Lawrence selected his course, delving deep into some of the oldest memories the dragons possessed for the information. The engines gathered up their colossal strength and impelled the Fool's Errand into the nullvoid.
Nebulas are among the most beautiful objects in the sky, revered by astronomers across the galaxy. Fluoresced by stars hidden deep inside, they shade parsecs with the most magical patterns of shifting primordial light. Yet for all their grandeur they are transient. The stars that provide their ethereal beauty also blow out a hard wind of ions that slowly disperses the gas and dust. Gravity, too, plays its part, inexorably thinning out the streamers and clouds. Protostars perform the opposite function, their great glowing whorls sucking in the spectral tides, compressing them down to a central spark.
Their lifetimes are measured in millions of years only—negligible in galactic timescales.
Even the Ulodan Nebula, one of the thickest and darkest ever to form in the galaxy, was waning when the Ring Empire archaeologists came across the planet of the Mordiff. By the time of the Decadence War it was just a zone of interstellar space with a slightly higher than average gas density. Even then the Mordiff sun was cold and shrunken, no more than a glimmering red ember. Just a memory within the newborn dragon civilizations.
It took Lawrence Newton and the Fool's Errand a long time to find the cool star-husk with its single lonely planet. But eventually the beautiful starship fell from the sky and landed beside the one remaining relic of the Mordiff.
Lawrence put on a spacesuit and stepped down onto the planet's surface. There was no air left: it had bled away millions of years ago. The sand under his boots had frozen to a crust harder than iron. But there was still light. High above the horizon, the galactic core formed a lambent white swirl that occupied nearly a tenth of the sky. It cast a sharp shadow behind him as he walked.
This was a landscape bleaker than any he had ever known. Rock outcrops were sharp and fractured: even the stones that littered the ground were jagged. Over millions of years, cold had drawn the very color from the land. He knew this planet had no future left. That knowledge didn't bother him; he had come for its past.
He paused on a low ridge and looked up at the terminus. It was strange, he thought, that a race so warlike and terrible could build a machine so much greater than themselves.
The terminus was a broad toroid, snow-white in color, its inner aperture measuring three kilometers in diameter. Five giant buttress towers supported it a kilometer off the ground. Outcrops of rock rested against the base of each one, as if they were waves breaking against a cliff. Neither cold nor entropy had affected the titanic artifact; even geology had been defeated by it. The Ring Empire archaeologists weren't even sure it was made from matter in the normal sense. Nothing else of the Mordiff remained, no ruins, no monuments. Only the terminus, their failed bid for immortality.
Harsh turquoise light shone down out of the center, illuminating the frozen sand underneath. Lawrence was vaguely disappointed he couldn't actually see the wormhole, but the blue light acted like a veil across the aperture.
After a while Lawrence walked back to the Fool's Errand.
He sat on his seat in the forward lounge and guided the star-ship under the toroid. It rose slowly into the blue haze. For a second the sensors could see nothing; then they were inside the wormhole. A tube of pale violet light stretched away from the starship. Ahead lay the future, billions of years stretching out to the end of the galaxy, when even the terminus fell into the black hole. In the other direction lay the past. Fool's Errand flew back into history.
The three sister planets were moving into their major conjunction. It was a spectacular sight as the bright crescents lined up above the gentle rolling hills of New Arnoon. Denise was sitting in the shade of a big cigni tree as they slid together, its ginger leaves casting a broad dapple over the grass around her. The cluster of seven-year-olds sitting on the ground sighed and cooed at the astral exhibition. If they squinted really hard, they could just make out hair-thin lines cutting across the distant planets. The silver threads of the world web spun out by the dragon in geostationary orbit were becoming more complex as the englobing progressed. Soon the whole world would be caged. These were exciting times for the children.
"Finish it," Jones Johnson whined plaintively. "Please, Denise!"
But not as exciting as other people used to have, she thought in amusement. Little Jones was getting agitated, his face screwed up with urgency.
"Finish! Finish!" the rest of them chanted.
"All right," she said.
Lawrence Newton tried not to show any nerves as he presented his ticket to the departures desk in the center of the terminal building. Templeton Spaceport was a small affair to the north of the domed city, a couple of runways and five hangars. It was built with arrivals in mind, twenty thousand at a time when one of McArthur's starships decelerated into orbit. Traffic in the other direction was small and open to scrutiny.
The receptionist scanned his ticket in and smiled as her sheet screen scrolled confirmation. "Do you have any baggage?" she asked.
"Er, one," Lawrence said. He was so relieved the Prime had guarded him from his father's askpings he made a hash of lifting the case onto her scales. She leaned over and helped him.
"Why are you going?" she asked.
"I, er, my family is sending me to university on Earth," he stammered.
"Lucky you," she said brightly. "You can go through to the lounge now, Mr. Newton. Your flight leaves in forty minutes. If the snowplows can keep the runway clear."
"Thanks." His stomach felt curiously light.
Starflight! I'm going to have a starflight. I really am.
And that made up for absolutely everything.
He straightened his back and walked toward the lounge door. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Vinnie Carlton hanging around by the main entrance. Lawrence gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up. Vinnie winked back.
The lounge doors closed behind him. Ahead of him, the picture window gave him a view out over the long arrowhead-shaped spaceplane that was due to take him up to the Eilean. Lawrence hurried forward for a better look.
Vinnie Carlton watched the lounge doors shut He went out to the taxi rank and climbed into the first of the little white bubbles. "Leith dome," he told the vehicle's AS.
A thin hail of ice twisted about them on the road. Vinnie settled back in the seat, closed his eyes and concentrated. The flesh on his face rippled; characteristics began to shift, his nose flattening slightly, chin protruding, eyebrows straightening. He opened his eyes, now shaded halfway between gray and green. When he looked in the taxi's mirror to check, Lawrence Newton's young features looked back at him. It had been so many months he barely recognized himself.
Sadly he acknowledged that for all the perfect physical regeneration patternform had given him, he could never project the naivetй that his younger self had always possessed. An inevitable consequence, he thought—not just from the twenty years of experience he owned, but also the result of living beside his earlier self for so long. That proximity had been so much harder than he'd ever imagined. There had been so many times when, as Vinnie, he'd wanted to give that love-stricken, horrifyingly ignorant teenage Lawrence a damn good kicking.