It seemed to take a long time to cross the thickness of the sliced Cyanean ghost-space. Besen puked and gasped, mouth gaping and messed. But Toby held on to his father, not to steady him but to simply know that he was there.

And then they were out, free. The hoop tumbled away, crushed. The Myriapodia ships banked after it, grasping at the battered cosmic string, turning back toward the poles of the entire rotating system.

Killeen found his voice. “Jocelyn. Try . . . try to follow them.”

<No.> Quath rattled her legs loudly, steel clanging and ringing. <The course we follow is toward the center.>

“What?” Killeen’s mouth sagged.

<As the Magnetic Mind directed.>

“Look . . . Family Bishop always spoke of True Center as our goal, without anybody knowing why. It was handed down. We believe it. But this . . .” Toby saw that his father was nearly finished, his endurance broken by the enormity of this place.

Then the gray exhaustion hardened. Killeen’s face lost its slackness, eyes regaining their composure. “Toward the black hole? Look, we’ve followed what you said. And that Magnetic Mind, too. And we’ve come as far as we can. Whatever was supposed to be here, waiting for us, it’s gone. Eaten up. Burned away.”

<I follow the ancient findings of the Myriapodia. There is more here. Inward.>

Killeen said flatly, “I don’t believe it.”

Toby looked ahead of them. The ergosphere was a rotating fat waist in the diagram, but ahead bulged something spitting light like an angry, setting sun. Except that it extended away in a great, curving sheet. It arced into the distance, and Toby understood at last the size of the demon black hole that was the ultimate, hidden cause of all the cosmic violence he had witnessed. The vicious maw. The reason why the Galactic Center was a swarming, frying pit of death and loss.

Through eye-stinging radiance he saw the spreading sheen where the hole came finally to rule even the fabric of the universe, clasping space-time until it bent to the unending will of gravity.

Through ten billion years the galaxy had fed it. Stars had perished, swept into it by the millions. And the civilizations that had thrived around those suns—they had been forced to flee or die.

He wondered what planets that sun had once harbored, whether they had given birth to organic molecules that could link and replicate themselves, whether intelligence had once brimmed on those lost shores. Whether creatures had glimpsed their fate, seen it as a boiling, growing presence in the sky. Perhaps they had known that at the dead center of such immense tragedy sat an absolute, unblinking void.

<We must fly on. Down, toward the thickest part of the spinning bulge.>

“The ergosphere?” Toby whispered.

<It is written. My kind have sacrificed their most valuable tool, to cut a passageway for your kind. You can carry forward the quest. The physics is momentarily appropriate for our entry.>

A strong timbre was back in Killeen’s voice. “Why?”

<The surge of matter that came from the dying star has now reached the innermost rim of the disk. It falls now into the ergosphere, creating fresh contortions. Only now, the Myriapodia say, can the ergosphere portal be entered.>

“Why?”

<It is like a living thing, flexing and restless. Pores in its great hide open in response to the massage of mass. Think of the ergosphere as a tight-stretched skin of space-time, across which waves wash. The infall of matter forces the entire beast to readjust itself, knit up the ravels of causality. As a star’s weight rains upon the beast, the resulting splashes in space-time open opportunities.>

“To do what?”

<To safely enter—or as safely as [untranslatable] allows. Only a black hole which has eaten a million suns can provide unscathed passage. Lesser holes would shred us. The Eater is so large, that its outer precincts are far from the central singularity. This renders its tidal forces here tolerable. A vessel slipping tangent to the ergosphere can find new routes, paths and passages.>

“To where?”

<I do not know—I cannot know. The illuminates describe a place of fundamental chaos, where physics rules randomly. Nothing in the universe can predict where we will end, once we pass through the portal.>

“It’s a gamble. If we wait—”

<Stars fall into the hole’s final embrace on average only once in a thousand years. This is the aperture moment.>

Toby studied Killeen. The glare surrounding Argo cut deep shadows in the face he knew so well, and in a hardening of the broad mouth Toby saw what they would do.

Photovores

Burning flowers rise from the disk. They blossom, spewing plasma seeds above and below the slow, spiraling churn.

Bright tongues press out. Positron swarms. Prickly, annihilating all they touch.

They dissolve where they strike the incoming, leaden matter. Antimatter spills and licks and dies. A blaze of hard gamma, cleansing purity.

Their funeral pyre is an outward-ramming wall of pure photons. Intense, implacable. Pushing back matter that wants to fall into the grasp of the gravity well.

Electromagnetic stresses work along the surface of the expanding pressure-bubble. Green worms twisting. Dark oblongs of troubled mass slow, hesitate above the fray. The infall halts.

Yet this is the food of the Eater itself, the raw material of the disk and all the following fury. The disk begins to starve. Not immediately, for light takes hours to cross the hurricane forests of furious, grinding gravity.

Inertial moments tick on. The disk ebbs. In turn, its light pressure—now holding back a jostling layer of anxious, ionized mass—drains away.

As the press of photons subsides, matter resumes its fatal fall. Again streams of black mass spiral down. The disk accepts this tribute. Fire-flowers again shatter clumps, smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge.

So goes the press and relax, press and relax. Perpetual armature. Fountain. Life source.

Above the disk, safe from the sting, hang motes. Sheets, planes, herds. Uncountable. Billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Holding steady.

The photovores are grazing.

They coast on the fitful breeze of electrons and protons blown out by the Eater’s angry disk. Great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread, catching the particle wind’s steady push. Vectoring.

They apply magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Turning, they wage a constant struggle to slip free of the Eater’s gravitational tug.

Yet they must use these ruling forces in their own perpetual, gliding dance. This is ordained.

At times the herds fail to negotiate the complex balance of outward winds against the inward, seductive drag. Whole sheets will peel away.

Some are cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they would strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare hammers them. They burst into tiny pinpricks of dying light.

But not now. A greater governing force approaches.

Ink-dark lenses swivel to regard an intruder. Easing in from high along the Eater’s axis, sensors see only ceramic slabs and high-impact buffers. Intelligence sheathed against the torrent. Circuits an atom wide, filmy substrates, helium-cold junctions—all are vulnerable here to the sting of gamma rays and hard nuclei. Even the exalted wear armor.

But the photovores see only a presence they should honor. The vast sailing herds part. Ivory sheets curl back to reveal still deeper planes: yellow-gold light seekers.

These live to soak in photons and excrete microwave beams. With minds no more complex than the tube worms of ancient oceans, they are each a single electromagnetic gut, head to tail. Placid conduits.