were tailed from there to Bamard's, where you picked up a load, the one you're carrying now. We found out you were going to deliver it to Uraniborg. On the way there you picked me up for the second time. The first time.'
The Paradox was real.
'How did Wilkes get into all this?'
She lowered her eyes. 'Through me. I told my father about the map.' She looked up at me defensively. 'The Authority was closing in. There have been scores of arrests recently. Nothing about it in me news feeds, only the vaguest hints. The map-object was a hot potato being passed from hand to hand, sometimes minutes before the knock on the door. It looked as if the map would wind up in the Authority's hands after all. That was when I told him. He was going to take me with him ? here.' A single, gelid tear welled in the comer of her left eye. 'I tried to save him…. I tried to save the movement… both… I?' She bent over and wet the grass with bitter tears.
I let her cry as long as she needed to, then took her shoulders and lifted her from the grass, gently pried her hands from her face. 'I need to know one thing more, Darla. What is it? The object, I mean. And who has it now?'
A mantle of calm settled over her. She stopped quivering and her breathing slowed. She did her straightening-up ritual, then took a deep breath. She reached for her pack, withdrew an ordinary-looking makeup box and opened the lid. It contained face coloring, the kind some women use for those partial Kabuki masks that are in vogue now, the kind of makeup job a lifecompanion of a high Authority 'crat might wear to the opera. She dug in two fingers and plucked out a black object. She wiped it off with a spare shirt from her pack, then took my hand. She pressed it into my palm. It was a jet-black cube about fifty millimeters on a side.
'You do, Jake. You have it now.'
Stunned, I sat and gaped at it. The color was the blackest black I had ever seen. It wouldn't have made a good paper-weight; the thing was like air in my hand.
'Touch two leads to it at any point,' Darla said, 'and you get a flood of binary numbers in a patterned sequence. No one's been able to figure it out, but the best guess is that it's a multidimensional coordinate system. No doubt touching leads to it isn't the proper way of getting the information out.'
I rose to my feet shaking my head, confounded beyond words.
'I know,' she said. 'It's a closed loop. The Paradox. A future self gives you ? the past self ? something that he got ^ from a future self when he was the past…. It's a classic contradiction. Where did the thing come from in the first place?' She got up, drew near me, and put a hand on my chest. 'No one planned it this way. We gave up trying to make any sense out of the cube. And just a few days ago, when the Authority finally acted on what they got from running a Delphi on Miller, there was no one around to take the relay but me. I couldn't leave the cube behind. When you picked me up the second time, I wasn't sure about the Paradox. It was just rumor then. I thought you were… the 'you' who handed the cube over. You weren't.'
I walked away from Darla, transfixed, holding the cube as if it were about to explode in my hand. I don't know how long I stared at it. Presently, I was aware of being near Winnie and the others.
Roland came over to me, an excited look on his face.,
'Jake, it's fantastic!' he bubbled. 'Winnie's map, I mean. There's a beltway, Jake. A beltway that circles the galaxy, spiraling in to the core. And as near as I can tell, about ten thousand light-years from here on the outer arm, there's a junction with a route that connects up the Local Group.' He seized my shoulder. 'The Local Group! Jake, can you believe it? The damn road goes all the way to Andromeda!' He squinted at the dark cube in my hand. 'What the hell's that?'
I didn't answer, and walked away.
The sun was halfway up now, painting the sky with rosy promise, and the black road ran straight into it.
