Ring

What the people did to each other, what they believed, was beyond her control. Perhaps it always had been. All she strove to do was to keep as many as possible of them alive.

But now, if the wormhole was lost, it had all been for nothing. Nothing.

The kinetic energy of the pod shattered the spacetime flaw that was the wormhole. The portal behind it imploded at lightspeed, and gravitational waves and exotic particles pulsed around the craft.

Arrow Maker felt the air thicken in his lungs, cold settling over his bare skin. The pod jolted, and he was almost thrown out of his seat; calmly he unwrapped Spi

He held his hands before his face. He saw frost, glistening on his skin; his breath steamed in the air before him.

The pod’s fragile hull cracked and starred; one by one the craft’s systems — its heating, lights, air — collapsed under the hammer-blows of this impossible motion.

Through a transient network of wormholes which collapsed behind him in storms of heavy particles and gravity waves. Arrow Maker fell across past and future, the light of collapsing spacetime playing over his shivering flesh.

Light flared from the Interface. It gushed from every face of the tetrahedron like some liquid, bathing the Northern in violet fire.

It was like a small sun.

The starship shuddered. The steady glow of the GUT-drive flickered — actually flickered, for the first time in centuries. The Britain, old and fragile in its cradle, rocked back and forth, and Louise heard a distant clatter of falling objects, the incongruously domestic sound of sliding furniture.

All over the lifedome, lights flickered and died.

14

He was the last man.

He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light against which all phenomena are shadows.

Time wore away, unmarked.

And then —

There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

From around an impossible corner a human entered the box. He sat in a battered, fragile craft which tumbled through space. A rope was wrapped around his waist, and he was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

He stared out at the stars, astonished.

Spacetime-fire erupted into the box, finally engulfing the little craft.

Something had changed. History had resumed.

Michael Poole’s extended awareness stirred.

PART III

Event: Sol

15

Louise Ye Armonk stood on the pod’s short ladder. Below her, the ice of Callisto was dark, full of mysterious depths in the smoky Jovian ring-light.

She felt a starburst of wonder. For the first time in a thousand subjective years she was going to walk on the surface of a world.

She stepped forward.

Her feet settled to the ice with a faint crunch. Her boots left well-defined, ribbed prints in the fine frost which coated Callisto’s surface.

The thick environment suit felt heavy, despite the easiness of Callisto’s thirteen-percent-gee gravity. Louise lifted her hands and pressed her palms together; she was barely able to feel her hands within the clumsy gloves. The suit was a thousand years old. Trapped inside this thing she felt deadened, aged, as if she were forced to work within some glutinous fluid.

She looked around, peering through her murky faceplate, squinting to make out detail through the plate’s degraded image-enhancement. As her sense of wonder faded, she felt irritation grow; she knew it was weak of her, but, damn it, she missed the crystal clarity of her Virtual dioramas.

Jupiter and Sol were both below the little moon’s infinite-flat, icy horizon: but Jupiter’s new rings arced spectacularly out of the horizon and across the sky. The ring system’s far edge occluded the stars, razor-sharp, and the ice and rock particles of the rings sparkled milky crimson in the cool, distant sunlight.

The rings were like a huge artifact, she thought. Here, a mote on a plain of ice, she felt dwarfed to insignificance.

She tipped back her head and looked at the stars.

It had already been a year since the Northern’s speed had dropped sufficiently for the last relativistic effects to bleach from the Universe, a year in which they’d slowly coasted in from the outer System to Jupiter. The Northern had been in orbit around the Jovian moon for several days now, and Morrow had been working down here for most of that time. Preliminary scans from the Northern had told them that there was something buried inside the freshly frozen Callisto ice — something anomalous. Morrow, with his team of ’bots, was trying to find out what that was.

But this was Louise’s own first trip down to the surface. And the experience of being immersed in a sky — a genuine, spread out, distortion-free starry sky — was an u

But what a sky it was — a dull, empty canopy of velvet, peppered by the corpses of stars: wizened, cooling dwarfs, the bloated hulks of giants — some huge enough to show a disc, even at interstellar distances — and, here and there, the traceries of debris, handfuls of spider-web thrown across the sky, which marked the sites of supernovas.

There was a grunt, and a diffuse shadow fell across the ice.

Louise turned. Spi

Louise gri

“Oh, thanks,” Spi

Louise looked down and scuffed the surface with her toe, leaving deep scratches. Within the ice she could see defects: planes, threads and star-shaped knots, imperfections left by the freezing process. “This is ice, but it’s not exactly smooth.”

Spi

“…Yes.”

“Look,” Spi