Their ship still gave some cover, apparently. Interrogating messages came beeping into it. Automatic programs aboard answered. Since the scavenger stowaway humans had long since corrupted the information base of the ship, what it told its superiors was undoubtedly nowhere near the truth. But the nature of the alien is that no one can adequately fake a true, intricate language.
So it was inevitable that scarlet traceries condensed around the ship. Potentials arced and played along its hull. A warning, perhaps.
“Or maybe just a bath and a scrub,” Nigel joked to Nikka. She could be moved about the ship in a makeshift wheelchair by then. When she saw the wall view outside she gasped.
Once the shock front of the explosion had passed, the True Center loomed like an impossibly detailed tapestry, each uncoiling plume and shimmering sun a jewel woven into the whisking churn of gravity.
“Trick is,” Nigel said, “we couldn’t see that something had forced mass into the center. A mouthful, sent straight down the gullet, apparently. But you can never stuff all of it down a black hole. Matter heats up, flares out like an angry objection, drives away the outer portion.”
She was still taking it in. “What made that happen?”
“Those, I’ll wager.”
It was the first time he had framed aloud the idea that most of the crew already held. Seemingly insubstantial filaments hung before them like mere filmy curtains. But above and below the galactic plane, they connected to the immense long strands of brilliant radiation, hundreds of light-years long and a light-year wide, which bracketed the entire True Center for vast volumes of space. Nigel had seen the radio maps on Earth, showing the arching filaments. Even through the dark clouds that shielded Earth from the fireworks of the Center, their steady gigahertz glow shone.
“They’re so thin.”
“To our eyes, true enough.”
“What do the ship’s diagnostics say?”
“Dead on, m’love. They show strong magnetic fields.”
“Enough to hold off all that mass that’s trying to slip through them?”
“Right again.” Just because she had nearly been killed, cast into a coma and thoroughly lacerated mentally, was no reason to forget that indeed, he had the old Nikka back. Always one step ahead of the argument. Circling round it, sometimes.
“I can see how that gas—lovely purple glow, isn’t it?—veers up and around. Some pressure is doing that.”
“Magnetic pressure. Never seen anything like it. Even in the outer strands, which nobody understood when we were back on Earth, the field isn’t a hundredth as strong.”
“And it’s coming at us, whatever it is.”
He was surprised again. “How can you tell?”
“I can see the stuff in front of it. It’s getting squashed, see?” Indeed, now that he screwed up his eyes and studied it, he could. Until now he had relied on ship’s instruments to check that the gossamer strands were rushing toward their ship from several directions.
“What are they?” Nikka asked, some fatigue still lacing her voice.
“Something fatal, I’d say.”
SEVEN
Old Ones
One virtue of the shock wave, my boy—it cleared the view. Finally we saw the Old Ones.
The long, curved filaments were not freeways or power sources or religious icons—they were intelligences. A life-form bigger than stars or giant molecular clouds or anything else in the galaxy’s astrophysical zoo.
I later learned that these were the, well, the body of the Old Ones—though that term means quite little. In the filaments, currents carried both information—thoughts—and food, that is, charge accumulations, inductances, and potentials. All flowing together. As if, in our bodies, sugars and synapses were the same thing, somehow. The long, sinewy structures glowed and flared, but that was a minor side effect.
After all, we eat and think and love—and the net result, viewed in the infrared, is a diffuse, ruddy glow, no more.
The real point of us you’d find only by peering at our industriously firing synapses. Or, backing off about six orders of magnitude, in our sluggish talk.
And of course, we are sluggish, compared to a lot that’s going on round here. In the local jargon, we talk at about fifty bits per second. We need small bandwidths for long times, just to get out a single idea.
The Old Ones are broad bandwidth, fast times. We talk slowly, but see well—big chunks of our brains are devoted to shaping up images. Punching up the data, before we ever “see” them at all.
The Old Ones have that, as well. I doubt there’s anything they can’t do.
I watched those strange strands, weaving like slow seaweed in a vacuum ocean, and automatically thought of telling Earth about them. That’s what I’d been doing for so long—beaming reports back down the tunnel of our wake.
Our flight time to Galactic Center was several centuries, ship’s time. I had transmitted a burst every few years. Earth would get those coded blips, I knew, widely spread out by relativistic effects. But was anyone listening?
Staring at the Old Ones, I realized that we were mayflies. The ebb and flow of our civilizations were like gusts of passing, feather-light winds.
I doubt there’s anything the Old Ones can’t do.
Point is, what do they want to do?
EIGHT
Grandfather
Toby was getting irked. “You sure got a funny way of telling me what the hell’s going on here.”
The naked man, though he was a mass of wrinkles, was able to get into his face an expression of canny humor. “Do you poke at your grandfather when he’s setting you straight?”
