<To this structure before us. Or to something beyond. My Philosophs know nothing more.>

The ship trembled and groaned with new stresses. A shiny, oily blackness filled all the screens, immense and inescapable.

TWO

Honeycomb Home

The glistening black thing seemed to unfold itself, swimming in the watery half-light. Toby realized that it was growing somehow. Emerging, like an ornate vessel rising from a slate-black lake. It appeared to ooze into the space nearby, drawn out of fitful storm-wracked darkness, as though emerging from some unseen, deeper place. Fresh ramparts and plains expanded along it, flinty and sharp-crested, faces of it catching the flashing illuminations that still shot by on all sides of them.

<Note our ship time.>

Toby stared, blinked. Quath’s tone gave no hint that she shared the surprise Toby felt. The outside time digits now fled by in a blur. <We are at the year level.>

Killeen still stood on the creaking deck, shifting his weight to counter random thrusts. Face tense, he did not take his eyes from the stretching, spreading mass on the screens. “How much deeper can we go?”

<No one knows. But further than this is possible.>

“Ummm,” Killeen said sardonically. “What isn’t possible here?”

Jocelyn said tersely. “Fuel rate’s up.”

Killeen nodded. “It’s been climbing all along. What’s our remaining margin?”

“To be able to get free of this place?”

“Yeasay—this ‘ergosphere.’” The word sat awkwardly on Killeen’s lips, Aspect jargon, like a language he only pretended to speak.

The popping of strains running through Argo had distracted Toby from the gut-deep pulse of their engines. The laboring rumble rose, sending tremors through his couch.

Jocelyn worked a moment, eyes dancing as she listened to her direct link with the ship’s systems. Worry-lines creasing her brow, she said, “The board’s working hard, calc’lating how much it’ll take to get out of here. These numbers keep jumping around. We’re getting close. Gobbling up fuel just to keep in an orbit, seems like.”

“How long?”

“Maybe fifty minutes left.”

Even to Toby’s practiced eye Killeen seemed unmoved by this. “I see.”

Argo flew by sucking in plasma with magnetic mouths, burning it in fusion chambers, and spewing it out the back. But it needed catalysts for this, and they were running low.

<If we approach to the very edge of the event horizon—the lip of the black hole—we will find that no amount of fuel can save us.>

Toby was shocked at the matter-of-fact way Quath stated this, without even a softening further remark. Killeen also gave nothing away, his eyes fixed on the strange oily-black thing. “This object, it’s like a rock that grows. You sure it has nothing to do with this ‘event horizon’?”

<I do not know. But it is not the black hole itself.>

“How come you’re sure?”

<When the streaking lights around us begin to die, it will mean that the streaming, infalling mass is being absorbed.>

“That’ll be the star stuff, taking a nosedive into the black hole?” Killeen asked.

<It must. It cannot orbit safely—there are no free paths in the time pit.>

Toby put in, “How come we’re okay here?”

<We aren’t, for long. The sole reason we can venture this close to the hole is because it is the largest in our galaxy, over a million times the mass of a star. Though its great mass attracts, the tidal forces are lesser here near the lip of the Eater. Near a smaller black hole, we would be shredded before we could venture in.>

“I don’t want to go any closer, not when we can’t see what’s happening. Or figure out what that thing is.” He pointed to the glinting complexities of the mass oozing into being before them, like a strange crystalline mud. Their engines shook the walls, but to no avail; the great bulk swam nearer.

Jocelyn said, “Cap’n, I don’t think we’ve got the power to do any maneuverin’, anyway.”

Killeen compressed his lips. “Can we get far from that thing?”

“Doubt it. I’m gunnin’ her hard as I can.”

“Quath, what can we do?” Killeen at last made a naked appeal.

<I do not know. The edge where space disappears forever is death-black. We will know that we are where matter rules all, and space slides forever down the throat of the Eater of All Things. But this object—it is different.>

“I . . . we . . . came all this way.” Killeen watched the screens with a strange expression, one Toby had seldom seen these last few years—uncertainty. “Family Bishop has always known that the Eater was important. But where should we go?”

<We have reached the limits of what the past can tell us.>

The way they both spoke made Toby’s hair stand up on end. It was like two old friends discussing suicide.

A part of Toby welcomed Killeen’s hesitation. He realized how much he missed the many-sided man he had known all his life, yet who now showed only one flinty face to the world. But then, as he watched, an edge returned to Killeen’s gaze. He whispered, “It’s got to be here.”

<Necessity emerges from logic, not desire. The Philosophs retire into [untranslatable] in such hours of doubt.>

Jocelyn gave Quath a skeptical glance and worked through the long silence that hung in the fevered air. Then she quietly reported to Killeen. “Argo says there’s an orbit we can follow, to bring us to a place it calls ‘perigee.’ That’s just above the lip of the black hole. But if we go that near, we can never fight our way back out of the, well, the whirlpool.”

“You’re sure?” Killeen’s voice was clipped, flat.

“Near as I can be in this crazy place.”

Toby’s Isaac Aspect put in dryly,

The correct term is “peribarythron.” “Perigee” refers to Old Earth, and orbits near it. These ship computers must have been programmed by someone with a classical education, but little concern for proper technical detail. I hope such sloppiness does not extend—

Toby squeezed the Aspect back down. Its outraged squawk ended with what felt like an audible pop.

“Why’s the clock running so hard?” Killeen asked, pointing. Numerals flickered faster and faster.

Quath clattered her legs uneasily. <That behavior does not fit the calculations I obtained from the Philosophs. Something is warping the space-time flow even more than they expected.>

“That?” Killeen pointed at the slick, ever-swelling darkness before them.

<Perhaps. Appearances deceive here, where gravity bends light to its will.>

In the mass, Toby could see complex ribs and valleys, arches and long columns. “It’s built, not natural,” he said.

Killeen blinked. “Yeasay! I knew! We came and—Abraham, the Magnetic Mind—they all lead to this.”

“How can something stay here?” Toby stared at it wonderingly. He could not guess what Killeen had envisioned, through the long years of their journey to this moment—some things his father never discussed—but plainly it wasn’t this. A puzzled frown stirred Killeen’s brow, then passed like a forgotten irritant.

“Doesn’t matter,” Killeen said flatly. “Plenty time later to figure out such stuff.”

Toby watched the screens with foreboding. The slick blackness grew and grew. It was as though it was drawing Argo to it with a slow, remorseless clutch. But the thing was not just getting closer. It seemed to swell into existence, emerging, being born from some unknowable place.