We have voyaged a considerable distance since achieving near light-speed. I do not believe anyone expected what is happening now. The Way is so complicated; even those who created it could not predict all of its possibilities.

We now journey down a ghost Way, its local nature altered by the violence of our near light-speed passage. It has no diameter or boundaries as such; objects with mass simply cannot exist beyond a distance of more than twenty thousand kilometers from the course on which we ride. (The flaw, or singularity, vanished three months ago. Simply evaporated in a pulse of newly created particles, some of them unknown even to the Geshels.)

We have traveled beyond the domain of the super-set of external universes which encompassed all our various world-lines. Even were we to stop now and open gates to the "outside," whatever that may be, we would encounter realms without matter, perhaps without form or order; it is highly doubtful we would find anything familiar.

There are an infinite number of alternatives to the Way, each originating in an alternative world-line, yet reaching beyond that world-line. Until now, Way researchers have not known quite how the alternate Ways were stacked or arranged, or indeed whether they could even be considered real. Since the Way intersects a large group of alternate world-lines—perhaps all—could there be more than one Way?

But by traveling close to the light-speed within the Way, we have answered these questions and found new ones to ask. We have distorted Way geometry in more than the requisite four dimensions; we have also contracted the fifth dimension, drawing the alternate Ways together. The Way boundaries have become transparent in a wide variety of frequencies, and we can perceive the shape of other Ways. We can select which Way we wish to inspect, using devices similar to the gate-opening clavicles. It is in observing these alternate Ways that Beryl Wallace is now occupied.

We can even see (and in some instances, communicate with) beings in other Ways.

So there are an infinite number of world-lines, and because of this one human artifact, an infinite number of connections between them. Our researchers devise schemes to allow us to cross over to other Ways, other super-sets of world-lines, but even with implants I have difficulty understanding what they are discussing.

This much I do know. There are Ways where the beings of thousands of completely different universes hold commerce, exchanging in some cases only information, in other cases actually exchanging different types of space-time. Is it possible to conceive of the potential that would exist between two universes of differing qualities? Would that potential be called energy?