John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel by John Maddox Roberts Page B

them, so many stars that it was as bright as daylight inside the bubble. And everywhere, in clouds and curtains and delicate veils, were nebulae, gas clouds, dust clouds, and the ghostly remnants of long-ago novas, shimmering like silken webs, multicolored gauzes so vaporous that it seemed impossible that they could be real.
    "If we never make it back," Michelle whispered to Torwald, "it was worth it to see this."
    "Sphere," said the skipper, after another lengthy silence, "how far are we from the Center?"
    About 90 percent of the distance is behind us now. You are looking back the way we have come, toward the Rim. Now, I will show you the Center.
    The ship rotated slowly, the stars seeming to move overhead, and the center of the galaxy hove over the edge of the horizon formed by the ship's side like a sunrise, only this "sun" was 'composed of billions of stars and was so bright that the bubble's filters cut in immediately. Even fully filtered, the Center was impossible to look at directly.
    Nancy finally put what they were all feeling into words, "It's the Face of God," she said, her voice trembling and her composure for the first time thoroughly shaken. "The Face of God, from Dante's Paradiso!"
    "Thank you, Nancy," said the skipper. "That's how I'll put it down in the log. I wonder how Dante ever got out here to see this?"
    "What now, Sphere?" Ham asked when they were all once again assembled in the mess, their nerves beginning to calm down a bit. Their brains were beginning to chop the experience into digestible chunks that could be stored away without causing any damage.
    We shall reconnoitre, taking short hops, perhaps contacting intelligences upon a number of planets.
    "To learn what, Sphere?" The skipper was becoming impatient. "We still don't have the slightest idea what we're supposed to be looking for, or what we're supposed to do when we find it. Will you kindly enlighten us?"
    You are to look for news, information, intelligence. What you do when you have collected this intelligence I shall tell you at that time.
    "News about what, Sphere?" Ham asked.
    About the Core Star.
    Silence claimed them for a moment as they thought that one over. They were trying to remember a detail from the dream they had all had when Sphere first came aboard, but no one could recall it with any clarity.
    "All right, what's the Core Star?" The skipper's anger was becoming more apparent in her voice.
    A phenomenon found at the center of most galaxies of any magnitude, the star which coalesced at the center of the galaxy when that galaxy first formed. Beyond that mass of stars you saw as the center of this galaxy, which you termed the Face of God, is a wide band of empty space, bare of all save wayward clouds of dust and gas. At its center is the Core Star, a star a billion times as large as the other largest stars in the galaxy.
    After taking a few moments to digest that concept, Finn spoke up. "Why doesn't it collapse from the weight of its own mass?"
    The rules of physics and the laws of nature with which you are familiar are limited phenomena that pertain only to a narrow spectrum of reality in that tiny one of the rim of this galaxy you inhabit. They apply considerably less in this zone near the Center and not at all within the Core Star. Within that mass, space, time, reality, take on entirely different meanings. Your minds cannot comprehend it. Even your system of mathematics does not apply. It is as if, within the ( ore Star, two plus two equals eighty-seven, but that is a simple and misleading example. Just as likely, and more to the point, two plus two equals green. Law exists, but it is not your law.
    "If the Core Star is so incomprehensible, how can we gather information about it?" the skipper asked.
    You need merely find out what has been occurring within the empty space between the last stars and the Core Star over the last billion or so years.
    "I hope you don't want a detailed report," Bert said.
    A random sampling will