docking with a huge colony ship orbiting 82 Eridani. The planet was inhabited, and we would have to move on.

fording a stream in America, white water rushing around my knees.

giving birth to Alicia, my second child, on the way to the core.

holding Alicia's hand as she gave birth to my grandson.

facing Vaffa.

dying. Dying again. And again.

I recoiled from it helplessly. All moments had been now. They all vanished, leaving me confused images and almost no memory. The things I remembered were as often in my future as in my past.

It returned, that vertiginous feeling of inhabiting all my past, present, and future at one time. Again I recoiled, and this time rebounded along the four-dimensional length of that long pink worm with a million legs that was my life, from my birth to my many deaths. I was one entity, one viewpoint, one now, I traveled the whole length of my existence, backward and forward, into the future and the past.

I fell back again, disoriented, confused. I had been shown something my mind could not contain, and I felt the memories of it fading already. I existed in too many ways at the same time for me to comprehend it. My eyes would not function, or they presented me with images that my brain could not assimilate.

I don't know how long I rested in that quiet, black place I had come to. There was no time, but all my sisters were there with me. We began to see, a little. Something swam into my detached consciousness, a strange thing that I perceived without actually seeing it. Strange as it was, it was closer to familiarity than anything else around me. Suddenly I knew it was a valuable thing. It was something I had to have. (Someone was telling me I had to have it?) It belonged to them, to the Invaders, and I had to possess it.

I reached—

She remembered Cathay leaning over her, shaking her shoulders. Her head bobbed back and forth, loosely. Her eyes focused.

"...all right? What happened?"

"Did they do something to you?" It was Vaffa's voice, and Lilo smiled when she saw the genuine concern in her face. Vaffa, Vaffa, there's hope for you yet.

"Who is that?"

"That's me," Lilo said, and sat up. It was Javelin who had asked the question, and Lilo had known what she was talking about. She had seen this moment during the kaleidoscope that had overcome her while the Trader siren wailed. She looked at the new occupant of the room—a tall, brown woman, dripping wet—and they nodded at each other. There was no need for any words between them. They had both been here before.

She was holding something in her hand, a silvery cube five centimeters on a side.

"Who are you?" Vaffa asked.

The woman looked curiously at Vaffa.

"I guess you can call me Diana, to avoid confusion. It's what everyone else called me."

The word sparked a fresh cascade of memories in Lilo's mind. She tried to hold them, but they were fading like a dream. A long trip, a fantastic trip, ten years of walking... hardships met and conquered... tall trees, huge trees that reached to the ceiling—no, that was from her own lifeline. She tried again to remember. There was another Lilo out there, on the runaway moon. She had been forced forward in time to her own death, three deaths and backward to many more... hadn't she? She was no longer sure. But something was guiding her steps still, some knowledge of how things would be, of how they had been.

"Let's get out of here," Lilo said.

"What?" Javelin couldn't believe what she heard. "I've got a lot of things I want to—"

"No. It's no use. Just one question," she said, looking at William. "What's that thing in my... in her hand?"

William looked sad.

"That," he said, "is a singularity. Things are going faster than we expected."

"And what is a singularity?"

He shrugged. "I wish we knew. If we did, we would be the equals of Invaders. We call it that because it violates basic laws of the universe. We think it might not exist in our universe, at least not in the normal way. What you see is just a nullfield that covers the thing itself. You'll never see any more than that."

"And what does it do?" Lilo felt dizzy. She had known the answers to the questions she was asking.

"It seems to remove the inertia from a body. Don't ask me how. We've studied them for millions of years and we don't know how it works. We think it might convert inertia to some other property of matter and store it in a theoretical hyperspace, or fifth dimension."

"Without all the double-talk, you're saying it's a space drive," Javelin said.

"The basis for a space drive. When you learn to use it, which will be very soon, you will be able to reach high speeds very quickly, and with very little fuel. The stars will be in your reach."

"I stole it," Diana said, proudly.

"Hmmm?" William glanced at her. He seemed distracted. "Indeed? You stole it, you say? Wonderful. You seem to have put one over on the Invaders."

Diana looked proud for a moment, then uncertain. Lilo felt sorry for her. She already had some notion of what had actually happened.

"I didn't, did I?" Diana said.

"No. It's part of the pattern which will culminate in the extermination of what remains of your species in the Solar System, other than the remnants on your home planet. The singularity will reproduce itself. It may even be a living creature. I won't pretend that we know much about it, but we use them, like everyone else."

"But why did they give it to us?"

"I don't know their motives. But they don't seem to wish to kill entire species. They didn't kill anyone on Earth, you remember, not directly. Nor did they hunt down the survivors on Luna. They let you live until you started bothering them. Now they are giving you another chance to spread yourselves to the stars; I don't think they care if you take it, but the chance is always offered."

"Then they do care about humans."

William frowned. "Who knows what they care about? They've not seemed unduly concerned about the hardships of my race. That singularity may seem miraculous to you, and to me. To them, it is probably the same level of technology as the chipped-stone cutting tool."

Cathay was still looking back and forth between the two Lilos.

"Will someone tell me what the hell's going on?" he said. "Who is she, and where did she come from?"

"You don't recognize me?" Diana asked. "Can I have changed that much? The last time you saw me, I was falling into Jupiter."

"But where have you been... I mean, how did—"

"She was returned by the Invaders," William said. "They simply bent her lifeline back on itself. From the strength of our preliminary indications, she went several thousand years into the future, spent ten years on Earth, and was returned here. It was as easy for them as connecting two dots with a line would be for you."

Lilo was getting impatient.

"Can we go now? I can answer most of your questions when we get back to the ship."

"Yes, yes," William said. "If you want to leave, then go. We'll have to rearrange some of our plans, of course. We expected something like this, but not so soon. And not in our own backyard. It's very disturbing. Think about what we told you. It still stands, but you don't have as much time as we thought you did."

"We never even got to see the inside of their big ring," Cathay grumbled. "All we saw was an artificial construction."

"A stage set," Vaffa suggested.

"Whatever. Something they whipped up to make us feel at home."

Javelin was looking out Cavorite's glass dome at the wheel. "I think they didn't want us to see inside."

Vaffa looked up. She had been brooding since they returned to the ship over an hour ago. She had listened silently as Diana told her story, and as Lilo tried her best to fill them in on the things she had learned, and how she had learned them. Halfway through her story, Lilo realized she was not getting it across to them. Javelin and Cathay were looking frankly skeptical, though it became plain that neither of them had any better explanation for the events they had observed. Javelin had advanced the theory—as diplomatically as possible—that Diana was an impostor, someone made by the Traders for reasons known only to themselves.