Timelike Infinity

'Watch me.'

* * *

The collision, when it came, was almost balletic.

GUT-drive fire blistered great swathes of the Spline’s writhing flesh; Michael found himself shrinking back from the bloody, carnal acres above his head. But still the Spline seemed to find it impossible to respond; those bizarre cherry-red beams, lightspeed rents in spacetime, lanced out — but they fired at random, all around them, consistently missing the Crab.

'There’s something wrong,' Harry breathed. 'It should have sliced us open by now. Why hasn’t it?'

And now the Crab entered the Spline itself, its burning GUT drive breaching the elephant-flesh hull. Creation light boiled away blood, flesh, in a vast, obscene, soundless explosion; the Spline’s huge body seemed to writhe back. At last the comet-ice tail of the Crab disappeared, still glowing, into the carcass of the Spline.

There was a cloud of motion around the huge wound; Michael squinted to see.

'Little robots,' Harry said, amazed.

'Antibody drones,' said Shira lifelessly; she stared at the scene with dull fascination.

Harry said, 'The robots are damaging our hull. We’re under attack. For the first time.'

'Maybe,' said Poole. 'But I don’t think it really matters now.'

The star-core glow of the GUT drive was extinguished at last, killed by the toiling antibody drones. But still the mass of comet ice, the long, crumpling body of the Crab, slid steadily into Spline flesh.

It was almost sexual, Michael thought.

* * *

The singularity shot, with its reduced launch velocity, seemed to crawl up the translucent cannon shaft. Berg had absurd visions of the singularities rolling out of the mouth of the barrel, falling back to the crystal floor with an anticlimactic plop -

The singularities reached the mouth of the cannon shaft and soared out of sight, eclipsed by the Xeelee-material dome of the chamber.

Berg’s energy seeped out of her, now that it was done — for better or worse. She clasped the console, feeling her legs sagging under her.

Purple-red light flared silently through the cracks in the shattered dome. The Spline’s deadly cherry-red starbreaker beams flickered, died.

All over the devastated earth-craft Friends turned their faces up to the uncertain glow, oddly like flowers.

Half the dome was gone now. Beyond it, the Spline eclipsed the stars.

Its starbreaker beams stilled, the huge warship rolled like a planet across the impassive sky. An immense, bloody crater — covering fully an eighth of the Spline’s surface area — deformed its hull, Berg saw; and she couldn’t help but wince in sympathy. And as the Spline rolled she realized that the crater was matched by a second — if anything, even deeper — at the ship’s opposite pole. Weapon navels pooled with blood; and the Spline’s roll across the stars was erratic, as if some internal balance system was failing.

'Implosion wounds from the directional gravity waves,' said Jaar, his voice calm and evaluating. He nodded thoughtfully. 'It worked.'

Berg closed her eyes. She sought feelings of triumph. Even of relief. But she was still stranded on a damn eggshell that would probably fall apart spontaneously, without any more help from the Spline. And, lest she forget, there was a merged mini-black hole, its devastating work on the Spline complete, falling out of the sky toward her…

She said, 'Come on, Jaar, you beautiful bastard. If we’re going to live through this we’ve still got work to do—'

* * *

The Spline imploded.

The GUT-drive module drove into its heart like a stiletto. Muscles convulsed in compression waves that tore through the body of the Spline like seismic events, and all over the surface of the ship vessels exploded, spewing fast-freezing fluids into space.

The Qax was silent.

Jasoft Parz clung to nerve cables; the eye chamber rolled absurdly as the Spline sought escape from its agony. Parz closed his eyes and tried to feel the suffering of the Spline — every spasm, every bursting vessel.

He had been brought here to witness the destruction of Earth. Now he was determined to witness the death of a Qax, embedded in the consciousness of the Spline; he tried to sense its fear at the encroaching darkness, its frustration at its own mistakes, its dawning realization that the future — of Jim Bolder, the Qax diaspora — would, after all, come to pass.

Failure, and death.

Jasoft Parz smiled.

* * *

The Crab had come to rest at last, its tail section buried in the ravaged heart of the Spline. The lifedome, perched on the crumpled shaft of the ship, overlooked the Spline’s carcass like, Michael thought, a viewing platform over some ghastly resort of blood and ripped flesh.

He lay in his couch, the tension drained out of him. Shira, beside him, even seemed to be asleep.

'I need a shower,' he said.

'Michael.' Harry’s Virtual head hovered at the edge of the dome, peering out. 'There’s something out here.'

Michael laughed. 'What, something other than a wrecked sentient warship from the future? Surprise me, Harry.'

'I think it’s an eyeball. Really; a huge, ugly eyeball, yards wide. It’s come out of its socket; it’s drifting at the end of a kind of cable… an optic nerve extension, maybe.'

'So?'

'So I think there’s somebody inside.' Harry grinned. 'I think he’s seen me. He’s waving at me…'

Chapter 12

Michael Poole followed Jasoft Parz, the strange bureaucrat from the future, through the entrails of the dead Spline.

They worked their way through gravity-free darkness broken only by the shifting, limited glow of the light globe Parz had rescued from his bizarre eyeball capsule; the semisentient device trailed Parz, doglike. The corridor they followed was circular in cross-section and a little more than head-high. Poole’s hands sank into walls of some grayish, oily substance, and he found himself worming his way past dark, floating ovals a foot or more wide. The ovals were harmless as long as he avoided them, but if he broke the crusty meniscus of any of them a thick, grainy blood-analogue flowed eagerly over his suit.

'Jesus,' he muttered. 'This is disgusting.' Parz was a few yards ahead of him in the cloying darkness. He laughed, and spoke in his light, time-accented English. 'No,' he said. 'This is life aboard the finest interstellar craft likely to be available to humans for generations to come — even after my time.' Parz was a thin, dapper man of medium height; his receding hair was snow-white and his face was gloomy, downturned, his chin weak. He looked, Michael thought, like a caricature of an aging bureaucrat — a caricature saved only by his striking green eyes. Parz, in his clear, skintight environment suit, moved more easily through the claustrophobic, sticky conditions than did Poole in his bulky space-hardened gear; but Poole, watching Parz slide like a fish through the cloacal darkness, found himself relishing the cool dryness inside his suit, and would not have exchanged.

A fleshy flap a yard square opened in the floor of this tunnel-tube. Poole jumped back with a cry; ahead of him Parz halted and turned. Fist-sized globes of blood-analogue came quivering out of the flap, splashing stickily against Poole’s legs, and then out shot an antibody drone — one of the little robots that seemed to infest the carcass of this damn ship. This one was a flattened sphere about a foot across; it hurtled from wall to wall, rebounding. Then, for a moment, the drone hovered before Poole; tiny red laser-spots played over Poole’s shins and knees, and he tensed, expecting a lance of pain. But the laser-spots snapped away from him and played over the walls and blood globules like tiny searchlights.

The drone, jets sparkling, hurtled off down the passageway and out of sight.

Poole found himself trembling.

Parz laughed, irritatingly. 'You shouldn’t worry about the drones. That one was just a simple maintenance unit—'

'With lasers.'

'It was only using them for ranging information, Mr. Poole.'

'And they couldn’t be used for any more offensive purposes, I suppose.'

'Against us? The drones of this Spline are thoroughly used to humans, Mr. Poole. It probably thinks we’re part of a maintenance crew ourselves. They wouldn’t dream of attacking humans. Unless specifically ordered to, of course.'

'That cheers me up,' Poole said. 'Anyway, what was it doing here? I thought you said the damn Spline is dead.'

'Of course it is dead,' Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. 'Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUT-drive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command channels, disrupt most of its higher functions. Like snapping the spinal cord of a human. But—' Parz hesitated. 'Mr. Poole, imagine putting a bullet in the brain of a tyrannosaurus. It’s effectively dead; its brain is destroyed. But how long will the processes of its body continue undirected, feedback loops striving blindly to restore some semblance of homeostasis? And the antibody drones are virtually autonomous — semisentient, some of them. With the extinguishing of the Spline’s consciousness they will be acting without central direction. Most of them will simply have ceased functioning. But the more advanced among them — like our little visitor just now — don’t have to wait to be told what to do; they actively prowl the body of the Spline, seeking out functions to perform, repairs to initiate. It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level… A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.' Parz’s laugh was delicate, almost effete, thought Poole. 'Perhaps we should hope, as one sentient species considering another, that the drones find tasks sufficient to give their lives meaning while they remain aware.'

Poole frowned, studying Parz’s round, serious face. He found Jasoft Parz oddly repellent, like an insect; his humor was too dry for Poole’s taste, and his view of the world somehow oversophisticated, ironic, detached from the direct, ordinary concerns of human perception.