They were a particular shade of dark blue, the colour of bruises. They were the five strands of their particle beams which had hit Her, slowed down millions of times, so they looked like treacle. They even glistened like treacle. They crept glutinously out of the wound, and as they emerged—and continued and continued to emerge—they lifted and undulated away from Her horizontally, reaching like blind worms towards the cloud of wreckage floating alongside Her.
They kept coming out of Her, nanoseconds of energy slowed millions of times to mass, but mass greater than their energy when they had hit Her, as if She had reversed the mass-to-energy multiple; or imported another multiple from another universe. The screen analysed them. It said their composition was that of the particle beams, but their mass was impossibly big, then reverted to Unable.
They reached the cloud of wreckage and nuzzled into it, gently bumping aside some of the larger pieces. Inside the cloud each of the five fingers subdivided into thinner fingers, and thinner into thinner until the thickest were only threads. They moved inside the cloud of wreckage, binding its pieces and organising them and spinning them, with the instinctive delicacy of spiders, into an openwork sphere which was bigger than She was.
The five fingers kept coming out of the gash in Her flank, across the gap and into the openwork sphere. They turned pale blue, then transparent; and they were hollow. Objects were being carried along inside them in suspension, pumped out of Her and into the sphere: at first only dozens, but then hundreds. The five transparent tubes pulsed with them. Foord told the screen to show closeups, but it had already done so, and he already knew what they were: everything She had ever taken from them, and everything they had ever thrown into Her, and more, in mounting and impossible quantities.
There were things the size of a human head, black and sickle-shaped, each with a diamond tip and a trailing tangle of monofilament: pieces of the grapples Cyr called Hands of Friendship. Then hundreds of slivers of fractal diamond, which their Jewel Boxes had exploded inside Her. Then something larger, a turning tumbling curvature of dark metaclass="underline" a broken rim from a Prayer Wheel. Then dark pieces of carapace from their dismembered spiders, trailing gears and claws and circuitry. They were coming in hundreds, through each of the five fingers, and the Bridge screen was labelling and classifying them in headups which flashed on-off in nanoseconds, as quickly as the beams had flashed when they were energy and before She had turned them to tubes of treacle. The screen tried to keep up, identifying and labelling each object in what Foord recognised, too easily, as monomania.
The objects were still coming in hundreds, out of Her and into the sphere. The five fingers were no longer just shaping and organising the sphere but feeding it, in quantities which could never have existed inside Her. Now the sphere was bigger than both ships put together.
Through the fingers the whole of their engagement, the whole of the last few days of their lives, poured out of Her. Silver hull plates which Her spiders had excavated so industriously and which She had taken back inside Her in giant entwined cables. The Fire Opals which had fallen and died somewhere inside Her. More jagged slivers of diamond, this time hundreds of thousands, from their giant Diamond Clusters. Even cylindrical bits of the the Diamond Clusters themselves, reduced to digestible pieces. More bits of Prayer Wheels showing fractions of curvature and attached spokes. And more hull plates, more diamond slivers, more bits of their spiders and more dead Fire Opals. Thousands and thousands of everything.
“There’s too much,” Smithson muttered. “Like the beams. There’s more coming out than we put in.”
“She’s making them,” Foord whispered. “Thousands of everything. What have we…”
“Started? Who knows.” Thahl answered him.
The five fingers changed colour again. Different objects gushed through them into the sphere, objects which were not theirs but Hers, in silver and grey: Thahl’s head, Smithson’s torso, Cyr’s eyeless face. Not one of each but hundreds. Foord saw his own simulation at least a hundred times. And then other things of Hers, but these were complete and not mutilated: the replicas of Aaron Foord, Susanna Cyr, Elizabeth Kaang, Smithson and Thahl, the ones which had stood on the Bridge, forming out of cold white light and dissolving back into it. Again there were hundreds of them. They bent and conformed to the contours of the five transparent fingers as they poured through them, like dead children on a slide, tumbling out empty-faced into the openwork sphere. The hundreds became thousands and the sphere was no longer openwork but dense and solid, a mixture of colours and textures and shapes from Her and from them.
The fingers came to an end. They never did turn into a hand. One by one they completed their emergence from the unplumbable darkness of the gash in Her flank, their trailing ends floating across to the sphere and entering it. The darkness, either a molecule deep or as deep as the distance between galaxies, remained.
Between the two ships the sphere, bigger than either of them, hung motionless.
A mixture of us and Her, thought Foord. “Fire on it,” he told Cyr; but Cyr was not able to, because it became something else.
It started to compress, as if invisible hands were crumpling it prior to throwing it away. The compression was not uniform but abrupt and jagged. Its volume halved in a nanosecond, then halved again in five seconds, then stabilised; then halved again and again, to the size of a boulder and the size of an apple; then compressed, finally, to almost nothing. The two ships faced each other, speechless, across the space where it had been and still was.
The Bridge screen tracked it and would not let it go, chasing its collapse down from the size of an apple to a grain of sand to a molecule. The screen had become as obsessive as Foord; it would not say Unable again. It chased the sphere’s collapse further down, past the size of a molecule. It ignored the lunacy of its own readings, refocussing down and down with the definition of a microscope, and showed the Bridge an empty point in space with Faith looming out of focus behind it, and told them There, at that point, was what Her sphere had become: either an atom or a universe.
It was not an atom.
•
It exploded, back to the size of a grain of sand. Then expanded, to the size of an apple. Then expanded further, but more slowly.
The screen had chased it down through its first collapse, and back through the explosion of its creation, the expansion of its infancy, and the stability of its steady state. All through the chase the screen had told them what it was or wasn’t or might be, deleting and rewriting its readouts, combining contradictions into conclusions. Finally, like the object itself, the screen’s conclusions collapsed to almost nothing, exploded outwards, expanded, and reached relative stability.
It was a universe, said the screen, the size of an apple. Inside it would be galaxies like molecules, solar systems like subatomic particles, lives and civilisations which would go from birth to extinction in nanoseconds. In maybe five minutes, said the screen, the explosion of its creation would reverse and it would collapse.
The screen magnified it beyond focus, and got only its surface. Its face filled the screen like Horus 4 had done, but was even less distinct. Its outer surface was impenetrable; more than solid. Its colour was the nameless colour from Her craters, but flat and unlit. And while it existed, it brought a noise they would always associate with it. Not its own noise but theirs, a dissonant mismatched chorus of all their instruments trying to probe or understand it, failing, and saying so.