Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [185]
“… the defense,” Truzenzuzex finished for his friend. “If we are lucky. And maybe also if we are not lucky.”
Clarity blinked at the thranx. “I don't follow you, Tru.”
The philosoph looked back at her. “We are traveling through a transportation system whose technology is at least as old as the last of the Xunca. Say, roughly half a billion terrestrial years.” A truhand gestured toward a projection hovering conveniently nearby. It displayed the view forward of the ship: a seemingly infinite corridor of energy and light.
“That something so old still functions is in itself almost beyond belief. Yet if Flinx's exchange with the Krang was accurate, it is conveying us toward a construct, a device, beside which this astonishing example of ancient engineering must appear little more than a sandy path by comparison.”
Clarity nodded pensively as she passed Scrap a piece of crust. “I wonder when we'll get there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”
“I will happily settle for arriving before we're dead,” Sylzenzuzex volunteered.
It took nearly a month. Given the speed at which they were traveling (or not traveling, if the seriously confused shipmind was to be believed), the expanse they must have crossed exceeded anything previously traversed by humans or thranx by many, many orders of magnitude.
“I think we're slowing down.”
Flinx's general call caused everyone to drop what they were doing and race to the control room. Finding him seated in the command chair, his companions joined him in staring out the foreport. At first glance nothing seemed different: it looked as if they were still traveling inside the endless tunnel of glowing plasma. As everyone's perception adjusted, however, a number of other realizations became obvious.
Most immediately, it appeared that the diameter of the channel had been greatly enlarged. Though the Teacher was still fully enveloped, the enclosing walls were farther off. The corridor had ballooned into a bubble big enough to hold a hundred ships the size of the Teacher. Set alongside other megastructures Flinx had encountered in his journeying, the spherical structure of shimmering iridescent energy was not large. Compared to something like the Tar-Aiym weapons platform its dimensions were downright modest.
What was impressive was what could be discerned just beyond the borders of the bubble that enclosed them: an all-pervasive luminosity.
They were surrounded, insofar as he could see, by light. Beyond the barrier of the plasma sphere there was only radiance. He queried the ship.
“I have already been analyzing the omnipresent broad-spectrum phenomena—or attempting to do so, given that my instrumentation is exceedingly inadequate for such a purpose,” the Teacher explained. “It is virtually impossible to impart an explanation in words. I myself can only just begin to appreciate the true nature of the phenomenon through the application of pure mathematics.”
“Give it a try,” Flinx urged his ship. “In words. Simple words.”
“A contradiction that I fear may be impossible to resolve,” the shipmind replied. “Outside the enclosed plasma spheroid in which we presently find ourselves, in all directions and to a distance I am unable to measure, there is nothing but a solidity of gravitons.”
Tse-Mallory blanched at the explanation. “That really is a contradiction in terms. Gravitons have zero mass and no charge. They're closed strings in special low-energy vibrational states. You can't catch them, you can't see them, and you certainly can't collect them in one place, much less in anything resembling a ‘solidity’”
The Teacher was not perturbed. “I told you that the reality I am perceiving crosses over into the inexplicable. Remember that as closed strings without endpoints, gravitons are not necessarily restricted