Rodi, in broken bits of old English, described the futile battle.
The Comms Officer mulled it over. “I understand little… only that people are dying for a foolish purpose.”
“But with your help, I can avert many deaths.”
“How?”
“Not all the Exaltation has been… contaminated. The virus of words is spreading via inseparability net links. If we break those links, the spread will stop.”
“And how can we disrupt this inseparability net?”
“Cause a starquake.”
He had to expand, to explain what he meant.
The Comms Officer hesitated. “Rodi, there are two things you should know. We cause these events for specific religious and sexual reasons. They are not — a sport. Second, many of us will lose our lives.”
“I know what I’m asking.”
A monitor flashed: another craft had dropped out of hyperspace near him. A Virtual tank filled up with a grinning face.
The craft was Unity Ark. The face was Thet’s.
She said, “They told me your flitter was gone. It wasn’t hard to work out where you’d be. You’re planning sabotage, aren’t you?”
Rodi stared at her.
“Are we still in contact, Rodi of the Integrality?”
“Yes, Comms Officer…”
“Rodi, you have one minute to begin your approach to Unity. After that we open fire. Do you understand?”
“Comms Officer, what is your answer?”
“I must consult.”
“Please hurry. I am desperate.”
Thet’s smile broadened as the minute passed. Rodi realized that the metamorphosis was a liberation for her; she made a much better warrior than missionary.
“Time’s up, Rodi.”
“Integrality? We will do as you say.”
“Thank you!”
And Rodi slammed the flitter into hyperspace; Thet snarled.
The Exaltation was beginning to split up.
The Arks, the metamorphosed battleships, continued to drop into three-space… but they returned battered and bleeding, and there were fewer each time.
The bulk of the fleet, now isolated from infection, cruised on its way.
Rodi probed at his feelings. Had he betrayed his race by wrecking this grand design?
But the stratagem itself had been a betrayal — of the generations who had lived and died in the Exaltation, and, yes, of the ideal of the Integrality itself.
He wondered if Gren’s hypothesis, of a key embedded in fragments of poetry, could hold truth. It seemed fantastic… and yet the fragments of verse had indeed been laid there, like a trail. Perhaps there were a dozen keys, scattered across the light years and centuries, reinforcing each other — some perhaps even embedded in the structure of the space through which the Exaltation must pass.
Or perhaps, Rodi thought bleakly, no key was necessary. He thought of Thet. She, in retrospect, had been all too willing to throw over the ideals of the Integrality, and indulge in warfare once more — key or no key.
But the perpetrators of this epochal plot had been too clever. In their search for a fine lie they had stumbled on a truth — the truth at the heart of the Integrality’s philosophy — and that truth, Rodi realized, was driving him to act as he did.
And so in the end it was the truth which had betrayed them.
Rodi would never see his parents again.
But the Exaltation would go on. He could join another Ark, and—
Thet’s voice hissed through the distorted inseparability net. “I know… you’ve done…”
Unity Ark loomed in his monitors, its bulk cutting him off from the Exaltation.
“Thet. There’s no point—”
The flitter slammed.
“…next time…”
Roaring with frustration he dropped into three-space, emerging poised over the Ring.
Unity Ark closed, bristling with weapons. Thet’s image was clear. “It’s over, Rodi.”
Rodi took his hands from the controls. He felt very tired. “Okay, Thet. You’re right. It’s over. We’re both cut off from the Exaltation. We’re stranded here. Kill me if you like.”
Unity Ark exploded at him. Thet stared into his eyes.
Then she cried out, as if in pain.
The Ark veered sideways, avoiding Rodi, and disappeared into the mist at the heart of the Ring.
“Integrality calling Comms Officer.”
“This is the Comms Officer.”
“How are you?”
“I am not the one who spoke to you previously. My mother died in the recent convocation.”
“…I’m sorry.”
“Did we succeed?”
In simple terms, Rodi told the story.
“So, in the end, Thet spared you. Why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the futility of it all got through to her. Perhaps she realized that with all contact with the Exaltation lost her best chance of survival was to take the Ark away, try for a new beginning in some fresh Universe…” And perhaps some lingering human feeling had in the end triumphed over the programing.
“But now you are stranded, Rodi. You have lost your family.”
“…Yes.”
“You are welcome here. You could join my sexual grouping. The surgery required is superficial—”
Rodi laughed. “Thank you. But that’s well beyond my resources.”
“What, then?”
He remembered Darby’s wise kindness. If the Lunar colonists welcomed him, perhaps the loss of his family would grow less painful…
“We will remember you, and your Integrality.”
“Thank you, Comms Officer.”
Rodi turned the battered flitter and set course for the Moon.
Fragments of humanity. Relics of forgotten battles, aborted assaults…
Here was the most extravagant mission of all.
Once the system had been a spectacular binary pair, adorning some galaxy lost in the sky. Then one of the stars had suffered a supernova explosion, briefly and gloriously outshining its parent galaxy. The explosion had destroyed any planets, and damaged the companion star. After that, the remnant neutron star slowly cooled, glitching as it spun like some giant stirring in its sleep, while its companion star shed its life-blood hydrogen fuel over the neutron star’s wizened flesh. Slowly, a ring of companion-gas formed around the neutron star, and the system’s strange, spectral second system of planets coalesced.
Then human beings had come here.
The humans soared about the system, surveying. They settled on the largest planet in the smoke ring. They threw microscopic wormhole mouths into the cooling corpse of the neutron star, and down through the wormholes they poured devices and human-analogues, made robust enough to survive in the neutron star’s impossibly rigorous environment.
The devices and human-analogues had been tiny, like finely jeweled toys.
The human-analogues and their devices swarmed to a magnetic pole of the neutron star, and great machines were erected there: discontinuity drives, perhaps powered by the immense energy reserves of the neutron star itself.
Slowly at first, then with increasing acceleration, the neutron star — dragging its attendant companion, ring and planets with it — was forced out of its parent galaxy and thrown across space, a bullet of stellar mass fired at almost light speed.
“A bullet,” I said. “Yes. An apt term.”
A bullet directed at the heart of the Xeelee Project.
“But,” Eve said, “when the single, immense shot had been fired, little thought was given to those abandoned within the star, their usefulness over…"[6]