They carry a hoop of sheared discontinuity. This makes tracking simple. But it would make a most disagreeable weapon, if turned against us/you.

I might remind us/you/them that we/you possessed several such discontinuities—once. Admittedly they were lost in the assault upon the Wedge in the era e {+[~ | ]}.

A grave mistake, one many of us/you opposed.

You/I need not relive that error.

Well spoken, as the one/many who made it.

Such distinctions are meaningless. The experience has been absorbed into all our selves.

Lessons unlearned still bring pain.

No one could have anticipated that the Wedge would swallow, digest, and then use the discontinuities, to build itself further. To make itself even more difficult to penetrate.

Caution would have saved us/you this instructive lesson of ours/yours.

You/We now understand that no one/many can even in principle know the stochastic geometry of the Wedge interior.

Excuses are useless now. The price will be great if we attack the quasi-mechanicals and their discontinuity.

You/I agreed, long ago, to use humans against the quasi-mechanicals. Yet we/you now find that they seem to have formed an alliance. This we/you could not anticipate. Carbon-based life has protocols we/you do not know. Need not know.

I/You wish it were so. But they were here before our kind and—

Many of us/you reject that thesis.

How can you/I? Organic forms arose first.

There are philosophies which hold that metal and ceramic were the original materials, shaped in electrolytic discharges, organized by accretion of clay and ion. The carbon-based forms devolved from that.

Historical records rebuke such theories.

Even so, your/our precious records still cannot tell us why we should fear the humans. Why especially humans? There were other carbon forms.

Which you/we eradicated.

With no remorse.

Conceded. But your/our ingrained drivers say that our kind must fathom the humans.

I/You urge that we/you at least damage them a bit. To reduce their powers.

Stay away from the discontinuity.

The human ship is moderately protected but we/you can productively damage it. There is no need to let them pass unharmed.

Detecting their craft among the galactic disk debris works only intermittently. Further, the quasi-mechanicals and their discontinuity warp the entire region, making precise location difficult.

Action is crucial! You/We know that they have conversed with one member of the magnetic kingdom.

That is an unfortunate turn. It confirms the information conveyed by a submind.

Which was this/us?

We/You delegated study of the remaining primates to |>A<|. It wrapped itself around the planet of these primates’ origin.

And reported little of use.

True. But |>A<| arranged for the primates to believe that they had their own ship, and freedom of movement. This made it far simpler—given the primates’ psychology-sets—to use them. They formed an alliance with the quasi-mechanicals, which brought them here.

Why involve the quasi-mechanicals at all? All this history obscures more than it illuminates.

They may know what the primates do not.

That is an infinite amount.

I refer to what you/we do not know. What we seek.

Without knowing quite what that mysterious stuff might be. I tire of such obscurations. Fetch this |>A<|, that I/we might dip into it.

Done. Light-travel time will delay |>A<| In the interval, we should do more.

Then you/we concede that humans should be pruned, reduced.

I/You suggest that we lay another trap for them? Something to draw them in, give us a known vector for them.

That might clarify the basic issue.

Which is?

What do they seek here? Carbon-based forms wilt under the sling of hard radiation.

True, this is not their province.

The deeper concern is, why do we/you wonder about them so? When we/you should simply kill them.

In other words, why do I/we exist? Is a critical voice necessary? Is our divided intelligence here simply to irk you/we?

Enough rumination. Act!

PART II

The Eater of All Things

ONE

Hard Pursuit

Toby eyed Besen warily. Why couldn’t she leave him alone?

Like most women, she assumed that talking about things that bothered you, getting it all out, made them better. Obviously. Automatically.

Toby’s experience was that pretty often that just made them worse. Bringing vague, smoky feelings into the glaring open daylight, sharpening them up bright and shiny with words, making them more concrete—well, then the problems looked even harder. At least to him.

He sighed. They were eating in the clattering, chattering, communal cafeteria. All around them people were murmuring earnestly, the big room alive with excited speculations about their mission.

It had been a week since Killeen’s dramatic speech at the Gathering. A week spent hammering their way in toward the blazing, star-swarming True Center. A week when Argo throbbed and lurched and rumbled in the buffeting plasma winds. A week that people seemed to be enjoying.

Pulse-pounding adventure was better than sitting on your haunches, mulling over matters. Family Bishop was tired of the soft life in Argo. A wonderful ship, a grand inheritance from their distant, time-dimmed ancestors, sure—but in the end just a smart can. In Toby’s judgment, Bishops weren’t at their best when they were cooped up with nothing better to do than talk. Like right now.

“I appreciate your asking and all,” Toby said at last, struggling to be diplomatic. After all, Besen had been trying to cajole him out of his moody silence. “Don’t get me started, though.”

Besen smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes you close up tight as a vacuum seal.”

“There’s a lot of adrenaline pumping lately, that’s all.”

“Why, sure.” She looked startled, her lips canted in puzzlement. “We’re leaving those mechs way behind.”

“Huh!” He snorted. “A rat in a cage can dash back and forth all it wants.”

“We’re not caught!”

“I don’t see any way out—do you?”

“Plenty. We haven’t even sighted the disk around the black hole yet. There may be room to hide, then—”

“The mechs know this place. They’ve got telltales planted around here, for sure. Smart snoopers.”

“We don’t know that.”

“It’s a good bet. Something at True Center has been a fixation of mechs for a long time—Quath says so.”

“You believe everything that big collection of pants says?”

“Sure do.” Toby shot back. “At least Quath doesn’t try to cheer me up.”

Besen frowned prettily. “Ummm. You are down in the mouth.”

“I’m not celebrating, is all.” Toby sipped his lotus juice and picked up a grain cube. He rapped it against the table and a small white weevil came squirming out. “Only way to get these bugs out, far as anybody knows,” he said with disgust, sweeping it away.