The vortex was closing, a tightening spiral that shrank until it became no wider than her body. Darya was plunging along the centermost line, deep into the maelstrom of the Eye. Forces again racked her body, but now they were twisting, from head to neck to chest to hips to legs to feet. As they became unbearable there was a final agonizing shear, and she found herself again in open space.

She felt no acceleration, but she could see that she was moving.

Faster and faster. As she watched, Mandel was in front of her… was off to the left… was shining from behind… was no bigger than a pinpoint of light when she turned her head.

After half a minute of total confusion, the analytical part of her brain asserted itself. She was seeing the universe as a series of still images, but there was no force of acceleration and there was no sign of an external gravity field. She must be pausing at each location for a fraction of a second before undergoing an instantaneous translation to another position. It was the universe in stop-motion, experienced as a series of freeze-frames. Although she was not traveling faster than light through ordinary space-time, she was certainly reaching each new location in less time than light would take. And since there was no sign of Doppler shift in the starscape around her, she must be sitting at rest between transitions, until the next one transported her to a new place.

It was a series of Bose Transitions, but without the Bose Network stations needed for all human interstellar travel. Each jump must have been a least a few million kilometers — and increasing. Mandel was no brighter now than any other star in the sky.

How fast was she moving in inertial space? She would have to estimate her rate of change of position. Darya looked around for a reference frame. She could see a blue supergiant, off to her right. It was surely no closer than a hundred light-years. Yet it was changing its apparent position at maybe a degree a second. Which meant she was moving at close to two light-years a second.

And still accelerating, if that word could be applied to her series of instantaneous translations. As she watched, the constellations ahead were beginning to change, to melt, to reconfigure themselves into unfamiliar patterns.

The blue supergiant was already drifting away behind her. Darya stared all around, looking for some new reference point. She could find only one. The gauzy fabric of the Milky Way was a band of light, far away to her left. It had become the single constant of her new environment.

Darya fixed her eyes on that familiar sight — and realized, with a shiver, that it was beginning to move. She was plunging downward, out of the galactic plane. The globular clusters of the Magellanic Clouds were in front of her. They had emerged from the clutter of the spiral arm to form glittering spheres of stars.

How fast? How far?

She could not say. But in order for her motion relative to the whole Galaxy to be noticed, she had to be skipping hundreds of light-years in each transition. Another minute, and much of the Galaxy’s matter lay below her. She was far below the spiral arm and catching a hint of a monstrous flattened disk. Below her feet she could see the sweeping curve of the spiral itself. Individual stars were disappearing, moment by moment, into a sea of spangles that glittered around dark dust clouds and lit the filaments of gaseous nebulas with multi-colored gemstones.

As she watched the stars faded again, merging to become the hazy light of distant millions. Far off to her left the disk had swelled up and thickened. She was far enough from the main plane to be clear of obscuring gas and dust clouds. She gazed in wonder at the glowing bulge of the galactic center. Hers were surely the first human eyes to see past the spiral arm to the densely packed galactic nucleus and to the massive black hole that formed the hub of the Galaxy.

How far? How fast?

She seemed to be moving straight away from the galactic disk, and now the blaze of the central hub was off at an angle of forty-five degrees to her direction of motion. With her lungs frozen and her heart stopped in her chest, Darya made her estimate. The Phemus Circle territories were about thirty thousand light-years from the center of the Galaxy, so she must be about that far from the galactic plane. And the angle of the hub was changing, at maybe ten degrees a minute. That gave her a speed of a hundred and seventy-five light-years a second.

Ten thousand light-years a minute. A million light-years in an hour and a half. The Andromeda Galaxy in twice that time.

Even as that thought came, the mad drive ended. The universe stopped its giddy rush and clicked into a fixed position.

Ahead of Darya in the open void sat a great space structure, agleam with internal lights, sprawling across half the sky, of a size impossible to estimate. Darya had the sense that it was huge, that those trailing pseudopods of antennas and twisting tubes of bright matter, spinning away into space from the central dodecahedron, were millions of kilometers long.

Before she could confirm that impression, there came a final transition. Stars, galaxies, and stellar clusters vanished. Darya found herself standing on a level plain. Overhead was nothing. At her feet, defining the level surface itself, were a billion twinkling orange lights.

And next to her, his suit open so that he could scratch his chin, stood Hans Rebka.

“Well,” he said. “We-ell, that’s one for the record books. Try and describe that in your trip report.”

He was silent for a few moments, breathing deep and staring around him. “Maybe we ought to trade ideas,” he said finally. “If either of us has any. For a start, where in the hell are we?”

“You opened your suit!”

“No.” He shook his head. “I never had time to close it when we dropped — nor did you.”

To Darya’s astonishment she saw that he was right. Her own suit was fully transparent. “But we were out in open space — airless vacuum.”

“I thought so, too. I don’t remember needing to breathe, though.”

“How long were we there? Did you count heartbeats?”

He smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I don’t know if I even had heartbeats. I was too busy trying to figure out what was happening — where you had gone, where I was going.”

“I think I know. Not what was happening, but where we went and where we are now.”

“Then you’re six steps ahead of me.” He gestured out at the endless plain in front of them. “Limbo, didn’t it used to be called? A nowhere place where lost souls went.”

“We’re not lost. We were brought here, deliberately. And it was my fault. I told The-One-Who-Waits how keen I was to meet the Builders. It took what I said at face value.”

“Didn’t work, though, did it? I don’t see any sign of them.”

“Give them time. We only just got here. Do you remember flying down into the Eye of Gargantua?”

“Until the day I die. Which I’d like to think is a fair way off, but I’m beginning to wonder.”

“The eye is the entry point to a Builder transportation system. It must have been there as long as humans have been in the Mandel system, maybe long before that; but it’s no surprise that no one ever discovered it. A ship’s crew would have to be crazy to fly down into it.”

“Explorer ships’ crews are crazy. People did plenty of mad things when this system was first being colonized. I know that ships went down deep into Gargantua’s atmosphere and came back out — some of them. But I don’t think that would be enough to do what we did. We had to be given that first boost from Glister, to rifle us exactly down the middle of the vortex. When I was in there it seemed to just fit my shoulders. There wasn’t room for another person, let alone a ship.”