‘There’s this city? Or I think it’s a city, across a weird plain or desert…I think I tried to get to it, but I couldn’t.’
‘The place where they have gone is too different, Suzy. That desert was a virtual diagram of the entropy barrier between here and there. You would have to expend an infinite amount of energy to cross it.’
‘It didn’t seem that far, until I started walking towards it.’ Suzy shivered in warm air, remembering, all of a sudden, the flat ridge glowing with yellow light, the way her footprints had destroyed it. She’d been a blamed fool, stepping out without a thought for what she was getting into. She could have died.
‘It is like a fractal surface,’ Machine said. ‘Analogous to the Koch Curve or the Mandelbrot Set. An infinitely complex boundary mapped within a finite space. You could have walked forever and never moved one centimetre nearer the place where the angels dwell.’
‘I know all about fucking fractals. Jesus Christ. What I don’t know from zero is these angels, or what they want from me.’
Machine didn’t answer right away, but after a while he said, ‘If you listen carefully, you can hear their voices.’
He fell silent again, and Suzy remembered the voice of the angel—or whatever it had been—woven out of the murmur of the beach, the world between worlds. After a while, she ventured to ask, ‘So where is this place? Where are we right now? You said Robot was dreaming it. Is it all inside your head?’
‘The angels have withdrawn from the corporeal universe, but not entirely. It is still important to them. Necessary, like an umbilical cord. We’re in that cord, that connection, but only a little way. I don’t know where it ends.’
Suzy listened to the silence under his words, and thought for a moment that she could hear a whispering many-tongued dictation…yeah, or maybe madness was infectious. She said, ‘If you’re still answering questions, you can tell me about the shadow dancers.’
‘They are from Novaya Rosya, I think I told you that much. They are refugees from the Alea genocide programme, although not refugees in the physical sense. Reconstructed engrams or animas, it isn’t clear. Although they are few, they hold memories of all that was lost…They are a symbiotic association between the sexual stage of the colonial sessile creatures which you saw living on the columns, and the creatures which graze on the sessile colonies. You follow this?’
Suzy nodded, remembering graceful black creatures rippling through warm crystal-clear water, remembering the gristly nodes back of their mouths, amongst the crab-thing’s palps. Robot explained that the symbionts infiltrated the nervous system of their hosts, each reinforcing the other and synthesizing an intelligent individual where before none had existed. When the host mated, so did the symbiont, scattering myriads of larvae, of which perhaps one in a million founded a new sessile colony. The colonies released swarmers which infected the hosts, and completed the cycle. As civilization had developed, other creatures had been turned into hosts to provide eyes and limbs for work on dry land. A ribbon of industry had developed along the coasts of their world’s shallow warm oceans; the symbiosis had discovered the phase graffle and was exploring the nearer stars when the Alea had struck it down. The shadow dancer hosts were natural empaths, and development of the symbiosis had been eagerly watched—although whether or not by the angels Machine didn’t know or wouldn’t say—and so extraordinary means had been taken to preserve something of it, held in this limbo until a suitable home could be found so that it could continue its development.
‘And the way I reacted to them was some sort of test. I guess you’re going to get around to telling me how I’m supposed to save the Universe eventually, might as well be now.’ Suzy struck a resolute pose, stiffening her back, sticking out her chin. ‘Go ahead. I can take it. You can start by telling me why these all-powerful angels can’t do it while you’re at it.’
‘They are not omnipotent,’ Machine said. ‘Otherwise, to be sure, neither of us would be here. They are limited because they have withdrawn. There are only certain places in the corporeal universe where they can exert even a limited influence; there are vast areas which they cannot even observe any more. You see, the history I told you really is history. We are living in a time when—’
As he had been talking, a faint grumbling roar had been growing. And then it was suddenly so loud that Suzy could feel it over the entire skin of her naked body. She got to her feet as wind scattered coins of light across the pool, whipped ropes of sand across the beach, whipped white-caps across the glittering sea. Machine was standing too, hands over his ears, shouting something that Suzy couldn’t hear. It was growing darker. Suzy looked up and saw that the flaw in the sky was now a dark hole ringed by writhing filaments of white light. A thundercrack boomed above the wind’s howl and the singleship’s clean elegant shape fell out of the widened flaw.
Suzy yelled with joy and ran out from beneath the palms, her forearm raised to shade her eyes as she watched the singleship skim the sea towards the beach…and then it was parked neatly on white sand as if it had always been there. Its delta lifting surface stretched from the fringe of palms to the breakers that were pounding in after the suddenly vanished storm. The irregular flaw that stood in place of a sun again blazed with green-white light in the blue sky.
Machine gripped Suzy’s arm with his flesh hand. ‘We have to go,’ he said. ‘Others have gone ahead of us. Time is confused here…We must arm our ship, Suzy, and catch them before they do any damage.’
Suzy was going to ask what he meant when he added, ‘They are ready for us. Look!’
A kind of haze was gathering around the singleship. It was a flock of angels. They burned brighter than the flaw in the sky as they wove and spun around the ship’s black leaf-shape; and then, as Suzy and Machine slogged across the stretch of soft hot sand towards them, they rose high into the air and winked out like so many soap bubbles.
Suzy went around the raised edge of her ship’s lifting surface, trailing one hand over the black ceramic surface: warm and faintly ribbed beneath her fingers: real. She ducked under the sigma-shaped snout of the ramjet’s airbreather, saw the weapons bay was open, exposing the missile-rack (one slot empty: the missile she’d uselessly fired into the vortex that had dragged them down to this real/unreal beach). Grainy complex patterns of light sank into the golden skin of the missiles even as she watched.
‘Pinch fusion warheads will do little against the marauders,’ Machine said. He stood quite still in hot light, a little way beyond the sharp shadow the ship cast on the sand. Eyes half-closed, showing only slivers of white like he was about to have a fit, but his voice was light, amused. ‘We have been given something better than crude energy weapons. The missiles have been infused with a kind of mathematical virus. The marauders use processes they believe only they understand. This countermeasure is a gift from those who forged those processes in the first place. They have progressed too far away from our Universe to re-enter it. The Planck constant would not sustain their entropy level; they would be dispersed just as a ship that engages with contraspace when it is too deep within a gravity well is dispersed. But you and I, Suzy, will be the deliverers. It is a great task.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure. So how will we know what to fire at?’
‘That will be the least of our problems. We will know, when the time comes.’
‘We’ll know, huh? Great.’ Suzy was trying not to think about what she would do, when she was finally back in the real. Not go chasing dragons at the behest of a bunch of fireballs, that was for sure. She suppressed the thought as best she could, paranoid all over again that the angels, or Machine, or maybe Robot, who was supposed to be dreaming this whole scene—where was he? inside Machine’s head?—could see right into her brain.
She said, ‘If time’s wasting, we had better get it on. I’ve seen enough sand to last me my life and yours both.’
The sight of the singleship’s cramped lifesystem hit Suzy with a great wave of nostalgia, brought memories crashing b
ack into place like slabs of ice calving from a glacier. The gimbal couch, its silvery cover still bearing the impression of her body. The control panel, tapes with her own crabbed handwriting on them stuck under half its switches; greasy shine on the keys of the input pad laid there from her own fingertips. And most of all the smell: sweet and rotten, her smell and Robot’s all mixed together from weeks of living in the little space. She breathed deeply, but already it was fading as her nostrils grew accustomed to it once more.
The hatch servo whined behind her. On the mesh decking, an arc of green-white light shrank to a line, went out.
Machine said, ‘You will close the weapons bay, and we will be ready to leave on the instant.’
Suzy looked at him. He was hunched in the aft of the cabin, his grown-out blond crest brushing the mesh ceiling, flesh and prosthetic hands dangling by his thighs. The way he stood so different from Robot’s easy slouch. Skin white and dirty-looking in the light of the glotubes. Planes of muscle across his stomach, hair like spun brass wires above his shrivelled cock. Naked: so was she.
Suzy pulled suit liners from the dispenser, threw one set at Machine, turned and clambered hastily into the other. And felt a sudden intense relief as the touch of soft quilted fabric replaced the airy sense of nakedness. She thumbed the fastening strip closed from navel to neck, turned to see Machine still naked, the liner crumpled at his bare feet (powdered with dusty white sand, toes crowded together, their yellow nails buckled and shrunken).
Suzy said, ‘You put it on one leg at a time.’
Machine said, without a trace of irony, ‘I remember,’ and stooped to pick up the liner with his prosthetic hand.
Suzy climbed into the couch, powered it to sitting position, called up a status check. She was so intent on scrolling through the array of icons that she hardly noticed as Machine pulled himself into the cramped sleeping niche set into the wall behind her. Everything was nominal: the hydrox boosters had been refuelled; air/ water/power all showed high green and consumables had somehow been topped up too; the dozen or so small glitches that had developed during the long chancy voyage to the hypervelocity star were all gone.
Suzy closed up the weapons bay, turned her head to tell Machine, ‘Your friends did a good job. They aren’t good for anything else, they’re boss mechanics. So you tell me now what’s the flight plan?’ Snug in clean liners, breathing cool filtered air, cradled by the couch’s crash webbing, she was beginning to feel in charge of her destiny again. She could fly the ship out and not look back: there was nothing to stop her, and nothing to make her carry out the angels’ kamikaze mission either. She’d flown enough of those through the asteroid habitats of BD Twenty to last her a double lifetime. At least.
Machine lay straight out on his back in the narrow niche, hands clasped at his chest, looking like the picture of some dead saint or other that had been in the big family Bible of Suzy’s childhood. His little rat-machine was sitting up near his head—Suzy guessed it had been waiting here for him all this time—and now he reached up with tapering steel and plastic extensors to caress the curved plates of its carapace, just as someone might absent-mindedly stroke a cat. Something funny about its flexible body, plates pulling away from each other like it was stretching maybe, falling apart…After a moment, Machine turned his head to look at Suzy.
‘You will fly straight up,’ he said, speaking slowly, as if attending to an inner voice. ‘A way will be opened for you, and you will go through it. We will arrive at a place no human has ever before seen, and there we will search out the marauders. And there, too, I will pilot the ship.’ The machine clung to his augmented arm, spinning fine cables, plugging him into the systems of her ship. Her ship. Hers.
‘Hey, I’m the pilot here. Remember?’
‘I remember, Suzy. You may fly the ship back to urspace, but after that you are not to be trusted.’ She started to protest, but Machine said, ‘Listen to me. You remember what my helper here did to the servant of Duke Bonadventure, on Titan. It can as easily do it to you, if you do not obey. I hope that we are a partnership, Suzy, but you will not be able to recognize the critical moment, the time and the place where the missiles must be released to burn out the marauders’ stolen technology. That is what this part of me has been taught, while Robot dreamed the dream through which you walked. The angels could talk to me, Suzy, to me alone. You will fly us there, and I will do the rest.’
‘Seems to me,’ she said angrily, ‘that I’m not needed at all. And where is Robot? We leaving him behind?’
‘You are needed, Suzy. As a pilot, and as a witness. Please, take the ship up.’
She took the ship up. She took it up hard and fast, hydrox boosters and reaction motor both. Burning a molten groove into the beach, palm trees and the little hut and the pool with its clear spring vanished in a blast of white fire as the singleship arced up and out over blue water.
Acceleration mashed Suzy into the couch. She’d bitten the inside of her lips; the bright coppery taste of blood was the taste of her fear and anger. Her sight was spotted with insets, wavering indices of thrust and fuel and delta vee. Machine flat out in his crash-cocooned sleeping niche, face deathly white, eyes rolled back; his rat-machine was starting to weave cables around him. A radar sweep that made no sense at all because it said that there was nothing out there, not even a horizon, while all around the inset was the view below and behind the ship as it roared up its steep trajectory.
The blue sea, dusted with sparkling whitecaps. The infinite white ribbon of the beach dividing the edge of the sea from the interlocking patterns of the fractal desert. Suzy looked for the bay of the shadow dancers, but already the beach had dwindled from ribbon to scribed line. And rising beyond the far horizon, as ever, the prickly golden shimmer of the citadel of Heaven…
Suzy felt a tremendous yearning at the sight. If she could, she would have pulled an immelman and made a run for the elusive shimmer. Flat out at mach five, she’d surely reach it. But she knew it wasn’t so, it wasn’t for her.
And even as she thought that, everything around the ship began to bend away, taking a direction she’d never noticed before. The ship shuddered. Boosters and reaction motor cut out and although Suzy hadn’t touched the board and there was no drain on the catalfission battery, it was suddenly in contraspace.
PART THREE
* * *
The Cradle of Creation
1
* * *
The Vingança had exited from one of some two dozen wormhole pits that ringed the equator of an irregular planetoid. And the planetoid was in orbit around a massive red supergiant star about five light days from the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy, deep within the ragged oval of its accretion disc. Nearby, a vast arc of gas swept across the sky; a braided river of glowing filaments and streamers spiralling around magnetic field lines, so vast that the Solar System would have been no more than a leaf whirled away in its torrential energies, it curved in towards the black hole and extended far through the shell of gas clouds which surrounded the accretion disc.
Those same gas clouds, remnants of some vast explosion a hundred thousand years ago, also obscured most of the stars of the Galactic Centre. It was not like the tidy picture Dorthy had been given on P’thrsn, of a vast jewel-box of stars packed close together in tidy, stable orbits, shining clearly and cleanly around a black hole which had swept up all interstellar debris. Of the several million packed into the central parsec, only a few thousand were actually inside the shroud of gas. Some, including a cluster of very hot, very young stars, were embedded within the shell of gas clouds; most were outside it, visible only in infrared. Those inside the shell were mostly massive red or blue stars, and all of them were devoid of planetary systems and showed some sort of deviation from normal stellar evolution. Some, oblate and furiously unstable flarestars, were clearly the products of recent collisions; others were naked cores stripped by tidal heating, or orbited so close to each other that they were bridged by loops of fusing gases.
All were moving at tremendous speeds around the black hole, and many, like the dim red supergiant about which the wormhole planetoid orbited at more than ten times the distance that Pluto orbited Sol, were being stripped of their outer layer by hypervelocity winds of ionized gases.
As for the planetoid, it was bigger than Earth’s moon but its mass was far less: it had to be, for it was not the usual oblate sphere expected of a body its size but a kind of dumbbell, as if something had gripped it at either pole and tried to pull it apart. Its equatorial constriction was pitted with wormhole exits, but instead of a Colcha-like patchwork scape caused by the opening and closing of wormholes there was a uniform chaotic terrain at the equator while the water ice surfaces of the opposing hemispheres were so smooth that they could have been machined to a centimetre’s tolerance.
And when a hastily launched mapping satellite began to download its data at the end of the second day, it suddenly became clear that humans were not the first to have been brought through one of the planetoid’s wormholes. A vast structure sprawled across a shallow crater at the planetoid’s constricted waist: a hectare of stiff tangled threads each no more than a metre in diameter, battered, broken, and coated in sooty interstellar dust.
Within minutes of discovery of the structure, someone managed to aim a neutrino probe at it. Dorthy had been awake about fifty hours by then; red-eyed and logy, she crowded with the dozen non-Witness scientists around a holotank as profiles from the probe shuffled past. Grey on grey, they showed that some kind of circuitry ran through the walls of the threads, that the threads had a hollow core only a centimetre thick, that some of them contained the unmistakable topology of a phase graffle wave guide. The collapsed tangle was the wreckage of a starship.
‘They must have been insects,’ Valdez said to Dorthy, ‘to have lived in something that small.’ He tugged at the points of his waxed moustache. ‘A bunch of roaches flying an intersystem ship, just imagine!’
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