Damn it, Parz protested silently, we’re talking about the snuffing out of species — of the potential of countless billions of souls as yet unborn…

But, as always, he realized dully, the Qax were doing nothing that humans had not tried to perpetrate on sections of their own species in the past.

"Parz, shortly we will be entering the throat of the wormhole. You must be prepared for causality stress."

"Causality stress?" Parz stared into the blank, gaping mouth of the wormhole portal; the hints of silver-gold were gone now, leaving only a receding darkness that covered the stars. "You know, Qax, you intend to destroy my home world. And yet all I feel now is a personal dread of entering that damn wormhole."

"You are a limited species, Jasoft Parz."

"Perhaps we are. Perhaps we’re better off that way."

The Spline trembled; to Jasoft, cushioned as he was by the entoptic matter, the mile-wide animal’s shudder was like a mild earth tremor.

"I’m frightened, Qax."

"Imagine my concern."

The Spline’s shuddering became continuous; Parz felt it as a high-frequency oscillation of the entoptic fluid — small waves beating against his flesh like insect wings — overlying a bass rumble that must come from resonances in the immense skeleton of the Spline itself. The ship was suffering.

"Qax. Talk to me."

"What about?"

"Anything," Parz muttered. "I don’t care. Anything to take my mind off this. Tell me the story of how a human destroyed your planet… Tell me about Jim Bolder."

"Will destroy it. Would have destroyed it."

"Whatever."

The Qax seemed to consider. "Perhaps. But what an odd question for you to ask, Jasoft Parz. I must consider what you have to gain by acquiring such information. Perhaps you have some vain scheme to use the data to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of your people… from the race’s greatest traitor, to an unsung hero—"

Parz, surprised, frightened, looked inward. Traitor? A month ago he would have denied the charge.

But now the Qax had changed the rules.

Suddenly Parz had found himself transformed from a morally dubious collaborating diplomat into a witness to the destruction of his race…

The Spline shuddered again, more violently, and through the entoptic medium he seemed to hear a low groan, as if of pain, or terror.

Could the Qax be right? Was some element of his subconscious still scheming, looking for advantage, even now?

Did he, he asked himself with wonder, still entertain hope?

The Qax was silent.

Now the Spline shuddered so hard that Parz was thrown into a soft collision with the wall of the huge eyeball. It felt as if the Spline had jerked through a few hundred yards, as if hauling itself away from some source of pain.

Jasoft closed his eyes and, with a subvocalized command, ordered the software in his eyes to call up an external image of the Spline, transmitted from the companion ship.

His craft was entering the portal face, inching forward as delicately as any docking, the curves of its flanks almost brushing the powder-blue edges of the tetrahedral framework.

Parz was a hundred hours away from the past.

The Qax spoke abruptly, its decision evidently made. "The human was — will be — called Jim Bolder. A man of the Occupation era — from not far into your own future, Parz.

"Bolder was one of the last human pilots. Eventually the Qax interdiction on human operation of spacecraft will become complete, Jasoft Parz. Ships will be impounded on landing. The off-Earth human colonies will become self-sufficient. Or they will be closed, their inhabitants returned to Earth. Or they will die.

"Men such as Bolder will lose their vocation, Parz. Their reason to be. This made — will make — it possible to recruit Bolder for a special assignment."

The clean geometries of the Interface framework looked stark, inhuman, against the flesh of the Spline. At one point the Spline came within a few dozen yards of brushing the frame itself. Flesh toughened against the rigors of hyperspatial travel was boiling. As Parz watched, blisters the size of city blocks erupted in that pocked, metal-gray surface; the blisters burst like small volcanoes, emitting sprays of human-looking blood that froze instantly into showers of ice crystals, sparkling in the blue glow of the framework. Acres of the Spline convulsed, trying to pull the damaged area away from the exotic matter.

"What was Bolder’s assignment?" Parz asked.

"Parz, what do you know of galactic drift?"

Galaxies — and clusters and superclusters of galaxies, across half a billion light-years — were moving in great, coherent streams through space. It was as if the galaxies were moths, drawn toward some unseen light… Human astronomers had described such drift for centuries, but had never been able satisfactorily to explain it.

"What does this have to do with Bolder?"

"We suspected the drift had some connection with the Xeelee," the Qax said.

Parz snorted. "Come on. The Xeelee are powerful, but they’re not gods."

"We sent Bolder to find out," the Qax said mildly.

Parz frowned. "How? That’s impossible. Even in the fastest of our hyperdrive craft it would take centuries of subjective time—"

"We had access to a Xeelee ship."

Parz felt his jaw working. "But that’s impossible too."

"Such details are unimportant. It is sufficient that Bolder survived his journey to the center of the streaming."

"To the place where all the galaxies go."

"Yes," said the Qax. "Although, close enough to the center, Bolder found that the structure of all but the most compact ellipticals was shattered; galaxy fragments, stars and worlds, tumbled into the immense gravity well at the center of it all, their blue-shifted light tumbling ahead of them."

"And at the bottom of the well?"

The Qax paused.

To Parz, still studying the Spline from without, it was as if the portal framework were scorching the flesh of the hapless Spline. But it wasn’t heat, he knew, but sleeting high-frequency radiation and gravity tides raised by the superdense exotic matter that were damaging the Spline so.

Parz shuddered in sympathy with the suffering Spline.

The image winked out. Parz, reduced to sudden artificial blindness, realized with a shock that his ship must now be totally inside the wormhole. With a feeling of claustrophobia and panic he snapped out subvocal commands.

His vision cleared.

The eye chamber had been reduced to the darkness within which he had awoken; his faithful globe lamp, floating beside him, cast his own shadow on the fleshy interior of the eyelid.

So the Spline had shut its eyes. Well, he couldn’t entirely blame it.

The ship shuddered, buffeted; entoptic fluid sloshed within its spherical chamber. Parz half swam to the nearest wall and clung to a ropy nerve channel.

"Gravitational stress," the Qax murmured in his ear. "This wormhole is a throat in space and time, Parz: a region of stress, immensely high curvature. The throat is lined with exotic matter throughout its length; we are traversing a tube of vacuum that runs along the axis, away from the exotic matter. The minimum width of the throat is about a mile. Our velocity is three miles per second—"

"Not fast enough," Parz gasped.

Vibration traveled through Parz’s grasping fingers, up through his arms, and to his very core; it felt as if the Spline were being beaten by some immense fist. "Can the ship endure this?"

"So the simulations tell us," the Qax said complacently. "But the creature is scarcely comfortable."

"Right." Parz clung to his nerve rope, imagining centuries unraveling around the hurtling Spline. "Tell me what Bolder found," he said through chattering teeth. "At the bottom of the gravity well."

A Ring, the Qax said. A torus. Composed of some unknown, crystalline substance. A thousand light-years across. Rotating at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.