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stacked against one wall, the one at the top displaying a lookplate like the lookplate over the piloting
module, but blank. Against another wall was a lustrous silvery cage, and within it a jagged diamond.
Burnish touched a knurled wheel and the wall lookplate lit up, displaying a pebbly gray field. "It might be
better if I had some help here," he said, "so perhaps I had best teach you two how to do this. Watch." As
he adjusted the wheel the gray dissolved, and they were looking at the same exterior scene of the central
galaxy. No, Achiever corrected himself, not quite the same. This lookplate narrowed the field and
increased the magnification; now individual stars were visible, and many showed actual disks.
"You know," Burnish said professorially, "that each voyage of a highspeed ship like ours leaves a sort of
ripple in space behind it?"
"I have been taught this, yes," Achiever said, and Breeze nodded.
"Then let me show you what these ripples look like." He made other adjustments. The magnification
increased again, while the stars themselves faded slightly. Breeze gasped, and then Achiever saw it too.
Images like bundles of pinkly luminous straws showed among the stars. What they resembled most of all
was what human scientists would have called Feynman diagrams. As no one in the ship had ever heard of
Richard Feynman nor his graphic displays of the summation of probabilities, they only called them
"representations of potential loci."
"Those are signatures of such faster-than-light travel," Burnish went on. "As it happens, our ships leave a
particular identifiable signature, like those you are looking at; those are the ripples left by the transit of
known ships, all of them our own. The tracks of the Assassins' ships are quite different. If," he corrected
himself, "the Assassins have ships of any kind at all; it is not clear what means they employed to travel
through space. Those artifactual signatures, however, do exist. Or at least they did, because they were
observed and identified at the time of the Withdrawal. Some of them I observed myself. Such artifacts
may take thousands of years to dissipate, and it is for those that I seek."
"I see," Achiever said, and then it was his turn to correct himself. "That is, there is one point that is
unclear to me. You spoke of some thousands of years, but we were inside the Core for much longer than
that. Is it not likely that they will all have dissipated by now?"
"Oh, I hope not," Burnish said gloomily. "Because if the traces are gone we will have to start looking in
places I do not wish to visit."
IV
As the days passed the lookplate displays thinned out. What had been an undistinguishable fog of white
now became a sprinkle of countless single stars white ones or golden, bright-hot blue or darkly
smoldering red. It became possible to isolate individual stars among them and even to see which ones
had planets, though none of the orbiting worlds Achiever detected seemed likely to have borne life.
"Planets are common enough," Burnish assured his crew, "but life is not." Which, Achiever thought, made
those ancient crimes of the Foe even worse; if life was rare, how much more horrid was its violent
extinction?
At the beginning of each watch he made sure to display the plot of their ship's course in order to keep
track of their progress; on the display the portion of their course they had already traveled was pale pink,
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the part yet to come in that shocking orange. But how slowly the pink line lengthened, and how
depressingly long the orange remained!
When, in the old days, Achiever had found himself thinking about what might be Outside of the
Core which was not all that often, because he had had more than enough to think about in his everyday
life on Three-Moon Largely Wet Planet, and in his regular job of flying back and forth to the other
planets of other stars that were his usual destinations when, that is to say, Achiever had thought aboutt
he matter at all, perhaps stimulated by those lessons that he had thought would never he put to use, on
running the order disrupter when, anyway, he had thought about what it would he like to really be
Outside, the single thing that had seemed oddest to him was the incredibly rapid pace of events as they
went on Outside the Core.
Now, however, he actually was Outside, and it did not seem that way at all. His fellow passengers did
not flit rapidly about. They moved, as Heechee generally moved, sedately and not really very fast by any
standard. Neither did those planets their instruments detected as they passed by spin dizzyingly around
their primaries. Nor did the stars themselves wink when they were variables, nor visibly bloat and decay
when they were supergiants.
But the difference in the rate of time was real enough on the personal level, and it made Achiever glum.
Sometimes, as he burrowed into his sleep nest at the end of a shift, it occurred to him that he would sleep
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