“So maybe it’s damaged. Taken hits. Got holes in it, even.”

“Likely it’s a warship, then.” Jocelyn frowned.

On the screen a blue-white shape swam, shimmering and bobbing in the incessant streaking light-drops. The ship’s minds fretted over its identity and strobed UNKNOWN on the screen. Toby watched the bobbing, silvery ship and Quath said, <We plunge quickly. Already we near the thirty-day level.>

“Huh? What?”

<A day at this depth inside the time pit equals thirty normdays’ duration outside.>

“How can that be?”

<The Myriapodia have sent me a submind. I assign it these tasks. Its digital consciousness can guide us through such reaches. It understands how the curving of space-time is both a warpage of distance and a shrinkage of time, for us.>

Toby swallowed, and not just from a new lurch of his couch. Before he could take in Quath’s meaning, Killeen made a decision, smacking a palm on the board. “Can’t risk it being a warship, maybe mech. Prepare to fire on it.”

Jocelyn replied crisply. “Ready for action.”

“Wait!” Toby called. “You heard Quath. She says everything’s twisted down here. That ship could be from some different time, not following us at all.”

“What’s time matter?” Killeen snapped. “A mech’s a mech.”

“Dad, give that ship a little leeway. My Isaac Aspect, Quath, they both’re talking about how crazy it is here. Seems to me, until we understand—”

Killeen glanced at his son and nodded to Jocelyn. “Keep a sharp eye. Stand ready. Armed.”

“Armed, Cap’n.”

“Dad!”

<It is not advisable to act without knowledge.>

Killeen studied the alien’s head and feelers, which swayed with the effort of compensating for the tides of gravity that swept through the Bridge like a pressure wind. “You sure?”

<Here nothing is certain. But my submind reports that many unknown craft linger here.>

“How many?”

<Unknown. They stack up from all ages past.>

“Mech?”

<Some, it says, may be from before the age of the mechanicals.> Quath sent a rippling, fizzy sound with this, which Toby did not know how to interpret. Wasn’t the ‘age of the mechanicals’ now—their time?

Killeen seemed to understand, though, and nodded. “All right. Can you put your information on our screens?”

<Soon.> Another mysterious series of fizzy, ringing notes.

The ship on the screens waxed and waned in shimmering, heated luminosity. For a moment it sharpened. A scarred skin, once silver-smooth, now pocked and stained. Bulges that could be domes, but streaked and grimy.

Jocelyn said, “Our pattern-recognition programs say that’s old human construction.”

Killeen rubbed his chin. “Ummm, could be.”

“It is!” Toby cried. The cut and angles struck a chord in him. Before he could say more, the clarity fled. A long moment of silence followed. The Bridge officers stared openly at their Cap’n. To fire on a human craft would be a great sin, but to die from a mech bolt . . .

“Not mech, anyway,” Killeen conceded. “Stand down.”

The tension on the Bridge broke. Officers murmured, rustled. Killeen resumed pacing. Toby was still watching the screens when the other ship’s image began to dwindle away. “Hey!” Jocelyn cried, working at her instruments. But the image faded like a plucked flower sinking into a dark pond.

“Gone.” Killeen seemed relieved. “Maybe we were looking at a mirage all the time.”

<It is possible, here. Note:>

Onto the main screen popped two clocks. Toby had learned to read a digital clock on Argo, so he was startled to see one in blue keep ticking away at the rate he knew, while another in red spun its numbers past in a blur. <The in-ship time flows normally,> Quath sent in response to his confusion. <Outside time runs much faster, the deeper we go.>

Toby watched the numerals spin, scarcely believing they could represent anything real. “You mean outside, time’s going fast?”

<Relative to us, this is true.>

“What makes it speed up, out there?”

<It is we who are slowed. Time is always a matter of local opinion.>

Toby couldn’t reckon how that could possibly be. “What happens when we go back out?”

<If we remain in this region of curvature, we will find that much has happened while we were here.>

“Curvature?” Killeen intruded.

<The effect can be opposite, as well. Much is contorted here, like events seen through smoky, thick glass.>

“Gonna make it hard to find anything.”

<That is the least difficulty. Time is trapped here. It can be ingested and disgorged.>

“So that’s why you call it a time pit?”

Toby’s Isaac Aspect added,

The black hole swallows space. Old Zeno says—though even her memory of these matters is from long before her real, bodily life—that we can regard it as if space slides into the hole’s gullet at ever-faster speed, as it nears the steepening angle of descent. Against this slippery slope even light labors to save itself. But the ergosphere is a chasm for time, not space. Here the duration of an event may stretch, compress, warp, as space—in-sliding, doomed space—plays and toys with it, twists the tail of time.

Toby tried to get his mind around all this, as his stomach lurched with acid and the screens flashed. Streaking matter, bristling with radiation, spattered their ship. Toby thought woozily that maybe they were seeing God spit across the sky, a cosmic joke. “How . . . how do we find our way around?”

Gravity may bend and turn a given sequence of events. Living in such a place is like being a bug doomed to crawl along a man’s belt, hanging in a closet. A belt, say, which has the tab flipped over, then fitted into the buckle. The bug can creep all it wants, and cover both sides of the belt—since now the leather really has only one side—but it can never get off. Events for the bug repeat endlessly, and the bug never reaches the end of its dreary, endless belt.

The Aspect’s tinny voice had a disagreeable relish to it. “You talk about all this like you know it firsthand.”

I studied these things, but alas, know them only from ancient texts. And from the dried-up Zeno, a truly disagreeable sort. She tells me of experiments humans once performed here. Even, she says, of constructions they made.

“How could anybody build here?”

Doubtless this is a transcription error, or doddering old Zeno’s errant memory. But I can quote to you from more reliable Chandelier texts. They often blended mythology and physics, a fashion of that great time—imagine, the luxury to do such! Still, for your edification I can lecture fully on—

“Uh, no thanks.” Toby hastily pressed the Aspect back into its crevice.

“What’s that?” Killeen asked, pointing at a glinting blackness that swam into view. To Toby it looked like a huge beehive, dark and oily and honeycombed with passages.

Quath sent a trill of alarm. <I do not know. But I suspect this may be our destination.>

“Why?” Killeen demanded.

<From the moment the Magnetic Mind spoke, I have communed with the Myriapodia, with the full legion of Philosophs. They spoke of the singular time when we could enter the time pit and find the right direction. It only occurs when much matter infalls—the mass fed by that dying star which we saw. Such colossal masses, plunging in, render the surface of the time pit turbulent. We could then enter. Only at such moments can one reach this place.>

Toby tried to figure how that could be. “Like slipping in a side door, one that blows open in the wind?”

<In a way. To ripple the surface of the time pit requires the wind of worlds.>

Killeen’s face tightened with uncertainty. “The aperture moment? Aperture means ‘opening,’ right? But an opening to what?”