“If that’s so, how are the pressures contained? This construct is like a bomb, waiting to go off.”
He shook his head. “Well, it looks as if the people who built this place found a way. And the construct may have been stable for a long time — millions of years, perhaps. You know, I wish we had more time to spend here. We don’t even know how old this base is — from how many years beyond our time this technology dates.”
“But why construct such a thing?” She stared into the tetrahedron. “Why fill a little box with reconstructed neutron star material? Mark, do you think this was some kind of laboratory, for studying neutron star conditions?”
Uvarov’s ruined voice brayed laughter into her ears. “A laboratory? My dear woman, this is a war zone; I think basic science was unlikely to be on the agenda for the men and women who built this base. Besides, this neutron star is hardly typical. The people who came here placed discontinuity-drive engines at the star’s pole, and drove it across space at close to lightspeed. Now, what research purpose do you think that served?”
Mark ignored him. He squatted down on his haunches before the image and peered up at it; the glow of the shifting pixels inside the tetrahedron cast highlights from his face and environment suit. “I don’t think the stuff in there was reconstructed, Lieserl.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it.” He pointed at the image. “We know there is exotic matter in there… and as far as we know the primary purpose of exotic matter is the construction of spacetime wormholes. I think there’s a wormhole Interface in there, Lieserl.”
She frowned. “Wormhole mouths are hundreds of yards — or miles — across.”
He straightened up. “That’s true of the Interfaces we can construct. Who knows what will be possible in the future? Or rather — ”
“We know what you mean,” Uvarov snapped from the pod.
“Let’s suppose there is a wormhole mouth inside this tiny construct,” Mark said. “A wormhole so fine it’s just a thread… but it leads across space, to the interior of the neutron star. Lieserl, I think the neutron superfluid in here isn’t some human reconstruction — I think it’s a sample of material taken from the neutron star itself.”
Lieserl, involuntarily, glanced around the chamber, as if she might see the miniature wormhole threading across space, a shining trail connecting this bland, human environment with the impossibly hostile heart of a neutron star.
“But why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Uvarov snapped.
Mark was smiling at her; evidently he had worked it out too.
She felt slow, stupid, unimaginative. “Just tell me,” she said dully.
Mark said, “Lieserl, the link is there so the humans who built this base could reach the interior of the neutron star. I think they downloaded equipment into there: nanomachines, ’bots of some kind — maybe even some analogue of humans.
“They populated the neutron star, Lieserl.”
Uvarov rumbled assent. “More than that,” he rasped. “They engineered the damn thing.”
Closed timelike curves, Spinner-of-Rope.
The nightfighter arced through the muddled, relativity distorted sky; the neutron star system wheeled around Spinner like some gaudy light display. Behind her, the huge wings of the Xeelee nightfighter beat at space, so vigorously Spinner almost imagined she could hear the rustle of immense, impossible feathers.
She felt her small fingers tremble inside gloves that suddenly seemed much too big for her. But Michael Poole’s hands rested over hers, large, warm.
The ship surged forward.
We are going to build closed timelike curves…
Ignoring the protests of her tired back, Louise straightened up and pushed herself away from the Deck surface. She launched into the air, the muscles of her legs aching, and she let air resistance slow her to a halt a few feet above the Deck.
Once this had been a park, near the heart of Deck Two. Now, the park had become the bottom layer of an improvised, three-dimensional hospital, and the long grass was invisible beneath a layer of bodies, bandaging, medical supplies. A rough rectangular array of ropes had been set up, stretching upwards from the Deck surface through thirty feet. Patients were being lodged loosely inside the array; they looked like specks of blood and dirt inside some huge honeycomb of air, Louise thought.
A short distance away a group of bodies — unmoving, wrapped in sheets — had been gathered together in the air and tethered roughly to the frame of what had once been a greenhouse.
Lieserl approached Louise tentatively. She reached out, as if she wanted to hold Louise’s hand. “You should rest,” she said.
Louise shook her head angrily. “No time for that.” She took a deep breath, but her lungs quickly filled up with the hospital’s stench of blood and urine. She coughed, and ran an arm across her forehead, aware that it must be leaving a trail there of blood and sweat. “Damn it. Damn all of this.”
“Come on, Louise. You’re doing your best.”
“No. That isn’t good enough. Not any more. I should have designed for this scenario, for a catastrophic failure of the lifedome. Lieserl, we’re overwhelmed. We’ve converted all the AS treatment bays into casualty treatment centers, and we’re still overrun. Look at this so-called hospital we’ve had to improvise. It’s like something out of the Dark Ages.”
“Louise, there’s nothing you could have done. We just didn’t have the resources to cope with this.”
“But we should have. Lieserl, the doctors and ’bots are operating triage here. Triage, on my starship.”
…And it didn’t help that I diverted most of our supply of medical nanobots to the hull… Instead of working here with the people — crawling through shattered bodies, repairing broken blood vessels, fighting to keep bacterial infection contained within torn abdominal cavities — the nanobots had been press-ganged, roughly — and on her decision — into crawling over the crude patches applied hurriedly to the breached hull, trying inexpertly to knit the torn metal into a seamless whole once more.
She clenched her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms. “What if the Xeelee are studying us now? What will they think of us? I’ve brought these people across a hundred and fifty million light years — and five million years only to let them die like animals…”
Lieserl faced her squarely, her small, solid fists on her hips; lines clustered around her wide mouth as she glared at Louise. “That’s sentimental garbage,” she snapped. “I’m surprised at you, Louise Ye Armonk. Listen to me: what is at issue here is not how you feel. You are trying to survive — to find a way to permit the race to survive.”
Lieserl’s stern, lined face, with the strong nose and deep eyes, reminded Louise suddenly of an overbearing mother. She snapped back, “What do you know of how I feel? I’m a human, damn it. Not a — a — ”
“An AI?” Lieserl met her gaze evenly.
“Oh, Lethe, Lieserl. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Louise. You’re quite right. I am an artifact. I have many inhuman attributes.” She smiled. “For instance, at this moment I have two foci of consciousness, functioning independently: one here, and one down on the planet. But…” She sighed. “I was once human, Louise. If briefly. So I do understand.”