Vacuum Diagrams

Pilot

When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was halfway through a year-long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.

Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.

Resistance had imploded quickly.

Anna Gage — shocked, alone, stranded between worlds — tried to figure out what to do.

She was seventy-nine years old, thirty-eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she’d carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.

Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn’t stay out here for long. But she couldn’t return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.

Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.

She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.

After a few days, with the Sun still little more than a spark ahead of her, she got a reply.

Chiron…

She opened up her GUTdrive and skimmed around the orbit of Saturn.

Chiron was an obscure ice dwarf, a dirty snowball two hundred miles across. It looped between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, following a highly elliptical orbit. One day the gravitational fields of the gas giants would hurl it out of the System altogether.

It had never been very interesting.

When Gage approached Chiron, she found a dozen GUTships drifting like spent matches around the limbs of the worldlet. The ships looked as if they were being dismantled, their components being hauled down into the interior of the worldlet.

A Virtual — of a man’s head — rustled into existence in the middle of Gage’s cabin. The disembodied head eyed Gage in her pilot’s cocoon. The jostling pixels of his head enlarged, as if engorging with blood; Gage imagined data leaking down to the worldlet’s surface.

“I’m Moro. You look clean.” He looked about forty physical, with a high forehead, jet black eyebrows, a weak chin.

“Thanks a lot.”

“You can approach. Message lasers only; no wideband transmission.”

“Of course—”

“I’m a semisentient Virtual. There are copies of me all around your GUTship.”

“I’m no trouble,” she said tiredly.

“Make sure you aren’t.”

With Moro’s pixel eyes on her, she brought the GUTship through a looping curve to the surface of the ice moon, and shut down its drive for the last time.

She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.

The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away.

Moro met her in person.

“You’re taller than you look on TV,” she said.

He raised a gun at her. He kept it there while her ship was checked over.

Then he lowered the gun and took her gloved hand. He smiled through his faceplate. “You’re welcome here.” He escorted her into the interior of Chiron.

Corridors had been dug hastily into the ice and pressurized; the wall surface — Chiron ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under her hand.

Moro cracked open his helmet and smiled at her again. “Find somewhere to sleep. Retrieve whatever you need from your ship. Tomorrow I’ll find you a work unit; there’s plenty to be done.”

Work unit?

“I’m not a colonist,” she growled. “You think we’ll be here that long?”

Moro looked sad. “Don’t you?”

She found a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings into the cabin — Virtuals of her parents on Mars, book chips, a few clothes. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place.

There were about a hundred people hiding in the worldlet. Fifty had come from a Mars-Saturn liner; the rest had followed in ones and twos aboard fugitive GUTship freighters, like Gage herself. There were no children. Except for the liner passengers — mostly business types and tourists — the colonists of Chiron were remarkably similar. They were wiry-looking, AntiSenescence-preserved, wearing patched in-ship uniforms, and they bore expressions — uneasy, hunted — that Gage recognized. These were pilots. They feared, not discovery or death, but grounding.

The drives of some of the ships were dismounted and fixed to the surface, to provide power. The colonists improvised plants for air processing and circulation, for heating and for AS treatments. Crude distilleries were set up, with tubing and vessels cannibalized from GUTdrive motors.

Gage dug tunnels, tended vegetables, lugged equipment from GUTships of a dozen incompatible designs into the ice.

It was hard work, but surprisingly satisfying. The ache in her muscles enabled her to forget the worlds beyond Chiron, places she was coming to suspect she would never see again.

This was her home now, her Universe.

Two years limped by. The Chiron colony remained undiscovered. The grip of the Squeem occupation showed no sign of relaxing.

A mile below the surface the colonists dug out a large, oval chamber. The light, from huge strips buried in the translucent walls, was mixed to feel like sunlight, and soon there was a smell of greenery, of oxygen. People established gardens in synthesized soil plastered around the walls, and built homes from the ancient ice. The homes were boxes fixed to the ends of ice pillars; homes sprouted from the walls like flower-stalks.

Each dawn arrived with a brief flicker, a buzz as the strip-lights warmed up, then a flood of illumination. Gage would emerge from her cabin, nude; she could look down the length of her home-pillar at a field of cabbages, growing in ice as old as the Solar System.

It was like being inside a huge, gleaming egg. She missed Mars, the warm confines of her pilot cocoon.

The colonists monitored the news from the occupied worlds. There seemed to be no organized resistance; the Squeem’s action had been too unexpected, too sudden and complete. As far as the colonists knew they were the only free humans, anywhere.

But they couldn’t stay here forever.

They held a meeting, in an amphitheater gouged out of the ice. The amphitheater was a saucer-shaped depression with tiered seats; straps were provided to hold the occupants in place. As she sat there Gage felt a little of the cold of the worldlet, of two hundred miles of ice, seep through the insulation into the flesh of her legs.

Some proposed that the colony should become the base for a resistance movement. But if the massed weaponry of the inner planets hadn’t been able to put up more than a token fight against the Squeem, what could one ad-hoc colony achieve? Others advocated doing nothing — staying here, and waiting until the Squeem occupation collapsed of its own accord.

If it ever did, Gage thought morosely.

A woman called Maris Mackenzie released her belt and drifted up to the amphitheater’s focal point. She was another pilot, Gage saw; her uniform was faded but still recognizable. Mackenzie had a different idea.

“Let’s get out of this System and go to the stars,” she said.

There was a ripple of laughter.

“How?”

“One day Saturn or Uranus is going to throw this ice dwarf out of the System anyway,” Maris Mackenzie said. “Let’s help it along its way. We use the GUTdrive modules to nudge it into a close encounter with one of the giants and slingshot out of the System. Then — when we already have escape velocity — we open up a bank of GUTdrives and push up to a quarter gee. We can use water-ice as reaction mass. In three years we’ll be close to lightspeed—”

“Yes, but where would we go?”

Mackenzie was tall, thin, bony; her scalp was bald, her skull large and delicate: quite beautiful, like an eggshell, Gage thought. “That’s easy,” Mackenzie said. “Tau Ceti. We know there are iron-core planets there, but — according to the Squeem data — no advanced societies.”

“But we don’t know if the planets are habitable.”

Mackenzie spread her thin arms theatrically wide. “We have more water, here in the bulk of Chiron, than in the Atlantic Ocean. We can make a world habitable.”

“The Squeem will detect us when we open up the drives. They can outrun us with hyperdrive.”

“Yes,” said Mackenzie patiently, “but they won’t spot us until after the slingshot. By then we’ll already have escape velocity. To board us, the Squeem would have to match our velocity in normal space. We’ve no evidence they’ve anything more powerful than our GUTdrives, for normal spaceflight. So they couldn’t outrun us; even if they bothered to pursue us they could never catch us.”

“How far is Tau Ceti? It will take years, despite time dilation—”

“We have years,” Mackenzie said softly.

A bank of cannibalized GUTdrive engines nudged Chiron out of orbit. It took three years for the ice dwarf to crawl to its encounter with Saturn.

The time went quickly for Gage. There was plenty of work to do. Sensors were ripped from the GUTships and erected in huge, irregular arrays over the ice-ship’s surface, so they could watch for pursuit. Inside the ice cave, the colonists had to take apart their fancy zero-gee homes on stalks. One side of the chamber was designated the floor, and was flattened out; squat igloos were erected across the newly leveled surface. The vegetable farms were reestablished on the floor and on the lower slopes of the walls of the ice cave.

The colonists gathered on the surface to watch the Saturn flyby.

Gage primed her helmet nipple with whisky from one of the better stills. She found a place away from the rest, dug a shallow trench in the ice, and lay in it comfortably; vapor hissed softly around her, evoked by her leaked body heat.

Huge storms raged in the flat-infinite cloudscape of Saturn. The feathery surfaces of the clouds looked close enough to touch. Rings arched over Chiron like gaudy artifacts, unreasonably sharp, cutting perceptibly across the sky as Gage watched. It was like a slow ballet, beautiful, peaceful.

Saturn’s gravitational field grabbed at Chiron, held it, then hurled it on.

Chiron’s path was deflected towards the Cetus constellation, out of the plane of the Solar System and roughly in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. The slingshot accelerated the worldlet to Solar escape velocity. The encounter left the vast, brooding bulk of Saturn sailing a little more slowly around the remote Sun.

A week past the flyby the bank of GUTdrive engines was opened up.

Under a quarter gee, Gage sank to the new floor of the ice cave. She looked up at the domed ceiling and sighed; it was going to be a lot of years before she felt the exhilarating freedom of freefall again.

A week after that, riding a matchspark of GUTdrive light, the Squeem missile came flaring out of the plane of the System. It was riding a full gee.

The countdown was gentle, in a reassuring woman’s voice. Gage lay with Moro in the darkness of her igloo. She cradled him in the crook of her shoulder; his head felt light, delicate in the quarter-strength gravity.

“So we got two weeks’ head start,” she said.

“Well, we’d hoped for longer—”

“A lot longer.”

“ — but they were bound to detect the GUTdrive,” Moro said. “It could have been worse. The Squeem must have cannibalized a human ship, to launch so quickly. So the missile’s drive has to be human-rated, limited to a one-gee thrust.”

The Squeem had evidently been forced to concur with Mackenzie’s argument, that pursuit with a hyperdrive ship was impossible; only another GUTdrive ship could chase Chiron, crawling after the rogue dwarf through normal space.

The woman’s voice issued its final warnings, and the countdown reached zero.

The ice world shuddered. Gage felt as if a huge hand were pressing down on her chest and legs; suddenly Moro’s head was heavy, his hair prickly, and the ice floor was hard and lumpy under her bare back. The crown of her igloo groaned, and for a moment she wondered if it would collapse in on them.

The bank of GUTdrive pods had opened up, raising Chiron’s acceleration to a full gee, to match the missile.

If Mackenzie’s analysis was correct, Chiron couldn’t outrun the missile, and the missile couldn’t overtake Chiron. It was a stalemate.

Gage stroked the muscles of Moro’s chest. “It’s actually a neat solution by the Squeem,” she murmured. “The pursuit will take years to play out, but the missile must catch us in the end.”

Moro pushed himself away from her, rolled onto his front, and cupped her chin in his hands. “You’re too pessimistic. We’re going to the stars.”

“No. Just realistic. What happens when we get to Tau Ceti? We won’t be able to decelerate, or the missile will catch us. Although we may survive for years, the Squeem have destroyed us.”

Moro wriggled on the floor, rubbing elbows which already looked sore from supporting his weight in the new thrust regime. He pulled at his lip, troubled.

Gage let herself get pregnant by Moro. The zygote was frozen, placed with a small store of others.

It was only after the storage of her zygote that Gage questioned her own motives in conceiving. How long was she expecting to be here? What kind of future did she think any of them could hope for?

Six months later the missile increased its acceleration to two gee.

The Squeem had been smart, Gage decided; they’d given the missile the ability to redesign itself in flight.

The colonists held another meeting to decide what to do. This time they sat around on the bare floor of their darkened ice cave; their elegant zero-gee amphitheater was suspended, uselessly, high on one wall of the cave.

Some wanted to stand and fight. But they had nothing to fight with. And Chiron, with its cargo of humanity, must be much more fragile than the hardened missile.

A few wanted to give up. They were still only fifty light days from the Sun. Maybe they could surrender, and return to the occupied worlds.

But most couldn’t stand the idea; it would be better to die. Anyway, a semisentient Squeem missile was unlikely to take prisoners.

They voted to run, at two gee.

They had to rebuild their colony again. Drone robots crawled over the battered surface of the ice world, hauling water-ice to the GUTdrive engines. Shields billowed wings of electromagnetic flux around the ice dwarf; they would soon be running at close to light-speed, and the thin stuff between the stars would hit Chiron like a wall.

The beautiful ice cave was abandoned. It wouldn’t be able to withstand the stress of two gravities. More tunnels were dug through the ice; new homes, made hemispherical for maximum strength, were hollowed out. The colonists strung lights everywhere, but even so Gage found their new warren-world gloomy, claustrophobic. She felt her spirits sinking.

The drives were ramped up to two gee in a day.

Only the strongest could walk unaided. The rest needed sticks, or wheelchairs. Broken bones, failing knees and ankles, were commonplace. Those like Gage who’d grown up on low-gravity worlds, or in freefall, suffered the most. The improvised AS units were forced to cope with a plague of failing hearts and sluggish circulations.

It was like growing old, in twenty-four hours.

Gage and Moro attempted sex, but it was impossible. Neither could support the weight of the other’s body. Even lying side by side, facing each other, was unbearable after a few minutes. They touched each other tenderly, then lay on their backs in Moro’s cavern, holding hands.

After three more months Maris Mackenzie came to see Gage. Mackenzie used a wheelchair; her large, fragile, beautiful bald head lolled against the back of the chair, as if the muscles in her neck had been cut.

“The missile is changing again,” Mackenzie said. “It’s still maintaining its two-gee profile, but its drive is flaring spasmodically. We think it’s redesigning its drive; it’s going to move soon to higher accelerations still. Much higher.”

Gage lay on her pallet; she felt as if she could feel every wrinkle in the ice world under her aching back. “You can’t be surprised. It was just a question of time.”

“No.” Mackenzie smiled weakly. “I guess I’ve screwed us up. We could have just stayed in our quiet orbit between Saturn and Uranus, not bothering anybody, flying around in that beautiful freefall ice cavern.”

“The Squeem would have found us eventually.”

“We’re using up so much of our water. It breaks my heart. My beautiful ocean, thrown away into space, wasted. But we can go faster. We can still outrun the damn thing.”

Gage knew that was true.

Once GUTenergy had fueled the expansion of the Universe itself. In the heart of each GUTdrive Chiron ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity — the Big Bang. The fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single, Grand-Unified-Theory superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel Chiron matter in a rocket action.

But none of that made a difference.

Gage sighed. “We’ve already abandoned half our tunnels because of tiny gradients we didn’t even notice under one gee. We’re slowly dying, under two gee, despite the AS units. We can’t take anymore. I guess this latest maneuver of the missile will be the end for us.”

“Not necessarily,” Mackenzie said. “I have another idea.” Gage turned her head slowly; she had to treat her skull as delicately as a china vase. “Your last one was a doozie. What now?”

“Downloading.”

It wasn’t a universally popular option. On the other hand, the alternative was death.

Eighty chose to survive, as best they could.

When her turn came Gage made her way, alone, to the modified AS machine at the heart of their warren of tunnels. The robot surgeon delicately implanted a sensor pad into her corpus callosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the two hemispheres of her brain. It also, discreetly, pressed injection-pads against her upper arms.

All around her, in the improvised infirmary, people were dying, by choice.

So was Gage, if truth be told. All that would survive of her would be a copy, distinct from her.

The callosum sensor would download a copy of her consciousness in about eight hours. Gage returned to her cavern, lay on her back with a sigh, and fell asleep.

She opened her eyes.

She wasn’t hurting anymore. She was in zero gee. It felt delicious, like swimming in candy floss. She was in the ice cave — no, a Virtual reconstruction of the cave; the walls and house-stalks were just a little too smooth and regular. No doubt the realism of detail would return as their minds worked at this shared world.

Moro approached her; he’d resumed the crude disembodied-head Virtual form Gage had first encountered. “Hi.” He grinned.

“I just died.”

Moro shrugged. “Tell me about it. We’re all stored inside the shelter now.” This was a hardened radiation shelter they’d built hurriedly into the heart of the ice world; it contained a solid-state datastore to support their new Virtual existence, what was left of their vegetation, their precious clutch of human zygotes embedded in ice. “Our bodies have been pulped, the raw material stored in a tank inside the shelter.”

“You’ve a way with words.”

“…We’re up to a thousand gee,” Moro said.

Gage’s Virtual reflexes hadn’t quite cut in, so she made her mouth drop open. “A thousand?”

“That’s what the missile is demanding of us. All our tunnels have collapsed.”

“I never liked them anyway.”

“And the drones are having to strengthen the structure of Chiron itself; the thing wasn’t built for this, and could collapse under the stress.”

At a thousand gee, the time-dilation factor they would pile up would be monstrous. Gage found herself contemplating that, her growing isolation from home in space and time, with no more than a mild detachment.

Gage rubbed Virtual hands over her arms. Her flesh felt rubbery, indistinct; it was like being mildly anesthetized. Perhaps she was, in some Virtual way.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what the food is like here.”

The chase settled down to stalemate again.

Gage sat under (a Virtual image of) the sky, watching starlight bend itself into a bow around the ship. It was a beautiful sight; it reminded her of Saturn’s rings.

Their speed was already so close to that of light that time was passing a thousand times as quickly inside Chiron as beyond it. Everyone Gage knew in the Solar System must be long dead, despite AS treatment.

She wondered if the Squeem occupation still endured. Maybe not. Maybe humans had hyperdrive ships of their own by now.

This solitary drama might be the last, meaningless act of a historical tragedy, yet to play to its conclusion.

Most of the eighty had retreated to Virtual playgrounds, sinking into their own oceanic memories, oblivious of the Universe outside, isolated even from each other.

But Gage was still out here.

New problems were looming, she thought.

She sought out Maris Mackenzie.

“We’re going bloody fast,” she said.

“I know.” Maris Mackenzie looked lively, interested. “This is the way to travel between the stars, isn’t it? Carrying live, fragile humans through normal space across interstellar distances was always a pipedream. Humans are bags of water, unreasonably fragile. A starship is nothing but plumbing. Humans crap inordinate amounts, endless mountains of—”

“Yes,” said Gage patiently, “but we still can’t stop. Where are we going? Tau Ceti is long behind us. And we’re heading out of the plane of the ecliptic, remember; we’re soon going to pass out of the Galaxy altogether.”

“Um.” Mackenzie looked thoughtful. “What do you suggest?”

Gage set up a simulation of her old freighter’s pilot cocoon; for subjective days she reveled in the Virtual chamber, home again.

But she got impatient. Her control and speed of reaction were limited.

She dismissed the cocoon and found ways to interface directly with the sensors of Chiron, internal and external.

The GUTdrive felt like a fire in her belly; the sensor banks, fore and aft, were her eyes.

It was odd and at first she ached, over all her imaginary body; but gradually she grew accustomed to her new form. Sometimes it felt strange to return to a standard-human configuration. She found herself staring at Moro or Mackenzie, still seeing arrays of stars, the single, implacable spark of pursuing GUTlight superimposed on their faces.

Gage had been a good pilot. She was prepared to bet she was a better pilot than the Squeem missile. If she learned to pilot Chiron, maybe she could find a way to shake off the missile.

She searched ahead, through the thinning star-fields at the edge of the Galaxy. She had to find something, some opportunity to trick the Squeem missile, before they left the main disc.

The black hole and its companion star lay almost directly in the path of Chiron.

The hole was four miles across, with about the mass of the Sun. Its companion was a red giant, vast and cool, its outer layers so rarefied Gage could see stars beyond its bulk.

Gage had found her opportunity.

She summoned Maris Mackenzie. A pale Virtual of Mackenzie’s disembodied head floated over an image of the hole and its companion.

The hole raised tides of light in the giant. Material snaked out of the giant in a huge, unlikely vortex which marched around the giant’s equator. The vortex fueled an accretion disc around the hole, a glowing plane of rubble that spanned more than Earth’s orbit around its Sun.

Some of the giant’s matter fell directly into the hole. The infall was providing the hole with angular momentum — making it spin faster. Because of the infall the hole was rotating unusually fast, thirty times a second.

“Hear me out,” Gage said.

“Go on,” said Maris Mackenzie.

“If a black hole isn’t spinning — and it’s uncharged — then it has a spherical event horizon.”

“Right. That’s the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein’s equations. Spherically symmetric—”

“But if you spin the hole, things get more complicated.” It was called the Kerr-Newman solution. “The event horizon retreats in, a little way. And outside the event horizon there is another region, called the ergosphere.”

The ergosphere cloaked the event horizon. It touched the spherical horizon at its poles, but bulged out at the equator, forming a flattened spheroid.

“The greater the spin, the wider the ergosphere,” Gage said. “The hole ahead is four miles across. It’s spinning so fast that the depth of the ergosphere at the equator is a hundred and forty yards.”

Mackenzie looked thoughtful. “So?”

“We can’t enter the event horizon. But we could enter the ergosphere, or clip it, and get away safely.”

“Um. Inside the ergosphere we would be constrained to rotate with the hole.”

“That’s the plan. I want to flyby, clipping the ergosphere, and slingshot off the black hole.”

Mackenzie whistled. Pixels fluttered across her face, as she devoted processing power to checking out Gage’s proposal. “It could be done,” she said eventually. “But we would have a margin of error measured in yards. It would require damn fine piloting.”

“I’m a damn fine pilot. And we can take a lot of stress, remember.” It’s not as if we have to protect anyone living.

“Why do you want to do this?”

“Because,” Gage said, “the missile will follow me through the ergosphere. But after we’ve passed through, the hole will have been changed. The missile won’t be able to work out how…”

“We’ll have to get consent to this from the others. The eighty—”

“Come on,” Gage said. “Most of them have retreated into their own Virtual heads. There’s hardly anybody out here, still thinking, save you and me.”

Slowly, Mackenzie smiled.

For Gage’s scheme to work, the speed of Chiron would have to be raised much higher. When Chiron flew by the hole it would need an angular momentum comparable to that of the hole itself. So the drones ravaged Mackenzie’s frozen ocean, hurling the stuff of Chiron into the GUTdrives.

Chiron approached the lightspeed limit asymptotically.

By the time the hole approached, Chiron’s effective mass had reached about a tenth of the Sun’s. For every second passing in its interior, a hundred years wore away outside.

Ahead of her, the radiation from the black hole’s accretion disc was Doppler-shifted to a lethal sleet. Massive particles tore through the neural nets which comprised her awareness. She felt the nets reconfigure, healing themselves; it was painful and complex, like bone knitting.

Behind her the redshifted emptiness was broken only by the patient, glowering spark of the Squeem missile.

The black hole was only seconds away. She could make those seconds last a Virtual thousand years, if she wished.

In these last moments, she was assailed by doubt. Nobody had tried this maneuver before. Had she destroyed them all?

Gage let her enhanced awareness pan through the bulk of Chiron. Years of reaction-mass plundering had reduced the ice dwarf to a splinter, but it would survive to reach the lip of the black hole — and so would its precious cargo, the awareness of eighty downloaded humans, the canister containing their clutch of frozen zygotes. That canister felt like a child, inside her womb of ice.

Enough.

She reduced her clock-speed to human perception. The black hole flew at her face—

The misty giant companion star ballooned over Gage’s head, its thin gases battering at her face.

Chiron’s lower belly dipped fifty yards into the ergosphere. The gravitational pull of the hole gripped her. It felt like pliers in her gut. She was hurled around; she was a helpless child in the grip of some too-strong adult. The fabric of Chiron cracked; Solar System ice flaked into this black hole, here on the edge of the Galaxy, flaring X-radiation as it was crushed.

Then the gravity grip released. The hole system was behind her, receding. The pit dug in spacetime by the hole’s mass felt like a distant, fading ache.

She watched the patient GUTspark of the Squeem missile as it approached the hole. It matched her path almost exactly, she saw with grudging admiration.

The missile grazed the lip of the hole. There was a flare of X-radiation.

The GUTspark was gone.

It’s worked. By Lethe, after all these years, it’s worked.

Suddenly Gage felt utterly human. She wanted to cry, to sleep, to be held.

Cydonia, her home arcology, was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken Sun. The ambient Martian light was like a late sunset, with the arcology drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against its surface its windows were rectangles of fluorescent light glowing a harsh pearl gray, startlingly alien.

Her boots had left crisp marks in the duricrust.

Gage wasn’t nostalgic, usually, but since the hole flyby she had felt the need to retreat into the scenes and motifs of her childhood.

Moro and Mackenzie met her on this simulated Martian surface.

“It was simple,” she said.

Mackenzie smiled.

Moro growled. “You’ve told us.”

“We took so much spin from the black hole that we almost stopped it rotating altogether. It became a Schwarzschild hole. Without spin, its event horizon expanded, filling up the equatorial belt where the ergosphere had been.”

Chiron had clipped the ergosphere safely. The missile, following Chiron’s trajectory exactly, had fallen straight into the expanded event horizon.

The long chase was over.

“I guess the missile wasn’t an expert on relativistic dynamics after all,” Mackenzie said.

“But we’re not so smart either,” Moro said sourly. “After all we’re still falling out of the Galaxy — even faster than before the hole encounter, in fact. A million years pass for every month we spend in here; we might be the only humans left alive, anywhere.” He looked down at his arms, made the pixels swell absurdly. “If you can call this life. And we don’t have enough reaction mass left to slow down. Well, space pilot Gage, where are we heading now?”

Gage thought about it. They could probably never return to their home Galaxy. But there were places beyond the Galaxy, massive stars and black holes that a pilot could use to decelerate, if she was smart enough.

And if they could find a place to stop, they could rest. Maybe Gage’s awareness could be loaded back into some flesh-and-blood simulacrum of a human form. Or maybe not; maybe the role of Gage and the rest would simply be to oversee the construction of a new world fit for her child, and the other frozen zygotes.

She smiled. “At this speed, we’ll be there in a couple of subjective months.”

“Where?”

“Andromeda…”

Even under the oppressive Squeem occupation, humans learned much.

They learned, for example, that much of the Squeem’s high technology — their hyperdrive, for instance — was not indigenous. It was copied, sometimes at second or third hand, based on the designs of an older, more powerful species…

“It was the first time,” Eve said, “that the name ‘Xeelee’ entered human discourse.”

I shuddered.

The Xeelee Flower

I still get tourists out here, you know. Even though it’s been so long since I was a hero. But then, I’m told, these days the reopened Poole wormholes will get you from Earth to Miranda in hours.

Hours. What a miracle. Not that these tourist types appreciate it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the company. It just bugs me that every last one, after he’s finished looking over my villa built into the five-mile cliffs of Miranda, turns his face up to the ghostly blue depths of Uranus, and asks the same dumb question:

“Say, buddy, how come you use a fish tank for a toilet?”

But I’m a good host, and I merely smile and snap my fingers. After a while, my battered old buttlebot limps in with a bottle of valley bottom wine, and I settle back and begin:

“Well, my friend, I use the fish tank for a toilet for the same reason you would. Because my boss used to live in it.”

And that’s how I got where I am today.

By working for a bunch of fish, I mean, not pissing in the tank. Although I don’t know what stopped me from doing just that by the time we reached Goober’s Star eight months out from Earth.

“The resolution, Jones, the resolution!” The shoal of Squeem darted anxiously around their tank, griping at me from the translator box taped to one glass wall.

I put down the spare tank I’d been busy scraping out, and blinked across the cluttered little cabin. The buttlebot — yes, the same one, squeaky-clean in those days — scuttled past, humming happily in its chores. I picked my way to the control panel. I got out my adjustable spanner and gingerly tweaked the fiddly little enhancement vernier. Like most Xeelee-based technology it was too fine for human fingers. The secretive Xeelee evidently have great brains but tiny hands. Then again, some people haven’t managed to evolve hands at all, I reflected, as the Squeem flipped around in their greenish murk.

“Ah,” enthused the Squeem as the monitors sharpened up. “Our timing is perfect.”

I gloomily considered a myriad beautiful images of two things I didn’t want much to be close to: Goober’s Star — about G-type, about two Earth orbits away, and about to nova; and a planet full of nervous Xeelee.

And the most remarkable feature of the whole situation was that we weren’t running for our lives. In fact, we were going to get closer — a lot closer — drawn mothlike by the greed of the Squeem for stolen Xeelee treasure.

The buttlebot squeezed past my leg, extended a few pseudopodia, and began pushing buttons with depressing enthusiasm. I sighed and turned back to my fish tank. At least I had one up on the ’bot, I reflected; at least I was getting paid. Although, like most of the rest of humanity at that time, I hadn’t exactly had a free choice in the nature of my employment—

The Squeem’s rasp broke into my thoughts. “Jones, our planet-fall is imminent. Please prepare the flitter for your descent.”

Your descent. Had they said “your” descent? I nearly dropped the fish tank.

Carefully, I got up from my knees. “Into Lethe’s waters with that.” I defiantly straightened my rubber gloves. “No way. The Xeelee wouldn’t let me past the orbit of the moons—”

“The Xeelee will be fully occupied with their flight from the imminent nova. And your descent will be timed to minimize your risk.”

“That’s a lot of ‘you’ and ‘your,’ “ I observed witheringly. “Show me where my contract says I’ve got to do this.”

Can fish be said to be dry? The Squeem said drily, “That will be difficult as you haven’t got a contract at all.”

They had a point. I reluctantly took off my pinafore and began to tug at the fingers of my rubber gloves. The buttlebot smugly opened up the suit locker. “You ought to send that little tin cretin,” I said; and the Squeem replied, “We are.”

I swear to this day that buttlebot jumped.

And so the buttlebot and I found ourselves drifting through a low orbit over the spectacular Xeelee landscape. We watched morosely as the main ship pulled away from the tiny, human-design flitter, and wafted our employer off to the comparative safety of the far-side of one of the planet’s two moons.

My work for the Squeem, roughly speaking, was to do any fiddly, dirty, dangerous jobs the buttlebot wasn’t equipped for, such as to clean out fish tanks and land on hostile alien planets. And me, a college graduate. Of course, the role of humanity at that time was roughly equivalent.

It isn’t that the Squeem — or any of the other races out there — were any brighter than we were or better or even much older. But they had something we didn’t, and had — then — no way of getting our hands on.

And that was stolen Xeelee technology. For instance the hyperdrive, scavenged by the Squeem from a derelict Xeelee ship centuries earlier, had been making that fishy race’s fortune ever since. Tools and gadgets of all kinds, on which a Galactic civilization had been based. And all pilfered, over millions of years, from the Xeelee.

I use the word civilization loosely, of course. Can it be used to describe what exists out there — a ramshackle construct based on avarice, theft and the subjugation of junior races like ourselves?

We began our descent. The dark side of the Xeelee world grew into a diamond-studded carpet: fantastic cities glittered on the horizon. The Xeelee — so far ahead, they make the rest of us look like tree-dwellers. Secretive, xenophobic. Not truly hostile to the rest of us; merely indifferent. Get in their way and you would be rubbed aside like a mote in the eye of a god.

And I was as close to them as any sentient being had ever got, probably. Nice thought.

Yes, like gods. But very occasionally careless. And that was the basis of the Squeem’s plan that day.

We dropped slowly. The conversation left a lot to be desired. And the surface of the planet blew off.

I recoiled from the sudden light at the port, and the buttlebot jerked us down through the incredible traffic. It looked as if whole cities had detached from the ground and were fleeing upwards, light as bubbles. The flitter was swept with shifting color; we were in the down elevator from Heaven.

Abruptly as it had risen, the Xeelee fleet was past. Immense, night-dark wings spread over the doomed planet for a moment, as if in farewell; and then the fleet squirted without fuss into infinity. Evidently, we hadn’t been noticed.

The flitter moved in looser arcs now towards the surface. I took over from the buttlebot and began to seek out a likely landing place. We skimmed over a scoured landscape.

From behind the darkened planet’s twin moons, the valiant Squeem poked their collective nose. “The nova is imminent; please make haste with your planetfall.”

“Thanks. Now get back in your tin and let me concentrate.” I wrestled with the flitter’s awkward controls; we lurched towards the ground. I cursed the Xeelee under my breath; I thought of fish pie; I didn’t even much like the buttlebot. The last thing I needed at a time like that was a reminder that what I was doing was about as clever as looting a house on fire. Get in after the owners have fled; get out before the roof caves in. The schedule was kind of tight.

Finally, we thumped down. Reproachfully, the buttlebot uncoiled its pseudopodia from around a chair leg, let down the hatch and scuttled out. Already suited up, I grabbed a data desk and flashlight laser, and staggered after it. That descent hadn’t done me a lot of good either, but in the circumstances I preferred not to hang around.

I emerged into a bonelike landscape. The noise of my breath jarred in the complete absence of life. I imagined the planet trembling as its bloated sun prepared to burst. It wasn’t a happy place to be.

I’d put us down in the middle of a village-sized clump of buildings, evidently too small or remote to lift with the rest of the cities. In a place like this we had our best chance of coming across something overlooked by the Xeelee in their haste, some toy that could revolutionize the economies of a dozen worlds.

Listen, I’m serious. It had happened before. Although any piece of junk that would satisfy the Squeem and let me get out of there would do for me.

The low buildings gaped in the double shadows of the moonlight. The buttlebot scurried into dark places. I ran my hand over the edge of a doorway, and came away with a fine groove in a glove finger. The famous Xeelee construction material: a proton’s width thick, about as dense as glass wool, and as strong as Life itself. And no one had a clue how to make or cut it. Nothing new; a familiar miracle.

The buttlebot buzzed past excitedly, empty-handed. The vacant place was soulless; there was nothing to evoke the people who had so recently lived here. The thorough Xeelee had even evacuated their ghosts.

“Squeem, this is a waste of time.”

“I estimate some minutes before you should ascend. Please proceed; I am monitoring the star.”

“I feel so secure knowing that.” I tried a few more doorways. The flashlight laser probed emptiness. — Until, in the fourth or fifth building, I found something.

The artifact, dropped in a corner, was a little like a flower. Six angular petals, which looked as if they were made of Xeelee sheeting, were fixed to a small cylindrical base; the whole thing was about the size of my open hand. An ornament? The readings from my data desk — physical dimensions, internal structure — didn’t change as I played with the toy in the light of the flashlight laser. Half the base clicked off in my hand. Nothing exciting happened. Well, whatever it was, maybe it would make the Squeem happy and I could get out.

I took it out into the moonlight. “Squeem, are you copying?” I held it in the laser beam, and twisted the base on or off.

The Squeem jabbered excitedly. “Jones! Please repeat the actions performed by your opposable thumb, and observe the data desk. This may be significant.”

“Really.” I clicked the base on and off, and inspected the exposed underside in the laser light. No features. But a readout trembled on the data desk; the mass was changing.

I experimented. I took away the torch: the change in mass, a slow rise, stopped. Shine the torch, and the mass crept up. And when I replaced the base, no change with or without the torch. “Hey, Squeem,” I said slowly, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Jones, this may be a major find.”

I watched the mass of the little flower creep up in the light of the torch. It wasn’t much — about an ounce per second, to be exact — but it was there. “Energy to mass, right? Direct conversion of the radiant energy of the beam.” And the damn thing wasn’t even warm in my hand.

I clicked the base back into place; the flower’s growth stopped. Evidently, the base was a key; remove it to make the flower work. The Squeem didn’t remark on this; for some reason, I didn’t point it out. Well, I wasn’t asked.

“Jones, return to the flitter at once. Take no further risks in the return of the artifact.”

That was what I wanted to hear. I ran through the skull-like town, clutching the flower. The buttlebot scurried ahead. I gasped out, “Hey, this must be what they use to manufacture their construction material. Just stick it out in the sunlight, and let it grow.” Presumably the petals, as well as being the end product, were the main receptors of the radiant energy. In which case, the area growth would be exponential. The more area you grow, the more energy you receive; and the more energy you receive, the more area you grow, and…

I thought of experiments to check this out. Listen, I had in my hand a genuine piece of Xeelee magic; it caught my imagination. Of course, the Squeem would be taking the profits. I considered ways to steal the flower…

My feet itched; they were too close to a nova. I had other priorities at that point. I stopped thinking and ran.

We bundled into the flitter; I let the buttlebot lift us off, and stored the Xeelee flower carefully in a locker.

The lift was bumpy: high winds in the stratosphere. A spectacular aurora shivered over us. “Squeem, are you sure you’ve done your sums right?”

“There is an inherent uncertainty in the behavior of novae,” the Squeem replied reassuringly. We reached orbit; the main ship swam towards us. “After all,” the Squeem lectured on, “a nova is by definition an instability. However I am confident we have at least five minutes before—”

At once, three events.

The moons blazed with light.

The Squeem shut up.

The main ship turned from a nearby cylinder into an arrow of light, pointing at the safety of the stars.

“Five minutes? You dumb fish.”

The buttlebot worked the controls frantically, unable to comprehend the abrupt departure of the Squeem. The nova had come ahead of schedule; the twin moons reflected its sick glory. We were still over the dark side of the planet, over which screamed a wind that came straight from the furnaces of a medieval hell. On the day side, half the atmosphere must already have been blasted away.

The flitter was a flimsy toy. I estimated we had about ten minutes to sunrise.

My recollection of the first five of those minutes is not clear. I do not pretend to be a strong man. I remember an image of the walls of the flitter peeling back like burnt flesh, the soft interior scoured out…

Leaving one object, one remnant, spinning in a cloud of metal droplets.

I realized I had an idea.

I grabbed the Xeelee flower from its locker, and wasted a few more seconds staring at it. The only substance within a million miles capable — maybe — of resisting the nova, and it was the size of my palm. I had to grow it, and fast. But how?

My brain chugged on. Right. One way. But would there be time? The flower’s activating base came off, and went into a suit pocket.

The buttlebot was still at the controls, trying to complete its rendezvous with a vanished ship. If there’d been time, I might have found this touching; as things were, I knocked it aside and began entering an emergency sequence. My thinking was fuzzy, my gloved fingers clumsy, and it took three tries to get it right. You can imagine the effect on my composure.

Now I had about a minute to get to the back of the vessel. I snapped closed my visor and de-cycled the airlock. I failed to observe the mandatory safety routines, thus voiding the manufacturer’s guarantees. The buttlebot clucked nervously about the cabin.

Clutching the Xeelee flower, I pulled into space and set off one-handed.

I couldn’t help looking down at the stricken planet. Around the curve of the world, the air rushing from the day side was gathering into a cyclone to end all cyclones; clouds swarmed like maggots, fleeing the boiling oceans. A vicious light spread over the horizon.

Followed by the confused buttlebot, I made it to the reactor dump hatch. In about thirty seconds, the safety procedure I had set up should funnel all the flitter’s residual fusion energy out through the hatch into space, in one mighty squirt. Except, the energy pulse wasn’t going to reach free space; it would all hit the Xeelee flower, which I was going to fix into place over the hatch.

Right. Fix it. With what? I fumbled in my suit pockets for tape. A piece of string. Chewing gum. My mind emptied. The buttlebot scuttled past, intent on some vital task.

I grabbed it, and wrapped the flower in one of its pseudopodia. “Listen,” I screamed at it, “stay right here. Got it? Hold it for five seconds, please, that’s all I ask.”

No more time. I scrambled to the far side of the flitter.

Five seconds isn’t long. But that five seconds was long enough for me to notice the brightening of the encroaching horizon. Long enough to note that I was gambling my life on a few more or less unfounded assumptions about the Xeelee flower.

It had to be a hundred percent efficient; if it couldn’t absorb all that was about to be thrown at it, then it would evaporate like dew. It had to grow exponentially, with the rate of growth area increasing with the area grown already. Otherwise it couldn’t grow fast enough to save me as planned.

I also had plenty of time to wonder if the buttlebot had got bored—

There was a flash. I peered around the flitter’s flank.

It had worked. The flower had blossomed in the fusion light into an umbrella-sized dish, maybe just big enough for the hard rain that was going to fall.

The flower tumbled slowly away from the now-derelict flitter, as did the buttlebot, sadly waving the melted stump of one pseudopod. I kicked it out of the way, and pushed into space. The heat at my back was knife-sharp.

I reached the flower and curled into a ball behind it. The light flooded closer, beading the edge of my improvised shield. I imagined the nova’s lethal energy thudding into the material, condensing into harmless sheets of Xeelee construction material. My suit ought to protect me from the nasty heavy particles which would follow. It was well made, based on Xeelee material, naturally… I began to think I might live through this.

I waited for dawn. The buttlebot tumbled by, head over heels. It squirmed helplessly, highlights dazzling in the nova rise.

At the last moment I reached out and pulled it in with me. It was the stupidest thing I have ever done.

The nova blazed.

The flitter burst into a shower of metal rain. The skin of the planet below wrinkled, like a tomato in steam.

And that buttlebot and I rode our Xeelee flower, like surfers on a wave.

It took about twelve hours. At the end of that time, I found I could relax without dying.

I slept.

I woke briefly, dry-mouthed, muscles like wood. The buttlebot clung to my leg like a child to a doll.

We drifted through space. The flower rotated slowly, half-filling my field of view. Its petaled shadow swept over the wasted planet. It must already have been a mile across, and still growing.

What a spectacle. I slept some more.

The recycling system of my suit was designed for a couple of eight-hour EVA shifts. The Squeem did not return from their haven, light years distant, for four days.

I did a lot of thinking in that time. For instance, about the interesting bodily functions I could perform into the Squeem’s tank. And also about the flower.

It grew almost visibly, drinking in the sunlight. Its growth was exponential; the more it grew, the more capacity it had for further growth — I did some woolly arithmetic. How big could it grow?

Start with, say, a square mile of construction material. I made educated guesses about its surface density. Suppose it gets from the nova and surrounding stars about what the Earth receives from the Sun — something over a thousand watts a square yard. Assume total efficiency of conversion: mass equals energy over cee squared.

That gave it a doubling time of fifteen years. I dreamed of numbers: one, two, four, eight, sixteen… It was already too big to handle. It would be the size of the Earth after a couple of centuries, the size of Sol a little later.

Give it a thousand years and you could wrap up the Galaxy like a birthday present. Doubling series grow fast. And no one knew how to cut Xeelee construction material.

The Universe waltzed around me; I stroked the placid buttlebot. My tongue was like leather; the failing recycling system of my suit left a taste I didn’t want to think about.

I went over my figures. Of course, the growing flower’s power supply would actually be patchy, and before long the edge would be spreading at something close to the speed of light. But it would still reach an immense size. And the Xeelee hadn’t shown much interest in natural laws in the past. We drifted into its already monstrous eclipse; the buttlebot snuggled closer.

This was the sort of reason the Xeelee didn’t leave their toys lying around, I supposed. The flower would be a hazard to shipping, to say the least. The rest of the Galaxy weren’t going to be too pleased with the Squeem…

These thoughts sifted to the bottom of my mind, and after a while began to coalesce.

The secret of the hyperdrive: yes, that would be a fitting ransom. I imagined presenting it to a grateful humanity. Things would be different for us from now on.

And a little something for myself, of course. Well, I’d be a hero. Perhaps a villa, overlooking the cliffs of Miranda. I’d always liked that bust-up little moon. I thought about the interior design.

It was a sweet taste, the heady flavor of power. The Squeem would have to find a way to turn off the Xeelee flower. But there was only one way. And that was in my suit pocket.

Oh, how they’d pay. I smiled through cracked lips.

Well, you know the rest. I even got to keep the buttlebot. We drifted through space, dreaming of Uranian vineyards, waiting for the Squeem to return.

The images faded.

“I liked Jones,” I said.

“Because he didn’t give up. I know you, Jack.”

“And he won, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Jones’s small victory would, indeed, prove to be the turning point in human oppression by the Squeem…”

The yoke of the Squeem was cast off. Humans were free again, able to exploit themselves and their own resources as they saw fit. Not only that, the Squeem occupation had left humans with a legacy of high technology.

The lost human colonies on the nearby stars were contacted and revitalized, and a new, explosive wave of expansion began, powered by hyperdrive. Humans spread like an infection across the Galaxy, vigorous, optimistic once more.

And everywhere, they encountered the footprints of the Xeelee…

More Than Time or Distance

My one-woman flitter dropped into the luminous wreckage of an old supernova. I peered into the folded-out depths of the dead star, hoarding details like coins for Timothy.

The star remnant at the heart of the wreck was a shrunken miser; its solitary planet was a ball of slag pockmarked with shallow craters. Once this must have been the core of a mighty Jovian. I landed and stepped out. Feel how the surface crackles like glass, Tim… I imagined four-year-old eyes round with wonder. Except, of course, my memory of my son was five years and a thousand light years out of date. But I felt Tim’s presence, somehow — when you get close enough to someone you’re never really alone again. And maybe if my prospector’s luck changed here, it wouldn’t be five years before I held him again.

Above me violet sails of gas drifted through a three-dimensional sky. Around me a thousand empty light years telescoped away. And ahead of me stood a building — plain, cuboid, a bit like a large shoe box.

But a shoe box at the center of a nebula — and made of Xeelee construction material.

I stood stock still, the hairs at the back of my neck prickling against the lining of my pressure suit. An original Xeelee relic, the dream of prospectors from a thousand races… and intact, too.

The exploded star washed blank walls with light like milk. I expected a giant to step through that low doorway… I thought of one of Timothy’s jokes. What do you call a giant alien monster with a zap gun?

You know it. Sir.

I stepped through the doorway. The wall material was sword-thin.

The ceiling was translucent; supernova filaments filled the place with violet and green shadows. My eyes were drawn to a flicker of light, incongruously playful: about five yards from the doorway a small pillar supported a hoop of sky blue, which was maybe two feet wide. The hoop was polished and paper-thin, and a sequence of pink sparks raced around its circumference.

About thirty yards further down the long axis of the hall was a second pillar bearing an identical hoop. The two circles faced each other, chattering bits of light.

That was all. But it was enough to stop my heart. Because whatever this place was, it was still working — and working for the Xeelee, lurking like watchful spiders in their Prime Radiant at the Galaxy’s core — only three days away in their magical ships.

I stepped forward with my portable data desk and began to mark and measure.

The sequence of sparks in the hoop nearest the door was random, as far as I could tell. So was the sequence in the other hoop — but it was an exact copy of the first sequence, delayed by a nanosecond.

I worked out the implications of that, and then I leaned carefully against a low pillar and breathed deep enough to mist up my face plate.

Think about it. Ring A was talking to ring B, which got the message delayed by a nanosecond. Each ring was a light nanosecond across. And the rings were placed a hundred light nanoseconds apart.

So all the delay was in the structure of the rings — and the communication between them was instantaneous.

My face plate fogged a bit more. Instantaneous communication: it was a technological prize second only in value to the hyperdrive itself…

The secret had to be quantum inseparability. When a single object is split up, its components can still communicate instantaneously. That’s high school stuff, Bell’s theorem from the twentieth century. But, everyone had thought, you couldn’t use the effect to send meaningful messages.

The Xeelee had really got their fingers into the guts of the Universe this time. It was almost blasphemous.

And very, very profitable.

My sense of awe evaporated. I found myself doing a sort of dance, still clinging to the pillar, booted heels clicking. Well, I had an excuse. It was the high point of my life.

And at just that moment, in walked a giant alien monster with a zap gun. Wouldn’t you know it?

At least it wasn’t a Xeelee. About all we know of them is that they’re small, physically. My superstitious terror faded to disgust.

“You tailed me,” I said into my suit radio. “You sneaked up on me, and now you’re going to rob me and kill me. Right?” I looked at the zap gun and remembered the joke. “Right, sir?”

I don’t suppose it got it. Silhouetted against a violet doorframe was a humanoid sketch in gun-metal gray. Its head was a cartoon; all the action was in a porthole in its stomach, through which I caught grotesque hints of faces. It was like an inside-out bathyscaphe with weird sea-bottom creatures peering out of darkness.

And it had the zap gun. The details of that don’t really matter; it was essence of gun and it was pointing at me.

I labeled it the Statue.

The silence dragged on, maybe for dramatic effect, more likely because the Xeelee-derived translator box I saw strapped to one metal thigh was having trouble matching up our respective world pictures. Finally it spoke.

“Allow me to summarize the situation.” The box’s voice was a machine rasp; the stomach monster twitched. “I have discontinued your vessel. I estimate your personal environment will last no more than five human days. You have no weapons, or any means of communication with your fellows — none of whom are in any event closer than a thousand light years.”

I thought it over. “Okay,” I said, “I’m prepared to discuss terms for your surrender.”

“The logic of the situation is that you will die. You will therefore move outside this structure—”

Actually the logic was that I was dead already. I thought fast, looking for the edge. “Of course, you’re right.” I stepped forward—

— and whirled like a leaf — and snapped one sky blue hoop off its pillar — and draped it around my neck.

It was over before either of us had a chance to think about it. The whirling pink sparks faded and died.

The Statue’s limbs were motionless but its stomach thrashed. I felt breathless and foolish; the hoop around my neck was like a lavatory seat put there during a drunken teenage party. “Logic’s not my strong point,” I apologized.

You see, I had a plan. It wasn’t a very good plan, and I was probably dead even if it came off. But it was all I had, and I noticed I was still breathing.

The Statue stared. “You have damaged the artifact.”

“You see, there had to be a reason why you didn’t shoot me in the back before I knew about it. And that reason’s got to be your ignorance of humans. Right?” I snapped. “Despite the fact that you and your kind have been tailing me for months—”

“Actually years. We find humans are resourceful creatures, worthy of study.”

“Years, then — if you zapped me, maybe I’d explode, or melt, or in general make a horrible mess of the Xeelee equipment. And you won’t hurt me now for fear of doing even more damage.” I clung to the frail hoop around my neck.

The Statue moved further into the building, the interesting end of the zap gun unwavering. We stood along the axis of the structure. The Statue said patiently, “But even with this awareness you are scarcely at an advantage.”

I shrugged.

“You are still isolated and without resources.” The Statue seemed confused. “All I have to do is wait five days, when you will die in undignified circumstances and I will retrieve the artifact.”

“Ah,” I said mysteriously. “A lot can happen in five days.” In fact, maybe in three — I kept that to myself.

The stomach monster thrashed.

I walked around the pillar and sat down, taking care not to squash my catheter. “So we wait.” I settled the hoop more comfortably around my neck.

Giant wings of gas flapped slowly beyond the translucent ceiling, and the hours passed.

Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.

I spent a day staring out a statue and not thinking about my catheter — or Tim.

I snapped out, “You’ve no idea what you’re stealing from me here.”

The Statue hesitated. “I believe I do. This is clearly a Xeelee monitoring station. Presumably one of a network spread through the Galaxy.”

Instantly I wished I hadn’t spoken. If it had thought through as far as that… to distract it, I said, “So you watched my experiments?”

“Yes. What we see must be a test rig for the instantaneous communication device.”

“How do you suppose it works?” Stick to details; keep it off the Xeelee—

A longer pause. Through the ceiling skin I watched a cathedral of buttressed smoke. The Statue said, “I fear the translator box cannot provide the concepts… At one time these two hoops were part of a single object. And an elementary particle, an electron perhaps, would be able to move at random between any two points of that object, without a time lapse.”

“Yeah. This is quantum physics. The electron we perceive is an ‘average’ of an underlying ‘real’ electron. The real electron jumps about over great distances within a quantum system, quite randomly and instantaneously. But the average has to follow the physical laws of our everyday experience, including the speed of light limit.”

“The point,” it said, “is that the real electron will travel at infinite speed between all parts of an object — even when that object has been broken up and its parts separated by large distances, even light years.”

“We call that quantum inseparability. But we thought you could use it only to send random data, no information-bearing messages.”

“Evidently the Xeelee do not agree,” the Statue said dryly. “It took many generations before my species could be persuaded that the elusive ‘real’ electron is a physical fact, and not a mathematical invention.”

I smiled. “Mine, too. Maybe our species have got more in common than they realize.”

“Yes.”

Well, that was a touching thought which augured hope for the future of the Galaxy. But I noticed it didn’t touch the zap gun.

The thing in the Statue’s stomach started to feed on something; I turned away. The gloom deepened as the pale supernova remnant was eclipsed by the edge of the ceiling. I tried to sleep.

The first day was bad enough, but the second was the worst. Except for the third.

For me, anyway. The suit had water and food — well, a syrup nipple — but the recycling system wasn’t designed for a long vacation. I didn’t want to lose face by sluicing out my plumbing system all over the floor. And so, when I went for my regular walks around the bereft pillar, I sloshed.

By contrast, the Statue was unmoving, machinelike. Bizarre fish swam in its stomach, and the zap gun tracked me like the eye of a snake.

On the third day I stood by my pillar, swaying in unstable equilibrium. I didn’t have to feign weakness. I sneaked glances at the futuristic sky. I had to time things just right—

At length, the Statue said, “You are weakening and will surely die. But this has always been inevitable. I do not understand your motivation.”

I laughed groggily. “I’m waiting for the cavalry.”

The stomach creature twitched uneasily. “What is this ‘calvary’?”

Too uneasy. I shut myself up with the truth. “Maybe I just don’t like being robbed. I’m a prospector for Xeelee gold, but it’s not just for me. Can you understand that? It’s for my son. My off-spring. That’s what you’re taking from me, and I don’t even know what you are.”

A flicker in the sky like the turn of a page.

It was time. I stumbled to my knees.

The Statue said, not unkindly, “You have been a worthy opponent. I will allow you to end your life according to the custom of your species.”

“Thank you. I — I guess it’s over.” I forced myself to my feet, took the hoop from my neck, and laid it reverently atop the little pillar. I began walking stiffly towards the door, feeling ashamed of my trickiness. Amazing, isn’t it. “I’d like to die outside,” I said solemnly.

The Statue glided away from the doorway, respectfully lowering its zap gun.

I got outside the building. Another shudder across the weird sky. I limped around the corner of the building—

— and ran for my life. My legs were like string, shivering from under use. A bar of light swept behind the stars. There were tiny explosions in my peripheral vision; it was as if something was solidifying out of the layer of space that cloaked the planet.

The Xeelee didn’t believe in a quiet entrance.

I tumbled face first into a shallow crater and stayed that way. It didn’t feel deep enough; I imagined my backside waving like a flag to the marauding Xeelee.

A giant started stomping around me. I held onto my head and waited for the pounding to stop. I glimpsed wings, night-dark, hundreds of miles wide, beating over the planet, eclipsing the glowing gas.

The planet stopped shivering.

I tried to move. My muscles were like cardboard. Pieces crackled off the back of my suit, which was burnt to a crisp. I walked from the crater scattering scabs like an unearthly leper.

I reached the site of the Xeelee station. I was a fly at the edge of a saucer; the hole was a perfect hemisphere, a hundred yards wide. I skirted it carefully, heading for a sparkle of twisted metal beyond it.

The Statue lay like Kafka’s cockroach, its sketch of a head battered into concavity, its limbs and torso crumpled. Fluid bubbled through a crack in the porthole, and something inside looked out at me listlessly.

The translator box was hesitant and scratchy, but intelligible. “I… wish to know.”

I knelt beside it. “Know what?”

“How you knew when… they would come.”

“Neat timing, huh?” I shrugged. “Well, the clues were there for both of us.”

“Quantum inseparability?”

“Signals will pass instantaneously between a communicator’s two halves. But those halves must once have been in physical contact. Once joined, they can never be truly parted. Like people,” I mused. “It takes more than time or distance—”

“I begin to… understand.”

“The components of this station, and all its clones throughout the Galaxy, must have been carried here from a central exchange. That’s where the repairmen we’ve just, ah, encountered, must have come from. And the exchange has to be at the Xeelee home base, at the Galaxy core. Three days’ travel for the Xeelee.”

“So they had to come. But the Xeelee Prime Radiant is a matter of speculation. You did not know—”

I grinned ruefully. “Well, I knew for sure I’d had it unless I took a long shot. Your precious logic demonstrated that.”

More bubbles from the stomach, and the voice grew weaker. “But your… ship is destroyed. Your victory does not bring success.”

“Yeah.” I sat in crunchy dirt beside the dying Statue. “I guess I didn’t like to think this far ahead.” The depth of focus seemed to shift; light years expanded around me.

Even the Statue was company. “You have been a worthy… opponent.”

“You’re repeating yourself,” I said rudely.

“My ship is at… the planet’s nearer pole, one day’s journey from here. You may be able to adapt its life system to your purposes.”

“Ah… thank you. Why?”

“Because you would probably find it anyway. And I hope your species will… be tolerant of mine in the future.”

I stayed with the Statue until it bubbled to silence.

I looked back ruefully at the hole the Xeelee had left. There went a hundred fortunes.

But, Lethe’s waters could take the money. I’d take away the Statue’s ship, and at least the principle of the instantaneous transmitter. That ought to be enough; resourceful creatures, we humans.

I felt Tim’s presence steal over me; it was as if his hand crept into mine, reasserting our inseparability. I picked up what was left of the zap gun; it would make a great gift for him. Then I walked over fire-crisped slag to the pole.

The Statue, that Kafka cockroach, reminded me of me. I wondered uneasily if that brave prospector would have found me as repellent, as inhuman, as the creature who tried to rob her.

I knew that the quantum inseparability communicator became a key enabling technology for the expansion of mankind. It made the prospector her fortune, and her fame.

And the expansion continued.

“Watch,” Eve said. “Learn…”

The Switch

After the ship landed, Krupp and I made our reluctant way to the airlock. We found Ballantine already there, climbing into his neat little suit.

“Wouldn’t you know it, Gorman,” Krupp growled at me as he thrust his tree-trunk legs into silvered fabric. “That little bastard Ballantine always has to be first.”

I searched for my helmet in a cluttered locker. “Well, it is his job, Krupp. He’s the xenotechnologist… A landfall is the only time he gets to do anything useful around here.”

Krupp pulled his gigantic shoulders straight. “Ask me, that creep doesn’t ever do anything useful. Waste of a berth.” Little Ballantine heard all that, of course. Krupp didn’t care. Nor would you, I guess, if your biceps measured wider than the other guy’s chest. But I thought I saw Ballantine’s big-eyed face redden up just a little inside his helmet.

Captain Bayliss came stomping down the corridor. She was still rounding us all up for the EVA. Soon there were a dozen bodies, the entire crew, crammed into that airlock. Alien air whistled in and we grumbled quietly.

“Stow it!” Bayliss said irritably.

“Ah, Captain, these science stops are a waste of time,” Krupp rumbled. “We’re a cargo freighter, not a damn airy-fairy survey ship—”

“I said stow it,” the Captain snapped. “Look, Krupp, you know the law. We’re obliged to make these stops. Every time his instruments detect something like that wreck outside.”

Well, we all knew who the “his” referred to. Ballantine kept his face turned to the door’s scuffed metal; but his shoulders sloped a bit more.

On that ship we were all alike, all semi-skilled cargo hands. All except for Ballantine. He was the xenotechnologist the law said we had to carry.

So he wasn’t exactly one of the guys.

But it wasn’t his fault. I suppose we were a little hard on him — Krupp maybe harder than most. Mind you, not so much that he deserved what he got…

The outer door slid upwards. We tumbled down the ship’s ramp and spread out like an oil drop on water.

Swinging my arms with relief, I looked around. There was a double sun directly overhead, two white ovals like mismatched eggs. The sky was pinkish, washed-out. On the horizon a range of ancient hills made a splash of gray…

And in the center of the purple plain before me was the ruin of a Xeelee spacecraft. It looked like the blackened skeleton of a whale.

We moved tentatively towards it; Ballantine scampered ahead. Small fists clenched, he peered up at ribs that arched high over him. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and brushed excitedly at the dust.

Krupp came carrying Ballantine’s data desk, a big trunk-sized unit that he’d propped on one wide shoulder. Captain Bayliss shook her head in disgust. “Always got to show off, haven’t you, Krupp? You know that’s a two-man job.”

Krupp grinned, a little strain showing in his rocky face. “Aye, well, Ballantine normally does it. I just thought he deserved a break.” There was a ripple of appreciative laughter. Krupp dumped the desk hard in the middle of the wreck.

Ballantine came storming up to him. “You bloody fool! You could smash something—”

Krupp considered him thoughtfully, like a biologist about to perform a dissection.

The Captain came strolling over, sending Krupp away with a simple glance. She poked one suited toe through the wreck’s crumbling skin. “Seems to me there’s not a lot left to smash, Mr. Ballantine,” she said smoothly.

“No,” Ballantine said, his breath shaking. “The Xeelee guard their technology like gold dust. When a Xeelee ship crashes, self-destruct mechanisms burn up anything that survives. But they aren’t perfect. The base of this ship is intact, and there’s some sort of control box down there.” He pointed. “A two-way switch…”

We collected probes from the data desk and were soon crawling like muscle-bound crabs over the ship’s bones. We all had our assigned tasks; with gloved fingers I poked tentatively at my Berry phase monitor, wishing I knew what it was for.

The Captain yelped in alarm. I dropped the instrument and whirled around.

Over the center of the wreck, a disc of dust as wide as a room had drifted up into the air. At its heart the data desk tumbled like an angular balloon. Captain Bayliss stood there staring, her mouth slack.

Evidently Ballantine had turned his two-way switch.

We gathered round eagerly. A working Xeelee artifact! The company paid good bounty for such things. Ballantine reached down to his switch — it was a button set in a tiny box — and turned it back again. The data desk fell to earth with a surprisingly hard thump; Ballantine watched thoughtfully.

The Captain cleared her throat, taking short, determined paces. “Well?”

“It’s a gravity nullifier,” the xenotechnologist said excitedly. He peered into instrument displays. “Above this bit of floor there was about one percent gee.”

The Captain was in control again. “Gravity nullifier? Big deal. That’s standard technology; got one in the ship. No bounty there, I’m afraid.”

Disappointed, we turned away; but Ballantine trotted after Bayliss. “Captain, the ship’s nullifier consumes gigawatts. Its central generator fills a room! This thing must work on completely new principles—”

The Captain turned on him. “Ballantine, get off my back, will you? All I care about is the schedule I’ve got to meet.” She looked at something approaching over Ballantine’s shoulder, and she smiled faintly as she continued: “If you can prise that thing out of the wreck in the next twelve hours, fine. Otherwise don’t bother me.” Her smile widened.

Ballantine opened his mouth to complain further — but never got the chance. A massive arm closed around his waist and lifted him, wriggling, into the air.

The Captain just kept on grinning.

“Come on, Ballantine!” Krupp roared, carrying him to the wreck. “Let’s see whether this thing of yours really works.” And he flicked the switch over and held Ballantine with two hands over the gravity disc. The other men watched expectantly. “Go for it, Krupp!” Ballantine just hung there like a limp doll.

With one mighty boost, Krupp hurled the little scientist straight up.

Now Krupp is a big man. Under normal gravity he could have launched Ballantine’s weight through — what? A couple of yards?

Under one percent of gee, Ballantine soared up two hundred yards. He took about thirty seconds to drift back down; he had to tumble like a clumsy snowflake into a circle of laughing faces.

He stumbled away, brushing past me. His eyes were bright, like ice.

After ten hours we’d just about finished. Most of the men were in their cabins, cleaning up. I stood on the ship’s ramp, peering up at the eclipse of one egg-shaped star by another.

Ballantine emerged from the ship and stood with me, gazing out in silence. After a while I decided to be sociable. Lethe, we were all a long way from home. “Did you get your nullifier free from the wreck?”

He shook his head angrily. “What a waste. And it works on a completely new principle.”

“Really?” I asked, already regretting opening my mouth.

“Did you know that gravity is actually made up of three forces?” he lectured. “There’s the positive force Newton discovered — and two extra, short-range forces called the Yukawa terms. Yukawa was a twentieth-century scientist.

“One Yukawa is positive and the other is negative, so they cancel each other out. Overall, two positives and a negative leave you with one positive, you see…”

His voice got higher, sharp with bitterness. I began to wonder how I could get away. “What the Xeelee artifact does is to nullify the Yukawas. The control switch has two settings. The first neutralizes the positive Yukawa, so that leaves the negative and just one positive — nothing, to within one percent.

“But the other setting doesn’t turn the device off, as I thought at first. Instead it — neutralizes… the…”

He tailed off, staring at the wreck. Only Krupp was still out there; as a nominal penalty for his prank the Captain had set him the chore of dumping the instruments’ data into the desk.

Krupp moved behind a blackened rib. Ballantine glanced at me, his face empty, then ran jerkily down the ramp towards the wreck.

Intrigued, I stayed to watch. Ballantine walked to the center of the nullifier disc and turned the two-way switch. Then he hoisted up the data desk’s one percent weight and set it on his shoulder. He posed like a parody of Krupp, grinning coldly—

— until Krupp himself came back into view. The big man stared, amazed. Then he strode up behind Ballantine and gave him a shove that sent him sprawling. The desk tumbled in the air; Krupp caught it neatly.

Ballantine hauled himself stiffly to his feet and brushed purple dust from his suit.

Krupp laughed at him. “Leave men’s work to the men,” he said harshly. “Turn that gravity thing off, Ballantine, and I’ll carry the desk back to the ship.”

Ballantine knelt and deftly turned the switch to its second setting.

Krupp gasped; his knees buckled. With a grunting effort he straightened up. I watched, bewildered. Ballantine approached Krupp and stared up into his face. “What’s the matter, big man? Can’t hold a little weight?”

Krupp looked as if he might drop the desk — but while Ballantine taunted he had to stand there, legs shaking.

Something was wrong, I realized. Shouting for help I ran to the wreck; I brushed Ballantine aside and turned the switch. As the weight lifted from him, Krupp sighed. His blood-swollen face smoothed over and he fell back into the dust.

It took three of us to carry him back to the ship.

The Captain spent a long time grilling Ballantine, but she came away frustrated. What was there to find out? Krupp had hoisted one load too many, crushed a few vertebrae—

The Captain filed a report, and Krupp started to learn to use crutches.

I spent a long time thinking it all over.

We lifted off, and I found myself standing once more with Ballantine, this time at a port. We watched the planet recede. I began: “You were saying?”

His bony head swiveled towards me.

“On the ramp,” I prompted. “Remember? You said that switch wasn’t on-off…”

He turned away, but I grabbed one sharp-boned shoulder. “You see, I’ve worked it out. You said there were three gravity forces, two positive and one negative. One setting of the switch canceled out the positive Yukawa, leaving zero overall.

“But the other setting didn’t switch the device off. It canceled out the other Yukawa. The negative one. And that left two positives…”

Ballantine grinned abruptly, showing crooked teeth.

I went on, “The first time you turned that switch you watched the data desk fall twice as fast as it should have done. That was your clue… And that’s how you got Krupp. The data desk suddenly came down on him at two gravities—”

“I had to abandon the nullifier on the planet,” he cut in harshly. “So you’ll never know for sure, will you, Gorman?” His head rotated and his pale eyes locked onto mine.

I knew he was right.

I had nothing else to say. I broke the stare and walked away. Ballantine stayed at the port, teeth bared.

The only law governing the squabbling junior races of the Galaxy was the iron rule of economics.

The second Occupation of the worlds of mankind was far more brutal than the first.

Because there were so few of them, the species called the Qax weren’t naturally warlike — individual life was far too precious to them. They were instinctive traders, in fact; the Qax worked with each other like independent corporations, in perfect competition.

“The Qax enslaved mankind simply because it was an economically valid proposition,” Eve said. “They occupied Earth because it was so easy — because they could. They had to learn the techniques of oppression from humans themselves. Fortunately for the Qax, human history wasn’t short of object lessons…”