Factoring Humanity

They’d sent their radio messages as harbingers, heralding their arrival. But the human overmind, locked into its own ways, unable to comprehend, had missed the point. Individual humans had long proclaimed that we must not be alone in the universe, but the human overmind had known — known down to its very essence — that nothing but isolation was possible.

But it had been wrong.

The Centaurs had broken through.

Contact had been made.

Were the individual threespace Centaurs en route to Earth? Had they stretched the confines of their overmind, extending a lobe from Alpha Centauri toward the yellow star in whatever name they gave to the constellation humans called Cassiopeia, and in that stretching, had they sufficiently closed the gap so that the overmind of Earth and the overmind of the Centaurs now touched, now interfaced, now — in the most tenuous, tentative way — mingled?

If the Centaurs were coming closer, who knew how long it would be before they arrived in the flesh? The radio messages had begun a decade ago; even an overmind might be constrained by Einstein. The Centaurs would have had to have managed half the speed of light to arrive here by now, assuming they’d left at the same time they sent their first message; at a quarter of light-speed, they would still be over two light-years from Earth.

Heather realized that her mind was racing, despite her efforts to keep it clear, and -

No. No, it wasn’t her mind. It was every mind. The human overmind was trying to make sense of it all, puzzling it through, looking for answers.

Heather decided not to fight it. She let herself go, giving herself up to the waves of astonishment and curiosity and wonder washing over her…

40

The chubby man continued to follow Kyle Graves, who was now heading back to Mullin Hall, munching on an apple. The man’s name was Fogarty, and he was under contract to the North American Banking Association. Not that NABA was a big customer of his, but every few years Cash phoned him with a job.

Fogarty was pleased that Graves hadn’t gone straight from his classroom to the subway. If he had, Fogarty wouldn’t have had an opportunity to earn his fee today. But there should be no trouble getting Graves alone in his office or lab. The university was largely deserted in the summer, and by early evening, Mullin Hall would be almost completely vacant. Fogarty stopped at a street-side news terminal and downloaded the day’s Globe and Mail into a stolen datapad. He’d cased Mullin Hall earlier in the day; he would sit and read in the third-floor student lounge for a while, until the crowds in the building thinned. Then he’d take care of the problem of Kyle Graves once and for all.

Suddenly Heather felt something grab hold of her. Her invisible body, until that moment floating freely in psychospace, was seized as if by a giant hand. She found herself being lifted up and away from the wall of hexagons, higher and higher and higher. Without any mental effort on her part, the whole view transformed from the interior of the sphere to the exterior view of two hemispheres, with the maelstrom of gold and silver and red and green off in the distance.

Two of the long iridescent snakes flew by in front of her almost simultaneously, one going up, the other down. She was moving forward now at breakneck speed — or at least she thought she was; there was no discernible breeze except for an almost subliminal sense of the air-circulation system inside the construct.

The two giant globes were soon receding behind her. For a moment, a third sort of Necker transformation occurred, swapping a different trio of dimensions into her perception. She saw the malestrom change to a series of flat disks, bronze and gold, silver and copper, like metal checkers or hockey pucks seen from the side, stacked in rickety columns. The space around her turned into long, silky white streamers.

But then, almost at once, it transformed again, back into the interior view, inside the joined sphere. She was rushing horizontally toward a vast mercury ocean. Vampire-like, she made no reflection in its glistening surface, but still, instinctively, she brought her hands up to protect her face as -

— as she collided with the surface, it shattering just as liquid mercury did, into a thousand rounded blobs -

The Necker transformation again: she was now seeing the exterior view, the two globes fully behind her, the maelstrom ahead.

And still she rushed onward. The impact, although visually splendid, had left her utterly unscathed. But she was now free of the sphere.

The maelstrom was no longer an infinitely distant backdrop. It was now looming closer and closer, its surface roiling and -

— and there, directly ahead, was an opening in it. A perfectly regular pentagonal hole.

Yes, a pentagon rather than a hexagon. The only polygonal shape she’d seen to date in this entire realm had been six-sided, but this opening had only five.