Standing in the streets and leaning out of doorways, others rising up from the weeds. Sarah Burges was one of them. There was an entire population amongst the growths: puffy, pulpy-looking things, bloated and white and worm-holed. They were staring up at the divers. Their mouths opened and closed like the mouths of fish, tiny squid coming out in clouds like cartoon balloons. Pink tendrils wriggled from eyes like tentacles. Mud worms crawled from holes in their chests and bellies.

“Don’t look at them!” Javy nearly screamed over the wire.

But Bell couldn’t help himself. The bodies were distending, swelling…then, one by one, they exploded, releasing millions of tiny yellow spores. The girl looked up at them, began rising from the town, holding out her fat white fingers to them…and erupted into a cloud of inching green worms.

Bell and Murphy both made strangled cries and hit the thruster footpads in their suits, carrying them over the town that was sinking into the weeds beneath them and into the blackness beyond. A blackness that was darker than anything they’d ever seen before.

“The anomaly,” Bell said. “I see it.”

33
THE INHABITANT
OF THE CITY

It was there, opening up right before them: the source of the magnetic disturbance itself.

Murphy said, “It’s…it’s a whirlpool…”

“God, like a black hole,” Javonivic said over the wire, her transmission breaking up. “Unbelievable.”

They were both right. Or nearly.

It was a whirlpool of sorts. A magnetic whirlpool, a self-augmenting matter/energy vortex and about as close to a black hole as you could get without collapsing the mass of a supernova to achieve your ends. To the naked eye, it looked like an immense, cyclical funnel of darkness whose mouth had to be three or four hundred feet across, the water before it and around it, agitated, boiling with random spouts of bubbles.

The vortex was utterly black…but not the murky, grainy blackness of the lake itself, of deep water untouched by light. This was different. A fluid, pulsing blackness that looked much different than the water around it—heavier, denser, gelatinous even. It was rotating slowly like water being sucked down a drain. Now and again, it would flare with occasional spectral shifts of incandescent color: reds, blues, a blazing spike of orange. It reminded Bell of those spinning paint cards at the county fair when he was a kid. The card would spin and you’d dribble paint onto it and it would spray over the card in brilliant abstract patterns. These flares of color were like that. As if something had been dropped into it and instantly atomized.

This is their technology, their science, he thought, dizzy at the sight of it. Not machines and cumbersome hardware, but the pure cosmic technology of the universe itself, the mechanics of the stars. Not only can they manipulate biology, but matter and space and time.

“Stars,” Murphy said. “I see stars in it.”