There was grumbling, complaint at the possible loss of the ship’s wonderful facilities — and, Erwal was moved to find, genuine concern at her own welfare.
But they agreed.
It took a couple of days for the villagers to set up camp in the Eight Rooms once more; but at last the ship was cleared, save only for a few stray blankets, garments and other oddments. Erwal spent the time experimenting with the ship’s panels, trying to work out a destination.
There was a light hand on her shoulder. Erwal turned. “Sura…”
The girl smiled down at her. “Are you ready?”
“What are you doing here?”
The smile broadened. “I couldn’t let you go alone, could I?”
A soft warmth was added to the brew of exhilaration and fear already swirling within Erwal. Briefly she covered Sura’s hand with her own — and then turned to the controls and slid her hands into the mittens.
The ship quivered.
Paul brooded over the wreckage of the Solar System.
Since the retreat of the Xeelee the Universe had been lost to baryonic life forms. The photino birds had not yet completed their vast conversion programs — stars were still shining, the Ring not yet closed — but at last, in a time not very distant, the final light would be extinguished and the baryonic Universe would grow uniform and cold, a stable home for the photino birds.
A shipful of primitive humans had no possibility of survival in a Universe occupied by such a force.
Therefore the humans would have to follow the Xeelee. Perhaps this escape had been the intention of the Xeelee all along, Paul mused. Perhaps they had provided many other junior baryonic races with similar “lifeboats,” so they could follow the Xeelee to a place where baryonic life was still possible.
He saw it now. His humans would have to use their ship to cross space and pass through Bolder’s Ring.
And Paul would have to guide them there. He felt a surge of determination, of anticipation…
And of fear.
Around his decision the diffuse cloud that comprised Paul’s awareness coalesced. He prepared to return to the ship—
But there was something in the way.
Paul stopped. He assembled awareness foci to consider the new barrier, confused. The wave-function guides he was following had been distorted, even terminated, and—
He was being watched.
Paul froze, shocked; his sub-personalities condensed into something almost as coherent and limited as his old corporeal self.
There was something here: something aware and able to study him… and to stop him.
As if trembling, he tried to respond. The data that formed his being was stored in a lattice of quantum wave functions; now he distorted that lattice deliberately to indicate an omission. A lack. A question.
The answer was imposed directly on his awareness; it was like being exposed to a raw, vicious dream, to a million years of venom.
The gateway between the Eighth Room and the ship healed shut, leaving Erwal and Sura alone in the ship.
“Where shall we go?” Sura asked innocently.
Erwal smiled. “Well, that’s a good question.” And, she realized, she barely knew how to start framing an answer. She flexed the gloves, and the panels, which had been displaying scenes of stars and of the Eighth Room, now filled with representations which were obviously artificial.
Sura stared at the graphic circles, the cones and ellipses, with confusion. “What does all this mean?”
Erwal withdrew her hands from the mittens. “I can only guess. But I think these pictures are meant to show us what this world is like.” She reached up to grasp Sura’s hand. “Sura, you know that the world we came from was like a box. There was the Shell below our feet, and Home above us, closing us in.”
Sura sniffed. “Any child could see that.”
“Yes. But now we’ve come out of that box; and out here it’s different. There is no box anymore! The Eighth Room, the doorway to the box, is just — hanging there.”
“The way the first Room was hanging over the ground, when we found it?”
“Yes, but — even more so,” said Erwal, struggling to make sense. “It simply hangs! And there is no ground above it, or below it, as far as I can see. Just empty space, and a great pit of stars.”
Sura, her mouth hanging open, thought it over. “I feel scared.”
Sura studied images of the Eighth Room. “If we’ve just come out of a great box — through the Eighth Room — then why can’t we see the outside of the box from here? All you can see is the Room itself!” Sura sounded aggrieved, as if this were an affront to her intelligence.
Erwal sighed and pushed a lock of hair from her brow. “That’s just one of a hundred — a thousand things about this situation I don’t understand at all. I think we have to proceed with what we can understand.”
“And what’s that?” Sura asked irritably. “Because none of this makes any sense so far.”
Erwal pointed to a particular schematic. This showed a bright light, little more than a dot, surrounded by nine concentric circles. A small, framework cube sat on the third circle from the center, slowly following the track in an anticlockwise direction; a complex arrangement of light points similarly followed the sixth circle. The other circles were empty. “Look at that,” said Erwal. “What does that remind you of?”
Sura reached out and, with one finger, touched the framework cube. The screen blanked and filled up with a magnified image of the cube; Sura snatched back her finger, startled.
Erwal laughed. “Don’t be afraid. The panels won’t hurt you.”
“The box is the Eighth Room.”
“That’s right.” Erwal touched a blank part of the image and the circles returned. “I think this shows where the Room is, you see. It’s following this circular path around the bright light. And here’s — something else — following the sixth circle.”
“What’s the bright light?”
“I don’t know.”
Sura touched the bright point; it expanded to show a dim globe, yellowing and pocked by huge dark spots. “Do you think we should go there?”
Erwal shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Sura restored the image of circles and counted. “Nine circles. We’re on the third, and this other marking is on the sixth. But the other circles are empty. I wonder why.”
“I don’t know,” Erwal said. “Maybe there were things there originally, which were destroyed. Or taken away.”
“What could they have been?”
“Oh, Sura, how should I know?”
“I’m sorry.” Sura studied the picture. “Well, then; there seems to be only one place to go.”
“The sixth circle?”
“Yes. But how do we get there?”
Erwal smiled at her, slid her hands into the mittens once more, and flexed her fingers. A feeling of power, of release, swept over her. “That’s the easy part,” she said slowly. “I just close my eyes—”
The ship had waited a million years for this.
It spread its sycamore-seed wings wide and soared through the wreckage of the Solar System, barely restrained by the tentative will of the woman at the controls.
Erwal and Sura felt waves of motion-echoes. It was, thought Erwal, like being a child again and riding the shoulders of a lively mummy-cow.
Sura laughed and clung to Erwal’s neck.
Within minutes the voyage was over; the ship, cooling, folded its wings.
The women stared up at the view panels.
At the heart of the sixth-circle complex was a single, immensely large, flattened sphere of gas. Much of the gas glowed a dull red, the color of burnt wood, although here and there fires still raged within the atmosphere, blurred patches of yellow or white. Three smaller globes, equally spaced, circled the center sphere; their panel images bristled with detail. Further out there was a ring of debris, broad and softly sparkling; Erwal wondered if there had once been still more of these globes, now long since destroyed.
She bade the ship slide around the limb of the fireball. She watched the burning landscape unfold beneath her, and shivered with a sudden sense of scale. “Sura, that thing is immense.”
“What is it? Is it a sun?”
“Perhaps. But it is far bigger than our Sun ever was. And it seems to be nearly burnt out now.”
“Perhaps it lit up the smaller globes,” Sura said brightly. “Perhaps people lived on the other globes, and set fire to this one to give them warmth. Erwal, is that possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Erwal murmured.
The ship had dipped so close that it had flattened into a landscape of glowing gas. Erwal felt a sudden thrill of apprehension. Without hesitating she pulled the ship up and away from the Sunworld.
“Let’s go see the smaller globes,” she said to Sura.
Beneath Saturn’s ruined atmosphere, ancient defense systems stirred.
Erwal brought the ship to the nearest of the globes. Soon the little world filled a panel; from pole to pole it was encrusted with detail, so that its surface reminded Erwal of fine leatherwork — or, perhaps, of a cow-tree overrun with lichen and moss. She spread her wings and swooped close over the surface: a miniature landscape rushed with exhilarating speed beneath her bow.
Sura clapped her hands, childlike.
