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"No, Spinner. Look, we've come to understand a bit belatedly, maybe how hard this trip is for you.
I wish, now, we'd found some other solution: someone else to relieve you, perhaps. But it's too late for
that. We've got ourselves into a situation in which we're very dependent on you, and your continued
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good functioning out in that cage, Spinner."
"And the heat?"
"Heat acts as a mild sedative, Spinner-of-Rope. As long as your fluid balance isn't affected and we're
monitoring that it's quite harmless. I thought it was a good solution to the problem..."
Spinner rubbed her cheek against the lining of her helmet. "Right. So you were sedating me, without my
consent. Louise Ye Armonk, engineer of human bodies and souls..."
"I guess I should have discussed it with you."
"Yes, I guess you should," Spinner said heavily. "And now?"
Louise hesitated. "It was becoming harder and harder to dig you out of your fantasies, Spinner. I was
afraid we might lose you altogether... lose you to a dream of the forest."
A dream of the forest.
With a sigh she straightened her posture in her couch. "Don't worry, Louise. I won't let you down."
"I know you won't, Spinner." Louise sounded nervous, excited uncharacteristically so.
"Spinner-of-Rope...it's the fifty-first day. Look around you."
Spinner loosened her restraints; she glared around at her surroundings, at first seeing only emptiness.
Irritated, she snapped out subvocals, and the faceplate began to enhance her naked-eye images.
"Spinner, we've traveled a hundred and fifty million light years. We're reaching the end of the
programmed hyperdrive jumps...
"It's nearly over, Spinner-of-Rope. We're almost there."
As the faceplate worked, dim forms emerged the moth-like forms of galaxies, far away, all around her.
She saw spirals, ellipticals, gigantic irregulars: huge clusters of galaxies in their characteristic threads and
sheets, the whole vision looking impossibly fragile.
But there was somethingodd about the pale images.
"We've arrived, Spinner-of-Rope," Louise said. "We are at the center of things."
Blue shift, Spinner-of-Rope. Blue shift, everywhere... Can you see it?
Yes. The galaxies all around her sky were tingedblue, she realized now.Blue shift.
She had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.
PART V
Event: Ring
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27
The nightfighter with its fragile cargo of humans, and traveling thirty-five light-years with every
hyperdrive jump arced down toward the disc of the scarred galaxy. Spinner-of-Rope sat in her cage,
letting the waldoes run through their program; in the corner of her eye, telltales winked reassuringly.
This galaxy was a broad spiral, with multiple arms tightly wrapped around a compact, glowing core. The
star system was a pool of rust red, punctuated with the gleam of novae and supernovae: thus, she saw,
the galaxy had not escaped depredation at the hands of the photino birds. And the gleaming disc was
disfigured by one stunning feature: a huge gouge of a scar, a channel of dust and glowing star-stuff that
cut right across the disc, from rim to core.
Now the nightfighter, flickering through hyperspace, neared the rim of the disc, close to the termination
of the scar.
This might have been the original Galaxy of humans, Spinner thought, and she wondered if Louise
Armonk was sitting under the skydome over the forest, peering out at this freight of stars. Maybe this
nostalgic similarity was the reason Louise and the rest had chosen this particular galaxy, out of hundreds
of thousands around the cavity, for a closer study.
Suddenly the plane of the disc loomed up at her and the nightfighter slid neatly into the notch gouged
out of the disc.
"Good navigation, Louise," she said. "Right down the channel."
"Well, it wasn't so hard to hit. The channel is over two thousand light-years wide, and as straight as one
of your blowpipes. The channel was cut so recently that the galaxy's rotation hasn't had time to distort it
too far although, in another few hundred thousand years there will be barely a trace of this feature
left..."
The 'fighter plunged along the gouge, and the view was spectacular. Above her was the gaunt,
galaxy-stained sky of the Attractor; below and around her was an open tunnel of stars, hurtling past her.
Looking ahead, it seemed she could see all the way to the gleaming core of the galaxy. It was difficult to
remember that this neat star-walled valley was no less than fifty thousand light-years long...
At thirty-five light-years a second, the ship would reach the core in under thirty minutes.
Now the 'fighter dived into a bank of opaque dust and then exploded out again, the stars gleaming
crimson and gold in the walls of the galaxy-spanning tunnel.
Spinner punched her fist into her palm and whooped.
She heard Louise laugh. "You're enjoying the ride, Spinner-of-Rope?"
There were voices behind Louise Armonk. "I see it." Excited, shouting. "I see it "
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