As if on cue the mile-wide bulk of the Governor’s Spline flagship slid into his view, dwarfing the flitter and eclipsing Earth. Parz could not help but quail at the Spline’s bulk. The flagship was a rough sphere, free of the insignia and markings that would have adorned the human vessels of a few centuries earlier. The hull was composed — not of metal or plastic — but of a wrinkled, leathery hide, reminiscent of the epidermis of some battered old elephant. This skin-hull was punctured with pockmarks yards wide, vast navels within which sensors and weapons glittered suspiciously. In one pit an eye rolled, fixing Parz disconcertingly; the eye was a gleaming ball three yards across and startlingly human, a testament to the power of convergent evolution. Parz found himself turning away from its stare, almost guiltily. Like the rest of the Spline’s organs the eye had been hardened to survive the bleak conditions of spaceflight — including the jarring, shifted perspectives of hyperspace — and had been adapted to se
trim345
Still, that brief period of first contact had provided humanity with most of its understanding about the Qax and their dominion. For instance, it had been learned that the Spline vessels employed by the Qax were derived from immense, sea-going creatures with articulated limbs, which had once scoured the depths of some world-girdling ocean. The Spline developed spaceflight, traveled the stars for millennia. Then, perhaps a million years earlier, they had made a strategic decision.
The Spline rebuilt themselves.
They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs — and rose from the surface of their planet like mile-wide, studded balloons. They had become living ships, feeding on the thin substance between the stars.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 1
The Spline rebuilt themselves.
They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs — and rose from the surface of their planet like mile-wide, studded balloons. They had become living ships, feeding on the thin substance between the stars.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 1
The Spline had become carriers, earning their place in the universe by hiring themselves out to any one of a hundred species.
It wasn’t a bad strategy for racial survival, Parz mused. The Spline must work far beyond the bubble of space explored by humankind before the Qax Occupation — beyond, even, the larger volume worked by the Qax, within which humanity’s sad little zone was embedded.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 1
The flitter passed through miles, it seemed, of unlit, fleshy passages; vessels bulging with some blood-analogue pulsed, red, along the walls. Tiny, fleshy robots — antibody drones, the Governor called them — swirled around the flitter as it traveled. Parz felt claustrophobic, as if those blood-red walls might constrict around him; somehow he had expected this aspect of the Spline to be sanitized away by tiling and bright lights. Surely if this vessel were operated by humans such modifications would be made; no human could stand for long this absurd sensation of being swallowed, of passing along a huge digestive tract.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 3
That sent a shiver through Berg, but she pressed on: “Then imagine a hundred violently armed GUT ships crashing through that portal, and into the future. They could do a hell of a lot of damage—”
Shira shook her head. “A single Spline warship could scythe them down in a moment.”
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 4
The walls of the Spline’s huge eyeball trembled, sending small shock waves through the heavy entoptic fluid; the waves brushed against Jasoft’s skin like light fingers. Muscles hauled at sheets of heavy flesh, and the eyelid lifted like a curtain. Through the rubbery grayness of the Spline’s cornea salmon-pink light swept into the eyeball like a false dawn, dwarfing the yellow glow of Jasoft’s light globe, and causing his slender, suspended form to cast a blurred shadow on the purple-veined retina behind him. Jasoft swam easily to the inside face of the pupil; feeling oddly tender about the Spline’s sensations he laid his suited hands carefully on the warm, pliant substance of the lens.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 8
The clean geometries of the Interface framework looked stark, inhuman, against the flesh of the Spline. At one point the Spline came within a few dozen yards of brushing the frame itself. Flesh toughened against the rigors of hyperspatial travel was boiling. As Parz watched, blisters the size of city blocks erupted in that pocked, metal-gray surface; the blisters burst like small volcanoes, emitting sprays of human-looking blood that froze instantly into showers of ice crystals, sparkling in the blue glow of the framework. Acres of the Spline convulsed, trying to pull the damaged area away from the exotic matter.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 8
To Parz, still studying the Spline from without, it was as if the portal framework were scorching the flesh of the hapless Spline. But it wasn’t heat, he knew, but sleeting high-frequency radiation and gravity tides raised by the superdense exotic matter that were damaging the Spline so.
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 8
“Gravitational stress,” the Qax murmured in his ear. “This wormhole is a throat in space and time, Parz: a region of stress, immensely high curvature. The throat is lined with exotic matter throughout its length; we are traversing a tube of vacuum that runs along the axis, away from the exotic matter. The minimum width of the throat is about a mile. Our velocity is three miles per second—”
-Timelike Infinity, Ch. 8