My heart was cold and lonely then. Yearning for you, I saw nothing.
If only some of my old crew had been here, they would have saved the Iron Ghost of Ximen. How I miss them! Artiga and Avenzoar, Echegaray and Falero, Zacuto and Zuazua! I think I miss Sarmento most of all, whose name means golden isle.
There had been a bond of unity among my stepfathers, the brotherhood of a gang of pirates who share one guilt, the compassion of a family with only one daughter, a pride in being the first men to sail the stars. It was a unity which I could not reproduce.
Ximen is from Andalusia and lived his life in war; D’Aragó (as his name says) is from unhappy, plague-burned Aragon; Father Reyes is from Goa in India, and he suffered for his race as well as for his faith; Sarmento i Illa d’Or is from the Saint Simon’s Island, and lived through the turmoil as Florida and Georgia rebelled against their Cuban overlords. All were rough men from rough times. Ximen thought that life requires sacrifice.
Perhaps it was not suicide. I pray it was not. Is it suicide when a man thrusts his living body into a hull break to save his crewmates from decompression, even though he dies himself?
Ximen redirected the ship’s power away from himself and into the gravitic lance. The long axis of the ship was blasted and burned, and all instruments overloaded, but not before Ximen successfully triggered the collapse of the Diamond Star entirely into a singularity in such a way as to form two vents, fore and aft. Even had the bore of the instrument not shot through the logic crystal of his brain, there was not enough power available to maintain his emulation and to overload the lance.
The fore vent of the collapsed star continued to slow us down from the insanity of warped near-lightspeed ever closer to normal spacetime; the rear vent I caught in my deceleration sails, and thus the neutron star decelerated the vessel as it pulled ahead.
The visual hemisphere ahead and behind the craft grew normal. We could see the half million stars of the M3 cluster in our direction of motion, and the vast, luminous spiral of the milky way, round as a shield, directly off the ship’s rearward-facing bow. Of the strange wonder of the galactic core, the meaning of the signals hidden in its polar x-ray vent, what I saw and deduced as the first astronomer in human history unhindered by intervening dust clouds, I will tell you when we meet again, for I will not speak of divine things where alien machines might overhear.
Despite all, our deceleration was not enough. Ximen had known his death was a magnificent but meaningless gesture.
The simplest calculations showed that we would pass through the star cluster at half the speed of light, out the far side, and back into the starless dark, never to encounter any star nor world or molecule again, and moving too slowly for there to be any appreciable relativistic effects. We were fated to pass through and face a void too empty for any hydrogen ramjet, even one whose intake cone was larger than the outer orbit of a solar system, to gather fuel.
The slumber coffins broke down. Without Ximen to run the genetic emulations, crewmen were waking with cancers and neural aberrations. Doomed, childless, our mission a failure, lacking all hope, while I slumbered, one crewman committed suicide, and then a second.
I foreswore all slumber thereafter, greatly blaming myself. Ximen thought I could bring peace. What use is bringing peace if the threat is not war but despair?
9. The Emulation of Hope
I searched the records of the Monument carefully, looking to see if there were other codes for messengers and emulations like myself, messengers to bring hope.
I found something. Something odd. I coded the Monument notation line by line into the empty crystal core of the Bellerophron section of the ship. I made my own little ghost, and it woke and spoke to me and told me what to do.
How like you I turn out to be! I made the cocktail of neural alterations just as instructed, and prayed, and meditated and injected myself.
In a dream I saw the unity of all things, and I walked outside of time and space. Here, there was another mind, in sympathy with mine, though vast beyond all description, issuing from one billion lightyears away. Because we both had entered the same framing sequence of synchronic semiotics, the ideas or forms overlapped, and we touched mind to mind. I was a droplet touching an ocean.
I woke the crew, and I spoke the words the massed coalition of living minds Corona Borealis Supercluster of Galaxies had instructed me. I told them of the hope beyond the universe. I told them how small our current mission was and what the greater thing was that awaited us.
There were no more suicides then, no more talk of mutiny nor despair. We all knew it was not willed that we should fail, even if it were willed that we should die. Gaily, and with joyful hope, I and my crew awaited we knew not what.
For the ship began to slow more rapidly than the exhaust vent from the neutron star could account for. We checked and rechecked the readings, but there was no mistake.
It was a miracle. If only Ximen had waited for it.
A beam of energy from M3 had found our sails and was imparting deceleration momentum. The aliens had reach across space with their strange hands, spread their fingers, and caught us.
10. The Dyson Oblate
The Diamond Star remnant dwindled to nothing, and the singularity at its core evaporated in a burst of Hawking radiation. The twelve remaining living souls spent over fifty years in the alien deceleration beam, but by the end of that time, the last cryogenic suspension coffin we were taking turns to share had failed, and we all turned old and gray.
We passed a quarter million stars, roughly half the cloud. The number of young blue-white giant stars, and the symmetries and patterns of the variables, showed that the civilization here had been engineering stellar life cycles since roughly the Carboniferous Period. The Authority at M3 had been herding stars, triggering supernovas, and forming solar systems in the resulting nebulae to bring forth worlds where elements high on the periodic chart existed in abundance. They had been doing this since the years when, on Earth, amphibians and arthropods were reigning.
The deceleration beam wafted my ship, crewed by octogenarians and sad memories, to rest at a point within a hundred thousand miles of an oblate Dyson sphere.
Supersphere would be a better term, because it was in an orb eleven lightyears in diameter at the equator, ten from pole to pole, that surrounded the entirety of the dense, compressed core of the cluster. The sphere captured one hundred percent of the emitted energy not of one but of hundreds of bright stars and dark star accretion disks at its center. It was visible to us only because it reflected ambient starlight and interstellar radiation on various wavelengths.
When we had first seen it on our approach, hundreds and hundreds of lightyears away, this core supersphere was transparent, but as we approached, it grew into a mirrored surface, reflecting all forms of radiation on all wavelengths from it. Perhaps it was built during those years, and the light of its completion had not yet reached us. Perhaps its optical properties changed according to the distance of the observer.
Closer still, and the reflections blurred into each other, perfectly and uniformly randomized, so that the surface of the Dyson oblate seemed a flat plane of pallid milky white to our eyes, a mathematically perfect surface to our instruments radiating at a few degrees above absolute zero. Particles of interstellar gas or dust encountering the surface, or rare interstellar micrometeorites, were disassembled when they struck into component subatomic particles and absorbed with no loss of momentum, no flare of waste heat.
There were dimples or indentations larger in diameter than the rings of Saturn, regularly spaced across the surface. Hence, my crew dubbed it the big golf ball, which made them less afraid of it. These indentations were parabolas pointed at various nearby stars, nebulae, and subclusters in the cluster. It was not the emitter of the beam which had braked us. The nearest was about one lightday away, six times the radius of Pluto’s orbit. Jury-rigged probes sent into the focal point of this nearest dimple detected fluctuations both of electromagnetic energy and in the neutrino count, which had to be signals.