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I woke in the robot.

The macro drew away from me, and it was as if something was being torn from my chest. I remembered just enough of what I’d known and felt to make the loss of that clarity and joy almost unbearable. I could remember my companions, but I couldn’t remember even their names. Our conversation, and the lucid equations, the very words we’d spoken and the formulae we’d thought were fading, the memory of a dream. The ache of separation, the agony of withdrawal, consumed my mind for a moment. Then came a rush of relief – I could go back in ten days!

Nothing else mattered.

When the first anguish of that parting had passed, I found that my whole attitude to, and understanding of, my work had changed. For the first time, I saw the structure which we were building as it really was. What had until now been a chaotic tangle of struts became visible as the scaffolding of a Visser–Price wormhole gateway, and the gantry of a ship. One part, over there, would stay; the other would leave with the ship. The Ring sprang into focus as the greatest particle-accelerator ever built, and Jupiter – my god, great Jove himself! – the ship’s fuel and reaction-mass.

I looked down, and saw the part of that work which I, at that moment, in that place, had the enormous privilege to do. Fine-tuning that interference modulator was what I had been born and re-born for. I set to work with the joy of a craftsman devoting his life to carving the door of a cathedral, certain of the credit it would bring him in a better life to come.

Nothing else mattered.

On my next visit to the macro my companions were the same people. They had changed since I’d last seen them, having lived another century of their still accelerating lives. More often than the first time, I didn’t understand their conversation. Their tact was subtle and kind, and all the more painful for that. But I came out of it, this time, shaken with anticipation rather than loss: the gate was soon to open.

Two days later, it happened. There was no ceremony about it. Only an alarm that warned the workforce away from the affected area. The macros had already flowed back from it, and now hung in a roughly circular pattern, spaced out among the girders. All work ceased as we jetted to the edges of the structure and clung there in wordless wonder.

In the core of the structure the girders began to move, folding into each other with increasing speed until a black circular space opened like a widening pupil. Two hundred metres across, four hundred, eight hundred, a mile: then at an arbitrary point on its rim, space cracked. In the twinkling of an eye, that one-dimensional flaw, the stretched point, became a circle cut loose from the universe.

The Visser–Price wormhole was held in place, like a film of soap in a ring, by the Malley non-exotic-matter structure around it. It couldn’t be held absolutely still: gravitational effects and sheer quantum uncertainty made the precise location of its edge undefinable to more than the nearest centimetre. This predictable imprecision created an unexpected, trivial but awesome effect: around the rim, the fractured light from the stars it occluded splintered into all the colours of the spectrum.

Now events progressed at the macros’ pace, not ours. The rainbow ring around the Malley Mile became two overlapping rings. The new circle separated, slowly at first. In the centre of that second circle, a section of the structure we’d built folded itself and unfolded into a dark parabolic blossom: the ship. I thought it, too, quivered with distorted space; I can’t be sure. The ship was linked to the second circle by a cone of cables, at whose apex it waited, poised.

Jupiter’s atmosphere boiled at dozens of points around its equator, sending tornadoes snaking up to the Ring around the planet. The Ring glowed, millions of accelerators around it whipping the stripped matter into a frantic circular race. After some minutes a white line blazed through our midst, from the Ring to