(I'll try. Let me see if—hey, watch it, Poppy!) Deutsch's voice suddenly went elsewhere.
Legroeder swallowed hard. But he saw a tendril of light stretching out toward them from Impris.
Legroeder focused on flying Phoenix, as Palagren and Ker'sell stretched their end of the Phoenix net toward Impris. It was still too long a reach. But the ships were drawing closer. Could they link in time?
Below, the quantum flaw was growing faster than ever, its diamond-white glare brightening. Legroeder clicked in a filtering routine and peered at the flaw through darkened glass. If they were going to fly headlong through it, was there any way to control the outcome? Was it all up to Nature and the structure of the flaw? Maybe not. This was the Flux, and if there was any chance of influencing their passage by changing their entry, it was now or never.
Legroeder felt a tremor, and looked up to see a tenuous link between the two ships. Palagren and Ker'sell were slowly reeling in the joined net.
Cantha spoke up. I recommend going in one after another. These readings are all very strange, my friends. I don't know what's going to happen, but I feel it's going to be interesting.
Interesting!
If you can't hold it together, Cantha called to Deutsch, then fall in behind us and break contact just before we enter. Try to follow as precisely as possible.
Are you going in and leaving us here? Poppy screeched.
No one's leaving anyone, Cantha answered. But our time perceptions may give us a better chance to find the way.
I approve of your plan, said another voice. It took Legroeder an instant to recognize Captain Friedman. He had almost forgotten about the captains. Not that any orders from them could make much difference at this point.
Everyone prepare, Legroeder called, to enter the quantum flaw.
From somewhere deep within the strained fabric of the net came the rumbling voice of Captain Glenswarg: Permission granted. Godspeed, gentlemen...
* * *
The quantum flaw dominated the sky now, nearly encircling them. It was no longer a smoothly curved line, but a finely jagged thing, fractal in nature. Deep within Legroeder's implants, a furious analysis of the flaw was taking place. Was it a relic of the primordial universe, like a cosmic string of normal-space? It was a discontinuity in the structure of spacetime, for certain. One moment, it looked like an opening across half the universe; the next, it was a one-way passage into oblivion.
The answers would soon become clear.
With Impris swinging around behind them, the joined nets were becoming more difficult to control. The attraction of the flaw was beginning to fluctuate as they drew near. Were they feeling the effects of its fractal shape?
Cantha looked increasingly worried. He peered across the net at Legroeder, his face lit by the ghostly glare of the quantum flaw. Uncertainty-readings are off the scale. Even if you find a way to maneuver, I can't give you any guidance on a course.
Legroeder nodded.
The fractal nature of the flaw was becoming increasingly pronounced, as finer and finer details of jaggedness came into view. Would their passage be determined by how they intersected with those jagged elements at the boundary? How could he possibly control that? But there had to be a way to influence their passage. It was not a matter of evidence, but of faith.
The Narseil were peering this way and that. What were they seeing in the tessa'chron? His own sense of time and reality was singing and twanging like a violin string. If any of you sees a way through this, don't be shy about telling me. Freem'n—can you still hear me?
Like you're at the end of a tunnel. You ready to go through?
Ready, Legroeder lied. He could feel the other ship pulling from side to side like a boat in tow. It'll be soon now. If we get separated going through...
I'll be looking for you on the other side. Tell Palagren to have one of those Narseil beers ready for me.
Yah, said Legroeder, wishing he could think of something more to say.
Palagren suddenly exclaimed, By the Three Rings, would you look at that!
And then the bottom fell out from under Legroeder, and he could feel the net suddenly stretching ahead like a spiderweb in a breeze, and one particular fractal angle in the flaw blossomed. And in a single, strangely prolonged instant of time, the flaw yawned open and swallowed them.
* * *
The net was turned inside out. The Narseil voices distorted into a sound like an electronic malfunction, and Legroeder's stomach went into freefall. His head felt distended like a child's soap bubble. As he brought his gaze around behind, to where Impris was following, he glimpsed a flicker of silver and a crazed opening in the sky. He heard Deutsch's voice—a heart-rending shriek, tearing off into silence. Then the jagged opening closed, with a blinding flash that billowed out in slow motion.
That had been... Impris... enveloped by the blinding flash.
Legroeder cried out: Frrreeemm'nnn... Faarrrraaeeeemmmmaaauuuu...
His voice was incomprehensible, even to him. Focusing inward, trying to reconnect with Deutsch through his implants, he found instead an enormous inner vista of space, spangled with stars and galaxies. He tried to draw breath; he could not; dizzily he searched for the implants; they were circling him like flickering stars, doing he knew not what. There was no connection left with Impris.
His vision ballooned out again. Where the flash had been there was now a coiling darkness, webbed with lines of force.
Dear Christ! he whispered, and his voice moaned out into the net, joining with the incomprehensible groans of the Narseil. Had they just watched Impris die?
Palagren's arms were stretched out, distended and transparent; all the riggers were turning transparent. All of their voices were dying away; but new sounds were rising...
*
An impossibly deep rumble... a thrum of incredible power... and, it seemed, sadness. Legroeder was hypnotized, unable to turn his attention, as the thrum filled with deeper and deeper harmonics. It was a choir of unimaginable size and proportion, a choir of space and time, and yet seemingly almost a living thing.
Was he hearing the shifting and creaking of the very fabric of spacetime itself? He was stunned, awed, terrified. For a moment, he wondered: was he even still alive? The quantum flaw could have wrenched them apart into constituent particles, puffing them out of existence in a cloud of neutrinos and gamma rays. Were these the dying thoughts of a haze of neutrinos, soon to dissipate like the morning dew?
They had lost Impris. Deutsch. Legroeder wanted to experience all that he could before he too vanished. Maybe it was pride. Or longing. Or grief. Or stubbornness. He focused all of his being on trying to perceive the sounds that welled around him. If only he could form a picture from them.
As if in response, coiling out of the darkness came distorted lines of force, turbulent traceries of fire, the body of the quantum splinter, surrounding them. Before them stretched a long, jagged avenue of fire and darkness, reaching out into the deeps of space... from infinity at one end to infinity at the other.
He stared at it and thought dumbly, it's either the road to Heaven or the road to Hell...
*
He viewed its majesty through sound, an embryonic music of the spheres, heartbreakingly mournful. But this was not just the music of a handful of stars and star clouds. This was something very different, something far, far greater...
...wheeling majestically in space...
...enveloped by the sound of an expanding universe...
...very close to the instant of its origins... the sound of an infant spacetime continuum struggling to establish itself in the... place?... time?... where there had been no place, no time, nothing at all.
Through his astonishment, Legroeder knew... if he could reach out just a little further, he might hear the sound of the Genesis Moment itself. There was a sound coming at intervals: a great CLUNGGGG ringing through the choir of origins, like a vast bass string being struck with percussive force. He thought he knew what
that was: fractures forming in the expanding continuum, splinters, flaws in space and time... fractures forming in the deep quantum structures of reality.
How he knew all this, he did not know. But he was aware of the perceptions of the Narseil overlapping his own, like layers of transparency. What they saw, he saw, in shimmering shadows.
And in his head, the implants were furiously recording.
*
Before him now was a broad ribbon of fire, reaching jaggedly, with streamers and fractal fingers, in both directions. It was not simply a blaze of light through a fracture, but something roiling with inner chaos and change, like a long window into the surface of a sun. It hurt the eye to behold; something about the perspective was all wrong. This was not Einsteinian space or even Chey-Kladdian... it was something different...
And then he knew what it was. This was the heart of the temporal discontinuities. This aspect of the flaw stretched through time rather than space, deep into the past at one end, and impossibly far into the future in the other. Stretching toward its birth... and its death.
The birth and death of the universe?
Legroeder was dumb with awe and terror, gazing down a rent in spacetime that stretched from one end of existence to the other. Would he next gaze into the face of God? Surely he would fall dead even if the flaw itself did not kill him...
But stirring in him now were other strange and wonderful and frightening emotions, emotions not human; and yet contained within them were human feelings—joy and determination and rage and reverence. It was the Narseil emotions; they were seeing this as he was—the terrible beauty and peril of the quantum flaw, the groans of birth and death, linked together in a single instant.
It was changing, though, sparkling at the edges, splinters of light streaming out into infinity... and at the same time, turning his thoughts inside out...
*
Visions of places he had been... present... past... future... Outpost Ivan... DeNoble... Maris and Jakus and Harriet... his mother carrying him as a small child, crying, in a shopping valley on New Tarkus... Tracy-Ace/Alfa standing with YZ/I, proposing a mission... in flight, speeding toward fabulous clouds of stars...
All these images gathered and then blew away like smoke, leaving him staggered by the vastness around him, the power of cosmic creation. What meaning could his existence have here, where elemental forces flowed like rivers? What possible influence could he have?
Insignificance.
The word flickered in his awareness like a sparkle of light at the boundaries of infinity. It danced, twinkling, along the great ribbon of light...
*
It was, Palagren knew, the most astounding thing he would ever see, the quantum flaw stretched out in multicolored glory: at one end the past, dwindling into the deepest infrared, and at the other end the future, vanishing into an ultraviolet diamond. The present loomed in a golden haze, within which possibilities danced like motes of dust against time and space.
Among the possibilities, Palagren saw a precious few that contained images of himself. He felt unutterably lonely as he glimpsed those. How could a single Narseil matter in the face of such cosmic history?
Something tattered was billowing around him; it was the rigger-net, coming undone. Electroquantum technology did not work well here; and yet something had been holding the net together. But if it wasn't the fluxfield generators...
Palagren saw the net quiver, as though in response to his uncertainty. And then a fragment of the Wisdoms echoed in his thoughts:
"The Whole survives in unity with the One, and the One with the Whole. In all of the Rings, nothing can exist apart from the Circle except that which would break it... the Destroyer..."
The Destroyer...
The quantum flaw?
Or his own doubt?
Palagren drew a breath and stretched his arms wide, and turned his will toward holding the net together...
*
Who are these beings that you are mindful of them...
The question sparkled in Legroeder's thoughts like a sunbeam through a window; it was a line from an ancient human text... but he hadn't heard it from a human, had he? It had been Com'peer, the Narseil surgeon.
But hadn't he heard it somewhere else, long ago? The memory was beginning to come:
What is man that you are mindful of him?
That was it: an earlier form. A poem, or a psalm. But what did it mean?
Skating across the sea of spacetime, his thoughts spun around, and the word "insignificance" twinkled back to face him. He laughed suddenly, and then cried. Who was he, what was he, to be here in the midst of this—surrounded by a shimmering net that was beginning to come apart like an old spiderweb?
The net... if they couldn't hold it together, they would cease to exist.
What is man—?
He was man, human, individual—like his fellows, and yet one of a kind, unique. Did that matter, his uniqueness?
He gazed into the sea of eternity, churning with chaos and uncertainty, and thought perhaps it did matter, very much so, right now.
*
To Palagren, the waves of uncertainty brought hope. Hope for the integrity of his own being, and of the net itself. He thought of the old human story: Schrodinger's cat in the box, its life or death decided by a single quantum event. And more than that, the life and death coexisting in one; it took the glance of an observer to force reality to crystallize.
Just as a rigger's thoughts forced the uncertainty of the Flux to transmute into the desired form...
That's it, Palagren thought. We must see ourselves holding the net together... finding our way through...
*
Around Legroeder, the net was twanging out of tune as it shredded. He was aware of the thoughts of the other riggers, but all in a jangling chaos. He was in a sea of consciousness, struggling to pick out the voices closest to him. He had to; only they, together, could hold the net together...
Was it even possible to contest infinity this way?
Why shouldn't they? If quantum events could link across spacetime—why not their own thoughts reaching out to critical points in this zigzag ribbon of spacetime? Perhaps they could even steer themselves through a window of their choosing in this cosmic chaos.
It came to him in a rush of understanding as he gathered the net around him like an enormous billowing bubble, and pulled it in close... and peered down and out through the beautiful and mysterious ribbon of fire, looking for the place to fall through... first riggers to sail the quantum flaw...
Alongside him, Palagren did likewise... and at last, following their lead, Cantha and Ker'sell.
*
And fire blossomed around them, filling the net with a cosmic glare....
Chapter 33
Hunted
It was the damnedest thing.
With the other riggers and crew on KM/C Hunter, Jakus Bark had been keeping an eye on the intermittent signs of the snark, Impris—mostly just the occasional ghostly glimmer on the deep-layer instrumentation. Every once in a great while the riggers in Hunter's net caught the even more ghostly glimmer of the actual ship, or heard the low, mournful trill of its distress beacon. They followed it relentlessly as it wandered on its erratic course, presently taking it back toward Golen Space. But lately, the readings just hadn't seemed right. It was as though something were disturbing it in its ghostly flight. And now...
Jakus strained to focus into the distance. What the hell is that over there? he asked his co-riggers, pointing down through the gauzy layers of the Flux. There was something in those layers that looked like a ship. But it didn't look like Impris.
Another ship? said Cranshaw. It looks like another ship!
Don't it just, Jakus breathed. What's another ship doing down there? That was not a layer of the Flux where any other ship should be. How would it even get there? Jakus called on the bridge com, What are you guys gettin' on the deep-layer, thirty down and twenty t' port? Do you see what we see?
&
nbsp; As he waited for an answer, Jakus tried to adjust the image. Now the ship was gone, like a puff of vapor. But there was no question he'd seen it. Right in the fold haunted by Impris. And so had Cranshaw and the others.
This is really strange, said Nockey, from the bridge instrumentation crew. We've lost it now, but there was definitely another ship there for a few seconds. Not in our layer. Down there with the snark. Someone call Captain Hyutu.
Yah, said Jakus. I wonder if someone else got lost like Snarkie. Maybe we've got two of them now. He chuckled at the thought. Even as one who thought this was a pretty wimpy way to snatch targets, it was amusing to think of another lure just dropping into their laps.
We're trying to refine the signal, said Nockey. Maybe we can get some kind of an ident on the thing. The captain will love it.
Yah, said Jakus, settling back into watchful mode. He checked the time. He'd be going off shift soon. If the normal pattern of sightings held true, that was all the excitement they could expect for a while.
* * *
By all accounts, nothing new had happened in the meantime, but when Jakus stepped into Captain Benadir Hyutu's office before his next shift, Hyutu was scowling. That in itself didn't mean much, since Hyutu had generally the disposition of a Kargan rattler; but it didn't take long to deduce that the captain was even more displeased with life than usual.
"What's wrong, Ben?" Jakus asked, dropping into a seat across from the captain. Having known Hyutu since the old days on the L.A., he allowed himself more familiarity than most of the crew.
Hyutu's right eyebrow twitched fiercely. The old man was a stiff prig, anyway—and under strain, his augments tended to go a little flaky. Jakus was sure it was some kind of a malf, but Hyutu refused to have them looked at. "You see the report on that sighting?" Hyutu said sharply.
Jakus shrugged. "I've been off duty. Why, is there something new?"
Hyutu's face tightened with disdain, which was a good trick with that eyebrow still going. He muttered something under his breath that Jakus couldn't quite hear, then grunted, "Bark, that's why you're never going to get ahead in this organization. An ambitious man is never 'off duty.' "
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