There is no need to keep pointing that barbaric weapon at me, Divivvidiv said as Toller got free of his skysuit and took the pistol from Steenameert to enable him to strip down as well. I told you that logic will prevail over force.
“In that case you have nothing to be alarmed about,” Toller replied comfortably, “if it comes to a falling out, you can fire syllogisms at me and I will have to make do with firing mere bullets at you.”
You grow complacent.
“And you grow tiresome, greyface. Tell me how you plan to retrieve the women and thus preserve your own life.”
Divivvidiv projected feelings of exasperation. I have a question for you, Toller Maraquine. It may seem irrelevant to our circumstances, but if you will control your impatience for a short time understanding will come. Is that reasonable?
Toller nodded reluctantly, with an uneasy suspicion that he was being manipulated.
Good! Now, how many worlds are in your planetary system?
“Three,” Toller said. “Land, Overland and Farland. My paternal grandfather—whose name I am proud to bear—died on Farland.”
Your knowledge of astronomy is deficient. Has it not come to your attention that there are now four worlds in the local system?
“Four worlds?” Toller stared at Divivvidiv, frowning, as he half-remembered someone having spoken to him in recent days about a blue planet. “Now four worlds? You speak as if a new world had been added to our little flock by magic.”
That is exactly what has happened—although no magic was involved. Divivvidiv leaned forward. My people have transported their home planet—which is called Dussarra—across hundreds of light years. They plucked it from its ancient orbit about a distant sun, and they placed it in a new orbit about your sun. Does that suggest anything to you about their powers?
“Yes—powers of imagination,” Toller said with a show of scorn in spite of a dreadful conviction that the alien was presenting the unvarnished truth. “Even if you could move an entire world, how could its inhabitants survive in the coldness and darkness between the stars? How long would such a journey take?”
No time at all! Interstellar travel has to be accomplished instantaneously. The concepts are far beyond your grasp—through no fault of your own—but I will try to implant analogies which will give you some measure of understanding.
Divivvidiv’s inhuman eyes closed for a second. Toller felt a wrenching sensation within his head, disturbing and yet curiously pleasurable, and he gasped as—like a slewing beam from a lighthouse—a flaring intellectual luminance swept through his mind. For one tantalizing instant he seemed on the verge of knowing everything that a complete being ought to know, then there came a wavering, an accelerating slippage, followed by an aching sense of loss as the light moved away from him. The philosophical darkness which rolled in to take its place was, however, less oppressive, less monolithic than before. There were twilight areas. Toller had a fleeting glimpse of vacuums within vacuums; of interstellar space as a spongy nothingness riddled with tubes and tunnels of a greater nothingness; of insubstantial galactic highways whose entrances coincided with their exits…
“I believe, I believe,” he breathed. “But—between us—nothing has changed.”
You disappoint me, Toller Maraquine. Divivvidiv stepped over his discarded suit, which had been drawn to the floor by air currents, and moved closer to Toller. Where is your curiosity? Where is your spirit of scientific enquiry? Do you not wish to know why my people embarked upon such a mammoth venture? Do you think it is a commonplace thing for the members of an intelligent species to transport their home world from one part of a galaxy to another?
“I have already told you—those things are no concern of mine.”
Oh, but they are! They are also the concern of every living creature on every planet of this system. Divivvidiv’s mouth underwent further asymmetrical changes, tugged by the invisible tides of emotion. You see, my people are fleeing for their lives. We are fugitives from the greatest catastrophe in the recent history of the universe. Does that fact not make you the least bit inquisitive?
Toller glanced at Steenameert, who appeared to have frozen halfway through the task of removing his skysuit, and for the first time in days his preoccupation with Vantara and her fate began to loosen its hold on his mind.
“Catastrophe!” he said. “But the stars are billions upon billions of miles apart! Are you talking about some manner of great explosion? If it ever happens I cannot see how—”
It has already happened, Divivvidiv cut in. And it matters little that stars are billions of miles apart—the scale of the explosion was such that upwards of a hundred galaxies will be destroyed by it!
Toller tried to conjure up a mental image to go with the alien’s words, but his imagination baulked. “What could cause such an explo… ? And if it has already happened why are we still here? How can you know about it?”
Divivvidiv was now very close to Toller, and his sweet body odor was thick in Toller’s nostrils. Again, the concepts are beyond you, but…
The slewing beam from the lighthouse was fiercer this time, and Toller’s instinct was to shrink away from it, but there was nothing he could do to protect himself. He shuddered as, within a tiny fraction of a second, his inner model of reality was torn apart and rebuilt, and he found that his newly vouchsafed vision of space as an emptiness riddled with transient wormholes of greater emptiness was a simplification. The cosmos—he now knew, or almost knew—was born in an explosion which was inconceivable in its ferocity, and within a minute its entire volume was permeated by seething masses of ropes. The ropes—comparatively ancient and decaying relics of a period of cosmic history which had spanned a length of time equal to one human breath—had a diameter approximating one millionth of that of a human hair, and were so massive that a single inch weighed as much as an average-sized planet. They writhed and twisted and oscillated, and in their blind contortions they decided nothing less than the disposition of matter throughout the universe: the patterns of galaxies, the patterns of clusters of galaxies, the patterns of sheets of clusters of galaxies.
As the universe grew older—and intelligent life made its first appearance—the ropes grew fewer in number. Their incredible stores of energy squandered by their frenzied threshings and twistings, by the propagation of gravitational waves, they became more of a cosmic rarity. As they slowly erased themselves from existence the universe became more stable, a safer place for frail biological constructs such as human beings—but it was not homogenous. There were anomalous regions in which ropes remained plentiful, so plentiful that interactions and collisions were bound to occur, with consequences beyond the descriptive powers of any system of mathematics.
At one location no less than twelve ropes had intersected and yielded up their total energy in an explosion which was destined to annihilate perhaps a hundred galaxies, and to have a profound effect on a further thousand. No living creature would ever see the explosion, so close was the speed of its fronts to that of light, but intelligent beings—using data gathered by subspace probes—could deduce its existence. And once the deduction had been made there was only one thing left to do.