The web exploded out of the sky. She could see thick knots at the intersection of the threads, the glistening stickiness of the lines themselves.
She curled into a ball and tucked her suited arms over her head.
How could she have been so stupid as to fall into such a trap? Lur and Wesa, even through their tears, would think her a fool, when they heard. She imagined her father’s voice: “Always look up- and downflux. Always. If you scare an Air-piglet, which way does it move? Along the flux paths, because it can move quickest that way. And that’s why predators set their traps across the flux paths, waiting for anything stupid enough to fly straight into an open mouth…”
She wondered how long the spin-spider would take to clamber down to her. Would she still be conscious when it peeled open her Hero’s suit as if unwrapping a leaf, and began its work on her body?
…A mass came hurtling from her peripheral vision, her left, towards the web. She flinched and looked up. Had the spider left its web and come for her already?
But it was the Hero. Somehow he’d chased her, kept track of her clumsy arrowing through the sky — and all without her realizing it, she thought ruefully. He carried his sword, his shining blade of Corestuff, in his bony hand.
…But he was too late; already the first strands of webbing were clutching at her suit, slowing her savagely.
In no more than a few heartbeats she came to rest, deep inside the web. Threads descended before her face and laid themselves across her shoulders, arms and face. She tried to move, but the webbing merely tightened around her limbs. It shimmered silver and purple all around her, a complex, three-dimensional mesh of light.
The web shuddered, rattling her body inside its gleaming suit. The spin-spider was approaching her, coming for its prize…
“Thea! Thea!”
She tried to turn her head; thread clutched at her neck. The Hero was swinging his sword, hacking into the web. His muscles were knots under his leathery skin. Thea could see dangling threads brushing against the Hero’s bare arms and shoulders, one by one growing taut and then slackening as he moved on, burrowing into the layers of web.
He was cutting through the web towards her.
“Open the suit! It’s caught, but you aren’t. Come on, girl—”
She managed to raise a trembling hand to her chest. It was awkward finding the seam, with the web constantly clutching at her; but at last the suit peeled open. The soft, warm stink of spin-spider web spilled into the opened suit.
She pushed away the helmet and drew her legs out of the suit.
The Hero, his crude web-tunnel already closing behind him, held out his hand. “Come on, Thea; take hold—”
She glanced back. “But the suit—” The ancient costume looked almost pathetic, empty of life and swathed in spider-webbing.
“Forget the damn suit. There isn’t time. Come on—”
She reached out and took his hand; his palm was warm and hard. With a grunt he leaned backward and hauled her from the web; the last sticky threads clutched at her legs, stinging. When they were both clear she fell against him; breathing hard, capillaries dilated all over his thin face, the Hero wrapped his arms around her.
The tunnel in the web had already closed: all that remained of it was a dark, cylindrical path through the layers of webbing.
And, as she watched, the spin-spider’s huge head closed over the shining suit.
“I always seem to be rescuing you, don’t I?” the Hero said dryly.
“You could have saved the suit.”
He looked defensive. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You didn’t even try. Why not?”
He brushed his stiff, yellowed hair out of his eyes. He appeared old and tired. “I think I decided that the world had seen enough of that suit — enough of the Hero, in fact.”
She frowned. “That’s stupid.”
“Is it?” He brought his face close to hers. His voice hard, he said, “It was that moment when I woke to find you inside the suit. I looked through that plate and into your eyecups, Thea, and I didn’t like what I saw.”
She remembered: In a moment, she could crush the life out of his bony neck —
“I saw myself, Thea.”
She shivered suddenly, unwilling to think through the implications of his words.
“What will you do now?”
He shrugged thin shoulders. “I don’t know.” He looked at her cautiously. “I could stay with you people for a while. I’m not a bad hunter, even without the suit.”
She frowned.
He scratched at one eyecup. “On the other hand…”
“What?”
He pointed to the south. “I hear the Parz tribe at the Pole are trying to build a city again.”
Despite herself, she felt stirred — excited. “Like before the Core Wars?”
He looked wistful. “No. No, we’ll never recapture those days. But still, it would be a great project to work on.” He studied her appraisingly. “I hear the new city will be twenty thousand mansheights, from side to side. Think of that. And that’s not counting the Corestuff mine they’re going to build from the base.” He smiled, wrinkles gathering beneath his eyecups.
Thea stared into the south — into the far downflux, to the place where all the vortex lines converged.
Slowly, they began to Wave back to the Crust forest.
The Hero said, “Even the Ur-humans would have been impressed by twenty thousand mansheights, I’ll bet. Why, that’s almost an inch…”
The goals and purpose of the great wars were lost; but still humans fought on, enraged insects battering against the glass-walled lamps of the Xeelee constructs.
The Xeelee, unimpeded, appeared at last to take pity. Humanity was — put aside.
But humanity had been a mere distraction. All the while, the Xeelee confronted a much more dangerous enemy.
PART 6
ERA: Flight
Secret History
C.A.D. 4,000,000
At last the Project was complete.
The migration alone had taken a million years. While the night-dark Xeelee fleets streamed steadily through Bolder’s Ring and disappeared into the folded Kerr-metric region, other races flared in the outer darkness, like candles. Freighters the size of moons patrolled the space around the Ring, their crimson starbreaker beams dispersing the Galaxy remnants that still tumbled towards the Ring like blue-shifted moths.
But now it was over. The Ring, its function fulfilled, sparkled like a jewel in its nest of stars. And the Universe that had been modified by the Xeelee was all but empty of them.
Call it the antiXeelee.
It was… large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.
Nevertheless—
The antiXeelee looked on its completed works, and was satisfied.
Its awareness spread across light years. Shining matter littered the Universe like froth on a deep, dark ocean; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that froth, and had now departed, as if lifting into the air. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the creatures of that dark ocean below. It felt something like contentment at the thought that its siblings were beyond the reach of those… others.
Now the antiXeelee turned to its last task. Seed pods, spinning cubes as large as worlds, were scattered everywhere in an orderly array, millions of them dispersed over the unraveling curve of space. The antiXeelee ran metaphorical fingers over each of the pods and over what lay within: beings with closed eyes, ships with folded wings, refined reflections of the antiXeelee itself.