“Now there was someone who fell back from himself,” the Shrander said, “exactly what I’m talking about. He was so promising early on, and yet so frightened of it all. I watched him fire up from nothing, Ed, then go out suddenly, just like a light. Oh, I know what you’re going to say. He and Brian Tate got you people out here. Without him you wouldn’t have quantum machines. You wouldn’t have massive parallel processing. And without that you’d never have found your way around. But in the end he was a disappointment, Ed, believe me: he was just too frightened of the things he knew. I shouldn’t have brought him here, but I felt I owed him.”

She laughed. “Even though he stole something of mine and ran away every time I tried to ask for it back.” She bent down and sought about in the dust with her little pudgy hands.

“Look.”

“Hey,” Ed said. “The Ship Game.”

“These are the originals, Ed. Look at that workmanship. We never knew how old they were.” She stared at the dice on the palm of her stubby little hand. “They were old when we found them.”

“So what do they do?”

“We never found that out either.” The Shrander sighed. “I kept them for their sentimental value,” she said. “Here. You have them.”

“It’s just a game to me,” Ed said.

He took the dice and turned them so they caught the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. This was the way they were meant to be viewed, he thought. They were another device for trying to understand the place where the rules ran out. The familiar images flickered and yearned, as if they wanted to jump off the faces of the dice and cook in the light. He felt he owed her something for that understanding, so he said:

“What do I do?”

“Here’s the deal: you take the K-ship. You go deep. It’s the Kefahuchi Boogie, Ed: it’s point and press. You go all the way.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the first of them. You’re what we hoped to make.”

“Kearney was the brains,” Ed pointed out. “Not me.”

“I don’t want you to understand it, Ed. I want you to surf it.”

Ed threw the dice thoughtfully.

He threw them again.

He said: “I always wanted to fly one of those things. What will happen if I take it in there?”

“To you?”

Ed threw the dice.

“To it all,” he said, making a gesture which seemed to include the universe.

The alien shrugged.

“Who knows? Things will change forever.”

Ed threw the dice once more. The Kefahuchi Tract raged silently above him. War was breaking out in sympathy, up and down the Beach. He looked at the dice, lying in the irradiated dirt. Something he saw there—something about the way they had fallen—seemed to amuse him.