“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 the 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.