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  "I am awed, Qax," Parz said, his voice a whisper.

  "No less I. Parz, the grace of this ship, the use of the sheet-discontinuity drive — all characteristics of Xeelee nightfighter technology."

  Xeelee… Parz felt his fear transmute into almost superstitious horror, that suddenly Xeelee might be made aware of the existence of humanity.

  "But this is a Qax ship, nevertheless," the Governor said. "I have received call signatures… My successors must fare well in the centuries to come, to gain such an access to Xeelee technology."

  "You must be proud," Parz said sourly. His heart still pounded, but already his fear was lapsing into irritation at the Qax’s complacency.

  "The wings are actual sheet-discontinuities in spacetime," the Governor babbled on. "Motive power for the ship is provided by a nonlinear shear of spacetime — much as acoustical shock waves will propagate themselves through an atmosphere, once formed. And—"

  "Enough."

  Parz’s breath caught in his throat. The new voice, which had come booming from the translator box that rested on the platform beside him, was feminine; but where the Governor’s synthetic voice was breathless, shallow, and fast-speaking, the new voice was deep and heavy, almost harsh.

  The Governor said, almost girlishly, "I hear your voice. Who are you?"

  "I am Qax."

  The Governor said, "I do not recognize you."

  "That should not surprise you. I traveled through the wormhole Interface from your future. I am not yet sentient in this local frame."

  "Sir," Parz said, determined not to show any awe or fear, "I’ve got used to a Qax being laid out on the scale of miles, like the Governor and his fragment of mother-sea up there. But the body of your ship is much smaller. How can the awareness of a Qax be contained in such a constricted space?"

  "Many things will change in the coming centuries," the newcomer said. "Many Qax will die, and many more will be formed; very few of the Qax now sentient will survive. And the forms that support our sentience will become greatly more varied. No longer will the Qax be able to afford the luxury of the ancient aquatic form; the Qax, scattered across the stars, must find new ways to survive."

  Parz could scarcely believe the implications of these words. "Qax, what are you saying? What happens to the Qax? What is it that humans do to you?"

  "First answer my question," the Governor cut in, and Parz thought he could detect a note of pleading, of aggrieved pride, in the synthesized voice. "Why did you not inform me of your approach? And why do we converse through this human translator box? We are Qax. We are brothers. Our forms may differ, but surely we can still communicate as the Qax have always done."

  "I want Jasoft Parz to hear and understand all that occurs here," the new Qax said. "Later, I will require his cooperation."

  Parz took an uneasy step back, feeling the edge of the metal platform under his feet. "You know me?"

  Again a primitive awe rose in him, threatening to overwhelm him, as if he were some savage confronted by a shaman. But how could a Qax from five centuries into the future know of his existence? But of course it does, he thought, a tinge of insanity bubbling in his thoughts. The Qax is from the future; it knows everything about this sequence of events. It’s probably watched this scene play itself out a dozen times…

  "Jasoft Parz, bear witness."

  Parz looked up.

  Light, cherry-red, lanced through the hull of the Spline, a geometrically perfect line that pierced the heart of the Governor’s ocean-globe. The flesh of the Spline peeled back from the wound, bubbling into immense blisters, and Parz was afforded a brief glimpse of space. The nightfighter ship’s Virtual image broke up into a cloud of pixels, vanished.

  Jasoft closed his eyes, ran the last second of the Virtual scene through his mind.

  The Qax ship, he realized. The weapon — the beam, whatever it was — had been fired by the Qax ship from the future.

  "Xeelee technology, Jasoft Parz," the new Qax said. "The starbreaker…"

  Where the cherry-red beam had struck, the surface of the ocean-globe seethed and steamed; huge bubbles erupted from the heart of the liquid, disrupting the delicate pattern of hexagonal turbulence cells. Mist wrapped around the churning globe.

  "My God," Parz breathed. "You’re killing it."

  "The beam consists of coherent gravity radiation," the new Qax said, almost conversationally. "The form of the ocean fragment is maintained by a small black hole at its center. The action of the weapon has caused the equilibrium of the globe to be broken; it is now imploding toward the central singularity."

  The ball of liquid above Parz’s head was completely obscured by mist now; it was like standing under a fat, spherical cloud. Droplets of fluid, round and heavy as drops of mercury, splashed obscenely against Parz’s faceplate. He wiped at the plate with a gloved hand. "Qax," he said angrily, "I didn’t know members of your species murdered each other."

  "The failure of the one you called the Governor, in permitting the escape of these rebel humans through time, is so catastrophic as to be criminal. If it troubles you, Parz, think of this as a culling, not a murder. A strengthening of my species through the elimination of the weak. The Governor of Earth was — hesitant. I am not."

  "A catastrophic failure?" Parz knelt again and pressed his face close to the translator box, shouting to hear his own voice over a rising wind. "My God, Qax, I don’t know what I expected from the future, but nothing like this… We humans terrify you. Don’t we, Qax?"

  "Yes," the Qax said simply. "But the fact of my apprehension should, perhaps, terrify you. For it is I, in this local frame, who wields the power—"

  Parz shivered at that.

  "And I do not fear you, Jasoft Parz," the Qax went on.

  Parz frowned. "How flattering."

  "I studied your conversation with the Governor earlier. This new policy, of permitting selected humans access to the ancient AS technology, is indeed a wise one. Because it divides you. And you, Jasoft Parz, you have accepted the payment of the Qax. You live, while your fellows die like insects." The Qax laughed, and its synthesized laughter was dark, sinister by comparison with the Governor’s. "Your analysis of the value of potential immortality was valid. A human would far sooner throw away a life of a mere few decades than abandon the chance of immortality. Wouldn’t you, Parz?"

  "If you want my cooperation, why do you insult me?"

  "Oh, I will have your cooperation."

  Parz lifted his head, letting the ghastly rain slide over his faceplate. "You listen to me. The Governor, who you seem to hold in such contempt, was civilized. Do you understand me? The framework within which we worked together — the Occupation — was not established by either of us. But the Governor strove for efficiency, not terror or brutality. And that was why I spent my life working with it; I felt it was the best way I could serve my species. But you. I’ve already seen you murder one of your own, since your irruption from the future only moments ago—"

  The Qax laughed. "You are honest, Jasoft Parz; perhaps that is why the Governor valued your presence so much.

  "Listen. My purpose here is not to maintain the Occupation."

  Parz asked uneasily: "Then what?"

  "I will not stay in this local spacetime frame. My intention is to pass through the original human portal — to move still further back into time."

  "You’re chasing the Friends of Wigner? The human rebels, back through time?"

  "I intend to destroy those rebels, yes. And to achieve much more besides."

  Parz tried to imagine this Qax — an unprincipled killer with an admitted fear and loathing of humans — emerging into the unprepared Solar System of fifteen centuries earlier.

  "And me?" Jasoft asked fearfully. "What will I do, while you launch this assault on the past?"

  "Why, you will accompany me, of course."

  "Dear God—" Primeval ocean murk sleeted again over Jasoft’s faceplate; he wiped at it ineffectually with the back of one gloved hand.<
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  The Qax said, "The Governor will remain conscious for some hours, although its sentience is diminishing already."

  "Is there pain?"

  "Our business is concluded here. Return to your craft."

  Barely able to see through a sheen of ocean-stuff, Parz reached for the shelter of the flitter.

  Chapter 6

  The GUT ship Hermit Crab swept backside-first through a powered orbit around the swollen cheek of Jupiter.

  Michael Poole sat in the Crab’s clear-walled lifedome with the Virtual of his father, Harry. The ship was rounding the dark side of the planet now, and the GUT drive, blazing a mile beneath the transparent floor of the cabin, illuminated vast areas of that ocean of swirling cloud. Violet light was cast upward through the cabin, and Poole noticed how his father’s young, blond head had been given suitably demonic shadows in response.

  "We’re making quite an entrance," Harry said.

  "I guess so. If you like fireworks."

  Harry turned to his son, his blue eyes boyishly wide with wonder. "No, it’s more than that. You’re the physicist, son, and I’m just a government functionary; and you’ll understand it all better than I ever could. But maybe the wonder of it doesn’t hit you with the same impact as a layman like me. We’re harnessing forces lost to the universe since the first few seconds after the Big Bang—"

  "Essentially. Except that you’re talking about the first few fractions of a second…"

  "GUT" stood for Grand Unified Theory, the philosophical system that described the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single superforce. The heart of the Crab’s GUT drive was a fist-sized chunk of hydrogen locked into a superconducting bottle and bombarded to creation physics temperatures. At such temperatures only the unified superforce could act. When hydrogen was bled from the bottle the superforce went through "phase transitions," decomposing into the four familiar forces of nature — strong and weak nuclear, gravitational, and electromagnetic.

  And just as steam releases heat when it goes through a phase transition by condensing to water, so at each transition of the superforce a pulse of energy was emitted.

  Poole said to his father, "The Crab uses GUT phase energy to flash comet ice to plasma; the superheated plasma is expelled through a superconducting nozzle…"

  Harry nodded, peering down the mile of superstructure to the residual lump of comet that had brought them in from the Oort Cloud. "Sure. But it was that same phase transition energy, liberated during the cooling period after the Big Bang, which drove the expansion of the universe itself.

  "That’s what seems so awesome, when you stop and think about it, Michael. We’ve spent a year scooting around the Solar System — and now we’re making Jupiter himself cast a shadow — and we’re doing it by harnessing the energies of creation itself. Doesn’t it make you wonder?"

  Poole rubbed the side of his nose. "Yes, Harry. Of course it does. But I don’t actually think that sort of attitude is going to help us all that much, in the next few days. I’d rather not feel awed by the workings of our own drive, right now. Remember we’re going to be dealing with humans from fifteen centuries into the future… for all I know, with artificial life-forms, or with aliens, even."

  Harry leaned closer to Poole and grinned. "Not all of us AIs are such terrible things, Michael."

  Poole narrowed his eyes. "Push your luck and I’ll pull your plug."

  Harry grumbled, "Maybe these superpeople from the future will be advanced enough to recognize the rights of AIs. Such as the right to continuous consciousness, for instance. Anyway, I know it’s all talk with you."

  "If you don’t get your fingers out of my head, then I’ll shut you down talk or not, you old fart."

  An alarm chimed through the lifedome. The Crab, sailing barely a thousand miles over a sea of purple clouds, was near its closest approach to the planet; and now the battered old ship swept around the limb of Jupiter and emerged into the light of the distant sun. Sol, shrunken by distance, lifted through layers of clouds at Jupiter’s flat-infinite horizon; for a few seconds there was a dazzling impression of the depth of the Jovian atmosphere as clouds cast thousand-mile-long shadows over each other. The cabin was flooded with brilliance. For a second Harry’s Virtual image retained the purplish shadows cast from the cabin floor by the drive. Then the processor caught up and when Harry turned his face to the sun his profile was highlighted in yellow.

  Then, like a second, angular dawn, the Interface portal hurtled over the horizon toward them. Michael could see the firefly sparks of ships circling the portal, waiting for any new intrusion from the future. The Crab’s trajectory took her to within a few dozen miles of the portal; Michael stared out at the dazzling sky-blue of the portal’s exotic tetrahedral frame, let his eyes linger over those cool lines and be drawn effortlessly to the geometrically perfect vertices. The faces were like semitransparent panes of silvered glass; he could make out the watercolor oceans of Jupiter through the faces, but the cloud images were overlaid with a patina of silver-gold and were distorted, swirled around in a fashion the eye could not quite track, like visions in a dream. And every few seconds a face would abruptly clear, just for a dazzling moment, and afford Michael a glimpse of another space, unfamiliar stars, like a hole cut into Jupiter.

  The Crab swept on and away from the artifact; it dwindled rapidly behind them like an abandoned toy.

  "My God," Harry breathed. "I didn’t know how beautiful it was. I thought I could see stars in those faces."

  "You could, Harry," Poole said softly. "It really is a gateway to another time, another place."

  Harry leaned toward Michael. "I’m very proud of you."

  Poole stiffened and pulled away.

  Harry said, "Listen, what do you really think we’re going to find out here?"

  "Aboard the craft from the future?" Poole shrugged. "Since they haven’t communicated with us apart from that single message from Miriam when they came through the Interface a year ago, it’s difficult even to extrapolate."

  "Will humans still be recognizably human, do you think?"

  Poole swiveled a glare at Harry. "And are we ‘recognizably human’? Look at us, Harry; I’m an AS immortal, and you’re a semisentient AI."

  "Semisentient?"

  "Superficially we look human enough, and we’d probably claim to be human, but I don’t know if a man of, say, a thousand years ago would recognize us as members of the same species as himself. And now we’re talking another fifteen centuries down the road…"

  Harry wiggled his fingers in the air, pulling his face. "A third arm growing out of the center of the face. Disembodied heads, bouncing around on the deck like footballs. What do you think?"

  Poole shrugged. "If gross modifications like that are efficient, or serve a purpose, then maybe so. But I don’t think any of that matters a damn, compared to what’s going on inside their heads. And what they’ve built."

  "What about technology?"

  "I guess I’d put singularity physics a long way up the list," Poole said. "The manipulation of spacetime curvature… We’ve already got a mastery of high-density, high-energy physics — that’s the heart of the GUT drive, and of the exotic matter that the Interface portals were built of. Exotic matter is mass/energy that is compressed to singularity densities, almost, so that the superforce emerges to bind it together — and then allowed to cool and expand so that the superforce breaks open in a controllable manner, to give us the negative-energy characteristics we want."

  "And in fifteen more centuries—" Harry prompted.

  "How far could we take this? I’d anticipate the manufacture of singularities themselves, on the scale of a few tons up to, maybe, asteroid masses."

  "What for?"

  Poole spread his hands wide. "Compact power sources. If you had a black hole in your kitchen you could just throw in the waste and see it compressed to invisibility in a fraction of a second, releasing floods of usable short-wavelength radiation. And how about artificial gravity?
Bury a black hole at the center of, say, Luna, and you could raise the surface gravity as high as you like."

  Harry nodded. "Of course you’d have to find some way of keeping the singularity from eating the Moon."

  "Yeah. Then there’s gravity waves, to be generated by colliding black holes. You could build tractor beams, for instance." Poole settled back into his couch and closed his eyes. "Of course, if they’ve taken this far enough, maybe they will have found some use for naked singularities."

  "And what’s a naked singularity?"

  "…Maybe we’re going to find out."

  Now they were entering a region of space filled with ships; hundreds of drive sparks flitted over the patient ocean of Jupiter. The ships were too distant to afford any detail, but Poole knew that there must be ships from the navies of the inhabited Jovian moons, science craft from the inner Solar System, and goddamned tourists and rubbernecks from just about everywhere. A subdued chatter in the background of the lifedome told him that signals were starting to come in from that motley armada — since the receipt of Berg’s message a year earlier, Poole knew, Jovian space had been the center of attention of most of the human race, and his own arrival here had been the most eagerly anticipated event since the emergence of the future ship itself.

  He ignored the messages, letting Virtual copies of himself handle them; if there was anything devastating they’d let him know.

  Peering into the crowded space ahead, and after his decades of isolation in the bleak outer lands of the Solar System, Poole felt a pang of absurd claustrophobia. He was driven on by curiosity as well as by a residual concern for Miriam Berg and her crew; but now that his year-long journey in from the Oort Cloud was complete he found he really, really didn’t want to be here, back among the fetid worlds of humankind.

  Harry was studying him, his youthful brow creased. "Relax, son," he said. "It was never going to be easy."

  "Oh, for Christ’s sake shut up," Poole snapped. Even as he spoke he was aware of an odd feeling of relief at having someone, or something, reasonably tangible outside his own head to react to. "I should put you in an electronic bottle labeled ‘Dad,’ and take you out when I feel the need of another patronizing fatherly homily."