I took a breath. "I'm okay. It's just -- fast." I risked another look. I was passing through a frothy barrage of stars and planets; beyond them sheets of galaxies moved past as steadily as roadside trees. I said slowly: "I must be making a megalight, or more, an hour. At this rate the journey will take about two weeks--"

"Yes," Lipsey said. "We think the Xeelee have a range of hyperdrive capabilities. The standard intragalactic version is limited to a kilolight an hour, or thereabouts. Whereas this more powerful intergalactic model--"

I tumbled into the creamy plane of an elliptical Galaxy. I wailed and closed my eyes again.

Ten days later, the popping stars no longer bothered me. I guess you can get used to anything. Even the growing gray patch ahead of me -- a cloud of objects around the Great Attractor -- seemed less important than the itchy confines of my suit. In fact, I felt fine until a disc of sky directly behind me turned china blue...

"I don't get it," I said. "Objects that I'm leaving behind should be redshifted."

"It's nothing to do with your motion, Bolder," the Qax explained. "The blue shift is gravitational. You're now close enough to the Great Attractor that light from the outside Universe is beginning to fall more steeply down its gravity well."

I checked my instruments. "But that's ridiculous... I'm still millions of light years away."

The Qax didn't bother to respond.

Two more days. The light became a hail of hard blue as it plummeted after me into this pit in space. I entered the outskirts of the mist around the Great Attractor; it resolved into individual stars and what looked like bits of galaxies.

The muddled starlight bathing my cage began to flicker. I felt my heartbeat rising. The skies riffled past me like the pages of a great book, ever slower. Finally the ship stuttered to a halt.

"I've arrived," I whispered. "I'm still inside the star mist." I looked around, clutching the arms of my couch. "I'm in orbit around what looks like a small G-type star. But the sky's crammed with streaming stars, hundreds of them close enough to show discs. It's blue-tinted chaos.

"And -- I can see something ahead. A bank of light beyond the mist." My breath caught at the sheer scale of it all. "That's the Great Attractor, right?"

"Don't touch your controls until we tell you, Bolder," the Qax murmured.

"What? Why not?"

"You've got company. To your left..."

A hoard of night-dark ships came soaring away from the Great Attractor and out into the star cloud. There were small fighters like mine, swirling in flocks like starlings. And here and there I saw cup-shaped freighters miles wide, cruising like eagles.

The sky was black with ships.