Stephen Baxter - Flux

It was like a huge sculpture of gas and light, Dura thought. She was stunned by the spectacle, and yet charmed by its proportion, scale, depths of shading and color.

She was seeing the gas ring around the star from edge-on… in fact, she realized slowly, the Ur-human construct around her was actually inside the body of the ring. And she could see beyond the central star to the far side of the gas ring; distance reduced the ring’s far limb to a line of light on which the little star was threaded, like a pendant.

She could see turbulence in the ring, huge cells big enough to swallow a thousand of the Ur-human colonies. The cells erupted and merged, changing as she watched despite their unthinkable scale. And there seemed to be movement around the star, a handful of sparks dipping into its carcass…

“Then it’s true,” Hork breathed.

“What?”

“That we’re not in the Star any more. That we’ve been transported, through the wormhole, to a planet outside it.” Ring-light bathed his face, casting complex highlights from his beard. “Don’t you see? That’s our star — the Star — and, just like the map said, we’re on a planet circling the Star. But the map didn’t show the ring.” He turned to her, excitement in his eyes. It was the excitement of understanding, she realized, of piecing together a puzzle. “So now we know how our Star’s system is put together.” He mimed with his hands. “Here’s the Star, at the center of it all. The gas ring encircles it, like this. The planet must drift within the ring. And hanging above it all we have the globe-thing, glowing dully and leaking gas.”

Dura stared at their Star. It was small and mean, she thought, disappointing compared to the glorious lanterns which glittered in other parts of the sky. And yet it was home; she felt a strange dislocation, a pang of sadness, of loss. “Our world is so limited,” she said slowly. “How could we ever have known that beyond the Crust was so much wonder, immensity, beauty…”

“You know, I think that big sphere of gas has a glow of its own. It isn’t just reflecting the Starlight, I mean.”

The globe was like an immense pendant on the ring, utterly dwarfing the Star itself. Hork seemed to be right; the intensity of its gray-yellow glow increased toward its rough center. And it wasn’t actually a sphere, she realized slowly; perhaps it had once been, but now it was drawn out into a teardrop shape, with a thin tip attached to the ring by an umbilical of glowing gas. The outer layers of the globe were misty, turbulent; Dura could see through them to the darkness of space.

“It’s like a star itself. But…”

“But it doesn’t look right.” Dura searched for the right word. “It seems — unhealthy.”

“Yes.” He pointed. “It looks as if stuff is being drawn out of the big star and put into the ring.” He glanced speculatively at Dura. “Perhaps, somehow, the Star is drawing flesh from the big star to create the ring. Perhaps the planet we’re on is constructed of ring-stuff.”

She shuddered. “You make the Star sound like a living thing. Like an eye-leech.”

“A star-leech. Well, perhaps that’s as good an explanation as we’ll ever get…” He grinned at her, his face spectral in the ring’s glow. “Come on. I want to try the arrow’s last setting.”

“Oh, Hork… Do you have any capacity for awe?”

“No.” His grin broadened through his beard. “I think it’s a survival characteristic. Mental toughness, I call it.” He led her back around the inner portal-chamber and eyed her roguishly. “So we’ve seen the stars. Big deal. What’s left?”

“Twist the arrow and find out.”

He did so.

The universe — of stars and starlight — imploded.

Dura screamed.

The stars — all except the Star — had disappeared, dragging all the light from the sky. The Star, with its ring and its huge, bleeding companion, hung in an emptied sky…

No, she realized, that wasn’t quite true. There was a bow around the sky — a multicolored ribbon, thin and perfect, which hooped around the Ur-humans’ habitat — and, she saw, passed behind the Star itself.

It was a ribbon which encircled the universe, and it contained all the starlight.

Hork loomed before her, the starbow adding highlights to the gray illumination of his face. “Well?” he demanded irritably. “What now?”

She rubbed her forehead. “Each setting of that device has shown us more of our surroundings — more of the universe. It’s as if successive layers, veils, have been removed from our eyes.”

“Right.” He lifted his eyes to the starbow. “So this must be the truth? The last setting, which strips away all the veils?” He shook his head. “But what does it mean?”

“The sky we saw before — of stars, scattered around the sky — was strange to us… even awesome. But it looked natural. The stars were just like our Star, only much further away.”

“Yes, Whereas this seems distorted. And how come we can still see our Star? Why isn’t its light smeared out into this absurd hoop, too?”

Smeared starlight… Yes. I like that. Good; that’s very perceptive…

Dura whirled in the Air, trying to suppress a scream. The voice, dry and soft, emanating from the emptiness of the huge room behind her had been utterly terrifying.

“Karen Macrae,” Hork said, his voice thick with hostility.

A sketch of shoulders and head wrought in pale, colored cubes of light hung in the Air a mansheight from them. The definition was poorer than within the underMantle — the colors washed out, the jostling light-cubes bigger. Karen Macrae opened her eyes, and again Dura was repulsed by the fleshy balls nestling within the cups.

Hork had been right; somehow Karen Macrae had ridden with them in the lump of Corestuff attached to the side of the “Pig,” all the way from the depths of the Star to this remote, austere place.

The starlight is smeared; yes. And it’s crucial that you understand why it’s smeared, what’s happening to you. The walls of this place aren’t windows; they have processing capacity — they’re virtually semi-sentient, actually — capable of deconvolving the Doppler distortions of…

Hork growled and Waved forward. “Talk straight, damn you.”

The blurred head rotated slowly. Doppler distortion. Blue shift. You — we — are traveling enormously quickly through space. Almost as fast as light itself. Do you see? And so…

“And so we outrun starlight,” Hork said. “…I think I understand. But why is it we still see the Star itself, and its system of ring and giant companion?”

The Colonist seemed to be retreating into her own half-formed head; the fleshy things in her eyecups slid around like independent animals.

Dura struggled to answer Hork. “Because the Star is traveling with us. And that’s why we can still see its light.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Does that make sense?”

Hork growled. “This Colonist and her riddle-talk… All right. Let’s assume you’re right. After all, we haven’t any better explanation. Let’s assume we, and the Star, are traveling through space as fast as light. Why? Where are we coming from? And where are we going?”

There was no answer from Karen Macrae. Light-cubes crawled over her face like leeches.

Hork and Dura stared at each other, as if seeking the answers in each other’s exasperated faces.

They looked around once more, trying to make sense of the distorted sky. Dura felt small, fragile, helpless in this ensemble of hurtling worlds. There was a symmetry to the smeared light around them, and after some argument they decided that their departure point and destination must lie at the poles of an imaginary globe around them, the globe whose equator was marked by the starbow.