Chapter 3: The Lacework

They went back through the wormhole. They reported everything. Earth went mad for a while — the kind of productive, awestruck madness that had last seized humanity when the first microscope revealed a universe of living things in a drop of pond water.

Within a year, two more wormhole mouths were found: one near the Sun-Jupiter L4 Lagrange point, and one — the smallest yet, barely ten meters across — orbiting within the rings of Saturn, its throat radiation the source of an infrared anomaly that had puzzled Cassini mission scientists a century earlier without ever being resolved. The Saturn mouth was too small for any crewed vessel; only instrumented probes could be threaded through its narrow throat.

Each one led somewhere different. Each destination had habitable worlds. Each habitable world had life — confirmed by crewed transits through the L4 wormhole and by the telemetry of probes sent through the Saturn capillary, whose instruments returned data from a world eight hundred light-years away.

And the world that had produced Nolan Cade no longer had any use for him.

---

Deimos Station had been built for miners, not astronomers.

The station orbited Mars’s smaller moon in a slow, lazy arc — a sprawling industrial platform that served the deep-space mining consortiums pushing equipment and personnel toward the asteroid belt and beyond. Its corridors smelled of recycled air and lubricant. Its population was transient: engineers cycling through three-month rotations, logistics coordinators managing cargo trajectories, and a thin permanent residency of people who had found reasons to live at the edge of inhabited space and not come back.

Nolan Cade had moved there in the spring of 2140, four years after the Meridian’s transit and two years after the first wormhole surveys began returning data that confirmed everything Adaeze Obi had predicted. He rented quarters in the station’s residential ring — a modest apartment by any standard, with a bunk, a workstation, and the one feature that justified the exorbitant rent: an observation port.

It wasn’t a viewport in the romantic sense. It was a reinforced oval of layered glass and polymer, sixty centimeters across, set into the outer hull at an angle that gave him a slice of sky whenever the station’s rotation brought his quarters around to face away from Mars. Through it, on clear rotations, he could see the stars of the outer solar system — and if he knew where to look, which he did, he could point his finger at the patch of nothing where a wormhole mouth sat at ninety-seven AU, invisible among a billion points of light.

He had bolted a folding chair to the deck plate beneath the port. A thermos sat in a magnetic holder on the wall beside it. The station’s environmental systems kept the air at a steady nineteen degrees and forty percent humidity, but Nolan kept his quarters two degrees colder than default — not for any physiological reason, but because it felt more like a porch.

He watched ships leave.

That was his life now. The wormhole discoveries had triggered a boom in deep-space transit, and Deimos Station sat at the junction point — close enough to Mars for regular resupply, far enough out to serve as a staging platform for missions pushing toward the wormhole mouths. Every few weeks, a survey vessel would dock, take on provisions, and depart for one of the three known wormholes. Nolan tracked each departure on his workstation, logging the ship’s mission profile, the wormhole it was targeting, the science team aboard. He knew the names of every principal investigator on every transit mission. He read their published findings before the ink was dry.

The L4 wormhole opened into a stellar nursery in Carina, four thousand light-years distant, where young worlds were already blooming green. The Saturn capillary — too narrow for any ship, but wide enough for the torpedo-shaped survey probes the UNEA designed for the purpose — delivered instruments to a system eight hundred light-years deeper in the Orion Arm, where three rocky worlds orbited a sun-like star and the innermost one had microbial mats so thick they stained its shallow oceans rust-red.

And at each destination, more doors. More wormhole mouths branching outward, leading farther, the network opening like a river delta explored upstream. But the pace of exploration was set by the UN Office of Extrasolar Affairs, and the pace was deliberate. Every new wormhole required months of remote survey before any transit was authorized. Missions were limited to single hops — through one door, survey the system, catalogue the secondary wormhole mouths found there, and return. Authorization to transit a secondary wormhole required its own review cycle: safety assessments, quarantine protocols, environmental surveys, the full institutional machinery of caution. In the years since the Meridian’s crossing, crewed missions had pushed only a handful of hops from Earth along any single branch, carefully clearing each system before advancing to the next. But every mission returned with data — wormhole positions, throat dimensions, gravitational fingerprints, the coordinates of doors catalogued but not yet entered — and even a cautious survey of the network’s nearest edges was producing a flood of topological data for anyone willing to step back and look at the whole picture.

From his workstation on Deimos, patched into the station’s external sensor arrays and every public data feed the Extrasolar Affairs office published, Nolan looked at the whole picture. The topology was hierarchical. Local Capillaries — the smallest wormholes, meters across — connected neighboring systems like blood vessels threading through tissue. Regional Bridges linked star clusters and arm segments, mouths hundreds of meters in diameter. And somewhere deeper in the galaxy, connecting the great structural regions, there had to be Trunk Lines: wormholes kilometers wide, anchored near massive, ancient stars.

The network was vast. It was old. And it was everywhere.

Everywhere they went, they found life. Young life, old life, simple life, complex life. Microbial mats on water worlds. Fungal analogues threading through the ice of frozen moons. On one extraordinary planet orbiting a red dwarf near the Sagittarius Arm, a survey team found something that moved — slow, lichen-like organisms that crept across rock faces over the course of days, following the dim sun. All of it sharing the same deep biochemistry Adaeze had confirmed on Viridis. The same chirality. The same molecular logic at the foundation, diverging wildly in every direction above.

The universe was not empty. It had been planted.

But the gardeners themselves were nowhere to be found.

Nolan read every report in his folding chair, the observation port at his shoulder, the thermos growing cold beside him. The same posture he’d held for decades on the ranch in Wyoming, but the ache had changed shape. In Wyoming, the torment had been distance — the beautiful objects he could see and never visit. Here, the torment was proximity. The ships that docked at Deimos were going to those places. He could watch them load provisions. He could watch them undock and fire their engines and shrink to points of light against the star field. He could read their reports when they returned, months later, carrying data from worlds forty thousand light-years away.

He could not go with them.

Vasik’s report followed him like a criminal record. No government mission would accept his application. No institutional review board would approve a crew manifest that included his name. He was the most famous amateur astronomer in human history, and he was radioactive — the brilliant liar who had found the door and couldn’t be trusted not to burn down the house once he was inside.

So he watched. And he mapped. And the topology told him things that no one else was listening for.

---

The call to Ren Hakoda was not planned.

It was a Tuesday — station time, which bore only a ceremonial relationship to any planetary clock — and Nolan had been running topology models for six hours straight, his workstation buried under overlapping datasets: gravitational fingerprints of every known wormhole mouth, positional data from forty-seven transit reports, the first confirmed Trunk Line locations from a deep-survey mission that had pushed past the Scutum-Centaurus hub and found wormholes three kilometers wide anchored in the gravitational wells of ancient red giants.

He had been building this model for three years. Adding data points as each new survey returned. Refining the pattern-detection algorithms he’d first written in a basement in Wyoming, adapted now for a different kind of signal in a different kind of noise. The wormhole mouths had gravitational signatures — subtle, but measurable if you knew what to look for — and those signatures encoded information about throat geometry, age, and connectivity. From the outside, without ever transiting, you could infer the network’s structure the way a doctor reads an X-ray: by the shadows things cast.

Tonight the model had enough data to resolve.

He overlaid the new Trunk Line positions onto the existing map and watched the algorithm converge. The display shifted, rotated, recalculated — and the pattern emerged with the sudden clarity of a face appearing in a cloud. Not random. Not scattered. Organized. The wormholes grew older the deeper you went into the galaxy. They grew larger. The Regional Bridges pointed inward. The Trunk Lines converged. Every thread in the network, every capillary and bridge and trunk, flowed in one direction.

Toward the galactic center.

He stared at it for a long time. The display cast pale light across his face in the darkened quarters, the folding chair creaking as he leaned forward. Outside the observation port, Mars’s ruddy glow caught the edge of Deimos and painted a dull amber crescent on the glass.

He called Ren.

The connection took four seconds — Ren was on the Ares Orbital Research Station, in a synchronous orbit above Acidalia Planitia, close enough to Mars that the light-lag was negligible. The delay was Ren deciding whether to answer.

He answered.

“It’s two in the morning, Nolan.” Ren’s voice carried the particular flatness of a man who had been asleep and was not yet sure he wanted to be awake. His hair was gray now — fully gray, not the salt-and-pepper it had been on the Perspicacity. A decade of studying the network had aged him the way the network aged everything: by revealing how much further there was to go.

“I know. Look at this.”

“You could send it.”

“I need you to look at it now.”

A pause. The particular quality of silence that exists between two people who share a history they have never fully discussed. Ren had been on the Perspicacity. He had watched Nolan lie for eighteen months. He had also watched Nolan be right — catastrophically, undeniably right — and the cognitive dissonance of those two facts had settled, over the years, into something that was not quite friendship and not quite forgiveness but occupied the space where both of those things might eventually grow.

“Send it,” Ren said.

Nolan shared his display. The topology map appeared on Ren’s end — the full network, every known wormhole mouth plotted in three-dimensional galactic coordinates, the convergence gradient rendered as a color field deepening from pale blue at the edges to deep red at the center.

Ren was quiet for a long time.

“Run the age correlation,” he said finally.

Nolan had already run it. He pulled up the overlay: wormhole age estimates, derived from throat stability profiles and vacuum energy equilibrium analysis, mapped against galactic position. The correlation was absolute. Inner wormholes were older. Outer wormholes were younger. The age gradient and the size gradient and the convergence gradient were all the same gradient, pointing the same direction.

“It’s a river system,” Ren said. His voice had changed — the flatness gone, replaced by something more alert and more careful, the voice of a scientist in the presence of data that was about to rearrange his understanding of everything. “Built from the inside out. The oldest nodes at the center, the youngest at the periphery. Like — ” He paused, searching for the metaphor. “Like lace. Stitched outward from a central knot. The whole galaxy threaded together.” He said it absently, still reading the data, the way a person describes a shape they’re tracing with their eyes.

Nolan repeated the word. “Lacework.”

“What?”

“The Lacework. That’s what it looks like. That’s what it is.” He stared at the map — the threads of connection stitching the galaxy into a single fabric, a web of shortcuts turning a disk a hundred thousand light-years across into a small world where any two points were only a handful of hops apart. “The Lacework.”

Ren made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I was describing a topology, not naming it.”

“Too late.”

Ren studied the convergence point. A gravitationally quiet zone approximately two kiloparsecs from Sagittarius A* — offset from the black hole, sitting in a saddle point between mass concentrations. The calmest spacetime in the inner galaxy. Where you would anchor the most important node in a network if you were building one to last for billions of years.

“Whatever built this is there,” Nolan said. “At the center. Or was there. The network was constructed from that point outward — the Throat Engines, the Capillaries branching off the Trunks. Everything radiates from that one location.”

“Or everything converges on it,” Ren said quietly. “Depending on which direction you’re traveling.”

Nolan felt the words land in his chest the way certain truths do — not as surprise but as recognition, the sensation of hearing someone say aloud something you have always known and never spoken. Depending on which direction you’re traveling. Inward. Following the current. The thread pulling through the lacework to the knot at the center.

“We need to go there,” Nolan said.

“Nolan.”

“Not a single-hop survey. A sustained expedition. Follow the Trunk Lines inward, hub by hub. Document the infrastructure, the biology, the gradient. Follow it all the way to the center and find whatever is there.”

“I know what you’re proposing. I’ve known since the first time you showed me the convergence data, three years ago.” Ren’s voice was careful now — the voice of a man choosing his words the way an engineer chooses load-bearing materials. “And you know what the response will be.”

“I know what the institutional response will be.”

A longer pause. “Nolan. Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do what you’re about to do. Whatever it is. I can hear it in your voice — the same tone you had on the Perspicacity when you were about to show Vasik the wormhole data. The sound of a man who has already made a decision and is rehearsing how to present it as a question.”

Nolan said nothing. Outside the observation port, the stars turned slowly as the station rotated, carrying the invisible wormhole mouth at ninety-seven AU in and out of view.

“Write the paper,” Ren said. “We’ll co-author. The data is sound — the convergence is real, the topology is undeniable. Publish it, attach the expedition proposal, and let the institutions decide.”

“And if they say no?”

“Then you’ll deal with that when it happens.” Ren paused. “And you’ll deal with it like a scientist, not like — ” He stopped himself.

“Not like what?”

“Good night, Nolan.”

The connection closed. Nolan sat in the folding chair with the Lacework glowing on his display — every thread pointing inward, every river flowing to the sea — and knew, with the same certainty that had driven him since a Tuesday in September 2133, that the institutions would say no. And that he would go anyway.

---

The paper was published four months later in Nature Astrophysics — the first major journal to carry Nolan Cade’s name since his anomaly detection work had been retroactively validated by the Perspicacity discovery. “Convergent Topology of the Intragalactic Wormhole Network: Evidence for a Central Origin Node,” by Cade and Hakoda. The data was pristine. The analysis was rigorous. The convergence was undeniable.

The expedition proposal was appended as a supplementary document: a detailed mission architecture for a sustained, multi-hop voyage following the Trunk Lines from the outermost confirmed node to the galactic center. Crew requirements. Ship specifications. Timeline. Cost estimates. Everything a review board would need to say yes.

The UN Office of Extrasolar Affairs rejected the proposal in eleven days.

The rejection was polite, professional, and devoid of specifics. The Office acknowledges the scientific merit of the convergence analysis and will incorporate it into ongoing mission planning. The proposed expedition architecture does not align with current programmatic priorities. We encourage the authors to continue their analytical work and to submit future proposals through standard channels.

Nolan read it twice. Standard channels. Programmatic priorities. The institutional vocabulary of no dressed in the syntax of not yet.

He made one more call.

Tomoko Sato answered on the third attempt. She had been a logistics coordinator on the Perspicacity mission — not crew, but ground support, part of the operations team that had managed the ship’s trajectory and resupply from Earth. She and Nolan had worked together during the pre-launch phase, before the deception, before any of it. She was one of the few people from that era who still took his calls, and she did so with the weary loyalty of a woman who distinguished between a man’s character and his mistakes and was not entirely sure which category Nolan occupied.

She was now a senior program officer at Extrasolar Affairs.

“I saw the rejection,” she said before he could speak. “Don’t.”

“I just want to understand the reasoning.”

“The reasoning is on the letterhead, Nolan. Programmatic priorities.”

“Tomoko.”

She exhaled. The sound of a person deciding how much truth a friendship could bear. “The science isn’t the problem. The convergence paper is the most important thing published in a decade, and everyone in the building knows it. Ren’s name gives it institutional weight. Someone will follow the thread inward — it’s too compelling not to.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Your name is on it.” She said it simply, without cruelty, the way a doctor delivers a diagnosis. “Vasik’s report didn’t just ground you, Nolan. It created a narrative. Every proposal that comes through with your name attached carries a liability assessment that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. The Office can’t fund a mission architected by a man who was formally documented as having compromised crew safety through deception. It doesn’t matter that you were right. It matters that you lied, and that it’s in the file, and that every oversight committee on Earth will use it as ammunition.”

“Then take my name off.”

“It’s not that simple. You are the convergence analysis. You and Ren. A mission that follows the Trunk Lines inward is a mission built on your work, and everyone knows it. Even if you’re not on the crew manifest, even if you’re not in the room — the mission is yours, and the politics around you are the politics around it.”

“So what happens?”

Tomoko was quiet for a moment. “Eventually, someone else picks it up. An institutional team. They reframe the proposal, staff it with career scientists, run it through the proper channels. It gets approved.”

“How long?”

“Years for approval. More years to organize, staff, build the ship. The Ceres yards are backed up with survey vessels for the next decade. You’re looking at — ” She paused, calculating. “Fifteen to twenty years, maybe, before a government mission follows the convergence inward. And that’s optimistic.”

Fifteen to twenty years. Nolan was fifty-seven. He would be in his seventies before an institutional mission reached the galactic center, if everything went perfectly, if the politics cleared, if the funding held, if no one flinched. And the convergence point would still be there — patient, ancient, waiting at the center of a network that had been waiting for billions of years. It could afford to wait. Nolan could not.

“There’s no path through the institutions,” he said. It was not a question.

“Not with you involved. Not on any timeline you’d accept.” Tomoko paused again. “I’m sorry, Nolan. The work is extraordinary. The situation is what it is.”

He thanked her. He meant it — she had told him the truth when the institution had told him boilerplate, and truth was the only currency he respected even when it bought him nothing.

The connection closed. The apartment was quiet. The folding chair. The thermos. The observation port with its slice of star-field, the station humming its industrial hum around him, the corridor outside carrying the voices of miners heading to a shift change.

Nolan sat with the Lacework map still glowing on his workstation — every thread converging, every river flowing inward, the central node pulsing in the display like a heartbeat — and felt something settle in him that was not anger and not grief but something older and colder than either. A door closing. The soft, final click of the last institutional path shutting, and the silence afterward, and the knowledge that had been forming in that silence for years, taking shape now with the inevitability of a proof:

No one was going to do this for him. No one was going to do it fast enough. The only ship that would carry him to the center was the one he built himself.

He would need money — more than he had. The kind of money that required other people’s belief, other people’s ambition, other people’s willingness to bet on a destination they couldn’t see. He would need a ship designed for a journey no ship had ever attempted. He would need a crew. And he would need to be the one who designed every system, every protocol, every contingency — because Nolan Cade had learned one lesson from the Perspicacity with a clarity that bordered on religion: if you want to walk through a door, you cannot depend on someone else holding it open.

He looked at the observation port. The stars turned. The wormhole at ninety-seven AU was somewhere out there, invisible, patient, the first door in a chain of doors that led to the center of everything.

He began to draw.