Madeleine couldn’t make out any framework within the icosahedron, or any reinforcement for its edges; it was a structure of sheets of almost transparent film, each triangle hundreds of meters wide. The glow of the flower-ship’s hungry ramscoop shone and sparkled from the multiple facets.

“It must be mighty strong to maintain its structure against the hole’s gravity, the tides,” Ben said. “It seems to be directing the flow of matter from the accretion disc into the event horizon…”

It was a jewel-box setting for a black hole. A comparative veteran of interstellar exploration, Madeleine felt stunned.

The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

“Time to pay the fare,” Nemoto said. “Are we ready to speak to God?”

Madeleine turned to Ben. “We didn’t know about this. Maybe we should think about what we’re doing here.”

He shrugged. “Nemoto is right. It is not our mission.” He began the operations they’d rehearsed.

Reluctantly, Madeleine worked a console to unship the first of the old X-ray lasers; the monitors showed it unfolding from its mount like a shabby flower.

The self-directed laser dove into the heart of the system, heading for its closest approach to the hole.

“Three, two, one,” Ben murmured.

There was a flash of light, pure white, that shone through the Service Module’s ports.

Various instruments showed surges of particles and electromagnetic radiation. The laser’s fission-bomb power source had worked. The shielding of Ancestor seemed adequate.

The X-ray beam washed over the surface of “God.” The net structure stirred, like a sleeping snake.

The Chaera quivered.

Ben was watching the false-color images. “Madeleine. Look.”

The surface of “God” was alive with motion; the icosahedral netting was bunching itself around a single, brooding point, like skin crinkling around an eye.

“I can give you a rough translation from the Chaera,” Nemoto said. “ ‘She heard us.’ ”

Madeleine asked, “ ‘She’?”

“God, of course. ‘If I have succeeded… then I will be the most honored of my race. Fame, wealth, my choice of mates — ’ ”

Madeleine laughed sourly. “And, of course, religious fulfillment.”

Ben monitored a surge of X-ray photons and high-energy particles coming from the hole — and the core at the center of the crinkled net exploded. A pillar of radiation punched through the accretion disc like a fist.

The Chaera wobbled around its tank.

“ ‘God is shouting,’ ” Nemoto said. She peered out of her biopro monitor tank, her wizened virtual face creased with doubt.

The beam blinked out, leaving a trail of churning junk.

The flower-ship entered a long, powered orbit that would take it, for a time, away from the black hole and in toward the primary star and its inner system. Madeleine and Ben watched the black hole and its enigmatic artifact recede to a toylike glimmer.

The Chaera inhabited the accretion disc’s larger fragments.

In the Ancestor ’s recorded images, Chaera were everywhere, spinning like frisbees over the surface of their worldlets, or whipping through the accretion mush to a neighboring fragment, or basking like lizards, their undersides turned up to the black hole.

The beam from “God” had left a track of glowing debris through the accretion disc, like flesh scorched by hot iron. The track ended in a knot of larger fragments.

In the optical imager, jellyfish bodies drifted like soot flakes.

“Let me get this straight,” Madeleine said. “The Chaera have evolved to feed off the X-radiation from the black hole… from ‘God.’ Is that right?”

“Evolved or adapted. So it seems,” Nemoto said dryly. “ ‘God provides us in all things.’ ”

“So the Chaera try to… shout… to ‘God,’ ” Ben said. “Some of them pray. Some of them build great artifacts to sparkle at Her. Like worshiping the Sun, praying for dawn. Basically they’re trying to stimulate X-radiation bursts. All the Gaijin have done is to sell them a more effective communication mechanism.”

“A better prayer wheel,” Madeleine murmured. “But what are the Gaijin interested in here? The black-hole artifact?”

“Possibly,” Nemoto said. “Or perhaps the Chaera’s religion. The Gaijin seem unhealthily obsessed with such illogical belief systems.”

“But,” Madeleine said, “that X-ray laser delivers orders of magnitude more energy into the artifact than anything the Chaera could manage. It looks as if the energy of the pulse they get in return is magnified in proportion. Perhaps the Chaera don’t understand what they’re dealing with, here.”

Nemoto translated. “ ‘God’s holy shout shatters worlds.’ ”

The main star was very Sunlike. Madeleine, filled with complex doubts about her mission, pressed her hand to the window, trying to feel its warmth, hungering for simple physical pleasure.

There was just one planet here. It was a little larger than the Earth, and it followed a neat circular path through the star’s habitable zone, the region within which an Earthlike planet could orbit.

But they could see, even from a distance, that this was no Earth. It was silent on all wavelengths. And it gleamed, almost as bright as a star itself; it must have cloud decks like Venus.

On a sleep break, Ben and Madeleine, clinging to each other, floated before the nearest thing they had to a picture window. Madeleine peered around, seeking constellations she might recognize, even so far from home, and she wondered if she could find Sol.

“Something’s wrong,” Ben whispered.

“There always is.”

“I’m serious.” He let his fingers trace out a line across the black sky. “What do you see?”

With the Sun eclipsed by the shadow of the FGB module, she gazed out at the subtle light. There was that bright planet, andthe dim red disc of rubble surrounding the Chaera black hole, from here just visible as more than a point source of light.

“There’s a glow around the star itself, covering the orbit of that single planet,” Ben said. “Can you see?” It was a diffuse shine, Madeleine saw, cloudy, ragged-edged. Ben continued. “That’s an oddity in itself. But—”

Then she got it. “Oh. No zodiacal light.”

The zodiacal light, in the Solar System, was a faint glow along the plane of the ecliptic. Sometimes it was visible from Earth. It was sunlight, scattered by dust that orbited the Sun in the plane of the planets. Most of the dust was in or near the asteroid belt, created by asteroid collisions. And in the modern Solar System, of course, the zodiacal light was enhanced by the glow of Gaijin colonies.

“So if there’s no zodiacal light—”

“There are no asteroids here,” Ben said.

“Nemoto. What happened to the asteroids?”

“You already know, I think,” virtual Nemoto hissed.

Ben nodded. “They were mined out. Probably long ago. This place is old, Madeleine.”

The electromagnetic petals of the flower-ship sparkled hungrily as it chewed through the rich gas pocket at the heart of the system, and the shadows cast by the Sun — now nearby, full and fat, brimming with light — turned like clock hands on the ship’s complex surface. But that diffuse gas cloud was now dense enough that it dimmed the farther stars.

Data slid silently into the FGB module.

“It’s like a fragment of a GMC — a giant molecular cloud,” Ben said. “Mostly hydrogen, some dust. It’s thick — comparatively. A hundred thousand molecules per cubic centimeter… The Sun was born out of such a cloud, Madeleine.”

“But the heat of the Sun dispersed the remnants of our cloud… didn’t it? So why hasn’t the same thing happened here?”

“Or,” virtual Nemoto said sourly, “maybe the question should be: How come the gas cloud got put back around this star? ”

They flew around the back of the Sun. Despite elaborate shielding, light seemed to fill every crevice of the FGB module. Madeleine was relieved when they started to pull away and head for the cool of the outer system, and that single mysterious planet.