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Chapter 26

The console in the mapping room surrounded him with its welcoming arms. In the soft darkness of the privacy-screened work station, the holo control-nudgers embraced him, prepared to respond to his touch. He extended his hands, caressed the nudgers, made ready to immerse himself in the streams of data. (Dax, I hope you're ready to capture a lot fast. I may need any or all of it.)

He squeezed the nudgers and light sprang into the darkness.

* * *

Images and details of the Breakstar project flowed past like sparkling plankton in an incoming tide. He was aware of other researchers tapping different streams in the tide: adding, altering, drawing from it. The tide of data was a living thing, responding each second to the changing conditions of the star. He barely glanced at the real-time data; what he needed was the basic knowledge that was already second nature to the other researchers. Once it had been second nature to him, too. He drifted, dipping and sampling from the tide.

Data holos danced and sparkled around his head:

Betelgeuse was nearing the end of its natural life as a star, anyway; but somehow that end had been drawn much closer by the Breakstar process. The fusion fuel at its core was now nearly exhausted: hydrogen and helium all gone, carbon turned to neon and oxygen, oxygen now burning to silicon. The silicon would soon begin fusing, in a tremendous conflagration, to iron. With a heart of pure iron, the star's fusion fires would abruptly die. Even at billions of degrees and astounding pressures, the iron was incapable of fusing to produce energy. In fact, only one thing could happen, and it would happen almost instantly: the iron nuclei would disintegrate, electrons and protons would crush together to produce neutrons and ethereal neutrinos. The core would collapse, in milliseconds, to nuclear density and beyond. Part of the core would rebound explosively; but the rest would be gone forever.

The star that was would already be dead. But out of the energy of that final crushing collapse would flash a tremendous burst of neutrinos, and a shock wave that would blast away the sun's outer layers in a cosmic-scale explosion. Out of the blast would come a hail of newborn heavy elements to seed the galaxy—a sacrificial offering from a dying sun to the next stellar generation. For a brief time, Betelgeuse would become its own funeral pyre, outshining the entire galaxy.

And at the very center of the sun's core, where trillions of trillions of tons of neutrons were crushed into nothingness in an instant, a black hole would yawn into being: a singularity, a hole in the fabric of four-space. It was that singularity which would open the entry point for the gateway that was to come.

Yes . . . but how . . . and what else . . . ?

And the other critical component of the process . . . was an enormous loop of cosmic hyperstring, even now stretching out toward Betelgeuse in its ancient oscillation through the complex metrics of galactic n-space.

The hyperstring . . . familiar, but . . .

The data confirmed at least some of his suspicions. While Betelgeuse was nearing its end in cosmic terms, it might have had a thousand years to go in human terms, if it were not for the intervention of Breakstar. He had guessed, or remembered, correctly. Breakstar was accelerating the process, snuffing out the star prematurely—creating the black hole at Human bidding, timed with the approach of the hyperstring. In fact, the hyperstring was crucial; it was the fantastic gravitational potential of the string that was being used . . .

Yes? But why do they need me in the control room?

He felt a sudden tremendous reluctance to scan further; he felt a wave of dizziness. . . .

* * *

Data flickered.

((Don't you know?))

A grogginess had come over him; he tried to shake himself free of it. What was happening in his head? He couldn't remember—

((You're purposely avoiding the truth.))

(What? I'm not—I'm trying, I swear, but this fog—)

((You don't want to remember. You just reviewed all of that material and repressed it as fast as you could.))

(Nonsense, Dax! I remember—)

((What? Tell me.))

(Well, I—the structure of a supernova, for one thing.)

((You knew that before. Do you remember how you were going to make the supernova?))

(No, but I didn't see that.) He struggled, focusing his thoughts backward. (Are you saying that I saw it—and lost it already?)

((Not lost. I've got it all recorded. But you're blocking your own understanding, Willard.))

(But why would I do that?)

((That is the question. Did you notice that the data files here are more complete than your own? They're undamaged.))

(It's true, then, that I sabotaged my own files?)

There was a long silence before Dax answered:

((Let's try something.))

The view of the data-holos was suddenly stripped away, like a sheet of paper being torn back. In its place came a now-familiar view of a forest. Ruskin was standing at its edge, grasslands and mountains behind him. The forest looked dark, and vaguely ominous. Two small creatures waited for him, flanking an opening into the woods. The terrakells.

"Have something to show you," said the kindah.

"If you dare," said the sortah.

Ruskin was almost overcome by dizziness, by a sudden feeling of nausea. Nevertheless, he stood his ground. Something in him objected terribly to what was being offered here. (And what would happen if someone came into his work station and found him staring blank-faced, like a zombie?)

((They'd only find you motionless for a second or two. In deep thought—))

whispered one of the trees.

He nodded. "I suppose you want me to follow you," he said to the terrakells. There was a pounding in his heart and it was growing.

The two creatures loped away into the woods. He followed. The path was dim, and it wound among the trees and climbed and descended tortuously. The terrakells glanced back at him with eyes that seemed to be trying to pierce his soul. What were they looking for? Was this another view of his own mind, his own heart? The path looped and came to a small clearing—and a pool, dark and still, banked by smooth stone and spongy moss. A fragment of the sky shone through the treetops.

The terrakells settled at the edge of the pool, and Ruskin came to stand between them. The creatures peered down at the surface of the pool; he let his own gaze drop. At first he saw only a perfect reflection of treetops framing a cloudless sky. Then, and he wasn't sure why—perhaps it was that a breeze stirred the air—he suddenly shivered; and a deep anxiety, not quite a fear, gripped him as he peered into the water. Something was coming into view, rising out of the darkness of the depths, something man-shaped and glistening. He couldn't quite catch his breath; he was trembling.

It was a man, yes, swimming up out of an impossible depth. A man that looked like . . . him. He bent forward, cold with fright, but unable to resist trying to see more clearly.

And the man came into focus, just beneath the surface; and it was him. But it was different, too—a Willard Ruskin from another time, another place. He reached out as though to touch the other Willard, but stopped short of disturbing the water's surface. Another figure was rising from the depths, beside the first. It was Thalia. And as the two rolled in the water to face each other, he could feel the tension between them like a pressure front passing through the still forest air. He heard Thalia's voice whisper, as though in his ear, "What makes you so special?"

(No!) he cried, before the other Ruskin could answer. He felt a shroud unraveling from his memory, and behind the shroud was a secret place, a place he remembered now, a place of pain. (Stop it, Dax!) he whispered. But no one answered.

And still he couldn't tear his gaze away from the sight of the younger Ruskin and Thalia arguing. The shroud was gone now, exposing the memory: the dispute that had raged between Thalia and him for months, before it destroyed their relationship, before it caused him to leave the Science Council on Ceti Alpha, caused him to leave for Kantano's World.

He strained to hear what Thalia was saying to him, three years ago. In the curl of his own lip, he could see the bitterness and disillusionment. And he heard his words, in memory, an instant before he saw them spoken: "If you side with them, then you're no better than they are!"

And her response, so typical: "Why should they look out for your interests if you won't look out for them yourself? You're living in a dreamland, Willard!"

"But look at what they're doing! I can't control it! I never intended for it to happen like this!"

Impatience clouded her face. "You can't hold something like this back, once it's in motion! If you care so much, why don't you stay and fight for the way it ought to be done? But don't cry if you don't win every battle. Grow up, Willard!"

And the pain contorting his face: "How can I fight it if they won't even recognize whose work they owe it to?"

"Then it's up to you to show them, isn't it?"

In the darkness of the water, the two figures faced each other angrily; and in the still of the forest, he watched them with a cold tightness in his chest. Just what was it they were talking about? He could almost remember. Whose work they owe it to . . .

((Let go of it—))

((Let it float free—))

said the terrakells, from somewhere out of sight. Let it go from where? he thought. But he already knew; and if they found the key to set it free in his mind, he didn't know if he could bear to . . .

* * *

"Willard, did you hear me? How are you coming with that review?"

Looking up, he saw Thalia peering over the side of the console, just the top half of her lanky body visible through the privacy-screen. "I—yes, I'm making progress. I mean—"

"Good. We need your recommendations soon. Are you almost ready?"

He struggled to focus his eyes. "Soon," he murmured. "Thalia!" She had started to draw back from the privacy-screen, but her head reappeared, eyes questioning. "Thalia, I just—"

"What, Willard?"

"I . . . why is it so important that I be the one to do this?"

She gazed at him in disbelief and shook her head. "You can ask?" Then she pulled out of the screen and was gone.

* * *

Gone too were the images of his former self and his former lover. And gone were the terrakells. He was not sorry; they only brought him pain and anxiety. (Dax, are you there?) He didn't disguise his annoyance.

((Yo.))

(Dax—isn't there some other way to do this? Can you just tell me—?)

((You have to find the memories yourself, Willard. We're scouts; we're not a memory playback machine.))

(Yeah.) He took a breath. (Well, look, do you mind if I do some work here for a while and see if I can pull it together that way?)

((Hey, it's your life.))

(What the hell's that supposed to mean?)

((There's only so much I can do until you find the associations. However you want to do it.))

(Well, I want to do it this way.) He sighed. The memory of that long-ago argument with Thalia still echoed in his mind. Fuck it. Where was he in his study of Breakstar?

The graphs and holos were still there. He squinted and focused. A cosmic hyperstring loop: an enormous flaw in the structure of n-space, a remnant of a phase-change in the early universe, when the seven fundamental forces separated out of the unified primordial force. It was swinging in the direction of Betelgeuse, in the course of an enormous, galaxy-spanning oscillation. Like a cosmic rubber band, the loop was growing longer and narrower as it came this way; its other end was anchored in the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Clearly the string and the coming supernova were to be linked in the formation of the gateway. But how?

He scanned the files, hoping to find a straightforward explanation somewhere among the exabytes of data. But anyone who used these files already knew what the project was attempting to do. He had no choice; he had to try to assemble the thousands of pieces into a whole.

He scanned faster. At first he wasn't aware of the assistance of Dax and the NAGs; he was like a child on roller skates, unaware of an adult's hand gently supporting and pushing him from behind, until his speed began to build; and eventually he realized that he was processing information far faster than he could have managed on his own:

Changes in the neutrino flux pouring out of the sun . . .

Velocity and position of the approaching hyperstring cusp . . .

Fleet of K-space-generating satellites deployed through the sun . . .

Continuing projections on gateway configuration; among the variables, time of triggering and speed of siphoning . . .

In the back of his mind, something was happening: understanding was starting to occur. It was almost a physical process, an accretion of tiny grains of information, arranging and rearranging themselves deep in his mind. Certain grains triggered his own recall, filling in gaps, or setting off sequences of associations. He began to feel that he knew this information; he began to anticipate data before they appeared. He felt the momentum building; the child on roller skates was going faster and faster . . .

A K-space projection provides the gravitic refraction from the hyperstring, altering the gravitational characteristics of the core . . . Ranlom focusing of neutrinos . . . increasing the compression and rate of fusions . . . drawing the star rapidly . . .

The vision grew clearer in his mind. He could visualize the physical process occurring, physical reactions that no human could view directly. He could sense the equations that described it all, still just out of his grasp. How was it that he felt such a tingling sense of knowledge? What was that itching sensation in the center of his forebrain, the feeling that something was about to shiver forth?

The data spiraled in circles in his forebrain, formed a broad accretion disk that filled the sky in his mind's eye. The itch intensified; became a trembling pressure. He kept scanning, drawing information as fast as he could absorb it. Or faster: it was not quite a blur, images emerging from half-understood data, half-perceived relationships. He searched for he knew not what—

It came abruptly as he passed a critical point, some cusp in the data flow: the accretion disk irised open like an enormous eye, a pupil filled with darkly mysterious reflections, welling up out of his memory. If he could just focus on them—

There was a diamond-point flash in the center of the eye, illuminating the images:

The history of Breakstar unfolding before him; his own formative work . . .

* * *

Dear God, I invented Breakstar—?

* * *

Ten thousand bits of memory came together and crystallized—

* * *

—bits he had been struggling to remember, tied to that crucial fact: he was the creator of it all. Without him there was no Breakstar. He could scarcely draw a breath, stunned by the realization.

I created Breakstar.

And why had he left to become a mere consultant, worlds away? What had driven him from his own creation?

Out of the starburst came another center of darkness, and it was the pool in which he'd seen the images of himself. And in the darkness of the pool he saw another image: two people fighting . . .

His stomach knotted as he recognized Thalia and Tamika struggling, wrestling silhouetted against the stars—past and present lover—and he knew that they were locked in a battle not for his heart, but for his mind. But why? Didn't he control his own mind, his own thoughts, his own heart?

((No, you don't—but you're beginning to see it.))

(What—?)

((The death struggle.))

His breath caught. (Between them?)

((Between what they represent. What your mind has been unwilling to let you remember.))

What was Dax talking about? Yes, it was he who had conquered the equations; he who had designed the method by which a star approaching the point of supernova could be coaxed along and timed to go at just the right moment; he who had shown how the hyperstring could be used to speed the collapse, how it would then join itself to the resulting singularity to create a permanent opening in the fabric of space; he who had shown how, by combining two cosmic-scale structures, they could open a gateway that would span half the galaxy.

And having laid the theoretical groundwork . . . he had left the program in disillusionment. But why? Because he'd feared it was being misused? Or because he was being deprived of the credit and control that he believed should have been his?

He wasn't sure.

And yet he hadn't stayed away; he'd come back as a consultant. The memory filled him with a crawling uncertainty. His arguments with Thalia, his discussions with Tamika—(Dax, what's wrong with me?)

((We're getting a pretty good idea now, aren't we?))

(Not good enough!) He had to know. Even if he remembered everything he had ever known about the project—even if he could do his job perfectly—what did he Willard Ruskin want to do with that knowledge? It wasn't enough just to do his job. What if the job was the wrong thing to do?

* * *

"Willard, we need you for a while. Can you close up on that?"

* * *

He had to know . . .

* * *

"Willard, do you hear me?"

* * *

What? Startled, he opened his eyes and saw Thalia over the console, leaning through the privacy-screen. "What?" he croaked. He stared at the holodisplays, trying to remember her question. She wanted him to leave. . . .

"Willard!"

He started again—and this time nodded, a wave of awareness flooding him. "Right," he murmured. He turned off the holos. Looking up into Thalia's dark, questioning eyes, he rose from his seat, leaving the console behind.

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