That requires great energy of the relay ship. Only the Wedge can hang suspended against the slide of space.
True. But the effort will be repaid.
We tried such methods before—and lost much.
This time is vastly more important.
Concentrate on these primates! They are the past—shuck them from us.
There is something of the future in them.
Ignore such musings. You have a mission—do it.
We must learn the nature of the threat. Otherwise we cannot be sure we can in fact expunge it.
Of course we can.
Ignorance is not an effective strategy.
I do not like your tone, Aesthetic.
Then I am understood.
PART THREE
The Time Pit
ONE
Deep Reality
They plunged toward the boundary sheet of the ergosphere. Toby thought it looked like the flexing skin of some blistered animal, leathery and trembling with perpetual rage.
Then Argo shot along it, accelerating in the quickening gravity, and his perspective changed. Now it was like a troubled sea just below, tossed with wrinkles and waves. Big combers collided with each other in choppy sprays, whipped into a frenzy by an unseen storm.
“Hold on,” Killeen said stiffly.
Toby was strapped into a Bridge couch. Gravity shifted all around them, plucking at his clothes, fidgeting in his inner ear, tilting his sensorium so that even his vision lurched and heaved. His crackling, faint Zeno Aspect volunteered,
These forces . . . vagrant . . . were recorded by . . . expeditions . . . humans . . . described them as “like an irritated tiger shaking a mouse.”
“Ummm . . . what’s a tiger?” Toby had seen field mice, had trapped the sharp-toothed rodents who ate their grain in Citadel Bishop. Zeno sent a foggy picture of something gazing with quiet, threatening ferocity. Flaring full-color into his sensorium, it sent a chill of alarm through Toby, until Zeno said,
This creature . . . data says . . . scarcely longer than your hand.
“What a relief.” He imagined being picked up and tossed around by a cat. The stomach-churning lurches and twists he could take, but sometimes the turbulence felt like whispery fingers trailing along his skin, eerie and ghostlike.
Bridge officers were in couches, but the Cap’n paced the deck grimly, fighting the tugs and yanks of vagrant gravity, unwilling to yield. No one dared interrupt Killeen’s thoughts as his boots thumped hard, hands clasped behind his back, face a permanent scowl.
Toby could see that his father was steeling himself against what looked like certain disaster. To charge into the unknown was one thing, a long habit for the Families. But to slam into the face of a living blackness . . .
Killeen nodded to Jocelyn. “Now.”
A sliding sensation. Toby gulped. A stretching wrench. The entire Bridge seemed to hold its breath.
They plunged toward the rippling skin of the ergosphere. The surface worked with gales black as carbon. Troughs and crests were lit by a hell-red glow, light bent and squeezed by brute gravity.
Jocelyn whispered, throat tight, “This is it!”
—and they dove beneath the waves.
In.
Through.
Toby blinked. No shock, no collision. Smooth, swift sailing into—
Flaming bullets. They rode through a rain of light.
To Toby the interior of the ergosphere was a sullen night, peppered by blinding, quick streaks of luminosity. Fever-bright pellets shot by them—a pelting shower in red and violet and a strange, hot green.
“What . . . what is this place?” Toby whispered.
<The time pit,> Quath sent.
“You mean the black hole?”
<That swallower lies further in. This is the region whirled into being by the rotation of the black hole. A murderous place. Here space-time is dragged around by the devourer’s dark mass, so that they become scrambled.> Quath rattled and twirled her eye-stalks to illustrate.
