It was a room, but not one I recognised. As I stepped out of the chamber, darkness yielded to light. The space was smaller even than Silver Wings’ bridge - little larger than a lounge or kitchen. The walls were square and metallic, with bolt-like reinforcements. The room contained nothing except the emergency survival device Hesperus had already described.
I recognised it.
It was a green cube, densely patterned with mouldings depicting castles and palaces, knights and princesses, ponies and dragons and sea-serpents. It was Palatial, or at least a clever replica of that ancient game. I must have brought it with me all the way from the Golden Hour, across six million years.
It was exactly as I remembered it.
I walked in through the portal in one green face of the cube. Instead of the glowing holographic landscape of the Kingdom, with the Palace of Clouds centremost, there was only a stasis casket, surrounded by multiple impasse generators.
‘Why here?’ I asked myself. But if I did not have the answer, it was unlikely anyone else would.
I settled myself into the seat. In an emergency situation, there was no sense in selecting anything other than the highest possible stasis ratio. I moved the controls to a million. If Silver Wings was destroyed, I might be rescued by one of the ships of the cordon within months or years of planetary time. On the other hand, I might sail right past them, destined to fall through space for tens of thousands of years. This time at least I was prepared for an extended stay. Before the restraints tightened, I dropped Synchromesh into my eyes. The combination of ‘mesh, stasis and relativistic time dilation would keep me alive until I was on the other side of the galaxy.
‘Hesperus?’ I asked, as the chamber warned me that stasis was about to be initiated. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Of course, Purslane.’
‘I’m about to go under. I just wanted to say—’
‘There is no need to say anything. I was, and will remain, your friend.’
‘I hope you can forgive us for the things we did.’
‘Machines may do awful things to the organic if we are not successful. One day, we may both need forgiveness. Until then, you have both my forgiveness and my thanks.’
‘Hesperus?’ I asked.
But there was no answer. The restraints began to tighten. Before they bound me into immobility I set my chronometer and let the Synchromesh take effect. Then I was in stasis, and I had time for exactly two coherent thoughts.
The first was that I was still alive.
The second was that we had almost certainly failed.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Hesperus had a message for me when I emerged from abeyance. I had intended to come out when Silver Wings was approaching the stardam, just before I expected the opener to activate. As it was, I came back to the living during a major space battle, almost a micro-war, between the cordon around the stardam and the ship they were trying to stop. To call it a ‘battle’ implies a certain even-handedness to the affair, but in fact it was a ruthlessly one-sided bloodbath. Silver Wings brushed aside the local civilisations’ efforts as if it was almost beneath her dignity to acknowledge them at all. But they did not give up, even when they had thrown dozens of ships against that hopelessly invulnerable target. The humans and machines kept coming. I watched with horrified, dumbstruck fascination.
‘I failed,’ Hesperus told me, after I had heard Purslane’s final message to me, the one she had recorded before entering abeyance. He was signalling me from an hour ahead, calm despite the horrific destruction that was taking place all around him. ‘I told Purslane that we had one chance of stopping this ship, by destroying the white ark. I believed it was in my power to do so, but I was mistaken. Unfortunately, I could not know for sure until I sent the final command. There was no way to gauge its effectiveness until that moment.’
He told me everything that had happened - how he and Purslane had come to a mutual decision to destroy the ship, thereby preventing the massacre of the cordon and the subsequent opening of the stardam. He told me how he had persuaded Purslane to take refuge in a stasis casket, so that she might have some slim but measurable chance of surviving the destruction of the ark, the opener and the larger ship in which both were contained.
‘Satisfied that I had done all I could, that Purslane was as safe as I could make her, I issued the command. A moment later, when I found myself still conscious, I knew that it had been unsuccessful. Purslane had been cleverer than both of us, Campion - cleverer than me, cleverer even than her future self. She had already taken measures to protect the opener against sabotage, so I suppose it was only natural that she would have considered this possibility as well. The command was intercepted and neutralised by fail-safe screens I had not detected until that moment. But it is much worse than that. The opener has triggered - I sensed the graviton pulse, racing ahead of Silver Wings. I do not know whether my command precipitated the activation of the opener, or whether it was simply time for it to happen, but ... we have failed.’ Hesperus paused long enough for me to think his message had ended. Then he said, ‘We are slowing. You will have detected that already, but I may as well confirm it in case you doubt your instruments. This will make it simple for you to catch up with us, but since the opener has already activated, nothing would now be gained from destroying Silver Wings. You may, of course, choose to regard this message as unreliable. I would not blame you if you did. But you may also wish to consider the implications of our deceleration. Left on its present course - and we have not begun to deviate from it - Silver Wings will run into the stardam only a few hours after the arrival of the opener transmission. At our previous velocity, the dam would not have opened sufficiently to allow a ship to slip between two of the ringworlds. But we are slowing, and that changes everything. The margin will still be narrow, but I believe that the additional time before our arrival will allow Silver Wings to enter the dam. This velocity correction was locked in thirty centuries of shiptime ago, Campion - I believe it was always the robots’ intention to pass through the stardam, and to encounter whatever lies at its heart. The purpose of their mission was to release the First Machines, but they must also have been desirous of making contact with those machines in Andromeda. The robots were intending to make a wormhole traversal, and I do not believe anything can now stop that from happening.’ He was silent again, giving me time to reflect on the scraps of intelligence we had learned from Galingale before we packed him off back to Neume and the tender mercies of Mezereon. The door, the aperture, the mouth - the macroscopic wormhole connection between our galaxy and Andromeda.
I finally realised why Hesperus was telling me this.
‘The stardam may not stay in its open configuration for ever. I cannot promise you that Silver Wings will survive the transition - this is not a journey any human ship has ever completed - but if you do not follow, you may never get another chance. It is a long way to Andromeda by the other route.’
I transmitted my reply. ‘If the cordon lets me through, I’m going to keep on following.’
The Line’s instructions to the local civilisations had been precise about the nature of the objective, and although the ships and defence stations of their cordon had been devastated, no one tried to take their revenge out on Dalliance. They understood that I had been chasing Silver Wings for sixty-two thousand years; they understood that I meant them no harm.
Silver Wings had dropped down to eighty per cent of the speed of light; I followed suit after allowing myself to fall within five minutes of the other ship. The cordon made a last effort to stop Silver Wings even though the opener had already activated. Their weapons barely grazed her, even at her reduced speed.
Ahead, the dark, nested machinery of the stardam began to respond to the signal. The ringworlds, held in place by pushers, began to tilt away from their existing inclinations. It was a deathly slow adjustment, but the monitoring devices around the stardam confirmed that the change was real and ongoing. No alarm was raised, for the monitoring d
evices knew only that an authenticated Gentian opener had sent that command. A widening, lens-shaped aperture was appearing along the circumference of the stardam, as if a dark marble was slowly opening its single, lazy eye. Over the course of hours, Silver Wings continued her deceleration, falling to fifty per cent of light, then to a third. She was still aimed precisely at the opening eye.
If there was one scant piece of consolation to be drawn, it was in the absence of hellish light pouring through that gap. No supernova had been contained by this stardam; the local civilisations were at least safe from that particular hazard. There was every likelihood that Galingale had been telling the truth.
I watched Silver Wings of Morning fall through the gap, into the black clockwork of the stardam. She held her course for several light-seconds then began to veer hard, passing out of my line of sight. A few minutes later a signal came through, staggered as it arrived from multiple reflection points. Dalliance sorted through the jumbled puzzle and dragged out a coherent message.
‘This is Hesperus. I trust you can still receive me, Campion. We have begun to execute a series of increasingly violent course adjustments so that we may pass through the gaps between the interior ringworlds. These adjustments are of such severity that the inertial compensation is no longer working properly. Unshielded forces have been in excess of five hundred gravities and are still rising. Purslane is safe in stasis, but she would not have survived had she still been in realtime. I urge you to take similar precautions. Silver Wings is still out of my direct control, but I can transmit a record of our trajectory to Dalliance so that you may maintain your pursuit. With foreknowledge of the interior conditions, you may be able to ease the stresses on your ship.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll go into stasis. Good luck, Hesperus. I hope you make it.’
‘I’ll see you on the other side, Campion. We’ll have much to discuss, I think.’
‘I expect we will,’ I said, wondering why he suddenly sounded so much more human.
Presently Dalliance informed me that she had a lock on Silver Wings’ trajectory. She was zigzagging deeper and deeper into the stardam, squeezing between gaps that were in some cases only a few thousand kilometres wide. Hesperus had been right to warn me into abeyance. It would be difficult enough for Dalliance to follow, let alone do so in a way that would protect her fragile human cargo.
There was just time to transmit a message to the Line, aimed in the rough direction of Neume, telling them of my plans. I also fired a copy towards the nearest node of the private network, deciding that it no longer mattered whether or not the network had been compromised. I did not even know for certain that there were any other Gentians alive. We had travelled so fast that only a few centuries’ worth of information had managed to catch up with us from Neume.
Satisfied that I had done all I could, I left Dalliance to follow Purslane’s trail and whisked to the abeyance chamber. I dialled the casket to a million, set the expiration clock to one hundred hours of shiptime (a wild guess, since I had no idea how long it would take to reach the heart of the stardam or complete the subsequent wormhole transition) and allowed the field to enfold me.
Four seconds of consciousness later, I was back in realtime.
I emerged from the casket. The room was exactly as I had left it; gravity was normal, the ride smooth. Deep inside the ship as I was, there was no visible evidence of damage or trauma to her systems. For a moment I wondered if Hesperus had tricked me, by guiding Dalliance onto a trajectory that caused her to miss the stardam completely, placing a higher premium on my survival than on keeping his word. I quickly dismissed the thought: he knew that I would sooner die than not follow Purslane all the way in. According to the clock in the head portion of the casket, ten days really had passed.
I whisked back up to the bridge, feeling as if I had only just been there. When I arrived I found all superficial indications normal, as if Dalliance was just floating in space, becalmed in flat vacuum. But the displayer was very reluctant to show me anything. It would not relay an external view, claiming that it was having trouble achieving a consistent description of our surroundings. Nor would it hazard a guess as to Dalliance’s present position. Its last reliable astrogation fix had been just before we entered the stardam, but according to the ship’s memory of her own motions, she should have passed through the stardam nearly a hundred hours ago. Yet it was still unable to get a reading from any navigation pulsars or beacons, or locate a pattern of stars that it recognised. In fact, it could not locate any stars at all.
So we were somewhere else - not necessarily in the Milky Way any more. Maybe we were inside the dark envelope of the Andromeda Absence, floating in a starless void that had once been a galaxy. I settled into my control seat and tugged down the floating console, punching commands to force the displayer to give me something, even if it was against its better judgement. Dalliance was so protective of me that she would rather withhold data than show me something she regarded as highly suspect, possibly distorted by the machine equivalent of ‘hallucinatory delirium. But in the end I prevailed.
It was a mistake.
I cannot adequately describe what I saw. I was aware that I was seeing only Dalliance’s attempt to translate her perceptions into a form that might be comprehensible to me, an echo of an echo, but it was still too much, too strange, too alien. Vast and luminous structures were rushing past in too many directions for my mind to process, approaching and receding at the same time, shifting from one shape to another in a constant fluid progression that made me think less of machinery, of some natural phenomenon, than of a protean creature inverting itself, turning itself inside out over and over again. I had an impression of appalling speed and appalling motionlessness, as if Dalliance was being swept along at the mercy of a storm and at the same time creating that storm around herself, sitting in perfect tranquillity in the calm eye of her own making. Unless what I was seeing represented conditions inside the Absence, then I had to accept that we were still riding the wormhole.
The Priors made this, I thought. We had assumed that their science was superior to ours when we contemplated their ringworlds and the ancient, sphinx-like machines floating around the Milky Way’s central black hole. In truth, we had understood nothing of their true capabilities. Faced with such a gulf of comprehension, my mind wanted to curl up inside my skull and hope that the universe would go away. In six million years, we had not even scratched the surface of the possible. We had barely recognised that there was a surface to scratch.
I thought of returning to abeyance, but since I still had no idea how much longer would be required, I chose to administer Synchromesh. I dialled myself up to ten, maintaining enough of a grip on external time to be able to respond to outside events. After three hours of consciousness, thirty hours of shiptime, I received a message from what Dalliance tentatively identified as ‘ahead’.
It was from Hesperus. His signal dopplered in and out, as if Silver Wings was experiencing absurd changes in velocity - one instant moving away from me at half the speed of light, the next surging closer at a quarter. I could only assume that the spacetime between our two ships was highly elastic.
‘I hope you can still hear me, Campion. I have a hailing fix on your ship, which suggests you have retained at least some basic functionality. The timelag between us is shifting unpredictably - it may be that we will move out of signalling range at any moment. I am afraid Silver Wings suffered damage during the latter stages of the passage through the stardam and the insertion into the wormhole. I am doing what I can to stabilise the ship and consolidate her basic functions, but I am fighting against the system blockades Cascade installed. I cannot say how much longer it will be before we emerge back into conventional space, but I believe the exit transition will be no less violent than the entrance transition. You may fare better, for your ship is smaller and perhaps more agile. I will do all in my power to protect Purslane, but I cannot promise that I will succeed.’
‘
I’m in one piece,’ I said. ‘Dalliance is struggling to orientate herself, but otherwise she’s in good shape.’
His response took forty minutes to arrive. ‘That is welcome news, Campion. I would nonetheless recommend that you return to abeyance at the earliest opportunity. Set your apparatus in such a way that I may bring you out, when I have deemed that our ships are safe.’
‘Thanks, Hesperus, but I’m fine as I am.’
This time his answer arrived within ninety seconds. ‘It must be your decision, Campion. Regardless, the instant I detect the transition back to normal space I will send warning of it. You may still have time to protect yourself before Dalliance runs into difficulties.’
‘Have you seen anything coming the other way?’
‘The concept of “other way” is a problematic one, given the confused state of our surroundings.’ This time I had to wait eleven minutes for his reply, and his message was redshifted almost to the point of incomprehensibility. ‘But if I take your meaning correctly, I have detected no other physical objects occupying the wormhole. The only two ships appear to be ours. You are doubtless wondering about the First Machines.’
‘It crossed my mind that if there are invasion fleets waiting to escape back into our galaxy, we aren’t seeing much sign of them.’
Five seconds later he said, ‘You were gone a very long time then, Campion - I began to worry about you. It is a great relief to find that you are still alive. Concerning your observation, you have a point. It may still be too soon to form ready judgements, but the absence of any traffic, let alone indirect evidence of the First Machines ... it is indeed puzzling.’
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