— and abruptly the Friend flooded her memory-picture with color and detail; determination flowed through her into the gloves and—
— jump—
It was like a stumble, a fall. There were screams behind her. She looked up, startled, at the panel-windows: the pale lines of the Eighth Room had vanished, to be replaced by a ball of fire, vast, red, brooding; flames as big as worlds licked out at the ship and—
— jump—
— and another jolt and the fire was replaced by nothing, nothing at all, and—
— jump—
— there was a tilted disc of color; she saw reds and browns and golds and it was so lovely it made her gasp but—
— jump—
— it was gone and—
— jump — jump — jumpjumpjump…
Images battered against the screens like gaudy snowflakes.
She switched off the screens. The panels emptied and turned silver-gray, and there was a sigh of relief from her companions. But the jumps continued; she could feel them as a soft flutter in her stomach.
Cautiously she withdrew her hands from the gloves, stared at the mittens as if they had betrayed her. She had thought she understood the ship; now she had been humbled, a child at the feet of the adults. She sensed the Friend’s strained reassurance but took little comfort.
In their borrowed Xeelee ship the little group of humans hurtled across the hostile Universe.
Paul sensed the bafflement of the woman, and anguish infiltrated his partial personalities. He had known that the initiation of the Xeelee hyperdrive would terrify the humans, but there was little he could do to protect them.
There was no time for this introspection. He must seek the Ring himself.
Paul’s focus of attention swept restlessly around the Solar System’s abandoned periphery. He found shipyards, weapons shops, blood-stained hospitals, the foundations of massive industrial complexes. Warships and fortresses, some as large as moons, circled the distant Sun.
Once two objects have been in contact they are forever linked by a thread of quantum wave functions. Once this had formed the basis of humanity’s inseparability communications net. Now the prowling Paul found tenuous quantum functions arcing from the warships to forgotten battlefields scattered across the Universe. Paul knew that the humans had attacked the site of the Ring, at least once; so among these haunted wrecks there must be relics of those great assaults, and a quantum link for him to follow.
At last he found it.
The Spline ship was a mile-wide corpse, its spherical form distorted by a single, vast wound a hundred yards across. Within the wound, organs and dried blood were still visible. Paul imagined the agony of the creature as it had returned from the battlefield, its guts open to the pain of hyperspace…
But this corpse-ship was embedded in a web of quantum functions which spun all the way to Bolder’s Ring; these sunken Spline eyes, hardened now, had once gazed upon the Ring itself.
Paul wrapped himself around a pencil of quantum functions. Absorbing them into his awareness was like being stretched, expanded, made unimaginably diffuse.
Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence, he began to adjust the phases of the quantum threads, and the multiple foci of his awareness translated through spacetime.
Paul hauled himself along the quantum functions in search of Bolder’s Ring.
It was as if he were sliding down a long, vast slope in spacetime. At first the slope was all but imperceptible, but soon its steepness was unmistakable.
The Ring was the most massive single structure in the Universe. It was like a boulder dropped into a pool: across a region hundreds of millions of light years wide its monstrous gravity well drew in galaxies as effortlessly as a lamp attracts moths. Now Paul was crossing the lip of that well, with the shining ruins of the Universe sliding alongside him. Eventually he saw how the fragile structures — the filaments, loops and voids of galaxies which had emerged from the singularity itself — were distorted, smashed, broken by the fall into this great flaw in space.
The galaxies — all around the sky — were tinged
He had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.
The Ring was a hoop woven from a billion-light-year length of cosmic string. Paul’s principal awareness focus was somewhere above the plane of the Ring. The near side of the artifact 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, hard band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.
Paul could study the Ring as Jim Bolder never had. With relish he sent sub-personalities skating along the tangled quantum functions that reached deep into the Ring’s stretched spacetime.
Cosmic strings were residual traces of the ultrahigh, symmetric vacuum of the primordial epoch — an era in which the forces of physics had yet to “freeze out” of a unified superforce — and the strings were now embedded in the “empty space” of the Universe, like residual lines of liquid water in solid ice. And the strings were superconducting; as they moved through the primordial magnetic fields, huge currents — of a hundred billion billion amps or more — were induced in the strings…
The strings writhed, like slow, interconnected snakes, across space. The strings were moving at close to lightspeed. They left behind them flat, glowing wakes — planes towards which matter was attracted, at several miles a second.
Paul looked into the center of the Ring. There he found a singularity. It was hoop-shaped, a circular flaw in space: a rip, caused by the rotation of the immense mass of the Ring. The singularity was about three hundred light years across — much smaller than the diameter of the Ring itself.
If the Ring were spinning more slowly, the Kerr metric would be quite well-behaved. The singularity would be cloaked in
But the Ring
Through the void at the heart of the Ring he could see blue-shifted starlight muddled, stirred. Here the wave functions were tangled, twisted, broken; here space was folded up like cheap cloth.
This distortion was the purpose of the Ring: this was the Kerr-metric Interface, a route to other universes — the gateway through which the Xeelee had made their escape.
…Ghostly flocks slid through the tangled cosmic string net that made up the Ring.
Paul widened his perception to embrace the entire Ring. Everywhere the photino birds soared, silent and purposeful. Somehow the great artifact seemed helpless, and Paul felt an absurd impulse to hurl himself forward, to try to protect the glorious baryonic monument.
At length the photino birds appeared to come to a decision. A knot of birds, billions of them, formed around one section of the toroid — perhaps some weak point — and from all around the Ring more bird flocks flickered in short hyperdrive hops to join the growing throng. Soon only a few scouts were left near outlying parts of the Ring, and around the weak point there was a swarm of shadow birds so thick they obscured the Ring itself.
Cautiously Paul slid his awareness focus closer to the stricken region. The photino birds, he realized, were now passing into the structure of the cosmic string itself.
If cosmic string self-intersected it cut itself. A new subloop formed, budding off the old. And perhaps that subloop, too, would self-intersect, and split into still smaller loops… and so on.
Paul understood. It would be an exponential decay process, once started. And so the birds, concentrating their mass, deflected the passage of string loops, causing them to self-intersect. Soon, threads — fragments of string thousands of miles long — drifted out of the structure, passing unimpeded through the ranks of birds.
Soon the ghost-gray birds were jostling in their eagerness to breach the threads; and, within minutes, a slice through the Ring — extremely thin, no more than a light year wide — began to turn a dull yellow.
The photino birds were cutting the Ring, Paul realized uneasily, and it didn’t appear that it would take them very long. And his little band of humans was still hours away.
He swept over the plain of the Ring and studied the turbulent space at its center. Thanks to the activities of the photino birds the Kerr-metric zone was like a pond into which gravel was being thrown. Star images rippled, and the inter-universal surface was awash with a milky blue light. Already the access paths through the zone must be disrupted—
— and a shock wave of gravitational radiation burst over him.
Rapidly he withdrew his attention foci from the Ring and rose to the roof of its star-walled chamber, so that it was as if he were an insect in some vast cathedral. Something monstrous had erupted into this region of space, mere light minutes away from him. He surveyed the space around the Ring, seeking the source of the gravitational radiation.
…It had burst out of hyperspace like a fist. At first Paul could make out nothing but a blaze of blue-shifted photons and gravitons. Then, gradually, he perceived its structure. It was a sphere a million miles wide. Fusion fires still burned within it, although its structure had clearly been badly damaged by its impact at near lightspeed with the debris in the Ring chamber: great gobbets of material showered from its surface, so that it left a trail like some impossible comet as it blazed, Paul saw, towards the throng of photino birds.
It looked like a ball of ice-cream thrown into a bank of live steam. But it was a star: a star that had been accelerated to near lightspeed and then launched through hyperspace. And it was aimed directly at the photino birds’ center of operations.
This was a weapon of war. The Qax had arrived.
After that things began to happen fast.
For days the ship had hurtled on.
Erwal knew she had no real understanding of the distances she was traveling, but she could sense how far she was being separated from the place of her birth.
And she and her companions were utterly alone. Even the Friend had withdrawn once more.
From time to time she slid her hands into the gloves and felt the continuing surge of the marvelous ship. And occasionally — when her companions were asleep — she would open one of the panel-windows and stare gloomily at the bright spheres which battered against the panel like vast insects, or at the distant pools of muddy light which sailed more slowly by.
Inside the ship there was, of course, no pattern of day and night by which to measure time, but Erwal counted the sleep periods that passed during the journey. Soon after the fourteenth she became aware, through the subtle touch of the gloves, of a change in the ship’s motion.
Hastily, still blinking sleep from her eyes, she opened a panel-window.
The barrage of stars was visibly slowing, and the motion of the distant pools of light was almost gone. Had they arrived, then? She peered at the screen.
A wall of starlight, muddled and blue-stained, blocked off the sky. She stared, awed.
Her companions stirred in their nests of rags on the floor. Hastily she shut off the panel and sat in her chair, wondering what to do now.
The Qax assault approached its climax.
The hijacked star was mere minutes away from impact with the workplace of the dark matter photino birds, and its hellish glow brought a million dancing highlights from Bolder’s Ring. Now
