The barrier filled her view. It was a somber dark gray-brown, shot through with radiating pulses of red. Where the singularity intersected it, the barrier glowed like molten lava.

Voices began speaking words she couldn't understand, and Olmy responded in kind. "We've been acknowledged," he explained to her. "Keep watching."

Directly ahead, a section of the barrier bubbled toward them and dissolved in a scatter of red pulses. They passed through.

Her first impression was that they were suddenly underwater. The plasma tube had ballooned out in all directions, widening by several kilometers and glowing the oceanic blue she had seen around the circular barrier. The floor of the corridor was still visible on all sides but reduced in definition and overlaid by the plasma's new color.

Directly ahead, two broad cubes were strung in succession along the pale thread of the singularity. Each of the visible faces of the cubes were marked with a broad horizontal cleft; the front of the foremost cube welcomed the singularity through a large hemispheric dimple, marked by glimmering spokes. At the center of the indentation was a red hole, and there the singularity was engulfed.

Beyond the cubes—and several times as broad—was a cylinder, rotating around its central axis, the line of the singularity. Its outer surface sparkled with thousands of lights; the side facing her was dark but for a series of five radiating arrays of beacons.

Next in line after the cylinder, three curved vanes stretched outward to the structure's maximum radius, perhaps ten kilometers. The vanes seemed to touch or support the plasma tube, making it glow blue-white around the outermost edge of each vane. Whatever else was beyond the cylinder was effectively blocked from view.

"Home," Olmy said behind her. She turned and looked at him, blinking. "The first segments are navigation and power stations, all automatic. The rotating cylinder is Axis Nader. We can't see them from this perspective, but beyond lie Central City, Axis Thoreau and Axis Euclid."

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"We'll enter a dock in Axis Nader."

"How large is the city?"

"Do you mean, how extensive, or how many people?"

"Both, I suppose."

"It stretches forty kilometers down the Way, and it has a population of about ninety million—twenty million corporeal, embodied; seventy million stored in City Memory."

"Oh." She turned back to the screen and watched in silence as the craft moved inward, past the doubled cubes and along the dark side of the rotating cylinder.

"I suppose, in your time, you would have called Axis City a necropolis, a city of the dead," Olmy continued. "But the distinction isn't so precise for us. I, for example, have died twice performing my duty to the Nexus."

"They revived you?" Patricia asked.

"They made me over again," he replied.

She did not turn away from the screen, even though her back prickled.