"They've noticed me." Rapidly I thought over my options. Before me was the reassuring red glow of the hyperspace button: my escape hatch, if things got too hot... but, I quickly decided, I'd come too far to go home without seeing the Great Attractor itself.

I spread my wings as far as they would go and dragged them downwards in one mighty swoop. I shot head first out of the closing trap and kept going, heading deeper into the blue-tinged star cloud. My breath was loud in my helmet.

"What now?" I gasped.

"Run!" said Lipsey.

I ran for hours. I dodged stars only light minutes apart, their surfaces distorted into surreal shapes by their proximity to each other. The bank of grayish light beyond the mist grew remorselessly brighter and wider -- and all the time the Xeelee formation was a spear pointing at my shoulderblades.

At last, abruptly, I burst out of the star mist. The naked light ahead was dazzling. Heart thumping, I wrenched at the wings and skidded to a halt. I found myself in a region clear of stars and debris... and the curtain of stars on the other side was tinged blue.

So I was at the center. The bottom of the pit; the place all the stars were falling into. And at the heart of it all, flooding space with a pearly light, was the Great Attractor itself.

It was a loop, a thing of lines and curves, a construct of some immense cosmic rope. My nightfighter was positioned somewhere above the plane of the loop. The near side of the construct formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, braided band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.

And it was -- astonishingly, unbearably -- a single object, an artifact, at least ten million light years across.

The rough disc of space enclosed by the artifact seemed virtually clear.

...Clear, I saw as I looked more carefully, save for a single, glowing point of light, right at the geometric center of the loop.

"Qax," I croaked. "Speak to me."

"A massive rotating toroid," murmured the Qax. "A made thing, of cosmic string. The Xeelee have manipulated one-dimensional space-time discontinuities, just as -- in their night-fighter intrasystem drive -- they manipulate two-dimensional discontinuities."

Lipsey said, "I didn't imagine anything like this. A ring, an artifact of cosmic string. As large as a giant galaxy. The audacity..."

"But -- why? What's the point?"

The Qax paused. "Well, this fits one of our hypotheses. Look in the central region, Bolder."

The hole in the ring hurt my eyes. It was a sheet of space that was somehow -- tilted. I saw muddled space, stars streaked like cream in coffee.