He felt faint, phantom deceleration as Tyrant matched trajectories with the egg and brought itself in for the rendezvous. The egg left a trail of bubbles behind it as it dropped, evidence of the transition to ocean. Somewhere on Tyrant's skin, a cavity puckered open, precisely shaped to accept the egg. They tore through rushing curtains of cloud. In a few moments he would be near enough to see the eye, he knew. One kilometre . . . six hundred metres. Three hundred.
The faintest of thumps as the egg was captured. Membranes of hull locked over the prize and resealed. Whoever he had saved was as safe now as Merlin.
Which was really saying very little.
'Instigate immediate pull-up. Hull collapse imminent. Severe pressure transition imminent.'
He was through the eye now, perhaps only two or three kilometres from the sucking point of the black hole. He had expected to see the clouds drawn into a malignant little knot, with a flickering glint of intense light at the heart of the whirlpool, but there was nothing, just clear skies. There was a local gravitational distortion, but it was nowhere near as severe as he had expected. Merlin glanced at the radiation alarms, but they were not showing anything unusual.
No hint of gamma radiation.
He wanted time to think, wanted to work out how he could be this close to a black hole and feel no radiation, but what was coming up below instantly demanded his attention. There was the other egg, tumbling below, wobbling as if in a mirage. Pressure was distorting it, readying to crush it. And down below, slumbering under the transition zone, was the true hydrogen sea. In a few seconds the other egg would be completely immersed in that unimaginably dense blackness and it would all be over. For a moment he considered swooping in low; trying to snatch the egg before it hit. He ran the numbers and saw the chilling truth.
He would have to enter the sea as well.
Merlin gave Tyrant its orders and closed his eyes. Even in the cushioning embrace of his suit, the hairpin turn as the ship skimmed the ocean would still not be comfortable. It would probably push him below consciousness. Which, he thought, might turn out to be the final mercy.
The sea's hazy surface came up like a black fog.
Thought faded for an instant, then returned fuzzily; and now through the windows he saw veils of cloud towards which he was climbing. The feeling of having survived was godlike. Yet something was screaming. The ship, he realised. It had sloughed millimetres of hull to stay intact. He prayed that the damage would not prevent him from getting home.
'The second egg . . .' Merlin said. 'Did we get it?'
Tyrant was clever enough - just - to know what he meant. 'Both eggs recovered.'
'Good. Show me . . .'
Proctors carried the first egg into the cabin, fiddling with it until they persuaded it to revert to androform shape. When the facial region became transparent he saw that it was Gallinule that this egg had saved, although his brother was clearly unconscious. Not dead though: he could tell that from the egg's luminous readouts. He felt a moment of pure, unadulterated bliss. He had saved Gallinule, but not selfishly. He had not known which of the two eggs had been falling towards the eye. In fact, he did not even know that this was that egg. Had he plucked his brother from the sea, instants before the ocean would have crushed him?
But then he saw the other egg. The proctors, stupid to the end, had seen fit to bring it into the cabin. They carried it like a trophy, as if it were something he would be overjoyed to see. But it was barely larger than a space helmet.
PART FOUR
'I think I know what killed her,' Sayaca said.
The three of them had agreed to meet within the Palace of Eternal Dusk. Sayaca had arranged a demonstration, casting into the sky vast projected shapes, which she orchestrated with deft gestures.
'It wasn't a black hole, was it?' Gallinule said.
'No.' She took his hand in both of hers, comforting him as they dug through the difficult memory of Pauraque's death. It had happened months ago, but the pain of it was still acute for Gallinule. Merlin watched from one side, lingeringly resentful at the tenderness Sayaca showed his brother. 'I think it was something a lot stranger than a black hole. Shall I show you?'
A double helix writhed in the sky, luminous and serpentlike against Plenitude's perpetual pink twilight.
Releasing Gallinule's hand, Sayaca lifted a finger and the DNA coil swelled to godlike size, until the individual base pairs were themselves too large to discern as anything other than blurred assemblages of atoms, huger than mountains. But atoms were only the beginning of the descent into the world of the vanishingly small. Atoms were assembled from even tinier components: electrons, protons and neutrons, bound together by the electroweak and -strong forces. But even those fundamental particles held deeper layers of structure. All matter in the universe was woven from quarks or leptons; all force mediated by bosons.
Even that was not the end.
In the deepest of deep symmetries, the fermions - the quarks and leptons - and the bosons - the messengers of force - blurred into one kind of entity. Particle was no longer the right word for it. What everything in the universe seemed to boil down to, at the very fundamental level, was a series of loops vibrating at different frequencies, embedded in a multidimensional space.
What, Sayaca said, scientists had once termed superstrings.
It was elegant beyond words, and it explained seemingly everything. But the trouble with superstring theory, Sayaca added, was that it was extraordinarily difficult to test. It was likely that the theory had been reinvented and discarded dozens or hundreds of times in human history, during each brief phase of enlightenment. Undoubtedly the Waymakers must have come to some final wisdom as to the ultimate nature of reality . . . but if they had, they had not left that verdict in any form now remembered. So from Sayaca's viewpoint, superstring theory was at least as viable as any other model for unifying the fundamental particles and forces.
'But I don't see how any of this helps us understand Pauraque's storm,' Merlin said.
'Wait,' said Sayaca's semblance. 'I haven't finished. There's more than one type of superstring theory, understand? And some of those theories make a special prediction about the existence of something called shadow matter. It's not the same thing as antimatter. Shadow matter's like normal matter in every respect, except it's invisible and insubstantial. Objects made of normal and shadow matter just slip through each other like ghosts. There's only one way in which they sense each other.'
'Gravity,' Merlin said.
'Yes. As far as gravity's concerned, there's nothing to distinguish them.'
'So what are you saying, that there could be whole universes made of shadow matter coexisting with our own?'
'Exactly that.' She went on to tell them there was every reason to suppose that the shadow universe was just as complex as the normal one, with exactly analogous particle types, atoms and chemistry. There would be shadow galaxies, shadow stars and shadow worlds - perhaps even shadow life.