“Prepare another shot,” Ruall said. “If the Mindaru comes out of this, fire directly on it. But only if.”
Copernicus hummed.
The inferno of magnetic fire dove down to its target—WHUMP!—and splatted outward.
Li-Jared yelped. Bandicut’s fists tightened involuntarily. Would it work? Would the electromagnetic pulse stop the enemy?
“EMP shock coming,” Copernicus warned. “You’ll be seeing it in false color. Now.”
It looked like a luminous blue and purple soap bubble expanding fast, and sparkling with electricity. By the time it reached The Long View, tucked for safety down in n-space, it had expanded and dissipated considerably, and it washed over them like a sheet of lightning. But down next to the Mindaru, it should have packed a tremendous wallop.
“Did it work?” Ruall asked, paddle-hands spread wide.
“It caught them,” Copernicus said. “That’s all I can—no, wait! It did not stop them! They are turning.” As Copernicus spoke, he loosed another series of quantum pulses, this time directly at the enemy. A cluster of flashes streaked down toward the adversary.
The Mindaru veered instantly, and the pulses only passed through it. With a lateral move along the outer edge of the shield-bubble, it arced up and shot away from the planet.
How could it have survived that? Bandicut wondered in dismay. Was the thing escaping—or planning to circle back, as they had just done?
“Pursue!” Ruall snapped.
The Long View sped in pursuit. But the Mindaru was already beyond firing range. They were both now rising out of high orbit from Karellia.
“Where is it going?” Bandicut asked.
For a minute, there was no answer. Copernicus and Jeaves were plotting the enemy’s course and analyzing. Then Jeaves announced, “It appears they have located Uduon. They are heading there on a direct course.”
There were gasps from Akura and Sheeawn at that, and then from Quin and Koro as Ruall gonged, “We must go after them. We have no choice.”
In the viewspace, the planet and clouds and stars wheeled and blurred, and The Long View rocketed away from Karellia, on course to punch straight through the Heart of Fire—the beautiful, perilous sky.
Toward Uduon.
Chapter 10
Back into the Ghoststream
AMADUSE FELT HIS heart spin up with excitement as he delved ever deeper into the Shipworld library records. He had long since moved beyond any data accessible to the average user of the library; this was material gathered from a thousand worlds over unrecorded millions of years, most of it brought here for storage without the slightest sorting or analysis. Uncatalogued, much of it undated, unread since being interred in the data-vaults. Most of it probably hadn’t been read even then, but simply gathered en masse from repositories on worlds visited by people from Shipworld, or saved by people from Shipworld, or saved only in the form of the memories of a few inhabitants rescued from some unstoppable disaster.
Some of it came by even more circuitous routes: preserved by one ancient world visiting another and gathering records—and perhaps on down the line, records passed from one civilization to another, along a string of interstellar contacts until even the identity of the originating world was lost. Much of the data was rumor and legend; some was written history identified as such; often it was hard to distinguish one from another, especially with fragmentary pieces.
For millennia the records had grown by a process of accretion in the Shipworld library system. There was never enough time, never the qualified staff, never the funding or the interest, to properly examine and catalog the information. It grew like a demon-lizard’s treasure-hoard, only more chaotically.
There was no other librarian in the system who could have searched through the treasure-hoard the way Amaduse could. He had a nose for information and truth, however deeply buried, that made him in some eyes the most valuable librarian in all of Shipworld.
He also had Gonjee. His assistant, whom the visitor Bandicut had remarked upon as looking like an Earthly simian, was in some ways his secret weapon. Trained by Amaduse, Gonjee was a savant; he had a remarkable ability to scan through vast amounts of data, looking for commonalities, which he would then bring to Amaduse. Gonjee could not in a lifetime have performed the subtle and detailed analyses at which Amaduse excelled, but he was an astonishingly adept first reader. Faced with a mountain of unsorted data, Gonjee would hoot with pleasure and spiral in from the outside, digging and reading with near-hysterical abandon. An impossibly short time later, he would start showing to Amaduse the connecting lines between something gathered on one world a thousand years ago, and an eons-old legend from someplace half a galaxy away, now dust.
Amaduse took on Gonjee’s excitement as his own. He probed and analyzed and synthesized as passionately as Gonjee scanned. A picture was starting to emerge. The picture that the yaantel had sent him to find. A story that had its roots lost in deep time, beyond hundreds of millions of years ago . . .
Soon now, Amaduse would have an answer for the yaantel. He already had a pretty good inkling of what its shape would be. And if he was right, he thought, they might want to let the galactic core mission team know, before someone made a terrible mistake.
***
The reentry into the ghoststream was both more and less frightening than the first time Julie had done it. She thought she knew what to expect: the out-of-body feeling of floating down a long, ethereal pathway through eternity, an almost life-after-death disconnectedness from her physical body, the awareness of Ik at her side, close but too far to reach. She felt reawakened to the excitement of probing the unknown, the edge of danger, the weight of responsibility on her shoulders. At the same time, her fear of the Mindaru loomed like a towering storm cloud, darkening everything and making her want to crouch low and pull something protective around her.
Instead of being greeted by the expected cloud of storming Mindaru, they found silence in the ghoststream, a great emptiness that seemed to stretch on forever. /How far ahead is the way clear?/ she wondered.
*Uncertain,* answered the stones. *Millions of years into the past, at least. But that’s a modest fraction of the way to the Mindaru birthplace.*
Ik stirred beside her in the stream, and she heard him ask, /Where did all the Mindaru go?/ His voice seemed to carry equal weights of relief and worry.
/They didn’t get past us at our end, did they?/ Julie asked.
*Not as far as we could tell,* answered the stones.
/So they either went back home, or they got off somewhere else,/ Ik murmured.
The millennia streamed by like snowflakes blowing on the wind, like calendar pages fluttering backward. Julie shivered. If the Mindaru left the ghoststream at some point in the past, somewhere down the starstream into the galaxy . . . /How will we find them?/ she asked.
*We are tracking into the past,* the stones reminded her. *We may yet see them in flight.*
Steeling her nerves, Julie focused her gaze down the ghoststream and imagined supernovas imploding as the ages reeled in reverse.
***
For Charli the quarx, time had become a surreal quantity since her separation from John Bandicut. There had been a period of merging into the starstream, after the initial period of helpless recognition that she was both in the starstream and part of the starstream. Was this where she was destined to spend the rest of eternity?
Those other voices she’d heard before seemed to come and go. They were always at a distance, hopelessly remote. She thought maybe they were part of the starstream, too. Bizarrely, she once thought she heard an echo of the voice of Jeaves, but that did not seem likely, so she dismissed it as a figment of her imagination. She was pretty sure Jeaves had not been cast out of The Long View during the fight. But then she remembered Jeaves once telling them that a version of himself had been present at the creation of the starstream, and had been absorbed by the created entity. Was it possible that Jeaves in some form was actually here with her, b
ut stretched out to infinity?
Time seemed to ebb and flow unevenly here, even pooling like water in certain places. In some of those places, she felt she had more freedom to be deliberate in assessing her surroundings, and in taking any action—if “action” was even still a meaningful word.
One thing she knew she could do was listen. Listen for anything of interest, but especially for anything familiar. She could also look, though vision had become a different thing from what she had once known through the eyes of John Bandicut and earlier partners. She was somehow focused on infinity and on the nearby all at once, and sometimes had difficulty distinguishing between the two. At the same time, there was a clarity such as she’d never experienced before. Perhaps that was why she was able to see the timestream embedded here, the thing that they had all worried so much about, the thing that linked them all to the deep past. She thought it might be wise to stay clear of it until she understood more; but even from here, she could see a considerable distance down its length. Things were moving in it, moving in time. Were those Mindaru?
Surely it was some time (that word again!) later—but who knew, really?—when she became aware of entities of another kind passing her by in the starstream, and headed down into the deep past. These were not vessels of the kind she knew in the starstream. This was more like the passage of someone like her, without body or substance; and that was a profoundly strange thought—because, for one thing, there was a familiarity about them.
It took effort to process the sensation, and then to recognize that she might know this entity.
Could that really be—?
It was just a whisper of light moving through the stream, moving galactic coreward, and backward in time. It was muttering and hrahing softly to itself. It was on a mission, and Charli recognized the voice. Recognized Ik.
Ik? And with him, who?
Another entity Charli did not recognize. Or wait—reaching back to an earlier time in her quarxian memory—could it be—?
No, that was impossible. The unlikelihood was just too great.
Julie Stone?
This could all be a mad dream, of course. But if it wasn’t, then suddenly Charli was bursting with a need to know more—and to tell of it. To tell it to someone who would care. There was someone she wanted to tell about it, but she could no longer speak with him.
She missed him above all others.
/// John, if I have not gone mad,
then I have found Julie Stone for you.
Here in the starstream.
Out of my reach—and yours. ///
But there was no John Bandicut to hear.
Ik and Julie were passing rapidly out of sight—back, back, back into the past. To Charli it looked like something she remembered from the Fffff’tink world, a pair of lantern-flies dwindling into the darkness of a wood.
Never had she imagined such a lonely sight.
***
What would the translator have counseled them to do? Julie wondered, feeling a strange powerlessness. They had tried to contact the translator for advice before their second launch, via Rings-at-Need, who had been attempting to maintain a connection. But she and Ik had been pressed back into the ghoststream before any answer could come back from the yaantel.
The feeling of loneliness was palpable. They weren’t exactly cut off, but contact with the launch point was difficult and limited to a slow bit-rate. The instrumentation in this launcher was different from what they’d gotten used to in the first mission—more sophisticated, presumably, but isolating in its unfamiliarity. She felt that they were more on their own here. Thoughts of John, and of Antares and the others, felt increasingly distant and abstract. Millions of years away.
Julie remembered once driving a land-car back on Earth, on an endlessly unwinding straight road at night, with snow flurries blowing into her headlights for hours on end. That was more or less what she saw now, peering forward in the ghoststream. The car drive had been hypnotic, wearying. That was just how she felt now, as the years unreeled past stellar generations and backward spins of the galaxy, stars melting back into the gas clouds from which they had been born.
***
Ik was the first to see it: a tiny flutter of something farther down the timestream.
The stones began to analyze. *It is unsteady. Difficult to obtain a good image,* they muttered, in a rare display of frustration.
In fact, all the stones were able to show Julie was a graphical interpretation of the data gathered by the instruments, which were modulated through her senses, anyway. Were the instruments feeding data to her, or the other way around? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The physical instruments were no more present here than she was, or Ik. They were all sealed in the launcher, held in a high-energy state of entanglement, only their senses here in the past. What the forward-looking sensors were gathering right now looked to her like incomprehensible squiggles and shadings spread in four dimensions.
The stones highlighted for her the peaks and changes that indicated movement ahead in the ghoststream; and when they were able, they showed the ghostly readings as tiny fluctuations in the view ahead, as if something was squirming in and out of the stream, threading space in the extreme distance. She remembered the tiny, deadly, squirming thing she and the translator had intercepted back in the solar system, and she shuddered. That thing had been trying to destroy the Earth. What about this?
/Hrah—it is them!/ Ik declared, while she was still trying to focus.
/The Mindaru? Are you sure? What do we do now?/
/I wonder what they are doing,/ Ik said.
Only one way to find out: Get closer. Well, that was going to happen anyway. They were on a straight-line course, as though sliding along a zip line, and about the only control they had was how far to go, and how fast. She tried to reassure herself silently. We are supposed to be invisible to anyone else, all right?
And do you believe that? Will you stake your life on it?
She supposed she was staking her life on it, whether she believed it or not.
The voices in Julie’s mind quieted as the contacts drew closer, but her senses, tied directly into the instrumentation, buzzed with far more data than she could absorb with her mind.
*The targets are not solid objects. They are waveforms, complex quantum phenomena. It may be,* the stones said, *that they found a way to convert from their original solid form into a wave function for the purposes of travel.*
/Sort of the way we do it, but with a way to reconstitute themselves at the other end?/ Julie asked.
/They must have a way to collapse, hrah, the wave function when they want,/ Ik said. /It would seem they are more advanced than we are, at least in some ways./
/A billion years before us./
*That may be so,* said the stones. *They also appear to be veering from side to side, as though seeking exit points. They may be trying to leave the timestream.*
Julie, with dread in her soul, tried to focus on the still-distant flickers, which were little more than wispy disturbances at the limit of sight. Two of them were now slipping sideways and then out. Leaving the stream, exiting right out the side, into . . . what?
*They are exiting into the surrounding galactic space. The time: somewhere around one hundred million years in your past.*
/You mean they’re seeding themselves out into the galaxy, and they have a hundred million years to mutate and evolve and develop before we meet them in our present?/ Julie asked, horrified. /Won’t that change the timeline?/
*We judge they are already part of the timeline. The Starmaker Nebula team may have met the descendants of these Mindaru,* answered the stones.
/Hrrm, should we not try to stop them?/ Ik asked.
*High probability we would fail. Any that have exited are gone, and are now in your past. Recommend we let these go and focus on our mission.*
/Stop more from coming in,/ Ik said.
*Exactly.*
***
As the range to the Mindaru
closed, Julie began to wonder, /How do we keep from plowing right into them?/
*Quantum uncertainties,* said the stones. *We hope.*
/I’m sorry. Was that an answer to my question?/
*Quantum uncertainties,* said the stones, *may provide an opportunity for us to maneuver.*
/I thought we were on a one-track zip line back in time./
*Almost,* said the stones. *Almost, but not quite. Because—*
/Hrah,/ said Ik, /because we are riding a wave of quantum entanglement? And therefore there are uncertainties in the stream?/
*Precisely. Or, rather, what is available to us is a lack of precision. If we were solid entities in this stream, the uncertainties would be inconsequential. But we are not, and our presence here involves an intricate matrix of quantum-level phenomena.*
/But the quantum uncertainties are small, aren’t they?/
*Extremely small. But they can be cumulative, and we are speeding along enormous distances, both temporal and spatial. If we can wield the uncertainties enough to achieve just a tiny deflection, it might be all we need to introduce small lateral movement in our course.*
/Do you mean we can swerve in the ghoststream—?/
/Like dodging potholes?/
*Exactly.*
Chapter 11
Return to Mindaru Home
THE VISION OF the starstream ahead of them flickered and distorted. Julie felt everything go into soft focus and then darken. It was like a camera shutter closing down, just far enough to make her feel that she was squinting. Then came a fresh burst of the snowstorm, a blizzard of snowflakes blowing past her face—which, the stones noted, was a way of visualizing a cloud of tiny, collapsing wave functions, noise in the signal.
The visualization quickly morphed. Their movement in the stream was turning into the rush of water in a channel, bubbling and hissing, thundering headlong and spreading out as the water jostled them from side to side. She dimly understood that the stones were smearing out the probability waves, allowing for greater uncertainty in their pathway. Through the agitated, translucent medium, Julie sensed shadows darting by, like fish in nearby currents schooling in the other direction. Were these the Mindaru, following slightly different cross-currents, passing them without their paths ever quite intersecting? Now and then she caught sight of a larger shadow in the waters, and she wondered, was that their own shadow? How could that be?
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