*
Soon Dark was looming large beside
The Long View
. There was a tiny silver sparkle in her interior. Bandicut felt a sudden sharp hope, but it was Copernicus who first cried out in recognition. “Dark has Napoleon! He’s calling to see if we can take him on! Listen...”
“Long View, Long View, this is Napoleon...”
“Nappy!” Bandicut cried.
Bong bong bong.
“How?” Li-Jared leaped up from the sofa, and that’s when Bandicut realized the damping field was gone and they could move again.
Antares raised the first note of caution. “Uhhl, is it Napoleon as we knew him?”
Copernicus ticked. “As nearly as I can tell. We will scan him thoroughly in the airlock.”
Bandicut’s heart soared at the thought of Napoleon coming back from the dead. But he felt a chill at the possibility of the Mindaru once more getting aboard the ship. “You’ll scan him
really
well—yes, Copernicus?”
“Indeed, Cap’n. In fact, he has requested it.”
“Requested it?”
“He reminds us of the time, back on Shipworld, when you had to find out if
I
was still trustworthy.”
Bandicut breathed a sigh of relief.
That’s the Napoleon I know.
*
Gathered around the airlock, the company peered in at the robot. “Are you all safe?” the robot asked from inside the airlock. “And where’s Deep? Dark saved my life. Where is she?”
“Dark is still with us,” Bandicut said, just as Napoleon said,
“Oh.”
He had apparently just gotten a silent summary from Copernicus. For a moment, nobody said anything. They hadn’t had time to contemplate it much. Deep was gone. Deep had saved them by grabbing that thing and plunging out of the universe with it.
“Then,” said Napoleon, “there is no hope for Deep’s return?”
Copernicus answered, this time for all of them to hear. “There is no opening. It was a difficult thing to do, puncturing the membrane borders between the universes. Without the gravitational collapse of the star’s core, Dark could not have done it. But the dark matter is gone now.”
“And the star?” Napoleon asked.
“Ringing, but stable.” Copernicus paused. “Captains, I’ve scanned Napoleon by every means I know. I detect no contamination. Does anyone object to my bringing him back in?”
Bandicut drew a deep breath, thinking. He badly wanted to see Napoleon back with them; but after what they had just been through with Ik...
Antares spoke first. “Copernicus, can you let me into the airlock, please?”
Bandicut tensed as the airlock opened and Antares stepped through. Four minutes later, she removed her hands from Napoleon. “My stones sense no presence of the enemy.” She looked up at the window. “They were wrong once before, but I believe they learned.”
Li-Jared’s bright blue eyes were focused, not on the airlock, but on Ik, whose expression was still haunted. Li-Jared blinked as he turned. “Then I, for one, would be glad to have Napoleon rejoin us.”
Bandicut let his breath out. “I agree.” The door winked out and Napoleon stepped forward. He flexed up and down on his legs in apparent pleasure as they greeted him. “Nappy, am I glad to see you!”
The reunion was interrupted by a call from Copernicus. “I need you back here, folks. We’re out of the turbulence, and with your permission, I want to light this candle and get us out of here.”
*
Candle lit, they sped away from the still-quaking star. In a few thousand years, Jeaves predicted, the quaking would subside. As they left it behind, Antares tried to tease out a few threads of the star’s thoughts or feelings. “I don’t really know what it’s thinking,” she said, giving up at last. “I think it’s mostly just in shock. I don’t know if it has any idea of what happened.”
Bandicut felt torn between immense relief at Napoleon’s safe return and sadness at the loss of Deep. Charli probably felt it more keenly than anyone, because she had lost a part of herself as well as Deep. There was little talk of the loss among the group, though once when Deep’s name came up, Napoleon rose up on his flexible legs, peered into space as though looking for him, then sank again with a pneumatic sigh.
/Can you read Dark’s thoughts?/ Bandicut asked Charlie. /I wonder how she is feeling about losing Deep./
/// I feel her...I will call it sadness,
because I have no other name for it.
But I cannot read her thoughts. ///
Bandicut turned, looking at Dark flanking them in one of the sections of the viewspace. /I wonder if there’s some way we could get Dark a set of translator-stones./
/// And some new ones for Ik? ///
Bandicut directed the question silently to his stones. They replied,
*Unknown. We are not able to split at present. Dark may be too different. And Ik must heal.*
As though she were reading his thoughts, Antares came to his side and said, “Do you suppose Dark will accompany us...wherever we’re...going?”
“Does anyone actually know where we
are
going?” Bandicut asked. “Copernicus? Jeaves?”
“Though you are in command, Captains,” Copernicus said, “I thought we might want to move out of this—shall we say—
hazardous
region of space, and see if we can begin to make our way home.”
“Whose home do you mean?” Li-Jared inquired.
“In the absence of a common home for us, I was referring to Shipworld.”
Jeaves made a throat-clearing sound and said, “I’m not sure we actually know how to
get
to Shipworld. Or if this ship is capable of making the trip.”
Bwang.
“Well, that’s just—”
“But I was going to suggest, if we can find the way there, we might look in on Ed’s homeworld. I’m very curious how Ed’s people are faring. And Ed
did
help us at a crucial moment.”
“Fine with me,” Bandicut said with a shrug.
If we can find our way there...
*
They were about forty light-minutes out from
*
Nick
*
, and in the commons filling their plates with lunch—having by common agreement requested a Hraachee’an setting for Ik. The Hraachee’an was once more, through translation and fumbling gestures, apologizing to Bandicut for trying to strangle him, when Ed appeared—this time in the form of a shimmering entity wrapped like a sunbeam around a Hraachee’an terrace wall. “Ed!” Bandicut cried. “We’ve been hoping to see you! You can take your toe out of the stream now.”
“Wee-ee have stopp-p-ed the f-flow?”
“Yes, yes! Are you all right? Did it hurt you to stop that stream inside the other star?”
“No-o...happ-p-y...my worl-ld s-safe!”
“How can you tell, Ed?” Antares asked. “Have you traveled back to it already?”
“Of-f cour-r-s-se. Look-k-k. S-see.”
At what? Bandicut wondered. Before he could ask, Ed suddenly dilated open like a camera’s iris, revealing an image like a strange telescopic view, right through the side of the ship. The group gasped and murmured in unison.
It was like peering down a luminous channel, with sides that hinted at various kinds of landscape all down its length, but without quite revealing them. The far end, however, was zooming in rapidly on a view of the broken, convulsive surface of Ed’s world that they had seen, long ago. It was a breathtaking view: brilliant crimson rocks; jagged cliffs; glowing lava pillows; yawning crevasses. But something was different. The lava flows were hardening. The crevasses seemed to be narrowing.
Li-Jared asked, “Have the gravity waves stopped, then?”
“Yes-s-s.”
“But how could it return to normal so fast?” Bandicut asked.
/// I think we’re seeing it
as interpreted by Ed. ///
“It will-l-l look-k this way-y. Glimps-s-se forward-d. My people-le may be able to re-t-turrrn, now.”
“Return?” Antares asked. “Where are they now?”
Ed seemed to struggle to answer. Napoleon intervened with a series of incomprehensible chirrups. After a bit of that, Ed tried again.
“T-trap-peez-eezium. Be-t-t-tween stars. Floating-ng. Waiting-ng.”
Bandicut stared in disbelief. “In the
Trapezium?
With those high-energy stars? How could they live
there,
if they can’t survive earthquakes and volcanoes on your homeworld?” The Trapezium was a maelstrom of radiation emanating from the four energetic stars. It hardly seemed a likely sanctuary for any lifeform.
Ed and Napoleon buzzed and chirruped some more. Finally Napoleon said, “Ed’s people can survive in gaseous clouds—even plasma clouds. But they need to nest and, I think, reproduce in complex rocky strata. If I interpret correctly, they are drawn to the specific pattern of their homeworld’s magnetic field. Rather, I believe, like certain sea creatures on your own homeworld that must return to their home grounds to spawn.”
Bandicut found that notion staggering. “Do you know—can you tell where their homeworld
is
?”
More buzzing. “Cap’n—they live on a proto-planet of the star we just saved. Of
*
Nick
*
.”
“Jesus,”
Bandicut murmured as Antares drew a startled breath. “Then a hypernova wouldn’t have just disrupted their planet, it would have vaporized it.”
“Indeed,” said Napoleon.
“S-sa-f-f-e now. Our-r-r hom-m-e.” The hyper-being, still visible as a glowing iris around the view, shivered—and looked as if he might disappear again at any moment.
“I’m glad, Ed,” Bandicut said with a heartfelt sigh. “I really am.”
And I’m glad Earth is safe, too, fifteen hundred years from now.
Chapter 39
Arrival
Julie was only half conscious through most of the passage through the sun. To the extent she had any conscious thought, it was the thought that she had died. She was occasionally surprised to realize that she
had
awareness, but that was inevitably burned away by the relentless inferno of gases past her face and body. It all seemed to deny any possibility of living reality.
Then something happened. A soundless
thump
and a low, crackling hiss, and the solar inferno blinked away. She was surrounded once more by the dark of space. Consciousness drifted away again; but eventually, it came back and she heard:
*Spatial translation complete. We’re threading space again.*
That brought her around. It was the translator. Or no—the stones.
*Look around you.*
I thought I was dead.
*We’ll be there soon.*
This doesn’t feel like Heaven.
*Open your eyes. We picked up a lot of energy diving through the sun.*
Oh yes. She remembered now. It seemed a long time ago. Finally her eyes came into focus. What she saw took her breath away. She was still looking out through a space helmet, and sitting atop the battered remnant of a spacecraft. But beneath the spacecraft, an entire galaxy stretched out like a carpet of jewels. Or like the view from an airplane, flying over a city at night. Except it wasn’t; it really was a galaxy. /Is that a close-up of—what? Andromeda?/
*Not Andromeda. Milky Way.*
Milky Way? That made no sense, not if this was supposed to be real. There was no way—from the solar system—that one could look
down
on the Milky Way from above the galactic disk. /You don’t mean...you aren’t saying.../ Suddenly she felt so dizzy she’d have fallen off the remains of her spaceship if she hadn’t been strapped on. Except she
wasn’t
strapped on, she was
holding
on, to the scorched beam she was straddling like a metal steed. She clutched it harder between her knees. /Stones?
Where are we?
/
There was no immediate answer. She looked off to one side, then the other. In the night, she saw few if any individual stars—just the galactic spiral and, dimly, close at hand, the twisted beams of her spacecraft. As her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she began to make out some small, fuzzy patches at the limits of her vision. Other galaxies? She shuddered. No. This was too vast and weird and terrifying to think about. She wasn’t
really
looking at her own galaxy from the outside.
Was
she?
Twisting farther to her left, she managed to look behind her. She was hoping, at least, for the reassuring sight of the translator. /Where is it?/ She had last seen it nestled among some reinforcing crossbeams, and it was not there now. Panic set in. /
Stones! Tell me!
/
*The translator is there, but is greatly reduced in size.*
/What do you—wait, is that it?/ In the dim surroundings, it was hard to see. She thought she saw a dark sphere about the size of a softball, wedged between two girders. /Is
that
it?/
*Yes. It was forced to collapse inward to protect itself. It sustained considerable damage protecting us in the passage through the sun. We are unable to make contact. We are unsure if it survived.*