Yes. A closed timelike curve is a circle in time. By following a closed timelike curve all the way to its starting point, you would at last meet yourself, Spinner-of Rope… Closed timelike curves allow you to travel through time, and into the past.
Again the nightfighter hurled itself at the cosmic string pair; again Spinner hauled at the waldoes, dragging the ship around. The huge wings beat at spacetime.
She screamed, “How much longer, damn it?”
Spinner, each traverse around the string pair is taking us a thousand years into the past. But we need to travel back through a hundred millennia, or more…
“A hundred traverses,” she whispered.
Can you do it, Spinner? Do you have the strength?
“No,” she said. “But I don’t think I have much choice, do I?”
Lieserl looked around the darkened chamber, confused. The ’bot’s brilliant lantern had been extinguished. Suddenly the walls were dim gray sheets, closing over her head, claustrophobic.
“Lieserl.” Mark’s face loomed before her, erupting out of the darkness; his blue eyes, white teeth were vivid. He moved with nanosecond speed, the slowness of humanity finally abandoned.
Dimly, she was aware of poor Uvarov sitting in the pod. He was frozen in human time, and unable to follow their high speed insect-buzz. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“The ’bot has failed. Lieserl, it was controlled by the ship’s processors. The download link from the ship must have gone down…”
Immediately, she felt that loss of processor support. She felt as if her mind had been plunged into a twilight cavern, echoing; she felt herself drift away.
“They’ve abandoned us.”
“Probably they had no choice, Lieserl.”
I am to experience death, then. But — so suddenly?
Lieserl would survive, of course — as would Mark, as projections on board the Northern. But this projection — she, this unique branch of her ancient consciousness — couldn’t be sustained solely by the limited processors on the pod.
She felt a spasm of regret that she would never be able to tell Louise and Spinner-of-Rope about the wonderful little people embedded inside the neutron star flux.
She reached for Mark. Their environment suits melted away; desperately they pressed their bodies against each other. With deep, savage longing, she sought Mark’s warm mouth with her lips, and -
“Lethe. And we can’t even talk to her.” Louise looked out of the house and across the lifedome, in the vague direction of the nightfighter cage. “Mark, Spinner is a smart woman, but she’s no expert on string dynamics. And she’s out there without significant processor support. I don’t see how she’s even calculating the trajectories we’re following.”
Mark frowned. “I — wait.” He held up a hand, and his expression turned inward, becoming blank.
“What is it?”
“We’ve stopped. I mean, the traverses around the string pair have been halted.” He thought for a moment. “Louise, I counted a hundred and seven complete circuits…”
“Louise? Mark?”
The voice sounded out of the air close to Louise’s ear. “Yes, Trapper-of-Frogs. I hear you. Where are you?”
“I’m in the forest. I — ”
“Yes?”
“I think you’d better get up here.”
Louise looked at Mark; he was frowning, and no doubt some sub-projection of him was already with Trapper.
“Why?” Louise asked. “What’s wrong. Trapper?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Not exactly. It’s just — different…”
Michael Poole’s invisible ghost-touch evaporated. Spinner-of-Rope lifted her hands from the waldoes.
Her job was done, then. She pulled her fingers inside the body of her gloves and balled her stiff hands into fists, digging her nails into the palms of her hands. She felt herself shudder, from fear and exhaustion. There was a stabbing in the small of her back, and across her shoulder blades, just below her neck; she twisted in her couch and flexed her spine, trying to work out the stiffness.
Then she looked out, beyond the construction-material cage, for the first time.
31
“Dr. Uvarov. Dr. Garry Uvarov.”
The voice, flat and mechanical, roused him from a broken sleep.
He opened his mouth to reply, and ropy saliva looped across his lips. “What is it now?”
“Is there anything you require?” The voice, generated by the pod’s limited processors, didn’t even bear a semblance of humanity, and it came — maddeningly! — from all around him.
“Yes,” he said. He felt himself shivering, distantly; he felt cold. Was the power in here failing already?
How long had it been, since his abrupt abandonment by Lieserl and Mark Wu?
“Yes,” he told the pod again. “Yes, there is something I require. Take me back to the Northern.”
The pod paused, for long seconds.
Uvarov felt the cold settle over his bones. Was this how he was to die, suspended in the thoughts of an idiot mechanical? Was he to suffer a final betrayal at the hands of technology, just as the AS nanobots had been slowly killing him for years?
Well, if he was to die, he would take with him one deep and intense regret: that he had not lived to see the conclusion of his grand design, his experiment at extending the natural longevity of his race. He knew how others had seen him: as obsessed with his eugenics objectives, as a monomaniac perhaps. But — ah! What an achievement it would have been! What a monument…
Ambition burned within him still, intense, almost all consuming, betrayed by the failure of his body.
His thoughts softened, and he felt himself grow more diffuse, his awareness drifting off into the warm, comfortable caverns of his memory.
The pod spoke again. “I’m unable to comply with your request, Doctor. I can’t obtain a fix on the Northern. I’m sorry. Would you like me to — ”
“Then kill me.” He twisted his head from side to side, relishing the stabs of pain in his neck. “I’m stranded here. I’m going to die, as soon as my supplies run out. Kill me now. Turn off the damn power.”
“I can’t comply with that, either, Dr. Uvarov.”
But Uvarov was no longer listening. Once more he felt himself falling into a troubled — perhaps final — sleep, and his ruined lips moved slowly.
“Kill me, you damn mechanical…”
32
The torus of ragged, fragmented string loops was gone. Now, cosmic string crossed the cavity: great, wild, triumphant whorls of it, shining a false electric blue in the sky dome’s imager.
This one, tremendous, complex, multiple loop of string filled the cavity at the bottom of the gravity well. This was — astonishingly, unbearably — a single object, an artifact, at least ten million light-years across.
Louise Ye Armonk — with Mark, Lieserl and Morrow — hovered on zero-gee scooters, suspended beneath the crown of the skydome. Beneath Louise — she was distantly aware — the layers of forest were filled with the rich, comforting noises: the calls of birds and monkeys and the soft burps of frogs, sounds of busy life which persisted even here at the end of time…