Faith

by John Love

  Here and there, as the bulging increased, hull plates were gently popping off Her surface, uncovering a small solid blob of the dark pewter layer underneath. The screen patched in closeups of some of the plates: they didn’t develop five miniature clawmarks of their own and burn away to nothing, they just lifted gently off and floated alongside Her. It was gradual, and did not seem threatening. The screen panned out again.

  More hull plates were lifting off; dozens, then hundreds, leaving dark solid blobs behind them. Hundreds became thousands. The impression of unreadable writing along Her flank changed; now it looked more like a musical notation, and Foord fought the temptation to read a tune into it. Smithson even started trying to hum it.

  Foord glared at him. “Stop that. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Smithson was unabashed. “What do you mean, Wrong?”

  “What is She doing?”

  “She isn’t, Commander, it’s being done to Her. She can’t stop it because She’s diverted Her power to the fields. To keep us off Her.”

  “Then we should be pleased, and you should be saying I Told You So. We’re not, and you aren’t. So what’s wrong?”

  Smithson did not reply.

  “What have we started?”

  Nine hundred feet of Her flank, between midsection and stern, blew open. There was no explosion. It blew open slowly, layer by layer, as if She was undressing for them.

  •

  Perhaps She really couldn’t stop it, and could only slow it down; if so, She had slowed it thousands of times. It had the shape of an explosion, but not the speed. Every surface feature on the nine-hundred-foot section of Her flank detached itself and floated gently outwards: silver thumbnail hull plates in hundreds of thousands; lines of windows plugged with darkness; manoevre drive nozzles, scanner outlets, weapons apertures. Most of them floated away complete and undamaged, turning end over end, and when the Bridge screen showed closeups of them there were no miniature echoes of larger damage and no burning away to nothing. They lifted off and came to rest floating alongside Her.

  There was no gushing of liquid silver and no nameless colour. Where the outer hull layer had lifted away, the second layer remained underneath: unbroken dark pewter, featureless except for echoes of the windows and apertures of the outer layer. Then it too blew slowly open.

  The second layer was an unbroken whole, not miniature plates like the outer layer. All nine hundred feet of it blew out in five pieces, so large they retained fractions of the original curvature. The screen showed them in closeup as they lifted away. When they were clear of Her they broke into smaller pieces, always with clean sharp edges, and floated alongside Her where they bumped and nuzzled into the remains of Her outer layer.

  Below the second layer was a cavity filled with a latticework of structural members and subassemblies which had linked it to the third layer, also dark pewter. After the second layer blew out, so did the latticework. They had glimpsed it once before when their missiles hit Her and opened the two craters, but now they saw it in detail as the screen went to closeup. Then, the explosions of their missiles had torn into it, breaking and twisting it; now it was exerting its own force, a thousand times slower but irresistible, to pull itself gently free from its fastenings to the third layer and float away from Her. Like before, some of it was recognisable and had counterparts in the Charles Manson: girders with an H cross-section, ducting, conduits, circular pipes squashed to ovals where they were sheared, platings with screw-fastenings and giant bolts (the screen even showed their threads in closeup, gleaming as they unscrewed themselves from their anchorage points). Other parts were unrecognisable, discs and triangles and polyhedrons made of something which hovered between gas and solid and liquid. It all lifted gently out of the nine-hundred-foot gash in Her flank, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, and floated alongside Her.

  For once, Foord thought, Smithson’s wrong. This isn’t being done to Her, She’s doing it to Herself.

  The third layer of Her hull, like the second, was dark pewter. All along the nine-hundred-foot gash, it was scarred and dented where the structural members had pulled free and floated outwards. The Bridge screen, anticipating that the third layer would also go, patched in closeups of sections along its length. When it blew out, the screen calculated, the gash would reach deeper into Her than the craters and they would see Her interior. But it didn’t blow out. The gash in Her side became dark, either depthless or infinite, and nothing else came out of it. The screen’s headups said the gash was a molecule deep, then nine thousand miles deep, then infinite, and then the headups cancelled themselves and said Unable. It belonged to another universe where physical laws unravelled and time went, not forwards or backwards, but sideways and inside out. Unable.

  “Kaang,” Foord managed to say, “you see that?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Fly us into it.”

  Around the Bridge, they turned on him in disbelief.

  The alarms started murmuring.

  “Commander,” Kaang stammered, “do you really…”

  “Alright, no. Cyr, fire the beams into it.”

  “We don’t know what it is, Commander!”

  “That’s why.”

  Cyr went to press the firing-panel, then looked round at the others.

  “I gave you an order.”

  The alarms were murmuring, louder because they were unanswered.

  “Look at the screen headups, Commander!”

  The alarms were murmuring because, for only the second time, their probes had detected something moving inside Her. The screen headups, like before, were unreadable. They said it was nine thousand miles inside Her, and ten times bigger than the previous movement; then three thousand miles inside, and a hundred times bigger.

  “I’ve seen the readouts. Fire on it.”

  The beams stabbed out, but Her fields met them on full power, opaque and almost solid, and held them. Cyr stopped firing and the fields cleared. The movement had not yet reached the surface of Her hull. The screen said it was only a molecule’s thickness inside Her and a million times larger than before, then cancelled. Unable.

  Nothing further happened.

  “She’s waiting for us to go back to Her,” Foord said, mostly to himself. New things about Her. “Kaang, take us to fifty thousand feet and hold us there.”

  Kaang did so.

  •

  When Kaang brought them to rest, She continued.

  Something started to emerge from the darkness of the gash in Her flank. It was not a hundred times or ten times or a million times bigger than before, but it would become bigger than She was and it was impossible. Earlier, She had survived by eating Herself. Now, She defecated.

  What came out of the gash looked like the fingers of a giant hand: five separate fingers, thicker than Sakhran trees, at intervals of about two hundred feet along the entire length of the gash. They were separate, but moving in a way which suggested that back inside Her, behind the darkness, they were linked together in a hand. They were dark blue, at first almost invisible against the darkness in the gash; then, as they emerged, they became visible against the silver of Her hull.

  They were a particular shade of dark blue, the colour of bruises. They were the five strands of their particle beams which had hit Her, slowed down millions of times, so they looked like treacle. They even glistened like treacle. They crept glutinously out of the wound, and as they emerged—and continued and continued to emerge—they lifted and undulated away from Her horizontally, reaching like blind worms towards the cloud of wreckage floating alongside Her.

  They kept coming out of Her, nanoseconds of energy slowed millions of times to mass, but mass greater than their energy when they had hit Her, as if She had reversed the mass-to-energy multiple; or imported another multiple from another universe. The screen analysed them. It said their composition was that of the particle beams, but their mass was impossibly big, then reverted to Unable.

  They reached the cloud of wr
eckage and nuzzled into it, gently bumping aside some of the larger pieces. Inside the cloud each of the five fingers subdivided into thinner fingers, and thinner into thinner until the thickest were only threads. They moved inside the cloud of wreckage, binding its pieces and organising them and spinning them, with the instinctive delicacy of spiders, into an openwork sphere which was bigger than She was.

  The five fingers kept coming out of the gash in Her flank, across the gap and into the openwork sphere. They turned pale blue, then transparent; and they were hollow. Objects were being carried along inside them in suspension, pumped out of Her and into the sphere: at first only dozens, but then hundreds. The five transparent tubes pulsed with them. Foord told the screen to show closeups, but it had already done so, and he already knew what they were: everything She had ever taken from them, and everything they had ever thrown into Her, and more, in mounting and impossible quantities.

  There were things the size of a human head, black and sickle-shaped, each with a diamond tip and a trailing tangle of monofilament: pieces of the grapples Cyr called Hands of Friendship. Then hundreds of slivers of fractal diamond, which their Jewel Boxes had exploded inside Her. Then something larger, a turning tumbling curvature of dark metal: a broken rim from a Prayer Wheel. Then dark pieces of carapace from their dismembered spiders, trailing gears and claws and circuitry. They were coming in hundreds, through each of the five fingers, and the Bridge screen was labelling and classifying them in headups which flashed on-off in nanoseconds, as quickly as the beams had flashed when they were energy and before She had turned them to tubes of treacle. The screen tried to keep up, identifying and labelling each object in what Foord recognised, too easily, as monomania.

  The objects were still coming in hundreds, out of Her and into the sphere. The five fingers were no longer just shaping and organising the sphere but feeding it, in quantities which could never have existed inside Her. Now the sphere was bigger than both ships put together.

  Through the fingers the whole of their engagement, the whole of the last few days of their lives, poured out of Her. Silver hull plates which Her spiders had excavated so industriously and which She had taken back inside Her in giant entwined cables. The Fire Opals which had fallen and died somewhere inside Her. More jagged slivers of diamond, this time hundreds of thousands, from their giant Diamond Clusters. Even cylindrical bits of the the Diamond Clusters themselves, reduced to digestible pieces. More bits of Prayer Wheels showing fractions of curvature and attached spokes. And more hull plates, more diamond slivers, more bits of their spiders and more dead Fire Opals. Thousands and thousands of everything.

  “There’s too much,” Smithson muttered. “Like the beams. There’s more coming out than we put in.”

  “She’s making them,” Foord whispered. “Thousands of everything. What have we…”

  “Started? Who knows.” Thahl answered him.

  The five fingers changed colour again. Different objects gushed through them into the sphere, objects which were not theirs but Hers, in silver and grey: Thahl’s head, Smithson’s torso, Cyr’s eyeless face. Not one of each but hundreds. Foord saw his own simulation at least a hundred times. And then other things of Hers, but these were complete and not mutilated: the replicas of Aaron Foord, Susanna Cyr, Elizabeth Kaang, Smithson and Thahl, the ones which had stood on the Bridge, forming out of cold white light and dissolving back into it. Again there were hundreds of them. They bent and conformed to the contours of the five transparent fingers as they poured through them, like dead children on a slide, tumbling out empty-faced into the openwork sphere. The hundreds became thousands and the sphere was no longer openwork but dense and solid, a mixture of colours and textures and shapes from Her and from them.

  The fingers came to an end. They never did turn into a hand. One by one they completed their emergence from the unplumbable darkness of the gash in Her flank, their trailing ends floating across to the sphere and entering it. The darkness, either a molecule deep or as deep as the distance between galaxies, remained.

  Between the two ships the sphere, bigger than either of them, hung motionless.

  A mixture of us and Her, thought Foord. “Fire on it,” he told Cyr; but Cyr was not able to, because it became something else.

  It started to compress, as if invisible hands were crumpling it prior to throwing it away. The compression was not uniform but abrupt and jagged. Its volume halved in a nanosecond, then halved again in five seconds, then stabilised; then halved again and again, to the size of a boulder and the size of an apple; then compressed, finally, to almost nothing. The two ships faced each other, speechless, across the space where it had been and still was.

  The Bridge screen tracked it and would not let it go, chasing its collapse down from the size of an apple to a grain of sand to a molecule. The screen had become as obsessive as Foord; it would not say Unable again. It chased the sphere’s collapse further down, past the size of a molecule. It ignored the lunacy of its own readings, refocussing down and down with the definition of a microscope, and showed the Bridge an empty point in space with Faith looming out of focus behind it, and told them There, at that point, was what Her sphere had become: either an atom or a universe.

  It was not an atom.

  •

  It exploded, back to the size of a grain of sand. Then expanded, to the size of an apple. Then expanded further, but more slowly.

  The screen had chased it down through its first collapse, and back through the explosion of its creation, the expansion of its infancy, and the stability of its steady state. All through the chase the screen had told them what it was or wasn’t or might be, deleting and rewriting its readouts, combining contradictions into conclusions. Finally, like the object itself, the screen’s conclusions collapsed to almost nothing, exploded outwards, expanded, and reached relative stability.

  It was a universe, said the screen, the size of an apple. Inside it would be galaxies like molecules, solar systems like subatomic particles, lives and civilisations which would go from birth to extinction in nanoseconds. In maybe five minutes, said the screen, the explosion of its creation would reverse and it would collapse.

  The screen magnified it beyond focus, and got only its surface. Its face filled the screen like Horus 4 had done, but was even less distinct. Its outer surface was impenetrable; more than solid. Its colour was the nameless colour from Her craters, but flat and unlit. And while it existed, it brought a noise they would always associate with it. Not its own noise but theirs, a dissonant mismatched chorus of all their instruments trying to probe or understand it, failing, and saying so.

  If it was a universe, then what they saw wasn’t its surface; that had no meaning. They saw its outer boundary, and that also had no meaning. What did the boundary of a universe look like from outside? Or from inside? If it was a universe it was infinite; inside was neverending so outside, where they were, was neverbeginning.

  The dissonant chorus of instruments continued. Everything in the ship tried to probe it, but it was denser than Horus 4, or a neutron star, or billions of either. It couldn’t exist in their universe, and the Bridge screen said it didn’t; or couldn’t, which was different. If it did exist its gravity would have annihilated both ships in the instant of its creation, but to one side of it was Faith and to the other side, further away, was the Charles Manson, and they registered no gravity. The thing between them, separating them by a few thousand feet and billions of light-years, behaved as if they didn’t exist, just as it didn’t exist for them; or couldn’t, which was different.

  Smithson was laughing. Not cruelly, as he usually did, but in wonderment.

  “She’s actually done it.”

  “The screen may be wrong.”

  “No, Commander. It may be wrong about details, how and when it collapses, but not about what it is.” He laughed again, softly. “The only way She could hold us off is to put a universe between us. Can there be a bigger compliment? We thought we’d learn new things about Her.”<
br />
  “I don’t…”

  “Yes you do, Commander, you do understand. You were right, She made it deliberately. And it’s made of us and Her. Together. Its life will be only seconds or minutes to us, but to them it’s eternity.”

  “Them?”

  Smithson looked away. He seemed to be blinking.

  Thahl said “Commander, he means the living things that will grow and die inside it. They must have already evolved…we may all meet again in there, Commander, and not know it.”

  Foord looked away. He too seemed to be blinking.

  “Commander,” Cyr said, “do we still fire on it?”

  “Not this time. Whatever She’s done, it must play itself out.”

  “But…”

  “First, it’s not really there. Second, if it is it’s beyond our weapons. And third…I’ve destroyed ships. I might destroy cities if I had to. But a universe?”

  “Made by Her.”

  “The fourth reason. We’re part of Her. We always were.”

  Again he found himself blinking back tears.

  It hung before them on the screen. The ship’s voice—its instruments, all unable to reach a conclusion—sang it through its life.

  •

  The alarms murmured. The two ships faced each other across Her universe, which could not exist as a discrete object between them because it was infinite.

  In five seconds and a billion years following its creation, it formed its time and space and physical laws. It formed nebulae; nebulae congealed locally into stars; stars were organised and spun into galaxies, measuring molecules and light-years across their spiral arms. Around some stars it formed planets.

  Fifteen seconds and three billion years into its existence, it was teeming with life and death. A minority of lifeforms developed civilisations, and a minority of civilisations flourished, lasting millionths of a second and thousands of years. A smaller minority of civilisations spanned more than one solar system. There was even an unidentified ship, prowling the dark spaces between galaxies. More than one, but they rarely met or communicated.