"It was odd."

             "How?"

             "I have never seen one worried before."

             Cley bit her Up, memories stirring. She had felt fihgrees of the Captain's anxiety. Already the sharp, vibrant images were trickling away. She suspected that her kind of intelligence was simply unable to file and categorize the massive infusion she had received, and so was sloughing it off.

             "The Supras it could deal with," she said. "It's afraid of the Mad Mind, though."

             Seeker nodded. "The Mind has fully arrived, then."

             "Fully?"

             "All components knit together."

             "I caught something about that from the Captain." She frowned, troubled, eyes distant. "Sheets of fine copper wire wrapping around blue flames . . ."

             "Where?"

             "Somewhere further out from here. Where it's cold, dark. There was a feeling of the Mad Mind spreading over whole stars. Suns . . . like campfires."

             "It is expanding." Seeker clashed its claws together, a gesture of sly menace which somehow made it look professorial.

             She told Seeker what she had glimpsed. Much of it was a tapestry of rediscovered history.

             The Mad Mind had been confined to the warped space-time near a huge Black Hole. Only the restraining curvature there could hold the Mind in place for long. This had been done eons ago, a feat accomplished by humanity in collaboration with elements and beings she could not begin to describe. Around the Black Hole orbited a disk made of infalling matter, flattened into a thin plate, spinning endlessly. The inner edge of the disk was gnawed into incandescent ferocity by the compressive clawing of the Black Hole's great tidal gradients. There the Mad Mind had been held by the swirl and knots of vexed space-time. Matter perpetually entered the disk at its outer rim, as dust clouds and even stars were drawn inward by friction and the shredding effects of the Black Hole's grip.

             The Mad Mind had been forced to perpetually swim upstream against this flux of matter in the disk. If it relented, the Mind would have been carried by the flow to the very inner edge of the disk. There it would have been sucked further in, spiraling down into the hole.

             That had been the prison and torture of the Mad Mind. It had been able to spare nothing in its struggle to survive. And that is all that had saved the rest of the galaxy from its strange wrath.

             "But it escaped," Seeker said.

             "It... diffused." The odd word popped into her head, summoned by the fading images from the Captain. "It is made of magnetic fields, and they diffused across the conducting disk. That took a very long time, but the Mind managed it."

             "Where was the Black Hole?" Seeker asked.

             "It was the biggest humanity could find—the hole at the center of the galaxy."

             They both looked out through the transparent pressure membrane. The vibrant glow of a million suns wreathed the center of the galaxy in beeswarm majesty. Yet at the center of all that glare dwelt an utter darkness, they knew. Ten billion years of galactic progression had fed the Black Hole. Stars which swooped too close to it were stripped and sucked in. Each dying sun added to the compact darkness, the dynamical center about which a hundred billion stars rotated in the gavotte of the galaxy.

             Cley whispered, "Then moving the solar system here, near the galactic center, was part of the scheme to trap the Mad Mind?"

             Seeker said, "It must have been."

             "Wouldn't it be safer to get as far away as possible?"

             "Yes. But not responsible."

             "So humanity brought the sun and planets here as a kind of guard?"

             "That is one possibility. Our star may have been moved here to challenge the Mad Mind when it emerged."

             "How can we?"

             "With difficulty."

             "That's one possibility, you said. What's another?"

             "That we were placed here as a sentinel, to warn others."

             "Who?"

             "I do not know."

             "Hard to warn somebody when you don't know who that might be."

             "There is yet one more possibility."

             "What?"

             "That we are here as a sacrifice."

             Cley said nothing. Seeker went on. "Perhaps if the Mad Mind finds and destroys its imprisoners, it will be content."

             The casual way Seeker said this chilled Cley. "What's all this about?'"

             "Perhaps the Supras know."

             "Well then, let them fight the Mind. I want out of it."

             "There is no way out."

             "Well, moving further from the sun sure doesn't seem so smart. That's where the Mind is accumulating itself."

             Seeker studied the stars, bright holes punched in the pervading night. "Your talent made you too easy to find on Earth. Here you blend into the many mind-voices."

             Cley opened her mouth to disagree and stopped, feeling a light, keening note sound through her thoughts. She blinked. It was a hunting call, a flavor that eons had not erased, as though from some quick bird swooping down through velvet air, eyes intent on scampering prey below.

             She glanced back at the smoldering glow of the galactic center. Against it were black shapes, angular and swift, growing. Not metal, like Supra ships, but green and brown and gray.

             "Call the Captain!" she said.

             "I have," Seeker said.

             As Cley watched the approaching sleek creatures she saw that they were larger than the usual spaceborne life she had known, and that it was far too late to avoid them, even if Leviathan could have readily turned its great bulk.

             Skysharks, Cley thought, the word leaping up from her buried vocabulary. The term fit, though she did not know its origin. They were elegantly molded for speed, with jets for venting gases. Solar sails gave added thrust, but the lead skyshark had reeled in its sails as it approached, retracting the silvery sheets into pouches in its side. Cupped parabolas fore and aft showed that it had evolved radar senses; these, too, collapsed moments before contact, saving themselves from the fray.

             The first of them came lancing into the Leviathan without attempting to brake. It slammed into the skin aft of the blister that held Seeker and Cley. They could see it gouge a great hole in the puckered skin.

             The skysharks were large, muscular, powerful. Cley watched the first few plow into the mottled hide of the Leviathan and wondered why they would risk such damage merely for food. But then her ears popped.

             "They're breaking the seals!"

             "Yes," Seeker said calmly, "such is their strategy."

             "But they'll kill everything aboard."

             "They penetrate inward a few layers. This lets the outrushing air bring to them the smaller animals."

             Cley watched a skyshark back away from the jagged wound it had made. A wind blew the backdrop of stars around, the only evidence of escaping air. Then flecks and motes came from the wound, a geyser of helpless wriggling prey. The skyshark caught each with its quick, wide mouth, seeming to inhale them.