I laughed — or sent appropriate impulses to my translator chips, at least. “How do you think I feel?”

“They tell me your spirits are high…”

“You’re reducing Planck’s constant. Aren’t you? But I don’t understand what quagma has to do with it.”

The Ghost hesitated.

When its voice came through again it had a richer timbre. “I have established a closed channel. All right, Jack. You are aware that quagma is the state of matter which emerged from the Big Bang. Matter, when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks — a quagma. And at such temperatures the fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. Quagma is bound together only by such a superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand the superforce decomposes into the four sub-forces.”

“So?”

“By controlling the decomposition, one can select the ratio between those forces.”

“Ah.” Eve, I wish you were here to help me with this… “And those ratios govern the fundamental constants — including Planck’s constant.”

“Correct.”

I wanted to rub my face, but my head and hands had been taken away. “So you’re building a model Universe, in which Planck’s constant is lowered. Lethe, Ambassador. I’m surprised the Xeelee have let you get as far as you have.”

“We have concealed well… Jack Raoul, are you still human?”

I would have shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t sound as if you care.”

“Why should you?”

“I have known you for a long time, Jack. Among my people there are analogies for the grief you felt at the loss of your wife.”

“Ambassador, do you think this is some complicated way of committing suicide? You invited me to take the damn trip, remember.”

“Human or not, you will still have friends.”

“You can’t imagine how much that comforts me.”

They disconnected my new senses during the hyperspace flight. “I apologize,” the Sink Ambassador said. “When we reach the quagma project site you will have freedom to inspect.”

“But you don’t trust me with the location.”

“I do not have a free rein, my friend.”

I spent the passage floating in a Virtual reality, trying not to think about what lay beyond my skin.

I emerged into a half-Universe.

I was in a Ghost intrasystem cruiser, a rough ovoid constructed of silvered rope. Instrument clusters were knotted to the walls. Perhaps a dozen Ghosts clung to the rope like berries on seaweed.

Above me I saw stars. Below me a floor of crimson mist, a featureless plane, extended to infinity.

A Ghost approached me.

“Ambassador?”

“We have arrived, Jack Raoul.”

“Arrived where?” I gestured at the blood-red floor. “What’s this?”

The Ambassador rolled, as if amused. “Jack, this is a red giant star. Are you familiar with astrophysics? This star is about as wide as Earth’s orbit. We have emerged a million miles above its boundary.”

I’m no small-town boy; I’d been off Earth before. But this was different. I felt the soft human thing inside my Ghost shell cringe.

I’d seen nothing yet.

The ship plunged into the interior of the star.

I cried out and grabbed at silvered rope. Glowing banks of mist shot upwards all around us. The Ghost crew floated about their tasks, unconcerned.

“Lethe, Ambassador.”

“I could not warn you.”

We emerged into a clear layer within the star. Far, far below was a dense ocean of fire, looking like some fantastic sodium-lit cityscape; beneath it something small, hot and yellow glowed brightly. We descended through slices of fire-cloud with startling speed.

The Ambassador said, “You are perhaps aware that this giant is a star in the latter part of its life. Its bulk is a gas whose density is only a thousandth that of Earth’s atmosphere, and whose temperature is well below that at the surface of Sol. Easily managed by your new skin. So you see, there is nothing to fear.”

Now the ship veered to the right, and we skirted a huge, blackened thunderhead. “A convection fount; complex products from the core,” explained the Ghost.

“The core?”

“Like a white dwarf star, about the size and mass of Sol. It is mostly helium by now, but hydrogen fusion is still proceeding in a surface layer.” The Ghost rolled complacently. “Jack, your visit — this project — is inspired by quantum mechanics. Do you understand the Pauli Exclusion Principle? — that no two quantum objects can share the same state? You may be amused to know that it is electron degeneracy pressure — a form of the Pauli Principle — which keeps that core from collapsing on itself.”

“You’re prepared to live inside a star, just to evade detection by the Xeelee?”

“We anticipate long-term benefits.”

We dropped into another clear stratus. The core was a ball about as hot and bright as the Sun from Earth; it rolled beneath us. Starstuff drifted above us like smog.

The Ghosts had built a city here.

Once this must have been a moon. It was a hollowed-out ball of rock, a thousand miles wide. Ghost ships swept over the pocked landscape.

At the poles two vast cylindrical structures gleamed. These were intrasystem drives, the Ambassador explained, there to maintain the moon’s orbit about the core.

Our ship approached the city-world’s surface — there was negligible gravity, so that it was like hovering before some vast, slotted wall — and, at length, slid into an aperture.

I turned to the Ambassador. “I won’t pretend I’m not impressed.”

“Naturally, after this demonstration, I will provide you with any backup data you require for your report.”

“Demonstration? Of what?”

A hint of pride shone through the thin, sexless tones of the translator chips. “We have timed your arrival to coincide with the initiation of a new phase of our project.”

“I’m honored.”

We hurtled along dimly-lit passages. Other craft dipped and soared all around us. Blocks of light tumbled from cross-corridors, reminding me irresistibly of pixels. I recalled Eve’s strange, ambiguous warning, and wondered bleakly if I really wanted to be present at the dawn of a “new phase.”

With a soundless rush we emerged into a spherical cavity miles wide. Beams of crimson starlight crossed the hollow, bathing its walls with a blood-red glow. At the heart of the chamber was a sphere. A couple of miles across, the sphere gleamed golden and was semi-transparent, like a half-silvered mirror. Platforms bearing Ghost workers hovered over its surface.

Some vast machine moved softly, within the confines of the mirrored sphere.

“Mr. Raoul, welcome to our experiment,” the Sink Ambassador said.

“What is that sphere?”

“Nothing material. The sphere is the boundary between our Universe… and another domain, which we have constructed by letting quagma droplets inflate under controlled conditions. Within this domain the ratio you know as Planck’s constant is reduced, to about ten percent of its value elsewhere. Other physical constants are identical.”

“Why the half-silvered effect?”

“The energy carried by a photon is proportional to the Planck number. When a photon enters the Planck domain the energy it may carry is reduced. Do you understand? It therefore sheds energy at the boundary, in the form of a second photon, emitted back into normal space.”

I asked if we were to enter the Planck space.

“I fear not,” the Ambassador said. “Our fundamental structure is based on Planck’s constant: the spacing of electrons around the nucleus of an atom, for example. If you were to enter the domain, you would be — adjusted. The device in there — an artificial mind — has been constructed to withstand such Planck changes. The device controls the regeneration of the domain from quagma; we are also using it to conduct computational experiments.”

The machine in its golden sac turned, brooding, like some vast animal.