A deep strumming came up through Toby’s heels. At first he thought it was the ship’s acceleration as it fought against the lurking gravitational pulls here in this riot of mass and light. Then he noticed that the quivering came and went with a slow rhythm. He felt it through his ears and hands, too. Pulses. Then the odd vibration climbed into the massive walls and filled the air of the Bridge with a heavy presence.

Give sign if you perceive.

The voice was gritty, granite-hard, immense.

“Not like before,” Killeen whispered. “Then it used our sensoria. Now—look, the whole room is shivering.”

I am charged with a task of discernment. If you be of the tribe of Bishop, give voice.

The Bridge was acting as a giant amplifier for the hollow, lordly voice, the walls ringing and shaking like a loudspeaker. Toby wondered how a thing that was just magnetic fields, with no weight or substance, could do that.

Killeen looked cornered, surrounded by the voice. Then he barked out, “Bishops we are. I’m Killeen. Remember?”

So you are. I forget nothing, and store tidings of times ancient beyond your imaginings in the curls and knots of my being. I recall your particular flat odor and squashed, slanted self. Good—I have been enjoined to inspect you.

“By who?” Killeen called. The Bridge crew stood transfixed, and the voice ignored him.

I seek another as well. It is termed “Toby” and must be with you if you are to receive further attentions from the inner realm.

“I’m here,” Toby shouted.

Are you? Let me taste . . . Each of you tiny things has a different aroma, an angularity. Such pointless profusion!

“We’re different people!” Toby protested.

Skittering spokes shot through him, electric-quick and bristling with points of pain. Probing. Then they were gone.

You are the flavor termed “Toby”—your animal signatures match the genetic inventory, crude though it is. Creation is so trivially diverse, endowing each of you with oblique gene-scents and dusky shadings. Such a waste of natural craft! Detail and artful turns, needlessly multiplied, throwing reason to ruination.

“We like ourselves pretty well,” Toby said, tight-lipped.

So you do. All is illusion. Still, I must report that you are here. Then I hope to be quit of this obligation and irritant.

“Wait!” Toby cried. “What’s this about? Who wants to know?”

A power which sits further inward.

“Well, what is it?”

It is not of the cold, dead flecks of matter such as you inhabit. The power which presses me to this task speaks to me through my feet, which rest in the warm hearth of the plasma disk.

“Yeasay,” Toby persisted, “so it’s a, a plasma cloud?” Whatever that was.

It dwells somewhere below me, in storm-cut majesty, but is unknowable to as large an entity as I.

Killeen called, “You said last time, years ago, that my father had something to do with this.”

Years? I do not know such terms . . .

Killeen said, “A major part of our present lifetimes. I—”

But which “present” do you reside in? Duration, distance—these are primitive terms.

Killeen was visibly puzzled. “Look, was my father—”

Tiny forms such as yourselves are impossible to resolve in the warp of energies at my feet. But such terms and names come rippling up to me, along the cables of myself. When such information was loaded onto my eternal tangle of knowledge-knots, and thus the age of this clotted cognizance, I cannot know. Forms such as yourself were once there, yes—squalid primitives. Their persistence in the realm of immense clashes-imponderable is quite unlikely.

“You’re saying he’s dead?” Killeen asked sharply.

Tiny lives wink like flames beneath my footpoints. My whole motivation to assume this field-form is to rise above mortality and its minute matters. I cannot register small endings, any more than animals like you sense grains of sand as you trod them.

“Is he—”

I go. If the power below desires more, I shall touch you further.

“Wait! We need to know what to do here, how to escape—”

The vibration of the Bridge walls cut off, leaving a hush.

Killeen threw up his hands, swearing, and then drove a fist into the wall. A painful smack.

This shocked Toby more than the abrupt departure of the Magnetic Mind. He realized how much his father had bottled up, how desperate he was beneath his flinty exterior.

“Dad—what did it mean? What—”

“Damned if I know. That thing treats us like bugs.”

“Well, we don’t much like to talk to bugs, either,” Toby pointed out reasonably, hoping to josh Killeen out of his scowling, nasty mood. Then he thought a moment and added to himself, Except Quath.

“I wonder if it could be? My father, Abraham, here?”

“Don’t see how. We never found his body at the Citadel—but we had to run pretty quick then, there wasn’t much time.” He shook his head in a flicker of weariness. “That was a long time ago, a long way off.”

—and Toby felt it all again. Steel stripped from stone, caved-in ceilings, masonry and smashed furniture, lives ripped away. Smoke seething from crackling fires. Intricate warrens squashed into stone and slag. Blood running in gutters. Rivulets of browning red running from beneath collapsed buildings. The strange silence after the mech flyers had left. Wind blowing through snapped-off girders.

—And his father, wandering the ruins. Abraham! he had shouted. Over and over. The name snatched away by a hungry wind, lost in swirls of smoke.

Then he was back from the searing memories. He watched his father blink, face haggard, and then pull himself together.

Killeen said shakily, “I figured he was dead. Had to be.”

In Killeen’s face Toby saw how much his father wanted to believe that somehow Abraham was here, that the Magnetic Mind knew more than they did. But at the same time, the Mind obviously found humans repugnant, and would not lift a finger to help them.

Then Toby reminded himself that the Mind had no fingers, nothing but electromagnetic pressures and waves. But didn’t it say it had feet?

When the Mind had spoken to them before, back on Trump, it had said something about being an intelligence that had slipped free of matter, and lived solely in the states available to magnetic fields. Apparently such states lasted longer. The Mind seemed to think it was immortal. He remembered Killeen chuckling, saying, “Forever’s a long time”—because the Mind might be huge and powerful, but it could sure seem petty and finite, too. Which made it even harder to deal with. A god, at least, wouldn’t be insulting.

“Look, Dad, what are you going to do?” Maybe in a moment of openness like this Killeen would say what he really thought.

“Do?” Killeen looked at Toby as though just noticing him. “Get into that jet. See what it’s like.”

“Why? Can we escape that way?”

Killeen gave him a veiled look. “That gas is movin’ out pretty quick. It’ll give us a boost, maybe even shield us some. Make us hard to pinpoint.”

“We can ride it outward?”

“Could be.”

Toby grinned. “Great. Crew’ll be glad to hear that.”

“Oh? How come?”

“They’re worried, think you just want to go further on in, no matter what.”

Killeen gave nothing away. “I’m not saying the jet idea will work. We’ll just try.”

“Sure, Dad, sure—but there’s hope, right?”

Killeen gazed at his son for a long while, emotions playing across his face so rapidly that Toby could not read them. “Could be. Could be.”