He paused a beat, and Palagren said, “When?”
“Eventually. What do you want? Some kind of preferred treatment?”
Palagren opened his mouth and closed it. “Could you define ‘eventually’? And ‘preferred treatment’?”
YZ/I glared around his cigar. “Better than nonpreferred treatment. Let’s quit screwing around. How useful is your information?”
Legroeder felt his own lips tighten, as Palagren made a soft hissing sound. Useful isn’t the right word, he thought. Indispensable is more like it, if it’s what I think it is.
“Look,” YZ/I said. His eyes flicked from one to another. “You all went out and risked your lives to bring this ship back, on the strength of my promise to release you. Right? Well, if I repeated that promise now, would it make any difference? I could still renege just as easily, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
How reassuring, Legroeder thought, noting that YZ/I had not repeated the promise. The Narseil seemed to be waiting for Legroeder to respond; this was human psychological territory. He cleared his throat.
“What?” YZ/I asked.
Legroeder let his breath escape. “We’re not trying to hold out on you. But until the information is processed—which we cannot do overnight—there’s only so much we can share. Right, Palagren? Cantha?”
Palagren’s neck-sail rippled in agreement.
YZ/I squinted through the cigar smoke. “All right, then—let’s back off a little. Tell me what you do know. Tell me what it felt like.” He waved his hands, inviting elaboration. “You were caught in this fold. Tell me what your instincts told you was going on…”
Palagren made a hissing sound, and began to describe the riggers-eye view of their flight out through the quantum flaw…
“The passage was utterly harrowing,” the Narseil concluded.
“To say the least,” Legroeder muttered.
Palagren glanced at him. “And I don’t know how repeatable it would be. I think we were very, very lucky.”
YZ/I looked troubled, as they by turns described their experiences. He questioned each of them with urgency, and a surprising degree of technical understanding. Legroeder was struck by how similar their impressions were in general, and yet how different in detail. Deutsch, in some ways, had the most interesting experience, since he’d been leading a team of human riggers who were wholly unprepared mentally. “Those men had some images during the transit that I would not want to see again in the net,” Deutsch murmured, the modulated tones of his synthetic voice belying the emotions that Legroeder guessed he was feeling. “If we had not been so closely linked to Phoenix, I doubt we’d have made it through.”
“I must speak with these Impris riggers,” YZ/I mused, when Deutsch finished. “But gentlemen—I’m still waiting to hear what caused Impris to fall into the fold in the first place. Was it just bad luck—or did they do something wrong, eh?” He squinted through the cigar smoke boiling in the air, and suddenly his manner seemed to suggest that they were old friends, catching up. “Was it because they’d rigged together too many times? Or was it their route?” He held out his hands. “Tell me why.”
It was Cantha who replied. “We don’t know for sure. We had only a brief time with the Impris riggers, before the time distortions forced us to act.” Cantha’s dark-green cheeks puffed out, and his oval eyes stretched even further, vertically, making him look like a large cobra.
“You have no opinion on why she was trapped, then?”
Cantha flicked his fingers. “If you want my opinion—I believe there was an element of bad luck in the route they followed. They may have frequented a route that took them—perhaps over and over—close to the folds, and the underlying flaw, without their ever being aware of it. They may have been perilously close on those occasions when they reported difficulty. And then, one time, they didn’t just come close.”
“They fell in?”
“Precisely.” Cantha paused. “This flaw is extremely long, and possibly infinite, and branches through several dimensions. I doubt it’s an isolated cosmological phenomenon. Other flaws may be closer to the surface in some places and farther in others. But in any case, difficult to detect, with our current state of knowledge.”
Legroeder stirred. “Cantha’s being way too conservative. Coming out of the flaw, I saw quite clearly… that space is full of these things.” He gazed hard at YZ/I. “If you want to find them the hard way, the surest thing you can do is send a whole fleet through the underflux.”
A long silence followed, during which YZ/I seemed frozen. Then he breathed again, and rose slowly to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I want to show you something.” As he turned, the back wall of his command center paled, and a doorway opened. “If you would follow me, please…”
Legroeder and the others exchanged glances as they followed YZ/I down a darkening passageway. The only light, for a few seconds, came from YZ/I’s body, and the tip of his cigar. Then all the darkness around slowly came to life with stars, a sprinkling at first, and then a multitude. The stars were below them as well as above, and on all sides. They seemed to be standing on a narrow catwalk, suspended in space. Legroeder’s pulse quickened as he saw the swirl of the galactic spiral arm; then the stars slowly wheeled until they were looking directly into the Sagittarian sector, in the direction of the galactic core. Out in those clusters of stars and nebulas, he knew, lay the Well of Stars, the next great sector of space to be colonized. By the Free Kyber, if YZ/I had his way.
“You know why I’ve brought you here?” YZ/I asked, his voice reverberating softly among the stars. No one answered. YZ/I raised a hand, and the stars slowly softened to a blur, until they were looking at a vast chart of the Flux, of the territory between where they were now, and the Well of Stars. The view changed gradually, reflecting a descent into ever-deeper levels of the Flux. “Gentlemen, I have only one overriding interest. And that is for you to show me: where are the quantum flaws that endanger my fleet?” He turned and his eyes burned with light. “Rigger Legroeder, you say you saw them. Can you put them on the map for me?”
Legroeder hesitated. He thought about the information that the implants had displayed to him—arrays of spacetime splinters that stretched out toward infinity through the underflux. He felt his implants continuing to buzz as they sifted through the mountains of information. He felt near-certainty that he would, in time, be able to produce just such a map. But not yet. Not until the implants finished their work. For a moment he reached out, as though to touch the Flux. Then he stopped and shook his head. “Not yet. But later, I think—after we’ve analyzed the information—”
“Later,” YZ/I echoed. “I see. And where is all this raw data that you need to analyze?”
Legroeder felt himself unable to speak.
“Some of it is in our data records,” Cantha volunteered. “But most—”
“Is where?” YZ/I growled.
Legroeder felt a shortness of breath. Why couldn’t he just say it?
Freem’n Deutsch floated forward. “It is in our minds, YZ/I. And our augments. That is probably where the most important part of it is.” He glanced at Legroeder. “And Legroeder here… well, you seem to have seen more of it than the rest of us. That talent of yours…”