I transmitted my reply. ‘If the cordon lets me through, I’m going to keep on following.’
The Line’s instructions to the local civilisations had been precise about the nature of the objective, and although the ships and defence stations of their cordon had been devastated, no one tried to take their revenge out on
Dalliance.
They understood that I had been chasing
Silver Wings
for sixty-two thousand years; they understood that I meant them no harm.
Silver Wings
had dropped down to eighty per cent of the speed of light; I followed suit after allowing myself to fall within five minutes of the other ship. The cordon made a last effort to stop
Silver Wings
even though the opener had already activated. Their weapons barely grazed her, even at her reduced speed.
Ahead, the dark, nested machinery of the stardam began to respond to the signal. The ringworlds, held in place by pushers, began to tilt away from their existing inclinations. It was a deathly slow adjustment, but the monitoring devices around the stardam confirmed that the change was real and ongoing. No alarm was raised, for the monitoring devices knew only that an authenticated Gentian opener had sent that command. A widening, lens-shaped aperture was appearing along the circumference of the stardam, as if a dark marble was slowly opening its single, lazy eye. Over the course of hours,
Silver Wings
continued her deceleration, falling to fifty per cent of light, then to a third. She was still aimed precisely at the opening eye.
If there was one scant piece of consolation to be drawn, it was in the absence of hellish light pouring through that gap. No supernova had been contained by this stardam; the local civilisations were at least safe from that particular hazard. There was every likelihood that Galingale had been telling the truth.
I watched Silver Wings
of
Morning fall through the gap, into the black clockwork of the stardam. She held her course for several light-seconds then began to veer hard, passing out of my line of sight. A few minutes later a signal came through, staggered as it arrived from multiple reflection points.
Dalliance
sorted through the jumbled puzzle and dragged out a coherent message.
‘This is Hesperus. I trust you can still receive me, Campion. We have begun to execute a series of increasingly violent course adjustments so that we may pass through the gaps between the interior ringworlds. These adjustments are of such severity that the inertial compensation is no longer working properly. Unshielded forces have been in excess of five hundred gravities and are still rising. Purslane is safe in stasis, but she would not have survived had she still been in realtime. I urge you to take similar precautions.
Silver Wings
is still out of my direct control, but I can transmit a record of our trajectory to
Dalliance
so that you may maintain your pursuit. With foreknowledge of the interior conditions, you may be able to ease the stresses on your ship.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll go into stasis. Good luck, Hesperus. I hope you make it.’
‘I’ll see you on the other side, Campion. We’ll have much to discuss, I think.’
‘I expect we will,’ I said, wondering why he suddenly sounded so much more human.
Presently
Dalliance
informed me that she had a lock on Silver
Wings’
trajectory. She was zigzagging deeper and deeper into the stardam, squeezing between gaps that were in some cases only a few thousand kilometres wide. Hesperus had been right to warn me into abeyance. It would be difficult enough for
Dalliance
to follow, let alone do so in a way that would protect her fragile human cargo.
There was just time to transmit a message to the Line, aimed in the rough direction of Neume, telling them of my plans. I also fired a copy towards the nearest node of the private network, deciding that it no longer mattered whether or not the network had been compromised. I did not even know for certain that there were any other Gentians alive. We had travelled so fast that only a few centuries’ worth of information had managed to catch up with us from Neume.
Satisfied that I had done all I could, I left
Dalliance
to follow Purslane’s trail and whisked to the abeyance chamber. I dialled the casket to a million, set the expiration clock to one hundred hours of shiptime (a wild guess, since I had no idea how long it would take to reach the heart of the stardam or complete the subsequent wormhole transition) and allowed the field to enfold me.
Four seconds of consciousness later, I was back in realtime.
I emerged from the casket. The room was exactly as I had left it; gravity was normal, the ride smooth. Deep inside the ship as I was, there was no visible evidence of damage or trauma to her systems. For a moment I wondered if Hesperus had tricked me, by guiding
Dalliance
onto a trajectory that caused her to miss the stardam completely, placing a higher premium on my survival than on keeping his word. I quickly dismissed the thought: he knew that I would sooner die than not follow Purslane all the way in. According to the clock in the head portion of the casket, ten days really had passed.
I whisked back up to the bridge, feeling as if I had only just been there. When I arrived I found all superficial indications normal, as if
Dalliance
was just floating in space, becalmed in flat vacuum. But the displayer was very reluctant to show me anything. It would not relay an external view, claiming that it was having trouble achieving a consistent description of our surroundings. Nor would it hazard a guess as to
Dalliance’s
present position. Its last reliable astrogation fix had been just before we entered the stardam, but according to the ship’s memory of her own motions, she should have passed through the stardam nearly a hundred hours ago. Yet it was still unable to get a reading from any navigation pulsars or beacons, or locate a pattern of stars that it recognised. In fact, it could not locate any stars at all.
So we were somewhere else - not necessarily in the Milky Way any more. Maybe we were inside the dark envelope of the Andromeda Absence, floating in a starless void that had once been a galaxy. I settled into my control seat and tugged down the floating console, punching commands to force the displayer to give me
something,
even if it was against its better judgement.
Dalliance
was so protective of me that she would rather withhold data than show me something she regarded as highly suspect, possibly distorted by the machine equivalent of ‘hallucinatory delirium. But in the end I prevailed.
It was a mistake.
I cannot adequately describe what I saw. I was aware that I was seeing only
Dalliance’s
attempt to translate her perceptions into a form that might be comprehensible to me, an echo of an echo, but it was still too much, too strange, too alien. Vast and luminous structures were rushing past in too many directions for my mind to process, approaching and receding at the same time, shifting from one shape to another in a constant fluid progression that made me think less of machinery, of some natural phenomenon, than of a protean creature inverting itself, turning itself inside out over and over again. I had an impression of appalling speed and appalling motionlessness, as if
Dalliance
was being swept along at the mercy of a storm and at the same time creating that storm around herself, sitting in perfect tranquillity in the calm eye of her own making. Unless what I was seeing represented conditions inside the Absence, then I had to accept that we were still riding the wormhole.
The Priors made this,
I thought. We had assumed that their science was superior to ours when we contemplated their ringworlds and the ancient, sphinx-like machines floating around the Milky Way’s central black hole. In truth, we had understood nothing of their true capabilities. Faced with such a gulf of comprehension, my mind wanted to curl up inside my skull and hope that the universe would go away. In six million years, we had not even scratched the surface of the possible. We had barely recognised that there was a surface to scratch.
I thought of returning to abeyance, but since I still had no idea how much longer would be required, I chose to administer Synchromesh. I dialled myself up to ten, maintaining enough of a grip on external time to be able to respond to outside events. After three hours of consciousness, thirty hours of shiptime, I received a message from what
Dalliance
tentatively identified as ‘ahead’.
It was from Hesperus. His signal dopplered in and out, as if Silver
Wings
was experiencing absurd changes in velocity - one instant moving away from me at half the speed of light, the next surging closer at a quarter. I could only assume that the spacetime between our two ships was highly elastic.
‘I hope you can still hear me, Campion. I have a hailing fix on your ship, which suggests you have retained at least some basic functionality. The timelag between us is shifting unpredictably - it may be that we will move out of signalling range at any moment. I am afraid
Silver Wings
suffered damage during the latter stages of the passage through the stardam and the insertion into the wormhole. I am doing what I can to stabilise the ship and consolidate her basic functions, but I am fighting against the system blockades Cascade installed. I cannot say how much longer it will be before we emerge back into conventional space, but I believe the exit transition will be no less violent than the entrance transition. You may fare better, for your ship is smaller and perhaps more agile. I will do all in my power to protect Purslane, but I cannot promise that I will succeed.’
‘I’m in one piece,’ I said.
‘Dalliance
is struggling to orientate herself, but otherwise she’s in good shape.’
His response took forty minutes to arrive. ‘That is welcome news, Campion. I would nonetheless recommend that you return to abeyance at the earliest opportunity. Set your apparatus in such a way that I may bring you out, when I have deemed that our ships are safe.’
‘Thanks, Hesperus, but I’m fine as I am.’
This time his answer arrived within ninety seconds. ‘It must be your decision, Campion. Regardless, the instant I detect the transition back to normal space I will send warning of it. You may still have time to protect yourself before
Dalliance
runs into difficulties.’
‘Have you seen anything coming the other way?’
‘The concept of “other way” is a problematic one, given the confused state of our surroundings.’ This time I had to wait eleven minutes for his reply, and his message was redshifted almost to the point of incomprehensibility. ‘But if I take your meaning correctly, I have detected no other physical objects occupying the wormhole. The only two ships appear to be ours. You are doubtless wondering about the First Machines.’
‘It crossed my mind that if there are invasion fleets waiting to escape back into our galaxy, we aren’t seeing much sign of them.’
Five seconds later he said, ‘You were gone a very long time then, Campion - I began to worry about you. It is a great relief to find that you are still alive. Concerning your observation, you have a point. It may still be too soon to form ready judgements, but the absence of any traffic, let alone indirect evidence of the First Machines ... it is indeed puzzling.’
‘I wonder what Cadence and Cascade would be saying now if they were still around.’
‘I imagine they would be ... vexed,’ Hesperus said, two and half hours later.
‘We know the First Machines existed. That’s not in dispute - is it?’
Eleven minutes: ‘I met them, Campion. It was a long time ago, but I don’t think my memory is playing tricks with me.’
‘I’m not sure how you can have met them, but I know there’s a lot you and Purslane haven’t been able to tell me. I’m burning with questions, but the most important one is: where are they?’
Fifteen seconds: ‘Perhaps when we emerge, we will have a better idea.’
‘What do you think we’ll find when we reach Andromeda? Are we even going to be able to exist inside the Absence?’
Nineteen hours, twenty-two minutes: ‘Cadence and Cascade must have expected to continue to exist or they would not have set
Silver Wings
on this course.’ After a moment he added, ‘Of course, they were robots. That may have factored into their thinking.’
I smiled at this far from comforting answer. ‘What do you think they were hoping to achieve?’
Six hours: ‘To meet the First Machines. To be welcomed as pilgrims unto God. I saw into Cadence’s mind, Campion. That is how it felt to her, as if this was a pilgrimage, with a sacred destination.’ Then Hesperus added, ‘I am detecting something - a change in the local conditions. Perhaps you feel it as well. I think we may be approaching the emergence point. You should hasten to abeyance, Campion. I cannot—’
Something cut him off. It was sudden and total. There was no longer even a carrier signal from Silver Wings.
‘Hesperus?’
Nothing returned. I waited a minute; ten more. Then I whisked to the abeyance chamber, dialled in one hundred hours at a stasis level of a million and submitted myself to the mercy of the casket.
A spine of stars arced across the sky, hazy with the light of a billion suns, none of which had ever been given human names. I thought back to the amplified sky over the Centaurs’ world, the taste of strong wine on my lips as Purslane and I sat by the bay at night, watching Doctor Meninx take his swim, waiting with nervous anticipation for Mister Nebuly to deliver his verdict on my trove. I had seen the Milky Way then, daubed across the sky. I was seeing it again now, except that this was another Milky Way - another spiral arm - arcing across the sky of a different galaxy. It looked achingly familiar, but I was two and half million years from home. One grove of stars may look much like another, but I was not even in the same forest.
I knew I had travelled, rather than simply being ejected back into the galaxy at some other point in space or time. Although the surroundings were familiar, the specifics were not.
Dalliance
listened for the tick of a thousand pulsars and heard none that she recognised. There were pulsars in the galactic disc, but none of them were rotating at the right frequencies. Even allowing for a million years of slowdown, even allowing for ten million, none of the pulsars could be matched against the fixed clocks she had come to expect. The same could be said for the brightest stars in the sky - those that we would have shrouded with stardams back home. None of them fitted the maps. I was in Terra Incognita.