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"It was a wonderful time. But you had greater ambitions in mind," she said. "Didn't you, Michael?"
The Virtual stared upwards at the display above, expression frozen, evidently unable to speak.
Mark said gently, "You mean theCauchy, Louise?"
"Yes. Michael Poole used wormhole technology to travel not just across space but acrosstime." She
pointed up to the tetrahedron in the dome. "This is just one Interface from Poole's greatest wormhole
project: termini three miles across, and the throat itself no less than a mile wide. The wormhole's second
Interface was attached to a GUT-ship theCauchy."
The GUTship was launched on a subrelativistic flight beyond the fringe of the Solar System a circular
tour, designed to return at last to Jupiter. TheCauchy carried one of Poole's wormhole Interfaces with it.
The other was left in orbit around Jupiter.
The flight lasted fifteen centuries but thanks to time dilation effects, only two subjective centuries had
passed for theCauchy's crew.
The two Interfaces remained linked by the wormhole flaw. Because of the link, when it returned to the
Solar System more than a millennium into the future of the System it had left, theCauchy's Interface was
still connected to its twin in orbit around Jupiter where only two centuries had passed since the
departure of theCauchy, as they had for theCauchy's crew.
"By passing through the wormhole," Louise said, "it was possible to travel back and forth through time.
Thus, Poole had used wormhole technology to establish a bridge across fifteen hundred years,to the
future."
Mark pulled at his lips. "We all know what became of this great time bridge. But I've never
understood whydid Poole build it?"
The Virtual spoke, his voice tired, dry so familiar that Louise felt her heart move. Michael Poole said,
"It was an experiment. I was more interested in proving the technology the concepts than in the final
application. But "
"Yes, Michael?" Louise prompted.
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"I had a vision a dream perhaps of establishing great wormhole highways across time, as well as
across space. If the technology is possible, why not? What power might be afforded to the human
species with the opening up of such information channels?"
"But the future didn't welcome this great dream," Uvarov said drily.
"No, it didn't," Virtual-Poole said.
The floor of theHermit Crab's lifedome turned transparent; space-darkness washed across it in a
sudden flood that made Milpitas gasp audibly.
Louise stood and looked down. There was space-emptiness beyond her feet; her eyes told her she was
suspended above an immense drop, and she had to summon all her will not to stumble, weakly, back to
her chair...
And then, belatedly, she registered what she was seeing: beneath the lifedome, and extending for
hundreds of yards in every direction, was afloor of some broken, irregular, bloody material a floor of
(what looked like, but couldn't possibly be)flesh.
Louise turned slowly around, trying to make out the geometry of what she was seeing.
The flesh-surface, bathed in sickly Jovian light, curved away from her in all directions; the "floor" was
actually the outer surface of a sphere as if theCrab were embedded in an impossible moon of flesh,
perhaps a mile wide. If theCrab's drive section still existed, it was buried somewhere deep inside this
immense carcass. The clean metal lines of the GUTship's spine which connected lifedome to drive
unit were enveloped in a gaping wound in this floor of flesh.
Apart from this huge wound in the fleshy floor caused by theCrab (a wound which pooled with what
looked un-nervingly like blood) there were a number of pockmarks in which metal glistened weapons
emplacements? and others...eyes, huge, dimmed analogues of her own eyeballs.
There was a sense of suffering here, she thought: of pain, on an immense scale the agony of a wounded
god.
She peered more closely at the nearest pockmark, trying to make out the nature of the device
embedded there. But the image was little more than a sketch a suggestion of form, rendered in shining
chrome.
Virtual-Poole, with Mark, Uvarov and Milpitas, stood beside her. The Virtual studied the flesh
landscape somberly. "The wormhole route to the future became a channel for invasion by the Qax, an
extraSolar species which had occupied the System by the time the bridge was established. You're seeing
here a reconstruction of one of the two Qax warships which came back through the wormhole. These are
Spline living creatures, perhaps even sentient a technology unlike anything we've developed."
Uvarov pointed to the sketchy surface of the Spline. "Your reconstruction isn't so impressive."
Virtual-Poole seemed more composed now, Louise thought moreVirtual, lessPoole. She felt grateful
for that. He said, "We know little about the Spline, save their name and gross form. I Poole with the
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