The Halcyon exits Drift 6 into the midst of absolute nothingness. A bit like the Sanctum, located outside the universe, where no light had yet arrived, here there was only blackness and the backlighting of the ship's observation bay-a pivoting window positioned just in front of the Wau's mask. This absolute void is abnormal: after two weeks of Drift, the destination is indeed within the universe-the universe surrounded by stars and their light endlessly progressing toward the ultimate boundaries. A black hole? No-the Drift would have stopped at the first gravitational wave. A nebula? The Halcyon would have issued some alerts about its condition…
And then, perhaps, one or two stars, very far away. By analyzing their light, the Wau understands that they belong to a different galaxy than its own. Perhaps they are even galaxies, not stars.
So-where has he arrived? The Drift indicates that it is the correct destination-within one astronomical unit, he is exactly where the great pipe of David Ilsner's inverted Babel led. Perhaps the Rifle is here, the weapon capable of dominating the Transients, and thus the Aleph. From the beginning, he had foreseen it: it is possible that the functioning of the Rifle is incomprehensible to the dogs that we are. In that case, all would be lost.
And then, in the slow inertia of a reactor burst fired in a random direction… the distant star disappears. The Wau understands: he is not in a place of emptiness or vacuum. The place is in fact full-but filled with perfectly dark masses-not even black holes, which would distort distant images through lensing effects: a labyrinth of dark walls. The Halcyon has only two exocets left-out of the fifty stored in its fortress, forty-eight had been given to the Resistance Fleet.
He launches one: the probe, shaped like a missile, darts into the darkness-the only object existing alongside him and his ship. For a moment, he believes he sees a mirrored image somewhere, nearby… and the exocet returns the map of the system. There is indeed a sun here. In fact, there are suns everywhere here: probably, as in all galaxies, on the order of a trillion stars. But all of them are enclosed within opaque Dyson spheres: artificial constructions that completely enclose a star. A supreme civilization has therefore come here, to this isolated galaxy-not content with creating an entangled gate several kilometers wide (the Wau didn't even know how to compute the calculations required for that)-has reorganized the matter of an entire galaxy to enclose each of its stars in a sphere, to capture all the energy they emit… a project fit for gods, and seemingly pointless: the energy required to construct it likely exceeds what will ever be harvested…
Humanity had theorized the possibility of Dyson spheres around a single sun even before sending a man to the moon, but the enterprise is a technological challenge still impossible to meet nearly a thousand years later-and above all, entirely pointless: what would one do with so much energy? Except build another Dyson sphere, of course… and in their explorations, humans had never really encountered civilizations that had engaged in such madness-well, almost: Banquo-2, a planet now reserved for archaeology, featured the beginning of a Dyson ring, created by an advanced society that had not discovered Drift nor the Transients, and which collapsed suddenly-both culturally and demographically-of despair, according to legend. We don't even know what they looked like. A civilization imprisoned by scientific destitution and the vast distances between stars.
With a gravitational filter, he finally sees the invisible become visible. The immense sun appears nearby, a gray-black blot in the absolute darkness.
The Wau has never considered himself at the summit of humanity, measuring the efforts made to become better rather than any absolute position-but here, faced with this work impossible even to imagine within the narrow space of human potential, he feels like an insect wandering through a cathedral, incapable of grasping where he is. A project incomprehensible in all its dimensions. The energy harvested from an entire galaxy, diverted to power the inverted Tower of Babel on Caliban… if this wasn't a Rifle, if it wasn't the Rifle, then what was it? And he begins to imagine a giant reset button for the universe, a way to tear it open and go into the parallel universes seen by the Owls-or even to escape the five-odd dimensions of our reality to address the Blind Gods.
"Strictly impossible," the Transient had said when the Wau asked him whether the Aleph had encountered those entities they themselves worshipped as their true gods, whose reality they affirmed. Could the Transients have encapsulated an entire galaxy like this? The Wau couldn't bring himself to believe it.
There's a protrusion on the sphere. To visualize the scale, one must remember that a star is on average a hundred times larger than a planet like Earth, and that this shell, several thousand kilometers away from the star, is even larger. As he approaches the protrusion, the Wau understands that it is an opening… in fact, the Halcyon struggles against the solar winds and the intense radiation escaping from it. On top of the heat, if the Wau didn't have his armor, he would have been vaporized. Without the multiple heterogeneous layers of Kentrochalque, all the electronics would be out of order. In truth, these special protections seemed perfectly suited to such a trial… as if the designers of the Armor had known he would be here one day.
The opening is a hangar several hundred kilometers high… a speck on the Dyson sphere, but a titan's construction for an advanced civilization. It is completely empty. The Halcyon, an insect in this immense house, advances several thousand kilometers in length to see an intense light-a column of vertical white light emerging from a shaft: the only safety valve for the colossal pressures generated by the star.
Many expeditions have approached suns or exotic hyperstars. The mythical Earth's sun has been the most studied, but it is fairly "ordinary"-bearing in mind that ordinariness holds many marvelous and unsuspected elements.
In ordinary stars, there is so much space that sentient forms of life-that is, possessing intelligence equivalent to animals-are born and evolve: simple clouds of fluctuating molecules, but fully alive. By accident, their intelligence sometimes multiplies and gives rise to societies and civilizations of a sophistication difficult for us to understand due to their difference. The Transients explain that these life forms too are destined to have an After and to join them. There are even religious movements-or human and Xeno psychoses-that consider stellar intelligences the only true ones, and that those born on planets, in deep space, or from quantum vacuum fluctuations are accidental scum, unworthy of attaining eternity.
But there are also extraordinary suns, stars housing civilizations conscious of the existence of extrastellar life-such as those of the binary sun Romeo and Juliet, a system beyond the Far Gate, Ariel, which communicate with a xenobiology laboratory found between these two stars, and which created a specific language for these beings: the Continuous Language-these beings, living in totally fluid and continuous environments, like the Murmurers (a Xeno race of colonists living in the clouds of gas giants), find the notion of the non-continuous-the idea that a word, a sentence, or even a thought can have a beginning and an end-unthinkable and incomprehensible. The Continuous Language therefore uses sentences, most often in the form of universe-numbers, which are absorbed by the medium and extend infinitely from the start of their thought to its conclusion. Thus, in the immeasurable space of stars, ideas have floated for billions of years, continuously evolving.
And then there are the great anomalies. Not simply Aurora, the star composed of strange quarks and which appears to be the result of an experiment, or Enigma-two Drift jumps away-whose composition is… unknown, but is thought to consist of objects smaller than quarks and beyond observation. The two anomalies that most feverishly agitate the HS are Hector and Lucifer.
Hector is a neutron star that appears fairly normal at first glance; its planets have long since vanished, and it is extremely dense-abnormally so. So dense, in fact, that the structure of spacetime deforms and recomposes itself constantly. Some astrophysicists have theorized that a ship could be sent through these brief tears and travel back in time… this has become the basis for many fiction serials and conspiracy theories.
The other, Lucifer, is doubly intriguing: it is a Kugelblitz-a black hole formed not of matter, but of energy. It has all the characteristics of a black hole… yet it emits electromagnetic wave spectra that can interface with the human mind. Many tourists, gurus, or lost souls have made pilgrimages to Lucifer and claim to have received instructions. The Cult of the Kugelblitz even claimed affiliation with the Emprise two hundred years ago, and a rather short religious war ended in the dissolution of the cult and the official surveillance of the Emprise.
The Wau lands the Halcyon not far from the opening, which spans several hundred kilometers across, from which the intense column of light emerges. It's just photons-but when he steps out and takes a few steps, he must fight against the solar wind… which says everything about its power and density. He touches the ground: uniform and light gray. Unknown material.
He leans into the opening, head inside the shaft of light. His visor protects him, and he sees the hypnotizing and terrifying spectacle of a star's surface-vertiginous masses of fire in constant motion, a nearly visible solar wind, carrying away tiny fire-planets before they fall back into the endless lake. Beneath the surface, there is an installation-and an identical opening. Impossible to gauge the distance: is it beneath the surface, ten, a hundred kilometers down? Where does the harvested energy go? Two months of Drift. Who knows how much time the Wau has lost getting here… but had he stayed, he would have always believed the Rifle was here.
Taking the Halcyon once more, using grappling claws, he attempts to go around. A protrusion… he lands again. The protrusion is a large grooved circle in the ground. Taking a chance, he leans in, passing his head through the opening, to see the infinite surface of the sun-and also a metal corridor descending into the star.
He pulls back his metallic body, steaming. So there is a way to go below. He tries to interface-nothing. He knocks. He strikes hard-nothing. He jumps on the circle-it's nearly a hundred meters in diameter. He places the Halcyon on it-nothing. He waits there for several hours-nothing. He draws symbols in the stellar language-nothing. He lets himself scream…
Will he have to return to Camerone empty-handed? Another idea begins to take root within him… he could descend into the construction. From many perspectives, it's suicidal-first, because there's a two-million-degree barrier at the surface. Hyperchalque has no melting point, but… two million degrees… that's more than a few sensitive points of the Halcyon could withstand.
But he could dive into the star.
Dive into a sun-and how to rise back up? Inside the Armor, Cass closes her eyes. She tells herself the Wau Order could die here. She also tells herself she will not die-that she has faith in the vision of the Owls, and that this vision will come after her leap. And she tells herself she's wasted enough time.
She launches herself, headfirst into the void.
She must make her body into a needle or a drop, for the photon currents push her upward. The temperature rises slightly inside-not more than fifty degrees, though it's two million outside. What the Prospero alloy can endure is terrifying.
She aims herself to fall along the column plunging into the sun.
Then comes the temporal barrier-only a few probes have truly experienced it. The star's mass is so dense that a quantum temporal jump occurs, due to the deformation of spacetime. From the outside, the Wau dives into the burning mass, but to experience it is different: he feels like he's losing consciousness intermittently. That's not what's happening-he's teleporting a few seconds ahead in time, adapting to the star's spacetime.
But it's a perilous barrier, as control is not easy… and yet, he plunges into the mass of flames-the temperature immediately drops to 5,000 degrees, but the Armor has been heated to such a degree that it slices through the flaming hydrogen structure as if it were nothing. Ten, fifty, a hundred kilometers. The Wau will never be able to return on his own. Perhaps the Owls really did see something in a parallel world, and not in his future…
Two hundred kilometers… his fall slows, and the currents of flaming hydrogen are like immense world-serpents devouring each other… in the coil of one of those titanic bodies, a metallic sphere: the internal structure… hopefully not just an antenna…
The unimaginable pressure of hydrogen weighs on his chest. Never has the Armor been pushed to such limits.
The violence of the currents diminishes, and the Wau uses the vertical corridor to slow his descent. He sets foot, at last, in the fury of the star, on a large square roof extending several kilometers. He knocks on it. Faintly, it sounds hollow. He advances, step by step through the fury… and discovers what appears to be a closed opening, like an iris. No controls. He sends messages on all frequencies, in all languages… perhaps some being, living here in the sun's currents, could help him?
And then the iris opens… the structure hums under the pressure of hydrogen seeping in. The Wau, physically and mentally exhausted, lets himself fall into the structure.
A vast room the size of the iris, capable of housing several ships. On the sides, other irises. The burning hydrogen is expelled by invisible, silent pumps… the Wau, on his knees on the floor, sensing that he may actually survive this day, begins to recover. His temperature decreases, the pressure as well…
And a lateral iris opens.