Toby got up and followed, hardly noticing the twinge in his leg where a metal spike had gouged him in the agro dome. That seemed like an age ago. He didn’t limp; his body had already fixed up most of the gouge.

He and Besen were at the back when the swarming pack reached the Bridge. To Toby there was a ghostlike quality to the rapid swerve of events. Again the officers stopped them. Again Killeen appeared on the balcony. Again he held them back with a stern speech.

This time Toby sensed the deep foreboding in the shuffling, muttering crowd, and now that he knew what to look for, he saw how his father used their fear to bind them to him. They needed to believe in him now, and he played upon that. If he hadn’t, they might easily have worked themselves into a frenzy, have boiled over into mutiny.

Killeen held them in part by sheer physical presence. He was a full chest-length taller than Toby, testament to his greater years. He used that, and the added perspective of the balcony, to cow the louder protestors.

Long ago, in response to the rapacious mechs, humanity had lengthened its life span by tinkering with its own growth pattern. The body given forth by natural evolution, far back on ancient Earth, had matured at about twenty of the Old Earth years. Then even the best body hit a plateau. Gradually it weakened with the years, the erosion of muscle and bone offset by the slow gathering of wisdom and experience.

To counter this, long ago the Family of Families had sculpted humanity. Now, people simply never reached that plateau where decline set in. People died of injury and mech attack, not age. They never stopped growing. Their rate slowed, of course—otherwise, elders would shoot up into sluggish giants. A woman a century old might not gain an extra finger’s width of height in a decade. But she grew. And she would have all the savvy and grit years brought.

This perpetual late youth held in check the inner magics that governed aging. The eldest Bishops were nearly twice as tall as Toby. This meant higher door sills and bigger meals. More important, elders towered over others, their experience given the force of bulk. Toby stood lanky for his eighteen Old Earth years, but he felt small and insignificant compared to Cermo or Killeen. In them, the weight of Family authority had firm physical presence.

This Killeen used with unconscious, telling effect. Still, voices called out protests. Oaths cut the air, strident and ragged with fear.

The only pressure keeping the crew back was the long history that had led them here. More than anyone, Killeen embodied that past. He stood fire-eyed, intimidating in his scowling silence. He had fooled the Mantis, gotten them off Snowglade. He had fallen through a planet and lived. Been swallowed by Quath, then been set free. He had killed mechs and laughed as he did it. And a voice like lightning had sought him out, had led them here. Against that they weighed their own fear.

At that stretched moment Quath came lumbering from the main corridor. There was a strange smell to the alien, a sweetsour aroma in the steadily warming ship. People moved uneasily aside. The alien was an ally, but that did not alter her strangeness.

Quath stopped, her great head turning. Ruby eyes on stalks twisted like vines, slowing to study a nervous upturned face, a bearded man’s hair, a woman’s clutched carrypouch, as if they were museum exhibits.

Then she sent, <I have finished communion with my kind. The great Cosmic Circle is prepared. They come fast upon us, for purpose I do not yet see. They say we must speak again with the magnetic being.>

Somehow, this straight, factual message carried the day. They quieted, looking to Killeen, who said calmly, “I’ll try. They’ll help us? With whatever comes?”

<They must.>

Toby thought it was a little funny that Quath didn’t say “They will” or “They’ll try”—but then the crowd began to drift away, and he realized that this odd, quiet note had gotten Killeen through another crisis.

As officers went back to their jobs, he and Besen managed to slip onto the Bridge. Killeen was talking to Quath, who snaked her neck and head into view. Metallic shanks scraped the walls as she moved, legs clattering with a staccato rhythm Toby found unsettling.

“That’s all they said?” Killeen demanded.

<The noise of transmission mounts. Plasma waves lap and tug at every word.>

“Where you figure we’re headed?”

<The Myriapodia have aged records which are perhaps of some use. They do not believe our goal can be the disk—that way lies chaos and death.>

Killeen chuckled without mirth. “Yeasay squared.”

<Others of the Myriapodia signify that the very oldest texts speak of portals here.>

“Portals to what?”

<No one knows, who has not crossed the portal. And that is blocked by mech inventions.>

“Here? What could survive?”

<So say other Myriapodia. We swarm, much confused on this point. Even the burning disk appears a more likely place for lasting structures than does the sphere of flame further in.>

Killeen paced, hands at the small of his back, shoulders set square and rigid. “We can’t last long, getting this close. We’re heating up, the jet is getting tighter around us—”

<We should slow.>

“That’ll just hang us out to dry. I want to be movin’, able to jet out of here as soon as—”

<A slight pause. Enough to let the Cosmic Circle lead the way.>

“Why?”

<I do not know.>

“Damn it! To helm this ship I have to know—”

<Hold. I sense something more here.>

Quath had caught it before the humans, but now Toby felt the prickly gathering of electrostatic charges along his scalp, the humming beneath his boots.

You have penetrated to my deep regions. You are at the edge of the jet. Now is the time to render farewells.

Killeen scowled. “What? You brought us here, you can’t—”

I feel the growing roll and stress of the disk at my feet. It sends devouring plumes of eating matter up, deep into my field lines. These erosions I must fight. I have little time for you.

“You said you were anchored in that stuff. All that talk about being immortal—”

Immortality is an aim, not a fact. Matter’s rub can erase even such as I. I am doomed to struggle, just as are you, though on scales of time and length you cannot know. I am far grander and share little else but this base property.

“So you abandon us, huh? Just when—”

I have final words for you, then I withdraw my store of complex waveforms from your region. By retreating to other parts of myself, the weave of fields far above the disk, I can preserve my sense of self, my remembrances of my long span, the essence of me.

“Damn it, we’re going to need help just to survive the next hour, never mind—”

I send a map, simple and misleading, but enough for you. I am lodged for the moment in the field lines which taper into the disk. You are riding down one of my flanks. You depart me in a moment, at the location marked.

Killeen shouted, “Damn you, you can’t—”

Small beings such as you should remember who they are.

“I’ll remember real well, thank you,” Killeen said sardonically.

Toby had never seen his father struggle so hard to control his temper, teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, flinty.

Toby opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment the wall screens all filled with the same figure. It was colored and three-dimensional, a tangle of lines and moving dots and splattered yellows and greens and reds.

Complexity, confusion. Toby felt awed by it and repelled at the same time. There were levels of meaning and motion here he knew he could not comprehend.

Then, as if the Magnetic Mind could tell how hard this was to understand, the figure simplified, became flat, two-dimensional. Geometry he could understand. The clarity of mathematics shaped to a human mind.