At last the Ask Politely, with its Kardish escort, broke through veils of stars into a place the crew called the Hole. Under the same strict guarantees as before, Poole brought Mara to the observation deck.

The ship came to a halt, suspended in a rough sphere walled by crowded stars. This was a bubble in the tremendous foam of stars that crowded the Galaxy’s centre, a bubble swept clean by a black hole’s gravity. Captain Tahget pointed out some brighter pinpoints; they were the handful of stars, of all the hundreds of billions in the Galaxy, whose orbits took them closest to Chandra. No stars could come closer, for they would be torn apart by Chandra’s tides.

When Futurity looked ahead he could see a puddle of light, suspended at the very centre of the Hole. It was small, dwarfed by the scale of the Hole itself. It looked elliptical from his perspective, but he knew it was a rough disc, and it marked the very heart of the Galaxy.

‘It looks like a toy,’ Mara said, wondering.

Poole asked, ‘You know what it is?’

‘Of course. It’s the accretion disc surrounding Chandra.’

‘Home,’ Poole said dryly.

‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘But I never saw it like this before. The Kardish shipped us out in their big transports. Just cargo scows. You don’t get much of a view.’

‘And somewhere in there—’

‘Is my daughter.’ She turned to him, and the washed-out light smoothed the lines of her careworn face, making her look younger. ‘Thank you, Michael Poole. You have brought me home.’

‘Not yet I haven’t,’ Poole said grimly.

The Ask Politely with its escort swooped down towards the centre of the Hole. That remote puddle loomed, and opened out into a broad sea of roiling gas, above which the ships raced.

Infalling matter bled into this central whirlpool, the accretion disc, where it spent hours or weeks or years helplessly orbiting, kneaded by tides and heated by compression until any remnants of structure had been destroyed, leaving only a thin, glowing plasma. It was this mush that finally fell into the black hole. Thus Chandra was slowly consuming the Galaxy of which it was the heart.

Eventually Futurity made out Chandra itself, a fist of fierce light set at the geometric centre of the accretion disc, so bright that clumps of turbulence cast shadows light days long over the disc’s surface. It wasn’t the event horizon itself he was seeing, of course, but the despairing glow of matter crushed beyond endurance, in the last instants before it was sucked out of the universe altogether. The event horizon was a surface from which nothing, not even light, could escape, but it was forever hidden by the glow of the doomed matter which fell into it.