IIRC the planet comes from the direction of the core, which the protagonists assume implies from the core... but it could have just been travelling through it, no?
As for the FTL limit, I always thought the causality is the reverse - that compute power that the Beyond has is because their computers run on the same physics that allows FTL travel.
If FTL was driven solely by compute, then you'd never have a clear boundary in the first place - just shorter and shorter hyperspace jumps, perhaps until the point where they become infeasible (because the amount of time it takes to make one, including compute, is more than just travelling there). But the way the book describes it, the boundary is qualitative, and FTL drives plainly don't activate once in the Slow Zone. Ditto for FTL comms.
Yes, that was my take too. "OnOff’s eccentric orbit had at least passed through those unseen depths." -- but the irony of the end of the book is that they're going to be going entirely the wrong way. The ellipse that describes its orbit is eccentric -- that means it can touch both points near the center of the galaxy and points outside the Slow Zone.
As for the FTL limit, I always thought the causality is the reverse - that compute power that the Beyond has is because their computers run on the same physics that allows FTL travel.
If FTL was driven solely by compute, then you'd never have a clear boundary in the first place - just shorter and shorter hyperspace jumps, perhaps until the point where they become infeasible (because the amount of time it takes to make one, including compute, is more than just travelling there). But the way the book describes it, the boundary is qualitative, and FTL drives plainly don't activate once in the Slow Zone. Ditto for FTL comms.