Ring

“I recognize some of this,” Louise said. “Some of the geography, I mean. I could even tell you place names. Can you believe that — after five megayears?

“…But I guess that’s just telling us that Port Sol was abandoned not long after my time. Once the Squeem hyperdrive was acquired, the GUTship lines — even the worm-hole route operators — must have become suddenly obsolete. There was no longer any economic logic to sustain Port Sol. I wonder what the last days were like… Perhaps the Port was kept going by tourism, for a while. And, thinking back, there would have been a few who wouldn’t want to return to the crowded pit of the i

“Maybe that’s how it was,” she said. “But I think I’d rather imagine they closed the place up with one major party.”

“How did Port Sol survive the wars?”

“Who would want to come here?” Louise said drily. “What is there to fight over? There’s nothing that’s even worth destroying. Spi

Spi

She twisted her head, looking around the sky. “I don’t like it here, Louise,” she said. “It’s barren. Abandoned. I thought the Jupiter system was bad, but — ”

Apart from the Sun and Port Sol, only the distant dimmed stars shone here, impossibly remote. Spi

Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations. The Northern forest-Deck — the whole of that enclosed world which had seemed so huge to her, as a child — was nothing but a remote scrap of incongruous green, irrelevant in all this emptiness.

Louise said, “I know how you’re feeling. At least at Jupiter there was something in the sky. Right? Listen to me, Spi

“I know what it means.”

“Spi

“Sure. So tell me how it makes you feel.”

Louise hesitated. “Spi

Louise spoke of bustling, sprawling, vigorous human communities nestling among the ancient ice-spires of the Kuiper object. The sky had been full of GUTships and stars, with Sol a bright yellow gleam in Capricorn.

“But now,” Louise said, her voice tight, “look at the Sun… Spi

Spi

“Louise, do you want to land here?”

“No. There’s nothing for us down there… It was only an impulse that brought me out here in the first place; we had no evidence that anything had survived. I’m sorry, Spi

Spi

“Well, since we’re out here in the dark, let’s stay out. We’re still picking up that remote beacon.”

“Where’s the signal coming from?”

“Further out than we are now — about a hundred AUs — and a goodly distance around the equatorial plane from Port Sol. Spi

Spi

“All right. I’ve already laid in your course…”

There could be no true dialogue, Garry Uvarov thought, between Lieserl — the strange, lonely exile in the Sun — and the crew of the returned Great Northern.

The corpse of Jupiter was only just over a light-hour from the center of the Sol-giant, but Lieserl’s maser messages took far longer than that to percolate out of the Sun along the flanks of their immense convection cells. So communications roundtrips — between the Northern and the antiquated wormhole terminus that supported Lieserl’s awareness — took several days.

Still, once contact was established, a prodigious amount of information flowed, asynchronously, back and forth across the tenuous link.

“Incredible,” Mark murmured. “She dates from our own era — she was placed within the Sun at almost exactly the same time as our launch.”

It sounded as if Mark were speaking from somewhere inside Uvarov’s own head. Uvarov swiveled his sightless face about the dining saloon. “You’re forgetting your spatial focus again,” he snapped. “I know you’re excited, but — ”

There was a soft concussion; Uvarov pictured Virtual sound-sources reconfiguring throughout the saloon. “Sorry,” Mark said, from a point in the air a few feet before Uvarov’s head.

“As far as I can tell, she’s human,” Mark said. “A human analogue, anyway. The woman’s been in there, alone, for five million years, Uvarov. I know that subjectively she won’t have endured all that time at a normal human pace, but still…

“She’s another Superet project — just as we are. Which is why there’s such a coincidence in dates. We must both date from Superet’s most active period, Uvarov.”

Uvarov smiled. “Perhaps. And yet, what has resulted of all the grand designs of those days? Superet was pla

“But Lieserl has followed a lot of the history of the human race — in patches, and from a distance, but she knows more than we could ever hope to have uncovered otherwise. She lost contact with the rest of the race only as humans entered a late period called the Assimilation, when mankind was moving into direct competition with the Xeelee.”

Uvarov couldn’t wrench his imagination away from the plight of Lieserl. “But, I wonder, are these few, pathetic scraps of data sufficient compensation for a hundred thousand lifetimes of solitude endured by this unfortunate Lieserl, in the heart of a dying star?”

Mark synthesized a sniff. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “Maybe you’re a better philosopher than I am, Uvarov; maybe you can come to judgments on the moral value of data. At this moment I don’t really care where this information has come from.”