“Let me get this straight,” Pirius said. “Sir,” he added.

Nilis waved that away. “Please, please. We know each other too well for formality!”

But he was talking about a different Pirius, Blue thought, indeed a different Nilis. “You want to send a scouting mission inside the Front — into the Cavity. You want to fly to Chandra itself.”

“Or as close as we can get to it, yes.”

Nilis talked rapidly about the great project he was devising out at Sol’s lonely orbit — aided, in part, by Pirius’s own younger self, his FTL twin Pirius Red. Pirius Blue had heard nothing of this before, and he was stunned by Project Prime Radiant’s scope and ambition.

“But if we are to strike successfully we have to know more about Chandra itself,” Nilis said. “Even after three thousand years of war here at the Galaxy’s heart, we still know woefully little.”

And that, he said, was where Pirius Blue came in.

“You want me to fly the mission.”

“To scope it out, define, it, choose a crew… Yes! You will be the commander, Pirius Blue. It will be a historic flight.”

“Historic? Suicidal.”

Nilis said gravely, “Suicidal? Not necessarily. There are many myths about this war, Pirius Blue. We are locked into ways of thinking, ways of fighting. After three thousand years of stasis we have talked ourselves into believing that taking the war to the Xeelee is reckless, even suicidal, as you say. But we’re only talking about a scouting mission! And how do you know it would be suicidal? Do you know how long it is since a mission of this type was actually studied? I’ve looked high and low and I can’t find one — a long time indeed! — even though the information is of such obvious value. But everybody knows it’s impossible. And of course, I am reluctantly coming to see, there are plenty in high places with a vested interest in the war not being concluded…”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. Anyhow, as commander it would be your duty to make the mission survivable, wouldn’t it?”

Pirius was full of doubt. Everything Nilis said sounded reasonable — and exciting. But it also conflicted with his training, everything he had been brought up to believe.

Nilis said, a little exasperated, “Look — I would not order you to do this. Yes, there are obvious dangers; yes, you might not survive — and, yes, I am asking you to have faith in me, in a fat old fool from Earth. But the mission is, quite simply, vitally necessary. We must know more.” He watched Pirius’s face with a kind of wistful longing. “Oh, Pirius, this is such a strange encounter. I feel I know you so well! Look at you now, the way you hold your head when you listen to me, your seriousness, your focus on your duty, even the play of the light in your eyes. You’re so familiar. And yet it’s Pirius Red I’ve come to know, and you don’t know me at all, save for your brief encounter with a bumbling old fool at your hearing! It’s so strange, so strange. Sometimes I think that by hurling ourselves around the Galaxy faster than the speed of light we are pushing our humanity too far.”

Pirius suddenly saw a new element in his relationship with the Commissary — or at least his FTL twin’s. This old man was fond of him, Pirius thought with a queasy horror. His unwelcome twin, Pirius Red, had allowed this ridiculous old man to form some kind of sentimental bond with him. Surely it wasn’t sexual. But he knew Nilis had a “family background.” Perhaps it was as a father might feel for a son, an uncle for a nephew, or some similarly unhealthy, atavistic tie. What a mess, he thought.

Nilis’s Virtual was of the highest quality. In the jargon, it was an avatar.

The avatar’s job was to live out this chapter of Nilis’s life on the original’s behalf as fully as was possible. The avatar was a fully sentient copy of the real Nilis, with identical memories up to the moment when this copy had first been generated. Here in Quin Base, Virtual Nilis couldn’t touch anything, of course; those data desks on the table were as fake as he was. But while here, for authenticity of experience, he would have to live according to human routines. He would eat his Virtual food, sleep, even eliminate his unreal waste. He could even smell, he said, and he declared that Quin Base stank of something called “boiled cabbage.” And when his visit was done, his records would be sent back to Earth, where they would be integrated into Nilis’s own memory.

Nilis had wanted to take home as rich an experience as he could, the better to shape his subsequent decision-making. But he would always have the odd feeling that he had lived out these ten days twice, once in his garden on Earth, and once here at the Galaxy’s crowded heart.

Pirius tried to concentrate on the mission. He could see its value. “But — why me? I haven’t even flown since the magnetar.”

“Because I know you.” His big watery eyes were still fixed on Pirius. “Because we’ve already proven we can work well together—”

“You’re still talking about my twin.”

“But your twin is you — he has all your talent, all your potential — save only that in you that potential has begun to be realized. And besides,” he said with disarming honesty, “how many frontline pilots do I actually know? Oh, come, Pirius! You know, in your shoes I would be galvanized by curiosity. We may be skirting a deep scientific mystery here, Pirius, something that could tell us a great deal about the nature of our universe, and our place in it.”

Pirius could hardly deny that. But when he thought about leaving here, about leaving Tili Three and Burden and the others, he felt deeply uneasy. He already felt guilty at having survived on Factory Rock, where so many had fallen; how could he justify walking out on them now?

Nilis leaned forward, made to touch Pirius’s shoulder, remembered it was impossible. “Pirius, you’re hesitating, and I don’t know why. You’re wasted here!” he said. “All these drone kids, their endless digging, digging. You’re meant for better things, Pilot.”

Pirius stood up. “And every one of those drone kids” he said, “is better than you, Commissary.” Nilis said nothing more, and Pirius left the room.

Pirius Blue talked it over with Cohl.

“The whole thing’s insane,” he said. In three thousand years, there had of course been many scouting missions beyond the Front and into the Cavity, deep into the nest. That complex place, crowded with stellar marvels as well as the greatest concentration of Xeelee firepower in the Galaxy, was known to every pilot as a death trap. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”

“We?”

He sighed. “If I have to do this, I’d want you with me. But it’s academic, because nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Because it’s insane?”

“Correct.”

“Well,” she said, “not necessarily.” She was lying on her bunk, her hands locked behind her head; she seemed undisturbed by the usual barracks clamor around her. In fact, she had something of Nilis’s remoteness. But then, Pirius thought with loyal exasperation, Cohl was a navigator, and most navigators were halfway to double domes anyhow.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it could be done. There’s a lot of junk in there, you know, in the Cavity. Astrophysical junk. Plenty of places to hide.” She rolled over. They had no data desks here, no fancy Virtual-generation facilities, and so she started sketching with a wet finger in the dirt on the floor. “Suppose you went in this way…”

The Cavity was a rough sphere some fifteen light-years across at the center of the Mass, bounded by the great static shock of the Front. It was called a “Cavity” because it was blown clear of hot gas and dust by Chandra and the other objects at the very center. But it was far from empty, in fact crowded with exotic objects. As well as a million glowering stars, there was the Baby Spiral, three dazzling lanes of infalling gas and dust. And the Baby, like everything else in the Cavity, was centered on the Prime Radiant itself: Chandra, the supermassive black hole, utterly immovable, the pivot around which the immense machinery of the inner Galaxy turned.