Reason, Soloman thought, should be left to the reasonable.

But seeing as there was precious little reason to be had there in the Uncertainty Drive’s den, he was best off taking another tact entirely.

When in Rome, he reminded himself before taking a deep breath and saying to the Drive, “Minstrel, do you know how long you were offline?”

“Query asked and answered. Insufficient data.”

“I have the necessary data, gathered by the instruments aboard the da Vinci. You were offline for something in the vicinity of one million years.”

“Probability: zero.”

Soloman shook his head. “But you don’t even know what happened to your crew. Have any of your attempts to contact your Empire met with success?”

The Drive made no response, but Soloman noted that the flow of bubbles inside Minstrel’s chamber had increased. He pressed on. “You set the probability that a coin could come down heads in sixty-three consecutive tosses at fifty percent,” he said. “What chances would you give the da Vinci, arriving at any random point along a one-half light-year-long stretch of space, coming to rest within visual distance of any particular ship, in this case the Minstrel’s Whisper?”

“Probability: fifty percent. The da Vinci is either near the Minstrel’s Whisper or it is not.”

Soloman realized that when he had initially encountered the Drive, it had been capable of offering odds—whether correctly calculated or not—other than fifty-fifty. The cards and the coin, meant to allow Soloman to establish the computer’s concept of stable probability, seemed to have served only to confuse the device. That signaled to him a rapid deterioration of its processing abilities—and he doubted they would deteriorate in favor of the da Vinci’s survival.

“And the probability of your being dealt nothing but winning hands sixteen straight times?”

“Probability: fifty percent. Either one will be dealt the high hand or one will not.”

“Then it stands to reason that there is a fifty percent chance that you were offline for one million years.”

The logic was, of course, completely specious. It was as though he had said because it’s possible to ride a bicycle without hands, it’s also possible to take an unprotected stroll across the surface of a gas giant. One had nothing to do with the other, but Soloman was placing his faith in the fact that he stood a fifty-fifty chance of Minstrel accepting his argument.

“Logic error…”

The golden liquid began bubbling ferociously.

Soloman held his breath, suddenly convinced he had gone too far, too fast.

“…Supposition irreconcilable with Minstrel’s Whisper’s two-thousand-year rating for organic memory matter.”

“Minstrel,” he said, exhaling and trying not to smile, “have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s Cat?”

Torches lined the corridor of the da Vinci, filling the air with oily smoke. The crew, clad in monks’ robes of coarse gray material, walked slowly along in double-file, chanting dirges in a language that none of them recognized.

Captain Gold felt as though his head were about to burst from the constant shifting of reality and the impossibility of everything that was happening to him and his crew. It was his responsibility to see that these forty beings under his charge came to no harm, but he was just so damned helpless in the face of this ancient and overwhelming alien technology. He would have felt humiliated had he for a second believed what they were going through was being done deliberately, but he knew better.

It was all just chance, science gone amok. What had he called it that first morning when he and Gomez had discussed their respective runs of bad luck? “Random acts of capricious nature.” Only in this instance, technology was giving nature a helping hand.

Bart Faulwell had died because of it. His ship, this home to Gold and his crew, was, moment by moment, coming that much closer to destruction. Just before they all found themselves chanting in robes, the sensors had picked up an approaching and powerful electromagnetic pulse, apparently generated from the magnetic field that helped hold the Sargasso of derelicts in stasis. Of course, that was relatively minor compared to the kilometer-wide meteor hurtling on a collision course for the da Vinci.

Or, he noted with renewed alarm, the gradual disintegration of the da Vinci’s physical structure, as though the ship were made of spun sugar and had been dipped in a basin of water. The hull was melting away, inch by inch, exposing them all to the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space.

Gold tried to cry out, to warn his crew of the coming disaster, but all that came out of his mouth was the unintelligible dirge. Capricious nature couldn’t even give him the comfort of prayer in this final moment.

But even had he been able to pray, the best he would have been able to summon would have been the kaddish.