Alchemy
Their wings, which had never been supple, despite their power, gradually became more and more flexible. And responsive, reacting as if to the very nerves their bodies contained. The power of their suits suddenly seemed puny and insignificant, especially in comparison with the burgeoning energies now entering their bodies; the power to split a planet in two or to extinguish a star; their glance suddenly charged with all the cataclysmic force of a supernova, their regard more deadly than Medusa’s glance. The moment of transition from one universe to another was just that. A moment. They breathed out in one universe and inhaled in another.
There were several dominant impressions: the first, a sensation of forward momentum, of being propelled by wings far faster than any they’d used in the past. An almost elemental experience of flight. Their passage was completely unopposed, unhindered by even the slightest friction.
They were moving so fast that the stars appeared as meteor trails, each producing an incandescent line of seemingly infinite length that Ryan could still see even with his eyes closed, falling like the paths of comets across his blind sight. He opened his eyes only to see that the stars had become galaxies, each describing their own matrix, elliptical rather than rectilinear.
Such speeds were impossible, of course, even in their current enhanced state. Even energies mastered from harnessing the power of the stars could not have produced such an effect. Equally impossible were the twin perspectives that continued to reveal the two universes through which they passed, the separate domains described by quantum science on the one hand and the laws of general relativity on the other. The infinitely small and the infinitely large, the worlds of the sub-atomic particle and the gravity field. Of wood and marble.
Tanya’s first impression was one of limitless space, of a universe without boundaries of any kind, unbordered by time or space. Its extent might have numbed another mind, one unaccustomed to such perspectives. But Tanya had lived all of her life with such views, her eyes having grown accustomed long ago to perspectives that cast the eye deep into space, far beyond terrestrial horizons. In this new universe there was no limit to what the eye could see, or the mind comprehend.
“Can you feel that?” she asked. “It’s like something is passing through my body. A charge or current of some kind.”
Now that it was remarked upon, Ryan could feel it. He felt slightly abashed at not having noticed it before, but then Tanya had always been more sensitive, her nervous system as receptive to change as that of a dragonfly. And it was the wings of just such a creature that she seemed to possess now, hovering upright even as the flux carried them forward, her velocity undiminished by this pose. Ryan copied her, duplicating her posture if not her poise.
It was the same sensation he’d felt before whenever he’d ventured close to the Axis, a precipitation of his senses; or, as he was now beginning to suspect, of new senses, of perceptions that could only thrive in this environment. But this time the impression of immensity, inspired by the dimensions of the Axis, had been replaced by one of infinity, the terrestrial by the cosmic, the constrained by the boundless.
This sensation was something new, emanations from a force he’d not experienced before, one that the full apparatus of science, in all its many disciplines, had yet to encounter. He was familiar with the basic forces of Nature, all of which affected his everyday life in countless ways. But this was a separate phenomenon entirely. It was neither electromagnetic, nuclear or gravitational - the three forces that bound the universe together and without which a state of total entropy would ensue. Nor was its nature that of the quantum universe. Or rather, not of that universe alone. It stood to reason that higher dimensions, could, and indeed would, contain higher forces. Forces that could not be detected in lower realms.
Tanya was clearly revelling in the experience, enjoying her ride with the same exuberance she displayed when experiencing any new sensation, the current empowering her sensorium. The flux carried them forward on its unseen and mysterious tides. To Ryan these waters were the rapids of a turbulent river. They seemed to have little control over their direction. Although he had no means of testing this suspicion, he was quite certain that the option to travel upstream simply didn’t exist. They were caught in the ebb and flow of the continuum through which they were passing, obliged to go wherever it took them, to ride out its currents to the end of the river.
Ryan had been in wild waters before but nothing even remotely like this. The obstructions in this current - the rocks and sandbanks that shaped the flow of the river’s energy - were moons and planets; gravity wells that created patterns of their own, eddies that twisted the flux, spinning vortices that seemed to reveal (and hence map) the angular momentum of the entire universe, if only in microcosm. But vast though such distortions were, they were as nothing compared to the disturbances generated by much more massive objects, the celestial bodies about which some of these worlds orbited. Many, of course, had no such attendants. Some had annihilated their own offspring in catastrophic supernovae explosions that outshone the very galaxies they were part of. Other worlds had been lost more slowly in the all encompassing expansion of a red giant - the massive and diffuse shell of radiation that devours everything within its boundaries.
To Tanya, her vision seemed to encompass the twin perspectives of the very small and the very large, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the quantum and the classical, worlds and atoms viewed with equal clarity, each in their entirety. It should not have been possible, of course, not with human eyes. But like every other aspect of her physiology her eyes were changing, which led to a conclusion that was as inescapable as it was shocking, one her mind could barely grasp. The transition was so subtle she could barely detect it, her senses noticing the outcome rather than the process itself. There was no pain, only a slight sensation of euphoria.
She examined her hands and arms, turning them over as she did so, as though she could see beneath the outer skin of her environment suit. With a shock that added to the charge already flowing through her body Tanya realised she could do just that!
The same penetrating vision which allowed her access to the world of sub-atomic particles also allowed her to see the blood in her veins and arteries; to watch the individual corpuscles as they made their way through her system, carried along on their own currents and tides just as she was; a current that travelled through her veins just as she travelled through this new transfiguring universe. One glance at Ryan was enough to tell her he was experiencing exactly the same transition.