Poole sat, apparently relaxed, on the ’fighter shoulder; his eyes were closed, his head bent forward. I remember the lifedome of my GUTship entering the Interface, he said slowly. There was light — like fire, blue-violet — from all around the lip of the dome. I knew that was the flesh of the Spline, burning up against the Interface’s exotic-matter framework. I remember — a sense of loss, of alienation.
“Loss?”
I was passing out of my time frame. Spinner-of-Rope, each of us — (he raised translucent hands) — even I — is bound into the world by quantum functions. I was linked non-locally to everything I had touched, seen, tasted… Now, all those quantum bonds were broken. I was as alone as any human had ever been.
I engaged the hyperdrive.
Bits of the wormhole seemed to fall away. I remember streams of blue-white light… I almost believed I could feel those hard photons, sleeting through the lifedome.
Spacetime is riddled with wormholes: it is like a sheet of flawed glass, crazed by cracks. When Poole set off his hyperdrive inside the wormhole, it was as if someone had smashed at that flawed glass with a hammer. Cracks exploded out from the point of impact and widened; they joined up in a complex, spreading network of cracks, a tributary pattern that continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.
The spacetime cracks opened up like branching tunnels, leading off to infinity… Poole smiled, self-deprecating. I started to wonder if this had been a good plan, after all.
The pod sailed down from the Northern’s lifedome.
Lieserl sat in a Virtual projection of a pod couch beside Mark Wu; ahead of them blind Uvarov was swathed in his blankets, his cavern of a mouth gaping, his breath a rattle. The huge discontinuity-drive wings of the nightfighter spread over the pod like the vaulted roof of some immense church.
Far below the pod revolved the bleak, airless planet to which they were descending. Staring down as the small island of solidity loomed out of the glowing fog, Lieserl had a sudden — and quite absurd — feeling of vertigo. She felt as if she were suspended, in this couch, without protection far above the planet’s surface; she had an impulse, which she suppressed with determination, to grip the sides of her couch.
Vertigo… After all her experiences inside the Sun, and despite her perfect knowledge that she couldn’t be harmed even if the pod exploded here and now since she was little more than a Virtual projection from the Northern’s main processors, with augmentation from the pod’s processor banks — after all that, she had vertigo.
Still, she thought, it was comforting to know that she’d retained enough humanity to be just a little scared. Maybe she should tell Mark; it might make him think a little better of her.
Beyond the pod’s clear hull, the neutron star system was a huge tableau all around them.
The neutron star itself was a tiny, fierce yellow-red ball. It had a companion a normal star — and it was surrounded by a ring of gas, which glowed softly. And there were several planets, orbiting the neutron star, inside the smoke ring.
In fact, the anomalous signal was coming from one of the planets, the little world toward which Lieserl was now descending.
The nightfighter had dropped them into the ring of smoke which orbited the star. It was like descending into fog. Close to the pod Lieserl could see dense swirls of the ring gas — clumps and eddies of turbulent stuff — and, beyond that, the rest of the ring was a band of pale light bisecting the Universe. She could see the neutron star itself, a small, hard coal glowing yellow-red at the heart of this ring of smoke. Beside it hung its companion star huge, pale, distorted into a squat egg-shape by the neutron star’s fierce gravitational field. Tendrils of gas led from the carcass of the companion and reached blindly toward the neutron star.
And beyond that, tilted crazily compared to the gas torus, was a starbow.
This neutron star was moving with extraordinary speed: it plummeted across space at close to the speed of light. As a result of this high velocity, the neutron star and its system were the only visible objects in Lieserl’s Universe. All of the rest — the blue-shifted galaxies, the nearby wall of cosmic string — was compressed into that pale starbow, a band of light around the equator of the star’s motion. And away from the starbow, there was only darkness.
Uvarov tilted his head, and the pod’s internal lights cast shadows across his imploded eye-sockets. “Tell me what you see,” he hissed.
“I see a neutron star,” Mark said. “An unexceptional member of its species. Just ten miles across, but with a mass not much less than Sol’s… What has made this one unusual is the fact that it has a companion, which is — was — a normal star.”
Before Mark, a Virtual diorama of the neutron star system glittered into existence; the globes of the neutron star and its companion were criss-crossed by lines of false color, showing — Lieserl suspected — gravitational gradients, lines of magnetic flux, and other observables. Bits of text and subsidiary graphics drifted in the air beside the glowing objects.
“Once,” Mark said, “these stars were a binary pair — a spectacular one, since the neutron star must have been a brilliant giant. Somehow, the companion survived the giant’s supernova explosion. But the remnant of that explosion the neutron star — is killing its companion, just the same.” He pointed. “The neutron star’s gravity well is sucking out material from the companion… Look at it, Lieserl; those delicate-looking tendrils of smoke could swallow Jupiter. Some of the companion’s lost matter is falling onto the neutron star itself. And as the mass down there increases, the rotation of the neutron star will glitch — the neutron star must suffer starquakes, quite regularly. The rest of the gas is drifting off to form this ring we’re in, orbiting the neutron star.”
“Do you think the birds caused the supernova explosion, Mark?” Lieserl asked.
He shook his head. “No. The system is too stable… I think the explosion took place long before the birds took an interest.”
“And the companion?”
He smiled, peering up at the complex sky. “Lieserl, that is one star the birds don’t need to kill. The neutron star is doing their work for them.”
The Virtual representation of the neutron star expanded before his face, expelling the companion and the other features from the diorama. Mark peered into a complex knot of light at what looked like one of the star’s magnetic poles.
Lieserl looked away. The planet wasn’t far below, now; slowly it was turning from a ball of rock, suspended in emptiness, into a landscape — bare, bleak, riven by cracks.
“What about the planets?” Lieserl asked. “How could they have survived the supernova?”
“My guess is they didn’t,” Mark said, still staring at the star’s pole. “I think they probably formed after the explosion: coalesced from material in the gas ring, and from debris left over from the explosion itself — maybe from the previous planetary system, if there was one… Lieserl. Lethe. Look at this.”
“What?”
The neutron star Virtual representation swept across the cabin toward her; the little knot of light at the pole was thrust in her face. Lieserl flinched, but stared gamely into the glowing, complex image.