David Brin - Heaven's Reach

Sara gently lifted Prity from her lap and put her on the deck. She stood up and began moving toward the conversation, whose intensity grew with each passing dura.

“But-t-t-t—” Akeakemai sputtered. “What about the Transcendentsss? Surely they would never allow such a thing to happ-p-pen!”

Allow what to happen, Sara puzzled as she approached.

Abruptly, the Niss Machine manifested its holo presence, spinning in midair near Gillian Baskin.

“I have bad news,” it announced. “The gateways have shut down. They are accepting no more candidates from this ingathering swarm.”

“I was afraid of this,” Gillian said. “The subspace disruptions have overcome the gateways’ ability to function. Now the arks will have nowhere to go, piling up just above the surface of the dwarf.”

“The pileup is already taking place, as ever larger numbers of candidate vessels finish their transformations and settle into that low, crowded orbit. However—” The hologram twisted and bowed. “You are wrong about the gateways. They are not dysfunctional. True, they appear to have stopped sending more candidates through to realms beyond. But this is because they now have other tasks in mind.”

“Show us!” Sara demanded, intruding on Gillian’s authority. The older woman nodded, and a multidimensional image sprouted. All objects were represented on a logarithmic scale, allowing events to be seen in vivid, compressed detail.

Down near the white dwarf, giant vessels thronged like a teeming herd of restless beasts, circling ever more tightly around a blazing fire. More streamed in steadily as Sara watched, contributing to a disk that kept spreading and thickening. Each new arrival came seeking passage to the next level. To a fabled place, next to some distant neutron star, where they might transform yet again, and bask in the embrace of mighty tides.

Only the conduits were gone! The needlelike structures had been busily occupied, just moments ago, passing candidates toward their goal. But now the immense devices deserted their stations and could be seen climbing away, abandoning the latecomers to their fate!

The gateways shimmered with inconstant colors that made them seem slippery to the eye, reminding Sara of the spectral flow — the desert of psi-active stone, back home on Jijo — where even a single glimpse could send a mind reeling.

Rising steadily away from the dwarf star, each needle plunged through the funnel of descending arks, forcing countless many of them to maneuver wildly out of the way, leaving behind swirls of confusion. Whatever order had remained in the mass pilgrimage swiftly vanished. Massive explosions glittered behind each behemoth, like phosphorescent diatoms, churned in some dark sea when a great beast comes rushing through.

“One of those things is headed almost straight for ussss!” the astrogator cried.

• • •

Gillian snapped an order. “Get us out of here, and to hell with prudence! Maximum inertial speed!”

Akeakemai responded with an emphatic tail slash. “Aye!”

Almost at once, Streaker’s engines began groaning with urgency. Sara felt ominous vibrations underfoot, along with a strange tension in her spine as compensating fields struggled to match acceleration.

“You know this is ffffutile, of course,” commented Zub’daki. “Even if we avoid collisions and the Jophur, we still aren’t going to make it-t. Streaker would have to be several light-years away in order to escape the coming calamity.”

“What are you talking about?” Sara asked. “What’s coming?”

Before the dolphin astronomer could answer, she stepped back with a gasp.

In the holo display, one of the huge, javelin-shaped gateways could be seen rising rapidly, leaving roiling chaos in its wake, on a course that seemed destined to pass nearby. While trillions died from crashes or fiery detonations, the “gateway” surged blithely onward and upward.

Only now Sara also observed—

“It’s shooting at some of the ships!”

Indeed, the needle-artifact was apparently not content with disrupting the migration with its backwash. It also flailed out with beams of force, like cruel, glowing lariats, aiming at specific targets as it climbed.

This was no anomaly. All the other gateways were behaving the same way as they hurried away from the white dwarf.

Sara felt Prity take her right hand. Aghast at the orgy of destruction — vastly more bloody and devastating than what had happened at the Fractal World — she could only stare and wonder.

I wish Emerson were here, so we could watch the end together.

Amid the advancing wave of blinding outbursts and detonations, she had time for one more thought before the shimmering monster lashed one more time, reaching toward Streaker, with dazzling rays of light.

Forgive me for thinking it — but God … it’s beautiful.…

HOW CAN I EXPRESS THE JOY I FEEL? OR THE sorrow that simultaneously fills my tense and throbbing spines?

Sometimes life seems just too ironic. The universe may be shaking apart around us, and yet I’ve been blessed by Ifni’s own good fortune, to find love and strange-warm acceptance among my own kind. Meanwhile, poor Pincer — whose idea it was to undertake the adventures that eventually brought us here from our wilderness home — met an untimely death at the very threshold of civilization, because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Scout-Major Harry Harms wanted to put out a police alert for the murderer, but Pilot Kaa begged him not to. A full investigation would blow our cover, revealing the presence of dolphins and sooners at Kazzkark. Above all, Huck must be protected, as the only living g’Kek survivor outside of Jijo — though she chafes at being put in such a position. Indeed, Huck is the angriest among us, shouting to avenge Pincer, whatever the cost!

I was forced to agree with Kaa. With law and order starting to crumble, it is doubtful that a “full investigation” would amount to very much, anyway.

“I’ll put out some feelers,” assured Scout-Major Harms. “And unleash ferret programs to look for any Rothen-like images on the monitors, in case Ro-kenn is careless enough to stroll openly along the avenues. But I’ll wager he’s gone underground. Rothen are notoriously clever at disguises and that sort of thing.”

“Or else he may have already taken shelter with one of the great clansss,” added Kaa. “Perhaps he is dickering with them right now, to sell out Streaker and Jijo.”

Against that possibility, Harry asked Kaa to move our little starship over to the docks of the Navigation Institute, sheltering it behind his own, odd-looking craft.

“You must understand, I’d never do this under normal circumstances,” he explained. “I took an oath. My first loyalty is to the Institute, and to the Civilization of Five Galaxies.” Then Harry shrugged expressively. “But right now it’s unclear what that means anymore.”

I confess, it was hard at first to watch him speak without umbling out loud! I know it shouldn’t surprise me so much to see a chimpanzee talk with sober eloquence. Especially one who stood so straight and tall, with elegant white fur and an enviably agile tail. Clearly, his race has benefited from several more centuries of genetic Uplift since the Tabernacle departed Earth, bringing his mute cousins to Jijo.

“In any event,” Major Harms continued. “You have a full set of bio identifications on Ro-kenn, contained in that report you’re carrying for the Terragens Council. Perhaps they’ll put some of their notorious interstellar agents on his trail. I’m sure the bastard will get paid in full for what he’s done. Don’t you worry.”

A bold reassurance. Even Huck seemed a little mollified.