* * *
The singularity shot, with its reduced launch velocity, seemed to crawl up the translucent cannon shaft. Berg had absurd visions of the singularities rolling out of the mouth of the barrel, falling back to the crystal floor with an anticlimactic plop—
The singularities reached the mouth of the cannon shaft and soared out of sight, eclipsed by the Xeelee-material dome of the chamber.
Berg's energy seeped out of her, now that it was done — for better or worse. She clasped the console, feeling her legs sagging under her.
Purple-red light flared silently through the cracks in the shattered dome. The Spline's deadly cherry-red starbreaker beams flickered, died.
All over the devastated earth-craft Friends turned their faces up to the uncertain glow, oddly like flowers.
Half the dome was gone now. Beyond it, the Spline eclipsed the stars.
Its starbreaker beams stilled, the huge warship rolled like a planet across the impassive sky. An immense, bloody crater — covering fully an eighth of the Spline's surface area — deformed its hull, Berg saw; and she couldn't help but wince in sympathy. And as the Spline rolled she realized that the crater was matched by a second — if anything, even deeper — at the ship's opposite pole. Weapon navels pooled with blood; and the Spline's roll across the stars was erratic, as if some internal balance system was failing.
"Implosion wounds from the directional gravity waves," said Jaar, his voice calm and evaluating. He nodded thoughtfully. "It worked."
Berg closed her eyes. She sought feelings of triumph. Even of relief. But she was still stranded on a damn eggshell that would probably fall apart spontaneously, without any more help from the Spline. And, lest she forget, there was a merged mini-black hole, its devastating work on the Spline complete, falling out of the sky toward her...
She said, "Come on, Jaar, you beautiful bastard. If we're going to live through this we've still got work to do—"
* * *
The Spline imploded.
The GUT-drive module drove into its heart like a stiletto. Muscles convulsed in compression waves that tore through the body of the Spline like seismic events, and all over the surface of the ship vessels exploded, spewing fast-freezing fluids into space.
The Qax was silent.
Jasoft Parz clung to nerve cables; the eye chamber rolled absurdly as the Spline sought escape from its agony. Parz closed his eyes and tried to feel the suffering of the Spline — every spasm, every bursting vessel.
He had been brought here to witness the destruction of Earth. Now he was determined to witness the death of a Qax, embedded in the consciousness of the Spline; he tried to sense its fear at the encroaching darkness, its frustration at its own mistakes, its dawning realization that the future — of Jim Bolder, the Qax diaspora — would, after all, come to pass.
Failure, and death.
Jasoft Parz smiled.
* * *
The Crab had come to rest at last, its tail section buried in the ravaged heart of the Spline. The lifedome, perched on the crumpled shaft of the ship, overlooked the Spline's carcass like, Michael thought, a viewing platform over some ghastly resort of blood and ripped flesh.
He lay in his couch, the tension drained out of him. Shira, beside him, even seemed to be asleep.
"I need a shower," he said.
"Michael." Harry's Virtual head hovered at the edge of the dome, peering out. "There's something out here."
Michael laughed. "What, something other than a wrecked sentient warship from the future? Surprise me, Harry."
"I think it's an eyeball. Really; a huge, ugly eyeball, yards wide. It's come out of its socket; it's drifting at the end of a kind of cable... an optic nerve extension, maybe."
"So?"
"So I think there's somebody inside." Harry grinned. "I think he's seen me. He's waving at me..."
Chapter 12
MICHAEL POOLE FOLLOWED JASOFT Parz, the strange bureaucrat from the future, through the entrails of the dead Spline.
They worked their way through gravity-free darkness broken only by the shifting, limited glow of the light globe Parz had rescued from his bizarre eyeball capsule; the semisentient device trailed Parz, doglike. The corridor they followed was circular in cross-section and a little more than head-high. Poole's hands sank into walls of some grayish, oily substance, and he found himself worming his way past dark, floating ovals a foot or more wide. The ovals were harmless as long as he avoided them, but if he broke the crusty meniscus of any of them a thick, grainy blood-analogue flowed eagerly over his suit.
"Jesus," he muttered. "This is disgusting." Parz was a few yards ahead of him in the cloying darkness. He laughed, and spoke in his light, time-accented English. "No," he said. "This is life aboard the finest interstellar craft likely to be available to humans for generations to come — even after my time." Parz was a thin, dapper man of medium height; his receding hair was snow-white and his face was gloomy, downturned, his chin weak. He looked, Michael thought, like a caricature of an aging bureaucrat — a caricature saved only by his striking green eyes. Parz, in his clear, skintight environment suit, moved more easily through the claustrophobic, sticky conditions than did Poole in his bulky space-hardened gear; but Poole, watching Parz slide like a fish through the cloacal darkness, found himself relishing the cool dryness inside his suit, and would not have exchanged.
A fleshy flap a yard square opened in the floor of this tunnel-tube. Poole jumped back with a cry; ahead of him Parz halted and turned. Fist-sized globes of blood-analogue came quivering out of the flap, splashing stickily against Poole's legs, and then out shot an antibody drone — one of the little robots that seemed to infest the carcass of this damn ship. This one was a flattened sphere about a foot across; it hurtled from wall to wall, rebounding. Then, for a moment, the drone hovered before Poole; tiny red laser-spots played over Poole's shins and knees, and he tensed, expecting a lance of pain. But the laser-spots snapped away from him and played over the walls and blood globules like tiny searchlights.
The drone, jets sparkling, hurtled off down the passageway and out of sight.
Poole found himself trembling.
Parz laughed, irritatingly. "You shouldn't worry about the drones. That one was just a simple maintenance unit—"
"With lasers."
"It was only using them for ranging information, Mr. Poole."
"And they couldn't be used for any more offensive purposes, I suppose."
"Against us? The drones of this Spline are thoroughly used to humans, Mr. Poole. It probably thinks we're part of a maintenance crew ourselves. They wouldn't dream of attacking humans. Unless specifically ordered to, of course."
"That cheers me up," Poole said. "Anyway, what was it doing here? I thought you said the damn Spline is dead."
"Of course it is dead," Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. "Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUT-drive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command channels, disrupt most of its higher functions. Like snapping the spinal cord of a human. But—" Parz hesitated. "Mr. Poole, imagine putting a bullet in the brain of a tyrannosaurus. It's effectively dead; its brain is destroyed. But how long will the processes of its body continue undirected, feedback loops striving blindly to restore some semblance of homeostasis? And the antibody drones are virtually autonomous — semisentient, some of them. With the extinguishing of the Spline's consciousness they will be acting without central direction. Most of them will simply have ceased functioning. But the more advanced among them — like our little visitor just now — don't have to wait to be told what to do; they actively prowl the body of the Spline, seeking out functions to perform, repairs to initiate. It's all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it's also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level... A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good." Parz's la
ugh was delicate, almost effete, thought Poole. "Perhaps we should hope, as one sentient species considering another, that the drones find tasks sufficient to give their lives meaning while they remain aware."
Poole frowned, studying Parz's round, serious face. He found Jasoft Parz oddly repellent, like an insect; his humor was too dry for Poole's taste, and his view of the world somehow oversophisticated, ironic, detached from the direct, ordinary concerns of human perception.
Here is a man, Poole thought, who has distanced himself from his own emotions. He has become as alien as the Qax. The world is a game to him, an abstract puzzle to be solved — no, not even that — to be admired dustily, as one might marvel at the recorded moves of some ancient chess game.
No doubt it had been an effective survival strategy for someone in Parz's line of work. Poole found a grain of pity in his heart for the man of the future.
Parz, proceeding ahead of Poole along the tunnel, continued to speak. "I've never been aboard a dead Spline before, Mr. Poole; I suspect it could be days before the normal functions close down completely. So you'll continue to see signs of life for some time." He sniffed. "Eventually, of course, it will be unviable. The vacuum will penetrate its deepest recesses; we will witness a race between corruption and ice..." He hesitated. "There are other ships in the area that could take us off? Human ships of this era, I mean."
Poole laughed. "A whole flotilla of them, flying every flag in the system. A damn lot of use they've been." But the key battles had been over in minutes, long before most of the inner System worlds were even aware of the invasion of the future. But, Poole had learned, the space battles had made spectacular viewing, projected live in huge Virtuals in the skies of the planets... "We've asked them to hold off for a few more hours, until we finish this investigation; we wanted to make sure this thing is safe — dead, deactivated — before letting anyone else aboard."
"Oh, I think it's safe," Parz said dryly. "If the Spline could still strike at you, be assured you'd be dead by now. Ah," he said, "here we are."
Abruptly the veinlike tunnel opened out around Jasoft. He drifted into empty space, his light globe following patiently. The white light of the globe shone feebly over the walls of a cavern that Poole, peering carefully forward from the tunnel, estimated to be about a quarter mile across. The walls were pink and shot through with crimson veins as thick as Poole's arms; blood-analogue still pulsed along the wider tubes, he noticed, and quivering globes of the blood substance, some of them yards across, drifted like stately galleons through the darkness.
But there was damage. In the dim light cast by the globe lamp, Poole made out a spear of metal yards wide that lanced across the chamber, from one ripped wall to another: the spine of the embedded Crab. The lining of the chamber had done its best to seal itself around the entrance and exit wounds, so that a tide of flesh lapped around the Crab spine at each extremity. And even now Poole could make out the fleeting shadows of drones — dozens of them — drifting around the spine, sparking with reaction jets and laser light as they toiled, too late, to drive out this monstrous splinter. Poole stared up at the immense intrusion, the huge wounds, with a kind of wonder; even the spine's straight lines seemed a violation, hard and painfully unnatural, in this soft place of curved walls and flesh.
He unwrapped a line from his waist and fixed one end to the pulsing wall of the chamber. As the jaws of the clip bit, Poole found himself wincing, but he forced himself to tug at the clip, feeling its strong teeth tear a little into the Spline's flesh, before he felt confident enough to push himself away from the wall after Parz.
Parz, propelled by some subtle reaction-pack built onto the spine of his skinsuit, swam with a stiff grace around the chamber. His skinsuit was slick with gobbets of blood-analogue, Poole noticed, giving Parz the odd and obscene appearance of something newborn. "This is the stomach chamber," Parz said. "The Spline's main — ah — hold, if you will. Where the Qax would customarily reside. At least, the Occupation-era Qax I have described; the turbulent-fluid beings."
Poole glanced around the dim recesses of the space; it was like some ugly, fleshy cathedral. "I guess they needed the elbow room."
Parz glanced across at Poole; the shadows cast by the floating globe threw the age lines of his face into sharp relief. His green eyes glimmered, startling. "You shouldn't be surprised to feel uncomfortable, moving through this Spline, Mr. Poole. It's not a human environment. No attempt has been made to adapt it to human needs, or human sensibilities." His face seemed to soften, then, and Poole tried to read his expression in the uncertain light. "You know, I'd give a lot to see the Spline of a few centuries from now. From my time," he corrected himself absently. "After the overthrow of the Qax, when human engineers adapt the Splines for our own purposes. Tiled vein corridors; metal-walled stomach chambers—"
"The overthrow of the Qax?" Poole asked sharply. "Parz, what do you know about the overthrow of the Qax?"
Parz smiled dreamily. "Only what I was told by the Governor of Occupied Earth... The second Governor, that is. Only what it told me of the future, when it was convinced I would die before seeing another human."
Poole felt blood pulse in the veins of his neck. "Jasoft, for the first time I'm glad I rescued you from that damn ridiculous eyeball."
Parz turned away. Half swimming, he made his way toward one section of the stomach-chamber wall, some way from the areas violated by the irruption of the Crab. He came to rest beside a metal canister, a coffin-sized box that was fixed to the fleshy wall by a web of metal strands.
"What is it?" Poole asked. "Have you found something?" Clumsily he made his way across the deserted space of the chamber toward Parz.
The two of them huddled over the box, the light globe hovering close like a faithful dog; the small tent of light cast over them was strangely intimate. Parz ran quick, practiced hands over the box, fingering telltale touch-screens that, Poole noticed, refused to light. His face was quite clear to Poole, but his expression was neutral. Unreadable.
Parz said, " 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.' "
"What?"
"This is Qax." He slapped the box with one gloved palm. "The Governor of Earth. Dead, harmless..."
"How?"
"The Qax preferred to run their Spline craft by direct conscious control, with their own awareness alongside — complementing and directing — the continuing sentience of the Spline."
Poole frowned. "Can't have been comfortable for the Spline."
"The Spline didn't have much choice," said Parz. "It's an efficient method. But not without its risks.
"When the collision with your ship terminated the Spline's higher functions, perhaps the Qax could have disengaged. But it didn't. Driven by its hatred — and, perhaps, by hubris, right to the end — it stayed locked inside the Spline's sensorium. And when the ship died, the Qax died with it."
Poole fingered the metal webbing, thoughtfully. "I wonder if the Spline could be salvaged, somehow. After all, the hyperdrive alone is worth centuries of research. Maybe we could link up the Crab's AI to what's left of the Spline's functions."
Parz frowned. "But if the Qax's method is any guide, you need a sophisticated conscious entity as a front end, something that can feel its way into what's left of the Spline's — identity. Sympathetically. Do you understand?"
Poole nodded, smiling. "I think so. And I know just the conscious entity to try it."
Parz was silent for a moment. His gloved fingers stroked the surface of the metal canister almost tenderly, and he seemed to be rocking in the thick intestinal air. Poole leaned closer, trying to read Parz's expression; but the half-shadowed face, with its mask of age tightened by AS, was as empty as it had ever been. "Jasoft? What are you thinking?"
Parz looked up at him. "Why," he said with a note of surprise, "I think I'm mourning."
"Mourning a Qax?" A creature, thought Poole, whose fellows had turned Earth's cities to glass — who would have, given a little more fortune, scraped humanity ou
t of the Solar System before most people had even learned the name of their destroyers — and who had turned Parz himself into a quisling, a man unable even to face his true self... "Jasoft, are you crazy?"
Parz shook his head slowly; folds of the clear skinsuit creased at his neck. "Poole, one day humans are going to cause the destruction of the Qax's home world. We'll almost wipe them out.
"...But they're unique. There are only — have only ever been — a few hundred of them. Yet each one has the seed of immortality — the potential to live long enough to witness star-corpses shine by proton decay.
"Poole, this is the second Qax I've seen die." Parz bent his head to the metal case, apparently looking inward. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I'm mourning."
Poole stayed with him in the silence of the dead Spline.
* * *
Miriam Berg, Jaar at her side, walked into the devastated heart of Stonehenge.
The ground had been ripped open, wadded into thick furrows; grass clung to the broken turf like hair to flesh. And the ancient stones had been scattered like matchsticks, shivered to rubble by the casual brush of a gravity-wave starbreaker beam.
Jaar touched her shoulder and pointed into the sky, toward the bulk of Jupiter. "Look up there," he said.
Miriam stared hard along the line of his long arm, crumpling her eyes with the effort. There was a shadow: a boxy, rough rectangle, a silhouette against the gaudy pink of Jupiter, turning slowly as it sailed away from the earth-craft. "The last of the henge," she said.
"Well, at least one of the old stones has survived. It will sail around Jupiter for a hundred thousand years, perhaps."
Berg shook her head. "Damn it. I should feel happier, I guess. We've saved the human race!... but what a cost."
Jaar inclined his head toward her with awkward tenderness. "Miriam, I think the first builders of this old henge — had they been able to imagine it — would have been happy with such a monument as that orbiting menhir."
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