She switched off the screens. The panels emptied and turned silver-gray, and there was a sigh of relief from her companions. But the jumps continued; she could feel them as a soft flutter in her stomach.

Cautiously she withdrew her hands from the gloves, stared at the mittens as if they had betrayed her. She had thought she understood the ship; now she had been humbled, a child at the feet of the adults. She sensed the Friend's strained reassurance but took little comfort. I hope you know what you're doing, she thought savagely. Maybe we're more stupid than you know. Or... more fragile.

In their borrowed Xeelee ship the little group of humans hurtled across the hostile Universe.

Paul sensed the bafflement of the woman, and anguish infiltrated his partial personalities. He had known that the initiation of the Xeelee hyperdrive would terrify the humans, but there was little he could do to protect them.

There was no time for this introspection. He must seek the Ring himself.

Paul's focus of attention swept restlessly around the Solar System's abandoned periphery. He found shipyards, weapons shops, blood-stained hospitals, the foundations of massive industrial complexes. Warships and fortresses, some as large as moons, circled the distant Sun.

Once two objects have been in contact they are forever linked by a thread of quantum wave functions. Once this had formed the basis of humanity's inseparability communications net. Now the prowling Paul found tenuous quantum functions arcing from the warships to forgotten battlefields scattered across the Universe. Paul knew that the humans had attacked the site of the Ring, at least once; so among these haunted wrecks there must be relics of those great assaults, and a quantum link for him to follow.

At last he found it.

The Spline ship was a mile-wide corpse, its spherical form distorted by a single, vast wound a hundred yards across. Within the wound, organs and dried blood were still visible. Paul imagined the agony of the creature as it had returned from the battlefield, its guts open to the pain of hyperspace...

But this corpse-ship was embedded in a web of quantum functions which spun all the way to Bolder's Ring; these sunken Spline eyes, hardened now, had once gazed upon the Ring itself.

Paul wrapped himself around a pencil of quantum functions. Absorbing them into his awareness was like being stretched, expanded, made unimaginably diffuse.

Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence, he began to adjust the phases of the quantum threads, and the multiple foci of his awareness translated through spacetime.

Paul hauled himself along the quantum functions in search of Bolder's Ring.

It was as if he were sliding down a long, vast slope in spacetime. At first the slope was all but imperceptible, but soon its steepness was unmistakable.