DROP A GEM IN thick oil. The brilliance yellows slowly, ambers, goes red at last, dies. That was the leap into hyperstatic space. At the computer console, Rydra pondered the charts. The dictionary had doubled since the trip began. Satisfaction filled one side of her mind like a good meal. Words, and their easy patterning, facile always on her tongue, in her fingers, ordered themselves for her, revealing, defining, and revealing. And there was a traitor. The question, a vacuum where no information would come to answer who or what or why, made an emptiness on the other side of her brain,
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