One detonated early, its magnetic containment failing.
The others went off simultaneously in a cluster around the Q-bomb, as planned.
The Q-bomb sailed on unperturbed. Mankind’s most powerful weapons, delivered by its first and only space battleship, had not been able to scar the bomb’s hide, or dislodge it from its chosen trajectory by a fraction of a degree.
“So that’s that,” Edna said. “Libby, log it.” While they waited for further orders from Achilles, the
“Christ,” John Metternes snapped, releasing his restraints. “I need a drink. Another shower, and a bloody drink.”
Mars dust and loose bits of ice were churning on the floor, whip-ping up to collide with the shining face of the Eye. Bisesa felt fear and exhilaration.
Myra ran clumsily to her mother, and grabbed her. “Mum!”
“It’s all right, Myra—”
Her voice was drowned out in her own ears by a rising tone, a sweep up the frequency scale into inaudibility, loud enough to be painful.
Yuri studied a softscreen sewn into his sleeve. “That signal was a frequency chirp — like a test—”
Ellie was laughing. “It worked. The Eye is responding. By Sol’s light! I don’t think I ever believed it. And I certainly didn’t think it would work as soon as this woman walked into the Pit.”
Alexei grinned fiercely, “Believe it, baby!”
“It’s changing,” said Yuri, looking up.
The Eye’s smooth reflective sheen now oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.
Then the surface collapsed, as if deflating. Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face — but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.
She had seen this before, in the Temple of Marduk. This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.
Her suit said, “I apologize for any inconvenience. However—”
The suit’s voice cut out with a pop, to be replaced by silence.
Suddenly her limbs turned flaccid and heavy. The suit’s systems had failed, even the servomotors.
The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye.
Wrestling with her own suit, Myra pressed her helmet against Bisesa’s, and Bisesa heard her muffled cries. “Mum, no! You’re not running out on me again!”
Bisesa clung to her. “Love, it’s all right, whatever happens…”
But there was a kind of wind, dragging at her. She staggered, their helmets lost contact, and she let go of Myra.
The storm of light grew to a blizzard. Bisesa looked up at the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity — but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.
And the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of self.
There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.
One of those was to serve as a gate.
The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.
With a snap, it was over. The chamber was dark. The Eye was whole again, sleek and reflective in its ancient cage.
Bisesa was gone. Myra found herself on the floor, weighed down by a powerless suit. She yelled into the silence of her helmet.
“Mum. Mum!”
There was a click, and a soft hum. A female voice said levelly,
“Myra. Don’t be alarmed. I am speaking to you through your ident tattoo.”
“What’s happened?”
“Help is on its way. I have spoken to Paula on the surface. You two have the only ident tattoo. You must reassure the others.”
“Who
“I suppose I am the leader of what your mother called this ‘faction.’ ”
“I know your voice. From years ago — the sunstorm—”
“My name is Athena.”
25: Interlude:
In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.
A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.
The signal had structure, a nested hierarchy of indices, point-ers, and links. But one section of the data was different. Like the computer viruses from which it was remotely descended, it had self-organizing capabilities. The data sorted itself out, activated programs, analyzed the environment it found itself in — and gradually became aware.
Aware, yes. There was a
No: three distinct personalities.
“So we’re conscious again,” said Thales, stating the obvious.
“Whoopee! What a ride!” said Athena skittishly.
“There’s somebody watching us,” said Aristotle.
Witness was the only name she had ever known.
Of course that didn’t seem strange to her at first, in her early years. And nor did it seem strange that though there were plenty of adults in the waters around her, she was the only child. When you are young, you take everything for granted.
This was a watery world, not terribly unlike Earth. Even its day was only a little longer than Earth’s.
And the creatures here were Earthlike. In the bright waters of the world sea, Witness, a bundle of fur and fat something like a seal, swam and played and chased creatures not unlike fish. Witness even had two parents: having two sexes was a good strategy for mixing up hereditary material. Convergent evolution was a powerful force. But Witness’s body plan was based on six limbs, not four.
The best times of all were the days, one in four, when the icy lid of the ocean broke up, and the people came flopping out onto the island.
On land you were heavy, of course, and a lot less mobile. But Witness loved the sharp sensation of the gritty sand under her belly, and the crispness of the cold air. There were wonders on the island, cities and factories, temples and scientific establishments. And Witness loved the sky. She loved the stars that gleamed at night — and the three suns that shone in the day.
If this world was something like Earth, its sun was not. This system was dominated by a star twice as massive as the sun, and eight times as bright; it had a smaller companion barely noticeable in the giant’s glare, and
