The room felt colder. The displays blanked, my arms numbed, my vision filled with fringes and distortions. I felt no sensation of movement, no momentous change whatsoever. Unlike anything in previous human history, tweaking involved no machinery, detonated no fuel, wasted no energy as heat and noise. The process had very little drama. The results would have to make up for that…

The displays flicked back on. My arms seemed cold, my legs hot, but I did not feel ill. My companions blinked, opened their eyes as if from a brief nap.

Charles moaned slightly, then apologized under his breath. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said.

“Where are we?” Leander asked.

I saw nothing in all the external views but stars. Mars had vanished. The background darkness, however, was enlivened by thick, interwoven wisps of faint color. Some of the stars seemed fogged, broader and less well-defined than pinpoints. I had never seen a sky like it in my life. Beautiful and terrifying. My blood pounded in my ears, my throat went dry, and I coughed into my fist. For a moment, I felt a rush of claustrophobia. This old tunnel, trapped in a moon tiny as moons go, but huge as rocks go.

And this old battered black rock had gone very far, incomprehensibly far.

There were no human beings within ten thousand light-years, ninety-five thousand trillion kilometers. We were surrounded by billions of kilometers of this vacuum-thin star mist and nothing else, could not know where we were, might be lost.

I forced my fingers to unclench and took several deep breaths.

Hergesheimer and Cameron worked quietly and quickly, drawing together all of their equipment to process the images and calculate position.

Hergesheimer swore under his breath. “We need more specifics on family dispersion for this group,” he told Cameron, pointing to five stars wreathed in blue haze, and she quickly calculated on her slate, forgoing the computers attached to the equipment.

“That’s group A-twenty-nine, EGO 23-7-6956 through 60,” she said.

“There’s the target.” Hergesheimer fingered a toggle beneath the display and swung our view, then pointed to a brilliant, tiny, unfogged spot centered in cross-hairs, barely more than a point against the wispy blackness. “We’re off by sixty billion kilometers,” he said, and then, admiringly, he added, “Not bad for a first approximation.” His admiration quickly turned somber. “But this isn’t horseshoes. We’re outside the orbit of the farthest planet by fifty-four billion kilometers.” He examined his equipment, nodded with an intense frown, and said, “Gentlefolks, if it matters after what we’ve just done… There are seven planets in our target system, three immense gas giants, very young, two to five times bigger than Jupiter, four small rocky worlds close to the star, and in between, lots of empty- space situated just right for a comfortable orbit, with nothing to avoid but a diffuse asteroid belt.

“But that won’t mean anything if we don’t make a slight correction.” Hergesheimer looked at me, swallowed hard, and nodded, as if acknowledging this was all worth being slightly uncool over.

“Charles?” Leander said.

“QL’s getting the corrections and translating now,” Charles said. “We’ll move again in five minutes.”

Deep within Phobos, something shifted with a grinding bass groan that sounded alive and monstrous. The station’s insulated walls vibrated. All of us except Charles looked at each other uneasily.

“We’ve heard that before, not as loud,” Leander said. “We’ve jerked this moon around a lot recently. Different tidal stresses.”

“And more to come,” Cameron said.

“There shouldn’t be any problems,” Leander assured us. “The stresses are minor. But the noise is impressive…”

Cameron pushed up beside me. “There’s a rec room with direct view,” she said. “The miners must have added it before the last map update. I sent an arbeiter to dust it and see if the outside armor would open. Dr. Hergesheimer doesn’t need more help until after we arrive — everything’s automatic now. I’d like to experience the move… I’d like company, too. Do they need you right here, right now?”

Charles seemed oblivious, but I did not want to leave him. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll stay here.” Cameron gave me an eager, anxious look, backed away, spun around with the expert grace of a Belter, and took a tunnel leading to the surface.

Hergesheimer said, “She’s young. I don’t even look through optical telescopes any more; it’s not worth the effort. The eyes see nothing.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing direct,” Leander said. “We’ll all take a peek when we finish moving.”

I still straggled to absorb the enormity of the region of space around us, the hundreds of thousands of stars, clouds of gas and dust.

Distance not important. Distance does not exist except as values within descriptors.

“Are you all right?” Leander asked me, and I shook my head. My cheeks were wet; spherical glittering tears drifted slowly toward my feet in the weak pull of Phobos.

“Sad?” Charles asked, turning toward me. His face seemed extraordinarily peaceful, unnaturally relaxed and unconcerned. I realized Leander’s question had pulled him away from his concentration.

“No,” I said. “A sense of scale. Lost. I just don’t know what will awe me any more.”

Charles turned away, eyes languid. “Making a mistake will awe every one of us,” he said quietly. “Destiny tweak.”

That phrase again, so often denied. I faced Leander and poked a finger not gently into his chest. In a whisper, I said, “I’ve heard that before. You said it was nothing.”

“Charles said it was nothing,” Leander said, shrugging. “He mumbles odd things when he’s down there with the QL.”

“Do you know what he means?” I asked.

Leander shook his head wryly. “I thought I did, once, years ago.”

“Well?”

“We invoked a destiny tweak to clear up logical contradictions. Also, to explain why we could not travel in time, except as instantaneous travel in space affects our position in time. It seemed very classical and naive, and yet… It was that simple.”

“What was simple?”

“With your enhancement, you must understand what the problems are.”

“Travel at speeds that outstrip a photon is logically difficult in a causal universe,” I said.

“Nobody’s much cared about a causal universe for over a century,” Leander said. “But descriptor theory puts everything back on a different sort of causal basis, albeit cause and effect are ultimately limited to the rules governing descriptor interactions.”

I understood that much: all external phenomena, all of nature, is simply a kind of dependent variable, the results of descriptor function. Now I had lost myself in mathematical abstractions and had to backtrack. “So is there logical contradiction or not?” I asked.

“The rules of descriptor-function are the only real logic,” Leander said. “We don’t need the destiny tweak.”

“What was it?”

“We never found it,” Leander said, shaking his head reluctantly. “I don’t know why he mentioned it”

“What was it?” I persisted.

“A variation on the old many-worlds hypothesis,” he said. “We thought that moving a mass instantaneously to a point beyond its immediate information sphere simply recreated the mass in a universe not our own. But we have no evidence for other universes.”

Charles said, “Stephen, I don’t feel right about this one. The QL is looking at too many truths.”

Leander frowned. “What can we do, Charles?”

“Hang on,” Charles said, voice thin. His hand reached up. From behind his couch, instinctively, I grasped it. He sighed, squeezed my fingers painfully, and said, “Damn. We’re missing something.”

Hergesheimer listened with his forehead creased. “What is he talking about?” he asked.