Vacuum Diagrams

Michael Poole was rightly celebrated for his achievements. His wormhole projects had opened up the System much as the great railroads had opened up the American continent, two thousand years earlier.

But Poole had greater ambitions in mind.

Poole used wormhole technology to establish a time tunnel: a bridge across fifteen hundred years, to the future.[2]

Why was Poole’s wormhole time link built?

There were endless justifications — what power could a glimpse of the future afford? — but the truth was that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it.

But Poole’s bridge reached an unexpected future.

The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole was confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. But it was a war — brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Solar space before — but a war nevertheless. It was an invasion from a remote future, in which the Solar System had been occupied by an alien power.

The incursion was repelled. Michael Poole drove a captured warship into the wormhole, to seal it against further invasion. In the process, Poole himself was lost in time.

The System, stunned, slowly returned to normal.

Various bodies combed through the fragments of data from the time bridge incident, trying to answer the unanswerable.

It was said that before Poole’s wormhole path to the future finally closed, some information had been obtained on the far future. And the rumors said that the future — and what it held for mankind — were bleak indeed.

If the data was anything like accurate, it was clear that there was an agency at large — which must be acting even now — systematically destroying the stars…

And, as a consequence, humanity.

In response, an organization called the Holy Superet Church of Light emerged and evolved. Superet believed that humanity was becoming mature, as a species. And it was time to take responsibility for man’s long-term survival as a species.

Eve said, “A fresh starship was launched, called the Great Northern, in an attempt to build a new time bridge. And probes were prepared to investigate the heart of man’s own star, the Sun, where a dark cancer was growing…'[3]

Cilia-of-Gold

A.D. 3948

The people — though exhausted by the tunnel’s cold — had rested long enough, Cilia-of-Gold decided.

Now it was time to fight.

She climbed up through the water, her flukes pulsing, and prepared to lead the group further along the Ice-tunnel to the new Chimney cavern.

But, even as the people rose from their browsing and crowded through the cold, stale water behind her, Cilia-of-Gold’s resolve wavered. The Seeker was a heavy presence inside her. She could feel its tendrils wrapped around her stomach, and — she knew — its probes must already have penetrated her brain, her mind, her self.

With a beat of her flukes, she thrust her body along the tunnel. She couldn’t afford to show weakness. Not now.

“Cilia-of-Gold.”

A broad body, warm through the turbulent water, came pushing out of the crowd to bump against hers: it was Strong-Flukes, one of Cilia-of-Gold’s Three-mates. Strong-Flukes’ presence was immediately comforting. “Cilia-of-Gold. I know something’s wrong.”

Cilia-of-Gold thought of denying it; but she turned away, her depression deepening. “I couldn’t expect to keep secrets from you. Do you think the others are aware?”

The hairlike cilia lining Strong-Flukes’ belly barely vibrated as she spoke. “Only Ice-Born suspects something is wrong. And if she didn’t, we’d have to tell her.” Ice-Born was the third of Cilia- of-Gold’s mates.

“I can’t afford to be weak, Strong-Flukes. Not now.”

As they swam together, Strong-Flukes flipped onto her back. Tunnel water filtered between Strong-Flukes’ carapace and her body; her cilia flickered as they plucked particles of food from the stream and popped them into the multiple mouths along her belly. “Cilia-of-Gold,” she said. “I know what’s wrong. You’re carrying a Seeker, aren’t you?”

“…Yes. How could you tell?”

“I love you,” Strong-Flukes said. “That’s how I could tell.”

The pain of Strong-Flukes’ perception was as sharp, and unexpected, as the moment when Cilia-of-Gold had first detected the signs of the infestation in herself… and had realized, with horror, that her life must inevitably end in madness, in a purposeless scrabble into the Ice over the world. “It’s still in its early stages, I think. It’s like a huge heat, inside me. And I can feel it reaching into my mind. Oh, Strong-Flukes…”

“Fight it.”

“I can’t. I—”

“You can. You must.”

The end of the tunnel was an encroaching disc of darkness; already Cilia-of-Gold could feel the inviting warmth of the Chimney-heated water on the cavern beyond.

This should have been the climax, the supreme moment of Cilia-of-Gold’s life.

The group’s old Chimney, with its fount of warm, rich water, was failing; and so they had to flee, and fight for a place in a new cavern.

That, or die.

It was Cilia-of-Gold who had found the new Chimney, as she had explored the endless network of tunnels between the Chimney caverns. Thus, it was she who must lead this war — Seeker or no Seeker.

She gathered up the fragments of her melting courage.

“You’re the best of us, Cilia-of-Gold,” Strong-Flukes said, slowing. “Don’t ever forget that.”

Cilia-of-Gold pressed her carapace against Strong-Flukes’ in silent gratitude.

Cilia-of-Gold turned and clacked her mandibles, signaling the rest of the people to halt. They did so, the adults sweeping the smaller children inside their strong carapaces.

Strong-Flukes lay flat against the floor and pushed a single eye stalk towards the mouth of the tunnel. Her caution was wise; there were species who could home in on even a single sound- pulse from an unwary eye.

After some moments of silent inspection, Strong-Flukes wriggled back along the Ice surface to Cilia-of-Gold.

She hesitated. “We’ve got problems, I think,” she said at last.

The Seeker seemed to pulse inside Cilia-of-Gold, tightening around her gut. “What problems?”

“This Chimney’s inhabited already. By Heads.”

Kevan Scholes stopped the rover a hundred yards short of the wall-mountain’s crest.

Irina Larionova, wrapped in a borrowed environment suit, could tell from the tilt of the cabin that the surface here was inclined upwards at around forty degrees — shallower than a flight of stairs. This “mountain,” heavily eroded, was really little more than a dust-clad hill, she thought.

“The wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said briskly, his radio-distorted voice tinny. “Come on. We’ll walk to the summit from here.”

“Walk?” She studied him, irritated. “Scholes, I’ve had one hour’s sleep in the last thirty-six; I’ve traveled across ninety million miles to get here, via flitters and wormhole transit links — and you’re telling me I have to walk up this damn hill?”

Scholes grinned through his face plate. He was AS-preserved at around physical-twenty-five, Larionova guessed, and he had a boyishness that grated on her. Damn it, she reminded herself, this “boy” is probably older than me.

“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love the view. And we have to change transports anyway.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

He twisted gracefully to his feet. He reached out a gloved hand to help Larionova pull herself, awkwardly, out of her seat. When she stood on the cabin’s tilted deck, her heavy boots hurt her ankles.

Scholes threw open the rover’s lock. Residual air puffed out of the cabin, crystallizing. The glow from the cabin interior was dazzling; beyond the lock, Larionova saw only darkness.

Scholes climbed out of the lock and down to the planet’s invisible surface. Larionova followed him awkwardly; it seemed a long way to the lock’s single step.

Her boots settled to the surface, crunching softly. The lock was situated between the rover’s rear wheels: the wheels were constructs of metal strips and webbing, wide and light, each wheel taller than she was.

Scholes pushed the lock closed, and Larionova was plunged into sudden darkness.

Scholes loomed before her. He was a shape cut out of blackness. “Are you okay? Your pulse is rapid.”

She could hear the rattle of her own breath, loud and immediate. “Just a little disoriented.”

“We’ve got all of a third of a gee down here, you know. You’ll get used to it. Let your eyes dark-adapt. We don’t have to hurry this.”

She looked up.

In her peripheral vision, the stars were already coming out. She looked for a bright double star, blue and white. There it was: Earth, with Luna.

And now, with a slow grandeur, the landscape revealed itself to her adjusting eyes. The plain from which the rover had climbed spread out from the foot of the crater wall-mountain. It was a complex patchwork of crowding craters, ridges and scarps — some of which must have been miles high — all revealed as a glimmering tracery in the starlight. The face of the planet seemed wrinkled, she thought, as if shrunk with age.

“These wall-mountains are over a mile high,” Scholes said. “Up here, the surface is firm enough to walk on; the regolith dust layer is only a couple of inches thick. But down on the plain the dust can be ten or fifteen yards deep. Hence the big wheels on the rover. I guess that’s what five billion years of thousand-degree temperature range does for a landscape…”

Just twenty-four hours ago, she reflected, Larionova had been stuck in a boardroom in New York, buried in one of Superet’s endless funding battles. And now this… wormhole travel was bewildering. “Lethe’s waters,” she said. “It’s so — desolate.”

Scholes gave an ironic bow. “Welcome to Mercury,” he said.