“Where is he?” Ang fretted. “He’s going to miss it.”
“Never mind,” Trist said gallantly. “I’ve saved an extra kiss for you. Jao’ll have to kiss Smeth. It’ll serve him right.”
“Five…” the crowd chanted. “Four…”
Bram could feel the faint trembling in the floor as Jao’s granddaughter, a hundred and fifty miles overhead in the trunk, began to cancel inertia in order to bring the Bob precisely level. He had to admit that she was an artist at it. In some previous years, before she had become tree systems officer, the Bob had been as much as three or four degrees off. Everybody had had to make the best of it—the clowns would rush out with a big, round target-painted rug and wrestle it into place under the Bob while people egged them on, and Yggdrasil would gradually be corrected over the next few days. But Jao’s granddaughter—he must remember that her name was Enyd—never missed.
“Here’s to all you lovely people and another safe year,” Marg said, raising her glass.
The Bob settled into place, swinging in a small diminishing arc that finally came to rest. More sparklers went off, and noisemakers raised a din. People were shaking hands, kissing, embracing.
Bram felt the shudder.
Others must have felt it, too. Around the arena there was a sudden dip in the noise level, then, as people decided they had been mistaken, things warmed up again.
Trist was staring at the Bob, his eyebrows knit together. Bram followed his lead. The Bob had started swinging again, making a small ellipse that finally settled precisely over the center of the bull’s-eye once again and hovered there, trembling, only a few feet above the floor.
“Your granddaughter’s losing her touch,” Orris teased Ang. “She usually gets it on the first try.”
Bram and Trist exchanged glances. Orris had missed the point, and so had most of the others at the table and in the festivities beyond. The babble of happy ringside voices continued undiminished.
It was not some small adjustment in the angle of radius that had set the Bob swaying again. If that had been the case, the Bob would not have returned to the same spot.
No, something had bumped Yggdrasil here in the interstellar night. Something violent enough to buffet a planetoid-size object stubborn with relativistic mass.
Bram rose to his feet. “I think I’d better—”
And then the thing struck again, knocking him off his feet.
Nobody could miss it this time. People went sprawling, tables overturned, and drinks went flying. Some reflex screaming was going on. The Bob swung in great pendulum arcs over the heads of the crowd. Some wall torches fell to the floor, and a few quick-witted people moved to stamp out the flames. The electric lights flickered, dimmed, then grew bright again.
And from above, where the red-shifted light had been filtering through the lenticule, there was a sudden hideous flare as great snakes of fire flashed by and dopplered through the spectrum.
Orris, white-faced, said, “What’s happening?”
“Everybody better stay put,” Bram said. “There’s a lot of broken glass around.” People were milling around, but the situation seemed to be coming under control again. “Orris, you look after things here. Trist, I’ll need your help.” Trist nodded and rose.
And then, suddenly, Jao was at Bram’s elbow, his forehead bleeding from a gash where he must have fallen against something.
“Better come to the bridge,” Jao said. “Jun Davd’s trapped in the trunk, but I’ve got him on the fiber-optic link. And Smeth’s in touch with his black gang in the engine section.”
“What’s wrong?” Bram asked.
“The galaxy is exploding.”
Bram stared straight ahead into a representation of hell.
The viewscreen that showed the spectrum-corrected forward view was a smear of red-hot coals punctuated by glaring white intersections and eerie violet blobs that throbbed at the headachy limits of vision.
At the center of the screen, a multicolored vortex of fire swirled around a tiny central blaze of eye-hurting brightness. Time was speeded up enough so that Bram could see the crushed stars breaking up, lengthening, feeding their substance into the rushing swirl of light.
Another flattened whirlpool flamed at the edge of the screen, tilted just enough to reveal a similar blinding center. The second vortex seemed even bigger, more violent, than the first.
The whole screen pulsed. At regular intervals of a few seconds, brightness swelled, the field of coals seemed to ripple, and a dazzling shower of sparks danced in front of the view. Each time this happened, Bram felt the floor beneath him shudder, heard the vast creak and groan of the wooden worldlet around him.
“It’s not a literal view, of course,” Jun Davd’s calm voice came over the communications link. “It’s the entire electromagnetic spectrum done in visible light. But I’ve done it in a logarithmic progression, so you can more or less trust your eyes between blue-green and yellow-orange. Then it really starts to stretch out. In the blues, you’re seeing by x-rays. In the far violet, between four thousand and forty-five hundred angstroms, you’re seeing by gamma radiation. And those dull reds are very long radio waves. I had to do it that way so you could make some sense of the view. The dust obscures everything. But infrared gets passed from particle to particle, and some of the energetic gamma punches through.”
“Thank you, Jun Davd,” Bram said. “You must have stayed up all night to do that.”
Jun Davd chuckled. “I don’t imagine there was much sleep for anybody.”
That was true enough. Bram rubbed at his grainy eyes with a fist. They were red, burning. All his joints were stiff.
The others in the long, sweeping loggia that served as this bough’s bridge had suffered equally from lack of sleep. Smeth looked bedraggled, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking up in tufts. Jao and Trist moved as if they had weights attached to their feet, and Bram could see the weary, drawn faces of the people hunched over the monitors.
Mim gave him a wan smile. She was still in her party dress. She had stayed here through the long night, making herself useful. Marg was here, too. She had put Orris to work cleaning up the shambles of the festivities, then she had gotten busy organizing hot food and drink for those on duty.
The bridge itself was fully functional, with everything plugged in, though a lot of unopened cases were still shoved against the rear wall, and some of the equipment was dispersed helter-skelter wherever convenient.
A great gout of incandescence leaped out of the screen. Bram flinched. It reached toward him, a violet serpent with a beady red and orange gut showing through, and writhed offscreen. Bram turned his head to look out the observation wall and saw a cross section of fire flash by, flaring from yellow to red in seconds. Yggdrasil gave a lurch.
“What was that?” Bram said.
“Jet,” Jun Davd said. “I’d estimate it at about twenty-five light-years long and still growing. It’s moving at about three-fourths of the speed of light, but of course it’s emitting a lot of relativistic electrons that are traveling faster.”
Smeth looked around, strain showing on his face. “We swallowed some of the fringes. That was the bump you felt.”
“What caused it?” Bram asked.