in the uncaring city she waits for remittance
in loneliness and terrible paucity,
for the weight raised up high
to fall down and down,
all the way down,
fall upon her
and shatter
her hated
reality...

* * *

"The event horizon is within range of our instruments," Pham Nuwen announced, his voice quiet in the crowded control room. "And the corridor is still holding."

Ravna Bergnsdot stared out of the viewscreen, shifting slightly to see over the shoulders of the people in front of her. If she had been foolish enough to trust her eyes - to believe that what was seen, was real - then she would have thought that there was no viewscreen, only a hole in the wall, a door into naked space. But the stars beyond had a depth, a three-dimensionality of representation, that would never have been visible to the parallax of naked eyes. You could have called it a lie - but surely the real lie was the flat bowl of stars you would see with unassisted human vision, eyes claiming that reality was embedded in a finite sphere; the accidental deception with which Nature had tricked the ancient planet-bound, the false shell of night. So their ship rushed forward at some meaningless speed that no meatbound mind could imagine, and it was just barely possible to see the closest stars move. You had to look carefully. There were a lot of stars.

Directly ahead of them was a small but growing black pit - which was the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy - and it was hard to shake the impression that they were very... slowly... falling.

"Well," snapped the young girl with her hair done up in yellow ribbons, "are we there yet?"

Pham Nuwen, or the shattered fragment of Old One embedded in him, could be inhumanly patient at times. "Ten minutes, Haruhi. It's a corridor of the Low Beyond, not the Transcend, and our FTL isn't all that fast here."

Ravna ground her teeth together. Something about that one girl, out of all their bizarre guests, had the ability to set her on edge. Why couldn't they all be like Belldandy? "Be glad it's not thirty thousand years," Ravna bit out. "That's how long it should take to get to the galactic core. Be glad the computers are still working, be glad your brains haven't given out, this far into the Unthinking Depths -"

"Ease up, mate," said a slight and slightly thin man, that absurd rapier still slung over one shoulder. Harold Shea gave her a mild, friendly look. "This may be your home universe, but the rest of us are pretty eager to move on at this point."

This... IS... your home universe! You are not a cross-dimensional traveler! Your life was a Powers-be-damned computer simulation! Your body was not transported here, it was synthesized into the real world by Old One's nanotechnology, patterned into existence like a living dinner steak, and you're never going anywhere else but here!

There were times when Ravna thought that Old One had simply been insane.

And there were times when she managed to swallow her naivete and remember the long, long history of the galaxy, and how many times various Powers had done things that only looked insane. Even in the retrospective lens of history, the hidden reasons weren't always apparent afterward. But there was more than enough evidence to suggest that what sometimes looked like stupidity, or even madness, was just the strategy of a very, very, very intelligent mind. How much hubris did it take for a mind running at 10^17 operations-per-second, dealing with a mind of 10^60 ops/second, to presume that what it could not understand was reasonless? Enough hubris that she probably couldn't comprehend it with her own small mind.

No. There was method to Old One's madness, there had to be. From the crashed refugee ship they had gleaned this map to the unreachable, the corridor of navigable space stretching all the way to the central black hole of the galaxy, the singularity which lay at the exact center of the Zones of Thought. If there were a power beyond the Powers - something that laid down the Zones of Thought, something capable of setting barriers to bar even superintelligences - then it might lie at the end of this mysterious corridor. If there was a key to defeating the Blight, it might be here.

And Old One - barred itself from reaching into this place, for the navigable corridor was only of the Beyond, not the Transcend - Old One had somehow anticipated this possibility, before the Blight killed it. And Old One had blessed her and Pham with a company that would, in some way she couldn't begin to imagine, prove well-suited to the task.

Ravna's eyes flickered around the crowded control room.

How the delusion of being a trans-universal traveler was going to help save the galaxy, her own mind could not imagine.

"I'll be glad to leave this bloody Shadow," said one of their guests. Beardless, slim, light-eyed, the man called Merlin. "No offense to our honorable hosts. But I can hardly even change shape here, and I don't like being cut off from the Logrus completely."

There were murmurs of agreement all around the room, from various synthetic beings who remembered magical powers that they were never getting back.

She was not looking forward to the moment when all their guests realized that this universe was their last and final stop. When the momentum of their imaginary travels came to an abrupt and shuddering halt. Synthesized and abandoned - the Powers did not have a reputation for pity on those mortals they found useful.

A gentle hand touched her shoulder; Ravna turned, and found herself looking into the eyes of Jake Stonebender. "You're thinking we're going to be disappointed," Jake said.

Ravna nodded. Jake was one of the nicer guests, a man with empathy (and sympathy) so acute that it bordered on telepathy. It wasn't supernatural, of course, couldn't be, and Jake didn't claim it was. According to Jake, he'd had the memories of being telepathic, for just a single night, with the customers of a bar called Callahan's - and ever since Jake had been trying by sheer niceness and empathy to bring down the borders between himself and other people. Trying to reproduce the event. Which he never would. It was only a synthesized memory.

Jake smiled and shrugged. "We've all been through this before, you know. All of us except you. You're hardly the first universe whose denizens have been convinced that it and it alone was the ultimate bottom level of reality."

A laugh went through the room, nasty in some places and gentle in others. "Hell," said the man called Merlin, "you should have seen the look on my face when I realized that Amber and Chaos weren't the twin poles of all existence, and that Xander here," nodding to a man dressed in brown robes and black boots, wearing a flashlight-like object on his belt, "wasn't from just another Shadow."

"It is a great and special moment," stated the oft-pontificating figure who called himself Lazarus Long, "when we realize the universe is larger than anything we knew about as children; and you, Ravna, are blessed to be heading for your moment."

"Speak for yourself," said one of the three identical-looking fourteen-year-old boys who had clustered in one corner of the room. They'd all had the same name originally, and had apparently come from slightly different versions of the same base simulated universe... along with a single copy of a red-haired girl, dressed in a torn form-fitting red suit, with bandages on her right arm and a patch over her left eye. She'd refused medical help, with prejudice; and a discreet scan had shown that, in fact, she was undamaged underneath the bandages. The red-haired girl was the creepiest of their guests, always staring around her with a expression of utter contempt. The three boys had some sort of messed-up relationship with her, and Ravna didn't know if they were sharing her, or taking turns, or what the hell was going on with the four of them, actually. The three boys wore distinguishing badges marked with the numbers 1000, 4 x 10^4, and +1. The one who had spoken was the third child, nicknamed Oncemore, and Oncemore now spoke once more: "That first moment was fucking traumatic for some of us. Ravna, if you or Pham do have any trouble dealing with reality once it sets in, I'm here for you -"

The red-haired girl snorted in complete disgust.

"- and so are we all," finished the boy.

"Yes," said the beautiful and quiet woman with the blue markings on her face, the goddess Belldandy - even Ravna sometimes found herself thinking of the woman as a "goddess". A smaller and softer deity, such as humans might have conceived to worship, in some more naive era when no one had yet imagined such a thing as a Power. "I remember what a shock it was to find that there were worlds beyond the reach of Yggdrasil." She clung a little tighter to the enviable black-haired boy next to her, who smiled and hugged her back. "If Keiichi hadn't been with me to help me deal with it -"

"I probably would have gone crazy," said the black-haired boy wryly.

"The universe has to bottom out somewhere!" Ravna had sworn she wasn't going to get involved in this argument again, and yet she couldn't seem to help herself. "You're going to come to a stop someday - and that place happens to be here, dammit! There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how you got here - or maybe 'reasonable' is too strong a word, but it's a perfectly logical explanation. And that explanation says that this is it. You've reached the end of the line."

"Been there," chorused Jake Stonebender and around half the others, "done that."

"No! Old One simulated you being there and doing that! It simulated your experiences - it might even have simulated your whole world for all I know - and that's how all those apparently impossible things could happen to you! Old One simulated your base worlds, Old One invented the higher universes and higher metaverses you discovered, Old One crossed them over! And then it finally synthesized you outside the simulation - out here, in the real world! Don't you understand?" Ravna stopped, because it was clear from the looks on their faces that they did understand.

"Look, Ravna," Harold Shea said gently. "I understand your perspective. Don't get me wrong. The first time I heard that my whole life had been a computer simulation - well, it was pretty scary. I'd been through enough worlds, at that point, to know that whenever it started to look like something magical actually had a reductionist explanation, the reductionist explanation was usually right. I thought that probably had been the truth all along - the real explanation for how I got from one world to another. I mean, it did seem pretty absurd if I stepped back and thought about it." Shea shrugged. "That's what I thought the first time."

Aaaagh! "Don't you understand that Old One can just simulate that too?"

Shea nodded. "Yes, that's what I thought the second time. It did indeed occur to me, the second time through, that the Solid State Entity could have just as easily synthesized my memory of the Five Galaxies and the Transcendents. But there was this certain nagging doubt, you understand." Shea sighed. "By the third time, it was just one more way of going from one place to another."

Ravna's hands made helpless gestures, as if trying to clutch air. "But we agree on all the real facts of the universe up until this point? You agree that all your memories were simply synthesized, or, at best, experienced within Old One's simulation?"

"Or within whatever simulated Old One," Shea said agreeably. "Look at it from my perspective, Ravna. What are the odds that this particular reality was the bottom one?"

Ravna buried her face in her hands. "We agree on all the facts of the universe up to this point. We agree on the reasons why you believe what you believe. Shouldn't we be able to agree on what we predict will happen next?"

Shea shrugged.

"We're always dreaming," said a middle-aged woman who carried herself with a queenly air and a quite peculiar demeanor, "and no matter how many times we wake up, we can wake up another time after that. It's a race whose end can never be reached. And will I be glad to wake up from this one! Ship time, ship time, just shipping shipping shipping from one end of the galaxy to the other! I haven't been so bored in years! Since I followed the rabbit!"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," said a taller and brown-haired boy, standing next to the yellow-ribboned girl - Kyon, that was his name. Kyon wore his customary expression of detached cynicism. "We don't know this is the exit."

"Where else would it be if not here?" snapped the yellow-ribboned girl. "Honestly, Kyon, you can be so dense sometimes!"

"Kyon-san's statement is logical," said Spock.

Pham Nuwen held up a hand. "I'm getting something on our sensors now... analyzing..." Pham's eyes flickered, and Ravna shivered; it might have been her imagination, but for a moment she thought she had caught something incomprehensible staring out of Pham's eyes, a fragment of the fathomless corpse of Old One.

Suddenly the ship fell out of FTL; and in the same instant, Ravna felt a pressure that quickly ramped up to a fifth of a G, making her body seem suddenly heavier, and the floor tilted; they were accelerating in real space now.

"Got it!" Pham said suddenly. "There's an artificial object ahead of us, just above the event horizon of the galactic singularity. Smaller than I would have expected - just a few hundred meters in diameter - and made out of some material that I can only describe as... anomalous-sensor-profile-onium..."

"I don't suppose it happens to block forty percent of neutrinos?" murmured a tall man with a shaved head. Pham shrugged in his general direction.

"How about the Blighted buggers pursuing us?" asked a semi-unshaven man; he was wearing shoddily mismatched chain mail, and more importantly, to him at least, a badge. "How long 've we got before we get stomped flatter than a... very flat thing?"

"Half an hour at the outside, Vimes," Pham replied. "Whatever we're going to do there -"

"We have to do it very fast!" finished the extremely short man in the gray uniform. "Um..." Miles Vorkosigan looked around the room. "I know a lot of us have a problem with shutting up and getting out of the way - including me - but those of us who aren't computer specialists really do need to shut up and get out of the way. This universe seems like Spock and Belldandy territory."

"But -" began the boy with the scar on his forehead.

"Sorry, no buts!" said the man in the bloodstained sweater. The man's word seemed to settle the issue; there were reluctant nods from around the room. The kindly, gentle old man was the closest that the group seemed to have to an acknowledged leader - or maybe arbiter would be a better term. (Though for some reason he refused to clean the blood off his sweater, which didn't fit with his image at all.)

The apparent tilt of the deck reversed itself; they were slowing down, now, but still drawing closer to the anomalonium object. In the viewscreen it resolved into a cup-like shape, a hollow teardrop with an opening at the top and a tapering tail coming down.

"I dub thee Another Damned Holy Grail," said the girl with the red shirt and black miniskirt and thigh-high black stockings (it made for an amazingly striking ensemble). Miles, heroically, tried to shush his girlfriend; but Tohsaka Rin gave him a hard elbow to the ribs, making his breath audibly whoosh out.

"Nothing promising on the tail," Pham Nuwen said, his voice flat and concentrated. "I'm taking us into the opening -"

And in almost the same moment, they were inside the teardrop and halted, facing the bottom of the cup, where, a hundred meters away, there was the gleam of complexity, a distant tracery within the cup's surface/floor.

Pham stood up abruptly from his chair, almost bumping into one of the other bodies in the overcrowded control room. "Suit up," he said. "We're going out there."

They shuffled into the cargo bay (the ordinary airlock wouldn't have been nearly large enough) and pulled on their pressure suits in silence, the guests stretching on the light spacesuits with varying degrees of recent or accustomed skill.

"I hate space," murmured the man with the shock of yellow hair, who always wore a yellow trenchcoat and always seemed to be complaining about something. "It's enough to make me wish I was visiting Hell instead. Seems like every bloody time I almost die out here -" He was interrupted by a muffled sound from a boy completely wrapped in an orange winter coat. "Yah, I suppose I shouldn't complain about almost."

They left the ship in a flock of strangeness, a horde of not overwhelmingly coordinated silver suits, tagged in Ravna's hud with the bizarre labels that served them as names. Belgarath, who the crowd seemed to look on as a relative newcomer, was the only one who had trouble - his thrusters vectoring him off in a random direction - but a suit labeled "Silverlock" caught up with him before he hit anything.

And so in a handful of seconds, they were standing in front of -

If life had been more convenient, they would have been standing in front of an airlock, with human-breathable air on the other side, and understandable directions on this side.

What lay at the base of the cup instead was a fractal tracery of raised substance and depressions, like symbols inside symbols...

"It's almost like the Logrus..." murmured one of the spacesuits, the one labeled Merlin in her hud. A few other suits turned their head toward him. "But not the same thing at all, I'm afraid." The heads turned back.

Spock, Belldandy, the Doctor, and Pham Nuwen were arranging themselves around the tracery.

"Everyone," said Ravna out loud, her voice transmitted by radio among the suits. "I do think you should look at the symbols and watch what Pham and the others are doing. If you have any ideas, please speak up. There has to be some reason why Old One wanted all of you here."

Secrets hidden in their imaginary memories? Toolboxes within their synthetic skills? If she'd shepherded all these lunatics to the center of the galaxy for nothing -

They stared at the surface pattern for a while.

"I think," ventured Daniel Jackson from the mob of floating suits, "that the depressions are meant to be traced by the equivalent of a finger - it seems similar to some of the other alien artifacts I've examined, where it turned out in the end that they were meant to be traced - or pushed around, in one case -"

"Yes..." came a mutter - Ravna's hud localized the sound to the Doctor's suit, though the tone was distinctive enough. "Yes... Exxilon... the City... the puzzle on the wall... it does seem similar."

"The thought had occurred to me," came the regulated tones from Spock's suit, "but I thought to study the machinery further before proceeding. Visualize a Rubik's cube where you may not be able to reverse a move. If it begins in an almost-unscrambled state, the first moves are critical -"

"Time's wasting, eyebrow boy!" Vimes said in a hard tone. "We have enemies, remember."

"This wasn't built by something with fingers," Ravna said. "This came from..." her voice trailed off on the sheer impossibility of explanation. Powers beyond the Powers. The makers of the Zones of Thought, barriers which not even Old One, not even the Blight could alter, with all their picotechnology. "Something so far beyond the need for fingers we can't even imagine it -"

"- which built this for a species with fingers!" Miles interrupted. "They meant it to be used, or they wouldn't give it controls at all. It would've just shot us down as we approached. And the corridor was Low Beyond, so it's meant to be used by us, not your Transcendents - and that means they meant it to be understood by our tiny little minds."

"So does that mean," said Haruhi, "that it probably won't do anything disastrous if we just try pressing a few buttons already?"

"NO," said the Doctor, Belgarath, and half a dozen others of the older and wiser sort.

"I've seen this..." came a whisper from the silver suit containing the tall man, in the dark robes, with a shock of black hair, with solid black eyes whose pupils shined like stars in the night. "Through ten thousand million billion dreams have I walked and watched -"

"Get on with it!" came the inevitable cry (from a strange man who never seemed to say anything else).

"- and I have seen this... from another angle..."

Spock and Pham Nuwen glanced at each other, and then, wordlessly, began to rotate themselves, using their thrusters to shift above and around the traceries.

Then - "Fascinating," came Spock's voice. "It is a map of the galaxy." Followed a moment later by Pham Nuwen's "Not just the galaxy! The Zones!"

Ravna blinked. The figure... might have had some vaguely spiral or oval qualities, but it looked nothing like the galaxy to her.

Pham Nuwen was still speaking. "The raised metal ridges show the density contours of the star map - gradients of starlight or star mass, I'm not sure which - and the depressions show the contours of the Zones of Thought. We divide them into Unthinking Depths, Slow Zone, Beyond, and Transcend, but there are many subtler gradients than that..."

An absolutely unbelievable thought came to Ravna. If she'd thought slightly faster, she might have shut up about it - if only she'd thought just a little faster -

"And you think the depressions are supposed to be moved? With our fingers?"

It should have produced absolute silence. Throughout the mob of suits. It should have stunned the whole galaxy. Everything should have gone quiet at that. The idea that you could rearrange the Zones of Thought just by pushing a depression with your fingers -

"Ah," said one of the three fourteen-year-old boys, the one called Thousand, a private being full of wry malice and manipulation. "And the invading alien horror du jour, the Blight as you call it, can't survive in the Slow Zone. Right? The Blight can invade systems in the Beyond with computer viruses and mind control, but in the Slow Zone it's essentially dead. So we just push up the Slow Zone and kill it. Like expanding an AT field."

Ravna literally could not speak. The idea was too huge to be comprehended. Too awful. Whole civilizations built on FTL travel and nanotechnology and advanced automation would be reduced to utter barbarism. Trillions upon uncounted trillions would die in the collapse -

"Yes," came the soft voice of Pham Nuwen. "Old One says that's what we have to do."

"No!" Ravna screamed. Heedless of everything else she vectored her thrusters at maximum -

Only to find her suit failing to respond. Pham had cut off her control.

"I'm sorry, Ravna," said Pham's voice. There was human sadness in it, and something more alien, something crystalline and god-touched. "They'll all die otherwise. The Blight will kill them - or worse. This way, some will live. We have no other choices, Ravna." He was carefully scrutinizing the surface pattern. "If it makes you feel any better - Old One thinks our corridor is going to disappear during the convulsion. It may reappear afterward, but we'll be in the Unthinking Depths long enough to kill all of us."

"Hey!" came an annoyed voice from Haruhi. "You cut off my suit power!"

"Of course he did," came the Thousand's voice. "Our new friend Pham is afraid one of us will interfere with his saving the galaxy and killing the lot of us." Elaborate sarcasm entered his voice. "It is, of course, an entirely unfounded worry."

"But still a clever precaution," came the gruff approval of Vimes.

"There surely was a time when I would have tried to interfere," came Belldandy's voice. There was a terrible abiding sorrow in it, a song of bleak experience, some unwanted bitter adulthood that had been forced on her in her journeys. "Do what you must to save your galaxy, Pham Nuwen; and try to live on, afterward."

Pham was already examining the depressions. His fingers hovered over, sketching movements - it looked like he was plotting angles to kill the Blight with a single slide, digging in his fingers and moving with the momentum of his suit behind them, just in case the controls updated the galaxy in realtime. "There won't be an afterward," Pham said absently. "We're going to die here."

"I wish," said Nathan Brazil and the Nameless One, speaking in almost perfect unison.

"You will learn," came the voice of Prince Adam, who always spoke in simple words as if addressing an audience of six-year-olds, "that any big magic explosion which is supposed to kill you, always sends you somewhere else instead."

There was the muffled sound of the boy in the orange coat; Ravna thought she caught the words "die", "episode", and "anthropic".

One of the other suits made a brief motion through the air, a puff of thrust and counterthrust. Pham's head swiveled in shocked surprise, but the suit made no move to approach the controls of the galaxy. "And don't think," said the voice of that suit - that was the fourteen-year-old boy marked 4 x 10^4 - "that you're doing this without our consent, or that you took us by surprise with your computer virus. I too accept responsibility for what you do this day. Believe me, I have the power to prevent it!"

Several of the other suits bobbed in agreement and demonstration.

Ravna's paralyzed thoughts managed to make a single further inference: Old One had foreseen this possible end - or something like it - and arranged for its synthetic creatures to remember surviving catastrophe, over and over, so that they would not hesitate to put themselves in harm's way.

She should have been afraid for herself, for her impending death, but she honestly wasn't, she was so afraid for the galaxy instead.

Pham Nuwen took a deep breath, positioned himself with a few thrusts over the map of the galaxy, his fingers poised to slide -

And Ravna suddenly realized that she was afraid to die, she was terribly afraid, her existence was about to end in the next few seconds, no more thoughts ever ever no more Ravna - "Pham! Don't! Please wait!"

Just a few more seconds, a few more seconds to come to grips with the end of her life, that was all she wanted.

Pham's rockets puffed thrust -

And Ravna's last scream choked off abruptly.