The Avatar, jumps V-XI

Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 28 June 2012.

The 5th Jump


A new system coalescing. Sun not yet compressed enough for thermonuclear reactions but energised by contraction. Asteroids plentiful, heating planets to incandescence and increasing their mass by falling onto them. In five million years, a planet will be like Earth - unless it is Earth?


6th


In an old globular cluster with little free gas or dust. Stars, mostly ruby, others orange and golden, block out blackness. There is a planet overrun by life where human beings would be able to survive but only on the uppermost plateaus. Elsewhere, the atmosphere is too concentrated.


7th


Near the dust clouds of the galactic core, a black hole with an orbiting observatory. Chinook does not stay because the forces, energies and shape of space are too strange.


8th


Inside the clouds near the galactic centre in the far future. Radiation background moderate. In one direction stellar density increases into  "...a ruby globe..." (1) While Chinook is here, a nearly massless force field ship transits in 37 seconds. Joelle speculates that an intelligent being can send a recording of his personality to be activated in an artificial body, then to be returned as a pattern for transcription into the original. Thus, the ship in transit need have carried only a molecular recording.


The T machine is twice as big as any previous, for transport across bigger distances.


9th


Maybe a billion years futureward and 50,000 light years out in intergalactic space. The entire galaxy is visible. Another big T machine.


10th


 The biggest T machine yet. Back in the galaxy but between 70 and 100 billion years futureward. Only the dimmest stars survive and they are dying while the galaxy disintegrates. The universe is four or five times bigger and the Virgo cluster of galaxies is no longer visible.


One planet has life because the Others have transformed its moon into an artificial sun, a nuclear reactor with almost total conversion of mass to energy, possibly by forced inter-quark interaction in a hollow space protected by fields at the centre of the moon.


11th


The Chinook is enclosed by a vast globe of moving colours containing the T machine, a white-hot sphere with lesser shapes moving around it and a curved ellipsoid extruding a delicate webwork like those seen at the neutron star and black hole observatories. A point of light moves from the ellipsoid to the Chinook. Something stirs in crew member Caitlin Mulryan... Another craft comes from the T machine to the Chinook. Two of the Others enter in the forms of Aengus mac Og and Brigit. Caitlin is an avatar.


Delicately balanced forces artificially maintain the place where they have met "...here at the end and the beginning of a universe...." (2) So the "...white-hot sphere..." must be a monobloc before its big bang?


A hyperdimensional ocean brings forth universes. Our expanding, dying universe intersects another. Their union will bring forth a new universe with different laws and constants of physics that the Others aim to understand.  


(1) Anderson, Poul, The Avatar, London, 1985, p. 347.
(2) ibid., p. 379.