Then something happened, something which at first appeared to be the antithesis of what they expected: there came a sudden silence. The craft’s engines ceased to sing; the clatter and untwisting of inanimate minutia stopped; the hail of small parts halted; and a quiet too absolute to be real clamped over their senses. In that same instant clarity returned to vision and the comforting sense of tactile roughness returned to the environment. Yet none of them attempted to stand, being content to remain on their backs to watch the story of the ending of a universe as it began before their eyes.
And with the withdrawal of the field of the Chaos Weapon, came the backlash of the continuum itself.
WITH a bruising
series of excursions, the whole universe was shaken. A mighty, invisible hand seized galaxies, stars, and provost-craft alike, and jarred them violently with long claps of soundless thunder. Within the ship the concussion fractured many of the already-weakened fittings, causing untold damage to its already precarious installations: in the universe at large, its results were traumatic.
Coul whimpered, was gone, returned briefly, then flickered with an uncertainty that suggested he was at rest in none of the dimensions in which he coexisted. His insatiable desire to witness events from a human standpoint was a force which drew him back to Wildheit’s shoulder, even though a greater wisdom warned him it was already long past a safe time for his departure. Wildheit understood the god’s indecision, but was glad to feel the ethereal roots of the symbiosis still deeply in his shoulder; he knew that when Coul left, his own going would not be long delayed.
The beginning of the end was impressive even by cosmic standards. A cluster of perhaps a hundred-thousand stars was thrown into criticality by the giant pulses of the continuum backlash. Had the stars been more separate, a series of novae would have wasted their potential; but so close was their proximity that the explosive compression caused each to lose its separate identity in a mammoth exchange of flux and incandescent matter of such a density that gravitational attraction welded them into a composite whole. The resultant flare eclipsed everything else in that quadrant of space, and although the polarizers in the dome strove to shield the flight-bridge from excessive radiation, nothing save a
solid bulkhead could have completely excluded all its terrifying radiance.
Through the now virtually-complete opacity of the dome, the fine structure of the fireball could be seen with clarity: a vast ball of plasma shot through with streamers and vortices and whirlpools; crazed remnants of former suns driven to random movements by the boiling off of a whole series of nuclear reaction states; a bright corona with flame-tongues fifty million miles in length; and somewhere inside, a white heart of cosmic proportions beating the slowing pulse of a dying universe.
Even as they watched, the giant heart heaved convulsively and died, and a new series of reactions began. Extremely small at first, but rapidly increasing in size, there grew a sphere of absolute darkness which was the event-horizon of a region where matter had been so hopelessly compressed by gravitational forces that a voracious black hole had been born out of the heated ashes of the surrendered suns.
The great fireball turned in upon itself, the vibrant life of its luminescence being drained in long trailing filaments and streamers as the soon-gigantic black hole sucked away its essence from inside. Other suns, like swirling water around a whirlpool, hurried to join and merge with the giant corona which harbored the hungry malignancy. Soon, the crowding throng of suicidal suns exceeded even the appetite of the hungry black hole, and a second sphere of radiation formed inside the corona, with temperatures and characteristics which had no place in any orthodox scheme of physics. So dense and active became the fragmented atoms in this new sphere that soon even the black hole was consumed by this new and even more singular singularity.
Wildheit heard Penemue gasp and dragged his eyes away from the giant nucleus to scan the great circulating storm which wracked the rest of space. Whereas the movements of the stars had previously been imperceptible, now all were caught by the great maelstrom, spiraling with increasing
rapidity toward the nucleus. Many suns were prematurely divesting themselves of brilliant mantles of star-stuff which flared under magnetic compulsion across the intervening space like sheets of incandescent velvet—advance gifts of great intrinsic beauty attempting to propitiate this angriest of gods. Even as the fascinated onlookers watched, the great whirlpool tide became stronger and swifter; the race to destruction became a mania; and the whole universe began to drain from all sides, its components jostling, thrusting, exploding, and fractionating in the hectic, desperate race to become one within the confines of this singular end of everything.
Wildheit did not need instruments to know that the provost-craft had itself joined the cosmic death-rush. The great fireball was growing; but even faster than it grew, its apparent size was enhanced by the speed of their own movement toward it. Furthermore the crush of self-destructive suns entrained in the spiral whirlpool was pressing closer, and the level of radiation in space had risen so high that the craft’s cooling equipment had precisely no direction in which it could dump its waste heat. The temperature was rising internally to an uncomfortable degree. This factor did not itself perturb the trio in the craft unduely, because it was obvious that with the ceasing of the engines something had also happened to the air supply. A slow and not unpleasant lethargy coupled with expansive dream-states was creeping upon them. The atmosphere could possibly have been adjusted, but there was no point in prolonging consciousness in order to endure a more painful death.
Dripping with sweat, Wildheit was finding it peculiarly difficult to maintain his attention. Time and again he dropped into a broken semisleep, only to reawaken on his back to note the inexorable progress of the ship toward its great and dreadful destiny. He knew with some objective part of his mind that he was becoming delirious, and the same critical faculty suggested that, all things considered, this was a reasonable state of
mind in which to die. Nevertheless the instinct to survive forced him to his feet and across to the now uncomfortably-hot control banks to investigate the possibility of continued life.
In the face of the ultimate destructive capability of the great singularity which had become the sky, the marshal realized that he had no idea whatever about what he was attempting to achieve. Even had the engines been in good order, it was debatable whether they could have succeeded in dragging the craft out of the immense gravitational well which now tugged whole galaxies toward destruction; nor did he have sufficient understanding of the instruments even to begin to understand their reasonings as to why the engines had failed. Kasdeya and Penemue had apparently found it reasonable to accept death stoically and, when conscious, faced the violent sun to end all suns with profoundly curious eyes. Wildheit swore, and lurched down the companionway with a half-formed idea of having a look at the engines themselves.
Away from the flight-bridge the air seemed cooler and easier to breathe. It possibly contained a fraction more life-supporting oxygen. Although he welcomed this, Wildheit knew objectively that all he could achieve was to prolong his own agony. Repeatedly his mind kept slipping from his task, and around each corner and behind each bulkhead door fragments of memory sparked by similar lines and forms and shapes obtruded into his thoughts, populating the lower deck with hints of familiar ghosts.
An emergency suit against a dark corner carried a suggestion of Saraya, bat-black and with a swirling cloak. The light streaming through a nearby viewport framed the illusion with a fire-glow, as if it were seen through a window into Hell. The next vision passed as he neared it: but on new legs, Cass Hover hurried to help his faltering progress, only to dissolve into a pattern of distorted reflections in the deep polish of a bulkhead door. With a face filled with
desperation, Roamer appeared to stand in the dark engine cell, gesturing with the whole of her arms imploringly. So real was this image that Wildheit could almost hear the words framed by her mouth.
“Coul, please don’t interfere!”
Struck by the curiousness of the phrase, Wildheit became conscious of the god still on his shoulder.
“How long to the end, Coul?”
“Soon. The old stars return for redistillation. The very atoms will be dissembled and remade. The mainspring of the universe is rewound. It is a terrible time for gods.”
The image of Roamer faded, then returned. This time she was addressing someone elsewhere, and the words seemed real rather than imagined.
“Help me! The time has nearly come.”
Coul stiffened as if he himself were responding to the object of Wildheit’s imagination. Some sort of catastrophe happened within the ship, and what little air there was became suddenly tainted with a sour, chest-constricting smoke.
“The time is come … is now …”
An explosion rocked Wildheit with a brief concussion. The pain in his shoulder increased intolerably, as if Coul were wrenching out the very root of the symbiosis that had united them together. He tried to contain the pain, but its increase swamped his whole system with agony, and he cried aloud in the instants before the black wing of unconsciousness deprived him of the further capacity to suffer. Then with the swooping of internal night, a long cry sounded deep in the recessed chambers of his mind.
“Good-bye, Marshal! Good-bye!”
What followed for Wildheit was a period of neither death nor consciousness. He fell into a great limbo in which things half-perceived came and went but had no actual meaning for him. He was aware that time passed, but how much of it and to what purpose, he neither understood nor cared. The sole unifying thread
which ran through the whole experience was the dreadful ache in his shoulder that extended down, toward, and sometimes into his heart.
Some incidents he remembered, or thought he remembered, but there was no way of deciding if they had actually taken place or whether they were fragments of some old memory resurrected. People came and stood over him; white sticks were played by unseen hands; a vast resonance physically bounced him where he lay, and sucked at what little consciousness he possessed; and a strong scent of violets in his lungs gave him days or perhaps eternities of rest and renewal.
“Steady, Jym, boy! It’s all over now!”
“Cass?”
Over the edge of a hospital bunk he could see a pair of Service shorts, and beneath the shorts was the most perfectly proportioned pair of male legs Wildheit had ever seen. The top half of the scene was completed by the rest of Space-Marshal Hover’s concerned form. Wildheit attempted to sit up, but the pain in his shoulder made him drop back with the movement uncompleted.
“Cass—where the hell am I?”
“You’re in the hospital ward of the Space-force Cruiser
Stellar Scorpion
, if that answers your question. You’ve been very ill indeed.”
“I remember … mixing it with the end of the old universe … in a Ra provost-craft … no hope. Cass, I
couldn’t
have got out of there alive!”
“Gently, old son! The whole craft was snatched out of the old universe and set back in the new. We don’t quite know how it was done, but we do know who did it and why.”
“Coul?”
“No. According to Talloth, Coul tried to prevent it. At the last moment he tried to hold the craft there, but failed. Instead he was himself lost in the fireball. It was the Sensitive seers, linked through Roamer,
who apparently pulled the ship out—by some sort of focused teleportation.”
“I dreamed I saw Roamer telling Coul not to interfere.”
“That sounds as if you caught a bit of the actual action. Though it wasn’t you she was trying to save. It was the ship she was after.”
“Why on Earth?”
“Lack of spacecraft is the only thing that confines the seers to Mayo. With Roamer off-planet to act as a focus, at last they had the chance to use their mental powers to snatch themselves a craft. We guess that Roamer wanted that ship in particular.”
“Why that one?”
“Because it was small enough for them to handle, and you’d already proved it was capable of penetrating through the trans-continuum junction. She needed a craft like that. It was the only way she could ever rejoin her kind.”
“Then where is she now?”
“I’ll tell you where she is, Jym. She’s sitting out there somewhere behind the sights of the Chaos Weapon, knocking our defensive structure to pieces as we try to come to grips with the Ra fleets still coming through the junction.”
Wildheit lay back and assimilated this information quietly, then leaned over again.
“What happened to the provost-craft, Cass?”
“That’s another story. The Sensitives fetched it down on Mayo. Fortunately there’s a guardian of sorts named Dabria who was on the alert for just such an eventuality. He captured the ship with you and two other slightly over-cooked characters still inside it. Realizing what he’d found, he contacted Saraya and invited us to come and collect.”
“But the craft itself, Cass? Is it still intact?”
“It will be. When we found it, it was little better than a collection of dissembled parts, on account of the fact that its former occupants apparently having undone everything which should still have been done
up. It’s a habit you’ll have to break yourself of, Jym. Dismantling a spacecraft while it’s still in space can be vary bad for your health. It’s taken two lab-ships and a space-assembly team the best part of a month out on the plains of Mayo trying to put the bits back together again.”
“But it can be made serviceable?”
“So I’m assured by the experts. Which is just as well, because it’s the only thing available to take you, me, and a few others for an appointment in the junction with a certain Miss whose downfall is long overdue.”
“Kasdeya and Penemue? Did they survive?”
“Like you, they needed extensive treatment; but we managed to pull them both through. In fact they rallied somewhat sooner and have even been helping rebuild the provost-craft.”