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still jams.”
    â€œThen my message didn’t get through.” Somehow it didn’t matter much.
    Fairchild gave the final order. Edith watched from his side with a small, knowing smile. She was trying to remem­ber her childhood. There had been so many pleasant things then. She’d married Disjohn, in fact, because he reminded her of the strength of her father.
    She needed that strength now.
    She wished she had the strength of a father near.
    The ship was otherwise empty. Her corridors echoed as the impact of the nebula’s clouds bucked her and made her groan.
    The tiny neutron star pulsated regularly, surrounded by a halo of accelerated particles, a natural gen­erator of radio energy. The two normal singularities orbited each other, light-days apart. The violet influx of gases outlined them clearly. Like two whirlpools whose surfaces have been smeared with oil, they glowed in disparate, shim­mering mazes of light. Starlight ran in rings around them. Ghost images of each other flickered in the rings, and the ghosts carried rings of stars, and images of other ghosts.
    The universe was being twisted into ridiculous failures and inconceivable alterations.
    Here time and space rushed into multi-dimensional holes so rapidly that an object had to move at the speed of light to stay in one place. It was a Red Queen’s race on a cosmic scale.
    In drawing diagrams of what happens in the singularity below the event horizons, space and time axes cross and replace each other. The word “singularity” itself is a phrase of no more significance than “boojum.” It implies points in any mathematical fabric where results start coming out in infinities.
    Thus, Graetikin knew, they would soon step off the pages of one book which had told their lives until now, leave that book behind and everything associated with it, and risk a plunge into null.
    The naked singularity invisibly approached.
    Kamon’s thoughts grew fuzzy and uncoordinated. He bris­tled with rage as one portion of his mind came unbalanced in the ritual, and kicked out with his tail at the bulkhead before him. He dented the inch-thick steel. Then he re­gained his balance.
    The holy display of the black holes dominated every­thing.
    He was ready. A tiny reserved part of him set his weapons for a last-ditch attempt, then vanished into the calm pool of his prepared being.
    Disjohn Fairchild felt a giddiness he’d never known before, as if he were being spun on a carnival toy, but every part of him felt it differently.
    â€œI’m expanding,” Lady Fairchild said. “I’m getting bigger. Alice down the rabbit hole—”
    Still the ship fell.
    And fell.
    Edith gasped. The bridge darkened for the blink of an eye, then was suddenly aglow with scattered bits of ghost lightning. She held her hands in front of her eyes and saw a blue halo around them like Cherenkov radiation.
    Expan­sion. Alteration. The desk in front of her, and her arms on the desk, broke into color-separated images and developed intricate networks of filigree, became crystalline, net-like, tingled and shimmered and pulsed, then repeated in reverse and became solid again. Everything smelled of dust and age, musty, like vast libraries.
    Both ships ended their existence in status geometry at the same moment.
    Kamon followed at a different angle and hit the affect-field at the same instant the Fairchild ship did. As he had known and expected, his warp-wave created a temporary event horizon and he was divested of his ma­terial form.
    The Fairchild ship survived its fall. Graetikin’s equa­tions, thus far, were wholly accurate.
    None of them could conceive of what happened in the interface. It was not chaos—it was instead a sea of quiet, an end to action. The destruction and rearrangement of rules and constants led to a lassitude of space-time, an end­less sargasso of thought and event, mired and tangled and gray.
    Then each