The door opened and the scale of what was on the other side arrived before anything else—not as visual information, not as something the eyes processed and transmitted to the brain in the normal sequence of sense to perception to understanding, but as a physical fact the body received first, the way the body received the presence of very large open spaces before the mind had finished deciding what to do about them.
It arrived in the chest. Then in the skin. Then, last of all, in the part of the brain responsible for comprehension, which took one look at what the chest and skin were reporting and requested additional processing time.
Five hundred meters of diameter. Two hundred meters of height.
The convergence chamber, which had felt vast enough to swallow seven people without noticing and had done exactly that, would have fit inside this space with room remaining.
