Huck lacked both strength and will to help dispose of the body. That chore was left to Kaa, using the mechanical arms of his walker to heave the bulky qheuen toward the recycler. Huck turned three eyes away from the gory scene, but the remaining stalk quivered and stared, as if dumbly transfixed.
How could this happen? Kaa worried as he sent control messages down his neural tap, causing the machine to move like an extension of his body. Did someone attack the ship? Or was this caused by the disease we heard about … the one that slaughtered many qheuens back on Jijo?
If so, how was Pincer exposed?
Abruptly, Huck let out an amazed cry. Her whistling shouts brought Kaa spinning around, stomping back from his grisly task. He looked down where she pointed, at the bloody deck where Pincer had lain.
There, partly masked by gruesome liquids, both of them now made out a design of some sort, carved deeply into the metal deck.
“He … he …,” Huck stammered. “He musta cut it with his teeth, while he was dying! Poor Pincer couldn’t walk or talk, but he could still move his mouth, as it lay against the floor!”
Kaa stared, in part amazed by the slicing power of qheuen jaws, and by the acute — even artistic — rendering that had been the poor creature’s final act.
It showed a face, vaguely humanoid, but somewhat feral looking, with lean, ravenous cheeks and a small, bitter mouth. He recognized the shape at once.
“A Rothen!”
The race of sneaky criminals and petty connivers, who had persuaded a cult of humans to believe they were patrons of all Earthclan, and rightful gods of Terran devotion.
Then he remembered. There had been such a creature aboard Streaker! A prisoner, brought aboard in secret at Wuphon Port. A Rothen overlord named Ro-kenn, mastermind of many felonies against the Six Races of Jijo.
“He musta stowed away aboard this ship!” Huck cried. “Stayed hidden till we docked, then came out an’ killed poor Pincer to get at the door!”
Kaa’s mind roiled over the disastrous implications. No matter how capable, Ro-kenn could not have managed such an escape all by himself. He must have had help aboard Streaker. Moreover, if this Rothen made it into Kazzkark, all their plans might be in jeopardy.
Stay calm, he told himself. Ro-kenn can’t go to the authorities. The crimes he committed on Jijo are worse than anything the sooners did.
Yes, hut he might hurry to one of the big fanatic clans or alliances, and try to sell them information about Streaker and Jijo. At the very least, he’ll send word to other Rothen.
“We had better try to contact Alvin and Ur-ronn,” Kaa said. And for once he could tell that Huck agreed.
Only that was far from easy. It seemed that all available telecomm lines were jammed with frantic traffic. And things only got worse as another wave of subspace disruptions hit, causing the planetoid to shake and rattle, resonating like a great, hollow bell.
From the Journal of Gillian Baskin
THE UNIVERSE IS AWASH IN TRAGEDY. YET, ONLY now, as it seems to be falling apart, have I finally begun to see some of the ironic, awesome beauty of its cosmic design.
As happened at the Fractal World, we find ourselves surrounded by sudden devastation, orders of magnitude greater than I ever imagined.
Far below us, whirling near the condensed core of a massive ancient star, we see vast, needle-shaped habitats — each one longer than the moon is wide — made of superstrong godstuff, built to withstand fierce tidal strains. Only now those habitats of the Transcendent Order show signs of terminal stress, shedding their outer skins like brittle slough — quivering as wave after wave of spatial convulsions surge through this part of Galaxy Four.
According to both Sara and the Niss Machine, these are symptoms of a fantastic rupture, beyond anything seen in a quarter of a billion years.
The effects have been even worse on the huge armada of “candidate ships” accompanying Streaker converging on multiple, crisscrossing downward spirals toward those needle monoliths. What had been a stately procession, triumphant and hopeful, wedding two of life’s great orders in a great and glorious union, is swiftly dissolving into chaos and conflagration.
So closely were the giant arks and globules packed together — in dense, orderly rows — that each wave of hypergeometric-recoil throws one rank against another. Collisions produce blinding explosions, slaughtering untold millions and throwing yet more vessels off course.
Yet, despite this awful trend, only a few other craft have joined Streaker in attempting to escape, climbing laboriously outward through the maze, seeking some relative sanctuary of deep space. It seems that the addiction of tides cannot easily be broken, once sapients have tasted its deeper pleasures. Like rutting beasts, irresistibly drawn toward mating grounds they know to be on fire, a majority continue on course, accelerating into the funnel, bound for the Embrace they so deeply desire.
Is this the ultimate destiny of intelligent life? After striving for ages to become brainy, contemplative, wise (and all that), do all races wind up driven forward by ineffable instinct? By a yearning so strong they must plunge ahead, even when their goal is falling apart before their eyes?
At last, for the first time in three long years, I begin to understand the persecution we Streakers have suffered — and Earth, as well. For our discovery of the Ghost Fleet truly does present a challenge, a shocking heresy, that strikes at the very heart of Galactic belief systems.
Most of them — and the hydrogen breathers, as well — maintain that true transcendence is the ultimate destiny of those who merge within the Embrace of Tides. Something must lie beyond … or so they’ve reasoned for countless ages. Why else would the universe have evolved such an elegant way of focusing, gathering, and distilling the very best of both life orders?
Surely, this must be the great path spoken of by the Progenitors, when they departed two billion years ago.
Ah, but then what of the Ghost Fleet, with its haunting symbols and glimmering hints at ancient truth?
Where did we find it?
In a “shallow” globular cluster, dim and nearly metal-free, drifting lonely toward the rim of Galaxy Two. A place where spacetime is so flat that even young races experience a faint, nervous revulsion. A kind of creepy agoraphobia. Such locales are seldom visited, since they contain nothing of interest to any life order, even machines.
(In which case, what clue … what hunch … drew Creideiki there? Did he set Streaker’s course for the Shallow Cluster because it seemed neglected by the Great Library, with an entry as skimpy as the one about Earth?
(Or was there something more to his decision? A choice that seemed so strange at the time.)
Now, at last, I see why our enemies — the Tandu and Soro and Jophur and the others — got so upset when Streaker beamed back those first images of the Ghost Fleet … and of Herbie and the rest.
If these truly are relics of the great Progenitors, sealed away in field-protected vessels for countless aeons, what does that imply about the Embrace of Tides? Did the founder race — earliest and wisest of all — seek desperately to avoid the attraction? Did they shun the deep places? If so, might it be because they knew something terrible about them?
Perhaps they saw the Embrace as something else entirely. Not a route to transcendence, but a trash disposal system. A means for recycling dross, like the Great Midden on Jijo.
Nature’s way of siphoning away the old in order to make room for the new.
