by Colin Kapp
“A phoenix reborn,” said Wildheit quietly. “When will all this happen?”
“There’s no way of knowing. Even the Ra couldn’t pin the time too accurately with their Chaos scans. I suppose the truth is that events on that scale take place relatively slowly when viewed against cosmic time. It could start tomorrow and last for a million years, yet such is the balance of forces that the thing which triggers it off could be something so small and slight as to be cosmically imperceptible—an atom, or a starquake …”
“… or a man?” asked Wildheit.
“Yes, I think perhaps a man,” said Penemue. He was following the direction of Wildheit’s attention—the corner of a table’s edge. That edge no longer had a sharp appearance, but was fringed with a minute halo, as if the light path was being partially diffracted by an imperceptible fog.
“Roamer!” said Wildheit heavily. “We might have guessed! Somehow she got me here—the trigger man in the center of the greatest conceivable potential catastrophe. And we’re still lined up under the crossed-hairs of the Chaos Weapon. Here’s all the power their Chaos tests predicted—millions upon millions of suns and galaxies waiting for the trigger to signal the end of the universe in the most unequivocal way.”
“But it’s the Ra’s own weapon,” objected Kasdeya. “They wouldn’t let her do that with it.”
“How could they know what she was doing. She’s promised to help them destroy the marshal, and they’ve programmed the weapon to make just that happen. The marshal’s great disaster is due, but their own is too diffuse to fix with certainty. Only Roamer could see that the two disasters were one and the same event.”
“And the time paradox?” asked Kasdeya.
“There is none, except that the marshal is at the center of the event, and they are spread far from it. Under gravitational attraction, the movement of these stars is going to be limited to the velocity of light. Just how many centuries do you think its going to take for all of them to reach the singularity?”
“Then,” said Kasdeya, “it appears that Saraya’s catalyst is about to fulfill its function.”
Although the build-up was slow, there was no doubting the great stress which was winding the continuum. As the hours passed, so the haloed fringes began to appear on every line and surface in the ship. Articles acquired a slippery sensation that gave the impression that everything was covered with a layer of slime. Small objects unaccountably slipped out of spring fixtures and slid out of grooves in which they had previously been safely maintained. Later, the loss of static friction became even more marked; heavy objects began to move down even the slightest incline in the surfaces on which they rested; and the deck had all the retentive security of a sheet of polished ice.
On Wildheit’s shoulder, Coul began to quiver, and the marshal went to a lower deck where they could speak unobserved.
“How much longer, Coul, before you leave?”
“Not very long. But I shall stay with you until the last second.” The symbiotic god sounded grave. “We gods are much troubled. My leaving will be a betrayal of the life-bond we formed between us. I wish there was another way.”
“I don’t see it as a betrayal,” said Wildheit. “Even gods are not infallible. It’s better that one of us survives than neither.”
“If the situation were reversed—if you were a god and I a human—would you leave me?”
“There’s no answer to that question. My present thinking is colored by human emotions I would not possess if I were a god.”
“Then you would not leave. For that I thank you. I’m in communion with Talloth. Do you wish to speak with Marshal Hover?”
“If that can be arranged.”
“Then breathe …”
“Jym, for Heaven’s sake!” Hover’s voice was immediate and concerned. “Where are you and what the devil are you doing now?”
“How long since we spoke last time, Cass?”
“All of twelve months.”
“Not according to my book. About three weeks is all. The chance to pick up all that back pay would be a fine thing.”
“Quit fooling! We’ve got a war on. Did you manage to fix the Chaos Weapon?”
“No, but it’s got a fix on me, right now. And if it’s any consolation, I’m programmed to take the Ra universe with me when I go. How’s that for a finale?”
“Honestly, Jym! I’m supposed to write a report on all this!”
“If you can spell Big Bang you haven’t got a problem. Tell Saraya it’s just about to begin. It’s the best—and the last—thing I shall be able to do for you. Did many of their ships get through?”
“Plenty too many. Fortunately some of them tangled with the aliens round the Rim and took a pasting, which saved us having to fight them ourselves. Their main fleet, however, came in from deep-space, and we went out to intercept. But after a short and very wild engagement, they quite literally disappeared.”
“They did what?”
“They disappeared. They wound up their speed like crazy and jumped clean out of space.”
“Oh no!”
“What’s funny about that?”
“They have standard subspace capability, Cass, but when they really want out, they’ve a tendency to go where you wouldn’t want to follow—into time-dilation. The chances are that units of that fleet are spread right over the next ten centuries, waiting for a supply backup which isn’t going to show up.”
“Jym, it’s becoming a good job you do only report in once a year or so, because you invariably leave me greatly confused. I’ve only just come to understand your last communication.”
“Never mind. Saraya will get the point. In hours, or days at the most, the Ra universe will start to end. That’s the Chaos resultant Saraya foresaw, and what his catalyst was designed to achieve. I only wish I could be around for the celebrations, but there’s one thing about a catalyst I’ve only just come to appreciate.”
“What’s that?”
“To be effective, Cass, you have to be right at the heart of the reaction.”
Vision even of gross details was now becoming blurred, and the friction between his shoes and the floor had become less than that of wet ice on wet ice. The ascent back to the upper levels of the craft was a nightmare journey, because it was impossible to grasp anything that did not slip through the fingers. Only by crooking his wrist and arms around stanchions and fittings could he gain sufficient purchase to make any progress at all.
Kasdeya and Penemue were sitting on the floor, having tired of slipping off the control seats, and they were resignedly watching screws, bolts, and fixtures unfix themselves and drop in a continuous rain of small parts that soon, they feared, would be followed by larger structures. It was obviously only a matter of time before something vital came apart in the ship’s engines or power plant which would destroy the vessel entirely. That this blow-up would itself initiate the destruction of the universe seemed unlikely, and Wildheit found himself waiting for the one final shock to the continuum which would trigger the greatest catastrophe of all.
By some trick of inspired acrobatics, Wildheit managed to depolarize the dome above the flight-bridge to such an extent that the great unbroken wall of stars shone brilliantly down on them as they lay slithering on their backs among errant bolts, washers, and springs. All the nearer, more easily-delineated stars seemed to have acquired their own stress-haloes, as if whatever forces gripped the ship also fanned far and wide beyond. If the same interference with natural forces continued down to the molecular scale and up to the stellar, then whole suns would soon become unknit and verify Penemue’s prediction of a vast coalescence to form the nucleus of the death of a universe.
Then something happened, something which at first appeared to be the antithesis of what they expected: there came a sudden silence. The craft’s engines ceased to sing; the clatter and untwisting of inanimate minutia stopped; the hail of small parts halted; and a quiet too absolute to be real clamped over their senses. In that same instant cl
arity returned to vision and the comforting sense of tactile roughness returned to the environment. Yet none of them attempted to stand, being content to remain on their backs to watch the story of the ending of a universe as it began before their eyes.
And with the withdrawal of the field of the Chaos Weapon, came the backlash of the continuum itself.
SEVENTEEN
WITH a bruising series of excursions, the whole universe was shaken. A mighty, invisible hand seized galaxies, stars, and provost-craft alike, and jarred them violently with long claps of soundless thunder. Within the ship the concussion fractured many of the already-weakened fittings, causing untold damage to its already precarious installations: in the universe at large, its results were traumatic.
Coul whimpered, was gone, returned briefly, then flickered with an uncertainty that suggested he was at rest in none of the dimensions in which he coexisted. His insatiable desire to witness events from a human standpoint was a force which drew him back to Wildheit’s shoulder, even though a greater wisdom warned him it was already long past a safe time for his departure. Wildheit understood the god’s indecision, but was glad to feel the ethereal roots of the symbiosis still deeply in his shoulder; he knew that when Coul left, his own going would not be long delayed.
The beginning of the end was impressive even by cosmic standards. A cluster of perhaps a hundred-thousand stars was thrown into criticality by the giant pulses of the continuum backlash. Had the stars been more separate, a series of novae would have wasted their potential; but so close was their proximity that the explosive compression caused each to lose its separate identity in a mammoth exchange of flux and incandescent matter of such a density that gravitational attraction welded them into a composite whole. The resultant flare eclipsed everything else in that quadrant of space, and although the polarizers in the dome strove to shield the flight-bridge from excessive radiation, nothing save a solid bulkhead could have completely excluded all its terrifying radiance.
Through the now virtually-complete opacity of the dome, the fine structure of the fireball could be seen with clarity: a vast ball of plasma shot through with streamers and vortices and whirlpools; crazed remnants of former suns driven to random movements by the boiling off of a whole series of nuclear reaction states; a bright corona with flame-tongues fifty million miles in length; and somewhere inside, a white heart of cosmic proportions beating the slowing pulse of a dying universe.
Even as they watched, the giant heart heaved convulsively and died, and a new series of reactions began. Extremely small at first, but rapidly increasing in size, there grew a sphere of absolute darkness which was the event-horizon of a region where matter had been so hopelessly compressed by gravitational forces that a voracious black hole had been born out of the heated ashes of the surrendered suns.
The great fireball turned in upon itself, the vibrant life of its luminescence being drained in long trailing filaments and streamers as the soon-gigantic black hole sucked away its essence from inside. Other suns, like swirling water around a whirlpool, hurried to join and merge with the giant corona which harbored the hungry malignancy. Soon, the crowding throng of suicidal suns exceeded even the appetite of the hungry black hole, and a second sphere of radiation formed inside the corona, with temperatures and characteristics which had no place in any orthodox scheme of physics. So dense and active became the fragmented atoms in this new sphere that soon even the black hole was consumed by this new and even more singular singularity.
Wildheit heard Penemue gasp and dragged his eyes away from the giant nucleus to scan the great circulating storm which wracked the rest of space. Whereas the movements of the stars had previously been imperceptible, now all were caught by the great maelstrom, spiraling with increasing rapidity toward the nucleus. Many suns were prematurely divesting themselves of brilliant mantles of star-stuff which flared under magnetic compulsion across the intervening space like sheets of incandescent velvet—advance gifts of great intrinsic beauty attempting to propitiate this angriest of gods. Even as the fascinated onlookers watched, the great whirlpool tide became stronger and swifter; the race to destruction became a mania; and the whole universe began to drain from all sides, its components jostling, thrusting, exploding, and fractionating in the hectic, desperate race to become one within the confines of this singular end of everything.
Wildheit did not need instruments to know that the provost-craft had itself joined the cosmic death-rush. The great fireball was growing; but even faster than it grew, its apparent size was enhanced by the speed of their own movement toward it. Furthermore the crush of self-destructive suns entrained in the spiral whirlpool was pressing closer, and the level of radiation in space had risen so high that the craft’s cooling equipment had precisely no direction in which it could dump its waste heat. The temperature was rising internally to an uncomfortable degree. This factor did not itself perturb the trio in the craft unduely, because it was obvious that with the ceasing of the engines something had also happened to the air supply. A slow and not unpleasant lethargy coupled with expansive dream-states was creeping upon them. The atmosphere could possibly have been adjusted, but there was no point in prolonging consciousness in order to endure a more painful death.
Dripping with sweat, Wildheit was finding it peculiarly difficult to maintain his attention. Time and again he dropped into a broken semisleep, only to reawaken on his back to note the inexorable progress of the ship toward its great and dreadful destiny. He knew with some objective part of his mind that he was becoming delirious, and the same critical faculty suggested that, all things considered, this was a reasonable state of mind in which to die. Nevertheless the instinct to survive forced him to his feet and across to the now uncomfortably-hot control banks to investigate the possibility of continued life.
In the face of the ultimate destructive capability of the great singularity which had become the sky, the marshal realized that he had no idea whatever about what he was attempting to achieve. Even had the engines been in good order, it was debatable whether they could have succeeded in dragging the craft out of the immense gravitational well which now tugged whole galaxies toward destruction; nor did he have sufficient understanding of the instruments even to begin to understand their reasonings as to why the engines had failed. Kasdeya and Penemue had apparently found it reasonable to accept death stoically and, when conscious, faced the violent sun to end all suns with profoundly curious eyes. Wildheit swore, and lurched down the companionway with a half-formed idea of having a look at the engines themselves.
Away from the flight-bridge the air seemed cooler and easier to breathe. It possibly contained a fraction more life-supporting oxygen. Although he welcomed this, Wildheit knew objectively that all he could achieve was to prolong his own agony. Repeatedly his mind kept slipping from his task, and around each corner and behind each bulkhead door fragments of memory sparked by similar lines and forms and shapes obtruded into his thoughts, populating the lower deck with hints of familiar ghosts.
An emergency suit against a dark corner carried a suggestion of Saraya, bat-black and with a swirling cloak. The light streaming through a nearby viewport framed the illusion with a fire-glow, as if it were seen through a window into Hell. The next vision passed as he neared it: but on new legs, Cass Hover hurried to help his faltering progress, only to dissolve into a pattern of distorted reflections in the deep polish of a bulkhead door. With a face filled with desperation, Roamer appeared to stand in the dark engine cell, gesturing with the whole of her arms imploringly. So real was this image that Wildheit could almost hear the words framed by her mouth.
“Coul, please don’t interfere!”
Struck by the curiousness of the phrase, Wildheit became conscious of the god still on his shoulder.
“How long to the end, Coul?”
“Soon. The old stars return for redistillation. The very atoms will be dissembled and remade. The mainspring of the universe is rewound. It is a terrible time for gods.”
“Help me! The time has nearly come.”
Coul stiffened as if he himself were responding to the object of Wildheit’s imagination. Some sort of catastrophe happened within the ship, and what little air there was became suddenly tainted with a sour, chest-constricting smoke.
“The time is come … is now …”
An explosion rocked Wildheit with a brief concussion. The pain in his shoulder increased intolerably, as if Coul were wrenching out the very root of the symbiosis that had united them together. He tried to contain the pain, but its increase swamped his whole system with agony, and he cried aloud in the instants before the black wing of unconsciousness deprived him of the further capacity to suffer. Then with the swooping of internal night, a long cry sounded deep in the recessed chambers of his mind.
“Good-bye, Marshal! Good-bye!”
What followed for Wildheit was a period of neither death nor consciousness. He fell into a great limbo in which things half-perceived came and went but had no actual meaning for him. He was aware that time passed, but how much of it and to what purpose, he neither understood nor cared. The sole unifying thread which ran through the whole experience was the dreadful ache in his shoulder that extended down, toward, and sometimes into his heart.
Some incidents he remembered, or thought he remembered, but there was no way of deciding if they had actually taken place or whether they were fragments of some old memory resurrected. People came and stood over him; white sticks were played by unseen hands; a vast resonance physically bounced him where he lay, and sucked at what little consciousness he possessed; and a strong scent of violets in his lungs gave him days or perhaps eternities of rest and renewal.
“Steady, Jym, boy! It’s all over now!”