box of Ada’s mind, released the dark spirit which could never be contained again. She blamed that experiment- undertaken for sensation’s sake-and her own impetuous nature for all that followed. Equations burned, pure thoughts soared, but her inner drives would always deny her peace.
Years earlier, her father’s body, with massive pageantry, was conveyed by carriage, drawn by six black steeds, through London’s streets (which were thronged with onlookers), and laid to rest in the family vault. Ada’s own funeral is more modest; her narrow corpse travels by modern train, black smoke billowing in lieu of stallion’s manes.
Finally, she lies interred beside the father she was not allowed to know.
Crosse, meanwhile, crouches beneath his mantelpiece, burning, one by one, every letter he received from the woman he loved, and every note from the forgotten half-sister entrusted with raising their secret child: the son he will never see.
That night, her demonstration seemed nothing special. Gus shone red laser light into her kludged lab-bench setup-draining power from the campus mesoreactor: she would get complaints-where the beam simply disappeared.
But, at the far end of the half-lit lab, a red spot glowed in mid-air.
To an onlooker, it would have seemed the simplest of holograms. Ives whistled as he examined the apparatus; whatever the underlying mechanism, the results were spectacular. Red light shone into nothingness, reappeared some seven yards away. He realized, though it would take decades for other minds to catch up all the way with his intuition, that this simple demonstration transformed everything.
Shortly before dawn, they were back at the beach, sitting upon damp sand, breathing in the ocean air. Stars still glittered overhead, though dark-green painted the horizon behind them.
“We’re going to get there.” Ives, craning back, stared straight up. “Thanks to you.”
“I hope so.”
They stayed there until the rising sun draped orange fire across steel-grey waves, lighting the warm salt fluid which gave birth to life, splashing endlessly against the shore.
Sapphire, wreathed in soft cotton. The entire world lies beneath her: a jewel upon black velvet.
So wonderful.
Over her right shoulder floats the tiny biographer-globe, recording everything except what’s important: her thoughts and feelings. The orbital station’s view-bubble is reserved just for her.
If I’d listened to what everyone knew was “right,” I wouldn’t be here.
Gus has overridden both lawyers’ and medics’ wishes many times. (“There’s no such thing, as escape velocity,” she told them weeks before. “Not with continuous thrust. I’ll use a slow-shuttle. Perfectly safe.”) The occasional lie will not hurt them: she came up fast.
They don’t have her perspective on the world.
After all this time.
Seventy-eight too-short years have passed since her discovery. Lightspeed spinglobes, forming stasis fields within, were created 120 years after Einstein’s blistering insights into the relativistic nature of spacetime. Her own research (she does not consider herself in Einstein’s league) has taken this long to come to technological fruition.
“Two minutes, ma’am.” A respectful voice in her earpiece.
Wealth comes from her corporations, more than intellectual endeavours. One of her companies owns the patent for this bubble’s material: a transparent paramagnetic ceramic. She has always invested ten percent of income, given ten percent away (to children’s foundations, mainly) and wisely spent the rest.
But none of it had meaning…
Her own researchers, at her insistence, use her as a guinea pig, for telomere replenishment and femtocytic re- engineering: for every life-extending treatment which looks likely to work. Equally importantly, she practices Yang- style t’ai chi every morning. Gus refuses to die too soon.
… until this moment.
Dark space outside. She wishes Ives were here.
“One minute.”
She remembers Mother, so frail in the hospital bed, in the Radcliffe’s terminal ward.
“Why did you call me Augusta, Mum?”
A long pause, then the tiniest of shrugs, from shoulders so emaciated her bones looked razor-sharp, attempting to cut through skin.
“Family tradition, pumpkin-”
It was days before Mother found final peace in death. But those were the last coherent words she spoke.
Now, Gus watches the stars. Blackness, sprinkled with diamond stars, across an invisible context whose mathematical reality she knows, but whose tangible qualities neither she nor anyone else can see.
Stardust, every one of us…
Born in the nearest sun. But all those suns seem to murmur now, as long-forgotten technology once whispered to the girl she was: secrets she will never truly grasp.
“Ma’am…”
“I see it.”
Silver dart. A tiny speck, orbiting fast, high above blueness, heading into…
Gone.
One moment it was there; next, the vessel no longer existed.
“Insertion complete.”
Hopeful, that message from Observation Control. There was no explosion; with luck, it means-
Speck.
“Is that it?”
“Beg your-? Yes! Ma’am, they’re back.”
Shining light, growing.
The silver vessel gleams, broadcasting its report of success on all wavelengths.
“We saw it!” The captain’s voice. “Alpha Centauri, for sure. Spectrometer confirms. We were there!”
“Thank you,” Gus whispers.
The silver biographer-globe drops closer, and she frowns. Then she realizes she is lying down, though she cannot recall changing position.
Blackness, circling all around.
And the stars, so bright.
“… ma’am?”
Sounds, fading.
We made it, Mum.
And, for a moment, she sees it: the fractal Pattern, the mu-space reality which holds up our illusory cosmos-
Thank you.
Somewhere, a major blood vessel erupts. A crack, then relief.
Stars…
A smile spreads across Gus’s lined face.
… fading…
Her personal universe dwindles.
