The ocean through which they were descending 364suggested to Vinny a reference system that had no equal. Concepts of “air” and “rock” and “ocean” became suddenly interchangeable. Water was lava. Ice was rock. And the ethane-methane ocean became simply the lowermost reaches of the Neptunian atmosphere. Once again, the reality of scientific achievement had caught up with and surpassed mythology. For one brief and shining moment, Vinny could reach out and touch and truly feel what the Buddha had meant when he talked about multiple planes of existence; and in the euphoria of that moment, it was possible for him to forget how a black stain on the Sun had affected his pilot and where his pilot was taking him.

At thirty-five hundred atmospheres, the freezing point of water should have been up to minus seventeen degrees centigrade, and still the sea remained fluid, sustained by volcanic upwellings from somewhere far below. There came a sudden, marginally alarming increase in turbulence, and when Vinny checked his pad he saw what he at first took to be a very large field of debris streaming out of the spacecraft—millions of particles everywhere. But closer inspection showed them to be clathrates of methane caged in microscopic needles of ice. He was relieved when he realized that they were not coming from his ship, and that except for further plunging the freezing temperature of water, they were of no consequence.

But Lenny arrived at a different conclusion. His attention was focused on the noise that had accompanied the turbulence. Could that be true? Had it really been the sound of an explosion just a short distance above?

“It’s them,” Lenny announced. “They’re following us.” And then, without any further warning or consultation, he barked orders to his pad, and the ship’s computer pulled a pin from the largest slush balloon and let it fly up.

“Decoy,” Lenny explained.

“Decoy?” Vinny said gravely. “Didn’t Mommy ever tell you that when you pull the pin, Mister Hand Grenade is no longer your friend?”

Vinny began calling his own orders to the ship’s computer, but he understood that there was not enough space in the remaining balloons to take up a surge of replacement slush, and that the spiders would probably take longer to cannibalize parts of the ship’s hull and manufacture a replacement balloon than any margin of error allowed.

The ship already had a sizable negative buoyancy even before Lenny cut loose the balloon. Now the added mass tipped the balance beyond all hope of quick recovery. Gaius was falling like a skydiver whose parachute had become hopelessly tangled. At sixty-three hundred atmospheres, the freezing point of water should have been (assuming it was clathrate and salt free) up to 2.0 degrees; but the temperature of the magma chamber itself was climbing higher the deeper they fell.

Luckily, or unluckily, there was no bottom in sight.

At ten thousand atmospheres Vinny became aware of a barely detectible grinding and crinkling sound in the Bardo shield. The spiders were working as fast as they could to halt the descent, but to little avail. There was a sickness in Vinny’s stomach, a sickness such as a man feels the instant he turns around and realizes he has just slammed his child’s hand in the car door. Sharon looked at him as if to ask, Are you scared? He was not scared—only disappointed that all their work and planning had been for nothing.