The Interface was very close now, Dura saw; the fine, perfect vertices of the upper face spread away from the curving window of the ship, and the rest of the frame was foreshortened by perspective.
Then the clean lines of the artifact began to slide across the windows of the ship, as slow as knife-blades drawn across skin. The ship’s downward trajectory had been carrying it steadily toward the center of the face; but now they were clearly drifting, sliding toward one knife-sharp edge.
Something was wrong.
Hork hauled at his levers and slammed his hand into the fragile console. “Damn it. She won’t respond. The Magfield here is disrupted — maybe by the presence of the Interface — and…”
“Look!” Dura pointed downward.
Hork stared at the edge, its fizzing blue light painting deep, shifting shadows on his face as it approached. He swore. “It’s going to hit us.”
“We might be safe. Maybe the Ur-humans designed this wormhole to be as safe as possible; maybe the ship will just rebound, and…”
“Or maybe not. Maybe the Ur-humans didn’t expect anyone to be stupid enough to go careering through their doorway in a wooden ship. I think that damn thing is going to cut us in two.”
The Interface edge, wheeling past the windows, had widened from the abstraction of a line into a glowing rod as broad as a human arm.
Dura wrapped her arms around herself. Behind her the pigs were a comforting, warm mass, an oasis of familiarity. “At least try, damn you. Maybe you can get a purchase on the Interface’s magnetic field.”
Now, beyond the walls of the ship, there was a spectacular flash, a sudden storm of blue-white light which flooded the cabin and made her cry out. The pigs squealed, terrified again. The ship lurched. Hork rolled in his seat and Dura grabbed at the pigs’ restraining harness.
“We’ve hit!” she cried.
Hork dragged at his levers. “No. It’s the ship’s own field; it must be brushing against the edge… The ship’s responding. Dura, I think you’re right; I think we’re starting to work against the artifact’s field. Keep feeding those animals, damn you!”
The flashing persisted and the shuddering of the ship assumed a steady, violent rhythm. Dura clung to the pigs’ harness, striving to feed the pigs with an unwavering rhythm of her own.
Slowly, painfully slowly, the wheeling of the edge lessened, and the blue glare which had filled the cabin began to diminish. Dura glanced through the windows; the edge was receding and the magnetic flashes lessened, growing fitful and irregular, before dying completely.
The three edges of the face were all around the ship now, a fence of pale light slowly ascending past her. At last the ship was passing through the face, Dura realized; they were actually entering the Interface.
“Yes,” she murmured. “But we’re hardly safe.”
Hork raised his hands over the control panel. Then he pushed all three of his levers forward, deliberately; the ship surged forward into the Interface. She heard the hum of current in the Corestuff bands around the hull. “We go on,” Hork said.
Dura had expected to make out the blue lines of the Interface, this box of light, from the inside. But there was no sign of the other faces, the rest of the wormhole; instead, beyond the walls of the ship, there was only a darkness even deeper than the twilit glow of the underMantle. It was as if they were entering — not a box of light — but the mouth of a corridor, like one of Parz’s dingy alleys. In fact, it seemed that she could make out the lines of a corridor, stretching through the wormhole and on into infinity; black on black, it was like staring into a throat. Deep in the corridor there were flashes — sharp, silent and distant, light which splashed briefly over the dim walls. Slowly a picture assembled in her mind, each flash providing another fragment; the corridor was a smooth-walled cylinder perhaps five mansheights across and…
And how deep?
The walls were all around them now; the ebony throat enclosed the fragile craft as if it had been swallowed. She felt a rush of Air through the capillaries of her head; illuminated in stabs, fragments of the walls raced upward past the ship like pieces of a dream. The walls seemed to converge at a great distance, closing around a point at infinity. But that was impossible — wasn’t it? — because the Interface itself, the four-faced frame of light, was only ten or a dozen mansheights across.
But of course the corridor was immensely long — impossibly long — for the very purpose of a wormhole was to connect far-distant places. And now she was entering such a wormhole; soon the ship would be passing through the device to emerge…
Somewhere else.
For a moment, fear, primitive, irrational and stark, surfaced in her mind; it was as if the mystery of it all was ramming itself into her eyes, ears and mind. She closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers in the soft leather of the pig harness. Was she, now, going to crumble into superstitious panic?
The wormhole was an artifact, she told herself. And an artifact built by humans — by Ur-humans, perhaps, but by humans nonetheless. She should not cringe before a mere device.
She forced her eyes open.
The ship shuddered.
Dura cried, “Too fast! You’re going too fast, damn it; we’ll turn over if you don’t slow down… Are you crazy?”
The control levers were still buried inside Hork’s fleshy hands, but when he turned to her his wide face was empty, wondering. “It’s not me,” he said slowly. “I mean, it’s not the ship… we’re no longer propelling ourselves. Dura, we’re being drawn into the wormhole.” He stared at the little control console, as if seeking an answer there. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Cris rode the turbulent Magfield almost automatically. He stared at the neutrino fount, fascinated, almost forgetting his own peril. The fount was a tower, dark, unimaginably massive, thrusting out of the turbulent mass of the Quantum Sea. As it rose into Mantle Air, the viscous purple Sea-stuff crusted over, shattering, the fragments spiraling upward around the dense-packed flux lines of the Magfield.
Here was stuff from deep in the heart of the Star — deeper than any Bell had gone, deeper perhaps even than Hork’s wooden ship would reach. Here was an expulsion of material from the immense, single nucleus that was the soul of the Star, from within the nebulous boundary between Sea and Core. The fount’s material was hyperonic; each hyperon was a huge cluster of quarks far more massive than any ordinary nucleon, and the hyperons were bound together by quark exchanges into complex, fractal masses. But as the material spewed up through the throat of the Pole its structure was collapsing, unable to sustain itself in the lower-density regime of the Mantle. The quark bags were breaking apart, releasing a flood of energy, and reforming as showers of nucleons; and the free nucleons — protons and neutrons — were congealing rapidly into chunks of cooling nuclear matter.
That deadly hail was now lancing through the Mantle, and would soon come streaming upward around the City. And he felt the energy released by that huge wave of hyperonic decay as it surged upward, the neutrinos sleeting through his body, hot and needle-sharp, on their way to the emptiness above the Crust.
Now, even as he watched, the spiraling paths of the charged chunks of freezing Core-matter seemed to be distorting — flattening — as if the Magfield itself were changing, in response to the disaster.
Suddenly Cris understood.
The Magfield was changing. The irruption of this immense freight of charged material from the Core had disrupted the field; the Sea-fount was like an electrical current, unimaginably strong, passing through the heart of the Star’s Magfield Pole, temporarily competing with the great magnetic engines at the Core of the Star itself. What he’d felt — the unexpected surges in the field — had been no more than distant echoes of that huge disturbance.