Heaven's Reach (61 page)

Stay calm
, he told himself.
Ro-kenn can't go to the authorities. The crimes he committed on Jijo are worse than anything the sooners did.

Yes, hut he might hurry to one of the big fanatic clans or alliances, and try to sell them information about
Streaker
and Jijo. At the very least, he'll send word to other Rothen.

“We had better try to contact Alvin and Ur-ronn,” Kaa said. And for once he could tell that Huck agreed.

Only that was far from easy. It seemed that all available telecomm lines were jammed with frantic traffic. And things only got worse as another wave of subspace disruptions hit, causing the planetoid to shake and rattle, resonating like a great, hollow bell.

From the Journal of Gillian Baskin

T
HE UNIVERSE IS AWASH IN TRAGEDY. YET, ONLY
now, as it seems to be falling apart, have I finally begun to see some of the ironic, awesome beauty of its cosmic design.

As happened at the Fractal World, we find ourselves surrounded by sudden devastation, orders of magnitude greater than I ever imagined.

Far below us, whirling near the condensed core of a massive ancient star, we see vast, needle-shaped habitats—each one longer than the moon is wide—made of superstrong godstuff, built to withstand fierce tidal strains. Only now those habitats of the Transcendent Order show signs of terminal stress, shedding their outer skins like brittle slough—quivering as wave after wave of spatial convulsions surge through this part of Galaxy Four.

According to both Sara and the Niss Machine, these are symptoms of a fantastic rupture, beyond anything seen in a quarter of a billion years.

The effects have been even worse on the huge armada of “candidate ships” accompanying
Streaker
converging on multiple, crisscrossing downward spirals toward those needle monoliths. What had been a stately procession, triumphant and hopeful, wedding two of life's
great orders in a great and glorious union, is swiftly dissolving into chaos and conflagration.

So closely were the giant arks and globules packed together—in dense, orderly rows—that each wave of hypergeometric-recoil throws one rank against another. Collisions produce blinding explosions, slaughtering untold millions and throwing yet more vessels off course.

Yet, despite this awful trend, only a few other craft have joined
Streaker
in attempting to escape, climbing laboriously outward through the maze, seeking some relative sanctuary of deep space. It seems that the addiction of tides cannot easily be broken, once sapients have tasted its deeper pleasures. Like rutting beasts, irresistibly drawn toward mating grounds they know to be on fire, a majority continue on course, accelerating into the funnel, bound for the Embrace they so deeply desire.

Is
this
the ultimate destiny of intelligent life? After striving for ages to become brainy, contemplative, wise (and all that), do all races wind up driven forward by ineffable instinct? By a yearning so strong they
must
plunge ahead, even when their goal is falling apart before their eyes?

At last, for the first time in three long years, I begin to understand the persecution we Streakers have suffered—and Earth, as well. For our discovery of the Ghost Fleet truly does present a challenge, a shocking heresy, that strikes at the very heart of Galactic belief systems.

Most of them—and the hydrogen breathers, as well—maintain that true transcendence is the ultimate destiny of those who merge within the Embrace of Tides.
Something
must lie beyond … or so they've reasoned for countless ages. Why else would the universe have evolved such an elegant way of focusing, gathering, and distilling the very best of both life orders?

Surely, this must be the great path spoken of by the Progenitors, when they departed two billion years ago.

Ah, but then
what of the Ghost Fleet,
with its haunting symbols and glimmering hints at ancient truth?

Where did we find it?

In a “shallow” globular cluster, dim and nearly metal-free, drifting lonely toward the rim of Galaxy Two. A place where spacetime is so flat that even young races experience a faint, nervous revulsion. A kind of creepy agoraphobia. Such locales are seldom visited, since they contain nothing of interest to any life order, even machines.

(In which case, what clue … what hunch … drew
Creideiki
there? Did he set
Streaker's
course for the Shallow Cluster
because
it seemed neglected by the Great Library, with an entry as skimpy as the one about Earth?

(
Or was there something more to his decision? A choice that seemed so strange at the time.
)

Now, at last, I see why our enemies—the Tandu and Soro and Jophur and the others—got so upset when
Streaker
beamed back those first images of the Ghost Fleet … and of Herbie and the rest.

If these truly are relics of the great Progenitors, sealed away in field-protected vessels for countless aeons, what does that imply about the Embrace of Tides? Did the founder race—earliest and wisest of all—seek desperately to
avoid
the attraction? Did they shun the deep places? If so, might it be because they knew something terrible about them?

Perhaps they saw the Embrace as something else entirely. Not a route to transcendence, but a
trash disposal system.
A means for recycling dross, like the Great Midden on Jijo.

Nature's way of siphoning away the old in order to make room for the new.

Standing in his glass case, Herbie smiles at me across my desk. The mummy's eerie humanoidal rictus has been my most intimate companion, ever since Tom went away. Sometimes I find myself talking to him.

Well, old fellow? Is this the big joke? Have I at last figured out why you've been grinning all this time?

It isn't easy trying to work our way out of this trap with our two best pilots gone. The swarm of arks and globules appears to extend endlessly above us, reaching far out beyond the range of any solar system. The sheer amount of mass involved approaches macroplanetary scales! Like the accretion disk surrounding a newborn star.

Where could all these “candidates” have come from?

Might the same thing be happening elsewhere? A
lot
of elsewheres? If even a small fraction of older white dwarves are home to such convergences, that would mean millions of sites like this one, surrounded by migrants eager to enter paradise, despite a growing gauntlet of collision and fire.

On a practical level
, Streaker
cannot attempt any hyperspace jumps till we're clear of all these massive ships, and the rippling effects of their mighty engines.

Even if we do succeed in working our way outward, the Jophur dreadnought is still out there. We detect it from time to time, tracking us like some tenacious predator, crippled and dying, with nothing else to live for anymore beyond finishing the hunt. If we make it to open space, there will be that peril to contend with.

If only we could rid ourselves of this deadly coating and restore
Streaker
to her old agility!

Hannes has been working on a new idea about that, alongside Emerson D'Anite. Something involving the big Communications Laser.

Poor Emerson struggles to explain something to us—humming melodies and drawing pictures, but all we can tell so far is that he managed to defeat yet another meme-attack on
Streaker
a while back, and destroyed the renegade—Tsh't—in the process.

I cannot help it. I grieve for my friend. The sweet comrade who was by my side through crisis after crisis. Poor Tsh't only thought she was doing the right thing, seeking help and succor from her gods.

Now another wraith follows through the night, surging like a porpoise through my restless dreams.

The big news is that the Niss Machine lately made a breakthrough. It managed at last to tap into what passes for a communications network among the Transcendents.

As one might expect, it is a dense, complex system, as far beyond Galactic-level technology as a hand computer exceeds an abacus. It was invisible for so long because only small portions on the fringes use classical electronics or photonics. The core technique appears to be quantum computing on a scale so vast that it must utilize highly compressed gravitational fields.

“Such fields are unavailable here,”
commented the Niss.
“Even among the needle habitats, whirling just above the compact star core, the potentials are many orders of magnitude too small.

“We must be picking up the margins of something much greater. Something with its center located far away from here.”

Of course it occurred to us that this might be our chance. Our hope of communicating with “higher authorities,” as ordered by the Terragens Council. The creatures who betrayed us at the Fractal World—those so-called Old Ones—were like infants in comparison to the minds using this new network. Indeed, all signs suggest they are the pinnacle that life achieves.

Yet, I'm reluctant to just hand over our data from the Shallow Cluster. We've been disappointed too many times. Perhaps the Transcendents
also
suffer from the same fear—that a deadly trap underlies the Embrace of Tides.

If it entered their thoughts to be vengeful toward us, we'd have all the chance of a hamster against a bolo battle tank.

“Let's ask simple questions, first,” I said. “Any suggestions?”

Sara Koolhan burst forth.

“Ask about the Buyur! Are
they
down there? Did the Buyur transcend?”

Lately, she's grown obsessed with the last species to have leasehold over Jijo. A race of genetic manipulators, who seemed to know in advance that sooners would invade their world, and about a coming Time of Changes.

“Even such a simple query will be hard to translate. It may be impossible to slip within the matrix in such a way that anyone will notice, or bother answering,”
warned the Niss.
“But I will try.”

Of course we risk drawing the attention of even more powerful enemies. But with the odds already against us, it seems a worthwhile effort.

Meanwhile, our dolphin astronomer, Zub'daki, has more bad news to report about the swarm of incoming Candidate vessels.

He knows and cares little about hyperspatial disruptions tearing the fabric of reality. That is Sara's department. Zub'daki's interest lies in the white dwarf itself, and the sheer amount of matter approaching it like flotsam in a whirling drain.

“What if most of the arks misssss their target?” he asked. “What if they fail to rendezvous with the needlegatewayssss?

“What if the needles are no longer there to collect them?”

I fear that my initial response was callous, asking why we should
care
if a stampede of giants go tumbling into a grave of their own making. As mere ants, it is our duty to escape. To survive.

But I will go and hear what he has to say.

What will one more worry matter? I've long passed the point where I stopped counting them.

Lark