Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

cloaked star, swelled
until its edges passed out of her field of view.
    The flitter dipped and swivelled, and swept along the line of the
star’s equator. Now she was flying low over a darkened plain, with a
starry night sky above her. The star was so vast, its diameter more
than a hundred times Earth’s, that she could see no hint of curvature
in its laser-straight horizon.
    ’Astonishing,’ she said. ’It’s like a geometrical exercise.’
    Dano murmured, ’And yet, to the best of our knowledge, the
photosphere of a star roils not a thousand kilometres beneath us, and
if not for this - sphere, whatever it is - we would be destroyed in
an instant, a snowflake in the mouth of a furnace. What’s your first
conclusion, Missionary?’
    Pala hesitated before answering. It was so recently that she had
completed her assessments in the Academies on Earth, so recently that
the real Dano had, grudgingly, welcomed her to the great and ancient
enterprise that was the Commission for Historical Truth, that she
felt little confidence in her own abilities. And yet the Commission
must have faith in her, or else they wouldn’t have committed her to
this mission.
    ’It is artificial,’ she said. ’The sphere. It must be.’
    ’Yes. Surely no natural process could wrap up a star so neatly.
And if it is artificial, who do you imagine might be
responsible?’
    ’The Xeelee,’ she said immediately. Involuntarily she glanced up
at the crowded stars, bright and vivid here, five thousand light
years from Earth. In the hidden heart of the Galaxy mankind’s
ultimate foe lurked; and surely it was only the Xeelee who could
wield such power as this.
    There was a change in the darkness ahead. She saw it first as a
faint splash of light near the horizon, but as the flitter flew on
that splash opened out into a rough disc that glowed pale blue-green.
Though a speck against the face of the masked star, it was sizeable
in itself - perhaps as much as a hundred kilometres across.
    The flitter came to rest over the centre of the feature. It was
like a shard of Earth, stranded in the night: she looked down at the
deep blue of open water, the mistiness of air, the pale green of
cultivated land and forest, even a greyish bubbling that must be a
town. All of this was contained under a dome, shallow and flat and
all but transparent. Outside the dome what looked like roads, ribbons
of silver, stretched away into the dark. And at the very centre of
this strange scrap of landscape was a shining sheet of light.
    ’People,’ Dano said. ’Huddling around that flaw in the sphere,
that lake of light.’ He pointed. ’I think there’s some kind of port
at the edge of the dome. You’d better take the flitter down by
hand.’
    Pala touched the small control panel in front of her, and the
flitter began its final descent.
     
    They cycled through a kind of airlock, and emerged into fresh air,
bright light.
    It wasn’t quite daylight. The light was diffuse, like a misty day
on Earth, and it came not from the sky but from the ground, to be
reflected back by mirrors on spindly poles. The atmosphere was too
shallow for the ’sky’ to be blue, and through the dome’s distortion
Pala saw smeared-out star fields. But the ’sky’ contained pale,
streaky clouds.
    A dirt road led away from the airlock into the domed ecology.
Looking along the road Pala glimpsed clusters of low buildings, the
green of forest clumps and cultivated fields. She could even smell
wood smoke.
    Dano sniffed. ’Lethe. Agriculture. Typical Second Expansion.’
    This pastoral scene wasn’t a landscape Pala was familiar with.
Under Coalition ideology Earth was dominated by sprawling
Conurbations, and fields in which nanotechnologies efficiently
delivered food for the world’s billions. Even so this was a human
scene, and she felt oddly at home here.
    But she wasn’t at home. The Navy scouts had determined that the
stellar sphere was rotating as a solid, and that this equatorial site
was moving at only a little less than orbital speed. This arrangement
was why they experienced such an equable gravity; if not for the
compensating effects of centrifugal force, they would have been
crushed by nearly thirty times Earth standard. She could feel none of
this, but nevertheless, standing here, gazing at grass and trees and
clouds, she was really soaring through space, actually circling a
star in less than a standard day.
    ’It takes a genuine effort of will,’ she said, ’to remember