He sensed confusion in the hierarchy of the Qax, but Paul ignored them.
At last the response he was waiting for came. Spectral ships miles wide coasted through the Jovian's system.
The presence of the antiXeelee might signify to an alert observer that the Xeelee had returned to the cosmos, and — as Paul had hoped — the Xeelee nemesis, the dark matter photino birds, had come to find out what was going on.
Paul, straining, maintained the illusion/substance of the antiXeelee. At length the dark matter ships departed with, as Paul intended, a new purpose.
He relaxed and the antiXeelee outline subsided into the quantum hiss of the Universe.
The photino birds, convinced that the Xeelee might reinvade the Universe from which they had been driven, would abandon their projects and focus their energies on Bolder's Ring. They'd already set in place long-term mechanisms to destroy the Ring. But now the closure of that gateway had to be accelerated; the Ring must be closed before the Xeelee could use it to return.
...But if the Ring were closed the Qax would be trapped in a dying Universe, their dream of species immortality threatened. So, Paul calculated, the Qax would have to get to the Ring and stop the photino birds from destroying it. With a sense of amusement and fascination he watched the urgent debate of the Qax, data and propositions chattering across all the scales of space and time.
Forgotten, Paul allowed himself to exult. His scheme seemed to be working. If so he had not only afforded the remnants of humanity a chance: he had also changed the species imperatives of two great races.
He slid along the quantum net to his little band of humans.
Across the Universe vast forces began to converge on Bolder's Ring.
The Friend had returned. And the visions were so vivid she could hardly see.
...A place, unimaginably far away, where a Ring, sparkling and perfect, turned in space; a place where all the starlight was blue...
"Erwal? Are you all right?"
The fantastic pictures overlaid Sura's concerned face. Erwal rubbed the leathery skin around her eyes. Her sight clouded by other worlds, she clung to comforting fragments of reality: the sound of children's laughter, the sweet, milky scent of the mummy-cow. "I'm all right. Just a little dizzy, perhaps. I need to sit down..." With Sura's help she touched the warm, soft wall of the Room and, as if blind, worked her way to the floor and sat down.
...She soared over the vast, tangled Ring; her fingers trembled in the glove-controls...
She opened her eyes, shuddering.
Sura sat down beside her, still holding her hand. "It isn't just dizziness, is it?"
"...No." Erwal hesitated, longing to unburden herself. "Sura, I think we have to travel again. Go away from here."
Sura's grip tightened. "Brave the snow again? But—"
"No, you don't understand. In the ship. We have to travel in the ship."
"But where to?"
Erwal said nothing.
Sura said slowly, "Why do we have to go? I don't understand. How do you know all this? You're frightening me, Erwal."
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to. But I don't think I can explain. And..." And I'm frightened, too, she told herself. Not by the mysterious visions — not anymore — but by what they represented: a journey the likes of which no human had undertaken for a million years.
She didn't want to go. She wanted to stay here, in the warmth; she didn't want to face anymore danger and uncertainty. But the visions were powerful, much more so than before; it was as if the Friend were screaming into her face.
The Friend was frightened, she realized suddenly. And what could such a godlike creature be fearful about?
"We have to go," she said. She could feel Sura's hand grow stiff in hers. "You think I'm mad, don't you?" she asked gently.
"No, Erwal, but—"
"For now you'll have to trust me," Erwal said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. "Look, I've been right in the past. About the healing panels, and the food boxes. Haven't I?"
"...Yes."
"Well, now I'll be right again. We're in great danger. And to escape it we have to go to this other place." The visions cleared briefly — miraculously — and she was afforded a glimpse of Sura's wide eyes. "Sura, we'll be safe in the ship. We'll be warm and dry."
Slowly the girl nodded. "It can't be worse than the snow."
"That's right," Erwal said firmly. "Not as bad as the snow."
After a time Sura said: "What do you want me to do?"
It took the fattened, slow-moving villagers several days to organize themselves to Erwal's satisfaction.
Not everyone was willing to come, of course. Some decided to stay behind in the Eight Rooms, unwilling to gamble their security and warmth on Erwal's unexplained visions. The ship's food lockers would provision the travelers, and so Sand, the last mummy-cow in the world, was left behind to sustain the rest.
Erwal found it hard to blame the stay-behinds.
After so much hardship together the leave-taking was protracted and difficult, each villager sensing that there would never be a reunion. Erwal stroked the stubby hairs at the root of the mummy-cow's trunk; huge, absurd tears leaked from Sand's eyes.
At last it was over. The stay-behinds gathered in the Eighth Room. Arke was among them, and Erwal studied his round face, trying to imagine his future, locked up in these tiny Rooms. The children would grow, of course, and perhaps have children of their own — why not? The bones of the dead would be laid in the snow outside, in rising heaps, and time would pass without incident; until finally the faithful mummy-cow would succumb to age, and the last people would die with her.
Abruptly Erwal felt restless, anxious to depart. Surely the human story was not meant to end like this, with the last of them hiding away in a box.
Arke pushed at the door control; the crystal panel slid across the face of the Eighth Room. The ship was cast free. Erwal's group gathered in a nervous huddle at the center of the ship's chamber. Erwal, self-conscious, walked across the cabin to her familiar seat and slipped her hands once more into the magical gloves.
The ship unfurled its night-dark wings. She closed her eyes, feeling a surge of exhilaration. The Friend was with her: the barrage of visions had mercifully ceased, but she could sense his presence, as if he were standing behind her, grave and quiet.
It was time.
She summoned up a memory of the shining Ring—
—the ship quivered—
—and abruptly the Friend flooded her memory-picture with color and detail; determination flowed through her into the gloves and—
—jump—
It was like a stumble, a fall. There were screams behind her. She looked up, startled, at the panel-windows: the pale lines of the Eighth Room had vanished, to be replaced by a ball of fire, vast, red, brooding; flames as big as worlds licked out at the ship and—
—jump—
—and another jolt and the fire was replaced by nothing, nothing at all, and—
—jump—
—there was a tilted disc of color; she saw reds and browns and golds and it was so lovely it made her gasp but—
— jump —
—it was gone and—
—jump — jump — jumpjumpjump...
Images battered against the screens like gaudy snowflakes.
She switched off the screens. The panels emptied and turned silver-gray, and there was a sigh of relief from her companions. But the jumps continued; she could feel them as a soft flutter in her stomach.
Cautiously she withdrew her hands from the gloves, stared at the mittens as if they had betrayed her. She had thought she understood the ship; now she had been humbled, a child at the feet of the adults. She sensed the Friend's strained reassurance but took little comfort. I hope you know what you're doing, she thought savagely. Maybe we're more stupid than you know. Or... more fragile.
In their borrowed Xeelee ship the little group of humans hurtled across the hostile Universe.
Pa
ul sensed the bafflement of the woman, and anguish infiltrated his partial personalities. He had known that the initiation of the Xeelee hyperdrive would terrify the humans, but there was little he could do to protect them.
There was no time for this introspection. He must seek the Ring himself.
Paul's focus of attention swept restlessly around the Solar System's abandoned periphery. He found shipyards, weapons shops, blood-stained hospitals, the foundations of massive industrial complexes. Warships and fortresses, some as large as moons, circled the distant Sun.
Once two objects have been in contact they are forever linked by a thread of quantum wave functions. Once this had formed the basis of humanity's inseparability communications net. Now the prowling Paul found tenuous quantum functions arcing from the warships to forgotten battlefields scattered across the Universe. Paul knew that the humans had attacked the site of the Ring, at least once; so among these haunted wrecks there must be relics of those great assaults, and a quantum link for him to follow.
At last he found it.
The Spline ship was a mile-wide corpse, its spherical form distorted by a single, vast wound a hundred yards across. Within the wound, organs and dried blood were still visible. Paul imagined the agony of the creature as it had returned from the battlefield, its guts open to the pain of hyperspace...
But this corpse-ship was embedded in a web of quantum functions which spun all the way to Bolder's Ring; these sunken Spline eyes, hardened now, had once gazed upon the Ring itself.
Paul wrapped himself around a pencil of quantum functions. Absorbing them into his awareness was like being stretched, expanded, made unimaginably diffuse.
Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence, he began to adjust the phases of the quantum threads, and the multiple foci of his awareness translated through spacetime.
Paul hauled himself along the quantum functions in search of Bolder's Ring.
It was as if he were sliding down a long, vast slope in spacetime. At first the slope was all but imperceptible, but soon its steepness was unmistakable.
The Ring was the most massive single structure in the Universe. It was like a boulder dropped into a pool: across a region hundreds of millions of light years wide its monstrous gravity well drew in galaxies as effortlessly as a lamp attracts moths. Now Paul was crossing the lip of that well, with the shining ruins of the Universe sliding alongside him. Eventually he saw how the fragile structures — the filaments, loops and voids of galaxies which had emerged from the singularity itself — were distorted, smashed, broken by the fall into this great flaw in space.
The galaxies — all around the sky — were tinged blue, he realized now. Blue shift.
He had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.
The Ring was a hoop woven from a billion-light-year length of cosmic string. Paul's principal awareness focus was somewhere above the plane of the Ring. The near side of the artifact formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, hard band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.
Paul could study the Ring as Jim Bolder never had. With relish he sent sub-personalities skating along the tangled quantum functions that reached deep into the Ring's stretched spacetime.
Cosmic strings were residual traces of the ultrahigh, symmetric vacuum of the primordial epoch — an era in which the forces of physics had yet to "freeze out" of a unified superforce — and the strings were now embedded in the "empty space" of the Universe, like residual lines of liquid water in solid ice. And the strings were superconducting; as they moved through the primordial magnetic fields, huge currents — of a hundred billion billion amps or more — were induced in the strings...
The strings writhed, like slow, interconnected snakes, across space. The strings were moving at close to lightspeed. They left behind them flat, glowing wakes — planes towards which matter was attracted, at several miles a second.
Paul looked into the center of the Ring. There he found a singularity. It was hoop-shaped, a circular flaw in space: a rip, caused by the rotation of the immense mass of the Ring. The singularity was about three hundred light years across — much smaller than the diameter of the Ring itself.
If the Ring were spinning more slowly, the Kerr metric would be quite well-behaved. The singularity would be cloaked in two event horizons — one-way membranes into the center — and, beyond them, by an ergosphere: a region in which gravitational drag would be so strong that nothing sublight could resist its current.
But the Ring was spinning... and too rapidly to permit the formation of an event horizon, or an ergosphere. And so, the singularity was naked.
Through the void at the heart of the Ring he could see blue-shifted starlight muddled, stirred. Here the wave functions were tangled, twisted, broken; here space was folded up like cheap cloth.
This distortion was the purpose of the Ring: this was the Kerr-metric Interface, a route to other universes — the gateway through which the Xeelee had made their escape.
...Ghostly flocks slid through the tangled cosmic string net that made up the Ring.
Paul widened his perception to embrace the entire Ring. Everywhere the photino birds soared, silent and purposeful. Somehow the great artifact seemed helpless, and Paul felt an absurd impulse to hurl himself forward, to try to protect the glorious baryonic monument.
At length the photino birds appeared to come to a decision. A knot of birds, billions of them, formed around one section of the toroid — perhaps some weak point — and from all around the Ring more bird flocks flickered in short hyperdrive hops to join the growing throng. Soon only a few scouts were left near outlying parts of the Ring, and around the weak point there was a swarm of shadow birds so thick they obscured the Ring itself.
Cautiously Paul slid his awareness focus closer to the stricken region. The photino birds, he realized, were now passing into the structure of the cosmic string itself.
If cosmic string self-intersected it cut itself. A new subloop formed, budding off the old. And perhaps that subloop, too, would self-intersect, and split into still smaller loops... and so on.
Paul understood. It would be an exponential decay process, once started. And so the birds, concentrating their mass, deflected the passage of string loops, causing them to self-intersect. Soon, threads — fragments of string thousands of miles long — drifted out of the structure, passing unimpeded through the ranks of birds.
Soon the ghost-gray birds were jostling in their eagerness to breach the threads; and, within minutes, a slice through the Ring — extremely thin, no more than a light year wide — began to turn a dull yellow.
The photino birds were cutting the Ring, Paul realized uneasily, and it didn't appear that it would take them very long. And his little band of humans was still hours away.
He swept over the plain of the Ring and studied the turbulent space at its center. Thanks to the activities of the photino birds the Kerr-metric zone was like a pond into which gravel was being thrown. Star images rippled, and the inter-universal surface was awash with a milky blue light. Already the access paths through the zone must be disrupted—
— and a shock wave of gravitational radiation burst over him.
Rapidly he withdrew his attention foci from the Ring and rose to the roof of its star-walled chamber, so that it was as if he were an insect in some vast cathedral. Something monstrous had erupted into this region of space, mere light minutes away from him. He surveyed the space around the Ring, seeking the source of the gravitational radiation.
...It had burst out of hyperspace like a fist. At first Paul could make out nothing but a blaze of blue-shifted photons and gravitons. Then, gradually, he perceived its structure. It was a sphere a million miles wide. Fusion fires still burned within it, although its structure had clearly been badly damaged by its impact at near lightspeed with the debr
is in the Ring chamber: great gobbets of material showered from its surface, so that it left a trail like some impossible comet as it blazed, Paul saw, towards the throng of photino birds.
It looked like a ball of ice-cream thrown into a bank of live steam. But it was a star: a star that had been accelerated to near lightspeed and then launched through hyperspace. And it was aimed directly at the photino birds' center of operations.
This was a weapon of war. The Qax had arrived.
After that things began to happen fast.
For days the ship had hurtled on.
Erwal knew she had no real understanding of the distances she was traveling, but she could sense how far she was being separated from the place of her birth.
And she and her companions were utterly alone. Even the Friend had withdrawn once more.
From time to time she slid her hands into the gloves and felt the continuing surge of the marvelous ship. And occasionally — when her companions were asleep — she would open one of the panel-windows and stare gloomily at the bright spheres which battered against the panel like vast insects, or at the distant pools of muddy light which sailed more slowly by.
Inside the ship there was, of course, no pattern of day and night by which to measure time, but Erwal counted the sleep periods that passed during the journey. Soon after the fourteenth she became aware, through the subtle touch of the gloves, of a change in the ship's motion.
Hastily, still blinking sleep from her eyes, she opened a panel-window.
The barrage of stars was visibly slowing, and the motion of the distant pools of light was almost gone. Had they arrived, then? She peered at the screen.
A wall of starlight, muddled and blue-stained, blocked off the sky. She stared, awed.
Her companions stirred in their nests of rags on the floor. Hastily she shut off the panel and sat in her chair, wondering what to do now.
Vacuum Diagrams Page 41