Timelike Infinity

plunge.

Harry crumbled into pixel dust, re-formed again, edgily. 'Damn those drones,' he grumbled. 'Look, Michael, while there’s enough time there’s something I have to tell you—'

* * *

The intrasystem freighter settled over the battered, gouged-out Spline eyeball. Cargo bay doors hung open like welcoming lips, revealing a brightly lit hold.

The eye bumped against the hold’s flat ceiling, rebounding softly; a few yards of chewed-up optic nerve followed it like a grizzled umbilical remnant, wrapping itself slowly around the turning eye. Then the hold doors slid shut, and the eye was swallowed.

In an airlock outside the hold, Miriam Berg pressed her face to a thick inspection window. She cradled a heavy-duty industrial-strength hand laser, and her fingers rattled against the laser’s casing as the hold’s pressure equalized.

She cast her eyes around the scuffed walls of the hold with some distaste. This was the Narlikar out of Ganymede, an inter-moon freighter run by a tinpot two-man shipping line. She knew she shouldn’t expect too much of a ship like this. The D’Arcy brothers performed a dirty, dangerous job. Normally this hold would contain water ice from Ganymede or Europa, or exotic sulfur compounds excavated with extreme peril from the stinking surface of Io. So that would explain some of the stains. But sulfur compounds didn’t scratch tasteless graffiti onto the hold walls, she thought. Nor leave sticky patches and half-eaten meals all over — it seemed — every work surface. Still, she was lucky there had been even one ship in the area with the capacity to come and pick up this damn eyeball so quickly. Most of the ships in the vicinity of the Interface portal were clean-lined government or military boats — but it had been the D’Arcy brothers, in their battered old tub, who had come shouldering through the crowd to pick her up from the earth-craft in answer to the frantic, all-channel request she’d put out when she’d realized what Poole was up to.

She watched the Spline eyeball bounce around in the hold’s thickening air. It was like some absurd beachball, she thought sourly, plastered with dried blood and the stumps of severed muscles. But there was a clear area — the lens? — through which human figures, tantalizing obscure, could be seen.

Michael…

Now a synthesized bell chimed softly, and the door separating her from the hold fell open. Towing the laser, Berg threw herself into the eyeball-crowded hold.

The air in the hold was fresh, if damn cold through the flimsy, begrimed Wignerian one-piece coverall she’d been wearing since before the Qax attack. She took a draught of atmosphere into her lungs, checking the pressure and tasting the air -

'Jesus.'

— and she almost gagged at the melange of odors that filled her head. Maybe she should have anticipated this. The gouged-out Spline eyeball stank like three-week- old meat — there was a smell of burning, of scorched flesh, and subtler stenches, perhaps arising from the half-frozen, viscous purple gunk that seemed to be seeping from the severed nerve trunk. And underlying it all, of course, thanks to her hosts the D’Arcys, was the nose-burning tang of sulfur.

Every time the eyeball hit the walls of the hold, it squelched softly.

She shook her head, feeling her throat spasm at the stench. Spline ships; what a way to travel.

After one or two more bounces air resistance slowed the motion of the sphere. The eyeball settled, quivering gently, in the air at the center of the hold.

Beyond the Spline’s clouding lens she could see movement; it was like looking into a murky fishtank. There was somebody in there, peering out at her.

It was time.

Her mind seemed to race; her mouth dried. She tried to put it all out of her head and concentrate on the task in hand. She raised her laser.

The D’Arcys, after picking her up from the earth-craft, had loaned her this hand laser, a huge, inertia-laden thing designed for slicing ton masses of ore from Valhalla Crater. Callisto. It took both hands and the strength of all her muscles to set the thing swinging through the air to point its snoutlike muzzle at the Spline eyeball, and all her strength again to slow its rotation, to steady it and aim. She wanted to set the thing hanging in the air so that — with any luck — she’d slice tangentially at the eyeball, cutting away the lens area without the beam lancing too far into the inhabited interior of the eyeball. Once the laser was aimed she swam over to the eyeball; pressing her face as close to the clouding lens as she could bear, she peered into the interior of the ball. There were two people in there, reduced to little more than stick figures by the opacity of the dead lens material. With her open palm she slapped at the surface of the lens — and her hand broke through a crustlike surface and sank into a thick, moldering mess; she yanked her hand away, shaking it to clear it of clinging scraps of meat. 'Get away from the lens!' She shouted and mouthed the words with exaggerated movements of her lips, and she waved her hands in brushing motions.

The two unidentifiable passengers of the eyeball got the message; they moved farther away from the lens, back into the revolting shadows of the eye.

Taking care not to touch the fleshy parts again, Berg shoved away and back to her laser. She palmed the controls, setting the dispersion range for five yards. A blue-purple line of light, geometrically perfect, leapt into existence, almost grazing the cloudy lens; Berg checked that the coherence was sufficiently low that the beam did no more than cast a thumb-sized spot of light on the hold’s far bulkhead.

Shoving gently at the laser, she made the beam slice down. As the opaque lens material burned and shriveled away from laser fire, brownish air puffed out of the eyeball, dispersing rapidly into the hold’s atmosphere; and yet another aroma was added to the melange in Berg’s head — this one, oddly, not too unpleasant, a little like fresh leather.

A disk of lens material fell away, as neat as a hatchway. Droplets of some fluid leaked into the air from the rim of the removed lens, connecting the detached disk by sticky, weblike threads.

She still couldn’t see into the meaty sphere; and there was silence from the chamber she had opened up.

Berg thumbed the laser to stillness. Absently she reached for the detached lens stuff and pulled it from the improvised hatchway; the loops of entoptic material stretched and broke, and she sent the disk spinning away.

Then, unable to think of anything else to do, and quite unable to go to the opening she’d made, she hovered in the air, staring at the surgically clean, leaking lip of the aperture.

Thin hands emerged from the aperture, grasped the lip uncertainly. The small, sleek head of Jasoft Parz emerged into the air of the Narlikar. He saw Berg, nodded with an odd, stiff courtesy, and — with an ungainly grace — swept his legs, bent at the knees, out of the aperture. He was shivering slightly in the fresh air outside the eyeball; he was barefoot, and dressed in a battered, begrimed dressing gown — one of Michael’s, Berg realized. Parz seemed to be trying to smile at her. He hovered in the air, clinging to the aperture of the eye with one hand like an ungainly spider. He said, 'This is the second time I’ve been extracted from a Spline eyeball, after expecting only death. Thank you, Miriam; it’s nice to meet you in the flesh.'

Berg was quite unable to reply; she stared wildly at the eyeball aperture.

Now a second figure emerged slowly from the eye. This was the Wigner girl Shira, dressed — like Berg — in the grubby remnants of a Wigner coverall. The girl perched on the lip of the aperture, her legs tucked under her, and briefly scanned the interior of the freighter’s hold, her face blank, uncaring. She faced Berg. 'Miriam. I didn’t expect to see you again.'

'No.' Berg forced the words out. 'I…'

There was something like compassion in Shira’s eyes — the closest approximation to human warmth Miriam had ever seen in that cold, skull-like visage — and Berg hated her for it. The Friend said, 'There’s nobody else, Miriam. There’s only the two of us. I’m sorry.'

Berg wanted to deny what she said, to shove past these battered, stained strangers and hurl herself headfirst into the eyeball, search it for herself. Instead she kept her face still and dug her nails into her palms; soon she felt a trickle of blood on her fingers.

Parz smiled at her, his green eyes soft. 'Miriam. They — Michael and Harry — have contrived a scheme. They are going to use the wreckage of the Spline to close the wormhole Interface, to remove the risk of any more incursions from the Qax Occupation future. Or any other future, for that matter.'

'And they’ve stayed aboard. Both of them.'

Parz’s face was almost comically solemn. 'Yes. Michael is very brave, Miriam. I think you should take comfort from—'

'Bollix to that, you pompous old fart.' Berg turned to Shira. 'Why the hell didn’t he at least speak to me? He turned his comms to slag, didn’t he? Why? Do you know?'

Shira shrugged, a trace of residual, human concern still evident over her basic indifference. 'Because of his fear.'

'Parz calls him brave. You call him a coward. What’s he afraid of?'

Shira’s mouth twitched. 'Perhaps you, a little. But mostly himself.'

Parz shook his head. 'I think she’s right, Miriam. I don’t think Michael was certain he could maintain his resolve if he spoke to you.'

Berg felt anger, frustration, surge through her. Of course she’d known people who died; and her lingering memories of those times had always been an immense frustration at unfinished business — personal or otherwise. There was always so much left to say that could now never be said. In a way this was worse, she realized; the bastard wasn’t even dead yet but he was already as inaccessible as if he were in the grave. 'That’s damn cold comfort.'

'But,' Jasoft Parz said gently, 'it’s all we can offer.'

'Yeah.' She shook her head, trying to restore some sense of purpose. 'Well, we may as well go and watch the fireworks. Come on. Then let’s see if these tinpot freighters run to shower cubicles…'

The freighter’s bridge was cramped, stuffy, every flat surface coated with notes scrawled on adhesive bits of paper. Only the regal light of Jupiter, flooding into the squalid space through a clear viewport, gave the place any semblance of dignity. The D’Arcy brothers, fat, moon-faced, and disconcertingly alike, watched from their control couches as Berg led her bizarre party onto their bridge. Berg said gruffly, 'Jasoft. Shira. Meet your great-grandparents.'

Then, leaving the four of them staring cautiously at each other, Miriam turned her face to the clear viewport, lifted her face to the zenith. Against the cheek of Jupiter the frame of the Interface portal was a tetrahedral stencil; and the Spline warship, the lodged wreckage of the Crab clearly visible even at this distance, was like a bunched fist against the portal’s geometric elegance.

As she watched, the warship entered the Interface; blood-colored sparks ringed the Spline where the battered carcass brushed the exotic-matter frame of the portal.

Berg considered raising a hand in farewell.

The sparks flared until the Spline was lost to view.

Miriam Berg closed her eyes.

Chapter 15

The lifedome of the Crab was swallowed by the receding darkness of the Interface portal. Michael, staring up through the dome, found himself cowering.

Blue-violet fire flared from the lip of the lifedome; it was like a multiple dawn arising from all around Michael’s limited horizon. Harry, from the couch beside Michael’s, looked across fearfully. Michael said, 'That’s the hull of the Spline hitting the exotic-matter framework. I’d guess it’s doing a lot of damage. Harry, are you—'

The holographic Virtual of Harry Poole opened its mouth wide — impossibly wide — and screamed; the sound was an inhuman chirp that slid upward through the frequency scales and folded out of Michael’s sensorium.

The Virtual smashed into a dust of pixels that crumbled, sparkling.