When William spoke again, his voice had changed.
"There's been detection of Invader activity," he said, and then his words trailed off into a babble that was meaningless to Lilo, but seemed to worry the Traders. The group stirred uncertainly.
25
Lilo-Diana hung on to the harpoon while the animal headed for the deep ocean. It reached the bottom and leveled out, still swimming strongly.
The adrenalin slowly began to wear away, and Lilo was left with the bitter dregs of defeat. She had not killed the beast, and was not likely to. She was not sure if she had even hurt it.
Eventually she let go and the whale vanished in the blue water in front of her. She floated, neither rising or sinking.
Where did she go from here? Her hand touched the intake valve on her chest. She could turn off the suit and drown quickly. Or she could rise to the surface and strike out for shore. She would probably make it with the suit lung feeding her air, but did she want to?
There was something above her.
Without knowing why, she kicked upward to meet it.
It grew rapidly—(below me now, still falling)—and made no attempt to get away from her. The shape hurt her eyes. Yellow? No, many colors—(a deeper yellow than the billowing clouds that now came into view around me, below me, another of the things like the one I had fallen into so many years before)—all colors and all shapes, contained in one shape.
Her stomach lurched, and she was falling.
I don't know how long I fell, but the question probably has no meaning. I was falling through space and time, and through my own life.
It became no longer possible to know who or where I was. Every second of my life existed simultaneously. I was—
standing on a rocky plain beneath a bright light, and knew I was on the world that used to be called Poseidon, but was now two light-years from the sun.
crying, hopelessly, with a depth of feeling never to be equaled in my life, holding the head of a dead man in my lap.
falling through the Jovian atmosphere.
facing the man called Vaffa, watching his weapon rise in slow-motion, hearing an explosion.
holding a knife in my hand, thinking about suicide.
looking at fish in a spinning, circular tank.
running through trees beneath a burning blue sun, laughing.
talking with a man named Quince in the public bath on Pluto.
sitting in a conference room at the hub of a seventy-kilometer wheel, watching a presentation from an alien race.
feeling an erect penis enter my body, with lights flashing around the walls of my room.
facing Vaffa, his gun coming up to kill me.
coming to life in a pool of yellow fluid.
five years old, holding my mother's hand as we followed the transporter carrying our possessions to a new home.
sitting in the green glow of my computer terminal, studying an interesting interpretation of Hotline data.
docking with a huge colony ship orbiting 82 Eridani. The planet was inhabited, and we would have to move on.
fording a stream in America, white water rushing around my knees.
giving birth to Alicia, my second child, on the way to the core.
holding Alicia's hand as she gave birth to my grandson.
facing Vaffa.
dying. Dying again. And again.
I recoiled from it helplessly. All moments had been now. They all vanished, leaving me confused images and almost no memory. The things I remembered were as often in my future as in my past.
It returned, that vertiginous feeling of inhabiting all my past, present, and future at one time. Again I recoiled, and this time rebounded along the four-dimensional length of that long pink worm with a million legs that was my life, from my birth to my many deaths. I was one entity, one viewpoint, one now, I traveled the whole length of my existence, backward and forward, into the future and the past.
I fell back again, disoriented, confused. I had been shown something my mind could not contain, and I felt the memories of it fading already. I existed in too many ways at the same time for me to comprehend it. My eyes would not function, or they presented me with images that my brain could not assimilate.
I don't know how long I rested in that quiet, black place I had come to. There was no time, but all my sisters were there with me. We began to see, a little. Something swam into my detached consciousness, a strange thing that I perceived without actually seeing it. Strange as it was, it was closer to familiarity than anything else around me. Suddenly I knew it was a valuable thing. It was something I had to have. (Someone was telling me I had to have it?) It belonged to them, to the Invaders, and I had to possess it.
I reached—
She remembered Cathay leaning over her, shaking her shoulders. Her head bobbed back and forth, loosely. Her eyes focused.
"...all right? What happened?"
"Did they do something to you?" It was Vaffa's voice, and Lilo smiled when she saw the genuine concern in her face. Vaffa, Vaffa, there's hope for you yet.
"Who is that?"
"That's me," Lilo said, and sat up. It was Javelin who had asked the question, and Lilo had known what she was talking about. She had seen this moment during the kaleidoscope that had overcome her while the Trader siren wailed. She looked at the new occupant of the room—a tall, brown woman, dripping wet—and they nodded at each other. There was no need for any words between them. They had both been here before.
She was holding something in her hand, a silvery cube five centimeters on a side.
"Who are you?" Vaffa asked.
The woman looked curiously at Vaffa.
"I guess you can call me Diana, to avoid confusion. It's what everyone else called me."
The word sparked a fresh cascade of memories in Lilo's mind. She tried to hold them, but they were fading like a dream. A long trip, a fantastic trip, ten years of walking... hardships met and conquered... tall trees, huge trees that reached to the ceiling—no, that was from her own lifeline. She tried again to remember. There was another Lilo out there, on the runaway moon. She had been forced forward in time to her own death, three deaths and backward to many more... hadn't she? She was no longer sure. But something was guiding her steps still, some knowledge of how things would be, of how they had been.
"Let's get out of here," Lilo said.
"What?" Javelin couldn't believe what she heard. "I've got a lot of things I want to—"
"No. It's no use. Just one question," she said, looking at William. "What's that thing in my... in her hand?"
William looked sad.
"That," he said, "is a singularity. Things are going faster than we expected."
"And what is a singularity?"
He shrugged. "I wish we knew. If we did, we would be the equals of Invaders. We call it that because it violates basic laws of the universe. We think it might not exist in our universe, at least not in the normal way. What you see is just a nullfield that covers the thing itself. You'll never see any more than that."
"And what does it do?" Lilo felt dizzy. She had known the answers to the questions she was asking.
"It seems to remove the inertia from a body. Don't ask me how. We've studied them for millions of years and we don't know how it works. We think it might convert inertia to some other property of matter and store it in a theoretical hyperspace, or fifth dimension."