Toc238718039” class=“calibre9” id=“Toc238718039”>

Once back on the ship Flinx could hardly wait for the lock to cycle shut to begin struggling out of the survival suit. Clarity and Sylzenzuzex were waiting for him on the other side. They had to wait their turn until a brilliant pink and blue winged shape finished caressing him with her pointed tongue.

“Flinx, you’re all right? You didn’t get hit?” An anxious Clarity was looking him up and down as if unable to believe he had not been crushed or otherwise injured.

He shook his head as Pip settled down on his shoulder. “I’m fine, Clarity, fine. Not so much as a scratch. There was stuff all around me, yes, and some of it was starting to move really, really fast by the time you arrived. But not one of them touched me. Not one.”

Sylzenzuzex was staring at him. “You activated something while you were out there, Flinx. Something that responded to your presence while also deliberately avoiding it. Truzenzuzex was right.”

He nodded as he started for the control room. “I’m beginning to think so. But right about what?”

Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory barely acknowledged his arrival. They were far too absorbed in the view out the foreport. Around them, images projected by the Teacher provided various views with the ship as its locus. No matter which direction one studied, the spectacle was the same.

From planetoids the size of cities to gravel splinters no bigger than a fingernail, the entire asteroid belt that ringed the outer reaches of the Senisran system was collapsing toward a single point. Not one of the incoming objects had hit Flinx. Not one struck the Teacher. Those that looked as if they might do so swerved over, under, and around the ship as they sped toward rendezvous. Tse-Mallory was quick to comment on the seemingly conscientious evasion.

“Something is not as it appears. Chondrites don’t have built-in avoidance systems,” he muttered.

“These do.” Truzenzuzex was studying a floating image close by his right shoulder that supplied a view astern. “They’d better.”

Bearing down on them was a rectangular cliff face twice the size of the Teacher. Even if Flinx had given a command to do so, there was no time to move out of the oncoming monster’s course. A moment later, when it was less than a dozen ship-lengths distant, it changed course. They could follow its progress easily as it shot past. Braking at the last possible instant, it rotated forty degrees and with incomparable delicacy slipped into a notch in another drifting planetoid even bigger than itself. The hurtling cliff face fit the empty notch as perfectly as a tooth fit its socket. The massive merge was accompanied by a blinding but brief burst of intense greenish lightning.

Only when exhaustion finally overcame fascination did they withdraw, one by one, to their cabins to rest.

When Clarity awoke, Flinx was no longer beside her. Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she gathered up Scrap and tracked him back to Control. Sylzenzuzex was standing nearby. For the most ephemeral of instants Clarity recognized and shamefacedly cast aside a flicker of irrational jealousy.

“Where are your mentors?” she asked as she came up beside him.

“In the lounge,” he told her, “noisily disputing statistics while toying with irreconcilable data among the ornamental flora.” He nodded forward. “Have a look.”

At first she thought the object floating in front of the Teacher was nothing more than the consequence of a great many stones large and small coming together to make one big one. Peering harder, she saw that the fused rocky debris now formed a shape with a distinctly regular silhouette. Vaguely conical in shape, it flaunted an enormous dark maw at one end while the other tapered to a blunt, somewhat indistinct tip. Though more and more rocky detritus continued to arrive and add additional bulk to the drifting mass, the surge of material had markedly diminished. She found herself gazing at a massive, stark, simplistic configuration that radiated a subdued but steady green light from somewhere deep within. A tapering cone large enough to accommodate every starship in the Commonwealth. Simultaneously.

“Okay,” she heard herself murmuring softly to the man standing beside her, “as Syl said yesterday, you’ve definitely gone and activated something. It was made aware of your presence, and it’s aware of our presence. But what is it?”

“That’s one of the things Bran and Tru are arguing about.” He put his arm around her, forcing both minidrags to shift position. “It’s beautiful, though, isn’t it?”

Though glad of the comforting arm, its gentle grasp did not change her opinion of the enormous unidentifiable structure. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. Dark green’s not my favorite color, anyway.”

Voices sounded behind them, coming closer and growing louder. Tse-Mallory made himself heard before he and the philosoph entered the bridge.

“Tru and I have spent hours pondering the possible nature and function of the object. We think we know what it is.”

Flinx turned immediately. “What is it, then? What does it do?”

Truzenzuzex flicked the tip of one antenna in his direction. “Bran said that we know what it is. He said nothing about knowing what it does.”

“We believe that it is,” the sociologist-soldier declaimed importantly, “the receptor of the occasional transmission from Horseye. Your ship has checked and rechecked the relevant readings for us. There is no mistaking the confluence. The signals pass directly through the point in space now occupied by the assembled contrivance.”

“That’s most interesting, esteemed Eighth,” Sylzenzuzex observed. “I confess, however, that I’m unable to see how this discovery has any practical ramification.”

Looking over at her, he switched to Low Thranx. “That’s because we remain ignorant of it. But both Bran and I are convinced there must be one.” With his right truhands and foothands he gestured toward the port. “Otherwise, all the intriguing activity that we have been witness to here represents nothing more than a grandiose expenditure of energy in the service of no purpose.”

Flinx had a sudden thought. “The Krang is both a weapon and a musical instrument. Could this be a work of art?”

Tse-Mallory frowned at him. “Why beam intermittent signals all the way from the Horseye system to here just to identify the location of a piece of art? Though I have to admit that I, personally, certainly find it pleasing from an aesthetic as well as an engineering point of view.”

Truzenzuzex was not about to be sidetracked. “We have already had this argument, Bran. It must do something! And furthermore, fss!is!kk, it must do something of significance. It is too big, too impressive, and too joined to the Xunca alarm system to be nothing more than a diversion.”

“That’s your opinion.” Tse-Mallory continued to play devil’s advocate. “A Xunca might view the arrangement differently.”

“How do we find out?” Flinx looked down at the philosoph.

“Bran and I have been debating that all day.” The subdued light of the control room gleamed mirror-like from the dozens of individual lenses that comprised the venerable thranx’s compound eyes. “Your physical and/or mental interaction with the orbiting matter galvanized, provoked, or otherwise set in motion the extraordinary orbital assembly process that has resulted in the new astronomical object we now see before us.” He did not hesitate. “It follows that if anything is likely to stimulate further activity on the part of the object, it will be your presence.”

Flinx swallowed. “You want me to put the suit on again and go out there—into there?” This time it was Clarity who put a protective arm around him.

Tse-Mallory nodded firmly. “Not alone, though. At least, not initially. We’ll enter together. Then, if nothing happens and we can’t come up with a better idea, that’s when we will ask you to continue by yourself.”

Clarity blinked at the old soldier-scientists. “‘Enter’?”

Human and thranx nodded in tandem, though it was Truzenzuzex who spoke. “Bran and I have concluded that we should take the Teacher into the large opening.” He gestured in the direction of the enigmatic alien construct. “There’s certainly more than enough room. It may be that an apparatus that encloses such a considerable volume is in fact intended to act upon a single individual—but it seems, even for the Xunca, unnecessarily profligate in terms of expenditure. There is no reason not to take the whole ship inside. Unless”—and he executed a broad gesture of deference in Flinx’s direction—“you choose not to. It is, after all, your vessel, and therefore your decision.”

Flinx considered his mentors’ words carefully. He hated the thought of risking the Teacher. On the other hand, he told himself, if he chose to enter in a suit, alone, and something untoward happened, of what use would be his wonderful ship? Bran and Tru were watching him closely, Sylzenzuzex was watching her Eighth, and Clarity—Clarity at that particular moment looked as if she would rather be anywhere else in the universe, as long as it was with him. In fact, of all those present, only one had not yet ventured an opinion regarding the philosoph’s request.

Twisting his head down and to his right, he murmured, “Well, Pip? What do you think? Do we take a dive into the alien well or do we try something else?”

Raising her gaze, the minidrag looked up at him and blinked. Then she yawned, dropped her head back into her upper coil, and went back to sleep.

“That’s what I thought you’d say.” He turned back to the patient Truzenzuzex. “If you and Bran think it’s something we should try, then I suppose we ought to go ahead and try it.”

“Sure,” an unhappy Clarity muttered, “just plunge ahead and hang the consequences.”

“What?” He looked over at her. “If you object, Clarity, or think we should try something else first…”

She sighed and shook her head. “Don’t listen to me. I’m just tired, that’s all.” She offered a wan smile. “My area of expertise is cosmetics, remember? Not of much use when it comes to trying to save civilization. As far as deciding how and when to experiment with alien artifacts, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have any qualifications.”

“Sure you do,” he contradicted her. “I’m an alien artifact, and you’ve experimented with me.”

She gaped at him. Figuratively, he gaped at himself in self-inflicted shock.

I—I made a joke, he thought numbly. A joke about my genesis. Try as he might, he could not remember having done anything of the sort ever before. His origins had always been a matter, to himself and to others, of utmost seriousness. Unsurprisingly, it had been left to Clarity to extract for the first time a scrap of absurdity from it.

Experiment, he thought dazedly to himself. That was the origin of Philip Lynx. Serious, somber, stern, severe—and if you looked at it a certain way, from a particular angle, just possibly also a little—silly?

They were all staring at him. As much to his surprise as that of everyone else, he smiled. “All right. Let’s go see what’s inside the big glowing green stone thing. Maybe it’s a Xunca surprise.”

“Let us hope it is a Xunca surprise.” Truzenzuzex whispered under his breath, his spiracles barely pulsing. “Otherwise we will be reduced to drifting mentally as well as physically while formulating hopeful hypotheses from nothing.”

Semisentient as it was, the Teacher might have been expected to raise an objection or two of its own to the scientists’ proposal. It was sufficiently advanced, however, to recognize that the experiment was one that had to be tried. If its master and his fellow organic intelligences were willing to risk their continued existence in the service of such investigation, then as a properly programmed AI it could hardly do less.

The vast chasm at the enlarged end of the asteroidal aggregate loomed even bigger as the Teacher approached it. Not a hint of the soft, almost comforting green glow was apparent within. A sequence of barely visible silvery striations lining the interior were all that interrupted the otherwise interminable starless dark. As the ship moved deeper and deeper inward, Flinx could not shake off the sensation of being swallowed.

He forced it from his thoughts as the ship moved deeper. It was a foolish analogy anyway. There was not the slightest suggestion of the macrobiotic about the alien assembly whose immense curving walls now fully engulfed them. It was cold, dead, and manifestly unalive.

Which led him to wonder at the source of the faint violet glow that appeared directly ahead.

At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks and that the purple was visual, not external. Standing beside him, however, Clarity raised an arm and pointed toward the same glimmering.

“Flinx, do you see that?”

He nodded. “There’s some color there.” He looked sharply to his left. “Bran, Tru?”

“Something there for sure.” Tse-Mallory moved forward until he was leaning against the smooth surface of the main console, as if the additional bit of space he had walked might bring him close enough to the flickering color to allow him to identify it.

Further reflection was interrupted by the Teacher. “Flinx, we are accelerating.”

“I didn’t give that order.” He had not taken his eyes off the distant speck of profound purple. “Do you feel a need to or have evidence that suggests we need to increase our forward velocity?”

“It would not matter if I did,” the ship replied uninformatively. “I note only that we have begun to accelerate. Rather dramatically, if I may say so.”

Flinx and Clarity exchanged a glance, then looked across at the two scientists.

Tse-Mallory looked bemused. “I don’t sense any increase in speed. Tru?”

The philosoph was likewise noncommittal. “I perceive nothing. Flinx, ask the ship to elaborate.”

Flinx needed no prompting. Except in cases of obvious emergency it was unlike the Teacher to take such action on its own initiative. In response to his query the ship replied readily, though as far as a rationale was concerned its explanation was no more illuminating than its initial announcement.

“What’s our speed?” Flinx asked. “How much faster are we moving?” He continued to stare out the foreport. Had the splotch of purple refulgence grown slightly larger?

“We are not moving faster,” the Teacher replied. “In fact, we are not moving at all. Space, however, is. As to our speed, by my instruments, it is zero.”

“You’re not making any sense.” An increasingly irritated Flinx glared at the nearest visual pickup. “If we’re accelerating, how can we not be moving?”

He broke off. Additional detailed explication could wait until later. In fact, everything could wait until later. He felt pressure at his waist. Clarity was hugging him, hard. The two humans standing shoulder to shoulder allowed Pip and Scrap, mother and offspring, to push up against one another. Off to their left Bran Tse-Mallory, the Eint Truzenzuzex, and his relative Sylzenzuzex joined the two humans in staring straight ahead.

They did not know what they were seeing. They did not understand what they were seeing. They knew only that they could not turn away from it.

The Teacher’s confusing and seemingly contradictory attempt at explanation notwithstanding, it appeared that they had entered some kind of tunnel. A tunnel or corridor composed entirely of energy that was simultaneously volatile and unwavering. It was as if, Flinx reflected in awe, someone had taken an entire galaxy in all its glory, replete with suns and nebulae, pulsars and masers, black holes and X-ray bursters, and attenuated it until it was no greater in diameter than the coruscating tube they were presently speeding through. The curved walls that enclosed them flung successive waves of electric crimson, intense cobalt, and eye-bending yellow at their stunned retinas. Some emerged from astern to overtake and blast past the ship itself. He had the feeling that if the Teacher was to drift to the left or right, up or down, and make the slightest contact with that scintillating, flaring cylinder of encircling energy, the ship and everything within it would evaporate like a cough in a hurricane.

“Some kind of plasma tunnel.” Tse-Mallory had found his voice. He spoke in that tone of barely controlled excitement scientists reserve for those special moments when they realize they have come across something that truly justifies the employment of the word “new.”

“Irrespective of what the ship says, I can’t tell if we’re moving through it or if it’s moving around us.”

“I can tell you this, cri!l!kk.” Truzenzuzex’s antennae were quivering like violin strings at the height of a Bartok arpeggio. “We are traveling. Sitashk, we are traveling! What I would not give to be able to pause and step for a moment outside these sculpted walls of dynamic conveyance.”

Occasionally they had glimpses of other loops of force that might have been similar corridors. There were not many, and they were widely dispersed, but they materialized often enough to show that the one that was conveying them was not the only one of its kind. Glimpses of other such tunnels rapidly became fewer and fewer. Before long the occupants of the Teacher found themselves utterly alone, speeding down a channel formed of unfamiliar energies toward an equally unknown destination.

“I guess the Xunca,” Sylzenzuzex observed hours later as they forced themselves to break away from the eye-numbing view out the foreport long enough to eat and drink something, “liked to get around.”

Seated across from her, Clarity was hand-feeding Scrap slightly burnt bread crumbs. The minidrag would rear back and strike from her shoulder, dispatching one piece of toast after another as if he were stalking prey deep in the sweltering jungles of distant Alaspin.

“I wonder where we’re going?” she ruminated.

“I think I can hazard a guess.” Tse-Mallory sipped the hot drink the ship had prepared for him. “The end of the road. The last station on the line. The definitive terminus.” He peered over at Flinx. Their host was neither eating nor drinking as his imagination worked overtime. “The place that the Tar-Aiym Krang told Flinx was coupled to the Xunca warning system on Horseye. The locality of…”

“… the defense,” Truzenzuzex finished for his friend. “If we are lucky. And maybe also if we are not lucky.”

Clarity blinked at the thranx. “I don’t follow you, Tru.”

The philosoph looked back at her. “We are traveling through a transportation system whose technology is at least as old as the last of the Xunca. Say, roughly half a billion terrestrial years.” A truhand gestured toward a projection hovering conveniently nearby. It displayed the view forward of the ship: a seemingly infinite corridor of energy and light.

“That something so old still functions is in itself almost beyond belief. Yet if Flinx’s exchange with the Krang was accurate, it is conveying us toward a construct, a device, beside which this astonishing example of ancient engineering must appear little more than a sandy path by comparison.”

Clarity nodded pensively as she passed Scrap a piece of crust. “I wonder when we’ll get there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

“I will happily settle for arriving before we’re dead,” Sylzenzuzex volunteered.

It took nearly a month. Given the speed at which they were traveling (or not traveling, if the seriously confused shipmind was to be believed), the expanse they must have crossed exceeded anything previously traversed by humans or thranx by many, many orders of magnitude.

“I think we’re slowing down.”

Flinx’s general call caused everyone to drop what they were doing and race to the control room. Finding him seated in the command chair, his companions joined him in staring out the foreport. At first glance nothing seemed different: it looked as if they were still traveling inside the endless tunnel of glowing plasma. As everyone’s perception adjusted, however, a number of other realizations became obvious.

Most immediately, it appeared that the diameter of the channel had been greatly enlarged. Though the Teacher was still fully enveloped, the enclosing walls were farther off. The corridor had ballooned into a bubble big enough to hold a hundred ships the size of the Teacher. Set alongside other megastructures Flinx had encountered in his journeying, the spherical structure of shimmering iridescent energy was not large. Compared to something like the Tar-Aiym weapons platform its dimensions were downright modest.

What was impressive was what could be discerned just beyond the borders of the bubble that enclosed them: an all-pervasive luminosity.

They were surrounded, insofar as he could see, by light. Beyond the barrier of the plasma sphere there was only radiance. He queried the ship.

“I have already been analyzing the omnipresent broad-spectrum phenomena—or attempting to do so, given that my instrumentation is exceedingly inadequate for such a purpose,” the Teacher explained. “It is virtually impossible to impart an explanation in words. I myself can only just begin to appreciate the true nature of the phenomenon through the application of pure mathematics.”

“Give it a try,” Flinx urged his ship. “In words. Simple words.”

“A contradiction that I fear may be impossible to resolve,” the shipmind replied. “Outside the enclosed plasma spheroid in which we presently find ourselves, in all directions and to a distance I am unable to measure, there is nothing but a solidity of gravitons.”

Tse-Mallory blanched at the explanation. “That really is a contradiction in terms. Gravitons have zero mass and no charge. They’re closed strings in special low-energy vibrational states. You can’t catch them, you can’t see them, and you certainly can’t collect them in one place, much less in anything resembling a ‘solidity’”

The Teacher was not perturbed. “I told you that the reality I am perceiving crosses over into the inexplicable. Remember that as closed strings without endpoints, gravitons are not necessarily restricted to this brane. Or if you prefer, to what is referred to as the immediate physical universe in which we exist. They are perfectly capable of existing in and traveling through other branes as well as the greater Bulk.”

“My head’s starting to hurt,” Clarity muttered.

“It does not matter,” Truzenzuzex objected. “What Bran said about gravitons holds true.”

“In this universe, yes,” the Teacher agreed. “But much as we know about this brane, we know nothing of others. As has long been theorized, the laws of physics in other branes may be completely different from those in ours. A proton in another brane, for example, might have no mass. A wave or particle like a photon that could possibly exist in both might exhibit entirely different properties in another brane. In the L-brane, O-brane, or another, such a particle might possess mass, charge, or both.

“Some physicists and mathematicians have long believed that branes are not fixed within the infinity of the multiverse or Bulk, but that they are in constant motion—at least at the edges of the branes themselves. Where the ripples of two such branes impinge upon one another insistently enough, you get a bang. Sometimes a Big Bang. If that theory is to be believed, new universes contained within their own new branes are being born all the time—universes upon universes within universes.

“Envisage a technology so advanced that it could bring about such an interaction between a pair of branes, but under controlled conditions and on a manageable scale.”

Truzenzuzex’s mind was awhirl with the possibilities. “Cr!!lk, perhaps that’s where the Xunca went. Through a congruency of two branes, from this one into another. The ultimate escape. Perhaps they traveled in craft propelled by focused gravitons—or composed of them.”

An equally enthralled Tse-Mallory was not averse to taking the impossible another step further. “If they could influence such processes on such a scale, maybe they manipulated the degree and extent of the interaction in order to generate their own made-to-order Big Bang.” Raising a hand, he brought thumb and forefinger toward one another to illustrate his point. “A little Bang, say. The result would be the creation of a new small universe contained within a customized brane. Nothing ostentatious. Insignificant, really. Say, a thousand available and unoccupied new galaxies they could explore and colonize at their leisure.”

“An entire civilization?” Clarity was whispering without knowing why. “To escape what’s coming toward the Commonwealth they moved their whole civilization to another dimension?”

Tse-Mallory smiled softly. “Tru and I are just speculating. If there was a Xunca around, I’d ask it. But they’re not here anymore. As Flinx says, they went away. Only some of their works remain behind to hint at what little we know of them.” With a wave of his arm he encompassed the view forward. “The plasma tunnel transport system. This place. The quantum impossibility it somehow holds at bay.”

The shipmind was not finished. “But before they learned how to do whatever it was that they finally did, they rendered this brane and another barely proximate in an attempt to try and accumulate what they thought would be enough energy to counter the oncoming menace, which itself I have come to believe is quite likely an intrusion of another kind of matter-energy from still a third brane.”

Truzenzuzex whistle-clicked softly. “I would need to do the math, but the juxtaposition of our brane with another could possibly provide an explanation for the Great Attractor’s unbelievable energy.”

“All that effort and science to create a defensive weapon became unnecessary,” the Teacher continued, “when the Xunca found a way to step from this brane to another, or to create their own. Either means of escape would have rendered this weapon superfluous.”

“But,” Flinx pointed out, “they left it behind.”

“Yes,” the shipmind concurred. “They left it behind.”

“Too big to move,” Flinx found himself thinking aloud. “No need to move it, anyway.” He eyed his companions. “Or maybe—maybe they left it behind, and intact, so that whatever civilizations and intelligences arose after them would have a chance to fight this thing that’s coming toward us.”

Clarity was not convinced. “If they wanted to help, why didn’t they leave a signal that would lead us to the same brane where they’ve taken refuge?”

Tse-Mallory chuckled softly, shaking his head. “It wouldn’t have mattered if they had, m’dear. In order to get to an island, you first have to have a proper boat. Maybe a quantum boat. It’s not just that humanxkind is still learning how to swim: we don’t even know what the water is like.” He looked over at her. “What’s the point of a signal you can’t follow?”

“Oh, right,” she murmured in sudden realization.

Turning away from the statistical illogicality visible through the foreport, Truzenzuzex spoke without looking at any of them. “The ship’s speculations offer explanation not only for the Xunca defense, but perhaps also how the destructive Evil that we must confront can exist in our brane. It is background independent.”

Flinx regarded the two scientists. “What does that mean? From a practical standpoint?”

Tse-Mallory explained. “It means that the oncoming menace flows through our brane without being a part of it, swallowing up matter and not acting like a normal part of our universe because it’s not a part of it. It—leaked in. Or punched its way in. Or for all we know, deliberately gnawed its way in from some incredible, impossible, much larger 3-brane where such perversions of physics are an accepted and natural occurrence. As such, not being subject to the physical laws of this universe, it likely cannot be destroyed. Not in the sense that we understand destruction. Therefore the only way to stop it is by forcing it back out. Back into its own brane, or into another.”

Flinx slumped in the command chair. Clarity came up behind him while Pip’s tongue flicked out from her perch on her master’s shoulder to lightly caress his cheek.

“I don’t,” he mumbled wearily, “feel much like a plumber.”

Tse-Mallory offered a hopeful, encouraging smile. “Try not to let yourself become overwhelmed by the scale involved.” Turning, he gazed out the foreport. “We’ve moved beyond that, anyway.”

Flinx looked at his old friend and mentor. “No worries there, Bran. How can I be overwhelmed by something that’s beyond comprehension?” He murmured under his breath, “So I was right all along: certain kinds of evil are quantifiable.” Raising his gaze, he looked toward the nearest visual pickup.

“Ship, why haven’t we been torn apart, crushed down to nothingness, or snapped out of this existence and into another one by the kind of forces that are at work here?”

“The unique bubble of energy that encloses this one small sphere of normal space shields us,” the Teacher informed him. “Otherwise we would no longer be. All here—you, your companions, myself—would be compacted down to a single subatomic particle. Or something less than a waveform. Or perhaps we would be kicked out of this universe and into another one. My own feeling is that by compressing our protective bubble, the energy of the solidity that surrounds it actually makes it stronger by forcing its bonds tighter together.”

Tse-Mallory was nodding to himself. “The Xunca not only knew how to fashion one hell of a transportation system, they knew how to build walls.”

“To keep the ‘water’ out,” Truzenzuzex added.

“Maybe they had to go elsewhere and didn’t use this defense because—it doesn’t work,” Clarity could not keep from wondering.

Tse-Mallory nodded. “That’s possible. I believe, however, that in addition to everything else they abandoned, they also left behind the means by which we may find out.” Moving to the foreport, he leaned to his right and pointed.

No one had noticed the object before. Or maybe it had not been present until just then and it was their arrival that had caused it to appear. Or possibly, Flinx thought a little wildly, it had drifted out of this brane and into another and back again. If Bran, Tru, and the Teacher were to be believed, anything was possible here. They were in a space-place unprecedented, a minuscule bruise on the skin of the space-time continuum that teetered on the cusp of outrageous calculation. Anyone attempting to state for certain why something was happening, or even why something was, might as easily be right dead as dead right.

Careful, he told himself. Concentrate on the knowable. The Teacher. Pip. Clarity. Those were solid things, those were real things. They consisted of actualities he could hang on to. Or were they and himself and everything else he believed to be real nothing more than transitory expressions of the tortuous, convoluted physics and mathematics of some whimsical long-vanished species?

At least what Tse-Mallory had singled out looked real enough.

It was a hemisphere. Translucent red, it was so dark it was almost brown. Flinx was not surprised when the Teacher revealed that it occupied the exact center of the plasma bubble. At his direction, the ship cautiously adjusted its position to move closer—but not too close. That the Teacher could maneuver at all in such an outre environment was in itself surprising—and encouraging. It was with relief that he saw that not every law of nature had been abstracted in this place.

As they drew carefully nearer the hemisphere, which was the color of fine burgundy, they saw that it contained, hovering within it, a lump of some wrinkled maroon material shaped like a kidney bean. Three loops of what appeared to be gold wire but were undoubtedly something else encircled the object lengthwise like slender hovering halos. At no point did they come into contact with the material or each other. The center of the bean shape was occupied by a prominent concavity.

A mesmerized Flinx studied the object intently. If the depression in the center was intended to cradle a living entity, its dimensions suggested that the Xunca had been physically much smaller than the Tar-Aiym, smaller even than humans. Though the long-since-departed master engineers were closer in size to the thranx, he had no doubt who was going to be asked to take up a position within that beckoning indentation. His initial trepidation began to diminish even before the issue was brought up for discussion. After all, wasn’t this what he had come all this way for?

Staring absently out the port, he found himself remembering a slightly built redheaded youth who with his pet minidrag had once innocently and without a care haunted the byways and back alleys of bustling, beguiling, aromatic Drallar. A boy who had worried only about staying one step ahead of the authorities, having enough to eat, looking after his elderly adoptive mother, and learning, learning, learning absolutely everything there was to know.

What a long, strange journey it had been.