Washen meant to respond.

Her words were already formed and waiting. Her mouth opened far enough to let out the first tentative sound. Then came an impact that she never felt. A black hole with the smallest mass so far struck within forty-six meters of the ship’s true bow—a mathematical point on the hyperfiber hull that was celebrated with a simple diamond plaque now submerged under a hundred kilometers of living ocean.

It was a tiny piece of infinity, but the polypond had accelerated it to one-third the speed of light.

The trajectory was nearly perfect.

As she watched—as her mute mouth hung open and her eyes brightened—Washen saw a flash of light emerge from the hyperfiber directly above Marrow, traversing the sleepy buttresses and cutting through the heart of the iron planet, then emerging on the far side with the same eerie blue afterglow that hung in what was an otherwise nearly perfect vacuum.

If the containment at the core had been disrupted …

If the ancient safeguards were failing …

If the monster was being unleashed now … now could she be here, lying with Pamir on her big undimpled bed?

“We may not have eight days,” she allowed, thinking of Endeavor.

“We might not have eight minutes,” Pamir grunted. Then with a big laugh, he said, “We might have died already. The universe has been created, finally, and we’re just shadows making tiny, unimportant sounds … !”

Thirty- five

The six great ports had been named after the children of an otherwise forgotten explorer. Alpha was where humans first slipped inside the ship, and it had always been the jewel, preferred by captains and requested by the most important passengers. Beta was a lesser sister, honorable and always reliable, and in her own fashion lovely. Caprice was where the muscular freighters brought in or removed cargo. Denali had earned a reputation for the illicit, although her main function was to handle objects and wild souls deemed a little dangerous. Endeavor was a quiet clean facility used to house surplus taxis and streakships. While the final port, the obscure and mostly unvisited Gwenth, had been left virtually untouched by a hundred thousand years of human occupation. Its central cylinder was rarely lit and never pressurized, and except for basic repairs made to adjacent hatches and berths, the facility looked as if no one had come to the place since the Builders had packed up their tools and walked away.

O’Layle stepped into a narrow and very deep chamber, and with a nervous little breath, smelled nothing.

Nothing.

It occurred to him that no human being, nor any other species for that matter, had stood where he was standing now. A glow-globe followed him, illuminating the entire room with a soft peach light. The floor was a sheet of hyperfiber older than the galaxy, perfectly clean but dimmed to gray by the pressures of simple time. The flanking walls and the low ceiling were much the same. It took a hundred strides to walk the length of the room, as he was supposed to do; then came a thick pane of diamond braced with hyperfiber strands. The glow-globe went black. O’Layle touched the diamond with a single finger, and only then did he realize that his hand was shaking. Both hands were trembling, and a sturdy pressure was building against his chest. What was he supposed to do? Stand alone in the darkness, waiting for the Builders to return? For a moment, despair got the best of him. He dipped his head, butting it against the cold pane, and his arms crossed on his chest, squeezing hard, forcing his tight little lungs to exhale and breathe again.

“Look.”

The voice was directly behind him.

“Ahead,” said the voice. “And down.”

When could he stop listening to others? When would his soul again be his own? Not yet, plainly. And with eyes that had adapted to the perfect blackness, O’Layle stared down into a chamber vast enough to hold a hundred fully fueled starships.

There, and there, flecks of light moved a little ways, then vanished.

More lights emerged, and one of them rose off the round expanse of floor, making no sound he could hear and no vibration that was transmitted through the thick pane. What he was seeing was beautiful—a sparkling mass of light and uncoiling energy—and as O’Layle watched the object rise, he realized it was intricate and vast, and in the end, utterly ordinary.

A simple tech-wagon sat in the middle of the lights, loaded with fefs and Remoras and scaling its way up an invisible thread.

“What’s happening—?” he began to ask.

“Not yet,” the voice told him.

O’Layle knew that voice. A name and face swam out of his memories, and then much else with it. Odd. That was the sensation. Prickly odd. A thousand tiny memories began to bubble out of nowhere, and in the middle of it, he said, “Perri,” with a soft, almost despairing voice.

“Quiet,” Perri told him.

He couldn’t obey. “I don’t feel right,” he explained. “Something’s wrong with my head, my mind—”

“Stand still,” a second voice growled.

O’Layle didn’t recognize that male voice, but it never spoke again. Instead, Perri moved closer to him, if not exactly close, and through acoustic trickery, he whispered into the frightened man’s ear. “You’re safe,” he promised. “You’re fine. I brought an old friend of mine.”

In the near blackness, O’Layle saw nothing. “I want to help,” he said again. “I told Washen—”

“We know.”

“What occurred to me,” O’Layle muttered. “I was thinking, and suddenly it occurred to me … and if it’s useful, and I can help …”

“But that’s an entirely different matter,” Perri claimed.

O’Layle shut his eyes, and now the blackness was his own.

“My friend brought some machinery with him—very rare, very elaborate tools—that help with memories. Did you know, O’Layle? The universe has infinite layers, and you exist in some infinite fraction of them. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” he blurted.

“And you understand that?”

Rarely, and never with much feeling. He shook his head, admitting, “It’s never made much sense to me.”

“Nor to me,” Perri replied.

O’Layle turned again, looking out through the diamond. No one told him to remain motionless, and the odd prickling in his head seemingly had fallen away. The lights below were softer now, and scarcer. As he watched, two and then two more of the glows folded in on themselves and vanished.

“How long have we known each other?”

Perri asked the question, and then he gave a clear and definitive answer. He named the precise year when they first met, and with a sharp tone, he asked, “Is that right? Or am I mistaken?”

O’Layle started to say. “You’re right.”

Then, he hesitated.

“No.”

“I’m wrong?” Perri snapped.

“It was eighty years earlier,” O’Layle confessed. “I had a different name, a different face. You and your old wife—”

“Quee Lee.”

“You were attending a party. In the Wealth District, wasn’t it? Sure, it was. I haven’t thought about that party in ages. If ever.”

“What do you remember?”

“Your old wife.”

Silence.

“She wandered off to find something unfancy to eat. That’s what she said to me. ‘Unfancy fare.’ And I turned to you and asked, ‘So how did you find …”’

His voice trailed away.

“How did I find what?” Perri purred with a soft, almost seductive voice. “Tell me what you remember. Exactly.”

“‘How did you find such a sweet place to park your prick?’”

In the darkness, O’Layle braced himself. The remembered moment came back to him, and with it arrived the memory of a pretty-faced man cracking him in the mouth with a crystal goblet. Suddenly he felt a blow delivered tens of thousands of years ago, and with one hand rubbing his unsore jaw, he asked, “How does this trick work?”