The first large bits of flaming debris were beginning to hit the carousel ring. Wreckage from the miniature sun fell into the springtime quarter, shattering the fairy tower, igniting trees and ornamental arbors. Deer and rabbits were running pell-mell clockwise and counterclockwise, and some of them jumped too high in the ever-lessening gravity and hung in midair kicking as the air turned dark with smoke.
Twinklewink was speaking at the same time: “The carousel is off center and will collapse. Going into hibernation here will not preserve you.”
Montrose looked up. Most of the wreckage was heading toward the spring and summer quarters. He said, “If I get to the nanosupply pool beneath the skating rink, can you form it into something that will protect me?”
“Yes.”
Montrose leaped into the air. A cluster of fairies, miniatures stronger than they looked, put their tiny shoulders to his feet or under his armpits and flew him face-first through the midair cloud of spinning wood shards and broken lanternworks, deftly eluding the larger bits of flying rubbish. A dead deer floated by.
There was no sensation of weight once he was in the air. Fires were spreading all along the ring.
Montrose watched in awe as the black sphere now made contact with the carousel and made the whole ship ring like a gong, a noise louder than a world being split in two. Instead of smashing through the flimsy-looking surface, the sphere bounced, made contact with the carousel again, and began rolling, flattening trees and crushing wildlife.
Eerily, the flames were losing their yellow and red color and flamelike shape as they turned blue and ghostlike, clinging and crawling as they assumed the aspect of zero-gee flame.
The little black-suited fairy, tucked in the armpit of Montrose and obediently helping his fellow miniatures tow him across the breadth of the disaster, was also reciting the last recording of Del Azarcheclass="underline" “Now, technically, this might seem like a violation of the terms of the duel, since we are supposed to place all our copies and backups in danger and erase them upon defeat. However, I will point out that this was not an official duel, nor did I actually challenge you to a duel. I was careful with my wording. You see, this was a continuation of the fight where you struck me across the face. All’s fair in a mere brawl, is it not?”
Twinklewink said, “I am also out of main power and have only four hundred seconds of reserves. Do you have any final orders?”
“Yes. Now hear this: when I enter the hibernation pool, download my brain information through the mind replicator into the black sphere; you will delete yourself as I enter to make room. It will kill you. Sorry.”
“I am a machine. Don’t anthropomorphize me,” said Twinklewink primly.
The little black fairy said, “You may have noticed by now that M3 is no longer directly to our fore. That was because while I was captain, I spent about a hundred years trailing the induction cable behind us and using the magnetic fields of the galaxy to turn the ship. I long ago released the cable, so you are left without any means to maneuver. Even if, by pure dumb luck, your specialty, you pass near a star on the way outside the galaxy, your relative velocity will make any rendezvous impossible, as I also piled on every last course and scrap of sail we had to push our velocity to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, with as many nines tacked on after the decimal as you’d like.”
The skating rink was underfoot. The carousel was turning slowly, now, and so the swaying trees were merely clinging by their roots in near weightlessness, as everything not tied down, from the water in the brook to the panicky white rabbits and snapping arctic foxes, toppled madly through midair.
Montrose crashed through the ice into the shockingly cold fluid, losing sensation almost immediately. The fluid, which was not water, thickened and produced wormlike organisms made of ice, which flowed over and into the armor, undoing buckles and latches with quick efficiency.
Montrose used the specialized cells in his brain to send a message. “Why did the black sphere not shatter?”
“The alien core operating system strengthened the interatomic bonds of the ceramic and changed it into an unknown substance, invulnerable to gunfire. The sphere was able to shield one-fourth of the shroud lines, which otherwise would have been severed. The sphere is off center. Shall I enact Rania’s instructions in the event of a shipwreck?”
There was no time to think about the implications of that. “Yes!”
“Stand by. I have given the order to reduce the ship carousel, life support, and decorative elements back into its base state, which Rania called gray goo. The blueprints for the carousel and decorative elements remain within the memory, and the ship can be re-created if another fuel or energy supply is found.”
“Decorative elements?”
“The flora and fauna are not real. They are molecular machines created by the M3 ship functions. This is now being altered to its original design. I am preserving the immediate area around your body in its current state, however.”
The fluid thickened around his head, beginning to form the machinery needed to read and transmit his brain information into the black sphere.
“What the hell? I mean, how are you doing this, if you are entirely out of power?” he asked, because more than the stipulated six minutes of time had passed.
Twinklewink started to melt, saying, “The return to the nonstructural condition is extropic—that is, more chemical energy is gained by the dissolution of the nanomachine infrastructure than is expended. I am attempting to convert this chemical energy into a useful form.”
“He said there would be an x-ray release when the drive core was shattered.”
“There would be, but the drive core has not been shattered. The hull has also changed into a new substance. It is chemically the same as it was, but the bonds of strong and weak nuclear force have increased exponentially, rendering the density beyond what I can measure.”
“That means the opal sphere is just going to bounce around inside the carousel for a while, right?”
“No. The drive sphere has already come to rest, and the carousel material is reconstructing itself into an energy-preserving configuration.”
“What configuration?”
“A sphere. This was the shape of the vessel when she was given to Rania, who endured most of the voyage as mental information in a non-self-aware state, only forming a physical body for herself, and a garden to hold it, and me to tend that garden, as she approached Earth.”
The little black fairy started to melt as, presumably, did all the trees and flowers and rabbits and little woodland animals peopling the wrecked ring. Del Azarchel’s voice rang out, vaunting, “There is no way to stop or slow the ship. Do not be deceived by the appearance of stars before and behind you: your course is in the direction of Canis Majoris, directly normal to the plane of the galaxy, and off into intergalactic nothingness. As I take Rania and clutch her warm and living body in my arms, I will think of your poor corpse drifting, unburied and unmourned, with a foolish expression no doubt frozen on your face forever, in a void where no stars gleam! And how I shall laugh! Farewell, and to hell with you! The empty hell of endless night.”
Del Azarchel’s chilling laugh of triumph seemed to cling to the brain of Montrose, echoing, even after the fairy form uttering it was gone.
9. Ghost ship
Montrose, or Extrose, woke at the same moment the ship’s mind died. The few remaining active figurines, which had resumed what was presumably their original shape as black teardrops, were expelling their small remaining fuel mass to jet around the wreckage and send him views.