His words made her suspicious. There were things she and her family had talked about in the safety of their own house that no one ever said in public, and certainly not to a stranger. Maes Far had been a liberal world compared to many, but still the risks of being overheard and having their words relayed to Concordance, watching from orbit, were great.
“What truth?”
Ondo, used to his solitude, was unconcerned about the risks. “I'm talking about the true nature of the universe and the lies people live their lives by. You know what I mean, I think. The notion that moving faster than the light barrier rips your soul from your body is a small lie in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it is insidious. These days we have alternative lies, equivalent scientific stories. You've heard them. Moving through metaspace degrades the synapses, causing the brain to malfunction. The different physical constants of the metaspace domain are inimical to our biologies, causing cancers and premature senescence. They're the same lies, so very useful to Concordance, keeping people in their place, keeping them apart, preventing them from learning the truth or combining their ships into fleets. Most people in the galaxy know you can't travel faster than the speed of light and remain yourself. They know it absolutely, even though it is demonstrably untrue.”
Was he testing her? She was suddenly past caring; she had already lost everything. “The ship you rescued me in, it's capable of FTL travel?”
“I've made metaspace jumps in the Radiant Dragon many, many times. And now you've made several, too. As you'll be aware, your mind is still your own, your soul hasn't been ripped screaming from your body.”
Did she know that? She felt like a very different person from the young woman who'd lived on Maes Far just a few months earlier. The thoughts that dripped through her mind in quiet moments often seemed unfamiliar, alien, like they were intruding from outside. Was she the same? Of course, she didn't believe any of the stories about bodies and souls separating if forced to travel at speeds above the light barrier, but that didn't mean she was still herself. She no longer knew what that meant.
“You're telling me we're not in the Maes Far system anymore.”
Ondo nodded his agreement. “The Refuge is a long way from any system, a long way from any place that Concordance might think to come looking for me.”
“Can't they follow your trail?”
“They try; I take steps to make sure they don't succeed. Multiple metaspace hops to be certain no one is following before I come anywhere near and very careful quarantining before I approach. It's kept me safe for the thirty years I've lived here.”
She'd assumed he'd wanted to show her Maes Far, images of how it now was. The solar shroud would be complete: an opaque, orbiting disk that moved with finely-calculated exactness to stay precisely in front of the sun relative to the planet's surface, cutting off all heat, all light except for the flaring corona. A dark sun to replace the light. But that wasn't it.
“Show me what you brought me up here to see.”
He made no movement, some control fleck of his own sending instructions to the Refuge. In an instant, the walls and domed ceiling of the little room turned transparent. There, above and around her, filling one half of the sky, lay the sparkling mass of the galaxy.
It was a familiar-enough sight, of course. On dark nights on Maes Far it stretched overhead, a shimmering and meandering pathway. Her ancestors had called it the Diamond Road, imagined it as a path you could walk to reach the gods. She knew well the truth of what it was, but still, as a girl, she'd liked to stare up at it and dream about taking that journey.
The galaxy seen from Maes Far was nothing compared to its appearance from the Refuge. Her planet lay in the galactic plane, as almost all systems did, making the stars appear as the shimmering, dust-occluded line across the night sky that she knew so well. The Refuge, however, clearly lay far outside the plane. The entire disc of the galaxy lay tilted before Selene's eyes, with very few stars nearby and its structure clear: the spiralling arms and the bright glow of the central mass.
The sight of it sparkled on her retinas. She studied it for long moments with both her natural right eye, and then with her enhanced left eye, picking out different wavelengths of radiation, the different spectra of the stars, the glowing clouds of nebulae. From the angle they were at, the whole thing looked curiously like an eye itself: the ovoid shape, the rainbow hues and the glowing central mass as the pupil.
“Where is Maes Far?”
Part-way along one of the spiral arms, towards the central mass, a star began to flash. There was nothing remarkable or special about it. Her homeworld's sun was insignificant: one star among billions. She knew well the scale of the galaxy, but the sight of the whole thing laid out before her took her breath away. When you were inside it you couldn't see the entirety.
Her life had been so small. Briefly, she felt the tug of an unfamiliar emotion: a wonder at what all those stars were, at who and what was to be found there.
“And Sintorus?”
Another insignificant light flashed, farther out along the same arm.
Turning away for a moment, she saw that on the opposite side of the dome, away from the galactic mass, there was only darkness. There was the deep void of intergalactic space, with only other galaxies, other islands in the emptiness, to provide any illumination. In its own way that was beautiful, too. Light and dark. With her left eye, she could peer farther and farther into the void, deeper and deeper into time. Wherever she looked there were more galaxies, and more, and more.
