Charles unbelted from the couch and I followed, floating free. “Three days’ supplies,” Charles said with a crooked grin as he passed me in the cargo bay.

“Will that be enough?” Galena Cameron asked, face creased in concern.

“We hope to be gone less than five hours,” Leander called from the deck above.

Hergesheimer grimaced. “We could spend ten years studying the system and not know enough.”

“The tunnels are going to be cold and uncomfortable for several hours,” Leander said. “Not used to visitors.”

Crawling through the transfer tube behind Charles, I nearly bumped into an old arbeiter felted with dust. It floated in a corner, the size and approximate color of a much-loved teddy bear, ancient sensor torque spinning with a faint squeak as it examined us.

“This device is in need of repair,” it said in a muffled voice.

Charles rotated in the lock to look at me, and for the first time in weeks I smiled, remembering Trés Haut Médoc. He returned the smile, wincing as stretched skin tugged on his nano patches. “We really should take better care of our orphans,” he said.

Hergesheimer cursed the lack of adequate sensor ports, and Leander instructed a small sample-drilling arbeiter to make new ones. We had brought repair kits with us, and most of the station arbeiters were undergoing upgrades and refits. Galena Cameron coordinated the sensors and telescopes, sitting in a cold cubic chamber by herself, putting everything through practice runs with simulated targets and data.

For the time being, I had little to do. I helped Leander by sitting in the star-shaped central control chamber and keeping close watch on pressure integrity; we could not trust the station’s own emergency systems until the upgrades were finished. I occupied one point of the star. Charles nursed the QL thinker in another. He leaned around the corner, optic leads attached to the back of his head, and said, “It’s fuddled.”

“What is?”

“The thinker. I should have given it a focusing task before we left. It’s off somewhere doing something we’ll never need to know about.”

“Can you get it back?” I asked.

“Of course. It just takes a while to corral all of its horses. How’s your enhancement?”

“Quiet, actually,” I said. “I think I’ve finally got it under control.”

“Good.” He looked at the wall behind me as if someone might be there. I felt the urge to turn, but I knew we were alone in the control center. “Casseia, I don’t know what this is going to do to me. Every time I guide the QL, I get a different reaction. It’s definitely not…” He couldn’t seem to find the word. He waggled his fingers in the air.

“Pleasant?” I offered.

“Maybe too pleasant.” he said. “Like slipping into a bad habit. Like joining a raucous party of crazy geniuses. There’s always something enchanting, the solution to everything — ”

“You’d like that,” I said quietly.

“Exactly. My weakness. I go looking for it, and the true parts vanish like ghosts, leaving only a sensation of completeness. The QL chases different kinds of truths, things not useful to human brains. Mathematical tangents we’ll never pursue, logics that actually hurt us. I have to watch myself, or I’ll come back and not be useful. To you or anybody.”

“You’ll always be useful,” I reassured him.

“Not necessarily. I just wanted to ask… May I keep a focus on you? I don’t really have anything but this job and you. Focusing on the job is recursive. Not productive.”

“How do you mean, focus?”

“A goal,” he said. “Something to value that’s real.”

The request bothered me deeply. I decided that a question needed to be asked now, no matter how awkward it might be. “Are you making a pass, Charles?”

“No,” he said. A frown crossed his face and he looked away again. “I need a strong friend. I hope that’s clear, and appropriate.” He took a deep breath. “Casseia, to hit on you now would be so horrible… You’re still grieving.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I need someone here who cares for me in more than a professional sense. To bring me back. Me. Not some product of merging with the QL, not some intellectual mutant.”

“I care for you,” I said. “You’re important in and of yourself. I value you.”

His expression softened. Once again, I felt my power to please and was dismayed by it. “That’s what I need,” he said. “But don’t be frightened. Even if I lose myself, whatever’s left will bring us back. Tamara or Stephen can take my place later. For the big trip.”

“Is it that dangerous?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Charles said. “But each time gets more difficult. The truths are so compelling.”

“Dangerous truths.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Falling in love with another reality… Getting all set to marry it. And being jilted.”

Leander entered the control center from below, hand over hand in the moon’s weak gravity. “ Galena and Jackson say they’re ready. I’ve connected our tweaker by direct link to Preamble’s big tweaker. We’re getting good signals. I can’t guarantee keeping a connection when we move, but I can probably get it back when we return.”

“It’s all so primitive,” Charles said.

“Doing my best,” Leander said, grinning. “Ready when you are, my captain.”

Galena Cameron came into the center from above, deftly maneuvered around Leander, and faced me. “Madam Vice President — ”

“Casseia, please.”

“We’re ready. We’re getting clean images from outside. The equipment’s meshed and the arbeiters seem to be functioning.”

“Tell Mars we’re going to do it,” I said to Leander.

“Five hours?” Leander asked.

“If we tweak all the descriptors just right,” Charles said. Hergesheimer squeezed in beside Galena , his face slick with sweat. He was terrified.

I felt calm. I pushed from the corner and reached for Charles’s hand. He clasped mine strongly. “We’re all here for you,” I said.

“My orders, Casseia?”

“Take us someplace far, far away,” I said. “Someplace safe and wonderful. Someplace new.”

“I think I have just the place,” he said. “Excuse me.”

He settled back into his chair and connected one last optic lead, long fingers working expertly. We watched the back of his head, the gray nano clamps attached to his cranium, the patterns of his black hair.

Cradled in a sturdy frame of the old base’s central control panel, the QL thinker projected a multicolored circus of complex shapes. The shapes had edges. The edges smoothed and the geometries became fluctuating blobs.

In a foamed rock alcove a meter away, the tweaker itself, and the force disorder pumps that maintained its sample of atoms at absolute zero, awaited the QL’s instructions.

Charles closed his eyes.

“Should we strap in?” Galena asked nervously, her voice little more than a whisper.

“No need,” Leander said, licking his dry lips. “Do anything you feel comfortable with.”

“We’re going,” Charles said.

I glanced at the outside views stacked atop one another on the console, Mars directly below us, Mars’s limb with sun’s corona flaring on black space, clouds of pinpoint stars, graphic of targeted galactic region, graphic of tweaker status.

The QL was now translating human measurements and coordinates into descriptor “language.” The interpreter spoke in a clear female voice, “Particle redescription complete. First destination, first approximation, complete.” The interpreter presented its own private estimation of how things were going: red lines growing as the QL addressed and tweaked descriptors within the supercold sample, then applied the sample’s changing qualities to all particles within the mass and near vicinity of the moon.

“We’ll need at least half an hour to find out where we are and calculate how far off we are,” Hergesheimer said.

“Right,” Leander said. The position fed into the QL would automatically correct for the movement of our target star in the ten thousand Earth years since its image began a light-speed journey, but other factors made exactitude difficult.