— jump — jump — jumpjumpjumpjump—
I closed my eyes. There was no inward sensation of motion; only a flickering outside my eyelids that told me of skies being ripped aside like veils.
“…Bolder! Can you hear me? Bolder—”
I took a breath. “I’m okay. It’s just — fast.” I risked another look. I was passing through a frothy barrage of stars and planets; beyond them sheets of galaxies moved past as steadily as roadside trees. I said slowly: “I must be making a megalight, or more, an hour. At this rate the journey will take about two weeks—”
“Yes,” Lipsey said. “We think the Xeelee have a range of hyperdrive capabilities. The standard intragalactic version is limited to a kilolight an hour, or thereabouts. Whereas this more powerful intergalactic model—”
I tumbled into the creamy plane of an elliptical Galaxy. I wailed and closed my eyes again.
Ten days later, the popping stars no longer bothered me. I guess you can get used to anything. Even the growing gray patch ahead of me — a cloud of objects around the Great Attractor — seemed less important than the itchy confines of my suit. In fact, I felt fine until a disc of sky directly behind me turned china blue…
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Objects that I’m leaving behind should be redshifted.”
“It’s nothing to do with your motion, Bolder,” the Qax explained. “The blue shift is gravitational. You’re now close enough to the Great Attractor that light from the outside Universe is beginning to fall more steeply down its gravity well.”
I checked my instruments. “But that’s ridiculous… I’m still millions of light years away.”
The Qax didn’t bother to respond.
Two more days. The light became a hail of hard blue as it plummeted after me into this pit in space. I entered the outskirts of the mist around the Great Attractor; it resolved into individual stars and what looked like bits of galaxies.
The muddled starlight bathing my cage began to flicker. I felt my heartbeat rising. The skies riffled past me like the pages of a great book, ever slower. Finally the ship stuttered to a halt.
“I’ve arrived,” I whispered. “I’m still inside the star mist.” I looked around, clutching the arms of my couch. “I’m in orbit around what looks like a small G-type star. But the sky’s crammed with streaming stars, hundreds of them close enough to show discs. It’s blue-tinted chaos.
“And — I can see something ahead. A bank of light beyond the mist.” My breath caught at the sheer scale of it all. “That’s the Great Attractor, right?”
“Don’t touch your controls until we tell you, Bolder,” the Qax murmured.
“What? Why not?”
“You’ve got company. To your left…”
A hoard of night-dark ships came soaring away from the Great Attractor and out into the star cloud. There were small fighters like mine, swirling in flocks like starlings. And here and there I saw cup-shaped freighters miles wide, cruising like eagles.
The sky was black with ships.
“Xeelee,” I breathed. “There must be millions of them. Well, you were right, Qax… But I don’t believe in coincidence. I haven’t stumbled across the only Xeelee fleet in the area. This star cloud must be swarming with them.”
“Follow them,” said the Qax.
“What?”
“Activate your drive. You’re a lot less likely to be noticed as one of a flock than as an individual.”
“…Yeah.” I spread my wings and banked sideways into the flock. Soon I was waddling along, a self-conscious duck among swans. Inside the waldoes my sweating fingers began to cramp up with the effort.
The fleet was heading for a young star. Through the crowd ahead of me I could see the star’s disc, its violet light diamond-hard. As we neared the star the torrent of ships abruptly splashed sideways, as if encountering an invisible shield. When I reached the breaking radius I banked left and set off after the herd.
Twenty hours after my arrival the Xeelee completed their formation. With wings folded like patient vultures they completely surrounded the star.
“What now?” I asked uneasily.
“No doubt we’ll find out.”
I wished I could rub my gritty eyes. “Qax… I haven’t slept since coming out of hyperspace, you know.”
“Take a stimulant.”
Sudden as an eye blink, bloodred threads of light snaked into the star from every ship in the fleet.
Well, from every ship except one. Mine.
It was a poignant sight: a stellar Gulliver, pierced by a million tiny arrows. The star’s light flickered, oddly. And I became aware of a stirring in the ranks of the Xeelee nearest me.
“They’re starting to notice me,” I whispered. “How do I turn on my beam?”
“You don’t,” said Lipsey. “Remember that Xeelee handgun? This must be what happens at the highest setting.”
A purple arch of tortured gas erupted from the star. Soon flares covered the star’s surface; clouds of ejecta drifted through the cherry-red beams. Cup freighters moved in, placidly swallowing the star flesh.
It was like watching the death of a magnificent animal. “They’re destroying it,” I said. “But how?”
“The handgun must be a gravity wave laser,” the Qax said slowly. “The coils on the butt of that handgun are small synchrotrons. Subatomic particles move at fantastic velocities in there; the thing emits a coherent beam of gravity waves which—”
“I thought you needed large masses to get significant gravity waves.”
“No. As long as you move a small mass fast enough… the energy must come from the same source as your ship’s — from the structure of space itself.”
“Handguns to break stars, eh?”
A shadow moved across my vision. I glanced about quickly. A dozen Xeelee slid across the blue-shifted sky and gathered into a close sphere around me.
“They’ve noticed me.” Rapidly I thought over my options. Before me was the reassuring red glow of the hyperspace button: my escape hatch, if things got too hot… but, I quickly decided, I’d come too far to go home without seeing the Great Attractor itself.
I spread my wings as far as they would go and dragged them downwards in one mighty swoop. I shot head first out of the closing trap and kept going, heading deeper into the blue-tinged star cloud. My breath was loud in my helmet.
“What now?” I gasped.
“Run!” said Lipsey.
I ran for hours. I dodged stars only light minutes apart, their surfaces distorted into surreal shapes by their proximity to each other. The bank of grayish light beyond the mist grew remorselessly brighter and wider — and all the time the Xeelee formation was a spear pointing at my shoulderblades.
At last, abruptly, I burst out of the star mist. The naked light ahead was dazzling. Heart thumping, I wrenched at the wings and skidded to a halt. I found myself in a region clear of stars and debris… and the curtain of stars on the other side was tinged blue.
So I was at the center. The bottom of the pit; the place all the stars were falling into. And at the heart of it all, flooding space with a pearly light, was the Great Attractor itself.
It was a loop, a thing of lines and curves, a construct of some immense cosmic rope. My nightfighter was positioned somewhere above the plane of the loop. The near side of the construct formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, braided band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.
And it was — astonishingly, unbearably — a single object, an
The rough disc of space enclosed by the artifact seemed virtually clear.
…Clear, I saw as I looked more carefully, save for a single, glowing point of light, right at the geometric center of the loop.
“Qax,” I croaked. “Speak to me.”
“A massive rotating toroid,” murmured the Qax. “A made thing, of cosmic string. The Xeelee have manipulated one-dimensional space-time discontinuities, just as — in their night-fighter intrasystem drive — they manipulate two-dimensional discontinuities.”
Lipsey said, “I didn’t imagine anything like this. A ring, an artifact of cosmic string. As large as a giant galaxy. The audacity…”
“But — why? What’s the point?”
The Qax paused. “Well, this fits one of our hypotheses. Look in the central region, Bolder.”
The hole in the ring hurt my eyes. It was a sheet of space that was somehow — tilted. I saw muddled space, stars streaked like cream in coffee.
“Do you know about the Kerr metric?” asked the Qax. “No? The Great Attractor is a massive toroid rotating extremely quickly. Your own theory of relativity predicts some odd effects with such a structure. There may be closed lines in space and time, for instance—”
“Come again?”
“Time travel,” said Lipsey. “And more… Bolder, the Kerr metric describes Interfaces between Universes. Do you understand? It’s as if—”
“What?”
“As if the Xeelee don’t like this Universe, so they’re building a way out.”
I focused my monitors on the dust that walled the cavity in the stars. I saw ships — an aviary of all shapes and sizes, uncountable trillions of them.
A few light minutes from me I made out a particularly monstrous ship, a disc that must have been the size of Earth’s Moon. Hundreds of cup freighters nestled into neat pouches in the disc’s upper surface, dumping out stolen star material. Vents in the underside of the main ship emitted a constant rain of immense crystalline shafts, as if it were some huge sieve leaking rainwater.
Peering deeper into the mist of craft I could see fantastic bucket-chains of the disc-ships descending to the Great Attractor, dwindling to pinpoints against the vast carcass of the ring. Returning ships, I saw, were diverted to clouds of cup freighters for reloading.
I began to see the pattern. “So the disc-ships are huge, ah, dumper trucks,” I said. “They’re tending the Great Attractor, bringing it matter and energy. Using that crystalline stuff to grow the string, knitting it together strand by strand, with a patience that’s lasted billions of years…”
There was a flicker in my peripheral vision. My posse. They whirled around me and began to close up once more.
I closed up my wings and prepared to punch the red button. “Lipsey, I’ve seen enough. We’ve got to spread this news around all the races in our region — find a way to stop the Xeelee before they wreck our Universe. We’ve time to plan—”
He coughed apologetically. “Ah — look, Bolder, this information is Qax commercial property. You know that.”
I hesitated. “You’re kidding. We’re doomed if the Qax keep this knowledge to themselves.”
