Dimly they know that this descending presence is the cause of their being. Herds shear apart in reverence for its passage.

A trembling chorus of greeting. The coasting mass ignores them.

Their hissing microwaves waver. Momentary confusion. Then come fresh orders. They focus all their abundance upon the passing presence. The visitor needs more power here. They feed it.

Accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It never notices the layers and multitudes peeling back, their gigahertz voices joined in glad chorus. They are plankton. It ingests their offering without heed.

In any case, a worsening discussion preoccupies it.

Our/Your deception went well. But I/We do not like their close approach to the Wedge.

The infalling star lashes the disk. They will probably perish there quite soon.

They may make use of turbulence.

I/You have been trying to understand their way of thinking. Let us discourse in their style of two-valuedness. It may serve to anticipate their moves.

Like this? I am merely me?

And I am a sole self as well. See how simple?

Stunted. Awkward.

Yet this is how they live.

As an experiment, I accept. The concept of “me” is so limiting. Nevertheless—Report!

Our direct intrusion into their craft went as planned. We interrogated their systems with the bolt of electrical discharges.

These craft-systems are loyal to us?

No. They cannot be, without destroying themselves.

We cannot master such minds?

They spring from an era when the primates knew how to protect against us.

Did they yield up the secrets we seek?

Not entirely. They know that this heritage the humans have is embedded in hard matter.

Improbable, on the face of it.

Though true, apparently.

Who would ever use such savage methods?

The primates were in decline when they devised this record, recall. Any electrical memory we would eventually subvert.

So it is in their ship?

Apparently, but not all of it. Encased in matter somehow. The Legacies, they term it. But the vessel of containment is not clear.

This clarifies matters. We must vaporize their craft.

Not all the needed information is there.

Where is the rest of it?

We do not know.

Is this why they speak to the magnetic Phylum?

To lodge their secrets there? That would make our task difficult.

You might be able to force compliance from that Phylum.

To do so entails moving enough mass to interrupt their field lines massively. The energetics are daunting.

Let you hope that is not called for.

Perhaps it is best to probe further, despite the dangerous warp of the quasi-mechanicals’ hoop-discontinuity.

With the same energies, directed into the heart of their craft, they would be vapor now.

Be mindful: The electrical discharges we devised infested their very innermost intelligences. Their own electrominds—of limited breadth, but useful—now listen for us.

Can they find these Legacies?

They already have some of them.

Excellent! What are they?

A guide to the location of their own genetic heritage.

A genome map?

Apparently.

That is of no danger to us.

Apparently.

You seem uncertain.

There are odd traces of data woven into the code. Useless, it would seem.

Errors, probably.

I wish we could be sure.

One must live with such ambiguities. It is of our and your nature to tolerate them.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There are no clear signs that any primates have reached the Wedge in a long time.

Some surely have gotten through.

Many of us dislike talk of the Wedge.

Now who is uncomfortable with ambiguity?

The decision to assault the Wedge long ago came from all of us.

No—it was mostly yours.

That is oversimplified! I knew this division into two selves would vex me! See? It leads to blame—self-blame. Surely you must admit that the idea, to carve the Wedge to pieces with a hoop-discontinuity, was a good one.

Except that the Wedge swallowed the hoops.

We need not dwell on memories. The Wedge will yield to us in time.

Exactly, though not the way you mean. The Wedge is in time—which is why we cannot reach it.

Our science will master it eventually. We have surpassed all else that ventured here. What matters this, if they enter the Wedge?

We have deployed a relay point. It will perch at the lip of the Wedge, picking up signals from their craft, sending them to us.

That requires great energy of the relay ship. Only the Wedge can hang suspended against the slide of space.

True. But the effort will be repaid.

We tried such methods before—and lost much.

This time is vastly more important.

Concentrate on these primates! They are the past—shuck them from us.

There is something of the future in them.

Ignore such musings. You have a mission—do it.

We must learn the nature of the threat. Otherwise we cannot be sure we can in fact expunge it.

Of course we can.

Ignorance is not an effective strategy.

I do not like your tone, Aesthetic.

Then I am understood.

PART THREE

The Time Pit

ONE

Deep Reality

They plunged toward the boundary sheet of the ergosphere. Toby thought it looked like the flexing skin of some blistered animal, leathery and trembling with perpetual rage.

Then Argo shot along it, accelerating in the quickening gravity, and his perspective changed. Now it was like a troubled sea just below, tossed with wrinkles and waves. Big combers collided with each other in choppy sprays, whipped into a frenzy by an unseen storm.

“Hold on,” Killeen said stiffly.

Toby was strapped into a Bridge couch. Gravity shifted all around them, plucking at his clothes, fidgeting in his inner ear, tilting his sensorium so that even his vision lurched and heaved. His crackling, faint Zeno Aspect volunteered,

These forces . . . vagrant . . . were recorded by . . . expeditions . . . humans . . . described them as “like an irritated tiger shaking a mouse.”

“Ummm . . . what’s a tiger?” Toby had seen field mice, had trapped the sharp-toothed rodents who ate their grain in Citadel Bishop. Zeno sent a foggy picture of something gazing with quiet, threatening ferocity. Flaring full-color into his sensorium, it sent a chill of alarm through Toby, until Zeno said,

This creature . . . data says . . . scarcely longer than your hand.

“What a relief.” He imagined being picked up and tossed around by a cat. The stomach-churning lurches and twists he could take, but sometimes the turbulence felt like whispery fingers trailing along his skin, eerie and ghostlike.