Heaven's Reach (69 page)

A roiling funnel now surrounded the ancient stellar remnant, shrouding its small, white disk beneath black streamers and turbulent haze.

According to Zub'daki, that whirling cloud had special dynamical properties. It would not orbit for long, or even spiral inward gradually, over the course of weeks or years.

“The debris storm has almost no net angular momentum,”
the dolphin astronomer announced.
“As collisional mixing continues, all the varied tangential
velocities will cancel out. When that happens, the whole mass will collapse inward, nearly all at once!”

Asked when this infall might occur, the dolphin scientist had predicted.

“Sssoon. And when it does, we'll be at ground zero for the greatest show in all the cosmossss.”

Staring at that murky tornado—comprising the pulverized hopes of countless races and individual beings—Gillian's crew mates knew the show would begin shortly. Akeakemai whistled a dubious sigh, getting back to Gillian's original question.

“Protective armor … againsssst what's coming?”

The dolphin switched languages to express his doubts in Trinary.

Gillian nodded appreciatively. It was very good dolphin imagery.

“Creideiki would be proud,” she said.

Akeakemai slashed with his tail flukes, reticent to accept praise.

Sara Koolhan commented, “Forgive my ignorance of stellar physics, but I've been studying, so let me see if I get this right.

“When that big, whirling cloud of dross and corpses finally collapses, it's going to dump a tenth of a solar mass onto the hot, dense surface of that white dwarf. A dwarf that's already near its Chandrasekhar limit. Much of the new material will compress to incredible density and undergo superfast nuclear fusion, triggering—”

“What Earthlings used to call a ‘type one' supernova,”
the Niss Machine cut in, unable to resist an inbuilt yen to interrupt.

“Normally, this happens when a large amount of matter is tugged off a giant star, falling rapidly onto a neighboring white dwarf In this case, however, the sudden catalyzing agent will be the flesh of once living beings! Their body substance will help light a pyre that should briefly outshine this entire galaxy, and be visible to the boundaries of the universe.”

Gillian thought she detected hints of hysteria in the voice of the Tymbrimi-built machine. Though originally programmed to seek surprise and novelty, the Niss might well have passed the limit of what it could stand.

“I agree, there doesn't seem much chance of surviving such an event, no matter how fancy a coating we are given. And yet, the coincidence seems too perfect to ignore.”

“Coincidence?” Suessi asked.

“The cancellation of angular momentum is too perfeet.
The Transcendents must have meant this to happen. They slaughtered the remaining candidates for a purpose—
in order
to trigger the coming explosion.”

“So, yes? Then the big question is—why aren't
we
down there now, mixing our atoms with all those other poor bugs, beasties, and blighters?”

Gillian shrugged.

“I just don't know, Hannes. Obviously, we have a role to play. But what role? Who can say?”

Zub'daki didn't expect mass collapse to occur for twenty hours, at least. Possibly several days.

“The infall may be disssrupted by outward radiation pressure, as the star heats up,” the dolphin explained. “It could make the whole process of ignition messsssy. Unless they have a solution to that problem, as well.”

He didn't have to explain who “they” were. The shimmering needle-gateway throbbed nearby, as long as Earth's moon, spinning webs of mysterious, translucent material near several dozen captive ships.

Assured that the crisis would not come for a while yet, Gillian headed to her quarters for some rest. Upon entering, she glanced across the dimly lit chamber at an ancient cadaver, grinning away in a glass cabinet.

“It seems our torment won't go on much longer, Herb. The end is coming at last, in a way that should erase all our troubles.”

The gaunt corpse said nothing, of course. She sighed.

“Ah well. Tom had a favorite expression. If you've really got to go, you might as well—”

Baritone words joined hers.

“You might as well go out with a bang.”

Gillian swiveled around, crouching slightly, her chest pounding from surprise. Something—or someone—stood in the shadows. The figure was tall, bipedal, with the shoulders and stance of a well-built human male.

“Who … who's there?” she demanded.

The answering voice came eerily familiar.

“No one you should fear, Dr. Baskin. Let me move into the light.”

As he did so, Gillian's heart sped instead of slowing down. She stepped back with her right hand pressed midway between throat and sternum. Her voice cracked on the chisellike wedge separating hope from dread.

“T-Tom …?”

His ready smile was there. An eager grin, always a bit like a little boy's. The stance, relaxed and yet ready for anything. Those well-known hands, so capable at a thousand tasks.

The head—black haired with a gray fringe—tilted quizzically, as if just a little disappointed by her response.

“Jill, are you so credulous, to believe what you see?”

Gillian struggled to clamp down her emotions, especially the wave of desperate loneliness that flooded as brief hope crashed. If it really were Tom, she would already know in several ways, even without visual sight. And yet, the careworn face seemed so real—fatigued by struggles that made her own trials pale by comparison. Part of her yearned to reach out and hold him. To soothe those worries for a little while.

Even knowing this was just a lie.

“I'm … not that naive. I guess it's pretty clear who you really are. Tell me … did you take Tom's image from my mind? Or else—”

She swiveled to glance at her desk, where a holo of her husband glowed softly, next to a picture of Creideiki, along with others she had known and loved on Earth.

“A bit of each,”
came the answer while Gillian was briefly turned away.
“Along with many other inputs. It seemed a useful approach, combining familiarity with tension and regret. A bit cruel, perhaps. But conducive of concentration.

“Are you alert now?”

“You have my attention,” she replied, turning back to face her visitor … only to be rocked by a new surprise.

Tom had vanished! In his place stood
Jacob Demwa
, elderly master spy of the Terragens Intelligence Service, who had lobbied hard for the commissioning of a dolphin-crewed
ship.
Streaker
was just as much his doing as Creideiki's. Dark, leathery skin showed the toll of years cruising deep space, among Earth's many outposts, fighting to stave off the fate suffered by most wolfling races.

“That's good,”
her visitor said, in a voice much like old Jake's … though it lacked some overtones of crusty humor.
“Because I can spare only a small part of my awareness for this conversation. There are many other tasks requiring imminent completion.”

Gillian nodded.

“I can well imagine. You Transcendents must be frightfully busy, slaughtering trillions of sapient beings in order to set off a brief cosmic torch. Tell me, what purpose did all those poor creatures die for? Was it a religious sacrifice? Or something more practical?”

“Must one choose? You might say a little of both. And neither. The concepts are hard to express, using terms available in your discursive-symbolic language.”

For some reason, she had expected such an answer.

“I guess that's true. But thanks anyway, for not using terms like ‘crude' or ‘primitive.' Others, before you, made a point of reminding us how low we stand on life's pyramid.”

The image of Jake Demwa smiled, with wrinkles creasing all the right places.

“You are bitter. After suffering through earlier contacts with so-called Old Ones, I can hardly blame you. Those creatures were scarcely older than you, and hardly more knowledgeable. Such immature souls are often arrogant far beyond their actual accomplishments. They try to emphasize how high they have risen by denigrating those just below. In your own journal, Dr. Baskin, you make comparisons to ‘ants scurrying under the feet of trampling gods.'

“In fact, though, any truly advanced mind should be capable of empathy, even toward ‘ants.' By deputizing a small portion of myself, I can speak to you in this manner. It costs little to be kind, when the effort seems appropriate.”

Gillian blinked, unable to decide whether to be grateful or offended.

“Your notion of selective kindness … terrifies me.”

The Demwa replica shrugged.

“Some things cannot be helped. Those composite beings who died recently—whose stirred mass and other attributes now form a dense cloud, hovering at the brink of oblivion—they will serve vital goals much better with their deaths than they would as junior Transcendents. Here, and at many other sites across the known cosmos, they will ignite beacons at just the right moment, when destiny opens a fleeting window, allowing heavens to converse.”

Her brow grew tense from concentration.

“Beacons? Aimed where? You Transcendents are already masters of everything within the Five—”

Abruptly, Gillian hazarded a guess.

“
Outside?
You want to contact others,
beyond
the Five Galaxies?”

Demwa seemed to croon approvingly.

“Ah, you see? Simple reasoning is not so difficult, even for an ant!

“Indeed, an aim of this vast enterprise is to shine brief messages from one heavenly locus to another. A greeting can be superimposed on the blaring eruption of light that will soon burst from this place, briefly achieving brightness greater than a whole galaxy.”

“But—”

“But! You are about to object that we can do this anytime! It is trivial for beings like us simply to set off supernovas, flashing them like blinking signal lights.

“True! Furthermore, that method is too slow, and too noise-ridden, for complex conversation. It amounts to little more than shouting ‘Here I am!' at the universe.

“Anyway, the vast majority of other galactic nexi appear to be mysteriously silent, or else they emanate vibrations that are too cryptic or bizarre for us to parse, even with our best simulations. Either way, the puzzle cannot be solved by remote musing on mere sluggish beams of light.”

Avoiding the false Demwa's scrutinizing gaze, Gillian
stared at a far wall, deep in thought. At last she murmured.

“I bet all this has to do with the
Great Rupture
that Sara predicted. Many of the old connective links—the subspace channels and t-point threads—are snapping at last. Galaxy Four may detach completely.”

Her hands clenched.

“There must be some
opportunity.
One that only takes place during a rupture, when all the hyperspace levels are convulsing. A window of time when …”

Looking back at her visitor, Gillian winced to find it transformed yet again. Now Jake Demwa was replaced by the image of
Tom's mother.

May Orley grinned back at her, bundled in thermal gear against a Minnesota winter, with a ski pole in each hand.

“Go on, my dear. What else do you surmise?”

Such rapid transfigurations might once have unnerved Gillian, Before she had departed on this long, eventful space voyage. But after years spent dealing with the Niss Machine, she had learned to ignore rude interruptions, like rain off a duck's back.

“A window of time when spatial links are greater than normal!” She stabbed a finger toward the Transcendent. “When physical objects can be hurled across the unbridgeable gulf between galactic clusters, at some speed much greater than light. Like tossing a message in a bottle, taking advantage of a rare high tide.”

“A perfectly lovely metaphor,”
approved her ersatz mother-in-law.
“Indeed, the rupture is like a mighty, devouring wave that can speedily traverse megaparsecs at a single bound. The supernova we set off shall be the arm that throws bottles into that wave.”

Gillian inhaled deeply as the next implication struck home.

“You want
Streaker
to be one of those bottles.”

“Spot on!”
The Transcendent clapped admiration.
“You validate our simulations and models, which lately suggested a change in procedure. By adding wolflings to the mixture, we may supply a much needed ingredient, this time. Perhaps it will prevent the failures that
plagued our past efforts—those other occasions when we tried to send messages across the vast desert of flatness between our nexus of galaxies and the myriad spiral heavens we see floating past, tantalizingly out of reach.”

Gillian could no longer stand the unctuous pleasantness of May Orley. She covered her eyes, in part to let the Transcendent shift again … but also because she felt rather woozy. A weakness spread to her knees as realization sank in.