“Why not? Any Interface would do; they are like viruses…”
“And ourselves? Could they get across the boundary into flesh?”
“I don’t want to find out. Come on, damn it.”
Logic light swarmed across a low ridge, explosive, defiant.
“They must be growing exponentially,” Hassan growled. “How long before the moon is consumed? Days?”
“More like hours. And I don’t know if a moon-sized mass of bucky tube carbon can sustain itself against gravity. Nereid might collapse.”
Now Hassan, with his one free hand, was struggling to get the flitter’s hatch open. “It will forever be uninhabitable, at the least. A prime chunk of real estate lost.”
“The System’s big.”
“Not infinite. And all because of the arrogance of one man—”
“But,” Bayliss said, her augmented eyes shining as she stroked the data cubes at her belt, “what a prize we may have gained.”
“Get in the damn flitter.”
Chen glanced back into the ruined dome. The splayed body of Marsden, exposed to vacuum, crawled with light.
The Pool beyond the Sky was limitless. He and his brothers could grow forever, unbounded, free of Culling! He roared out his exultation, surging on, spreading—
But there was something ahead of him.
He slowed, confused. It looked like a brother. But so different from himself, so changed.
Perhaps this had once been a brother — but from a remote branch which had already grown, somehow, around this greater Pool.
The brother had slowed in his own growth and was watching. Curious. Wary.
Was this possible? Was the Pool finite after all, even though unbounded? And had he so soon found its limits?
Fury, resentment, surged through his mighty body. He gathered his strength and leapt forward, roaring out his intent to devour this stranger, this distant brother.
Eve said, “The great wormhole network covered the System. And everywhere, humans found life…”
Gossamer
The flitter bucked.
Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.
“We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.
Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I’m no hero; I’m only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die — and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for fifty years.
She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.
Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”
“What? But we should have been traveling for another half-hour.”
Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The wormhole is buckling.”
“What does that mean? Are we in danger?”
Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds — hold tight—”
Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: the Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.
Glowing struts swept over the flitter.
The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed space-time yielded in a gush of heavy particles.
Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.
Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—
There was a lurch, a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet loomed before them.
“Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down — we’re too close—”
Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw—
No. It was impossible.
The vision was gone, receded into darkness.
“Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.
Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.
She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.
The flitter came to rest.
A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.
In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen. Spider-web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.
“Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.
Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.
The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few percent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.
There were clouds above her, wispy cirrus: aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was dark, dark on dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.
The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen-ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.
Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?
Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was stuck here; she couldn’t talk to anyone, and there wasn’t even the processing power to generate a Virtual environment.
Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert-gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.
Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.
Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.