The deceleration beam wafted my ship, crewed by octogenarians and sad memories, to rest at a point within a hundred thousand miles of an oblate Dyson sphere.

Supersphere would be a better term, because it was in an orb eleven lightyears in diameter at the equator, ten from pole to pole, that surrounded the entirety of the dense, compressed core of the cluster. The sphere captured one hundred percent of the emitted energy not of one but of hundreds of bright stars and dark star accretion disks at its center. It was visible to us only because it reflected ambient starlight and interstellar radiation on various wavelengths.

When we had first seen it on our approach, hundreds and hundreds of lightyears away, this core supersphere was transparent, but as we approached, it grew into a mirrored surface, reflecting all forms of radiation on all wavelengths from it. Perhaps it was built during those years, and the light of its completion had not yet reached us. Perhaps its optical properties changed according to the distance of the observer.

Closer still, and the reflections blurred into each other, perfectly and uniformly randomized, so that the surface of the Dyson oblate seemed a flat plane of pallid milky white to our eyes, a mathematically perfect surface to our instruments radiating at a few degrees above absolute zero. Particles of interstellar gas or dust encountering the surface, or rare interstellar micrometeorites, were disassembled when they struck into component subatomic particles and absorbed with no loss of momentum, no flare of waste heat.

There were dimples or indentations larger in diameter than the rings of Saturn, regularly spaced across the surface. Hence, my crew dubbed it the big golf ball, which made them less afraid of it. These indentations were parabolas pointed at various nearby stars, nebulae, and subclusters in the cluster. It was not the emitter of the beam which had braked us. The nearest was about one lightday away, six times the radius of Pluto’s orbit. Jury-rigged probes sent into the focal point of this nearest dimple detected fluctuations both of electromagnetic energy and in the neutrino count, which had to be signals.

We did not possess the calculation brainspace needed to translate those signals via Monument Notation analysis.

Twelve years passed, and we could not attract the attention of the Authority beneath the surface of the oblate.

11. Overlooked

We tried everything, including discharges of energy which would have been considered acts of war had any damage been done. Material objects encountering the pallid wall were eaten; energy of any wavelength or composition was reflected back. Apparently the aliens welcomed mass, but not energy.

Once only, our instruments caught a glimpse of a material object leaving the surface. It issued from a point on the oblate half a lightyear from our position, so we saw the motion six months after the fact. From the distortion as it passed between us and a nearby star, it seemed to be a superdense, ultrathin thread of material, roughly nine thousand miles long, about the diameter of a uranium atom in cross section.

A ship? A message container? For a technology that could impregnate thought patterns into any sufficiently complex material thing, the difference was moot.

The neutronium thread was last seen heading toward a young blue-white giant star. That star was surrounded by 633 superjovian-sized bodies orbiting between one-tenth and one-twentieth of a lightyear away.

Perhaps whatever was causing the stellar engineering activity there would have been more ready to turn its attention toward us, but there was no fuel for the ship, no working cryogenic coffins.

There was roughly a dozen such man-made solar systems within reach of our instruments. What purpose did they serve? Why were so many young stars taken off the normal path of stellar evolution and turned into hotter-burning blue giants? M3 contains 230 variable stars, far more than in any other globular cluster. Why did the Authority transmute stable suns into variables? Why did precisely one-third display the Blazhko effect of long-period modulation? Many were the secrets I never learned.

Cheerfully we worked at our hopeless task, as one by one old age claimed us.

12. Abandoned

We spent our lives in sick bay. As the only one able to learn each and every field of medicine from the surviving onboard library, I acted as our doctor. With Ximen dead, the Hermeticist prosthetics to expand our life processes grew ever less reliable. There was one ironic loophole: it is easier to increase the life span of women, due to the production, in the ovaries, of the base material for totipotent cells. I was a gray-haired Eos surrounded by a matched set of Tithonius, each one turning into a cricket.

They were as old as mummies and moved carefully and slowly in the zero gee, drifting with medical packs and blood bags like pods of seaweed behind them, fearful of breaking their fragile bones. Peacefully, serenely, giving me words of comfort, one by one, they passed into a heaven my astronomy plates could not spy. One by one, they told me not to surrender, not to despair. More intelligent I was, but not more wise, and their words cheered me.

Then there were only a few of us left, then four, then three, then only one. He was of course the youngest because he had spent the most time in cryonic sleep during the years when we had working coffins to spare. I am speaking of the mutineer I had spared from the death penalty.

I will record his name here. In life, he was Scholar Intermediate Jehan Baptiste Ghede Lwa Oosterhoff, the ship’s neural syncretism officer. I accepted his parole and granted him pardon and was rewarded by his loyalty. As the years passed, he aided the attempts to attract the attention of the aliens.

He disobeyed me one last time, on the last watch of his life. He stole the extravehicular frame to jet to within a mile, a yard, a foot of the wall. We had a platform there to tend or repair the jury-rigged instruments floating so close to that eerie, impossible, intangible, infinitely deadly surface.

Only once before had a crewman touched it, a physicist named Manvel. When the fingers of Manvel’s gauntlet encountered the pallid mirror, the suit substance dissolved, and the fingers neatly sliced in half. The air inside the suit, at fifteen pounds per square inch, jetted out, along with much blood. I assume each molecule of oxygen and nitrogen and helium vented from the ruptured suit was also absorbed into the cool and pallid surface of the Dyson sphere. But the explosive decompression shoved Manvel away. Even with the emergency internal seals nipping off a severed hand or arm, the unexpected tumble put Manvel beyond the reach of the next nearest crewman on watch, and there were no waldoes within any acceleration solution that could catch him and return him to the ship. I read prayers to him over the radio.

This time was different. Oosterhoff had switched off his ears but not his mike. He was so giddy that I suspect oxygen overdose, his voice high and squeaking in the suit air, a laughing mouse. But his last words made an eerie sort of sense, a mad sanity.

An examination of the gravitational anomalies recorded during Manvel’s accident had convinced Oosterhoff that only inanimate objects were being dissolved, that any living flesh and blood was perfectly preserved on the far side of the surface. Oosterhoff was convinced the surface was not just an infinitely thin disintegration field, but was meters or miles or lightyears deep and housed their mental-pattern information, their souls.

He said that the aliens had no need of nonliving material.