across her cage.

…And, abruptly as it had begun, the barrage of starfields thinned out, diminished, vanished. Before the nightfighter now was only a uniform, restful darkness; a soft pink light, from some source behind her, played over the surfaces of the cage.

It’s over.

Spinner-of-Rope felt herself slump in her couch. She felt as if her bones had turned to water. She cradled her visor in her glove, shutting out the Universe, and sucked on an orange juice nipple; the sharp, homely taste seemed to fill up her head.

She felt herself retreat into the small cosmos of her own body once more, into the recesses of her own head. It’s comfortable in here, she thought groggily. Maybe I should never come out again…

“Spinner-of-Rope.” Louise’s voice, sounding very tender. “How are you feeling?”

Spinner sucked resentfully on her orange juice. “About as good as you’d expect. Don’t ask stupid questions, Louise.”

“You did bloody well to withstand that.”

Spinner grunted. “How do you know I did withstand it?”

“Because I didn’t hear you scream. And because my telltales are showing me that you aren’t chewing the inside of your helmet. And — ”

“Louise, I knew what to expect.”

“Maybe. But it was still inhuman. A Xeelee might have enjoyed that ride… People, it seems, need to work on a smaller scale.”

“You’re telling me.”

“…When you’re ready, take a look behind you.”

Spinner lifted her face from the nipple. The pinkish light from the source behind her still played over the surfaces of the waldoes, the crumpled suit fabric over her thighs.

She loosened her restraints, carefully, and turned around.

There was a ceiling of light above her. It was an immense plane of curdled smoke: lurid red at its heart and with violent splashes of colors — yellow and orange and blue further out. The plane was foreshortened, so that she stared across ridged lanes of gas toward the bulging, pregnant center. Smoky gas was wrapped around the core in lacy spirals of color.

The plane of light receded, almost imperceptibly slowly, from the ship. The plane was a cathedral roof, and the nightfighter — with its precious burden of people, and all the hopes of humanity — was a fly, diving down and away from that immense surface.

“Louise, it’s beautiful. I had no idea…”

“Do you understand what you’re seeing, Spinner-of-Rope?” Louise’s voice sounded fragile, as if she were struggling with the enormity of what she was saying. “Spinner, you’re looking up at our Galaxy — from the outside. And that’s why that barrage of stars has finished… Our Galaxy’s disc is only around three thousand light-years thick. Traveling obliquely to the plane, we were out of it in just a couple of minutes.”

The nightfighter had plunged out of the Galaxy at a point about two-thirds of the way along a radius from the center to the rim. The ship was going to pass under the center of the disc; that bloated bulge of crimson light would look like some celestial chandelier, thousands of light-years across, hanging over her head. Spiral arms — cloudy, streaming — moved serenely over her head. There were blisters of gas sprinkled along the arms, she saw, bubbles of swollen color.

“Spinner, the disc is a hundred thousand light-years across. It will take us just fifty minutes to traverse its width…”

Spinner heard Louise turn away and mumble something.

“What was that?”

“Your kid sister. Painter-of-Faces. She asked why we aren’t seeing relativistic distortion.”

Spinner grinned. “Tell her not to bother us with such stupid questions.”

“We aren’t all hardened space pilots like you, Spinner-of Rope…”

There was no relativistic distortion — no starbow, no red or blue shift because the nightfighter wasn’t moving through the Universe. The ’fighter was hopping from point to point like a tree frog, Spinner thought, leaping between bromeliads. And at the end-point of each jump, the ship was stationary — just for a second — relative to the Galaxy.

So, no blue shift.

But the nightfighter was falling out of the Galaxy at an effective velocity of millions of times lightspeed. It was the frequency of the jumps which gave Spinner this illusion of constant, steady motion.

It was working out, just as planned.

“We’re making it, Louise,” Spinner said. “We’re making this happen.”

“Yes… But — ”

Spinner let out a mock groan. “But now you’re going to tell me how things just ain’t what they used to be, again, aren’t you?”

“Well, it’s true, Spinner,” Louise said angrily. “Look at it… Even from this distance, outside the Galaxy, you can see the handiwork of those damn photino birds.”

The Galaxy contained two main classes of stars, Louise told Spinner. Population I stars, like the Sun, had evolved in the hydrogen-rich spiral arms, away from the center. Some of these — like the blue supergiants — had been hundreds of times larger than the Sun, blazing out their energy in a short, insanely profligate youth. Population I stars tended to explode, enriching the interstellar medium — and later generations of stars — with the complex products of their nucleosynthesis.

By contrast, Population II stars had formed in regions where hydrogen fuel was in scarce supply: in the old regions close to the core, or in the clusters outside the main disc. The II stars were more uniform in size, and — by the era of the earliest human astronomy — had already been old, characterized by jostling herds of red giants.

“Look at that disc,” Louise snapped. “I don’t suppose the damn birds had to do much to the dull, stable Population IIs; those things were half-dead already. But look — oh, look at the spiral arms…”

Spinner saw how ragged the spirals were, disrupted by the blisters of yellow-red light which swelled across the lanes of dust.

“Those blisters are supernova remnants,” Louise said bitterly. “Spinner, not every star would respond as peacefully to the photino birds’ engineering as did our poor old Sun. A lot of the more spectacular, and beautiful. Population I stars would simply explode, tearing themselves apart… Probably the birds set off chain reactions of supernovae, with the wreckage of one star destabilizing another.”

Spinner stared up at the wreckage of the disc, the muddled spiral arms.

…We’re already forty thousand light-years below the disc, Spinner, her companion said. The light you’re seeing now left the stars forty millennia ago… Think of that. Forty thousand years before my birth, humans were still shivering on the edges of glaciers, making knives out of bits of stone. And the further we travel, with every second, the light is getting older: Spinner-of Rope, you’re taking us through a hail of ancient light…

Spinner laughed. “You should have been a poet.”

“What?”

“…Tell me what’s coming next, Louise.”

“All right. Spinner, do you know what a globular cluster is?”

Spinner frowned. “I think so.” She closed her eyes. “A stable ball of stars perhaps a hundred thousand of them orbiting around the main disc, in the Galactic halo.”

“Right,” Louise said. “They are Population II stars. And one particular cluster, called Omega Centauri, was one of the brightest clusters visible from old Earth.”

Spinner thought that over. “Omega Centauri. That name means it was in the line-of-sight of the Centaurus constellation.”

“Right.”

“You mean — ”

“We’re heading right for it. Keep your eyes tight shut, Spinner-of-Rope.”

Spinner turned, and looked ahead.

Beyond the fragile cage, giant stars ballooned at her, dazzling her with their billowing silence.

24

Upright on their zero-gee scooters, Lieserl and Milpitas descended into the deep loading bay at the base of the Northern’s lifedome. Above Lieserl the maintenance bulkhead at the base of Deck Fifteen spread out, an improbable tangle of ducts, cables and tree roots.

From the corner of her eye, Lieserl watched Milpitas curiously. He looked down at the drop beneath his feet with undisguised dread. Milpitas had been a starship traveler for a thousand years, but he was so obviously a gravity-well dweller. He visibly suffered in this zero-gee environment, his instincts quite unadapted to the fact that even if his scooter failed completely he’d simply drift through the air, perfectly safely.

Beneath the thick layer of dank, empty air into which she was descending, the base of the Northern’s lifedome had been turned transparent. The base appeared to Lieserl as a pool of cool darkness — and there, pinned against the underside of the lifedome base, like some immense insect immersed in a pond, was the slender form of the Xeelee nightfighter which bore them through space. Its sycamore-seed wings looked somehow darker even than the emptiness between stars.

The Planner turned to her stiffly and smiled. “You look uncomfortable — on that scooter.”

She suppressed a grin. Me? “Uncomfortable? Not really.” She clicked her fingers and her scooter disappeared. She smiled at Milpitas, feeling mischievous. She did a back flip in the air, rolling twice; the clear floor beneath her wheeled across her vision.

She finished up falling alongside Milpitas once more. “I don’t feel uncomfortable,” she said. “Just — well, a little foolish. Sometimes I feel these Virtual masks Mark sets up for me are a little forced.”

Milpitas had turned away from her antics, his face pale; he gripped the handles of his scooter so hard his knuckles were white.

Hastily she called subvocally for the return of her Virtual scooter. “I’m sorry,” she said, sincerely. “I guess I shouldn’t have done that.”

She saw how the sweat glistened on the patchwork scars of his brow, but he determinedly held himself erect on his scooter. “Don’t apologize,” he said primly. “We’re here on an inspection tour… to consider the disposition of the ship, not my well-being.”

So, after that brief moment of human frailty, Milpitas was back in his shell. She turned away, vaguely disappointed.

They were approaching the base of the loading bay, now. Lieserl could see the twin small jets of her scooter reflected in the clear floor; like attracting stars, she converged with her own image — in fact it was an image of an image, she thought wryly; the processors which sustained her were doing a good job with their Virtual reality creation today.

Milpitas, with a tense flick of his bony, scarred wrist, levelled off and began to sail parallel to the surface. Lieserl followed, a few feet behind.

Beneath the dome base, the Xeelee nightfighter spread its construction-material wings, huge, dormant.

“Good morning, Spinner-of-Rope,” Louise said.

Spinner stretched. Allowing herself to wake up slowly, she sucked fortified fruit juice from her helmet nipples and let the environment suit clean her skin with blasts of ultrasonics; she felt a warm trickle of urine enter her catheter.

She grunted in reply to Louise.

It was Spinner’s tenth day in the nightfighter cage.

She loosened her restraints and looked around — and found herself staring into intergalactic emptiness. In the distance were patches of muddy light which could have been galaxies, or clusters of galaxies — so remote that even at the ’fighter’s immense speed of three million light-years a day, she could make out no discernible movement.

Spinner slumped back into her couch. “Lethe. Another day in the middle of this gray, lifeless desert,” she said sourly.

Louise — watching, Spinner knew, from her encampment on the Northern’s forest Deck — laughed, sounding sympathetic. “But today should be a little more interesting than most, Spinner-of-Rope. We’ve reached a milestone. Or rather, a mega-light-year-stone…”

“We have?”

“After ten days, we’ve come thirty million light-years from Sol. Spinner, we’ve reached the center of the Virgo Cluster — the supercluster of galaxies of which our Galaxy is a member. Way behind you is a little patch of light: that’s the Local Group — three million light-years across, the small cluster dominated by our Galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. And to your left, at about eleven o’clock, you’ll see the center of the Virgo Cluster itself: that massive group of several thousand bright galaxies. They used to be bright, anyway…”

Spinner made out the central galaxy group. It was a gray, grainy cloud of light. “Fascinating.”

“Oh, come on, Spinner. Look, we’re making an epic journey here — we’re traveling so far we’re making progress through the large-scale structure of spacetime. You can’t fail to be — well, uplifted.”

“But I can’t see any of it, Louise,” Spinner said fretfully.

Louise was silent for a moment. Then she said, “All right, Spinner. I’ll show you where you are.”

A ball of brilliant white light, expanding rapidly to about a foot across, appeared a few yards in front of the ’fighter cage.

Spinner slouched in her couch and folded her arms. “Another educational Virtual display, Louise?”

“Bear with me, Spinner-of-Rope. Look at this. Here’s the Universe, expanding from the Big Bang — as it was after perhaps three hundred thousand years. The cosmos is a soup of radiation and matter — a mixture of the dark and light variants.

“The temperature is still too high for atoms to form. So the baryonic matter forms a plasma. But plasma is quite opaque to radiation, so the pressure of the radiation stops the matter from clumping together. There are no stars, no planets, no galaxies.”

Abruptly the Virtual Universe expanded to double its size, and turned clear; a flash of light flooded out over Spinner’s face, making her blink.

“Now the temperature has fallen below three thousand degrees,” Louise said. “Suddenly the electrons can combine with nuclei, to form atoms — and atoms don’t interact strongly with photons. So the Universe is transparent for the first time, Spinner. The radiation, free to fly unhindered across space, will never interact with matter again. And in fact we can still see the primordial radiation today — if we care to look, its wavelength greatly stretched by the expansion of the Universe — as the cosmic background microwave radiation.

“But the key point is, Spinner, that after this decoupling the radiation could no longer stop the matter from clumping together.”

The model Universe was now a cloud of swarming, jostling particles.

“It looks like a mist,” Spinner said.

“Right. Think of it as like a dew, Spinner. It’s spread out thin and uniform: on average there’s one hydrogen atom in a space the size of one of our transport pods. And at this point the expansion of the Universe is pushing the dew-drops still further apart. But now, the structures of matter the galaxies, the clusters and superclusters of galaxies are ready to coalesce; they’ll condense out like dewdrops on a spider web.”

Spinner smiled. “Some spider. But where’s the web?”

The ball of mist was filled, now, by a fine tracery of lines; the toy Universe looked like a cracked, glass sphere. “Here’s the web, Spinner,” Louise said. “You’re looking at cosmic strings. Strings are defects in spacetime — ”

“I know about string,” Spinner said. “The Xeelee used strings — and domain walls — in the construction of the nightfighter.”

“Right. But these strings formed naturally. They are remnants of the phase transitions of the early Universe, remnants left over after the decomposition of the GUT unified super-force which came out of the singularity… Cosmic strings are residual traces of the ultrahigh, symmetric vacuum of the GUT epoch, embedded in the ‘empty space’ of our Universe — like residual lines of liquid water in solid ice. And the strings are superconducting; as they move through the primordial magnetic fields, huge currents of a hundred billion billion amps or more — are induced in the strings…”

The strings writhed, like slow, interconnected snakes, across space. The particles of mist, representing the uniform matter distribution, began to drift toward the strings. They coalesced in narrow columns around the strings, and in thin sheets in the wake of the strings.

“It’s beautiful,” Spinner said.

“The strings are moving at close to lightspeed,” Louise said. “They leave behind them flat wakes — planes toward which matter is attracted, at several miles a second. Structure starts to form in the wakes, so we get a pattern of threads and sheets of baryonic matter surrounding voids…” Now the baryonic matter, coalescing around the string structure, imploded under its own gravity. Tiny Virtual galaxies — charming, gem-like — twinkled to life, threaded along the webbing of cosmic string.

“And there’s more,” Louise said. “Look at this.”

Now there was a loop of cosmic string, twisting in space and oscillating wildly.

“String loops can form, when strings cross each other,” Louise said. “But they’re unstable. When loops form they decay away rapidly… unless they are stabilized, as the Xeelee have made stable their nightfighter wings. Now: remember I told you that the strings are superconducting threads, carrying immense electrical currents? When the strings decay, all that electromagnetic energy has to go somewhere…”

Abruptly the loop shrank, precipitately, and once again light blasted into Spinner’s face.

Spinner lifted her hand to her faceplate. “I wish you’d stop doing that,” she said.

“Sorry. But watch, Spinner. See what’s happened?”

Spinner dropped her hand and blinked dazzled eyes.

The explosion of the loop of string had blown out a huge hole, in the middle of the mesh of galaxy threads.

Spinner nodded. “I get it. There’s a pulse of electromagnetic energy, which blows a bubble in the clouds of matter.”

“Not quite,” Louise said. “Spinner, remember that dark matter is transparent to photons — to electromagnetic radiation. So the loop’s electromagnetic pulse blows out just the baryonic matter; it leaves a hole, filled by dark matter but scoured clean of star stuff.

“Spinner, all this cosmic engineering induced by the strings — the primordial seeds — has left us with a fractal structure, fractal means the foam has the same general structure at all scales. It looks the same, no matter how far out or how close in you study. Our Galaxy is part of a small cluster — the Local Group — which, together with several other clusters, is part of a supercluster called the Virgo Cluster… which in turn — ”

“I get the idea,” Spinner said.

“The baryonic matter is clustered in filaments and sheets, around huge voids filled only with dark matter. It’s like a froth, Spinner — and it’s a very active froth, like an ocean’s surface, perhaps; the strings are whipping through space at near lightspeed, and so there are huge movements, currents in the foam.”

“Louise, you said you’d show me where I am.”

“All right, Spinner…”

Below the glistening glass the curves of the nightfighter rippled like some immense sculpture. There was Xeelee construction material only feet away from her now, and Lieserl had an urge to reach out and stroke it, as if the ’fighter were some immense, caged animal. But the material was separated from her both by the base of the lifedome and by a layer of hard vacuum — and, she thought ruefully, by a layer of unreality which only Mark Wu and his gadgets could breach.

“You’re thoughtful,” Milpitas said.

She rubbed her chin. “I was thinking how very alive this Xeelee ship looks. Not like a piece of technology at all. This is like some immense ocean beast, trapped beneath a frozen surface; it’s as if I can see muscles beneath that skin of construction material.”

Milpitas grunted. “It’s an attractive image,” he said drily. “Although I’m not entirely sure how helpful it is.”

Lieserl glanced up at the maintenance layer, a fifth of a mile above her, with its tangle of tree roots and plumbing conduits. “Look at that primitive mess up there, by contrast… Lethe’s waters, Milpitas, this was a starship designed to last a thousand years. Some of that design looks as if it predates the Romans.” She sighed. “You know, I caught a few glimpses of human technology, as we advanced over the years after the Northern’s launch. Obviously, we got better with time. But we always — always — ended up carrying our damn plumbing with us. I don’t think humans ever, in their long history, ever came close to matching the simple perfection of this one Xeelee artifact, this nightfighter.”

Milpitas dipped closer to the transparent base surface and peered through it, intent. “Perhaps you are right. But does that imply we should bow down and worship the Xeelee and all their works?”

“No,” she said coldly. “But it does imply that the Xeelee were smarter than we ever were, or could have become.”

She saw his eyebrows rise, through a fraction of an inch; otherwise he didn’t reply.

Now they were close to the rim of the base, near the transparent, curving wall of the loading bay. Here, the broad shoulders of the fighter nestled against the underside of the base; thick bands curled from the base around the ’fighter’s curves and out of sight, hugging the ’fighter against the life-dome.

Milpitas leaned over the control bar of his scooter, peering at the attaching bands. He seemed quite fearless, Lieserl thought with some amusement, now that he was only a few feet above the lifedome base: close to the floor of his rigid, gravity-dominated mental universe.

She allowed herself to sail smoothly along the lines of the Xeelee ship. Shoulders — yes, that was a good label for this part of the ’fighter, at the root of the wings; here, so close to the ship, she had a real sense of being carried, on the broad, strong shoulders of some giant of construction material.

Milpitas straightened up from his inspection.

“So how’s the engineering?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said, without looking up. “That is, within tolerance limits… The creep is minimal today.”

“Creep?”

He studied her. “Perhaps you’re not aware of the problems we faced, fixing the lifedome to this nightfighter. Lieserl, Xeelee construction material is effectively frictionless, and it is harder than any material substance known to us. It’s impervious even to exotic matter… You know we’ve speculated its manufacture may have violated the Pauli Exclusion Principle — ”

“I heard about that.”

“So when we came to attach the lifedome, we couldn’t simply nail a superstructure to the nightfighter. No known adhesive would adhere to the construction material either. So, instead, we constructed a loose cage around the ’fighter.”

Governed by the Northern’s processors, ’bots had drawn in the straps comprising the cage, slowly and steadily tugging the lifedome against the nightfighter.

“So,” the Planner said, “the strap arrangement hugs the nightfighter tightly against us, without fixing us to it. But that’s obviously enough to persuade the ’fighter to carry the lifedome safely through hyperspace.”

“And — creep?”

“Because the cage is not fixed to the ’fighter — and because we are subject to various stresses — the cage’s bands slip over the construction-material surface. They creep. But we have nanobots out there working continually, readjusting the straps and compensating for stress.”

Lieserl nodded. “It’s a smart solution, Milpitas.”

He bowed, sardonically. “Perhaps. But I can’t take the credit for it. I merely implemented the design which — ”

Suddenly she felt a stab of pity for this scarred, stunted man. “Don’t underestimate yourself,” she said on impulse. “Believe me, you’ve achieved so much…”

“For a madman?” he asked disarmingly. He smiled at her. “I know you think I’m a rather foolish, rigid person, Lieserl.”

Startled, she opened her mouth to deny this, but he held up his hand.

“Well, perhaps I am. But I was responsible, in large part, for the teams of ’bots which constructed this frame for the nightfighter. I know that our sensors could tell us much more about the state of the infrastructure which fixes us to this nightfighter than my naked gaze ever could. And yet — ”

“And yet, you feel you want to see it for yourself?” She smiled. “You’re wrong, Planner. You’re not the easiest person I’ve ever had to get along with, but I don’t think you’re a fool to follow your instincts.”

He studied her, coolly appraising. “You believe so?”

“I know so,” she said firmly. “After all, that was the whole point of my stay in the Sun — in fact, the point of my very existence. Plenty of probes were dropped into the Sun ahead of me, and after me. I was sent in so that — at least through a surrogate — human eyes could see what was happening in there.”

He grunted. “Although, it seems, we made precious little use of the insights you gained.”

“That’s as may be.” She laughed. “But I couldn’t control that.”

He studied her. “You may be a surrogate,” he said. “But, Lieserl, despite that your humanity is powerful and obvious.”

That left her confused. She kept her face straight, determinedly. She issued subvocal commands, overriding the autonomic simulation of her face; she was adamant that her cheeks shouldn’t show a hint of coloring. “Thank you,” she said lightly. “Although I’m not sure you need thanks. You’re not proffering compliments, are you? I suspect you don’t praise, Planner; you appraise,” she said.

“Perhaps.” He turned away, closing the subject.

She studied his battered profile. Milpitas gave the impression of a man in control, but maybe he gave away more than he bargained for. With Milpitas, the communication of information was only one function — and a subsidiary one at that — of speech. The real purpose of conversation, for Milpitas, was control. She felt he was constantly fencing with her — testing her sharpness, and strength of will.

This was a man who was used to power, and used to exerting it, even in the most trivial conversation. But what type of person was this who — after centuries of subjective existence — would bother to fence with a tired old Virtual like her?

Milpitas continued his inspection, slowly, methodically.

Perhaps he was a little less than human — less, even, than her, she thought. Still — she conceded warily — there was a core of strength in Milpitas she had to admire.

Milpitas had been forced to watch his world — a world he’d controlled — fall apart, before his eyes. And he’d fought hard to preserve it. But then he’d stopped fighting, when he realized his old world was gone — that his beliefs were actually indefensible.

And that was the hard part. That, she reflected, was the point from which the endless strings of martyrs strewn across mankind’s bloody history had failed to return. And since then he’d kept functioning — contributing to the mission.

She grinned. “I think you’re tougher than you look, Planner Milpitas. I mean, you have managed to break out of the prison of your past…”

He turned. “But the past is not a prison,” he said softly. “The past is altered, constantly, by our actions in the present. Every new act revalues the meaning of the past…”

She was surprised. “That sounds like the surface of a deep philosophy.”

“Deep, and old,” he said. He eyed her, the tracery of scars over his scalp vivid in the flat light of the loading bay. “We in Superet were never one-dimensional oppressors, Lieserl. We saw ourselves as preserving the best of humanity’s wisdom, and we sought constantly to interpret our present and future in history’s light…”

She grunted. “Hmm. Interesting. Perhaps the notion of a fluid past, recast in the light of our changing assumptions, is the only philosophy which will allow a race of immortals to stay sane. Maybe I’m still underestimating you, Milpitas.”

He touched his control bar and, gently, rose into the air. His face was impassive. “Perish the thought,” he said drily.

The Universe-image expanded, focusing on a comparatively small volume; Spinner studied a nondescript chunk of cosmic foam, a collection of threads, voids and sheets of shining matter.

“Okay, Spinner-of-Rope: here’s a three-dimensional map of our neighborhood. The voids are around a hundred million light-years across, on average.

“Now here’s a local landmark — a famous void called the Hole in Bootes, two hundred million light-years across — and, look, here’s the Great Wall: the largest coherent structure in the Universe, a sheet of galaxies five hundred million light-years long.” Louise paused, and when she spoke again her voice was darker, tinged with the resentment and half suppressed anger Spinner had come to recognize. “Of course the Wall isn’t quite the tourist site it was when I was a girl,” she said sourly. “The damn photino birds have been active there as well… All across the Wall, as far as we can observe, there’s evidence of bird degradation.”

Spinner allowed herself to smile. She could imagine what Louise was thinking. Damn it, it’s our Wall!

Louise was saying, “This cloud” — a mist fragment the size of Spinner’s hand, labeled by a small red arrow — “is the Virgo Cluster. Our local supercluster.” A small region within the Virgo cloud began to flash yellow, and a straight blue line snaked out of the yellow clump, piercing the heart of the Virgo. “The little yellow volume is the Local Group, where Sol is,” Louise said, “and the line represents our journey so far with the nightfighter: right through the middle of the Virgo supercluster.”

Spinner grunted. “Not very far.”

“Oh, come on, Spinner; think about the scale of this picture!

“Now look at this,” Louise said. Small, lime-green vector arrows appeared, bristling over the dusty surface of the Virgo Cluster. “See that? The whole of our supercluster is moving through space — and it’s at a significant speed, a million miles an hour or more. So fast that the motion was even observable from Earth — it imposed a Doppler shift on the whole Universe, Spinner: on the microwave background radiation itself.”

Now more velocity arrows appeared on another massive cluster close to the Virgo Cluster. “There’s another super-cluster, called Hydra-Centaurus,” Louise said. “And guess what: that’s streaming in the same direction as the Virgo.”

Velocity arrows bristled now all over the foamy region of space… and all the arrows, Spinner saw, pointed inwards, to an anonymous region at the heart of the three-dimensional diagram.

And the projected blue line of the nightfighter’s voyage reached toward the center of the immense implosion.

“I know what that is,” Spinner breathed. “At the center of the implosion. That’s the Great Attractor.” The place all the galaxies are falling to…

“Yes. There seems to be a mass concentration there, attracting galaxies across hundreds of millions of light years. The Attractor is a hundred and fifty million light years from Sol, and with the mass of ten thousand galaxies…”

Staring into the toy Universe, Spinner-of-Rope felt her heart flutter. “And if it really is an artifact — ”

“If it is, then it’s an artifact so massive it’s drawing in superclusters like moths, Spinner; so massive it’s actually counteracting the expansion of the Universe, in this part of space… It’s an artifact beyond our imagination.”

Yes, thought Spinner. Beyond imagination. And that’s where we’re heading…

25

“I don’t know why you had to drag me up here, into the forest,” Louise grumbled. “Not now. Couldn’t you wait until you were sure of your data?”

Mark said, “But the data — ”

“Is partial, and incomplete, and hardly conclusive. What have you got — just two double images?”

“But the spectral match of the double galaxy images is almost perfect, in each case. I tell you it must be string,” Mark insisted.

“And I’m telling you that’s impossible,” Louise growled. She felt her irritation rise. “How could there be cosmic string in the middle of a void like this?”

Uvarov raised his skull-like face and cackled, relishing the conflict.

The three of them were suspended just below the forest skydome. Louise was on a zero-gee scooter, and Uvarov had been strapped into a stripped-down life support chair attached to three of the flexible little scooters.

Mark, irritatingly, was choosing to manifest himself as a disembodied head, twice life-size, hovering in the air. “How’s Spinner-of-Rope?” he asked Louise.

She grunted. “Bearing up. We’re thirty-three days into the mission, now thirty-three days for Spinner in that couch. And the last ten of them inside this damn hole in the sky.”

“Well, this is really a pretty exciting part of the journey,” Mark said. “We’re crossing the edge of the greatest cosmological void ever detected: more than two hundred million light-years across. As far as we can tell, we’re the only scrap of baryonic matter in all that immensity. That’s an exciting thought even without my evidence of cosmic string…”

“Not exciting for Spinner,” Louise said drily. “For her this void is nothing but sensory deprivation.”

“Hmmm,” said Uvarov. “The Universe as an immense sensory deprivation tank… maybe that’s a good image to sum up the photino birds’ cosmic handiwork.”

Now schematic graphics of remote galaxies — sheets of them, at the boundary of the huge void — peppered the dome with splashes of false color; here and there fragments of text and supplementary images were interspersed amid the insect like galactic swarms.

Mark’s head swiveled around toward Louise. “Look, I’m sorry you don’t think it’s appropriate for me to have dragged you up here. Maybe I should have waited for proof of the string’s existence. Well, I didn’t realize we were out here to do science. I thought we were trying to find ways to stay alive — to anticipate what we’re up against. And that means reacting — and thinking, Louise — as quickly and as flexibly as possible. All right, maybe I’m guessing. But — what if it is cosmic string out there? Have you thought about that?”

Louise turned her face, uncertainly, up to the dome. “If it is string — here — then, perhaps, we’re heading into something even more extraordinary than we’ve anticipated.”

Uvarov chuckled. “Perhaps we should stick to the facts, my dear Mark.”

“There are no facts,” Louise said. “Only a handful of observations. And — across distances measured in hundreds of millions of light-years, and taken from a platform moving through a hyperdrive journey — they’re damned imprecise observations at that.”

Uvarov turned his head to the Virtual. “Tell me about your observations, then. Why are these double images so all-fired important?”

“I’ve been taking observations of the far side of the void,” the Virtual said. “I’ve been looking for evidence of gravitational tensing… The distortion of light from distant objects by the gravitational field of some huge, interposed mass. I wasn’t looking for strings specifically. I was trying to see if I could detect any structure within the void — any concentrations of density.”

“Are the strings so massive, then, that they can distort light so far?”

Louise said, “It isn’t really as simple as that, Uvarov. Yes, strings are massive: their width is only the Planck length, but their density is enormous — a one-inch length would have a mass of around ten million billion tons… a string stretching from Sol to Saturn, say, would have around one Solar mass. We expect strings to be found either in loops thousands of light-years across, or else they will be endless — stretched right across the Universe by the expansion from the singularity.”

Uvarov nodded. “Therefore, if they are so massive, their gravitational fields are correspondingly huge.”

“Not quite,” Louise said. “Strings are very exotic objects. They aren’t like stars, or planets, or even galaxies. They simply aren’t Newtonian objects, Uvarov. The relativistic gravitational fields around them are different.”

Uvarov turned to her. “Are you telling me the strings are antigravitational, like the domain walls of the nightfighter’s discontinuity-drive wings?”

“No…”

Far enough from a loop — a finite length of string — the mass of the string would attract other bodies, just as would any other massive object. But an observer close to a string, either a loop or part of an infinite string, would not experience the gravitational effects to be expected from such massive concentrations of matter.

Louise said, “Uvarov, gravitational attraction works by distorting spacetime. Spacetime is flat if no heavy objects are present; an object will sail across it in a straight line, like a marble across a tabletop. But the spacetime close to a Newtonian object, like a star, is distorted into a well, into which other objects fall. But close to a string, spacetime is locally flat — it’s what’s called a Minkowski spacetime. Objects close by aren’t attracted to the string, despite the huge mass…”

“But,” Mark said, “the spacetime around a string is distorted. It is conical.”

Uvarov frowned. “Conical?”

“Imagine spacetime as a flat sheet. The presence of the string removes a slice from that sheet — like a slice of a pie, cut out of spacetime. What’s left of the spacetime is joined up — the hole left by the missing slice is closed up so that the spacetime is like a cone. Still flat, but with a missing piece.

“If you were to draw a circle around a string, you would find its circumference shorter than you would expect from its radius — it’s just like drawing a circle around the apex of a cone.”

“And this small spacetime defect is sufficient to cause the double images you speak of?”

“Yes,” Mark said.

A cosmic string wasn’t visible directly. But its path could be made visible, by a track of double images of remote objects, separated by about six arc seconds, along the length of the string.

Louise said, “Uvarov, imagine two photons setting off toward us from a remote galaxy, beyond a string. One of them comes to us directly. The second, passing on the far side of the string, travels through the conical defect. The second photon actually has less distance to travel to reach us, thanks to the defect; its journey time is less than the first’s by around ten thousand years. Hence, the double images.”

Uvarov grunted. “Louise, you have explained to me how the network of strings was the web around which the galaxies coalesced. I do not understand how this can be, if the gravitational effects of these strings are so slight.”

Louise sighed. “The strings are primeval objects: they were formed within an invisible fraction of a second after the Big Bang itself, during the symmetry loss caused by the decomposition of the unified superforce. Since then, the expansion of the Universe has stretched the strings. So the strings are under great tension — a tension caused by the expansion of the Universe itself… The strings whip through space, at close to the speed of light.

“Where the strings pass, their conical defects cause them to leave a wake. Matter falls in toward the two-dimensional, sheet-like path swept out by the string. And it’s this infalling that caused the formation of the baryonic matter structures we observe now: clusters of galaxies, in threads and sheets.”

“In fact,” Mark said, “the wake is itself observable. Or should be. It imposes a slight Doppler shift on the microwave background radiation. I should be able to see a slightly brighter sky on one side of the invisible string than on the other…”

“And have you seen this?” Uvarov snapped.

“No,” Mark admitted. “Damn it. The Northern couldn’t be a much worse platform for this kind of measurement; the microwave Doppler is below my level of resolution.”

“But do you think you’ve found some image pairs,” Uvarov persisted.

“Yes,” Mark said, sounding excited again. “Two pairs so far, and a few other candidates. The two pairs are aligned, just as you’d expect them to be if a string is the cause…”

“Enough,” Uvarov snapped. He raised his chair into the air above them and prowled across the underside of the sky-dome, his ravaged profile silhouetted against the false colors of the galaxies. “Now tell me what this means. Let us accept, Louise, that your Virtual lover has found a fragment of this — string. So what? Why should we care?”

“We’re in a void, Uvarov,” Louise said patiently. “We’d expect to find string at the heart of huge baryonic structures — like the Great Wall, for instance, a sheet of clusters half a billion light-years long, which — ”

“But we are not at the heart of such a huge baryonic structure. Is that your point, Louise?”

“Yes. That’s the point. There’s no reason why we should find string here, in this void, away from any concentrations of matter.”

“I see. There is nothing out there but dark matter,” Uvarov growled quietly. “Nothing but the photino birds, and their even more exotic cousins — and whatever they’ve chosen to build, here at the heart of their dark empire, far from any baryonic structure.”

Uvarov wheeled to face Louise, his scooters spurting puffs of reaction gas. “If it exists, will the string have any effect on the photino birds?”

“Possibly,” Mark said. “Strings are gravitational defects. Dark matter is influenced by gravity…”

Uvarov nodded. “So perhaps the string is here to do damage to the photino birds. Is that possible? Perhaps the string has been moved here deliberately.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but I guess it’s possible.” Mark peered up into the dome, his eerie, disembodied head looking bizarre. “Yes. If someone is waging war on the photino birds, then maybe they are using lengths of cosmic string as weapons. Think of that. And more: who in this Universe is capable of such an act, but the Xeelee themselves?

“Lethe — fighting wars with bits of cosmic string. How have they the audacity to even imagine such weapons?”

Louise looked up into the dome’s sketchy, gaudy rendering of the Universe. Suddenly these scraps of data seemed pathetic, their understanding hopelessly limited. Were the final wars for the destiny of the Universe being played out between Xeelee and photino birds, somewhere in this huge void, even now, as she stared up in her blindness and ignorance?

“Keep gathering your data, Mark,” she said. “In another few days we’ll be out of this damn void.”

“We’re like rats, crossing the rim of some huge war zone,” Mark said, his huge face expressionless. “We can barely comprehend the visions around us. And we’re heading for the final battlefield…”

Suspended between Decks, in the middle of a cloud of floating chickens, Mark and Lieserl made love.

Afterwards, Lieserl rested her head against Mark’s bare chest. His skin, under her cheek, was rough, covered in short, tight-curled dark hairs, and slick with sweat — in fact she could taste the sweat, smell its salty tang. She felt a pleasant, moist ache in her thighs.

“I still feel breathless. Maybe I’m too old for this,” she said.

Mark nuzzled her hair. “Then make yourself younger.”

“No.” She pressed her face against his chest. “No, I don’t want to change anything. Let’s keep it just the same, Mark; let’s keep it real.”

“Sure.”

She was silent for a moment. Then, despite herself, she added, “And it is bloody real, you know. A magnificent illusion.”

She felt him smile.

“I told you, I’ve put a lot of time into getting it right,” he said. “This and coffee.”

She laughed, and pulled herself away; her skin parted from his with a soft, moist sucking sound. “I wonder if anyone was watching us.”

Mark stretched; the chickens, fluttering and clucking, swam clumsily through the air away from his arms. He glanced around. “I don’t see anyone. If there was, do you care?”

“Of course not. It might have done them good, in fact. Shaken them up a bit more.”

Lieserl rolled in the air, reached behind her back and began to straighten her hair. The Decks wheeled slowly around her, an immense box of green-furred walls. After the surrender of the Temples, the coming of zero-gee had, slowly, made inroads into the life of the people — the Undermen, as Spinner-of-Rope still called them — who lived here between the Decks. The most noticeable was the cultivation of all of the available surfaces of the Decks; now, the walls and ceilings were coated with meadows, patches of forests, fields of wheat and other crops. The trees grew a little haphazardly, of course, but they were being trained to emerge straight. And, without the pressure of walking feet, the grass in the parks and other areas was beginning to look a little wild.

A huddle of people had gathered under what had been the roof of Deck Two — the underside of Deck One. Mark — or rather a second projection of him — was taking the hesitant, young-old people through a literacy and Virtual usage program. And elsewhere, Lieserl knew, the infrastructure of the Decks was being upgraded to remove the Decks’ enforced reliance on pictograms.

These initiatives gladdened Lieserl. She remembered the world of her brief childhood, drenched in Sunlight and data and Virtuals and sentience: perhaps the most information rich environment in human history. The contrast with the stunted, data-starved environment of the Decks was poignant.

In one spot, close to the surface, she saw Milpitas and Morrow, toiling together. The two old men were constructing a sphere of water, bound together in a frame of wood and reeds: a zero-gee water garden, Morrow had called it. Lieserl remembered his smile. “All part of Milpitas’ therapy,” he’d said.

The whole environment made for a charming prospect: the Decks had evolved away from the bleak, iron-walled prison they’d been under the Planners during the long flight, and turned into a green-lined sylvan fantasy. There were trees growing at you out of the sky, for Life’s sake. And some inspired soul had liberated boxes of wild flower seeds from the Northern’s long-term stores; now the inverted meadows were, more often than not, peppered with bluebells.

The old floors were still coated with the old, boxy homes and factories, of course. But many of the homes had been abandoned; they sat squat on the surface like empty shells. Instead, new homes had been established in the air: rangy, open dwellings, loosely anchored to whichever surface was nearest, or fixed on thin, impossibly fragile spindles.

She held Mark’s hand and drifted through the chicken cloud, drinking in the fowls’ childhood, farmyard smell (…or at least a Virtual, cleaned-up version of it). “You know,” she said, “maybe zero-gee was the best thing that could have happened to this society. Slowly the Decks are turning into a decent place to live.”

Mark grunted. “But it’s taken a long time. And sometimes I think this is all a little unreal.”

“What is?”

He waved a hand. “The strange, aerial society that’s been established here. I mean, beyond these walls of grass there is nothing — nothing but an intergalactic desert, across which we’re fleeing in search of protection from an alien species with whom man has been at war for megayears…”

Across the Universe we flee, Lieserl thought, with chicken eggs and bluebells…

“Maybe that’s true,” she said. “But so what? Is it a bad thing? What can the people here do, but live their lives and maintain the lifedome’s infrastructure? An awareness of what’s outside — of the Universe as megayear celestial battlefield, across which we’re fleeing — is like a morbid, paralyzing awareness of death, it seems to me. Mark, we’re bystanders in the middle of a war. I suspect the last thing any of us needs is a sense of perspective.”

He grinned, and laid his hands on her bare hips. His eyes were alive, vibrant blue, within his coffee-dark face. “You’re probably right.” He pulled her to him, and she could feel the firmness of a new erection against her own pad of pubic hair. “What can any of us do, but follow our instincts?”

She felt a small, contained part of herself open up in his warmth. Sex — even this Virtual reconstruction of it — was wonderful, and, remotely, she was reminded once more of how much had been kept from her during her brief, engineered life. She’d gained five million years of sentience, but had been deprived of her ancient, human heritage.

She lifted her arms and wrapped them around Mark’s neck. “You should be careful with me,” she said. “I’m an old lady, you know…”

He bent his head to hers and kissed her; she ran her tongue over the sharpness of his teeth.

Around them, the chickens rustled softly, detached feathers drifting through the air like snow.

26

It was a good day for Spinner-of-Rope.

She found a large hive high in a tree. The bees buzzed in alarm as she approached, but she circled the trunk warily, keeping away from their vicious stings. She set a small fire in a notch in the bark a little below the fat, lumpy form of the hive, and piled the flames high with moist leaves; she let the thick smoke waft up and over the hive. The bees, disoriented and alarmed, came flooding out into the smoke and scattered harmlessly.

Spinner, whooping in triumph, clambered back to the abandoned hive, broke it open with her axe of Underman metal, and dug out huge handfuls of comb, dripping with thick honey. She feasted on the rich, golden stuff, cramming it into her mouth; the honey smeared over her face and splashed her round spectacles. There would be more than enough to fill the two leather sacks she carried at her waist.

…Then, sitting on her branch, eating the honey, she found herself shivering. She frowned. Why should she be cold? It wasn’t even noon yet.

She dismissed the odd sensation.

In a nearby tree, a hundred yards from Spinner, a man sat. He wore a battered coverall, and his face looked tired, lined, under a thatch of gray hair. He was eating too: a fruit, a yam, perhaps. He smiled and waved at her.

He was a friend. She waved back.

She rinsed her face in a puddle of water inside a fat bromeliad, and climbed down to the ground.

She ran lightly across the level, leaf-coated floor of the forest. Arrow Maker would be tending his bamboo clumps, she knew; there were only a few groves of the species which provided the six-feet-long straight stems Arrow Maker needed to manufacture his blowpipes, and Maker cultivated the clumps with loving care, guarding them jealously from his rivals. Spinner would run up to him and show him the honey treat she’d found, and then -

Spinner-of-Rope. I know you’re awake.

…and then…

Come on, Spinner, talk to me.

Spinner slowed to a halt.

With regret she glanced down once more at the honey she would not be able to enjoy, and issued a soft, subvocal command.

Out of the air, the environment suit congealed over her limbs like some web made of silvery cloth, and the bulky couch materialized around her body. Like a skull poking through decaying flesh, the darkness of space, the harsh telltale lights of her waldoes, emerged through the forest dream.

“Spinner-of-Rope. Spinner.”

Her heart beat as rapidly as a bird’s. “Yes, Louise.”

“I’m sorry I had to dig you out of your Virtual like that. You, ah, you didn’t want to come back to us, I don’t think.”

Spinner grunted as the suit went into its daily sonic bath routine. “Well, can you blame me for wanting to escape?” She let the bleakness outside the cage flood into her mind. How wonderful it had been to be ten years old again, to have no greater horizon than a day’s frog-hunting with her father! But she wasn’t ten years old; more than five decades had worn away since those honey hunting days, and since then immense responsibilities had descended on her. The renewed awareness of who she was settled over her like a tangible weight: a weight she’d been carrying around for all this time — but which she’d forgotten to notice.

She shivered again — and became suddenly, sharply suspicious. She hissed out brief subvocal commands and called up a display of her environment suit air temperature. It was around eighteen degrees Celsius. Not exactly ice cold, but still noticeably cool. She called up a faceplate graphic of how her suit temperature had varied over the last few days.

The coldness she’d felt in her dream had been real. The suit temperature had been changed. For more than a week it had been maintained at twenty-five degrees — fully seven degrees warmer than today.

“Louise,” she said sternly.

She heard Louise sigh. “I’m here, Spinner-of-Rope.”

“What in Lethe is going on? What have you been trying to do, cook me to death?”

“No, Spinner. Look, we’ve come to understand — a bit belatedly, maybe — how hard this trip is for you. I wish, now, we’d found some other solution: someone else to relieve you, perhaps. But it’s too late for that. We’ve got ourselves into a situation in which we’re very dependent on you, and your continued good functioning out in that cage, Spinner.”

“And the heat?”

“Heat acts as a mild sedative, Spinner-of-Rope. As long as your fluid balance isn’t affected — and we’re monitoring that — it’s quite harmless. I thought it was a good solution to the problem…”

Spinner rubbed her cheek against the lining of her helmet. “Right. So you were sedating me, without my consent. Louise Ye Armonk, engineer of human bodies and souls…”

“I guess I should have discussed it with you.”

“Yes, I guess you should,” Spinner said heavily. “And now?”

Louise hesitated. “It was becoming harder and harder to dig you out of your fantasies, Spinner. I was afraid we might lose you altogether… lose you to a dream of the forest.”

A dream of the forest.

With a sigh she straightened her posture in her couch. “Don’t worry, Louise. I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t, Spinner.” Louise sounded nervous, excited uncharacteristically so. “Spinner-of-Rope… it’s the fifty-first day. Look around you.”

Spinner loosened her restraints; she glared around at her surroundings, at first seeing only emptiness. Irritated, she snapped out subvocals, and the faceplate began to enhance her naked-eye images.

“Spinner, we’ve traveled a hundred and fifty million light years. We’re reaching the end of the programmed hyperdrive jumps…

“It’s nearly over, Spinner-of-Rope. We’re almost there.”

As the faceplate worked, dim forms emerged — the moth-like forms of galaxies, far away, all around her. She saw spirals, ellipticals, gigantic irregulars: huge clusters of galaxies in their characteristic threads and sheets, the whole vision looking impossibly fragile.

But there was something odd about the pale images.

“We’ve arrived, Spinner-of-Rope,” Louise said. “We are at the center of things.”

Blue shift, Spinner-of-Rope. Blue shift, everywhere… Can you see it?

Yes. The galaxies — all around her sky — were tinged blue, she realized now. Blue shift.

She had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.