Ring

15

Louise Ye Armonk stood on the pod’s short ladder. Below her, the ice of Callisto was dark, full of mysterious depths in the smoky Jovian ring-light.

She felt a starburst of wonder. For the first time in a thousand subjective years she was going to walk on the surface of a world.

She stepped forward.

Her feet settled to the ice with a faint crunch. Her boots left well-defined, ribbed prints in the fine frost which coated Callisto’s surface.

The thick environment suit felt heavy, despite the easiness of Callisto’s thirteen-percent-gee gravity. Louise lifted her hands and pressed her palms together; she was barely able to feel her hands within the clumsy gloves. The suit was a thousand years old. Trapped inside this thing she felt deadened, aged, as if she were forced to work within some glutinous fluid.

She looked around, peering through her murky faceplate, squinting to make out detail through the plate’s degraded image-enhancement. As her sense of wonder faded, she felt irritation grow; she knew it was weak of her, but, damn it, she missed the crystal clarity of her Virtual dioramas.

Jupiter and Sol were both below the little moon’s infinite-flat, icy horizon: but Jupiter’s new rings arced spectacularly out of the horizon and across the sky. The ring system’s far edge occluded the stars, razor-sharp, and the ice and rock particles of the rings sparkled milky crimson in the cool, distant sunlight.

The rings were like a huge artifact, she thought. Here, a mote on a plain of ice, she felt dwarfed to insignificance.

She tipped back her head and looked at the stars.

It had already been a year since the Northern’s speed had dropped sufficiently for the last relativistic effects to bleach from the Universe, a year in which they’d slowly coasted in from the outer System to Jupiter. The Northern had been in orbit around the Jovian moon for several days now, and Morrow had been working down here for most of that time. Preliminary scans from the Northern had told them that there was something buried inside the freshly frozen Callisto ice — something anomalous. Morrow, with his team of ’bots, was trying to find out what that was.

But this was Louise’s own first trip down to the surface. And the experience of being immersed in a sky — a genuine, spread out, distortion-free starry sky — was an unnerving novelty to Louise, after so long being surrounded by the washed-out starbow of near-lightspeed.

But what a sky it was — a dull, empty canopy of velvet, peppered by the corpses of stars: wizened, cooling dwarfs, the bloated hulks of giants — some huge enough to show a disc, even at interstellar distances — and, here and there, the traceries of debris, handfuls of spider-web thrown across the sky, which marked the sites of supernovas.

There was a grunt, and a diffuse shadow fell across the ice.

Louise turned. Spinner-of-Rope was making her slow, cautious way out of the pod after her. Spinner’s small body, made bulky by the suit, was silhouetted against the pod lights. She placed each footstep deliberately on the surface, and she held her arms out straight.

Louise grinned at Spinner. “You look ridiculous.”

“Oh, thanks,” Spinner said sourly. Through the dully reflective faceplate Louise could see the glint of Spinner’s spectacles, the glare of face paint, the white of Spinner’s teeth. Spinner said, “I just don’t want to go slip-sliding across this ice-ball of a moon.”

Louise looked down and scuffed the surface with her toe, leaving deep scratches. Within the ice she could see defects: planes, threads and star-shaped knots, imperfections left by the freezing process. “This is ice, but it’s not exactly smooth.”

Spinner waddled up to her and sniffed; the noise was like a scratch in Louise’s earpiece. “Maybe,” Spinner said. “But it’s a lot smoother than it used to be.”

“…Yes.”

“Look,” Spinner said, pointing. “Here comes the Northern.” Louise turned and peered up, dutifully. The Northern, trailing through its hour-long orbit, was a thousand miles above the surface. Subvocally she ordered her faceplate to enhance the image. The ship became a remote matchstick, bright red in the light of Sol; it looked impossibly fragile, like some immense toy, she thought. The asteroid ice which had provided reaction mass for so long was a dark, anonymous lump, barely visible now that the great blue flame of the GUTdrive had been stilled after its thousand-year service. The spine, with its encrustation of antennae and sensor ports, was like an organic thing, bony, coated by bleached parasites. Red sunlight pooled like blood in the antennae cups. Still fixed to the spine was the wreckage of the worm-hole Interface — twisted so that its tetrahedral form was lost-beyond recognition, the electric-blue sparkle of its exotic matter frame dulled.

And the lifedome itself — eggshell-delicate — was huge atop that skinny spine, like the skull of a child. Most of the dome was darkened — closed up, impenetrable — but the upper few layers still glistened with light.

Within those bland walls, Louise reflected, two thousand people still went about their small, routine lives. Beyond Louise and her close companions, there were very few within the lifedome’s fragmented societies who even knew that the Northern’s immense journey was, at last, over.

“How are you doing down there?”

She winced. The sudden voice in her ear had been raucous, overloud — another problem with this damn old suit.

“Mark, I’m fine. How are you?”

“What can you see? What are you thinking?”

“Mostly I can see the inside of this faceplate. Couldn’t you have got it cleaned up? It smells like something’s been living in it for a thousand years.”

He laughed.

“…I see the stars. What’s left of them.”

“Yes.” Mark was silent for a moment. “Well, it’s just as we suspected from the deconvolved reconstructions during the flight… but never quite believed, maybe. It’s the same picture all over the sky, Louise; we’ve found no exceptions. It’s incredible. In the five million years of our flight, stellar evolution has been forced through at least five billion years. And the effect isn’t limited to this Galaxy. We can’t even see the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, for example.”

The sky was lowering, oppressive. She said, “Superet got it about right, didn’t they? Remember the projections they showed us in the Virtual dome in New York, when they recruited us?”

“Yes… wizened stars, faded galaxies. Depressing, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “Maybe. But the sky’s become an astrophysicist’s dream lab.”

“But it can’t have been much of a dream for anyone left alive here, in the Solar System, when those novae and supernovae started going off. The sleet of hard radiation and massive particles must have been unrelenting, for a million years…”

“Yes. A hard rain indeed. That will have sterilized the whole damn place — ”

” — if there had been anyone left alive here by then. Which we’ve yet to find evidence of. Well, we’re still following up our four leads — the maser radiation coming out of the Sun, the very strange gravity waves coming from Sagittarius, the artifact in the ice, here on Callisto, and that weak beacon in transPlutonian space… But we’re no further forward understanding any of it.”

“I can see the forest,” Spinner murmured, her faceplate upturned.

Louise studied the lifedome more carefully, enhanced the image with artificial colors — and there, indeed, she could see a thin layer of Earth green at the leading edge of the life-dome, the layer of living things stained dark by the aged sunlight.

That pet forest, she thought suddenly, might be the only green left, anywhere in the Universe.

Absurdly, she felt her throat tightening; she found it difficult to pull her gaze away from that drifting particle of home.

There was a hand on her arm, its weight barely registering through the numbing, stiff fabric of the suit. Spinner smiled. “I know how you feel.”

Louise peered through the faceplate at this odd girl-woman, with her glinting spectacles and her round, childish face.

After Spinner’s father had wrecked the Interface — and with it, any chance of getting home again — Louise had offered Spinner and her people AS-treatment. And, looking at Spinner now, fifty years later, it was hard to remember that this was no longer a child, but a sixty-five-year-old woman.

“I doubt you know how I feel,” she said coldly. “I doubt it very much.”

Spinner studied her for a few moments, her painted face expressionless behind her plate.

They climbed back into the pod.

The little ship rose to a height of a mile, then levelled off and coasted parallel to the surface. Louise looked back. Their landing jets had blown a wide, shallow crater in the ice; it marred a plain which stretched, seamless and featureless, to the close horizon.

Louise sat in her seat; surrounded by the disconcertingly transparent hull, she felt — as always, in these pods — as if she were suspended in space. Below them the Callisto plain was a geometrical abstraction; above them. Northern climbed patiently past the deep, gleaming rings of Jupiter, a spark against those smooth arcs.

The main activity on Callisto was centered around Morrow’s excavation site on the far side of the moon, the Jupiter-facing side. The purpose of this jaunt was to have a general scout, and to give Spinner-of-Rope some more experience of working outside the ship, the feel of standing on a planet surface… Even, Louise thought, a surface so featureless, and with a sky so bare, that the moon had become almost an abstract representation of a planet.

Still, Louise knew it did her good to get away from the ship that had been her home, and prison, for so many centuries — and which, barring a miracle, was going to have to sustain her and her people for the rest of her life. Callisto was — had been — Jupiter’s eighth moon, one of the four big Galilean satellites. At the time of Northern’s launch Callisto had been a ball of water ice and rock, heavily cratered. Debris had been sprayed across the mysterious surface from the bright cores of the impact craters; from space, Callisto had looked like a sphere of glass peppered by gunshots. One basin — called Valhalla — had been four hundred miles across, an immense amphitheater surrounded by concentric terrace-like walls.

Louise remembered how human cities, feeding on Callisto’s ancient water, had glinted in the shadows of Valhalla’s walls, shining like multicolored jewels.

Well, the craters had gone now — as had Valhalla, and all the cities. Gone without trace, it seemed. Callisto had been wiped smooth, unblemished save for her own footsteps.

During, or after, the depopulation, Callisto had been caused to melt. And, when the moon froze once more, something had been trapped in the ice…

The pod skimmed around the smooth limb of the moon. They were heading over the moon’s north pole, and soon, Louise realized, they would be passing over the sharp terminator and into daylight.

…Or what passed for daylight, in these straitened times, she thought.

Beside her, Spinner fitted her faceplate over her head, leaving it open below her mouth. She peered around, through the flimsy walls of the pod. From the absent, unfocused expression in her eyes, Louise could tell she was using the plate’s enhancement and magnification features.

“I can see moons,” Spinner said. “A sky full of moons.”

“Nice for you,” Louise said drily. “There should be eight — there used to be eight beyond Callisto. Small, irregular: probably captured asteroids. The outer four of them were retrograde, moving backwards compared to the planet’s own rotation.”

“I’m surprised any moons survived the destruction of the planet.”

Louise shrugged. “The nearest of the outer moons was a hundred and fifty Jovian radii from the primary, before the planet imploded… even Callisto survived, remember, and that was a mere twenty-six radii out.” The orbits of the surviving moons had been disturbed by the Jovian event, of course; the implosion had sent them scattering with a shock of gravity waves, and now they swooped around their shattered parent along orbits of high eccentricity, like birds disturbed by earth tremors.

Within the orbit of Callisto, nothing had survived.

Now, as the pod passed over the pole, the Jovian ring system unfolded like a huge floor before Louise, infinite-flat and streaked with shadows.

This new ring system, the debris of worlds, lay in what had been Jupiter’s equatorial plane — the plane once occupied by the vanished moons. Callisto still lay in the equatorial plane, patiently circling the site of the giant planet just outside the ring system, so that the disc of ring material — if it had stretched out so far — would have bisected Callisto neatly.

The ring system didn’t terminate at a sharp inner boundary, like Saturn’s. Instead the creamy, smoothed-out material stretched inwards — this system was actually more a disc than a ring system, Louise realized slowly. As her eyes tracked in toward the center the system’s texture slowly changed — becoming more rough, Louise saw, with knots of high density locked into the churning surface, orbiting through tight circles, swirling visibly.

The whole assemblage was stained crimson by scattered sunlight.

The rings were almost featureless — bland, without the complex colors and braids which characterized Saturn’s system. Louise sighed. The gravitational interaction of moons had provided Saturn’s rings with their fantastic structure. The trouble was that Jupiter’s remaining moons simply weren’t up to the job of shepherding the rings. For poor, dead Jupiter, only a single dark streak marked the orbital resonance of Callisto itself.

Now, the center of the ring-disc rose above Callisto’s sharp horizon. Louise could clearly see inhomogeneities churning around the geometric center of the disc, twisting through their crowded, tortured orbits. But the disc center itself was unspectacular — just a brighter patch, spinning with the rest of the disc. It was somehow frustrating, as if there were something missing.

Spinner sounded disappointed. “I can’t see anything in the middle. Where the planet used to be.”

Louise grinned. “You’d hardly expect to. A black hole with Jupiter’s mass would have a diameter of just twenty feet or so…”

“There’s plenty to see in higher frequencies,” Mark cut in. “The X-ray, and higher…

“Toward the heart of the system we have a true accretion disc,” he went on, “with matter being heated tremendously before falling into the black hole itself. It’s small, but there’s a lot of structure there, if you look at it in the right bands.”

Spinner, with apparent eagerness, adjusted her plate over her face, and Mark told her how to fix the settings. Soon, Spinner’s eyes assumed that unfocused look again as they adjusted to the enhanced imagery.

Louise left her own visor in her lap; the black hole, and its huge, milky ring, depressed her enough in visible light.

Jupiter’s new ring system, with its bland paleness, and the jostling, crowding swirl at the center, was far from beautiful, on any wavelength. It was too obviously a place of wreckage, of destruction — a destruction which was visibly continuing, as the black hole gnawed at its accretion disc. And, to Louise’s engineer’s eye, with its empty center the system had something of an unfinished, provisional look. There was no soul to this system, she thought, no balance to the scale of the rings: by comparison, Saturn’s rings had been an adornment, a necklace of ice and rock around the throat of an already beautiful world.

Spinner turned to her, her bespectacled eyes masked by the faceplate. “The whole thing’s like a whirlpool,” she said.

Louise shrugged. “I suppose so. A whirlpool surrounding a hole in spacetime.”

“A whirlpool of gas — ”

— gas, and rock and water ice: bits of smashed-up worlds —

Louise started to tell Spinner-of-Rope about the vanished moons of Jupiter. She remembered Io with its volcano mouths and their hundred-mile-high vents, its sulfur-stained surface and its surrounding torus of volcano-fed plasma; she remembered Io’s mineral mines, nestling in the shadow of the huge volcano Babbar Patera. She told Spinner of Ganymede: larger than Mercury, heavily cratered and geologically rich — the most stable and heavily populated of all the Jovian moons. And Europa, a ball of ice, with a bright smooth surface — constantly renewed by melting and tectonic stress — covering a liquid layer beneath. Europa had been a bright precursor of this smoothed-over corpse of Callisto, perhaps.

Worlds, all populated — all gone.

Louise hoped fervently that there had been time to evacuate the moons before the final disaster. If not, then — drifting through Jovian orbit among the fragments of rock and ice which comprised those rings — there would be bits of humanity: shards of shattered homes, children’s toys, corpses.

Spinner pushed up her faceplate and rubbed her eyes. “I’d have liked to have seen Jupiter, I think, with its moons and all those cities… Perhaps Jupiter could have been saved. After all, the implosion must have taken thousands of years, you told me.”

Louise bit back a sarcastic reply. “Yes. But picking black holes out of the heart of a gas giant was evidently a bit too difficult, even for the humans of many millennia beyond my time.”

Jupiter had been wrecked by the actions of the Friends of Wigner.

The Friends were human rebels from a Qax-occupied future, who had fled back in time through Michael Poole’s time-tunnel wormhole.

The Friends had had in mind some grand, impossible scheme to alter history. Their plan had involved firing asteroid-mass black holes into Jupiter.

The Friends’ project had been interrupted by the arrival of Qax warships through Poole’s wormhole — but not before the Friends had succeeded in spearing the giant planet with several of their tiny singularities.

The pinprick singularities had looped through the thick Jovian atmosphere like deadly insects, trailing threads of plasma. When the holes met, they had whirled around each other before coalescing, their event horizons collapsing into each other in Planck timescales.

The vibration of merging event horizons had emitted vicious pulses of gravity waves. Founts of thick, chemically complex atmosphere had been hurled out of the planet, bizarre volcanoes on a world of gas.

The Friends’ ambitions had been far-reaching. Before the final implosion they’d meant to sculpt the huge planet with these directed gravity-wave pulses, produced by the complex interactions of their singularity bullets.

Louise now stared morosely at the bland, displeasing disc of glowing rubble. Well, the Friends had certainly succeeded in part of their project — the reduction of Jupiter. Quite a monument to such ambition, after five million years, Louise thought: a collapsed Jovian, and a string of crushed human worlds.

And all for what? A black hole of the wrong size…

“It’s getting brighter over there,” Spinner said, pointing.

Louise looked right, across Callisto. A dull, flat crimson light was spreading across the ice. The glow cast long, disproportionate shadows from the low irregularities in Callisto’s smooth surface, turning the ice plain into a complex landscape of ruby-sparkling promontories and blood-red pools of shadow.

At the horizon, smoky tendrils of crimson gas were rising across the sky.

“Sunrise on Callisto,” Louise said sourly. “Come on; let’s land. We don’t want to miss the full beauty of the Solar System’s one remaining wonder, do we?”

On the surface of Callisto, standing beside Louise in her environment suit. Spinner held up her arms, framing the Sun with her outspread hands; standing there on the light-stained ice floor, with the swollen globe reflected, distorted, in her faceplate, Spinner-of-Rope looked more than ever like a child.

Sol, looming over the horizon, was a wall of blood-red smoke. It was transparent enough to see through to the distant stars for perhaps a quarter of the disc’s radius — in fact, the material was so thin that Louise could make out the steadily deepening color of the thicker layers toward the core.

The Sun didn’t even look like a star any more, she thought tiredly. A star was supposed to be hard, bright, hot; you weren’t supposed to be able to see through it.

“Another astrophysicist’s dream,” Mark said drily. “You could learn more about the nature of stellar evolution just by standing there and looking, than in all the first five millennia of human astronomy.”

“Yes. But what a price to pay.”

Once, from Jupiter’s orbit the Main Sequence Sun would have been a point source of light — distant, hot, yellow. Now, the Sun’s arc size had to be at least twenty degrees. Its bulk covered fully a fifth of Louise’s field of view: twenty times the width of the full Moon, as seen from Earth.

Jupiter was five AU from the Sun’s center — an AU was an astronomical unit, the radius of Earth’s orbit. For the Sun to subtend such an angle, it must be two AU across, or more.

Two astronomical units. In exploding out to become a giant, the Sun had swallowed the Earth, and the planets within Earth’s orbit — Venus, Mercury.

Spinner-of-Rope was studying her, concern mixing with curiosity behind those pale spectacles.

“What are you thinking, Louise?”

“This shouldn’t have happened for five billion more years,” Louise said. Her throat was tight, and she found it difficult to keep her voice level. “The Sun was only halfway to turnoff — halfway through its stable lifecycle, on the Main Sequence.

“This shouldn’t have happened. Somebody did this deliberately, robbing us of our future, our worlds — damn it, this was our Sun…”

“Louise.” Mark’s synthesized voice was brisk, urgent.

She breathed deeply, trying to put away her anger, her resentment, to focus on the present.

“What is it?”

“You’d better come back to the Northern. Morrow has found something… Something in the ice. He thinks it’s a spacecraft.”

16

“Uvarov. Uvarov.”

Garry Uvarov jerked awake. It was dark. He tried to open his eyes…

As always, in that first instant of wakefulness — even after all these years — he forgot. His blindness crowded in on him, a speckled darkness across his eyes, making every new waking a savage horror.

“Garry. Are you awake?”

It was the solicitous voice of that fake person. Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Uvarov swung his head around, trying to locate the source of the artificial voice. It seemed to be all around him. He tried to speak; he felt his gummy mouth open with a pop, like a fish’s. “Mark Wu. Where are you, damn it?”

“Right here. Oh.” There was a second of silence. Then: “I’m here.”

Now the voice came from directly in front of him, from a precise, well-focused place.

“Better,” Uvarov growled.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I hadn’t formed an image. I didn’t think — ”

“You didn’t bother,” Uvarov snapped. “Because I can’t see you, you thought it was enough to float around me in the air like some damn spirit.”

“I didn’t think it would be so important to you,” Mark said.

“No,” Uvarov said. “To think of that would have been too much the human thing to do for an imprint like you, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you need anything?” Mark asked, with strained patience. “Some food, or — ”

“Nothing,” Uvarov snapped. “This chair takes care of it all. With me, it’s in one end and out of the other, without even having to swallow.” He stretched his lips and leered. “As you know. So why did you bother to ask after my health? Just to make me feel dependent?”

“No.” Mark sounded cool, but more certain of himself. “I thought to ask would be the human thing to do.”

Uvarov let himself cackle at that. “Touché.”

“It’s just that you sleep for such a long time, Uvarov,” Mark said drily.

“So would you, if you weren’t dead,” Uvarov said briskly.

He could hear the rattle of his own breath, the subdued ticking of a huge old clock somewhere, here in the dining saloon of Louise’s old steam ship. Hauling this useless relic five megayears into the future had been, of course, an absurd thing to do, and it showed a fundamental weakness in the character of Louise Ye Armonk. But still, Uvarov had to admit, the textures of the old material — the painted walls, the mirrors, the polished wood of the two long tables — sounded wonderful.

“I suppose you had a reason for waking me.”

“Yes. The Sun maser probes — ”

“Yes?”

“We’re starting to get meaningful data, Uvarov.” Now Mark sounded excited, but Uvarov never let himself forget that every inflection of this AI’s voice was a mere artifice.

Still, despite this cynical calculation, Uvarov too began to feel a distinct stirring of interest — of wonder. Meaningful data?

The maser radiation was coming from hot-spots on the photosphere itself patches of intense maser brightness, equivalent to tens of millions of degrees of temperature, against a background cooler than the surface of the yellow Sun had once been. The convection mechanism underlying the maser flares’ coherent pathways fired the radiation pulses off tangentially to the photosphere. So the Northern had sent out small probes to skim the swollen, diffuse surface of the photosphere, sailing into the paths of the surface-grazing maser beams.

“Tell me about the data.”

“It’s a repeating group, Uvarov. Broadcast on maser wavelengths, from within what’s left of the Sun… Uvarov, I think it’s a signal.”

They hadn’t learned much about the Solar System, in the year since their clumsy, limping arrival from out of the past. So many of the worlds of man simply didn’t exist any more.

Still, in the quiet time before the arrival of the Northern at Jupiter, Uvarov and the AI construct had performed some general surveys of the Solar System what was left of it. And they’d found a few oddities…

There was what looked like one solid artifact — Morrow’s anomalous object buried in the ice of Callisto. And, apart from that, there were just three sources of what could be interpreted as intelligently directed signals: this maser stuff from the Sun, the fading beacon from the edge of the System, and — strangest and most intriguing of all, to Garry Uvarov — those strange pulses of gravity radiation from the direction of Sagittarius.

Uvarov had done a little private study, on the structure of the Universe in the direction of Sagittarius. Interestingly enough, he learned, the cosmic structure called the Great Attractor was to be found there, right at the place the photino beam was pointing. The Attractor was a huge mass concentration: the source of galactic streaming, for hundreds of millions of light-years’ distance around. Could the Attractor be connected to the g-waves?

And then there was all that strange photino activity in and around the Sun.

The data was patchy and difficult to interpret — after all, dark matter was, almost by definition, virtually impossible to study… but there was something strange there.

Uvarov thought he’d detected a streaming.

There was a steady flow, of photino structures, out of the heart of the Sol giant… and on out of the Solar System. It was a beam of photinos aimed like a beacon, out of Sol — and straight toward the source of the anomalous gravity waves in Sagittarius.

Something was happening in Sagittarius — something huge, and wonderful, and strange. And, somehow, impossibly, it was connected to whatever was taking place in the heart of the poor, suffering Sun.

…The Virtual, Mark Armonk, was talking to him again. Or perhaps at him, Uvarov thought sourly.

“I wish you’d pay attention, Uvarov — ”

“Without me to talk to, you’d lapse into non-sentience, devoid of independent will,” Uvarov pointed out. “So spare me the lectures.”

Mark ground out, “The Sun, Uvarov. The photosphere maser radiation is standard stuff — generated by silicon monoxide at 43 Gigahertz. There are natural mechanisms for generating such signatures. But in this case, we’ve found hints of modulation of the silicon monoxide stuff… deliberate modulation.

“We’ve found structure everywhere, Uvarov.” Again that fake excitement in Mark’s voice; Uvarov felt his irritation grow. Mark went on, “There is structure in the amplitude of the beams, their intensity, phasing, polarization — even in the Doppler shifting of the signals. Uvarov, someone — or something — is in there, trying to signal out with modulated natural masers, as hard as they can. I’m trying to resolve it, but…”

Uvarov strove to shift in his chair, vainly trying to find a more comfortable posture — a prize he’d been seeking for the best part of a thousand years, with as much assiduousness as Jason had once sought his Fleece, he thought. How pathetic, how limited he was!

He tried to ignore his body, to fix his analytical abilities — his imagination — on the concept of an intelligence within the Sun…

But it was so difficult.

His mind wandered once more. He thought of his forest colony. He thought of Spinner-of-Rope.

Sometimes Uvarov wondered how much better young people might have fared, if they’d been given this opportunity to study and learn, with this strange, battered Universe as an intellectual playground. How much more might youth have unearthed, with its fresh eyes and minds, than he could!

It had already been fifty years since — in his misguided, temporary lunacy — he had inspired his forest children to undertake their hazardous journey out of the lifedome. Fifty years: once most of a human lifetime, he thought — and yet, now, scarcely an interlude in his own, absurdly long life, stuck as he was in this moldering cocoon of a body.

So even Spinner-of-Rope, Arrow Maker’s wise-ass daughter, must be — what, sixty five chronological? Seventy, maybe? An old woman already. But still, thanks to AS-freezing, she’d retained the features — and much of the outlook, as far as he could tell — of a child.

He felt a great sorrow weigh upon him. Of course his experiment was lost, now; his carefully developed gene pool was already polluted by interbreeding, no doubt, between the forest folk and the Superet-controlled Decks, and his immortal strain was overwhelmed by AS treatments.

But the progress he had made was still there, he thought; the genes were there, dormant, ready. And when — if — the inhabitants of the Northern got through this time of trouble, when they reached whatever new world waited for them, then the great experiment could begin anew.

But in the meantime…

He thought again of Spinner-of-Rope, a girl-woman who had grown up among trees and leaves, now walking through the wreckage of the Solar System.

Uvarov had made many mistakes. Well, he’d had time to. But he could be proud of this, if nothing else: that to this era of universal desolation and ruin, he Garry Uvarov — had restored at least a semblance of the freshness of youth.

“…Uvarov,” Mark said.

Uvarov turned. The AI’s synthesized voice sounded different — oddly flat, devoid of expression. None of that damn fake intonation, then, Uvarov thought with faint triumph. It was as if the Virtual’s processing power had, briefly, been diverted somewhere else. Something had happened.

“Well? What is it?”

“I’ve done it. I’ve resolved the signal — the information in the maser pulses. There’s an image, forming in the data desk…”

“An image? Tell me, damn you.”

It was a woman’s face (Mark said), crudely sketched in pixels of color. A human face. The woman was aged about sixty-five physical; she had short-cropped, sandy hair, a strong nose, a wide, upturned mouth, and large, vulnerable eyes.

Her lips were moving.

“A woman’s face — after five million years, transmitted out on maser signals from the heart of a Sun rendered into a red giant? I don’t believe it.”

Mark was silent for a moment. “Believe what you want. I think she’s trying to say something. But we don’t have sound yet.”

“How very inconvenient.”

“Wait… Ah. Here it comes.”

Now Uvarov heard it, heard the voice of the impossible image from the past. At first the timbre was broken up, the words virtually indecipherable, and, so Mark informed him, badly out of synchronization with the moving lips.

Then, after a few minutes — and with considerable signal enhancement from the data desk processors — the message cleared.

“Lethe,” Mark said. “I even recognize the language…”

My name is Lieserl. Welcome home, whoever you are. I expect you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here tonight…

Against the dull red backdrop of the ruined, inflated Sun, the accretion disc of the Jovian black hole sparkled, huge and threatening.

Once more a pod from the Northern carried Spinner-of-Rope — alone, this time down to the surface of Callisto. Spinner twisted to look down through the glass walls of the little pod; as she moved, biomedical sensors within her suit slid over her skin, disconcerting.

The craft from within the ice, dug up and splayed out against the surface by a team of autonomous ’bots, was like a bird, with night-dark wings a hundred yards long trailing back from a small central body. The wing material looked fragile, insubstantial. The ice of Callisto seemed to show through the wings’ trailing edges.

Louise and Mark had told her that the craft was alien technology. And it had a hyperdrive, they thought…

She scratched at her shoulder, where one of Mark’s damned biosensors was digging particularly uncomfortably into her flesh. When she landed, Louise was damn well going to have to tell her why she’d been buttoned up like this.

The craft was more like some immense, black-winged insect, resting on a sheet of glass, Spinner thought. Its elegant curves were surrounded by the stumpy, glistening forms of the Northern’s pods, and by other pieces of equipment. Spinner could see a small drone ’bot crawling across the surface of one nightdark wing, trailing twisted cable strands and scrutinizing the alien material with clusters of sensors. The Callisto ice around the craft was scarred and broken, pitted by the landing jets of the pods and criss-crossed by vehicle tracks.

The craft was immense. The activities of the humans and their machines looked utterly inadequate to contain the power of this artificial beast… if it were to awake from its centuries-long slumber.

Spinner’s fear seemed to rise in inverse proportion to her nearness to the craft. It was as if the sinister insectile form, pinned against the ice, radiated threat.

She shivered, pulling the fabric of her environment suit close around her.

The streets and houses around Morrow were empty. The endless, ululating cries of the klaxon echoed from the bare walls of the ruined buildings and the steel underbelly of the sky.

A grappling hook — a crude thing of sharpened, twisted partition-metal — sailed past Morrow’s face, making him flinch. The hook caught in some irregularity in the floor of the Deck, and the rope it trailed stiffened, jerking. Within a few seconds Trapper-of-Frogs had come swarming along the rope, across the Deck floor; her brown limbs, glistening with sweat, were flashes of color against the gray drabness of the Decks’ sourceless light, and her blowpipe and pouch of darts bounced against her back as she moved.

Morrow sighed and dropped his face. In zero-gee, they were abseiling across the floor of Deck Two. The metal surface before his face was bland, incongruously familiar, worn smooth by countless generations of feet, including his own. He twisted his neck and took a glance back. His other companions were strung out across the surface of the Deck behind him, their faces turned to him like so many flowers: there was Constancy-of-Purpose with her powerful arms working steadily, and her dangling, attenuated legs, the Virtual Mark Wu, a handful of forest folk. The Virtual was trying to protect their sensibilities. Morrow saw, by making a show of climbing along the ropes with the rest of them.

The Temple of the Planners was a brooding bulk, outlined in electric blue, still hundreds of yards ahead, across the Deck.

Many of the houses, factories and other buildings were damaged — several quite badly. In one corner of Deck Two there was evidence of a major fire, a scorching which had even licked at the gray metal ceiling above.

Morrow tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have been here, in the cramped, enclosed world of the Decks, when the GUTdrive had finally been turned off — when gravity had faded out. He imagined walking along, on his way to another routine day at work — and then that strange feeling of lightness, his feet leaving the Deck…

The klaxon had called out ever since they’d climbed down here, into the Decks, through the Locks from the forest; perhaps it had been wailing like this ever since the zero-gee catastrophe itself. The noise made it difficult even to think; he tried to control his irritability and fear.

Trapper twisted and grinned at him. “Come on, Morrow, wake up. You climbed all the way down the elevator shaft with Spinner-of-Rope, once, didn’t you? And that was under gravity. Zero-gee is easy.”

“Trapper, nothing is easy when you get to my age.”

Trapper laughed at him, with all the certainty of youth. And it was genuine youth, he reflected; Trapper was — what? Eighteen, nineteen? Children continued to be born, up in the forest, even all these decades after the opening-up of the Locks on Deck One, and the provision of AS treatment for the forest folk.

“You know,” he said, “you remind me of Spinner-of-Rope.”

Trapper twisted easily, as if her small, bare body had all the litheness of rope itself; her face was a round, eager button. “Really? Spinner-of-Rope’s something of a hero up there, you know. In the forest. It must have taken a lot of courage to follow Uvarov down through the Locks, and — ”

“Maybe,” Morrow said testily. “What I meant was, you’re just as annoying as she was, at your age.”

Trapper frowned; there was a sprinkling of freckles across her small, flat nose, he saw, and a further smattering that reached back across her dark-fringed patch of shaven scalp. Then her grin broke out again, and he felt his heart melt; her face reminded him of the rising of a bright star over the ice fields of Callisto. She craned her neck forward and kissed him lightly on the nose.

“All part of the package,” she said. “Now come on.”

She scrambled up her rope again; within seconds she had reached her grappling hook and was preparing to throw the next one across the Deck, in preparation for the next leg of the trek.

Wearily, feeling even older than his five centuries, Morrow made his way, hand over hand, along his rope.

He tried to keep his eyes focused on the scuffed floor surface before his face. Why was he finding this damn jaunt so difficult? He was, after all, Morrow, Hero of the Elevator Shaft, as Trapper had said. And since then he had been out, beyond the ribbed walls surrounding the Decks, out into space. He had walked the surface of Callisto, and watched the rise of the bloated corpse of legendary Sol over the moon’s ice plains; he had even supervised the excavation of that ancient alien spacecraft. He’d shown courage then, hadn’t he? He must have done — why, he hadn’t even thought about it. So why did he feel so different, now he was back here, inside the Decks once more — inside the metal-walled box which had been his only world for half a millennium?

He’d been apprehensive ever since Louise had asked him to lead this expedition in the first place.

“I don’t want to go back in there,” he’d told Louise bluntly.

Louise Ye Armonk had come down to Callisto to congratulate him on his archaeology and to give him this new assignment. She had looked tired, old; she’d run a hand through grizzled hair. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, as if speaking to a child, her patience barely controlled. When she’d looked at him, Morrow could detect the contempt in her eyes. “Believe me, if I had someone else to send, I’d send ’em.”

Morrow had felt a sense of panic — as if he were being asked to go back into a prison cell. “What’s the point?” he asked, his desperation growing. “The Planners closed off the Decks centuries ago. They don’t want to know what’s happening outside. Why not leave them to it?”

Louise’s mouth was set firm, fine wrinkles lining it. “Morrow, we can’t afford to ‘leave them to it’ any more. The Universe outside — we — are impinging on what’s happening in there. And we’ve evidence, from our monitors, that the Planners are not — ah, not reacting well to the changes.

“Morrow, there are two thousand people in there, in the Decks. There are only a handful of us outside — only a few hundred, even including the forest on Deck Zero. We can’t afford to abandon those two thousand to the Planners’ deranged whims.”

Morrow heard his own teeth grind. “You’re talking about duty, then.”

Louise had studied him. “Yes, in a way. But the most fundamental duty of all: not to me, or to the Planners, or even to the ship’s mission. It’s a duty to the species. If the species is to survive we have to protect the people trapped in there, with the Planners — as many as possible, to maintain genetic diversity for the future.”

“Protect,” he said sourly. “Funny. That’s probably just what the Planners believe they are doing, too…”

Now he looked around at the abandoned houses in their surreal rows, suspended from what felt like a vertical wall to him now, not a floor; he listened to the silence broken only by the plaintive cries of the klaxon. All the people had gone — taken, presumably into the Temples, by the Planners — leaving only this shell of a world; and now the elements of this oppressive place seemed to move around him, pushing at him like elements of a nightmare…

Perhaps it was the very familiarity of the place that was so uncomfortable. Coming back here — even after all these decades — it was as if he had never been away; the metal-clad walls and ceiling, the rows of boxy houses, the looming tetrahedral bulks of the Planner Temples all loomed closely around him, oppressing his spirit once more. It was as if the huge, remarkable Universe beyond these walls — of collapsing stars, and ice moons, and magical alien spacecraft with wings a hundred yards wide — had never existed, as if it had all been some bizarre, fifty-year fantasy.

In the old days, before his first encounter with Arrow Maker and Spinner, he’d thought himself something of a rebel. An independent spirit; a renegade — not like the rest of the drones around him. But the truth was different, of course. For centuries, the culture of the Planners had trained him into submission. If it hadn’t been for the irruption of the forest folk — an event from outside his world — he’d never have had the courage, or the initiative, to break free of the Planners’ domination.

In fact, he realized now, no matter what he did or where he went in the future and no matter how this conflict with the Planners turned out — he never would be free of that oppression.

Now he reached the end of his rope. He let himself drift away from the Deck a little, and launched himself through the air across the few feet to the next rope Trapper had fixed. He glanced back again; the little party was strung along the chain of ropes which led all the way back to the ramp from the upper levels.

There was a rush of air above his head, a sizzling, hissing noise.

Instinctively he ducked down, pressing his body flat against the Deck; infuriatingly he bounced away from the scarred surface, but he grasped the edges of Deck plates and clung on.

The noise had sounded like an insect’s buzz. But there were very few insects within the Decks…

Another hiss, a sigh of air above him. And it had come from the direction of the Temple which was — he sneaked a look up — still a hundred yards away. Another whisper above him — and another, and now a whole flock of them.

Someone behind him cried out, and he heard the clatter of metal against the Deck.

Trapper-of-Frogs came clambering back down the rope toward him; without inhibition she scrambled over his arms and snuggled against his side, a warm, firm bundle of muscle; her shaven patch of scalp was smooth against his cheek. She was no more than four feet tall, and he could feel her bony knees press into his thighs.

“It’s the Planners,” she whispered into his ear. Her breath was sweet, smelling of forest fruit. “They’re shooting at us from the Temple.”

He felt confused. “Shooting? But that’s impossible. Why should they?”

She growled, and again he was reminded of a young Spinner-of-Rope, decades ago, who also had spent a lot of time getting annoyed at him. “How should I know?” she snapped. “And besides, why hardly makes a difference. What’s important is that we get out of here before we get hurt.”

He clung to his rope, disoriented. Maybe he should have been prepared for this. Maybe the Planners really had gone that crazy.

But if that was true, what was he supposed to do about it?

Now someone else came clambering up behind him. It was Constancy-of-Purpose, pawing her way across the Deck with her huge, powerful right hand; she clutched something shiny and hard in her left. Those AS-wasted legs, Morrow thought irrelevantly, looked even slimmer than Trapper’s; they clattered against the Deck, pale and useless.

“Morrow.” Constancy-of-Purpose opened her left hand. The object nestling within it was a piton: sharpened, the coarse, planed surfaces of its point glistening in the sourceless light. “This look familiar? The Planners are using their damn crossbows on us again.”

“But why?”

Constancy-of-Purpose looked exasperated, even amused. “Why hardly matters, does it?”

Trapper punched Morrow in the ribs, lightly; he winced as her small, hard fist dug into the soft flesh. “That’s what I’ve been telling him, too,” she told Constancy-of-Purpose.

“At the moment they’re hitting the Deck behind us,” Constancy-of-Purpose said urgently. “They are shooting over our heads. Maybe they’re trying to find their range. Or maybe they’re just trying to warn us; I don’t know. But as soon as they like, they’ll be able to pick us off… Come on. We have to retreat.”

Morrow, still confused, twisted his head to study the Temple ahead of him.

The building’s tetrahedral form, with its outline of electric blue and triangular faces of golden-brown, was no longer a seamless whole. Windows had been knocked out of the nearest face, leaving black, gaping scars. He saw small figures in those windows: men and women, dressed in the drab, uniform coveralls he’d worn himself for so many centuries.

They were raising bows toward him.

“All right,” he said, wishing only that this were over. “Let’s move out of range. Come on; Constancy-of-Purpose, you lead the way…”

The pod landed close to the stern of the night-dark craft. Spinner climbed down onto the ice of Callisto.

Around her waist she’d tied a length of her own rope, and within her suit, suspended on a thread between her breasts, was one of her father’s arrow-heads. She raised her hand to her chest and pressed the glove against the fabric of her suit; the cool metal of the arrow-head dug into her flesh, a comforting and familiar shape. She tried to regulate her breathing, looking for bits of comfort, of stability. Even the gravity here was wrong, of course; and the presence of the heavy suit over her flesh, with Mark’s biostat probes inside, was a constant, scratching irritant.

Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the pod, leaving shallow footprints in the frost of Callisto. The engineer had turned up an interior light behind her faceplate.

“Spinner-of-Rope.” Louise held out her hand and smiled. “Well, here we are again. Come on. I’ll show you around the craft.”

Spinner took Louise’s hand. Slowly, her feet crunching softly against the worn ice, she walked with Louise to the craft.

The rings of Jupiter arced across the sky, a plain of bloodstained, frozen smoke. The craft lay against the ice, dark, vital.

They drew to a halt perhaps ten feet from the edge of the nearest wing. The wing hovered a few feet above the ice, apparently unsupported; perhaps it was so light it didn’t need support, apart from its join with the central trunk of the ship, Spinner thought. Beyond the leading edge the wing curved softly, like a slow, frozen billow of smoke; its form, foreshortened, was sharply delineated against the bland ice backdrop of Callisto, but its utter darkness made the scale of the wing’s curves hard to judge. At the trailing edge of the wing, the material was so delicate that Spinner — bending, and peering upwards — could see through the fabric of the wing, to the wizened glow of the stars.

“In form the ship is like a sycamore seed.” Louise glanced across at Spinner. “Do you have sycamores in your forest?… Here are these lovely wings, which sweep back through a hundred yards. The small central pilot’s cage sits on top of the ‘shoulders’ of the ship — the base of the wings.”

Lovely, Louise had said. Well, Spinner reflected, perhaps there was a certain loveliness here — but it was a beauty that was utterly inhuman, and endlessly menacing.

“This isn’t a human ship,” she said slowly. “Is it, Louise?”

“No.” Louise set her shoulders. “Damn it,” she said sourly. “We find one reasonably complete artifact in the rubble of the Solar System, and it has to be alien…

“Spinner, we think this is a Xeelee craft. We’ve checked the old Superet projections; we think this is what the Friends of Wigner — the people from the Qax occupation era — called a nightfighter. A small, highly mobile, versatile scout craft.”

The leading edge of a sycamore-seed wing was at a level with Louise’s face; now she raised a gloved hand and made as if to pass a fingertip along that edge. Then, thoughtfully, she drew her hand back. “Actually, we wouldn’t advise that you touch anything, unless you have to. This stuff is sharp. The wings, and the rest of the hull, are probably made of Xeelee construction material.”

She ducked her head and sighted along the plane of the wing. Spinner had to stand on tiptoe to do the same. When she did manage to raise her eyes to the level of the wing, the Xeelee material seemed to disappear, such was its fineness. Even this close it was utterly black, returning no reflections from the ice, or the Jovian rings above. It wasn’t like anything real, she thought; it was as if a slice had been taken out of the world, leaving this hole — this defect.

Louise said, “This stuff resists analysis. Uvarov and Mark suggest that the construction material is a sheet of bound nucleons — bound together by the strong nuclear force, I mean, as if this was some immense, spun-out atomic nucleus.

“But I’m not so sure. The density doesn’t seem right, for one thing. I have a theory of my own: that what we’re looking at is something more fundamental. I think the Xeelee have found a way to suppress the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and so have found their way into a whole new regime of matter. Of course the problem with that theory is that there aren’t supposed to be any loopholes in the Exclusion Principle. Well, I guess nobody told the Xeelee about that…”

“How did they make this stuff?”

Louise smiled. “If you believe the old Superet reconstructions, they grew it, from ‘flowers’. Construction material simply sprouted like petals from the flowers, in the presence of radiant energy.

“It would be interesting to know how this ship got here, to Callisto, in the first place,” she said. “Capturing a Xeelee craft must have been a great triumph, for humans of any era.

“Uvarov thinks this moon was used as a lab. This site, remote from the populated colonies, was a workshop — a safe place to study the Xeelee craft. There must have been research facilities here, built around the nightfighter, as the people of the time tried to pry out the secrets of its intrasystem drive, its hyperdrive, the construction material. But we’ve found little evidence of any human occupation, apart from close to this nightfighter. When the war came — ”

“What war?”

Louise dropped her faceless, helmeted head. “A war against the Xeelee, Spinner. One of many wars. More than that I doubt we’ll ever know.

“In the final war, the human facilities — and any people here — were destroyed, all save a few scraps. But — ”

“But the Xeelee nightfighter survived,” Spinner said.

Louise smiled. “Yes. The Xeelee built to last. Whatever happened was enough to melt Callisto’s ice. But the nightfighter sank into the new oceans, and was trapped in there when Callisto froze again.”

Spinner thought: Trapped, dormant, for an immeasurable time — perhaps a million years.

“And they never came back,” Louise said. “The people, I mean. The humans. They never recovered, to return here to rebuild. Perhaps that really was the war to end all wars, as far as Sol was concerned…

“Here’s the pilot cage, Spinner-of-Rope… Well, now you can see why I need your help.”

Spinner-of-Rope stared at the squat cage of construction material. It was barely six feet across.

She felt a prickly cold spread across her limbs.

17

A simple metal stepladder rested against the side of the cage; the ladder looked incongruously primitive, amid all this alien high technology.

Spinner looked at the ladder with dread. “Louise,” she said. “I have to climb in. Don’t I?”

Louise, bulky and anonymous in her environment suit, stood close beside her. “Well, that’s the general idea. Look, Spinner-or-Rope, we need a pilot…” Her voice trailed off; she shrugged her shoulders, uncertain.

Spinner closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to still the shuddering, deep in her stomach. “Lethe. So that’s why I’m all wired up.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you before bringing you down here, Spinner. We didn’t know what was best. Would telling you have made things any easier?”

“I don’t get a choice, do I?”

Louise’s face, through her plate, was hard. “You’re the best candidate we have, Spinner-of-Rope. We need you.”

Without letting herself think about it, Spinner grabbed the ladder and pulled herself up.

She looked into the pilot’s cage. It was an open sphere made of tubes of construction material. The tubes were arranged in an open lattice which followed a simple longitude-and-latitude pattern. Inside the cage was a horseshoe-shaped console, of the black Xeelee material. Other devices, made of dull metal looking crude by comparison, obviously human — had been fixed to the Xeelee console.

A human couch had been cemented into the cage, before the console. Straps dangled from it. To fit into the cramped cage, the couch had been made small too small for any human from the Decks but a child… or a child-woman from the forest.

“I’m going to climb in, Louise.”

“Good. But for Life’s sake, Spinner-of-Rope, until I tell you, don’t touch anything.”

Spinner swung her legs, easily in the light gravity, through the construction material frame and into the cage.

The couch fitted her body closely — as it should, she thought resentfully, since it had obviously been made for her — but it was too snug. The couch — the straps across her chest and waist, the bulky, crowding console before her — devoured her. The cage was a place of shadows, crisscrossing and mysterious, cast by the Jovian ring and the ice below her. It pressed around her, barely big enough for the couch and console.

She looked out through her murky faceplate, beyond the construction-material cage, to the ice plains of Callisto. She saw the blocky forms of the Northern’s ’bots, the pod that had brought her here, the shadowy figure of Louise. It all seemed remote, unattainable. The only reality was herself, inside this suit, this alien craft — and the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.

Spinner had got used to a lot of changes, in the few decades since she and her father had climbed down through the life-dome with Morrow. Just not growing old had been a challenge enough. Most of her compatriots in the forest had refused the AS treatments offered to them by Louise, and after a few years the physical age differences had grown marked, and widened rapidly.

Spinner had a younger sister: Painter-of-Faces, Arrow Maker’s youngest child. By the time the little girl had grown older than Spinner could remember her mother, Spinner had let her visits back to the forest dwindle away.

The life of the forest people carried on much as it always had done — despite the end of the Northern’s journey and the discovery of the death of the Sun. Because of her greater awareness — her wider understanding — Spinner felt shut out of that old, enclosed world.

Isolated by age and by her own extraordinary experiences, she had tried to grow accustomed to the bizarre Universe outside the walls of the ship. And, over the years, she’d learned a great deal; Louise Ye Armonk, despite the ghastly way she had of patronizing Spinner, had assured her often of the great strides she’d made for someone of her low-technology upbringing.

But now, she longed to be away from this bleak, threatening place — to be naked again, and moving through the trees of the forest.

“Spinner-of-Rope.” It was the voice of the artificial man, Mark, soft inside her helmet. “You’ve got to try to relax. Your biostat signs are way up — ”

“Shut up, Mark.” Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the Xeelee cage and pressed her body against the black bars, peering in; she’d turned on the light behind her faceplate, so Spinner could see her face. “Spinner, are you all right?”

Spinner took a deep breath. “I’m fine.” She tried to focus on her irritation: with patronizing Louise, the buzzing ghost Mark. She fanned her annoyance into a flame of anger, to burn away the chill of her fear. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

“Okay.” Louise lifted her hands and stepped back from the cage. “As far as we can tell, the cage you’re in is the control center of the nightfighter. You can see, obviously, that it’s been adapted for use by humans. We put the couch in for you. You have waldoes — ”

“I have what?”

“Waldoes, Spinner. The metal boxes on top of the horseshoe. See?”

There were three of the boxes, each about a foot long, one before Spinner and one to either side. There were touch pads — familiar enough to her now — illuminated across the tops of the boxes. She reached out toward the box in front of her -

“Don’t touch, damn you,” Louise snapped.

Spinner snatched her fingers back.

With audibly strained patience, Louise said, “Spinner-of-Rope, the controls in those boxes have been tied into what we believe are controls inside the horseshoe console — and they are the nightfighter’s real controls, the Xeelee mechanisms. That’s why we called the boxes waldoes… By working the waldoes you’ll be able to work the controls. The waldoes are reconstructions, based on fragments left from the destruction of the original lab.”

“All right.” Spinner ran a tongue over her lips; sweat, dried in a rim around her mouth, tasted of salt. “I understand. Let’s get on with it.”

Beyond the cage, Louise held up her hands. “No. Wait. It’s not as simple as that. We reconstructed the waldoes from clues left by the original human researchers. We believe they are going to work… But,” she went on drily, “we don’t know what they will make the nightfighter do. We don’t know what will happen when you touch the waldoes.

“So we’ll have to be patient. Experiment.”

“All right,” Spinner said. “But the original researchers, before the war, must have known what they were doing. Mustn’t they?”

Mark said, “Not necessarily. After all, if they’d been able to figure out Xeelee technology, maybe they wouldn’t have lost the war — ”

“Shut up, Mark,” Louise said mildly. “Now, Spinner. Listen carefully. You have three waldoes — three boxes. We believe — we think — the one directly in front of you is interfaced to the hyperdrive control, and the two to your sides connect to the intraSystem drive.”

“IntraSystem?”

“Sublight propulsion, to let you travel around the Solar System. All right? Now, Spinner, today we aren’t going to touch the hyperdrive — in fact, that waldo is disabled. We just want to see what we can make of the intraSystem drive. All right?”

“Yes.” Spinner looked at the two boxes; the touch-pad lights glowed steadily, in reassuring colors of yellow and green.

“On your left hand waldo you’ll see a yellow pad. It should be illuminated. See it?”

“Yes.”

Louise hesitated. “Spinner, try to be ready. We don’t know what to expect. There might be changes…”

“I’m ready.”

“Touch the yellow pad — once, and as briefly as you can…”

Spinner tried to put aside her fear. She lifted her hand -

Spinner-of-Rope. Don’t be afraid.

Startled, she twisted in her couch.

It had been a dry, weary voice — a man’s voice, sounding from somewhere inside her helmet.

Of course, she was alone in the cage.

It’s just a machine, the voice said now. There’s nothing to fear…

She thought, Lethe. What now? Am I going crazy?

But, strangely, the voice — the sense of some invisible presence, here in the cage with her — was somehow comforting.

Spinner held her right hand over the waldo. She pressed her gloved finger to the yellow light.

A subtle change in the light, around her. There was no noise, no sense of motion.

She glanced down, through the bars of her cage.

The ice was gone. Callisto had vanished.

She twisted in her seat, the straps chafing against her chest, and peered out of her cage. The rings of Jupiter and the Sun’s swollen form covered the sky unperturbed by the disappearance of a mere moon. She couldn’t see the Northern.

She spotted a ball of ice, small enough to cover with her fist, off to her right, below the nightfighter.

Could that be Callisto? If so, she’d traveled thousands of miles from the moon, in less than a heartbeat — and felt nothing.

She looked behind her.

The Xeelee nightfighter had spread its sycamore-seed wings. From within their hundred-yard shells, sheets of nightdarkness — hundreds of miles long — curled across space behind her, occluding the stars.

At her touch, the ancient Xeelee craft had come to life.

She screamed and buried her faceplate in her gloves.

Lieserl soared out from the core, out through the shell of fusing hydrogen, and inspected her maser convection loops. She sensed the distorted echoes of her last set of messages, as they had survived their cycles through the coherence paths of the convection loops.

She adjusted the information content of her maser links, and initiated new messages. She added in the latest information she’d gleaned, and restated — in as strong and simple a language as she could muster — her warnings about the likely future evolution of the Sun.

When she was done, she felt something within her relax. Once more she’d scratched this itch to communicate; once more she’d assuaged her absurd, ancient feelings of guilt…

But it was only after she’d sent her communication that she studied, properly, the cycled remnants of her last signals.

She allowed the maser bursts to play over her again. The messages had changed — and this time it wasn’t simple degradation. How was this possible? Some unknown physical process at the surface of the red giant, perhaps? Or — she speculated, her excitement growing as she began to see traces of structure within the changes — or was there someone outside: someone still alive, and recognizably human — and trying to talk to her?

Feverishly she devoured the thin information stream contained in the maser bursts.

Fifty thousand miles from Callisto, pods from the Northern hung in a rough sphere. At the center of the sphere, the magnificent wings of the Xeelee ship remained unfurled, darkly shimmering — almost alive.

Spinner sat with Louise within the safe, enclosing glass walls of a pod. Louise, with a touch on the little control console before her, guided the pod around the Xeelee nightfighter; neighboring pods slid across space, bubbles of light and warmth. The wings were immense sculptures in space, black on black. Spinner could hear Mark whispering in Louise’s ear, and numbers and schematics rolled across a data slate on Louise’s lap.

Spinner’s faceplate dangled at her back, and she relished the feel of fresh air against her face. It was wonderful simply not to breathe in her own stale exhalations.

She’d dug her father’s arrow-head out of her suit so that it dangled at her chest; she fingered it, rubbing her hands compulsively over its smooth lines.

Louise glanced at Spinner. “Are you all right now?” She sounded apologetic. “Mark got to you as quickly as he could. And — ”

Spinner-of-Rope nodded, curtly. “I wasn’t hurt.”

“No.” Louise glanced down at her slate again; her attention was clearly on the data streaming in about the activated nightfighter. She murmured, “No, you did fine.”

“Yeah,” Spinner grunted. “Well, I hope it was worth it.”

Louise looked up from her slate. “It was. Believe me, Spinner; even if it might be hard for you to see how. The very fact that you weren’t harmed, physically, by that little jaunt has told us volumes.”

Now Mark’s voice sounded in the air. “You traveled tens of thousands of miles in a fraction of a second, Spinner. You should have been creamed against the bars of that cage. Instead, something protected you…”

Louise looked at Spinner. “He has a way of putting things, doesn’t he?”

They laughed together. Spinner felt a little of the numbness chip away from her.

“Mark’s right,” Louise said. “Thanks to you, we’re learning at a fantastic rate about the nightfighter. We know we can use it without killing ourselves, for a start… And, Spinner, understanding is the key to turning anything from a threat into an opportunity.”

Louise took the pod on a wide arc around the unfurled wings of the Xeelee craft. The wings were like a star-free hole cut out of space, beneath Spinner-of-Rope; they retained the general sycamore-seed shape of the construction-material framework, but were vastly extended. Spinner could see ’bots toiling patiently across the wings’ surface.

“This far out, the mass-energy of the wing system is actually attracting the pod, gravitationally,” Louise murmured. “The wings have the mass equivalent of a small asteroid… I can see from my slate that the pod’s systems are having to correct for the wings’ perturbation.

“Let’s go in a little way.”

She took the pod on a low, sweeping curve over the lip of one wing and down toward its surface. The wing, a hundred miles across, was spread out beneath Spinner like the skin of some dark world; the little pod skimmed steadily over the black landscape.

Louise kept talking. “The wing is thin — as far as we can tell its thickness is just a Planck length, the shortest distance possible. It has an extremely high surface tension — or, equivalently, a high surface energy density — so high, in fact, that its gravitational field is inherently non-Newtonian; it’s actually relativistic… Is this making any sense to you, Spinner?”

Spinner said nothing.

Louise said, “Look: from a long way away, the pod was attracted to the wings, just as if they were composed of normal matter. But they’re not. And, this close, I can detect the difference.”

She drew the pod to a stop, and allowed it to descend, slowly, toward the wing surface.

Spinner, gazing down, couldn’t tell how far away the nightblack, featureless floor was. Was Louise intending to land there?

The pod’s descent slowed.

Louise, working her control console, caused the pod’s small vernier rockets to squirt, once, twice, sending them down toward the wing surface once more. But again the pod slowed; it gradually drifted to a halt, then, slowly, began to rise, as if rebounding.

Louise’s face was alive with excitement. “Spinner, could you feel that? Do you see what’s happening? This close, the wing surface is actually gravitationally repulsive. It’s pushing us away!”

Spinner eyed her. “I know you, Louise. You’ve already figured out how a discontinuity drive would work. You were expecting this antigravity stunt, weren’t you?”

Louise smiled and waved a hand at the Xeelee craft. “Well, okay. Maybe I made a few educated guesses. This ship isn’t magic. Not even this antigravity effect. It’s all just an exercise in high physics. Of course we couldn’t build one of these.” Her eyes looked remote. “Not yet, anyway…”

“Tell me how it works, Louise.”

At extremes of temperature and pressure, spacetime became highly symmetrical (Louise told Spinner). The fundamental forces of physics became unified into a single superforce.

When conditions became less intense the symmetries were broken. The forces of physics — gravity, nuclear, electromagnetic — froze out of the superforce.

“Now,” Louise said, “think of ice freezing out of water. Think back to what we saw on Callisto — all those flaws inside the ice, remember? The freezing of water doesn’t happen in an even symmetrical way. There are usually defects — discontinuities in the ice.

“And in just the same way, when physical forces freeze out of the unified state, there can be defects — but now, these are defects in spacetime itself.”

Space was three-dimensional. Three types of stable defects were possible: in zero, one or two dimensions. The defects were points — monopoles — or lines — cosmic strings — or planes — domain walls.

The defects were genuine flaws in spacetime. Within the defects were sheets — or points, or lines — of false vacuum: places where the conditions of the high-density, symmetrical, unified state still held — like sheets of liquid water trapped within ice.

“These things can form naturally,” Louise said. “In fact, possibly many of them did, as the Universe expanded out of the Big Bang. And maybe,” she went on slowly, “the defects can be manufactured artificially, too.”

Spinner stared out of the pod at the nightfighter. “Are you saying — ”

“I’m saying that the Xeelee can create, and control, space-time defects. We think that the ‘wings’ of this nightfighter are defects — domain walls, bounded about by loops of cosmic string.

“Spinner-of-Rope, the Xeelee use sheets of antigravity to drive their spacecraft…”

The domain walls were inherently unstable; left to themselves they would decay away in bursts of gravitational radiation, and would attempt to propagate away at speeds close to that of light. The Xeelee nightfighter must actually be stabilizing the flaws, actively, to prevent this happening, and then destabilizing the flaws to gain propulsion.

Louise believed the Xeelee’s control of the domain-wall antigravity effect must be behind the ship’s ability to shield the pilot cage from acceleration effects.

“All this sounds impossible,” Spinner said.

“There’s no such word,” Louise said aggressively. “Your trip was a real achievement.” Louise, clearly excited by the Xeelee’s engineering prowess, sounded as alive and full of enthusiasm as Spinner had ever heard her. “You gave us the first big break we’ve made in understanding how this nightfighter operates — and, more significantly, how we can use it without destroying ourselves.”

Spinner frowned. “And is that so important?”

Louise looked at her seriously. “Spinner, I need to talk this out properly with you. But I suspect how well we use this nightfighter is going to determine whether we — the human species — survive, or perish here with our Sun.”

Spinner gazed out at the Xeelee craft, at the scores of drone ’bots which clambered busily across the face of its wings.

Perhaps Louise was right; perhaps understanding how something worked did make it genuinely less threatening. The Xeelee nightfighter wasn’t a monster. It was a tool — a resource, for humans to exploit.

“All right,” she said. “What next?”

Louise grinned. “Next, I think it’s time to figure out how to take this nightfighter on a little test jaunt around the Solar System. I’d like to see what in Lethe happened here. And,” she said, her face hardening, “I want to know what’s happening to our Sun…”

18

Milpitas put down his pen.

Annoyingly, it drifted away from the surface of his desk and up into the air, cart-wheeling slowly; Milpitas swiftly scooped up the offending item and swept it into a drawer, where it could drift about to its little insensate heart’s content.

He climbed stiffly from his chair and made his slow way from the office.

Fine white ropes had been strung out along the Temple’s warren of corridors. By judiciously sliding one’s closed fists along the rope, one could quite easily maintain the illusion — for oneself and others — of walking, as normal. He passed another Planner, a junior woman with her tall, shaven dome of a scalp quite gracefully formed. Her legs were hidden by a long robe, so that — at first glance anyway — it could have been that she was walking. Milpitas smiled at the girl, and she nodded gravely to him as they passed.

Excellent, he thought. That was the way to deal with this ghastly, offensive situation of zero-gee, of course: by not accepting its reality, by allowing no intrusion into the normal course of things — into the usual, smooth running of their minds. By such means they could survive until gravity was restored. He moved through the corridors of his Temple, past Planner offices which had been hastily adapted to serve as dormitories and food stores. Beyond the closed doors he heard the slow, subdued murmur of the voices of his people, and beyond the Temple walls there continued the steady, sad wailing of the klaxon.

He worked his way out from the bowels of the building, out toward the glistening skin of the Temple. He had conducted an inspection tour like this every shift since the start of the emergency. His assistants formed a complex web of intelligence throughout the Temple, of course, and reports were ready for him whenever he requested them. Some contact had even been maintained with the other Temples, thanks to carefully selected runners. But, despite all that data, Milpitas still found there was no substitute for getting out of his office and seeing for himself what was going on.

And, he flattered himself to think, perhaps it comforted the people — the lost children he’d gathered here into his protection, in the midst of this, their greatest crisis — to be aware that he, Milpitas, their Planner, was among them.

But, he thought, what if gravity were never returned?

He pulled at his chin, his fingernails lingering on the network of AS scars they found there.

They would have to adjust. It was as simple as that. He evolved vague schemes for stringing networks of ropes across the Decks; there was really no reason why normal life — at least, a close semblance of it — should not resume.

The discipline of the Planners had already persisted for almost a thousand years. Surely a little local difficulty with the gravity wasn’t going to make any difference to that.

Still, he thought, some events — however unwelcome — did force themselves into one’s awareness. Such as the moment when the gravity had died. Milpitas remembered clinging to his own chair, watching in horror as the artifacts on his desk — the ordinary, humdrum impedimenta of everyday life — drifted away into the treacherous air.

In the Decks, there had been panic.

Milpitas had sounded the klaxon — and it still sounded now — calling the people to him, to the protection of the Temple.

Slowly, one by one, or in little groups clinging to each other fearfully, they had come to him. He had lodged them in offices, giving them the security of four stout walk about them.

People had been stranded helplessly in mid-air. Ropes had been slung between the Decks, huge nets pulled through the air to gather in the flopping human fish. All of them had been brought to him, some almost catatonic with fear, their old young faces rigid and white.

He reached the tetrahedral outer hull of the Temple. The skin was a wall of golden glass which inclined gracefully over him, softening the harsh light of the Decks; the wall’s framework cast long, soft-edged shadows across the outer corridors.

…But the light, today, had changed, he noticed now. He glanced up, quickly, above his head. Shafts of gray Deck daylight, raw and unfiltered, came seeping through holes in the golden wall. At each gap in the wall a sentry hovered, fixed to the glass wall by a loose sling of rope.

The holes had been punched out, in the last few minutes or hours, by the sentries; they must have seen someone, somehow, approaching the Temple.

The nearest sentry glanced down at Milpitas’ approach. It was a woman, Milpitas saw; she held her cross-bow up against her chest, nervously.

He smiled at her and waved. Then, as soon as he felt he could, he dropped his eyes and moved on.

Damn. His composure, the gestalt of his mood, had been quite disrupted by the sight of the sentries and the knocked-out glass panes. Of course he himself had posted the sentries up there as a precaution (a precaution against what, he hadn’t cared to speculate). He’d really hoped that the sentries wouldn’t need to be used, that no more irruptions from outside would occur.

Evidently that hope hadn’t yet been fulfilled. His plans to repopulate the Decks would have to be postponed for a while longer.

Well, there was still food and other essentials, here in the Temples. And when the supplies ran out, their AS nanobots could preserve them all for a long while; the nanobots would enable each antique human body to consume its own resources, digging deeper and deeper, to preserve the most vital functions.

And even the failure of that last fallback would, in the end, be irrelevant, of course.

The people would remain with him, Planner Milpitas, here in the Temple. Where they were safe. He had to protect the future of the species. That was his mission: a mission he had followed unswervingly for centuries. He had no intention of abandoning his duty to his charges now.

Not even if it meant keeping them in here forever.

The wings of the nightfighter loomed over the battered surface of Port Sol.

The relativistic effects of the flight — intense blue shift ahead, the hint of a starbow girdling the sky — faded rapidly from Spinner’s sensorium. The Universe beyond her cage of construction material assumed its normal aspect, with the wizened stars scattered uniformly around the sky, and the blood-red bulk of the Sun an immense, brooding presence.

She took her hands from the control waldoes and lay back in her couch. She closed aching eyes, and tried to still the trembling in her hands.

She sucked apple-juice from the nipple inside her helmet. The juice tasted slightly odd — as usual, because of the nutrient supplements that had been added to it. Her legs and back felt stiff, her muscles like bits of wood, after two days in this box. The plumbing equipment she’d been fitted with was chafing again, and somewhere under her back there was a fold of cloth in her suit, a fold which dug enthusiastically into her flesh. Even the loop of rope at her waist felt tight, restricting.

“Spinner-of-Rope. Can you hear me?” It was Louise’s voice, calling from the cozy shirtsleeve environment inside the life-lounge she’d fixed to the shoulders of the nightfighter. “Are you all right?”

Spinner sighed. “About as all right as you’d expect me to be.” She clenched her hands together and worked her fingers through the thickness of the gloves’ material, trying to loosen up the muscles. Over-tension in her hands was probably going to be her biggest problem, she reflected. Her guidance of the ship was assisted by the processing power Louise had had installed inside the life-lounge, but still, and quite frequently. Spinner had to supply manual intervention.

“Spinner, do you want to close up the wings?”

Spinner stabbed at a button on the left-hand waldo. She didn’t bother to look back to watch the controlled defects in spacetime heal themselves over; without the wings, the quality of light in the cabin changed a little, brightening.

“Okay. Would you like to come into the lounge for a while?”

Another damn spacewalk? She closed her eyes; her eyeballs prickled with fatigue. “No thanks, Louise.”

“You’ve been in that couch for thirty-six hours already, Spinner. You need to be careful with yourself.”

“What are you worried about?” Spinner asked sourly. “Bedsores?”

“No,” Louise said calmly. “No, the safety of the nightfighter…”

Spinner had quickly learned that journey times in the ’fighter were going to be long. Louise had worked out that the nightfighter’s discontinuity drive could bring it to better than half lightspeed. Terrific. But most of the Solar System was empty space. It was a big place. During a ’fighter journey, little would change visibly, even from hour to hour — but that served to make the worst moments, when she came plummeting at some planet or moon, even more terrifying, with their sensations of such intense speed.

Spinner had felt no acceleration effects, and Louise assured her that her suit and the action of the construction material cage around her — would protect her from any hard radiation, or heavy particles she might encounter… But still, she was forced to sit in this damn box, and watch the stars blue-shift toward her.

Maybe the Xeelee had never suffered from vertigo, but she’d quickly found that she sure did.

“Well, here we are at Port Sol. Louise, how long do you want to stay here?”

Louise hesitated. “Not long, I don’t think. I didn’t expect to find anything here, and now that I’m here I still don’t.”

“Then I’ll stay in the pod. The sooner we can get away, the more comfortable I’ll feel.”

“All right. I accept that. Spinner-of-Rope, tell me what you see.”

Spinner opened her eyes, with some reluctance, and looked beyond the construction material cage.

In contrast to the crowded sky of the ruins of the Jovian system, there was emptiness here.

The Sun was a ball of dull red, below the cage and to her right. Even here, on the rim of the System, Sol still showed a large disc, and sent bloody light slanting up through her cage.

To her left the worldlet Louise called Port Sol rotated, slowly. The little ice moon was scarred by hundreds of craters: deep, surprisingly regular. The tiny moon had supplied the ancient interstellar GUTships with ice for reaction mass. There were still buildings here, tight communities of them all over the surface; Spinner could see the remnants of domes, pylons and arches, spectacular microgravity architecture which must have been absurdly expensive to maintain.

But the buildings were closed, darkened, and thin frost coated their surfaces; the pylons and graceful domes were collapsed, with bits of glass and metal jutting like snapped bones.

“I recognize some of this,” Louise said. “Some of the geography, I mean. I could even tell you place names. Can you believe that — after five megayears?

“…But I guess that’s just telling us that Port Sol was abandoned not long after my time. Once the Squeem hyperdrive was acquired, the GUTship lines — even the worm-hole route operators — must have become suddenly obsolete. There was no longer any economic logic to sustain Port Sol. I wonder what the last days were like… Perhaps the Port was kept going by tourism, for a while. And, thinking back, there would have been a few who wouldn’t want to return to the crowded pit of the inner System. Perhaps some of them stayed here until their AS treatment finally failed them…

“Maybe that’s how it was,” she said. “But I think I’d rather imagine they closed the place up with one major party.”

“How did Port Sol survive the wars?”

“Who would want to come here?” Louise said drily. “What is there to fight over? There’s nothing that’s even worth destroying. Spinner, Port Sol must have been abandoned for most of the five megayears since the Northern’s departure. It’s drifted around the rim of the System, unremarked and never visited, while the tides of the Xeelee wars washed over the inner worlds. The System is probably littered with sites like this — abandoned, too remote to be worth tracking down for study, or exploitation, or even to destroy. All encrusted with bits of human history — and lost lives, and bones.”

Spinner laughed uneasily; she wasn’t used to such reflection from the engineer.

She twisted her head, looking around the sky. “I don’t like it here, Louise,” she said. “It’s barren. Abandoned. I thought the Jupiter system was bad, but — ”

Apart from the Sun and Port Sol, only the distant dimmed stars shone here, impossibly remote. Spinner felt cowed by the dingy immensity all around her: she felt that her own spark of human life and warmth was as insignificant against all this darkness as the dim glow of the touch-pad lights on her waldoes.

Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations. The Northern forest-Deck — the whole of that enclosed world which had seemed so huge to her, as a child — was nothing but a remote scrap of incongruous green, irrelevant in all this emptiness.

Louise said, “I know how you’re feeling. At least at Jupiter there was something in the sky. Right? Listen to me, Spinner; it’s all a question of scale. Port Sol is a Kuiper object — a ball of ice traveling around the Sun about fifty AUs out. AUs — astronomical units — that means — ”

“I know what it means.”

“Spinner, Jupiter is only five AUs from the center of the Sun. So we’re ten times further out from the heart of the System than Northern is… so far out that we’re on the edge of the Solar System, so far that the other bodies in the System — save Sol itself — are reduced to points of light, invisible without enhancement. Spinner, emptiness is what you have to expect, out here.”

“Sure. So tell me how it makes you feel.”

Louise hesitated. “Spinner-of-Rope, five million years ago I came here to work in the old days, while the Great Northern was being constructed…”

Louise spoke of bustling, sprawling, vigorous human communities nestling among the ancient ice-spires of the Kuiper object. The sky had been full of GUTships and stars, with Sol a bright yellow gleam in Capricorn.

“But now,” Louise said, her voice tight, “look at the Sun… Spinner-of-Rope, even from this far out — even from fifty AUs — the damn thing is twice as wide as the Moon, seen from old Earth. It’s obscene to me. It makes it impossible for me to forget, even for a moment, what’s been done.”

Spinner sat silently for a moment. Memories of Earth meant nothing to her, but she could feel the pain in Louise’s voice.

“Louise, do you want to land here?”

“No. There’s nothing for us down there… It was only an impulse that brought me out here in the first place; we had no evidence that anything had survived. I’m sorry, Spinner.”

Spinner sighed. “Where to now?”

“Well, since we’re out here in the dark, let’s stay out. We’re still picking up that remote beacon.”

“Where’s the signal coming from?”

“Further out than we are now — about a hundred AUs — and a goodly distance around the equatorial plane from Port Sol. Spinner-of-Rope, we’re looking at another few days in the saddle, for you. Can you stand it?”

Spinner sighed. “It’s not getting any easier. But it’s not going to get any worse, is it?” …And, she thought, it wasn’t as if the base they had established amid the ruins of the Jupiter system was so fantastically inviting a place to get back to. “Let’s get it over.”

“All right. I’ve already laid in your course…”

There could be no true dialogue, Garry Uvarov thought, between Lieserl — the strange, lonely exile in the Sun — and the crew of the returned Great Northern.

The corpse of Jupiter was only just over a light-hour from the center of the Sol-giant, but Lieserl’s maser messages took far longer than that to percolate out of the Sun along the flanks of their immense convection cells. So communications roundtrips — between the Northern and the antiquated wormhole terminus that supported Lieserl’s awareness — took several days.

Still, once contact was established, a prodigious amount of information flowed, asynchronously, back and forth across the tenuous link.

“Incredible,” Mark murmured. “She dates from our own era — she was placed within the Sun at almost exactly the same time as our launch.”

It sounded as if Mark were speaking from somewhere inside Uvarov’s own head. Uvarov swiveled his sightless face about the dining saloon. “You’re forgetting your spatial focus again,” he snapped. “I know you’re excited, but — ”

There was a soft concussion; Uvarov pictured Virtual sound-sources reconfiguring throughout the saloon. “Sorry,” Mark said, from a point in the air a few feet before Uvarov’s head.

“As far as I can tell, she’s human,” Mark said. “A human analogue, anyway. The woman’s been in there, alone, for five million years, Uvarov. I know that subjectively she won’t have endured all that time at a normal human pace, but still…

“She’s another Superet project — just as we are. Which is why there’s such a coincidence in dates. We must both date from Superet’s most active period, Uvarov.”

Uvarov smiled. “Perhaps. And yet, what has resulted of all the grand designs of those days? Superet was planning to adjust the future of mankind — to ensure the success of the species. But what is the outcome? We have: one half-insane relic of a woman-Virtual, wandering about inside the Sun, one broken-down GUTship, the Northern… and a Sun become a giant in a lifeless Solar System.” He worked his numb mouth, but there was no phlegm to spit. “Hardly a triumph. So much for the abilities of humans to manage projects on such timescales. So much for Superet!”

“But Lieserl has followed a lot of the history of the human race — in patches, and from a distance, but she knows more than we could ever hope to have uncovered otherwise. She lost contact with the rest of the race only as humans entered a late period called the Assimilation, when mankind was moving into direct competition with the Xeelee.”

Uvarov couldn’t wrench his imagination away from the plight of Lieserl. “But, I wonder, are these few, pathetic scraps of data sufficient compensation for a hundred thousand lifetimes of solitude endured by this unfortunate Lieserl, in the heart of a dying star?”

Mark synthesized a sniff. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “Maybe you’re a better philosopher than I am, Uvarov; maybe you can come to judgments on the moral value of data. At this moment I don’t really care where this information has come from.”

“No,” Uvarov said. “I don’t suppose you do.”

“I’m simply grateful that, because Lieserl exists, we’ve managed to learn something of humanity’s five-megayear past… and of the photino birds.”

“Photino birds?”

The timbre of Mark’s voice changed; Uvarov imagined his stupid, pixel-lumped face splitting into a grin. “That’s Lieserl’s phrase. She found what she was sent in to find — dark matter energy flows, sucking the energy out of the core of the Sun. But it wasn’t some inanimate process, as her designers had expected: Lieserl found life, Uvarov. She’s not alone. She’s surrounded by photino birds. And I think she rather enjoys the company…”

“Lieserl…” Uvarov rolled the name around his mouth, savoring its strangeness. “An unusual name, even a thousand years ago.” Uvarov’s patchy, unreliable memory fired random facts into his tired forebrain. “Einstein had a child called Lieserl. I mean Albert Einstein, the — ”

“I know who he was.”

“His wife was called Mileva,” Uvarov said. “Why do I remember this?… They bore a child, Lieserl — but out of wedlock: a source of great shame in the early twentieth century, I understand. The child was adopted. Einstein had to choose between his child, and his career in science… all that beautiful science of his. What a choice for any human to have to make!

“So this woman has the name of a bastard,” he said. “A name redolent of isolation. How appropriate. How lonely she must have been…

“And now she enjoys the company of dark matter life forms,” he mused. “I wonder if she still remembers she was once human.”

Port Sol was twenty light-hours from the source of the beacon, Louise estimated. The nightfighter would be able to complete the trip in fifty hours.

Spinner-of-Rope, working her rudimentary controls with growing confidence, opened up the sail-wings of the nightfighter. She glanced over her shoulder to watch the wings. Her view was partially obscured by Louise’s life-lounge, an improvised encrustation which sat, squat, on the thick construction material shoulders of the ship’s wing-mountings, just behind her own cage. One of the Northern’s small, glass-walled pods had been fixed there too.

The nightfighter used its domain wall antigravity effect to protect the lounge, with Louise in it, from its extremes of acceleration. After a lot of experimentation they had found that securely attaching the lounge, and other artifacts, to the structure of the Xeelee nightfighter was enough to fool the craft into treating the enhancements as part of its structure.

But still, despite the human obstructions, Spinner could see the sparkle of the cosmic-string rims of the wings as they wound out across hundreds of miles of space, hauling open the night-blackness of the domain wall wings themselves. As they unfurled, the wings curved over on themselves with a grace and delicacy astonishing, Spinner thought, in artifacts so huge — and yet those curves seemed imbued with a terrific sense of vigor, of power.

She touched the waldoes.

The wings pulsed, once.

There was an instant in which she could see Port Sol recede from her, a flashbulb impression of squat human buildings and gaping ice-wounds which imploded to a light-point with a terrifying, helpless velocity.

And then the worldlet was gone. Within a heartbeat, Port Sol had become too dim even to show up as a point — and there was no longer a frame of reference against which she could judge her speed.

Then, with slow sureness as her speed built up, blue shift began to stain the stars ahead of her once more. For a few hours relativistic effects would spuriously restore those aged lights to something like the brilliance they had once enjoyed.

…And again she had the sense, almost undefinable, of someone here with her, inside the cage — a presence, surely human, staring out wistfully at the blue shifted stars as she did.

She wondered whether she should tell Louise about this. But — real or not, external to her own, fuddled mind or not — her companion wasn’t threatening.

And besides, what would Louise make of it? What could she do about it?

As the starbow coalesced around her once more, Spinner-of-Rope opaqued her faceplate, wriggled in her couch until an irritating wrinkle of cloth behind her back had smoothed itself out, and tried to sleep.

The slow, wide orbits of Port Sol and the beacon source had left them ninety degrees apart, as seen from the center of the Sun. Louise had laid in a course which took the nightfighter on a wide, high trajectory high above the plane of the System, arcing across its outer regions. The nightfighter’s path was like a fly hopping across a plate, from one point on the plate’s rim to another.

The Sun sat like a bloated, grotesque spider at the heart of its ruined System. All of the inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth/Luna — were gone… save only Mars, which had been reduced to a scorched cinder, surely barren of life, its orbit taking it skimming through the outer layers of the new red giant itself.

In a few more millennia that fragile orbit would erode, pitching Mars, too, into the flames.

Of the outer gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — all had survived with little change, save imploded Jupiter. But the outermost planet of all — the double world Pluto/Charon — had disappeared.

Spinner listened to Louise describe all this. “So where did Pluto go?”

“I’ve no idea,” Louise said. “There’s not a trace to be seen, anywhere along its old orbital path. Maybe we’ll never know.

“Spinner, a lot of the minor bodies of the System seem to have taken a real beating. Some of that is no doubt due to the Sun’s new, extreme state… but maybe some of it has been deliberate, too.”

Once, the Solar System had served as host to billions of minor bodies. The Oort Opik Cloud was — had once been — a swarm of a hundred billion comets circling through an immense, sparse shell of space, between four light-months and three light-years from the Sun. Now, that cloud was denuded.

Louise said, “Many of the comets must have been destroyed by the growth of the Sun — flashed to steam by its huge outpouring of heat energy, in one last, extravagant fling… They would have been visible from other systems, actually; they’d have inserted water lines, briefly, in the spectrum of the Sun: a kind of spectral Last Post for the Solar System, if there was anybody left, anywhere, to see.”

Further in toward the Sun, there were the Kuiper objects, like Port Sol; icy worldlets, orbiting not far outside the widest planetary orbits. And throughout the System there were more rings of small objects — like the asteroids, shepherded into semi-stable orbits by the gravitational interaction of the major planets.

“But all those worldlet rings are depleted,” Louise said. “Now, some of that depletion must be due to the Sun’s forced evolution, not to mention the loss of three of the inner planets. But many of the small objects must have been populated, by the era of the Xeelee wars.”

“So the objects might have been deliberately destroyed — more casualties of war.”

“Right.”

Spinner swilled apple-juice around her mouth, wishing she had some way to spit it out — or better still, to clean her teeth.

Spinner had learned of the Solar System only through Louise’s bookslates and records, but she’d gained an impression of an immense, bustling, prosperous world-system. There had been huge orbital habitat-cities, heavily populated worlds laced together by wormhole transit routes, and ships like immense, extravagant diamonds crossing the face of the yellow-gold Sun. Somewhere inside her — despite all the dire warnings of Superet — she’d hoped to arrive here and find it all just as she’d read.

Instead, there was only this decayed Sun and its ruined worlds… even the wormhole routes, it seemed, had been shut down. And here she was, stuck inside the pilot-cage of an alien craft, chasing across tens of billions of miles in search of one, sad, isolated beacon.

She began to take her body through a simple regime of calisthenics, exercises she could get through without climbing out of her couch. “So, Louise. You’re telling me that Sol is dead. The System is dead. And you sound… upset about it. But what else did you expect to find?”

“I expected nothing. I hoped for more,” Louise said. “But I guess the slow destruction of the Sun, coupled with the Xeelee assaults, were together enough to wipe the System clean…”

Spinner felt, suddenly, profoundly depressed, as if the weight of all those lost years, those hundreds of billions of lives which had resulted in nothing but this cosmic rubble, was bearing down on her.

“Louise, I don’t want to hear any more.”

“All right, Spinner. I — ”

Spinner shut her off.

She blanked out her faceplate, and filled its inner side with a soothing, cool green light, the light which had filtered through leaves from an artificial Sun to illuminate her childhood. She immersed herself in the warm feel of her muscles, as she pushed through her exercises.

Immersed in the cries of the klaxon, Morrow’s party held a council of war.

“I’ve been scouting,” Mark said. “And as far as I can tell it’s the same all over the Decks. No people, anywhere. The same emptiness… Everyone has been taken into the Temples. And it’s not going to be easy to get them out.”

“Let’s leave them in there, then,” Trapper-of-Frogs said practically. “If that’s what they want.”

Morrow studied her round, unmarked face. “Unfortunately, that isn’t an option,” he said gently. “We have to protect them.”

“From themselves?”

“If necessary, yes. At any rate, from the Superet Planners.”

Trapper thrust her face up at his. “Why?”

Morrow started to feel impatient. “Because we have to. Look, Trapper, I didn’t want to come on this jaunt into the Decks any more than you did. It’s not my fault we’re being shot at — ”

“Starve them,” Trapper said simply.

Morrow turned to her. “What?”

“Starve them.” She turned to study the Temple with an appraising eye, as if assessing its capacity. “There must be hundreds of people in there — and in the other Temples. They can’t have that much food and water; there just isn’t room in there. I say we wait here, until they get starved out. Simple.”

Constancy-of-Purpose grinned, maliciously. “We could block the sewage outlets. I know where the outlets are; it would be easy. That would be fun. And a lot faster acting.”

Mark hovered before her, his artificial face drawn into stern disapproval. “And cause plague, illness and death on a massive scale? Is that really what you’re proposing?”

Constancy-of-Purpose looked doubtful; she passed a massive hand over her scalp.

“Listen to me,” Mark said slowly. “This is my field — I’m a socio-engineer, after all. Was, whatever. The last thing we want is a siege, here. Do you understand? I’m not sure if we have the resources to break a siege. If we tried, the fall-out — the illness and death — would put an immense strain on the Northern’s infrastructure.

“Besides — ” He hesitated.

Morrow said, “Yes?”

“Besides, I’m not certain that breaking a siege is even possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look: the Planners see themselves as messianic. They, and only they, can save ‘their’ people. If we besiege them, the Planners simply won’t respond the way a rational person would — by studying their resources, by assessing the chances of a successful break-out, and so on. Worse still, we — the besiegers — would become part of the fabric of their delusion, an embodiment of the external threats which assail their people.”

Morrow frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Mark, evidently forgetting there was no drive-induced gravity, started pacing around the Deck, his Virtual feet soundlessly missing the floor by a fraction of an inch. “You have to understand things from the point of view of the people in control in there: the Planners.” He turned a frank gaze on Morrow. “I’ve been studying you, Morrow. I know you’re still intimidated — by this place, by the nearness of the Planners. Aren’t you? — despite all your experiences outside here, beyond these walls.”

Morrow said nothing.

“This culture has a lot of power,” Mark said. “Almost all of it is concentrated in the hands of the Planners, with the mass of people dumbly acquiescing. Morrow, the Planners have taken the species-survival logic of Superet — the logic which lay behind the whole of the Northern’s mission, after all — and extrapolated it into something more — something almost religious.

“We’re dealing with a powerful concept, folks; one that seems to touch buttons wired deep into our human psyches. People on these Decks have followed where the Planners have led for nearly a millennium — including you, Morrow.

“When Louise and I saw this tendency developing, quite early in the flight, we decided we couldn’t overcome it — and it would be wastefully destructive to try.

“So we withdrew, to the Great Britain, leaving enough of a physical control infrastructure in place for us to ensure the ship could run smoothly.

“Well, maybe we were wrong to do that; because now the Planners’ messiah complex is leading us to a crisis…”

Morrow found he intensely disliked being analyzed in this way by a Virtual construct. “But what are we to do?” he snapped. “How are we to use these staggering insights of yours?”

“The situation is unpredictable,” Mark said bluntly. “But it’s possible that the Planners would destroy their people — and themselves — rather than let us win.”

The little party exchanged shocked glances.

Trapper said, “But that’s insane. It even contradicts their conscious goals — to protect their people.”

Mark’s smile was thin. “Nobody said it had to make sense. Unfortunately, there are plenty of precedents, right through human history.”

Constancy-of-Purpose said, “With flaws like that hardwired into our heads, it’s a wonder we ever got into space in the first place.” She let herself drift a little way from the Deck, her legs dangling beneath her, and studied the Temple, eyes squinting. “Well, if we can’t break the siege, we’re going to have trouble. For a start, there are more of them than us. And, second, their cross-bows have a much greater range than these blowpipes wielded by Trapper and her friends — ”

“Maybe,” Trapper-of-Frogs said slowly, “but I’ve been thinking about that. I mean, the Planners could have killed us earlier, when we were strung out along the Deck. Couldn’t they?”

Mark frowned. “They fired over us. Maybe they were trying to warn us.”

“Maybe.” Trapper-of-Frogs nodded grudgingly. “Or maybe they were trying to hit us — but couldn’t. Watch this.”

She pulled a dart from the pouch at her waist and raised her blowpipe to her lips. She spat the dart harmlessly into the air, on a flat trajectory parallel to the Deck.

Morrow, bemused, tracked the little projectile. It rapidly lost most of its initial speed to the resistance of the air, but its path continued flat and even, still parallel to the Deck. Eventually, Morrow supposed, it would slow up so much that it would fall to the Deck, and…

No, it wouldn’t, he realized slowly. The GUTdrive was shut off: there was no gravity. Even if air resistance stopped the dart completely, it still wouldn’t fall.

“When the gravity first disappeared,” Tracker said, “I couldn’t hit a damn thing. I seemed to aim too high, every time. I quickly worked out why: even over quite short distances, gravity will pull a dart — or a cross-bow bolt — down a little way. I’ve grown up compensating for that, allowing for it unconsciously when I aim at something.

“In the absence of gravity the dart just sails on, in a straight line, until it hits something.” She hefted the blowpipe. “It took me hours of practice before I felt confident with this thing in zero-gee; it was like learning from scratch all over again.”

Mark was nodding slowly. “So you think the Planners’ bowmen meant to hit us.”

“I’m sure of it. But they shot too high. They haven’t learned to adjust to zero gee; they certainly didn’t allow for it when they shot at us.”

Constancy-of-Purpose cupped her chin. “Maybe you’re right. But I don’t see how that helps us. Even if their aim is a little off, there are enough of them to blanket us with bolts if we try to get too close.”

“Yes,” Mark said, some excitement entering his artificial voice, “but maybe we can use Trapper’s insight in another way. She’s right; the Planners — everyone in that building — are failing to learn how to cope with the absence of gravity. In fact, they seem to be denying that the absence even exists.” He glanced around, staring at the tracery of ropes they’d laid from the access ramps as if seeing them for the first time. “And so have we. Look at the way we’ve traveled — abseiling across the floor, sticking to the familiar two dimensions to which gravity restricts us.”

Morrow frowned. “What are you suggesting?”

Mark raised his face to the iron sky. “That we try a little lateral thinking…”

At the origin of the weak, ancient signal Louise and Spinner found a worldlet. It was a dirty snowball three hundred miles across, slowly turning in the outer darkness.

When Louise bathed the worldlet with spotlights from her life-lounge, broken ice shone, stained with splashes of color: rust-brown, gray.

This lost little fragment followed a highly elliptical path, each of its distorted journeys lasting a million years or more. Its closest approach to the Sun came somewhere between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, while at its furthest it got halfway to the nearest star — two light-years from the inner worlds.

“Bizarre,” Louise mused. “It’s got the orbital characteristics of a long-period comet — but none of the physical characteristics. In morphology it’s more like a Kuiper object, like Port Sol. But then it should be in a reasonably circular orbit…”

Spinner-of-Rope peered out of her cage at the dark little world, wondering what might still be living down there.

Here and there, in pits in the ice, metal gleamed.

“Artifacts,” Louise said. “Can you see that, Spinner? Artifacts, all over the surface.”

“Human?”

“I’d guess so. But I don’t recognize anything. And I doubt if there’s much still working…

“I’m taking radar scans. There are hundreds of chambers in there, in the interior. And our beacon’s somewhere inside: still broadcasting on all wavelengths, with a peak in the microwave range… Life knows what’s powering it.”

“Is this ice-ball inhabited? Is there anyone here?”

“I don’t know.” Spinner heard Louise hesitate. “I guess I’m going to have to go down to find out.”

The pod’s small jets flared across the worldlet’s uneven surface as Louise descended. Spinner watched; the pod was the only moving thing in all of her Universe.

“I’m close to the surface now,” Louise reported. “I’ll level off. They certainly made a mess of this surface. I think these artifacts are sections of ships, Spinner. Not that I can label much of it — so much of this technology must be tens of millennia beyond us… Lethe, I wish we had the time to spend here, to study all this stuff.

“But at least it’s human.” Her voice sounded strained. “The first traces of humanity we’ve found in the whole damn System, Spinner.

“I think people landed here, and broke up their ships for raw materials to occupy the interior.

“I’m going to land now. I see what looks like a port.”

Louise couldn’t find any way to open the wide, hatch-like port to the interior. Instead, she had to erect a plastic bubble to serve as an airlock over the port, and cut her way through, working slowly in the microgravity.

“All right, I’m in.” Her breath was scratchy, shallow — almost as if she were whispering, Spinner thought. “It’s dark here, Spinner. I have lamps; I’m going to leave a trail of them, as I go through.”

Spinner, listening in her cage, prayed that nothing bad happened to Louise down there. If it did, what could she — Spinner — do? Would she have the courage even to try a landing on the ice worldlet?

Doubt flooded her, a feeling of inadequacy, of being unable to cope…

You’ll manage, Spinner-of-Rope.

That same dry, sourceless voice.

Strangely, her fears seemed to subside. She glanced around; of course, she was alone in the cage, with the nightfighter suspended passively over the ice worldlet. But still — again — she had had the impression that someone was here with her. She couldn’t see him, or her — but somehow she knew there was nothing to fear; she sensed a massive, comforting presence similar to her own, lost father.

But still — hearing voices? What in Lethe is going on inside my head?

“…Lots of chambers,” Louise said a little breathlessly. “They are boxes, carved out of the ice and plated over with metal and plastic. A bit cramped… There is air here, but foul; I won’t be breaking my suit seal. This was definitely a human colony, Spinner. But it’s all — neat. Tidy; abandoned in an orderly way.

“I guess they took a long time to die. They had time to clear up after themselves — to bury their dead, maybe, even, as they withdrew. I guess they went deeper as their numbers dwindled, toward the center of the world… It’s kind of dignified, don’t you think? There are no signs of panic, or conflict. I wonder how we would behave, in the same circumstance. Spinner, I’m going on now.”

Later: “I’m in a deeper layer of chambers. I think I’ve found the source of the signal.” She was silent for a while. Then, “They sure built this to last.”

“Well, they got that right.”

“I still can’t identify what’s powering it… I guess one of the ship’s GUTdrive plants on the surface. I think they used nanobots to maintain the beacon, Spinner. Maybe they adapted AS nanobots from their medical stores.” Her tone of voice changed, subtly, and Spinner imagined her smiling. “They were determined to enable this to survive. But it’s been millions of years… and the ’bots have made a few cumulative mistakes. The damn thing looks as if it’s melted, Spinner. But it’s still pumping out its signal, so we can’t criticize too much…”

“Louise,” Spinner asked slowly, “why were these people here? What were they trying to do?”

Louise thought for a while. “Spinner, I think they were trying to escape.”

This ice-world was typical of the small, subplanetary bodies which could once have been found throughout the Solar System, Louise said, shepherded into orbital clusters by the major planets.

“But,” Louise said, “the orbits of many of those little bodies were only semi-stable. Their orbits were intrinsically chaotic, you see… That means, over a long enough time period the minor bodies could move out of their stable pathways. They could even fall into the gravity wells of the major planets and be flung out of the System altogether. It’s a form of evaporation — an evaporation of worlds and moons out of stellar systems. In fact, over a long enough scale — and I’m talking tens of billions of years now — the same thing would happen to the major planets too — and to stars, which could evaporate out of their parent galaxies… If,” she went on sourly, “they had ever been given the chance.”

“So you think this little world just evaporated away from Sol, gravitationally?”

“No… not necessarily.”

Louise speculated about the closing stages of the Xeelee conflicts. She imagined mankind trapped within its home System, sliding toward the final defeat. Toward the end, even communication between the worlds might have broken down. Humanity would have been reduced to isolated pockets, cowering under the Xeelee onslaughts.

But some might have seen a way out — a way to try to escape the final investing of the System by the Xeelee.

Louise said, “Imagine this little worldlet following its semi-stable path — say, between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. It wouldn’t have taken much to push it far enough out of its orbit to bring on orbital instability. And once equilibrium was lost, the drift away from the standard orbital elements could have been quite rapid — say, within a few orbits — and the decay wouldn’t have required any further deliberate — and observable — impulses, perhaps.”

Silently, all but invisibly to anyone watching, the little world, with its precious cargo of cowering, fearful humans, had looped through its increasingly perturbed orbit, falling at last — after many orbits, perhaps covering centuries — into the gravitational field of one of the major planets.

Then, finally, the worldlet was slingshot out of the Solar System.

“If they’d got it right,” Louise said, “maybe it would have been a viable plan. If. These people were going to the stars, by the lowest-tech way you can imagine. It would have taken tens of thousands of years to get to even the nearest star — but so what? They had tens of thousands of years to play with, thanks to AS — or the equivalent they’d developed by then. And locked up in the ice of the worldlet there was probably as much water as in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean… Going to the stars in an ice moon was certainly a better chance than staying here to be creamed by the Xeelee with the rest — it was a viable way to get out of all this, all but undetectable.

“The scheme obviously attracted support. You can see the bits of ships, littering the surface… People must have fled here, quietly, from all over the collapsing System. The mission was a beacon of hope, I guess.

“But — ”

“But what?”

“But they got it wrong.

“I’m going to go deeper now, Spinner.”

“Be careful, Louise.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Louise’s shallow breath. Spinner filled her faceplate once more with cool, green leaf-light and stared into it, trying not to imagine what Louise was finding, down there inside the little tomb-world.

At length, Louise said: “Well, that’s it. I guess I’m here: the last place they occupied… the one place they couldn’t tidy up after themselves.”

Spinner stared into green emptiness. “What can you see?”

“Abandoned clothes.” Hesitation. “Dust everywhere. No bones, Spinner; no crumbling corpses… you can put your imagination away.”

After five megayears, there would only be dust, Spinner thought: a final cloud, of flakes of bone and crumbled flesh, settling slowly.

“If they left records, I can’t find them,” Louise said. She sounded as if she were trying to be unconcerned — to maintain control — but Spinner thought she could hear fragility in that level voice. “Perhaps there’s something in the electronics. But that would take years of data mining to dig out, even if we could restore the power. And we’re probably looking at technology a hundred thousand years beyond ours anyway…”

“Louise, there’s nothing you can do in there. I think you should come out.”

“…Yes. I guess you’re right, Spinner-of-Rope. We don’t have time for this.”

Spinner thought she heard relief in Louise’s tone.

The little Northern pod clambered up from the worldlet’s shallow gravity well, toward the Xeelee craft.

Louise, safe inside her life-lounge, said: “They couldn’t control the slingshot well enough. Or maybe the Xeelee interfered with their plans.

“They weren’t thrown out of the System as they’d planned, on an open-ended hyperbolic trajectory; instead they were put into this wide, and deadly, elliptical orbit — an orbit which was closed, taking them nowhere, very slowly.

“I guess they tried to stick it out. Well, they’d broken up their ships; they had no choice. Maybe if we had time for a proper archaeological study here we could work out how long they lasted. Who knows? Hundreds of thousands of years? Maybe they were hoping for rescue, for all that time, from some brave new future when humans had thrown out the Xeelee once more.

“But it was a future that never came.

“By the time they set up their beacon, their final plea for help, they must have known they were through — and that there was nobody to come to their aid.”

“Nobody except us.”

“Yes,” Louise growled. “And what can we offer them now?”

“What about the beacon?”

“I shut it down,” Louise said softly. “It’s served no purpose… not for five million years.”

Spinner sat in her Xeelee-crafted cabin, watching the grim little tomb of ice turn beneath her prow. “Louise? Where to now?”

“The inner System. I think I’ve had it with all this bleakness and dark. Spinner-of-Rope, let’s go to Saturn.”

19

Surrounded by swooping photino birds, Lieserl sailed around the core of the Sun. She let hydrogen light play across her face, warming her.

The helium core, surrounded by the blazing hydrogen shell scorching its way out through the thinning layers, continued to grow in the steady hail of ash from the shell. Inhomogeneities in the giant’s envelope — clouds and clumps of gas, bounded by ropes of magnetic flux — moved across the face of the core, and the core-star actually cast shadows outwards, high up into the expanding envelope.

The photino birds swept, oblivious, through the shining fusion shell and on into the inert core itself. Lieserl watched as a group of the birds broke away and sailed off and out, to their unknowable destination beyond the Sun. She studied the birds. Had their rate of activity increased? She had the vague impression of a greater urgency about the birds’ swooping orbits, their eternal dips into the core.

Maybe the birds knew the ancient human spacecraft, the Northern, was here. Maybe they were reacting to the humans’ presence… It seemed fanciful — but was it possible?

The processes unfolding around the Sun were quite remarkably beautiful. In fact, she reflected now, every stage of the Sun’s evolution had been beautiful whether accelerated by the photino birds or not. It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process.

Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?

She smiled at herself. Ironic. Here she was, an AI five million years old, accusing herself of too much anthropomorphism…

But, she thought uneasily, perhaps her true fault lay in not enough anthropomorphism.

The sudden communication from the humans outside — the whispers of maser light which had trickled down the flanks of the huge, dumb convection cells — had shaken her to her soul.

She’d undertaken her cycle of messages, she suspected strongly, because she was driven to it by some sinister bit of programming, buried deep within her: not out of choice, or because she believed she might actually get a reply. So she’d packed her data with pictures of herself, and small, ironic jokes — all intended, she supposed, to signal to herself that this wasn’t real: that it was all a game, unworthy of being taken seriously because there was no one left out there to hear.

Well, it seemed now, she’d been wrong. These people — of her own era, roughly, preserved by relativistic time dilation in their strange ship, the Great Northern — had returned to the Solar System.

And they were — she’d come to believe — people who didn’t approve of her.

They hadn’t said as much, explicitly. But she suspected an inner coldness was there, buried in the long communications they exchanged with her.

They thought she’d lost her objectivity — forgotten the reason she was placed in here in the first place. They thought she’d become an ineffectual observer, seduced by the rhythmic beauty of the photino birds.

Lieserl was some form of traitor, perhaps.

For the truth was — in the eyes of the men and women of the Northern — the photino birds were deadly. The birds were anti-human. They were killing the Sun.

They couldn’t understand how Lieserl could not be aware of this stark enmity.

She closed her eyes and hugged her knees; the hydrogen shell, fusing at ten million degrees, felt like warm summer Sunlight on her Virtual face. She’d watched the photino birds do their slow, patient work, year after year, leaching away the Sun’s fusion energy in slow, deadly, dribbles. She’d come to understand that the birds were killing the Sun — and yet she’d never thought really to wonder what was happening outside the Sun, in other stars. Had she vaguely assumed that the photino birds were somehow native to the Sun, like a localized infection? — But that couldn’t be, of course, for she’d seen birds fly away from here, and come skimming down through the envelope to join the core-orbiting flock. So there must be birds beyond the Sun — significant flocks of them.

She realized now, with chilling clarity, that her unquestioned assumption that the birds were contained to just one star, coupled with her intrigued fascination with the birds themselves, had led her to justify the birds’ actions, in her own heart. It hadn’t even mattered to her that the result of the birds’ activity would be the death of Sol — perhaps, even, the extinction of man.

She quailed from this unwelcome insight into her own soul. She had once been human, after all; was she really so clinical, so alien?

The murder of Sol would have been bad enough. But in fact — the crew of the Northern had told her, in brutal and explicit detail — all across the sky, the stars were dying: ballooning into diseased giants, crumbling into dwarfs. The Universe was littered with planetary nebulae, supernovae ejecta and the other debris of dying stars, all rich with complex — and useless — heavy elements.

The photino birds were killing the stars: and not just the Sun, man’s star, but all of the stars, out as far as the Northern’s sensors could pick up.

Already, there was nowhere in the Universe for humans to run to.

And she, Lieserl — the Northern crew seemed to believe — should be doing more than leaking out wry little messages via her maser convection cells. She should be screaming warnings.

Through her complex feelings, a mixture of self-doubt and loneliness, anger erupted. After all, what right did the Northern crew have to criticize her even implicitly? She’d had no choice about this assignment — this immortal exile of hers in the heart of the Sun. She’d been allowed no life. And it wasn’t her who had shut down the telemetry link through the wormhole, during the Assimilation.

Why, after millions of years of abandonment, should she offer any loyalty to mankind?

And yet, she thought, the arrival of the Northern, and the fresh perspective of its crew, had made her take a colder, harder look at the birds — and at herself — than she had for a long time.

She pictured the shadow universe of dark matter: a universe which permeated, barely touching, the visible worlds men had once inhabited… And yet that image was misleading, she thought, for the dark matter was no shadow: it comprised most of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter was a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean.

The photino birds — and their unknowable dark matter cousins, perhaps as different from the birds as were the Qax from humanity — slid through the black waters like fish, blind and hidden.

But the small, shining fraction of baryonic matter seemed vital to the dark matter creatures. It was a catalyst for the chains of events which sustained their species.

For a start, dark matter could not form stars. And the birds seemed to need the gravity wells of baryonic stars.

When a clump of baryonic gas collapsed under gravity, electromagnetic radiation carried away much of the heat produced — it was as if the radiation cooled the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud eventually balanced the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium was found: a star formed.

But dark matter could not produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of the radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, trapped much more of its heat of contraction. As a result, much larger clouds — larger than galaxies — were the equilibrium form for dark matter.

So the early Universe had been populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it had been a cosmos almost without structure.

Then the baryonic matter had gathered, and the stars began to implode — to shine. Lieserl imagined the first stars sparking to life across the cosmos, tiny pinprick gravity wells in the smooth oceans of dark matter.

The photino birds lived off a trickle of proton-photino interactions, which fed them with a slow, steady drip of energy. And to get a sufficient flow of energy the birds needed dense matter — densities which could not have formed without baryonic structures.

And the birds’ dependence on baryonic matter extended further. She knew that the birds needed templates of baryonic material even to reproduce.

So baryonic-matter stars had given the photino birds their very being, and now fed them and enabled them to reproduce.

Lieserl brooded. A fine hypothesis. But why, then, should the birds be so eager to kill off their mother-stars?

Once more the chatter of the humans from the Northern passed through her sensorium, barely registering. They were asking her more questions — requesting more detailed forecasts of the likely future evolution of the suffering Sun.

She sailed moodily around the core, thinking about stars and the photino birds.

And her mind made connections it had failed to complete before in millions of years.

At last, she saw it: the full, bleak picture.

And, suddenly, it seemed urgent — terribly urgent — to answer the humans’ questions about the future.

She hurried to the base of her convection cells.

The shower’s needle-sharp jets of water sprayed over Louise’s skin. She floated there at the center of the shower cubicle, listening to the shrill gurgle of the water as it was pumped out of the booth. She lifted her arms up and let the water play over her belly and chest; it was hot enough, the pressure sufficiently high, to make her battered old skin tingle, as if it were being worked over by a thousand tiny masseurs.

She hated being in zero-gee. She always had, and she hated it still; she even loathed having to have a pump to suck the water out of her shower for her. She’d insisted on having this shower installed, curtained off in one corner of the life-lounge, as her one concession to luxury — no, damn it, she thought, this is no luxury; the shower is my concession to what’s left of my humanity.

A hot shower was one of the few sensual experiences that had remained vivid, as she’d got so absurdly old. High-pressure, steaming water could still cut through the patina of age which deadened her skin.

There was hardly anything else left. Since her sense of smell had finally packed up, eating had become a process of basic refuelling, to be endured rather than enjoyed. And, apart from her Virtuals, nothing much stimulated her mentally; it would take more than a thousand-year life to exhaust the libraries of mankind, but she’d long since wearied of the ancient, frozen thoughts of others, rendered irrelevant by the death of the Sun.

She turned off the spigot. Hot air gushed down around her, drying her rapidly. When the droplets had stopped floating off her skin she pulled back the shower curtain.

The lounge was basic — it contained little more than this shower, a small galley, a sleeping cocoon and her data desk with its processor bank. Lashed up in haste from sections of the Northern’s hull material, the lounge was a squat cylinder five yards across, crouched on the shoulders of the Xeelee craft like a malevolent parasite — utterly spoiling the lines of the delicate nightfighter, Louise had thought regretfully. The walls of the lounge were opaqued to a featureless gray, making the lounge rather dingy and claustrophobic. And the place was a mess. Bits of her clothing drifted around in the air, crumpled and soiled, and she was conscious of a stale smell. She really ought to clean up; she knew she utterly lacked the obsessive neatness needed to survive for long in zero gee.

She reached for a towel drifting in the air close by. She rubbed herself vigorously, relishing the feeling of the rough fabric on her skin. A mere blast of air never left her feeling really dry.

The feel of the warm towel on her skin made her think, distantly, about sex.

She’d always had a sour public persona: people saw her as an engineer obsessed with her job, with building things out there. But there was more to her than that — there were elements which Mark had recognized and treasured during their marriage. Sex had always been important to her: not just for the physical pleasure of it but also for what it symbolized: something deep and old within her, an echo of the ancient sea whose traces humans still carried, even now. The contrast of that oceanic experience with her work had made her more complete, she thought.

After she and Mark had reconciled — tentatively, grudgingly, in recognition of their joint isolation in the Northern — they had revived their vigorous sex life. And it had been good, remaining vital for a long time. Longer than either of them had a right to expect, she supposed. She wrapped the towel around her back and began to rub at her buttocks. Maybe if Mark had stayed alive -

The lounge walls snapped to transparency; space darkness flooded over her.

Louise cried out and pulled the towel around her body.

From her comms desk came the sound of laughter.

She scrambled in a locker for fresh clothes. The door of the jury-rigged locker jammed and she hauled at it, swearing, aware of the towel slipping around her.

“By Lethe’s waters, Spinner, what do you think you’re doing?”

Louise could just make out Spinner’s cage, a box of winking lights at the prow of the nightfighter. A shadow moved across the lights — Spinner, probably, twisting in her couch to take a mocking look at her. “I’m sorry. I knew you’d be embarrassed.”

Louise had found a coverall; now she thrust her legs into it. “Then why,” she said angrily, “did you invade my privacy by doing it?”

“What difference does it make? Louise, there’s no one to see; we’re a billion miles from the nearest living soul. And you’re a thousand years old. You really ought to rid yourself of these taboos.”

“But they’re my taboos,” Louise hissed. “I happen to like them, and they make a difference to me. If you ever get to my age, Spinner-of-Rope, maybe you’ll learn a little tolerance.”

“Well, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t de-opaque your walls just to catch you with your pants off.” She sounded mischievous.

Suspiciously, Louise asked, “Why, then?”

“Because — ” Spinner hesitated.

“Because what?”

“Look ahead.”

There was a point of light, far ahead, beyond Spinner’s cage: a point that ballooned, now, exploding at her face -

Saturn, plummeting out of emptiness at her.

Louise cried out and buried her face in her hands.

“Because,” Spinner said softly, “we’re there. I thought you’d enjoy watching our arrival.”

Louise opened her fingers, cautiously.

Steady, orange-brown light shone into her cabin: the light of a planet, illuminated by the bloated body of its Sun.

Spinner was laughing softly.

Louise said slowly, “Spinner — if this is Saturn — where are the rings?”

“Rings? What rings?”

The planet itself was the same swollen mass of hydrogen and helium, with its core of rock twenty times as massive as Earth intact, deep within it. Elaborate cloud systems still wound around the globe, like watercolor streaks of brown and gold, just as she remembered. And the largest moon, Titan, was still there.

But the rings had gone.

Louise hurried to her data desk.

“…Louise? Are you all right?”

From the surface of the city-world of Titan, the rings had been a line of light, geometrically precise, vivid against the autumn gold of Saturn…

Louise made herself reply. “I think I’m mourning the rings, Spinner. They were the most beautiful sight in the Solar System. Who would smash up such harmless, magnificent beauty? And, damn it, they were ours.”

“But,” said Spinner, “there is a ring here. I can see it. Look…”

Following Spinner’s directions, Louise studied her data desk.

The ring showed up as a faint band across the stars, a shadow against the swollen, imperturbable bulk of the planet itself.

Once, three ice moons had circled outside the orbit of Titan: Iapetus, Hyperion and retrograde Phoebe. All that was left of those three moons was this trail of rubble. Thin, colorless, with no evidence of structure, the ring of ice chunks, glowing red in the light of the dying Sun, circled the planet at about sixty planetary radii, a pale ghost of its glorious predecessor.

And where were the other moons?

Louise paged through her data desk. Once, Saturn had had seventeen satellites. Now — as far as she could tell from their orbits — only Titan and Enceladus remained. And there wasn’t much left of Enceladus at all; the little moon still swung through an orbit around four planetary radii from Saturn, but its path was much more elliptical than before. Its surface — always broken, uneven — had been left as rubble. There was no sign of the small human outposts which had once sparkled against the shadows of its curved ridges and cratered plains.

The rest of the moons — even the harmless, ten-mile-wide islands of water ice had gone.

Louise remembered the ancient, beautiful names. Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus… Names almost as old, now, as the myths from which they had been taken; names which had outlived the objects to which they’d been assigned.

“Louise?”

“I’m sorry, Spinner.”

“Still mourning?”

…Janus, Mimas, Tethys, Telesto…

“Yes.”

“I guess somebody has to.”

“Spinner, what happened here?”

“A battle,” Spinner said quietly. “Obviously.”

Calypso, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe…

The nightfighter spread its hundred-mile wings, eclipsing the debris of the shattered moons.

Milpitas sat in his office. From throughout the Temple, there were the sounds of shouting, of screams, of yelled words too indistinct for him to hear.

The shouting seemed to be coming closer.

He cleared his magnetized desk top, putting his paper, pens, data slates away into drawers. He folded his hands and held them over the desk.

The door to his office was opened.

The renegade from — outside — hovered there in the air. He was almost horizontal from Milpitas’ point of view: as if he were defying the Planner to fit him into his orderly, gravity-structured Universe.

The renegade spread his empty hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I know you,” Milpitas said slowly.

“Perhaps you do.” The renegade was tall, quite well-muscled; he wore a practical coverall equipped with a dozen pockets which were crammed with unidentifiable tools. He wore his hair short, but not shaven-clean; his look was confident, even excited. Milpitas tried to imagine this man without the hair — and with a little less of that damnable confidence, too — in standard, drab Superet coveralls, and with a more appropriate posture: stooped shoulders, perhaps, hands folded before him…

“My name’s Morrow. You had a certain amount of — trouble — with me.” The renegade glanced around at the office, as if recalling some sour experience. “I was in here several times, as you tried to explain to me how wrong I was in my thinking…”

“Morrow. You disappeared.”

Morrow frowned. “No. No, I didn’t disappear. Milpitas, you sound like a child who believes that as soon as an object is out of sight, it no longer exists…”

Milpitas smiled. “What do you know of children?”

“Now, a lot,” Morrow said. He smiled, in turn, quite in control. “I didn’t disappear, Milpitas. I went somewhere else. I’ve done extraordinary things, Planner — seen wonderful sights.”

Milpitas folded his hands and settled back in his chair. “How did you get in?”

“Past your sentries?” Morrow smiled. “We came in from above. It took seconds, and we were quite silent. Your sentries were positioned to watch for an approach across the Deck; they didn’t imagine anyone would come in over their heads. They didn’t even know we were in the building, before we took them out.”

“Took them out’?”

“They’re unconscious,” Morrow said. “The forest people use a certain type of frog sweat, which… well, never mind. The sentries are unharmed.”

Milpitas tried to think of something to say — some words with which he could regain control of the situation. He felt a rising panic; suddenly, his orders had failed to be executed. He felt as if he were at the heart of some immense, dying machine, poking at buttons and levers which were no longer linked to anything.

Morrow’s voice was gentle. “It’s over. I know you believe what you’re doing is right, for the people. But this is for the best, Milpitas. More deaths would have been — inexcusable. You see that, don’t you?”

“And the mission?” Milpitas asked bitterly. “The goals of Superet? What of that?”

“That’s not over,” Morrow said. “Come back with me, Milpitas. There are remarkable things out there. The mission is still alive… I want you to help me — help us — achieve it.”

Milpitas closed his eyes again; suddenly he felt immensely old, as if the energy which had sustained him for the best part of a thousand years were suddenly drained away.

“I don’t know if I can,” he said honestly. Someone, in the depths of the Temple, stilled the klaxon at last; the final, chilling echoes of its wail rattled from the close, claustrophobic metal sky.

20

The pod slid, smooth and silent, down toward Titan.

Louise clutched at her seat. The hull was quite transparent, so that it felt as if she — swathed in her environment suit, with a catheter jammed awkwardly inside her — were suspended helplessly above the pale brown clouds of Titan.

Above her, the Xeelee nightfighter folded its huge wings.

Titan, Saturn’s largest satellite, was a world in itself: around three thousand miles across, larger than Earth’s Moon. As she descended, the cloudscape took on the appearance of an infinitely flat, textured plane. Huge low pressure systems in the photochemical smog spiraled around the world, and small, high clouds scudded across the stratosphere.

The first thin tendrils of air curled around the walls of the pod. Overhead, the stars were already misting out.

Suddenly the pod dropped, precipitously. She was jarred down into her seat. Then the little craft was yanked sideways, rocking alarmingly.

“Lethe,” Louise said ruefully, rubbing her spine.

Louise had left Spinner in the lounge, to follow the pod’s progress on the data desk. “Are you all right?” Spinner asked now.

“I’ve been better… I’m not hurt, Spinner-of-Rope.”

“You knew you had to expect this kind of treatment. Titan’s atmosphere is a hundred miles thick: plenty of scope for generating a lot of weather. And there are high winds, up there at the top of the atmosphere.”

It was quite dark in the cabin now; the opaque atmosphere had enfolded the pod completely, leaving only the cabin lights to gleam from the transparent walls.

Spinner went on, “And did you know Titan has seasons? It’s spring; you’ve got to expect a lot of turbulence.”

As the pod dropped further it shuddered against a new onslaught; this time Louise thought she actually heard its structure creak.

“Spring,” murmured Louise. “’Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?’”

“Louise?”

“John Keats, Spinner-of-Rope. Never mind.”

Now the buffeting of the little ship seemed to lessen; she must have passed through the high-wind stratosphere. She pulled out a little slack in the restraints which bound her to the seat. Beyond the hull, the cabin lights illuminated flakes of ammonia ice, and fine swirls of murky gas shot up past the pod and out of sight.

“It’s bloody dark,” she muttered.

“Louise, you’re dropping into a mush of methane, ethane and argon. It’s a smog of photochemical compounds, produced by the action of the Sun’s magnetosphere on the air — I can see a lot of hydrogen cyanide, and — ”

“I know all that,” Louise growled, gripping her seat as the pod lurched again. “Don’t read out the whole damn data desk to me. Photochemical compounds aren’t what I came down here to find.”

“What, then?”

“…People, Spinner.”

Once, this had been the most populous world outside the orbit of Jupiter: Titan had cradled mankind’s most remote cities. Surely — Louise had thought — if anywhere had survived the devastation that had struck the inner worlds it would be here.

She needed to see what was going on. Louise punched at the control pad before her. The walls of the pod faded to pearly opacity. She called for a Virtual image, an amalgam constructed of radar and other data.

Below her, in the pod’s Virtual windows, the landscape of Titan assembled itself, as if from elements of a dream.

She banked the pod and took it skimming over the crude Virtual representation, fifty miles above the surface.

Titan had a core of rock at its heart, clad by a thick mantle of frozen water ice. Beneath the obscuring blanket of atmosphere, eighty percent of the solid ice surface was covered by oceans of liquid methane and ethane, richly polluted by hydrocarbons. The remaining fraction of “dry” ice-land was too sparse to form into sizeable continents; instead, ridges of water-ice, protruding above the methane, formed strings of islands and long peninsulas.

Well, the oceans were still here. Louise let the ancient, familiar names roll through her head: there was the Kuiper Sea, Galilei Archipelago, the Ocean of Huygens, James Maxwell Bay…

But, of the humans who had once named this topography, there was no sign. In fact, it was as if they had never been.

Once, huge factory ships had sailed across these complex oceans, trailing high, oily wakes; enough food had been manufactured in those giant ships to feed all of Titan, and most of the other colony-moons in the Saturn system as well. There were no ships here now. Maybe, if she looked hard enough, she would find traces of huge metal carcasses, entombed in the ice floors of the chemical seas.

…But now there seemed to be something approaching over the tight-curving horizon: a feature which didn’t chime with her memory. She leaned forward in her seat, trying to see ahead more clearly.

It was a ridge of ice, looming over the oceans, stretching from side to side of her field of view as it came over the edge of the world.

“Spinner — look.”

“I can’t quite make it out — it doesn’t seem to fit the maps…”

“Maps?” Louise muttered. “We may as well throw the damn things out.”

It was the rim of a crater — a crater so huge it sprawled like an immense scar around the curve of the planet. Within the mile-high walls of the crater, a new sea, deep and placid, lapped its huge low-gravity waves.

“Well, that wasn’t here before,” Spinner said. “It’s wiped out half the surface of the moon.”

Louise had Spinner download projections of the crater’s overall shape, the deep profile hidden from view by the circular methane ocean it embraced.

Beneath the ocean surface the crater was almost cylindrical, with sharp, vertical walls and a flat base.

“Volcanic, do you think?” Spinner asked.

“It doesn’t look like any volcano mouth I’ve ever seen,” Louise said slowly. “Anyway, Titan is inert.”

“Then what? Could it be an impact crater? Maybe when the moons got broken up — ”

“Look at it, Spinner,” Louise said impatiently. “The shape’s all wrong; this was no impact.”

“Then what?”

Louise sighed. “What do you think? We’ve come all this way to find another relic of war, Spinner-of-Rope. Now we know what happened to the people. When whatever caused that struck Titan, the whole surface of the moon must have convulsed. No wonder the cities were lost…”

She imagined the ice-ground cracking, becoming briefly liquid once more, swallowing communities whole; there must have been mile-high tidal waves in the low gravity methane seas, overwhelming the food ships in moments.

Spinner was silent for a while. Then, “You’re saying this was done deliberately?”

Louise smiled. Superet, reconstructing the future from the glimpses left by Michael Poole’s encounter with the Qax, had come across the concept of a starbreaker: a planet-smashing weapon wielded by the Xeelee — a weapon based on focused gravity waves. Superet had even had evidence that a starbreaker of limited power had been deployed inside the Solar System itself: by the Qax invaders from the future, during their failed onslaught on the craft of the Friends of Wigner.

She said to Spinner, “You ought to be getting used to this by now. We know the Xeelee had weaponry sufficient to destroy worlds. For some reason they spared Titan. Instead — they wiped it clean. Just as they did Callisto.”

Louise took the pod down to one of the largest individual islands, close to the rough rim of the Kuiper Sea. There was a soft crunch when she landed, as the pod crushed the friable-ice surface.

A small airlock blistered out of the side of the pod’s hull, and Louise climbed through it.

Instantly she was enclosed by a shell of darkness. In the murk of photochemical smog, her suit lights penetrated barely a few feet. Looking down she could only just make out the surface. Under a layer of thick frost, which creaked as it compressed under her boots, the ground was firm, flat. She lifted herself on her toes, trying her weight; she felt light, springy, under Titan’s thirteen percent gee. There was a soft wind which pushed at her chest.

Snow, drifting down from the huge atmosphere, began to lace across her faceplate; it was white and stringy, and — when she tried to wipe it off with her glove — it left clinging remnants. It was a snow of complex organic polymers, drifting down from the hundred-mile-thick chemical soup above her head.

“Louise? Can you still hear me?”

“I hear you, Spinner.”

She took a few steps forward, away from the gleaming pod; soon, its lights were almost lost in the polymer sleet.

“You know, we terraformed Titan,” Louise told Spinner. “There were ships to extract food and air from the seas. You could walk about on the surface in nothing more than a heated suit. We got the atmosphere clear, Spinner-of-Rope. You could see Saturn, and the rings. And the Sun. You knew you weren’t alone down here — that you were part of the System…”

Now, the terraforming had collapsed. Titan had reverted. It was as if humans had never walked Titan’s surface.

“There used to be a city here, Spinner. Port Cassini. Huge, glittering caverns in the ice; igloos on the surface… A hundred thousand people, at least.

“Mark was born here. Did you know that?” She looked around, dimly. “And as far as I can remember this was the site of his parents’ home…”

She tried to imagine how it must have been to stand here as the final defense around Titan fell, and the Xeelee onslaught began. The starbreaker beams — cherry-red, geometrical abstractions — burned down, through the hydrocarbon smog, from the invisible nightfighters far above the surface. Methane seas flash-evaporated in moments — and the ancient water-ice of the mantle flowed liquid for the first time in billions of years…

“Louise? Are you ready to go home, now?”

“Home?” Louise raised her face to the hidden sky and allowed the primeval, polymeric snow to build up over her faceplate; for a moment, tears, ancient and salty, blinded her. “Yes. Let’s go home, Spinner-of-Rope.”

“Helium flash,” Mark said.

Uvarov had been dozing; his dreams, as usual, were filled with birds: ugly carrion-eaters, with immense black wings, diving into a yellow Sun. When Mark spoke the dreams imploded, leaving him blind and trapped in his chair once more. He felt a thin, cold sensation in his right arm: another input of concentrated foodstuffs, provided by his chair.

Yum, he thought. Breakfast.

“Mark,” he whispered.

“Are you all right?”

“All the better for your cheery questioning, you — construct.” He spoke with a huge effort, fighting off his all-encompassing tiredness. “If you’re so concerned about my health, plug yourself into my chair’s diagnostics and find out for yourself. Now. Tell me again what you said. And what in Lethe it means…”

“Helium flash,” Mark repeated.

Uvarov felt old and stupid; he tried to assemble his scattered thoughts.

“We’ve heard from Lieserl. Uvarov, the birds are continuing to accelerate the evolution of the Sun.” Mark hesitated; his intonation had gone flat, a sign to Uvarov of his distraction. “I’ve put together Lieserl’s observations with a little extrapolation of my own. I think we can tell what’s going to come next… Uvarov, I wish I could show you. In pictures — a Virtual simulation — it would be easy.”

“Well, you can’t,” Uvarov said sourly, twisting his face from side to side. “Sorry to be so inconvenient. You’re just going to have to hook up a few more processor banks to enhance your imagination and tell me, aren’t you?”

“…Uvarov, the Sun is dying.”

For millions of years, the photino birds had fed off the Sun’s hydrogen-fusing core. Each sip of energy, by each of Lieserl’s birds, had lowered the temperature of the core, minutely.

In time, after billions of interactions, the core temperature had dropped so far that hydrogen fusion was no longer possible. The core had become a ball of helium, dead, contracting. Meanwhile, a shell of fusing hydrogen burned its way out of the Sun, dropping a rain of helium ash onto the core.

“The inert core has steadily got more massive — contracting, and heating up. Eventually the helium in the collapsing core became degenerate — it stopped behaving as a gas, because — ”

“I know what degenerate matter is.”

“All right. But you have to be clear about why that’s important, for what comes next. Uvarov, if you heat up degenerate matter, it doesn’t expand, as a gas would… Degenerate matter is not a gas; it doesn’t obey anything like the gas laws.”

“So we have this degenerate, dead core of helium, the burning shell around it. What next?”

“Now we start speculating. Uvarov, in a conventional giant, when the core mass is high enough — about half a Solar mass — the temperature becomes so high, a hundred million degrees or more, that a new fusion chain reaction starts up: the triple-alpha reaction, which — ”

“The fusion of the helium ash into carbon.”

“Yes. Suddenly the ‘dead’ core is flooded with helium fusion energy. Now remember what I told you, Uvarov: the core is degenerate. So it doesn’t expand, to compensate for all that heat…”

“You turn condescension into an art form,” Uvarov growled impatiently.

“Because it can’t expand, the core can’t cool off. There is a runaway fusion reaction — a helium flash — lasting no more than seconds. After that, the core starts to expand again, and eventually a new equilibrium is reached — ”

“All right. That’s the standard story; now let’s get back to the Sun. Sol isn’t a conventional giant, whatever it is.”

“No. But it’s approaching its helium flash point.”

“Won’t the action of the birds suppress this helium runaway — the helium flash just as they’ve suppressed hydrogen fusion, all this time?”

“No, Uvarov. They’re not taking out enough energy to stop the flash… Maybe they don’t intend to. And, of course, the fact that the core of Sol is so unusually hydrogen-rich is going to make a difference to the outcome. Perhaps there will be some hydrogen fusion in there as well, a complex multiple reaction.”

“Mark. You said a new equilibrium will be reached, after the helium flash.” Uvarov didn’t like the sound of that. He wondered if it would be healthy to be around, while an artificially induced red giant struggled to find a new stability after the explosion of its core… “What will happen, after the helium flash?”

“Well, the pulse of heat energy released by the flash will take time — some centuries — to work its way through the envelope. The envelope will expand further, seeking a new balance between gravity and radiation pressure. And the energy released in the flash will be immense, Uvarov.”

“Immense?”

“Uvarov, there will be a superwind.”

Superwind…

The helium flash would blow away half the mass of the Sun, into an expanding shell ballooning outwards at hundreds of miles a second.

The core — exposed, a shrunken thing of carbon-choked helium — would become a white dwarf star: cooling rapidly, with half the mass of Sol but just a few thousand miles across, no larger than old Earth. The flocks of photino birds, insubstantial star-killers, would continue to swoop around the heart of Sol’s diminished gravity well.

At present — before the flash — Sol was a red giant around two astronomical units across. After the superwind the envelope would be blown into a globe twenty thousand times that size, a billowing, cooling cloud three hundred light days across.

The furthest planet from the heart of old Sol was only forty astronomical units out — six light-hours. So the swelling envelope would, at last, smother all of Sol’s children.

Then, when the superwind was done, the dwarf remnant would emit a new wind of its own: a fizz of hot, fast particles which would blow at the expanding globe, pushing out the inner layers. The globe would become a planetary nebula — a huge, cooling, hollow shell of gas, fluorescing in the light of the dying dwarf at its heart.

Mark said, “At last, of course, the fusing helium in the core will be exhausted. Then the core will shrink once more, until the temperature of the regions around the core becomes high enough for helium fusion to start — in a shell outside the core, but within the hydrogen-burning shell. And the helium fusion will deposit carbon ash onto the core, growing in mass and heating it up — until the fusion of carbon begins…

“The cycle repeats, Uvarov. There will be carbon flashes — and, later, flashes of oxygen and silicon… At last, the giant might have a core of almost pure iron, with an onion-shell structure of fusing silicon, oxygen, carbon, helium and hydrogen around it. But iron is a dead end; it can only fuse by absorbing energy, not liberating it.”

“And all this will happen to the Sun?”

Mark hesitated. “Our standard models say that the reactions go all the way to iron only in stars a lot more massive than the Sun — say, twelve Solar masses or more.” He sighed, theatrically. “Will we get onion-shell fusion in the heart of the Sun? I don’t know, Uvarov. We may as well throw out our theoretical models, I guess. If the photino birds are as widespread as they seem to be, there may not be a single star in the Universe which has followed through a ‘standard’ lifecycle.”

“Superwind,” Uvarov breathed. “How soon is Sol’s helium flash?”

“Lieserl’s observations are sketchy on this. But, Uvarov, the conditions are right. The flash may even have happened by now. The superwind could already be working its way out…”

“How soon, damn you?”

“We have a few centuries. No more.”

Uvarov swept his blind face around the saloon. He pictured the ruined Jovian system beyond these walls, the bloated star dominating the sky outside.

“Then we can’t stay here,” he said.

21

By the time she’d climbed to the top of the giant kapok tree her hand-grips were slick with sweat, and her lungs were pumping rapidly. Spinner-of-Rope took off her spectacles and wiped the lenses on a corner of her loincloth. Zero-gee or not, it still took an effort to haul her bulk around this forest… an effort that seemed to be increasing with age, despite all the AS treatment in the world.

She was at the crown of the kapok. The great tree was a dense, tangled mass of branches beneath her. Seeds drifted everywhere, filling the rippling canopy with points of light — like roaming stars, she thought. Somewhere a group of howler monkeys shrieked out their presence. Their eerie ululations, rising and falling, reminded her of the klaxon which had once called the Undermen to their dreary work…

She put that thought out of her mind with determination. She pulled some dried meat from her belt and chewed on it, relishing the familiar, salty taste. She felt tired, damn it; she’d come here, alone, because she wanted — just for a few hours — to put all of the strangeness below the forest Deck, and beyond the skydome, out of her mind, to immerse herself once more in the simple world in which she’d grown up.

In the distance a bird flapped, shrieking, its colors gaudy against the bland afternoon blue of the skydome.

The bird was flying upside down.

“Spinner-of-Rope.”

The voice was close to her ear. Still chewing her meat, Spinner turned, slowly.

Louise Ye Armonk hovered a few feet away, standing on the squat, neat platform of a zero-gee scooter. Louise grinned. “Did I make you jump? I’m sorry for cheating with this scooter; I’m not sure I would have managed the climb.”

Spinner-of-Rope glared at her. “Louise. Never — never — sneak up on someone at the top of a tree.”

Louise didn’t look too concerned. “Why not? Because you might lose your grip, and drift off the branch a couple of feet? What a disaster.”

Spinner tried to maintain her anger, but she started to feel foolish. “Come on, Louise. I’m trying to make a point.”

Louise, skillfully, brought her scooter in closer to Spinner; without much grace she clambered off the scooter and onto the branch beside Spinner. “Actually,” she said gently, “so am I.” She breathed deeply of the moist forest air, and looked around the sky. “I saw you watching that bird.”

Spinner pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose. “So what?”

Louise picked at the tree bark. “Well, the bird seems to be doing its best to get by, in zero-gee.”

“Maybe. Not everyone here is doing so well,” Spinner said heavily. The loss of gravity was, slowly but surely, devastating the forest biota. “The higher birds and animals seem to be adapting okay… The monkeys quickly learned to adjust the way they climb and jump. But otherwise, things are falling apart, in a hundred tiny ways.” She thought of spiders which could no longer spin webs, of tree-dwelling frogs which found their tiny leaf-bound ponds floating away into the air. “We’re doing our best to keep things working — to save whatever we can,” she said. “But, damn it, even the rain doesn’t fall right any more.”

Louise reached out and took her hand; the old engineer’s skin was cold, leathery. “Spinner, we have to reestablish all of this. Permanently.” Louise lifted her face; the diffuse light of the dome softened the etched-in age lines. “I designed this forest Deck, remember. And this is the only fragment of Earth that’s survived, anywhere in the Universe — as far as we know.”

Spinner-of-Rope pulled her hand away. “I know what your little parable about the bird was about, Louise. I should adapt, just like the plucky little bird. Right? You want me to come back to the nightfighter.”

Louise nodded, studying her.

“Well, it was a dumb parable. The bird is the exception, not the rule. And — ”

“Spinner, I know you needed a break. But you’ve been climbing around these trees for a long time, now. I need you to come back — we all do. I know it’s difficult for you, but you’re the only person I have who can do the job.”

Spinner watched her face, skeptically. “But we’re not talking about mere discontinuity-drive jaunts around the Solar System now. Are we, Louise?”

“No.” Louise wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Spinner felt a hollowness in her chest — as if it had expanded, leaving her heart fluttering like a bird in some huge cavity. Hyperdrive…

“Spinner, we need the hyperdrive. You understand that, don’t you? The Sun is dying. Perhaps we could attempt to establish some sort of colony here, in the Solar System. But we need to find out what’s happening beyond the System. Are there any people left, anywhere? Maybe we can join them — find a better place than the Solar System has become.

“But, without the hyperdrive, journeys like that would take millennia, more even with the discontinuity drive. And I don’t think we have millennia…”

Spinner took a deep breath. “Yes, but… Louise, what will happen when I throw the switch? How will it feel?”

Louise hesitated. “Spinner, I don’t know. That’s the truth; that’s what we want to find out from the first flight. We aren’t going to know for sure until we try it in anger. Mark and I have only just begun to put together theories on how the damn hyperdrive works… Spinner, all we know is it’s something to do with dimensionality.”

A conventional craft (Louise said) worked in a “three-plus-one” dimensional spacetime — three spatial dimensions, plus one of time. And within those dimensions nature was described by a series of fundamental constants — the charge on the electron, the speed of light, the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant, and others.

But — humans believed — physics was governed by the Spin (10) theory, which described symmetries among the forces of nature. And the symmetries needed to be expressed in higher dimensions than four.

“So, Spinner-of-Rope, there are more than three spatial dimensions,” Louise said. “But the ‘extra dimensions’ are compactified—”

“They’re what?”

“Collapsed down to the smallest possible scale — to the Planck scale, below which quantum physics and gravitation merge.”

Once — just after the initial singularity — the forces of physics were one, and the Universe was fully multi-dimensional. Then the great expansion started.

“Three of the spatial dimensions expanded, rapidly, to the scales we see today. The other dimensions remained compactified.”

“Why did three dimensions expand? Why not four, or two, or one — or none at all?”

Louise laughed. “That’s a good question, Spinner. I wish I had a good answer.

“Geometrically, three-dimensional spaces have some unique attributes. For instance, only in three dimensions is it possible for planets to have stable orbits governed by the central forces exerted by stars. Did you know that? Planets in a four-dimensional cosmos would drift into space, or spiral into their suns. So if life needs billions of years of a stable planetary environment, three dimensions are the only possibility. Matter isn’t stable in higher dimensions, even: the Schrödinger wave equation would have no bound solutions… And waves can propagate without distortion, only in three dimensions. So if we need high-fidelity acoustic or electromagnetic signals to be able to make sense of the world, then again, three dimensions is the only possibility.

“Spinner, maybe there are alternate universes, out there somewhere, where more than three dimensions ballooned up after the initial singularity. But as far as we can see, life — our kind of life — couldn’t have evolved there; the fundamental geometry of spacetime wouldn’t have allowed it…

“Remember, though, the extra dimensions are here, still, but they’re rolled up very tightly, into high-curvature tubes a Planck length across.”

“So we can’t see them.”

“No. But — and here’s the trick we think the Xeelee have exploited, Spinner — the extra dimensions do have an impact on our Universe. The curvature of these Planck tubes determines the value of the fundamental constants of physics. So the way the tubes are folded up determines things like the charge of an electron, or the strength of gravity.”

Spinner nodded slowly. “All right. But what has this to do with the hyperdrive?”

“Spinner-of-Rope, we think the Xeelee found a way to adjust some of those universal numbers. By changing the constants of physics — in a small region of space around itself — the hyperdrive can make spacetime unfurl, just a little.” Louise lifted her face. “Then the nightfighter can move, a short distance, through one of the higher dimensions.

“Think of a sheet of paper, Spinner. If you’re confined to two dimensions — to crawling over the paper — then it will take you a long time to get from one side to the other. But if you could move through the third dimension — through the paper — then you could move with huge apparent speed from one place to another…”

Spinner frowned. “I think I see that. Is this something like wormhole travel?”

Louise hesitated. “Not really. Wormholes are defects in our three-plus-one dimensional spacetime, Spinner; they don’t involve the higher collapsed dimensions. And worm-holes are fixed. With a wormhole you can travel only from one place to another, unless you drag the termini around with you. With the Xeelee drive — we think — you can travel anywhere, almost at will. It’s like the difference between a fixed rail route and a flitter.”

Spinner thought it over. “It sounds simple.”

Louise laughed. “Believe me, it’s not.” She turned, distracted. “Hey. Look,” she said, pointing to the skydome.

Spinner looked up, squinting through her spectacles against the glare of the dome. “What?”

Louise leaned closer so that Spinner could sight along her outstretched arm. “See? Those shadows against the dome, over there…”

The shadows, ten or a dozen forms, clambered across a small corner of the skydome, busy, active.

Spinner smiled. “Howler monkeys. They’ve colonized the skydome. I wonder how they got up there.”

“The point is,” Louise said gently, “they’ve adapted, too. Just like that parrot.”

“Another parable, Louise?”

Louise shrugged, looking smug.

Spinner felt, she decided, like one of Morrow’s Under-men. She was no longer free; she was bowed down by the need to serve Louise’s vast, amorphous project.

“All right, Louise, you’ve made your point. Let’s go back to the nightfighter.”

For the first time, Lieserl understood the photino birds.

She thought of novae, and supernovae.

As the newly shining stars had settled into their multi-billion-year Main Sequence lifetimes, the Universe must have seemed a fine place to the photino birds. The stars had appeared stable: eternal, neat little nests of compact gravity wells and fusion energy.

Then had come the first instabilities.

Red giant expansions and novae must have been bad enough. But even a nova was a limited explosion, which could leave a star still intact: survivable, by the infesting birds. A supernova explosion, however, could destroy a star in seconds, leaving behind nothing more than a shriveled, fast-spinning neutron star.

Lieserl tried to see these events from the point of view of the photino birds. The instabilities, the great explosions, must have devastated whole core-flocks. Perhaps, she speculated now, the birds had even evolved a civilization in the past; she imagined huge, spinning cities of dark matter at the heart of stars cities ripped apart by the first star-deaths.

If she were a photino bird, she wouldn’t tolerate this.

The birds didn’t need spectacular, blazing stars. They certainly didn’t need instability, novae and supernovae, the disruption of dying stars. All they demanded from a star was a stable gravity well, and a trickle-source of proton photino interaction energy.

She thought of Sol.

When the birds were finished with the Sun — after the superwind had blown through the wrecked System — a white dwarf would remain: a small, cooling lump of degenerate matter smaller than the Earth. The Sun’s story would be over. It could expect no change, except a slow decline; there would certainly be no cataclysmic events in Sol’s future…

But the dwarf would retain over half the Sun’s original mass. And there would be plenty of dense matter to interact with, and energy from the slow contraction of the star.

The Sun would have become an ideal habitat for photino birds.

Lieserl saw it all now, with terrifying clarity.

The photino birds were not prepared to accept a Universe full of young, hot, dangerous stars, likely to explode at any moment. So they had decided to get it over with — to manage the aging of the stars as rapidly as possible.

And when the birds’ great task was done, the Universe would be filled with dull, unchanging white dwarfs. The only motion would come from the shadowy streams of photino birds sailing between their neutered star-nests.

It was a majestic vision: an engineering project on the grandest possible of scales — a project which could never be equalled.

But it was making the Universe — the whole of the Universe — into a place inimical to humans.

She studied the swelling core of the Sun. Its temperature climbed higher almost daily; the helium flash was close — or might, indeed, already have occurred.

The humans seemed to have assimilated the data she had sent them. A reply came to her, via her tenuous maser-light pathways.

She translated it slowly. A smiling face, crudely encoded in a binary chain of Doppler-distorted maser bursts. Words of thanks for her data. And — an invitation.

Join us, the human said.

Once again, Spinner-of-Rope sat in the cage of the Xeelee nightfighter. Arcs of construction material wrapped around her; beyond them the bloated bulk of the Sun loomed, immense and pale, like some vast ghost.

She tried to settle into her couch. Between each discontinuity-drive jaunt she’d had Mark adjust the couch’s contours, but still it didn’t seem to fit her correctly. Maybe it was because of the biostat sensors with which she continued to be encrusted, for each flight…

Or maybe, she thought dispiritedly, it was just that she was so tired of this bombardment of strangeness.

She fingered her chest, against which — under her suit — lay her father’s arrowhead. Before her was the black horse shoe of the Xeelee control console, with its three grafted-on waldoes. She stared at the waldo straight ahead of her — the one which controlled the hyperdrive. Superficially the waldo was just another box of metal and plastic, its telltale lights glowing warmly; but now it seemed to loom large in her vision, larger even than the corpse of the Sun…

“Spinner. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Louise. I’m here.”

“Are you all right? You’re in your couch?”

Spinner allowed herself a sigh of exasperation. “Yes, I’m in my couch, just where you saw me not five minutes ago.”

Louise laughed. “All right, Spinner, I’m sorry. I’m in the life-lounge. Look whatever risks you take in this, I’ll be right here sharing them…”

Now Spinner laughed. “Thanks, Louise; that’s making me feel a lot better.”

Louise was silent for a moment, and Spinner imagined her lopsided, rather tired grin. “I never was much of a motivator. It’s amazing I ever got as far as I did in life… Are you ready to start?”

Spinner took a deep breath; her throat was tight, and she felt light, remote as if this were all some Virtual show, not connected to anything real.

“I’m ready,” she said.

There was silence; Louise Ye Armonk seemed to be holding her breath.

“Spinner-of-Rope, if you need more time — ”

“I said, I’m ready.” Spinner opened her eyes, settled into her crash couch, and flexed her gloved fingers. Before her, the touchpads on the hyperdrive waldo glowed.

“Tell me what to do, Louise.”

The Sun was a brooding mass to her right hand side, flooding the cage with dull red light.

There were three touchpads in a row, all shining yellow. Without thinking about it. Spinner stabbed her forefinger at the middle touchpad.

The ambient light — changed.

She was aware that she had stopped breathing; even her pulse, loud in her ears inside this helmet, seemed to have slowed to a crawl.

She was staring at her gloved hand, the outstretched forefinger still touching the surface of the waldo; beyond that, in her peripheral vision, she could see the ribs of the construction-material cage. It was all just as it had been, a heartbeat before.

…Except that the shadows which her hand cast across the waldo box had altered, subtly.

Before, the diffuse globe of the Sun had flooded her field of view with a crimson, bloody glow, and her cage was filled with streaky, soft-edged shadows. But now the shadows had moved around, almost through a hundred and eighty degrees. As if the Sun — or whatever light source was acting now — had moved around to her left.

She lifted her hand and turned it over before her face, studying the way the light fell across her fingers, the creases in the glove material. The quality of the light itself had changed, too; now it seemed more diffuse — the shadows still softer, the light pinker, brighter.

She dropped her hand to her chest. Through layers of suit material she could feel the hard edges of her father’s arrow blade, pressing against her chest. She pushed the point of the head into her body, feeling her skin break; the tiny pinpoint of pain was like a single, stationary point of reality amid this Universe of wheeling light.

She turned her head, slowly.

The Sun had gone. Where its immense bulk had coated the sky with crimson smoke, there was only emptiness — blackness, a smearing of wizened stars.

And to her left there had appeared a wall of pinkish gas, riven by lanes of dark, its edges diffusing into blackness. It was a cloud full of stars; it must be light-years across.

She must have traveled hundreds — perhaps even thousands of light-years. And she’d felt nothing. A mere touch of a button…

She folded forward, dropping her head into her lap. She clutched the arrowhead to her chest, stabbing at her skin, over and over; she spread one hand against her faceplate and scrabbled at it, seeking her face. She felt her bladder loosen; warm liquid gushed through her catheter.

“Spinner-of-Rope. Spinner…”

Hands on her shoulders, shaking her; a distant voice. Her thumb was crammed into her mouth. The pain in her chest had become a dull ache.

Someone pulled her hand away from her mouth, gently.

Before her there was a square, weary face, concern showing through an uneven smile, a crop of gray, stiff hair.

“Louise… ?”

Louise’s smile broadened. “So you’re with us again. Thank Life for that; welcome back.”

Spinner looked around. She was still in her cage; the waldoes still sat on their jet-black horseshoe of construction material before her, their touchpad lights burning. But a dome of some milky, opaque material had been cast around the cage, shutting out the impossible sights outside.

Louise regarded her gravely. She hovered beyond the cage, attached by a short length of safety rope; reaching through the cage bars she held out a moistened cloth. “Here. You’d better clean yourself up.”

Spinner glanced down at herself. Her helmet lay in her lap. Her hands were moist with spittle — and she’d dribbled down her chin — and where Louise had opened Spinner’s suit at the chest, there was a mass of small, bleeding punctures.

“What a mess,” Spinner said. She dabbed at her chest.

Louise shrugged. “It’s no great trouble, Spinner. Although I had to move fast; I needed to get the air-dome up around you before you managed to open your faceplate.”

Spinner picked up her helmet; reaching through the faceplate, she found an apple-juice nipple. “Louise, what happened to me?”

Louise grinned and reached through the construction-material bars; with her old, leathery hand she touched Spinner’s cheek. “The hyperdrive happened to you. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Spinner. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I had no idea how traumatic it would be.”

Spinner frowned. “There was no sensation of movement at all. It seemed like magic, impossible. Even with the discontinuity drive there are visual effects; you can see the planets looming up at you, and the blue shift, and — ”

Louise sighed and rubbed her face. “I know. Sometimes, I think I forget that this is a Xeelee ship. It’s just not designed for human comfort… I guess we can conclude that the Xeelee are a little tougher, psychologically, than we are.”

“But did it work, Louise?”

“Yes. Yes, it worked, Spinner. We crossed over two thousand light-years — in a time so brief I couldn’t even measure it…”

Louise took her hand from Spinner’s cheek and rested it on her shoulder. “Spinner, I can de-opaque this dome. If you feel you want me to.”

Spinner didn’t want to think about it. “Do it, Louise.”

Louise picked up her helmet and whispered instructions into its throat mike.

The Trifid Nebula, from Earth, had once been a faint glow in the constellation of Sagittarius — as broad as the full Moon in the sky, but far dimmer; at over two thousand light-years from Earth, powerful telescopes had been needed to reveal its glorious colors. Light took fully thirty years to cross its extent.

Louise and Mark had chosen the Trifid as the first hyperdrive target. Even if the nightfighter’s trajectory was off by hundreds of light-years, the Nebula should surely be an unmistakable landmark.

But the waldo had worked. Louise’s programming had brought the nightfighter to within sixty light-years of the rim of the Nebula.

The Nebula was a wall, sprawled across half of Spinner’s sky. It was a soft edged study in pinks and reds. Dark lanes cut across the face of the Nebula in a rough Y-shape, dividing the cloud into three parts. The material seemed quite smooth, Spinner thought, like some immense watercolor painting. Stars shone through the pale outer edges of the Nebula — and shone, too, from within its bulk.

“This is an emission nebula, Spinner,” Louise said abstractedly. “There are stars within the gas; ultraviolet starlight ionizes hydrogen in the Nebula, making the gas shine in turn…” She pointed. “Those dark rifts are empty of stars; they’re dozens of light-years long. The Nebula is called the Trifid because of the way the lanes divide the face into three… see? And — can you see those smaller, compact dark spots? They’re called Bok globules… the birth places of new stars, forming inside the Nebula.”

Spinner-of-Rope turned to Louise; the engineer sounded flat, distant.

“Louise? What’s wrong?”

Louise glanced at her. “I’m sorry, Spinner. I should be celebrating, I guess. After all, the hyperdrive delivered us just where I expected to be. And I was only using the Trifid as a landmark, anyway. But — damn it, the Trifid used to be so much more, Spinner. The colors, all the way through the spectrum from blue, and green, all the way to red… There were hot, bright young stars in there which made it blaze.

“But now, those stars are gone. Snuffed out, or exploded, or rushed through their lifecycles; like every other star in the damn Galaxy.

“I just find it hard to accept all this. I try, but every so often something like this comes along, and hits me in the eye.”

Spinner turned to the Nebula again, trying to lose herself in its light.

Louise smiled, her face outlined by the Nebula’s soft light. “And what about you?… Why, Spinner, you’re crying.”

Surprised, Spinner raised the heel of her wrist to her cheeks. There was moisture there. She brushed it away, embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just — ”

“Yes?”

“It’s so beautiful.” Spinner stared at the eagle wings of the Nebula, drinking in its pale colors. “Louise, I’m so lucky to be here, to see this. Uvarov might have sent someone else through the Locks, that first time; not me and Arrow Maker. You might have asked someone else to learn to run your nightfighter for you — and not me.

“Louise, I might have missed this. I might have died without seeing it — without ever even knowing it existed.” She looked at Louise uncertainly. “Do you understand?”

Louise smiled. “No.” She reached into the cage and patted Spinner’s arm. “But once I would have felt the same way. Come on, Spinner. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s go home.”

Spinner-of-Rope picked up her helmet. As she fastened up her suit, she kept her eyes fixed on the impossible beauty of the Trifid.

22

Lieserl walked into the dining saloon of the Great Britain.

She hesitated, uncertain, in the low doorway. She was stunned by the antique beauty of the place: by its fine pillars and plasterwork, the mirrors glimmering on the walls. She was the last to arrive for this strange dinner; there were six people — three men and three women — already seated, facing each other at the center of one of the long tables. The only light came from candles (real candles, or Virtuals?) set on the table between them. As the people talked, their faces, and the fine cutlery and glass, shone in the flickering, golden light; shadows stretched across the rest of the old saloon, turning it into a place of mystery — even romance.

One of the men turned as she came in. He rose, pushing back his chair, and walked toward her, smiling. His blue eyes were bright in a dark face.

She felt an odd, absurd, flutter of nervousness in her throat; she raised her hand to her mouth, and felt the coarseness of her flesh, the lines etched deep there. This was her first genuine human interaction in five million years… But how ludicrous to suffer adolescent nerves like this! She was an AI, geologically old, yet within mere subjective days of returning to the company of humans she had become immersed once more in the complex, impossibly difficult world of human interactions.

She felt a sudden, intense, nostalgic desire to return to the clean, bright interior of the Sun. All those millennia, orbiting the core with the photino birds, seemed like a long, fantastic dream to her now: an interval within this, the true human reality…

The man reached out and touched her arm. His flesh was firm, warm.

She cried out and stumbled backwards.

Five faces, bright with candlelight, turned toward her, and the conversation died.

No one had touched Lieserl in megayears.

The man leaned toward her, his blue eyes bright and mischievous. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist that. I’m Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu.”

She straightened herself up, primly, and glared at him. The sudden touch had left a trembling, deep in her stomach, and she was sure a flush was spreading over her cheeks, despite her age of physical-sixty. She was vividly aware — too aware, distractingly so — of Mark’s presence beside her.

He took her arm again, more delicately, and escorted her toward the dinner party. “I won’t startle you again, I promise. And I’m the only Virtual here other than you, of course.”

“These Virtual illusions are just too damn good sometimes,” she said. Her voice sounded feathery — weak, she thought. It was going to take her a long time to forgive Mark Wu for that trick.

He led her to a seat and pulled it out for her — so that was Virtual, too — and she sat with the rest.

The woman opposite her leaned forward and smiled. Lieserl saw a square, strong face, tired eyes, a thatch of grizzled hair. “I’m Louise Ye Armonk,” she said. “You’re welcome here, Lieserl.”

“Ah,” Lieserl said. “Louise. The leader.”

One of the men — grotesquely blind, bald, wrapped in a blanket — allowed his head to rock back on its spindle of a neck, and bellowed laughter.

Louise looked weary. “Lieserl, meet Garry Uvarov… You’ve spoken with him before.”

Louise introduced the rest: Morrow, a spindly, reticent man who, with Uvarov, had supervised her downloading through the maser link from the Interface carcass (now abandoned) inside the Sun; and two tiny, young-looking women with strange names — Spinner-of-Rope, Trapper-of-Frogs — their bare flesh startlingly out of place in the formal surroundings of the saloon. Their faces were painted with vivid, intimidating splashes of scarlet, and patches of their scalps were shaven bare. The older-looking one of the pair wore glinting spectacles and carried a crude arrowhead on a thong tied around her neck.

Lieserl was still new enough to all this to be intensely aware of her own appearance. Her hands cast soft shadows, and her brooch — of intertwined snakes and ladders — glittered in the candlelight. Looking out from the twin caverns of her eyes, she saw how the flickering of the light was reflected, with remarkable accuracy, on the blurred outlines of her own face; she knew she must look quite authentic to the others.

She smiled at Louise Ye Armonk. “You’ve invested a great deal of processing power in me.”

Louise looked a little defensive; she pulled back slightly from the table. “We can afford it. The Northern’s on idle. We’ve plenty of spare capacity.”

“I wasn’t criticizing. I was thanking you. I can see you’re trying to make me welcome.”

Mark, sitting beside Lieserl, leaned toward her. “Don’t mind Louise. She’s always been as prickly as a porcupine…”

Spinner-of-Rope, the girl with the spectacles, said: “A what?”

“…and that’s why I divorced her.”

“I divorced him,” Louise Ye Armonk said. “And still couldn’t get rid of him.”

“Anyway,” Mark said to Lieserl, “maybe you should reserve your thanks until you’ve seen the food.”

The meal was served by autonomic ’bots. A ’bot — presumably a Virtual — served Mark and Lieserl.

The meal was what Louise Ye Armonk called “traditional British” — just what somebody called “Brunel” would once have enjoyed, on an occasion like this, she said. Lieserl stared at the plates of simulated animal flesh doubtfully. Still, she enjoyed the wine, and the sensation of fresh fruit; with discreet subvocal commands she allowed herself to become mildly drunk.

The conversation flowed well enough, but seemed a little stilted, stale to Lieserl.

During the meal, Trapper-of-Frogs leaned toward her. “Lieserl…”

“Yes?”

“Why are you so old?”

Uvarov, the crippled surgeon, threw back his head and bellowed out his ghastly laughter once more. Trapper looked confused, even distressed. Watching Uvarov, Lieserl felt herself start to incubate a deep, powerful dislike.

She smiled at Trapper, deliberately. “It’s all right, dear.” She spread her hands, flexing the thin webbing between thumb and forefinger, immersing herself in the new reality of the sensation. “It’s just that this is how I remember myself. I chose this Virtual shell because it reflects how I still feel inside, I suppose.”

“It’s how you were before you were loaded into the Sun?” Spinner-of-Rope asked.

“Yes… although by the time I reached my downloading I was quite a bit older than my aspect now. You see, they actually let me die of old age… I was the first person in a long time to do so.”

She began to tell them of how that had felt — of the blights of age, of rheumy eyes and failing bladders and muscles like pieces of old cloth — but Spinner-of Rope held her hand up. Spinner smiled, her eyes large behind her glasses. “We know, Lieserl. We’ll take you to the forest sometime; we’ll tell you all about it.”

The meal finished with coffee and brandy, served by the discreet ’bots. Lieserl didn’t much care for the brandy, but she loved the flavor of the coffee. Virtual or not.

Mark nodded at her appreciation. “The coffee’s authenticity is no accident. I spent years getting its flavor right. After I got stranded in this Virtual form I spent longer on replicating the sensations of coffee than anything.” His blue eyes were bright. “Anything, except maybe those of sex…”

Disconcerted, Lieserl dropped her eyes.

Mark’s provocative remark made her think, however. Sex. Perhaps that was the element missing from this gathering of antique semi-immortals. Some had been preserved better than others — and some, like Spinner-of-Rope, were even genuinely (almost) young — but there was no sexual tension here. These people simply weren’t aware of each other as human animals.

She knew of Uvarov’s eugenics experiments on the forest Deck, inspired by a drive to improve the species directly. Maybe this gathering, with its mute testimony to the limitations of AS technology, was a partial justification of Uvarov’s project, she thought.

Louise Ye Armonk gently rapped her empty brandy glass with a spoon; it chimed softly. “All right, people,” she said. “I guess it’s time for us to get down to business.”

Uvarov grinned toward Lieserl, showing a mouth bereft of teeth. “Welcome to the council of war,” he hissed.

“Well, perhaps this is a war,” Louise said seriously. “But at the moment, we’re just bystanders caught in the crossfire. We have to look at our options, and decide where we’re going from here.

“We’re in — a difficult situation.” Louise Armonk looked enormously tired, worn down by the responsibilities she had taken on, and Lieserl felt herself warm a little to this rather intimidating engineer. “Our job was to deliver a wormhole Interface to this era, to the end of time, and then travel back through the Interface to our own era. Well, we know that didn’t work out. The Interface is wrecked, the wormhole collapsed — and we’ve become stranded here, in this era.

“What I want to decide here is how we are going to preserve the future of our people. Everything else — everything — is subordinate to that. Agreed?”

For a moment there was silence around the table; Lieserl noticed how few of them were prepared to meet Louise’s cold eyes.

Morrow leaned forward into the light. Lieserl saw, with gentle amusement, how his bony wrists protruded from his sleeves. “I agree with Louise. We have one priority, and one only. And that’s to protect the people on this ship: the two thousand of them, on the Decks and in the forest. That’s what’s real.”

Louise smiled. “Morrow, you have the floor. How, exactly?”

“It’s obvious,” Morrow said. “For better or worse, we’re now the custodians of a thousand-year-old culture — a culture which has evolved in the conditions which were imposed on it during the flight. The confined space, the limited resources… and the constant, one-gee gravity.

“But now the flight is over. And we took away the gravity, virtually without notice. You know we managed to break up the Temple sieges, without much injury or loss of life. But, Louise, I can’t tell you that life in the Decks has gone back to normal. How could it? Most people are barely retaining their sanity, let alone returning to work. No one’s producing any food. At the moment we’re working our way through stores, but that’s not going to last long.”

Trapper pushed her face forward. “And in the forest, too, the biota are — ”

Louise held up her hands. “Enough. Morrow has made the point. Give me a suggestion, please.”

Morrow and Trapper exchanged glances. “If there was an Earth to return to,” Morrow said slowly, “I’d say return there.”

“But there isn’t,” Uvarov said acidly. His voice was a rasp, synthesized by some device in his throat. “Or had you missed the point?”

Morrow was clearly irritated, but determined to make his case. “I know there’s no Earth.”

“So?” Louise asked.

“So,” Morrow said slowly, “I suggest we stay in the ship. We overhaul it, quickly, and retrieve more reaction mass. Then we send it on a one-gee flight.”

“Where?” Mark asked.

“Anywhere. It really doesn’t matter. We could loop around the Sun in some kind of powered orbit, for all I care. The point is to restart the drive: to restore acceleration-induced gravity inside the ship. Let us — let the people in there get back to normal again, and start living.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Spinner-of-Rope said, “Actually, in this scenario, it surely would be better to stay in the Solar System, on a powered orbit. The new chunk of reaction mass would be used up, in time; wouldn’t it be better to stay close enough to the Sun to be assured of being able to refuel later?… Even if that’s not for another thousand years from now.”

“Perhaps.” Louise rubbed her nose thoughtfully. “But I’m not sure it’s going to be viable to stay in the ship. Not in the long term.” She sighed. “The dear old Northern did her job superbly well — she exceeded all her design expectations. And maybe she could last another thousand years.

“But, in the end, she’s going to fail. It may not be for ten thousand years, but failure will come. And then what?” She frowned. “Then, we might not be around to oversee any transition to another environment.”

“There’s a more fundamental point,” Mark said seriously. “The engineering — the nuts and bolts — may have survived the trip, but the social fabric of the Northern didn’t stand the strain so well. Consider the behavior of the Planners, toward the end; their messianic visions, which had had a thousand long years to incubate, became psychotic delusions, virtually.” He looked pointedly at Uvarov. “And we had one or two other little local difficulties along the way.”

“Yes.” Louise’s tiredness was etched into her face. “I guess, in the end, we didn’t do a very good job of preserving our rationality, across the desert of time we’ve traversed…”

Mark looked around the table. “People, we aren’t Xeelee. We aren’t designed to live with each other for centuries, or millennia. We just don’t know how to build a society that could survive, indefinitely, in a cramped, enclosed box like the ship. We’ve already failed to do so.”

“Do you have an alternative?” Louise asked.

“Sure. We stay in the System. But we get out of the damn ship. We could try to colonize some of the surviving moons. They can give us raw materials for habitats, at least. We could break up the Northern to give the new colonies a start… Louise, what I’m advocating is giving ourselves space, before we kill each other.”

Uvarov turned his face toward the Virtual; his blind smile was like a snake’s, Lieserl thought. “A nice romantic thought,” he said. “But not viable, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the helium flash.” Uvarov turned, disconcertingly, straight to Lieserl; his eyes were shadowed pits. “The flash: the coming gift from Lieserl’s cute dark matter chums inside the Sun. Our best predictions are that it will blossom from the Sun within — at the most — a few centuries.” He swiveled his head toward Louise. “And after that we can expect the carbon flash, and the oxygen flash, and… My friends, thanks to the photino birds the Solar System is, in practical terms, uninhabitable.”

Mark glared at the old surgeon. “Then come up with a better idea.”

Louise held up her hands. “Wait. Let’s talk around the photino birds a little.” She glanced at Lieserl. “You know more about the birds than any of us. Uvarov’s projections are right, I suppose.”

“About the continuing forced evolution of the Sun? Oh, yes.” Lieserl nodded, feeling uncomfortable to be at the center of attention; she was aware of the flickering candlelight playing around her nose and eyes. “I’ve watched the birds for five million years. They’ve maintained their behavior pattern for all of that time; I’ve no reason to believe they are going to change now. And your observations show that every other star, as far as we can tell, is inhabited — ”

Uvarov scowled. “Infested. These birds of yours — these creatures of dark matter — they are our true enemy.”

Louise regarded Lieserl. “Do you think he’s right about that, too?”

Lieserl thought carefully. “No. Not exactly. Louise, I don’t think the birds really know we are here. After all, we’re as marginally visible to them as they are to us.” She closed her eyes; the illusion of inner eyelids was remarkably accurate, she thought absently. “I think they became aware of me, quite early… I’ve told you I think they tried to find ways to keep me alive. But they never showed any inclination to go seeking more of my kind. And they never tried to communicate with me… Still,” she said firmly, “I don’t think it’s true that the photino birds are an enemy.”

Uvarov laughed. “Then what in Lethe’s waters are they? They fit most of the criteria I can think of.”

Lieserl quailed from the harshness of the ruined man’s tone, but she pressed on. “I just don’t think it’s helpful to think of them in that way. They’re doing what they’re doing — wrecking our Sun — because that’s what they do. By accelerating the stars through their lifecycles they’re building a better Universe for themselves, and their own offspring, their own future.” She groped for an image. “They’re like insects. Ants, perhaps.” She glanced around the table. “Do any of you know what I’m talking about? The birds are following their own species imperatives. Which just happen to cut across ours, is all.”

Mark nodded. “I think your analogy is a good one. The birds don’t even have to be alive, in our sense of the word, to accomplish enormous things — changes on a cosmic scale. From the way you’ve described their lifecycles, they sound like classic von Neumann self-replicating machines…”

Uvarov leaned forward; his head seemed to roll at the top of his thin neck. “Listen to me. Alive or not, conscious or not, the photino birds are our eternal, true enemy. Because they are of dark matter, we are of baryonic matter.”

Louise drained her brandy snifter and poured herself a fresh measure. “Maybe so. But for most of human history — as far as we can tell from the old Superet projections, and from the accounts Lieserl has provided us — the enemy of man was seen as the Xeelee.”

Uvarov smiled, eerily. “I don’t deny that, of course. Why should you be surprised at such a monumental misapprehension? My friends, even the comparatively few millennia of human history before our departure from the time streams in the Northern were a litany of ghastly errors: the tragi-comic working out of flaws hard-wired deep into our psyches, a succession of ludicrous, doomed enterprises fueled by illusions and delusions. I refer you to the history of religious conflict and economic ideology, for a start. And I see no reason to suppose that people got any wiser after we left.” He turned his head to Mark. “You were a socio-engineer, before you dropped dead,” he said bluntly. “You’ll confirm what I say. It seems to me that the Xeelee war — or wars — were no more than still another ghastly, epochal error of mankind. We know that the Xeelee inhabited a higher plane, intellectually, than humans ever could: you only have to consider that remarkable craft, the nightfighter, to see that. But humans being humans — could never accept that. Humans believed they must challenge the Xeelee: overthrow them, become petty kings of the baryonic cosmos.

“This absurd rivalry led, in the end, to the virtual destruction of the human species. And — worse — it blinded us to the true nature of the Xeelee, and their goals: and to the threat of the dark matter realm.

“It is clear to me now that there is a fundamental conflict in this Universe, between the dark and light forms of matter — a conflict which has, at last, driven the stars to their extinction. Differences among baryonic species — the Xeelee and ourselves, for instance — are as nothing compared to that great schism.”

Louise Ye Armonk frowned. “That’s a fairly gloomy scenario, Uvarov. Because if it’s true — ”

“If I’m correct, we face more than a simple search for safety beyond this imperilled Solar System. We may not be able to find a place to hide in this cosmos. Even if we were able to found some viable colony, the birds would come to seek it out, and destroy it. Because they must.”

Mark, the Virtual, seemed to be suppressing a laugh. “This Universe ain’t big enough for the both of us… Let me sum up: everyone’s dead, and the whole Universe is doomed. Well. How are we supposed to cope with an emergency like that?” He grinned.

Lieserl studied his face curiously. After their brief physical contact, she felt intensely aware of Mark. And yet, it disquieted her that he could speak so flippantly.

For if Uvarov was right, then it could be that the humans in this fragile old ship were the only people left alive in an implacably hostile Universe.

Lieserl seemed to shrink in on herself, as if cowering inside this recently rediscovered shell of humanity; she looked around at the serious, young-old faces in the candlelight. Could it be true? Was this — she wondered with a stab of self-pity — was this the final ironic joke to be played on her by a vicious fate? She had been born as an alien within her own species. Now she had returned — been welcomed, even — and was it only to find that the story of man was finished?

“I’m sorry,” Mark was saying; he seemed deliberately to calm down. “Look, Uvarov, what you’re saying sounds absurd. Impossibly pessimistic.”

“Absurd? Pessimistic?” Uvarov swiveled his blind eyes toward Mark. “You have sight; I do not. Show me a part of the sky free from the corruption wrought by these dark-matter crows.”

Mark’s grin grew uncertain. “But we can’t escape the cosmos.”

Now Uvarov smiled, showing the blackness of his toothless mouth. “Can’t we?”

Lieserl watched Uvarov with interest. His analysis of the Northern’s situation had a devastating clarity. He seemed to be prepared to address issues with unflinching honesty — more honestly than any of the others, including herself.

Perhaps this was why Louise Armonk kept Uvarov around, Lieserl speculated. As a human he was barely acceptable, and his sanity hung by a thread. But his logic was pitiless.

Spinner-of-Rope folded her bare arms on the tablecloth. “So, Doctor, you know better than all the generations of humans who ever lived.”

Uvarov sighed. “Perhaps I do, my dear. But then I have the benefit of hindsight.”

“Then tell us,” Louise said. “You said humans were blind to the goals of the Xeelee. What were the Xeelee up to, all this time?”

“It’s obvious.” Uvarov swept his empty eyes around the table, as if seeking a reaction. “The Xeelee are the dominant baryonic species — the baryonic lords. And they have led the fight, the climactic battle for the Universe, against these swarms of dark-matter photino birds. They have been striving to preserve themselves in the face of the dark matter threat.”

“And the human wars with the Xeelee — ”

” — were no more than an irritation to the Xeelee, I should judge. But a dreadful, strategic error by humanity.”

The group fell into silence; Lieserl noticed that the eyes of Trapper-of-Frogs had become huge with wonder, childlike. She stared into the candle flames, as if the truth of Uvarov’s words could be found there.

“All right,” Louise said sharply. “Uvarov, what I need to understand is where this leaves us. What should we actually do?”

There was a gurgling sound from within Uvarov’s wrapping of blankets; Lieserl, uneasily, realized that his chair was feeding him as he spoke.

“What we should do,” he said, “is obvious. We cannot possibly defend ourselves against the photino birds. Therefore we must throw ourselves on the mercy of our senior cousins — we must seek the protection of the baryonic lords, the Xeelee.”

Mark laughed. “And how, exactly, do we do that?”

“We have evidence that the Xeelee are constructing a final redoubt,” Uvarov said. “A last defense perimeter, within which they must intend to fall back. We must go there.”

Louise looked puzzled. “What evidence? What are you talking about?”

Mark thought for a moment. “He means the Great Attractor…” He summarized the findings of the anomalous gravity-wave emissions from the direction of the Attractor.

Louise frowned. “How do you know that’s anything to do with the Xeelee?”

“Well, it could make sense, Louise; from the gravity waves we’ve picked up, we know something is going on at the Attractor site. Some kind of activity… something huge. And there’s no sign of life anywhere else…”

Uvarov nodded, his head jerking. “The Attractor is an immense construction site, perhaps: the last great baryonic project. We can even guess at its nature.”

“Yes?” Louise snapped.

“We know their technology was based on the manipulation of spacetime,” Uvarov said. “We have the evidence of the starbreaker — gravity-wave weapons — and the domain wall defect drive of the nightfighter. I believe the object in Sagittarius, whatever it is, is a construct.”

“A construct of what?”

“Manipulated spacetime,” Uvarov said.

“It’s logical, Louise,” Mark said. “Think about it. Only through spacetime effects, including gravitation, can the Xeelee interact with the photino birds. So they’ve evolved weapons and artifacts based on the manipulation of spacetime: the nightfighter domain-wall drive, the starbreaker…”

“The Ring,” Lieserl breathed. “Perhaps this — the Great Attractor — is the Ring. The Xeelee’s greatest, final Project…” Is it possible? “Dr. Uvarov, have you found the Ring?”

Garry Uvarov turned to her. “Perhaps.”

Mark was nodding. “Maybe you’re right… We’ve evidence that the dark matter creatures know about the activity in Sagittarius, too.” To Lieserl he said, “We’ve seen streams of them coming and going from the Sun and heading in the direction of the Attractor… as if that is the focus of their activities, as well.”

Uvarov smiled. “It is the final battlefield.”

“How far?” Lieserl asked.

Louise grimaced, her mouth twisting. “To the Great Attractor? Three hundred million light-years… It’s no walk around the block.”

“But we could get there,” Mark said. Lieserl noticed that his tone was flat, more distant than before. “We have the nightfighter hyperdrive. We’ve no evidence that the hyper-drive is distance-limited. Spinner’s flights have already man-rated it…”

Lieserl saw how Spinner-of-Rope shrank, subtly, away from the table, and dropped her small hands into her lap, her round face expressionless.

Louise Ye Armonk was frowning. “We’d have to find a way of transporting our people, obviously.”

Mark spread his hands. “Surely that’s possible. We may have to detach the lifedome from the Northern, fix it to the nightfighter somehow…”

Louise nodded. “We’d have to strengthen the dome internally, though… Obviously we’ll need co-operation from the Decks, Morrow — will we get it?”

Morrow leaned forward, into the light, to reply.

Lieserl folded her hands on the table and tried to stop them trembling. She let the rest of the conversation, as it delved into detail, wash over her.

The decision seemed to have been made, then, almost by default. She examined it in her own mind.

Had there been any alternative? Given Uvarov’s devastating logic, probably not.

But Uvarov’s logic implied that she — Lieserl — was going to end her own long, strange life at the center of all myths — myths which had persisted for most of mankind’s sad history.

She was going to the Ring…