—That’s this station. We’re clear of the string,—Shibo sent.
“More like a cosmic ring,” he mused. Wedding band, he thought. Getting married to a planet…“It hitting anything?”
—Naysay. Nothing’s orbiting near it.—
“Looks like somethin’ in high polar orbits.” He had picked up some of the jargon from his Aspects but still had trouble with two-dimensional pictures like this simulation.
—That’s small stuff. Too far away to tell.—
“Much around the middle?”
—The equator? More small things. And a funny signal. Looks very large one moment, then a little later it reads as small.—
“Where?”
—Close in. Just skims above the atmosphere, looks like.—
“Sounds like mechtech. We’ve poked our hands into a beehive. Damn!”
—There’s more. I’ve been scanning New Bishop. Picking up faint signals that seem human-signified.—
“People?” Killeen felt a spurt of elemental joy. A human presence in this strange enormity…“Great! Maybe we can still live here.”
—I can’t tell what the signals say. Might be suit comm amped way up. Like somebody talkin’ to a crowd.—
“Try getting a fix on it.”
—Yeasay, lover.—She added a playful laugh and he realized he was being too brusque and Cap’nly.
“You can get even in bed tonight.”
—That an order?—
“You can give the orders.”
—Even better.—
He laughed and turned back to the spectacle.
His mind skipped with agitated awe. It had been sheer bravado, he thought, to name this sun Abraham’s Star. A tribute to his father, yes, and with a sudden wrenching sadness he wished desperately that he could again talk to Abraham. It seemed he had never had enough time to learn from his father, never enough to tap that unpretentious certainty that Abraham had worn like a second skin.
He recalled that weathered yet mirthful face, its casual broad smile and warm eyes. Abraham had known the value of simple times, of quiet days spent doing rough work with his hands, or just strolling through the ample green fields that ringed the Citadel.
But Abraham had not been born into a simple time, and so he had come to be a master of the canny arts humans needed. Killeen had absorbed from him the savvy to survive when they raided mech larders, but that was not what he remembered best. The wry, weary face, with its perpetual promise of love and help, the look that fathers gave their sons when they glimpsed a fraction of themselves in their heirs—that had stayed with Killeen through years of blood and fear that had washed away most of the Citadel’s soft im- ages. He could not recall his mother nearly as well, perhaps because she had died when he was quite young.
And what would Abraham say, now that his son had named a star for him that was a caldron of vast forces, beside which humanity was a mere fleck, a nuisance? Some promised land! Killeen grimaced.
The hoop had finished its first revolution and begun the second, hastening. Its inner edge did not lie exactly along New Bishop’s axis but stood a tiny fraction out from it.
As Killeen watched, the cosmic ring finished its second passage, revolving with ever-gathering speed. The hoop seemed like a part in some colossal engine, spinning to unknown purpose. It glowed with a high, prickly sheen as fresh impulses shot through it—amber, frosted blue, burnt orange—all smearing and thinning into the rich, brimming honey gold.
—I’m picking up a whirring in the magnetic fields,—Shibo sent.
His Arthur Aspect immediately observed:
That is the inductive signal from the cosmic string’s revolution. It is acting like a coil of wire in a giant motor.
“What for?” Killeen demanded, his throat tight. Without ever having set foot on it, he felt that New Bishop was his, the Family’s, and not some plaything in a grotesquely gargantuan contraption. He called up his Grey Aspect.
I cannot…understand. Clearly it moves…to the beck…of some unseen hand…I have never heard…of mechs working on such a scale…nor of them using a cosmic string…To be sure…strings were supposed…in human theory…to be quite rare. They should move…at very near the speed of light. This one must have…collided with the many stars…and clouds…slowing it. Someone captured it…trapped with magnetic fields.
Arthur broke in:
A truly difficult task, of course, beyond the scope of things human—but not, in principle, impossible. It merely demands the manipulation of magnetic field gradients on a scale unknown—
“What’s your point?” Killeen demanded. Though the Aspect talk streamed through his mind blindingly fast, he had no patience for the smug, arched-eyebrow tone of Arthur’s little lectures. Equations fluttered in his left eye. They were leakage from Arthur; or maybe the Aspect thought much mumbo jumbo would impress him. Killeen grimaced. The Aspect had now assimilated Grey’s memories and was working with them. Grey’s dusty presence faded as Arthur continued crisply:
Simply that the cosmic string is clearly employed here in some sort of civil-engineering sense. Shibo detects the strong inductive electromagnetic fields generated by its revolving, but surely this cannot be the purpose. No, it is a side effect.
“Why slice in when the cut seals up right away?”
Indeed. A puzzle, surely. Still, I can admire this object for its beauty alone. Grey tells me that they ascribed the very formation of the galaxies, and even whole clusters of galaxies, to immense cosmic strings, at the very dawn of our universe. Rings were once truly, cosmologically huge. Galaxies formed from the turbulence of their passing, like whorls behind a watercraft. As time waxed on, cosmic strings twisted on themselves, breaking where they intersected. Coiled strings did this repeatedly, proliferating into many lopped-off loops—such as this magnificent fossil, apparently.
“Look, what’s that thing doing?” Somewhat miffed, Arthur said coolly:
We will have to deduce its function from its form, obviously. Note that the absolutely straight inner edge of the hoop stops short of exactly lying along the planet’s axis. This cannot be a mistake, not with engineers of this ability. Clearly this offset is intended.
The hoop revolved faster and faster. Through Shibo’s comm line he could hear the distant whump-whump-whump of magnetic detectors in the control vault.
