Bridge officers were in couches, but the Cap’n paced the deck grimly, fighting the tugs and yanks of vagrant gravity, unwilling to yield. No one dared interrupt Killeen’s thoughts as his boots thumped hard, hands clasped behind his back, face a permanent scowl.

Toby could see that his father was steeling himself against what looked like certain disaster. To charge into the unknown was one thing, a long habit for the Families. But to slam into the face of a living blackness . . .

Killeen nodded to Jocelyn. “Now.”

A sliding sensation. Toby gulped. A stretching wrench. The entire Bridge seemed to hold its breath.

They plunged toward the rippling skin of the ergosphere. The surface worked with gales black as carbon. Troughs and crests were lit by a hell-red glow, light bent and squeezed by brute gravity.

Jocelyn whispered, throat tight, “This is it!”

—and they dove beneath the waves.

In.

Through.

Toby blinked. No shock, no collision. Smooth, swift sailing into—

Flaming bullets. They rode through a rain of light.

To Toby the interior of the ergosphere was a sullen night, peppered by blinding, quick streaks of luminosity. Fever-bright pellets shot by them—a pelting shower in red and violet and a strange, hot green.

“What . . . what is this place?” Toby whispered.

<The time pit,> Quath sent.

“You mean the black hole?”

<That swallower lies further in. This is the region whirled into being by the rotation of the black hole. A murderous place. Here space-time is dragged around by the devourer’s dark mass, so that they become scrambled.> Quath rattled and twirled her eye-stalks to illustrate.

“Huh? Scrambles what?”

<Time and space. They are truly linked, and deep reality appears only to those who can see in space-time.>

“Well, I can see pretty near any part of the spectrum—”

<You and I do not share the privilege of perceiving spacetime directly. I doubt that anything which struggles up out of lesser life can see it so, alas. It must be like [untranslatable]. Or being able to see gravity itself as a vital thing, elastic.>

“How come we’re so dumb?” The luminous downpour outside hammered harder, the wall screen splashing the faces of everyone on the bridge with sparking, fleeting colors. No one moved. Argo shook and popped with unseen strains. Toby’s sour stomach told him that gravity was shifting restlessly, like a prowling beast.

<To split the true world into simpler ones is a great convenience. So we sense space easily, but leave the riddle of time to be governed by the ticking of our machines, our clocks.>

Toby grimaced. “Time is just what clocks tell, mother of maggots. Don’t fancy it up.”

<But time is not merely that. It lives and wrestles with its marriage partner, the three dimensions of extension that we can sense. Their struggle is never done, and rules all. Here in the time pit, they wage it to the full.>

Toby shook his head, feeling woozy. “Too much for me.”

The Bridge lay silent, awed. The bulk of the crew was crammed into the ship’s center, shielded against the sleeting particles that even Argo’s magnetic fields could not fully deflect. Toby and the others on the Bridge had taken a concoction drawn up by one of Jocelyn’s Aspects, to repair any radiation damage to their body cells. It was a milky drink that tasted like cinders somebody’d peed on, but Jocelyn said it held tiny critters that could fix up shattered molecules, stitch together broken structures, like a smidge of a seamstress.

Right now Toby felt like the damage was all in his stomach. It lurched and squeezed as the direction of gravity swung and snaked like an unmoored cable. He held on to his couch and breathed through his mouth, not minding the saliva that fell from his lips—until it then looped through the air as gravity abruptly curled and pulsed—sending the warm gop back into his right eye.

“Augh!”

“You all right, son?” Killeen called.

“Uh, yeah. Kinda woozy, is all.”

Killeen gave him a quick, sympathetic smile. “Hold on. It’ll probably get worse.”

Abruptly there rose in him a silent, stony presence—Shibo, her Personality sending silky fingers of reassurance into his sensorium. She did not speak, and he had not summoned her, but her essence laced the air, tinged his sight, brought delicate traceries of memory peeling like sheets from the granite-firm surface of her mind. Filigrees of olden, endless days, of sundappled calm and damp leafy bowers she had played in as a girl, of happy children’s laughter tinkling through a glade, of lip-smacking spicy meals shared with friends now gone—

Uneasily he shrugged off these influences, his anxiety surfacing despite her silent efforts. “Dad, where are we going?”

A rueful grimace. “I don’t know.”

“But—” Yes, Toby thought, but—

They both knew full well how dangerous this was, everybody knew, yet they flew on into the pit of the unknown. An abyss with no visible redemption. And for reasons none of them, not even the Cap’n, could express in words.

Something shimmered in the wall screens.

“Ship incoming,” Jocelyn said tensely.

“Here?” Cermo whispered nearby. “A ship in this place?”

A rustle of surprise, maybe hope.

“Vector in,” Killeen said. “Our diagnostics working?”

“Some are,” Jocelyn answered, fingers dashing over her control board. Argo’s computers would accept voice or touch commands, and seemed to blend the two to anticipate what its unlearned crew wanted.

“How far away is it?” Killeen asked.

“I can’t tell.” Jocelyn frowned. “The board says refraction makes it impossible to measure.”

“Refraction?” Toby asked. Everybody ignored him, but his Isaac Aspect supplied,

In curved space-time, light is warped. It cannot propagate in straight lines. No distance measurements are reliable. Or time measures, either.

“That thing’s getting nearer,” Cermo said. “Bigger.”

That may be an illusion, too, caused by the bending of light. Here nothing is what it seems, theory says.

“What design is it?” Killeen asked.

“Hard to tell,” Jocelyn answered, frowning. “Its image keeps jumping around.”

“Kinda lumpy,” Cermo said.

“Not like the Myriapodia craft,” Killeen mused.

“Are those domes?” Jocelyn delicately tuned the sensors. “Bulges in the profile, see?”

“Ummm. Could be. Mechs have bumps like that.”

“Frap!” Jocelyn gritted her teeth. “Looks to be getting closer. If it’s mech, we’ll be wide open.”

<I see similarities to your own ship.>

Killeen glanced back at Quath, startled. Toby had forgotten that the Bridge was tuned into Quath’s transmissions. He could not carry on a snug, private conversation with the alien any longer. The thought made him somehow sad.

Killeen said, “Argo’s ancient. Last of its kind, prob’ly. Wouldn’t find anything like that here.”

<Assumptions are not facts.>

“Humans here?” Cermo asked. “I hope to God it’s so.”

“Its color function is not smooth,” Jocelyn said crisply. No speculations for her; she kept eyes fixed on the flowing dynamics of her board.

Killeen ceased his slow pacing and walked quickly to her side, fighting the jolts of vagrant gravity. The board showed a bewildering array of numbers, graphs, scattershot diagrams. Toby could piece them out, with some help—they were like the math lessons from Isaac—but Killeen had a long-standing impatience with such pesky details. “What’s that stuff mean?”

“When the instruments scan across the image, even though it’s kinda watery, they can tell if it’s the same color. That ship has blotches on it.”

“So?” Killeen ran a hand over the displays, as if he could feel their significance. Toby knew the puzzled impatience in his father’s face. Long years of trusting his wits made abstract instruments seem untrustworthy, no matter how advanced. Toby could sympathize; he felt pretty shaky, too, relying on devices he could not possibly figure out.