"But where is it going to be?" asks Sadeq. "Do you know what you are looking for?"

"Yes. We should have no trouble finding it," says Amber. "It looks like this." She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet. "Looks like a William Latham sculpture made out of strange matter, doesn't it?"

"Very abstract," Sadeq says approvingly.

"It's alive," she adds. "And when it gets close enough to see us, it'll try to eat us."

"What?" Sadeq sits up uneasily.

"You mean nobody told you?" asks Amber: "I thought we'd briefed everybody." She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. "Damn," she adds mildly.

Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he's busy in another private universe.

"Hrrrr! Boss! Found something," calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor.

Amber glances up. Please, let it be the router , she thinks. "Put it on the main screen."

"Are you sure this is safe?" Su Ang asks nervously.

"Nothing is safe," Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. "Here. Look."

The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai +4904 /–56 's residual rotation. The image-intensification level is huge – a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf – or second-innermost planet – a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of frigid darkness.

"That's it," Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around her; "That's it !" Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she values. "Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where's Pierre? He's got to see this!"

Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a prarranged rendezvous. He's been drinking, and his best linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. Why am I doing this? he wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around —

He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness lower down that makes him cry out, "where are you?"

"Over here." He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She's partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He's full of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She's the magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. "Is it working for you?" she asks.

"Yes." he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walks toward her. They've experimented with gender play, trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they've done it this way. She opens her mouth: He kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms enclosing her waist.

She leans against him, feeling his erection. "So this is how it feels to be you," she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but she doesn't have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations – rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive sensorium – has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations of her body – it's as if he's dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist – so tight, so breathless – and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She's whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: "Do it to me!" she demands, "Do it now!"

Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away. It's hot and as hard as rock, and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it's an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his own head, I didn't know it felt like this —

Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, "How was it for you?" Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have, too.

But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, and of how good it felt. All he can hear is his father yelling ("What are you, some kind of queer?") – and he feels dirty.

Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.

The solar system is thinking furiously at 1033 MIPS – thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots.

The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight – a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of superconducting cable – traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's magnetosphere. It's trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai +4904 /–56. As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system, part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history.