Louise felt something move inside her; the lifedome looked so beautiful — so fragile.
She stared around at the familiar polished walls of her room — it was actually two of the old ship’s state rooms, knocked together and converted. Here was the center of her world, if anywhere was; here were her few pieces of old furniture, her clothes, her first, antique data slate — which still contained the engineering sketches of the Great Britain she’d prepared during her first visit to the old ship as a teenager, five million years and half a Universe away. If only, she thought, if only she could pull this room around her like some huge wooden blanket, never to emerge into the complex horrors of the world…
But here was Mark, politely sitting on the corner of her bed and watching her face. And now he said quietly: “Here it comes, Louise.”
She forced herself to look at the Virtual of the lifedome.
Mark pointed at the mid-section of the lifedome. A horizontal line of blue-white light appeared; it shimmered bale-fully against the clear substance of the lifedome, like a sword blade.
“The string has sliced into us from this side. I guess we can be grateful the relative velocity was actually quite low…”
The string cut easily into the substance of the dome, like a hot wire into butter.
Louise, watching in the silence of her room, felt as if the string were cutting into her own body; she imagined she could hear the shriek of lost air, the screams of her helpless human charges.
Mark looked blank as his processors worked. He said rapidly, “The wake took a slice out of the hull tens of yards thick. Lethe. We’re losing a lot of air, Louise, but the self repair systems are working well… A lot of our infrastructure has gone down quickly — too damn quickly; I think we need to take a look at our redundancies again, if we make it through this…”
“And the Decks? What’s happening in there?”
He hesitated. “I can’t tell, Louise.”
She felt useless; the control panels in the room mocked her with their impotence. She felt the blame for this ghastly accident fall on her shoulders, like a tangible weight. I’m responsible for bollixing up those distance evaluation routines. I’m responsible for insufficient redundancy — and for losing touch with Spinner-of-Rope in the cage, just when we need her most. If only I could talk to Spinner, maybe she could get us out of here. If only —
“The geometry of the string is just as theory predicted,” Mark said. “I’m getting measurements of pi in the regions around the string… 3.1402, compared to the flat-space value of 3.1415926… The conical space has an angle deficit of four minutes of arc.
“At this moment we have a quarter-mile length of string, actually inside the lifedome, Louise. That’s a total mass of four hundred billion billion tons.” Mark looked bemused. “Life, Louise, think about that; that’s the mass of a fair sized moon…”
Her introspection was futile. The destruction of the life dome could be suddenly — mere seconds away. And, in the end, she was helpless. All I could do, in those last, frantic moments, was sound the damn klaxon…
There was a whisper of spider-web light above Spinner. She could see how the string made the stars slide across the sky, just above the lifedome. The encroaching string was like the foregathering of some huge, supernatural storm around the Northern.
Don’t be afraid…
She twisted in her couch and tightened her restraints. “What in Lethe do you expect me to be?” she yelled at Poole. “We’ve been hit by a length of cosmic string, damn it. This could finish us off. I have to get us out of here.” She placed her hands on the waldoes. “But I don’t know what to do. Louise? Louise, can you hear me?”
You know she can’t.
Feverishly, Spinner said, “Maybe we’re already hit; maybe that’s why the connection went down. But what if she managed to program a routine into the waldoes before we lost the connection? Maybe — ”
Come on, Spinner-of-Rope. You know that’s not true.
“But I have to move the ship!” she wailed. The thump of her heartbeat sounded impossibly loud in the confined space of the helmet. “Can’t you see that?”
Yes. Yes, I see that.
“But I don’t know how — or where — without Louise…”
A hand rested over hers. Despite the thickness of her glove fabric, she could feel the warm roughness of Michael Poole’s palm.
I will help you. I’ll show you what you must do.
The invisible fingers tightened, pushing her hands against the waldoes. Behind her, the nightfighter opened its wings.
Morrow, crumpled against the Deck beside the crushed body of Planner Milpitas, stared up into the wake of the cosmic string.
The structure of the middle Decks was fragile; it simply imploded into the string wake. Morrow saw homes which had stood for a thousand years rip loose from the Deck surfaces as if in the grip of some immense tornado; the buildings exploded, and metal sheets spun through the air. The newer structures, spun across the air in zero-gee, crumpled easily as the wake passed. Much of the surface of Deck Two was torn loose and tumbled above him, chunks of metal clattering into each other. Morrow saw patterns of straight lines and arcs on those fragments of Deck: shards of the soulless circular geometry which had dominated the Deck’s layout for centuries.
People, scattered in the air like dolls, clattered against each other in the wake. The string passed through a Temple. The golden tetrahedron — the proudest symbol of human culture — collapsed like a burst balloon around the path of the string, and shards of gold-brown glass, long and lethal, hailed through the air.
And now the string passed through another human body, that of a hapless woman. Morrow heard the banal, mundane sounds of her death: a scream, abruptly cut off, a moist, ripping sound, and the crunch of bone, sounding like a bite into a crisp apple.
The woman’s body, distorted out of recognition, was cast aside; tumbling, it impacted softly with the Deck.
The wake of a cosmic string… The wake was the mechanism that had constructed the large-scale structure of the Universe. It was the seed of galaxies. And we have let it loose inside our ship, Morrow thought.
Once the string passed through the lifedome completely, the Northern would die at last, as surely as a body severed from its head…
Morrow, immersed in his own pain, wanted to close his eyes, succumb to the oblivion of unconsciousness. Was this how it was to end, after a thousand years?
But the quality of the noise above him — the rush of air, the screams — seemed to change.
He stared up.
The string, still cutting easily through the structure, had slowed to a halt.
“Mark,” Louise hissed. “What’s happening?”
The string had cut a full quarter-mile into the lifedome. For a moment the blue glowing string hovered, like a scalpel embedded in flesh.
Then the Virtual display came to life once more. The electric-blue string executed a tight curve and sliced its way back out of the lifedome, exiting perhaps a quarter-mile above its entry point.
Louise wished there was a god, to offer up her thanks.
“It’s done a lot more damage on the way out — but we are left with an intact lifedome,” Mark said. “The ’bots and autonomic systems are sealing up the breaches in the hull.” He looked up at Louise. “I think we’ve made it.”
Louise, floating above her bed, hugged her knees against her chest. “But I don’t understand how, Mark.”