He pushed the crude control as far forward as it would go. The pod hurtled past the spine. He felt mesmerized, bound up in the extraordinary events around him, beyond any remnants of fear.
Once again a frame of light embraced the pod, expanding, enclosing, like a swallowing mouth. This time, the frame was triangular, not rectangular; it was rimmed by blue light, not silver-white. And it contained — not a bleak, charcoal-gray emptiness — but a pool of golden light, elusive, shimmering.
There were stars in that pool. How ironic it was, thought Arrow Maker, that perhaps here at last he would find the stars of which old, mad Uvarov had dreamed.
The ghost-man — Mark — was still speaking to him, urgently; but the ghost was crumbling into cubes of light, which scattered in the air, shrinking and melting.
Arrow Maker barely noticed.
Suddenly, she thought she understood.
She spoke rapidly. “Uvarov, listen. Please. The skydome above the forest isn’t truly transparent. It’s semisentient — it’s designed to deconvolve the distorting effects of the flight, to project an illusion of stars, of normal sky. Garry, can you hear me? The skydome shows a reconstruction of the sky and I think you’ve forgotten that it’s a reconstruction. The forest people can’t have seen the stars.” She tried to find words to reach this man, whom she’d first known a thousand years ago. “I’m sorry, Garry. I truly am. But you must make him turn back.”
“Louise.” Mark’s voice was clipped, urgent. “Arrow Maker is not responding. I’m starting to break up; we’re already within the exoticity field of the Interface, and — ”
Uvarov screamed, “The Interface, Arrow Maker! You’ll travel back across five million years — tell them we’re here, that we made it, Arrow Maker!”
Now there were other voices on Uvarov’s link: a man, a girl. “Maker! Maker! Come back…”
Mark’s voice faded out.
On Louise’s desk, the gleaming, toylike images, of pod and Interface, converged.
The blue-white framework was all around him now, its glow flooding the cabin of the pod with shadowless light and banishing the spine and lifedome, as if they were insubstantial. The pod shuddered, its framework glowing blue-violet.
The voice of Spinner-of-Rope, his daughter, became indistinct.
He called to her: “Look after your sister, Spinner-of-Rope.”
He couldn’t make out her reply. Soon there was only the tone of her dear voice, pleading, pressing.
A tunnel — lined by sheets of light, shimmering, impossibly long — opened out before him.
He sank into the golden pool, and even Spinner’s voice was lost.
Louise massaged her temples and closed her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Not now.
She remembered how it had become clear — early in the flight, after a shockingly short time — that the Northern’s fragile artificial society was going to collapse. Mark had helped her understand the cramped social dynamics going on inside the lifedome: the dome contained a closed system, he said, with positive socio-feedback mechanisms leading to wild instabilities, and…
But understanding hadn’t helped them cope with the collapse.
The first rebellion had been inspired by one of Louise’s closest allies: Uvarov, who had led his eugenics-inspired withdrawal to the forest. After that Superet or rather, the Planners who had turned the original Superet philosophy into a bizarre ideology — had subverted whatever authority Louise had retained and imposed its will on the remaining inhabitants of the lifedome.
Louise and Mark had withdrawn to this place: to the converted, secure Great Britain. From here Louise had isolated the starship’s essential systems — life support and control — from the inhabitants of the dome. During the long centuries since — long after Mark’s death, long after the occupants of the dome had forgotten her existence — she had watched over the swarming masses within the lifedome: regulating their air, ensuring the balance of the small, enclosed ecologies was maintained, guiding the ship to its final destination.
What the people did to each other, what they believed, was beyond her control. Perhaps it always had been. All she strove to do was to keep as many as possible of them alive.
But now, if the wormhole was lost, it had all been for nothing. Nothing.
The kinetic energy of the pod shattered the spacetime flaw that was the wormhole. The portal behind it imploded at lightspeed, and gravitational waves and exotic particles pulsed around the craft.
Arrow Maker felt the air thicken in his lungs, cold settling over his bare skin. The pod jolted, and he was almost thrown out of his seat; calmly he unwrapped Spinner’s liana-rope from his waist and tied it around his torso and the seat, binding himself securely.
He held his hands before his face. He saw frost, glistening on his skin; his breath steamed in the air before him.
The pod’s fragile hull cracked and starred; one by one the craft’s systems — its heating, lights, air — collapsed under the hammer-blows of this impossible motion.
Through a transient network of wormholes which collapsed behind him in storms of heavy particles and gravity waves. Arrow Maker fell across past and future, the light of collapsing spacetime playing over his shivering flesh.
Light flared from the Interface. It gushed from every face of the tetrahedron like some liquid, bathing the Northern in violet fire.
It was like a small sun.
The starship shuddered. The steady glow of the GUT-drive flickered — actually flickered, for the first time in centuries. The Britain, old and fragile in its cradle, rocked back and forth, and Louise heard a distant clatter of falling objects, the incongruously domestic sound of sliding furniture.
All over the lifedome, lights flickered and died.
14
He was the last man.
He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light against which all phenomena are shadows.
Time wore away, unmarked.
And then —
There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.
From around an impossible corner a human entered the box. He sat in a battered, fragile craft which tumbled through space. A rope was wrapped around his waist, and he was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.
He stared out at the stars, astonished.
Spacetime-fire erupted into the box, finally engulfing the little craft.
Something had changed. History had resumed.
Michael Poole’s extended awareness stirred.
PART III
Event: Sol
15
Louise Ye Armonk stood on the pod’s short ladder. Below her, the ice of Callisto was dark, full of mysterious depths in the smoky Jovian ring-light.