A Path Through The Star Gates

After conversing with the Others' Oracle on the pulsar, Joelle the holothete:

makes probabilistic computations of the magnitude and direction of particular paths through the star gates;

also makes reasonable estimates of the likelihood that another T machine will be at the end of a gate;

devises a scheme for traveling from machine to machine, always jumping as far as possible in a plausible direction, thus eventually reaching the frontier where the Others are still building T machines.

The remaining seven jumps are to:

a still coalescing planetary system;

an old globular cluster with one planet humanly habitable only on plateaus, like Larry Niven's Plateau or Anderson's Rustum in the first generation of its colonization;

the galactic core;

near the galactic center in the far future;

intergalactic space a billion years in the future;

in the galaxy, 70 to 100 billion years in the future;

the Others.