The display showed an entry which Aptat read aloud. “British American astronomer and astrophysicist, Harvard College Observatory. Noted for over three million spectral observations, including correctly determining the composition of the Sun and other stellar bodies, where her male contemporaries had failed. Widely published. Was not promoted to full professor until 1956, despite surpassing the accomplishments of many of her male colleagues in years prior. Some of her most important discoveries were later attributed to men.”

“Well, seems that’s universal,” said Izairis.

Naecia shifted, aching. “Probably why they were working in secret. Testing a theory they didn’t want stolen, maybe?”

“What theory?” asked Aptat.

“She had these pictures. Spectrographs of a human head next to a starfield.” Naecia looked up, brow furrowed. “I think she’d found a way to observe the Oblivion Fray.”

Aptat made a face. “Doubtful. But even assuming she’d determined the spectral range, humans don’t understand the character of the Fray.”

“I think maybe she did,” said Naecia. “She’d written something: Ideas have weight. She used the term ‘Thought mass’. What else could she have been talking about?”

“Even so, that’s no more than we already know about it.”

Izairis and Oush had come up around the Dredge. Oush offered a hand and Naecia felt stable enough to take it and step out.

Aptat was lost in thought, then asked, “So maybe a human stumbled upon the Fray. How does that get us to a cheat drive?”

“It doesn’t. But perhaps it bridges the gap between what I’ve built and what it’s supposed to do.”

“Explain.”

“Our thinking has been walled in by the confines of conventional matter. First of all, it’s not entangled by nature. When we communicate via entanglement, we create the sibling particles and carry them through bulkspace to distant points where they’ll be useful. Entanglement communication is ‘faster-than-light’ but only once we’ve set the particles in place using subluminal transportation. If, hypothetically, you could use entanglement as a means of transport, you’d have to follow the same procedure. Your origin and destination would be limited by wherever you placed the members of the pair. And that’s all restrained by the laws of physics. You could only go where you’d placed them.”

“Like setting out communications beacons across Dasma,” said Izairis. “You’d need the infrastructure first, then you could jump from one place to the next.”

“Hypothetically,” said Aptat.