The blue glare faded. He stood stock still, and blinked until he could see.

He was standing on sand, bits of eroded rock. He felt the gravity stress his bones, pull at his internal organs.

He was here, then, in configuration space. He felt like himself. But he was the copy, projected into this strange realm, while another Pirius, the original, was back on the ice moon.

He struggled with fear. Callisto was only seconds in his past, yet he could never go back. He somehow hadn’t imagined his impulsive action ending up like this — or hadn’t let himself imagine it — as Luru Parz had surely calculated when she talked him into this. And he didn’t want to die.

“Lucked out,” he said to himself.

He looked around. The sky above him was open — no roof, no dome. But he was used to that by now.

The light was bright, but diffuse, shadowless, without a single source, without a sun.

A mountain loomed over the horizon, a pale cone made misty by distance. The ground sloped gently toward a sea that lapped softly. But the sea was black, like a sea of hydrocarbons, as if this were Titan. He looked the other way and saw a tangle of some kind of vegetation. He dug the words out of his memory. Ocean. Land. This was a beach, then, an interface between land and the open ocean; he was on a beach.

None of this was real, of course. All of these props — the beach, the ocean — were a rendering of a more profound reality into terms he could grasp. Metaphors, drawn from the human world. But not his world. This was an abstraction to suit a different mind, a mind that had grown up on Earth. This would have been a strange place to a Navy brat even if he hadn’t come here by such a strange route.

But he had a mission. He was here to find a weapon that could strike at a galactic-center supermassive black hole. That was something to focus on. And maybe after that, he could find some way to survive after all.

He turned and trudged up the beach, toward the vegetation. It was difficult walking on the sand, which gave with every step.

The wall of vegetation that fringed the beach was thick, apparently impenetrable. He didn’t know much about plants, save what he had seen in Nilis’s garden. But then, this tangled bank was not a true forest; the plants that grew here were not “trees.” The trunklike shapes he saw, crowded with waxy, gray-green leaves, were each composed of dozens of ropelike vines, all tangled up together.

When he looked down, he saw that the vines spread out into the dirt at the base of the vegetation. They did not dig into the ground like roots, though. Instead they spread over the surface, bifurcating further — until, he saw now, they blended into structures in the sand itself, at last dissipating altogether in a scattering of grains. It was a gathering of structure, he thought, rising from the sand, melding into these apparently living things.

Luru Parz had told him none of this had anything to do with biology, but somehow, with causality, with chains of consequences gathering in significance…

He was never going back.

Suddenly the truth of it hit him, blinding him to the place in which he found himself. He probed for a sense of loss, of abandonment, found only numbness. He tried to think of other times, other places: the ancient ice mine on Callisto, and the deeper past beyond that, the worldlets of Arches Base, the dorms, the soft warmth of Torec. It took an effort, as if the brief moments he had been here were expanding to fill his life.

After all, he remembered, he was a mere representation of somebody else. He wasn’t real, and that lost life had never been his. His fear faded.

Luru had warned he might lose himself in here. Maybe losing his fear was the first stage of that. Real or not, he had his duty; that was real enough.

Something rustled, deep inside the tangle of gray-green. He looked up, startled. Two eyes peered back at him — human eyes? But another rustle, a shake of the leaves as if a wind had passed, and they were gone.

He plunged into the vegetation. “Wait,” he cried. “Wait!” He had to rip aside the tangle of vines by main force, and even so was barely able to move forward.

There was a face before him. Two bright eyes, peering from green shadow. He froze, shocked. At first he could make no sense of it. He saw eyes, nose, a mouth. But the proportions seemed wrong — the eyes too close, the mouth too wide. Then it shifted, as if one face were melding into another, or a Virtual image were failing. But the eyes were steady, that gaze locked on his. Was it possible this was the relic of some jasoft, come here to flee from the Coalition?

And was this a glimpse of his own fate?

“Help me,” he said. It came out as a whisper, and he tried again. “Help me. Humanity is in peril. We need to strike at the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. We need a way to harm a supermassive black hole.”

It seemed absurd. What could such things matter here? What was a war, even, in a place where a handful of sand grains held a million possible instants? What indeed was life or death? And yet he remembered his duty; he tried to speak to that monstrous, shifting face. “If there is anything left of the human in you, you must answer—”

A fist slammed into his face, with impossible force. He felt his nose crunch under the impact. And something was forced into his mouth, hard enough to tear the muscles of his cheeks.

The blow hurled him backward, out of the forest, his hunched body ripping through the tangle of causality. He landed on the beach, sprawled in reality dust. And his hand was burning, as if he had dipped it in fire. The pain distracted him even from the ache of his shattered face, the bitterness of the stuff in his mouth. The black ocean was lapping close to him, much further up the beach than before. Tides, he thought. Secondhand gravitational effects, working on open bodies of liquid. Bits of facts from his training, from a life that was lost.

He held up his arm. His hand was gone, the stump neatly filmed over with pink flesh, as if the hand had never been. The black stuff wasn’t water. It must have burned off his hand like the strongest acid. Neat it might be, but the pain was agonizing.

Causality, he thought. Entropy. That’s what Luru said the sea means. I am being eaten by a sea of entropy, dissolved into disorder.

He forced himself to roll over, away from the ocean. Pain lanced up his arm.

The stuff in his mouth shifted, blocking his breathing. He could suffocate lying here. Or the blow itself might turn out to be lethal. There were ways to kill people like that, he remembered; you rammed your face into your opponent’s nose, to push a shard of bone into the brain.

He was going to die here. But he was just a Virtual — not Pirius, not Pirius Red or Pirius Blue. He was Pirius Gray, he thought, Pirius the shadow. His death didn’t matter.

His mouth worked. Perhaps he could spit the crud out from his mouth. But some instinct made him bite into it. A thick, acidic fluid spurted into his mouth. He bit again, and forced himself to swallow.

Perhaps he had succeeded. He had come seeking answers, and he had been given a cruel feeding. But what had he expected, a textbook? Some philosophers said that humans shouldn’t dream of contact with the Xeelee; their warmaking was the only possible contact. And perhaps this revolting mouthful was the solution he had been sent for.

He tried to think of his name again. It was fading, fading like a dream in the moments after waking. Gray, gray.

Pain striped along his left hand side. He cried out. The black ocean had washed a little further up the beach. He tried to scramble away.