Qax-controlled Spline ships crackled out of hyperspace in the wake of the star, their fleshy hulls sparkling with weapons fire. Paul saw how the photino birds were responding; insubstantial flocks rose from the Ring material, like steam from wet earth, to face the Qax vanguard.
One photino bird flock got too close to the star. Paul watched raging gravitational radiation tear open the flock’s structure. Within seconds the birds had dispersed.
…And, just at this crucial instant, a little clump of consciousness knots popped out of hyperspace, emerging just outside the clear space around the Ring.
The humans had arrived. Paul hurried to them.
Wings outspread, the Xeelee ship hurtled through a storm of light.
The panel-window showed blue stars, hundreds of them jammed together, some so close they were joined by umbilici of fire. The villagers stood and stared, transfixed. Children clung to the legs of their parents and cried softly.
“Turn it off!” Sura buried her face in her hands. “I can’t bear to look at it; turn it off!”
Erwal gripped the gloves grimly. “I can’t,” she said.
The Friend was in her head again, his visions a clamor that left her unable to think.
Onwards, he said. She had to go onwards, deeper into this swarm of insect-stars, using all the skills she had learned to haul the ship through this barrage of stars. Tears leaked out of her eyes, but she dared not rest. Her world narrowed to the feel of the gloves on her stiffening hands, the gritty rain of stars in her eyes.
With a soundless explosion the ship erupted into clear space.
Erwal gasped, pulled her hands out of the gloves; the ship seemed to skid to a halt.
They were in an amphitheater of light. The far wall was a bank of stars, hard and blue; it curved into a floor and ceiling also made of blue-tinged starstuff. And at the center of the vast chamber was a jewel, a Ring that turned, huge and delicate. One point of the Ring was marred by smoke; red and blue light flickered in that cloud.
Erwal felt Sura touch the crown of her head. The girl’s hand seemed to be trembling, and Erwal laid her own hand over Sura’s — then realized that the trembling was her own, that her whole body was shaking uncontrollably.
Sura asked, “Are you all right?”
“…I think so.”
“Where are we?” Sura pointed. “What’s that? It’s beautiful. Do you think it’s some kind of building? Why, it must be miles wide.”
But Erwal barely heard. Once more the Friend clamored in her thoughts, pressing, demanding; she longed to shut him out—
Without hesitation she shoved her hands back into the gloves. The Xeelee ship plummeted into hyperspace.
The weapon-star burned through the ranks of photino birds towards the Ring. Vast as it was the star was lost against that great tangled carcass…
Until it hit.
The battered star collapsed as if made of smoke. Sheets of hydrogen, some of it still burning at star-core temperatures, were dug out of the star’s gut by writhing cosmic string. The star’s mass was reduced from lightspeed to stationary in less than a minute; Paul watched huge shock waves race around the Ring’s structure.
Now the Qax’s Spline warships followed up the starstrike; cherry-red beams lanced from their weapon pits, and Paul recalled the Xeelee gravity-wave starbreaker cannons observed by Jim Bolder. Photino birds imploded around the beams, flocks of them turning into transient columns of smoke that shone with exotic radiations and then dispersed.
For a brief, exhilarating moment, Paul speculated on the possibility of a Qax victory, a defeat for the photino birds after this single, astonishing blitzkrieg; and he felt an unexpected surge of baryonic chauvinism.
Soundlessly he cheered on the Qax.
But, within thirty minutes, the debris of the starstrike was cooling and dispersing. The photino bird flocks began to regroup, gliding unimpeded through the glowing wreckage of the star. Grimly the Qax fought on; but now, from all around the Ring, photino birds were flicking through hyperspace to join the battle, and soon the marauding Qax were surrounded. The Spline armada, with foe in all directions, became a brief, short-blossoming flower of cherry-red light.
Soon the end was beyond question. Ghostly photino birds penetrated the Spline fleet and overlaid the battered Qax ships, and the Spline, their effective masses increased enormously, began to implode, to melt inwards one by one.
Perhaps if the Qax had taken more time, Paul mused; perhaps if they had organized a barrage of the starstrikes…
Perhaps, perhaps.
Soon it was evident that the assault had been no more than a temporary inconvenience for the photino birds, and the shadowy flocks were swooping once more into the Ring’s crumbling threads.
Dropping out of hyperspace was like falling through ice.
The panel-window filled with light, but Erwal, disoriented, could make no sense of the image: of the threads of crystal-blue light that crossed the picture, of the sea of milky, muddled stars below her. Were those threads the Ring? Then they must be very close to it, poised over its very center. And what was the meaning of the crushed, twisted starlight below?
The Friend returned, screaming visions at her. She cried out, but she grasped the gloves.
Night-dark Xeelee wings stretched across space for the last time. Ignored by the warring fleets the ship dived towards the Kerr-metric Interface.
As Erwal entered the sea of light there was a moment of farewell, an instant of almost unbearable pain… and then the Friend was gone.
She dropped into strangeness.
The ghost-gray photino birds slid through the Ring’s pale flesh and its bruiselike discoloration spread.
Paul, somber, reflected that the destruction of the Ring had in the end provided the key racial goal for the human race. But now that the end was close the last human — Paul — felt nothing but a cultured sadness, an aesthetic pain at the loss of such power and beauty.
The surviving Qax, too, were, at last, no more than impotent observers, ignored by the photino birds.
After about half a year the photino birds withdrew. The fruit of their labor was a slice through the Ring perhaps a light year thick. Around this darkling slice the substance of the Ring was crumbling, turning to sparkling threads that drifted away from the structure.
The Kerr-metric Interface wavered, dissolved; and the Universe was sealed.
Paul moved his attention foci closer to the gap. The broken threads of cosmic string shriveled from the wound, so that the gap in the Ring widened at near lightspeed.
Photino birds swooped around the wound as if in a huge triumphant dance.
The vast structure had no mechanism to recover from such a wound. Now there was only its long, slow death to play out; and the photino birds, evidently incurious, began to depart, returning their attention to their own mysterious projects.
Like sea waves from the wreck of some immense ship gravity radiation surged out of the Ring’s gravitational well, and at last the vast pit in spacetime began to close.
The observers — the Qax, the last photino bird flocks — began to leave the scene. Paul grasped his quantum threads and slipped into the gathering darkness.
The Xeelee ship emerged from the Kerr-metric Interface. It furled its wings, slid to a halt, and sent its sensors probing into the new Universe.
Erwal stared at a screen that had become suddenly a blank pane of silver, reflecting only her own tired face.
Sura asked, “What does it mean?”
Erwal frowned. “I don’t know.” She tried to move the focus of the screen, but there was no response. And the gloves around her hands were like dead things, inert.
The ship no longer responded to her touch. She withdrew her hands.
“I don’t understand,” Sura said. “Did we pass through the Ring? What should we do?”
“How could I know?” Erwal snapped. “We wait, I suppose.”
Sura stepped away, uncertain.
After some hours, Erwal climbed out of her chair and stretched painfully.
Trying to overcome her enormous sense of anticlimax she established a routine. After each of the next few sleeps she crossed to the control table and slipped her hands into the gloves. But the ship remained inert, sealed off.
Gradually her routine broke down.
She was tired, and she had had enough mystery. She tried to settle into life inside this odd ship-village and forget the strangeness outside.
The function of the Xeelee ship was to optimize the chances of survival of its human occupants.
It studied the purposeless emptiness stretching around it and considered how this might be achieved.
Gas clouds, dark and cooling, reached to the limits of this expanding Universe. There were no stars. There was no evidence of intelligence, or life.
The ratio of helium to hydrogen here was about twenty-five percent. This, and various other cosmological relics, told the Xeelee ship that this Universe had emerged from its singularity in a broadly similar fashion to that of the Universe of its origin, with comparable ratios between the fundamental forces.
This, of course, was good.
The semisentient ship was capable of independent speculation. Perhaps some property of the Ring had guided them to an inhabitable environment, the ship wondered.
It did not spend much processing time on such theorizing. After all, speculation was not its primary function; and even if it were, there was no one to report back to.
So the Universe was broadly similar to that once shared by humans and Xeelee. With one important difference.
It was much younger.
Less than a billion years had passed since the singularity here. No stars yet burned. There was virtually no iron, no carbon, no silicon — no oxygen. Save for the helium and a few traces of more complex elements which had emerged from the singularity, there was only hydrogen. All the heavy elements would become abundant much later, when true stars began to shine and complex fusion processes in their cores got underway.
There were no Earths to land the humans on, no air for them to breathe, no metals for them to dig.
The ship unfurled its night-dark wings and dived into the hydrogen clouds. Cherry-red starbreaker beams blasted ahead of the ship; the gravity waves lanced through convection cells billions of miles wide, and a cylinder of roiling hydrogen-helium gathered. Within the cylinder temperatures rose by millions of degrees and complex fusion chains, comparable to those in the cores of the stars yet to form, were initiated.
