Sue-ling turned quickly back. It didn't look to her as though anything were wrong, but she did see that something like a vast shadow had settled on the fringes of the image. The angry dot of light from the companion had winked out, the furious haze of blue light was covered over, and that part of the screen had gone almost black. Sue-ling saw only a pale powdering of more distant stars in the background.
But Krake too was scowling. He looked around at the others who were beginning to come into the control room, answering to his summons. "Where are the Turtles?" he demanded.
"They're on their way, Captain," Daisy Fay reported. "What's the matter?"
"It's funny," he complained. "At this distance we should be able to pick up the Turtle planet, but where is it?"
"What does it look like?" Sue-ling asked, squinting as hard as she could at the screen.
"Not much of anything," he said absently, looking around for the Turtles. Then he turned back to her. "All I can tell you is what I've seen from space. It's a bare world, Sue-ling. No green. It doesn't even have ice caps. It looks dead."
"And the Turtles live there?"
"Some of them still do, yes. Or did. They all come from there originally. They aren't human, you know. That radiation would fry us in a second, but it's mother's milk to them— it's most of what they live on." But he was paying little attention to their conversation, speaking only with half his mind. The rest was trying to be patient until the Turtles arrived.
"Captain?" Marco called. "I bet I know why they aren't here. They've got screens of their own in their quarters—I'll bet they're watching from there, just to be private from the rest of us."
"And cooking up what they want to tell us," Sork snarled —startling Sue-ling, who hadn't seen him come in. He looked distinctly hung over, she saw, and was not surprised.
"Maybe so," Krake said worriedly, peering at the wall view. He shook his head. "I've seen the planet on other trips," he said, exasperated. "I've even landed on it—sort of."
She looked at him in surprise. "I could have sworn you said you hadn't."
"It wasn't really much of a landing," he explained. "I dodged down and back—they warned me the radiation from the accretion disk would be deadly if we were unprotected. The neutron star's not quite as bad, but it's bad enough; so we had to take precautions. But I had to land to transfer cargo." He stared somberly out at the scene in space. "See, the black hole and its accretion disk are several light-days away—a safe enough distance, unless you get caught in a flare. We stayed in the shielded parts of the ship, unloading by machine, but the important thing we did was to come in at night. We brought Hind in down the cone of shadow, where it was shielded, to the orbiting station for their Skyhook. Then we did what we had to do, and got out of there before the orbiter was exposed again."
"It sounds dangerous."
He looked at her blankly. "Oh? Well, a little maybe, but that's not what's worrying me. What I'm worried about is where the damned thing is. I know IVe picked the planet up from farther out than this."
And then, as the two Turtles at last appeared, despondently pulling themselves into the room, he appealed to them. "What's wrong? Are our instruments screwed up?"
It was Chief Thunderbird who answered. "The instruments are working perfectly, Krake," the Turtle boomed, the grating voice like a dirge. "The situation is as our worst fears. It is our entire sacred Mother planet that has disappeared. There is nothing left of it at all."
Among the songs the aiodoi sing is a song which speaks of oneness, and it goes:
"It is all now.
"It is all ever.
"It is all one."
And sometimes among the songs the aiodoi hear there is a song which echoes their own, even when it comes from a small voice on a distant world.
"Now suppose these notions of Stephen Hawking and all those other people are true, and our universe is only one of many—maybe of an infinity of them. Is there any way that one universe can make contact with another?
"The answer, surprisingly, is 'yes.' It may not be a practicable way. But theoretically, yes, there may be a point of contact; it's what Hawking and others called a Svormhole.'
"According to Hawking and Roger Penrose, the trouble with wormholes as a doorway to other universes was that they were surrounded by an impassable barrier called the Cauchy horizon. It was theoretically possible that something could pass the Cauchy barrier, but only if you didn't care what shape it got through in. Hawking and Penrose thought that the Cauchy horizon would destroy anything that entered it with one giant pulse of infinite energy.
"That was kind of discouraging to would-be universe travelers.
"But then Kip Thorne took a closer look at the problem, and came up with good news. The barrier wouldn't be all that destructive in one special case that he discovered, and that was where the wormhole had been formed from so-called 'exotic matter.'
"That inspired a couple of English scientists, Felicity Mel-lor and Ian Moss, to dig a little deeper into the question. Sure enough, they discovered that you didn't even need exotic matter. All you needed was a closed universe.
"The mistake their predecessors had been making lay in the assumption that the universe was flat and open. That made their mathematics easier, but it hid the truth from them. There was, after all, no a priori reason to make that assumption. There was no evidence that the flat-open universe corresponded to physical reality. When Mellor and Moss did the problem over with the more plausible closed-universe assumption, they found that the problem of the Cauchy barrier had disappeared.
"So the way was open for anyone to go through a worm-hole and come out in another universe. . . .
"Well, that's not quite true. There was one little remaining problem.
"For that kind of a trip, the first step was the hardest. You had to do one of two things. In order to travel through a wormhole, you had to make one to travel through. Or, if you couldn't find any way to make a wormhole, you had to find a way to get to where some wormhole was."
And the aiodoi sang on:
"And that is the way to reach from the near to the endless. "Do it!"
12
What puzzled Moon Bunderan most was that, although it seemed clear that the planet they were aiming toward no longer existed, the Turtles had not given up. They were demanding—no, it was even more astonishing than that; they were almost pleading—for something more.
What that something more was Moon could not say. She had begun listening to all those old lecture chips with the others, but none of them seemed to relate to any reality she had ever experienced, and all too many of them were worrisome.
Thrayl, for instance. What did the Turtles want with him? He looked up at her from where he sat cross-legged on the floor, his gentle eyes concerned. "There is nothing to fear, Moon," he rumbled. "I hear no ill songs for you."
"What about for you?" she demanded. "What are the Turtles going to do with you?"
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "They will do what they must, Moon."
"And what will that be?" But he didn't answer, only took her hand in his and closed his eyes again. Moon fidgeted, ill at ease. This whole situation, she thought, was getting too weird for comfort. She held tight to Thrayl's hard, comforting, three-fingered paw for reassurance. It was the only reassurance she had when these—"beings"—she had gone off with were shouting and squawking at each other.