Bemor shuddered a bit and in low bass tones said, “She is in conversation with her … Undermind. The Great Shame was merely a phrase to her. Now she has discovered that her Undermind concealed its meaning, to preserve her balance.”

“I thought you Folk could view all your unconscious,” Tananareve said.

“Not always.” Bemor hesitated, then with a rustle of feathers that she now knew meant he had made a decision, went on. “The proto-Folk of that ancient era, who committed the Great Shame, were unwise. They returned to their home system, flush with triumphant contacts with scores of nearby worlds. The dynamics of their parent system were well known to them, but wrong. Their data was gathered when the second sun—our star, now—was still in place. And perhaps they ventured too deeply into the large cloud of iceteroids.”

Tananareve was digesting this when Cliff frowned and said, “The Bowl has one great commandment—stability is all. Right? Having this Great Shame is a contradiction you don’t want to face—is that what’s making that one”—a nod to Memor—“so crazy?”

An awkward silence. Then Asenath said, “We Folk differ from those who built the Bowl. Those could not view their Underminds. The vagrant forces that arise in Underminds can be managed, if the sunshine of the Overmind shines upon them.”

Tananareve said, “You think of your unconscious as like, say, bacteria? Sanitize it, problem solved?”

Bemor and Asenath looked at each other and exchanged fast, complex fan-signals with clacking and rustling. Bemor had Memor in a restraining hold and the big creature was slowly becoming less restive.

“Not knowing your desires renders them more potent,” Bemor said. “They then emerge in strange ways, at unexpected moments. Your greatest drives lie concealed from your fore-minds. So the running agents and subsystems of your immediate, thinking persona can be invaded, without knowing it, by your Underminds. Quite primitive.”

“Which defeats control, right?” Cliff said.

“And so stability,” Tananareve added.

Asenath said, “You mean, Late Invaders, that notions simply appear in your Overminds?”

“You mean do we have ideas?” Tananareve considered. “Sure.”

“But you have no clue where the ideas came from,” Asenath said.

Bemor added, “Worse, they cannot go find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds is barred to them.”

“Astounding!” Asenath said. “Yet … it works in a way. They did get here on their own starship.”

“There are many subtle aspects,” Bemor began, and then paused. “We must keep to task.” He turned and gestured. Attendants rolled forward a large machine.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Tananareve said. “Is this the same machine you put me in before? That Memor used to study my mind?”

“No,” Bemor said. “This enables you to communicate with other minds, specifically those who need you to serve as an intermediary.”

“Who?” Tananareve turned to Irma and Cliff. “I hated that suffocating box with its foul smell. And the feeling—like snakes swarming over my skull. Then fingers in my head. I’d think something, then it slipped away, as if something was … running greasy hands over it.”

“We require you to enter this device,” Asenath said. She turned to Bemor and said in Folk—but not so fast that Tananareve could not translate it—“Do we need the others? They are trouble.”

Bemor rattled suppressing signals with his hind feathers. Not now.

Cliff and Irma had caught none of this. She said, “Look, I can’t square that Great Shame history of yours. You came back from star-voyaging to see the old place, Earth. So why haven’t we found Folk artifacts on other planets in the solar system?”

“There were stages. There was the era, after the Great Shame, that earlier Folk forms called the Dusting. It was a rain of small fragments into the solar system. An aftereffect of the Shame, in ways known to orbital specialists, arising from multiple iceteroid collisions far out from Sol. A sad era. Mere high-velocity dust destroyed much space-based technology. It etched whole cities out of existence on worlds not protected by atmospheres.

“But enough of this!” Bemor said. “Into this device you go now, Late Invader. We are ordered to send you thus, for reasons opaque to me. The Ice Minds would have it so. Welcome to this”—a broad sweeping gesture with a final feathered flourish—“a singular machine which we term a Reader.”

She had no choice. The assistants looked nasty and they moved swiftly, closing in on her. She turned and embraced the people near her. “Damn, we’ve just reunited and, and—”

“We’ll still be here when you come out.”

The others gave murmuring reassurances. She turned to follow the assistant, some nervous little form of robot, and suddenly a loud thunderclap hammered through the room. The fleshy walls of the skyfish rippled with it, and the floor lurched beneath her. She staggered, caught herself on Irma’s shoulder, stayed standing. “Damn!”

“A shock wave,” Cliff said. He turned to the Folk. “From what?”

Bemor looked out the transparent wall. “Disaster.”

PART XIII

THE DIAPHANOUS

It appears that the radical element responsible for the continuing thread of cosmic unrest is the magnetic field. What, then, is a magnetic field … that, like a biological form, is able to reproduce itself and carry on an active life in the general outflow of starlight, and from there alter the behavior of stars and galaxies?

—EUGENE PARKER,

C OSMICAL M AGNETIC F IELDS

THIRTY-NINE

Karl said, “It’s a standing kink.”

Beth looked at the screen showing the jet, its plasma and magnetic densities highlighted in color. “This is a snap of it?”

“No, it’s real-time. The sideways movement of the jet in the Knothole region is hung up, lashing against the mag bumpers meant to keep it away.” A side excursion had forked over against one of the life zones, penetrating the atmospheric envelope of a pie-shaped wedge.

“How in hell did that happen?” Redwing asked from over Beth’s shoulder.

Karl grimaced. “We’ve been driving our fusion burn pretty hard, trying to get some distance from the fliers that are coming up at us in the jet—”

“And failing,” Redwing added.

“—so that added our plume to the plasma already forcing the kink instability. Nonlinear mechanics at work. The kink has gotten into some mode where it snags against the mag defenses and just stays there.” Karl shrugged, as if to say, Don’t blame me, it’s nonlinear.

“So it’s getting worse down there,” Beth said. Her eyes were always on the shifting screens as they powered away from their pursuers. In the howling maelstrom of the jet, there were always vagrant pressures, sudden snarling knots of turbulence, shifts in SunSeeker’s magscoop configuration. Now SunSeeker had Mayra Wickramsingh and Ayaan Ali as backup navigator/pilot, since Clare Conway had died in an instant’s sudden lightning flash through the excited air above the bridge deck.

That had been only an hour ago, but the sharp terror of it was already fading in memory. There was too much to do now, to think of what had happened. Beth had helped carry away the charred corpse, holding Clare by the arms, seeing the face that was swollen and already darkening. Only hours ago, she had seen that mouth smiling, laughing.

Beth heard her own voice rattling out, “Those flitters, as you call ’em, Cap’n, are coming up fast.” Her eyes studied the slim, quick shapes, just barely defined in size by their microwave radars. They had spread into a triangle, centered on SunSeeker’s wake.

Redwing stood in the middle of the bridge and said to everyone, “We’re plainly about to go into battle. Those flitters are fast. We can’t outrun them. So we’ve got to engage them with a ship not designed to do battle at all.”