Mark was grinning, his voice animated by excitement. “Do you see it?”
“Yes, Mark,” she said patiently, “but you’re going to have to tell me what I’m seeing.”
“There’s a major disturbance in the gravitational gradients at that magnetic pole.” Arrows clustered around the star’s pole, forming themselves into a two dimensional plane. “Can you see it?”
“What about it?”
Mark sounded impatient. “Lieserl, I think there’s a sheet discontinuity down there. A two-dimensional defect. A domain wall, inside the star…”
Lieserl frowned. “That’s impossible.”
“Of course it is.” He grinned. “How could a domain-wall defect form within the structure of a neutron star? Impossible… unless it’s been put there.”
Uvarov’s ruined mouth stretched into a smile. “Put there?”
“We wondered how come this neutron star was out here on its own — away from any galaxy, and moving so bloody fast. Well, now we know.”
Lieserl found herself laughing. “This is outrageous. Are you suggesting — ”
“Yes,” he said seriously. “I think someone, maybe human, installed a discontinuity drive at the magnetic pole of this neutron star, and used it to hurl the whole system across space at close to lightspeed.”
“But that’s absurd,” she said. “Why should anyone do such a thing?”
Now Uvarov laughed, at her. “Still the rationalist, Lieserl, after all our experiences? Well, perhaps we will soon learn the answer to such questions. But of this I’m sure — that it has some connection to this endless, bloody war in Heaven we’ve wandered into.”
The pod’s descent bottomed out, now, and the little ship sailed over the planet’s battered landscape.
At length, Mark said, “We’re over the source of the signals… There,” he said suddenly. “Can you see it?”
Uvarov tilted his head on its thin neck.
Lieserl peered down.
“A structure,” Mark said. “There on the surface… Some kind of building. Come on; I’ll take us down.”
I fell into the future, Spinner-of-Rope, through a network of transient wormholes that collapsed after me. My instruments were smashed, but I knew my lifedome must have been awash with high-energy particles and gravity waves. I was as helpless as a new-born babe.
Poole sat in raw vacuum on the shoulder of the nightfighter with his legs tucked beneath him, lotus-style, his hands resting comfortably, palms-up, on his knees. Spinner could see a grooved pattern, molded mundanely into the soles of his shoes.
He said, I fell across five million years…
Mark Wu — or rather, one of his Virtual consciousness foci, on the Northern — peered at the loop of cosmic string through the hundred eyes of the ship’s sensors. He wasn’t happy: his multifaceted view was muddy, imprecise.
The trouble was, the ship was in orbit around this damn neutron star planet, which was falling through space so fast the observable Universe was relativity shifted into a skinny, pale starbow. It was like being taken back to the Northern’s thousand-year flight. Mark had to deconvolve out the effects of the near-lightspeed motion: to unsmear the Universe back out of the starbow once more.
Mark had subroutines to achieve this. But it was, he thought uneasily, a little like unscrambling an egg. The resulting images weren’t exactly clear.
Inside his box of processors, Mark Wu worked on nanosecond timescales. He could process data at several millions of times the rate achievable by humans, and it sometimes took an effort of will to come back out of there and return to the glutinous slowness of the human world.
It was seven centuries since his physical death and downloading into the AI banks of the Northern, and he’d steadily got more proficient at non-human operation. Right now, for instance, he was maintaining a conventional human Virtual on the pod with Lieserl and Uvarov, and another with Louise in the Great Britain, in parallel with his direct interfacing with the Northern’s systems.
Running these multiple consciousness foci felt odd, but he’d grown used to enduring minor discomforts when the need arose.
And there was need now.
Maybe he should have tried to veto this trip to the neutron star, he thought. It had brought the Northern close — too damn close — to this loop-cloud of cosmic string. When dealing with an object a thousand light-years across, he thought sourly, a separation of a mere handful of light years didn’t seem nearly sufficient.
Mark split off a series of more subordinate foci, and set to scanning overlapping sectors of the sky.
His image of the Universe was a mosaic, constructed of the fragments supplied to him by the sensors; he imagined it was a little like looking out through the multifaceted eyes of a fly. And the Universe was criss-crossed, everywhere, by string double-image paths — it was as if the sky were some huge dome of glass, he thought, marred by huge cracks.
By studying the double images of stars and galaxies, Mark was able to check on the near-lightspeed velocities of the string segments; he constantly updated the internal model he maintained of the local string dynamics, trying to ensure the ship stayed a safe distance away from -
A watchful subroutine sounded an alarm. It felt to Mark like a prickling of vague unease, a shiver.
…There was movement, in the field of view of one sensor bank. He swiveled his consciousness, fixing most of his attention on the anomaly picked up by that sensor bank.
Against a background provided by a beautiful, blue-stained spiral galaxy, he saw a double track of multiple stellar images.
There had to be two lengths of string there, he realized: two arcs of this single, huge loop of string, no more than light-hours apart. And he could see from the melting flow of the star images that the arcs were sliding past each other in opposite directions; maybe eventually they would intersect.
In some places there were three images of single stars. Light from each of those stars was reaching him by three routes — to the left of the string pair, to their right, and straight through the middle of the strings.
The cause of the alert was obvious. All along the double tracks, he saw, star images were sliding, as if slipping across melting spacetime. These strings must be close — maybe even within the two-light-year limit he’d imposed on himself as a rough safety margin.
He ran a quick double-check on the routines he’d set up to monitor the strings’ distance from the ship. He wondered if he ought to tell Louise and Spinner about this…
Now, suddenly, alarm routines shrieked warnings into his awareness. It was like being plunged into an instant panic; he felt as if adrenaline were flooding his system.
What in Lethe —
He interrogated his routines, briskly and concisely. It took only nanoseconds to figure out what was wrong.
The pair of string arcs were closer than he’d thought at first. His distance estimation routines had been thrown by the interaction of the two strings, by the way the pair jointly distorted star images.
So the strings were closer than his monitoring systems had told him. The trouble was, he couldn’t tell how close; maybe they were a lot closer.
Damn, damn. I should have anticipated this. Feverishly he set off a reprogramming routine, ensuring that for the future he wouldn’t be fooled by multiple images from pairs of string lengths like this — or, indeed, from any combination.