"Stop it, please!" Krake begged, writhing uselessly in Thrayl's arms. "We can't do this! You're endangering my ship! Marco—Daisy Fay—stop him!"
"No one is to stop this process!" Chief Thunderbird roared. "It is for the salvation of the entire Brotherhood and our sacred Mother!"
Krake swore violendy to himself as he watched. The accretion disk of the old black hole was whirling, crawling away as they dropped toward the wormhole. Accelerating to light speed, their subjective time slowed almost to a stop, he could see the wrinkle expanding, and the clustered green ship beacons bloating too. Krake heard a low-toned moan from Thrayl —of agony or delight, he couldn't tell.
"It's too late, Francis," Daisy Fay said, her voice trembling. "We're too close now. We have to go in—and through—or we'll get torn apart."
The dome went black, all but that strange wrinkle, Thrayl's horns glowing milky white against the darkness. Krake felt the Taur shudder in a kind of ecstasy. Across the cabin, what Sue-ling Quong felt was a sort of shock in the deck beneath her feet that rocked her with a wave of nausea. Blind in the internal darkness of the control room, she clutched at Sork and Kiri.
"The wormhole," she heard Sork's whisper from close beside her, and even in that moment she could not escape the morning-after sourness of his breath. "We're in it. ..."
For Moon Bunderan it was a giddy feeling, as though she were plunging headfirst into a widening whirlpool. The wormhole brightened before them until it filled one whole side of the globe, its center an ebony pit, ringed with faint spinning spirals of tenuous gas.
The darkness lasted only an instant. . . .
And then, without warning, the whole sky shone!
Ten thousand suns blazed out all around the slender bridge, above it and below. Krake glared at the spectacle, almost sickened; no human being had ever seen a sky like that before. The falling sensation had vanished. Though there was no physical sensation, something in his unadapted sensory systems was crying to him that he was rising—zooming—soaring into that burning splendor of stars, away from the maelstrom of fire that was the wormhole. He could still see it behind them. Its center was a blinding pit, ringed with spinning spirals of glowing gas and dust. A vast blue plume trailed out of it toward them.
There was a rapturous moan from Lidun at the controls. "We're through!" he rasped. "We've followed the sacred Mother!"
"My God," Sue-ling Quong whispered. "And we're still alive."
Krake bellowed and pulled away from the Taur. "We're alive, all right," he roared, "but what's happened to my ship? Look at that thing!" In the screen behind them a vast accretion disk spun ominously, but receding rapidly as they drew
away.
"Do not interfere, Krake! Attend me, Facilitator! Where is the Mother Planet?" Chief Thunderbird croaked eagerly. "Can you see it on the screen?"
But Lidun was gazing in shock at his navigation board, sparkling with evil red error signals. "Something's wrong," he said in dismay. "What has happened, Elder Brother?"
Krake shouted in wordless anger at what the instruments were telling him about the condition of his ship. Drowning him out, Chief Thunderbird screamed, "Have you damaged the navigation? It is inexcusable!"
"No, no," Litlun said feebly, his yellow-red eyes wandering about helplessly. "One did nothing wrong! But—see for yourself, there are no reference points, nothing is as it should be."
"Fool! Of course not! This strange notion is true; we're in another universe, and certainly there are no familiar reference points! It is the Mother planet you must find, not some distant star!"
"But, Proctor," Litlun sobbed, waving his arm at the screen around them. "Don't you see? There are no navigation beacons. There is nothing to guide us. The Mother planet— its entire network of navigation satellites and beacons—it is not here."
"Marco?" Krake snapped, turning to his crewman.
But Marco said helplessly, "I'm still trying, Captain, but— I think he's right. I'm not getting any beacon readings at all."
"Keep trying," Krake ordered. It was only instinct speaking though. Half to himself, he said, to no one in particular, "There's not much chance."
Chief Thunderbird glared madly at him for a moment, then seemed to collapse. With a wordless howl of despair he fell against the wall, pounding his carapace against it. "Failed," he moaned. "We have failed."
For a moment it seemed the huge Turtle was on the verge of some catastrophic action—suicide, perhaps; or an apoplectic fit, if Turtles could have such things—even, almost, as though he were going to attack, physically attack, Francis Krake. Or Sork Quintero, or Kiri, or even Chief Thunder-bird's own Younger Brother—anyone, almost, it seemed. Krake had never seen a Turtle so excited. The coppery eyes were revolving wildly, the claws drumming furiously against the belly plastron. . . .
Then the Taur spoke up. It wasn't a word Krake could recognize, hardly more than a loud, commanding bull's bellow. Everyone turned to him and Moon Bunderan. "What did he say?" Chief Thunderbird rasped at the girl.
And hesitantly, bewildered, she said, "I think what Thrayl said was, 'Not yet.'"
Not yet, Krake thought to himself in the sudden silence that fell in the control room. Not yet! Did the stupid creature possibly mean that there was still a chance? Or did he mean something else entirely, something that only a Taur could understand? He opened his mouth to ask an angry question . . . and closed it again, for Marco Ramos was waving agitatedly to him from the control board. "Captain?" he said, his voice shaking. "Look at that."
Krake followed the machine-man's stare to a corner of the board. It was at absolute maximum magnification, the tens of thousands (no, now it was hundreds at least!) of blue-white suns almost blinding him. But there, among them, almost hidden in the brilliance—
It was faint, but it was undeniably green, and it had the characteristic Turtle delta shape.
"The Mother planet!" Litlun squealed, almost hysterical. "One may yet win through!"
"I'm not sure of that, Lit—Facilitator," Marco said quickly. "It looks to me like a ship signal, not a planetary beacon."
"No matter!" cawed Chief Thunderbird, miraculously revived. "Where there are ships of the Brotherhood, then we will find our Mother! Krake! Set course for that beacon at once!"
The aiodoi never fear the future, either for their own sake or for the sakes of those whose songs they listen to, for the future and the past are all one to them. They are not trapped within time. The aiodoi are not trapped within space, either, for they live within all dimensions and none, and they listen kindly to the yearning songs of those who are.
"We've talked about the four dimensions of space-time, but I ought to tell you that that's really pretty old-fashioned stuff. A lot of the current cosmologies need more than four dimensions to make sense, especially the group that are called 'Kaluza-Klein' theories.
"In order to talk about Kaluza-Klein theories, we should start by saying what a Kaluza-Klein theory is, or maybe even by saying who these two guys, Kaluza and Klein, were in the first place.
"Long ago—in 1919, to be exact—Theodor Kaluza was what they called a 'privatdocent.' There's no exact American equivalent, but it was sort of like being a teacher in a junior college. It was the kind of job that didn't have any serious academic rank. Basically Kaluza was the sort of person who teaches the freshman courses no serious scientist wants to be bothered with.
"He wanted more for himself, so on the side he tried to do some real research of his own. When Arthur Eddington gave Einstein's relativity theory its first observational support—that happened, you remember, in his expedition to view the 1919 solar eclipse—Kaluza felt there was something in this 'relativity' idea that would repay some serious investigation. So he began looking into the mathematics of it.