Heaven's Reach (49 page)

I confess I did not understand at first. It seems that certain elements can be made from ingredients other than the normal run of protons, electrons, and neutrons, utilizing unusual varieties of quarks. Such atoms must be kept caged, or they tend to vanish from normal space, hopping off to D Level, or another subcontinuum where they feel more at home.

It felt weird to picture
Streaker
sheathed in such stuff.

Then again, I guess it would be weirder to be dead.

I well remember expecting to be vaporized when those fierce beams struck. But our surprising new armor absorbed all that energy, shunting every erg to another reality plane, dissipating it harmlessly.

“Sounds like a neat trick,” I commented.

“Indeed, Dr. Baskin,”
the Niss answered, with a sardonic edge.
“But a few hundred aeons ago, someone discovered how to render this fine defense useless by reversing the flow. By turning this wondrous material into a huge antenna
, absorbing
energy from hyperspace—in effect cooking the crew and everything else inside.”

So, that was why no one in the Five Galaxies had been stupid or desperate enough to use this kind of armor for a long time. It worked at first, because the Jophur were taken by surprise. But they have their own Branch Library aboard the
Polkjhy
, every bit as good as ours. By now they must surely have caught on, and prepared for our next encounter.

Somehow, we've got to get rid of this stuff!

I assigned Hannes Suessi to puzzle over that problem. Meanwhile, my plate is full of other troubles.

For one thing, the glavers howl, night and day.

Before leaving aboard Kaa's little boat, Alvin Hauph-Wayuo instructed us in the care and feeding of those devolved descendants of mighty starfarers. There wasn't
much to it. Feed them simulated grubs and clean their pen every few days. The glavers seemed stolid and easy to please. But no sooner did Kaa depart, taking Alvin and his friends to safety, than the filthy little creatures started moaning and carrying on.

I asked our only remaining Jijo native what it could mean, but the behavior mystifies Sara. So I can only guess it has something to do with the changing composition of the huge migration fleet surrounding us.

As we move across vast reaches of space and hyper-space, more globulelike vessels keep joining the throng, jostling side by side with jagged-edged arks of the former Retired Order.
Zang
 … plus other varieties of hydrogen breathers … now make up roughly two-thirds of the armada, though their vessels are generally much smaller than the monumental oxy-craft.

Our glavers must be sensing the Zang presence somehow. It makes them agitated—though whether from fear or anticipation is hard to tell.

They aren't the only ones feeling edgy. After leaving so many crewmates behind on Jijo,
Streaker
seems haunted and void … a bit like a wraith ship. Mystery surrounds us, and dangerous uncertainty lies ahead.

Yet, I can say without reservation that the dolphins left aboard this battered ship are performing their tasks admirably, with complete professionalism and dedication. After three years of winnowing, we are down to the last of Creideiki's selected crew. Those who seem immune to reversion or mental intimidation. Tested in a crucible of relentless hardship, they are pearls of Uplift—treasures of their kind. Every one would get unlimited breeding privileges, if we made it home.

Which doubles the irony, of course.

Not one of the fins believes we'll ever see Earth again.

As for Sara, she spends much of her time with the silent little chimp, Prity, using a small computer to draw hyperdimensional charts and complex spacetime matrices.

When I asked the Niss Machine to explain what they
were doing, that sarcastic entity dismissed their project, calling it—
“Superstitious nonsense!”

In other words, Sara still hopes to complete the work of her teacher, combining ancient Earthling mathematical physics with the computational models of Galactic science, trying to make sense out of the strange, frightening disruptions we have seen. Convulsions that appear to be unsettling a large fraction of the universe.

“I'm still missing some element or clue,” she told me this morning, expressing both frustration and the kind of heady exhilaration that comes with intense labor in a field you love.

“I wonder if it may have something to do with the Embrace of Tides.”

The Niss seems all too ready to dismiss Sara's efforts, because they have no correlation in the Great Library. But I've been impressed with her gumption and brilliance, even if she does seem to be bucking long odds. All I can say is more power to her.

Always hovering near Sara—with a distant, longing expression in his eyes—poor Emerson watches her tentative models flow across the holo display. Sometimes he squints, as if trying to remember something that's just on the tip of his tongue. Perhaps he yearns to help Sara. Or to warn of something. Or else simply to express his feelings toward her.

Their growing affection is lovely to behold—though I cannot entirely deflect pangs of jealousy. I was never able to return Emerson's infatuation, before his accident. Yet he remains dear to me. It is only human to have mixed feelings as his attention turns elsewhere. The stark truth is that Sara now has the only virile male human within several megaparsecs. How could that not make me feel more lonely than ever?

Yes, Tom. I sense you are still out there somewhere, with Creideiki, prowling dark corners of the cosmos. I can trace a faint echo of your essence, no doubt making, and getting into, astonishing varieties of trouble. Stirring things up even more than they already were.

Assuming it isn't wishful thinking—or some grand
self-deception on my part—don't you also feel my thoughts right now, reaching out to you?

Can't you, or won't you, follow them?

I feel so lost … wherever “here” is.

Tom, please come and take me home.

Ah, well. I'll edit out the self-pity later. At least I have Herbie for company.

Good old Herb—the mummy standing in a corner of my office, looking back at me right now with vacant eyes. Humanoid but ineffably alien. Older than many stars. An enigma that Tom bought with more than one life. A treasure of incalculable value, whose image launched a thousand Galactic clans and mighty alliances into mortal panic, shattering their own laws, chasing poor
Streaker
across the many-layered cosmos, trying to seize our cargo before anyone else could wrap their hands-claws-feelers-jaws around it.

My orders sound clear enough. Deliver Herbie—and our other treasures—to the “proper authorities.”

Once, I thought that meant the Great Library, or the Migration Institute.

Sorely disappointed and betrayed by those “neutral” establishments, we then gambled on the Old Ones—and nearly lost everything.

Now?

Proper authorities.

I have no idea who in the universe that would be.

Till this moment, I've put off reporting my most disturbing news. But there's no point in delaying any longer.

Yesterday, I had to put a dear friend under arrest.

Tsh't, my second-in-command, so competent and reliable. The rock I relied on for so long.

It breaks my heart to dial up the brig monitor and see her circling round and round, swimming without harness in a sealed pool, locked behind a coded door plate.

But what else could I do?

There was no other choice, once I uncovered her secret double dealings.

How did this happen? How could I have been blind to the warning signs? Like when those two Danik prisoners “committed suicide” a couple of months ago. I should have investigated more closely. Put out feelers. But I left the inquest to her, so involved was I with other matters.

Finally, I could no longer ignore the evidence. Especially now that she helped another, far more dangerous prisoner to esc—

…

I had to interrupt making that last journal entry, several hours ago. (Not that I was enjoying the subject.)

Something intervened, yanking me away.

An important change in our state of affairs.

The Niss Machine broke in to say the momentum field was collapsing.

The entire huge armada was slowing at last, dropping from A Level down to B, and then C. Flickers into normal space were growing longer with each jump. Soon, long-range sensors showed we were decelerating toward a brittle blue pinpoint—apparently our final destination.

Olelo's spectral scan revealed a
white dwarf star
, extremely compact, with a diameter less than a hundredth that of Earth's home sun, consisting mainly of ash from fusion fires that entered their last stage of burning aeons ago. In fact, it is a very massive and old dwarf, whose lingering furnace glow comes from gravitational compression that may last another twenty billion years.

We began picking up nearby anomalies—spindly dark objects revolving quite close to that dense relic star. Massive structures, big enough to make out as black shadows that sparkled or flashed, occulting the
radiant disk whenever they passed through line of sight. Which they did frequently. There were a lot of them, jammed so close that each circuit took less than a minute!

Soon we verified they were orbiting artifacts, jostling deep inside the sheer gravity well.

Of course the concept was familiar, reminding me of the Fractal World, crowding and shrouding its small red sun—a contemplative sanctuary for retirees. Indeed, this place bears a family resemblance to that vast habitat. Only here the distance scales are a hundred times smaller. Tremendous amounts of matter abide in that curled well, crammed into a tight funnel of condensed spacetime.

Whoever lives down there must not value elbow room very much.

They belong to an order of life that craves a different kind of dimensionality. A squeezing clasp that older races interpret as loving salvation.

Joining others in the Plotting Room, I watched this new variation on an old theme gradually loom before us.

“There are ssseveral billion white dwarves per galaxy,” commented Akeakemai. “If even a small fraction are inhabited like this, the p-population of transcendent beings would be staggering. And none would've been detectable from pre-Contact Earth!”

Sara held the hand of Emerson, whose eyes darted among the surrounding vessels of our convoy, perhaps fearing what they might do, now that we'd arrived. I sympathized. We're all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Deceleration continued through normal space, as the Niss Machine rematerialized to report. It had finished researching the symbol on our prow—the broad chevron representing our counterfeit membership in a higher order of sapiency.

“Let me conjecture,” I said, before the whirling hologram could explain. “The emblem stands for a union of the hydro- and oxy-life, coming together at last.”

One of my few remaining satisfactions comes from surprising the smug machine.

“How … did you know?”
it asked.

I shrugged—a blithe gesture, covering the fact that I had guessed.

“Two line segments meeting at an angle of one hundred and four degrees. That can only represent the bonds of a
water molecule.
Hydrogen plus oxygen, combining to make the fundamental ingredient of all life chemistry. It's not so mysterious.”

The spinning lines seemed to sway.

“Maybe for you,”
the Niss replied.
“Earthling preconceptions are not as fixed, perhaps. But to me this comes as a shock. After all the warnings, the endlessly repeated stories about how dangerous Zang are … how illogical, touchy, and inscrutable they can be …”

I shrugged.

“Young boys call little girls names, and vice versa. Often, they can't stand each others' company. At least, till they grow up enough to need one another.”

It was a facile analogy. And yet, the comparison made sense!

I used to wonder about the oxy-hydro antagonism. How, if they are so fundamentally different, so explosively hostile and incompatible, did the Zang and their brethren manage to keep peace with the Civilization of Five Galaxies for so long? Why hasn't one side wiped out the other, instead of grudgingly cooperating in complex feats of migration and ecomanagement, sharing spiral arms and space lanes with a relative minimum of violence?

How, indeed? It seemed improbable.

That is, unless the whole thing was already worked out at a higher level! A level where both life orders at last matured enough to find common ground.

A consummation, with each side providing what the other lacks.

So.

Here we are, at a place of fusion and consolidation.

A union forged amid strong gravity currents, deep within the Embrace of Tides.

We seem to be invited.

That leaves just one question.

Why?

Harry