Some consolation, Toby thought. Probably they all were on the same trip.

“Did your brothers map this place?” Killeen demanded impatiently.

<I am processing their records now with a hindbrain. Here.>

The screens swam with colors, forming and reforming into images that might make sense to the Myriapodia, Toby thought, but not to him.

The image was three-dimensional, shot through with gaudy rushing dots. It whirled and jumped and made no sense. Then Quath squashed it down to two dimensions, and Toby could see what was happening.

“That empty ball at the center—it’s the black hole, right?” he asked his Isaac Aspect. He heard a rapid cross talk, Zeno’s sad static-clogged phrases, entries spooling out from a text-chip he carried but could not read by himself.

Indeed. I consulted with Zeno, who agrees that these Myriapodia have correctly mapped the geometry near it, as well. The bulging, shaded region wrapped around the hole is the ergosphere—a zone where the black hole’s spin warps everything, forcing spacetime to rotate with the hole itself.

“Sounds dangerous.”

No one knows. Zeno’s folk believed that the ergosphere was a place where nearly all the energy of a ship would be required simply to keep from falling into the black hole itself.

Toby watched the figure on the wall screens, the way the spin of the hole made a whirlpool in space. Isaac told him that it was not matter spinning around there, but space-time itself.

“Uh, what’s space-time? I mean, I know space, and time’s what a clock talks about, but . . .”

Quath broke into his mind, transmitting directly.

<Lower beings do not see the fundamental essence of the world, which combines space and time. Do not knit a knot of concern for this. Even the Myriapodia do not see space-time. We, too, divide it into the easier ideas of distance and duration.>

Until that moment Toby had not realized that Quath could pick up his whispering talks with his own Aspects. He felt embarrassed, then irked—and then pushed aside his feelings. No time for that now.

“So how do we get out of here?”

<We do not.>

“Huh?” Toby noticed the dashed line of their planned trajectory. It lifted some, then plunged toward the top crescent-shaped blob.

<We must pass through the Cyaneans. There is no other way to enter the portal that the Myriapodia believe dwells here.>

“Those? The crescents? They’re awfully close to that ergosphere thing.” The hazy crescents hovered like caps over the poles of the black hole, seeming to screen it.

<The Cosmic Circle will clear our way.>

Toby looked around, dazed more by the ideas that were coming thick and fast than by the fluttering, lurching waves that swept through Argo. More tidal stresses, twisting with immense hands.

Then it dawned on him that everyone in the Bridge was looking at him. He blinked. Knowing his easy way with Quath, Killeen had just let Toby extract information from the alien. Well, it was efficient.

“So what do we do now?” Killeen studied Quath as if he could read an expression in the great, many-eyed head.

<Let the Cosmic Circle do its work.>

“It’s going to get us out of this?”

<The Myriapodia believe this is the only path.>

Killeen paused, reflecting as the flickering screens lit the Bridge with eerie, shifting patterns. He was at the end of his tether, Toby saw, tired and confused. His heart went out to his father, caught in this huge engine of destruction, led here by hopes and legends, driven by fear. He let go of Besen and went to his father’s side. Hesitantly, as Killeen watched the vibrant flux, he reached out and clasped Toby’s arm.

They stood that way for a long moment, watching now as the Myriapodia ships came into view. Against the seethe of sky and mass Toby saw that this place was not evil or good, but something far worse. It was indifferent. Beauty lay here, and terror. It could witness anything, this churning machine. Its unforgivable vast resplendence mocked the human plight.

The glinting Myriapodia ships held the huge cosmic hoop between them in a magnetic grip, and it glowed with intense brilliance. Isaac told Toby that the hoop was gathering energy as it fell toward the black hole. It passed through the magnetic fields anchored in the hole and extracted from them strong currents, electrical surges that lit up the hoop like an immense sign.

<The cusp moment approaches.>

“That the same as what the Magnetic Mind said?” Killeen whispered, eyes fixed on the screens. In the warming air the Bridge was silent.

<No. This is the end of the mech device.>

Toby frowned. “Mech? What’s mech-made here?”

<The Cyaneans. They are great twisted regions of spacetime, turbulence trapped in caps. They would shred us.>

“So? Just more of the weird weather here—”

<The mechanicals made the Cyaneans.>

Killeen and Toby alike regarded Quath with disbelief. The alien went on, <The mechanicals can bring great forces to bear. You saw their massive, shadowy constructions, feeding on the energy and matter here. Their researches are many and wide.>

“But . . . the Cyaneans? Hard to believe,” Killeen said. “Those things, they’re huge.”

<Larger than stars. That is why the Myriapodia bring their own craft to bear. My kind shall lead the way.>

The Cosmic Circle had raced ahead of Argo now. Then on the major wall screen Toby saw ahead an enormous sheet—the Cyaneans. It was like a choppy gray sea, waves of blacks and troughs of white making shifting patterns as far as the eye could see.

In the brilliant white-hot glare of yellows and reds that blazed up all around them, the eerie lack of color in the Cyaneans filled Toby with a sinking dread. He felt as though the bottom had fallen out of his stomach. Only Besen steadied him, holding from one side while Toby stood with the other arm around his father. There was nothing here for mere humans to do.

Ahead, the hoop plunged down into the gray, rippling expanse. And cut. Like a knife, it sheared through the ashen surface and deep, deep into the interior.

Released, the edges of the strange dusky surface pulled away. They curled away from the Cosmic Circle, peeling back.

But the hoop paid a price. It crumpled along its leading edge. The resistance of the turbulence dented and deformed it.

Toby could not guess what colossal energies grappled there. The sharpness of the Cosmic Circle was a mere atom wide, his Isaac Aspect said, but its tight curvature was more than equal to the gray, storming surges. It pierced the tossing turbulence, sending sputtering hot light in its wake.

“What . . . what do we do?” Killeen asked quietly.

<Follow the Cosmic Circle.> Quath sent a chorus of lilting sounds through the human-linked sensorium, a plaintive long note of sympathy.

Killeen made a sign to Jocelyn, who was watching him with round, frightened eyes. She turned the ship downward, into more of the blazing luminosity, toward the shifting gray sheet. Long moments passed as the grayness swelled like an impassable wall of strangely shifting stone.

They rushed into the shadowy gap carved by the hoop. To all sides peaks and valleys formed and dissolved, like mountains of ash made from burned bones.

Fringes of the stuff washed over Argo and brought dizzying, reeling moments when Toby thought he had been snatched up by his heels and shaken, upside down, hair fraying in the air. Crew vomited on the Bridge. Others howled with fright and nausea. The ship’s deep skeleton protested, popping and creaking.

But the long passage stayed open. Once cut, it peeled back to form new zones of contorted space-time. Argo sped after the glowing, crumpling hoop.