And to her left there had appeared a wall of pinkish gas, riven by lanes of dark, its edges diffusing into blackness. It was a cloud full of stars; it must be light-years across.

She must have traveled hundreds — perhaps even thousands of light-years. And she’d felt nothing. A mere touch of a button…

She folded forward, dropping her head into her lap. She clutched the arrowhead to her chest, stabbing at her skin, over and over; she spread one hand against her faceplate and scrabbled at it, seeking her face. She felt her bladder loosen; warm liquid gushed through her catheter.

“Spinner-of-Rope. Spinner…”

Hands on her shoulders, shaking her; a distant voice. Her thumb was crammed into her mouth. The pain in her chest had become a dull ache.

Someone pulled her hand away from her mouth, gently.

Before her there was a square, weary face, concern showing through an uneven smile, a crop of gray, stiff hair.

“Louise… ?”

Louise’s smile broadened. “So you’re with us again. Thank Life for that; welcome back.”

Spinner looked around. She was still in her cage; the waldoes still sat on their jet-black horseshoe of construction material before her, their touchpad lights burning. But a dome of some milky, opaque material had been cast around the cage, shutting out the impossible sights outside.

Louise regarded her gravely. She hovered beyond the cage, attached by a short length of safety rope; reaching through the cage bars she held out a moistened cloth. “Here. You’d better clean yourself up.”

Spinner glanced down at herself. Her helmet lay in her lap. Her hands were moist with spittle — and she’d dribbled down her chin — and where Louise had opened Spinner’s suit at the chest, there was a mass of small, bleeding punctures.

“What a mess,” Spinner said. She dabbed at her chest.

Louise shrugged. “It’s no great trouble, Spinner. Although I had to move fast; I needed to get the air-dome up around you before you managed to open your faceplate.”

Spinner picked up her helmet; reaching through the faceplate, she found an apple-juice nipple. “Louise, what happened to me?”

Louise grinned and reached through the construction-material bars; with her old, leathery hand she touched Spinner’s cheek. “The hyperdrive happened to you. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Spinner. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I had no idea how traumatic it would be.”

Spinner frowned. “There was no sensation of movement at all. It seemed like magic, impossible. Even with the discontinuity drive there are visual effects; you can see the planets looming up at you, and the blue shift, and — ”

Louise sighed and rubbed her face. “I know. Sometimes, I think I forget that this is a Xeelee ship. It’s just not designed for human comfort… I guess we can conclude that the Xeelee are a little tougher, psychologically, than we are.”

“But did it work, Louise?”

“Yes. Yes, it worked, Spinner. We crossed over two thousand light-years — in a time so brief I couldn’t even measure it…”

Louise took her hand from Spinner’s cheek and rested it on her shoulder. “Spinner, I can de-opaque this dome. If you feel you want me to.”

Spinner didn’t want to think about it. “Do it, Louise.”

Louise picked up her helmet and whispered instructions into its throat mike.

The Trifid Nebula, from Earth, had once been a faint glow in the constellation of Sagittarius — as broad as the full Moon in the sky, but far dimmer; at over two thousand light-years from Earth, powerful telescopes had been needed to reveal its glorious colors. Light took fully thirty years to cross its extent.

Louise and Mark had chosen the Trifid as the first hyperdrive target. Even if the nightfighter’s trajectory was off by hundreds of light-years, the Nebula should surely be an unmistakable landmark.

But the waldo had worked. Louise’s programming had brought the nightfighter to within sixty light-years of the rim of the Nebula.

The Nebula was a wall, sprawled across half of Spinner’s sky. It was a soft edged study in pinks and reds. Dark lanes cut across the face of the Nebula in a rough Y-shape, dividing the cloud into three parts. The material seemed quite smooth, Spinner thought, like some immense watercolor painting. Stars shone through the pale outer edges of the Nebula — and shone, too, from within its bulk.

“This is an emission nebula, Spinner,” Louise said abstractedly. “There are stars within the gas; ultraviolet starlight ionizes hydrogen in the Nebula, making the gas shine in turn…” She pointed. “Those dark rifts are empty of stars; they’re dozens of light-years long. The Nebula is called the Trifid because of the way the lanes divide the face into three… see? And — can you see those smaller, compact dark spots? They’re called Bok globules… the birth places of new stars, forming inside the Nebula.”

Spinner-of-Rope turned to Louise; the engineer sounded flat, distant.

“Louise? What’s wrong?”

Louise glanced at her. “I’m sorry, Spinner. I should be celebrating, I guess. After all, the hyperdrive delivered us just where I expected to be. And I was only using the Trifid as a landmark, anyway. But — damn it, the Trifid used to be so much more, Spinner. The colors, all the way through the spectrum from blue, and green, all the way to red… There were hot, bright young stars in there which made it blaze.

“But now, those stars are gone. Snuffed out, or exploded, or rushed through their lifecycles; like every other star in the damn Galaxy.

“I just find it hard to accept all this. I try, but every so often something like this comes along, and hits me in the eye.”

Spinner turned to the Nebula again, trying to lose herself in its light.

Louise smiled, her face outlined by the Nebula’s soft light. “And what about you?… Why, Spinner, you’re crying.”

Surprised, Spinner raised the heel of her wrist to her cheeks. There was moisture there. She brushed it away, embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just — ”

“Yes?”

“It’s so beautiful.” Spinner stared at the eagle wings of the Nebula, drinking in its pale colors. “Louise, I’m so lucky to be here, to see this. Uvarov might have sent someone else through the Locks, that first time; not me and Arrow Maker. You might have asked someone else to learn to run your nightfighter for you — and not me.

“Louise, I might have missed this. I might have died without seeing it — without ever even knowing it existed.” She looked at Louise uncertainly. “Do you understand?”

Louise smiled. “No.” She reached into the cage and patted Spinner’s arm. “But once I would have felt the same way. Come on, Spinner. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s go home.”

Spinner-of-Rope picked up her helmet. As she fastened up her suit, she kept her eyes fixed on the impossible beauty of the Trifid.