“It’s beginning now,” he told Olmy.
Ry Oyu came forward from the shadowy rear of the flawship, startling Korzenowski. “Your bravery is deeply appreciated,” he said.
Korzenowski shook his head slowly.
75
Axis Euclid
Suli Ram Kikura was no longer a ward of the Hexamon. Released from confinement to her apartment, she was a free woman again, free to contemplate the confusion and contradiction of the past few weeks.
She could not help thinking that Olmy was playing some substantial part in all this; perhaps he even knew what was really happening. Nobody else did.
All her anger and frustration was overridden by her sense of duty. First, she had to be sure that the destruction of Thistledown—if it happened—would not jeopardize the orbiting bodies or Earth. She did not have the technical expertise in these matters, even using the full capabilities of her implants, to come to any useful conclusions by herself.
For a moment, she simply reveled in having her lines of communication open and unmonitored. She decided to contact Judith Hoffman.
When she called Hoffman’s terrestrial residence in South Africa, a message awaited her, conveyed by a delegated partial with instructions to speak only to selected people, herself among them. The partial explained that Hoffman had been on Thistledown until the very last moment, and was now on a shuttle returning to Axis Euclid. The partial was willing to arrange a meeting; it was possible, if channels were not closed by the Hexamon, to speak with its primary now. Did she wish to do so?
Ram Kikura, usually reluctant to impose, did not hesitate now. “If you can open a channel, I’ll be very grateful.”
Hoffman’s partial made the necessary arrangements, found that channels were still available, and Hoffman herself appeared in Ram Kikura’s living room, seated in a white shuttle formfit, exhausted and unhappy.
“Suli!” she said, trying to muster a semblance of polite gladness. “It’s a disaster out here. We couldn’t access a third of what we wanted to…. If it all goes, we’ll lose so much…”
“Do you now what’s happening?”
“It isn’t even classified!” Hoffman said, waving her fingers in dismay. “The presiding minister lifted all security measures—”
“I know. I’m free.”
“The re-opening is a disaster. They say there was instability in the Way—but I can’t believe Korzenowski couldn’t take care of that.”
“Mirsky?” Ram Kikura suggested.
Hoffman rubbed her neck with her hands. “We were warned.”
The coloring on her image changed. With raised eyebrows, she peered to her left—where a transparency in the hull might be—and a look of wonder crossed her face. “What is it?” she asked others around her. Ram Kikura caught muffled sounds of other voices.
She glanced through her own window at the arc of darkness visible beyond the edge of what had once been the flaw passage. That region was no longer dark; now it glowed a ghostly blue.
“Something’s happening,” Hoffman said. “Transmission—”
She faded with a silent sizzle of white lines. Ram Kikura called for an image of the precinct’s exterior, and then added, “Where’s Thistledown? Show me that octant.”
A circle of radiant blue appeared in the middle of her living room, enchanting and deeply disturbing. It did not block out the haze of stars visible beyond Earth. “Thistledown,” she ordered. “Show me where Thistledown is.” A projected red line curled snake-like around the bean-sized white object and blinked. The glow was not coming from Thistledown, nor was it limited to the starship’s vicinity; it seemed to come from all space, all directions.
The bean-sized object grew brighter as she watched. “Magnify,” she demanded. Throughout Axis Euclid, she knew citizens by the tens of thousands were asking for the same picture; her own private projector’s image flickered occasionally as the precinct’s signal amplifiers and splitters cut in.
Thistledown appeared enlarged and in sharp detail, surrounded by a faint corona of even brighter blue. The north pole pointed away from the Earth and all precincts. But the south pole itself glowed now. Concentric and expanding rings of luminous pinspecks formed beyond the south pole, followed by even brighter rings and then continuous halos.
The Beckmann drive engines were cutting in; she was sure of it. Thistledown had not used those drives since the Sundering; now the asteroid starship was pushing itself away from Earth and the precincts.
What had been only an intellectual speculation before was now reality; Thistledown was preparing for its death.
Somehow, she knew Olmy was still aboard, or very near the Thistledown—perhaps in the Way itself.
Ram Kikura, like Olmy, did not have the means to cry. She sat in tense silence, watching as Axis Euclid’s sensors tracked the Thistledown. How long?
The glare from the Beckmann drives increased until the display had to adjust for brightness. The plume of destroyed matter reflected from the south polar crater, forming a long violet brushstroke against the unnatural blue. The colors and the circumstances went against all reason; she felt as if she were watching an artificial entertainment, depicting something remote and beautiful but hardly plausible.
It hurts, she thought, her implants working steadily to handle the emotional overload. I know he’s there. And that’s my home, where I was born and grew and worked—within the Way.
She could hardly bear to watch, yet she did not move.
She owed her past this much, to sit and watch it die.
76
Earth
The ethereal night sky brought people out by the hundreds of thousands. In Melbourne there was religious frenzy and rioting; Karen heard the sounds, like a distant grumbling wave, from the balcony of her hotel room. She had been ordered to take a week’s vacation after her episode in the evacuee camp, a gift she did not appreciate, since it left her with little to do but think.
She looked upon the show calmly. Marvels had multiplied in her lifetime; after the events of the past two weeks, she almost expected them now. She had some vague notion this glow was associated with Thistledown, but the asteroid starship was not visible.
At midnight, however, she did see the violet plume of the Beckmann drives, rising from the northeastern horizon like a spotlight beam. It faded three hand’s-breadths above the horizon, which meant it was huge—tens of thousands of kilometers in length. She did not know what it signified; she thought it might be Thistledown’s death glow, but that was yet to come.
Sitting in a deck-chair on the balcony, wrapped in a sweater against the night chill, she looked across Melbourne’s brightly lit skyline, clutching a ceramic mug, shivering slightly not just with the cold, but with having drunk too much coffee.
She knew she was a wreck; she allowed she might someday be able to rebuild herself, conduct her own Recovery, perhaps become a whole human being; but for the moment the curtain was down and the stage props were being rearranged. What came before the spotlights next might be a new Karen Farley Lanier, or merely a rewrite of the old; at any rate, she hoped it would be a more successful one. Andia could help her; but until she actually saw her daughter, she would be as unreal and fantastic as the night sky.
The plume seemed to grow longer as the minutes passed. Then she realized the Earth was turning, perhaps bringing Thistledown into view, if it still existed.
She had had no more contact with Garry. She began to wonder if in fact she had been overstrained; but an inner voice reassured her, the experience had been real; it had been Garry.
That alone could give her strength. If the powers behind Mirsky had saved her husband, or given him some alternate existence beyond death, then perhaps all things would turn out right after all; perhaps her life, however trivial in the march of millennia and on a scale of light-centuries, would have some use, be worth continuing.
Though not forever.
Garry, whatever his final doubts, had left her this: that age and death and
change were natural, even necessary, if not for citizens of the Hexamon, then for those humans who had not seen the slow evolution of life-extension across the centuries.
Someday, she would allow herself to age and die. She smiled, thinking what Ram Kikura might say.
Something rose in the northeast, at the beginning of the violet plume; a bright, twinkling thing that looked less like Thistledown than some distant, continuous fireworks display.
Suddenly, it became as brilliant as a sun, and cast Melbourne into the light of full summer noon. Cup still hooked to her finger, she flung up her forearm to shield her eyes and gave herself a painful whack on one ear. The cup fell to the concrete porch and shattered.
Cursing in English and Chinese, she lurched out of the chair, through the open sliding glass door and into the bathroom. There, she blinked at herself in the mirror, her face hidden behind a negative blind spot turning green and red at the edges.
The flash had been silent. The hotel was quiet; even the sound of distant riots had died. When her vision recovered, she peered around the bathroom door. The sky outside was dark. Cautiously, she walked to the balcony, holding her hand up near her eyes just in case, and squinted at where the Thistledown had been. The plume still glowed faintly in the blackness; a few degress past the plume’s tip, all that remained of Thistledown was a turbulent, dim red ball the size of her thumbnail.
77
Thistledown City
Farren Siliom felt the grinding sound before he heard it. It came through the anchors and suspension cables into the hanging buildings, vibrating the floor under his feet, making his bones ache.
A remote in the sixth chamber relayed its impressions:
The northern bore hole leading to the seventh chamber was spewing a fountain of intense white and green. The fountain grew along the axis of the chamber, spreading as it traversed the thirty kilometer length. The remote’s eyes tracked the fountain to the opposite southern cap, where it sprayed out in brilliant rings of violet and greenish blue.
The sixth chamber machinery was no longer operating. The remote turned its attention to the chamber itself. The valley floor seemed to be buckling, but that couldn’t be—the sound and vibration would have been much more violent. Areas of machinery tens of kilometers wide formed globules and rose toward the axis like soap bubbles. That, too, made no sense.
Then the sound increased. The northern cap split from the center outward like a plate of glass hit by a bullet. Radial slivers of asteroid rock and metal lifted away from the cap and twisted weirdly with the stress of their uneven inward and outward centrifugal spin. With dream-like slowness, they plummeted toward the valley floor, striking and crumpling. Where they had left gaps in the cap, glowing red molten rock spewed into the chamber, arcing outward in beautiful, uneven pinwheel spirals.
The remote had a momentary glimpse of this before the entire cap blew inward, the shock wave racing along the valley floor, obscuring everything with dust and smoke and ending its transmission.
It’s grinding the end off Thistledown, Farren Siliom thought, working its way toward me…
The remote in the fifth chamber watched mountains and rusty rivers distort as if in a rippled mirror. The northern cap shattered, but there was no outpouring of molten rock; the air in the chamber abruptly clouded over. This remote also ceased transmitting.
In the fourth chamber, the president’s extended eyes and ears heard the rumbling grow to potentially deafening levels, the trees of the forests shaking their limbs away, rivers and lakes seeming to boil.
The sixth chamber was almost certainly gone, and that meant no more inertial damping within Thistledown. If the asteroid was subjected to any abrupt motion, the cities in the second and third chambers would crumple like toy castles made of stacked blocks.
Farren Siliom could see his own death, then, minutes before it came. He would not witness the conclusion of this final episode in Thistledown’s history.
78
The Way
Korzenowski knew the kink had formed, ablating the first few chambers from the Thistledown. The force of this would twist the asteroid around like a piece of wood on a lathe. The twist would probably reverse at some point as the kink began its motion along the Way, and that would destroy everything within Thistledown.
He could see this with a feverish clarity; time and again, his implants created realistic scenarios for the asteroid starship’s demise with a painful persistence he could hardly stop. Something akin to guilt compelled him to pay attention, to imagine the destruction as accurately as he could…
For he was directly responsible. He had built the Way; he had pushed a sliver into God’s finger.
They had been traveling for just under five hours. Ry Oyu floated near the bow, face calm.
The flawship shivered faintly. Olmy called up a select display of the next few thousand kilometers. He saw odd square patches floating a kilometer or so above the flaw itself.
We approach a flaw station, the Jart warned him. Begin deceleration.
He applied the clamps in reverse, making the flaw fluoresce a vivid green. By the time they came to a dead stop, they would have traveled some five million kilometers; the flaw station was probably just where the Jart had foreseen.
“We’ll reach a flaw station in about four hours,” he told the Engineer.
The Jart took him over and began to send signals through the flawship radio frequency transmitters.
79
Axis Euclid
Ram Kikura’s display showed the Thistledown spinning this way and that, like some giant’s spindle gathering thread and throwing it off. The northern first third of the asteroid had been melted and blasted away and formed a fan of glowing red haze around the remaining mass.
Hoffman’s shuttle had not been damaged, she had learned a few moments before; all communications had been cut off to allow full channels for official Hexamon signals. Thistledown’s demise would not affect the Earth or the orbiting precincts, beyond a few Old Natives temporarily blinded by the first flare.
She stood up and walked around the apartment, unable to turn away from the display. What next? How long until—
A funnel like the bell of an enormous trumpet congealed out of darkness ahead of Thistledown. Undulating like a jellyfish, the funnel had none of the qualities of the Way; something far more ominous had just come into being, a restrained, shaped black hole, like nothing this universe had ever seen before. The starship began to visibly move toward the yawning dark bell. That implied tremendous acceleration.
The uneven acceleration toward the funnel split the starship along its thinner walls with surgical precision. Tidal forces twisted the asteroid apart in latitudinal segments, as if it were being cut by a giant cake knife, each section corresponding roughly to an internal chamber.
Air and water and rock—and molten rock toward the northern end—spread outward from Thistledown like paint smeared by an enormous thumb, accompanied by a dusty debris that could only be the fragments of interior mountains, forests, cities.
Thistledown’s ruins vanished into the gaping funnel, emerging nowhere, going nowhere, creating a deficit of trillions of tons in this universe which had to be made up in some fashion.
From the complex domain of superspace, to the far-spread reaches of this universe, spontaneous and compensatory leaks of pure energy would occur, amounting precisely to the mass of Thistledown; thus the books would be balanced. Chances were the leaks would be so widespread that not a single one of them—and they would probably number in the billions—would occur near a star, much less a planet. Still, for thousands, perhaps millions of years, tiny bursts of gamma rays would mystify human and non-human astronomers. And who would guess their origin?
Perhaps no one.
Ram Kikura watched the display for minutes after Thistledown had disappeared. The funnel showed now only as a ring of inward-spiraling dust and debris and a greater darkness against the stars.
Then the bell closed like a f
lower withdrawing for a long night.
The Way had begun its long, violent suicide.
80
The Way
The Jart flaw station, from their perspective, was simply a huge black triangle strung on the flaw, its edges flashing dark rainbows as they approached. Korzenowski and Ry Oyu watched Olmy work intently at the flawship console, aware that the Jart was conducting the orchestra, attempting to make the right music to placate vigilant defenses.
“There’s been an enormous amount of activity here,” Olmy said. Korzenowski looked at the picted information from the flawship sensors; gates had been opened dozens of times about two hundred kilometers ahead. They appeared to have been opened in one latitude surrounding the Jart flaw station. Glancing at Ry Oyu, the Engineer brought forward his clavicle. “This is a geometry stack region,” he said. “We’re very close to where Patricia Vasquez opened her own gate.”
“It must have been fused shut by the stellar plasma,” Olmy said.
“It would have left a trace…something the Jarts could have detected,” Korzenowski said. “Did they?”
Olmy consulted the Jart. “They have that capability.”
“They might have found the trace of a gate in the geometry stacks too unusual to ignore.” Korzenowski shook his head. “Patricia may not have had much time, whether she made it home or not.”
Entry to a world populated by humans would be most useful to command oversight, the Jart said within Olmy. He turned to Ry Oyu. “They might have found her. Did they?”