Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity

The two unidentifiable passengers of the eyeball got the message; they moved farther away from the lens, back into the revolting shadows of the eye.

Taking care not to touch the fleshy parts again, Berg shoved away and back to her laser. She palmed the controls, setting the dispersion range for five yards. A blue-purple line of light, geometrically perfect, leapt into existence, almost grazing the cloudy lens; Berg checked that the coherence was sufficiently low that the beam did no more than cast a thumb-sized spot of light on the hold’s far bulkhead.

Shoving gently at the laser, she made the beam slice down. As the opaque lens material burned and shriveled away from laser fire, brownish air puffed out of the eyeball, dispersing rapidly into the hold’s atmosphere; and yet another aroma was added to the melange in Berg’s head — this one, oddly, not too unpleasant, a little like fresh leather.

A disk of lens material fell away, as neat as a hatchway. Droplets of some fluid leaked into the air from the rim of the removed lens, connecting the detached disk by sticky, weblike threads.

She still couldn’t see into the meaty sphere; and there was silence from the chamber she had opened up.

Berg thumbed the laser to stillness. Absently she reached for the detached lens stuff and pulled it from the improvised hatchway; the loops of entoptic material stretched and broke, and she sent the disk spinning away.

Then, unable to think of anything else to do, and quite unable to go to the opening she’d made, she hovered in the air, staring at the surgically clean, leaking lip of the aperture.

Thin hands emerged from the aperture, grasped the lip uncertainly. The small, sleek head of Jasoft Parz emerged into the air of the Narlikar. He saw Berg, nodded with an odd, stiff courtesy, and — with an ungainly grace — swept his legs, bent at the knees, out of the aperture. He was shivering slightly in the fresh air outside the eyeball; he was barefoot, and dressed in a battered, begrimed dressing gown — one of Michael’s, Berg realized. Parz seemed to be trying to smile at her. He hovered in the air, clinging to the aperture of the eye with one hand like an ungainly spider. He said, "This is the second time I’ve been extracted from a Spline eyeball, after expecting only death. Thank you, Miriam; it’s nice to meet you in the flesh."

Berg was quite unable to reply; she stared wildly at the eyeball aperture.

Now a second figure emerged slowly from the eye. This was the Wigner girl Shira, dressed — like Berg — in the grubby remnants of a Wigner coverall. The girl perched on the lip of the aperture, her legs tucked under her, and briefly scanned the interior of the freighter’s hold, her face blank, uncaring. She faced Berg. "Miriam. I didn’t expect to see you again."

"No." Berg forced the words out. "I…"

There was something like compassion in Shira’s eyes — the closest approximation to human warmth Miriam had ever seen in that cold, skull-like visage — and Berg hated her for it. The Friend said, "There’s nobody else, Miriam. There’s only the two of us. I’m sorry."

Berg wanted to deny what she said, to shove past these battered, stained strangers and hurl herself headfirst into the eyeball, search it for herself. Instead she kept her face still and dug her nails into her palms; soon she felt a trickle of blood on her fingers.

Parz smiled at her, his green eyes soft. "Miriam. They — Michael and Harry — have contrived a scheme. They are going to use the wreckage of the Spline to close the wormhole Interface, to remove the risk of any more incursions from the Qax Occupation future. Or any other future, for that matter."

"And they’ve stayed aboard. Both of them."

Parz’s face was almost comically solemn. "Yes. Michael is very brave, Miriam. I think you should take comfort from—"

"Bollix to that, you pompous old fart." Berg turned to Shira. "Why the hell didn’t he at least speak to me? He turned his comms to slag, didn’t he? Why? Do you know?"

Shira shrugged, a trace of residual, human concern still evident over her basic indifference. "Because of his fear."

"Parz calls him brave. You call him a coward. What’s he afraid of?"

Shira’s mouth twitched. "Perhaps you, a little. But mostly himself."

Parz shook his head. "I think she’s right, Miriam. I don’t think Michael was certain he could maintain his resolve if he spoke to you."

Berg felt anger, frustration, surge through her. Of course she’d known people who died; and her lingering memories of those times had always been an immense frustration at unfinished business — personal or otherwise. There was always so much left to say that could now never be said. In a way this was worse, she realized; the bastard wasn’t even dead yet but he was already as inaccessible as if he were in the grave. "That’s damn cold comfort."

"But," Jasoft Parz said gently, "it’s all we can offer."

"Yeah." She shook her head, trying to restore some sense of purpose. "Well, we may as well go and watch the fireworks. Come on. Then let’s see if these tinpot freighters run to shower cubicles…"

The freighter’s bridge was cramped, stuffy, every flat surface coated with notes scrawled on adhesive bits of paper. Only the regal light of Jupiter, flooding into the squalid space through a clear viewport, gave the place any semblance of dignity. The D’Arcy brothers, fat, moon-faced, and disconcertingly alike, watched from their control couches as Berg led her bizarre party onto their bridge. Berg said gruffly, "Jasoft. Shira. Meet your great-grandparents."

Then, leaving the four of them staring cautiously at each other, Miriam turned her face to the clear viewport, lifted her face to the zenith. Against the cheek of Jupiter the frame of the Interface portal was a tetrahedral stencil; and the Spline warship, the lodged wreckage of the Crab clearly visible even at this distance, was like a bunched fist against the portal’s geometric elegance.

As she watched, the warship entered the Interface; blood-colored sparks ringed the Spline where the battered carcass brushed the exotic-matter frame of the portal.

Berg considered raising a hand in farewell.

The sparks flared until the Spline was lost to view.

Miriam Berg closed her eyes.

The lifedome of the Crab was swallowed by the receding darkness of the Interface portal. Michael, staring up through the dome, found himself cowering.

Blue-violet fire flared from the lip of the lifedome; it was like a multiple dawn arising from all around Michael’s limited horizon. Harry, from the couch beside Michael’s, looked across fearfully. Michael said, "That’s the hull of the Spline hitting the exotic-matter framework. I’d guess it’s doing a lot of damage. Harry, are you—"

The holographic Virtual of Harry Poole opened its mouth wide — impossibly wide — and screamed; the sound was an inhuman chirp that slid upward through the frequency scales and folded out of Michael’s sensorium.

The Virtual smashed into a dust of pixels that crumbled, sparkling.

The Spline shuddered as it entered the spacetime wormhole itself; Michael, helplessly gripping the straps that bound him to his couch, found it impossible to forget that the vessel that was carrying him into the future was no product of technology, but had once been a fragile, sentient, living thing.

Harry’s head popped back into existence just above Michael’s face. Harry looked freshly scrubbed, his hair neatly combed. "Sorry about that," he said sheepishly. "I should have anticipated the shock as we hit the exotic matter. I think I’ll be okay now; I’ve shut down a lot of the nerve/sensor trunks connecting the central processor to the rest of the ship. Of course I’ve lost a lot of functionality."