They had stepped clear out to the edge of the galaxy, where the
fringing stars were lost in the outer void and the dead suns swept
forever through the entombing dark, where even the memory of creation
was gone, blotted out by unimaginable time. No delimited frontier was
here, but a border region between the swarming star-sparks and the
black abyss beyond.
Trehearne tried to remember how long it had been since they had taken
off from Thuvis. He couldn't. Time seemed oddly elastic when you lost
all the familiar frames of reference. He gave it up. It didn't matter.
He peered with aching bloodshot eyes into the lightless seas that lie
beyond the island universes and tried to remember why he had come here.
And that too was dim in his mind.
Edri was bent over a table that had been set up in the bridge. He no
longer looked like Edri. He seemed to have been working for a million
years. Arrin sat near him. He held his head between his bony hands, a
bearded mummy embalmed upright, hardly retaining the semblance of life.
There were charts under Edri's hands, endless sheets of calculations
and graphs, endless miles of figures. Joris studied them, bending
beside Edri. His broad jowls hung down now over his wrinkled collar.
His eyes had sunk deep under ridges of bone, peering out as from two
shadowed caves.
Edri was talking in a voice that came from far away. The words reached
Trehearne in droning snatches from beyond the fog of weariness.
"--so our only way to locate Orthis' ship was to triangulate its
position from two separate bearings on it. One bearing was the course
of that life-skiff Orthis sent in with his last message, allowing for
aberrations caused by the gravitational field of stars. The other
bearing was Orthis' course in his last flight. We couldn't get that
till I found the part of the Lankar manuscript that Arrin didn't have."