Spinner-of-Rope. I know you’re awake.

…and then…

Come on, Spinner, talk to me.

Spinner slowed to a halt.

With regret she glanced down once more at the honey she would not be able to enjoy, and issued a soft, subvocal command.

Out of the air, the environment suit congealed over her limbs like some web made of silvery cloth, and the bulky couch materialized around her body. Like a skull poking through decaying flesh, the darkness of space, the harsh telltale lights of her waldoes, emerged through the forest dream.

“Spinner-of-Rope. Spinner.”

Her heart beat as rapidly as a bird’s. “Yes, Louise.”

“I’m sorry I had to dig you out of your Virtual like that. You, ah, you didn’t want to come back to us, I don’t think.”

Spinner grunted as the suit went into its daily sonic bath routine. “Well, can you blame me for wanting to escape?” She let the bleakness outside the cage flood into her mind. How wonderful it had been to be ten years old again, to have no greater horizon than a day’s frog-hunting with her father! But she wasn’t ten years old; more than five decades had worn away since those honey hunting days, and since then immense responsibilities had descended on her. The renewed awareness of who she was settled over her like a tangible weight: a weight she’d been carrying around for all this time — but which she’d forgotten to notice.

She shivered again — and became suddenly, sharply suspicious. She hissed out brief subvocal commands and called up a display of her environment suit air temperature. It was around eighteen degrees Celsius. Not exactly ice cold, but still noticeably cool. She called up a faceplate graphic of how her suit temperature had varied over the last few days.

The coldness she’d felt in her dream had been real. The suit temperature had been changed. For more than a week it had been maintained at twenty-five degrees — fully seven degrees warmer than today.

“Louise,” she said sternly.

She heard Louise sigh. “I’m here, Spinner-of-Rope.”

“What in Lethe is going on? What have you been trying to do, cook me to death?”

“No, Spinner. Look, we’ve come to understand — a bit belatedly, maybe — how hard this trip is for you. I wish, now, we’d found some other solution: someone else to relieve you, perhaps. But it’s too late for that. We’ve got ourselves into a situation in which we’re very dependent on you, and your continued good functioning out in that cage, Spinner.”

“And the heat?”

“Heat acts as a mild sedative, Spinner-of-Rope. As long as your fluid balance isn’t affected — and we’re monitoring that — it’s quite harmless. I thought it was a good solution to the problem…”

Spinner rubbed her cheek against the lining of her helmet. “Right. So you were sedating me, without my consent. Louise Ye Armonk, engineer of human bodies and souls…”

“I guess I should have discussed it with you.”

“Yes, I guess you should,” Spinner said heavily. “And now?”

Louise hesitated. “It was becoming harder and harder to dig you out of your fantasies, Spinner. I was afraid we might lose you altogether… lose you to a dream of the forest.”

A dream of the forest.

With a sigh she straightened her posture in her couch. “Don’t worry, Louise. I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t, Spinner.” Louise sounded nervous, excited uncharacteristically so. “Spinner-of-Rope… it’s the fifty-first day. Look around you.”

Spinner loosened her restraints; she glared around at her surroundings, at first seeing only emptiness. Irritated, she snapped out subvocals, and the faceplate began to enhance her naked-eye images.

“Spinner, we’ve traveled a hundred and fifty million light years. We’re reaching the end of the programmed hyperdrive jumps…

“It’s nearly over, Spinner-of-Rope. We’re almost there.”

As the faceplate worked, dim forms emerged — the moth-like forms of galaxies, far away, all around her. She saw spirals, ellipticals, gigantic irregulars: huge clusters of galaxies in their characteristic threads and sheets, the whole vision looking impossibly fragile.

But there was something odd about the pale images.

“We’ve arrived, Spinner-of-Rope,” Louise said. “We are at the center of things.”

Blue shift, Spinner-of-Rope. Blue shift, everywhere… Can you see it?

Yes. The galaxies — all around her sky — were tinged blue, she realized now. Blue shift.

She had come, at last, to the place all the galaxies were falling into.

The nightfighter — with its fragile cargo of humans, and traveling thirty-five light-years with every hyperdrive jump — arced down toward the disc of the scarred galaxy. Spinner-of-Rope sat in her cage, letting the waldoes run through their program; in the corner of her eye, telltales winked reassuringly.

This galaxy was a broad spiral, with multiple arms tightly wrapped around a compact, glowing core. The star system was a pool of rust red, punctuated with the gleam of novae and supernovae: thus, she saw, the galaxy had not escaped depredation at the hands of the photino birds. And the gleaming disc was disfigured by one stunning feature: a huge gouge of a scar, a channel of dust and glowing star-stuff that cut right across the disc, from rim to core.

Now the nightfighter, flickering through hyperspace, neared the rim of the disc, close to the termination of the scar.

This might have been the original Galaxy of humans, Spinner thought, and she wondered if Louise Armonk was sitting under the skydome over the forest, peering out at this freight of stars. Maybe this nostalgic similarity was the reason Louise and the rest had chosen this particular galaxy, out of hundreds of thousands around the cavity, for a closer study.

Suddenly the plane of the disc loomed up at her — and the nightfighter slid neatly into the notch gouged out of the disc.

“Good navigation, Louise,” she said. “Right down the channel.”

“Well, it wasn’t so hard to hit. The channel is over two thousand light-years wide, and as straight as one of your blowpipes. The channel was cut so recently that the galaxy’s rotation hasn’t had time to distort it too far — although, in another few hundred thousand years there will be barely a trace of this feature left…”

The ’fighter plunged along the gouge, and the view was spectacular. Above her was the gaunt, galaxy-stained sky of the Attractor; below and around her was an open tunnel of stars, hurtling past her. Looking ahead, it seemed she could see all the way to the gleaming core of the galaxy. It was difficult to remember that this neat star-walled valley was no less than fifty thousand light-years long…

At thirty-five light-years a second, the ship would reach the core in under thirty minutes.

Now the ’fighter dived into a bank of opaque dust — and then exploded out again, the stars gleaming crimson and gold in the walls of the galaxy-spanning tunnel.

Spinner punched her fist into her palm and whooped.

She heard Louise laugh. “You’re enjoying the ride, Spinner-of-Rope?”

There were voices behind Louise Armonk. “I see it.” Excited, shouting. “I see it — ”

I see it, too.

Spinner turned in her chair, the restraints riding up awkwardly across her chest. The voice had sounded as if it had come from her left.

It had been the voice of the man from her forest dreams, of course. She almost expected to see that slim, dark form, sitting out there beyond the cage: that sixty-year-old face, the hair of gray pepper-speckled with black, the vulnerable brown eyes…

Somehow, she felt he was coming closer to her. He was emerging.