Below them it lay, filling well over a ninety-degree arc: the entire galaxy of man’s domicile, viewed broadside by man for the first time. The pallid white of the stars and nebulae deflowered by Earth’s atmosphere existed no more; the colossal fog of interstellar gas and dust had been banished from the vicinity of the observer. The result was a view of the Milky Way Galaxy as it really existed — ten thousand times as rich as that perceivable from Earth.
Color, yes — but not as any painter could represent, or any atmosphere-blinded eye could fathom. Red in the center where the old lights faded; blue at the fringe where the fierce new lights formed. A spectrum between — but also so much more! Here the visible splay extended beyond the range for which nomenclature existed, and rounded out the hues for which human names did exist. A mighty swirl, a multiple spiral of radiance, wave on wave of tiny bright particles, merged yet discrete. The Milky Way was translucent, yet mind-staggeringly intricate in three, in four dimensions.
At the fringe it was wafer-thin, sustained largely by the masses of cosmic dust that smeared out thousands of stars with every hideously compelling wisp and whorl. Within this sparse galactic atmosphere, nestled in tentacles of gas, floated Sol and its solar debris: hardly worthy of notice, compared to the main body; indeed, invisible without magnification.
And, clear from this exquisite vantage, the pattern of the stellar conglomeration that was the galaxy emerged: the great spiral arms, coiling outward from the center, doubled bands of matter beginning as the light of massed stars and terminating as the black of thinning dust. Not flat, not even; the ribbons were twisted, showing now broadside, now edgewise, resembling open mobius strips or the helix of galactic DNA.
And yes, he thought, yes — the galaxy was a cell, bearing its cosmic organelles and glowing in its animation; motile, warm-bodied, evolving, its life span enduring for tens of billions of years.
Ivo felt a physical hunger, and realized that he had been looking at the galaxy for many hours. He had been stupefied by it, as a worshiper was said to be blessedly stupefied by confrontation with his god.
He broke the trance and looked about him. Afra stood nearest, lovely in her mortal fashion, her eyes encompassing a hundred billion stars, her lungs inhaling cubic par-sees of space.
Harold turned to face him, and he noticed with a shock that the man, like the women, had lost weight sometime in the past few months. Everyone was changing! “Did you observe the globular clusters? Hundreds of them orbiting the galaxy, a million stars in each. Look!” He pointed. “That one must be within ten thousand light-years of us.”
Ivo saw what he had somehow missed before: a glob of light near at hand and about as far out from the galactic disk as they were. It resembled a small galaxy except that it was shapeless, a Rorschach blob of brilliance. It was as though some of the cotton had drifted free when the fabric of the main tapestry was woven. At its fringe, as with the main galaxy, the stars were sparse, but they thickened at the center, converting from blue to mid-range. This cluster was younger than the main body.
There were many others in sight, most closer in toward the galactic nucleus. Each, perhaps, was a cosmos in itself, possessing lifebearing planets and stellar civilizations. The overall pattern of the entire group of clusters was spherical — or at least hemispherical, since he could not see what lay on the far side of the main disk. Though he could not perceive individual motion, it struck him that the clusters were in fact orbiting the center of the galaxy — elliptical orbits, brushing very near to its rim and riding higher over its broad face. Some even seemed to be colliding with the galactic fringe, though that was so diffuse that it was a matter of interpretation.
Almost, he could picture the original ball of gas and dust, turning grandly in space and throwing out gauze and sparks. The majority of the material remained in the plane of rotation, to become the spiral arms and the overall disk-shape; but a few mavericks took separate courses, and were the clusters.
How did the universe appear to a creature looking out from a planet aboard one of these island systems? Did any cultures aspire to descend to the mighty mother complex? Was their god a whirlpool thirty thousand parsecs in diameter?
Beatryx emerged from the kitchen area, and Ivo realized that it had been the smell of cooking that had first brought his attention to his stomach. She was typically the bringer of nourishment. It was good that someone was practical!
At last Afra came out of it. “We are within the traveler field, but beyond the destroyer,” she said musingly. “We are thirty thousand light-years toward the traveler — so it will be passing Earth and the galaxy for at least that period in the future. Obviously it preceded the destroyers, too, or they would have started earlier and reached out this far. And that suggests—”
“That the point of the destroyer may be merely to suppress the alien beam,” Harold finished for her. “Since myriad local stations come through nicely, they cannot have incited the destroyer.”
“Talk of xenophobia!” she exclaimed. “Just because it proved that there was superior technology elsewhere — !”
Harold cocked his head at her. “Is that the way you see it? I might have reasoned along another line.”
“I am aware of your—”
“Soup’s on!” Beatryx called, once more abridging the discussion appropriately.
Because there was no destroyer here, they turned on the main screen to watch Ivo work. Afra could have used the macroscope herself, but there was now a certain group recognition that this was Ivo’s prerogative, and that practice had brought him to a level of proficiency no other person could match without a similar apprenticeship. It was his show.
He had stage fright.
He avoided the routine programs, now offered in such splendor and multiplicity that it would require years to Index them by hand. Their several language coding families were of course unfamiliar to the others; Ivo had mastered the basics only after intense concentration, though all were to some extent similar to the technique of the destroyer itself. He also avoided the traveler signal (when had that term come into use?); that would come in its own time. Instead he concentrated on the nonbroadcast band and searched for Earth: the world of Man as it was thirty thousand years ago.
And couldn’t pick it up.
He rechecked the coordinates derived from their telescopic sightings of the Andromeda Galaxy and selected Population II Cepheids of the Milky Way, and made due allowance for galactic rotation and the separate motions of the stars in the course of 30,000 years. Everything checked; he knew where to find Earth.
Except that it wasn’t there.
“Either I’ve lost my touch, or Earth didn’t exist thirty thousand years ago,” he said ruefully.
“Nonsense,” Afra said. “Let me try it.” She seemed eager.
Ivo gave place to her, feeling as though he had been sent to the showers.
Afra played with the controls for twenty minutes, focusing first on the Earth-locale, then elsewhere. The screen remained a mélange of color; no clear image appeared. At last she swung around to focus on one of the globular clusters outside the galaxy — and got an image.
She had set the computer to fix on any planetary surface encountered in a routine sweep of the views available, and it had done that. The picture was of a dark barren moon far from its primary. In the night sky above the horizon individual stars could be made out, and even the light band of massed distant stars.
“That’s no cluster!” Groton exclaimed. “You wouldn’t find a band like that in a spherical mass of stars.”
Afra fussed with the controls, adjusting the scene clumsily and finally losing it. She returned to the computer sweep, while Ivo chafed internally at the loss of the only picture they had landed, and such a mysterious one. The picture would not come in again. She began to show her temper.