Uvarov was a link with the days of the ship’s construction. Arrow Maker felt, with a deep, superstitious dread, that if Uvarov were to die — if that tangible link to the past were ever broken — then perhaps the ship itself would die, around them.
And then, how could they possibly survive?
He looked at his daughter, troubled, wondering if he would ever be able to explain this to her.
9
Lieserl roused — slowly, fitfully — from her long sleep.
She stirred, irritated; she peered around, blinking her Virtual eyes, trying to understand what had disturbed her. Motion of some kind?
Motion, in this million-degree soup?
Virtual arms folded against her chest, legs tucked beneath her, she floated slowly through the compressed plasma of the radiative zone. Around her, all but unnoticed, high-energy photons performed their complex, million-year dance as they worked their way out of the core toward the surface.
After all this time, she had drifted to within no more than a third of a Solar radius of the center of the Sun itself.
She ran brief diagnostic checks over her remaining data stores. She found more damage, of course; more cumulative depredation by the unceasing hand of entropy. She wondered vaguely how much of her original processing and memory capacity she was left with by now. Ten percent? Less, perhaps?
How would she feel, if she roused herself to full awareness now? She’d never used her full capacity anyway — there was immense redundancy built into the systems — but she would surely be aware of some loss: gaps in her memory, perhaps, or a degradation of her sense of her Virtual body — a numbness, imperfectly realized skin.
Lieserl, she told herself, you’re getting old, all over again. The first human in history to grow old for the second time.
Another first, for the freak lady.
She smiled and snuggled her face closer to her knees. Once, her depth of self awareness and her ability to access huge memory stores had made her the most conscious human — or quasihuman, anyway — in history. So she’d been told.
Well, that couldn’t be true any more.
Always assuming there were still humans left to compare herself against, of course.
Plasma still poured through the faces of the Interface which cradled her ancient, battered data stores; somewhere beyond the Sun, the energy dumped through the refrigerating wormhole must still blaze like a miniature star, perhaps casting its shadows across the photosphere. She knew the wormhole refrigerating link must be operating still, and that the various enhancements the engineers had made to it, as she’d gone far beyond her design envelope in her quest deeper into the Sun, must still be working. After a fashion, anyway.
She knew all that, because if the link wasn’t working, she would be dead.
It was even conceivable that there were still people at the other end of the wormhole, getting useful data out of the link. In fact, she vaguely hoped so, in spite of everything. That had been the point of this expedition in the first place, after all. Just because they no longer chose to speak to her didn’t mean they weren’t there.
Anyway, it scarcely mattered; she’d no intention of waking out of the drowsy half-sleep within which she had whiled away the years — and centuries, and millennia…
But there was that hint of motion again. Something elusive, transient -
It was no more than a shadow, streaking across the rim of her sensorium, barely visible even to her enhanced senses. She tried to turn, to track the elusive ghost; but she was stiff, clumsy, her “limbs” rusty from centuries of abandonment.
The fizzing shadow arced across her vision again, surging along a straight line and out of her sight.
Working with unaccustomed haste, she initiated self-repair routines throughout her system. She analyzed what she’d seen, decomposing the compound image presented to her visually into its underlying component forms.
She felt dimly excited. If she’d been human still, she knew, her heart would be beating faster, and a surge of adrenaline would make her skin tighten, her breathing speed up, her senses become more vivid. For the first time in historic ages she felt impatience with the cocoon of shut-down Virtual senses which swaddled her; it was as if the machinery stopped her from feeling…
She considered the results of her analysis. The image scarcely existed; no wonder it had looked like a ghost to her. It was no more than a faint shadow against the flood of neutrinos from the Solar core, a vague coherence among scintillas of interaction with the slow-moving protons of the plasma…
The shadow she’d seen had been a structure of dark matter. A thing of photinos, orbiting the heart of the Sun.
She felt jubilant. At last — and just at the depth, a third of a Solar radius out from the center, that she and Kevan had deduced it would be all those years ago, she’d found what she’d come here for — the prize for which her humanity had been engineered away. At last she’d penetrated to the edge of the Sun’s dark matter shadow core, to the near-invisible canker which was smothering its fusion fire.
She waited for the photino object to return.
Arrow Maker slid toward the ground.
He passed through another layer of leaves: this was the forest’s understorey, made up of darkness-adapted palms and a few saplings, young trees growing from seeds dropped by the canopy trees. The light at this level — even now, at midday — was dim, drenched in the green of the canopy. The air was hot, stagnant, moist.
Arrow Maker reached the ground, close to the base of a huge tree. Under one of his bare soles, a beetle wriggled, working its way through decaying leaf matter. Arrow Maker reached down, absently, picked up the beetle and popped it into his mouth.
He hauled his rope down from the tree and set off across the forest floor.
Beneath the thin soil he could feel the tree’s thick mat of rootlets. The trees were supported by immense buttresses: triangular fins, five yards wide at their base, which sprouted from the clustering trunks. A thin line of termites — a ribbon hundreds of yards long marched steadily across the floor close to his feet, on their way to the tree trunk cleft that housed their nest.
He passed splashes of color amid the corruption of the forest floor — mostly dead flowers, fallen from the canopy — but there was also one huge rafflesia: a single flower a yard across, leafless, its maroon petals thick, leathery and coated with warts. A revolting stench of putrescence came from its interior, and flies, mesmerized by the scent, swarmed around the vast cup.
Arrow Maker, preoccupied, walked around the grotesque bloom.
“…Where in Lethe have you been?”
Uvarov’s chair came rolling toward Maker, out of the shadows of his shelter.
Maker, startled, stumbled backwards. “I stopped to gather figs. They were ripe. I met my daughter — Spinner-of-Rope — and — ”
Garry Uvarov was ignoring him. Uvarov rolled his chair back into the shelter, its wheels heavy on the soft forest floor. “Tell me about the stars you saw,” he hissed. “The stars…”
Uvarov’s shelter was little more than a roof of ropes and palm leaves, a web suspended between a cluster of tree trunks. Beneath this roof the jungle floor had been cleared and floored over with crudely cut planks of wood, over which Uvarov could prowl, the wheels of his chair humming as they bore him to and fro, to and fro. There were resin torches fixed to the walls, unlit. Uvarov kept his few possessions here, most of them incomprehensible to Arrow Maker: boxes fronted by discs of glass, bookslates worn yellow and faded with use, cupboards, chairs and a bed into which Uvarov could no longer climb.