Unbounded

Chapter Twelve: Perinucleon

Mission Time: +10,646.38 Earth-years

It was a sunny day in Durban. Mbali sat on the park bench and laughed as she watched the children play on the grass. Beyond the grove of trees, the sparkling mega-towers shimmered in the heat. Then a shadow passed over her, and she shivered. The continual clicking of the gossiping women behind her stopped. Mbali turned and saw no one was there. Something dark emerged from the trees: something large, something long, something serpentine.

"No!" Mbali screamed and rushed towards the Pelagoid exosuit, fists held as if they were deadly weapons. But the ground beneath her feet broke into hexagonal fragments, each shrinking away to reveal a backdrop of monochromatic pink noise; the ophidian form dwindled into a glowing line. The line vibrated and became music, a deep hum which propagated through and vanquished the noise. Mbali was caught in the humming waves and flailed her limbs. She was in an ocean of light. But the ocean blinked. Blinked? It disappeared, then came back in an instant. The Cosmos was light, flashing on and off and on.

<<Be still, Mbali. You are alright. Everything is alright.>> She did not hear the words, but saw them in the pulses of darkness. Her limbs were moving in circles, over the edges of a table. She was weightless as restraints retracted and saw she was on a perforated slab suspended above an open cryostat chamber. The oddly curving room was composed of metal hexagons. A Pelagoid stood attached to the deck nearby, and Tai was floating next to it.

"Doctor Tai?" Mbali said. "What is that flashing light? Turn it off!"

Tai pointed to the broad monitor screen covering one wall. The light emanated from a point in space. "It's a pulsar with a quarter-second rotation rate. Just wait a moment ..." The flashing stopped, and the room was dark except a soft glow from gaps amongst the hexagons. "There. We passed out of the pulsar's beam."

Mbali pushed off the table towards the screen. "A pulsar? Aren't those dangerous? How far away are we?" The faint wisps of a planetary nebula filled the view.

"We just passed the farthest point in our orbit--the apastron--although, since a neutron star isn't really a star anymore, and it's composed of nucleonic matter, I suppose I should say 'apnucleon.' We're far enough out to escape gravitational tides and dangerous magnetic effects. This is an optical pulsar, and there isn't enough x-ray or gamma-ray output to cause tissue damage. Standing Wave, can you zoom in on it?"

Standing Wave did not appear to do anything, but the image on screen zoomed to fill the field of view with the neutron star. The surface was a smooth mirror, reflecting the swath of the Milky Way. But the starlight beyond its edge, as well as its reflection on the surface, was warped by both gravitational and magnetic lensing.

"There are things here perhaps even more interesting," Tai said. He nodded to the Pelagoid, and the view zoomed out again. Tai pointed to dark silhouettes against the nebula.

"Asteroids?" Mbali squinted. The dark spots were sharp and regular, often cubic or rectangular solids. The more she looked, the more she saw; they filled the sky. "What the ..."

The tiles on one wall reconfigured themselves to form an opening, and Ryder and another Pelagoid, Interference Pattern, floated through. "We found Unbounded," he said. "It's orbiting the pulsar, near one of the mandelboxes."

"I'm sorry--'mandelboxes'?" Mbali asked.

"Yes," Tai said. "The megastructures appear to be large space stations orbiting about the pulsar. The Pelagoids refer to them as Topology Temples, and this particular type is a 'Holomorphic Cathedral.' They all have approximate fractal geometry, mainly slices of mandelboxes, which are maps of continuous Julia sets."