Louise, watching in the silence of her room, felt as if the string were cutting into her own body; she imagined she could hear the shriek of lost air, the screams of her helpless human charges.

Mark looked blank as his processors worked. He said rapidly, “The wake took a slice out of the hull tens of yards thick. Lethe. We’re losing a lot of air, Louise, but the self repair systems are working well… A lot of our infrastructure has gone down quickly — too damn quickly; I think we need to take a look at our redundancies again, if we make it through this…”

“And the Decks? What’s happening in there?”

He hesitated. “I can’t tell, Louise.”

She felt useless; the control panels in the room mocked her with their impotence. She felt the blame for this ghastly accident fall on her shoulders, like a tangible weight. I’m responsible for bollixing up those distance evaluation routines. I’m responsible for insufficient redundancy — and for losing touch with Spinner-of-Rope in the cage, just when we need her most. If only I could talk to Spinner, maybe she could get us out of here. If only —

“The geometry of the string is just as theory predicted,” Mark said. “I’m getting measurements of pi in the regions around the string… 3.1402, compared to the flat-space value of 3.1415926… The conical space has an angle deficit of four minutes of arc.

“At this moment we have a quarter-mile length of string, actually inside the lifedome, Louise. That’s a total mass of four hundred billion billion tons.” Mark looked bemused. “Life, Louise, think about that; that’s the mass of a fair sized moon…”

Her introspection was futile. The destruction of the life dome could be suddenly — mere seconds away. And, in the end, she was helpless. All I could do, in those last, frantic moments, was sound the damn klaxon…

There was a whisper of spider-web light above Spinner. She could see how the string made the stars slide across the sky, just above the lifedome. The encroaching string was like the foregathering of some huge, supernatural storm around the Northern.

Don’t be afraid…

She twisted in her couch and tightened her restraints. “What in Lethe do you expect me to be?” she yelled at Poole. “We’ve been hit by a length of cosmic string, damn it. This could finish us off. I have to get us out of here.” She placed her hands on the waldoes. “But I don’t know what to do. Louise? Louise, can you hear me?”

You know she can’t.

Feverishly, Spinner said, “Maybe we’re already hit; maybe that’s why the connection went down. But what if she managed to program a routine into the waldoes before we lost the connection? Maybe — ”

Come on, Spinner-of-Rope. You know that’s not true.

“But I have to move the ship!” she wailed. The thump of her heartbeat sounded impossibly loud in the confined space of the helmet. “Can’t you see that?”

Yes. Yes, I see that.

“But I don’t know how — or where — without Louise…”

A hand rested over hers. Despite the thickness of her glove fabric, she could feel the warm roughness of Michael Poole’s palm.

I will help you. I’ll show you what you must do.

The invisible fingers tightened, pushing her hands against the waldoes. Behind her, the nightfighter opened its wings.

Morrow, crumpled against the Deck beside the crushed body of Planner Milpitas, stared up into the wake of the cosmic string.

The structure of the middle Decks was fragile; it simply imploded into the string wake. Morrow saw homes which had stood for a thousand years rip loose from the Deck surfaces as if in the grip of some immense tornado; the buildings exploded, and metal sheets spun through the air. The newer structures, spun across the air in zero-gee, crumpled easily as the wake passed. Much of the surface of Deck Two was torn loose and tumbled above him, chunks of metal clattering into each other. Morrow saw patterns of straight lines and arcs on those fragments of Deck: shards of the soulless circular geometry which had dominated the Deck’s layout for centuries.

People, scattered in the air like dolls, clattered against each other in the wake. The string passed through a Temple. The golden tetrahedron — the proudest symbol of human culture — collapsed like a burst balloon around the path of the string, and shards of gold-brown glass, long and lethal, hailed through the air.

And now the string passed through another human body, that of a hapless woman. Morrow heard the banal, mundane sounds of her death: a scream, abruptly cut off, a moist, ripping sound, and the crunch of bone, sounding like a bite into a crisp apple.

The woman’s body, distorted out of recognition, was cast aside; tumbling, it impacted softly with the Deck.

The wake of a cosmic string… The wake was the mechanism that had constructed the large-scale structure of the Universe. It was the seed of galaxies. And we have let it loose inside our ship, Morrow thought.

Once the string passed through the lifedome completely, the Northern would die at last, as surely as a body severed from its head…

Morrow, immersed in his own pain, wanted to close his eyes, succumb to the oblivion of unconsciousness. Was this how it was to end, after a thousand years?

But the quality of the noise above him — the rush of air, the screams — seemed to change.

He stared up.

The string, still cutting easily through the structure, had slowed to a halt.

“Mark,” Louise hissed. “What’s happening?”

The string had cut a full quarter-mile into the lifedome. For a moment the blue glowing string hovered, like a scalpel embedded in flesh.

Then the Virtual display came to life once more. The electric-blue string executed a tight curve and sliced its way back out of the lifedome, exiting perhaps a quarter-mile above its entry point.

Louise wished there was a god, to offer up her thanks.

“It’s done a lot more damage on the way out — but we are left with an intact lifedome,” Mark said. “The ’bots and autonomic systems are sealing up the breaches in the hull.” He looked up at Louise. “I think we’ve made it.”

Louise, floating above her bed, hugged her knees against her chest. “But I don’t understand how, Mark.”

“Spinner-of-Rope saved us,” Mark said simply. “She opened up the discontinuity drive and took us away from there at half lightspeed — and in just the right direction. See?” Mark pointed. “She pulled the ship backwards, and away from the string.”

She looked into his familiar, tired eyes, and wished she could hug him to her. “It was Spinner-of-Rope. You’re right. It must have been. But the voice link to Spinner was one of the first things we lost. And we certainly didn’t have time to work up routines for the waldoes.”

“In fact, we’re still out of touch with Spinner,” Mark said.

“So how did she know?” Louise studied the scarred Virtual lifedome. “The trajectory she chose to get us out of this was almost perfect, Mark. How did she know?”

Spinner-of-Rope buried her faceplate in her gloves; within her environment suit she trembled, uncontrollably.

It’s over, Spinner. You did well. It’s time to look ahead.

“No,” she said. “The string hit the ship. The deaths, the injuries — ”

Don’t dwell on it. You did all you could.

“Really? And did you, Michael Poole?” she spat.

What do you mean?

“Couldn’t you have helped us more? Couldn’t you have warned us that the thing was coming?”

He laughed, softly and sadly. I’m sorry, Spinner. I’m not superhuman. I didn’t have any more warning than your people. I’m pretty much bound by the laws of physics, just as you are…