In fact, Poole told her, there had to exist further gateways, in the universe beyond, to still more cosmoses… He painted a picture of a mosaic of universes, connected by the glowing doorways of positive and negative Kerr singularities. It’s wonderful, Spinner-of-Rope.

Spinner stared down at the singularity. “Is this what they intended? Did the Xeelee mean to construct the singularity as a gateway?”

Of course they did. Why do you think they made the singularity so damned big?… So that ships could pass through it, without being destroyed by tidal forces from the singularity thread.

Spinner-of-Rope, this is the Xeelee’s most magnificent achievement. I would have liked to tell you some day how this Ring was built… how the Xeelee returned through time and even re-engineered their own evolution, to give themselves the capabilities to achieve this.

“You would have liked to tell me… ?”

Yes. Poole sounded sad. Spinner, I’m not going to get the chance… I can’t follow you.

“What?”

It was as if she descended through an immense tunnel, walled by the distant, irrelevant forms of blue-shifted galaxies. The singularity was the starlit open base of that tunnel, out of which she would fall into -

Into what?

Still, the starling flocks of nightfighters swirled around the ship.

“You know,” she said, “the Xeelee could have stopped us at almost any point. I’m sure they could destroy us even now.”

I’m sure they could.

“But they haven’t.”

Perhaps they are helping us, Spinner-of-Rope. Maybe there is some residual loyalty among the baryonic species, after all.

“…Spinner-of-Rope.”

“Yes, Lieserl.”

“Listen to me. The trip through the singularity is going to be — complicated.”

“Oh, good,” Spinner said drily.

“Spinner, the spacetime manifold around here isn’t simple. Far enough out the singularity will attract us — draw us in. But close to the plane of the singularity, there is a barrier of potential in the gravitational field.”

She sighed. “What does that mean?”

“…Antigravity, Spinner-of-Rope. The plane will actually repel us. If we don’t have enough kinetic energy as we approach the plane, we’ll be pushed away: either back to the asymptotically flat regions — I mean, to infinity, far from the plane — or else back into the zone of attraction. We could oscillate, Spinner, alternately falling and being repelled.”

“What happens on the other side? Will we be drawn back into the plane?”

“No.” Lieserl hesitated. “When we pass through the plane, there is a coordinate sign change in the metric… The singularity will push us away. It will hurl us on, deep into the new universe.”

“So what do I have to do?”

“To get over the potential barrier, we need to build up our kinetic energy before we hit the plane of the singularity. Spinner, you’re going to have to operate your discontinuity drive in parallel with the hyperdrive. The fractions of a second between jumps, when we’re in normal space, will be enough to let us begin our normal-space acceleration.”

Spinner felt sweat trickle over her face, pooling under her eyes behind her spectacles. She was afraid, suddenly, she realized: but not of the singularity, or what might lie beyond, but of failing. “That’s ridiculous, Lieserl. How am I supposed to pull that off? What am I, a spider-monkey?”

Lieserl laughed. “Well, I’m sorry, Spinner-of-Rope. We’re making this up as we go along, you know…”

“I can’t do it.”

“I know you can,” Lieserl said calmly.

“How do you know?”

Lieserl was silent for a pregnant moment. Then she said, “Because you have help. Don’t you, Spinner-of-Rope?”

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.

33

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.