The beings called Talsit were offshoots of a unified biological-mechanical intelligence that had once occupied the fourteen planets of a very old solar system. At one point, the intelligence had been entirely stored in memory banks, with no physically manifested individuals—not unlike the Axis City Memory. But gradually the intelligence had broken down into individuals—a condensation of consciousness within the system—and the individuals had created new forms for their physical manifestation. These had been the parent species of the Talsit. The parent species, this Talsit seemed to imply, still existed, but were introverted and isolationist; they had created the Talsit to act as mercantile representatives, consultants to younger civilizations. A circuit of gates happened to open onto one of their worlds, and they had begun trading, first with the Jarts who had opened the gates, and then with humans after the Jarts had been pushed back.

By implication, the Talsit and their ancestral forms were at least a hundred times older than humanity.

"Then why even bother communicating with us?" Lanier asked.

"Consider it a hobby of one's old age, or senility," the Talsit said, without a hint of condescension or dissembling. "My kind have services—particularly regarding the cleansing and reordering of information—which humans and others find invaluable. It pleases us to be useful, and in turn we acquire information of great value to us."

The call to the ceremony came a few minutes later, one of the Frants ringing a high-pitched, sweet sounding bell hung from a bar on the south side of the scaffold.

Lanier stood at parade rest, hands behind his back, next to Korzenowski's image and Prescient Oyu, while Patricia took a position of honor between Yates and Ry Oyu.

Ry Oyu's ceremonial clothes were simple, consisting of rough white cloth shirt and black pants. He wore black cloth slippers. Yates wore a forest-green robe, showing some signs of wear.

Ry Oyu stepped to the stairs that curved over the top of the rounded scaffold. He stood for a moment, head bowed, and then beckoned for Patricia to follow.

"You must learn this," Ry Oyu said to Patricia at the top of the scaffold. "The clavicle can tell you where a gate is to be opened, but only in part; you must also sense the point, and tune it to that desired world. There is as much of what you would call intuition as calculation."

He bent down and gripped the handles of the clavicle, removing it from its holder at the center of the radiance of traction lines. Patricia stared down and became dizzy; the top of the scaffold was at least sixty meters from the pit bottom.