Maker described this.
“The spine,” Uvarov said impatiently. “You’re traveling parallel to the spine of the GUTship. Yes, yes; just as I told you. Arrow Maker, can you see the Interface? The wormhole — ”
Arrow Maker leaned forward and peered down, past the seats and stanchions, through the pod’s base. This spine descended for a great distance, its encrustation of parasitic forms dwindling with perspective, until the spine narrowed to a mere irregular line. The whole form was no less than three miles long, Uvarov had told him.
Beyond the spine’s end was a sheet of light which hid half the sky. The light was eggshell-blue and softly textured; it was like a vast, inverted flower petal, ribbed with lines of stronger, paler hue. As Arrow Maker watched he could see a slow evolution in the patterns of light, with the paler lines waving softly, coalescing and splitting, like hair in a breeze. The light cast blue highlights, rich and varying, from the structures along the spine.
He was looking at the GUTdrive: the light came from the primeval energies, Uvarov had told him, which had hurled the ship and all its cargo through space and time for a thousand years.
Silhouetted against the sheet of creation light, just below the base of the spine, was a dark, irregular mass, too distant for Arrow Maker to resolve: that was the tethered ice asteroid, which still — after all these years — patiently gave up its flesh to serve as reaction mass for the great craft. And -
“Uvarov. The Interface. I see it.”
There, halfway down the spine’s gleaming length, was a tetrahedral structure: edged in glowing blue, tethered to the spine by what looked like hoops of gold.
“Good.” He heard a tremulous relief in Uvarov’s voice. “Good. Now, Arrow Maker — look around the sky, and describe the stars you see.”
Arrow Maker stared, beyond the ship. The spine, the Interface, were suspended in darkness.
Uvarov’s speech became rushed, almost slurred. “Why, we might be able to place our position — and the date — by the constellations. If I can find the old catalogs; those damn survivalists in the Decks must have retained them. And — ”
“Uvarov.” Arrow Maker tried to inject strength into his voice. “Listen to me. There’s something wrong.”
“There can’t be. I — ”
“There are no constellations. There are no stars.” Beyond the ship there was only emptiness; it was as if the great ship, with its flaring drive and teeming lifedome, was the only object in the Universe…
No, that wasn’t quite true. He stared to left and right, scanning the equator of the gray-black sky around him; there seemed to be something there — a ribbon of light, too faint to make out color.
He described this to Uvarov.
“The starbow.” Uvarov’s voice sounded much weaker, now. “But that’s impossible. If there’s a starbow we must be traveling, still, at relativistic velocities. But we can’t be.” The old, dead voice cracked. “Maker, you’ve seen the stars yourself.”
“No.” Arrow Maker tried to make his voice gentle. “Uvarov, all I’ve ever seen were points of light in a sky-dome… Maybe they weren’t stars at all.”
If, he thought ruefully, the stars ever existed at all.
He stared at the mass of the spine as it slid upwards past him, suddenly relishing its immensity, its detail. He was glad there were no stars. If this ship was all that existed, anywhere in the Universe, then it would be enough for him. He could spend a lifetime exploring the worlds contained within its lifedome, and there would always be the forest to return to. And -
Light filled the cabin: a storm of it, multicolored cubes and spheres which swarmed around him, dazzling him. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the cubes hurtled together and coalesced.
There was a man sitting beside Arrow Maker, inside the pod, dressed in a gray silver tunic and trousers. His hands were in his lap, folded calmly, and through his belly and thighs Arrow Maker could see the quiver of arrows he’d left on the chair — he could actually see the quiver, through the flesh of the man.
The man smiled. “My name’s Mark — Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Don’t be frightened.”
Arrow Maker screamed.
Lieserl swam with the photino birds through the heart of the bloated Sun. The photino birds appeared to relish Sol’s new incarnation. Plasma oscillations caused energy to flood out of the core, in neutrino-antineutrino pairs, and the birds swooped around the core, drinking in this glow of new radiance.
The matter in the inert, collapsing core had become so compressed it was degenerate, its density so high that the intermolecular forces that governed its behavior as a gas had broken down. Now, the gravitational infall was balanced by the pressure of electrons themselves: the mysterious rule of quantum mechanics called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which ensures that no two electrons can share the same energy level.
But this new state of equilibrium couldn’t last for long, Lieserl realized. The shell of fusing hydrogen around the core continued to burn its way outward, raining helium ash down on the core; and so the core continued to grow, to heat up.
Now that the inner planets were gone, she felt utterly isolated.
Why, even the stone-faced bureaucrats of the Assimilation period had been contact of a sort. She’d found it immensely valuable to be able to share impressions with somebody else — somebody outside her own sensorium. In fact she wondered if it were possible for any human being to remain sane, given a long enough period without communication.
But then again, she thought wryly, she wasn’t a human being…
Into Lethe with that. She closed her eyes and stretched. She took a slow, careful inventory of her Virtual body-image. She wriggled her fingers, relishing the detailed feel of sliding tendons and stretching skin; she arched her back and felt the muscles at the front of her thighs pull taut; she worked her feet forward and back, as if she were training for some celestial ballet, and focused on the slow, smooth working of her ankles and toes.
She was human, all right, and she was determined to stay that way — even despite the way she’d been treated by humans themselves, in her brief, but still vivid, corporeal life. What had she been but a freak, an experiment that had ultimately been abandoned?
She didn’t owe people anything, she told herself.
Maybe.
But again that buried urge to communicate all this gripped her: she felt she had to tell someone about all this, to warn them.
But those feelings weren’t logical, she knew. Since the wormhole telemetry link had been shut down she had no way to communicate anyway. And while she had dreamed, here inside the imperilled heart of the Sun, five million years had worn away in the Solar System outside. For all she knew there might be no humans left alive, anywhere, to hear whatever she might have to say.
…Still, she itched to talk.
Again, maser radiation shone out of a convection cell and sparkled over her, bright and coherent.
Intrigued, she followed the path of one of the convection cells as it swept out of the heart of the Sun, bearing its freight of heat energy; she tried to trace the source of the maser light.
The radiation, she found, was coming from a thin trace of silicon monoxide in the mantle gas. Collisions between particles were pumping the gas with energy, she saw — leaving the monoxide molecules in an unstable, excited state, rotating rapidly.