The New Space Opera 2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought.
    But dark matter has a peculiar relationship with gravity and mass, Erasmus said; so when the Enemy learned to colonize it, they found ways to propagate themselves from one universe to the next. They could survive the end of all things material , in other words, and they had already done so—many times!
    The Enemy was genuinely immortal, if that word has any meaning. The Enemy conducted its affairs not just across galactic space but across the voids that separate galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters…slow as molasses, they were, but vast as all things, and as pervasive as gravity, and very powerful.
    â€œSo what have they got against the Fleet, if they’re so big and almighty? Why are they killing us?”
    Erasmus smiled then, and the smile was full of pain and melancholy and an awful understanding. “But they’re not killing us, Carlotta. They’re rapturing us up.”
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    One time in school, when she was trying unsuccessfully to come to grips with The Merchant of Venice , Carlotta had opened a book about Elizabethan drama to a copy of an old drawing called Utriusque Cosmi . It was supposed to represent the whole cosmos, the way people thought of it back in Shakespeare’s time, all layered and orderly: stars and angels on top, hell beneath, and a naked guy stretched foursquare between divinity and damnation. Made no sense to her at all. Some antique craziness. She thinks of that drawing now, for no accountable reason. But it doesn’t stop at the angels, girl. I learned that lesson. Even angels have angels, and devils dance on the backs of lesser devils .
    Her mother in her bloodstained nightgown hovers in the doorway of Carlotta’s bedroom. Her unblinking gaze strafes the room until it fixes at last on her daughter. Abby Boudaine might be standing right here, Carlotta thinks, but those eyes are looking out from someplace deeper and more distant and far more frightening.
    The blood fairly drenches her. But it isn’t Abby’s blood.
    â€œOh, Carlotta,” Abby says. Then she clears her throat, the way she does when she has to make an important phone call or speak to someone she fears. “Carlotta…”
    And Carlotta (the invisible Carlotta, the Carlotta who dropped down from that place where the angels dice with eternity) understands what Abby is about to say, recognizes at last the awesome circularity, not a paradox at all. She pronounces the words silently as Abby makes them real: “Carlotta. Listen to me, girl. I don’t guess you understand any of this. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for many things. But listen now. When it’s time to leave, you leave. Don’t be afraid, and don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast .”
    Then she turns and leaves her daughter cowering in the darkened room.
    Beyond the bedroom window, the coyotes are still complaining to the moon. The sound of their hooting fills up the young Carlotta’s awareness until it seems to speak directly to the heart of her.
    Then comes the second and final gunshot.
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    I have only seen the Enemy briefly, and by that time, I had stopped thinking of them as the Enemy.
    Can’t describe them too well. Words really do fail me. And by that time, might as well admit it, I was not myself a thing I would once have recognized as human. Just say that Erasmus and I and the remaining timesliders were taken up into the Enemy’s embrace along with all the rest of the Fleet—all the memories we had deemed lost to entropy or warfare were preserved there. The virtualities the Enemies had developed across whole kalpas of time were labyrinthine, welcoming, strange beyond belief. Did I roam in those mysterious glades? Yes I did, girl, and Erasmus by my side, for many long (subjective) years, and we became—well, larger than I can say.
    And the galaxies aged and flew away from one another until they were swallowed up in manifolds of cosmic emptiness, connected