Not much time for guilt. Cermo pressed him into a gang to repair the dome, to slap on pressure patches, to secure ship’s atmosphere for the next attack.

But there wasn’t any attack. The mechs had taken severe losses from Argo’s automatic defenses. She was an old ship but still pretty agile.

People celebrated like it was a victory. Toby wondered if maybe the mechs had just decided to let Argo go on, into more dangerous territory. Let the Eater do their job for them.

The thought gave him a sinking sensation, like stepping off into a metallic-tasting chasm. Into the void.

EIGHT

The Aperture Moment

“What’s your favorite dish?” Besen asked.

“Huh? Oh—the nearest.” Toby noticed that he was shoveling in cauliflower with yellow cheese melted over it. Not his favorite dish, but then he hadn’t been tasting it anyway.

“Some gourmet you are.” She wrinkled her nose at him.

“Look, I don’t want to have good taste, I just want things that taste good.”

He finished the cauliflower and looked for anything that might be left. The best thing about communal eating was that at the end of the meal extras got passed around. A quick eater got more, and Toby was always hungry. Even when they were zooming down toward a huge disk of white-hot fire, he responded to the rumble in his stomach.

“You don’t look concerned,” Besen said.

Toby studied her face. The deaths only hours before had been acknowledged in a ship-wide ceremony. Now, by necessity, they got back to business, teams repairing the damage, a bustle of purpose. Besen was not one to give a lot away, but he could read the tightening around the edges of her mouth, the slight high-strung cant of her head.

“No point in worrying.” He took her hand across the table and squeezed. “Bigger heads than ours are working on this thing.”

Besen bit nervously at her lip. He leaned across the table and gave her a light kiss on the brow. “Ummmm,” she said, but didn’t stop chewing.

“We’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones.” He could do no such thing, but he had to cheer her up.

“Do you really think so?”

“Sure. Uh, could you reach me those potatoes?”

“What an animal! Facing death, and he wants to eat.”

“Only smart thing to do, seems to me.”

“My stomach feels tight. I can’t get anything down.” She lifted a pea pod with her chopsticks, bit off a fraction, and put it back.

“Well, maybe some other recreation will take your mind off things.” He gave her a blank face.

“Some other—oh. You beast!”

“I hear it’s good for the circulation.”

“First food, then—no, I will not jump into the sack with you while we are flying into the teeth of, of—”

“No need to throw a duck fit.”

“Well—I mean—it’s so totally inappropriate.”

He pretended to consider the question deeply, complete with a profound scowl. “Ummm. What’s a better way to vote in favor of there being a future? That’s what the whole thing points toward, after all.”

She snorted. “I thought it was about love.”

“That, too. But when we’re all candidates for the bone orchard—only who’s going to bury us here, when there’s no dirt for a cemetery anyway?—the oldest human ritual is a, well, a gesture of faith. Faith in the future.”

“So sex is faith now?” She was starting to grin, which had been his aim. “You have an odd religion.”

“I worship at the altar of my choosing,” he said with a staged haughty air.

“And what’s that about the oldest ritual? I can think of some more uplifting ones.”

Toby consulted with Isaac, who was a gold mine of ancient terms, in the space of a heartbeat. “They used to call it ‘the beast with two backs’—so maybe you have a point.”

Besen gave him a grin that began wickedly and slid into a tentative shyness. “You were really just joshing me out of my mood, weren’t you?”

“Um.”

“You don’t like to admit it, but you are very kind, in your own way, behind that fake toughness.”

“You have unmasked me, madam.”

“Ummm.” She eyed him speculatively. “How much time is it, until we get really close to the disk?”

“I can’t tell. The Bridge is too busy to give out details, and we’re swooping in along a complicated kind of spiral, so—say, why do you want to know?”

“Well, if there really is enough time . . .”

“You hussy! Here I was just trying to cheer you up—”

“Oh, forget it. You can’t take a little ribbing yourself.” She poked him in the chest with a finger. “Come on, Romeo, let’s see what the wall screens tell us. I guess you’ve used up your supply of romance for the week.”

“Then I’ll have to stop off and pick up my next allotment. Where do I go?”

“Don’t think I can’t tell you where to go—get moving.”

He had managed to kid her out of her jittery depression, but the raging cauldron visible on the big Assembly Hall screen was enough to bring it all back. He put his arm around her as they stood with a large crowd of the Family, watching the harsh glare of the disk seem to spread and wriggle as they drew nearer.

“Where are we going in all this?” Besen asked, wonder and fear mingling in her tone.

“I don’t know. I can’t even guess.”

“The disk, it’s like a huge world or something.”

“A world is nothing here, a fly speck.”

“But I can see clouds down there. And that twisty thing, it almost looks like a river.”

“Almost ain’t the same as is. Those clouds are really plasma that would boil away your hand in an eye-blink. That river, my faithful Aspect tells me, is some kind of magnetic knot that’s gotten caught up in the disk as it churns around.”

“But it looks so familiar, somehow.”

Toby’s mouth twisted, eyes distant. “We need to see familiar things here. Otherwise it’s too strange to deal with.”

Besen paused, then nodded soberly. “My teacher Aspect just said that ‘river’ is bigger than a whole planet. Lots bigger. And that the disk is the size of a solar system.”

“Sometimes I wish our Aspects wouldn’t tell us so much.” She nodded, her hair tumbling in the low gravity. “I felt better when I thought that little squiggle was a river. Still, with the Aspects we can get all branches of learning.”

Toby chuckled dryly. “Branches, yeasay. But none of the roots.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t tell us what all this means.”

“They know lots of facts and numbers, though.”

“Maybe that’s all we can trust them with. Anyway, this place, it’s big-time stuff.” He had to keep up a casual face, but the approaching disk, swelling, throbbing with seething light, was starting to inspire in him less awe and more plain old fear.

“And it eats stars. We don’t belong here.”

“Yeasay to that, too. Only somebody thinks we do.”

“And your father believes it, too. He decides.”

A note of bitterness had crept into her voice. Around them jaws clenched, eyes whitened as a giant white flare burst across the disk, and a low growl rose. Slowly it dawned on Toby that the entire Assembly Hall murmured with discontent, with dread, with tight-stretched anxiety. The deaths had sobered them, loosened Killeen’s hold. A bitter wind stirred them all.

A band of men and women at the far side of the Hall began shouting. Before Toby could understand what was happening, the crowd began to move. They knocked over tables and squeezed through the outer doorways, pressing on with gathering energy, like a tide sucked forward by an irresistible moon. Sour words flew, boots thumped on the deck, the air rang with harsh accusation.