In the end, I manage to talk them down from what Zidanya refers to as full fig. I’d like to be gracious and generous and say that that’s why we’re done with getting ready so much earlier than we need to be, but that would be too blatant a lie.

It’s not that I resent the rush. I’m familiar with the feeling of wanting to be ready early. I just resent the lack of what else we could have done in the meantime.

Regardless, I get a slow nod from Sara and a thoughtful hum from Vonne when we rejoin them in the common area, both of them assessing in a sort of impersonal way. I’m in what are indisputably tights, sheer to the point of being almost see-through down the calves and barely thicker as they rise, but I don’t have it in me to be even the least bit displeased by them. They’re stunningly gorgeous, colorful with subtly shifting flames in a hundred shades of red and gold, and they feel like a soft caress on my skin. The shirt’s just as comfortable, tight across the chest and pectorals, flowing more loosely down in patterns of smoke and haze to blur into the tights.

It’s a look, enhanced by a somewhat toned-down version of the makeup I’d worn to the audience. I don’t mind it, don’t mind the smug pleasure on Zidanya’s face when she finishes doing the cosmetics, certainly don’t mind the softness of the clothes on my skin. I particularly don’t mind the way that Amber can’t stop stealing glances, the hungry way she looks at me.

Everyone else is dressed up to some extent, though not with nearly the care that I am. Whether that’s because of Lily’s having shown an interest in me or because I’m at least notionally the leader of the group, I can’t tell, but it’s also possible that I’m overthinking it and they were simply able to get ready much faster. Vonne, at least, isn’t wearing any clothes, with her fur shining—actually, literally glowing to a small extent, despite how dark her fur is—and dyed, presumably temporarily, in subtle patterns of black and dark greys, purples, and reds. Sara’s in a more subtle version of her previous ghost-like attire, and both Amber and Zidanya are in matching, saturated gemstone-rich dresses. The dresses are sleeveless, cut to draw the eye to their muscles and their curves alike, and I’m not any subtler than Amber about lingering appreciatively.

Given perfect foreknowledge of the timing, I’d have chosen to spend the excess kiloseconds having sex, or possibly it would be more honest to say rutting, given how raw my nerves are scraped. Instead, we gather around a table, and Sara asks a question I’ve been asked a thousand times and have never managed to give a satisfying answer to.

“How does it work?”

“It’s like solving a puzzle.” There’s an exasperated hiss from at least three people, and I sigh. “Um. It’s like the feeling you get when you solve a puzzle, when the a-ha clicks into place and you see a pattern where before there was only the seeming of chaos, uncorrelated noise?”

“Were some grace to grant us an example,” Zidanya offers leadingly, teasingly, and I laugh.

Imagine, I venture at some length, a set of twenty little word puzzles. Each has a clear, correct answer; perhaps it begins with a strange glove, possesses some signs of friendship, and is a compromise. A strange glove, maybe that’s a word for glove in a foreign language; add half of a word for friend and the letter whose number representation signifies, among other things, compromise, and you have the word for hiding.

Clear and correct; rarely simple or obvious, always cryptic.

Twenty of these, and you can almost see how they could fit together, and indeed, they do almost fit together. But something is wrong, and they don’t; ah, but what if you removed one letter from each of them? Then they do fit together, and that moment of clarity, that plasma-arc-bright flash of revelation when you see how they do all fit if you just do this one thing, that is the essence of how a wormhole navigator threads the needle between universes.

We chase patterns in the chaos. We orient ourselves in our relatively miniscule skiffs tethered to titanic craft and the totality of all possible existence, constrained only by our anchors, shifts around us. We live and breathe in the narrow edge between seeing patterns that exist only in our minds and missing the patterns that we should have seen, and we bring Worldships through the Great Darkness, through the Void Between.

There are a lot of questions I can’t answer in any meaningful way. I have, frankly, no idea how the Wyrmdrive functions; its etymology is unrelated to the word wormhole, and rooted, according to a passionate linguist of my occasional assignatory acquaintance, in a word that refers to moving by wiggling, somehow, and that’s about all the information I have about its function. I don’t know why the tethering effect works, I don’t know why the Void Between is a singularity that borders every physical space in every universe but also two ships can dive at the same time without seeing each other, and I don’t know why a given link between two systems eventually stabilizes into manifesting the same kind of expression of order.

It’s to the point where a vimboat can take the Centauri-Eridani jump successfully eight out of ten times, if you tune the Volitional Interface Mind you’ve got piloting the ship to the right kind of audio resolution puzzle. There’s a half-dozen other links that are in settled enough shape to have near-real-time mail service; they send a ship every other day and carry confirmations of everything that’s been received, but nobody other than the mad, viciously desperate, or coerced jumps without a properly trained, Voidsighted human in the nav blister, the skiff, the bucket, whatever you call it.

Eventually they get tired of asking questions I don’t have an answer for, which is a really long list. It’s a gigasecond—thirty years, really, qualifications are a civil matter—from starting Focus, well before your majority, to being a Cog, a fully-qualified engineer in any of the voting disciplines, and it’s not far off from that for the non-engineering disciplines. Even as someone who, leaving any false modesty aside, contributed materially to the advancement of the art in two different software fields—VIMs and Dynamic-Chaotic-Model representations of neurological activity—I was probably still a third of the way out from a level of mastery that’d give me that mark of approbation, not that they’d ever make it official for a whole lot of reasons.

Eventually, the conversation comes back around to puzzles. It’s much more comfortable ground than arguing about the governance structure of a Worldship or fielding increasingly more technical questions about everything from water treatment facilities to how we cycle salt, which actually is also water treatment. It was self-indulgent of me, I guess, but my nerves were getting to me about Lilith stars-ever-burning Sheid coming over for a luncheon of extraordinary social importance, and I needed the indulgence.

Courtesy of Omniglot, I produce in short order a word search in which thematically-suited valid words could be found using odd encoding methods. Numeric patterns of how many cells to skip, the drawing geometric shapes and making moves as though moving pieces in a game, and different mechanisms for writing down non-verbal speech—semaphore, dotform, and more. While they’re working on that, I throw together one of my favorite gimmicks, something I almost never get to indulge myself with: a third-order puzzle.

We don’t have time for me to build the base feeder puzzles, so I simply throw down their answers, twenty five of them. This is the second-order puzzle, and they’re new to this, it’s a style entirely foreign to their tradition, so I put them in five columns of five; but I make sure to point out that they’d be unordered in the classic presentation, or ordered alphabetically by name of the puzzle as a way of indicating that the ordering would have to change.

Hinted by the puzzle they’d just finished playing with, Sara and Vonne both pretty much instantly figure out the set of five that give letters via semaphore. The second one, Zidanya points out that there’s anagrammed words for currencies hidden in the set, Vonne notices that they’re always inside the word, and Sara notices that the bigrams to the left and right are pretty nice letters, so there’s that one solved seconds later. The third set is simple, just a doubled letters extraction, and I think they all get that within about thirty seconds but they all sort of dance around it to give each other the opportunity to answer so I don’t know who got it first.

Sara pokes fun at Vonne for her tell, the way her tail stops its flicking and sweeping back and forth to go stock still except at the very tip, which practically vibrates back and forth, when she spots the answer. Vonne’s tail goes away with a dramatic sniff and a burst of complex magic.

The fourth second-order puzzle is more intricate, and they stall for a bit on it. Vonne and Sara get pretty much right off the fact that the answer lengths are consecutive, which is the first trick, but it’s long minutes of them throwing ideas back and forth while they stare blankly at the list before one of them thinks about the numerical values of the letters and then it’s off to the races. Zidanya twigs to the fact that there’s a cycle, Vonne to the fact that it can be treated as a cipher, and Sara to the fact that the operation is reversible, and that gets them the answer, though when they put it together it turns out that Vonne’s cipher actually incorporates both the cycle and the reversal, and that irony has them laughing for a long moment.

The last one is simple again, simple enough that they do the stalling dance again and Amber gives the answer. It’s trigrams, overlapping trigrams, which I thought was a nice touch, if a bit on the trying-too-hard side of basic constructions.

That brings them to the third-order puzzle, and they sort of stare at it for a while. They’ve got twenty-five feeder answers and five second-order answers, but it takes a while for them to start noticing that the second-order answers are all not just answers in their own right, but descriptions that can characterize a string. At that point, though, they stall out again; they’re too focused on that and they’re trying to find words or phrases that match the characteristics, treating those as the third-order answer.

I can see the crystalline moment of clarity when Amber gets the next leap. It burns in her eyes and it suffuses every millimeter of her bearing, radiating in her body language, so loud in unspoken triumphant revelation that I can’t understand how anyone else misses it, all the stronger because this time, this once, she’s the first to spot it.

What if, she says softly, each of the second-order answers is applied to the set of first-order answers? See here, how the lengths either are or are not longer than the number we thought; see how each does or does not contain the consecutive anagrammed letters of a bug?

Her pride is the shared glee of the rest of my companions, for the simplicity of what they’d been missing by overthinking. The rest falls in short order, largely to Sara and Vonne. Five bits of truth is enough to encode thirty-two unique symbols, but the bitwise ordering problem eludes them for long moments until Vonne starts to think about it and immediately realizes that they can rule out any ordering that results in any of the twenty-five characters being valid letters in Common Iavshetani, which thankfully has had the same alphabet since Zidanya’s… well, death. That gets them a unique ordering of, by order presented, 3-5-1-4-2, and that gives them a string of perfectly good letters that turns into an appropriately humorous and clear phrase that references all five of the second-order answers.

There’s a moment of quiet, a moment that sings of joy. They stare at the wall where the words are projected, we all stare at the wall, and there’s that contented, slightly-hollow feeling when it was good but it’s over, and then the door chimes a request for entry and we scramble, centered and off-balance at the same time, into readiness for our guests.