“Yes,” the machine resumed at last. “The bizarre and tragic fact is confirmed. Criswell structures appear to be collapsing all over Galaxy Four.”
It was hard for Sara to imagine. The devastation she had witnessed — a fantastically enormous edifice, an abode to quadrillions, imploding before her eyes — that could not possibly be repeated elsewhere! And yet, that was the news being relayed in sputtery flashes by refugee ships blazing past each other along the Gordian twists and swooping arcs of the transfer point nexus.
“But … I thought all that fighting and destruction happened because of us!”
“So I also believed, Sage Koolhan. But that may be because my Tymbrimi makers filled my personality matrix with some of their own exaggerated egotism and sense of self-importance. In fact, however, there is another possible interpretation of the events that took place at the Fractal World. We may have been like ants, scurrying beneath a burning house, convincing ourselves that it was happening because our queen laid the wrong kind of egg.”
Sara grasped what the Niss was driving at, and she hated the idea. As awful as it felt to be persecuted by mighty forces, there was one paranoiac consolation. It verified your importance in the grand scheme of things, especially if all-powerful beings would tear down their own great works to get at you. But now the Niss implied their suffering at the Fractal World was incidental — a mere sideshow — spilling from events so vast, her kind of entity might never understand the big picture.
“B-but … b-but in that case,” asked the little, crablike qheuen, Pincer-Tip. “In that case, who did wreck the Fractal World?”
Nobody answered. No one had an answer to offer — though Sara had begun ruminating over a possibility. One so disturbing that it came to her only in the form of mathematics. A glimmering of equations and boundary conditions that she kept prim and passionless … or else the implications might rock her far too deeply, shaking her faith in the stability of the cosmos itself.
Tsh’t, the dolphin lieutenant, intervened with a note of pragmatism. “Gillian, Kaa reportsss we’re nearing a junction that might take us to Galaxy Two. Is Tanith still your aim?”
The blond woman shrugged, looking tired.
“Unless anyone sees a flaw in my reasoning.”
A sardonic tone once more filled the voice of the Niss Machine.
“There is no difficulty perceiving flaws. You would send us charging toward violence and chaos, into the one part of the universe where our enemies are most numerous.
“No, Dr. Baskin. Do not ask about flaws.
“Ask instead whether any of us has a better idea.”
Gillian shrugged.
“You say the Jophur could figure out how to defeat our new armor at any moment. Before that happens, we must find sanctuary somewhere. There is always a slim hope that the Institutes—”
“Very well, then,” Tsh’t cut in. “Galaxy Two is our goal. Tanith Sector. Tanith World. I will tell Kaa to proceed.”
In theory, clients weren’t supposed to interrupt their patrons. Though Tsh’t was only trying to be efficient.
At the same time Sara thought—
We’re heading toward Earth. Soon we’ll be so near that Sol will be a visible star, just a few hundred parsecs away, practically round the corner.
That may be as close as I ever get.
Gillian Baskin answered with a nod.
“Yes, let us proceed.”
Harry
ABOUT ONE SUBJECTIVE DAY AFTER SETTING forth, pursuing the mysterious interlopers, Harry learned that an obstacle lay dead ahead.
Hurrying across a weird province of E Space, he dutifully performed his main task, laying instrument packages for Wer’Q’quinn alongside a fat, twisty tube that contained the entire sidereal universe. All the galaxies he knew — including the complex hyperdimensional junctions called transfer points — lay circumscribed within the Avenue. Whenever he paused to stare at it, Harry got a unique, contorted perspective on constellations, drifting nebulae, even whole spiral arms, shimmering with starlight and glaring emissions of excited gas. It seemed strange, defying all intuitive reason, to know the domain inside the tube was unimaginably more vast than the constrained realm of metaphors surrounding it.
By now he was accustomed to living in a universe whose complications far exceeded his poor brain’s ability to grasp.
While performing the job assigned to him by Wer’Q’quinn, Harry kept his station moving at maximum prudent speed, following the spoor left by previous visitors to this exotic domain.
Something about their trail made him suspicious.
Of course what I should be doing is lying low till Wer’Q’quinn’s time limit expires, then collect the cameras and scoot out of here before this zone of metareality transmutes again, melting around my ship and taking me with it!
So dangerous and friable was the local zone of eerie shapes and twisted logic that even meme creatures — the natural life order of E Space — looked sparse and skittish, as if incarnated ideas found the region just as unpleasant as he did. Harry glimpsed only a few simple notion-beasts grazing across the prairie of fuzzy, cactuslike trunks. Most of the mobile concepts seemed no more complex than the declarative statement — I am.
As if the universe cared.
His agile vessel made good time following the trail left by prior interlopers. Objects made of real matter left detectable signs in E Space. Tiny bits of debris constantly sloughed or evaporated off any physical object that dared to invade this realm of reified abstractions. Such vestiges might be wisps of atmosphere, vented from a life-support system, or clusters of hull metal just six or seven atoms wide.
The spoor grew steadily warmer.
I wonder why they came through here, he thought. The oldest trace was about a year old … if his Subjective Duration Meter could be trusted, estimating the rate at which protons decayed here, converting their mass into microscopic declarative statements. From dispersal profiles, he could tell that the small craft in front — the earliest to pass by — was no larger than his mobile station.
They must have been desperate to come this way … or else terribly lost.
The second spoor wasn’t much younger, coming from a bigger vessel, though still less massive than a corvette. It had nosed along in evident pursuit, avidly chasing after the first.
By sampling drifting molecules, Harry verified that both vessels came from his own life order. Galactic spacecraft, carrying oxygen-breathing life-forms — active, vigorous, ambitious, and potentially quite violent.
The third one had him confused for a while. It had come this way more recently, perhaps just days ago. A veritable cloud of atoms still swirled in its wake. Sampling probes waved from Harry’s station, like the chem-sense antennae of some insect, revealing metal-loceramic profiles like those associated with mech life.
As an acolyte of the Institutes, Harry was always on the lookout for suspicious behavior by machine entities. Despite precautions programmed into mechs for billions of years, they were still prone to occasional spasms of uncontrolled reproduction, grabbing and utilizing any raw materials in sight, making copies of themselves at exponentially increasing rates.
Of course this was a problem endemic to all orders, since opportunistic proliferation was a universal trait of anything called “life.” Indeed, oxygen breathers had perpetrated their own ecological holocausts in the Five
