It had no reason to think we were lying. It probably just wanted to see for itself. Hell, it didn’t even try to hide its actions: the telemetry from at least two probes was sitting right there in the op logs, waiting for anyone with a couple of megasecs to kill.
Then again, neither did the Chimp go out of its way to raise the subject. So we didn’t either. It became our mutual unspoken secret, that awkward truth that everyone knows but no one speaks aloud for fear of ruining the vibe at the family get-together.
In a weird way, I suppose that made the Chimp a coconspirator.
“I enter the Black Cauldron,” Yukiko Kanegi said. “Alert for the ice monster.” By which she meant The Chimp’s somewhere around the ventral mass cache.
“You catch a glimpse of it in your torchlight before it disappears,” I told her. By which I meant Not any more. Fucker’s gone.
Social alcove halfway between core and crust, starboard equatorial, a half-hearted half-gee holding us down. The game board sat on its stand between us: a multilevel dungeon two meters across and almost as high, each wall and chamber and booby-trap fabbed lovingly by hand. Gaetano had acquired a taste for role-playing strategy games over the past few gigs. This was his ode to that ancient pastime, a physical game of his own design. You moved your pieces manually through the labyrinth (the levels came apart and snapped back together for easy access) seeking treasure, avoiding traps, fighting monsters. Dice with fifty facets decided the outcome of probabilistic encounters. It was quite charming when you got into it.
Gaetano called it Teredo. I never asked why.
If you flipped the lower half of that dungeon upsidedown in your mind, and imagined that certain other elements were stretched just so, you might notice a certain topological equivalence to the way Eriophora was laid out. You might almost use it as a kind of map.
Yuki’s character had ventured into the Black Cauldron: either a spring-fed subterranean lake patrolled by blind, ravenous predators or—if you lacked imagination—a lens of rubbery silicon glued into a depression and decorated with tiny plastic stalagmites. It was her piece, but it was following in my footsteps.
“Fuck,” she said now, meaning: Fuck. “I check for traps.” Did it see you coming? Is it on to us?
I made a show of rolling the dice, pretended to take note of whatever number came up. “You find no traps.” Don’t think so. Just changed nodes again.
“Dammit. I was that close. I, um, check for, whaddya call it. Spoor.”
“There’s a frost trail on the rock, straight line, bearing one nine seven degrees.” According to the pings he’s now somewhere in this direction.
“How wide is the frost trail?” How far? Not that she had any real hope I could give her an exact range; latency pings don’t follow a straight line at the best of times. You could always take a stab at an educated guess, though.
“Maybe twenty centimeters?” Twenty kliks?
Her eyes followed an invisible line back from her game piece, came to rest on a larger cavern deep in the bowels of the dungeon. She pursed her lips. “Maybe it’s spawning.”
The Uterus.
I let a coy smile flicker across my game face. “Maybe.”
Yuki snapped her fingers. “Say, before I forget; you check nav since you thawed out?”
“No, wh—” But she’d already thrown a model of the local neighborhood into my head. A filament, fine as spider silk, passed through its heart: Eri’s trajectory. A dimmer thread, dotted and red-shifted, split from it a few lightyears in the past and diverged gradually into the future.
An initial trajectory, and a modified one.
I shrugged. “Course drift. Chimp wakes us up now and then to see if we can explain it.”
Yuki shook her head. “Drift’s still less than a degree. We’re looking at more than three degrees of divergence here.”
It clicked. “We’ve changed course.”
“Yes we have.”
I sacc’d a projection, extended the deviation out a hundred years. It passed through nothing but space. A thousand: dwarfs and Gs, potential builds but no more than if we’d just continued along our original arc. A thousand years: more of the same. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand.
“Huh.”
Two hundred thousand years from now, our current course would take us through an open cluster about thirty-five lightyears across—right into the heart of a red supergiant. Mass spec said thirty-six solar masses, twenty-four million years old. Young, so very young: a mayfly next to Eriophora, barely a whiff of hydrogen condensing in the void when we’d first shipped out.
And yet so very very old: senescent, hydrogen long-since spent, suffused in a caul of incandescent gas cast off during a profligate youth. It lived on helium now; its spectrum reeked of carbon and oxygen and just the slightest hint of neon.
Twenty-four million years dying and not yet dead.
Wouldn’t be long now, though.
This was why the Chimp had relocated: to get close to the firing chamber, to reduce latency to an absolute minimum. Because this was going to be one big nasty build, and there would be no room for error.
Sure it would be a solid petasec before that mattered. The Chimp was never one to procrastinate. Once you know what needs to be done, why wait?
“Chimp.”
“Hello, Sunday.”
I tagged the supergiant. “Are we building a hub?”
“Yes. Do you still want to be on deck when it happens?”
“Damn right I do.”
Yuki’s eyes glittered. “Kind of exciting, right?”
The window closed in my head. Yuki returned her attention to the Teredo board. “In the meantime, though, I’m going to hunt down this ice monster once and for all.”
“Feeling lucky?” I wondered.
“Mark my words.” She met my eye. “The Lord has delivered it into my hands.”
This is how they told it to me when I was a child, before I learned to talk in numbers. This is the way I still remember it best. Maybe you don’t know anything but the numbers. Tough. This is the way I remember it to you:
Imagine a hose. It doesn’t matter what’s inside: water, coolant—blood, if your tastes run to the organic—so long as it’s under pressure. A flexible tube, strained to the limit, anchored at one end.
Chop through it at the other.
It spurts. It convulses. It thrashes back and forth, spewing fluid in great arcing gouts. We call that a wormhole, of the nonrelativistic kind: fixed to a gate on one side but at panicky loose ends on the other.
It writhes that way for centuries, millennia sometimes, bashing against spacetime until another gate boots up further down the road. That new gate calls to it, somehow. The loose end hears the hail, snaps forward across the continuum and locks on for dear life. Or maybe it’s the other way around; maybe the newborn gate reaches out with some infinite elastic hand and snatches the wormhole to its bosom in the blink of an eye. You can look at it either way. The equations are time-symmetric.
Of course, those loose ends aren’t choosy; they’ll close the circuit with anything that fits, whether we approve the union or not. If some natural-born black hole wanders into range before we boot the next stepping stone, that’s it: a dead-end marriage, monogamy unto Heat Death. The gates are designed to put up stop signs in such cases, shut down gracefully and direct any travelers back the way they came, although I don’t know if that’s ever happened. We take steps to see it doesn’t: scan the route ahead for lensing artifacts, steer clear of any reefs that might prove too seductive.