Rodi turned away.

Gren said, “No, Rodi. Hear the rest. The growths are nervous tissue. They contain information… it’s like a false memory. And an obsession. I walked to a wall and touched tiles in a certain way; control panels unfolded — and I knew how to work weapons mounted in the hull… The Exaltation is a deception, the message of the Integrality a way to enable a war fleet to approach the Ring.

“Your poetry is being spread from Holism by closed inseparability net. Not all the Exaltation has yet been infected. But… but finally…” His rheumy eyes fluttered closed.

Rodi shook frail shoulders. “Gren… tell me what to do. We’ve got to stop this—”

Gren’s mouth gaped, spittle looping between his lips.

Holism Ark had become an alien place. Rodi watched weapons pods erupting from walls still coated with uplifting Integrality slogans.

He thought of trying to find his parents. He envisaged their grisly welcome, overlaid with spinal knots and blank, driven faces.

He shuddered and swam towards the flitter hangars. There was no way he could influence events here. Perhaps if he made his way to the battle site…

Then what?

He readied the flitter for launch, trying to lose himself in activity.

He skimmed the surface of the Ark; the blisters which had puzzled him earlier had now opened up to reveal the snouts of weapons and guidance sensors.

He pulled away. Much of the Exaltation, he saw, was still unaffected and held its formation. He flew to the tip of the flying wedge.

For the first time in three thousand years, the great Arks were leaving hyperspace.

His heart heavy, he swept ahead of the fleet and dropped into three-space.

He was in a mist of blue-stained stars. A torus glowed: Bolder’s Ring, still hundreds of light years away but already spanning the sky.

He pushed towards the Ring.

The flitter passed through the last veil of crushed matter and entered the clear space at the bottom of the Ring’s gravity well… and for a few seconds, despite everything, Rodi’s breath grew short with wonder.

The Ring, a tangle of cosmic string, glittered as it rotated. There was a milky place at its very center, a hole ripped in the fabric of space by that monstrous, whirling mass.

Xeelee were everywhere.

Ships miles wide swept over the artifact’s sparkling planes, endlessly constructing and shaping. Rodi watched a horde of craft using cherry-red beams to herd a star, an orange giant, into a soft, slow collision with the Ring. The star’s structure was breaking up as cosmic string ripped into its flank—

A dozen flesh-pale spheres hurtled over Rodi’s head, spitting fire.

They were Spline: the warships of the Integrality. They tore towards the star drovers and battle was joined.

At first the humans had the advantage of surprise. The ponderous Xeelee construction ships scattered in confusion. One of them was caught in the cross-fire of two Arks; Rodi could see its structure melt and smolder. More human ships dropped out of hyperspace and the battle spread.

But now a Spline ship splashed open. Rodi watched people wriggle in vacuum, soaked by spurts of Spline blood.

A Xeelee nightfighter covered the wreck with wings a hundred miles wide.

There were nightfighters all around the battle site. Fire bit into the sides of the laboring Spline.

It was a massacre.

Rodi could not bear to watch. Each Ark was a world, millennia old, carrying families… He increased the scale of his monitors, turned the battle into a game of toys.

But now the Xeelee fighters pulled away. They folded their wings and hovered outside the mist of debris, almost aloof.

The human ships tore into the defenseless construction vessels. Out of control, the orange star splashed against the Ring surface.

The Arks withdrew to hyperspace. One of them whirled as if in jubilation, spitting fire in all directions. Wrecks sailed into clumsy orbits around the Ring.

The Xeelee fighters departed, wings shimmering.

Rodi closed his eyes.

This had been no triumph for the humans. The Xeelee had given them a meaningless victory; they had simply not wished to slaughter.

Couldn’t the human crews see that? Would this happen again and again until every Ark was disabled, every human life lost?

No. He couldn’t let it occur. And, he began to realize, there was a way he could prevent it.

He opened his eyes, rubbed his face, and lifted the flitter to hyperspace.

The neutron star scraped the surface of its companion, just as it had in that dream time before the metamorphosis. “Integrality for the Comms Officer—”

“Greetings, Rodi from the Integrality.”

Rodi, in broken bits of old English, described the futile battle.

The Comms Officer mulled it over. “I understand little… only that people are dying for a foolish purpose.”

“But with your help, I can avert many deaths.”

“How?”

“Not all the Exaltation has been… contaminated. The virus of words is spreading via inseparability net links. If we break those links, the spread will stop.”

“And how can we disrupt this inseparability net?”

“Cause a starquake.”

He had to expand, to explain what he meant.

The Comms Officer hesitated. “Rodi, there are two things you should know. We cause these events for specific religious and sexual reasons. They are not — a sport. Second, many of us will lose our lives.”

“I know what I’m asking.”

A monitor flashed: another craft had dropped out of hyperspace near him. A Virtual tank filled up with a grinning face.

The craft was Unity Ark. The face was Thet’s.

She said, “They told me your flitter was gone. It wasn’t hard to work out where you’d be. You’re planning sabotage, aren’t you?”

Rodi stared at her.

“Are we still in contact, Rodi of the Integrality?”

“Yes, Comms Officer…”

“Rodi, you have one minute to begin your approach to Unity. After that we open fire. Do you understand?”

“Comms Officer, what is your answer?”

“I must consult.”

“Please hurry. I am desperate.”

Thet’s smile broadened as the minute passed. Rodi realized that the metamorphosis was a liberation for her; she made a much better warrior than missionary.

“Time’s up, Rodi.”

“Integrality? We will do as you say.”

“Thank you!”

And Rodi slammed the flitter into hyperspace; Thet snarled.

The Exaltation was beginning to split up.

The Arks, the metamorphosed battleships, continued to drop into three-space… but they returned battered and bleeding, and there were fewer each time.

The bulk of the fleet, now isolated from infection, cruised on its way.

Rodi probed at his feelings. Had he betrayed his race by wrecking this grand design?

But the stratagem itself had been a betrayal — of the generations who had lived and died in the Exaltation, and, yes, of the ideal of the Integrality itself.

He wondered if Gren’s hypothesis, of a key embedded in fragments of poetry, could hold truth. It seemed fantastic… and yet the fragments of verse had indeed been laid there, like a trail. Perhaps there were a dozen keys, scattered across the light years and centuries, reinforcing each other — some perhaps even embedded in the structure of the space through which the Exaltation must pass.

Or perhaps, Rodi thought bleakly, no key was necessary. He thought of Thet. She, in retrospect, had been all too willing to throw over the ideals of the Integrality, and indulge in warfare once more — key or no key.

But the perpetrators of this epochal plot had been too clever. In their search for a fine lie they had stumbled on a truth — the truth at the heart of the Integrality’s philosophy — and that truth, Rodi realized, was driving him to act as he did.