She pulls a face. "Wormwood. Or maybe Amanita phalloides." (The death cap mushroom, so called because the folks who name poisonous toadstools have no sense of humor: it's shaped like a cap, and you die if you eat it.)

"Are you ready to talk about it?"

She takes a sip of Lagavulin. "Not yet." Her lips twitch in the faintest ghostly echo of a smile—"But just knowing I can unload when I need to—" She shudders, then abruptly knocks back the contents of her glass in one.

"Do you believe Andy?" she asks, presently.

"I wish I didn't have to." I pause. "You mean, about the, the—"

"The acceleration."

"Yeah, that." I fall silent for a moment. "I'm not sure. I mean, he says it came out of Dr. Ford's work in Research and Development, using analytical methods to observe bias in stochastic sequential observations at widely separated sites, and Mike Ford's not the kind of man to make a mistake." Sly and subtle, with a warped sense of humor—and a mind sharp enough to cut diamond, that's our avuncular Dr. Ford. "I'd love to hear what Cantor's deep-duration research team at St. Hilda's made of it, but I suspect you'd have to go all the way to Mahogany Row to get permission to talk to them about current work—they're sandboxed for a reason." Mostly to protect everybody else's sanity: it's a team of no less than four DSS-grade sorcerers working on a single research project for more than thirty years. They've grown more than slightly weird along the way. Just talking to them, then thinking too hard about their answers can put you at risk of developing Krantzberg syndrome, the horrible encephalopathy that tends to afflict people who spend too much time thinking about symbolic magic. (The map is one with the territory; think too hard about the wrong theorems and you shouldn't be surprised if extradimensional entities start chewing microscopic chunks out of your gray matter.)

"I want to see Ford's raw data," Mo says thoughtfully. "Someone ought to give it a good working-over, looking for artifacts."

"Yeah."

She puts her glass down and plants the box of chocolates on top of it. "If the acceleration is real, we've only got a few months left."

And there's the rub. What Ford has detected—so Andy told us—is an accelerating rip in the probabilistic ultrastructure of spacetime.