Vacuum Diagrams

Perhaps she should tell Arke about the Friend — what a relief it would be to share her doubts and uncertainties with another! — but Arke, good man as he was, would surely conclude that she was simply insane; and she would never again be allowed to use the controls without the watchful eye of a villager on her.

Anyway, she reflected, at the moment the Friend wasn’t here! So whatever was impelling her, making her restless, was coming from inside her.

She leaned forward and peered into Arke’s pale, anxious eyes. “I think we have to go on. We can’t stop here.”

He spread his hands. “Why? We are comfortable and safe.”

“Arke, this ship isn’t just a teepee. It flies! Look — someone built the Eight Rooms for us to find. Didn’t they?”

Arke nodded slowly. “Someone who knew we would need to escape the ice one day.”

“So they released us from one danger — the cold. But, Arke, why give us a ship as well? Why not just stop at the Eight Rooms?”

Arke frowned. “You think there’s something else — another danger; something we would need to escape in the flying ship.”

“Yes.” She sat back, resting her hands on her knees. “And that’s why I think we have to learn to use this vessel.”

Arke rubbed his broad nose. “Erwal, you’ve been right about a lot of things before. But—” He gestured at the sleeping villagers. “We aren’t pioneers. We only came so far because the alternative seemed certain death. And even if you’re right, this mysterious danger might not manifest itself for a long time — for lifetimes, perhaps! So why should we not relax, let our children worry about the future?”

Erwal shook her head, remembering the urgency of the Friend. “I don’t think we have lifetimes, Arke.”

Arke spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Frankly, Erwal, I don’t see why the rest of us should let you endanger all our lives.”

She nodded. “Then consider this: Arke, would you let me take the ship away alone? — Then I would only be endangering myself, after all.”

He scratched his chin. “But the food lockers—”

“I wouldn’t take the mummy-cow,” she said briskly. “No one would starve.”

“I don’t know…”

She took both his hands in hers. “Arke, I’ve saved all your lives. Now I think I am saving them again! Don’t you owe it to me to let me try?”

He stared up at her uncertainly, the lines of his face softened by the twilight of the chamber.

“Let’s talk to the others in the morning,” he said.

There was grumbling, complaint at the possible loss of the ship’s wonderful facilities — and, Erwal was moved to find, genuine concern at her own welfare.

But they agreed.

It took a couple of days for the villagers to set up camp in the Eight Rooms once more; but at last the ship was cleared, save only for a few stray blankets, garments and other oddments. Erwal spent the time experimenting with the ship’s panels, trying to work out a destination.

There was a light hand on her shoulder. Erwal turned. “Sura…”

The girl smiled down at her. “Are you ready?”

“What are you doing here?”

The smile broadened. “I couldn’t let you go alone, could I?”

A soft warmth was added to the brew of exhilaration and fear already swirling within Erwal. Briefly she covered Sura’s hand with her own — and then turned to the controls and slid her hands into the mittens.

The ship quivered.

Paul brooded over the wreckage of the Solar System.

Since the retreat of the Xeelee the Universe had been lost to baryonic life forms. The photino birds had not yet completed their vast conversion programs — stars were still shining, the Ring not yet closed — but at last, in a time not very distant, the final light would be extinguished and the baryonic Universe would grow uniform and cold, a stable home for the photino birds.

A shipful of primitive humans had no possibility of survival in a Universe occupied by such a force.

Therefore the humans would have to follow the Xeelee. Perhaps this escape had been the intention of the Xeelee all along, Paul mused. Perhaps they had provided many other junior baryonic races with similar “lifeboats,” so they could follow the Xeelee to a place where baryonic life was still possible.

He saw it now. His humans would have to use their ship to cross space and pass through Bolder’s Ring.

And Paul would have to guide them there. He felt a surge of determination, of anticipation…

And of fear.

Around his decision the diffuse cloud that comprised Paul’s awareness coalesced. He prepared to return to the ship—

But there was something in the way.

Paul stopped. He assembled awareness foci to consider the new barrier, confused. The wave-function guides he was following had been distorted, even terminated, and—

He was being watched.

Paul froze, shocked; his sub-personalities condensed into something almost as coherent and limited as his old corporeal self.

There was something here: something aware and able to study him… and to stop him.

As if trembling, he tried to respond. The data that formed his being was stored in a lattice of quantum wave functions; now he distorted that lattice deliberately to indicate an omission. A lack. A question.

— Who are you? —

The answer was imposed directly on his awareness; it was like being exposed to a raw, vicious dream, to a million years of venom.

— Qax. —

The gateway between the Eighth Room and the ship healed shut, leaving Erwal and Sura alone in the ship.

“Where shall we go?” Sura asked i

Erwal smiled. “Well, that’s a good question.” And, she realized, she barely knew how to start framing an answer. She flexed the gloves, and the panels, which had been displaying scenes of stars and of the Eighth Room, now filled with representations which were obviously artificial.

Sura stared at the graphic circles, the cones and ellipses, with confusion. “What does all this mean?”

Erwal withdrew her hands from the mittens. “I can only guess. But I think these pictures are meant to show us what this world is like.” She reached up to grasp Sura’s hand. “Sura, you know that the world we came from was like a box. There was the Shell below our feet, and Home above us, closing us in.”

Sura sniffed. “Any child could see that.”

“Yes. But now we’ve come out of that box; and out here it’s different. There is no box anymore! The Eighth Room, the doorway to the box, is just — hanging there.”

“The way the first Room was hanging over the ground, when we found it?”

“Yes, but — even more so,” said Erwal, struggling to make sense. “It simply hangs! And there is no ground above it, or below it, as far as I can see. Just empty space, and a great pit of stars.”

Sura, her mouth hanging open, thought it over. “I feel scared.”

So do I, Erwal thought grimly; and she reflected on the many times she had instinctively sought a colorful roof-world over her head, and how she had cowered in her seat, wishing she were at home in her teepee with a hard roof of rock between her and the stars.

Sura studied images of the Eighth Room. “If we’ve just come out of a great box — through the Eighth Room — then why can’t we see the outside of the box from here? All you can see is the Room itself!” Sura sounded aggrieved, as if this were an affront to her intelligence.

Erwal sighed and pushed a lock of hair from her brow. “That’s just one of a hundred — a thousand things about this situation I don’t understand at all. I think we have to proceed with what we can understand.”

“And what’s that?” Sura asked irritably. “Because none of this makes any sense so far.”

Erwal pointed to a particular schematic. This showed a bright light, little more than a dot, surrounded by nine concentric circles. A small, framework cube sat on the third circle from the center, slowly following the track in an anticlockwise direction; a complex arrangement of light points similarly followed the sixth circle. The other circles were empty. “Look at that,” said Erwal. “What does that remind you of?”