Try Again

Maria

Date: c. 60000

The singularity spun slowly in front of Maria, Razorback, and Eidolon as they streaked through the glittering nebula in beams of light. Looking closely at Razorback's yellow beam, one could see a thinner, pure white light spinning rapid spirals around it. To the left of this, Maria's dark gold arced downward, and beyond that, Eidolon's distant imperial-purple corkscrewed around her companions as they followed Maria's lead.

The four of them splashed against the surface of a star, and for an instant the light of the body shifted into a pale purple-white, with bright-line spectra matching the spectra of the thought-streams. When the Ghosts emerged from the opposite side, it was slightly dimmer, but since it had no planets, this was unimportant. Only ten to the twenty Joules was scattered into the zero-point by the collision.

They continued on through the violet-red of the nebula, traveling at a leisurely five thousand cee toward the Magellanic Clouds' splattering of blue stars, below the plane of the Galaxy.

Sadness, Maria cast at her companions as they passed through a small cluster of old, red stars near the galactic-southern end of the nebula on their way to cleaner, interstellar space.

Explain. This from Eidolon, whose thoughtstream darkened slightly as she cast an inquisitive thread at Maria. Her friend accepted the contact, and Eidolon gave the impression of an understanding nod. Agreement. But.

We have agreed not to disturb the flow of the past, came the dual voice of Razorback and Xenogears. Their DNA-like thought streams, swirling and dancing in crazy arcs, then coalescing in flashes of silver-and-gold.

Time is fluid here, Eidolon noted. The domain of space they inhabited was indeed malleable, and Maria's final readjustment to her powers less than a millennium ago now made it possible to alter the very structure of space-time as she desired. Eidolon had never lost that power, and had never gained it either, for that matter. She existed as a loop, winding through multiple dimensions and infinite alternate universes, connected to the current universe at many points. Her current stream existed only as a manifestation of her maintenance loop, that which ensured her continued existence by altering the fragments of the continuum that related to her existence.

Headache, Maria said dryly as she considered these matters. She dismissed them immediately and referred to the issue at hand. Delithita. Icey. Izabella.

Sadness, Xenogears and Razorback said, understanding, as if their agreement with Maria's emotion somehow validated it and fixed the situation. Hopelessness.

No. Maria branched two streams off herself to touch the others, to include them in her thought processes, to make them understand. This universe was not as it should be. It never had been the right universe.

Agreed, Eidolon said, surprising her. This universe is wrong. But.

We inhabit this universe and have no place in any others. Xenogears's voice was emphasized in the duality. The Razorback fragment was quieter.

And why can we not create our own? Maria demanded.

Creating our own was what caused the problem, Eidolon said quietly. We were too long separated from Del and the others. Our universes diverged. In this one, Delithita and Icey died. In the other... chaos reigned and worse things eventually happened, including the destruction of the human race. All of it. But that was the correct one.

I am returning.

You cannot. It is not possible.

Maria's stream accelerated for the nearest locale that had the power and distortion she required. Her course arced toward the heart of a distant galaxy. Grimly, the other Ghosts accelerated to match, their speeds soon reaching Maria's one trillion cee, sufficient to reach the target in hours. But as they did so Maria continued to increase her speed, becoming from a beam of light in an accelerated-cee tunneling domain a chain of tachyons, then a stream of directed inversions, each particle itself being a complete inside-out universe. She no longer cared about the destruction such particles might cause, and the fabric of space-time ripped in a long, straight line fifty million light-years in length. Fortunately, there were no galaxies nearby to the chain, or they would have had their stars ripped to shreds, ripped into streams of tachyons that would cast the entire sum of matter-energy conversions in concentric circles over a billion light-years.

By the time she reached the massive black hole, the others had caught up with her. When she struck the event horizon, the distortion rippled outward at infinite velocity, and the universe collapsed into the black hole.

-----

Fifty million light-years from the Milky Way, a black hole exploded three streams of modulated tachyonic energy at a speed of some twenty trillion cee, and these streams rocketed toward the Milky Way, decelerating all the while until they came to rest at the edge of the human Wilderzone, at a convenient distance from a local planet near a jumpgate.

Behind them, the black hole dissolved into random photons, electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. If anyone had been there to see it, the destruction would have cast a supernova-bright light over the stars of the M-81 Galaxy. This light, powerful though it was, was as nothing when one considered that it was all that remained of a universe.

-----

Date: October 3500

"It is 3500," Eidolon said, standing on the ugly planet and staring into the sky wearily. "You've brought us here and what's done is done. So let's get to work."

Maria gazed at the swirls of black clouds that swirled around them. If they had retained any physical form, they would have quickly perished. The temperature was on the order of nine hundred kelvin, and the atmosphere consisted of poisonous phosphor compounds mixed with a generous dosage of background radiation from the soup of uranium, radium, actinium, and other heavy metals this world had an abundance of.

"How should we do this?" Xenogears and Razorback asked.

"There is only one way we can," Maria whispered. "Only one way that allows the Ghosts to continue without dissolution."

Eidolon nodded. "I understand.'

"Xeno? Raz?"

Xenogears and Razorback, in the silvery quicksilver form that rapidly morphed between the two faced, nodded slowly.

Maria waved her hand and created her last singularity, a vast mirror hovering among the poisonous gases. It divided into four parts, one for each of them.

Xeno and Razor split apart into two pillars of silver, holding hands for as long as possible. "I love you," the words came from both of them, each a soft echo of the other resonating to infinite complexity. And then they let go.

Maria looked into the singularity and watched the other version of herself, the correct one in this universe, as she felt a strange urge to touch the mirrored surface of the other singularity. Maria spared one last look for her companions, and touched the fingers of the other that were touching the surface of the distortion.

Maria felt the contact and the question, and answered. She felt acceptance, invitation. And surrendered.

-----

Maria withdrew her hand from the singularity and gazed sadly around the Sanctum. She accepted her double's sacrifice, and was determined to make it worth it.

She shifted the singularity's focus to Icey and Delithita, blushed, and turned away. She waved a hand in the air and the computer console she'd hidden in a spatial fold appeared. She typed on it for a moment and accepted the metaplas printout it spit at her. Tossing it on the bed beside the other Ghosts, she reached through the singularity, plucked them and the bed out of their chamber in Caliente's upper level, and tossed them into the old Sanctum at the galactic center.

She returned the focus of the singularity to the Heartworlds with a faint smile. Teleported thirty thousand light-years, and Del and Icey hadn't noticed.

-----

Xenogears looked up from the console streaming with multidimensional equations and blinked a few times.

"What is it?" Izabella snapped, the other's blue eyes narrowing in annoyance. "Have you found something?"

Xenogears slowly rose and went to the viewscreen in front of the bridge of the Mirror Dance, gazing out at the hissing and snarling vortexes of energy and space-time distortion crackling around the ship. The Silent Strike was visible as a silver wall a hundred meters away, ensnared in the Dance's tractor beams.

Xeno traced her fingers over her face as if expecting her features to change at any moment. "Something has found me," she said softly, and her gaze snapped back to the shifting colors outside. "And we will be out of here shortly."

"How?"

-----

A day later, Razorback, wrestling with another copy of himself with as much irritation as he felt wrestling with his own, singular self, blasted the engines of the powerful cargo hauler on full as he drove into the local Hyperweb gate. From there, the ship shuddered as it began accelerating along the thread with the tremor indicating a highly overstressed engine complex.

Let's do it, his own voice told him, and he nodded, placing his hand on the console.

His other self faded away into the main computer system, and he watched with impatience as the streams of energy blasted past. There was nothing to see, of course, and there wouldn't be anything. Even at the speed his enhanced thought processes worked at, they would blow past the other ships too fast for him to see anything more than a flash of white.

He blinked as nausea shot through him for an instant, and then passed. The Hyperweb vanished, replaced by black space... with a pair of ships dangling from the supertractor the cargo hauler usually directed at ten-kilometer nickel-iron asteroids.

"My love," the voice came through the commlink an instant later.

"Xena," he said even as he fired the engines in a smooth docking maneuver and locked hulls with the Mirror Dance. He leapt for the door and thundered down the stairs to the airlock, and the instant it had cycled it opened from the other end. Xena ran into his arms and they embraced fiercely.

A ghostly image of Razorback came from the console nearby and Xena glanced at it with a smile. A similar, spectral image of herself leapt from her outstretched hand, landing with a musical laugh on the floor like an elf. The transparent Xena expanded and went to the transparent Razorback, and they took each other's hands and regarded their solid selves.

"Thank you," each of the four said, in unison. The transparent ones merged into a sphere of silver light and vanished in a flare of light.

Bemused, Razorback regarded his lover with a puzzled expression. "Where'd they go in such a hurry?"

"I believe they've created a microuniverse," Xena murmured.

"Out of what?"

"Themselves," Xena said with a smile. "We have to try that someday."

-----

Sighing, Eidolon stared at the singularity underneath the Galaxy's central black hole, showing the interior of Maria's Sanctum on one side and the trio of ships on the other. "Perhaps this time you'll get it right," she muttered, and turned away from the black hole with a sad sigh...

/ < / << /