Once the sac of its belly was full, the spider launched itself back toward its web with a barely visible burst of ions. It had already constructed a rigid, skeletal frame for the mirror segment it was building. Each segment was a kilometer wide, but even when the planned ten billion segments were completed they would only fill one ten-thousandth of the eighty trillion square kilometers spanned by the telescope’s total width. Seen as a whole, the mirror would be mostly empty space, but the individual segments lost none of their light-gathering power by being spread out like this, and it increased the resolution of the instrument by a factor of a hundred.
The spider started at the rim of the frame and began secreting a glistening polymer film, more like a metallic-looking tape than a silken thread. Mobile electrons in the polymer made it as reflective as silver, but it was lighter and stronger than any metal. The precise molecular structure of the polymer was being constantly tweaked as it was synthesized, tailoring the natural curvature of the film to fit the parabolic shape of the mirror to within a fraction of a wavelength.
The frame was rotating, so the spider only had to inch its way slowly toward the center, depositing the film in a tightly wound spiral while the growing mirror turned beneath it. Rakesh watched patiently as the annular strip finally reached a sufficient size for him to glimpse the blaze of the central cluster reflected back at him, a view so sharp that it looked more like some kind of rift in space than a mere reflection.
When this segment was completed and moved into position, an array of precision accelerometers measuring the phase difference between counter-rotating superconducting currents would track its orientation, and a faint breath of ions from its attitude thrusters would keep it perfectly aligned. The insect-eyed instrument package that sat at the telescope’s focus was already complete, and undergoing testing and calibration. Once a million or so of the ten billion segments were in place, some worthwhile data collection could take place, albeit far more slowly than it would when the full light-collecting area was brought into play. At that point, the telescope would be imaging the accretion disks of thousands of neutron stars simultaneously, hunting for the telltale spectrum of an Ark’s synthetic walls.
Probes had scoured the rubble-strewn center of the sole Ark that remained in this system, but had found neither artefacts nor the mummified remains of its original inhabitants. Though the higher tiers of the wind-fed ecosystem had probably collapsed quite quickly, there was a sufficient population of microbes even now to make short work of anything organic, and the slow grinding of the rubble over the millennia had milled any remnants of the inhabitants’ material culture down to dust. Rakesh didn’t dare to guess what the chances were that any of the Arks captured by the neutron star had thrived—even briefly, let alone for fifty million years—but he had written off the cousins prematurely before, and he was not about to make the same mistake again.
He turned away from the mirror and let his avatar drift, spinning slowly. He shifted his vision down the spectrum, into the infrared and microwave bands, dimming the fierce stars but revealing the eerie world of gas and dust in which they were embedded, full of structures more subtle, delicate and diffuse. Shells of plasma from thousand-year-old supernovas hung in space like the smoke from some slow-motion fireworks display. Half a dozen glowing filaments lined up perpendicular to the galactic plane shone with the synchrotron radiation of electrons spiraling along magnetic field lines. From a ring of gas a dozen light years wide that circled the galactic center, a surreal double helix stretched across the sky: the infrared glow of dust trapped by a wave in the magnetic field that was anchored to, and twisted by, the orbiting gas.
Somehow, the Aloof had mastered this beautiful, perilous place and claimed it as their own. While Rakesh’s hapless cousins had been hammered relentlessly by the forces of nature, perhaps to the point of extinction, the Aloof had overcome or circumvented the same hardships, to make this their jealously guarded home. Whether they’d matured in the disk first and only come here once they were armed with sophisticated technology, or whether their whole mode of existence had rendered them impervious to the dangers of the bulge from the start, was anybody’s guess. Rakesh did not expect answers from them, at least not directly, but he couldn’t entirely surrender the naive hope that merely being allowed inside the fence and permitted to see what the Aloof had seen, to steep his body in the same radiation and feel the same stellar winds and tides, might yet crystallize some insight about their nature that could never have formed from idle speculation back in the disk.
Parantham spoke, puncturing his reverie.
“We have company.”
This assertion was so bizarre and unexpected that Rakesh simply floated in silence for a while, refusing to abandon his sanctuary among the spiders to see if she was joking.
“What do you mean?” he finally replied.
“Someone has sent us a messenger. I’ve already asked it what it wishes to say, but it insists on speaking to us together.”
Rakesh took his senses out of the avatar, back to his body slumped in a couch in the control room of Lahl’s Promise.
Standing beside Parantham was a figure resembling Csi, as Rakesh had perceived him back in the node: the same bald head, the same serious demeanor, the same barely visible hint of a smile. Unlike Csi himself, it was meaningless to ask what this messenger really looked like; as an insentient courier it had no self-perception, let alone any need for a physical embodiment. Their hosts had simply loaded it into one of the habitat’s processors and let it communicate with them via Amalgam-standard protocols.
Rakesh rose to his feet and embraced the messenger. “Welcome to the bulge!” This was not his old friend, but it was designed to communicate as if it were, and perhaps to take a reply back to the sender. Some people became self-conscious in the presence of messengers, but Rakesh’s policy was to treat them as if they were the sender, and only to retreat from that stance if it led to real absurdities. To embrace this insentient hallucination was no more foolish than responding with warmth and sincerity to a written letter or a video message. “What’s been happening? Where have you come from?”
“Darya-e-ghashang. A few years after you and Parantham left the node, a traveling festival came through: the Ocean of Ten Million Worlds. I fell in with them, and I’ve been with them ever since.”
“The Ocean of Ten Million Worlds?”
“Every month, we swim, sail, or dive in the waters of a different planet.”
Rakesh smiled, recalling his sodden farewell from the node. “That sounds wonderful.” These festivals were really just large groups of friends traveling together, but they were usually dressed up with some kind of distinguishing paraphernalia: claiming to offer some new social structure or artistic milieu, or to choose their destinations in order to celebrate some particular aspect of life. Their real attraction was that they offered a satisfying mixture of stability and novelty. As long as you stayed with the group, you didn’t have to cut ties with everyone you knew just for a change of scenery.
Parantham said, “So what made you think of us, out of the blue?”
“I heard some news about Lahl,” the messenger said.
“Lahl?” Rakesh was almost as surprised by this as he had been by the messenger’s arrival. “What did she do to become famous?”