“In fact,” Mark said, “the wake is itself observable. Or should be. It imposes a slight Doppler shift on the microwave background radiation. I should be able to see a slightly brighter sky on one side of the invisible string than on the other…”
“And have you seen this?” Uvarov snapped.
“No,” Mark admitted. “Damn it. The Northern couldn’t be a much worse platform for this kind of measurement; the microwave Doppler is below my level of resolution.”
“But do you think you’ve found some image pairs,” Uvarov persisted.
“Yes,” Mark said, sounding excited again. “Two pairs so far, and a few other candidates. The two pairs are aligned, just as you’d expect them to be if a string is the cause…”
“Enough,” Uvarov snapped. He raised his chair into the air above them and prowled across the underside of the sky-dome, his ravaged profile silhouetted against the false colors of the galaxies. “Now tell me what this means. Let us accept, Louise, that your Virtual lover has found a fragment of this — string. So what? Why should we care?”
“We’re in a void, Uvarov,” Louise said patiently. “We’d expect to find string at the heart of huge baryonic structures — like the Great Wall, for instance, a sheet of clusters half a billion light-years long, which — ”
“But we are not at the heart of such a huge baryonic structure. Is that your point, Louise?”
“Yes. That’s the point. There’s no reason why we should find string here, in this void, away from any concentrations of matter.”
“I see. There is nothing out there but dark matter,” Uvarov growled quietly. “Nothing but the photino birds, and their even more exotic cousins — and whatever they’ve chosen to build, here at the heart of their dark empire, far from any baryonic structure.”
Uvarov wheeled to face Louise, his scooters spurting puffs of reaction gas. “If it exists, will the string have any effect on the photino birds?”
“Possibly,” Mark said. “Strings are gravitational defects. Dark matter is influenced by gravity…”
Uvarov nodded. “So perhaps the string is here to do damage to the photino birds. Is that possible? Perhaps the string has been moved here deliberately.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, but I guess it’s possible.” Mark peered up into the dome, his eerie, disembodied head looking bizarre. “Yes. If someone is waging war on the photino birds, then maybe they are using lengths of cosmic string as weapons. Think of that. And more: who in this Universe is capable of such an act, but the Xeelee themselves?
“Lethe — fighting wars with bits of cosmic string. How have they the audacity to even imagine such weapons?”
Louise looked up into the dome’s sketchy, gaudy rendering of the Universe. Suddenly these scraps of data seemed pathetic, their understanding hopelessly limited. Were the final wars for the destiny of the Universe being played out between Xeelee and photino birds, somewhere in this huge void, even now, as she stared up in her blindness and ignorance?
“Keep gathering your data, Mark,” she said. “In another few days we’ll be out of this damn void.”
“We’re like rats, crossing the rim of some huge war zone,” Mark said, his huge face expressionless. “We can barely comprehend the visions around us. And we’re heading for the final battlefield…”
Suspended between Decks, in the middle of a cloud of floating chickens, Mark and Lieserl made love.
Afterwards, Lieserl rested her head against Mark’s bare chest. His skin, under her cheek, was rough, covered in short, tight-curled dark hairs, and slick with sweat — in fact she could taste the sweat, smell its salty tang. She felt a pleasant, moist ache in her thighs.
“I still feel breathless. Maybe I’m too old for this,” she said.
Mark nuzzled her hair. “Then make yourself younger.”
“No.” She pressed her face against his chest. “No, I don’t want to change anything. Let’s keep it just the same, Mark; let’s keep it real.”
“Sure.”
She was silent for a moment. Then, despite herself, she added, “And it is bloody real, you know. A magnificent illusion.”
She felt him smile.
“I told you, I’ve put a lot of time into getting it right,” he said. “This and coffee.”
She laughed, and pulled herself away; her skin parted from his with a soft, moist sucking sound. “I wonder if anyone was watching us.”
Mark stretched; the chickens, fluttering and clucking, swam clumsily through the air away from his arms. He glanced around. “I don’t see anyone. If there was, do you care?”
“Of course not. It might have done them good, in fact. Shaken them up a bit more.”
Lieserl rolled in the air, reached behind her back and began to straighten her hair. The Decks wheeled slowly around her, an immense box of green-furred walls. After the surrender of the Temples, the coming of zero-gee had, slowly, made inroads into the life of the people — the Undermen, as Spinner-of-Rope still called them — who lived here between the Decks. The most noticeable was the cultivation of all of the available surfaces of the Decks; now, the walls and ceilings were coated with meadows, patches of forests, fields of wheat and other crops. The trees grew a little haphazardly, of course, but they were being trained to emerge straight. And, without the pressure of walking feet, the grass in the parks and other areas was beginning to look a little wild.
A huddle of people had gathered under what had been the roof of Deck Two — the underside of Deck One. Mark — or rather a second projection of him — was taking the hesitant, young-old people through a literacy and Virtual usage program. And elsewhere, Lieserl knew, the infrastructure of the Decks was being upgraded to remove the Decks’ enforced reliance on pictograms.
These initiatives gladdened Lieserl. She remembered the world of her brief childhood, drenched in Sunlight and data and Virtuals and sentience: perhaps the most information rich environment in human history. The contrast with the stunted, data-starved environment of the Decks was poignant.
In one spot, close to the surface, she saw Milpitas and Morrow, toiling together. The two old men were constructing a sphere of water, bound together in a frame of wood and reeds: a zero-gee water garden, Morrow had called it. Lieserl remembered his smile. “All part of Milpitas’ therapy,” he’d said.
The whole environment made for a charming prospect: the Decks had evolved away from the bleak, iron-walled prison they’d been under the Planners during the long flight, and turned into a green-lined sylvan fantasy. There were trees growing at you out of the sky, for Life’s sake. And some inspired soul had liberated boxes of wild flower seeds from the Northern’s long-term stores; now the inverted meadows were, more often than not, peppered with bluebells.
The old floors were still coated with the old, boxy homes and factories, of course. But many of the homes had been abandoned; they sat squat on the surface like empty shells. Instead, new homes had been established in the air: rangy, open dwellings, loosely anchored to whichever surface was nearest, or fixed on thin, impossibly fragile spindles.
She held Mark’s hand and drifted through the chicken cloud, drinking in the fowls’ childhood, farmyard smell (…or at least a Virtual, cleaned-up version of it). “You know,” she said, “maybe zero-gee was the best thing that could have happened to this society. Slowly the Decks are turning into a decent place to live.”