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Spi
…and then…
Come on, Spi
Spi
With regret she glanced down once more at the honey she would not be able to enjoy, and issued a soft, subvocal command.
Out of the air, the environment suit congealed over her limbs like some web made of silvery cloth, and the bulky couch materialized around her body. Like a skull poking through decaying flesh, the darkness of space, the harsh telltale lights of her waldoes, emerged through the forest dream.
“Spi
Her heart beat as rapidly as a bird’s. “Yes, Louise.”
“I’m sorry I had to dig you out of your Virtual like that. You, ah, you didn’t want to come back to us, I don’t think.”
Spi
She shivered again — and became suddenly, sharply suspicious. She hissed out brief subvocal commands and called up a display of her environment suit air temperature. It was around eighteen degrees Celsius. Not exactly ice cold, but still noticeably cool. She called up a faceplate graphic of how her suit temperature had varied over the last few days.
The coldness she’d felt in her dream had been real. The suit temperature had been changed. For more than a week it had been maintained at twenty-five degrees — fully seven degrees warmer than today.
“Louise,” she said sternly.
She heard Louise sigh. “I’m here, Spi
“What in Lethe is going on? What have you been trying to do, cook me to death?”
“No, Spi
“And the heat?”
“Heat acts as a mild sedative, Spi
Spi
“I guess I should have discussed it with you.”
“Yes, I guess you should,” Spi
Louise hesitated. “It was becoming harder and harder to dig you out of your fantasies, Spi
A dream of the forest.
With a sigh she straightened her posture in her couch. “Don’t worry, Louise. I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, Spi
Spi
“Spi
“It’s nearly over, Spi
As the faceplate worked, dim forms emerged — the moth-like forms of galaxies, far away, all around her. She saw spirals, ellipticals, gigantic irregulars: huge clusters of galaxies in their characteristic threads and sheets, the whole vision looking impossibly fragile.
But there was something odd about the pale images.
“We’ve arrived, Spi
Blue shift, Spi
Yes. The galaxies — all around her sky — were tinged blue, she realized now. Blue shift.
She had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.
PART V
Event: Ring
27
The nightfighter — with its fragile cargo of humans, and traveling thirty-five light-years with every hyperdrive jump — arced down toward the disc of the scarred galaxy. Spi
This galaxy was a broad spiral, with multiple arms tightly wrapped around a compact, glowing core. The star system was a pool of rust red, punctuated with the gleam of novae and supernovae: thus, she saw, the galaxy had not escaped depredation at the hands of the photino birds. And the gleaming disc was disfigured by one stu
Now the nightfighter, flickering through hyperspace, neared the rim of the disc, close to the termination of the scar.
This might have been the original Galaxy of humans, Spi
Suddenly the plane of the disc loomed up at her — and the nightfighter slid neatly into the notch gouged out of the disc.
“Good navigation, Louise,” she said. “Right down the cha
“Well, it wasn’t so hard to hit. The cha
The ’fighter plunged along the gouge, and the view was spectacular. Above her was the gaunt, galaxy-stained sky of the Attractor; below and around her was an open tu
At thirty-five light-years a second, the ship would reach the core in under thirty minutes.
Now the ’fighter dived into a bank of opaque dust — and then exploded out again, the stars gleaming crimson and gold in the walls of the galaxy-spa
Spi
She heard Louise laugh. “You’re enjoying the ride, Spi
There were voices behind Louise Armonk. “I see it.” Excited, shouting. “I see it — ”
I see it, too.
Spi
It had been the voice of the man from her forest dreams, of course. She almost expected to see that slim, dark form, sitting out there beyond the cage: that sixty-year-old face, the hair of gray pepper-speckled with black, the vulnerable brown eyes…
Somehow, she felt he was coming closer to her. He was emerging.