Killeen chuckled without mirth. “Yeasay squared.”
<Others of the Myriapodia signify that the very oldest texts speak of portals here.>
“Portals to what?”
<No one knows, who has not crossed the portal. And that is blocked by mech inventions.>
“Here? What could survive?”
<So say other Myriapodia. We swarm, much confused on this point. Even the burning disk appears a more likely place for lasting structures than does the sphere of flame further in.>
Killeen paced, hands at the small of his back, shoulders set square and rigid. “We can’t last long, getting this close. We’re heating up, the jet is getting tighter around us—”
<We should slow.>
“That’ll just hang us out to dry. I want to be movin’, able to jet out of here as soon as—”
<A slight pause. Enough to let the Cosmic Circle lead the way.>
“Why?”
<I do not know.>
“Damn it! To helm this ship I have to know—”
<Hold. I sense something more here.>
Quath had caught it before the humans, but now Toby felt the prickly gathering of electrostatic charges along his scalp, the humming beneath his boots.
You have penetrated to my deep regions. You are at the edge of the jet. Now is the time to render farewells.
Killeen scowled. “What? You brought us here, you can’t—”
I feel the growing roll and stress of the disk at my feet. It sends devouring plumes of eating matter up, deep into my field lines. These erosions I must fight. I have little time for you.
“You said you were anchored in that stuff. All that talk about being immortal—”
Immortality is an aim, not a fact. Matter’s rub can erase even such as I. I am doomed to struggle, just as are you, though on scales of time and length you cannot know. I am far grander and share little else but this base property.
“So you abandon us, huh? Just when—”
I have final words for you, then I withdraw my store of complex waveforms from your region. By retreating to other parts of myself, the weave of fields far above the disk, I can preserve my sense of self, my remembrances of my long span, the essence of me.
“Damn it, we’re going to need help just to survive the next hour, never mind—”
I send a map, simple and misleading, but enough for you. I am lodged for the moment in the field lines which taper into the disk. You are riding down one of my flanks. You depart me in a moment, at the location marked.
Killeen shouted, “Damn you, you can’t—”
Small beings such as you should remember who they are.
“I’ll remember real well, thank you,” Killeen said sardonically.
Toby had never seen his father struggle so hard to control his temper, teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, flinty.
Toby opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment the wall screens all filled with the same figure. It was colored and three-dimensional, a tangle of lines and moving dots and splattered yellows and greens and reds.
Complexity, confusion. Toby felt awed by it and repelled at the same time. There were levels of meaning and motion here he knew he could not comprehend.
Then, as if the Magnetic Mind could tell how hard this was to understand, the figure simplified, became flat, two-dimensional. Geometry he could understand. The clarity of mathematics shaped to a human mind.
Toby saw that a long thick swath was a side view of half the disk, the wrath and roil of it replaced by a single shading. Thin lines sloped down into the disk—from above and below, where the jet formed. These were the magnetic lines of the Mind itself—part of its huge structure, stretching beyond the disk and into the leagues between the stars. But these magnetic feet mired in the disk were important, for here the Mind fed itself from the furious energies released in the disk. Toby felt, for reasons he could not name, that even these sloping lines, far larger than solar systems, were as insignificant on the scale of the Mind as the curling hairs on his own legs.
And along the innermost magnetic line lay an orange dashed trail that lengthened as he watched—Argo’s path.
Then the dashed trail raced ahead, switched from orange to blue, and left the field line. It arced inward—and the figure expanded, bringing into view the disk’s inner edge, which tapered down to a point. Beyond that, even further in, Toby had expected to see the glowing white-hot ball that he saw on the view screens.
But the intense radiance appeared on the figure as only an insubstantial shimmer. Apparently the Magnetic Mind did not consider those searing energies important. Argo’s dashed trail led through the radiance, moving more and more swiftly. Then it arced up slightly. At the very center of the white ball lay something utterly dark, though winking with small energies as he watched.
You will depart from me. I withdraw. I send now details of your trajectory to come.
“Wait!” Toby saw real fear haunt Killeen’s eyes. “Where are we going?”
The star that has died at the outer rim now sends its shattered self inward through the disk. A swirl and plunge of massive lumps come lashing through the disk. They stress and deform me. This I suffer—and for you. Such wrenching mass yields up the conditions the Abraham-thing appears to want—and predicted. You shall embrace it. Move quickly now, for a cusp season approaches.
“What?” Killeen shouted, balling his fists. “What’s coming?”
The aperture moment.
