Read Online The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois - Free Book Online Page B

Cassiopeia Remnant, even if you do need false-color enhancement to see the fucking thing.
    Now, though. Now, I want to know . This creature crying out across the gulf, massive as a moon, wide as a solar system, tenuous and fragile as an insect’s wing: I’d gladly cash in some of my life to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even live here at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast, unfathomable intellect must it possess, to see us coming from over half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our instruments, to send a signal we can even detect , much less understand?
    And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed of light?
    I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn’t changed: not much. The damn thing’s already full of holes. Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it doesthrough every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can’t imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we’re going we’d be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.
    And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop .
    It’s not us, of course. It’s what we’re building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It’s why we never slow down to take pictures.
    One of the reasons, anyway.
    We can’t stop, of course. Even changing course isn’t an option except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle among the stars, but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree, and you’ve got some serious damage at 20 percent light-speed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading, but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.
    Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.
    Â 
    We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.
    It gave up asking us to stop stop stop the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it’s saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging toward some offstage focus like spokes pointing toward the hub of a wheel. The bull’s-eye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428’s bright backdrop, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six light-secs to starboard. There’s something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island’s makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.
    Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.
    The message is so obvious that even Dix sees it. “Wants us to move thegate…” and there is something like confusion in his voice. “But how’s it know we’re building one?”
    â€œThe vons punctured it en route,” the chimp points out. “It could have sensed that. It has photopigments. It can probably see.”
    â€œProbably sees better than we do,” I say. Even something as simple as a pinhole camera gets hi-res fast if you stipple a bunch of them across thirty