Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

side were scattered hillocks of ice, purple-streaked in the
starlight. They were the wrecks of comets that had splashed against
the unflinching floor of the sphere.
    The road surface was smooth, the traction easy. The blue-green
splash of the domed colony receded behind her. The star sphere was so
immense it was effectively an infinite plain, and she would not see
the colony pass beyond the horizon. But it diminished to a line, a
scrap of light, before becoming lost in the greater blackness.
    When she gave the car its head it accelerated smoothly to
astounding speeds, to more than a thousand kilometres an hour. The
car, a squat bug with big, tough, all-purpose tyres, was
state-of-the-art Coalition engineering, and could keep up this pace
indefinitely. But there were no landmarks save the meaningless
hillocks of ice, the arrow-straight road laid over blackness, and
despite the immense speed, it was as if she wasn’t moving at all.
    And, somewhere in the vast encompassing darkness ahead, another
car fled.
    ’Xeelee construction material,’ Dano whispered. ’It’s like no
other material we’ve encountered. You can’t cut it, bend it, break
it. Even if we could build a sphere around a star and set it spinning
in the first place, it would bulge at the equator and tear itself
apart. But this shell is perfectly spherical, despite those huge
stresses, to the limits of our measurements. Some believe the
construction material doesn’t even belong to this universe. But it
can be shaped by the Xeelee’s own technology, controlled by gadgets
we call >flowers<.’
    ’It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere.’
    ’Of course not. Even the Xeelee have to obey the laws of physics.
Construction material seems to be manufactured by the direct
conversion of radiant energy into matter, one hundred per cent
efficient. Stars burn by fusion fire; a star like this, like Earth’s
sun, probably converts some six hundred million tonnes of its
substance to energy every second…’
    ’So if the sphere is ten centimetres thick, and if it was created
entirely by the conversion of the star’s radiation - ’ She called up
a Virtual display before her face, ran some fast calculations.
    ’It’s maybe ten thousand years old,’ Dano said. ’Of course that’s
based on a lot of assumptions. And given the amount of comet debris
the sphere has collected, that age seems too low - unless the comets
have been aimed to infall here…’
    She slept, ate, performed all her biological functions in the
suit. The suit was designed for long-duration occupancy, but it was
scarcely comfortable: no spacesuit yet designed allowed you to
scratch an itch properly. However she endured.
    After ten days, as the competition between the star’s gravity and
the sphere’s spin was adjusted, she could feel the effective gravity
building up. The local vertical tipped forward, so that it was as if
the car was climbing an immense, unending slope. Dano insisted she
take even more care moving around the cabin, and spend more time
lying flat to avoid stress on her bones.
    Dano himself, of course, a complacent Virtual, sat comfortably in
an everyday chair.
    ’Why?’ she asked. ’Why would the Xeelee create this great
punctured sphere? What’s the point?’
    ’It may have been nothing more than a simple industrial accident,’
he said languidly. ’There’s a story from before the Qax Extirpation,
predating even the Second Expansion. It’s said that a human traveller
once saved himself from a nova flare by huddling behind a scrap of
construction material. The material soaked up the light, you see, and
expanded dramatically… The rogue scrap would have grown and grown,
easily encompassing a star like this, if the traveller hadn’t found
the >Xeelee flower<, the off-switch. It’s probably just a
romantic myth. Or this may alternatively be some kind of technology
demonstrator.’
    ’I suppose we’ll never know,’ she said. ’And why the light lakes?
Why not make the sphere perfectly efficient, closed, totally
black?’
    He shrugged. ’Well, perhaps it’s a honey trap.’ She had never seen
a bee, or tasted honey, and she didn’t understand the reference.
’Sool was right that this immense sphere-world could host billions of
humans - trillions. Perhaps the Xeelee hope that we’ll flock here, to
this place with room to breed almost without limit, and die and grow
old without achieving anything, just like Sool, and not bother them
any more. But I think