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five-megayear past...and of the photino birds."
"Photino birds?"
The timbre of Mark's voice changed; Uvarov imagined his stupid, pixel-lumped face splitting into a grin.
"That's Lieserl's phrase. She found what she was sent in to find dark matter energy flows, sucking the
energy out of the core of the Sun. But it wasn't some inanimate process, as her designers had expected:
Lieserl foundlife, Uvarov. She's not alone. She's surrounded by photino birds. And I think she rather
enjoys the company..."
"Lieserl..."Uvarov rolled the name around his mouth, savoring its strangeness. "An unusual name, even a
thousand years ago." Uvarov's patchy, unreliable memory fired random facts into his tired forebrain.
"Einstein had a child called Lieserl. I mean Albert Einstein, the "
"I know who he was."
"His wife was called Mileva," Uvarov said. "Why do I remember this?... They bore a child, Lieserl but
out of wedlock: a source of great shame in the early twentieth century, I understand. The child was
adopted. Einstein had to choose between his child, and his career in science... all that beautiful science of
his. What a choice for any human to have to make!
"So this woman has the name of a bastard," he said. "A name redolent of isolation. How appropriate.
Howlonely she must have been...
"And now she enjoys the company of dark matter life forms," he mused. "I wonder if she still remembers
she was oncehuman."
Port Sol was twenty light-hours from the source of the beacon, Louise estimated. The nightfighter would
be able to complete the trip in fifty hours.
Spinner-of-Rope, working her rudimentary controls with growing confidence, opened up the sail-wings
of the nightfighter. She glanced over her shoulder to watch the wings. Her view was partially obscured by
Louise's life-lounge, an improvised encrustation which sat, squat, on the thick construction material
shoulders of the ship's wing-mountings, just behind her own cage. One of theNorthern's small,
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glass-walled pods had been fixed there too.
The nightfighter used its domain wall antigravity effect to protect the lounge, with Louise in it, from its
extremes of acceleration. After a lot of experimentation they had found that securely attaching the lounge,
and other artifacts, to the structure of the Xeelee nightfighter was enough to fool the craft into treating the
enhancements as part of its structure.
But still, despite the human obstructions, Spinner could see the sparkle of the cosmic-string rims of the
wings as they wound out across hundreds of miles of space, hauling open the night-blackness of the
domain wall wings themselves. As they unfurled, the wings curved over on themselves with a grace and
delicacy astonishing, Spinner thought, in artifacts so huge and yet those curves seemed imbued with a
terrific sense of vigor, of power.
She touched the waldoes.
The wings pulsed, once.
There was an instant in which she could see Port Sol recede from her, a flashbulb impression of squat
human buildings and gaping ice-wounds which imploded to a light-point with a terrifying, helpless
velocity.
And then the worldlet was gone. Within a heartbeat, Port Sol had become too dim even to show up as a
point and there was no longer a frame of reference against which she could judge her speed.
Then, with slow sureness as her speed built up, blue shift began to stain the stars ahead of her once
more. For a few hours relativistic effects would spuriously restore those aged lights to something like the
brilliance they had once enjoyed.
...And again she had the sense, almost undefinable, of someonehere with her, inside the cage a
presence, surely human, staring out wistfully at the blue shifted stars as she did.
She wondered whether she should tell Louise about this. But real or not, external to her own, fuddled
mind or not her companion wasn'tthreatening.
And besides, what would Louise make of it? What could she do about it?
As the starbow coalesced around her once more, Spinner-of-Rope opaqued her faceplate, wriggled in
her couch until an irritating wrinkle of cloth behind her back had smoothed itself out, and tried to sleep.
The slow, wide orbits of Port Sol and the beacon source had left them ninety degrees apart, as seen
from the center of the Sun. Louise had laid in a course which took the nightfighter on a wide, high
trajectory high above the plane of the System, arcing across its outer regions. The nightfighter's path was
like a fly hopping across a plate, from one point on the plate's rim to another.
The Sun sat like a bloated, grotesque spider at the heart of its ruined System. All of the inner
planets Mercury, Venus, Earth/Luna were gone... save only Mars, which had been reduced to a
scorched cinder, surely barren of life, its orbit taking it skimming through the outer layers of the new red
giant itself.
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In a few more millennia that fragile orbit would erode, pitching Mars, too, into the flames. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]