Malenfant said to Emma, “Ironic because we sent the squid up there in the first place to give us a better look at Cruithne.”

Cornelius started to bring up data — graphs, bar charts — on the softscreens embedded in the tabletop. “You’d be surprised how much we can figure out about an asteroid just by looking at it. We can see how bright our asteroid is by comparing it with nearby stars, see how fast it’s moving by watching it against the background sky, see how its brightness changes so we can guess its shape, see what color the rocks are and so guess what they’re made of. Also we use radio telescopes to bounce radar beams off Cruithne’s surface. By comparing the echo with the outgoing beam, we can tell even more about the asteroid: its shape, rotation, surface properties, position and velocity, composition.

“We’ve found that the surface morphology of some parts of the asteroid is unusual. And not just because of the presence of the squid habs. We did manage to pick up a signal from one of the firefly drones that got close enough to return an image, a partial image, before it was turned away.”

Malenfant snapped, “Close enough to what?”

For answer, Cornelius flashed up an image in the tabletop softscreens.

Emma shared a firefly’s view of Cruithne:

A star field; a lumpy horizon; a broken, pitted, dark gray surface highlighted by a light source somewhere behind her, presumably fixed to the robot whose electronic eyes she was looking through. She saw bits of the firefly in the foreground: a metal manipulator arm, a couple of tethers pinning the drone to the surface. Her view was restricted; the drone was low, hugging the surface, bringing the asteroid’s horizon in close.

And on that horizon she saw—

What?

It was an arc, bright blue. It seemed utterly smooth, geometrically pure. It stretched from one side of the frame to the other, obviously artificial.

She felt cold. This was strange, utterly unexpected.

“Holy shit,” Malenfant said. “It’s an artifact, isn’t it?”

“That,” Cornelius said, “is what our AWOL squid have dug out on Cruithne. What you see is only part of the structure. After sending this the firefly was turned back. I can show you an image of the whole thing.” He tapped at his softscreen. “Taken from the ground, however. Distressingly remote, blurred.”

Emma leaned forward. She saw a potato-shaped object — gray, lumpy, and scarred — against a dark background. “Cruithne,” she said.

The image was animated; Cruithne rotated, gracefully, about its long axis, bringing something into view. Standing in a pit, deep and neatly round, there was a structure.

It was a blue circle.

Overenlarged, it was just a ring of blocky pixels. It was obviously the extension of the arc the firefly had approached. She had no way of gauging its size. There were squid habs clustered around the circle, golden splashes, not touching it directly.

Within the circle itself there was only darkness.

“It’s about thirty feet tall. We tried bouncing radar and laser signals off the artifact. It doesn’t have the same reflective properties as the rest of the asteroid. In fact we don’t seem to be getting any radar echo at all. It’s hard to be definitive. The clutter from the surrounding surface—”

Malenfant said, “So what does that mean?”

“Maybe it’s perfectly absorbent. Or maybe it’s a hole.”

Malenfant frowned. “A hole? What kind of hole?”

“An infinitely deep one.” Cornelius smiled. “We’re looking for a better explanation. We’ve also detected other anomalies. Radiation, high-energy stuff. Some oddities, pions and positrons. We think there must be high-energy processes going on there.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to reflect light. That blue glow comes from the substance itself. It has no spectral lines. Just a broad-spectrum glow.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“If it were made of atoms,” he said patiently, “any kind of atoms, it would emit precise frequencies, because the electrons in atoms jump between quantized energy levels.”

“So this isn’t made of atoms,” Dan said, wondering.

“We should soon get back direct control of a couple of robots,” Cornelius said. “Then, if this is a hole in space, let’s find out where it leads. We’ll send in a firefly.”

Malenfant paced, obsessive, exultant. “So it’s true. It’s an artifact, out there on Cruithne. You were right, Cornelius. This will stick it to those assholes at the FAA and NASA and Congress.”

Emma looked inside herself, searching for awe, even terror perhaps. She found only numbness.

Malenfant’s mind was immediately on the implications for his projects, Emma realized, his business. Not on the thing itself, its blunt reality. And yet, if this was real, everything was different.

Wasn’t it?

Cornelius was smiling. Dan was sitting with his mouth open. Michael’s prism-lit eyes were on her, empty and open.

It took Cornelius another week to set it up.

Sitting in her office in Vegas autumn sunlight, trying to deal with her work — the complex, drawn-out destruction of Bootstrap, the various related scandals concerning the end of the world and the Blue children and the squid — what she had seen on Mount Palomar seemed unreal. A light show.

Artifacts on an asteroid? A hole in space?

It couldn’t possibly be real.

And yet she found it unaccountably hard to concentrate.

Malenfant, during this period, was a pain in the ass. He threw himself into Bootstrap affairs, but it was obvious he was trying to distract himself: angry, vigorous, frustrated, burning up nervous energy. Emma did her best to keep him away from the press.

At last Cornelius called Emma and Malenfant to a meeting at Eschatology’s offices in New York. Emma considered ignoring the request: excluding Cornelius, and the strain of madness and inhumanity he had introduced into her life.

But, she found, she couldn’t. She had to know.

With a sense of dread, she put her affairs on hold and flew out with Malenfant.

Cornelius met them at Reception and led them to a conference room.

At the closed door — a mundane oak panel in this plain carpeted corridor — he paused. “Be warned,” he said.

Emma’s hand crept into Malenfant’s.

Cornelius opened the door.

And Emma found herself on Cruithne: black sky, dull black surface curving under her feet, the light from a powerful sun, hanging above her, drowning the stars. And, in a neatly excavated pit in front of her, there was a blue artifact: thirty feet tall, shining, perfectly circular, like some piece of blunt municipal sculpture. Waiting.

She walked forward, hesitantly, her eyes slowly adjusting. When she looked down she saw that her feet were a little below the coal-black asteroid surface, as if she were paddling in a shallow pool. Of course, she felt nothing.

Cornelius said, “We papered the walls with softscreens. Not quite immersive VR. Much of the imagery comes directly from the various camera feeds we’re managing to operate up there. The rest is software extrapolation. I’ve been preparing our firefly robot probe. But—”

“But what?” Malenfant said.

Cornelius sighed. “An hour ago this happened.” He tapped at a desk surface.

A firefly robot materialized from a pixel hail in front of them. Using its cables and pitons to drag at the coarse surface, it made its painstaking way toward the artifact. Lines trailed back from it, out of their view.

Malenfant said, “That’s our robot?”

“No. Not ours. Just watch.”

And now an object like a huge beach ball, attached to the long lines, came washing into the virtual reconstruction, towed by the firefly. It was water, Emma saw: a droplet wrapped up in a shimmering golden blanket, complex waves molding its surface as it bounced gently on the regolith.