Heaven's Reach (74 page)

T
HE SUPERNOVA'S PHOTON FRONT CAUGHT
Streaker
just short of a swirling black tunnel—the escape path promised by cryptic Transcendents.

Alarms wailed and dolphins squalled as waves of searing energy struck from behind, crushing the normal protective fields, slamming each square meter with more heat than a normal sun would over the course of its lifespan. The blast would have evaporated the
Streaker
of old almost instantly.

But the Earthship was like a whale whose skin was coated with hard-shell barnacles,
Streaker
toiled under layers of strange stuff—coatings that shimmered in the heat, as if
eager
for the ruinous light.

Sara held Prity and Emerson. A rumbling vibration rattled her bones and the marrow inside. Blinding turmoil swamped every outside camera, but sensors told of staggering photon and neutrino fluxes as the star passed its limits of endurance … or perhaps ecstasy. In real time, the eruption took milliseconds, but
Streaker
's duration-stretched
field let the crew witness successive stages, in slow motion.

“Our magic coating's impressive,” commented Suessi. “But these're just photons. No way it can handle what's next. More than a solar mass of real matter … protons and heavy nuclei … leapin' this way at a good share of lightspeed.”

Sara had learned enough practical physics to know what fist was about to smite them.
Each atom of oxygen and carbon in my body passed through a convulsion like this one … cooked in a sun, then spewed into great clouds, before condensing to form planets, critters, people.

Now her own Stardust might return to the cosmic mixing bowl, perhaps joining the life cycle of a new world, yet unborn. It seemed a dry consolation. But she knew another.

Lark.

I got his message—just as that shell closed around the
Polkjhy,
spreading its lambent tendrils, preparing to catch waves of hyperreality, the very moment when galaxies part company forever.

By now, his ship must already be punching through, catching a great tide of recoiling metric. Outward bound on a great adventure.

Ironies made her smile. Among Nelo's three children, Lark alone never dreamed of leaving his beloved Jijo. Yet now he would see more of the cosmos than even the great Transcendents! An avowed celibate, he and his mate could sire a whole nation of humanity in some far galaxy.

Good-bye, brother. May Ifni's Boss keep an eye on you.

Have fun.

Their escape tunnel loomed, a cave filled with eerie, unnerving spirals. She looked up at Emerson. Moments ago, as a final hail of crushed Old Ones fell on the white dwarf's tormented surface, he had barked a single word—

“Dross!”

—and smiled, as if watching a deadly foe collapse in failure.

Someone counted subjective seconds till the matter-wave would hit. “…  fourteen … thirteen … twelve …”

Meanwhile, Akeakemai crooned. “Almost there …” The pilot's flukes thrashed, urging
Streaker
along to the refuge. “Almossssst …”

The suspense was so awful, Sara's mind reflexively fled to a domain where she had some control. Mathematics. To a problem she had discovered recently—while Gillian dickered with the Transcendents to take
Polkjhy
, and let
Streaker
go.

Amid a maze of transfinite tensors, Sara had found a renormalization quandary that simply would not go away. In fact, it seemed
essential
to describe the chaos waves they had seen. Yet, according to the Transcendents' own models, it made no sense!

I thought I knew the whole truth when I foresaw the galactic breakup, arising from the expansion of the universe. But now I can tell—some added force is driving things faster than expected.

It only made sense if she made a peculiar conjecture.

Something is coming
in.
Something titanic.

Details were vague, but she knew one thing about the intruding presence.

It won't be found in any gravity well. We must look elsewhere, in flat space. Far from the Embrace of—

Streaker
shook suddenly. Vibrations leaped in force and volume, shuddering her spine. Someone screamed.

“Matter wave!”

For an instant, time seemed to flicker—

Then, across the span of an eyeblink, Sara was surrounded by leaping, yelling figures. Emerson squeezed her as if it were the end of the world. And briefly, she thought it was.

Then she knew Prity's gleeful screech, the dolphins' whistled raspberries of joy, and her lover's gasping laughter. Amid the tumult and confusion, Sara noticed—all
the ominous rumblings were gone. Vanished! Replaced by a happy roar of unleashed engines.

The view screens were back on, showing vistas of strangely distorted
ylem
—the walls of a weirdly beneficent tunnel, sweeping them along.

“We made it!” Suessi's amplified voice exulted.

We … did?

Sara realized with some chagrin that her math-trance had kept her from witnessing the moment of triumph and salvation.

Well, damn me for a distracted nerd
, she thought, and threw herself into kissing Emerson with all her might.

E Space

H
ARRY'S PROFESSION ALWAYS SEEMED A LONELY
one.

Now I know why Wer'Q'quinn sent solitary scouts on missions to E Space. Too many minds can be dangerous here. And embarrassing.

During earlier trips to the kingdom of living ideas, he sometimes had entered a new territory only to find the local matrix crystallizing around symbols that leaked from his own mind. Since there was seldom anyone else around but herds of local memoids, it hardly mattered what the shapes revealed about his subconscious.

This time, the station carried
five
strong-willed personalities, from four different races. Harry worried from the moment his vessel emerged through a drifting purple haze, striding on long, spidery legs.

The initial fog shredded, as if blown aside by his passengers' curious scrutiny. Dwer and Kaa and Kiwei Ha'aoulin pressed the windows rimming the control chamber. Dwer had been in E Space before. The others were transfixed by their first visit to this famous, mythical province.

You wouldn't peer about so eagerly if you'd seen what I have.

Still Harry refrained from closing the louvered blinds. This would be the last chance of their lives to see E Space.

And maybe my last trip, as well.

Soon, the mist cleared to reveal a vast landscape of cubes, pyramids, tilted planes, and other more complex geometric forms. At least, that was how the objects began.

The first time he looked closely at one, it started
melting
, congealing, taking on new, rounded contours. Soon he saw protrusions on both sides that resembled … ears! Then a flared nose. Moments later, a mouth full of yellowed teeth grimaced back at him, both unappealing and familiar.

He checked instruments. The memic-monolith stood over thirty pseudokilometers away! Apparently, he had just triggered the manifestation of a gigantic sculpture representing his own head, towering higher than the largest structures on Earth. Glancing left and right, he saw that Synthian, dolphin, and human-shaped statuary were coagulating in all directions. Replications of Kaa, Dwer, and Kiwei soon stretched as far as the eye could see.

“Well, well,” commented the delighted Synthian trader, with both hands folded across her belly. “Should someone wake Rety, so she might also partake in this opportunity for megascale immortalization?”

Harry shook his head while a mammoth sculpture mimicked his expression of piqued irritation.

“The poor kid is sleeping off a concussion, for Ifni's sake. Anyway, this sort of thing generally doesn't last. Most of these gross memes just fade back into the ylem, soon as the stimulating host mind leaves.”

“But occasionally they
don't
fade? There is a chance this will be permanent?”

Harry shrugged, wondering why Kiwei cared.

“I've seen things—crypto-shapes and frozen images from the distant past. Wer'Q'quinn says reified memestuff can sometimes get more rigid than anything made of true matter, like the ideas that become permanently fixed in some living brains. I guess there are concept-objects
in E Space that may outlast all the protons an' quarks, an' the whole sidereal universe.”

Kiwei gazed at a range of hillocks and mountains, most of them wearing her own smug, rounded countenance.

“Really?” Her sigh was wistfully hopeful.

Dwer and Kaa both chuckled. But Harry shook his head.

“Let's get moving,” he said. “Before something else goes wrong.”

So far, little had gone according to plan.

First came that riotous muddle at the Kazzkark warehouse. While Dwer covered their retreat with a hail of arrows, Harry and Kiwei had managed to grab the unconscious Rety and carry her off without being ripped to shreds by the angry Tandu warrior. Nearby hallways clamored with sounds of reinforcements—more of the vicious creatures—charging to help their comrade wreak havoc while chaos waves shook the little planetoid from end to end.

With a backward glance, Harry caught the final moments of the Skiano missionary—hurled into an exploding globe-icon of Earth, the blue “martyr planet.”

Troubles followed them to the Institute Docks, where slabs of rock wall were already coming loose, toppling to crush vehicles parked at nearby wharves. Screeching alarms warned that a vacuum breach was imminent. Harry hurried everyone aboard and got his station under way—with Kaa's little corvette towed just behind—just before the ceiling started collapsing. By the time he reached the main airlock, there wasn't much point going through emigration protocols. The obstructing wall
dissolved
, revealing fields of weirdly twinkling stars.

It took a while to dodge swarms of hazardous debris before they could make even a simple, short-range hyperjump. Meanwhile, chaos waves rocked the planetoid.
Even if I make it back from this mission, there'd be no sense reporting here.

There are other Institute bases.

Anyway, they say it's safer to be on a planet these days.

Finally, the chaos waves ebbed, though he knew worse was to come. As Kazzkark vanished from sight, Harry hoped Wer'Q'quinn, the old squid, would make it somehow.

Things got kind of blurry then. He gave coordinates to Kaa and let the expert space pilot take them through a dozen B-Level jumps, then into a small t-point that was already declared dangerously unstable.

Kaa's innovative thread-jumping maneuvers somehow kept them from being torn, sliced, roasted, or vaporized. Still, it was a wild, nerve-racking ride. Harry spent half the time cursing cetaceans and their ancestors, all the way back to the Miocene.

At last, they reached his assigned entry point—a special place, darker than black, where the walls between reality levels were thin enough to pierce—and it was Harry's turn to take over. Soon, materiality shimmered and they underwent transition to a realm whose physics let ideas have a life of their own.

It gladdened Harry to depart the province of giant statuary, entering a terrain covered by endless swaths of undulating orange “grass”—each blade consisting of some basic concept that thrived free of any language or host mind.

On close inspection, the prairie looked eroded, discolored. Large patches seemed broken or seared, as if raked by quake and fire. Apparently, E Space wasn't immune to the tumult shaking five linked galaxies. Even the memoid herds were affected. He witnessed several great flocks darting to and fro, stampeding as both ground and sky rippled threateningly.

While his passengers stared in wonder, Harry set course for the Cosmic Path. He must find a portion that peered into Galaxy Four and set his instruments, as soon as possible. Fortunately, these new devices were disposable. He could leave them in place till they were destroyed. Their death cries would give Wer'Q'quinn's
people vital data about the Great Rupture. This time, his boss promised, the information would be broadcast widely, not kept in secret files for use by elder races and star gods.