The only pressure keeping the crew back was the long history that had led them here. More than anyone, Killeen embodied that past. He stood fire-eyed, intimidating in his scowling silence. He had fooled the Mantis, gotten them off Snowglade. He had fallen through a planet and lived. Been swallowed by Quath, then been set free. He had killed mechs and laughed as he did it. And a voice like lightning had sought him out, had led them here. Against that they weighed their own fear.
At that stretched moment Quath came lumbering from the main corridor. There was a strange smell to the alien, a sweetsour aroma in the steadily warming ship. People moved uneasily aside. The alien was an ally, but that did not alter her strangeness.
Quath stopped, her great head turning. Ruby eyes on stalks twisted like vines, slowing to study a nervous upturned face, a bearded man’s hair, a woman’s clutched carrypouch, as if they were museum exhibits.
Then she sent,
Somehow, this straight, factual message carried the day. They quieted, looking to Killeen, who said calmly, “I’ll try. They’ll help us? With whatever comes?”
Toby thought it was a little funny that Quath didn’t say “They will” or “They’ll try”—but then the crowd began to drift away, and he realized that this odd, quiet note had gotten Killeen through another crisis.
As officers went back to their jobs, he and Besen managed to slip onto the Bridge. Killeen was talking to Quath, who snaked her neck and head into view. Metallic shanks scraped the walls as she moved, legs clattering with a staccato rhythm Toby found unsettling.
“That’s all they said?” Killeen demanded.
“Where you figure we’re headed?”
Killeen chuckled without mirth. “Yeasay squared.”
“Portals to what?”
“Here? What could survive?”
Killeen paced, hands at the small of his back, shoulders set square and rigid. “We can’t last long, getting this close. We’re heating up, the jet is getting tighter around us—”
“That’ll just hang us out to dry. I want to be movin’, able to jet out of here as soon as—”
“Why?”
“Damn it! To helm this ship I have to know—”
Quath had caught it before the humans, but now Toby felt the prickly gathering of electrostatic charges along his scalp, the humming beneath his boots.
You have penetrated to my deep regions. You are at the edge of the jet. Now is the time to render farewells.
Killeen scowled. “What? You brought us here, you can’t—”
I feel the growing roll and stress of the disk at my feet. It sends devouring plumes of eating matter up, deep into my field lines. These erosions I must fight. I have little time for you.
“You said you were anchored in that stuff. All that talk about being immortal—”
Immortality is an aim, not a fact. Matter’s rub can erase even such as I. I am doomed to struggle, just as are you, though on scales of time and length you cannot know. I am far grander and share little else but this base property.
“So you abandon us, huh? Just when—”
I have final words for you, then I withdraw my store of complex waveforms from your region. By retreating to other parts of myself, the weave of fields far above the disk, I can preserve my sense of self, my remembrances of my long span, the essence of me.
“Damn it, we’re going to need help just to survive the next hour, never mind—”
I send a map, simple and misleading, but enough for you. I am lodged for the moment in the field lines which taper into the disk. You are riding down one of my flanks. You depart me in a moment, at the location marked.
Killeen shouted, “Damn you, you can’t—”
Small beings such as you should remember who they are.
“I’ll remember real well, thank you,” Killeen said sardonically.
Toby had never seen his father struggle so hard to control his temper, teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, flinty.
Toby opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment the wall screens all filled with the same figure. It was colored and three-dimensional, a tangle of lines and moving dots and splattered yellows and greens and reds.
Complexity, confusion. Toby felt awed by it and repelled at the same time. There were levels of meaning and motion here he knew he could not comprehend.
Then, as if the Magnetic Mind could tell how hard this was to understand, the figure simplified, became flat, two-dimensional. Geometry he could understand. The clarity of mathematics shaped to a human mind.
Toby saw that a long thick swath was a side view of half the disk, the wrath and roil of it replaced by a single shading. Thin lines sloped down into the disk—from above and below, where the jet formed. These were the magnetic lines of the Mind itself—part of its huge structure, stretching beyond the disk and into the leagues between the stars. But these magnetic feet mired in the disk were important, for here the Mind fed itself from the furious energies released in the disk. Toby felt, for reasons he could not name, that even these sloping lines, far larger than solar systems, were as insignificant on the scale of the Mind as the curling hairs on his own legs.
And along the innermost magnetic line lay an orange dashed trail that lengthened as he watched—Argo’s path.
Then the dashed trail raced ahead, switched from orange to blue, and left the field line. It arced inward—and the figure expanded, bringing into view the disk’s inner edge, which tapered down to a point. Beyond that, even further in, Toby had expected to see the glowing white-hot ball that he saw on the view screens.
But the intense radiance appeared on the figure as only an insubstantial shimmer. Apparently the Magnetic Mind did not consider those searing energies important. Argo’s dashed trail led through the radiance, moving more and more swiftly. Then it arced up slightly. At the very center of the white ball lay something utterly dark, though winking with small energies as he watched.
You will depart from me. I withdraw. I send now details of your trajectory to come.
“Wait!” Toby saw real fear haunt Killeen’s eyes. “Where are we going?”
The star that has died at the outer rim now sends its shattered self inward through the disk. A swirl and plunge of massive lumps come lashing through the disk. They stress and deform me. This I suffer—and for you. Such wrenching mass yields up the conditions the Abraham-thing appears to want—and predicted. You shall embrace it. Move quickly now, for a cusp season approaches.
“What?” Killeen shouted, balling his fists. “What’s coming?”
The aperture moment.
NINE
The Cyaneans
Toby put his arm around Besen and held on for dear life. The Argo groaned and pulsed. Decks and bulkheads creaked. Toby felt his own boots rock with unseen stress. His Isaac Aspect called,
What marvelous tides!
“That’s what moves water around in lakes and such, right?”
Yes, but the force comes from another gravitating body. Like the doomed star we saw at t
he edge of the great disk, torn apart. Now the black hole is pulling on Argo, a bit more strongly on the side closer to the hole, than on the outer side. We feel that as tension, trying to pull the ship apart.
“Damn!” Toby told Besen this, then asked, “Can Argo take it?”
I believe so. The stress is annoying, that I concede—
“How would you know?”
I can generalize from my past life. Admittedly I do not feel your bodily discomfort, but—
“Or pleasures either, right?”
Quite so. I merely watch your visual input.
Toby didn’t like the thought of Isaac even seeing some parts of his private life, and Besen’s close warmth made him even more sure of it. It was embarrassing, to think that his Aspects had been there, in some limited sense, in the warm, aromatic intimacy of the bedclothes . . .
Do not trouble over that. Our opinions mean nothing.
This was from Shibo. A deeper, resonant voice that carried nuances that without warning drew him into her own interior world, the full spreading wealth of her past.
—Her beloved Citadel beset by forces bleak and imponderable, ill-shaped and just beyond the deranged horizon. Would they come by seething air or across the cratered plain? And when? Or were their ambassadors already inside the shut gates?—gray enemies no bigger than an eye’s pupil, yet seeing just as much, and rapping back to their comrades their microwave reports, machine tales of the soft goings here.—
He regained his balance. “How . . . how come?”
Aspects are static. Aspects cannot grow. So their views do not alter. You cannot truly change their minds about anything.
Toby wasn’t sure this was much consolation. He noted that Shibo did not say that she could not change. Were Personalities different? He had the distinct impression, from subtle changes in Isaac and Joe and maybe even Zeno, that Shibo was carrying out some sort of therapy on them, resolving the clashing psyche-storms that beset such truncated minds.
Then his distracted thoughts came to an abrupt end when a sudden wave flexed through the deck. He and Besen slammed into a bulkhead and tumbled to the deck of the Bridge.
As he got up, Toby saw that Killeen had remained standing, legs braced to take surges. But the Cap’n’s face was drawn and he searched the wall screens intently for understanding. They showed a blinding hail of gauzy hot gas and chunks of unknown matter, all spraying by them at blistering speed. Warm breezes now blew through the Bridge, fluttering Toby’s hair as the circulators labored to ease the steady heating from outside.
Killeen called again for the Magnetic Mind. Again there was no answer. It had abandoned them.
The ship’s officers were all anchored in their shock couches, staring at Killeen, visibly wondering why he did not strap himself in, too. Toby knew why. If he conceded even this small vulnerability, it would whittle him down in the eyes of those he now had to lead. So he turned and conspicuously paced, hands behind back, as another ripple shook the Bridge. He did not stumble, did not even slow his steady pace.
Toby looked around, but there were no vacant shock couches for him and Besen. If they wanted to see what was going on, they would have to stand. Nobody noticed them, or else they would have been hustled away. All eyes watched the screens and the Cap’n.
Killeen turned slowly, holding the Bridge crew with his level, stone-faced gaze. Then he saw Quath’s head, shifty-gimballed in a hooded carapace, jutting into the Bridge entrance. The Cap’n called out with a faint note of desperation, “What do your brothers know about this place?”
“They never came back?”
Toby broke in. “How come you hunted humans, then? We could have been allies all along.”
Toby gulped. Quath was no diplomat.
Killeen asked, “These ‘texts’ of yours—what do they say?”
“Space? Hell, what about the heat? And this stuff coming at us, big chunks—”
Some consolation, Toby thought. Probably they all were on the same trip.
“Did your brothers map this place?” Killeen demanded impatiently.
The screens swam with colors, forming and reforming into images that might make sense to the Myriapodia, Toby thought, but not to him.
The image was three-dimensional, shot through with gaudy rushing dots. It whirled and jumped and made no sense. Then Quath squashed it down to two dimensions, and Toby could see what was happening.
“That empty ball at the center—it’s the black hole, right?” he asked his Isaac Aspect. He heard a rapid cross talk, Zeno’s sad static-clogged phrases, entries spooling out from a text-chip he carried but could not read by himself.
Indeed. I consulted with Zeno, who agrees that these Myriapodia have correctly mapped the geometry near it, as well. The bulging, shaded region wrapped around the hole is the ergosphere—a zone where the black hole’s spin warps everything, forcing spacetime to rotate with the hole itself.
“Sounds dangerous.”
No one knows. Zeno’s folk believed that the ergosphere was a place where nearly all the energy of a ship would be required simply to keep from falling into the black hole itself.
Toby watched the figure on the wall screens, the way the spin of the hole made a whirlpool in space. Isaac told him that it was not matter spinning around there, but space-time itself.
“Uh, what’s space-time? I mean, I know space, and time’s what a clock talks about, but . . .”
Quath broke into his mind, transmitting directly.
Until that moment Toby had not realized that Quath could pick up his whispering talks with his own Aspects. He felt embarrassed, then irked—and then pushed aside his feelings. No time for that now.
“So how do we get out of here?”
“Huh?” Toby noticed the dashed line of their planned trajectory. It lifted some, then plunged toward the top crescent-shaped blob.
“Those? The crescents? They’re awfully close to that ergosphere thing.” The hazy crescents hovered like caps over the poles of the black hole, seeming to screen it.
Toby looked around, dazed more by the ideas that were coming thick and fast than by the fluttering, lurching waves that swept through Argo. More tidal stresses, twisting with immense hands.
Then it dawned on him that everyone in the Bridge was looking at him. He blinked. Knowing his easy way with Quath, Killeen had just let Toby extract information from the alien. Well, it was efficient.
“So what do we do now?” Killeen studied Quath as if he could read an expression in the great, many-eyed head.
“It’s going to get us out of this?”
Killeen paused, reflecting as the flickering screens
lit the Bridge with eerie, shifting patterns. He was at the end of his tether, Toby saw, tired and confused. His heart went out to his father, caught in this huge engine of destruction, led here by hopes and legends, driven by fear. He let go of Besen and went to his father’s side. Hesitantly, as Killeen watched the vibrant flux, he reached out and clasped Toby’s arm.
They stood that way for a long moment, watching now as the Myriapodia ships came into view. Against the seethe of sky and mass Toby saw that this place was not evil or good, but something far worse. It was indifferent. Beauty lay here, and terror. It could witness anything, this churning machine. Its unforgivable vast resplendence mocked the human plight.
The glinting Myriapodia ships held the huge cosmic hoop between them in a magnetic grip, and it glowed with intense brilliance. Isaac told Toby that the hoop was gathering energy as it fell toward the black hole. It passed through the magnetic fields anchored in the hole and extracted from them strong currents, electrical surges that lit up the hoop like an immense sign.
“That the same as what the Magnetic Mind said?” Killeen whispered, eyes fixed on the screens. In the warming air the Bridge was silent.
Toby frowned. “Mech? What’s mech-made here?”
“So? Just more of the weird weather here—”
Killeen and Toby alike regarded Quath with disbelief. The alien went on,
“But . . . the Cyaneans? Hard to believe,” Killeen said. “Those things, they’re huge.”
The Cosmic Circle had raced ahead of Argo now. Then on the major wall screen Toby saw ahead an enormous sheet—the Cyaneans. It was like a choppy gray sea, waves of blacks and troughs of white making shifting patterns as far as the eye could see.
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