The journey took ten hours. As it neared its end Spinner-of Rope took a brief nap; when she woke, she had her suit’s systems freshen her skin, and she emptied her bladder.
She checked a display on her faceplate. Twenty jumps to go. Twenty more seconds, and -
Something vibrant-blue exploded out of space at her, ballooning into her face.
She cried out and buried her faceplate in her arms.
It’s all right, Poole said softly.
“I’m sorry, Spinner-of-Rope,” Louise Armonk said. “I should have warned you…”
Spinner lowered her arms, cautiously.
There was string, everywhere.
A tangle of cosmic string, rendered electric blue by the faceplate’s false coloring, lay directly ahead of the ship. Cusps, moving at lightspeed, glittered along the twisted lengths. She leaned forward and looked up and down, to left and right; the threads of string criss-crossed the sky as far as she could see, a textured wall across space. Looking deeper into the immense structure. Spinner saw how the individual threads blurred together, merging into a soft mist at infinity.
The string loop was a barrier across the sky, dividing the Universe in two. It was quite beautiful, she thought — but deadly. It was a cosmic web, with threads long enough to span the distances between stars: a web, ready to trap her and her ship.
And, she knew, this was just one thousand-light-year fragment, among thousands in the torus…
“Lethe,” she said. “We’re almost inside this damn thing.”
“Not quite,” Louise said. Her voice, nevertheless, was tight, betraying her own nervousness. “Remember your distance scales, Spinner. The string loops in this toroidal system are around a thousand light-years across. We’re as far from the edge of that loop as the Sun was from the nearest star.”
“Except,” Mark Wu cut in, “that the loop has no easily definable edge. It’s a tangle. Cosmic string is damn hard to detect; the display you’re looking at, Spinner, is all Virtual reconstruction; it’s just our best guess at what lies out there.”
“Then are we at risk by being here?” Spinner asked.
Of course, Michael Poole said.
“No,” Louise said.
“Yes,” Mark said. “Come on, Louise. Spinner, we’re working to minimize the risks. But the danger is there. Spinner, you need to be ready to react — to get us out of here, quickly. We have escape routines laid into the waldoes, for both hyperdrive and discontinuity drive.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said calmly. “But why are we here? Is the human signal coming from somewhere in there — inside the string?”
“No,” Louise said. “Thankfully, Spinner, the signal is coming from the system of a neutron star — just a few light hours away from here. We’ve laid in — ”
” — a discontinuity-drive sequence into the waldoes,” Spinner said drily. “I know.” She reached for her controls. “Tell me when you’re ready, Louise.”
Poole looked tired, his brown eyes deep in a mesh of wrinkles. You know, I worked with Louise Armonk, he said. He smiled. And here we are, together again. Small world, isn’t it? She was a good engineer. I guess she still is.
“I know you decided to close your wormhole time bridge,” Spinner said. “Tell me what happened to you.”
Poole sat, apparently relaxed, on the ’fighter shoulder; his eyes were closed, his head bent forward. I remember the lifedome of my GUTship entering the Interface, he said slowly. There was light — like fire, blue-violet — from all around the lip of the dome. I knew that was the flesh of the Spline, burning up against the Interface’s exotic-matter framework. I remember — a sense of loss, of alienation.
“Loss?”
I was passing out of my time frame. Spinner-of-Rope, each of us — (he raised translucent hands) — even I — is bound into the world by quantum functions. I was linked non-locally to everything I had touched, seen, tasted… Now, all those quantum bonds were broken. I was as alone as any human had ever been.
I engaged the hyperdrive.
Bits of the wormhole seemed to fall away. I remember streams of blue-white light… I almost believed I could feel those hard photons, sleeting through the lifedome.
Spacetime is riddled with wormholes: it is like a sheet of flawed glass, crazed by cracks. When Poole set off his hyperdrive inside the wormhole, it was as if someone had smashed at that flawed glass with a hammer. Cracks exploded out from the point of impact and widened; they joined up in a complex, spreading network of cracks, a tributary pattern that continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.
The spacetime cracks opened up like branching tunnels, leading off to infinity… Poole smiled, self-deprecating. I started to wonder if this had been a good plan, after all.
The pod sailed down from the Northern’s lifedome.
Lieserl sat in a Virtual projection of a pod couch beside Mark Wu; ahead of them blind Uvarov was swathed in his blankets, his cavern of a mouth gaping, his breath a rattle. The huge discontinuity-drive wings of the nightfighter spread over the pod like the vaulted roof of some immense church.
Far below the pod revolved the bleak, airless planet to which they were descending. Staring down as the small island of solidity loomed out of the glowing fog, Lieserl had a sudden — and quite absurd — feeling of vertigo. She felt as if she were suspended, in this couch, without protection far above the planet’s surface; she had an impulse, which she suppressed with determination, to grip the sides of her couch.
Vertigo… After all her experiences inside the Sun, and despite her perfect knowledge that she couldn’t be harmed even if the pod exploded here and now since she was little more than a Virtual projection from the Northern’s main processors, with augmentation from the pod’s processor banks — after all that, she had vertigo.
Still, she thought, it was comforting to know that she’d retained enough humanity to be just a little scared. Maybe she should tell Mark; it might make him think a little better of her.
Beyond the pod’s clear hull, the neutron star system was a huge tableau all around them.
The neutron star itself was a tiny, fierce yellow-red ball. It had a companion a normal star — and it was surrounded by a ring of gas, which glowed softly. And there were several planets, orbiting the neutron star, inside the smoke ring.
In fact, the anomalous signal was coming from one of the planets, the little world toward which Lieserl was now descending.
The nightfighter had dropped them into the ring of smoke which orbited the star. It was like descending into fog. Close to the pod Lieserl could see dense swirls of the ring gas — clumps and eddies of turbulent stuff — and, beyond that, the rest of the ring was a band of pale light bisecting the Universe. She could see the neutron star itself, a small, hard coal glowing yellow-red at the heart of this ring of smoke. Beside it hung its companion star huge, pale, distorted into a squat egg-shape by the neutron star’s fierce gravitational field. Tendrils of gas led from the carcass of the companion and reached blindly toward the neutron star.
And beyond that, tilted crazily compared to the gas torus, was a starbow.
This neutron star was moving with extraordinary speed: it plummeted across space at close to the speed of light. As a result of this high velocity, the neutron star and its system were the only visible objects in Lieserl’s Universe. All of the rest — the blue-shifted galaxies, the nearby wall of cosmic string — was compressed into that pale starbow, a band of light around the equator of the star’s motion. And away from the starbow, there was only darkness.