Close your eyes. Think about your vision again — of the string loop, cutting through the stars. It frightened you, didn’t it? What did that image mean, Spinner-of-Rope? What was it telling you?
Suddenly she saw it.
“Mark,” she said. “This is not just a gravitational rocket.”
“What?”
“Think about it. The string knot must be a missile.”
The galaxy images dimmed, leaving Mark and Lieserl suspended in a crimson-tinged darkness. Then, against that background, new forms began to appear: speckles of light, indistinct, making up the ghostly outline of a torus, its face tipped open toward her.
“Of course this is a false color representation,” Mark said. “The images have been reconstructed from gravity wave and gamma ray emissions…”
The torus as a whole reminded her, distantly, of Saturn’s rings; it was a circle which spanned the galaxy-walled cavity.
At first she thought the component speckles were mere points of light: they were like stars, she thought, or diamonds scattered against the velvet backdrop of the faded galaxy light. But as she looked more closely she could see that some of the nearer objects were not simple points, but showed structure of some kind.
So these weren’t stars, she thought, and nor was this some attenuated galaxy: there were only (she estimated quickly) a few thousand of the shining forms, as opposed to the billions of stars in a galaxy… And besides, this cavity spanning torus was immense: she could see how the blood-dark corpses of galaxies sailed through its sparse structure.
She knew that the Galaxy of humans had been a disc of stars a hundred thousand light-years in diameter. This torus must be at least a hundred times as broad — more than ten million light-years across.
She turned to Mark; he studied her face, a certain kindness showing in his eyes now. “I know how you’re feeling. It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”
“It can’t be the Ring,” she said slowly. “Can it? As far as we know, Jim Bolder reported a solid object — a single, continuous artifact.”
“Look more closely, Lieserl. Cheat a little; enhance your vision. What do you see?”
She turned her head and issued brisk subvocals. A section of the torus exploded toward her; the fragments, rushing apart, gave her a brief, disorienting impression of sudden velocity.
Her view steadied. Now, it was as if she was within the torus itself, and the sparkling component objects were all around her.
The fragments weren’t simple discs — or ellipses, or any of the shapes into which a star or galaxy might be distorted by the presence of others. She could see darkness within the heart of these objects.
The fragments were knots.
“Mark — ”
“You’re looking at loops of cosmic string,” he said calmly. “This immense torus is made up of string knots, Lieserl ten thousand of them, each a thousand light years across.”
She was aware of her hand convulsing closed around his. “I don’t understand. This is — fantastic. But it isn’t the Ring Bolder described.”
He looked distant, wistful. “But it must be. We know we’ve come to the right place, Lieserl. This is undoubtedly the site of the Great Attractor: the loops, together, have sufficient mass to cause the local streaming of galaxies.
“And we know this assemblage must be artificial. Primeval string loops could have formed during the formation of the Universe, after the singularity. But there should have been no more than a million of them — in the entire Universe, Lieserl — spaced tens of millions of light-years apart. It simply isn’t possible for a collection of ten thousand of the damn things to have gathered spontaneously within a cavity a mere ten million light-years across…”
“But,” Lieserl said patiently, “but Bolder said the Ring was solid. If he was right — ”
“If he was right then the Ring has been destroyed, Lieserl. These loops are rubble. We’re looking at the wreckage of the Ring. The photino birds have won.” He turned to her, his face a sculpture, expressionless, obviously artificial. “We’re too late, Lieserl.”
She felt bewildered. “But if that’s true — where are we to go?”
Mark had no answer.
Louise said, “What are you talking about, Spinner?”
“Can’t you see it?” She closed her eyes and watched, once again, as the string loop punched through the fragile superstructure of the galaxy. “Mark — Louise this string loop was aimed, quite precisely. It’s a weapon. It is blasting through this galaxy with its gravitational rockets, destroying all in its path with focused beams of electromagnetic and gravitational energy…”
Louise snapped, “Mark?”
Mark hesitated. “We can’t prove she’s right, Louise. But the chances of the loop hitting such a precise trajectory at random are tiny…”
“It seems crazy,” Morrow said. “Who would dare use a thousand-light-year loop of cosmic string as a weapon of war?”
Uvarov grunted. “Isn’t that obvious? The very entities we have come all this way to seek, from whom we hope to obtain shelter — the Xeelee, Morrow; the baryonic lords.”
“But why?” Mark asked. “Why destroy a galaxy like this?”
“In defense,” Uvarov snapped.
“What?”
“Isn’t that clear too? The Xeelee were masters of the manipulation of spacetime. Their weaponry consisted of these immense structures of spacetime flaws. And the flaws have been used against the weapons of their enemies — like this galaxy.”
There was silence for a moment. Then Morrow said, “Are you insane, Uvarov? You’re saying that this galaxy has been hurled like some rock — deliberately?”
“Why not?” Uvarov replied calmly. “The photino birds are creatures of dark matter — which attracts baryonic matter gravitationally. We can easily imagine some immense dark chariot hauling at this fragile galaxy, hurling it hard through space…
“Think of it. The photino birds must have begun to engineer the deflection of this galaxy’s path many millions of years ago — perhaps they were intent on launching this huge missile at the Ring long before men walked on the Earth. And the Xeelee must have been preparing their counter, this loop of string, over almost as great a timescale.”
Now Spinner-of-Rope felt a bubble of laughter, wild, rise in her own throat. She had an absurd image of two giants, bestriding the curving Universe, hurling galaxies and string loops at each other like lumps of mud.
“We are truly in the middle of a war zone,” Uvarov said coldly. “This galaxy, with the bullet of cosmic string aimed so accurately at its heart, is merely one incident among ten million in a huge battlefield. To our fleeting perceptions the field is frozen in time — we buzz like flies around the bullet as it hurtles into the chest of its target — and yet the battle rages all around us.”
Don’t be afraid.
Spinner closed her eyes and thought of the forest dream man, smiling at her from his tree and eating his fruit…
I know who this is, she realized suddenly. I’ve seen his face, in Louise’s old Virtuals…
“I know you,” she told him.
Yes. Don’t be afraid, said Michael Poole.
28
Louise Armonk asked Spinner to take the nightfighter to the source of Mark’s anomalous hydrogen-band signal.