Trapped, she understood.

             The Mad Mind held that this universe was one of many expanding bubbles adrift inside a meta-universe. Ours was but one of the possibilities in a cosmos beyond counting.

             The great adventure of advanced life-forms, it believed, was to transcend the mere bubble which we saw as our universe. Perhaps there were civilizations of unimaginable essence, around the very curve of the cosmos. The Mad Mind wished to create a tunnel which would prick a hole in our universe-bubble and extend into others.

             Slimy blackness crept like fingers. Easeful ideas soothed into her.

             The Galactic Empire, she saw, had been a festering pile of insects. When she stopped to see them better they were of all shapes, chitter-ing, filled with meaningless jabber.

             Long ago some of these vermin had slipped away, she remembered, through the veils beyond the galaxy. Out, flying through strings of galaxies, across traceries of light. Spanning the great vaults and voids where few luminous sparks stirred.

             Those Empire maggots had vanished, leaving dregs to slump into petrified cities: Diaspar. Lys.

             And elsewhere in the spiral arms, other races had dwindled into self-obsessed stasis.

             But should the holy, enduring fire follow the Empire across the curve of this universe? Should the Mind pursue?

             She knew instantly that such goals were paltry. The stuff of maggot-minds.

             No—far grander to escape the binds of this universe entirely. Not merely voyage in it. Not simply skim around the sloping warp.

             Cley struggled but could find no way through the cloying hot ink that oozed into her throat, her bowels.

             She faintly felt that these turgid sensations were in fact ideas. She could not comprehend them as cool abstractions. They reeked and banged, cut and seared, rubbed and poked at her.

             And on this stage ideas moved as monstrous actors, capable of anything.

             She understood now—as quickly as she could frame the question—what the Madness cloaking her wanted. It desired to create deep wells in space-time. Compression of matter to achieve this in turn required the cooperation of many magnetic minds—for in the end, only intelligence coolly divorced from matter could truly control it.

             The risk of such a venture was the destruction of the entire galaxy. Fresh matter had to be created and compacted. This could curve space-time enough to trap the galaxy into a self-contracting sphere, cut off from the universe even as it bled downward into a yawning gravitational pit.

             The galaxy could not accept such danger. The magnetic minds had debated the wisdom of such a venture while the Mad Mind was confined. Their discussion had been dispassionate, for they were not threatened. Magnetic intelligences could follow the Mad Mind beyond such geometric oblivion, since they were not tied to the fate of mere matter.

             But the galaxy brimmed with lesser life. And in the last billion years, as humanity slept in Diaspar, life had integrated.

             Near most stars teemed countless entities, bound to planets or orbiting them. Further out, between the suns, the magnetic structures looked down on this with a slow, brooding spirit. Their inability to transcend the speed of light except in tiny spots meant that these most vast of all intelligences spoke slowly across the chasms of the galactic arms.

             Yet slowly, slowly, through these links a true Galactic Mind had arisen. It had been driven to more complex levels of perception by the sure knowledge that eventually the Mad Mind would escape.

             So the magnetic beasts could not abandon the matter-born to extinction. They had ruled against the Mad Mind's experiment before, and now they moved to crush the newrisen Mind before it could carry out the compression of mass.

             Cley saw this in a passing instant of struggle, while she swam in a milky satin fog—and then immeasurably later, through sheets the colors of blood and brass. She was like a blind ship adrift, with only the gyroscope of her senses of any use.

             The pain began then.

             It soared through her. If she had once thought of herself and the other Ur-humans as elements in an electrical circuit, now she understood what this could mean.

             The agony was timeless. Her jaws strained open, tongue stuck straight out, pink and burning. Her eyes bulged, though still squeezed shut by a giant hand which pinched her nose. She was terrified and then went beyond that to a longing, a need for extinction simply to escape the terror. Her agony was featureless. No tick of time consoled her. Her previous life, memories, pleasures—all dwindled into nothing beside the giant flinty mountain of her pain.

             She longed to scream. Alvin! Muscles refused to unlock in her throat, her face. Timeless excruciation made her into a statue.

             And then without transition she was standing, water cascading all over her, her hair bunched atop her head, her shoulders and breasts white with soapy smears. Her prickly flesh shimmered and melted and her nipples were fat spigots. They snagged bubbles and dripped rich drops. The air eagerly lapped these teardrops as they fell. Her eyes were closed but she could see a pulse flutter in her throat, satin moistness slither over her pendulous breasts.

             She knew that this, too, was part of the Mind. Or a last brushing kiss from it. For it was genuinely mad, and contained within it a skein that humans would see as love, or hate, or malignant resolve. But these were categories evolved for a species. Ihey no more described another class of being than violins and drums describe a storm.

             Some of its madness was human. Lodged in magnetic helices lay the mentality of Man. Several races had made the Mind and each left a signature.

             The Mind's ambition, to escape the bands of space-time itself, was born of humanity. And lacing through the pain were streaks of ancient guilt.

             Alvin had known this, she saw. That was some of the weight he carried.

             The Mind had come from a substrate of magnetic beings, too. She felt them now, ponderous and eerie.

             They brimmed throughout the solar system. Their intelligences were neither higher nor lower than humans', for they were not born from evolutionary forces which had driven humanity to solve problems. They had survived by altering their perceptions. How this happened Cley could not fathom.

             But for a sliding instant she caught a glimpse of humanity, from their view.

             A great eagle hung in black space, near a sulfurous planet, its wings flapping long and lazy. Diamond-sharp eyes glinted. The beak hung slightly open, as though about to call out a booming song. She watched the flex of the immense feathers for a while as muscles bulged beneath the wings. Only then did she see that the bird flew between the planet behind it and toward a sun in the distance, a star red and hairy with immense chromatic flares.

             And across the span of the immense wings nestled small, fevered mites. At one wingtip rose pyramids. Mountains capped in white framed broad plains, which in turn lead to silvery, spiky cities. Across the wingspan lay ages of greatness and long nights of despair. But always the ferment, the jutting towers of boundless ambition, the dusty ruins brought by wear and failure. At the far wingtip a fogged land lay, just beyond her ability to make out detail.

             Humanity. All who had ever carried the gleam kindled behind the searching eyes—they were there.