The chimp says nothing.
«For the sake of argument,» I say after a while, «suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?»
«A favor,» the chimp replies. «To be repaid in future.»
My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.
We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion increments of a life's moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling each other into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer
And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works, and what doesn't. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.
But I believe in the Island, because I don't have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can't help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.
I believe in the Island. I've gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.
I may yet.
In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.
Final approach.
Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerising infinite regress of bullseyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.
Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair — if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters — we will be dead. Before we know it.
Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically-displaced mass.
I turn to the drone's-eye view relayed from up ahead. It's a window into history — even now, there's a timelag of several minutes — but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly-minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, re-enlist them for the next build — but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it's cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.
A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.
At least we've spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?
I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds. Angels do not speak to ants.
Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri's incidental time machine barely looks into the past any more, I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.
Tactical beeps at us. «Getting a signal,» Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thankyou, perhaps? A cure for heat death? But —
«It's ahead of us,» Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.
Two minutes.
«Miscalculated somehow,» Dix whispers. «Didn't move the gate far enough.»
«We did,» I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.
«Still in front of us! Look at the sun!»
«Look at the signal,» I tell him.
Because it's nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we've followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It's almost — random, somehow. It's spur-of-the-moment, it's panicky. It's the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.
The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.
I wonder if you'll notice the corpse we left behind.
«Maybe we're missing something,» Dix says.
«We miss almost everything,» I tell him.
DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole's online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We'll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it'll do any good.
So far, though, nothing's come out.
«Maybe our numbers were wrong,» he says. «Maybe we made a mistake.»
Our numbers were right. An hour doesn't pass when I don't check them again. The Island just had — enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.
I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…
I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.
«Maybe there was a war,» I mumble. «Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some — family squabble.»
«Maybe didn't know,» Dix suggests. «Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.»
Why would you think that, I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn't, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He's not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.