"Poor bastards," Sork Quintero said, sounding almost as though he meant it.
Sue-ling gave him an appraising look. "You mean you're sorry for them because they'll find out the planet's gone?"
"Hell, Sue-ling, they're not that stupid. They know that already; they're just going through the motions now."
Krake confronted him. "And what are we supposed to do?"
"Why," Sork said easily, "we're no better off than they are, are we? We've lost the wormhole, you know. There's no way for us to go back. Even if we could find the place again, I'll bet it's closed up—how many years of universe time have we been going now?"
Moon Bunderan shook herself as the Taur lowed gendy in her ear. She gave him a perplexed look, then said: "Thrayl says we shouldn't try to go back. He says we are just to go on; it's what the songs tell him."
"Oh, fine," said Sork, with a nod that managed to look sarcastic. "We've done so well following his songs so far."
No one answered that. Then Marco, who had been listening uneasily to the conversation, lifted his eyes to the screen. He spoke up: "They're at the ship, Francis."
Even at maximum magnification, the Hinds scout looked no bigger than a toy as it came to relative rest near the other waveship. The people in The Golden Hind saw the scout nudge slowly closer until it was almost touching. Then it hung motionless for a time.
"What are they doing, Captain Krake?" Moon Bunderan asked worriedly.
Sork answered for him. "They're trying to lock on, of course. And failing—of course."
"Why are you so sure of that?" Suc-ling asked him, and again it was someone else who answered.
"Because there's no one alive in that ship," said Kiri Quintero, his voice gentler than his words. "I think we all knew that. They would have responded to signals if there were anyone to do it."
Daisy Fay said sharply, "Look at them now!"
The two Turtles were coming out of the lock of their scout ship. At that great distance even the great Turtles were barely visible as they came creeping naked out into the burning light of the surrounding stars. Sue-ling shivered at the thought of those scorching rays, though she knew that the Turtles would take no harm from them—might even enjoy the influx of energy. Then, tethered to their own scout, the two Turtles swung themselves to the other scout. They crawled around it for a moment, conferred with each other, then eased themselves over to the hull of the silent waveship itself.
Moon Bunderan gasped as there was a sudden flare of tiny, white-hot sparks from the hull of the waveship.
"They're cutting their way in," Krake said somberly. "I guess you were right, Sork."
Sork Quintero nodded absently. Then he yawned. "I think I'll take a little nap," he said. "They'll be poking around there for a long time before they come back . . . and, after all, we already know what they're going to find."
Long it was. Long enough for Krake to begin muttering to himself about the length of dme they were hanging free in space, this heavily irradiated space saturated with energy from the onrushing stars. He had ordered everyone to stay inside the shielded compartments of the waveship, which perhaps preserved their health but did little to improve their tempers in the crowded conditions. But Krake kept a worried eye on the instruments. If they let themselves be exposed to that radiation indefinitely there would certainly be serious leakage even through the shielding. . . .
As soon as the muffled clank of the scout told them the Turtles had returned, Krake was at the lock, waiting for them. "Well?" he demanded.
Chief Thunderbird was first to come through, bending his parrot-beaked head to avoid the top of the lock. He stopped short, holding Lidun behind him, and his eyes roamed around the chamber.
He spoke at last. Even through the transposer his voice seemed flat, lifeless, despondent. "You wish to know what we discovered," he said. "There is no reason to conceal it from you. Every Brother on this waveship is dead."
"Long dead. Very dead," Lidun added, drawing a sour look from Chief Thunderbird. But the Proctor went on:
"Although none of the crew of this waveship survived, they left a log. It stated that the vessel had been in wave-drive, near the planet of our Mother, when the object we called a Svormhole' opened up. Both they and the planet were swept through, and they saw—" The voice halted for a moment, but when it resumed it was as unemotional as ever. "They saw the planet break up into tiny fragments, like a shower of dust. That was all. The Mother planet is . . . gone."
"Oh, Proctor," Moon Bunderan said impulsively. "I'm so sorry."
The great red eyes peered at her, but all the Turtle said was, "We wish now to consult in privacy, the Facilitator and this one."
As he moved away Sork laughed. "What's to consult about?" he called after their backs. "Gone is gone."
Litlun, following his Elder Brother, paused to regard Sork. When he spoke it was with dignity. "There are some things which we wish to say only to each other. Still, there are data of interest to you as well, one believes," he said. "The entries in the ship's log ended fifty-four years after they entered this universe—"
Sork's eyes opened wide. "Fifty-four years)" "—but the log itself," the Turtle continued, unheeding, "continued to record dates for some time after that. For a long time, Sork Quintero. Perhaps you should consult your lecture chips about this. The last entry was nearly eleven hundred years later."
He turned to leave, but one eye rolled back to look at them. "It appears," the Turde declared, "that there are some anomalies concerning the passage of time in this universe."
If there are any songs the aiodoi enjoy almost as much as their own, they must be those songs in which some smallsinger comes close to making a great song, a song of which even an aiodos might be proud ... a song which conies close to capturing great truth. And indeed one such song is heard by the aiodoi, and they rejoice at what the Earth person sings.
"We suspect, you will remember, that there can be more dimensions than our senses observe in the universe we live in. We can suppose, too, that there are more universes than ours; Stephen Hawking showed how they might be formed out of vacuum fluctuations, and there's no reason to believe that our personal vacuum is the only one that ever fluctuated.
"Some people would disagree with that, I know. Wittgenstein, for instance, said, 'The existence of other universes is not a predicate'—by which he meant, as I'm sure most of you can figure out, that there wasn't much point to speculating about possible other universes as long as we couldn't detect any consequences of them.
"Well, Wittgenstein was a truly grand old guy, but I'd like to do some speculating anyway.
"What I want to speculate about is what's called 'the Everett Many-Universe Interpretation.'
"You know that quantum theory tells us that there's no fixed way for a particle to move from Point A to Point B. Instead there are a whole bunch of ways, which you can represent on a diagram by lines; when you've got all the lines drawn in they look like the braided pigtails some of you have hanging down your backs, and such drawings are called 'Feynman diagrams.' We don't a priori know which path the particle will take; so we describe the 'sum over histories' clutch of possible paths as a 'probability wave.'
"A long time ago, back in 1957, a man named Hugh Everett had an idea about these probability waves.
"He pointed out that every time a probability wave collapses—that is to say, when we actually observe a particle's passage—we suddenly have a definite, measurable state, where before there were only degrees of probability.