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laws of physics often overruled
tradition. Maybe these brethren would have to be destroyed in the
end, lest their easygoing, not so subtly insubordinate ways infect
the rest of the meth race.
    Marika scanned the night for a brethren workship towing a string
of bundles and spotted its flare. She touched her Mistress, relayed
instructions. The darkship began to drift backward.
    She was pleased with what she saw at that trojan.
    She would be remembered. The meth race would recall that Marika
the Reugge, wild silth of the Degnan pack of the upper Ponath, had
lived. Even if the project failed, if it died in squabbling between
the sisterhoods, it was something that would not be forgotten. She,
its instigator, would be remembered with it.
    Already the mass of materials reflected enough light to be
visible from the planet’s surface. In a few years it would be
the brightest object in the heavens, bar the moons. When it was
complete only the sun itself would outshine it.
    There was nothing she could contribute here, other than
encouragement. She touched several senior sisters who were working
the site and sent her wholehearted approval, then touched her
Mistress.
Proceed to the other site now, please.
    The darkship began easing out of the clutter.
    It took an hour to reach space where the Mistress dared move
swiftly. During the wait Marika ducked through her loophole into
the realm of ghosts, through which she worked her silth magic, and
continued a long-term effort to further familiarize herself with
the odd those-who-dwell of the void.
    She was accustomed to them now, and used them as she did the
ghosts down below on her homeworld. Their immensity and power no
longer disturbed and intimidated her, perhaps because by dealing
with them she developed her own strength and power. There were none
of them so mighty she could not take them into control and use them
to pull her voidship or perform some task ordinary meth would
perceive as witchery.
    She knew them, and the void, but still she had not realized her
dream. Still she had not traveled to an alien star, even as a
passenger upon another Mistress’s darkship. Still she had not
dared breach the Up-and-Over, where light became a lagging
pedestrian. For reasons deep within her, reasons she could not
fathom herself, she was frightened of what she might encounter
there.
    Darkfarers told her hers was a problem all voidfaring Mistresses
and bath faced before faring the Up-and-Over. They called the fear
the Final Test. Those who conquered it joined the most elite
sisterhood of all, the few score who flew the darkships to the
starworlds. Those who did not conquer it seldom fared past the
orbits of the meth homeworld’s major moons.
    Marika extended her touch, her sensing, farther and farther
outward . . . There it was, that dark something—remote, lying
outside the system itself, vast, colder than the indifferent void.
A sense of darkness radiated from it. And it terrified her.
    She sensed it every time she passed outside Biter’s orbit.
Kiljar had told her it was the ultimate in those-who-dwell, more
vast and powerful and deadly than anything she had yet experienced.
It lurked in the gulf between the stars, and had to be appeased by
any voidship that passed out of the system. It had appeared there
soon after the first silth had penetrated the deep.
    It was the thing that made Bestrei, the Serke champion, the most
terrible of living silth. Three living silth could manipulate that
great darkness. Bestrei could control it better than any other. She
could call it and hurl it against any challenger. None had the
strength to steal her control and drive it away.
    Kiljar said Bestrei meshed with it so well because inside she
was just as cold, deadly, and vacant.
    Marika feared it because she sensed it in her future. The script
was written. The very nature of meth, silth, and the silth ideal
made certain eventualities inevitable.
    Someday . . . 
    Unspoken by anyone, tacitly assumed and