Korzenowski locked himself into the traction field at the center of the blister and slowly swung the control clavicle into place. The nodes surrounding the seventh chamber’s cap were slaved to this device. He had all the capabilities and the entire power of the sixth chamber machinery at his disposal. He had months of preparation and tests behind him. His hands on the clavicle were sure; his mind was more clear and more sharply focused than it had been in years.

The time had come. Around him, the visitors fell quiet and stopped picting.

Korzenowski closed his eyes and let the clavicle speak to him. The Thistledown’s superspace probes—little more than mathematical abstractions given temporary reality by the sixth chamber machinery—spread outward and inward and in directions that could not be followed by unaided human brains.

Across the smear of closely related half-realities that surrounded this universe, across the multiform fifth dimension that separated the great universes and their different world-lines, the probes went in search of something artificial, something unlike the precisely organized chaos of nature. They passed their results back to the clavicle and to Korzenowski. He saw a weave of great universes twisting around and even through each other, coinciding and separating, almost always spreading away from each other, their fifth dimensional distances increasing.

He knew a kind of ecstasy. The part of him that was Patricia Vasquez was like the quiet surface of a deep ocean accepting rain; not responding, merely receiving, leaving him alone to work his extraordinary technology.

For a timeless moment, Korzenowski’s senses merge with the clavicle, and he understood with a clarity at once transient and transcendent all the secrets of this limited fifth-dimensional cross-section. Korzenowski was in the state he had experienced only a few times in his past; theoretical quibbles about the nature of superspace meant less than nothing. He knew.

In that place beyond words and experience, he found an anomaly. Infinitely long, curiously coiled

it is very like a worm

at a number of points, those points being places of deep confusion known as the geometry stacks; curiously super-coiled within the boundaries of one universe, his own; extending like a linear flame to an unoccupied and indefinite darkness—the shadow of the terminal universe that would be made and would fail—

The Way.

Within those ponderous, fluid yet immutable coils—intestines, snakes, protein molecules, DNA—he searched for a cauterized end. The search might have taken centuries; he did not know or care. If the Thistledown itself had become a cold, sterile hulk in the time it took, he would not have been bothered. His goal was clear and overwhelming.