Chapter 65
Later – much later, the kind of many-years passage that makes people uncomfortable – I flew the Emni one last time.
He was getting old, my beautiful ship. Soon he would start to shed his final layers of bark, heat shield cracking and engines leaking into the capillaries of his system.
Autumn was turning to a final winter, and so cool and dark we flew, the lights turned low and hull doors closed to all but the essential rooms and systems, back to the place where once the Lovers had been.
Back to Lhonoja, the graveyard of the binary stars.
The Edge had long since passed, and the subsequent neutrino blast was rippling through the galaxy, dissipating into the dark.
Forests grew on Adjapar, and the magnetic shield above Tu-mdo had been dismantled many years ago.
Two stars had collapsed into one and created a detonation that had scoured all life from the galaxy for light years all around – but if I wanted to, I could still take the Emni to a place hundreds of light years away and look back through time to see the light of the Lovers shining still.
Not now.
Now I sat in the dead-dark death left behind by the explosion, by the light that had killed two worlds and torn apart dozens more, and I poured out a cup of kol, and I sang the songs of lovers falling, and toasted those who were still alive.
The nothingness around the husk of these stars was not a complete nothingness, of course.
A black hole was coalescing in the remnant core, matter squeezed into matter into matter into matter, dragging the burning remnants of whatever was left behind into a point of darkness from which no light would ever escape.
Not yet a fully fledged monster, a threat to me and my ship, but one day it would be a darkness deeper than even the stillest corners of arcspace.
A curious thought: could a ship escape an event horizon via arcspace jump?
I accessed the ship’s onboard databanks, there being nothing living within easy comms reach to supplement my system.
A few papers cropped up – the most interesting was a two-thousand-word tract on whether the conservation of data, let alone energy, applied in arcspace.
I ran a few calculations, tried to coax the computer into doing maths whose purpose it could not understand, and in the end decided this was not my experiment to try.
After all, there was a life to live.
A life to blaze brightly. A song to sing across the stars.
Instead, I raised my glass one last time, drained it down, then slipped into the Pilot’s chair.
Hello, I whispered, as the void reached out in familiar, silent embrace. Where next?