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choosing suicide rather than death at Kamon’s hands. Or is he up to something else?”
    â€œI can offer no explanation, madame. Either something has malfunctioned or they have gone insane.”
    â€œI hate Kondrashef,” Anna said quietly. “He has always been right, has always given advice I could never follow—and he’s always been so damned, irrefutably correct. But I’ve got to follow my own wyrd.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Can they receive any messages now?”
    â€œThey are in the cloud. There’s too much interference.”
    â€œVeer off. Circle to the opposite side of the nebula and see if anything emerges on that end. I’ve met Fairchild’s captain—he’s a brilliant man. He may have more up his sleeve than we can know.”
    Dumbfounded, Anna watched the final act on her sen­sors and tapped her fingers on the Heuritex.
    Probability fell apart at the ergosphere interface of a sin­gularity. Whether the same conditions applied to a naked singularity or not, Graetikin didn’t know—he guessed they would.
    But they wouldn’t have to face the danger of the tidal forces—there would be no event horizons, no overt indication of in-rushing­ space-time. The singularity ahead had collapsed from a star oblated by the presence of other stars, and the result was a hole in space-time stretched out into a line. If conditions still applied here, he’d have to figure their chances of survival on a near-intuitive hunch.
    It was clear to Graetikin now. Inter-universe connections of necessity were devoid of probabilities. They were truce zones between regions of differing qualities, differing con­stants. Hence, somewhere above the singularity, re­shaping of in-falling material had to take place.
    Perhaps the Aighors weren’t far wrong after all.
    He worked all his findings into a single tight-packed sig­nal on several media, and broadcast it to space in general. When he was finished he turned to Disjohn and Edith and said, “Feels good to toss out a bottle, anyway. If someone picks it up, well and good. If not, we’ve lost a few terawatts.”
    Kamon could either back off, let them escape and hope for an encounter later, or he could pursue to the very end. But he was becoming fatalistic. It seemed the Fairchild ship was behaving not with human insanity, but with divine irrationality—a shield to his Venging. That could imply they were operating in the Grace of the Thrina, not against it. He wished he could consult the Council about this new insight, but there was no time. Whether correct or not, it made him reluctant to interfere. That small re­luctance made him hesitate.
    â€œNo!” he shouted, pounding his thorax in disgust. “They are only insane! There is no Grace upon them!”
    But it was too late. He had followed the Fairchild ship into the nebulosity on a matching course. They could only construe that as an intention to continue the chase.
    Since they were insane, they would destroy themselves.
    In his self-rage, he considered destroying the Nestor ship for personal satisfaction. But he had other things to do. He had to prepare himself mentally for the Fall. He told the others to begin their rituals.
    They would follow all the way in.
    â€œCourse plotted,” the computer told Graetikin. “There will be a proper configuration at these points on the chart. We can meet the singularity’s affect-field here, or here—that is, at these points in our future-line. If we fail within any width of time measurably in quantum jump intervals, we will come in at a closer angle, and the warp-wave of our approach will create a temporary event horizon which will destroy us. These are our options.”
    â€œInitiate the action and test it on a closed loop. Then choose the best approach and put us there. Kamon hasn’t left our tail?”
    â€œNo, he still follows. And