Stephen Baxter - Ring

And Spinner felt the warm hands of Michael Poole close over hers once more, strong, reassuring.

The discontinuity-drive wings unfurled behind the hulk of the lifedome, powerful and graceful.

“If it’s any consolation, Spinner, we’ll be a spectacular sight as we hit the plane,” Lieserl said. “We’ll shed our Kerr plunge radiation in a single burst of gravity waves…”

The singularity plane was widening; it was a disc, filled with jumbled starlight, opening like a mouth.

“Michael, will there be photino birds, in the new universe?”

I don’t know, Spinner.

“Will there be Xeelee?”

I don’t know.

“I want you to come with me.”

I can’t. I’m sorry. The quantum functions which sustain me don’t traverse the plane of the singularity.

The Xeelee ’fighters swirled around her cage, graceful, their nightdark wings beating. They filled space to infinity, magnificent here at the heart of their final defeat. The plane of the singularity was a sea of silver light below her.

The construction material of her cage, of the wings, began to glow, as if white hot.

Michael Poole turned to her, and nodded gently. The construction-material light shone out through his translucent face, making him look like a sculpture of light, she thought. He opened his mouth, as if to speak to her, but she couldn’t hear him; and now the light was all around him, engulfing him.

“Come with me!” she screamed.

And now, suddenly, dramatically, the singularity was here. Its rim exploded outwards, all around her, and she fell, helplessly, into a pool of muddled starlight.

She cringed into herself and clutched her hands to her chest; her worn arrowhead dug into her chest, a tiny mote of human pain.

The lifedome was plunged into darkness.

The jungle sounds beneath Louise were subdued, as if night had fallen suddenly… or as if an eclipse had covered the Sun.

The lifedome groaned, massively; it was like being trapped inside the chest of some huge, suffering beast. That was stress on the hull: the coordinate change, as the ship had crossed the singularity plane.

We have entered a new cosmos, then. Is it over? Louise felt like an animal, helpless and naked beneath a storm-laden sky.

Lieserl had spoken of how all of human history was funnelling through this single, ramshackle moment. If that was true, then perhaps, before she had time to draw more than a few breaths, her own life — and the long, bloody story of man — would be over.

…And yet the sky beyond the dome wasn’t completely dark, Louise saw. There was a mottling of gray: elusive, almost invisible. When she stared up into that colorless gloom, it was like staring into the blood vessels she saw when she closed her own eyelids; she felt a disturbing sense of unreality, as if her body — and the Northern, and all its hapless crew — had been entombed, suddenly, within some gross extension of her own head.

There was a rasp, as of a match being struck. Louise cried out.

Mark’s face, dramatically underlit by a flickering flame, appeared out of the gloom. Lieserl laughed.

“Lethe,” Louise said, disgusted. “Even at a time like this, you can’t resist showing off, can you, Mark?”

“Sorry,” he said, grinning boyishly. “Well, the good news is we’re all still alive. And,” more hesitantly, “I can’t detect any variation of the physical constants from our own Universe. It looks as if we may be able to survive here. For a time, at any rate…”

Lieserl snorted. “Well, if this universe is so dazzlingly similar to our own where are the stars?”

Now the lifedome began to lighten, as Mark kicked in image enhancing routines. It was almost like a sunrise, Louise thought, except that in this case the spreading light did not emerge from any one of the lifedome’s “horizons”; it simply broke through the muddy darkness, right across the dome.

In a few heartbeats, the image stabilized.

There were stars here, Louise saw immediately. But these were giants — and not like the bloated near-corpse which Sol had become, but huge, vigorous, brilliant white bodies each of which looked as if it could have swallowed a hundred Sols side by side.

The giants filled the sky, almost as if they were jostling each other. Several of them were close enough to show discs, smooth white patches of light.

Nowhere in her own Universe, Louise realized, could one have seen a sight like this.

Beside her, Lieserl sighed. “Uh-oh,” she said.

The light of New Sol gleamed from the pod’s clear hull, unremitting, blinding. Louise watched the faces of Mark, Spinner-of-Rope and Morrow as they peered out at the new cosmos. The pod turned slowly on its axis, and the brilliant young lamps of this new universe wheeled around them, bathing their profiles in intense white brilliance.

For their new sun, the crew of the Northern had selected a particular VMO: a Very Massive Object, a star of a thousand Solar masses — a typical member of this alternate cosmos. This star drifted through the halo of a galaxy, outside the galaxy’s main disc. Huge shells of matter — emitted when the star was even younger — surrounded New Sol, expanding from it at close to the speed of light.

The Great Northern itself hovered, a few miles from the pod. By the harsh, colorless light of New Sol Louise could see the bulky outline of the lifedome, with the sleek, dark shape of the Xeelee nightfighter still attached to the dome’s base — and there, still clearly visible, was the hull-scar left by the impact with the strand of cosmic string.

The battered ship orbited the new sun as timidly as ice comets had once circled Sol itself — so widely that each “year” here would last more than a million Earth years. The ship was far enough away that the VMO’s brilliance was diminished by distance to something like Sol’s. But even so, Louise thought, there was no possibility that the VMO could ever be mistaken for a modest G-type star like Sol. The VMO was only ten times the diameter of old Sol, so that from this immense distance the star’s bulk was reduced to a mere point of light — but its photosphere was a hundred times as hot as Sol. The VMO was a dazzling point, hanging in darkness; if she studied it too long the point of light left trails on her bruised retinae.

Externally, the Northern’s lifedome looked much as it had throughout its long and unlikely career: the ship’s lights glowed defiantly against the glare of this new cosmos, and the forest was a splash of Earth-green, flourishing in the filtered light of New Sol. But inside, the Northern had become very different. In the year since its arrival through the Ring, the dome had been transformed into a workshop: a factory for the manufacture of exotic matter and drone scoop ships.

Morrow, beside Louise, was blinking into the light of New Sol. His cupped hand shaded his eyes, the shadows of his fingers sharp on his face. He was frowning and looked pale. He caught Louise’s glance. “Things are certainly different here,” he said wryly.

She smiled. “If we ever build a world here, it won’t have a sun in the sky. Instead, by day there will be this single point source, gleaming like some unending supernova. The shadows will be long and deep… and at night, the sky will shine. It’s going to seem very strange.”

He glanced at her sharply. “Well, it will be strange for those of you who remember Earth, I guess,” he said. “But, frankly, there aren’t so many of you around any more…”