Blue Shift

A.D. 5406

Blue shift!

My fragile ship hovered over the tangled complexity of the Great Attractor. From across a billion light years worlds and galaxies were tumbling into the Attractor’s monstrous gravity well, arriving so fast they were blue-shifted to the color of fine Wedgewood.

I could have stared at it all until my eyes ached. But I had a problem. Swirling round me like dark assassins’ hands were a hundred Xeelee ships. They would close on me within minutes.

My hand hovered over the control that would take me homebut I knew that the Qax, who had sent me to this fantastic place, were waiting there to kill me.

What a mess. And to think it had all come out of a sentimental journey to a breaker’s yard in Korea…

Of course I should have been looking for a job before my creditors caught up with me, not getting deeper into debt with travel costs. But there I was on the edge of that floodlit pit, watching gaunt machines peel apart the carcass of a doomed spaceship.

A wind whipped over the lip of the pit. The afternoon light started to fade; beyond the concrete horizon the recession-dimmed lights of Seoul began to glow. It was a desperate place. But I had to be there, because what they were breaking that day was the last human-built spacecraft. And my life…

A shadow moved over the pit; workmen paused and looked up as the mile-wide Spline ship drifted haughtily past the early stars. There was a Spline ship looming over every human city now, a constant reminder of the power of the Qaxthe ships’ owners and our overlords.

The shadow moved on and the wrecking machines worked their way further into the ship’s corpse. Finally, after three centuries of Occupation, the Qax had shut down human space travel. The only way any human would leave the Solar System in the future was in the alien belly of a Spline. I began to think about finding a bar.

“Like watching the death of a living thing, isn’t it?”

I turned. An elegant stranger had joined me at the pit’s guard rail. Gray eyes glittered over an aquiline nose, and the voice was rich as velvet.

“Yeah,” I said, and shrugged. “Also the death of my career.”

“I know.”

“Huh?”

“You’re Jim Bolder.” The breeze stirred his ash-tinged hair and he smiled paternally. “You used to be a pilot. You flew these things.”

“I am a pilot. I don’t know you. Do I?” I studied him warily; he looked too good to be true. Did he represent a creditor?

He spread callus-free palms in a soothing gesture. “Take it easy,” he said. “I don’t want anything from you.”

“Then how do you know my name?”

“I’m here to make you an offer.”

I turned to walk away. “What offer?”

“You’ll fly again.”

I froze.

“My name’s Lipsey,” he said. “My… clients need a good pilot.”

“Your clients? Who?”

He glanced about the deserted apron. “The Qax,” he said quietly.

“Forget it.”

He exhaled sadly. “Your reaction’s predictable. But they’re not monsters, you know”

“Who are you, Lipsey?”

“I… was… a diplomat. I worked with a man called Jasoft Parz. I helped negotiate our treaty with the Qax. Now I try to do business with them.”

I stared at him, electrified.

The Qax, during the long Occupation, had withdrawn Anti-Senescence technology. Death, illness, had returned to our worlds.

If he remembered Jasoft Parz, Lipsey must be centuries old. Unlike the rest of Occupied mankind, Lipsey was AS-preserved.

He saw the look on my face.

“I know it’s hard to sympathize, but I believe we have to be pragmatic. They’re just like us, you see. Looking out for number one, scrabbling for Xeelee artifacts”

I jammed my hands in my pockets and turned away once more. “Maybe, but I don’t have to fly one of their damn Spline ships for them.”

“You don’t fly a Spline ship. Such strong opinions, and you don’t even know that? Spline ships fly themselves.”

“Then what’s the ship? Squeem?”

“Xeelee,” he said softly. “They want you to fly a Xeelee ship.” He smiled again, knowing he’d hooked me for sure.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Lipsey shrugged, turning his face from the rising breeze. “The Xeelee fighter was found derelicta long way from here. The Qax paid well for it.”

I laughed. “I’ll bet they did.”

“And they’ll pay you well for flying it.”

“Prove it exists.”

Furtively he dug inside his coat of soft leather and produced a plastic-wrapped package. “This was found aboard,” he said. “Take a look.”

I peeled back the packaging. Inside was a delicate handgun sculpted from a marblelike material. The butt was wrapped in a hair-thin coil. Fine buttons were inlaid into the barrel, too small for human fingers.

“Xeelee construction material.” Lipsey’s gray eyes were fixed on my face. “Controls built to the Xeelee’s usual small scale.”

“What is it?”

“We don’t know. There is synchrotron radiation when the thing’s operated at its lowest power setting, so the Qax think the coil around the butt is a miniature particle accelerator. They haven’t had the courage to try the higher settings.” His face lit up briefly at that. He put away the artifact and pulled his coat tight around him. “The ship’s in orbit around the Qax home sun. The Qax will tell you the rest when you get there. I’ve a flitter waiting at Seoul spaceport; we can leave straight away.”

“Just like that?”

He studied me with a frank knowledge. “You have someone to say goodbye to?”

“…No. I guess you know that. But tell me one thing. Why don’t the Qax fly the damn ship themselves?”

He stared at me. “Have you ever seen a Qax?”

A million years ago the race we call the Spline made a strategic decision.

They were ocean-going at that time, great whalelike creatures with articulated limbs. They’d already been space travelers for millennia.

Then they rebuilt themselves.

They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs… and left the surface of their planet, rising like mile-wide, eye-studded balloons. Now they’re living ships, feeding patiently on the thin substance that drifts between the planets.

Since then they’ve hired themselves out to fifty races, including the Qax; but since they’re not dependent on any one world, or star, or type of environment, they’re their own mastersand always will be.

But there are drawbacks… mostly for their passengers.

Our cabin was a red-lit hole scooped out of the Spline’s gut. Our journey to the Qax home world meant three days in that stinking gloom. It was like being swallowed.

As a precondition of accepting our commission, the Spline sold us each an emergency beacon. It was a sort of limp bracelet. “It’s a quantum-inseparability beacon. You work it by squeezing its mid-portion,” Lipsey said. “The Spline guarantee your rescue, anywhere within the Galaxy. Of course, the price of the rescue’s negotiable. Higher if you don’t want the Qax to know about it.”

“I don’t want this.”

He shrugged. “Have it on credit. You might need it one day.”

“Maybe.” I wrapped the bracelet around my wrist; it nestled into place like a living thing.

Disgusting. I missed human technology.

We entered orbit around the Qax planet.

Our air and water were re-absorbed by the cabin walls, then an orifice dilated and we passed through a bloody tube to space. The stars were clean and cold. I breathed freely for the first time since we’d left Earth.

Lipsey’s two-man flitter was extruded from another sphincter, and we spiraled over the Qax world. Under the murky atmosphere I saw a planet-wide ocean. Submerged volcano mouths glowed like coals. There were no cities, no lights. “It’s a goddamn swamp,” I concluded.

Lipsey nodded cheerfully, intent on his inexpert piloting. “Yes. It’s like the primeval Earth.”

“So where are the Qax? Undersea?”

“Wait and see.”

We landed and stepped out onto a spaceport, a metal island in a bubbling quagmire. Steam misted up my face plate. Lipsey lifted a suitcase-sized translator box down from the flitter. “Meet our client,” he said.

“Where?”

He smiled. “Here! All around you.”

The translator box woke up. “This is the human pilot we discussed?”

I jumped, whirled around. Nothing but swamp.

“Yes,” said Lipsey, his tone deep and reassuring. “This is Jim Bolder.”

“And this is really one of your best?” boomed the Qax.

I bristled. “Lipsey, what is this?”

He smiled, then stood beside me and pointed. “Look down there. What do you see?”

I stared. “Turbulent mud.” Hexagonal convection cells a hand’s breadth across, quite stable: the ocean was like a huge pan of boiling water.

Lipsey said: “All known forms of life are based on a cellular organization. But there are no rules about what form the cells have to take…”

I thought it over. “You’re telling me that those convection cells are the basis of the Qax biology?”

I stared at the sea, trying to perceive the limits of the mighty creature. I imagined I could see thoughts hopping over the rippling meniscus like flies…

“Can we proceed?” the Qax broke in. The box gave it an appropriate voice: deep-bellied, like an irritable god.

I tried to concentrate. “Show me the Xeelee ship,” I said.

“In time. Do you know what we want of you?”

“No.”

“What do you know of galactic drift?” the Qax began. “Your astronomers first detected it in your twentieth century…”

The galaxies are streaming.

Like a huge liner our Galaxy is soaring through space at several hundred miles a second. That’s maybe no surpriseuntil you learn that all the other galaxies, as far as we can see in any direction, are migrating, too. And they’re all heading for the same spot.

Standing there on that shiny island in a mud sea, I struggled with the scale of it all. Throughout a sphere a billion light years wide, galaxies are converging like moths to a flame.

But what is the flame? Andwho lit it?

“We call it the Great Attractor,” said the Qax. “We know something about its properties. It is three hundred million light years from here. And it’s massive: a hundred thousand times the mass of our Galaxy, crammed into a region about half the Galaxy’s diameter.”

A cold mist settled over us; the Qax restlessly stirred its oceanic muscles. I felt like a flea on the back of a hippopotamus.

“We need to understand what is happening out there,” the Qax went on. “Now: we have trading contacts throughout the Local Cluster, and we’ve been analyzing sightings of Xeelee ships. We had the idea of trying to track down the Xeelee Prime Radianttheir source and center of activities. We have done so.”

“The Prime Radiant is at the center of the Galaxy,” I said.

Lipsey smiled thinly. “You’re not thinking big enough, Bolder. The Xeelee transcend any one Galaxy.”

I thought that through… and my mouth dried up. “You’re not suggesting,” I asked slowly, “that the Xeelee are responsible for the Great Attractor? That they’re building it?”

“We plan to send a probe to find out,” said the Qax. “Our captured Xeelee ship is the technology we need to cross such distances.”

“Which is where I come in?”

“Do you accept the commission, Bolder?”

“Yes,” I said immediately, staring fixedly at the translator box. To fly a Xeelee fighter to the center of everything… my only fear now was that I’d be turned down.

Lipsey interrupted smoothly: “Subject to a suitable fee, of course.” He smiled like a good agent.

Surrounded by the primeval murk, we began discussing powers of ten.

We returned to Lipsey’s flitter.

“Lipsey… why do the Qax care? What turns them on?”

“Short-term profit,” he said simply. “This is a young planet, not all that stable. Hot spots come and go, and individuals tend to be broken up quickly.

“As a result they don’t have a strong sense of self, and they find it hard to plan foror even imaginethe future.” His face creased with wonder. “There are only a few hundred of them, you know, each of them miles across… but thanks to their peculiar biology their awareness and material control go right down to the molecular level. They’ve developed a high, miniaturized technology; it’s the basis of their commercial power. Of course,” he smiled, “they trade by proxy.”

I frowned. “We’re millions of years from a crisis over this Great Attractor. If they’re so shortlived, why spend so much on gathering data about it?”

“Profit. With a secret as big as this they can name their own price.”

We rendezvoused with a Spline craft, orbiting the Qax star. The Spline was a gunship. We scurried around huge walls covered with thirty-feet-wide scales, and I peered curiously into hundreds of weapon emplacementsand then, drifting through the Spline’s long shadow, we found the Xeelee ship.

A Xeelee nightfighter is a hundred-yard sycamore seed wrought in black. The wings sweep back from the central pilot’s pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they are so fine you can see the stars through them.

Lipsey caught me gawping. “Save it. You’ve seen nothing yet…”

The pilot’s pod was an open framework about my height. A human crash couch had been cemented inside it. I clambered through the skeletal hull and into the couch. The hull became a mesh of blackness around me that barely excluded the stars. “Kind of open,” I said.

Lipsey, watching from outside, laughed a bit unsympathetically. “Evidently the Xeelee don’t suffer from vertigo. Do you?”

I clamped the translator box to a strut above my head. Now the Qax spoke. “Study your controls, Bolder.”

“Right.” Set ahead of me and to my sides were three control panels, each briefcase-sized. Magnifying monitors showed me sequinlike control studs. Waldoes would let me work the panels by my sides, but there was no waldo for the third.

“The panels to your sides are for in-system flight,” said the Qax. “The third, before you, is for the hyperspace drive. The three panels were the only equipment found in this shipapart from the synchrotron handgun.”

“I’m not getting that back?”

“The Qax think you’re dangerous enough as it is,” Lipsey said quietly.

The Qax continued: “We’ve worked out a setting to take you out to the Great Attractor. Just hit the red button, on the left of the third panel. Hit it again to come home.”

I ran a gloved finger over the surface of the third panel. Apart from the red button the panel was half-melted… unusable. I asked why.

“Of course,” the Qax explained acidly, “you’d never be tempted to steal a treasure like this, but…”

I slipped my hands into the waldo manipulators. The ship woke up. “So tell me how I fly this thing.”

The wings of the sycamore seed billowed out, a shaken blanket a hundred miles wide.

“The motive force comes from the structure of space itself,” the Qax explained. “The wings are sheets of discontinuity in space. Thehealing upof space drives the ship forward.”

I squeezed minutely. The wings trembled and the pod jerked. Lipsey and his flitter disappeared. “Try to restrain your monkey impulse to meddle,” said the Qax. “You’ve just traveled half a light second.”

I let go, fast.

“Now,” said the Qax. “A controlled pressure with your right index finger…”

All I’ve ever wanted to do is fly. I’ve given up everything else in life for it, I suppose… and now my wings pulsed like sheets of shadow as I flew around the Qax star at half the speed of light. I stared into the eye of a vacuole and, whooping, whizzed under the blue-shifted arch of a stellar flare.

Blue shift! I was traveling so fast that light itself seemed as sluggish as the Doppler-shifted noise of a passing train.

The Qax gave me my head. Probably the ship was fairly immune to accidents… even if I wasn’t.

“The Xeelee hyperdrive works on unconventional principles,” the Qax told me. “On your return, we’re not sure precisely where in our system you’ll arrivebut we know it will be a fixed distance from the sun.

“The mass of the ship and sun are the deciding factors. The more mass the ship has, the closer to the sun you’ll be placed.”

I flew out to that critical return orbit. I wasn’t surprised to find a Spline gunship, pitted with weapons that tracked me like eyes. Around the curve of the orbit was another gunship, and another. I swept out of the ecliptic plane, only to find more gunships. The Qax sun was encased by a sphere of them, completely staking out my return radius. “This must be costing you a fortune,” I said. “Why?”

Lipsey said elegantly: “Oh, they’re not scared of you, Bolder. But they wouldn’t like a hundred armed Xeelee to come swarming out of that ship instead of you, now would they?”

After two months’ training I felt ready. I skimmed out to the Spline-guarded radius and closed up my wings. Lipsey, once more alone with the Qax, said gently: “Good luck, Jim Bolder.”

“Yeah.” I hit the red button

and gasped as the hyperdrive jump made the Qax sun wink to nothingness. Below my feet appeared a compact yellow star, set in a sky crowded with stars and dust. I became aware of a trickle of clicks and pops as instruments clustered around me began to study the hurtling wonders.

“Wow!” I said.

“Bolder,” said the Qax, “skip the epithets and report.”

“I think I’m near the center of the Galaxy.”

“Good. That is”

another jump

“according to plan.”

“Lethe.” The yellow sun had disappeared; now I hovered below a dumbbell-shaped binary pair. Great tongues of golden starstuff arced between the twin stars. The sky was darker; I must be passing through the Galaxy and out the other side

jump

and now I was suspended below the plane of the Galaxy itself; it was a Sistine ceiling of orange and blue, the contrasts surprisingly sharp

jump

and these jumps were coming faster; I watched a dwarf star scour its way over the surface of its huge red parent and that dim disc over there must be my Galaxy

jump

and now I was inside a massive star, actually within its pinkish flesh, but before I could cry out there was another

jump

and

jumpjumpjumpjumpjumpjump

I closed my eyes. There was no inward sensation of motion; only a flickering outside my eyelids that told me of skies being ripped aside like veils.

“…Bolder! Can you hear me? Bolder”

I took a breath. “I’m okay. It’s justfast.” I risked another look. I was passing through a frothy barrage of stars and planets; beyond them sheets of galaxies moved past as steadily as roadside trees. I said slowly: “I must be making a megalight, or more, an hour. At this rate the journey will take about two weeks”

“Yes,” Lipsey said. “We think the Xeelee have a range of hyperdrive capabilities. The standard intragalactic version is limited to a kilolight an hour, or thereabouts. Whereas this more powerful intergalactic model”

I tumbled into the creamy plane of an elliptical Galaxy. I wailed and closed my eyes again.

Ten days later, the popping stars no longer bothered me. I guess you can get used to anything. Even the growing gray patch ahead of mea cloud of objects around the Great Attractorseemed less important than the itchy confines of my suit. In fact, I felt fine until a disc of sky directly behind me turned china blue…

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Objects that I’m leaving behind should be redshifted.”

“It’s nothing to do with your motion, Bolder,” the Qax explained. “The blue shift is gravitational. You’re now close enough to the Great Attractor that light from the outside Universe is beginning to fall more steeply down its gravity well.”

I checked my instruments. “But that’s ridiculous… I’m still millions of light years away.”

The Qax didn’t bother to respond.

Two more days. The light became a hail of hard blue as it plummeted after me into this pit in space. I entered the outskirts of the mist around the Great Attractor; it resolved into individual stars and what looked like bits of galaxies.

The muddled starlight bathing my cage began to flicker. I felt my heartbeat rising. The skies riffled past me like the pages of a great book, ever slower. Finally the ship stuttered to a halt.

“I’ve arrived,” I whispered. “I’m still inside the star mist.” I looked around, clutching the arms of my couch. “I’m in orbit around what looks like a small G-type star. But the sky’s crammed with streaming stars, hundreds of them close enough to show discs. It’s blue-tinted chaos.

“AndI can see something ahead. A bank of light beyond the mist.” My breath caught at the sheer scale of it all. “That’s the Great Attractor, right?”

“Don’t touch your controls until we tell you, Bolder,” the Qax murmured.

“What? Why not?”

“You’ve got company. To your left…”

A hoard of night-dark ships came soaring away from the Great Attractor and out into the star cloud. There were small fighters like mine, swirling in flocks like starlings. And here and there I saw cup-shaped freighters miles wide, cruising like eagles.

The sky was black with ships.

“Xeelee,” I breathed. “There must be millions of them. Well, you were right, Qax… But I don’t believe in coincidence. I haven’t stumbled across the only Xeelee fleet in the area. This star cloud must be swarming with them.”

“Follow them,” said the Qax.

“What?”

“Activate your drive. You’re a lot less likely to be noticed as one of a flock than as an individual.”

“…Yeah.” I spread my wings and banked sideways into the flock. Soon I was waddling along, a self-conscious duck among swans. Inside the waldoes my sweating fingers began to cramp up with the effort.

The fleet was heading for a young star. Through the crowd ahead of me I could see the star’s disc, its violet light diamond-hard. As we neared the star the torrent of ships abruptly splashed sideways, as if encountering an invisible shield. When I reached the breaking radius I banked left and set off after the herd.

Twenty hours after my arrival the Xeelee completed their formation. With wings folded like patient vultures they completely surrounded the star.

“What now?” I asked uneasily.

“No doubt we’ll find out.”

I wished I could rub my gritty eyes. “Qax… I haven’t slept since coming out of hyperspace, you know.”

“Take a stimulant.”

Sudden as an eye blink, bloodred threads of light snaked into the star from every ship in the fleet.

Well, from every ship except one. Mine.

It was a poignant sight: a stellar Gulliver, pierced by a million tiny arrows. The star’s light flickered, oddly. And I became aware of a stirring in the ranks of the Xeelee nearest me.

“They’re starting to notice me,” I whispered. “How do I turn on my beam?”

“You don’t,” said Lipsey. “Remember that Xeelee handgun? This must be what happens at the highest setting.”

A purple arch of tortured gas erupted from the star. Soon flares covered the star’s surface; clouds of ejecta drifted through the cherry-red beams. Cup freighters moved in, placidly swallowing the star flesh.

It was like watching the death of a magnificent animal. “They’re destroying it,” I said. “But how?”

“The handgun must be a gravity wave laser,” the Qax said slowly. “The coils on the butt of that handgun are small synchrotrons. Subatomic particles move at fantastic velocities in there; the thing emits a coherent beam of gravity waves which”

“I thought you needed large masses to get significant gravity waves.”

“No. As long as you move a small mass fast enough… the energy must come from the same source as your ship’sfrom the structure of space itself.”

“Handguns to break stars, eh?”

A shadow moved across my vision. I glanced about quickly. A dozen Xeelee slid across the blue-shifted sky and gathered into a close sphere around me.

“They’ve noticed me.” Rapidly I thought over my options. Before me was the reassuring red glow of the hyperspace button: my escape hatch, if things got too hot… but, I quickly decided, I’d come too far to go home without seeing the Great Attractor itself.

I spread my wings as far as they would go and dragged them downwards in one mighty swoop. I shot head first out of the closing trap and kept going, heading deeper into the blue-tinged star cloud. My breath was loud in my helmet.

“What now?” I gasped.

“Run!” said Lipsey.

I ran for hours. I dodged stars only light minutes apart, their surfaces distorted into surreal shapes by their proximity to each other. The bank of grayish light beyond the mist grew remorselessly brighter and widerand all the time the Xeelee formation was a spear pointing at my shoulderblades.

At last, abruptly, I burst out of the star mist. The naked light ahead was dazzling. Heart thumping, I wrenched at the wings and skidded to a halt. I found myself in a region clear of stars and debris… and the curtain of stars on the other side was tinged blue.

So I was at the center. The bottom of the pit; the place all the stars were falling into. And at the heart of it all, flooding space with a pearly light, was the Great Attractor itself.

It was a loop, a thing of lines and curves, a construct of some immense cosmic rope. My nightfighter was positioned somewhere above the plane of the loop. The near side of the construct formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, braided band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.

And it wasastonishingly, unbearablya single object, an artifact, at least ten million light years across.

The rough disc of space enclosed by the artifact seemed virtually clear.

…Clear, I saw as I looked more carefully, save for a single, glowing point of light, right at the geometric center of the loop.

“Qax,” I croaked. “Speak to me.”

“A massive rotating toroid,” murmured the Qax. “A made thing, of cosmic string. The Xeelee have manipulated one-dimensional spacetime discontinuities, just asin their nightfighter intrasystem drivethey manipulate two-dimensional discontinuities.”

Lipsey said, “I didn’t imagine anything like this. A ring, an artifact of cosmic string. As large as a giant galaxy. The audacity…”

“Butwhy? What’s the point?”

The Qax paused. “Well, this fits one of our hypotheses. Look in the central region, Bolder.”

The hole in the ring hurt my eyes. It was a sheet of space that was somehowtilted. I saw muddled space, stars streaked like cream in coffee.

“Do you know about the Kerr metric?” asked the Qax. “No? The Great Attractor is a massive toroid rotating extremely quickly. Your own theory of relativity predicts some odd effects with such a structure. There may be closed lines in space and time, for instance”

“Come again?”

“Time travel,” said Lipsey. “And more… Bolder, the Kerr metric describes Interfaces between Universes. Do you understand? It’s as if”

“What?”

“As if the Xeelee don’t like this Universe, so they’re building a way out.”

I focused my monitors on the dust that walled the cavity in the stars. I saw shipsan aviary of all shapes and sizes, uncountable trillions of them.

A few light minutes from me I made out a particularly monstrous ship, a disc that must have been the size of Earth’s Moon. Hundreds of cup freighters nestled into neat pouches in the disc’s upper surface, dumping out stolen star material. Vents in the underside of the main ship emitted a constant rain of immense crystalline shafts, as if it were some huge sieve leaking rainwater.

Peering deeper into the mist of craft I could see fantastic bucket-chains of the disc-ships descending to the Great Attractor, dwindling to pinpoints against the vast carcass of the ring. Returning ships, I saw, were diverted to clouds of cup freighters for reloading.

I began to see the pattern. “So the disc-ships are huge, ah, dumper trucks,” I said. “They’re tending the Great Attractor, bringing it matter and energy. Using that crystalline stuff to grow the string, knitting it together strand by strand, with a patience that’s lasted billions of years…”

There was a flicker in my peripheral vision. My posse. They whirled around me and began to close up once more.

I closed up my wings and prepared to punch the red button. “Lipsey, I’ve seen enough. We’ve got to spread this news around all the races in our regionfind a way to stop the Xeelee before they wreck our Universe. We’ve time to plan”

He coughed apologetically. “Ahlook, Bolder, this information is Qax commercial property. You know that.”

I hesitated. “You’re kidding. We’re doomed if the Qax keep this knowledge to themselves.”

He sighed. “The Qax don’t think on those timescales. They can’t, remember. They think about profit, today.”

I forced my hand away from the escape button; a cold knot in my stomach started to tighten. Suddenly this wasn’t a game. If I tried to go home after what I’d just blurted out, the Qax wouldn’t hesitate to use their Spline warships to blast me out of the sky. Abruptly my isolation telescoped into a vivid reality, and the cage around me seemed absurdly fragile… And the Xeelee whirled tighter, reminding me that hanging around here wasn’t an option either.

I had to find more time. To my right, obscured now by the fog of fighters around me, was that dumper truck with its attendant freighters. I opened up my wings, clutched at space and lurched out of the trap. Soon I was thrusting my way into the crowded freighter formation, my wings tucked tight. The fighters blurred after me.

I rammed thoughts through my sleep-starved brain as I flew. Could I evade the waiting Spline? Maybe I could divert the ship’s hyperspace flightbut how? Prise open the melted control box? Change the ship’s mass, to change the distance I arrived from the Qax sun?

Of course I could abandon ship before I reached the Qax system, at one of the later jump points. I had that Spline emergency beacon; I’d be picked up. And if I kept quiet I could hide from the Qax, for years maybe…

But, damn it, if I did that humanity and a few hundred other races would one day end up falling into the Xeelee pit. Hiding wasn’t good enough.

I dipped under the lip of the dumper truck and dodged the processed Great Attractor material sleeting from the truck’s base. The huge icicles fell a few thousand miles and then broke up into a fine mist… and as I stared abstractedly at that mist I realized there was a way out of this. It was stupid, crazy, nearly unworkable. And my only chance.

“All right, Qax,” I said. “I’ll come home. But first…”

I dropped, spread my wings as far as they would go and whirled like a seagull through the crystal rain. The wings plated over rapidly and grew stiff and cumbersome.

“Bolder, what are you doing?”

“Wrecking this beautiful ship,” I told Lipsey with real regret.

The Xeelee fighters finally closed around me, shutting out the rain.

I pressed the button.

The Xeelee trap disappeared; I’d jumped back to the blue-tinged light of the star cloud. And then

Jump. Jump. Jumpjumpjumpjumpjumpjump

The skies became a blur. I slumped into sleep.

I fell towards the welcoming pool that was my home Galaxy. I peered out of my glazed-over cage as the stars’ flickering began to slow. For the first time in a month I unbuckled the straps that bound me to my couch, and prized the translator box free of the strut over my head.

Lipsey and I said our goodbyes. “Do me a favor,” I said. “Whatever happens, keep talking. Tell me what you see.”

“Whatever you say.” I imagined his noble face gazing out over the seething Qax ocean. “Bolder… I want you to know I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” The shipjumpedto the dumbbell binary system. It was dazzling; I’d arrived much closer than I remembered from my visit on the way out. I bunched a gloved fist in triumph. This was going to work

jump

A compact yellow star at the heart of the Galaxy, searingly close to the ship. Last stop. Time to get out.

I climbed onto my seat, put my shoulders against the pod’s crystalline plating, and pushed. For a heart-stopping moment I thought the shell was too strongthen it crumbled, and I popped into space, clutching my translator box. Below me glittered the crusted wings of the ship I’d taken so far.

My plan had worked. The Great Attractor substance had added enough mass to the ship to shift its arrival point significantly closer to the system center. Now I had to rely on the Qax to do the rest

jump

and the ship disappeared and I was left alone in a cloud of fragments; they sparkled in the light of the compact star.

I drifted there for a while, rotating slowly. Then I squeezed the Spline distress bracelet. It turned rigid and cold.

Lipsey began to speak out of the translator box. His voice was hoarse, forced. I listened, absently picking sparkling fragments out of the space around me and stuffing them into a suit pocket.

“You haven’t come out where we expected, Bolder. What have you… you’re causing the Qax a lot of confusion, I can tell that much…”

A pause. “I think they’ve found you… but what are you doing there?”

The Spline warships rotated like eyeballs, scouring space…

Then they found my ship, inexplicably close to the Qax sun.

The Qax panicked. They sent their shell-shaped armada roaring in towards their sun. Waves of energy pounded the Xeelee ship; the great wings sagged like melting chocolate. And in the middle of that torrent of energy was a thread of cherry-red light that arrowed through the wreck and into the sun.

As I’d hoped, in their anxiety and confusion the Qax had thrown at my ship all they hadincluding their only Xeelee weapon.

Of course, it was only a single starbreaker. I’m told it took a couple of days before the flares started.

Lipsey died alone, surrounded by the rage of humanity’s conquerors. It was the end of an undeservedly long life. But he died laughing at them. I heard him.

A Spline freighter ingested me after a day.

The Spline sold me access to a human news channel. I figured, why not. Since I was still broke, in spite of everything, I wasn’t going to be able to pay them anyway…

Humanity was rejoicing. Qax-owned ships were disappearing from the skies of the human worlds of the Solar System. The Qax were going to need every cubic foot of carrying capacity to get themselves off their home world before their sun blew up. They were going to be busy for a long, long time, and much too preoccupied to hunt me down.

And once I released my news about the Xeelee, we’d be busy, too. One day we’d go back to the Great Attractor, take on the Xeelee starbreakers.

But in the meantime I’d have to find a job. My adventure was over and I faced the dreary prospect of spending the rest of my life paying off the Splineamong others. I reached for my suit and dug out my handful of Great Attractor fragments. Cold as ice, and just as worthless, they sparkled even in the Spline’s blood-tinged light

Worthless?

Suddenly I imagined these stones set in platinum and resting against tanned flesh: Xeelee-made gems from half a billion light years away.

Maybe I had a way to pay off my debts after all. Soon, AS technology would be available again. And after that I could buy my own ship, start a small line…

I put away the stones and began to dream again.

Eve said, “Jim Bolder was a brave, impulsive man. But he thought big. He immediately saw the significance of the knowledge of the Xeelee artifact, the thing he called the Great Attractor, to mankind.

“Bolder lived for the moment. But his actions would resound through millions of years. It is entirely appropriate that, for humans, the artifact he found would always bear his name:

“Bolder’s Ring.

“But the impact of his actions on the Qax was devastating…”

The pathetic Qax evacuation armada consisted of hundreds of Spline ships.

The craft, their spherical hulls open, settled into the Qax ocean. Each hull was lined with heaters designed to simulate the volcanism of that mother sea; convection cells were stirred to life inside the ships, and the awareness of a Qax slid reluctantly aboard each craft.

The Spline carriers lifted cautiously from the amniotic ocean. Flares like human fists already punched out of the sun, and gales howled through the atmosphere, buffeting the stately rise of the Spline. With each jolt the delicate convection patterns were disrupted; the Qax endured the gradual paring away of their awareness.

Over half the race expired.

But after the evacuation, the inventiveness and enterprise of the Qax were reasserted. Soon traders were once more spreading Qax goods and services through the neighboring star systems. And the Qax, adrift in their Spline fleet, began to explore new homes for their delicate structures.

They were creatures of turbulence, and they found turbulence everywhere.

Qax awareness took root in the roiling air of Jovians… in the slow, stately gravitational rhythms of galactic orbits… and at last they learned how to colonize the structure of seething space itself.

On their reemergence as an interstellar power the Qax sought out humanity, butas Bolder in his blundering way had evidently hopedthe Qax’s long, forced withdrawal from affairs had given mankind time to grow powerful.

The history of the two species diverged, with humanity resuming its vigorous expansion, and the Qax beginning an introspective retreat into the structure of space.

Soon the Qax were numberless, and had become immortal.

But they remembered the moment at which a single human being had brought them to the brink of extinction.

Meanwhile, humans prospered.

Some argued that access to Xeelee technology damaged human inventiveness. It was too easy to take rather than build.

But not all exploration was finished. And, in the course of that exploration, evidence was unturnedfragmentary and incompleteof a technology even older than the Xeelee…

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