Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

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

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

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

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

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

  But there was something odd about the pale images.

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

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

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

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

  PART V

  Event: Ring

  27

  The nightfighter — with its fragile cargo of humans, and traveling thirty-five light-years with every hyperdrive jump — arced down toward the disc of the scarred galaxy. Spinner-of-Rope sat in her cage, letting the waldoes run through their program; in the corner of her eye, telltales winked reassuringly.

  This galaxy was a broad spiral, with multiple arms tightly wrapped around a compact, glowing core. The star system was a pool of rust red, punctuated with the gleam of novae and supernovae: thus, she saw, the galaxy had not escaped depredation at the hands of the photino birds. And the gleaming disc was disfigured by one stunning feature: a huge gouge of a scar, a channel of dust and glowing star-stuff that cut right across the disc, from rim to core.

  Now the nightfighter, flickering through hyperspace, neared the rim of the disc, close to the termination of the scar.

  This might have been the original Galaxy of humans, Spinner thought, and she wondered if Louise Armonk was sitting under the skydome over the forest, peering out at this freight of stars. Maybe this nostalgic similarity was the reason Louise and the rest had chosen this particular galaxy, out of hundreds of thousands around the cavity, for a closer study.

  Suddenly the plane of the disc loomed up at her — and the nightfighter slid neatly into the notch gouged out of the disc.

  “Good navigation, Louise,” she said. “Right down the channel.”

  “Well, it wasn’t so hard to hit. The channel is over two thousand light-years wide, and as straight as one of your blowpipes. The channel was cut so recently that the galaxy’s rotation hasn’t had time to distort it too far — although, in another few hundred thousand years there will be barely a trace of this feature left…”

  The ’fighter plunged along the gouge, and the view was spectacular. Above her was the gaunt, galaxy-stained sky of the Attractor; below and around her was an open tunnel of stars, hurtling past her. Looking ahead, it seemed she could see all the way to the gleaming core of the galaxy. It was difficult to remember that this neat star-walled valley was no less than fifty thousand light-years long…

  At thirty-five light-years a second, the ship would reach the core in under thirty minutes.

  Now the ’fighter dived into a bank of opaque dust — and then exploded out again, the stars gleaming crimson and gold in the walls of the galaxy-spanning tunnel.

  Spinner punched her fist into her palm and whooped.

  She heard Louise laugh. “You’re enjoying the ride, Spinner-of-Rope?”

  There were voices behind Louise Armonk. “I see it.” Excited, shouting. “I see it — ”

  I see it, too.

  Spinner turned in her chair, the restraints riding up awkwardly across her chest. The voice had sounded as if it had come from her left.

  It had been the voice of the man from her forest dreams, of course. She almost expected to see that slim, dark form, sitting out there beyond the cage: that sixty-year-old face, the hair of gray pepper-speckled with black, the vulnerable brown eyes…

  Somehow, she felt he was coming closer to her. He was emerging.

  But there was nobody there. She felt disappointed, wistful.

  “That was Morrow, butting in,” Louise was saying. “I’m sorry, Spinner. Do you want me to patch you into the conversation?… Spinner? Did you hear me? I said — ”

  “I heard you, Louise,” she Said. “I’m sorry. Yes, patch me in, please.”

  “…straight ahead of us, at the end of this gouge,” Morrow was saying. “There… there… See?”

  “Spinner, I’ll download our visuals to you,” Louise said.

  Spinner’s faceplate image was abruptly overlaid with false colors: gaudy reds, yellows and blues, making detail easy to discriminate.

  The glowing walls of the star valley dwindled into a dull mist at infinity. And at the end of the valley — almost at the vanishing point itself — there was a structure: a sculpture of thread, colored false blue.

  “I see it,” Spinner breathed. Subvocally, she called for magnification.

  “Do you know what you’re looking at, Spinner?” Louise’s flat voice contained awe, humility. “It’s what we suspected must have gouged out this valley. It’s a fragment of cosmic string…”

  At the center of an immense cavity, walled by crowded galaxies, Lieserl and Mark rotated slowly around each other, warm human planets.

  The sky was peppered with the dusty spirals of galaxies, more densely than the stars in the skies of ancient Earth. But the cavity walls were ragged and ill defined, so that it was as if Lieserl was at the center of some immense explosion. And every one of the galaxies was tinged by blue shift: the light from each of these huge, fragile star freights was compressed, visibly, by its billion-year fall into this place.

  Mark took her hand. His palm was warm against hers, and when he pulled gently at her arm, her body slowly rotated in space until she faced him.

  “I don’t understand,” Lieserl said. “This — cavity — is empty. Where’s the Ring?”

  The light of a hundred thousand galaxies, blue-shifted, washed over his face. Mark smiled. “Have patience, Lieserl. Get your bearings first.

  “Look around. We’ve arrived at a cavity, almost free of galaxies, ten million light-years across: a cavity right at the site of the Great Attractor. The whole cavity is awash with gravitational radiation. Nothing’s visible, but we know there’s something here, in the cavity… It just isn’t what we expected.”

  Lieserl raised her face to stare around the crowded sky, at the galaxies embedded in the walls of this immense cave of sky. One galaxy with an active nucleus — perhaps a Seyfert emitted a long plume of gas from its core; the gas, glowing in the search-light beam of ionizing radiation from the core, trailed behind the infalling galaxy like the tail of some immense comet. And there was a giant elliptical which looked as if it was close to disintegration, rendered unstable by the fall into the Attractor’s monstrous gravity well; she could clearly see the elliptical’s multiple nuclei, orbiting each other within a haze of at least a thousand billion stars.

  Some of the galaxies were close enough for her to make out individual stars — great lacy streams of them, in disrupted spiral arms — and, in some places, supernovae glared like diamonds against the paler tapestry of lesser stars. She picked out one barred-spiral with a fat, gleaming nucleus, which trailed its loosening arms like unraveling bandages. And there was a spiral heartbreakingly like her own Galaxy — undergoing a slow, stately collision with a shallow elliptical; the galaxies’ discs had cut across each other, and along the line where they merged exploding stars flared yellow-white, like a wound.

  It was, she thought, as if the Universe had been wadded up, comp
ressed into this deep, intense gravity pocket.

  Everywhere she caught a sense of motion, of activity: but it was motion on an immense scale, and frozen in time. The galaxies were like huge ships of stars, Lieserl thought, voyaging in toward here, to the center of everything — but they were ships caught suspended by the flashbulb awareness of her own humanity. She longed for the atemporal perspective of a god, so that she could run this immense, trapped diorama forward in time.

  “It’s all very beautiful,” she said. “But it almost looks artificial — like a planetarium display.”

  Mark grunted. “More like a display of trapped insects. Moths, maybe, drawn in to an invisible gravitational flame. We’re still sifting through the data we’re gathering,” he said softly. “I wonder if any astronomers in human history have ever had such a rich sky to study… even if it does mark the end of time.

  “But we’ve found one anomaly, Lieserl.”

  “An anomaly? Where?”

  He raised his arm and pointed, toward an anonymous-looking patch of sky across the cavity. “Over there. A source in the hydrogen radio band. As far as we can tell it’s coming from a neutron star system — but the neutron star is moving with an immense velocity, not far below lightspeed. Anomalies all round, right? The source is difficult to pick out against all this galactic mush in the foreground. But it’s undoubtedly there…”

  “What’s so special about it?”

  He hesitated. “Lieserl, it seems to be a signal.”

  “A signal? From who?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Maybe it’s a freak; an artifact of our instruments.”

  “Quite possibly. But we’re thinking of checking it out anyway. It’s only a million light-years away.” He smiled ruefully. “That’s all of eight hours’ travel, if you hitch a ride on a nightfighter…”

  A signal, here at the end of space and time… Was it possible the motley crew of the Northern wasn’t alone after all?

  The hair at the base of her skull prickled. At the end of this long, long life, she’d thought there was nothing left to surprise her.

  Evidently, she was wrong.

  Mark said, “Lieserl, what you’re looking at here is visible light: the Virtual display we’re drifting around inside is based on images from right at the center of the human visible spectrum. You’re seeing just what any of the others would see, with their unaided vision. But the image has been enhanced by blue shift: red, dim stars have been made to look blue and bright.”

  “I understand.”

  Now the blue stain faded from the galaxy images, seeping out like some poor dye.

  A new color flooded the galaxy remnants, but it was the color of decay dominated by flaring reds and crimsons, though punctuated in places by the glaring blue-white of supernovae. And without the enhancement offered by the blue shift, some of the galaxies faded from her view altogether.

  The galaxies had turned into ships of fire, she thought.

  Mark’s profile was picked out, now, in colors of blood. “Take a good look around, Lieserl,” he said grimly. “I’ve adjusted out the blue shift; this is how things really are.”

  She looked at him curiously; his tone had become hostile, suddenly. Though he still held her hand, his fingers felt stiff around hers, like a cage. “What are you saying?”

  “Here’s the result of the handiwork of your photino bird pets,” he said. “In the week since we arrived, we’ve been able to catalog over a million galaxies, surrounding this cavity. In every one of those million we see stars being pushed off the Main Sequence, either explosively as a nova or supernova or via expansion into the red-giant cycle. Everywhere the stars are close to the end of their lifecycles — and, what’s worse, there’s no sign of new star formation, anywhere.”

  Suddenly she understood. “Ah. This is why you’ve set up this display for me. You’re testing me, aren’t you?” She felt anger build, deep in her belly. “You want to know how all this makes me feel. Even now — even after we’ve been so close — you’re still not sure if I’m fully human.”

  He grinned, his red-lit teeth like drops of blood in his mouth. “You have to admit you’ve had a pretty unusual life history, Lieserl. I’m not sure if any of us can empathize with you.”

  “Then,” she snapped, “maybe you should damn well try. Maybe that’s been the trouble with most of human history. Look at all this: we’re witnessing, here, the death of galaxies. And you’re wondering how it makes me feel? Do you think all this has somehow been set up as a test of my loyalty to the human race?”

  “Lieserl — ”

  “I’ll tell you how I feel. I feel we need a sense of perspective here, Mark. So what if this — this cosmic discontinuity — is inconvenient for the likes of you and me?” She withdrew from him and straightened her back. “Mark, this is the greatest feat of cosmic engineering our poor Universe will ever see — the most significant event since the Big Bang. Maybe it’s time we humans abandoned our species-specific chauvinism — our petty outrage that the Universe has unfolded in a way that doesn’t suit us.”

  He was smiling at her. “Quite a speech.”

  She punched him, reasonably gently, beneath the ribs, relishing the way her fist sank into his flesh. “Well, you deserve it, damn it.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply — ”

  “Yes, you did,” she said sharply. “Well, I’m sorry if I’ve failed your test, Mark. Look, you and I — by hook or by crook — have survived the decline and destruction of our species. I know we’re going to have to fight for survival, and I’ll be fighting right alongside you, as best I can. But that doesn’t remove the magnificence of this cosmic engineering — any more than an ant-hill’s destruction to make way for the building of a cathedral would despoil the grandeur of the result.”

  Still holding her hand within his stiff fingers, he turned his face to the galaxy-stained sky. His offense at her words was tangible; he must be devoting a great deal of processing power to this sullen rebuke. “Sometimes you’re damn cold, Lieserl.”

  Lethe, she thought. People. “No,” she said. “I just have a longer perspective than you.” She sighed. “Oh, come on, Mark. Show me the Ring,” she said.

  The sculpture of string, driving itself into the heart of the scarred galaxy, was not symmetrical. It was in the form of a rough figure-of-eight; but each lobe of the figure was overlaid with more complex waveforms — a series of ripples, culminating in sharp, pointed cusps.

  “Do you see it, Spinner?” Mark asked. “That is a loop of string nearly a thousand light-years wide.”

  Spinner smiled. “That’s not a loop. That’s a knot.”

  “It’s moving toward the galactic core at over half the speed of light. It’s got the mass of a hundred billion stars… Can you believe that? It’s as massive as a medium-size galaxy itself. No wonder it’s cutting this swathe through the stars; the damn thing’s like a scythe, driving across the face of this galaxy.”

  Louise laughed. “A knot. Knot-making is a skill, up there in the forest, isn’t it, Spinner? I’ll bet you’d have been proud to come up with a structure like that.”

  “Actually,” Mark said, “and I hate to be pedantic, but that isn’t a knot, topologically speaking. If you could somehow stretch it out — straighten up the cusps and curves — you’d find it would deform into a simple loop. A circle.”

  Spinner heard Garry Uvarov’s rasp. “And I hate to be a pedant, in my turn, but in fact a simple closed loop is a knot — called the trivial knot by topologists.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Louise said drily.

  Spinner frowned, peering at the detailed image of the string loop; in the false colors of her faceplate it was a tracery of blue, frozen against the remote background of the galaxy core. She realized now that she was looking at one projection of a complex three-dimensional object. Subvocally she called for a depth enhancement and change in perspective.

  The loop seemed to loom toward her, lifting away from the starry
background, and the string was thickened into a three-dimensional tubing, so that she could see shadows where one strand overlaid another.

  The image rotated. It was like a sculpture of hosepipe, rolling over on itself.

  Mark commented, “But the string isn’t stationary, of course. I mean, the whole loop is cutting through this galaxy at more than half lightspeed — but in addition the structure is in constant, complex motion. Cosmic string is under enormous tension — a tension that increases with curvature — and so those loops and cusps you see are struggling to straighten themselves out, all the time. Most of the length of the string is moving at close to lightspeed — indeed, the cusps are moving at lightspeed.”

  “Absurd,” Spinner heard Uvarov growl. “Nothing material can reach lightspeed.”

  “True,” Mark said patiently, “but cosmic string isn’t truly material, in that sense, Uvarov. Remember, it’s a defect in spacetime… a flaw.”

  Spinner watched the beautiful, sparkling construct turn over and over. It was like some intricate piece of jewelry, a filigree of glass, perhaps. How could something as complex, as real as this, be made of nothing but spacetime?

  “I can’t see it move,” she said slowly.

  “What was that, Spinner?”

  “Mark, if the string is moving at close to lightspeed — how come I can’t see it? The thing should be writhing like some immense snake…”

  “You’re forgetting the scale, Spinner-of-Rope,” Mark said gently. “That loop is over a thousand light-years across. It would take a millennium for a strand of string to move across the diameter of the loop. Spinner, it is writhing through space, just as you say, but on timescales far beyond yours or mine…

  “But watch this.”

  Suddenly the three-dimensional image of the string came to life. It twisted, its curves straightening or bunching into cusps, lengths of the string twisting over and around each other.

  Mark said, “This is the true motion of the string, projected from the velocity distribution along its length. The motion is actually periodic… It resumes the same form every twenty thousand years or so. This graphic is running at billions of times true speed, of course — the twenty millennia period is being covered in around five minutes.