Chapter 63: 422421

The Halcyon exits Drift 6 into the midst of absolute nothingness. A bit like the Sanctum, located outside the universe, where no light had yet arrived, here there was only blackness and the backlighting of the ship’s observation bay-a pivoting window positioned just in front of the Wau’s mask. This absolute void is abnormal: after two weeks of Drift, the destination is indeed within the universe-the universe surrounded by stars and their light endlessly progressing toward the ultimate boundaries. A black hole? No-the Drift would have stopped at the first gravitational wave. A nebula? The Halcyon would have issued some alerts about its condition ... And then, perhaps, one or two stars, very far away. By analyzing their light, the Wau understands that they belong to a different galaxy than its own. Perhaps they are even galaxies, not stars.

So-where has he arrived? The Drift indicates that it is the correct destination-within one astronomical unit, he is exactly where the great pipe of David Ilsner’s inverted Babel led. Perhaps the Rifle is here, the weapon capable of dominating the Transients, and thus the Aleph. From the beginning, he had foreseen it: it is possible that the functioning of the Rifle is incomprehensible to the dogs that we are. In that case, all would be lost.

And then, in the slow inertia of a reactor burst fired in a random direction ... the distant star disappears. The Wau understands: he is not in a place of emptiness or vacuum. The place is in fact full-but filled with perfectly dark masses-not even black holes, which would distort distant images through lensing effects: a labyrinth of dark walls. The Halcyon has only two exocets left-out of the fifty stored in its fortress, forty-eight had been given to the Resistance Fleet.

He launches one: the probe, shaped like a missile, darts into the darkness-the only object existing alongside him and his ship. For a moment, he believes he sees a mirrored image somewhere, nearby ... and the exocet returns the map of the system. There is indeed a sun here. In fact, there are suns everywhere here: probably, as in all galaxies, on the order of a trillion stars. But all of them are enclosed within opaque Dyson spheres: artificial constructions that completely enclose a star. A supreme civilization has therefore come here, to this isolated galaxy-not content with creating an entangled gate several kilometers wide (the Wau didn’t even know how to compute the calculations required for that)-has reorganized the matter of an entire galaxy to enclose each of its stars in a sphere, to capture all the energy they emit ... a project fit for gods, and seemingly pointless: the energy required to construct it likely exceeds what will ever be harvested ... Humanity had theorized the possibility of Dyson spheres around a single sun even before sending a man to the moon, but the enterprise is a technological challenge still impossible to meet nearly a thousand years later-and above all, entirely pointless: what would one do with so much energy? Except build another Dyson sphere, of course ... and in their explorations, humans had never really encountered civilizations that had engaged in such madness-well, almost: Banquo-2, a planet now reserved for archaeology, featured the beginning of a Dyson ring, created by an advanced society that had not discovered Drift nor the Transients, and which collapsed suddenly-both culturally and demographically-of despair, according to legend. We don’t even know what they looked like. A civilization imprisoned by scientific destitution and the vast distances between stars.

With a gravitational filter, he finally sees the invisible become visible. The immense sun appears nearby, a gray-black blot in the absolute darkness.

The Wau has never considered himself at the summit of humanity, measuring the efforts made to become better rather than any absolute position-but here, faced with this work impossible even to imagine within the narrow space of human potential, he feels like an insect wandering through a cathedral, incapable of grasping where he is. A project incomprehensible in all its dimensions. The energy harvested from an entire galaxy, diverted to power the inverted Tower of Babel on Caliban ... if this wasn’t a Rifle, if it wasn’t the Rifle, then what was it? And he begins to imagine a giant reset button for the universe, a way to tear it open and go into the parallel universes seen by the Owls-or even to escape the five-odd dimensions of our reality to address the Blind Gods.