I glanced around, nervous at even these few constraints. The room smelled cold and metallic and seemed absurdly large for the apparatus; an echoing cavern with lights focused on the tweaker, force disorder pumps, refrigerators… One director, one backup — Tamara Kwang, with her own nimbus of cables and connectors — and one observer.

Leander finished checking all connections and stood to one side, arms folded.

“Mars is a big body,” Charles said. “We have to reference more orthonormal bases for each descriptor, exponentially more for descriptors that superposit. That means storing some results in the unused descriptors within the tweaker. That’s easier in a larger tweaker.”

“The danger is no greater than before — less, probably,” Leander said. “But the director’s job is more difficult. He has to be more congruent with the QL to keep those extra descriptors in tune with the overall goal.”

“And?”

“The interpreter still gets in the way. Charles will have to be more direct. Straight through to the QL.”

Again the howl of converted matter shook the floor. Dandy left the auditorium and stood beside Stephen. “We’re going to lose the station through blast effects if we don’t go now,“ he said.

Dandy avoided looking at Charles as if he were indecent or sacred and forbidden.

“We’ll do it in three,” Charles said. “Just to be extra cautious. First, we’ll advance along Mars’s orbital path fifty million kilometers. If there’s any doubt about the next step, we’ll leave it there.”

“They’ll find us again, finish the job,” Tamara Kwang said softly, self-consciously touching her cables. Drops of sweat beaded her face even in the chill.

“There won’t be any doubt,” Charles said. “The next step will put us about three trillion kilometers from the New System. We’ll get our bearings and make the next jump.”

“We can’t stay in deep space for more than a few minutes,” Hergesheimer said. I had not seen him come into the lab, but he stood a few meters from the tweaker, hands in his pockets, hair thoroughly tousled. “If we stay in deep space for more than a few minutes, Mars will experience extreme weather changes.”

Faoud Abdi entered, followed by two assistants. “I have checked the damage,” Abdi said, “and we have only ten percent of our Mars surface trackers linked through transponders. The rest are gone or we can’t reach them. I believe we can still get a feel for what is happening to the planet, but of course… there is no way to tell others what to expect. There will also be more severe areological effects if we do not enter a comparable solar tide situation quickly. And the same side must be turned toward the new sun. This is very important.”

“Understood,” Charles said.

“The tidal bulge,” Abdi continued.

“It’s in the calculations,” Stephen told him.

“Where’s my station, my instrument hookup?” Hergesheimer asked. I heard but could not see Leander directing him toward the far side of the lab, where all of the exterior instruments of Preamble would direct their flow of data.

“Let’s do it,” Charles said.

I dropped my head back and stared into the projectors. Suddenly my neck hair rose and I nearly screamed. I felt some one standing beside me, opposite Leander and Dandy; I knew who he was, but did not want to accept that I was still so close to the edge.

I could not see him, but his presence was as real as anything else in the room, more real perhaps, more believable. His name was Todd, and he was about five years old, with fine brown hair and a ready smile, cheek smooth and downy and brown, fingers nimble, face flushed, as if he had just come back from exercise or play. He wanted to tell me something. I could not hear him.

He would have been my son. Ilya would have been his father.

I must have made a sound. Charles asked if something was bothering me.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s go.” I wanted to reach out and hold my son’s hand, but he was no longer there.

I would never feel his presence again.

“Go,” Stephen echoed.

“Going,” Charles said.

Staring into the projectors, my head wrapped in neutral sound from the immersion bands, I saw Mars mapped above me as a highly detailed sphere, elevations exaggerated, all of our remaining trackers marked by pinpricks of red. By turning my head, I could see Phobos and Deimos. The map had not been recently updated, for Many Hills and other stations I knew to be gone were plainly marked as well.

“We’ll lose all our satellites,” Dandy murmured. He seemed far away, as did the rumbling howl.

Charles’s voice spoke in the middle of my head, startling me. “First frame shift in two minutes,” he said. “Hear me, Casseia?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see Mars.”

“Would you like to see what the QL is doing?” he asked. “When I go in, I’ll be part of its processing. You’ll be outside, watching.”

“Okay,” I said.

I tried to relax my rock-tense muscles. Best to die relaxed, I thought; the universe seemed unpredictable enough that such a distinction might be important.

The image of Mars changed radically as I was drawn into the QL’s perspective. What I saw was not a planet, but a multi-colored field of overlapping possibilities, the planet as a superposited array. The QL’s assessment changed every few seconds, colors shifting, assignments of the Pierce region flashing at blinding speed: all of Mars scoped and measured using a logic no human could follow, a logic lying outside or beneath the rules of the universe.

I saw more clearly now the value of the QL’s contribution. That it was in fact self-aware, despite these distortions, gave me a chill. What sort of self-awareness could function when consciousness had no shape, no specified purpose?

Who could have designed such a mind? Humans had — famous and less famous; and QL thinkers had played a small role in human affairs for a century and a half — but no human, not even the designers, could encompass the QL mentality. It was not superior — in some respects, it operated much more simply than any human or thinker mind — but what it did, it did superbly — and unpredictably…

If I was a spectator, watching this odd and beautiful horse perform its dressage, Charles was the rider.

“We’ve measured and drawn the first orthonormal base,” Charles said. “Now we measure the translation of conserved descriptors to the larger system.”

With the help of my enhancement, I understood part of what I saw: massive number-crunching through the interpreter’s computer portion, cheating on nature by pulling the “energy” required to shift Mars from the total energy of the larger system, the Galaxy. In fact, the energy would never be expended, not in any real sense; the universe would simply have its demanding bookkeeping balanced, under the table, while it wasn’t looking.

“Twenty seconds until the first frame shift,” Charles told me. Our link seemed more and more intimate. He spoke solely for my benefit. “QL is now reassigning all descriptors to the first destination.” We would move everything in the “space” to be occupied by Mars, at the same “time” we shifted the planet itself, in effect trading places. This was the easiest part of the process to understand, though not to accomplish.

“The tweaker is beginning to radiate,” Stephen said outside. “Fluctuation in the Pierce region.”

I saw the two frames — our present frame and the frame we would translate ourselves to. They overlapped, and then, for an instant, I could not see Mars at all. What I saw instead was horrifying in its simplicity.

Mars had been reduced to an ineffable potential. It could be anything, and we were with it — we had been drawn outside of the rules, away from the game. This was the blanking, when systems that relied on moment-to-moment correlations — minds, computers, thinkers, electronic systems — had to jumpstart themselves, to assume that there had at one time been a reality, and that all of the rules had been what they seemed to be now.