Ram Kikura’s display showed the Thistledown spinning this way and that, like some giant’s spindle gathering thread and throwing it off. The northern first third of the asteroid had been melted and blasted away and formed a fan of glowing red haze around the remaining mass.
Hoffman’s shuttle had not been damaged, she had learned a few moments before; all communications had been cut off to allow full channels for official Hexamon signals. Thistledown’s demise would not affect the Earth or the orbiting precincts, beyond a few Old Natives temporarily blinded by the first flare.
She stood up and walked around the apartment, unable to turn away from the display. What next? How long until—
A funnel like the bell of an enormous trumpet congealed out of darkness ahead of Thistledown. Undulating like a jellyfish, the funnel had none of the qualities of the Way; something far more ominous had just come into being, a restrained, shaped black hole, like nothing this universe had ever seen before. The starship began to visibly move toward the yawning dark bell. That implied tremendous acceleration.
The uneven acceleration toward the funnel split the starship along its thinner walls with surgical precision. Tidal forces twisted the asteroid apart in latitudinal segments, as if it were being cut by a giant cake knife, each section corresponding roughly to an internal chamber.
Air and water and rock—and molten rock toward the northern end—spread outward from Thistledown like paint smeared by an enormous thumb, accompanied by a dusty debris that could only be the fragments of interior mountains, forests, cities.
Thistledown’s ruins vanished into the gaping funnel, emerging nowhere, going nowhere, creating a deficit of trillions of tons in this universe which had to be made up in some fashion.
From the complex domain of superspace, to the far-spread reaches of this universe, spontaneous and compensatory leaks of pure energy would occur, amounting precisely to the mass of Thistledown; thus the books would be balanced. Chances were the leaks would be so widespread that not a single one of them—and they would probably number in the billions—would occur near a star, much less a planet. Still, for thousands, perhaps millions of years, tiny bursts of gamma rays would mystify human and non-human astronomers. And who would guess their origin?
Perhaps no one.
Ram Kikura watched the display for minutes after Thistledown had disappeared. The funnel showed now only as a ring of inward-spiraling dust and debris and a greater darkness against the stars.
Then the bell closed like a flower withdrawing for a long night.
The Way had begun its long, violent suicide.