Flux

Dura stared at their Star. It was small and mean, she thought, disappointing compared to the glorious lanterns which glittered in other parts of the sky. And yet it was home; she felt a strange dislocation, a pang of sadness, of loss. “Our world is so limited,” she said slowly. “How could we ever have known that beyond the Crust was so much wonder, immensity, beauty…”

“You know, I think that big sphere of gas has a glow of its own. It isn’t just reflecting the Starlight, I mean.”

The globe was like an immense pendant on the ring, utterly dwarfing the Star itself. Hork seemed to be right; the intensity of its gray-yellow glow increased toward its rough center. And it wasn’t actually a sphere, she realized slowly; perhaps it had once been, but now it was drawn out into a teardrop shape, with a thin tip attached to the ring by an umbilical of glowing gas. The outer layers of the globe were misty, turbulent; Dura could see through them to the darkness of space.

“It’s like a star itself. But…”

“But it doesn’t look right.” Dura searched for the right word. “It seems — unhealthy.”

“Yes.” He pointed. “It looks as if stuff is being drawn out of the big star and put into the ring.” He glanced speculatively at Dura. “Perhaps, somehow, the Star is drawing flesh from the big star to create the ring. Perhaps the planet we’re on is constructed of ring-stuff.”

She shuddered. “You make the Star sound like a living thing. Like an eye-leech.”

“A star-leech. Well, perhaps that’s as good an explanation as we’ll ever get…” He grinned at her, his face spectral in the ring’s glow. “Come on. I want to try the arrow’s last setting.”

“Oh, Hork… Do you have any capacity for awe?”

“No.” His grin broadened through his beard. “I think it’s a survival characteristic. Mental toughness, I call it.” He led her back around the inner portal-chamber and eyed her roguishly. “So we’ve seen the stars. Big deal. What’s left?”

“Twist the arrow and find out.”

He did so.

The universe — of stars and starlight — imploded.

Dura screamed.

26

The stars — all except the Star — had disappeared, dragging all the light from the sky. The Star, with its ring and its huge, bleeding companion, hung in an emptied sky…

No, she realized, that wasn’t quite true. There was a bow around the sky — a multicolored ribbon, thin and perfect, which hooped around the Ur-humans’ habitat — and, she saw, passed behind the Star itself.

It was a ribbon which encircled the universe, and it contained all the starlight.

Hork loomed before her, the starbow adding highlights to the gray illumination of his face. “Well?” he demanded irritably. “What now?”

She rubbed her forehead. “Each setting of that device has shown us more of our surroundings — more of the universe. It’s as if successive layers, veils, have been removed from our eyes.”

“Right.” He lifted his eyes to the starbow. “So this must be the truth? The last setting, which strips away all the veils?” He shook his head. “But what does it mean?”

“The sky we saw before — of stars, scattered around the sky — was strange to us… even awesome. But it looked natural. The stars were just like our Star, only much further away.”

“Yes, Whereas this seems distorted. And how come we can still see our Star? Why isn’t its light smeared out into this absurd hoop, too?”

Smeared starlight… Yes. I like that. Good; that’s very perceptive…

Dura whirled in the Air, trying to suppress a scream. The voice, dry and soft, emanating from the emptiness of the huge room behind her had been utterly terrifying.

“Karen Macrae,” Hork said, his voice thick with hostility.

A sketch of shoulders and head wrought in pale, colored cubes of light hung in the Air a mansheight from them. The definition was poorer than within the underMantle — the colors washed out, the jostling light-cubes bigger. Karen Macrae opened her eyes, and again Dura was repulsed by the fleshy balls nestling within the cups.

Hork had been right; somehow Karen Macrae had ridden with them in the lump of Corestuff attached to the side of the “Pig,” all the way from the depths of the Star to this remote, austere place.

The starlight is smeared; yes. And it’s crucial that you understand why it’s smeared, what’s happening to you. The walls of this place aren’t windows; they have processing capacity — they’re virtually semi-sentient, actually — capable of deconvolving the Doppler distortions of…

Hork growled and Waved forward. “Talk straight, damn you.”

The blurred head rotated slowly. Doppler distortion. Blue shift. You — we — are traveling enormously quickly through space. Almost as fast as light itself. Do you see? And so…

“And so we outrun starlight,” Hork said. “…I think I understand. But why is it we still see the Star itself, and its system of ring and giant companion?”

The Colonist seemed to be retreating into her own half-formed head; the fleshy things in her eyecups slid around like independent animals.

Dura struggled to answer Hork. “Because the Star is traveling with us. And that’s why we can still see its light.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Does that make sense?”

Hork growled. “This Colonist and her riddle-talk… All right. Let’s assume you’re right. After all, we haven’t any better explanation. Let’s assume we, and the Star, are traveling through space as fast as light. Why? Where are we coming from? And where are we going?”

There was no answer from Karen Macrae. Light-cubes crawled over her face like leeches.

Hork and Dura stared at each other, as if seeking the answers in each other’s exasperated faces.

They looked around once more, trying to make sense of the distorted sky. Dura felt small, fragile, helpless in this ensemble of hurtling worlds. There was a symmetry to the smeared light around them, and after some argument they decided that their departure point and destination must lie at the poles of an imaginary globe around them, the globe whose equator was marked by the starbow.

Hork reached for the arrow device. “All right. Then let’s see if we can see what lies there…” He set the pointer at its penultimate setting.

The stars fled from the crumbling starbow and back to their scattered homes around the sky.

Hork Waved toward one of the imagined poles, peering through the blocky Ur-human cloud devices and into space. To Dura, who remained close to Karen Macrae, he looked like a toy, a speck swimming against the Ur-humans’ vague immensities.

“Nothing here,” he called at last, sounding disappointed. “Just an anonymous patch of stars.”

“Then it must be at the other end of the chamber. The other pole. Come on.”

She waited for him to return. Then, hand in hand, they Waved in the Star’s direction of flight.

…And there was something at the pole of the sky: something set against the backdrop of stars, something huge — if diminished by distance — and precisely defined.

Karen Macrae was saying something. The rustling words sighed across the huge silences of the chamber.

Dura and Hork hurried back and pressed their faces close to the Colonist’s cloudy lips. “What is it?” Dura demanded, almost despairing. “Won’t you try again? What are you saying to us?”

…The Ring. Can you see it? I’ve so little processing power here… hard to… the Ring…

Dura turned away and looked at the artifact; and a fear borne of childhood tales, of old, distorted legends, welled up in her.

* * *

The car sailed away.

Adda hung on to the ward’s improvised doorframe and sucked Air into his lungs. He glanced around the sky. The panorama, now somber and deep yellow, grew less and less like the secure, orderly Mantlescape he’d grown old with: the vortex lines were discontinuous shreds of spin loops struggling to reform, and the starbreaker beams continued to cut down through the Air and into the Core, unnaturally vertical.

Tired as he was, something probed at the edge of his awareness. It seemed darker than before. Why should that be? He pushed himself out of the ward and Waved a few weary mansheights into the sky. Behind him, the Skin was a limitless wooden wall which cut away half of the sky. It was bounded about by the huge anchor-bands and punctuated by a hundred crude gashes; a slowing trickle of cars and people still dribbled from the opened-up walls and diffused into the wastes of the Air. The Skin was dark, intimidating…

Too dark. That was it.

Adda Waved a little further and twisted his head around, surveying the Corestuff anchor-bands. The huge hoops were like a gray cage over the City’s wooden face — but they were dull, lifeless, where a little earlier they had crackled with blue electron gas.

The glow of the gas had gone.

So the dynamos, the huge, wood-burning lungs of the City, had failed at last. Perhaps they had been abandoned by their attendants; or maybe some essential part of the City’s infrastructure had failed under the strain of holding the City against the fluctuating Magfield.

It scarcely mattered.

There was a sharp explosion. A hail of splinters fanned out from the base of the City, at the junction of the Spine and the main inhabited section. The splinters sailed away through the showers of sewage material still falling from the base of Parz.

There might be no more than heartbeats left.

Adda Waved strongly back to the improvised Hospital port and dived into the melee of swaddled patients, harassed staff and volunteers. He found Farr helping Deni Maxx to fix a patient’s bandages. He grabbed Farr’s and Deni’s arms roughly; he hauled them away from the unconscious patient and toward the exit.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

Deni stared at him, the deep yellow Air-light scouring shadow-lines in her face. “What is it? I don’t understand.”

“The anchor-bands have lost power,” Adda hissed. “They can’t sustain the City, here above the Pole. The City’s going to drift — come under intense stress… We have to get away from here. The City will never withstand it…”

Farr glanced back to the patients and helpers. “But we’re not finished.”

“Farr,” Adda said with all the persuasiveness he could muster, “it’s over. You’ve done a marvelous job, but there’s nothing more you can do. Once the effects of the band failure hit we won’t be able to complete the evacuation anyway.”