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?”
<Only ancient texts can guide us. The Myriapodia ventured this way once, probing to see what had drawn the mechs here.>
“They never came back?”
<We, too, suffered a fall when the mechs discovered us. They sensed us here first, disturbing their works. We withdrew quickly, unlike you humans. You persist beyond reason.>
Toby broke in. “How come you hunted humans, then? We could have been allies all along.”
<We mistook you for animals. You had fallen so far, beaten down by mechs. Only your father and your Legacies reminded us that you are of the stuff which once blazed so bright and now is so pitiful.>
Toby gulped. Quath was no diplomat.
Killeen asked, “These ‘texts’ of yours—what do they say?”
<Many ships were lost here. It is easy to slip on the sliding surface of space itself.>
“Space? Hell, what about the heat? And this stuff coming at us, big chunks—”
<Those are masses crushed and compacted by the stretch of geometry here. Avoid them, and otherwise ignore them. They are on their way to their funerals.>
Some consolation, Toby thought. Probably they all were on the same trip.
“Did your brothers map this place?” Killeen demanded impatiently.
<I am processing their records now with a hindbrain. Here.>
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.
<Lower beings do not see the fundamental essence of the world, which combines space and time. Do not knit a knot of concern for this. Even the Myriapodia do not see space-time. We, too, divide it into the easier ideas of distance and duration.>
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?”
<We do not.>
“Huh?” Toby noticed the dashed line of their planned trajectory. It lifted some, then plunged toward the top crescent-shaped blob.
<We must pass through the Cyaneans. There is no other way to enter the portal that the Myriapodia believe dwells here.>
“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.
<The Cosmic Circle will clear our way.>
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.
<Let the Cosmic Circle do its work.>
“It’s going to get us out of this?”
<The Myriapodia believe this is the only path.>
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.
<The cusp moment approaches.>
“That the same as what the Magnetic Mind said?” Killeen whispered, eyes fixed on the screens. In the warming air the Bridge was silent.
<No. This is the end of the mech device.>
Toby frowned. “Mech? What’s mech-made here?”
<The Cyaneans. They are great twisted regions of spacetime, turbulence trapped in caps. They would shred us.>
“So? Just more of the weird weather here—”
<The mechanicals made the Cyaneans.>
Killeen and Toby alike regarded Quath with disbelief. The alien went on, <The mechanicals can bring great forces to bear. You saw their massive, shadowy constructions, feeding on the energy and matter here. Their researches are many and wide.>
“But . . . the Cyaneans? Hard to believe,” Killeen said. “Those things, they’re huge.”
<Larger than stars. That is why the Myriapodia bring their own craft to bear. My kind shall lead the way.>
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.
In the brilliant white-hot glare of yellows and reds that blazed up all around them, the eerie lack of color in the Cyaneans filled Toby with a sinking dread. He felt as though the bottom had fallen out of his stomach. Only Besen steadied him, holding from one side while Toby stood with the other arm around his father. There was nothing here for mere humans to do.