Louise glanced around the sky, seeing again the smooth distribution of galaxies she’d noted earlier. “Right. And, in a hundred thousand years, the Northern will fly right into the middle of the debris from that huge explosion.”

Now the ship had sailed high above the plane of the Ring; Louise could see the whole structure, laid out before her like the rim of a glimmering mirror, with the sparkle of the singularity at its heart.

Lieserl said, “Louise, the hostile photino bird activity we’ve noted before — the direct assault on the Ring itself with lumps of matter — is spectacular, but Mark’s right: this radio bomb trick is what will truly bring down the Ring.” A subtle smile played on her lips. “It’s damn clever. The birds are draining the Ring itself, drawing energy out of the gravitational field using inertial drag. They’re going to use the Ring’s own mass-energy to wreck it.”

Subvocally, Louise checked her chronometer. Less than twenty minutes had elapsed since Mark and Lieserl had ordered Spinner to start moving the ship, but already they must have crossed eight million light-years — already they must be poised directly above the singularity.

“Mark. Where are we going?”

Poole, evidently trying to calm Spinner, told her what would happen to the nightfighter as it approached the disc singularity.

A timelike trajectory could reach the upper surface of the disc, Poole told her. A ship could reach the plane of the singularity. But — so said the equations of the Kerr metric — no timelike trajectory could pass through the singularity loop and emerge from the other side.

“So what happens? Will the ship be destroyed?”

No.

“But if the ship can’t travel through the loop — where does it go?”

There can be no discontinuity in the metric, you see, Spinner-of-Rope. Poole hesitated. Spinner-of-Rope, the singularity plane is a place where universes kiss.

“Lethe,” Louise said. “You’re planning to take us out of the Universe?”

Mark swiveled his head toward her, unnaturally stiffly; the degradation of the image of his face — the crawling pixel-defects, the garish color of his eyes — made him look utterly inhuman. “We’ve nowhere else to run, Louise. Unless you have a better idea…”

She stared up at the singularity. The AIs, working together at inhuman speed, had come up with a response to this scenario. But are they right? She felt the situation slipping away from her; she tried to plan, to come to terms with this.

Lieserl said drily, “Of course, timing is going to be critical. Or we might end up in the wrong universe…”

Morrow clung to his scooter, his eyes wide, his knuckles bloodless. “What in Lethe’s name are you talking about now?”

Mark hesitated. “The configuration of the string is changing constantly. It’s a dynamic system. And that’s changing the topology of the Kerr metric — it’s changing the basis of the analytical continuation of space through the singularity plane…”

“Damn you,” Morrow said. “I wish you’d stick to English.”

“The singularity plane is a point at which this Universe touches another smoothly. Okay? But because of the oscillations of the Ring, the contact point with the other universe isn’t a constant. It’s changing. Every few minutes sometimes more frequently — the interface changes to another continuation region — to another universe.”

Morrow frowned. “Is that significant for us?”

Mark ran a hand through his hair. “Only because the changes aren’t predictable, either in timing or scope. Maybe the changes cycle round, for all I know, so if we wait long enough we’ll get a second chance.”

“But we don’t have time to wait.”

“No. Well, we’re not exactly planning this… We won’t be able to choose which universe we end up in. And not every universe is habitable, of course…”

Louise pressed her knuckles to her temples. Good point, Mark. We’ve decided to commit ourselves to crashing out of our Universe, and we have half the Xeelee nightfighters in creation on our tails already… and now you bring me this. What am I supposed to do about it?

“Tell me what you see through there right now,” she said. “Tell me about the universe on the other side of the Kerr interface.”

“Now?” Mark looked doubtful. “Louise, you’re asking me to come up with an analysis of a whole cosmos — based on a few muddled glimpses — in a few seconds. It’s taken all of human history even to begin a partial — ”

“Just do it,” she snapped.

He studied her briefly, his expression even. “Some of the twin universes feature a degree of variation to our physical laws. That’s no great surprise; the constants of physics are just an arbitrary expression of the way the symmetries at the beginning of time were broken… But even those universes with identical laws to ours can be very different, because of changed boundary conditions at the beginning of time — or even, simply, from being at a different stage of their evolutionary cycles to ours.”

“And in this particular case?” she asked heavily.

He closed his eyes. Louise could see that stray pixels, yellow and purple, were again migrating across the Virtual images of his cheeks. His eyes snapped open, startling her. “High gravity,” he said.

“What?”

“Variation of the laws. In the neighboring universe, the constant of gravity is high — enormously high — compared to, uh, here.”

Morrow looked nervous. “What would that mean? Would we be crushed?”

More pixels, glitches in the image, trekked across Mark’s cheeks. “No. But human bodies would have discernible gravity fields. You could feel Louise’s mass, Morrow, with a pull of about half a gee.”

Morrow looked even more alarmed.

“Stars could be no more than a mile wide, and they would burn for only a year,” Mark said. “Planets the size of Earth would collapse under their own weight immediately…”

Lieserl frowned. “Could we survive there?”

Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. The lifedome would implode immediately under its own weight. We’d need to find a source of breathable air, and fast. And we’d have to live in free fall; any sizeable mass would exert unbearably high gravitational forces. But maybe we could make some kind of raft of the wreckage of the Northern…”

Lieserl looked up into the singularity plane, and her expression softened. “We know there have been human assaults in the Ring — like the neutron star missile. So perhaps we are not the first human pilgrims to fall through the Ring. Mark, you said the bridge to the other universe goes through cycles. I wonder if there are humans on the other side of that interface even now, clinging to rafts made from wrecked warships, struggling to survive in their high-gravity world…”

Mark smiled; he seemed to be relaxing. “Well, if there are, we won’t meet them. That continuation has closed off; a new one is opening… Wherever we’re going, it won’t be there.”

Louise glanced up at the false-color sky. “…I think it’s time to find out,” she said.

The Northern reached the zenith of its arc, high over the plane of the Ring.

Spinner felt as if she were suspended at the top of some huge cosmic tree, a million light-years high. The ship was poised above the singularity’s central, glittering pool of muddled starlight, and beyond that, at the edge of her field of view, was the titanic form of the Ring itself.

The flock of nightfighters hovered in a rough cap around her and above her, their wings spread. The ’fighters were sharp, elegant forms, filling space.

Spinner-of-Rope closed her hands over the hyperdrive waldo.

Now, it was like tumbling out of the tree.

The nightfighter fell through space, covering ten thousand light-years every second.

The singularity is a gateway to other universes, Michael Poole said. Who knows? — perhaps to better ones than this.