“Nearly, madam.”
“Visit me.” She sounded almost friendly, her golden face shining down at him. “My annual feast is in four days. Join me and the rest of your colleagues, and we’ll discuss your next assignment. Is that understood?”
“Always, madam.”
The smile acquired a useful menace, and as she vanished, she warned, “The Remoras have better things to do than look after your toys. Darling.”
Over the next three days, detectors were dragged alongside the barge and taken off-line, and drones began to stow them for shipment. The sonar array and deep-dredges waited their turn. Where everything would end up, Pamir didn’t know. Probably stored inside a warehouse, and he didn’t particularly care about their fate.
Whatever happened now, he was definitely done with this place.
Because it was an order, and because it might do some good, Pamir decided to attend the Master’s feast. Returning to his quarters, he let his sonic shower carve off several layers of old flesh, then he stepped into his garden, the clean new skin beneath maturing in the false sunlight. In his absence, his llano-vibra had gone wild; thousands of mouths sang badly, a chorus of wild, unlovely sounds accompanying him as he dressed in his most ornate uniform. He tied the mysterious silver clock to his mirrored sash. A mouthful of bacterial spores guaranteed that he could eat and drink anything, his belches and farts turned to perfumes. Then he boarded his personal cap-car, and once under way, Pamir realized that he wasn’t simply tired, he was exhausted, better than a century of hard, thankless work suddenly grabbing him by the throat. He slumped, and slept.
He would have slept until he pulled up beside the Grand Hall, but an AI yanked him out of a perfectly delightful sex dream.
The dream faded, as well as his erection. On a secure channel, he opened a channel to the AI. A dry, unimpressed voice reported, “There has been, sir, a rather considerable surge in neutrino activity.”
“From where?”
“From below,” the AI replied. “With just one array, I cannot pinpoint a source—”
“Straight below?” Pamir interrupted.
“And in a region encompassing an eight-degree dispersion, yes.”
“How big of an increase?”
“I’m witnessing activity levels approximately two hundred and eighteen thousand percent greater than our previous max—”
“Show me,” Pamir grunted.
The neutrino universe engulfed him. Suns were points of light burning in a endless gray haze. The nearest sun was a red giant orbiting a massive black hole, its fiery core and the black hole’s weak accretion disk both bright. But the brightest lights belonged to the ship, tens of thousands of fusion reactors producing the ship’s essential power, the power gridwork looking to his wide eyes like a beautiful and delicate orb composed of many tiny, brightly lit pearls.
Beneath the orb was a region of blackness.
In the neutrino universe, stone and iron were theories, were ghosts, and ordinary matter could rarely be seen, or felt, or believed in.
But beneath the blackness, enshrouding the ship’s core, was a second orb. What Pamir didn’t notice at first glance became obvious, then unmistakable. Eight degrees of the sky was covered with a neutrino-bright object. Staring hard, he heard himself asking,’Could it be an engine firing? An early burn, maybe?”
That would at least explain the neutrinos.
With no small measure of disdain, the AI said, “Sir, no engine is at work, and even if there was, no reaction vessel is properly aligned. Sir.”
Pamir blinked, asking, “Is it getting brighter?”
“Since we began this conversation… it has brightened nine hundred and eleven percent, with no signs of a plateau, sir…”
Softly, to himself, Pamir said, “Shit.”
To the AI, he demanded, “Explanations.”
“I have none, sir.”
But it was a tech-AI, not a theory-spawner. Pamir squinted at the mysterious projection, noting that unlike the ship’s bright pearls of light, this object had a diffuse glow, almost milky, and sourceless, and in its own fashion, lovely.
Then he noticed a brighter splotch.
Ninety degrees removed, which placed it… shit, directly beneath his own deep, deep hole… five hundred kilometers deeper, and what, if anything, did that mean…?
Pamir excused the tech-AI, then contacted his crew.
The AI foremachine answered. “Where are the captains?” Pamir asked. “One is sitting with the tenth-grades. The other with the fifteenths. Sir.”
At the Master’s feast, he realized.
“What do you see?” he blurted. Then, narrowing the topic, he asked, “How’s the work progressing?”
“I see everything, and all is nominal. Sir.”
“Do you sense any odd activity?”
“None.”
“Just the same,” he responded, “put yourself and the crew on alert. Understood?”
“I don’t understand, but I will do it, sir. Is that all?”
“For now”
Pamir cleared the channel, then fought to contact the Master. But her staff were doing their reliable best to protect her on this busy day. A rubber-faced AI glared at him. “The traditional festivities have begun,” it snapped, glass eyes filled with disdain. “Only in the most severe emergencies—”
“I realize—”
“-will I allow you to interrupt the Great Master.”
“Just deliver a message to her security nexuses. Will you do that?”
“Always.”
Pamir squirted the latest data to the Master’s station, then added a quick cautionary note. “I don’t have any idea what’s happening, madam. But something is. And until someone understands it, we’d better try to be careful!”
The AI absorbed the data, the words. Then it volunteered, “If you feel this strongly, perhaps you should deliver the message in person—”
He blanked the channel, gave his cap-car a new destination, and once that destination was registered, he overrode it, effectively masking his plans.Then he sat back, feeling a momentary sense of doubt. The feast would be a waste; he wouldn’t be able to reach the Master’s ears, or mind, for hours. But instead of flying down into the hole and seeing things for himself, which was his first duty, Pamir was returning to the giant fuel tank and his aerogel raft, reasoning that if he could get half a dozen of the detectors on-line, and if he could recalibrate them in the next half-day…
What would happen?
More and better data. And maybe some obvious explanation would take him by the head, and give him a good shake…
En route, he twice contacted the foremachine in the hole.
Both times, the familiar voice told him, “Nothing is out of the ordinary, sir. And we are digging at the usual furious rate. Sir.”
To reach the aerogel barge required passing through the leech habitat. An elevator had been grafted into the alien structure, running from its hub down to the calm cold surface of the sea. As his car pulled to a stop in the tunnel above, a thought found him. Again, he contacted the foremachine. Again, it said, “Nothing,” and, “We are digging.” Then he asked the tech-AI for an update on the neutrino activity.
“The counts have tripled since our last words,” the AI replied. “They have reached a plateau that’s holding steady. Sir.”
Pamir climbed from the car and paused, taking a deep, slow breath of air.
He smelled something… What?
“Is there anything else, sir?” asked the tech-AI.
Pamir began to walk, maintaining contact through his implanted nexuses. “What we’re seeing looks like a sphere of neutrinos, but it doesn’t have to be. Am I right? What we’re seeing could come from a single point inside a refractory container. Like an ancient glass bulb wrapped around an incandescent filament. But instead of light, we see neutrinos. Instead of glass, the neutrinos are emerging from an envelope of hyperfiber—”