It was, she thought, as if the Universe had been wadded up, compressed into this deep, intense gravity pocket.
Everywhere she caught a sense of motion, of activity: but it was motion on an immense scale, and frozen in time. The galaxies were like huge ships of stars, Lieserl thought, voyaging in toward here, to the center of everything — but they were ships caught suspended by the flashbulb awareness of her own humanity. She longed for the atemporal perspective of a god, so that she could run this immense, trapped diorama forward in time.
“It’s all very beautiful,” she said. “But it almost looks artificial — like a planetarium display.”
Mark grunted. “More like a display of trapped insects. Moths, maybe, drawn in to an invisible gravitational flame. We’re still sifting through the data we’re gathering,” he said softly. “I wonder if any astronomers in human history have ever had such a rich sky to study… even if it does mark the end of time.
“But we’ve found one anomaly, Lieserl.”
“An anomaly? Where?”
He raised his arm and pointed, toward an anonymous-looking patch of sky across the cavity. “Over there. A source in the hydrogen radio band. As far as we can tell it’s coming from a neutron star system — but the neutron star is moving with an immense velocity, not far below lightspeed. Anomalies all round, right? The source is difficult to pick out against all this galactic mush in the foreground. But it’s undoubtedly there…”
“What’s so special about it?”
He hesitated. “Lieserl, it seems to be a signal.”
“A signal? From who?”
“How should I know?”
“Maybe it’s a freak; an artifact of our instruments.”
“Quite possibly. But we’re thinking of checking it out anyway. It’s only a million light-years away.” He smiled ruefully. “That’s all of eight hours’ travel, if you hitch a ride on a nightfighter…”
A signal, here at the end of space and time… Was it possible the motley crew of the Northern wasn’t alone after all?
The hair at the base of her skull prickled. At the end of this long, long life, she’d thought there was nothing left to surprise her.
Evidently, she was wrong.
Mark said, “Lieserl, what you’re looking at here is visible light: the Virtual display we’re drifting around inside is based on images from right at the center of the human visible spectrum. You’re seeing just what any of the others would see, with their unaided vision. But the image has been enhanced by blue shift: red, dim stars have been made to look blue and bright.”
“I understand.”
Now the blue stain faded from the galaxy images, seeping out like some poor dye.
A new color flooded the galaxy remnants, but it was the color of decay dominated by flaring reds and crimsons, though punctuated in places by the glaring blue-white of supernovae. And without the enhancement offered by the blue shift, some of the galaxies faded from her view altogether.
The galaxies had turned into ships of fire, she thought.
Mark’s profile was picked out, now, in colors of blood. “Take a good look around, Lieserl,” he said grimly. “I’ve adjusted out the blue shift; this is how things really are.”
She looked at him curiously; his tone had become hostile, suddenly. Though he still held her hand, his fingers felt stiff around hers, like a cage. “What are you saying?”
“Here’s the result of the handiwork of your photino bird pets,” he said. “In the week since we arrived, we’ve been able to catalog over a million galaxies, surrounding this cavity. In every one of those million we see stars being pushed off the Main Sequence, either explosively as a nova or supernova or via expansion into the red-giant cycle. Everywhere the stars are close to the end of their lifecycles — and, what’s worse, there’s no sign of new star formation, anywhere.”
Suddenly she understood. “Ah. This is why you’ve set up this display for me. You’re testing me, aren’t you?” She felt anger build, deep in her belly. “You want to know how all this makes me feel. Even now — even after we’ve been so close — you’re still not sure if I’m fully human.”
He grinned, his red-lit teeth like drops of blood in his mouth. “You have to admit you’ve had a pretty unusual life history, Lieserl. I’m not sure if any of us can empathize with you.”
“Then,” she snapped, “maybe you should damn well try. Maybe that’s been the trouble with most of human history. Look at all this: we’re witnessing, here, the death of galaxies. And you’re wondering how it makes me feel? Do you think all this has somehow been set up as a test of my loyalty to the human race?”
“Lieserl — ”
“I’ll tell you how I feel. I feel we need a sense of perspective here, Mark. So what if this — this cosmic discontinuity — is inconvenient for the likes of you and me?” She withdrew from him and straightened her back. “Mark, this is the greatest feat of cosmic engineering our poor Universe will ever see — the most significant event since the Big Bang. Maybe it’s time we humans abandoned our species-specific chauvinism — our petty outrage that the Universe has unfolded in a way that doesn’t suit us.”
He was smiling at her. “Quite a speech.”
She punched him, reasonably gently, beneath the ribs, relishing the way her fist sank into his flesh. “Well, you deserve it, damn it.”
“I didn’t mean to imply — ”
“Yes, you did,” she said sharply. “Well, I’m sorry if I’ve failed your test, Mark. Look, you and I — by hook or by crook — have survived the decline and destruction of our species. I know we’re going to have to fight for survival, and I’ll be fighting right alongside you, as best I can. But that doesn’t remove the magnificence of this cosmic engineering — any more than an ant-hill’s destruction to make way for the building of a cathedral would despoil the grandeur of the result.”
Still holding her hand within his stiff fingers, he turned his face to the galaxy-stained sky. His offense at her words was tangible; he must be devoting a great deal of processing power to this sullen rebuke. “Sometimes you’re damn cold, Lieserl.”
Lethe, she thought. People. “No,” she said. “I just have a longer perspective than you.” She sighed. “Oh, come on, Mark. Show me the Ring,” she said.
The sculpture of string, driving itself into the heart of the scarred galaxy, was not symmetrical. It was in the form of a rough figure-of-eight; but each lobe of the figure was overlaid with more complex waveforms — a series of ripples, culminating in sharp, pointed cusps.
“Do you see it, Spinner?” Mark asked. “That is a loop of string nearly a thousand light-years wide.”
Spinner smiled. “That’s not a loop. That’s a knot.”
“It’s moving toward the galactic core at over half the speed of light. It’s got the mass of a hundred billion stars… Can you believe that? It’s as massive as a medium-size galaxy itself. No wonder it’s cutting this swathe through the stars; the damn thing’s like a scythe, driving across the face of this galaxy.”