And if it could do it just once, and be able to report success, even to itself..."/ Bandicut held his breath, waiting to see what it would say. And if it said yes, what then? Had they just volunteered to be flung somewhere across the galaxy again--only this time not under the control even of the Shipworld Masters, but of some completely different alien intelligence? /Going where?/ he whispered softly. It seemed like madness.*

THE INFINITE SEA * 369.

But if it saved the Neri and the Astari from ruin? Wasn't it worth it, for them?

"/The stones are willing."/ Willing. Because they'd planned it all along and knew what was happening, or because they too saw a thread they could hang onto through the crazy, chaotic winds of this journey? And what of the others?

He dared a glance. From Antares, fear and longing both; and from Ik, determination. And then the stargate replied: Are you starsbtp?

"We are starship," said Napoleon. "Our purpose and nature are as brethren to the ship that has crashed. We seek to find a new world. It is in our nature."

And your nature is "Intelligence," said Napoleon. "Joined to machine."

said the Maw, and with its words there was a flickering of light against the darkness that enveloped them, subst.i.tution is acceptable "Yes," said Napoleon. But the Maw was not finished speaking.

if approved by command authority of Astari ship have you such authority?

"I believe so. John Bandicut?" asked Napoleon.370 * *

Bandicut blinked, uncertain; and then from far off, through the link with the stardrive of the sunken ship, came Morado's voice: "I am commander of this ship, and I have such authority. I approve, provided those before you are willing... '

Bandicut caught Ik's glance, which was fiery. Yes. And he could feel Antares' affirmation.

And Li-Jared? The Karellian was gazing, half-entranced, not into the Maw, but up into a kind of tunnel, where the figure of Morado, encased in an Astari diving suit, was silhouetted against the coiling light of the stardrive chamber. Bandicut could almost read Li-Jared's thoughts from his face: Let us do this for Harding, to make good his lfe and his death...

"We are willing," Bandicut said aloud. "But--"

There was a quiet rumble.

"Will you agree, when this task is done--when your triumph is finished--to cease trying to move the Astari ship? To cease creating earthquakes and disruptions?"

it is agreed this task is our purpose you will all take this journey together?

"Together," Bandicut said. But looking around suddenly, he had a panicky thought. "Except--"

"/L 'Kell. "/ The quarx's voice was quiet, but stark.

Bandicut peered down through the bottom of the star-spanner bubble, into the viewport of the sub. He could just make out L'Kell's face, staring up at them--helpless, without maneuvering power for his sub, which was still descending. Could L'Kell hear any of this?

Did he know the agreement that had just been reached? Bandicut shifted his gaze, looking for the heart of the Maw's light, but it was impossible to localize now. They were surrounded by an almost celestial glow. "We are willing," he called to the Maw, "except for the one in the submarine, the vessel beneath us. Can you send him back up through the ocean above, to the city in the sea? His home is there, his purpose, his mission. We can move on, but he should not. Can you do this before sending us through?"*

THE INFINITE SEA * 371.

Silence. Or not quite silence, but a low hum that grew very slowly until it seemed to fill this glowing abyssal place. And then the stargate replied: it done yot release tie submarine Bandicut knelt. His voice caught as he called out to L'Kell. "Can you release the bubble?" He made chopping gestures toward the cables that secured the bubble to the top of the sub. L'Kell peered up in obvious bewilderment. Had he lost power even for the comm?

"We have an agreement with the Maw/Release the bubble/" Bandi-cut shouted.

L'Kell's voice came back very thinly: "What do you intend?"

"We're sending you home/"

"But you can't! What about you?"

Bandicut gestured broadly, then cupped his hands to his mouth.

"We're going back to the stars/"

L'Kell's expression was unreadable, but he suddenly moved away from the viewport. The hum in the ocean was growing louder.

Something was opening below them, and the bubble was beginning to vibrate. L'Kell returned to the window. He was doing something with the controls. There was a jarring sensation in the floor of the bubble, and the line at the front of the bubble went slack and floated free of the sub. The bubble rocked alarmingly. The lines at the rear followed a moment later, and the net holding the bubble floated loose. The bubble jostled in the current, not quite lifting from the top of the sub.

L'Kell's face was pressed to the viewport now. His expression was clear: fear for his friends, and grief. Where must he think they were going?

Bandicut raised his hands in salute. The hum had grown too372 * *

loud for him to speak to L'Kell. /Can the stones make any contact at all with him?/ "/ Feeligs, sensations..."/ /Then send him joy and hope. For him. For us. For his people./ are you ready asked the stargate.

/Yes./ *

There was a perceptible surge, as an unseen current lifted the bubble and jostled it away from the sub. A pellucid, horizontal ring of light encircled the bubble now, separating it from the submarine.

The bubble stopped rising, but the sub did not. A powerful up-welling current had developed beneath it, made visible now by the movement of suspended silt. Beneath it stretched a glowing tunnel that appeared to reach down into the very depths of the planet. In fact, Bandicut knew, it reached through some twisted bit of s.p.a.ce-time to another part of the sea, on the far side of the planet. This time, instead of drawing seawater down in a vain attempt to tug on the shipwreck, the Maw was pumping water upward.

The sub turned as it rose. Its nose came around and, for a few heartbeats, L'Kell gazed straight out at them, his eyes dark and wide with fear and wonder. In that moment, Bandicut thought of all the unspoken things he wished he could say, wishing he could shake L'Kell's hand, join stones with him, spend a night in conversation and learn all there was to know about the Neri. An electric current seemed to join them, and not just Bandicut but all in the bubble.

"Hrah, farewell!" called Ik. Li-Jared and Antares both shouted goodbyes, and Bandicut cried, "G.o.dspeed, L 74ell/" and somehow sensed that L'KeI1, through his stones if no other way, had heard them. The Neri's eyes seemed to soften for an instant, and then the upwelling current lifted the sub away from them.

The stargate held the bubble solidly, as the sub dwindled overhead.

In the last moments it looked like a toy riding the spout of a fountain, against a haze of spectacular night-lighting. It moved with startling speed, and in another eyeblink was gone.*

THE INFINITE SEA * 373.

Bandicut's heart was pounding with excitement and fear and sorrow.

Around him, his friends crowded close, encircling him with their presence. He felt Antares' hand on his shoulder, then Ik's. He cleared his throat, not knowing what to say to his friends. "Stargate!"

he cried. "The sub has no power of its own left. Can you guide it to the region where there are others like it, near the city?"

this is being done prepare now "It will be all right, I think," Antares whispered.

Bandicut sighed. "Yes. I only wish I could--"

"Rakh, we understand, John Bandicut. We understand." Ik peered downward. "I wonder, where is this thing going to send us?"

Bandicut closed his eyes./Where are we bound? Where will you send us?/ There was no answer from the Maw. Perhaps it did not even know.

Bong. "Wherever, is better than here," Li-Jared said with a blaze of electric-blue fire in his eyes. He clearly preferred making a getaway to the stars over the risk of dying a piece of flotsam at the bottom of an alien sea.

"Cap'n, I believe we are beginning to be underway," said Copernicus, tapping.

Bandicut swallowed and looked at his friends, and wondered if the star-spanner bubble could exert any influence over where they were about to go.

"/We shall soon see..."/ *

When it came, it was swift and silent as a dream. The tunnel of light darkened and closed. All the brightness below faded to blackness, and if there was a current still flowing, it was no longer visible. They were surrounded now by a ring of cool, emerald-sapphire light, contracting and hardening.

From out of the darkness at the bottom of the abyss came a flickering of energy . . .

fleeting sparks of light, ruby, then gold strobing pulses of color, scaling up and down through the spectrum374 * *

and finally the diamond-studded blackness of s.p.a.ce, and a sud- den awareness that they were falling, had been falling. The ring of light around them was gone. The ocean over their heads was gone.

The abyss ... the stargate ...

Nothing at all surrounded them now except stars, a heartstop- ping panoply of stars.CHAOS UNBOUNDED FOR A TIME, Bandicut felt as if his heart really had stopped.

There was no sense of motion, no sound; not even the quarx seemed to stir. Was he suspended in some pocket of reality where everything would remain frozen for eternity?

But no ... that could not be, if he was aware of his own thought.

And now he felt something, not outward but inward, as though his body were undergoing change. Decompression? Renormaliza-tion?

He couldn't tell, but he felt comforted by the thought, and clung to it like a child's security blanket.

In time he noticed a slight movement nearby. Ik, just within his peripheral vision beside him, moving his head ever so slowly. And now he noticed his own chest expanding in glacially slow movement, breathing.

And some time later, he noticed that the stars, so pointlike in their diamond iciness, had blurred. Smudged.

And then Char spoke.

"/We're all.., here... I think..."/ /That is good. All here./ Except L'KelI, their dear friend L'Kell. They had not even been able to say a proper farewell. What of the Neri people? And what of the Astari? And the undersea factory? And the Maw? They would probably never know, he thought. Never know.

It saddened him, and yet he felt curiously uplifted--reminded of those images that certain of the quarx incarnations had been fond of showing him as they described chaotic attractors to him: tiny forces kicking spinning, dynamic systems in unpredictable376 * .

ways, their kicks resonating into the future like the reverberations of a plucked string. Had this company kicked some useful reverberations into the future of the Neri world? He wondered if the translators, or the Shipworld Masters, would keep tabs and find out.

The quarx's thoughts still came haltingly, from the time distortion.

"/Don't forget... . you leJi . . .

four sets of stones.., and an intelligent stargate. "/ /A stargate,/he whispered./A dying stargate./ "/Dying, yes.

But perhaps not.., for a few hundred years. "/ /But belonging to someone else. Someone not of Shipworld./ "/Indeed, someone...

about whom the stones are.., deeply concerned.

The Others."/ /Is this what the stones promised to tell me about?/ "/Indeed.

The Others are a race whose home lies far across the galaxy.

A race whose goals are inimical to Shipworld's.

To the stones'.

To your own peoples'."/ /Humanity's? Earth's? Why do you say that?/ "/Remember the stars the Maw put out, getting to where it was going?

Remember the comet that almost put out the Earth?"/ Bandicut was silent for a moment./Jesus./ "/Exactly.

But of details, the stones know little.

That's why it took them so long to be sure of the origin of the Maw. "/ Bandicut absorbed that./I wonder where the Maw has sent us.

Not toward its creators, I hope./To that, Char had no answer. He began to turn his head. It was like stirring mola.s.ses, but a little less so than before.

In time he managed to bring his head around to where he could*

THE INFINITE SEA * 377.

see his friends. He discovered that Antares was closer to him than anyone, even Ik. She was looking his way. Almost at his eyes, but not quite, as though she had just begun to glance away from him to gaze into the mysterious infinity of s.p.a.ce, wondering also where they were bound. He began to raise his left hand. It felt as though it were floating on a slow-rising bubble, not requiring great effort, but incapable of moving fast, regardless of the force he might apply.

He noticed that her hand was moving, too.

By the time their hands met, her lips had parted in a Thespi smile. Her eyes shone with puzzlement and uncertainty. As their hands touched, and their fingers slowly clasped, he felt her presence within him, in a way that reminded him of their joining through the stones. He felt in her a stalwart companionship, and intimacy, as if they had traveled through danger together for years; and yet also an electrifying alienness. And she touched not just him, but Charlie, too. Char. What connection had they made? He was startled to realize he didn't know, and perhaps couldn't really fathom it if he did know.

What was Antares to him now? Friend? Lover? Stranger?

It was still being worked out, he knew, not just in his mind but also in hers. And as he slowly, slowly squeezed her hand, he felt the memory of Julie rising in him, and with it a tide of sadness. And yet, he thought, she would be glad; she would want me to take the chance. I think. I hope.

"/You, John Bandicut, are a complicated.., person,"/ the quarx said slowly, in a tone that he thought was approval.

He started to think of an answer to that, but was interrupted by a feeling, almost a verbal thought, from Antares. You are, andlam, and we shall see. In time we shall see.

But before he could answer, he became aware of something changing around them.

There was a faint crinkling of the starfield, as though it were embedded in cellophane. An instant later, a shock wave hit the bubble, and it shone blazing golden around them, and for a moment it seemed as if their own bodies were filled with an interior light.

Bandicut felt a quivering sense of release, and realized that the mola.s.ses was gone; he was left in near-shock, but he could move and378 , .

breathe normally again. Had they arrived, were they arriving some- '.

where?

*Star-spanner beam intercept.*

He blinked./Huh?/ "John Bandicut," said Antares, "I--"

"/The stargate's transport effect had been interrupted."/ /By what?/ "/By a star-spanner beam."/ /From Shipworld?/ "/Presumably."/ /I'11 be .../He peered at Antares, who appeared to be listen- ing to her own inner voices--and then at Ik, whose eyes were alight with inner fire, and at Li-Jared, whose head was snapping back and forth as he tried to take in everything at once. The stars were no longer visible through the bubble, though whether it was because they were gone, or just because the inside of the bubble was bathed in light, he couldn't tell.