The pool surged, in an instant, across the floor and out beyond the dome. The light, squirming with logic trees, rippled beneath Chen’s dark, booted feet; she wanted, absurdly, to get away, to jump onto a data desk.
“The quantum switch.” Bayliss’s voice was tight, angry; she was squatting beside the switch, in the middle of the swamped light pool.
“Get away from there.”
“It’s not functioning. The nanobots are unrestrained.”
“No more culling, then.” Hassan stared into Chen’s face. “Well, Susan? Is this some sentimental spasm, on your part? Have you liberated the poor logic trees from their Schrodinger hell?”
“Of course not. Lethe, Hassan, isn’t it obvious? The
Hassan looked down at his feet, as if aware of the light pool for the first time. “There’s nothing to restrain them.”
“Hassan, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Yes.” He turned to Bayliss, who was still working frantically at her data mines.
“Leave her.”
Hassan gave Chen one long, hard look, then stalked across to Bayliss. Ignoring the little mathematician’s protests he grabbed her arm and dragged her from the data desks; Bayliss’s booted feet slithered across the glowing floor comically.
“Visors up.” Hassan lifted his pistol and lazed through the plastic wall of the dome. Air puffed out, striving to fill the vacuum beyond.
Chen ran out, almost stumbling, feeling huge in the feeble gravity. Neptune’s ghost-blue visage floated over them, serene, untroubled.
Waves of light already surged through the substance of the moon, sparkling from its small mountaintops. It was eerie, beautiful. The flitter was a solid, shadowed mass in the middle of the light show under the surface.
Hassan breathed hard as he dragged a still reluctant Bayliss across the flickering surface. “You think the trees, the nanobots could get into the substance of the flitter?”
“Why not? Any Interface would do; they are like viruses…”
“And ourselves? Could they get across the boundary into flesh?”
“I don’t want to find out. Come
Logic light swarmed across a low ridge, explosive, defiant.
“They must be growing exponentially,” Hassan growled. “How long before the moon is consumed? Days?”
“More like hours. And I don’t know if a moon-sized mass of bucky tube carbon can sustain itself against gravity. Nereid might collapse.”
Now Hassan, with his one free hand, was struggling to get the flitter’s hatch open. “It will forever be uninhabitable, at the least. A prime chunk of real estate lost.”
“The System’s big.”
“Not infinite. And all because of the arrogance of one man—”
“But,” Bayliss said, her augmented eyes shining as she stroked the data cubes at her belt, “what a prize we may have gained.”
“Get in the damn flitter.”
Chen glanced back into the ruined dome. The splayed body of Marsden, exposed to vacuum, crawled with light.
The Pool beyond the Sky was limitless. He and his brothers could grow forever, unbounded, free of Culling! He roared out his exultation, surging on, spreading—
But there was something ahead of him.
He slowed, confused. It looked like a brother. But so different from himself, so
Perhaps this had once been a brother — but from a remote branch which had already grown, somehow, around this greater Pool.
The brother had slowed in his own growth and was watching. Curious. Wary.
Was this possible? Was the Pool finite after all, even though unbounded? And had he so soon found its limits?
Fury, resentment, surged through his mighty body. He gathered his strength and leapt forward, roaring out his intent to devour this stranger, this distant brother.
Gossamer
The flitter bucked.
Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.
“We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.
Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile.
She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.
Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”
“What? But we should have been traveling for another half-hour.”
Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The wormhole is buckling.”
“What does that mean? Are we in danger?”
Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds — hold tight—”
Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: the Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.
Glowing struts swept over the flitter.
The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed space-time yielded in a gush of heavy particles.
Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.
Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—
There was a
“Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down — we’re too close—”
Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw—
The vision was gone, receded into darkness.
“Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.
Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.
She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.
The flitter came to rest.
A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.
In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen.
“Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.
Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.
The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few percent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.
There were clouds above her, wispy cirrus: aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was
The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen-ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.
Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?
Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was
Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert-gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.
Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.
Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate
