“I could build a spatial-coordinates box,” Harold said. “Intersecting lines and planes of force to hold the items in place, the whole thing transparent so we can study any section from any angle. If we plotted our five known points of tangency and looked for an applicable framework, we might be able to begin deriving equations—”
Afra grabbed his arm, abruptly excited. “How soon?”
The sixth jump was a large one, but that was the least of it.
They contemplated the figures and could not deny them.
“It is a different destroyer,” Afra said.
They were another five thousand light-years slantwise from Sol, and Earth history stood at approximately 4,000 BC. The destroyer signal that bathed Earth in 1980-81 was gone — but sixteen thousand light-years down a divergent azimuth was the point source of a second emission virtually identical to the first.
“I suspect,” Harold said, “that we are up against a genuine galactic conspiracy. A paranoiac’s delight.”
“I’m ecstatic,” Afra said.
He cocked a finger at her warningly, as though she were a child of five. “It cannot be coincidence that similar broadcasters of this nature are set up thirty-thousand light-years from each other, the range of each about eighteen thousand miles, presumably expanding in all directions at light velocity. Note how both skirt the middle edge of the galaxy. Six so placed, with a seventh in the center, would cover the vast majority of the stars available.”
“Which seems to prove that their target is all civilization, Earth’s being incidental,” Afra agreed.
“Which may also mean that those sources are armed,” Ivo said. “Physically, I mean. They couldn’t have stood up for all these millennia, against all the species we know exist, otherwise.” He paused. “Do we go on?”
“Yes we go on!” Afra said so fiercely it alarmed him. Every so often she still furnished such a reminder of her personal involvement in this mission. Her memory of Brad — the god-prince who had died and not returned to life.
They were becoming blasé about galactic travel, or at least inured; but the tenth jump amazed them all. It was about thirty-five thousand light-years — and it placed them entirely outside the Milky Way Galaxy by approximately thirty thousand. They had jumped almost vertically out of the great disk.
There were no destroyer sources in evidence.
The party gathered to look at their galaxy on the “direct vision” screen. This was actually an image relayed from sensors set into orbit around Neptune. Harold had not been idle during the intervals of recuperation between hops, and he had sophisticated machinery to play with. The mini-satellites even survived the jumps without disturbance, once the anchor-field had been modified to account for such motion.
Below them it lay, filling well over a ninety-degree arc: the entire galaxy of man’s domicile, viewed broadside by man for the first time. The pallid white of the stars and nebulae deflowered by Earth’s atmosphere existed no more; the colossal fog of interstellar gas and dust had been banished from the vicinity of the observer. The result was a view of the Milky Way Galaxy as it really existed — ten thousand times as rich as that perceivable from Earth.
Color, yes — but not as any painter could represent, or any atmosphere-blinded eye could fathom. Red in the center where the old lights faded; blue at the fringe where the fierce new lights formed. A spectrum between — but also so much more! Here the visible splay extended beyond the range for which nomenclature existed, and rounded out the hues for which human names did exist. A mighty swirl, a multiple spiral of radiance, wave on wave of tiny bright particles, merged yet discrete. The Milky Way was translucent, yet mind-staggeringly intricate in three, in four dimensions.
At the fringe it was wafer-thin, sustained largely by the masses of cosmic dust that smeared out thousands of stars with every hideously compelling wisp and whorl. Within this sparse galactic atmosphere, nestled in tentacles of gas, floated Sol and its solar debris: hardly worthy of notice, compared to the main body; indeed, invisible without magnification.
And, clear from this exquisite vantage, the pattern of the stellar conglomeration that was the galaxy emerged: the great spiral arms, coiling outward from the center, doubled bands of matter beginning as the light of massed stars and terminating as the black of thinning dust. Not flat, not even; the ribbons were twisted, showing now broadside, now edgewise, resembling open mobius strips or the helix of galactic DNA.
And yes, he thought, yes — the galaxy was a cell, bearing its cosmic organelles and glowing in its animation; motile, warm-bodied, evolving, its life span enduring for tens of billions of years.
Ivo felt a physical hunger, and realized that he had been looking at the galaxy for many hours. He had been stupefied by it, as a worshiper was said to be blessedly stupefied by confrontation with his god.
He broke the trance and looked about him. Afra stood nearest, lovely in her mortal fashion, her eyes encompassing a hundred billion stars, her lungs inhaling cubic par-sees of space.
Harold turned to face him, and he noticed with a shock that the man, like the women, had lost weight sometime in the past few months. Everyone was changing! “Did you observe the globular clusters? Hundreds of them orbiting the galaxy, a million stars in each. Look!” He pointed. “That one must be within ten thousand light-years of us.”
Ivo saw what he had somehow missed before: a glob of light near at hand and about as far out from the galactic disk as they were. It resembled a small galaxy except that it was shapeless, a Rorschach blob of brilliance. It was as though some of the cotton had drifted free when the fabric of the main tapestry was woven. At its fringe, as with the main galaxy, the stars were sparse, but they thickened at the center, converting from blue to mid-range. This cluster was younger than the main body.
There were many others in sight, most closer in toward the galactic nucleus. Each, perhaps, was a cosmos in itself, possessing lifebearing planets and stellar civilizations. The overall pattern of the entire group of clusters was spherical — or at least hemispherical, since he could not see what lay on the far side of the main disk. Though he could not perceive individual motion, it struck him that the clusters were in fact orbiting the center of the galaxy — elliptical orbits, brushing very near to its rim and riding higher over its broad face. Some even seemed to be colliding with the galactic fringe, though that was so diffuse that it was a matter of interpretation.
Almost, he could picture the original ball of gas and dust, turning grandly in space and throwing out gauze and sparks. The majority of the material remained in the plane of rotation, to become the spiral arms and the overall disk-shape; but a few mavericks took separate courses, and were the clusters.
How did the universe appear to a creature looking out from a planet aboard one of these island systems? Did any cultures aspire to descend to the mighty mother complex? Was their god a whirlpool thirty thousand parsecs in diameter?
Beatryx emerged from the kitchen area, and Ivo realized that it had been the smell of cooking that had first brought his attention to his stomach. She was typically the bringer of nourishment. It was good that someone was practical!
At last Afra came out of it. “We are within the traveler field, but beyond the destroyer,” she said musingly. “We are thirty thousand light-years toward the traveler — so it will be passing Earth and the galaxy for at least that period in the future. Obviously it preceded the destroyers, too, or they would have started earlier and reached out this far. And that suggests—”