You do not believe it.

“Why should I? Who would, with half a brain?”

Yet strange vectors work here.

“Look, Abraham we lost at the Calamity, the fall of Citadel Bishop. That was plenty years back and a hell of a long way from here.”

Exactly.

“What you mean by that?”

How would some creature not even made of matter at all, this far distant, know his name?

That stopped Toby for a moment. “Okay, I don’t know. But mechs, they make records of everything. Maybe the Magnetic Mind learned it from them.”

But the Mind seems to be no friend of mechs.

“Who knows, in this craziness?”

I sometimes wonder about the connection between these entities. Remember the Mantis?

“Sure.”

The thought chilled him. The Mantis had pursued Family Bishop, “harvesting” them, killing their bodies and sucking away their selves so that the Family could extract no chipmemory. These suredead the Mantis fashioned into grotesque contortions that it termed “art”—and had displayed to Killeen and Toby with a touch of something like pride.

The Mantis stood in awe of the Magnetic Mind. It may have offered up its knowledge of us, of our ways and persons, to the Mind.

He felt Shibo as though she were sitting before him cross-legged, relaxed and yet ready to move in an instant. “I . . . I don’t want to think about that now.”

Such memories can hobble us, dear Toby, but they must be faced.

“Hey, some other time, okay?” He felt her somehow shift, pressures adjusting. He sighed with relief and felt better.

It is interesting that now your father has the crew behind him, supporting what he had said all along he wanted—to fly to the True Center, and find there what the ancient texts said was a miraculous place.

Toby shrugged. “Maybe that’s what a talent for being Cap’n means. You finagle things around until you like them.”

He had let his gaze drift aimlessly, and didn’t notice his father approaching. Killeen asked sharply, “What’re you saying?”

It was the height of impoliteness to intrude into conversation with an Aspect—much less with a Personality, which could absorb your whole attention. Toby gulped. “I, I was just—”

“I lip-read you saying ‘Cap’n.’ What is it you can’t say to my face?”

“Idle talk, that’s all.”

Killeen licked his lips, hesitated, then plunged on. “It’s Shibo, isn’t it?”

“Well, yeasay, but—”

“I just want to say this. So she hears it straight from me.” Killeen stared deeply into Toby’s eyes, as if somehow he could see the compact intelligence that Toby felt as a looming wall.

“Dad, I don’t think—”

“Shibo, we’re going to need your judgment up ahead. I’m following my instincts here, and something big is going to happen.”

“Dad, come on, I—”

“Remember how we’d talk over plans, figure the best next move, just you and me? I miss that. I miss that a hell of a lot. I know I won’t get it back, but if you have any ideas, any guess about what I should do, you speak up, okay?” Killeen’s eyes were pleading. He blinked furiously, holding back tears. “Through Toby. I’ll understand, I promise I will.”

“Dad . . . you know . . .”

Sensations rose in Toby, strange coursing currents of excitement, desire, hoarse murmurs, smells layering the air, husky urgings, remembered moments of skin sliding, satiny, a sheen of sweat—

He jerked away, staggered. Then a hand patted his shoulder.

Killeen drew a long breath. “Thank you, son. I needed that. Just a moment with her, that’s all.”

Before Toby could spit out a rebuke, Killeen stepped back, saluted, turned—and strode away, the crisp Cap’n again. Toby felt irritated, used. He tasted sharp, bitter bile in the back of his mouth. Damn him! But in the same moment he could see the anguish in his father, and the turmoil that the man could not let rise to the surface.

It is wise to forget this.

“Yeasay, only wisdom’s not my strong area.”

You are much like your father.

A faint tinkling laughter sounded in his mind. A Personality could take a certain abstract distance from his seething world, Toby saw, and catch the amusement of it. Humor usually invisible to him.

There is an old Family Knight saying, time-honored. Some believe it comes from Old Earth. We say that life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.

“Makes sense. Maybe that just means we shouldn’t look back over our shoulder too much, see what’s gainin’ on us.”

Good advice as well.

Toby leaned against a steel bulkhead and sighed. Shibo towered in his mind, her serene intelligence sifting through what he saw with a finer, more patient hand.

I wonder who else—or what else—wants us to come here?

“I can’t see what makes anybody think people could live in this place. Quath maybe, but not humans. All those old engravings, what were they talking about? Miraculous, sure—” he swept a hand at the view. “But dead.”

The wall screens sputtered with virulent radiance. The disk of inward-orbiting matter drew nearer, revealing more fine-grained whorls of color and glowing violence. Now the doomed star they had seen days before was no longer a lopsided, blazing egg. It had exploded into flares, a storm being sucked greedily into the outer rim of the disk. It was like a tortured, twisted sun setting on the far horizon above a flaming landscape. “Looks like a frying abyss to me.”

With a gut-tightening surge of feeling, Toby knew that they didn’t belong here. The Families were all nomads, in the long run. Only machines could live in this huge, fiery engine. The Families were here now only because of Argo, another mechanism made in the great days of human antiquity. Machines like Argo were a natural extension of the human hand, but mechs were a cancer. Planets were not their home. Let cold space and burning matter be their realm. So what of human scope could lie here?

Perhaps we are being narrow of vision.

“What’s that mean?”

Look there. The threads of green.

The Argo was plunging ever closer to the disk, and now they could see the far rim in profile. Gouts of angry red boiled up from the churning plane where the freshly eaten star was working its way inward. Lumps were being chewed as they rotated in the streams.

“So? Looks like a rat getting digested by a snake.”

True. Not pretty, probably not even if you’re a snake.

“Oh, I see. Those green strands above the plane there?”

Toby could now make out weaving filaments of deep jade that stood above where the star was being devoured. They were like reeds above swamp water, blowing in a breeze.

“It flashes, see?” Blue-green fibers winked with darting yellow. “Like frozen lightning, sort of.”

We might be wrong, that nothing else lives here.

“Ummm. Lightning life?”

The Bridge officers had noticed the threads, too. Some fumbled with ship’s instruments, focusing sensors on them. Knots and furious snarls climbed up the glowing green lines.

“The stuff ripped off the star—looks like it’s fouling up those threads,” Toby said.

Jocelyn had managed to get the Argo’s antennas to narrow in on the threads, despite the turbulent plasma buffeting the ship. The speakers on the Bridge sputtered and buzzed with the fizzing emissions of the disk—and then eerie high wails cut through the mushy wall of sound.

“What’s that?” Jocelyn called. “It sounds terrible.”

Killeen’s mouth twisted at the shrill chorus. Each voice would rise momentarily over the others, peal forth a mournful note, and then subside into the lacing pattern of lament. “Maybe the Magnetic Mind’s not the only thing that knows how to live on electricity.”