Space Opera

He hoped so.

The thrust flames died out. Running lights and fluorescent markings winked out. A moment later he watched the other ship come apart like something fashioned from gossamer. Debris lingered for an instant before being crushed toward invisibility.

And two bulbously suited human figures fell through the air, drifting apart as they were caught in the torpid currents that ran through the transition zone. For a moment the suits were androform, but then their carapaces flowed liquidly toward smooth egg-shapes, held rigid by the same principle that still protected Merlin's ship. They were alive—he was sure of that—but they were still sinking, still heavier than the air they displaced. The one that was now falling fastest would pass the storm at what he judged to be a safe distance. The other would fall right through the storm's eye.

He thought of the focus of the storm: a seething eye of flickering gamma rays, horrific gravitational stress, and intense pressure eddies. They had not seen it yet, but he could be sure that was what it would be like. A black hole, even a small one, was no place to be near.

"Final warning," Tyrant said, bypassing all his overrides. "Pressure now at maximum safe limit. Any further increase in . . . "

He made his decision.

Slammed Tyrant screaming toward the survivor who was headed toward the eye. It would be close—hellishly so. Even the extra margins he had built into this ship's hull would be pushed perilously close to the limit. On the cabin window, cross-hairs locked around the first falling egg. Range: eleven kilometers and closing. He computed an approach vector and saw that it would be even closer than he had feared. They would be arcing straight toward the eye by the time he had the egg aboard. Seven kilometers. There would not be time to bring the egg aboard properly. The best he could do would be to open a cavity in the hull and enclose it. Frantically he told Tyrant what he needed; by the time he was done, range was down to three kilometers.

He felt faint, phantom deceleration as Tyrant matched trajectories with the egg and brought itself in for the rendezvous. The egg left a trail of bubbles behind it as it dropped, evidence of the transition to ocean. Somewhere on Tyrant's skin, a cavity puckered open, precisely shaped to accept the egg. They tore through rushing curtains of cloud. In a few moments he would be near enough to see the eye, he knew. One kilometer . . . six hundred meters. Three hundred.

The faintest of thumps as the egg was captured. Membranes of hull locked over the prize and resealed. Whoever he had saved was as safe now as Merlin.

Which was really saying very little.

"Instigate immediate pull-up. Hull collapse imminent. Severe pressure transition imminent."

He was through the eye now, perhaps only two or three kilometers from the sucking point of the black hole. He had expected to see the clouds drawn into a malignant little knot, with a flickering glint of intense light at the heart of the whirlpool, but there was nothing, just clear skies. There was a local gravitational distortion, but it was nowhere near as severe as he had expected. Merlin glanced at the radiation alarms, but they were not showing anything unusual.

No hint of gamma radiation.

He wanted time to think, wanted to work out how he could be this close to a black hole and feel no radiation, but what was coming up below instantly demanded his attention. There was the other egg, tumbling below, wobbling as if in a mirage. Pressure was distorting it, readying to crush it. And down below, slumbering under the transition zone, was the true hydrogen sea. In a few seconds the other egg would be completely immersed in that unimaginably dense blackness and it would all be over. For a moment he considered swooping in low; trying to snatch the egg before it hit. He ran the numbers and saw the chilling truth.

He would have to enter the sea as well.

Merlin gave Tyrant its orders and closed his eyes. Even in the cushioning embrace of his suit, the hairpin turn as the ship skimmed the ocean would still not be comfortable. It would probably push him below consciousness. Which, he thought, might turn out to be the final mercy.

The sea's hazy surface came up like a black fog.

Thought faded for an instant, then returned fuzzily; and now through the windows he saw veils of cloud toward which he was climbing. The feeling of having survived was godlike. Yet something was screaming. The ship, he realized. It had sloughed millimeters of hull to stay intact. He prayed that the damage would not prevent him getting home.

"The second egg . . . " Merlin said. "Did we get it?"

Tyrant was clever enough—just—to know what he meant. "Both eggs recovered."

"Good. Show me . . . "

Proctors carried the first egg into the cabin, fiddling with it until they persuaded it to revert to androform shape. When the facial region became transparent he saw that it was Gallinule that this egg had saved, although his brother was clearly unconscious. Not dead though: he could tell that from the egg's luminous readouts. He felt a moment of pure, unadulterated bliss. He had saved Gallinule, but not selfishly. He had not known which of the two eggs had been falling toward the eye. In fact, he did not even know that this was that egg. Had he plucked his brother from the sea, instants before the ocean would have crushed him?

But then he saw the other egg. The proctors, stupid to the end, had seen fit to bring it into the cabin. They carried it like a trophy, as if it were something he would be overjoyed to see. But it was barely larger than a space helmet.

Part Four

"I think I know what killed her," Sayaca said.

The three of them had agreed to meet within the Palace of Eternal Dusk. Sayaca had arranged a demonstration, casting into the sky vast projected shapes, which she orchestrated with deft gestures.

"It wasn't a black hole, was it?" Gallinule said.

"No." She took his hand in both of hers, comforting him as they dug through the difficult memory of Pauraque's death. It had happened months ago, but the pain of it was still acute for Gallinule. Merlin watched from one side, lingeringly resentful at the tenderness Sayaca showed his brother. "I think it was something a lot stranger than a black hole. Shall I show you?"

A double helix writhed in the sky, luminous and serpentlike against Plenitude's perpetual pink twilight.

Releasing Gallinule's hand, Sayaca lifted a finger and the DNA coil swelled to godlike size, until the individual base pairs were themselves too large to discern as anything other than blurred assemblages of atoms, huger than mountains. But atoms were only the beginning of the descent into the world of the vanishingly small. Atoms were assembled from even tinier components: electrons, protons, and neutrons, bound together by the electroweak and -strong forces. But even those fundamental particles held deeper layers of structure. All matter in the universe was woven from quarks or leptons; all force mediated by bosons.

Even that was not the end.

In the deepest of deep symmetries, the fermions—the quarks and leptons— and the bosons—the messengers of force—blurred into one kind of entity. Particle was no longer the right word for it. What everything in the universe seemed to boil down to, at the very fundamental level, was a series of loops vibrating at different frequencies, embedded in a multidimensional space.

What, Sayaca said, scientists had once termed superstrings.

It was elegant beyond words, and it explained seemingly everything. But the trouble with superstring theory, Sayaca added, was that it was extraordinarily difficult to test. It was likely that the theory had been reinvented and discarded dozens or hundreds of times in human history, during each brief phase of enlightenment. Undoubtedly the Waymakers must have come to some final wisdom as to the ultimate nature of reality . . . but if they had, they had not left that verdict in any form now remembered. So from Sayaca's viewpoint, superstring theory was at least as viable as any other model for unifying the fundamental particles and forces.


"But I don't see how any of this helps us understand Pauraque's Storm," Merlin said.

"Wait," said Sayaca's semblance. "I haven't finished. There's more than one type of superstring theory, understand? And some of those theories make a special prediction about the existence of something called shadow matter. It's not the same thing as antimatter. Shadow matter's like normal matter in every respect, except it's invisible and insubstantial. Objects made of normal and shadow matter just slip through each other like ghosts. There's only one way in which they sense each other."

"Gravity," Merlin said.

"Yes. As far as gravity's concerned, there's nothing to distinguish them."

"So what are you saying, that there could be whole universes made of shadow matter coexisting with our own?"

"Exactly that." She went on to tell them there was every reason to suppose that the shadow universe was just as complex as the normal one, with exactly analogous particle types, atoms, and chemistry. There would be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and shadow worlds—perhaps even shadow life.

Merlin absorbed that. "Why haven't we encountered anything like shadow matter before?"

"There must be strong segregation between the two types across the plane of the Galaxy. For one reason or another, that segregation has broken down around Bright Boy. There seems to be about half a solar mass of shadow matter gravitationally bound to this system—most of it sitting in Bright Boy's core."

Merlin tightened his grip on the balustrade. "Tell me this answers all our riddles, Sayaca."

Sayaca told them the rest, reminding Merlin how they had probed Cinder's interior via sound waves, each sonic pulse generated by the impact of an in-falling meteorite; the sound waves tracked as they swept through Cinder, gathered at a network of listening posts sprinkled across the surface. It was these seismic images that had first elucidated the fine structure of the Digger tunnels. But—unwittingly—Sayaca had learned much more than that.

"We measured Cinder's mass twice. The first time was when we put our own mapping satellites into orbit. That gave us one figure. The seismic data should have given us a second estimate that agreed to within a few percent. But the seismic data said there was only two-thirds as much mass as there should have been, compared with the gravitational mass estimate." Sayaca's semblance paused, perhaps giving the two of them time to make the connection themselves. When neither spoke, she permitted herself to continue. "If there's a large chunk of shadow matter inside Cinder, it explains everything. The seismic waves only travel through normal matter, so they don't see one-third of Cinder's composition at all. But the gravitational signature of normal and shadow matter is identical. Our satellites felt the pull of the normal and shadow matter, just as we did when we were walking around inside Cinder."

"All right," he said. "Tell me about Bright Boy, too."

"It makes just as much sense. Most of the shadow matter in this system must be inside the star. Half a solar mass would be enough for Bright Boy's shadow counterpart to become a star in its own right—burning its own shadow hydrogen to shadow helium, giving off shadow photons and shadow neutrinos, none of which we can see. Except just like Bright Boy it would be an astrophysical anomaly—too bright and small to make any kind of sense, because its structure is being affected by the presence of an equal amount of normal matter from our universe. Both stars end up with hotter cores, since the nuclear reactions have to work harder to hold up the weight of overlying stellar atmosphere."

Sayaca thought that the two halves of Bright Boy—the normal and shadow mass suns—had once been spatially separated, so that they formed the two stars of a close binary system. That, she said, would have been something so strange that no passing culture could have missed it, for the visible counterpart of Bright Boy would have seemed to be locked in orbital embrace with an invisible partner, signaling its oddity across half the Galaxy. Over the ensuing billions of years, the two stars had whirled closer and closer together, their orbital motions damped by tidal dissipation, until they had merged and settled into the same spatial volume. Whoever comes after us, Merlin thought, we won't be the last to study this cosmic mystery.

"Then tell me about Pauraque's Storm," he said, flinching at the memory of her crushed survival egg.

Gallinule nodded. "Go on. I want to know what killed her."

Sayaca spoke now with less ease. "It must be another chunk of shadow matter—about the mass of a large moon, squashed into a volume no more than a few tens of kilometers across. Of course, it wasn't the shadow matter itself that killed her. Just the storm it caused by its passage through the atmosphere."

And not even that, Merlin thought. It was his decision that killed her; his conviction that it was more vital to save the first egg, the one falling into the storm's eye. Afterward, discovering that there was no gamma-ray point there, he had realized that he could have saved both of them if he had saved Pauraque first.

"Something that massive, and that small . . . " Gallinule paused. "It can't be a moon, can it?"

Sayaca turned away from the sunset. "No. It's no moon. Whatever it is, it was made by someone. Not the Huskers, I think, but someone else. And I think we have to know what it was they had in mind."

Nervously, Merlin watched seniors populate the auditorium—walking in or simply popping into holographic existence, like card figures dropped into a toy theater. Sayaca had bided her time before announcing her discovery to the rest of the expedition, but eventually the three of them had gathered enough data to refute any argument. When it became clear that her news would be momentous, seniors had flown in from across the system, leaving the putative hideaways they were investigating. A few of them even sent their semblances, for the simulacra were now sophisticated enough to make many physical journeys unnecessary.

The announcement would take place in the auditorium of the largest orbiting station, poised above Ghost's cloud-tops. An auroral storm was lashing Ghost's northern pole, appropriately dramatic for the event. He wondered if Sayaca had scheduled the meeting with that display in mind.

"Go easy on the superstring physics,"Gallinule whispered in Sayaca's ear, as she sat between the two men. "You don't want to lose them before you've begun. Some of these relics don't even know what a quark is, let alone a baryon-to-entropy ratio." Gallinule was right to warn Sayaca. It would be like her to begin her announcement by projecting a forest of equations on the display wall.

"Don't worry," Sayaca said. "I'll keep it nice and simple; throw in a few jokes to wake them up."

Gallinule kept his voice low. "They won't need waking up, once they realize what the implications are. Straightforward hiding's no longer an option, not with something as strange as the Ghost anomaly sitting in our neighborhood. When the Huskers arrive they're bound to start investigating. They're also bound to find any hideaway we construct, no matter how well camouflaged."

"Not if we dig deep enough," Merlin said.

"Forget it. There's no way we can hide now. Not the way it was planned, anyway. Unless . . . "

"Don't tell me; we'd be perfectly safe if we could store ourselves as patterns in some machine memory?"

"Don't sound so nauseated. You can't argue with the logic. We'd be nearly invulnerable. The storage media could be physically tiny, distributed in many locations. Impossible for the Huskers to find them all."


"The Council can decide," Sayaca said, raising a hand to shut the two of them up. "Let's see how they take my discovery, first."

"It was Pauraque's discovery," Merlin said quietly. "Whatever."

She was already walking away from them, crossing the auditorium's floor toward the podium where she would address the congregation. Sayaca walked on air, striding across the clouds. It was a trick, of course: the real view outside the station was constantly changing because of the structure's rotation, but the illusion was flawless.

"It may have been Pauraque who discovered the storm," Gallinule said, "but it was Sayaca who interpreted it."

"I wasn't trying to take anything away from her."

"Good."

Now she stepped up to the podium, the hem of her electric-blue gown floating above the clouds. She stood pridefully, surveying the people who had gathered here to hear her speak. Her expression was one of complete calm and self-assurance, but Merlin saw how tightly she grasped the edges of the podium. He sensed that beneath that shell of control she was acutely nervous, knowing that this was the most important moment in her life, the one that would make her reputation among the seniors and perhaps shape all of their destinies.

"Seniors . . . " Sayaca said. "Thank you for coming here. I hope that by the time I've finished speaking, you'll feel that your time wasn't wasted." Then she extended a hand toward the middle of the room and an image of Ghost sprang into being. "Ever since we identified this system as our only chance of concealment, we've had to ignore the troubling aspects of the place. Bright Boy's anomalous mass-luminosity relationship, for instance. The seismic discrepancies in Cinder. Pauraque's deep-atmospheric phenomenon in Ghost. Now the time has come to deal with these puzzles. I'm afraid that what they tell us may not be entirely to our liking."

Promising start, Merlin thought. She had spoken for more than half a minute without using a single mathematical expression.

Sayaca began to speak again, but she was cut off abruptly by another speaker. "Sayaca, there's something we should discuss first." Everyone's attention moved to the interjector. Merlin recognized who it was immediately: Weaver. Cruelly handsome, the boy had outgrown his adolescent awkwardness in the years since Merlin had first known him as one of Sayaca's class.

"What is it?" she said, only the tiniest hint of suspicion in her voice.

"Some news we've just obtained." Weaver looked around the room, clearly enjoying his moment in the limelight while attempting to maintain the appropriate air of solemnity. "We've been looking along the Way, as a matter of routine, monitoring the swarm that lies ahead of us. Sometimes off the line of the Way, too—just in case we find anything. We've also been following the Bluethroat."

It was so long since anyone had mentioned that name that it took Merlin an instant to place it. Of course, the Bluethroat. The part of the original ship that Crombec had flown onward, while the rest of them piled into Starling and slowed down around Bright Boy. It was not that anyone hated Crombec or wished to bury him and his followers from history, simply that there had been more than enough to focus on in the new system.

"Go on . . . " Sayaca said.

"There was a flash. A tiny burst of energy light-years from here, but in the direction we know Crombec was headed. I think the implications are clear enough. They met Huskers, even in interstellar space."

"Force and wisdom," said Shikra, the archivist in charge of the Cohort's most precious data troves. "They can't have survived."

Merlin raised his voice above the sudden murmur of debate. "When did you find this out, Weaver?"

"A few days ago."

"And you waited until now to let us know?"

Weaver shifted uncomfortably, beginning to sweat. "There were questions of interpretation. We couldn't release the news until we were sure of it." Then he nodded toward Sayaca. "You know what I mean, don't you?"

"Believe me, I know exactly what you mean,"she said, shaking her head. She must have known that the moment was no longer hers; that even if she held the attention of the audience again, their minds would not be fully on what she had to say.

She handled it well, Merlin thought.

But irrespective of what she had found in Ghost, the news was very bad. The deaths of Crombec and his followers could only mean that the immediate volume of space was much thicker with Husker assets than anyone had dared fear. Forget the two swarms they had already known about; there might be dozens more, lurking quietly only one or two light-years from the system. And perhaps they had learned enough from Crombec's trajectory to guess that there must be other humans nearby. It would not take them long to arrive.

In a handful of years they might be here.

"This is gravely serious," one of the other seniors said, raising her voice above the others. "But it must not be allowed to overshadow the news Sayaca has for us." He nodded at her expectantly. "Continue, won't you?"

Months later, Merlin and Gallinule were alone in the Palace, standing on the balcony. Gallinule was toying with a white mouse, letting it run along the balustrade's narrow top before picking it up and placing it at the start again. They had put Weaver's spiteful sabotage long behind them, once it became clear that it had barely dented the impact of Sayaca's announcement. Even the most conservative seniors had accepted the shadow-matter hypothesis, even if the precise nature of what the shadow matter represented was not yet clear.

Which was not to say that Weaver's own announcement had been ignored, either. The Huskers were no longer a remote threat, decades away from Bright Boy. The fact that they were almost certainly converging on the system brought an air of apocalyptic gloom to the whole hideaway enterprise. They were living in end times, certain that no actions they now took would really make much difference.

It's been centuries since we made contact with another human faction, another element of the Cohort, Merlin thought. For all we know, there are no more humans anywhere in the Galaxy. We are all that remains; the last niche which the Huskers haven't yet sterilized. And in a few years we might all be dead as well.

"I almost envy Sayaca," Gallinule said. "She's completely absorbed in her work in Cinder again. As if nothing else will ever affect her. Don't you admire that kind of dedication?"

"She thinks she'll find something in Cinder that saves us all."

"At least she's still optimistic. Or desperate, depending on your point of view. She sends her regards, incidentally."

"Thanks," Merlin said, biting his tongue.

Gallinule had just returned from Cinder, his third and longest trip there since Sayaca had left Ghost. Once the shadow-matter hypothesis had been accepted, Sayaca had seen no reason to stay here. Other gifted people could handle this line of enquiry while she returned to her beloved tunnels. Merlin had visited her once, but the reception she had given him had been no more than cordial. He had not gone back.

"Well, what do you think?" Gallinule said.

Suspended far out to sea was a representation of what they now knew to be lurking inside Ghost. It was the sharpest view Merlin had seen yet, gleaned by swarms of gravitational-mapping drones swimming through the atmosphere. What the thing looked like, to Merlin's eye, was a sphere wrapped around with dense, branching circuitry. The closer they looked, the sharper their focus, the more circuitry appeared, on steadily smaller scales, down to the current limiting resolution of about ten meters. Anything smaller than that was simply blurred away. But what they saw was enough. They had been right, all those months ago: this was nothing natural. And it was not quite a sphere, either: resolution was good enough now to see a teardrop shape, with the sharp end pointed more or less parallel to the surface of the liquid hydrogen ocean.


"I think it scares me," Merlin said. "I think it shows that this is the worst possible place we could ever have picked to hide."

"Then we have to accept my solution," Gallinule said. "Become software. It can be done, you know. In a few months we'll have the technology to scan ourselves." He held up the mouse again. "See this little fellow? He was the first. I scanned him a few days ago."

Merlin stared at the mouse.

"This is really him," Gallinule continued. "Not simply a projection of a real mouse into the Palace's environment, or even a convincing fake. Slice him open and you'd find everything you'd expect. He only exists here now, but his behavior hasn't changed at all."

"What happened to the real mouse, Gallinule?"

Gallinule shrugged. "Died, of course. I'm afraid the scanning procedure's still fairly destructive."

"So the little catch in your plan for our salvation is that we'd have to die to get inside your machine?"

"If we don't do it, we die anyway. Not much to debate, is there?"

"Not if you put it in those terms, no. We could of course experiment with the final syrinx and find a better way to escape, but I suppose that's too much of an imaginative leap for anyone to make."

"Except you, of course."

They were silent for long moments. Merlin stared out to sea, the Palace's reality utterly solid to him now. He did not think that it felt any less real to the mouse. This was how it could be for all of them, if Gallinule had his way: inhabiting any environment they liked until the Husker threat was over. They could skip over that time if they wished, or spend it exploring a multitude of simulated worlds. The trouble was, would there be anything to lure them back into the real world when the danger had passed? Would they even bother remembering what had come before? The Palace was already tantalizing enough. There had been times when Merlin had found it difficult to leave the place. It was like a door into his youth.

"Gallinule . . . " Merlin said. "There's something I always meant to ask you about the Palace. You've made it as real as humanly possible. There isn't a detail out of place. Sometimes it makes me want to cry, it's so close to what I remember. But there's something missing. Someone, to be exact. Whenever we were here—back in the real Palace, I mean—then she was always here as well."

Gallinule stared at him in something like horror. "You're asking me if I ever thought of simulating Mother?"

"Don't tell me it didn't cross your mind. I know you could have done it as well."

"It would have been a travesty."

Merlin nodded. "I know. But that doesn't mean you wouldn't have thought of it."

Gallinule shook his head slowly and sadly, as if infinitely disappointed at his brother's presumption. In the silence that followed, Merlin stared out at the shadow-matter object that hung over the sea. Whatever happened now, he thought, things between him and Gallinule could never be quite the same. It was not simply that he knew Gallinule was lying about their mother. Gallinule would have tried recreating her; anything less would have been an unforgivable lapse in his brother's devotion to detail. No; what had truly come between them was Sayaca. She and Gallinule were lovers now, Merlin knew, and yet this was something that he had never discussed with his brother. Time had passed and now there seemed no sensible way to broach the subject. It was simply there—unavoidable, like the knowledge that they would probably all die before very long. There was nothing to be done about it, so no point in discussing it. But in the same moment he realized something else, something that had been nagging at the back of his mind since the very earliest maps of the anomaly had been transmitted.

"Expand the scale," he said. "Zoom out, massively."

Gallinule looked at him wordlessly, but obeyed his brother all the same. The anomaly shrunk toward invisibility.

"Now show the anomaly's position within the system. All planetary positions to be exactly as they are now."

A vast, luminous orrery filled the sky: concentric circles centered on Bright Boy, with nodal points for the planets.

"Now extend a vector with its origin in the anomaly, parallel to the anomaly's long axis. Make it as long as necessary."

"What are you thinking?" Gallinule said, all animosity gone now.

"That all the anomaly ever was, was a pointer, directing our attention to the really important thing. Just do it, will you?"

A straight line knifed out from Ghost—the anomaly insignificant at this scale—and cut across the system, toward Bright Boy and the inner worlds.

Knifing straight through Cinder.

Part Five

"I wanted you to be the first to know," Sayaca said, her semblance standing regally in his quarters like a playing-card monarch. "We've found signals coming from inside the planet. Gravitational signals—exactly what we'd expect if someone in the shadow universe was trying to contact us."

Merlin studied the beautiful lines of her face, reminding himself that all he was speaking to was a cunning approximation of the real Sayaca, who was light-hours of communicational timelag down-system.

"How do they do it? Get a signal across, I mean."

"There's only one way: you have to move large masses around quickly, creating a high frequency ripple in spacetime. They're using black holes, I think: miniature ones, like the thing you first thought we'd found in Ghost. Charged up and oscillated, so that they give off an amplitude-modulated gravitational wave."

Merlin shrugged. "So it wasn't such a stupid idea to begin with."

Sayaca smiled tolerantly. "We still don't know how they make and manipulate them. But that doesn't matter for now. What does is that the message is clearly intended for us. It's only commenced since we reached into Cinder's deeper layers. Somehow that action alerted them—whoever they are—to our presence."

Merlin shivered despite himself. "Is there any chance that these signals could be picked up by the Huskers as well?"

"Every chance, I'd say—unless they stop before they get here. Which is why we've been working so hard to decode the signal."

"And you have?"

Sayaca nodded. "We identified recurrent patterns in the gravitational signal, a block of data that the shadow people were sending over and over again. Within this block of data were two kinds of bits: a strong gravitational pulse and a weaker one, like a one and zero in binary notation. The number of bits in the signal was equal to the product of three primes—definitely not accidental—so we reassembled the data-set along three axes, forming a threedimensional image." Sayaca paused and lifted her palm. What appeared in midair was a solid rectangular form, slab-sided and featureless. It rotated lazily, revealing its blankness to the audience.

"Doesn't look like much," Merlin said.

"That's because the outer layer of the solid is all ones. In fact, only a tiny part of its volume is made up of zeroes at all. I'll remove the ones and display only the zero values . . . "

A touch of showmanship: the surface of the box suddenly seemed to be made out of interlocking birds, frozen in formation for an instant before flying in a million different directions. Suddenly what she was showing him made a lot more sense. It was like a ball of loosely knotted string. A map of Cinder's crustal tunnels, plunging more deeply toward the core than their own maps even hinted. Five or six hundred kilometers into the lithosphere.

"But it doesn't tell us anything we wouldn't have learned eventually . . . " Merlin said.


"No; I think it does." Sayaca made the image enlarge, until she was showing him the deep end of one particular tunnel. It was capped by a nearly spherical chamber. "All the other shafts end abruptly, even those that branch off from this one at higher levels. But they've clearly drawn our attention to this chamber. That has to mean something."

"You think there's something there, don't you."

"We'll know soon enough. By the time this semblance speaks to you, Gallinule and I will have almost reached that chamber. Wish us the best of luck, won't you? Whatever we find in there, I'm fairly certain it'll change things for us."

"For better or for worse?"

The semblance smiled. "We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"

End times, Merlin thought again. He could taste it in the air: quiet desperation. The long-range sensors sprinkled around the system had picked up the first faint hints of neutrino emission, which might originate with Husker craft moving stealthily toward Bright Boy from interstellar space. And the main swarms up and down the length of the Way had not gone away.

One or two humans had undergone Gallinule's fatal scanning process now, choosing to go ahead of the pack rather than wait for the final stampede. Their patterns were frozen at the moment, but before very long Gallinule's acolytes would weave a simulated environment which the scanned could inhabit. Then, undoubtedly, others would follow. But not many. Merlin was not alone in flinching at the idea of throwing away the flesh just to survive. There were some prices that were simply too high, simply too alien.

Do that, he thought, and we're halfway to being Husker ourselves.

What could he do to save himself, if saving the rest of them was out of the question? He thought of stealing the syrinx. He had not learned enough to use it safely yet, but he knew he was not far from being able to do so. But it was tightly guarded, under permanent Council scrutiny. He had asked Gallinule and Sayaca to apply persuasion to the others, but while they might have had the necessary influence, they had not acceded to his wishes.

And now Sayaca was back from Cinder, bearing tidings. She had convened a meeting again, but this time nobody was going to steal her thunder.

Especially as she had brought someone with her.

It was the semblance of a woman: a female of uncertain age but from approximately the same genetic background as everyone present. That was nothing to be counted on; since the Flourishing there had been many splinters of humanity, which seemed monstrously strange to those who had remained loyal to the old phenotype. But had this woman changed her clothes, makeup, and hairstyle, she could have walked among them without attracting a second glance. Except perhaps for her beauty: something indefinably serene in her face and bearing that seemed almost supernatural.

Her expression, before she began speaking, was one of complete calm.

"My name is Halvorsen," she said. "It's an old name, archaic even in my own time . . . I have no idea how it will sound to your ears, or if you can even understand a word of what I'm saying. We will record versions of this message in over a thousand languages, all that we hold in our current linguistics database, in the hope that some distant traveler will recognize something, anything, of use."

Merlin raised a hand. "Stop . . . stop her. Can you do that?"

Sayaca nodded, causing Halvorsen to freeze, mouth open. "What is she?" Merlin said.

"Just a recording. We triggered her when we arrived in the chamber. It wasn't hard to translate her. We already knew that the Diggers' language would later evolve into Main, so it was just a question of hoping that one of the recordings would be in a tongue that was also in our records."

"And?"

"Well, none of her messages were in languages we knew moderately well. But three were in languages for which we had fragments, so we were able to patch together this version using all three threads. There are still a few holes, of course, but I don't think we'll miss anything critical."

"You'd better hope not. Well, let her—whoever she is—continue."

Halvorsen became animated again. "Let me say something about my past," she said. "It may help you establish the time frame in which this recording was made. My ancestors came from Earth. So did yours—if you are at all human—but in my case I even met someone who had been born there, although it was one of her oldest memories, something as faint and tiny as an image seen through the wrong end of a telescope. She remembered a time before the Flourishing, before the great migrations into the Orion Arm. We rode swallowships for ten thousand years, cleaving close to lightspeed. Then came wars. Awful wars. We hid for another ten thousand years, until our part of the Galaxy was quiet again. We watched many cultures rise and fall, learning what we could from them; trading with those who seemed the least hostile. Then the Waymakers came, extending their transit network into our region of space. They were like gods to us as well, although we stole some of their miracles and fashioned them to our own uses. After thousands of years of careful study we learned how to make syrinxes and to use the Waynet." She paused. "We had a name for ourselves, too: the Watchers."

Halvorsen's story continued. She told them how a virus had propagated through their fleets, subtly corrupting their most ancient data heirlooms. By the time the damage was discovered, all their starmaps had been rendered useless. They no longer knew where Earth was. At first, the loss seemed of minimal importance, but as time passed, and they came into contact with more and more cultures, it became clear that the Watchers' records had probably been the last to survive uncorrupted.

"That was when she died, the oldest of us. I think until then she had always clung to some hope that we would return to Earth. When she knew it could never happen, she saw no reason to continue living."

Then they entered a long Dark Age. The Waymakers had gone; now, unpoliced, terrors were roaming the Galaxy. Marauders sought the technological wisdom that the Watchers had acquired over slow millennia. The Watchers fled, pursued across the light-years in much the same manner as the Cohort now found itself, hounded from star to star. Like the Cohort, too, they found Bright Boy. They were exploring it, trying to understand the system's anomalies; hoping that the understanding would bring new power over their enemies. They had excavated the tunnel system into Cinder and created the machines that lined the terminal chamber. They, too, had detected signals from the shadow universe, although the contents of the messages proved much harder to decode.

"They were alien," Halvorsen said. "Truly alien: automated transmissions left behind half a billion years earlier by a group of creatures who had crossed over into the shadow universe. They had been fleeing the fire that was about to be unleashed by the merger of a pair of binary neutron stars only a few hundred light-years away. They left instructions on how to join them. We learned how to generate the same kinds of high-frequency gravitational waves that they were using to signal us. Then we learned how to encode ourselves into those wave packets so that we could send biological information between universes. Although the aliens were long gone, they left behind machines to tend for us and to take care of our needs once we were reassembled on the other side."

"But the Marauders are long gone,"Merlin said. "Our oldest records barely mention them. Why didn't Halvorsen and her people return here?"

"There was no need," Sayaca said. "We tend to think of the shadow universe as a cold, ghostly place, but once you're mapped into it, it looks much like our own universe—the sky dotted with bright suns, warm worlds orbiting them. Theirs for the taking, in fact. Halvorsen's people had been late-players in a Galaxy already carved up by thousands of earlier factions. But the shadow universe was virgin territory. They no longer had to skulk around higher powers, or hide from outlaw clades. There was no one else there."


"Except the aliens . . . the—" Merlin blinked. "What did she call them?"

Sayaca paused before answering. "She didn't. But their name for them was the . . . " Again, a moment's hesitation. "The Shadow Puppets. And they were long gone. They'd left behind machines to assist any future cultures who wanted to make the crossing, but there was no sign of them now. Maybe they moved away to settle some remote part of the shadow Galaxy, or maybe they returned to our universe when the threat from the merger event had passed."

"Halvorsen's people trusted these creatures?"

"What choice did they have? Not much more than us. They were in as much danger from the Marauders as we are from the Huskers."

It was Halvorsen who continued the story. "So we crossed over. We expanded massively; extended a human presence around a dozen nearby systems on the other side. Star travel's difficult because there's no Waynet, but the social templates we acquired during the time before the Marauders have served us well. We've been at peace for one thousand years at the time of this message's recording. Many more thousands of years are likely to have passed before it reaches you. If we attempted to communicate with you gravitationally, then you can be sure that we're still alive.

By then we will have studied you via the automated systems we left running in Cinder. They will have told us that you are essentially peaceable; that we are ready to welcome you."

Halvorsen's tone of voice changed now. "That's our invitation, then. We've opened the gateway for you; provided the means for information to pass into the shadow universe. To take the next step, you must make the hardest of sacrifices. You must discard the flesh; submit yourselves to whatever scanning techniques you have developed. We did it once, and we know it's a difficult journey, but less difficult than death. For us, the choice was obvious enough. With you, it may not be so very different." Halvorsen paused and extended a hand in supplication. "Do not be frightened. Follow us. We have been waiting a long time for your company."

Then she bowed her head and the recording halted.

Merlin could feel the almost palpable sense of relief sweeping the room, though no one was undignified enough to let it show. A swelling of hope, after so many months of staring oblivion in the face. Finally, there was a way out. A way to survive, which was something other than Gallinule's route to soulless immortality in computer memory. Even if it also meant dying . . . but it would only be a transient kind of death, as Halvorsen had said. Waiting for them on the other side was another world of the flesh, into which they would all be reborn.

A kind of promised land.

It would be very difficult to resist, especially when the Huskers arrived. But Merlin just stared hard at the woman called Halvorsen, certain that he knew the truth and that Sayaca had, on some level, wanted him to know it as well.

She was lying.

Tyrant fell toward empty space, in the general direction of the Way. When Merlin judged himself to be a safe distance from Cinder he issued the command that would trigger the twenty nova-mines emplaced in the lowermost chamber. He looked down on the world and nothing seemed to happen, no stammer of light from the exit holes of the Digger tunnel system. Perhaps some inscrutable layer of preservation had disarmed the nova-mines.

Then he saw the readouts from the seismic devices that Sayaca had dropped on the surface, what seemed like half a lifetime earlier. He had almost forgotten that they existed—but now he watched each register the detonation's volley of sound waves as they reached the surface. A few moments later, there was a much longer, lower signal—the endless roar of collapsing tunnels, like an avalanche. Some sections of the tunnels would undoubtedly remain intact, but it would be hard to cross between them. He was not yet done, though. First he directed missiles at the tunnel entrances, collapsing them, and then assigned smaller munitions to destroy Sayaca's seismic instruments, daubing the surface in nuclear fire.

There must be no evidence of human presence here; nothing to give the Huskers a clue as to what had happened—

That everyone was gone now: crossed over into the shadow universe. Sayaca, Gallinule, all the others. Everyone he knew, submitting to the quick, clean death of Gallinule's scanning apparatus. Biological patterns encoded into gravitational signals and squirted into the realm of shadow matter.

Except, of course, Merlin.

"How did you guess?" Sayaca had asked him, just after she had presented Halvorsen's message.

They had been alone, physically so, for the first time in months. "Because you wanted me to know, Sayaca. Isn't that the way it happened? You had to deceive the others, but you wanted me to know the truth. Well, it worked. I guessed. And I have to admit, you and Gallinule did a very thorough job."

"Do you want to know how much of it was true?"

"I suppose you're going to tell me anyway."

Sayaca sighed. "More of it than you'd probably have guessed. We did detect signals from the shadow universe, just as I said."

"Just not quite the kind you told us."

"No . . . no." She paused. "They were much more alien. Enormously harder to decode in the first place. But we managed it, and the content of the messages was more or less what I told the Council: a map of Cinder's interior, directing us deeper. There we encountered other messages. By then, we had become more adept at translating them. It wasn't long before we understood that they were a set of instructions for crossing over into the shadow universe."

"But there was never any Halvorsen."

Sayaca shook her head. "Halvorsen was Gallinule's idea. We knew that crossing over was the only hope we had left, but no one would want to do it unless we could make the whole thing sound more, well . . . palatable. The aliens were just too alien—shockingly so, once we began to understand their nature. Not necessarily hostile, or even unfriendly . . . but unnervingly strange. The stuff of nightmares. So we invented a human story. Gallinule created Halvorsen and between us we fabricated enough evidence so that no one would question her reality. We manufactured a plausible history for her and then pasted her story over the real one."

"The part about the aliens fleeing the neutron star merger?"

"That was completely true. But they were the only ones who ever crossed over. No humans ever followed them."

"What about the Diggers?"

"They found the tunnels, explored them thoroughly, but it seems that they never intercepted the signals. They helped though; without them it would have been a lot harder to make Halvorsen's story sound convincing." She paused, childlike in her enthusiasm. "We'll be the first, Merlin. Isn't that thrilling in a way?"

"For you, maybe. But you've always stared into the void, Sayaca. For everyone else, the idea will be chilling beyond words."

"That's why they couldn't know the truth. They wouldn't have agreed to cross over otherwise."

"I know. And I don't doubt that you did the right thing. After all, it's a matter of survival, isn't it?"

"They'll learn the truth eventually," Sayaca said. "When we've all crossed over. I don't know what'll happen to Gallinule and me then. We'll either be revered or hated. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, but I suspect it may be the latter."

"On the other hand, they'll know that you had the courage to face the truth and hide it from the others when you knew it had to be hidden. There's a kind of nobility in that, Sayaca."


"Whatever we did, it was for the good of the Cohort. You understand that, don't you?"

"I never thought otherwise. Which doesn't mean I'm coming with you."

Her mouth opened the tiniest of degrees. "There's nothing for you here, Merlin. You'll die if you don't follow us. I don't love you the way I used to, but I still care for you."

"Then why did you let me know the truth?"

"I never said I did. That must have been Gallinule's doing." She paused. "What was it, then?"

"Halvorsen," Merlin said. "She was created from scratch; a human who had never lived. You did a good job, as well. But there was something about her that I knew I'd seen before. Something so familiar I didn't see it at first. Then, of course, I knew."

"What?"

"Gallinule based her on our mother. I always suspected he'd tried simulating her, but he denied it. That was another lie, as well. Halvorsen proved it."

"Then he wanted you to know. As his brother." Merlin nodded. "I suppose so."

"Then will you follow us?"

He had already made his mind up, but he allowed a long pause before answering her. "I don't think so, Sayaca. It just isn't my style. I know there's only a small chance that I can make the syrinx work for me, but I prefer running to hiding. I think I'll take that risk."

"But the Council won't let you have the syrinx, Merlin. Even after we've all crossed over, they'll safeguard it here. Surround it with proctors who'll kill you if you try and steal it. They'll want it unharmed for when we return from the shadow universe."

"I know."

"Then why . . . oh, wait. I see." She looked at him now, all empathy gone; something of the old Sayaca contempt showing through. "You'll blackmail us, won't you. Threaten to tell the Council if we don't provide you with the syrinx."

"You said it, not me."

"Gallinule and I don't have that kind of influence, Merlin."

"Then you'd better find it. It's not much to ask, is it? A small token of your gratitude for my silence. I'm sure you can think of something." Merlin paused. "After all, it would be a shame to spoil everything now. Halvorsen's story seemed so convincing, too. I almost believed it myself."

"You cold, calculating bastard." But she said it with half a smile, admiring and loathing him at the same time.

"Just find a way, Sayaca. I know you can. Oh, and one other thing."

"Yes?"

"Look after my brother, will you? He may not have quite my streak of brilliance, but he's still one of a kind. You're going to need people like him on the other side."

"We could use you too, Merlin."

"You probably could, but I've got other business to attend to. The small matter of an ultimate weapon against the Huskers, for instance. I'm going to find it, you know. Even if it takes me the rest of my life. I hope you'll come back and see how I did one day."

Sayaca nodded, but said nothing. They both knew that there were no more words that needed to be said.

And, true to his expectations, Sayaca and Gallinule had come through. The syrinx was with him now—an uninteresting matte-black cone that held the secrets of crossing light-years in a few breaths of subjective time—sitting in its metal harness inside Tyrant. He did not know exactly how they had persuaded the Council to release it. Quite possibly there had been no persuasion at all, merely subterfuge. One black cone looked much like another, after all.

This however was the true syrinx, the last they had.

It was unimaginably precious now, and he would do his best to learn its secrets in the weeks ahead. Countless millions had died trying to gain entry to the Waymakers' transit system, and it was entirely possible that Merlin would simply be the next. But it did not have to be like that. He was alone now—possibly more alone than any human had ever been—but instead of despair what he felt was a cold, pure elation: he now had a mission, one that might prove to be soul-destroyingly difficult, even futile, but he had the will to accomplish it.

Somewhere behind him the syrinx began to purr.