frightening disruptions we have seen. Convulsions that appear to be unsettling a large fraction of the universe.
“I’m still missing some element or clue,” she told me this morning, expressing both frustration and the kind of heady exhilaration that comes with intense labor in a field you love.
“I wonder if it may have something to do with the Embrace of Tides.”
The Niss seems all too ready to dismiss Sara’s efforts, because they have no correlation in the Great Library. But I’ve been impressed with her gumption and brilliance, even if she does seem to be bucking long odds. All I can say is more power to her.
Always hovering near Sara — with a distant, longing expression in his eyes — poor Emerson watches her tentative models flow across the holo display. Sometimes he squints, as if trying to remember something that’s just on the tip of his tongue. Perhaps he yearns to help Sara. Or to warn of something. Or else simply to express his feelings toward her.
Their growing affection is lovely to behold — though I cannot entirely deflect pangs of jealousy. I was never able to return Emerson’s infatuation, before his accident. Yet he remains dear to me. It is only human to have mixed feelings as his attention turns elsewhere. The stark truth is that Sara now has the only virile male human within several megaparsecs. How could that not make me feel more lonely than ever?
Yes, Tom. I sense you are still out there somewhere, with Creideiki, prowling dark corners of the cosmos. I can trace a faint echo of your essence, no doubt making, and getting into, astonishing varieties of trouble. Stirring things up even more than they already were.
Assuming it isn’t wishful thinking — or some grand self-deception on my part — don’t you also feel my thoughts right now, reaching out to you?
Can’t you, or won’t you, follow them?
I feel so lost … wherever “here” is.
Tom, please come and take me home.
Ah, well. I’ll edit out the self-pity later. At least I have Herbie for company.
Good old Herb — the mummy standing in a corner of my office, looking back at me right now with vacant eyes. Humanoid but ineffably alien. Older than many stars. An enigma that Tom bought with more than one life. A treasure of incalculable value, whose image launched a thousand Galactic clans and mighty alliances into mortal panic, shattering their own laws, chasing poor Streaker across the many-layered cosmos, trying to seize our cargo before anyone else could wrap their hands-claws-feelers-jaws around it.
My orders sound clear enough. Deliver Herbie — and our other treasures — to the “proper authorities.”
Once, I thought that meant the Great Library, or the Migration Institute.
Sorely disappointed and betrayed by those “neutral” establishments, we then gambled on the Old Ones — and nearly lost everything.
Now?
Proper authorities.
I have no idea who in the universe that would be.
Till this moment, I’ve put off reporting my most disturbing news. But there’s no point in delaying any longer.
Yesterday, I had to put a dear friend under arrest.
Tsh’t, my second-in-command, so competent and reliable. The rock I relied on for so long.
It breaks my heart to dial up the brig monitor and see her circling round and round, swimming without harness in a sealed pool, locked behind a coded door plate.
But what else could I do?
There was no other choice, once I uncovered her secret double dealings.
How did this happen? How could I have been blind to the warning signs? Like when those two Danik prisoners “committed suicide” a couple of months ago. I should have investigated more closely. Put out feelers. But I left the inquest to her, so involved was I with other matters.
Finally, I could no longer ignore the evidence. Especially now that she helped another, far more dangerous prisoner to esc—
…
I had to interrupt making that last journal entry, several hours ago. (Not that I was enjoying the subject.)
Something intervened, yanking me away.
An important change in our state of affairs.
The Niss Machine broke in to say the momentum field was collapsing.
The entire huge armada was slowing at last, dropping from A Level down to B, and then C. Flickers into normal space were growing longer with each jump. Soon, long-range sensors showed we were decelerating toward a brittle blue pinpoint — apparently our final destination.
Olelo’s spectral scan revealed a white dwarf star, extremely compact, with a diameter less than a hundredth that of Earth’s home sun, consisting mainly of ash from fusion fires that entered their last stage of burning aeons ago. In fact, it is a very massive and old dwarf, whose lingering furnace glow comes from gravitational compression that may last another twenty billion years.
We began picking up nearby anomalies — spindly dark objects revolving quite close to that dense relic star. Massive structures, big enough to make out as black shadows that sparkled or flashed, occulting the radiant disk whenever they passed through line of sight. Which they did frequently. There were a lot of them, jammed so close that each circuit took less than a minute!
Soon we verified they were orbiting artifacts, jostling deep inside the sheer gravity well.
Of course the concept was familiar, reminding me of the Fractal World, crowding and shrouding its small red sun — a contemplative sanctuary for retirees. Indeed, this place bears a family resemblance to that vast habitat. Only here the distance scales are a hundred times smaller. Tremendous amounts of matter abide in that curled well, crammed into a tight funnel of condensed spacetime.
Whoever lives down there must not value elbow room very much.
They belong to an order of life that craves a different kind of dimensionality. A squeezing clasp that older races interpret as loving salvation.
Joining others in the Plotting Room, I watched this new variation on an old theme gradually loom before us.
“There are ssseveral billion white dwarves per galaxy,” commented Akeakemai. “If even a small fraction are inhabited like this, the p-population of transcendent beings would be staggering. And none would’ve been detectable from pre-Contact Earth!”
Sara held the hand of Emerson, whose eyes darted among the surrounding vessels of our convoy, perhaps fearing what they might do, now that we’d arrived. I sympathized. We’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Deceleration continued through normal space, as the Niss Machine rematerialized to report. It had finished researching the symbol on our prow — the broad chevron representing our counterfeit membership in a higher order of sapiency.
“Let me conjecture,” I said, before the whirling hologram could explain. “The emblem stands for a union of the hydro-and oxy-life, coming together at last.”
One of my few remaining satisfactions comes from surprising the smug machine.
“How … did you know?” it asked.
I shrugged — a blithe gesture, covering the fact that I had guessed.
“Two line segments meeting at an angle of one hundred and four degrees. That can only represent the bonds of a water molecule. Hydrogen plus oxygen, combining to make the fundamental ingredient of all life chemistry. It’s not so mysterious.”
The spinning lines seemed to sway.
“Maybe for you,” the Niss replied. “Earthling preconceptions are not as fixed, perhaps. But to me this comes
