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Are we ready? He twirled his finger.  Let s roll it!
The room went dark, but almost at once began to fill up with
stars. An enormous title stretched across the starfield:
GALACTI GEOGRAPHIC PRESENTS
and then:
THE STREAM OF STARS
Our Gateway to the Galaxy
As the title faded, a large orange sun grew out of the starfield, grew until
it seemed to fill the whole front of the room, though the room itself
seemed to have vanished. Claudi smiled in the darkness. This was just the
sort of surroundie she loved, and she didn t care if the other kids
made fun of it. She was in her element.
A tiny, gleaming station came into view, almost lost in the surface
of that big sun. A
narrator spoke, in a voice deep and resonant:  Welcome to the great red star 
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Beetlejuice
, Claudi whispered. She knew where the gateway had come from.
 Bait l juice, said the narrator. But the caption that appeared
under it spelled the name
B-e-t-e-l-g-e-u-s-e
.  This is the star as it appeared in the last century, before Willard Ruskin
and the secret Auricle Alliance Breakstar project turned it into a gigantic 
Supernova
, Claudi mouthed.
  supernova. The narrator fell silent as the star suddenly flared up into a
brilliant, blazing white and seemed to fill the whole universe. Claudi was
awed by the sight. And suddenly she was more than awed; she was dizzy. She
felt her mouth become dry as a memory came back to her something she d
dreamed, no, not dreamed, seen
. The memory felt very strange to her;
it seemed both close and far away. Hadn t she seen something like this star?
But when? During the night? And it &
Hadn t it spoken to her?
Claudi squinted, blinking, wiping away a tear so that she could see
better. She saw the other kids heads moving like shadowy ghosts in the
dazzling light. But then the light faded suddenly, and the star shrank
back down, until it was no longer a star, but a whirlpool of light, with a
black center.
 And in the heart of the exploded sun a black hole came into existence, where
matter was crushed so tightly that it literally opened a hole in
four-space, the narrator was saying.  But more than that, the explosion
was timed to the fraction of a second, because something else was
coming into the equation, as well. Let s watch it again, this time from a
greater distance.
Betelgeuse reappeared, but smaller and farther away.  Now, notice the
glowing thread approaching from the right. A luminous, silken thread,
curved in a long loop, was drifting toward the reddish star.  It s
called a cosmic hyperstring
. It s no thicker than a hair on your head, but you couldn t break it,
no matter how hard you tried. It s a sort of crack in space, and on its
inside there is a great channel of n-space, something like the
K-space that ordinary starships travel through, but even more useful.
Watch its shape change, as it approaches
Betelgeuse. The loop was stretching narrower and narrower as its end sped
toward Betelgeuse, as though being reeled in.
The star exploded. The flash passed quickly this time, and Claudi could see
the black spot form in the star s center just as the thread reached
it. The thread suddenly tightened and vibrated, like a guitar string
plucked by an invisible finger. Now she could see the other end of the thread
stretching off to the right, through the star clouds, and finally disappearing
into the dense clusters of stars that enveloped the center of the Milky Way.
There was a change in the image, and the galactic core became visible,
through the dust and the stars. It, too, was a glowing whirlpool with
a black center.  There, holding the other end of the loop, is the great
black hole at the center of our galaxy, which some call the Well of God.
Into the black hole, the fine, luminous thread vanished.
 The string is now anchored at both ends, the narrator said.  And
at our end, where
Betelgeuse used to be, there is an opening to the new gateway
formed by the space-altering hyperstring and the black holes.
Claudi got a little lost, trying to follow the explanation at this
point. But the image drew closer, to show a faint stream of light moving
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along the closed loop of that tight string. That, she knew, was the
starstream.
 As grand a feat as making the gateway was, finding a way to enter it safely
was almost as difficult. And to explain that, we must tell the strange story
of the gateway s designer, Willard
Ruskin.
Claudi had heard this before, but she listened anyway to the story
of the man who had died, and yet not died, in the creation of the
starstream. It was the story, as well, of a Logothian serpent-man named Max,
who died with his friend Ruskin, and of a Tandesko assassin who was
with them. And strangest of all, it was the story of a star that had been
very much alive, and conscious, until it died along with the others and with
them, had become a living part of the gateway that they had created.
Only later, and only through a death-defying attempt to contact them,
had two brave women and their shipmates actually found a way to
enter the gateway and travel it in safety.
 Do Ruskin and the others remain alive today as a part of the gateway? No
contact has been reported for many years. Have they passed on to
another plane of existence? Perhaps but what a strange existence it
must be! Imagine them, without bodies, their minds and souls spanning
half the galaxy& !
At this point, Mr. Zizmer stopped the show and asked if there were any
questions. There were a few: Jeremy wanted to know how they d made such a
neat explosion, and Suze wanted to know if Ruskin and the others had gone to
be with God when they died, since they hadn t actually died. There was
some debate over that, which Claudi only half paid attention to,
because she was thinking about her dream, and the sun-being she thought
she remembered seeing in the night. She realized she should probably tell Mr.
Zizmer about it. But she didn t want to do it in front of the whole
class.
She was glad when the lights went down again to continue the show. It allowed
her to keep thinking, in privacy. Gradually, she was drawn back into the
narrative. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]