“Spinner, we’ve traveled a hundred and fifty million light years. We’re reaching the end of the programmed hyperdrive jumps…
“It’s nearly over, Spinner-of-Rope. We’re almost there.”
As the faceplate worked, dim forms emerged — the moth-like forms of galaxies, far away, all around her. She saw spirals, ellipticals, gigantic irregulars: huge clusters of galaxies in their characteristic threads and sheets, the whole vision looking impossibly fragile.
But there was something odd about the pale images.
“We’ve arrived, Spinner-of-Rope,” Louise said. “We are at the center of things.”
Blue shift, Spinner-of-Rope. Blue shift, everywhere… Can you see it?
Yes. The galaxies — all around her sky — were tinged blue, she realized now. Blue shift.
She had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.
PART V
Event: Ring
27
The nightfighter — with its fragile cargo of humans, and traveling thirty-five light-years with every hyperdrive jump — arced down toward the disc of the scarred galaxy. Spinner-of-Rope sat in her cage, letting the waldoes run through their program; in the corner of her eye, telltales winked reassuringly.
This galaxy was a broad spiral, with multiple arms tightly wrapped around a compact, glowing core. The star system was a pool of rust red, punctuated with the gleam of novae and supernovae: thus, she saw, the galaxy had not escaped depredation at the hands of the photino birds. And the gleaming disc was disfigured by one stunning feature: a huge gouge of a scar, a channel of dust and glowing star-stuff that cut right across the disc, from rim to core.
Now the nightfighter, flickering through hyperspace, neared the rim of the disc, close to the termination of the scar.
This might have been the original Galaxy of humans, Spinner thought, and she wondered if Louise Armonk was sitting under the skydome over the forest, peering out at this freight of stars. Maybe this nostalgic similarity was the reason Louise and the rest had chosen this particular galaxy, out of hundreds of thousands around the cavity, for a closer study.
Suddenly the plane of the disc loomed up at her — and the nightfighter slid neatly into the notch gouged out of the disc.
“Good navigation, Louise,” she said. “Right down the channel.”
“Well, it wasn’t so hard to hit. The channel is over two thousand light-years wide, and as straight as one of your blowpipes. The channel was cut so recently that the galaxy’s rotation hasn’t had time to distort it too far — although, in another few hundred thousand years there will be barely a trace of this feature left…”
The ’fighter plunged along the gouge, and the view was spectacular. Above her was the gaunt, galaxy-stained sky of the Attractor; below and around her was an open tunnel of stars, hurtling past her. Looking ahead, it seemed she could see all the way to the gleaming core of the galaxy. It was difficult to remember that this neat star-walled valley was no less than fifty thousand light-years long…
At thirty-five light-years a second, the ship would reach the core in under thirty minutes.
Now the ’fighter dived into a bank of opaque dust — and then exploded out again, the stars gleaming crimson and gold in the walls of the galaxy-spanning tunnel.
Spinner punched her fist into her palm and whooped.
She heard Louise laugh. “You’re enjoying the ride, Spinner-of-Rope?”
There were voices behind Louise Armonk. “I see it.” Excited, shouting. “I see it — ”
I see it, too.
Spinner turned in her chair, the restraints riding up awkwardly across her chest. The voice had sounded as if it had come from her left.
It had been the voice of the man from her forest dreams, of course. She almost expected to see that slim, dark form, sitting out there beyond the cage: that sixty-year-old face, the hair of gray pepper-speckled with black, the vulnerable brown eyes…
Somehow, she felt he was coming closer to her. He was emerging.
But there was nobody there. She felt disappointed, wistful.
“That was Morrow, butting in,” Louise was saying. “I’m sorry, Spinner. Do you want me to patch you into the conversation?… Spinner? Did you hear me? I said — ”
“I heard you, Louise,” she Said. “I’m sorry. Yes, patch me in, please.”
“…straight ahead of us, at the end of this gouge,” Morrow was saying. “There… there… See?”
“Spinner, I’ll download our visuals to you,” Louise said.
Spinner’s faceplate image was abruptly overlaid with false colors: gaudy reds, yellows and blues, making detail easy to discriminate.
The glowing walls of the star valley dwindled into a dull mist at infinity. And at the end of the valley — almost at the vanishing point itself — there was a structure: a sculpture of thread, colored false blue.
“I see it,” Spinner breathed. Subvocally, she called for magnification.
“Do you know what you’re looking at, Spinner?” Louise’s flat voice contained awe, humility. “It’s what we suspected must have gouged out this valley. It’s a fragment of cosmic string…”
At the center of an immense cavity, walled by crowded galaxies, Lieserl and Mark rotated slowly around each other, warm human planets.
The sky was peppered with the dusty spirals of galaxies, more densely than the stars in the skies of ancient Earth. But the cavity walls were ragged and ill defined, so that it was as if Lieserl was at the center of some immense explosion. And every one of the galaxies was tinged by blue shift: the light from each of these huge, fragile star freights was compressed, visibly, by its billion-year fall into this place.
Mark took her hand. His palm was warm against hers, and when he pulled gently at her arm, her body slowly rotated in space until she faced him.
“I don’t understand,” Lieserl said. “This — cavity — is empty. Where’s the Ring?”
The light of a hundred thousand galaxies, blue-shifted, washed over his face. Mark smiled. “Have patience, Lieserl. Get your bearings first.
“Look around. We’ve arrived at a cavity, almost free of galaxies, ten million light-years across: a cavity right at the site of the Great Attractor. The whole cavity is awash with gravitational radiation. Nothing’s visible, but we know there’s something here, in the cavity… It just isn’t what we expected.”
Lieserl raised her face to stare around the crowded sky, at the galaxies embedded in the walls of this immense cave of sky. One galaxy with an active nucleus — perhaps a Seyfert emitted a long plume of gas from its core; the gas, glowing in the search-light beam of ionizing radiation from the core, trailed behind the infalling galaxy like the tail of some immense comet. And there was a giant elliptical which looked as if it was close to disintegration, rendered unstable by the fall into the Attractor’s monstrous gravity well; she could clearly see the elliptical’s multiple nuclei, orbiting each other within a haze of at least a thousand billion stars.
Some of the galaxies were close enough for her to make out individual stars — great lacy streams of them, in disrupted spiral arms — and, in some places, supernovae glared like diamonds against the paler tapestry of lesser stars. She picked out one barred-spiral with a fat, gleaming nucleus, which trailed its loosening arms like unraveling bandages. And there was a spiral heartbreakingly like her own Galaxy — undergoing a slow, stately collision with a shallow elliptical; the galaxies’ discs had cut across each other, and along the line where they merged exploding stars flared yellow-white, like a wound.