The Eon Series

Legacy, Eon, and Eternity

Greg Bear

CONTENTS

Legacy

Prologue - Journey Year 753

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Eon

Prolog - Four Beginnings

Chapter One - April 2005

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter  Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Epilog - Four Beginnings

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Eternity

1 Recovered Earth, Independent Territory of New Zealand, A. D. 2046

2 Terrestrial Hexamon, Earth Orbit, Axis Euclid

3 Gala, Island of Rhodos, Greater Alexandreian Oikoumen?, Year of Alexandros 2331-2342

4 Terrestrial Hexamon, Axis Euclid

5 Earth

6 Thistledown

7 Gaia, Near Alexandreia, Year of Alexandros 2345

8 Earth

9 Thistledown

10 Gaia

11 Earth

12 Gaia

13 Thistledown

14 Gaia

15 Thistledown City

16 Gaia

17 Thistledown

18 Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

19 Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

20 Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

21 Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

22 Gaia, Alexandreia

23 Thistledown

24 Gaia

25 Thistledown City

26 Gaia

27 Thistledown, Fourth Chamber

28 Earth

29 Thistledown

30 Gaia

31 Gaia

32 Thistledown City

33 Thistledown City

34 Thistledown City Memory

35 Rhita

36 Thistledown

37 The Way

38 Thistledown City

39 The Way

40 The Hawaiian Islands

41 Thistledown

42 Hawaii

43 The Way, Efficient Gaia

44 Thistledown City

45 Thistledown, the Orbiting Precincts, and Earth

46 Thistledown

47 Earth

48 Thistledown

49 Earth

50 Thistledown

51 Thistledown

52 Efficient Gaia

53 Earth, Thistledown

54 Earth

55 Thistledown

56 Earth

57 Halfway

58 Thistledown

59 Thistledown City

60 Earth, Christchurch

61 Thistledown City

62 Thistledown

63 Earth

64 The Way

65 Thistledown City

66 The Seventh Chamber

67 The Way

68 Between

69 The Beginning of the Way

70 The Way

71 Thistledown

72 The Beginning of the Way

73 Thistledown

74 The Way

75 Axis Euclid

76 Earth

77 Thistledown City

78 The Way

79 Axis Euclid

80 The Way

81 Home

82 In the Flaw

83 Timbl

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Legacy

Greg Bear

For Bertha Merriman

A pioneer who lived in a tougher time...

With love from a grandchild

PROLOGUE: JOURNEY YEAR 753

I stood on the lip of the southern borehole, clutching a service line, and, for the first time in my life, stared beyond the mass of Thistledown at the stars. They spread through deep space as many and sharp as a cloud of crystal snow blown against black onyx. The uncharted constellations spun with a stately haste, betraying the asteroid's rotation around its long axis.

The worksuit performed its tasks silently, and for a time I seemed a point of crystal myself, at the center of the crystal empyrean, at peace. I looked for patterns in the stars, but before I could find any, my companion interrupted me.

“Olmy.” She pulled herself carefully along the line and floated beside me.

“Just a moment,” I said.

“We're done here. Parties await us, Olmy. Celebrations and diversions ... but you're a bonded man, aren't you?”

I shook my head, annoyed. “Hard to believe that something as huge as Thistledown can shrink to nothing,” I said.

Her expression, surveying the stars, was half-worry, half-distaste. Kerria Ap Kane had been my partner in Way Defense since basic, a good friend if not exactly a soulmate. I had so few soulmates. Not even my bond...

“Give me a minute, Kerria.”

“I want to get back.” She shrugged. “All right. A minute. But why look outward?”

Kerria would never have understood. To her, the asteroid starship was all and everything, a world of infinite social opportunities: work, friends, even dying for Way Defense if it came to that. The stars were outside, “far south,” and meant nothing; only the confined infinity of the Way aroused wonder in her soul.

“It's pretty,” she said flatly. “Do you think we'll ever get to Van Brugh?”

Van Brugh's star, still a hundred light-years distant, had been the original goal of Thistledown. For most of the ship's population of Naderites—my family included—it was the point of all our existences, a holy destination, and had been for seven hundred years’ journey time.

“Can we see it from here, do you think?”

“No,” I said. “It's visible from midline this year.”

“Too bad,” Kerria said. She clucked her tongue restlessly.

The ten-kilometer-wide crater at Thistledown's southern pole had once deflected and directed the pulses of the Beckmann drive motors. The motors had not been fired in four centuries. I took one last look beyond the lip of the borehole, my eyes tracking outward along the honeycombed curve of the dimple at the center of the crater. Huge black many-limbed robots sat in the dimple around the lip of the borehole, having arranged themselves for our inspection hours earlier.

“All right,” I said to the massed robots. “Go home.” I aimed the command transponder and the machines backed away, hooks and claws grabbing the spinning slope, returning to their duties on the asteroid's surface.

We turned and pulled ourselves along the line down the borehole, toward the tuberider, an oblate grayness resting lightly against the dark rock and metal wall. Beyond the tuberider lay the massive prime dock, a cylinder within the borehole designed to counterrotate and allow easier access to cargo vehicles. Tens of kilometers north glowed a small bright dot, the opening to the first chamber. We climbed into the tuberider, pressurized the cramped cabin, and collapsed our worksuits.

Kerria beamed a signal at the borehole mouth. Two massive shutters swung from the walls and came together like black-lipped jaws, sealing this end of Thistledown and blanking the stars.

“All clean and clear,” she said. “Agreed?”

“All clear and clean,” I said.

“Do the generals actually think the Jarts will get outside the Way and swing up our backside?” Kerria asked cheerfully.

“They surprised us once,” I said. “They might do it again.”

Kerria gave me a dubious grin. “Shall I drop you off at the sixth chamber?” she asked, lifting the vehicle away from the wall.

“I need to do some things in Thistledown City first.”

“Ever the mystery man,” Kerria said.

She had no idea.

We sped north down the tunnel. The kilometers to the end of the borehole passed rapidly. The entrance to the first chamber yawned wide, and we flew into brilliant tubelight.

Fifty kilometers in diameter and thirty deep, the first chamber seemed to my recent interstellar perspective to be little more than the inside of a big, squat drum. Its true size was emphasized by the slowness with which our tuberider crossed to the borehole in the chamber's northern cap.

Clouds decked the chamber floor, twenty-five kilometers below. The atmosphere in the chamber rose to a height of twenty kilometers, a sea of fluid lining the drum. I saw a small storm gathering on the floor overhead. No storm could touch us at the axis, riding as we were in almost perfect vacuum.

The first chamber was kept nearly deserted as a precaution against any breach of the comparatively thin walls of the asteroid at the southern end.

We traveled down the middle of the tube light, a translucent pipe of glowing plasma five kilometers wide and thirty long, generated at the chamber's northern and southern caps. We could see rapid pulses of light from our position along the axis, but on the chamber's floor, the tube presented a steady, yellow-white glow, day and night. So it was in all of the first six chambers.

The seventh chamber, of course, was different.

The borehole seemed a pinprick in the gray, gently curved wall of asteroid rock ahead of us. “Shall I go manual and thread us in?” Kerria asked, grinning at me.

I smiled back but gave no answer. She was good enough to do it. She had piloted flawships and numerous other craft up and down the Way with expert ease.

“I'd rather relax,” she said, peeved by my silence. “You would refuse to be impressed.” She folded her arms back behind her head. “Besides, it's been a long day. I might miss.”

“You never miss,” I said.

“Damn right I don't.”

Inspections were mandated by Hexamon law twice yearly. Way Defense had upped that to four times yearly, with special emphasis on sixth chamber security, inspection of reserve batteries in the ship's cold outer walls, and maintenance of the southern borehole and external monitors. This time, Kerria and I had drawn inspection duty for the far south. We then had liberty for thirty days, and Kerria thought herself lucky: The Way's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration was just beginning.

But I had an unpleasant task ahead: betrayal, separation, putting an end to connections I no longer believed in but was not willing to mock.

The cap loomed, filling our forward view, and the second borehole suddenly swallowed us. Kilometers away, the opening to the second chamber city, Alexandria, made another brilliant dot against the tunnel's unlighted blackness.

“Elevator, or shall I swoop down and drop you off somewhere?”

“Elevator,” I said.

“My,” Kerria said with a cluck. “Glum?”

“You sound like a chicken,” I said.

“You've never seen a live chicken. How can you be glum with so much liberty ahead?”

“Even so.”

We passed into the second chamber, the same size as the first, but filled with Thistledown's oldest city. Alexandria covered two-thirds of the second chamber floor, thirty-one-hundred square kilometers of glorious white and gold and bronze and green towers arrayed in spirals and stepped ranks, walls of blunt-faced black and gold cubes, ornately inscribed spheres rising from massive cradles themselves rich with colors and populations. Between the city and the southern cap stretched a blue-green “river,” a kilometer wide and several meters deep, flowing beneath the graceful suspension bridges spaced at the floor's four quarters. In Thistledown's original designs, the parks along the capside bank did not exist; in their place had risen a “slosh” barrier one hundred meters higher than the opposite shore to mitigate the effects of the ship's acceleration. But in the early days of Thistledown's construction, that problem had been solved by the inertial damping machinery in the sixth chamber. The same machinery, centuries later, had allowed Konrad Korzenowski to contemplate creating the Way. The chamber floor was flat, not banked; the park and the river formed bands of green and blue around the chamber's southern end.

Parks and forests covered the open spaces between neighborhoods. In plots scattered around the city, robots labored to finish structures destined to absorb the slowly growing population. Thistledown was ever young.

After seven centuries, the asteroid's inhabitants numbered seventy-five million. She had begun her voyage with five million.

Kerria clucked again and shook her head. We passed over Alexandria and into the third borehole. Near the northern opening, she slowed the vehicle and sidled up against a raised entrance. A transfer passage reached across to the door of the tuberider and I disembarked. I waved to Kerria and stepped into the green and silver elevator. The air smelled of moisture and people, the clean but unmistakably human perfume of the city where I had lived two years of my youth.

“See you in a few days?” Kerria said, looking after me with some concern.

“Yeah.”

“Cheers!”

I leaned my head to one side and said good-bye to her.

On the way down, I told my uniform to become civilian, standard day dress style one, mildly formal. I wanted to avoid attracting attention as a member of Way Defense, not all that common in the Naderite community.

The elevator took nine minutes to reach the chamber floor. I stepped out and walked down the short corridor into the chamber proper.

I crossed the Shahrazad bridge, listening to the whisper of the slender Fa River and the wind-blown rustle of thousands of long red ribbons blowing from the wires in the gentle breeze from the southern cap. Some neighborhood had chosen this decoration for the bridge, this month; in another month it might be crawling with tiny glowing robots.

Thistledown City had been built in the first two centuries after the starship's departure. With its chamber-spanning catenary cables, reaching from cap to cap and hung with slender white buildings, it seemed to dwarf Alexandria. It was obviously a Geshel showplace—and yet, in the worst conflicts between Geshels and Naderites on the starship, after the opening of the Way, many conservative and radical Naderites had been forced to move from their homes in Alexandria to new quarters in Thistledown City. There were still strong Naderite neighborhoods near the southern cap. New construction was under way here as well, with arches being erected parallel to the caps, the greatest planned to be ten kilometers long.

A short walk took me to the tall cylindrical building where I had spent my early childhood. Through round hallways filled with sourceless illumination, my shadow forming and dissolving in random arcs around me, I returned to our old apartment.

My parents were away in Alexandria, to escape the celebrations—I had known that before coming here. I entered the apartment and sealed the door, then turned to the memory plaques in the living center.

For twenty-four years, I had kept one important secret, known to me and perhaps one other—the man or woman or being who had placed the old friend in this particular building, not anticipating that an inquisitive child might come upon him, almost by accident. I had come here to check up on a friend who had died before I was born, in his perfect hiding place, and make certain he was still hidden and undisturbed.

I—and no more than that one other, I was convinced—knew the last resting place of the great Konrad Korzenowski—the tomb not of his body but of what remained of his personality after his assassination by radical Naderites.

I connected with the building's memory, used a mouse agent to bypass personal sentries, as I had decades ago and at least once a year since, and dropped into the encrypted memory store.

Hello, I said.

The presence stirred. Even without a body, it seemed to smile. It was no longer human, half its character having been destroyed, but it could still interact and share warm memories. What remained of the great Korzenowski was vulnerably friendly. All of its caution removed, all of its self-protections destroyed, it could only be one thing—a giving and occasionally brilliant friend, ideal for a lonely young child unsure of himself. I kept this secret for one reason: damaged personalities could not be repaired, by Naderite law. If what remained of Korzenowski were to be discovered, it would be erased completely.

Hello, Olmy, it answered. How is the Way?

An hour later, I cabbed across the city to the mixed Geshel and Naderite “progressive” neighborhoods, favored by students and Way Defense members. There, in my small apartment, I linked with city memory, sent my planned locations for the next few days to the corps commanders, and removed my mutable uniform for purely civilian garb appropriate to the celebration: sky-blue pants, Earth-brown vest, pale green jacket, and light boots.

I returned to the train station.

As I joined the throng waiting on the platform, I looked for familiar faces and found none. Four years in service guarding against the Jarts on the extreme frontiers of the Way, four billion kilometers north of Thistledown, had given my Geshel acquaintances from university time to change not just partners and philosophies, but body patterns as well. If any of my student friends were in the crowd, I probably would not recognize them. I did not expect to find many Way Defenders here.

Except for raccoon stripes of pale blue around my eyes, I was still physically the same as I had been four years before. Arrogant, full of my own thoughts, headstrong and sometimes insensitive, judged brilliant by many of my peers and moody by many more—attractive to women in that strange way women are attracted to those who might hurt them—the only child of the most mannered and gracious of parents, praised frequently and punished seldom, I had reached my thirtieth year convinced of my courage from a minimum of testing, yet even more convinced there would be greater tests in store. I had abandoned the faith of my father and, in truth, had never understood the faith of my mother.

Thistledown, immense as it was, did not seem capable of containing my ambition. I did not think I was young, and certainly did not feel inexperienced. After all, I had served four years in Way Defense. I had participated in what seemed at the time to be important actions against the Jarts...

Yet now, caught up in crowds celebrating the silver anniversary of Thistledown's wedding with the Way, I seemed an anonymous bubble in a flowing stream, smaller than I had felt among the stars. What I was about to do dismayed me.

Music and pictures flowed over the largely Geshel crowd, narrative voices telling the details we all knew, Naderites and Geshels alike, by heart. Twenty-five years before, Korzenowski and his assistants had completed, connected, and opened the Way. From my childhood, the Way had beckoned, the only place—if place it could be called—likely to provide the tests I craved.

“In the history of humankind, has there ever been anything more audacious? Issuing from Thistledown's seventh chamber, the inside (there is no ‘outside') of an endless immaterial pipe fifty kilometers in diameter, smooth barren surface the color of newly-cast bronze, the Way is a universe turned inside-out, threaded by an axial singularity called the flaw...

“And at regular intervals along the surface of the Way, potential openings to other places and times, histories and realities strung like beads...”

My parents—and most of my friends during my early youth—were devoted Naderites, of that semi-orthodox persuasion known as Voyagers. They believed it was simple destiny for humankind to have carved seven chambers out of the asteroid Juno, attached Beckmann drive motors, and converted the huge planetesimal into a starship, christened Thistledown. They believed—as did all but the extreme Naderites—that it was right and just to transport millions across the vast between the stars to settle fresh new worlds. Our family had lived for centuries in Alexandria, in the second and third chambers; we had all been born on Thistledown. We knew no other existence.

They simply did not believe in the creation of the Way. That, virtually all Naderites agreed, had been an abomination of the Korzenowski and the overly ambitious Geshels.

By releasing the bond between myself and the woman chosen for me in my youth at Ripen, I would finally end my life as a Naderite.

The trains arrived with a flourish as sheets of red and white arced over the train station. The crowd roared like a monstrous but happy animal, and pushed me across the platform to the doors spread wide to receive us. I was lost in a sea of faces smiling, grimacing, laughing, or just intent on keeping upright in the jostle.

We packed into the trains so closely we could scarcely move. A young woman jammed against me; she glanced up at me, face flushed, smiling happily but a little scared. She wore Geshel fashion, but by the cut of her hair I saw she was from a Naderite family: rebelling, cutting loose, joining the Geshel crowds on this least holy of celebrations—perhaps not caring in the least what the celebration was about.

“What's your name?” she asked, nibbling her lower lip, as if expecting some rebuff.

“Olmy,” I said.

“You're lovely ... with the mask. Did you do it yourself?”

I smiled down at her. She was perhaps five years younger than I, years past Ripen, an adult by any measure, Naderite or Geshel, but out of her place. She rubbed against me in the jostle, half deliberate. I felt little attraction to her, but some concern.

“You're going to see the Way? Visit Axis City?” I asked, bending to whisper in her ear.

“Yes!” she answered, eyes dancing. “And you?”

“Eventually. Family meeting you there?”

She flushed crimson. “No,” she said.

“Bond meeting you there?”

“No.”

“I'd think again,” I said. “Geshels can get pretty wild when they party. The Way makes them drunk.”

She drew back, blinking. “It's my hair, isn't it?” she said, lips flicking down suddenly. She fought to get away from me, pushing through the thick pack, glancing over her shoulder resentfully.

For the young—and at thirty, in a culture where one could live to be centuries, I could not think of myself as anything but very young—to be a Geshel was infinitely more exciting than being a Naderite. We all lived within a miracle of technology, and it seemed the soul of Thistledown had grown tired of confinement. The Geshels, who embraced the most extreme technologies and changes, offered the glamour of infinite adventure down the Way, contrasted with the weary certainty of centuries more in space, traveling with Thistledown in search of unknown planets around a single distant star.

Truly, we had outstripped the goals of our ancestors. To many of us, it seemed irrational to cling to an outmoded philosophy.

Yet something tugged at me, a lost sense of comfort and certainty...

The train passed through the asteroid rock beneath Thistledown City, more news of the celebration projected over the faces of the passengers. Stylized songs and histories flowed over and around us:

“For twenty-five years, the Way has beckoned to pioneers, an infinite frontier, filled with inexhaustible mystery—and danger. Though created by the citizens of Thistledown, even before it was opened, the Way was parasitized by intelligences both violent and ingenious, the Jarts. With the Jart influence now pushed back beyond the first two billion kilometers of the Way, gates have been opened at a steady pace, and new worlds discovered—”

I pressed through the crowd and left the train in the fourth chamber. The open-air platform held only a few sightseers, mostly Naderites, fleeing to the countryside of forests and waterways and deserts and mountains to escape the celebration. But even here the sky that filled the cylindrical chamber flashed with bright colors. The yellow-white tubelight that spanned the chamber's axis had been transformed into a pulsing work of art.

“They're overstepping it,” grumbled an older Naderite man on the platform, dignified in his gray and blue robes. His wife nodded agreement. Twenty kilometers above us, the tubelight sparkled and glittered green and red. Snakelike lines of intense white writhed within the glow.

Forests rose on all sides of the station and resort buildings. From the floor, the chamber's immensity revealed itself with deceptive gradualness. For five kilometers on each side, as one stared along a parallel to the flat gray walls of asteroid rock and metal capping the cylinder, the landscape appeared flat, as it might have seemed on Earth. But the cylinder's curve lofted the land into a bridge that met high overhead, fifty kilometers away, lakes and forest and mountains suspended in a haze of atmosphere, transected by the unusual gaiety of the tubelight.

In the early days, the chambers had been called “squirrel cages"; though immense, they were roughly of the same proportions. The entire ship spun around its long axis, centrifugal force pressing things to the chamber floors with an acceleration of six-tenths’ Earth's gravity.

My heart felt dull as lead. The station platform was just a few kilometers from the Vishnu Forest, where my bond would be waiting for me.

I walked, glad for the delay and the exercise.

Uleysa Ram Donnell stood alone by the outside rail beneath the pavilion where we had once jointly celebrated our Ripen. We had been ten then. She leaned against the wooden railing, backed by the giant trunks of redwood trees as old as Thistledown, a small black figure on the deserted dance floor. The high white dome shielded her from the rainbow flows of the tubelight. I walked up the steps slowly, and she watched with arms folded, face going quickly from pleasure at seeing me to concern. We had spent enough time together to prepare for being man and wife; we knew each other well enough to sense moods.

We embraced under the high white pine dome. “You've been neglectful,” she said. “I've missed you.” Uleysa was as tall as I and after we kissed, she regarded me at a level, large black eyes steady and a little narrowed by lids drawn with unspoken suspicion. Her face was lovely, clearly marked by intelligence and concern, nose gently arced, chin rounded and slightly withdrawn.

Our bond was special to our parents. They hoped for a strong Naderite union leading into city and perhaps even shipwide politics; her parents had spoken of our becoming Hexamon representatives, joint administers, part of the resurgence in Naderite leadership...

“You've changed,” Uleysa said. “Your postings—” For a moment I saw something like little-girl panic in her eyes.

I said what I had to say, not proudly and not too quickly. My numbness grew into a kind of shock.

“Where will you go?” she asked. “What will you do?”

“Another life,” I said.

“Do I bore you so much?”

“You have never bored me,” I said with some anger. “The flaws are mine.”

“Yes,” she said, eyes slitted, teeth clenched. “I think they must be... all yours.”

I wanted to kiss her, to thank her for the time we had had, the growing up, but I should have done that before I spoke. She pushed me away, held out her hands, and shook her head quickly.

I walked from beneath that dome feeling at once miserable and free.

Back on still another crowded train to the sixth chamber, I simply felt empty.

Uleysa had not cried. I had not expected her to. She was strong and proud and would have no difficulty finding another bond. But we both knew one thing: I had betrayed her and the plans of our families.

I intended to sink myself wholeheartedly into the celebrations. Getting off the train in the sixth chamber, standing in the Korzenowski Center with other celebrants waiting to be carried by construction cars to the seventh, I watched patters of rain fall from thick clouds onto the transparent roof.

It almost always rained in the sixth chamber. The carpets of machinery that covered most of the chamber, transferring and shaping forces that were beyond my own comprehension, created heat that needed to be drained away, and this ancient method had proved best.

I thought of Uleysa's face, her narrowed eyes, and an unexpected stab of grief hit me. My awareness of where I was, and who I was, curled inward like a snail's horns. Implants did not stop me from having negative emotions ... And I did not try to blank them. Uleysa had no affect controls. I deserved my own share of suffering.

Someone touched me, and I thought for a moment I was blocking a line into the cars. But the cars had not yet arrived. I turned and saw Yanosh Ap Kesler. “You look all beaten up,” he said. “Without the bruises.”

I smiled grimly. “It's my own fault,” I said.

He wore around his neck the pictor then becoming fashionable, though he did not speak in picts with me. Otherwise his dress was of the style called atonic, mildly conservative, blue and beige midwaist, black leggings, charcoal gray slippers, all fabrics flat, lacking image inlays.

“Yes, well, I've been trying to reach you for two days now.”

“I've been on duty,” I said. Yanosh was an old friend. We had met as youths at the Naderite Union College in Alexandria; I had performed favors, not too difficult, that obscured some of his less discreet escapades. All in all he had been a better judge of circumstance and character and had risen in his career much more rapidly than I. But I was in no real mood for companionship, even his.

“That's how I traced you. I convinced someone I needed to learn your whereabouts... desperately.”

“Rank hath its privileges,” I said.

He frowned and half twisted his upper body before turning to shoot back at me, “Stop being so damned opaque. Where are you going?”

“To the seventh chamber.”

“Axis City?”

“Eventually.”

“Join me. No need to wait in line.”

Four months before, Yanosh had been elected as third administer for the seventh chamber and the Way. He had come to this center of power and activity from a background similar to mine. Son of devout Naderites, he had gravitated to the Geshels shortly after the opening of the Way, as so many others had.

We all respected the philosophy of the Good Man, crusader and wary critic of the technology that had brought on the Death, but that had been ten centuries before.

“More privilege?” I asked.

“Just friendship,” Yanosh said.

“You haven't spoken to me in a year.”

“You haven't exactly made yourself accessible,” Yanosh said.

“I might prefer crowds now.”

“It's important,” Yanosh said. He took my arm. I hung back, but he tightened his grip. Rather than be dragged, I relented and walked beside him. He palmed his way through a security door and we walked down a chill hallway to a maintenance shaft. Lights formed a line down a long, wide tunnel, vanishing north into darkness.

“What could be so important?”

“You can listen to something incredible, as a favor,” Yanosh said. “And maybe I can save your career.” He whistled and a small sleek cab with Nexus markings came out of the shadows, floating a few centimeters above the gritty black floor.

“You're being investigated by the Naderites,” Yanosh told me as the cab traversed the tunnel in the wall between the sixth and seventh chambers.

“Why?” I asked, smiling ironically. “I'm in Way Defense. I've just cut myself off from the last Naderite ritual in my life—”

“I know,” he said. “Poor Uleysa. If I were you, I'd have tried to convince her to come with me. She's a fine woman.”

“I wouldn't do that to her,” I said, staring through the window at the flashing maintenance lights. Lumbering dark robots moved aside to allow our quick passage. “She tolerated my lapses. She didn't agree with them.”

“Still, she might have appreciated being tempted. Should I look her up and console her?” Yanosh asked. “It's about time I found a family triad.”

I shrugged, but some tic of my expression amused him.

“Much as I need to renew my connections with the Voyagers now, I wouldn't be so rude,” he said. “The Naderites are going to push for control of the Nexus in a few weeks. They'll probably get it. The cost of pushing back the Jarts is drawing grumbles even among the hardiest Geshel administers. If Naderites take over, the Nexus changes its face—and all us juniors get drudge work for a decade. My administer's career is hanging by a few thin threads. And, I might add, the Way could be in peril.”

I stared at him, genuinely shocked. “They couldn't put together the coalition to do that.”

“Never underestimate the people who made us.”

The cab emerged on a straight highway beneath brilliant pearly light, tan and snow-colored sand on either side. We were five kilometers spin-ward from the public access to the seventh chamber. Behind us, the gray heights of the seventh chamber's southern cap receded, an immense cliff wall.

Ahead, there was no cap ... No end.

The Way stretched on forever, or at least into incomprehensible and immeasurable distances. This was what Korzenowski had done—making the Thistledown bigger on the inside than the outside, opening up endless potential and adventure and danger, and for that, he had been assassinated shortly after the Way's opening.

He could not have known about the Jarts.

“It's a matter of economic stability, to be sure,” Yanosh said. “But some high passions have been engaged in the past twenty-five years.”

“There are gates being opened. Naderites are signing up to immigrate.”

“Politics isn't a rational art,” Yanosh said, “even on Thistledown. We have too much of Earth in us.”

I looked up. In the center of the tubelight that flowed from the southern cap, a thin line made itself visible more as an uncanny absence. The creation of the Way had by some metaphysical necessity I only half understood made a singularity that ran the length of Korzenowski's pipe-shaped universe: the flaw. Threaded on the flaw, sixty kilometers from the southern cap's borehole, a suspended city was being built a section at a time.

Spinward, a new section lay on the empty white sand, covered by robots like ants on a huge sugar cake; it would become the remaining half of Axis Nader, a concession to those forces that did not even believe in the Way. Three previously threaded sections or precincts of the Axis City already floated over us, white and steel and gray, great cylindrical monuments studded with towers that reached a kilometer and more from their main bodies. The city gleamed, startlingly clear seen through the thinner atmosphere that covered the floor of this section of the Way.

At the end of the highway, sixty kilometers from the southern cap, a private cable hung from the city overhead. The cab stopped beside the cable's gondola.

“What do they think I've done?” I asked Yanosh.

“I don't know. Nobody does. It's something not even the First Administer of Alexandria is willing to talk about.”

“I'm a small soldier in a very big army,” I said. “A lowly rank seven. Not worth the fuss.”

“That's what the sensible folk are saying ... this month. Secret allegations too dire to be spoken, among extremists who are not supposed to have a voice even with the radicals...” He turned to me as the door to the gondola opened. “Make any sense?”

It did, but I could never tell him, or anyone else for that matter. Korzenowski, in theory, could be revived if Geshels changed the laws. He could become a very powerful symbol. Perhaps the only other who knew had had a change of heart, or had been indiscreet.

“No,” I said.

“We'll talk more in my office.”

Yanosh's office opened to an outer wall of the finished first precinct of Axis Nader. Nexus offices clustered like quartz crystals in this external neighborhood.

“Let me counter one absurdity by relating another,” Yanosh said. “This one's more important by far, actually. Have you heard of Jaime Carr Lenk?” He perched on the edge of his narrow workboard. Details of Axis City construction flashed in display around and behind him.

“He headed a group of radical Naderites, calling themselves divaricates. He disappeared,” I said.

“We know where he's gone,” Yanosh said. “He took four thousand followers—divaricates—and a few humble machines and went off to make Utopia.”

I wondered if Yanosh was joking. He loved stories of human folly. “Where?” I asked.

“Wrong first question,” Yanosh said. He studied my face intently.

The limits of Thistledown were well known. Hiding places could be found ... But not for so many. Then the enormity of this disappearance struck me: first, the sheer numbers, four thousand citizens, and next, the fact that their disappearance had gone unnoticed and unpublicized. I became at once intensely interested and wary.

“How, then?” I asked.

“Their devotion to Lenk was complete. They even adopted his name and gave him honorifics, like Nader himself. Each carefully laid a trail of deception. Individually, or as a family or group, they claimed to be off on a knowledge retreat, in one chamber or another, in one city or another, under the laws of the coalition, not to be pursued or questioned by Nexus agencies until they returned to secular life. As well, Lenk chose whole families, husbands with their wives, children with parents, triad groupings together ... No loose fragments. They vanished and left nary a ripple, five years ago. Only Lenk himself was reported missing. The others...” Yanosh shrugged.

“Where did he take them?” I asked.

“Down the Way,” Yanosh said. “With the complicity of two apprentice gate openers, he created an illegal passage in a geometry stack.”

“No one knew?” My amazement grew to incredulity. I was relieved not to have to think about my other predicament ... if it was a predicament, and not a false alarm.

Yanosh shrugged again. “We've been distracted, needless to say, but that's a weak excuse. They chose a stack region near the frontier, close to Jart boundaries. They used the conflict of 748 as a cover. Slipped in behind defense forces ... Disguised themselves as a support unit. Nobody detected them. They had help—and we're still investigating.

“Lenk had connections, apparently,” Yanosh said. “Somebody told him about Lamarckia.”

“Lamarckia?” The name sounded exotic.

“A closely held secret.”

“The Nexus?” I asked, mocking dismay. “Keeping secrets?”

Yanosh hardly blinked. “An extraordinary world was discovered by the first gate prospectors about twelve years ago. Very terrestrial. They named it Lamarckia. There was little time to explore, so after making a brief survey, they closed the gate, marked a node, and saved it for future study. All such discoveries have been kept secret, to prevent just such occurrences as this.”

“How do we know about Lenk, after all this time?” I asked.

“One of the immigrants returned,” Yanosh said. “He stole one of two clavicles in Lenk's possession and came back through a tangle of world-lines in the stack. A defense flawship found him more than half-dead in a depleted pressure suit. It brought him here.”

Yanosh stared through the transparent floor at the immense cranes and webs of cables and flowing strings of purple and green tracting fields lifting pieces of the new precinct from the floor of the Way. “Some say we may never be able to return to Lamarckia, because of what they've done,” he said. “Others I trust more say it may be difficult, but not impossible. The gate openers are disturbed that a clavicle could fall into Jart hands—if they have hands. We could lose control of that region at any time. The Nexus has agreed to send a mid-rank gate opener to check out the damage. They've asked for a single investigator to accompany him. Your name came up. I wasn't the one who brought it up.”

“Oh?” I smiled, disbelieving. He did not return my smile.

“It may be the most beautiful world we've yet found. Some Geshels privately speculated Lamarckia might become our refuge if we lost the war.” He lifted an eyebrow critically. “It's the most Earthlike of the ten worlds we've had time to open.”

“Why didn't we develop it?”

“Could we have held it if we did?” Yanosh asked. “The Jarts pushed us beyond that stack, and we pushed them. Back and forth three times since its discovery.”

Little or nothing was known about Jart anatomy, psychology, or history. Even less was known about how they had made their own reversed gate just after the Way's creation, and before it had been opened and attached to Thistledown.

The Jarts had begun a furious surprise offensive at the moment of the opening, killing thousands. Ever since, the war had been waged unmercifully by both sides, using all the weapons available—including the physics of the Way itself. Those who had built it, and who accessed its many realities strung like beads, could also make large stretches of it inhospitable to anything living.

Yanosh looked at me squarely, intense green eyes challenging. “The Nexus would like someone to cross to Lamarckia and retrieve the remaining clavicle. While that someone is there, he might as well investigate the planet more thoroughly. We know little—a slim surveyor's report. Lamarckia appears to be a paradise, but its biology is unusual. We need to learn what damage Lenk has done.”

“You didn't suggest me immediately?”

Yanosh smiled.

I shook my head dubiously. “My reputation is that of a stubborn but capable renegade. I doubt my division commanders would recommend me.”

“They asked me about you, and I said you could do it—might even relish something like this. But frankly, this isn't an assignment I'd give to an old friend.”

Yanosh suspected I was bored as a simple soldier and needed a chance to excel; he knew without my telling him that my personality chafed in Way Defense. The Jart situation had settled for the time being into a drawn-out stalemate. Being brought into a Nexus action—and a difficult action at that—was a guarantee of rapid advancement, if I succeeded.

Yanosh knew I had once had some social connections with divaricates. My mother and father had known a number of them; I had once met Jaime Car Lenk fifteen years before. I knew their ways.

“Lamarckia has been dropped into my lap by the Geshel leaders in the Nexus,” Yanosh said. “It's my own kind of trial by fire. And a test. If you agree and succeed, we both benefit ... So I said I would ask, but I did not specifically back you.”

“And the immigrants?”

“Bringing them back will be politically difficult. Divaricates are peculiar in their attitude toward the Way. They abhor it, but they think they can use it. They have always spoken of a homeland away from Thistledown and the Geshels. A new, fresh Earth. But in truth, for the time being the Geshels are still in power in the Nexus, and we're more interested in the planet than in the people. If they've interfered, and it seems inevitable that they would—being who they are—then we'll bring them back, and Lenk will stand trial. It would give the radicals a bad stain on their record.”

“That's grim,” I said.

Yanosh did not disagree. “It's a grand assignment for somebody,” he said. “An entire planet, yours to explore. Not that it's going to be easy. I have to admit, in some ways, it suits you, Olmy.”

I wondered if I was being too sensitive about my secret. I had not spent the last five years just soldiering; and Yanosh, or the people behind him, were not the first outside of Way Defense to find me useful. This, however, was well beyond my proven capabilities.

“Are there other reasons I've been chosen?” I asked.

“Whatever you've done to displease the Naderites, this gets you out of the political war zone. The mission could be a kind of oubliette, actually, a tight little closet where nobody can reach you, until we sort out the political situation. Whatever it is you're involved in...”

“I've never been other than loyal to the Hexamon,” I said.

“The Nexus appreciates loyalty as well.”

“You make fine distinctions,” I said. “Power comes and goes. I render unto the caesars.”

Yanosh looked away, eyelids lowered with sudden weariness. “You've become an enigma to most of our friends. Where do your loyalties lie—with Geshels, or with Naderites?”

“Korzenowski was a Naderite,” I said, “and he built the Way.”

“He paid for his presumption,” Yanosh said.

“Where do yours lie?”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“Fortunately for us all, we don't have to reveal our loyalties to serve in defense, or in the Nexus. I've served Geshel ends for years.”

“But Uleysa...” Yanosh raised an eyebrow, significant of so many things unsaid, all that had happened since we last met. Throughout our friendship, there had been moments—quite a few of them—when Yanosh's perceptiveness irritated me.

“A mistake,” I said. “Not political. Personal. But if the Nexus wants something done—why send just one?”

Yanosh's look intensified, as if he would see through me. “Your face. Your eyes. You've never tried to blend in, have you?”

“I've never had to.”

“It's more than that.” He shook his head. “Never mind.” He sighed. “I wish I had been born before the Hexamon opened the Way. Things were much simpler.”

“And more boring. I wonder how much confidence you have in me.”

“To tell the truth, I was maneuvered into agreeing to interview you,” Yanosh said. “By skilled tacticians whose motives are never clear. I think you can do the job, of course; I don't think it's my hide they're after. And if you agree, you'll take considerable pressure off me.”

“Somebody values Lamarckia.”

“The Presiding Minister herself,” Yanosh said. “So I hear. She wants to know more about Lamarckia, but can't push a major expedition through the Nexus just now. Jarts must be our main concern. In a way, you're a chip in a massive gamble. The Presiding Minister will gamble that they can place you on Lamarckia, alone, to gather information and make judgments. When she convinces the Nexus that a larger team should be sent, their mission will go all the more smoothly. They connect with you, you fill them in, and together, we all lay a stronger claim on Lamarckia.”

“I see,” I said.

“I believe she'll win the gamble, even if the Naderites take control of the Nexus. Her arguments are unassailable. In a few weeks or months, if the geometry stack cooperates, you'll have lots of company.”

“And if they can't get Nexus approval, and the gate can't be opened?”

“You'll have to find Lenk's second clavicle and open your own gate.”

“That does sound like an oubliette,” I said.

“Nobody believes the mission will be safe or easy.”

To me, that sounded like a challenge, as much as Yanosh's flickering enthusiasm. “Perfect,” I said. In that small office, with its spectacular view, crowded with perspectives of progress on Axis City, I smiled at my old friend. “Of course, I'm interested,” I said.

“Interest isn't enough, I fear,” Yanosh said, pulling back and folding his hands. “I need an answer. Soon.”

My first instinct was to refuse the assignment. Despite recent setbacks and confusions, I did have my plans, and they had a certain elegance. I also had my responsibilities ... Which made me far more important and valuable than I seemed, than even Yanosh or anyone in the Nexus could know.

But I was acutely aware of my lack of experience. My time spent in Way Defense had largely been wasted. I will be nothing unless I am tested and tempered. The counterargument sounded much more compelling: You'll certainly be nothing if you're dead, or lost and forgotten on a worm closed off from the Way.

The voice of reason was about to prevail. But another voice leaped ahead and answered for me, the voice my father had warned me about and my mother deplored.

“I'll go,” I said.

Yanosh gave me a shrewd look, then leaned forward and grabbed my shoulder firmly. “Grand impetuosity. It's what I expected.”

I had become more than a little cynical, with my torn loyalties. I did not know who I was any longer. Getting away—completely away—seemed a real solution. My secret would keep, perhaps be in less peril if I was gone.

This is the way history sometimes works. Simple connections, simple decisions, with untold consequences.

I studied the secret Dalgesh report, made by three surveyors immediately after Lamarckia's discovery. Lamarckia was the second planet of a yellow sun, born in a relatively metal-poor galactic region, not correlated with any known place in our own galaxy. The surveyors had barely had two days to do their work before the gate was closed, and so their findings were incomplete. They had left three monitors on the largest continent but had launched no satellites. The photos and recordings showed a world at once familiar and extraordinary.

I was particularly interested in Jaime Carr Lenk's logistics planning. The Good Lenk had selectively abandoned divaricate restrictions to make the immigration possible. There were no tested and confirmed native foodstuffs on Lamarckia, and of course no support for machines beyond what the immigrants themselves could transport. The expedition had carried six months’ food and personal water purification systems. They also took selected traditional seed stock—grains, some fruit and lumber trees, a few herbs and ornamentals. Though Lamarckia lacked the complex terrestrial ecosystem to make farming easy, these monoculture crops had been designed by humans to need nothing more than human-supplied chemicals. In effect, humans were their essential ecosystem. The chemicals, the immigrants believed, could be found or synthesized on Lamarckia.

The immigrants took no animals. For machines, they transported three small factories for making tools and electronics, and twenty multipurpose tractors, all capable of self-repair.

In one way, Lenk had stuck to his divaricate beliefs: The immigrants had refused to take nutriphores, highly efficient artificial organics that could easily have fed them indefinitely. Nutriphores, however, had not existed in Nader's time; and the Good Man had been highly suspicious of genetic engineering.

Yanosh accompanied me to the chambers in Axis Nader where the informer now resided. His name was Darrow Jan Fima. He was a small, worried man, dressed in simple dun-colored clothes. Now that he had regained his health—in decidedly advanced medical conditions not favored by divaricates—he was eager to tell his story again, to provide all the details he knew.

He told Yanosh and me of Moonrise, the village and ferry landing near his point of exit—the most likely place for the emergence of a new gate; of the towns and travel routes by river and sea, the short history of the Lenk immigrants—privations, arguments over the planning of this one-way voyage, rivalries between quickly split factions, the unavoidable politics of any group of people of that size ... And more about Lamarckia's biology, what little Lenk's immigrants had come to understand.

At the last, contrite, weeping, perhaps only half-rational, the informer had told us of the Adventists, an opposition group formed to resist Lenk's rule. They had never been very effective; they waited for the Hexamon to send people to bring them back to Thistledown. In each village, he said, they had placed an operative to prepare the way for the Hexamon. Rumors of Hexamon investigators had acquired the status of folk myth. But nobody had come.

Darrow Jan Fima had argued with his fellow Adventists, broken ranks, pretended to serve Lenk, worked his way over a year into Lenk's inner council...

And stolen the clavicle.

“Why did you take so long?” the informer asked plaintively. “I had to lie, to do so many evil things.” Finally, he whispered his confession to the sins of his people. “We have sullied the many mothers of life.”

Then, smiling as if about to give me a gift, “Lamarckia is not a bad place to die...”

I did not believe that. He had left, after all.

I began my training. Yanosh accorded me all the resources I needed. And I made appointments to have all my supplements removed.

That would have pleased my mother, but of course she would not know.

The spindle-shaped silver flawship coursed down the center of the Way at three hundred kilometers per second. I sat in one of two well-padded white seats in the ship's nose blister and stared ahead into a funnel-shaped brightness that seemed full of eerie promise. I was caught between numbness, exaltation, and simple terror.

I fingered the pink patches at the base of my skull and on my wrist, feeling a new loneliness. Since the death of my father, I had given myself a variety of mental enhancements not condoned by him: tiny devices in my head and neck that sped thoughts, improved memory, gave me certain abilities and knowledge bases, and also made direct internal connections to City Memory, to millions of individuals and thousands of libraries.

To pass undetected among the Lenk divaricates, who carried no such implants, I had been stripped of my extra voices and eyes and minds. Within my thoughts there was only my own self now. I felt a peculiar embarrassment: I was naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothing or revealed flesh.

The flawship began its long, gentle deceleration. Barely four meters from where I sat, the flaw glowed pink, brightening as the clamps spaced within the middle of the ship applied pressure. It was not friction that slowed the ship, but the clamps’ intrusion into a forbidden region of space-time.

“Greetings, Ser Olmy Ap Sennon.” Gate opener Frederik Ry Ornis, tall and thin as a praying mantis, stretched and bent himself into the blister beside me, slid his trunk into the seat and let its plush white cushions enfold his hips and chest. “How long since you've hugged the flaw?”

Whatever my concessions to progressive Geshel fashions and technologies, I had at least kept my natural body plan. Ry Ornis was of the new breed that explored more radical shapes.

“A few years. And never this far north,” I said.

“Not many of us have been this far,” Ry Ornis said with a rueful look. “Not recently. The Jarts are less than a million kilometers from here.” He stretched a long, five-jointed finger and pointed elegantly ahead.

Gate openers such as Ry Ornis had acquired immense power and prestige. Part of me envied him.

“One hour until we go down to the wall,” Ry Ornis said. “I'm not looking forward to this.”

“Why?” I asked.

Ry Ornis gave me a dour glance. “Anxious to begin your first mission?” he asked.

“I suppose,” I said, grinning.

“Ready to show your loyalty to the Hexamon Nexus ... Ripe for adventure?”

My grin faded at his sardonic tone. I shrugged against the green and purple glow of the tracting fields.

“You don't have to find this place again,” Ry Ornis complained. He grimaced ruefully. “It's been accessed by amateurs. I can imagine what they did to isolate and pull up the right world-line. They've probably mangled the embryonic gate and reduced our accesses to at most three or four. So ... I have no room for error. If I fumble a few world-lines, it's a one-way trip for you, and Lamarckia is of no use to anybody.”

I did not like Ry Ornis much; most gate openers made me nervous. Their talents were on such a different plane, their personalities radically opposed to my own.

The minutes stretched. Ry Ornis seemed mesmerized by the endless spectacle outside the blister. He leaned across the gap between our seats. “Frankly, the council members and administers have too much on their minds. If Lamarckia was really important, don't you think they'd have expended more effort than sending just you?”

My emotions burst forth in a wry laugh. “The thought's occurred to me,” I admitted.

“Why did you agree to do this?”

“It suits me,” I said. “Why did you?”

Ry Ornis grimaced again, his face contorting like a circus mask. “Among the gate openers, advancement comes at the expense of obedience. Is it the same in Way Defense?”

“I don't know,” I said, not entirely truthful. “I'm only a seven.”

Ry Ornis stared at me. “Even so,” he said.

“Can you get me to Lamarckia?”

“Blunt questions deserve blunt answers,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Unfortunately, I don't know.” The flawship had slowed to a few thousand kilometers an hour; soon it would come to a complete stop. “It's not an exact science. Every gate opener has illusions. My illusion is that the more I know about a place, the better I'm able to sniff out its world-lines.”

“In some ways, it resembles Earth,” I said.

“I've read the Dalgesh report. I know the size and rough characteristics. I'm asking for a personal opinion. What makes it so interesting?”

I didn't understand what he was getting at. “There are humans on it now...”

“The story about our being able to sniff out humanoid life is quite wrong. That's not what a gate opener looks for. We look for interest.”

“What do you think is interesting?” I asked.

Ry Ornis leaned his head to one side. The tracting fields had withdrawn. We were moving at less than a hundred kilometers an hour and the flaw no longer glowed. “Lamarckia defies all we've learned of evolution and the origins of life.”

“The informer seems to think it does. He called it a ‘New Mother.’ He thought the immigrants would destroy it.”

“Now that's interest.” Ry Ornis nodded approval. “Big events mark world-lines. If Lenk's people are going to reshape the history of a planet ... I'll get you there,” he said.

The flawship pilot pulled herself forward and poked her head between us. “Enjoying the view?” she asked.

“Immensely,” I said.

“We're both nervous,” Ry Ornis said.

The pilot bent her lips and cocked her head with an expression of regret. “Well, this won't reassure you. The Jarts know we're here—no surprise—and we have maybe thirty minutes before they investigate. The borders here are flexible.” She gave us an appraising look. “Not a top-priority mission, I take it?”

I lifted myself from the seat and went aft. Ry Ornis followed, staring at the pilot with feigned affront. “Some of us might disagree,” he said haughtily.

I found that a clownish response. Perhaps I deserve no better than him. We are, after all, the agents of a measured response—a gamble. Not top-priority.

Ry Ornis and I descended from the flawship in a small transfer craft. The journey took less than ten minutes. The deltoid vehicle maneuvered in a cautious spiral. The closer it came to the wall, the more weight it acquired. And, contrary to its name, the wall behaved more like a floor—a gravitating surface. The craft landed lightly, with no discernible jolt.

Ry Ornis and I put on light pressure suits. He picked up a box not much larger than his head and tucked it under his arm. We nodded to an eye conveying our images to the pilot waiting in the flawship above; then we stepped outside.

Beneath our boots, the wall felt as hard as rock. Ry Ornis immediately set out across the bare bronze surface, long legs carrying him two meters with each stride. He removed a clavicle from the box, dropped the box carelessly, and immediately gripped the bars of the device, swinging it back and forth ahead of him. I had read of old-fashioned dowsing rods, once a fad on Earth; Ry Ornis wielded his clavicle in much the same way as an ancient seeker after water.

Beneath us lay one of the fabled, fearful regions called geometry stacks, where the Way's physics adjusted itself unpredictably—often compared to a wrinkle in the skin of a many-dimensional worm. I did not like the comparison.

“This whole region is knotted,” the gate opener said, voice rough, his tone between wonder and disgust. “What color is it? My God, what does it smell like?”

Puzzled by the questions, I did not answer. Best not to interrupt, I decided.

Ry Ornis continued, “Do you know a geometry stack hurts? When we search it? It gives us colossal headaches that are tough to cure. Somebody's clearly been here before us, though. They've left their own kind of dirty fingerprints: bulges; world-lines pulled out of place; accesses ruined. My God, what amateurs.”

I followed him at a measured pace. I carried nothing; I would take nothing with me but the clothes beneath my pressure suit. All of my baggage was internal—weeks of training and education, the careful transfer of relevant knowledge from my supplements to biological memory...

The pilot's voice sounded in our helmets. “The Jarts are painting us every few seconds. I'd be happier if I could leave soon.”

Ry Ornis said, “I can't guarantee putting you on Lamarckia at any particular time.” His voice dripped disgust. “It'll be very difficult to get you to within a decade of when the informer made his temporary gate. Lenk must have left a nipple, a node, or the informer could never have returned at all. But that's gone now.”

The gate opener stood straight, his tall, emaciated figure and white suit a startling contrast to our surroundings. Light played tricks in this immense featureless, shadowless pipe. To stand and stare at the distant curve of the wall, rising above the flat nearness until it arched high overhead, disoriented me even more. I squinted up at the plasma tube, running the length of the flaw to a dazzling blur of brightness in the south, illuminating the Way for millions of kilometers ... But ending not far north of where we stood, leaving the Jarts in a darkness all their own.

I looked down to keep from getting dizzy. My body had no help overcoming feelings of vertigo. Naked inside.

The gate opener bent over, gripping the bars of the clavicle, passing its spherical head a few centimeters above the surface. “Found something,” he announced. “Knots retied. Some attempt to renormalize, to heal, apparently.”

“Heal?” I asked.

Ry Ornis did not hear, or simply ignored me. “Most of these lines pour out into empty expanse. So much desolation, measure without interest. Makes us all very lonely. Here a solitary star, there an airless ball of rock. So easy to be attracted by false worlds, dreams of futures not yet accessible, not yet quite real. Ten years, twenty years ... Maybe two dozen years. No guarantees. I might drop you before Lenk's immigrants arrived. Wouldn't want that. And no way to return, for any of you ... must be careful to leave a few more accesses.”

“Please do,” I said, shivering. I had pictured this time as a trouble-free interlude, a brief moment watching the precise and even inhuman work of a master gate opener. Instead, the assistants to the Presiding Minister had assigned this stick figure, this insect man with his long face and propensity to babble. Perhaps they really do want to lose me.

“Found something. Come here, Ser Olmy.” Ry Ornis beckoned for me to step closer and watch.

I walked up beside him and peered at the cryptic display between the bars of his clavicle.

Ry Ornis drew his gloved finger lightly over the colors on the display. “See this?” I saw only twisted lines, flashing fields of green and blue. “An access. It tells me it's a locus of extreme interest. Nothing around it ... No doubt that's Lamarckia. And it follows chronologically what must be the Lenk access. But where do I shift it? Where do I drop you in Lamarckia's world-line? Here to here,” sketching across the display with his finger, “comparative boredom, boredom, nothing ... but here.” He smiled radiantly behind his visor. “These are exquisite loci. I look for things of interest to humans, Ser Olmy, and I find them. If Lamarckia is of interest all by itself, then these points on its world-line are even more interesting to us. To you and to me. Understand?”

“No,” I said.

Ry Ornis shifted his finger again, waving the clavicle gently. “Loci of large human-centered events. Lamarckia is a huge event behind them, unfamiliar ... But definitely ready to change. Shall I place you at one of the most fascinating loci, Ser Olmy?”

“Just get me there,” I said. I bit my lower lip, trying to still my growing anxiety. Courage seemed a sorry abstraction.

“Within a decade or two of Lenk's access. Can't be certain. It's really the best I can do.”

“Do it. Please, just do it.” I had already disgraced my family and the memory of my father by cleaving to the progressive Geshels and putting unnatural devices within my body, by signing up in Way Defense, by rejecting the woman I had pledged to. I did not want to disgrace myself again by failing here and now.

“No reason to be nervous. No gate will open if I can't put you someplace truly interesting.”

I wanted to hit the man.

“So I spread my carpet here ... And dub this gate number thirty-two, of stack region twelve...” Ry Ornis traced a glowing red line on the wall with the sphere of the clavicle. “Stand aside.”

I stood aside.

A bump rose from the surface of the Way, five meters wide with a dimple in the middle. Red and green lines danced across its fresh surface, vibrated rapidly, and became the familiar color of fresh bronze. Ry Ornis spread it by backing away, trailing the clavicle behind him. A disk-shaped canopy grew over the new gate.

Mouth dry as stone, head cold as ice, I climbed the side of the bump on hands and knees, perched on the rim of the dimple, and stared down into a storm of fluid darkness.

“It'll take you where you need to go,” Ry Ornis said. “And it will vanish after you.”

I stood erect on the lip of the gate, pushed by the very last of my limited courage. I would walk straight ahead, in a straight line, and come out where the informer had left Lamarckia.

“Just walk,” the gate opener said, voice hollow in my helmet. “Don't forget to remove your suit halfway across. There will be air from Lamarckia in the gate at that point.”

“All right,” I said.

“Only two more accesses left, I judge. How you'll come back, I don't know. Good luck.”

I looked over my shoulder, saw the gaunt white-suited figure, the eye-twisting uniformity beyond and above ... turned, and met another kind of illusion, even more extreme.

Here, there were no straight lines, would never be any unswerving paths. In the gate, I would crawl through a hole punched into all possible worlds, a fistula between the Way and somewhere else...

I had to put complete faith in Ry Ornis. My body did not think that was wise. I clenched my teeth, pushed one leg forward, then the other. Felt the pressure build around me. I removed the suit and dropped its pieces on the gate's slope behind me. I now wore only the clothes that might be worn by one of Lenk's immigrants.

I could no longer see the Way or Ry Ornis.

“Gate's pressurized. Hurry.” The gate opener's voice echoed around me like the buzz of an insect, issuing from the discarded suit. Ahead, I saw a swirl of purple and red and black, bands of blue and a bright arc of yellow-orange: my destination, viewed through the distorting lens of the gate.

I closed my eyes, held out my arms, made one last step forward...

And fell feet-first into lumpy wet soil, spattering my boots and brown pants. For a moment I thought I would fall over. I held out my hands, knelt with boots firm in the muck, and steadied myself. Behind me, the wheeling darkness dilated to a point, sucked at my coat's fabric, and abandoned me in a tiny eddy of air.

1

The sun hung two hand-spans above the horizon. Late morning, early evening: I could not judge. I stood on the crest of a low hill, between thick black trunks smooth as glass. Behind me, a dense enclosure of more black trunks. And ahead ... detail rushed upon me; I sucked it in with frantic need.

Red and purple forest pushed over low boxy hills, fading to pink and lavender as the hills receded toward the horizon. Mist curled languidly between. Immense trees like the skeletons of cathedral towers punctuated the forest every few hundred meters, pink crowns perched atop four slender vaulting legs, rising high over the rest of the forest. Above the hills, sky beckoned crystal blue with mottled patches of more red and purple, as if reflecting the forest. In fact, the forest inhabited the sky: tethered gas-filled balloons ascended from the distant stands of black-trunked trees into thin shredded-ribbon clouds.

Everything glowed with serene yellow light and brilliant blood-hued life. Everything, related. For as far as the eye could see—what Darrow Jan Fima had called Elizabeth's Zone, one creature, one thing.

From where I stood, at the top of a rise overlooking the broad, dark olive Terra Nova River, Lamarckia hardly seemed violated. Not a human in sight, not a curl of smoke or rise of structure. Somewhere below, hidden in the tangle of smooth black trunks, huge round leaves, and purple fans, the ferry landing was supposed to be ... And inland a few hundred meters along a dirt and gravel path, both hidden in the dense pack, the village of Moonrise.

I touched my clothes self-consciously. How out-of-place would I look?

I realized I had been holding my breath. I inhaled deeply. It was a sweet and startling breath. The air smelled of fresh water, grapes, tea leaves, and a variety of odors I can only describe as skunky-sweet. Rich aromas wafted from nearby extrusions resembling broad purple flowers with fleshy centers. They smelled like bananas, spicy as cinnamon. The extrusions opened and closed, twitching at the end of each cycle. Then they withdrew altogether with thin, high chirps.

I reached out my hand to stroke the smooth black curve of a trunk. At my touch, the bark parted to form a kind of stoma, red and pink pulp within. A drop of translucent white fluid oozed from the gash, which quickly closed when I lifted my hand.

“Not a tree,” I murmured. The Dalgesh report—by the original surveyors—had called them “arborid scions.” And this was not a forest, but a silva.

There were no plants or animals as such on Lamarckia. The first surveyors, in the single day they had spent on the planet, had determined that within certain zones, all apparently individual organisms, called scions, in fact belonged to a larger organism, which they had called an ecos. No scion could breed by itself; they did not act alone. An ecos was a single genetic organism, creating within itself all the diverse parts of an ecosystem, spread over large areas—in some cases, dominating entire continents.

Each ecos was ruled, the surveyors had theorized, by what they called a seed mistress, or queen. Neither the surveyors—nor the immigrants, according to Jan Fima—had ever seen such a queen, however; understanding of Lamarckian biology and planetary science in general had still been primitive among the immigrants when the informer left.

Above, the black trunks spread great round parasol-leaves, broad as outstretched arms, powdery gray at their perimeters, rose and bloodred in their centers. The parasols rubbed edges in a canopy-clinging current of air, making a gentle shushing noise, like a mother calming an infant. Black granular dust fell in thin drifts on my head; not pollen, certainly not ash. I rubbed some between my fingers, smelled it, but did not taste.

The last light of the orange sun warmed my face. So this was not morning but evening; the day was ending. I savored the glow. It felt wonderfully, thrillingly familiar; but it was the first sunlight I had ever directly experienced. Until now, I had spent my whole life within Thistledown and the Way.

My terror passed into numb ecstasy. The sense of alien newness, of unfamiliar beauty, hit me like a drug; I was actually walking on a planet, a world like Earth, not within a hollowed-out rock.

Reluctantly, I turned from the sun's warmth and walked in shadow down an overgrown trail. If I had come out in the right place, this trail would lead to the Terra Nova River and the landing that served the village of Moonrise. Here, I had been told, I might catch a riverboat and travel to Calcutta, the largest town on the continent of Elizabeth's Land.

I wondered what sort of people I would meet. I imagined feral wretches, barely social, clustered in dark little towns, immersed in their own superstitions. Then I regretted the thought. Perhaps I had spent too much time among the Geshels, having so little respect for my own kind. But of course Lenk's people had gone beyond my own kind. Yanosh had characterized them as fanatic.

The moist air of the river valley sighed around me, like an invisible chilly flood. Picking my footsteps carefully, avoiding lines of finger-sized orange worms topped by feathery blue crests, I listened for any sounds, heard only the rubbed-silk hiss of air and the liquid mumble of the river.

The trail at least had once been traveled by humans. Dropped between the trunks, in a tangle of stone-hard “roots,” I spotted a small scrap of crumpled plastic and knelt to pick it up. Spread open by my fingers, it was a blank page from an erasable notebook.

At least, I realized with considerably relief, I had not arrived before the human intruders. That would have meant I was truly trapped here, with no chance of returning until they arrived ... Or someone came from the Hexamon to get me.

I pocketed the scrap. I still could not be sure how much time had passed since the arrival of Lenk and his followers.

Four thousand one hundred and fourteen illegal immigrants; as much as three decades between my arrival and theirs. What could they have done to Lamarckia in that time?

I pushed through a tangle of purple helixed blades. My feet sank into a grainy, boggy humus littered with pink shells and pebbles. No landing visible; no lights, no sign of river traffic. For a moment, I knelt and dug my fingers into the soil. It felt gritty and resilient at once—grains of sand and spongy corklike cubes half a centimeter on a side, suspended in inky fluid that globbed immiscibly amid drops of clear water. It looked for all the world like gardener's potting soil mixed with viscous ink.

I picked up a pink shell. Spiral, flat, like an ancient Earth ammonite, four or five centimeters across. I sniffed it; clean and sweet, with a watery, dusty smell backed by a ghost of roses and bananas. I poked it with a finger; it crushed easily.

More black powder fell in thin curtains nearby. I glanced up and saw what looked like an immense reddish-brown snake, banded with deep midnight blue, dozens of meters long and as thick across as my own body, twisted around and draped across the trunks and leaves above. It wriggled slowly, peristaltically. I could see neither its head nor its tail. With a clamping sensation in my throat and chest, I trotted down the trail, trying to get out from under the serpent.

The trail became thicker, overgrown by smaller red and purple plantlike forms, phytids, filling in between the arborids. I lost my way and had to listen for the sound of the river to orient myself.

Several minutes passed before I realized I was smelling something out of place, rich and gassy. During my walk, I had not once smelled mold or methane, not once felt the squelch of dead vegetation. Plants, trees—convenient words only—grew from soil that might have been prepared by diligent and cleanly gardeners. Only the pink shells, mired in the mud, gave a hint that anything here lived, then died, and in dying, left remains—

And this fresh scent of decay.

I thrashed down to the bank again and stared over the deep brownish water to the black silhouette of the opposite shore. Faint, broad patches of blue glow sprang up between the trees across the river. They sputtered and went out again. I could not be sure I had seen them. Then, high above, the undersides of the broad parasols flashed blue. Somewhere, high-pitched tuneless whistling. A flutter beneath the parasols: dark winged things carrying fibrous scraps. Something small and red darted past my face with an audible sniff.

The wind died. The night air sank. Fog danced and twisted in the middle of the river. With the silence came another whiff of decay. Animal flesh, rotting. I was sure of that much.

I followed the scent. Back up the bank, stepping gingerly over writhing purple creepers, guided by faint blue flashes through the undergrowth, I found the remains of the trail.

Something made a sound between a squeak and a sigh and scuttled on three legs out of the undergrowth: a pasty white creature the size of a small dog, triangular in shape. It stood by a black trunk and regarded me through patient, empty eye-spots mounted along a red central line. It pulsed and made tiny whistling sounds. Its skin crawled in what I took to be disgust at my presence. But apparently disgust was only disapproval—or something else entirely—for it did not retreat. Instead, it slowly clasped and crawled its way up a trunk, opened a stoma with a tap of its pointed tail-foot, and began to suck milky fluid. I watched in fascination as its white body swelled. Then, half again as large as before, the creature dropped from the trunk, landed in the dirt with a rubbery plop, and crabbed away with a half-circling gait on the down-bent points of its triangle.

Twilight was quickly obscuring everything. A double oxbow of stars pricked through the thin clouds. Ahead, a flickering orange light drew my attention: a torch or flame. I pushed toward the orange light and found the landing and the dirt road that pointed inland to Moonrise.

The landing began as a broad platform at the end of the road, then narrowed to a long pier. On the platform a figure squatted beside a lantern: human, small. Other dark shapes sprawled on their backs or stomachs on the landing and the pier.

In the broad smear of starlight and the lantern's dim glow, I saw that the dark shapes were also human, and still. Their stillness, and the careless way they sprawled on the dock platform, told me they were not alive. They had been dead for some time. Lying in blotches of dried blood, they had bloated in the sun and now strained at their clothes, as if having surrendered themselves to a feast of violence.

My eyes abruptly filled with a sheen of tears. I had expected anything but this.

The figure near the lamp wore a tattered mud-spattered brown shirt and long skirt. Its head was bowed and its breath came harsh and shallow.

My foot made a hollow thud on the platform. The figure turned quickly, with surprising grace, and raised a long-barreled black pistol. It was a woman, brown face muddy and pinched, eyes slitted. The lamp probably half-blinded her. She could only see my outline.

“Who are you?” she asked, voice quavering.

“I've come to take the ferry,” I said. I put a strident note into my voice. “Star, fate and pneuma, what happened?”

The woman laughed softly, bitterly, and pointed the pistol squarely at my chest. “My husband,” she said. “He went with Beys.”

“Please,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

“Do you know him? Janos Strik? My husband? Do you know Beys?”

“No,” I said. Neither of those names had been on the list of immigrants, I was sure.

“You can't be anybody. Didn't know my husband. He was very important around here.”

“I'm frightened,” I said, trying for her sympathy. “I don't know what happened here.”

“They'll kill us all.” She stood slowly, pushing on her knee with one hand as if it pained her. The gun remained pointed at my chest. Her eyes were wild, light gray perhaps, yellow in the lantern-light. She seemed ancient, face cramped with pain, streaked with tears and mud and dried blood. “You must be one of them,” she said sharply, and pulled back the hammer.

“One of who?” I asked plaintively, not having to work to sound frightened. It could all end here, before I was fairly started. It could all really end.

“I'll keep you here,” the woman said with a note of weary decision. “Someone will come soon from the north. They took our radios.”

The divaricates had not brought weapons with them, the informer had said, yet this gun was metal, heavy, smoothly machined to judge by the sound. Bullets probably charged with explosive powder. A primitive but very effective weapon. Her language was recognizably first-century Trade, common in Thistledown, but the accent sounded marginally different.

I kept my hands visible. The woman shifted from foot to foot, eyes straying to look into the darkness beyond the lantern's circle.

“Who killed them?” I asked.

“The Brionists,” she said. “You dress like them.”

“I'm not one of them,” I said. “I've been in the forest studying Calder's Zone, south of here. Zone two. I didn't know about this.”

The woman squinted, held the gun higher. “Don't be stupid,” she said.

I tried to shrug congenially, an ignorant stranger, if it was possible to be congenial under the circumstances. The woman was more than suspicious; she had been through hell, and it took some strength of character—or some deep reluctance to add to the carnage—to keep from pulling the trigger and killing me, if only to avoid having to think.

“I haven't heard of Calder's Zone in years,” she said. “It gave in to Elizabeth's Zone. They sexed and fluxed when I was a child.”

Years had passed, perhaps decades. My information was seriously out of date. “Are you a biologist?” I asked. She did not seem so tired or unskilled that her bullets would miss. And I had none of my medical machinery to save me if the gun did tear me open, not even a memory pack to store my thoughts and personality.

“I'm no biologist and neither are you,” the woman said. “You don't even talk like anyone I know. Why do you call it a forest?” Her eyes glittered in the lamplight. The gun barrel dropped a few centimeters. “But I don't think you're a Brionist. You said you've been in the silva—out there—a long time?”

“Two years.”

“Studying?”

I nodded.

“A researcher?”

“I hope to become one.”

“You didn't fight when they came?”

“I didn't see it. I didn't know it was happening.”

“The best ones fought. You're a coward. You stayed in the silva.” She shook her head slowly. “That's my cousin, Gennadia.” She pointed a shaky finger at the nearest of the corpses. “And that's Johann, her husband. That's Nkwanno, the village synthesist. Janos went to Calcutta and then crossed to Naderville to join the Brionists. He left me here.” She rubbed her nose and inspected the back of her hand. “He told them we had magnesium and tin and copper and some iron. They came to see. Janos came back with them. He wouldn't even look at me. We told them they would have to consult with Able Lenk.”

I thought perhaps Lenk had had a son, until I realized by her intonation that the first name was an honorific.

“They said we could not refuse them. They took our radios. They said Beys had his orders. The mayor told them to leave. They killed the mayor, and some of the men tried to fight. They killed ... all except me. I hid in the silva. They'll come back soon and take over everything.” She laughed with girlish glee. “I'm a coward, too. Not much left.”

“Terrible,” I said. Nkwanno—that name had been on the list. I had once met the scholar named Nkwanno—a devout Naderite student who had studied under my uncle.

She picked up the lantern and raised it above her head, stepping closer. She shined the fitful beam on my clothes. “You've only been in the silva a few hours. Elizabeth covers all visitors with her dust. But the boats left days ago. You're hardly black at all.” Her eyes burned. “Are you real?”

“I bathed in the river,” I said.

She issued a half-whine, half-laugh, raised the gun as if to fire into the air, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. Then she released the gun, letting it dangle from one finger before it fell to the boards with a heavy thump. She dropped to her knees. “I don't care,” she said. “I'd just as soon die. The whole world is a lie now. We've made it a lie.”

With a shudder, she lay down, curling up her arms and legs into a fetal ball, and abruptly closed her eyes.

I stood for a while, heart thumping, mouth dry, uncertain where to begin. Finally, with a jerk, I walked over to the woman and knelt beside her. She seemed to be asleep. My breath came fast from having the gun held on me. This proof of my weakness—nearly dying within a few minutes of my arrival—made me angry at myself, at everything.

Teeth clenched, I picked up the gun, slipped it into my waistband, and stepped around her to examine the bodies. Two men and a woman. I found the smell unfamiliar and offensive. I had never smelled dead bodies undergoing natural decay except in entertainments and training; conflict with the Jarts in the Way did not have such crudities.

I suspected the decay had progressed in unfamiliar ways; no external bacteria, I thought, only internal, and those carefully selected centuries ago for the populations of Thistledown. A peculiarly artificial and unnatural way to return to the soil—if Lamarckia could be said to have soil.

With a shudder, I bent over to examine Nkwanno first. A tall, dark-skinned male, face almost unrecognizable; but in the discolored features I saw a resemblance to the young, vital student who had worked with my father's brother in Alexandria. But this man was much older than the Nkwanno I knew would have been...

The hastily opened gate had pushed me decades along Lamarckia's world-line.

For a long moment I could only stare, all my thoughts in confusion. Then I steeled myself and searched through the corpse's pockets. I found a few coins and a thin pouch containing paper money, a small, elegantly tooled slate, and a stale piece of bread wrapped in waxy paper. I examined the money, then returned it to the corpse.

Divaricates preferred twentieth-century modes of economic exchange. In my own pocket, I carried some money copied from samples provided by the informer. The money bore little resemblance to that which I found on Nkwanno. More than likely, it would be useless here.

I could not bring myself to steal money from corpses. The slate was another matter. I needed information desperately. I slipped it into my pants pocket.

I sat beside the sleeping woman, thinking. The breeze had died to nothing and the blunt, sweet stink of death hung in the air. I closed my eyes, pinched my nose against the smell.

Jan Fima had said he was part of a faction opposed to Lenk's policies. This faction regretted Lenk's decision to migrate illegally, with limited resources, and foresaw much trouble in the future. Apparently the trouble had begun. Perhaps it had been going on for some time. Jan Fima had supposed there would be an individual in Moonrise who would have supplies and information for a Nexus representative ... But how patient an individual?

I cursed under my breath and rubbed my eyes. Two small moons rose within the hour, each a quarter of a degree wide, and chased each other slowly overhead. Their light threw mercurial roads across the river's smooth currents.

Large dark humps rose in the river, several dozen meters from the bank. Moonlight danced around them in ghostly sparkles. I did not know what the humps were. Your ignorance will kill you. And here ... it could all really end.

The woman slept soundly, like a child, breath even and shallow, with occasional twitches and grumbles. I was reluctant to leave her, but there did not appear to be any more trouble in the offing. I could not let her stay on the dock, however. I lifted her and carried her away from the corpses, laying her gently on the soft dirt adjacent to the landing. I took off my coat and made a pillow for her. She grumbled faintly, twitched, and settled onto the cushion, gripping the folded coat with long, dirty fingers.

You had it all and it wasn't enough. Restless, searching, you threw it all away ... You went to the Geshels, gravitated to their power. Begged for assignments. Glory of fighting the Jarts. Then they sent you here. A grand assignment, Yanosh told you. An entire world, and all the glory yours. But a kind of oubliette. A mere sideslip in one's career.

To shut up the whining voice, I pulled Nkwanno's slate from my pocket. It was an anachronism—a late twentieth-century design favored by the divaricates, who shunned all later technology.

I sat. The illuminated screen cast a glow across my face remarkably similar to that from the moons above. Searching the memory, I found a number of Nkwanno's personal files, some of them extensive, but all locked. I searched through the library on the slate, and found a directory with files created on Lamarckia, dated by a calendar established after the immigration.

A scholar named Redhill had begun a fairly extensive local encyclopedia, and I was able to learn much about this part of Lamarckia in the space of an hour. Reading and scrolling and playing back videos, I lost myself in new knowledge, and my confidence began to return.

Thirty-seven Lamarckian years had passed since the arrival of the immigrants. The gate-keepers had been off more than they knew; it was possible I could never return to the Way, even if I located the other clavicle, and that no one in the Way could ever find Lamarckia through the stack again.

The humps in the river sank with soft gurgling sounds. The encyclopedia called them river vines and said they were intrusions from zone five, Petain's Zone, scions of another ecos; the river was only lightly utilized by zone one, Elizabeth's Zone, which apparently did not like riparian or pelagic environments.

So much to learn. I searched with an inward lick of thought for the elements that had once enhanced and accelerated my mind. The gaps left by their removal felt like missing limbs, still having a kind of phantom presence. I kept darting back and forth between exhilaration and fear amounting to despair that I would fail. In my dread lurked a strong sexual need. My erection seemed more than inappropriate in these surroundings. With the smell of decay, such a response struck me as obscene.

I frowned and quelled the impulse. Others had spoken of danger arousing such reactions; no reason, yet, to be ashamed.

With a few minutes to calm down, I felt my confidence return. I had been well-trained and well-educated for this mission. Using what the informer knew, I had created an inference map of talents necessary to survive and travel on Lamarckia: technologies, attitudes, language shifts.

But no one had expected slaughter, or wholesale war.

A fine mist crossed the river, out of place in these conditions; I realized after a moment that the mist was a scented aerosol, not just water vapor: something in the ecos conveying information to something else. I visualized all of zone one, all of Elizabeth, as an organic processor, a vast, sensate organizer not quite as primitive as a hive, not as swift and connected as a mind, but aware of all its tiny forms, sending them messages on chemical winds, a huge mother directing many billions of children.

Redhill brought me up to date on what progress had been made in Lamarckian studies in almost four decades. The encyclopedia postulated that life had first arisen on Lamarckia three hundred million years ago. The star was young, barely four billion years old; the planet still retained a great deal of primordial heat, which supplemented the star's relatively weak insolation.

On all of Lamarckia, only one hundred and nine genetically different organisms had been discovered, all ecoi, seven of them on Elizabeth's Land. Ecoi in the different zones rarely preyed on scions of other ecoi, but frequently observed and copied, or captured them for more detailed study. The ecoi sent swift samplers, sometimes called spies or thieves—flying or running or swimming scions—to recover and return bites of tissue or whole scions. If the designs were found useful, the ecoi incorporated them, modifying some or all of their own scions or replacing them with new forms. Observed, stolen, and copied, as well as inherited, traits were passed on to subsequent generations.

Inheritance of acquired traits, a largely discredited theory of Earth's evolution, had been postulated almost nine hundred years ago by the French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck ... So the original surveyors had given his name to the planet.

When the immigrants had first arrived, Elizabeth's silva had been mostly orange and gray. The encyclopedia said that an ecos could “flux” or alter much of its character suddenly, in as little time as two days and without warning. During a flux, many if not all types of scions were absorbed and recycled into scions with new designs. This had last happened in zone two twenty-eight years before, as the woman had said: Calder's Zone had “sexed"—become receptive to a complete genetic merger. Elizabeth's Zone had accepted this proposal. The two had merged and all of the scions of both ecoi had been recalled. The new single ecos had then “fluxed,” recreating itself.

This had been a time of extraordinary hardship for the immigrants.

Elizabeth's Zone had dominated, taken over Calder's Zone, and now occupied a stretch of Elizabeth's Land from the center to the northern coast, two thousand kilometers at its widest extent east to west. Where it met with other zones—three, four, five, and now six, denuded “truce lines” formed stark white barriers like lines on a map. Altogether, five zones now covered the continent of Elizabeth's Land.

In the south, I learned, a group of large islands filled a crowded sea bounded by Cape Magellan, and on these islands, zones three and four divided territories, with one island occupied by a much smaller zone, little explored and called simply zone seven.

Zone five, called Petain's Zone, lay east of Elizabeth's Zone and along the eastern coast. It was an adapted pelagic—an oceangoing zone that had adapted to land perhaps a million years before. Few zones occupied large areas of both land and water. It was zone five's huge vines that rose three times a day from the river that flowed past Moonrise.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and shut off the slate. I had used these primitive displays in training and had become proficient, but they still hurt my eyes.

After a few minutes, listening to the lapping of the river against the piles of the pier and the woman's steady breathing, I returned to the slate again. I found a citizens’ list, two years old, and searched for the village of Moonrise, found the woman's picture, and connected it with a name: Larisa Cachemou, born to Sers Hakim Cachemou and Belinda Bichon-Cachemou thirty-two Lamarckian years ago. Married into the Strik triad. Janos Strik, husband. In divaricate society, and in most orthodox Naderite arrangements, triad families did not exchange mates—monogamy was the rule—but families shared finances and the raising of children.

Larisa Strik-Cachemou was in fact not much older than I. Stress and disaster had made her seem ancient.

I slipped the slate into my pants pocket and took the woman's lantern. Time to find out what had happened in Moonrise; time to begin this work, however unpleasant.

2

The road from the dock was irregularly paved with stones and gravel. Fresh broad-tread wheel tracks had been cut into the roadbed, making a mess of the gravel. Twisted scraps of mud on the dock could have fallen from tire treads. I concluded that someone had moved large equipment down the road and onto the dock.

Shining the light across the silva, I noticed holes and splintered gouges in the trunks of a few arborids near the road. Poking my finger a few centimeters into one hole, I felt a hard object at its bottom: a bullet. I looked back at the bodies on the landing, trying to put all this evidence together.

I dismissed the possibility that Larisa had killed the people on the dock. For the moment, that made no sense at all. The only other conclusion possible was that shots had been fired from boats on the river.

Narrow pipes mounted on iron rods lined the road. I bent to examine the pipes, felt a moisture dripping from their lower halves. Tiny holes pierced the pipes, pointing outward toward the silva. I sniffed a drop on my finger. The fluid in the pipes was redolent with a sour skunkiness. I guessed that the pipes sprayed something the scions found unpleasant, one way to keep the roads and village from being overgrown—or invaded. Something large and indistinct stirred trunks and made gentle sucking sounds in the undergrowth. Against the bright stars, two long, sinuous arms or necks rose black against the trees, plucking at the parasols and fans; not grazing, but wiping with long shussing sounds and pruning with quick snicks of faintly luminous blue teeth. I raised the lantern high, but the unfocused beam revealed little. Each arm rose from a dark central body and extended six or seven meters above my head. The whole was as large as two adult giraffes.

I picked up my pace, again feeling my arm hairs prickle.

The road broadened and then ran up against a round tower of ochre stone, rising above the silva. The road split and skirted the edge of a clearing beyond. In the clearing sat the center of the village of Moonrise. Twin two-story square stone buildings with peaked slate roofs, like dormitories, flanked a quadrangle north of the tower.

I crossed the square, shining the broad, dim beam right and left. More bodies lay on the square. In the middle, I paused beside one of the bodies, a woman, age uncertain, a bullet through her forehead. In the square, which covered perhaps a quarter hectare, I grimly counted twenty-two bodies. They had all been shot with low-caliber kinetic weapons: guns somewhat less powerful than the one now tucked in my waistband.

I stood in the middle of the square, working to stay calm. Gentle wind and the rhythmic creaking of a door. Cool moist air, bodies, silence, bright double arc of star clouds and spray of brighter stars, gave me a moment of giddy vertigo. I controlled that quickly but found the burn of anger less easy to snuff.

Away from centuries of culture and political experience, away from all restraints and the enforced patterns of tens of millions of fellow citizens, the immigrants had reverted. The old human pattern of violent conflict had started again. But my instructions did not include salvation for the divaricate immigrants.

Lamarckia was my main concern. I didn't come here to get involved in a stupid war.

I crossed the quadrangle diagonally and reached the north end of the closest dormitory. I climbed the steps quietly and peered into the open door. My fingers felt the door's strong, smooth-grained material as I waved the lantern at the dark and empty hall beyond. In Redhill's encyclopedia, zone one's most common “trees” were called lizboo—Elizabeth's bamboo. The door was made from xyla, the immigrant word for woody material taken from arborids—in this case of lizboo trunk sheet, unwound from the spiral growth. One could simply fell the trunk, lop off the crown and low-growth parasols, grab the edge of lizboo in one's hands and unwind it.

I shook my head. Old habits—mind happily displaying fresh knowledge, like a shield.

I entered the building and searched, not for bodies—though I found twelve more of those—but for information. The buildings had been fully wired and had electric lights. I looked through desks and chests of drawers, carefully replacing everything. I picked through the pockets and belongings of the corpses, grimacing at the ghoulish task, hoping to find more slates. I found none.

Robbing corpses had not been specified in my instructions, but it was not entirely dishonorable under the circumstances. On the second floor, I entered the mayor's office and found a primitive message board covered with village records. Charts for monoculture crop growth and harvest yields, a chart of the village's population over the last twenty years—pegged at its highest, one hundred and fifty, in the last year—and a map of the village. I touched the thornlike pins holding the map and saw that another, more recent map had been torn off, leaving corners. The older map, heavily penciled, had been revealed.

I emerged from the building and looked at the dark sky. Clouds had sailed in, thin parallel lines of irregular fluff high across the stars. Both moons were down.

It would be dawn soon.

Before searching the next dormitory, I walked to the greenhouses and fields farther north, beyond the water plant. Two white ceramic pipes carried water from the river to the plant, where it was filtered, but not boiled or otherwise treated. Lamarckia had no indigenous microbes that would bother humans. Human-carried microbes (the few that had survived purging and translation to Thistledown) seemed not to thrive on Lamarckia. The biological niches were either too restricted or already occupied.

The power plant employed simple technologies. Two hectares of silva had been felled and cleared and lizboo trunks now supported sheets of electrolysis membrane. Hydrogen was rapidly and efficiently stripped from water by sunlight and stored in fuel cells. The sheets also created electricity directly—bilayer technology, simple to manufacture from raw organic materials.

I lifted the lantern, sniffed at it. Not oil or some other liquid fuel, but an ion discharge coil that flickered much as a flame would. The liquid was a supercharged chemical solution. Pretty, but not efficient. Perhaps it had hung as a decoration outside a house. I had seen no other lanterns, and the town's power had been cut at its source—the fuel cell and transformer shed. Cells, generators, and other heavy equipment had been removed.

As had the village's children, apparently. I found no bodies of inhabitants younger than twenty.

So equipment and children had been stolen. Carried downriver, perhaps. The raiders—Brionists, the woman called them—were hungry for metal. Lamarckia was short of high-quality metal ores, and the immigrants evidently had not gone in for large-scale mining or big smelters.

The village's communications center had once occupied a small house thirty meters west of the power shed. The equipment—simple radios, judging by the marks and few implements left behind—had been removed. Three bodies sprawled on the porch.

I studied the dark greenhouse and crop fields, a hundred hectares of cleared land cut out of the silva. The raiders had left behind a number of wagons but taken the village's electric tractors. That explained the wheel ruts on the gravel road to the dock. They had probably used the tractors to haul the transformers, generators, and other stolen goods from the village.

I pictured a wagon full of children, crying and screaming. Teeth clenched harder, I walked to the second dormitory.

Inside, the halls were piled high with bodies. Streaks of blood up the walkways and steps showed the course of action taken against Moonrise. Clearly the raiders had meant to torch this building and all the bodies in it. Somehow, they had failed to finish their task, leaving the bodies on the quadrangle and in the other dormitory, perhaps in the houses as well. Someone had apparently decided it was more expedient to take the equipment and children and get away before others arrived.

Bullets in the trees.

Perhaps a few—Larisa, her cousin, Nkwanno, and one other—had survived the attacks and gone to the docks. I pictured a lone boat left behind to pick off survivors as they came out of the jungle.

Or they might have been the first to die, as the boats arrived.

Then I thought of Nkwanno's slate. Slates would be valued here. I had found no other slates among the bodies, yet they had left his. That convinced me Nkwanno, Gennadia, and the other had been killed last.

This level of violence was a new thing on Lamarckia.

I picked my way through and over the bodies at the end of the hall, keeping my lantern beam high, boots sinking into soft flesh, arms and legs and torsos sliding, chests expelling bizarre moans as they shifted. I refused to look into their blank rotten-fruit faces. My eyes already filled with tears and my stomach spasmed at the extraordinary smell. Never in my life had I been exposed to so much intimate, concentrated death. I climbed to the second floor and leaned against a wall. I could not remember the last time I had felt a need to vomit.

The feeling passed. I stood upright again.

A sound came from a side room. I stopped, listened, rapped the wall with my knuckles.

“Who are you?” a weak male voice responded. “Oh, kill me and damn you.”

“Are you armed?” I asked.

No reply. I got to my hands and knees and placed the lantern in the doorway. Nobody shot at it. I peered around the corner, saw a room filled with crates and boxes, and lying against the boxes, a man. His legs only were visible from where I squatted, pants torn, dried blood caking the cloth. I stood and entered slowly.

The man lay with arms spread wide in a pile of books and papers, eyes focused on the ceiling. He appeared to be seventy-five or eighty years old, hair white, face gaunt with more than age. He clutched a bottle of water and a dark gnawed piece of something—bread perhaps. I hunkered beside him. The man turned his head into the beam of the lantern, squinted, and said, “Did you see? Have you brought them?”

“I'm alone,” I said.

The man reached up and felt my sleeve. “They left us behind,” he said. “Are you a—?” His lips couldn't make the word.

“I'm a researcher. I just got here.”

“On a boat?”

I shook my head.

“No other boats? No disciplinary?”

“Not yet. Are you badly hurt?”

“Bad enough,” the man said. “I'm going to die. I really need to die.”

He had been shot in the chest and arm and seemed to have been cut across his arms and breast by knives. I could do nothing for him. No water left in the village plumbing, no electricity, no medical supplies. I asked if he could describe his attackers.

“Everything we predicted,” the man murmured, shrugging free of my fingers. “Everything I told them.” His lips worked again, managed the word he had been trying for. “Brionists, of course. General Beys. Who else?”

“From where?”

“Nearby. Beys sailed from Naderville in Hsia and made a base. His ships send boats upriver at night. They lie low during the day. They look for ore and metal and machines. Everything goes east to Hsia.” Hsia was a massive continent northeast of Elizabeth's Land, across two thousand kilometers of the Darwin Sea.

“Children?” I asked.

The man's face wrinkled in distress. “All,” the man said. “Beys wants them for Brion.”

“What's your name?”

“Fitch.” He licked his lips. “Sander Darcy Fitch. A doctor. They took all the medicine. All the equipment.”

“Why did they kill so many?”

“Except me,” Fitch said.

“And a woman.”

“Who?”

“Larisa Strik-Cachemou.”

Even in his pain, he managed to make a face. “Crazy bitch. Her husband thought we could deal with the Brionists.”

“Why kill everybody?”

“Oh, there will be mansions and riches and Lamarckia will bow to their will.” The man started to sing in an undertone. His eyes shut tight, he rocked back and forth, making the box upon which he leaned creak and rustle. Suddenly he convulsed, then opened his eyes again and reached up to me.

“Secret,” he said. “Very secret.”

“What?”

“The Hexamon will come. Do you believe?”

“It's inevitable,” I said.

“I have disguises and supplies. Old clothes. Cast-offs. Right here. I run the charity. That's why I hid instead of fighting. I thought they would come, seeing this. They can have their pick. Of course, if they send thousands ... not enough.”

“You've been waiting?” I asked.

“He's been gone thirty-seven years,” Fitch said. “He took the clavicle and just went away. Maybe he didn't make it.” Fitch coughed and shuddered again. “Smells so bad. Secret. Please, I have to tell now.”

“It's all right,” I said.

The old man reached up, brushed his filth-caked fingers on my face. “Don't know you, or anyone like you,” he said, looking me over, my thin shirt and baggy tan pants. “You dress the old style, like when we arrived. And you look different.” A light grew in his eyes. His mouth opened wide. “Take these clothes. Yours are all wrong. By the Good Man, do I make you out of air?”

I shook my head. He struggled to rise but fell back, legs kicking like shaken sticks.

“Star, fate, and breath,” he croaked, licking his lips, “be kind to me, preserve me from the pride of the hand. Star, source of all life, to which I will return to be remade, erase my sins...”

My eyes moistened again, hearing the old prayer, and I echoed the old man. Together:

“...and purify, bind my atoms to something higher, send my light far to others who truly see. In the arms of great galaxies there lies salvation, and we there will go, to dance in endless joy the innocent dance free of the hand.” The old man's voice faded, and I finished, “In the name of the Good Man, the secrets of Logos, of Fate and Breath and Soul, so be it through deep time.”

“You,” Fitch said, grasping my arm weakly. “Are you alone?”

Tears streamed down my cheeks. “Yes,” I said.

“Take the clothes. Save us from what we've done. May the memory of the Good Man serve you.”

Fitch's breath stopped. Here, that was enough. He was dead. The bottle of water rolled and spilled. I set it upright, then sprinkled water on the old man's face. Free of the hand and its toils. Absolution. I kneeled beside the body, lips set tight.

After some minutes, I stood, nerves ragged. As Fitch had suggested, I searched through the boxes of old clothes and cast-off goods. I exchanged my new clothes for sturdy, if frayed, trousers and shirt, but kept my boots. A cloth rucksack served to hold the slate and a few other clothes.

Outside, in the courtyard, away from the trails of blood, I smeared my boots with mud. Then I returned to the river.

3

In the east, sun peeked pale yellow between the immense trunks and parasols and fan-leaves behind the dock. The woman stirred. She opened her eyes, saw me, and closed them again, as if resigned.

“Nobody's come,” she murmured.

“Not yet,” I said. “Feel better?”

“I haven't eaten in days.”

“I'm pretty hungry myself,” I said. “Is there food anywhere?”

She shook her head. “They looted the town.”

“The Brionists.”

“Yes.”

“You're expecting somebody to come. A boat.”

“I don't know who's alive. Beys sent big boats filled with troops. Maybe they took Calcutta, too. They shot ... when Nkwanno and Gennadia and Ganna...” She lifted her head, jaw thrusting and neck straining at the memory. “Missed me.”

“Are there any boats nearby? Another village?” I asked.

She pointed upriver with her nose. “They should have been here yesterday. I waited and they didn't come.” She walked to the shore. I stood and followed. She glanced over her shoulder. “Go away, whoever you are,” she said. “I'm tired. I'm a dead person.”

“What's your name?” I asked, though I knew already.

“Larisa,” the woman said, stopping again, hunching her shoulders as if I were a buzzing insect that might sting.

“My name is Olmy,” I said. “I'm from the triad family of Datchetong.”

“I've heard of them,” Larisa said. “Lenk disenfranchised them.” She rubbed her nose and raised her eyes to my face. “I know you're a liar,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Maybe the silva made you.”

I shook my head.

“I'll believe anything now. Nothing matters,” she said. With a shake of her head and a shiver, she led me away from the river, back to the village.

I walked beside her. She took each step with a wide-eyed deliberation, forcing herself on. Her lips worked silently.

“We're almost there,” she said.

The broad red fans and black trunks closed overhead. We walked in shadow. Something—a flying ribbon—darted in front of my face, undulated, stung me on the cheek, flashed away before I could swipe at it. Larisa stared at me listlessly.

“Samplers only bite once here. Then Liz knows you.”

I wiped a small smear of blood from my cheek.

Larisa trudged on.

“When were you bitten?” I asked.

“When I was a little girl, I suppose. I forget.”

We neared the tower. From the direction of the river came a sound of motors. Larisa slowed, eyes wild, breath coming in jerks. I stopped and took hold of her arm. She looked up at me like a child. “They're back,” she said.

“Stay here. I'll see,” I said. I held her shoulders as if to plant her feet on the spot, but felt sure, once I was gone, she would run and hide. I returned along the path, looked over my shoulder, saw her standing beside the tower like a stunned animal.

By the dock, I hid behind a thick black lizboo trunk and peered north, downriver. Four small launches moved slowly against the current, their hulls chalk white against the river's dawn gray-blue. Each launch carried ten or twelve passengers, all in uniform. I frowned. Black dust fell from above, coating like soot. I absently rubbed some between my fingers. It felt fine as rouge and clung to my skin. There was some commotion on the boats; I heard their voices across the water, angry and concerned. The launches were within a hundred meters of the dock and observers in their prows had already seen the bodies. The motors cut back and the boats edged toward the shore. I saw rifles held at ready.

They did not appear to be invading soldiers. Very likely the boats carried police—a disciplinary and officers—from Calcutta. I considered whether to meet them here or at the village.

Larisa decided for me. She stepped up behind me and walked onto the dock. Her footsteps echoed on the planks in the morning stillness.

“You're late,” she shouted to the boats.

A thick-bodied, balding man with a narrow, closely-trimmed beard stood in the bow of the leading boat. “Who are you?” he called back. He tossed her a rope and she took it, sidestepping her cousin's body to tie it. She stood, brushing black dust from her hands on her pants, and said in clear, accusing tones, “Why didn't you come earlier?”

I stepped from behind the trunk and stood on the dock. The men and women regarded us both warily. All wore uniforms, but of varying colors, some ill-cut; homemade, I thought, hand-sewn.

The balding, bearded man climbed from the first boat. “We didn't get any radio calls for a day and a half. We saw unknown boats going upriver ... raiders, Brionists, we presumed. The citizens rank thought maybe a disciplinary should have a look.” He approached, squinting at her. “Larisa, aren't you? Larisa ... Strik-Cachemou? What happened here?”

“They killed us,” she answered. “Then he came.” She pointed to me. I stepped forward and pulled the pistol from my waistband, holding it by the barrel. “It's hers,” I said. The balding man took the pistol and handed it to one of his officers, who placed it in a cloth bag. “My name is Olmy Ap Datchetong.”

“Elevi Yar Thomas. Disciplinary at Calcutta.” He did not offer to shake my hand. “I don't recognize you. Where are you from?” he asked.

“I've been in the silva, traveling and studying,” I said. “I just arrived.”

“He's a liar,” Larisa confided, as if it might ingratiate her with the older man. He gave her a wary glance, sensing something was not quite right.

“Did you see what happened?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

All but three of the men and women in gray marched along the trail toward the village. One man with a heavy, long-barreled rifle stood guard over the boats. The disciplinary examined the bodies on the dock. One woman, short and powerfully built, with auburn hair cut short beneath a loose gray cap, pulled tarps from the boat lockers and spread them beside the corpses. “We didn't bring a doctor,” she reminded Thomas.

He could not take his eyes from the bodies. His broad, fleshy face showed taut pale lines. “In the name of the Good Man, why?”

“Passion,” Larisa said, lips curling with hate. “They have a lot of passion.”

In the empty village refectory, where all the inhabitants of Moonrise would have sat in communion for lunch and dinner, the disciplinary spun a chair around and sat on it front to back. I sat across from him, on the opposite side of a round table.

“You're lucky you weren't involved, aren't you?” Thomas didn't wait for my answer. “The whole village had maybe three guns. They've lived peacefully here for thirty-nine years. They had twenty-seven children. All gone. We haven't found a one of them.” Thomas scratched his nose reflectively. “I've heard Beys is taking all the children, that the Brionists want to raise them to think as they do. I hope that's true. They wouldn't just kill them, would they? Take them away and then kill them?”

I shook my head, ignorant.

“You can't tell me anything?” he asked in an undertone.

I summed Thomas up quickly: chosen by the citizens rank and heads of triad families of his district to act as chief disciplinary, a kind of constable. The disciplinary would choose new citizen deputies every three years, a tradition in divaricate communes. He had arrived late, I judged, because there would have been nothing he could have done. He had seen the boats, known them for what they were, and...

Or perhaps I misjudged.

“I've only been in the village since yesterday evening,” I said. “Larisa says they had a dispute over minerals.”

“What do they lack in their zone? An innocuous village, no reason for it to be slaughtered. One hundred twenty-four dead.” Thomas's face wrinkled into an ugly scowl and he seemed ready to spit. “Not much high-grade ore on Lamarckia, not out in the open. A little here ... Ten kilometers through the silva. Just beginning to think about mining it. Brion lusts for metal, enough to kill for it. What can we do? We have few weapons. Just bury the bodies.” Thomas leaned forward. “The woman calls you a liar. Something's taken a chunk out of your cheek. A sampler?”

I had hoped to have more time to blend in. I could only stick with my story, however thin—and hope to get away in Calcutta.

“It wasn't the first time I've been sampled,” I said. “I discovered a sub-zone and spent some time in it. Looking for signs of a new flux.” Sub-zones, Redhill's encyclopedia said, were regions of peculiar specialization within an ecos, where scions of unfamiliar characteristics sometimes emerged. Some scholars speculated that changes in sub-zones could be harbingers of fluxes. Others maintained sub-zones were actually small ecoi in themselves, serving specific needs for the larger zones in a symbiotic relationship.

I hoped the encyclopedia was not hopelessly out of date.

Thomas considered this answer, then shrugged. “I try to stay out of zone studies. People interest me.” Thomas raised his own slate. “I have no track on you. Census of five years ago. Twenty-two thousand of us on Lamarckia, ten thousand on Elizabeth's Land. I have no birth records for a man named Olmy of the Datchetong. I do have a record for a Darrow Jan Fima, of the Datchetong extended triad ... He stole something pretty important—it doesn't say what—thirty-seven years ago. He was never caught. Case not pursued.”

My respect for the disciplinary jumped several notches. Darrow Jan Fima was the informer who had returned to the Way. I suddenly connected his theft of a clavicle with Larisa's comment that the Datchetong had been disenfranchised. Wrong name, I told myself. They proscribed the whole triad.

Thomas rocked on his chair, then stood and pocketed his slate. “I knew Nkwanno well. An intelligent, kind man. He came to lecture every few months downriver in Calcutta. We found the body of the encyclopedist, Redhill himself. Did you know he lived here? He put Moonrise on the map, so to speak. They shot him in the head.” Thomas raised his eyes and met mine squarely. He stood. “Quite a few distinguished citizens, for so small a village.”

I watched him closely, saying nothing.

“Time to finish. Bury the bodies and leave. We've recorded the scene. Nothing more I can do now.”

“The silva will take over inside a week,” said Thomas's second, the tough-faced, stocky woman, Bruni. She stood by the tower and scrutinized the lizboo trunks and one foot of a cathedral tree beyond the pipes. One of her eyelids twitched reflexively. She turned and regarded me curiously, but was leaving all questions to Thomas.

I accompanied Thomas and four others down to the river. I took one end of a stretcher, Thomas the other, and we carried Nkwanno's body, the last, from the dock. Larisa watched as we approached the other bodies lined up in the quadrangle. “Thank Logos I have no children,” she murmured, falling in step behind.

We all dug four long trench-graves in the hard-packed soil of the quadrangle, very different from the rich chunky loam in the silva. The spades bit into the dead and chalky dirt with short singing barks.

Until arriving in Moonrise, I had never had human mortality shoved in my face with such visceral force, and so often. I had never buried anyone before. Conflicts with the Jarts in the Way were altogether swifter and more deadly, leaving few traces...

The sharp intakes of breath and heavy panting of the men and women working around me, the stamps of defiant individuality on their faces, awoke a hazy, difficult emotion, horror and pride commingled.

I dug with a will.

One women stopped to wipe away tears. A man joined her, shovel in hand, arm around her shoulder, and offered her a handkerchief.

We finished a trench intended for thirty of the dead. The first was a small thin body. The tarp was removed and I saw a woman of perhaps sixty or seventy years. Natural years, lived without extraordinary medical assistance or rejuvenation. She had been shot in the neck and chest by a projectile weapon. The wounds looked ugly, purple and puffy like old meat. That was what they had made of her: old meat. The woman's swollen brown and purple face seemed rudely, disdainfully peaceful.

I looked at my fellow diggers: a strong young man with broad bull-shoulders and fat cheeks, the auburn-haired strong-bodied woman Bruni, slender middle-aged man with a permanently worried expression, a young woman whose face stayed flushed all the time we dug. Individual. No acquiescence to artificial beauty; no reconstruction. The bull-shouldered young man put down his shovel and stared at the dead woman. He seemed reluctant to do what had to be done.

I bent and closed the old woman's eyes with two fingers. I had once seen that in an entertainment about times long past, on distant Earth. The touch of her skin, cold and moist, and the sticky push of her eyelids against sunken eyeballs made my flesh crawl. The young man nodded gratitude and approval. We put the woman into the shroud again, making a sling, and lowered her into the grave. Others arranged more bodies—young men, old men, two more older women. They lowered the other bodies into the hole. Working in synch, we filled in the grave. I observed the faces around me, grim, eyes a little wild; some dream dying inside.

Sunset. The quadrangle bathed in orange light from a passing cloud, glorious in the sun.

Dusk loomed when we finished.

Thomas spoke a few words from the Prayer of Common Place over the rows of long graves. Others finished their lists and maps of what remained of the village. A female officer conferred with Thomas about a list of missing children taken from records in the mayor's office.

Then Thomas took me back to the tower. He pulled a bar of sweetened gum from his coat pocket, broke it in half, offered half to me, and I took it, interested in maintaining a friendly connection with this man.

We climbed the tower and looked down on the darkening silva and village, the empty buildings and houses, the pale tan scars of fresh graves in the grayish-brown quadrangle, the small greenhouse farm and large tanks, paddles motionless inside brown sewage, no longer converting waste directly to food. I could not see the dock, but the far bank of the river was visible. Parasols and fans folded and furled, withdrawing for the night. A cloud of black dust shot up from the silva a hundred meters off, drifted. I smelled citrus and spice.

“Tell me more about why you're here,” Thomas said.

“I came here to catch a riverboat. I've spent much of my life the last few years alone in the silva. I'm not used to violence. I don't know what more I can do or say.”

Thomas rubbed his balding head with a chalky hand. “I said years ago citizens should be forced to carry papers.” He lifted his eyebrows and glared at the horizon. “'Oh, no, not that,'” he mimicked. “'This is a place where we can all be free.’ We'll take you to Calcutta. You'll tell what you know to the committee of citizens rank. If you're one of the Brionists and they left you here by accident—or left you here to spy—I'll personally see you to a full citizen trial in Athenai.”

There was nothing I could say.

I still did not need to sleep. No one wanted to sleep in the buildings. I lay with the others in one corner of the quadrangle, where no bodies had fallen and the soil was not stained with blood, under the broad clear sky, tracing patterns in the stars. The double oxbow was not visible. Now, the sky was marked by tiny puffs of dim color—purples and pinks. The shrouds of dead suns. I felt a dizzying moment of complete disorientation. These stars probably occupied the same universe, but not necessarily the same galaxy, or even the same period of time. In the Way's geometry stacks, distance and time could become as tangled as an infinity of threads tossed into a box.

I was among humans, but that gave little comfort. If I died here, who would know me well enough to connect the thread of my pneuma to any comprehensible past?

The burial and service had moved me more profoundly than I thought possible. I had largely abandoned my spiritual beliefs since joining Way Defense, concentrating on a different kind of personal development: devotion to concept, to large-scale social and not metaphysical issues. Devotion to fighting off the menace of the Jarts, devils beyond the conception of any human before the opening of the Way.

Now I faced a much smaller problem, but more personal, and challenging to the point of almost certain defeat. What I saw in the stars now were the faces of my mother and father, and all they stood for, suddenly become diseased, wrong.

Not many slept that night, however tired.

The boats prepared to depart at dawn. They would move much more quickly with the river current, but it would still take a day to get back to Calcutta. I listened to the officers talking among themselves; they had segregated me at the stern of the last boat, leaving me two meters of space, as if I were a pariah. No family, no known origin, rumors passing quickly; monkeys shying from a stranger to the communal tree. I felt a brief flash of anger at their stupidity, then wondered what I would do in their place.

Before Thomas could give the order to leave, however, we all heard the distant sound of another small engine. Larisa, in the cabin of the largest boat, let out a sharp wail and struggled, pushing aside the startled men and women around her. She leaped ashore with surprising dexterity and ran up the road to the village.

The few deputies who had rifles lifted them, aiming them upriver where the sounds came. A single eight-meter launch was drifting downriver with the current, its internal combustion engine idling, bow cutting through swaths of morning fog. In the launch, two men squatted at stern and prow, both staring at the four boats arranged around the dock and shore. Neither of them appeared to be armed.

The disciplinary came aft and stood beside me to get a better view of the boat. “It's Randall,” he said. “Erwin Randall and someone else—Matthew Shatro, I think.” Thomas seemed to know everyone on the river. He ordered the rifles lowered. “They're not Brionists. They're researchers.” He shouted to the crew of his second boat, “Go get that woman, damn her.”

The launch came alongside and a tall, loose-limbed man with a thin face and long nose and somber brown eyes waved to Thomas, adding a half-hearted flick of the hand to the others. “What happened here?” he asked.

“Dead,” Thomas said.

“Fate and breath,” Randall said. Shatro, at the rear, frowned and drew up his jacket collar. “All of them?”

“All but the missing,” Thomas said.

“There are seven boats upriver,” Randall said, pointing. “They must be the ones. Three flatboats. They didn't even bother shooting us.”

“Good to see you're healthy,” Thomas said without irony.

“I passed a radio message down to Calcutta,” Randall said. He ran his hand through thick, straw-colored hair. “You know Matthew Shatro, my assistant. We've been surveying Liz up to Lake Mareotis.”

Thomas seemed in a quandary and not happy to see these men. He stood with foot on the lead boat's gunwale, glanced at me with a puzzled expression, and then looked to his boats and deputies. “They came past Calcutta at night. They must have a base somewhere ... We should go after them.”

“We passed a camp on the way down. They're about thirty kilometers upriver by now, and the camp's empty. Everything cleared out. I think they'll make a run downriver in the next few days.”

“If I know where they are ... then we must respond.” Thomas sounded regretful.

Randall sympathized. “They're all armed—over fifty men and women. We'll go with you...” He held out his empty arms. “But without guns we're not much use.”

“No need for that,” Thomas said. “I have two people who need to get downriver. This man here, his name is Olmy Ap Datchetong, and a woman from the village. She's been through a lot and she's easily frightened. Her name is Larisa Strik-Cachemou.”

“I know of her,” Randall said. He nodded to me and fixed me with a curious stare. Everybody knew everybody and I did not fit in.

“Can you take them to Calcutta and deliver them to the citizens rank for depositions?”

Randall's eyes, it seemed, would permanently record all that was important. “Of course,” he said. Shatro, a well-muscled, short fellow with pale skin and cropped blond hair, began to rearrange boxes and bags in the launch.

Randall and Thomas stood awkwardly in their boats, both realizing that the news had put Thomas and his deputies into a quandary. As disciplinary, Thomas had a duty to confront the attackers. Yet a small party such as this, armed with only eight rifles and a few pistols, would not do well against such opposition. Randall's face grew red, and he stammered, “I don't think it would be a good idea for you to take them on—”

Thomas coughed and waved a hand. “That's my decision,” he said. “We'll call downriver and ask for more boats, and for citizens to be on the lookout. Nobody wants them to get away after all they've done on the north coast. They can't sneak so many boats past us if we're watching night and day.”

“They may divide their forces and send their stolen goods down first,” Randall said. “One of the flatboats was heavy in the water.”

“Loaded with tractors and scrap metal,” Thomas surmised. He shook his head sharply, not wanting to hear news that would make him angrier, or fix him more firmly in his duty. “Pull your launch in and take these people, and we'll be on our way.”

Larisa returned to the dock in the firm arms of two women. Thomas explained the situation to her, and she listened with little birdlike nods, eyes wide. We climbed into Randall's boat and I thanked Thomas for all he had done.

“I've done nothing for you,” Thomas said, a little coldly. “When you get to Calcutta, tell the truth, and tell them what I'm doing here. If nobody sends help, or even if they do, we may not come back. I'm not asking for pity. It's just the damned truth.”

The deputies in the boats stared at us owlishly as we pulled away and headed downriver. Shatro unfolded a rough blanket for Larisa, and Randall took the tiller, pushing us out to the middle, avoiding a few river vine humps. The bottom of the boat was filled with boxes packed with glass jars. The jars contained chunks of mottled tissue: specimens.

“You weren't in Moonrise when it happened, then?” Randall asked. I shook my head. Larisa began to chatter nervously, telling the two men all she had told Thomas and me, and adding her suspicions that I was a liar. Randall listened intently but did not seem to share her concern or disapproval.

The banks of the river revealed an immense monotony of silva, with little change in color or elevation. Red and black, browns and purples, no green. Tens of kilometers from the banks, mountains rose, and silva balloons clustered along the base of the mountains; but from this distance, a hundred meters from either shore, I could see little more than black trunks, parasols and fans, and the legs and pink crowns of cathedral trees.

The river smelled of pure fresh water, bland but invigorating. Peering into the dark clarity, I saw dappled silver blurs move flash and undulate us. Redhill's encyclopedia said that creatures of Petain's zone, zone five, dominated the Terra Nova to its roots deep in Elizabeth's Land. Some of the riparian scions were as large as whales, easily capable of toppling a boat. A picture showed a sinuous monstrosity, twenty meters in length, crude eyes arrayed in a cross on its flat forehead, blunt tusks mounted on nose, no mouth. Its function within the river, its use to the zone five ecos, was not known.

I imagined such a thing sliding beneath our boat in the deep blue water and actually enjoyed the shiver I felt. Awe at nature was a much cleaner emotion than any I had been feeling lately.

Larisa fell asleep, head lolling with mouth open. Randall sat on a bench beside me, letting Shatro take the tiller, and offered me a bar of gum. Chewing gum seemed quite the habit here.

“Ser Cachemou is known up and down the river,” Randall said in a low voice. “A loud and foolish woman. If her husband left her to go to Hsia, he may have had better reason than most.” He confided a wry grimace. “What were you doing in the silva?”

“I've always wanted to do research,” I said. “Science” was a word rarely used by divaricates. “I've spent the last two years studying on my own.” I felt very vulnerable with this man; he probably knew more about the silva than anyone on the river, and certainly more than I could have gleaned from Jan Fima, the Dalgesh report, and Redhill's encyclopedia. “It's not been easy. I should have studied more ... Before going into the silva.”

Randall chuckled. “Very likely. Did you really get sampled?”

The small prick on my cheek had almost healed. “She says I did. Something flying struck me in the dark and drew blood, but Liz doesn't do that twice, does she?”

“No,” Randall said. He smiled and went aft to rig a shade for the woman.

Left to myself, with nothing to do but study the river and the endless silva, I took out Nkwanno's slate and resumed my study. I still could not access the scholar's personal records, but judging from clues left in several small open files, Nkwanno had used a few key words that he changed every few months. I wondered who he thought would read his private documents. I could not put the right words together yet, but all his public references were open to me.

As we drifted downriver, I searched for a history, and found several, all unfinished, all with the hallmarks of enthusiastic amateurs.

The immigrants had come here, thirty-seven Lamarckian years before, emerging from a gate near the present site of Calcutta. Lenk named their landfall (its measure then unknown) after his wife, Elizabeth. They had been woefully unprepared. It took months to sort out Lamarckia's possible contributions to diet and the need for raw materials. For the first ten years, starvation was a major problem.

I punched through dozens of stills of gaunt, hollow-eyed settlers clearing lizboo scions, planting grains and fruit trees and vines, toppling cathedral trees for their strong, light, woody trunks. Lenk's recordists made videos of determined mothers and fathers carrying the first children born on Lamarckia, babies wrapped in worn cloth, parents in rags.

Among the two thousand had been seven doctors with less than a ton of medical supplies, little of it advanced; here, Lenk had insisted on doctrinal purity. Some, apparently, had ignored or interpreted his instructions, but not enough to avert serious medical problems, including fatal allergic reactions to certain scions. Hungry, desperate people had eaten many things without going through proper procedures.

The faces in the pictures and movies haunted me: gaunt, frightened but steadfast, sure of themselves. All Thistledown's citizens regarded themselves as pioneers and explorers, but Lenk's people had embarked on an adventure qualitatively different from Thistledown's journey, and with far less chance of success.

Along the banks on both sides, black and brown pipes several meters wide reached down to the river, mouths half-submerged. Booming, sucking sounds came across the water, enormous organic pumps at work, drawing water from the river and transporting it inland. Every few kilometers we passed these pipes, part of Liz's immense hydraulic system, circulating water for all of her scions.

Ten hours into the journey, Randall divided a loaf of bread between the four of us. “Wine?” he asked, offering a small ceramic jug. Larisa ate her bread in delicate nibbles, staring at the far shore, but refused the wine, scooping water from the river instead.

I accepted a cup. The wine was heavy and sweet, with a bitter aftertaste. I carefully did not make a face. Randall, focused on my reaction, seemed dissatisfied.

“You didn't say where you studied ... Though I assume at Jakarta, since that's where most of the Datchetongs have lived since Lenk brought us here.”

“I studied independently,” I said.

Randall squinted. “I'm as fond of Liz as anyone ... But I can't imagine being alone in the silva for years. I'd go slaps. What was it like?”

“Hard,” I said. I grinned. “I almost did go slaps.”

“You're a cautious man, Ser Olmy.”

“Being alone does it,” I said.

He shaded his eyes, searching the overgrown banks. “There are a couple of camps along here. Prospectors, small crop farmers, gatherers. Characters. I promised to look in on one. Kimon Giorgios is his name. He likes being alone, too.”

I followed Randall's gaze to the western bank. The lizboo arborids were hung with orange sausage-shaped pods as much as two meters long, dangling over the water like a thickly tasseled fringe. Through the fringe, I saw a pale brown smudge hidden among the shiny black trunks. “Is that a house?” I asked.

Randall rose to a crouch, hands on his knees, and murmured, “Yesss. Sharp eyes, Olmy.”

The boat pushed slowly into a narrow branch of the main river. Amid lizboo and thick clumps of phytids, five cathedral trees surrounded a small clearing. An elegantly crafted small house stood in the clearing. Hinged window covers raised on stakes propped up in the dirt gave it the appearance of an old, crippled bird trying valiantly to fly.

Shrill whistling broke out on the opposite shore and was taken up by the silva around the house. The sound bothered neither Randall nor Shatro, so I did not act surprised, either.

Randall hailed the house. No one answered. He gestured for Shatro to take us in closer. We pushed up onto the bank beside the clearing.

“Giorgios has been up and down this river for years,” Randall said. “He knows it better than anyone. Someone looking for a guide ... like Janos Strik...” He didn't finish his thought. We stepped off the prow and walked up the bank, listening to whistles echo back into the depths of the silva. Larisa stayed under the shade Randall had rigged, peering out at us like a small, frightened animal. Randall and Shatro walked around the house and Randall called Giorgio's name. Still no answer.

Randall entered the house through the front door. A startled curse was followed by a relieved chuckle. A scion the size of a cat, tubular red body mounted on three long, thin legs, stalked through the front door with slow dignity, pointed what might have been its head at the shore and the boat, and turned to walk into the jungle.

Randall came out of the house shaking his head. “He's been gone for days. Liz is starting to move in.” He climbed into the launch. Shatro and I pushed the boat off the bank and climbed in after him. Randall took the tiller and guided us back to the middle of the main body of the river.

Randall nodded as if keeping time with some inner tune. “He'd have shut the house up if he'd left voluntarily. Never left it open for longlegs. He's well-known on the river. Everyone knows he's the best guide upstream.”

Larisa shouted, “They took him!” Her voice rang across the river and was met with more high whistling from both shores.

“If they were smart, they probably did,” Randall said.

Shatro sat in the bow and said little, but scanned the river constantly.

Twelve kilometers from Calcutta, the banks of the Terra Nova grew in height and narrowed to form a deep gorge only fifty meters wide. The launch rushed through the gorge with thrilling speed. Randall took the tiller, and we avoided the few rocks and quick, broad eddies without mishap.

I observed large pink parasols waving like huge hands on the rims of the gorge. Black and electric blue creepers hung down the sheer, mist-shiny black walls, pulsing as they pumped water from the river to the silva above. After several kilometers, the walls dropped again and we passed through low, flat countryside, populated by thick canopies of lizboo and punctuated by the ubiquitous cathedral trees.

“Did you see any heliophiles this far south?” Randall asked. We had been quiet since leaving the deserted cabin, and he seemed to want to break the grim mood. I did not know what heliophiles were, so I shook my head.

“Some years they travel south of Moonrise, but I haven't seen them recently. They're taking a different role in Liz's scheme, I think ... You must have relied on diospuros.”

“Kept me alive most of the time,” I said. Edible after soaking in water and cooking, high in usable protein and sugars, sweet and meaty to the taste, diospuros had been one of the first phytids used successfully for food. If Randall was testing me, however, he would soon catch me up.

“Did you see whitehat feeding on diospuros?”

“No,” I said. “I saw them sucking on lizboo.”

“That's their habit this far north. South of here, where we haven't depleted them, they seem to prefer diospuros.” Randall seemed satisfied with this, and kept silent for the next few kilometers.

The sun felt good on my hands as I clasped the launch's gunwale. Much of the time, the sky was veiled by thin, high ice-crystal clouds, diffusing the sun's hot disk into an incandescent pearl. I shifted forward and leaned back, closing my eyes in the bright, milky glare. My neck muscles had bunched with something ... tension, I supposed. I could not remember having felt tense in years—if ever. The implants and supplements I had given up for this mission had smoothed so many of my body's basic reactions; I seemed to be experiencing a new kind of existence, or at least one largely forgotten.

My vision blurred and I drifted into a musing doze, also a novel experience.

I jerked and lifted my head, blinking at a shadow leaning over me.

Shatro handed me a tin of biscuits. He spoke softly, diffidently. “We'll see Calcutta in an hour.”

The river broadened and the current slowed again. Larisa came out from under the shade and sat well apart from me, staring at nothing in particular but away from the boat, lips pursed, brows elevated as if in unending surprise. On Thistledown, her family would take her in for a mental refresh. Even divaricates recognized mental dysfunction.

Randall joined me with his own tin of biscuits. “You've not heard much news recently, then.”

I liked Randall, felt that he was sympathetic, but I was not looking for more conversation. I needed much more time to study, to avoid being caught up in stupid mistakes. “Yes,” I said. “I apologize for my ignorance.”

He smiled and shook his head. “The political situation has changed since you left ... Calcutta?”

“Calcutta,” I said.

“Passed through Moonrise.”

“On my way upriver, yes.”

“Brion sent his dogs out to savage the north coast last year. They've ransacked seven villages and stolen everything they could get their hands on ... including children.”

“Why take children?” Shatro asked, shaking his head. “It doesn't figure, a hungry community stealing children.”

“They may not be hungry anymore, if the stories are to be trusted. We don't talk with Naderville much now,” Randall said. “Somebody in Naderville may have made some calculations and realized we'll outstrip them in population and influence in the next generation. Their women are exhausted and they can't make their baby machines work. Stealing kids in populations as small as ours makes sense, if you can feed and raise them.”

I had heard nothing about baby machines. Nkwanno's references did not mention them either. Divaricates had never believed in ex utero gestation and birth. “Nobody's fought back?” I asked.

Randall gave me one of his appraising looks. “Lenk doesn't seem to have the stomach for a war. I think he hopes Naderville will just fade away. But they've regained a lot of strength in the last year. Of course, when they communicate with us at all, they publicly disavow General Beys ... But he delivers his goods to Naderville, all the same.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Then Randall said, “Do you have anyplace to stay in Calcutta?”

“Hospice,” I said. “No money.”

“No need to stay in hospice. Why not stay with my family while you wait to testify? Might be a couple of days.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm not very presentable. I've been on my own for so long...”

“We've been down south on the Terra Nova for the last two weeks,” Randall said. “I'm sure you've seen interesting things, even if you don't know how to interpret them. There aren't enough researchers on this planet that we can afford not to talk with each other.”

Six kilometers above Calcutta, the geology changed abruptly. The land became bumpy and rugged. The silva thinned, leaving cathedral trees and a few scattered lizboos rising like game markers on a low rolling carpet of vivid purple and sky blue. Pale gray granite hills rose to the west, capped by thick, violet phytids.

“Look at the color on the hills this spring,” Randall said. “Brightest I've seen in many years. Wonder if Liz has changed a specification or two?”

Shatro examined the hills through a pair of binoculars. He saw my interest and loaned them to me. I looked at the hills, a clump of lizboo two hundred meters from the bank, and saw a group of two-necked cleaners working on the arborids’ parasols and fans. Their eyeless heads swept from leaf to leaf with slow, sure motions, reminding me both of dinosaurs and microscopic tardigrades. I returned the binoculars to Shatro.

“Ser Randall and I found seven more varieties of lizboo, all specialized to different mineral conditions,” Shatro said. “We've been measuring oxygen production in the deep silva.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“Elementary, really,” Randall said. “Lenk gave us a commission to make sure Liz isn't headed toward another flux. The silva really isn't an important source of oxygen. Negligible, actually. Most of it comes from the coastal oceans. Dissociation of water, we presume—though we don't know. But oxygen levels in the silva could point to changes in the scion mix. It's important work, but rather dull.”

I began to wonder how long I could hold out in conversation, as a visitor in Randall's house, without being unveiled as a complete fraud.

I wondered when the Brionists would return to Moonrise and stake their claim. Would the disciplinary or the citizens of Calcutta oppose them? I tried to imagine this Brion, about whom there was nothing in Redhill: an ambitious petty dictator, I guessed, clothed in a ridiculous uniform.

Shatro cut the motor and the launch drifted with the stream. Breezes carried unfamiliar scents—tomato juice, ginger.

From the south, upriver, I heard the thin, flat whine of more motors. Three large flat-bottom boats were gaining on us. Clutching a half-eaten biscuit, Randall stepped aft and stared at them. With disgust, he crumpled the biscuit and threw it between the thwarts. “Here they come, the bold bastards,” he growled.

Soon the three boats were less than a hundred meters away. Uniformed men crowded their decks, perhaps a hundred in all. Each flatboat was about fifteen meters long and six or seven across the beam, with shallow drafts and long, wide cabins large enough to store farm and other equipment. No women were visible on deck. They would all be back home, I thought, rearing more children for Brion.

The men standing around the cabins were mostly brown, a few blacks and whites, the familiar Thistledown mix. They wore tan trousers and loose-fitting white shirts. Most carried their large rifles prominently. Some smiled and talked in low voices as the boats passed the launch. The rest said nothing and just stared at us, rifles poised.

“What do you know about a village upriver, called Moonrise?” Randall called to the boats. His face reddened as he got no answer. Larisa retreated to the shade and lay down, covering her face with her hands.

A slight restless milling on the flatboats. We were very close. They could kill us all if they chose.

“What about a citizen named Giorgios? Kimon Giorgios?”

The boats motored ahead of us. We faced the men on the rear, faces young and old, all indifferent.

“Where are the rest of you?” Randall called, a little foolishly, I thought. We sat waiting for an answer, but nobody replied in words. Instead, the men on the boats lifted their rifles and pointed them just over our heads, teeth shining behind the glistening black barrels.

A high, ululating shout rose from the boats. The men lifted their hands and rifles and sang out again, voices echoing from the edge of the silva. The gray boats’ harmonizing electric whines sounded like a leftover taunt.

“They're going to pass through Calcutta in broad daylight, and ahead of us,” Shatro said.

“We're about six kilometers south of Calcutta,” Randall said. “Won't even talk with us. Absolute contempt. The bastards.”

The silva grew lush again, lizboo with fringes of pods packed thick along both sides. On the northern bank, a glistening black sand beach pushed into the silva and along the river. A party of picnickers lazed over their midday meal, watching us. The men waved politely. They might have waved at the gray boats as well; they did not seem concerned. Three naked children splashed in the river, their musical shouts and screams rising above the liquid lapping of the river against the boat hulls. I wondered if the children had been called in to hide when the flatboats passed.

Everybody seemed unconcerned, relaxed...

I dropped one arm over the side and dabbled my fingers. The water was cold, but not bone-chilling. Before I could react, a silvery creature the size of a small trout swifted from the depths and plunged something sharp into my thumb. Jerking, clamping my jaw to still a startled yelp, I yanked my hand out, sucked away a drop of blood, and wiped the thumb quickly on my dark socks. A prick; nothing more. Nobody had noticed. I thought, the river knows me, as well, now.

The sky gleamed like old polished silver at zenith, bluing only above the horizon. Farther downriver, buildings appeared in more clearings, closely attended by lizboo: boathouses, some sort of small factory with smoke pouring from a thin black stack and men marching across a clearing in black aprons, loading wagons. I saw only a few tractors, and of course there would be no horses or oxen; the Lenk group had brought no animals with them.

A small farm nestled between walls of lizboo like a brown postage stamp on red and purple and black paisley. Silos, but no barns. Out of place, my mind said, but it actually looked quite lovely, familiar in my gut, though I had never seen such a thing in actual experience. I imagined fields of crops—grain and vegetables, biomass ponds—inland, away from the river, perhaps scattered between or spread across the low plateaus northeast of Calcutta, as Redhill described: human intrusions that Liz apparently tolerated. As we passed the farm, a young man in blue and brown workits—overalls of an ancient cut—came out on a small dock and waved to us. Randall and Shatro returned his wave.

“There's a reception downriver, above Calcutta,” the young man shouted, his voice cracking with youth and excitement. “I'd pull in and wait it out.”

“What kind of reception?” Randall asked.

“Enough said. You might be spies.”

Randall shook his head and waved his thanks for the slender warning, but we did not pull in.

“A reception?” Shatro asked nervously.

“I think he means Calcutta isn't going to let the flatboats pass,” Randall said.

“What can they do?”

“I'd like to find out.”

Shatro started to object, but shut his mouth and lowered his head. Randall stood at the bow, glaring downriver. We all listened. Larisa moaned beneath the shade.

“We should land the woman,” Shatro said.

Randall did not seem to hear him.

“Perhaps Ser Olmy would like to get out, too,” Shatro added.

I shook my head. I was as curious as Randall to see what sort of response the town might mount.

A few shots like snapping sticks sounded down the river. We all jumped as one.

Randall told Shatro to bring the launch about and run the motor at quarter speed, letting us drift with the current, but more slowly. An island covered with pure black lizboo split the Terra Nova half a kilometer ahead. “That's where I would do it,” Randall said. “Which way ... right or left?”

“I would take my flatboats around both sides,” I said.

“Both sides flow deep,” Randall said. “But the best side is to the east, left. It's the widest. A lazy, self-assured pilot would go to the left ... And that's where I'd put my pickets and lay my traps. The Brionists are arrogant bastards, Ser Olmy. They think they know more than we do. They think we've become sheep.”

More wide-spaced shots, then a steady series of crack-crack-crack-crack, frantic shouting, a boom. A puff of smoke rose above the trees, whirling. “Left,” Randall called out, and Shatro turned the tiller to veer us east of the island.

In the silva along the left bank, men and women stood peering downriver, talking. Some waved and grinned like fools as we passed; others shouted warnings. “Skirmish ahead! Pull in!”

Randall shook his head and ignored them. Shatro was becoming more and more agitated, sweat standing out on his pale face. He stared grimly forward with his pale blue eyes as if expecting the boat to be swallowed.

We rounded a stand of lizboo on a narrow sand spit. Randall increased the turns on the motor. At less than a kilometer an hour, we descended toward the three Brionist flatboats. Nets and ropes had been strung across the river and the flatboats were caught in them. Men had been pulled off into the water by the ropes and swam around their boats, heads bobbing in the current. One man hung from a sagging rope, feet dragging in the river, dead. On the eastern bank, shots rang out from behind cover of small shacks and lizboo trunks. The men on the flatboats were returning fire as best they could, but they were exposed, and more and more of them were falling to the deck or into the water. The air filled with more cries and shouting.

From the shore came war whoops and more shots. A sizzling pipe bomb flew over the river and bounced on the deck of the leftmost flatboat, rolled into the water, and exploded, sending up a plume of spray. Another landed squarely on the cabin, rolled to the starboard side, blew up, and propelled a cloud of splinters high into the air. Yet a third landed on the middle boat and a man plucked it up to toss it away. It exploded in his hand and his arm and head vanished. On the shore, mingled cries of horror and cheers met this sight, and more cheers as the headless body crumpled and slid off the deck.

I felt a sick excitement. My stomach knotted and I clenched sweaty hands. I smelled gunpowder and burning and something else—I presumed it was blood. My skin crawled and my throat closed and I choked at the thought of breathing the vapor of somebody else's blood.

All three flatboats were hopelessly caught. From their decks now came cries of surrender, and a few men stood with hands raised, throwing their weapons into the water.

“No quarter!” someone bellowed from the shore, no doubt a student of history. Shots continued, but fewer in number. The rightmost of the flatboats was taking on water and listing badly. Other sounds came to us, muffled, like trapped animals crying out. Randall stood in the bow, brow creased. “Fates and breath,” he said. “There are prisoners in that boat.”

He walked aft, took the tiller from Shatro, swung the launch around again and propelled us at full speed down the river, directly toward the fight. Shatro scrambled to the middle of the launch. “Where are we going?” he shouted.

“That boat is going to founder,” Randall said.

Shatro sat beside Larisa, who stared straight ahead like a doll, frightened out of her wits.

The cries from inside the listing flatboat came louder now. A few bullets zizzed past our heads until voices on the banks shouted that we were not Brionists. The river was backing up behind the flatboats, fifteen meters ahead, and we began to yaw in an eddy. Randall took advantage of the eddy and steered us to the right. The rightmost flatboat, heeling onto its starboard side, suddenly threw open its cabin hatches and seemed to erupt. Heads, arms, legs poured onto the deck: children, I saw, over two dozen of them.

I could not help crying out, and Randall nodded grimly, tears on his cheeks falling in twin glittering streams. The children leaped and fell off the tilting deck into the water. A man carrying two babies lost his balance and also fell. For a moment, he held the babies up, then let them go and swam to save himself.

I thought of ants falling from a floating leaf.

The water was filled with bobbing heads: a few Brionist soldiers, but mostly children of all ages. Our boat moved in among them and Shatro and I immediately began grabbing arms, legs, heads, pulling children into the boat, five, six, eight, nine, I lost count. Larisa remained rooted to her seat, staring left and right like an antique toy. A young girl with slick wet hair climbed over her, crying out, “I know you! I know you!” and tried to hug her. Larisa pushed her away with frightened disgust.

More boats came from the shore now, dinghies and smacks and canoes. The river filled with boats.

A crouching soldier on the flatboat mechanically aimed and shot his rifle into the rescuers. As if in a dream, I watched him take aim, fire, and turned to see a splash of water beside a boat, or a man scream and grab his chest, lurching backward. The soldier's expression was calm, indifferent. I stared at him for what seemed minutes but could only have been a few seconds.

A small body came out of the water in Randall's arms and he passed it to me. I immediately laid it on the forward bench and began artificial respiration. It was a young boy. His skin was warm and his eyes open, staring. I dreaded he was already dead. But after a few of my puffed breaths he shut his eyes tight, coughed up water and vomited, and started to breathe, and then to scream and thrash. I spat the sour taste of vomit from my mouth and handed him to an older boy, who cradled him in a skinny lap.

I looked up, took another child from Shatro, and then another, and saw that our launch held too many, was in danger of tipping over itself. We had drifted with the current past the flatboats. A few men still huddled on the decks, but most had retreated within the cabins.

The soldier with the rifle had been shot and lay over the gunwale, blood dripping from his ruined head into the river.

A few shots still rang out, from the boats and from the shore, but the children were the main concern of most of the citizens.

Randall gave Shatro the tiller again and shouted at Larisa to help keep the children calm. She did not move. The launch carried perhaps twenty-five boys and girls, the youngest barely two, the oldest twelve or thirteen, all terrified, pasty white or olive green with shock. A small boy's body lay in bottom of the boat, staring with the slack empty look of the dead. The boat smelled of fear and urine and vomit. “Put in to shore,” Randall told Shatro. “Olmy, help me get these children to the port side ... to the left.” I helped rearrange five of the youngsters, moving them bodily if they were too stunned or frightened to respond.

The launch ran up onto a small black sand beach, nearly knocking me off my feet. A tall, wiry older girl fell into the water and clambered ashore on her own, hair streaming sand and water, face set with determination to stay alive and get away from the madness.

Three women and two men came out of the silva behind the beach and helped us unload the children.

“Where are they from?” a matronly, tall woman with graying hair asked. She gripped two children by their arms. One kicked his feet in the water and began to scream.

“I don't know,” Shatro answered.

“From Moonrise, perhaps,” Randall suggested.

How many villages had had their children stolen?

A man in soaked brown pants and clinging white shirt swam to the beach and stood in the shallows, lurching ashore. He glanced at us, saw we were busy tending to the children, and tried to run into the silva, but two strong young men in workits carrying large sticks blocked his path. “Who are you?” one asked him.

“I give up,” he said breathlessly.

They took him away, whacking him on the shoulders and back with their fists.

The children were led or walked on their own back into the silva, and the launch bobbed gently in the water now that it was lighter, beginning to come around stern first and pull off the beach. A single boy of five or six had stayed in the boat. He gripped the gunwale with both hands and looked over his shoulder at me.

“My name is Daniel Harrin,” he said. “My family is dead. Where do I go?”

Other than the dead boy still in the bottom, he was the last in our care. I sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder. “We'll find you a place, Daniel,” I said.

Larisa had somehow managed to get ashore, where she squatted on the sand, as helpless and useless as ever. I felt a sudden flash of hate mixed with pity for her. So many primitive emotions in one hour; I felt drained.

Randall moored the boat with a line and anchor, and stood in the water beside us, staring at me and at the boy.

“Where have we gone so wrong?” he asked.

4

Calcutta rose along the scallops and harbors of the west bank like a magnificent card castle, more lovely than I expected. Yellow and white walls rose from the surrounding red and black and pink silva. The late-afternoon sun burnished the tops of the low, planar, angular buildings like white gold. The walls merged with steps descending past level parks and warehouses to the river, where the waters slopped and slid.

As the boat cruised past the outlying sections of the city—if it could be called a city, having less than five thousand residents—I saw that most of the buildings were made of painted xyla, probably lizboo or cathedral tree. Foundations and retaining walls were concrete and granite. Of steel and plastic I saw little. Broad glass windows faced the east and the river. That meant furnaces and manufacturing.

The launch passed a few other boats. Shatro and Randall sat in the rear, Larisa back beneath the shade, and I took the bench near the bow. We had been relieved of the dead boy and we had cleaned the bottom of the boat as best we could with buckets of water and rags.

I could not clear my head of the sounds and smells. Vomit from the boy I had breathed life back into stained my shirt and pants. Parts of me still saw and analyzed, but the center of my thoughts was a numb grayness. I could not sleep yet but I wanted to fall asleep. The closest I could come to sleep was to sit on the bench and stare and try not to remember too clearly.

I had never felt strong parental instincts until I saw the children in the water. Now, behind the grayness, flashes of horror and unconditional love for the children, and animal hatred, the urge to wrap my hands around the necks of the Brionists, all came and went like lightning behind clouds.

I would have to work hard to keep my objectivity. My mission was to study Lamarckia, not to become involved in immigrant politics.

The tallest building rose from the city's center on a low hill, four rounded stories, each eccentric from a central axis, beneath cantilevered pagoda roofs and porches that to me seemed lovely if ancient: Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, I thought, a touch of Tibet, Shangri-la, trying to remember fragments of terrestrial art history that I had explored before all my memory supplements had been removed.

The missing information bothered me. I shuddered slightly, stumbling onto a lapse in some personal wisdom based on memory no longer accessible, like a missing molar. I hated that sensation. It made me feel reduced, less capable; it shook my confidence. What if I lurched into a crucial gap during an emergency?

But none of this really mattered compared to what we had just experienced.

The launch slid smoothly into a covered berth at the municipal dock. As Shatro secured the lines, I climbed out of the boat and took a deep breath, turned, and found Randall staring at me blankly. Suddenly he smiled. He looked like a wolf.

“We did some good back there,” he said. “We'll go to the court tomorrow and let them know you're here. You can stay with my family tonight.”

Larisa came out from under the shade, stiff with dignity or perhaps exhaustion. She barely looked at us. “I have family here,” she said. “I do not need your help.”

“Thomas wants you at the court,” Randall reminded her.

She nodded. “I will be there.” She glared at me. Her eyelids drew together and her face seemed full of hatred. “I do not need your help.”

We walked through the center of Calcutta to Randall's home. Shatro said his farewells and went off to his own home. He was unbonded, Randall said, and lived with an older man and woman in the Karpos neighborhood. “They raise fruits there. Pears and apples do well if you grind up lizboo parasols for fertilizer. They naturally give up the right nutrients for those trees. It's a luxury crop, but that's nothing against it.”

The courthouse, center of the district's legal proceedings, sat just below the elegant tower on Calcutta's highest hill. We walked up a long winding flight of steps lined with homes and shops. The tower, Randall said, was the Lenk Hub, seat of cross-district government and home of Lenk himself when he chose to come to Calcutta.

“It's really quite spare quarters for such a fine man,” Randall said.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Through Captain Keyser-Bach.”

The broad steps were caught in afternoon shadow, which seemed richly brown, almost golden beneath the silver sky. The city smelled of cooking food, mostly yeasty bread smells and rich molasses smells, dust from carts rolling on the busy street below, orange and tomato and spice from the silva never completely absent. Children ran laughing and shrieking down the steps beside us, boys and girls from late infancy to middle childhood, wearing red shorts and white vests with green vertical stripes, tended by a young man with a bemused look, no doubt junior husband in a triad. Otherwise, the streets were quiet, the citizens polite, their clothes muted, generally browns and grays or greens, each however with one splash of color, a scarf or sash or belt, signifying solemnity within living joy. These traditions had held up well on Lamarckia.

I was relieved that not everything had fallen into chaos. After all I had heard of famine and hardship, I was surprised that Calcutta looked prosperous and its citizens well-fed.

At the top of the stairs, in a shaded courtyard graced with a single terrestrial tree—an ash, I thought, its limbs bare, not faring very well—we turned into a narrow alley. The houses that rose on either side were made of cut reddish lava held together by dark gray cement. An anonymous xyla doorway no different from the others pushed open with a creak at Randall's touch, and we entered cool shadow.

“Randall?” a woman called eagerly. “Erwin, is that you?”

“That's me,” Randall said. He smiled shyly, the wolf look gone. “That's my wife, Raytha. Head of family. I'm an infrequent extra here.”

Randall's family totaled seven: four children, age two to twelve, two younger girls and two older boys, who flocked around him with broad smiles and big eyes, simply glad to see their father; his wife Raytha, a plump, pretty woman the same age as he; and her mother, Kaytai Kim-Jastro. Ser Kim-Jastro was tall and straight and gray and formidable, and she did not hug Randall, but instead shook his hand and welcomed him back with deep gravity.

The children gathered around me when they were finished welcoming their father. They asked where I was from and whether I was married and had any children, and why their father had brought me home with him. Randall answered the last question by saying, “He's a researcher and he's our guest. He's not used to a lot of company, so please give him some room until after dinner at least.”

The two older boys stayed to hear Randall's stories, but the younger girls went with their mother and grandmother into another room down the hall. I heard other voices in that room: a communal kitchen. Men from another family in the triad were cooking today. “Nothing fancy,” Raytha said as she walked down the hall flanked by her girls. “But it's food.”

“More gray piscids and flockweed paste,” Randall said when she had left, and confided another grimace. He led me into a room he said was his own, and his alone, but he did not object when the boys followed. This tiny cubicle had a window high in one wall to the outside, through which a cool evening breeze was blowing. A small electric lantern hung in one corner, casting a dim yellow light over shelves packed with crudely bound books.

“Father, what happened at the river?” the older of the two boys asked as we settled onto woven fiber chairs. “The teacher dismissed us early today and went to the river ... He said he was joining a committee.”

“There was a fight,” Randall said, lines growing deeper in his face. He did not like describing this to his sons.

“Did anybody get killed?” the younger boy asked. He reminded me of the boy I had saved by breathing life back into him. His eyes danced with intense interest. My stomach knotted with the remembered love and hate all over again.

“A lot of people were killed, mostly pirates,” Randall said. He did not volunteer information about the children in the boats. A bell jangled near the alleyway door and Randall got up to answer it. After a conversation of several minutes, during which time the boys sat in the room alone with me, biting their lips and staring at each other for support, but saying nothing, Randall returned.

“A representative of the citizens rank, welcoming me back,” Randall said. “Thomas radioed them from upriver. They will indeed expect us tomorrow.”

“Any more news?” the older boy asked.

“Ser Olmy, let me name these chatty ones for you,” he said, patting their heads. “This is Nebulon, and this is Carl. Carl is a year and a half younger than his brother.”

“I made my mother a little sick,” Carl said. “That's why our sisters are so new and we're not.”

“There's more news, yes,” Randall said, eyes half-closed with exhaustion. “Go help your mother and grandmother. I'll tell you later.”

“Now!” Carl insisted, but Randall gently and firmly packed them out of the room and drew the curtains once they were down the hall and out of hearing.

“There were thirty-seven children on the boat,” Randall said. “Thirty of them were saved. We had most of them in our boat. Twelve of the Brionists died and twenty were wounded. Sixty are in custody. Nobody knows what to do with them. They'll probably be sent to Athenai for Lenk to decide. We can't afford to keep them here.” He took a deep breath and lifted his arms. “Pardon me. I'm acting as if we're old friends.”

“We've been through a lot,” I said.

“But I don't know you. That's unusual around here. Most people know each other along the Terra Nova.”

“I've been a loner most of my life.”

“Because your family was proscribed?”

I put on an air of ignoring this, and Randall assumed he had touched on a sensitive issue.

“You showed real courage on the river today,” he said. “Even more than Shatro. You seem accustomed to this kind of incident.”

“I'm not,” I said, truthfully. “And I wouldn't call it courage.”

“Um.” Randall muttered and sat down in his chair, stretching his legs out in the small, close, brown, and shadowy room. “Still, you impressed me. What prospects do you have, what plans, if I may continue this ungrateful prying?”

“I need to get to Athenai at some point,” I said.

“How soon?” Randall asked.

“I'm not sure.”

“I'm asking because my partner, Captain Keyser-Bach...” He paused to gauge my reaction to that name. I pursed my lips and widened my eyes, and that seemed to satisfy him. “...And I ... are about to begin a very ambitious journey by ship. We've overcome many difficulties and many kinds of reluctance, both to get this journey financed and approved, and to find the right people to go with us.”

I saw that the name of Captain Keyser-Bach was meant to impress me, but though he had mentioned it once before, I knew nothing about this person. I decided to behave as if I were impressed. “A journey to where?” I asked.

“A circumnavigation,” Randall said. “We hope to finish the voyage Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago never completed. To Jakarta first, then to Wallace Station to pick up Ser Mansur Salap and more researchers, then across the Darwin Sea northeast to Martha's Island ... That's just the beginning. A circumnavigation from east to west. We'll end up in Athenai, but it might take us three years.”

I felt my chest tighten. “That's a grand voyage,” I said. “A scientific expedition?”

Randall cringed, and I realized my mistake too late. “The captain uses that word much too often, and in the wrong company,” he said. “For us, it is always research, and we are researchers. But it amounts to the same thing. We've studied Liz enough for the time being. She's a wonderful ecos, peaceful and nurturing, once we knew her ways, but she's a little bland and uniform for our tastes. It's time to make comparisons and draw broad conclusions. Otherwise, both the captain and I firmly believe, in time Lamarckia is going to kill us.” He lowered his voice. “We came here ignorant and unprepared, and it has taken all these decades to even begin to climb out of the hole.” Now he stared at me earnestly, large liquid eyes penetrating, measuring, still more than a little doubtful.

“Whom will you report to,” I asked, “when you've finished the voyage?”

“To Able Lenk himself,” Randall said.

I stared at my hands, almost too tired and numb to realize my fortune. Ry Ornis had truly put me at a locus of extreme interest.

“If it fits within your plans, you're welcome to interview with the captain, and I'll back you up. But no need to answer right away. We both need rest. And you have to testify tomorrow.”

“The offer is very interesting,” I said.

“That's enough for now,” Randall said, lifting his hands from the arm of the woven chair. “We should wash ourselves before dinner. We deserve a brave meal and a few glasses of wine.”

As I splashed water on my face from a ceramic bowl in a cramped washroom, I saw clearly again the Brionist soldier on the flatboat, kneeling and taking careful aim at the rescuers in their canoes and dinghies. His expression haunted me more than his death, which I did not witness. He seemed perfectly content to be killing people, even those who were not trying to kill him. He squinted one eye and aimed his pitiful rifle, as if it might be the most powerful weapon in the universe.

For the people he killed, of course, it was.

But I had seen weapons that could scour a million hectares and reduce matter to blue-violet plasma...

I looked up at the little unframed mirror on the wall and wondered just why this thought had occurred to me. The soldier on the flatboat had become a tool and this man, this dead man, had been content to be such a tool. He did not think whether it was right or wrong to shoot men and women in boats trying to save children he himself had kidnapped.

I wondered whether there was not a little of him in me. What would I do with this anger, this wish that I myself had put my hands around the man's neck and strangled him, watching his flat, contented eyes go blank and slack as the eyes of the boy in the bottom of the boat?

“Not your job,” I whispered to the image in the mirror: black hair, sharp eyes, sharp nose, large lips that seemed a little insolent even to me. “Just learn what you can, get the clavicle, go home.”

The eight of us sat down at a long lizboo table to ladle helpings from several bowls of flockweed paste and baked piscids from the river: gray-skinned mouthless fishlike creatures with translucent fringed tails, three black eye-spots, and a body about twenty centimeters long. They consisted almost entirely of ropy muscle-like proteins that were nourishing but tasteless. Various sauces concocted from a private herb garden added some zest to a very bland meal.

It was apparent within the first few minutes of dinner that Ser Kaytai Kim-Jastro thought she was the head of this branch of the triad. Randall and his wife treated her with quiet deference, and the children did likewise; but it was obvious that nobody treated her quite as well as she thought she deserved. As we settled down to eat, she picked at her food with sad dignity, like deposed royalty dreaming of past feasts. This did not seem to bother Raytha, who had not cooked the food this day, taking the family's share from the communal kitchen.

There was little talk of the action on the river. Instead, Raytha asked her husband about the journey upriver and what they had found. Randall described twelve previously uncataloged scions. “Not new ones—they don't have the marks of prototypes or test cases—but we've just never observed them and recorded them at the same time. We made a great many oxygen measurements. No signs of a fluxing.”

“Was it worthwhile, as a trip?” Raytha asked.

“I think so. Not nearly as worthwhile as the big voyage, of course ... But good exercise.”

“My husband gets restless if he spends more than a few days a month at home,” Raytha said to me cheerfully.

Randall smiled and inclined his head, as if showing modesty at some compliment. “My wife gets restless if I'm underfoot,” he responded.

“We like having Da home,” the youngest boy, Carl, said. Carl was eating very little. I found the children's faces mesmerizing. The girls in particular were enchanting—little mimics of the adult women, lisps and childish accents like music. The children in the river had affected me more deeply than I realized.

“Why are you staring at us?” the oldest girl, Sasti, asked after a few minutes.

“I've been out in the silva for so long...” I said. “Not many young, beautiful faces out there.”

“Our children are very attractive,” Raytha said proudly. “Not well-behaved all the time, but attractive.”

“Thank you, Mima,” Sasti said primly.

“Would it be polite to ask about your work?” Raytha asked me.

“Much like Ser Randall's, only less educated and much less directed. Largely a waste of two years, actually.”

Randall gave a quick warning look to Raytha, who caught it and redirected her line of questioning. “And your present plans?”

“I need to find work. I thought I would go to Athenai.”

Raytha's mother shook her head. “A snobbish town if ever there was one. Everybody bows to Able Lenk. I came here from Athenai to be with my daughter when her children were born. My husband is still there.”

“Kaytai's views are a bit harsh,” Raytha said. “She lived close to the throne too long.”

Randall said in an undertone, “Be kind. Remember, we have the funding and approval.”

“Yes, well, it took Good Lenk seven years to give it to you,” Kaytai said. “I don't fear spies. I know Lenk doesn't go in for them, for one thing—this is not a police state, and I give him credit where it's due—and besides, Ser Olmy does not have the look of an informer.”

“I wouldn't know who to talk to,” I said. “I don't know much about politics in Athenai.”

“It's a political town, but that's hardly abnormal,” Kaytai continued. “Few criticize Good Lenk, even when there is much to criticize. If more criticism had been given at the beginning, perhaps we wouldn't have experienced so much hardship and tragedy.”

“The crossing through the Way was very difficult to arrange,” Raytha said with a hint of piety. “So I understand, of course. I hadn't been born.”

“Tell us more about Thistledown and the Way, Granmee,” Nebulon said, but she ignored him. “I was an adult,” Kaytai said. “I should have known what I was getting into. But living in Thistledown was a dream of luxury and we weren't prepared. Nobody knew what to expect. Least of all did we know we'd be turned into baby machines.”

That phrase again.

“Law of nature,” Randall said dryly.

“Easy for men to say,” Kaytai continued, warming to her subject. “And for Lenk to expect of us. And we agreed! It sounded dramatic and powerful, to become mothers to a new and cleaner society. But what happened on the river today—was that clean or honorable?”

“What the defenders did was honorable,” Raytha said, cheeks pinking. She glanced at Randall, but he was used to his in-law, apparently, and was studiously taking no offense.

“Did you see all bravery and no foolishness, Ser Olmy?” Kaytai asked.

“I saw bravery and a lot of foolishness,” I said.

“A lot of foolishness, that's true enough. We need to be brave with so much foolishness.” She sat silent for a while, and we finished the dinner with little but the chatter of the children. Nebulon described Thistledown and the Way for me, and Carl added telling details. They thought it was a fabulous place, full of cold pounding machines and people who no longer looked like people.

Kaytai picked up where she had left off as herb tea was served. “I remember Thistledown well,” she said. “Nobody else here remembers it at all.”

“I was three years old,” Randall said. “Not very clear memories.”

“It was not what Lenk portrays, nor what Carl and Nebulon make up. It was not a corrupting place of technological hubris. It was wonderfully comfortable and fulfilling. I did not realize it at the time. I was a young idealist. My husband was a devoted follower of Good Lenk. Everything my husband believed, I believed. And for his sake, I crossed. Three of my children died in the first three years. I bore those children in misery and pain and they died. On Thistledown their births would have been much easier, and they would not have died...”

“The price we paid was high,” Raytha said softly, sipping from her ceramic cup and staring at the top of the table. “But we've gained a beautiful world, a young world.”

She seemed embarrassed by her mother's talk, but was not going to cut it short. I wondered how much she agreed with it—and how much Randall agreed, and how much the general population of immigrants resented the difficulties of the past few decades.

“How many worlds have been opened in the Way by now? Almost forty years! We might have each found a paradise...”

Kaytai thought that time passed on Thistledown as it did here.

“But we hated the technology. We feared it. We feared it so much we left most of it behind, even the machines that would have kept our children alive. Everything fell upon the women. Making babies and watching them die. The old ways, forgotten by all of us. We were not prepared for them. I remember.”

“The Way was monstrous,” Raytha said.

“Lenk used the Way, didn't he?” Kaytai said.

“Mother, our guest has had a very difficult day ... And so has Erwin. We should find other things to talk about.”

“The day's difficulties are part of what I ... I can't even begin to express. Someday it will all be set right, but I do not know how. I apologize, Ser Olmy, if I've upset you.”

“Not upset at all,” I said.

Kaytai gave me the first smile I had seen on her face. “I'd like to tell you about Thistledown, sometime,” she said. “You're much too young to remember, and there's so much distortion of the facts. I remember the way it really was. When I was a girl, before I met my husband...”

Randall and Raytha prepared a cot for me in the study. “Feel free to consult the books,” Randall said.

“We often have scholars stay with us,” Raytha said. “Randall likes to show off his library.”

“Not many as good outside of Athenai or Jakarta,” Randall said. “Almost everything known about Lamarckia.” He shook his head ruefully. “Obviously, there's a lot left to learn.”

The family retired a few minutes later, and the apartment fell quiet. My exhaustion had passed, and I sat up on the cot, wide awake. I had the entire evening ahead of me while the family slept.

Fingers tapped lightly on the frame beside the drawn curtain. I pulled the curtain aside. Kaytai stood in the hall, fingers to her lips, gray eyes glistening in the dark. “You seem sympathetic,” she said. “I get so little sympathy here. Oh, there's much love, but nobody seems to understand.”

Irritated that I might have less time to study the slate or the books, I pulled the curtain aside and invited her in.

“I do feel I have something to tell,” she said stiffly, glancing at the walls of books with no interest whatsoever. “Erwin will take you away tomorrow and I'll probably not have another chance.

“You spent two years in the silva. I have no doubt you found it fascinating and maybe even beautiful. It is beautiful, I can't deny that. But on Thistledown, there were chambers filled with terrestrial forests, animals, insects ... Rich and dense and complete. When I was a girl we would spend weeks in the forests, and unless we looked up into the sky, we could pretend we were back on Earth ... Lovely, lovely places.

“My husband told me Lamarckia would be a paradise. He assured me Lenk knew everything, and that we would live in pristine wilderness never visited by humans. I don't think even he understood what that would mean. Lenk told us to procreate. I spent the first ten years here having babies and watching most of them die. Raytha was my fourth, and the first to live. The soil was poor in cobalt and selenium and magnesium. None of our crops grew properly. We didn't know which things to eat on Lamarckia. The food was wrong. Adults became sick as well, but not as often as the children. Their little bodies didn't seem to know how to fit in. Those were terrible times ... We suffered diseases never known on Thistledown. We were not prepared.”

Raytha stood in the doorway. “Mother,” She said gently. “Please. Our guest is very tired.”

“I just wanted to tell him,” Kaytai said.

“I'm sorry, Ser Olmy,” Raytha said, putting her arm around her mother's shoulder. She turned her head to look at me. “I don't disagree with my mother, but there are better times to talk. And we haven't even asked what your views are.”

“He's young,” Kaytai said. “He should know. Who will tell him?”

Raytha drew the curtain and the apartment became quiet again.

I took Nkwanno's slate from the backpack. The walls of books were too formidable. High-level texts, papers written by researchers for other researchers. I had to prepare myself with basic knowledge before I tackled them. But by morning, I had to be ready for further conversations with Randall and with his friend, the important and well-known Captain Keyser-Bach.

I studied Nkwanno's personal files again, trying to piece together the clues to unravel his code. There were many bookmarks in texts by Henry David Thoreau, laid in with quotes from Henry Place, the head ecologist during the construction of Thistledown. I tried combinations of these names and of various titles as keys, without success. Then, half by accident, I found a highlighted passage from Thoreau:

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

After the quote, a laid-in note from Nkwanno: “Thoreau has the Earth in him. ‘Unless you know where you are, you don't know who you are.'”

“Place,” I thought. “Rabbits, partridges. Place ... Country. Thoreau. Rabbits...”

Thoreau has the Earth in him. Not had, but has.

I tapped the slate against my knee, getting more and more irritated. It was right in front of me. I knew it...

Earth. Thoreau.

I saw the letters, and matched them name to name. Thoreau did indeed contain Earth, with O and U left over. UO. OU. Ou. I checked the dictionaries in the slate for O and U and U and O. Ou, the slate told me, was French for where. “Unless you know where you are, you don't know who you are.” That was a quote from a twentieth-century author named Wendell Berry, often used by citizens of Thistledown.

The slate's simple computer was tracking my searches, a small icon revealed. I felt as if Nkwanno watched over my shoulder as I riddled his little puzzle.

I keyed in, “Earth. Where. Place. Thoreau. Berry.”

A box suddenly popped up on the screen of the slate. “Do you know the place where Thoreau is buried?”

I entered, ‘"Earth.'”

The box wrote in new text:

“Thoreau is in the Earth. The Earth is in Thoreau. But where is Thoreau buried?”

I went to the old Greater Starship Encyclopedia that had come as standard issue with these slates when they had been made—reproductions of twentieth-century antiques—for divaricates on Thistledown. The slate had lasted all these years; I wondered how many twentieth-century batteries had been brought with the immigrants, for their special humble slates, but there was no place to remove batteries and replace them. As I searched the encyclopedia for entries on Thoreau, I realized that the slates must have been equipped with contemporary power supplies, which could last centuries. Divaricates often made such choices, after careful consideration with their philosophical leaders. The usual dispensation for modern technology was given following the phrase, “The Good Man would have approved of this, for it is human-centered and does not make us less than what we are.”

I could not disagree that Nkwanno's slate was human-centered.

There was no specific answer as to where Thoreau was buried in the encyclopedia, or anywhere else in the slate's references, but it did say that he had last lived in Boston. I keyed in, “'Boston, Massachusetts.'”

“Access given,” the slate replied.

I now had Nkwanno's personal journals open to me. I remembered his smooth, musical conversation, when I had met him as a child on Thistledown, and even then, his keen intellect had impressed me. I knew I would find some of the perspective and clues I needed.

I began with entries from more than thirty Lamarckian years before:

Crossing 4. Fall 67.

Much discussion today about Lenk's plan to formalize our search for edible scions. From his perch in Jakarta, Lenk listens to his various lieutenants, and suddenly realizes how hungry we at the edge of the human territories are ... Everybody is hungry. The crops do not grow fast enough, nor in sufficient quantity. Harvests are poor. The soil is metal-poor, and that includes trace minerals. We eat scions in desperation, and some of us have sickened and died. We know that whitehats—so we have named the slow, flat, three-cornered scions that walk on their downturned tips—are not edible, yet two of Moonrise's children have died in the last week trying to eat one.

Some successes. For a long time, we have trimmed mat fiber from low-growth broadfan epidendrids, which prosper near Moonrise, and used it as a kind of tea and in making fabric. Chewing it provides some satisfaction—it contains a mild elevant, not yet isolated by our chemists—but little nutrition. The most successful food we've discovered so far is a pulpy paste made from the thick pelt of purple and red tendrils on the so-called asparagus phytid. The pelt regrows quickly, the paste tastes like mild fish, and it provides substantial protein. No one has yet analyzed all the phytids, and it is likely that some of what we eat may hurt us later—but for now, hunger rules, especially in places like Moonrise, on the edge of Lenk's domain.

Crossing 7. Spring 78.

The first two years after Able Lenk brought us all here, I remember the silva would sing every night. It sang a gentle whistling, whooping song, the arborids drawing air through slits on parasol leaves, other scions making their own unique sounds, like instruments in an orchestra. Nobody knew why the silva sang. It just did, and we accepted it, and grew used to it.

But as the years passed, the nightsong declined. Some nights, the silva would produce only a few scattered sounds, haunting and lonely. Some nights there would be no singing at all. Now, the silva sings perhaps once every ten days. I think I understand why it sings, but I do not know why it does so less frequently.

The ecos must have many ways to keep track of its scions. We have seen speeders on their accustomed trails through the silva, like three-legged greyhounds, zipping between the phytids and arborids at speeds up to thirty kilometers an hour. We know some of the paths of gliders and avids, who swoop above the silva. I believe (and I'm not alone) that all of these creatures play a role in the ecos's internal communication. Like messengers, they carry information ... perhaps about conditions in the south, or the north, about intrusions from other zones, or just general gossip. They carry them somewhere. Something listens, considers, contemplates...

Or so I hope. I would like to meet the heart and mind of an ecos. I have many questions to ask of her—or it.

Crossing 8. Spring 43.

Today saw a herd of parasol sweepers, like great two-headed giraffes, pushing through the silva half a kilometer outside Moonrise and a few dozen meters from the river. Infrequently see them in daylight, and never in such numbers, and of such size—one was tall enough to touch the brushes of a cathedral tree! I wondered if the ecos was reassigning them to another region. They move on three parallel tracks, like the feet of slugs. On close inspection (when Hilaire killed a small one by accident with a tractor one night) each track reveals itself as a parade of thousands of sucker-tipped feet, each no more than an inch long, yet supporting the weight of these creatures large as Earth's dinosaurs ... And bearing them some resemblance.

They do not ingest—I hesitate to say “eat"—the parasols or fan-leaves unless the stalks have been injured—perhaps by wind—or are otherwise not functioning. When we first arrived, some of us thought these were herbivores, as we might expect on an Earth savanna or in a jungle. Now we know much more about them, yet not nearly enough.

Also today saw many whitehats feeding from a lizboo, like aphids on a rose stem. They remained there for hours, but usually feed in a few seconds, then leave. No one knows what purpose the whitehats serve.

Received a package of documents from Jakarta today. The reconvened Research Standards convention has finally decided on classifications and nomenclature for Lamarckian biology. We must deviate substantially from old terrestrial standards, for obvious reasons.

There seems to be no higher classification than an ecos. Ecoi will be described and defined by geographic location or the name of the discoverer, and a zone number (e.g., Elizabeth's Zone or Zone One). Determination of boundaries and proof of relationship to an ecos will depend on observations and genetic analysis, the latter still crude and uncertain. Observation seems to be the principal and most reliable method for the time being.

Clades within ecoi come next. Arborids or treelike clades, phytids, annulids, polygonids, etc., define these groups of scions. Next come related scions, or forms, that vary little in design. Thus, whitehats are classified as Elizabethae Polygonon Trigonichos.

No doubt the classifications and nomenclature will change and improve, but at least we have reached some agreement on how to begin.

I skipped ahead, scrolling rapidly through the hundreds of pages of text:

Crossing 22. Winter 34.

My wife has been dead for almost twenty years, and l have not remarried. I began this journal when she died. Women have borne the brunt of our coming to Lamarckia. We live our philosophies with a vengeance now, and deep are the hurts and regrets. Some say deeper still the satisfactions. But I remember my wife, and her gentle ways, and the dismay on her face at the pain of birthing our first child. I felt so much pain myself, that my lust, my insistence, should put her in this state. There was of course her recovery and joy after ... But I can't help but think the women look back on our time in Thistledown, and feel regret at what they left behind. It is because of their true courage that they don't complain more.

My wife's time came far too early. Something failed within her, and she just died. Death can arrive a simple friend for those who die. It is never simple for those who survive.

Crossing 23. Summer 7.

With the village children from the Lenk School, I have walked through the silva. We have captured scions and brought them back to the school for study, always releasing them within a few hours. The most poignant capture for me was last week. William Tass Fenney, age eight, found a small six-legged transporter with seven young phytids. At this early stage, Elizabeth's phytids—especially the smaller ones we call sprouts—are little more than blobs of dark gray or purple gelatin the size of a finger, filled throughout with tiny white threads. William brought the transporter back to our school in a cart. We looked at the wriggling bowl with its leathery lid, and at the young phytids within, and made our notes. I then told William to take it back to where he had found it, and he said, “But I don't remember where that was.”

We tried to walk back along some trail into the silva, but William had left few marks, and his cart's wheel tracks had vanished in the springy soil. Finally, with less and less of the day to spare, and lessons on other subjects beginning soon, we placed the transporter and its cargo on the silva floor. It turned in a circle several times, emitted a small sigh, and fell to the ground. Then it dumped its load of phytids. They lay like finger-sized worms, wriggling on the dark, clumpy earth.

Angela called from the school building, so I took the children back, but vowed to return as soon as I could. A few hours later, I found the transporter in a morbid condition, and all the young phytids desiccated and crumbling.

We had interfered with the transporter's simple instructions, or removed it from a track scented or otherwise marked, and replaced it where it did not belong.

I think often of that carrier. What of our own children, removed from their track?

Crossing 25. Winter 15.

Joseph Visal visits again from Calcutta. He came from Athenai and arrived in Calcutta just yesterday, then took the Wednesday boat immediately to Moonrise. We have spent many hours the past evenings catching up. In the daytime he travels with his researcher friends farther south along the river, but they always return by dusk. I fear none of them are more than dilettantes. But they take joy in their small discoveries, some of which may be valuable...

He brings more details of the attempted assassination of Able Lenk, news of which horrified us all two weeks ago, when we first heard it on the radio. The would-be-assassin belongs to the Gaians, a group much rumored and about which little has ever been learned, making me think perhaps they are more legend than fact; but this would-be-assassin, Daw Tone Kunsler, whom I have never met, claims to be of them. Joseph tells me that the Gaians are active everywhere, and know each other by secret signs.

Quaint. We left Thistledown to create a new kind of heaven, and instead find ourselves on roads to old, insipid hells.

Joseph also brings word that Lenk is approving a new research program, against the advice of his counselors, particularly Allrica Fassid, a small woman who is a formidable adversary. For once Lenk does not listen to her. The program will be called the Lamarckian Year, and all communities will participate—by which they must mean allocate resources to some central distribution point. There will be much protest. Our resources are still scarce, though the famine has passed.

I suppose we may sacrifice a tractor and send it to Athenai.

A new exploring expedition will begin, led by Baker and Shulago, two of my former students at Jakarta. They are brilliant but argumentative and I fear they may not be good leaders.

After a dozen entries in Nkwanno's journal, I went to the shelves of books and found two thick volumes, introductory texts that were not filled with technical terms and words I could not easily cross-reference. They would serve well enough as introductions to what the immigrants knew about Lamarckia, or at least about Liz.

I read all that night, until just before dawn, when I grew restless and my muscles began to cramp. As in Thistledown, there were no locks on the doors. I stole out quietly and walked north up the alley. I needed to see Calcutta alone and think about what I had read.

I had not counted on the profound darkness of Calcutta in the early-morning hours. No electric lights burned along the alley or on the streets outside, and only a few were visible on the hills below. Clouds had moved in over the river delta and not even the starlight helped. I felt my way back down the alley, counting doors, fingers scuffing rough lava brick and the grain of the lizboo in the door posts and doors, until I came back to what I thought must be Randall's.

With some relief, I lay on my cot in the library and considered all the simple things I would have to learn.

5

Randall accompanied me the half kilometer from his house to the court building below the Lenk Hub. We passed through a crowd of angry, curious citizens. Some of them recognized Randall and me from the engagement on the river and clapped us on our backs, expressing their thanks and congratulations. We came to a cordon of court security guards, and the officer in charge checked our names and let us through.

Outside the main courtroom, a group of five citizens rank, two grim-faced older men and three women past childbearing years, greeted us stiffly. Before hearing our testimony, they were taking a short break in the annex, standing in their dark gray robes and sipping mat fiber tea. They had been busy since dawn that morning ruling on how and when to send the captured Brionists to Athenai for Lenk's disposition.

Larisa Strik-Cachemou sat on a bench nearby, alone and silent.

The last of the Brionists to be arraigned that day were led out of the court as we arrived, seven men and a woman, all wearing the clothes they had worn the day before though dried and cleaned for them, all trussed neck to neck and foot to foot with thick ropes. Iron and steel were too valuable for chains, and I suspected there was little need for chains in Calcutta.

The crowd outside began to shout and jeer as the prisoners came in sight. Their guards guided them swiftly down an open alley and away from the hub complex.

A few minutes after we arrived, the disciplinary Elevi Bar Thomas and two of his deputies walked into the annex. Thomas nodded at Randall, Larisa, and me, and walked closer. “I hear we both had a skirmish,” he said. “We met the three flatboats snagged above Calcutta. They passed us upriver. A few shots were fired, but we knew we couldn't stop them.”

“Did you wait for the other boats?” Randall asked.

“Until last night. Then I decided it was useless and we came back to Calcutta.”

Randall was not impressed by this story, but he did not say anything critical.

“The citizens did well here,” Thomas said. “I wish I could have been here to help them.”

After five minutes, the clerk announced the citizens rank would reconvene. Randall excused himself and invited me to come down to the Vigilant at the docks after and meet Captain Keyser-Bach. The rest of us moved into an interior, windowless room, brightly illuminated by electric incandescents. Here the city smells lapsed into mustiness and stale air. The citizens rank took five chairs on a low dais. Thomas stood beside them, facing Larisa and me. Larisa rose from her cot and sat gingerly on a chair.

“What are her injuries?” asked the eldest woman with a sympathetic tone. Her name was Sulamit Faye-Chinmoi. Small, lean-faced, her hands wrinkled and bones showing in fine ridges beneath ivory skin, she focused her attention on Larisa, brow wrinkled in concern.

“Grief and shock,” Larisa replied sharply. “Betrayal.”

“Exhaustion,” Thomas added. “Days without food.”

“Are you strong enough to tell your story?”

Larisa rolled her eyes and clenched her jaw muscles. “I've told already. It hurts to chew on it again and again.”

“We understand,” the eldest woman said. “Do you recognize me, Larisa Strik-Cachemou?”

“No,” Larisa said.

“I married you to your husband ten years ago.”

“Then I curse you,” Larisa said.

The woman drew back in some surprise. “We should identify ourselves formally,” she said. One by one, the citizens rank gave their names and residences in the city. The youngest male, a broad-hipped, narrow-shouldered man with a pinched, nosy face and searching, deep-set eyes, said he was from Jakarta, servant in courtesy to Calcutta by rank exchange. His name was Terence Ry Pascal, and he seemed particularly interested in me.

“Please tell your story to us,” said a tall, long-fingered man with thick black hair and large blue eyes, Kenneth Du Chamet of south city, a farmer. “And remember, under the creed of the Good Man and Lenk's law, every citizen speaks before a legally convened five as if sworn under sacred oath.”

“The oath assumed that none should ever feel free to lie,” I remembered. That I would almost certainly violate this brought a sudden and unexpected pang.

Larisa gave her testimony slowly, painfully. She drew herself upright in her chair several times as she told of her husband's meeting with the Brionists and of his leaving with them two seasons before. Then she spoke of the boats that returned and of the Brionist soldiers—she used the old term of disdain, soldaters, created just after the Death ten centuries before—and her words hissed forth like air from a deflating balloon. Weak, exhausted, she slumped in the chair, face twisted and wet with tears.

“The mayor turned down the representative of General Beys. I hid when they came. I knew they would do bad things.”

Drawing herself up again, she spoke of searching the village, finding no one alive, hiding again for a time, then wandering to the river to wait for boats. There she had found the last victims, Nkwanno, her cousin Gennadia, and the other two. Then she described my appearance on the dock. “He came out of nowhere. Everything he said was a lie.”

She asked forcefully why the boats had not come earlier.

Faye-Chinmoi said in reedy tones, “Because your village was not missed until radios went unanswered for a day and a half. Normally boats go there from Calcutta once every five days.”

“We've explained this to her,” Thomas said in an undertone.

“Don't condescend to me! I am a thinking human being!” Larisa erupted, rising. I looked away, feeling a quick flush on my cheeks—distress at her distress, at this whole proceeding. Why did these people affect me so? I felt as if I were looking back nine centuries in time, to the Recovery; falling into an older kind of history, the adolescence of humanity, with all its snares and barbs.

“And your story, Ser Olmy?” Kenneth du Chamet asked. “Your name and location, please. And remember—”

“The oath assumed,” I said. “My name is Olmy Ap Datchetong, of Jakarta by birth.”

“And how did you come to Moonrise?”

“I walked. I've been studying in the silva.”

“Ser Thomas indicates in his report that you claim to have been in the silva for two years. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Under what grant or institution?”

“On my own.”

“And how were you qualified for such research?” asked Faye-Chinmoi.

I looked puzzled. I certainly did not want to answer unnecessary questions.

“Your education.”

“I don't see how that's important,” I said.

The woman leaned back, glanced at her colleagues, then leaned forward again. “You must have gone to an institution after Lenk schooling.”

“No,” I said. “I'm an independent.” I walked on loose ground. How had divaricate society changed since Lenk brought them here? Were independents—those who chose to avoid formal schooling—still tolerated?

“Did you witness the attack?” Faye-Chinmoi asked.

“No.”

“Did you hear it while it happened?”

“I was several kilometers from the river.”

Larisa stood again, a length of hair falling into her eyes. “He couldn't have been in the silva for more than a few hours. I saw a sampler bite him. And he called it a forest.”

Du Chamet looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. “We must focus on the village and incidents surrounding the attack,” he said.

They questioned me for another hour. Thomas listened carefully to my answers, no doubt weighing them against what I had already told him.

“I don't feel as if we've gotten the whole truth here,” Faye-Chinmoi said after the end of testimony. “However, there is no evidence linking anyone other than boatloads of renegades who may or may not be Brionists, and the only immediate witness to that effect is Ser Larisa Strik-Cachemou, and perhaps this Kimon Giorgios, if he can be found. I understand that Ser Olmy took part in the skirmish with the Brionist flatboats, and helped to save most of the children from the boat that sank. We express our gratitude to you, Ser Olmy. You are free to go, but we request you stay in Calcutta and make yourself available for further testimony, until we release you of that obligation. We have to report to Athenai and Jakarta by radio. We are damnably spread out on this planet, as a bureaucracy.” She sniffed.

Larisa had fixed her gaze on me for some minutes now.

“I think,” du Chamet said, “that we're going to have to become much more efficient soon. This is the ninth such raid on Elizabeth's Land, and by far the worst, although the first in our district. The north coast towns have been taking the brunt. They are more accessible than towns and villages along the Terra Nova.”

Sulamit Faye-Chinmoi concluded: “For the first time, we have a number of prisoners to use in negotiations. I don't know what good they'll do us, but if Brion's General Beys is in desperate need of children, how much more desperate will he be for trained soldiers?”

“Who will protest to the Brionists?” Thomas asked.

The citizens rank glanced at each other, then du Chamet said, “I'll report to the district administer through the mayor's radio. We'll ship the prisoners to Athenai tomorrow.”

Thomas followed me to the bottom of the steps and the main street leading from the river to west Calcutta. I saw tall poles in the direction of the river, rising between a gap in a row of shops. Yards and rigging crossed the poles—masts, I realized. Sailing ships in the main harbor. A fair number of them, judging by the number of masts. That was where I would meet Randall. For some reason not clear to me—a kind of instinct—I did not want to explain all this to Thomas.

“Where to now, Ser Olmy?” he asked.

“I'm supposed to stay here,” I said. “That was my impression...”

Thomas closed one eye and smoothed his crown's short-cut stubble with a thick, strong hand. “But what will you do here?”

“When I'm free, continue with my studies.”

“You will wait?” Thomas seemed doubtful. “You won't just vanish back into the silva?”

“I don't seem to satisfy you, Ser Thomas. Not that you're alone. My poor mother had higher hopes for me.”

Thomas acknowledged the shadow wit with a nod and a small smile. “My mother wanted me to be a farmer. I preferred keeping an eye on people, making sure they were all right. Well, I haven't done much of that recently. In truth, Ser Olmy, you've shown more courage than I have.” Thomas straightened and clasped his hands in front of him, stretched his arms and shrugged his shoulders. “Cause no harm, eh, Ser Olmy? That's what I ask of you while you're here.”

I smiled and held out my hand. Perhaps because of his suspicions, I liked Thomas. He reminded me of instructors I had had in Defense School. He took my hand and shook it firmly.

“No harm,” I said.

Thomas stared after me as I walked away. When I had gone half a dozen meters, he said, voice raised only slightly, “You are not what you say you are, Ser Olmy. I don't know what your purpose is, but I hope to,”

I wanted to see more of Calcutta before I met up again with Randall. I doubted that I would get lost in bright daylight. I strode down the stone-paved streets, walking north between shops and the blank fronts of houses painted white and light gray and yellow, smelling the dust and pervasive odor of lizboo like dry dusty ginger. I walked beside a long straight road flanked by freestanding houses, well-maintained frame structures whose porches and decks had been allowed to weather to a natural wheaten color, the black edges and stoma-marks of lizboo exterior layers inlaid in simple floral patterns.

No street signs were evident, and no maps; Calcutta was not built for strangers. I ate lunch in a small, dark restaurant at the end of the main north-south street. The cook and waiter, a thin young woman who kept her gaze on the brightness of the single small window, described the menu to me: three kinds of grain bread they had baked that morning, Liz cherries and hookvine paste—both from epidendrids, forms aclenophora and ampelopsis—and fried flockweed patties. I ordered patties and bread and a single Liz cherry. She looked at my ticket for a long moment, frowned, and walked off to get my food.

The bread was chewy, like sponge, but tasted good. The Liz cherry was extremely tart with the characteristic bitter undertaste of all phytid fruit. Some phytids created nutritional packets for mobile scions on long journeys, and these were generally what passed as fruit in Elizabeth's zone. Liz cherries were one of the most common. They were not highly nutritious, but contained usable sugars, some vitamins, and few allergens or toxins.

After eating, I stopped by a small park overlooking the river and sat on a stone bench. I took out Nkwanno's slate and returned to a history of the years just after the Crossing.

“Among some who came with Lenk to Lamarckia,” the history continued,

a substantial conspiracy arose. Where it began, and how large it was when it began, is not known; but it is assumed it began in Thistledown, and there were eventually several hundred of the conspirators who joined Lenk's secret expedition. They regarded Lamarckia as an opportunity all their own. They would follow Lenk, they would pretend fealty, but they had their own plans and goals.

Upon arriving in Lamarckia, this conspiracy had no strength. Its parts and individuals could not agree on specific goals. Lamarckia, they thought, would be theirs, but which of the splinters would grow the new tree, none could decide. What was decided almost from the beginning, apparently, was Lenk's unsuitability to rule.

Yet within a few years of the Crossing, most of the splinters gave up their grand plans, discouraged by the extreme difficulty of maintaining conspiracies within a grander and much-divided conspiracy.

The last of the splinters, and the most persistent, was the most hidden and thoroughly disguised. For there soon arose a faction that had no Naderite leanings whatsoever. Technophilic, aristocratic, the Urbanists followed a persuasive woman named Hezebia Hoagland, who quickly professed Geshel teachings. Hoagland believed in the necessity of female control of technology. “Only through knowledge can women rise above patriarchy,” she proclaimed. “Naderites, and particularly Lenk's divaricates, have tried to return us to patriarchal servitude: to keep us constantly pregnant, in order to populate a new world with babies in the most primitive conditions imaginable; quite against the teachings of their supposed mentor, the Good Man Nader. Who was, of course, a man...”

Hoagland took seventy-seven followers—twenty men and fifty-seven women—and crossed the Darwin Sea to Hsia. There, on a rugged coastline, they found a relatively sheltered harbor and began a settlement in conditions far cruder and more primitive than those at Jakarta or the newly founded Calcutta. Initially, the settlement was called Godwin.

At Godwin, conditions improved very quickly, and population grew at a rate double that of the settlements on Elizabeth's Land. Some have said that the Godwinians took charge of secretly smuggled advanced medical equipment—or the resources for making such equipment—allowing ex utero births.

Soon, the hopes of many of the discouraged turned to Godwin, a golden land across the sea, where conditions—so it was said—were ideal, where no one starved, and where technological harmony with the zones of Hsia had been achieved without predation upon scions. Here, it was claimed, vast tracts of land left open by the ecoi, unused, were “ceded” to human farming, and “seeded” with fast-growing grains.

By this time, grainlands had been cleared in Tasman, and Able Lenk had moved his government to the newly founded port of Athenai to oversee food production. But the attractions of Hsia and Godwin were immense. Four hundred and five women and ninety-three men shipped across the Darwin, causing crises in Calcutta and Jakarta.

The remaining splinter groups finally united behind a strong and able leader, born on Lamarckia, named Emile Brion. A quondam ecologist with some training in agriculture, Brion early in life showed a remarkable talent to convince and organize. This attracted the attention of Lenk's assistants, who could not, however, recruit him to Able Lenk's cause. Some say pressure was applied that Brion deeply resented.

At age twenty (Lamarckian years), Brion traveled in secret (some say in female disguise) to Godwin.

I looked up from the slate and watched part of a triad family walk through the park: two fathers with their respective wives; three girls and two boys in late infancy; and two adolescents, one boy and one girl. Most adults dressed in dull clothes with bright sashes or scarves, and most children in happy tatters of play clothes.

I felt a wave of homesickness for the parks of Thistledown, and wondered if I would ever serve as father in a triad, or have any children at all.

One of the fathers, the younger of the two, limped. He walked on one leg with a hip-swing motion that showed it was a centimeter shorter. He had been injured and the injury had been imperfectly repaired.

The family passed, self-absorbed. The man with the limp had survived his injury and adapted to it. Perhaps they simply took these last few peaceful years as relaxation between challenges, a time to walk in parks and raise children. Life was made of challenges and distortions.

What Brion and his acolytes found in the secret and largely closed society of Godwin was chaos. By fiat of Hoagland, more females than males had been born. Hoagland believed that a society consisting of nine women to every man would be ideal. She wrote that women who lived together in harmony could do quite well with many fewer men. Oddly, most of the men in Godwin did not object.

After five years of comparative peace, the plan went awry when several hundred young women, led by a young engineer named Caitla Chung, formed their own political group, calling themselves the True Sisters. The True Sisters disapproved of what they referred to as the Matriarchy, claiming it reduced all women to workers, giving them no say in the character of the children they raised, not to mention no way to exercise natural urges and desires.

A kind of religious rebellion occurred, instigated by the True Sisters—none of them older than eighteen—perhaps with Brion's help. Hoagland committed suicide, though some claim she was murdered. Both men and women dismantled—some say destroyed—the advanced machines, and perhaps also the miniature factories that could be used to make more machines.

The fields went unharvested, and starvation became widespread in the land of alleged plenty.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and eyes, then went to a stone fountain and dipped water to drink. The water I drank tasted sweet and pure; even if there was contamination from human sewage, it wouldn't matter. All remaining human disease had been eradicated on the Thistledown during the first years of the journey, long before my birth. Mutation of microorganisms into potential disease-causing forms had been eliminated by supplements implanted in all children—even divaricate children—during infancy. The Good Man had never disapproved of immunization, and these supplements were, so orthodox Naderites ruled, merely elaborate forms of immunization.

What mutation of bacteria and viruses that occurred in such a small population as inhabited Lamarckia would easily be handled by these supplements and by natural defenses. The reservoirs of disease were simply not there. Whether Lamarckia's living things could produce disease—or could be infected by human pathogens—was still an open question, but most experts thought it unlikely.

The human pathogens of Lamarckia were cultural and philosophical, not biological.

I searched the slate, trying to find updates of the last ten years, but there was nothing more about Brion and Hsia. Apparently Brion had renamed Godwin, calling it Naderville.

My ignorance felt like a deadly itch I could not scratch fast enough.

I walked to a bare stretch of dirt surrounding a half-dead elm tree. Digging my fingers through the tough, hard-packed soil, peering at the grains in my palm, I found bits of fiber, grains of black sand, a dry dark powder—but none of the living vibrancy of the dirt in the silva.

Clearly, this was human ground.

The sky grayed again in the afternoon and a gentle rain fell.

The showers stopped and the clouds passed, blowing slowly eastward. I walked along the waterfront, past long covered docks and warehouses, stone and concrete steps.

I shouldered my rucksack and walked beside the brick and stone wall, through which steps broke every fifty meters to lead down to the water. In a small building near the main warehouses, adolescent boys and girls in ill-fitting black uniforms stood in rows, listening to a large man with beefy arms and fists like gnarled tree roots explain riverboat handling and sailing skills. Seven small boats and a ten-meter single-masted yacht were moored near the building alongside short floating piers. I stopped to listen for a moment, until the large man noticed my presence, then moved on.

A riverside market was just closing for the day. A few men with a wagon traded the last of their terrestrial produce to a vendor cleaning out a stall.

I saw river catch in the buckets and on tables covered with mostly melted ice: small silvery “smelty piscids” from zone five; river celery, purple tubes as thick as my arm; piles of apple-sized shining balls the color of unbaked bread, called, reasonably enough, lumpfruit. From my reading I knew that these came from dashers, scions that crossed large tracts of Liz for purposes unknown, but which supplied themselves with lumpfruit along the way. Where the lumpfruit originated, or whether the dashers actually made them, was not known.

Coming into the margin of the main harbor, separated from the Terra Nova by a curving wall, I saw the two Brionist flatboats tied up. Tractors and other equipment were being offloaded on ramps and with small cranes. Farther along, the largest ship in port was a full-rigged vessel about forty meters long, with three masts and two cylindrical slatted windmills for generating power. Two gangplanks linked the ship with the pier, and men carried boxes along the planks, loading them onto the ship. More sailing ships—three-masted schooners, barques, a small ketch, all with elegant sharp prows, all wide in the beam—lay at anchor. One of these ships, a barque with a single low, large canvas windmill mounted astern, glowed along its rigging and rails with hundreds of little electric lights, and, as if that might not be enough, additional gas lanterns hissed port and starboard.

As I watched from the dockside, a sailor walked along the deck, extinguishing the lanterns. She walked aft, reached into a box, and the electric lights went out.

I smiled in anticipation. Here at last was something I thought I might be competent to handle. I had sailed many times in the fourth chamber waterways on Thistledown and had studied sailing ships extensively for this mission, clued by the informer's description of travel and commerce. I knew the nautical terms—what I did not know was which terms the immigrants had retained in the decades since the informant had made his gate and left, and what they had added. Nkwanno's slate had little to say about ships or travel on Lamarckia's oceans and waterways.

I walked a few dozen meters along the pier, to the next vessel, a full-rigged ship. A tall, lank, discouraged-looking man stood by a pile of lizboo-plank boxes wrapped in nets, waiting for a short, thick crane to lift the assemblage and convey it into the ship's hold. I approached. “I'd like to find Erwin Randall's ship—I mean, Captain Keyser-Bach's ship.”

The man looked me over woefully. “I'm the chandler's assistant,” he said. “This is the Vigilant.”

“Keyser-Bach?” I persisted.

“He's the captain, yes.”

“Where's Ser Randall?”

The discouraged-looking man curled his lip. “I'm not from the ship, man. I deal with supplies.”

“Who would I talk to?”

“I don't want to judge, but by your dress ... You've not had work in some time.” He chuckled and shook his head. “She's an eccentric ship, the Vigilant. There's a shortage of seamen here, but you don't look the grade.” The man sucked in his cheeks. “I don't spread tales, besides, but Captain Keyser-Bach is not the man I'd sail under. A thinking man's thinking man, and what kind of a sailor would that make him? All wrapped in charts and studies.” He tapped his head meaningfully.

I thanked him and waited for someone to disembark the Vigilant. Within a few minutes, a man of middle years in long brown breeches and a light coat, chest bare between two half-tied strings, picked his way along the plank with grace. I said, “I'm looking for Ser Randall.”

“Not a passenger ship,” the man said, regarding me curiously. “I don't know you.” He waited for a moment, then began to move off again before adding, “Not that I know everybody here.”

“Ser Randall told me to report to Captain Keyser-Bach.”

The man turned and spent more time looking me over. “Name's French. Navigation and meteorology. Randall isn't back yet. Here's what you do. You go to the researcher's mate—he's in that little shed with the black lizzie fringe. He's seen Randall recently and he might know something. But beware. He's arguing with the chief chandler and he's in a whiney mood, right?”

I crossed the yard to the shed, and entered. Inside, bare dim bulbs cast a waxy yellow glow over a dusty desk. Two men argued across the desk, one sitting behind it on a battered stool, the other, a chunky blond, standing, leaning on the desk with thick arms. It was Shatro. He looked surprised to see me. The man behind the desk looked up, fixed me with sharp blue eyes, and said, “Ship? Needs?” His narrow face and thin cheeks gave him a skeletal appearance.

“Randall told me to report to the ship,” I said to Shatro.

“I'm chandler here,” the seated man said, a broad if not convincing smile displaying fine teeth under his long pale nose. “Do you know—”

“I know this man,” Shatro said. “Why did he tell you to come here?”

I did not really want to explain myself to Shatro and did not understand why he asked the question. “He did, and I'm here. Where is Ser Randall?”

“He hasn't reported in yet,” Shatro said. He gestured for me to go away, but I stood my ground and he turned back to the chandler with a look of one more weight laid upon his shoulders.

The argument between the two continued. The chandler's prices had gone up twice in the past year, against Lenk's economic suggestions, Shatro claimed. The chandler calmly responded that with seven ships lost in that year and metal at a premium, it stood to reason gear would cost, and especially gear useful for research. “Good-quality jars and steel receptacles are at a special premium,” the chandler said.

Shatro faced me in exasperation. “We're putting foam on the beard tomorrow morning, and this... man cares nothing for science.” But the argument seemed to have lost its momentum. Shatro sighed and stood back from the desk. “I can't believe Ser Randall told you any such thing,” he said to me in a pointed undertone. “Our crew is select. We need Lenk schooling and strong secondary training. Seamanship desirable. Forgive me, but you don't look it.”

“I have many skills. Technical training and experience. And I'm strong.”

The chandler looked between us with some amusement. “Everybody's strong, now,” he said with a low hoot of humor. “Just a few years ago, now—”

“Been under sail?” Shatro asked.

I nodded.

“You certainly don't look it,” the chandler said, shaking his head sadly.

“He wants you to be a ship's hand, right?” Shatro asked. “We're short of hands, but not that short. Excuse me, Ser Costa,” he said to the man behind the desk. “Charge what your conscience suggests. You can serve all knowledge, bring honor to your children, and share the adventure, or you can prosper on our hunger.”

The chandler received this with a broad smile and squint. “I trust the next ship you serve on—if there is a next ship—you'll be back with a better argument.” He swiveled on the stool to look more closely at me. “I suggest you find yourself a less ambitious vessel.”

Shatro walked heavily from the shed, across the stone paving. I followed, and behind, the chandler began to crow with laughter.

“You must have misunderstood Ser Randall,” Shatro said. “He's master of the Vigilant, but the captain chooses the crew. We've been in Calcutta six months waiting for funding from Athenai and trying to put together a scientific team. How can you help us?”

I crab-gated, almost skipped beside him, yet spoke firmly—to appear at once youthfully obsequious and competent, assured. Shatro, I judged, lacked the basic elements of self-confidence. Somehow or other, I posed a threat to him. “I know physics and the principles of meteorology. I know the basics of ships and the sea. And I'm a quick learner.”

Shatro stopped, held up his hands with palms toward me, and said, “Let me add to the chandler's poor description of our itinerary.”

“Ser Randall explained—”

“I doubt he gave you the whole itinerary. It's going to be a difficult voyage, to say the least. We'll go east along the Sumner Coast, then swing south-southeast around Mount Pascal, drop in to Jakarta to pick up some more real researchers, then south to Wallace Station for another load of researchers. Along the way, we might study the pins in the Chefla Lava Waste, then sail out to Martha's Island. A journey of eight thousand nautical miles, fourteen thousand eight hundred kilometers to you. After Martha's Island, we'll head south to Cape Magellan, make landfall there and study zone six, then round the cape and run west with the Kangxi current, if it exists, around the unknown side of Lamarckia, We hope to reach Basilica and Nihon, if they exist, and touch Hsia from the eastern side. Then we slip through the Cook Straits. An additional twelve thousand nautical miles. And still we won't be home. We'll cross the Darwin Sea at the lowest longitudes to La Pèrouse Land. Only then will we turn north for Athenai, if our ship lasts so long. So, would-be-sailor, how many days do we have left before we miss the spring northers and the southeasters from the Walking Sticks?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Right,” he said, suspicions confirmed. He turned and boarded the ship. “Ser Randall will be here any moment. It's really up to the captain, and to him.”

I took a deep breath and spent the next twenty minutes sitting on a bench at the head of the pier where Vigilant was moored, watching men and women come and go. A small electric tractor pulled a wagon of foodstuffs in casks and boxes to the side of the ship. There it was left, to be loaded aboard later.

Randall came down to the docks with several other men. He saw me sitting on the bench, gave me a curt nod, and continued about his business, walking along the pier, examining Vigilant, exchanging remarks with his companions, pointing, nodding heads. I had seen men everywhere do this—a ritual of checking and measuring and reassuring, liberally punctuated with outstretched arms and fingers.

When the men departed, still talking and pointing, Randall stood by the Vigilant's gangplank and waved for me to join him.

“Still no luggage, eh, Ser Olmy?” he asked as I approached. “Thomas will think you're a man without roots.”

“I am,” I said.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. Have you been here long?”

“Not long,” I said. “I had a talk with Ser Shatro.”

“Oh?”

“I don't think he approves of me.”

Randall grinned. “The captain makes the choices,” he said.

“That's what Ser Shatro told me.”

“Shall we get on with it?” Randall asked. We crossed the gangplank and went aboard the ship.

A small, knobby man with darting eyes, quick stringy fingers and a high forehead topped by thick red hair, Captain Keyser-Bach gave me a look of pinched concern. The mate and Shatro bustled in and out of his cabin, bringing forms on paper for signing, a printed newspaper (I had never seen one before), a box of manuals and texts, also on paper, and in the midst of this, his right hand wielding a pen and his left pushing signed forms into a folder held open by one aide, the captain said, “I assume the respectable master has given you some idea what we're facing.”

“Yes, Ser.”

’”Captain,"’ Randall said.

“Captain.” I examined the cabin, walls of white-painted cathedral tree with lizboo trim, xyla floor with brass cleats, ceramic gutters beneath a small lab table, a wall covered by rolled charts and a case filled with large, thick books. A single slate hung in a sleeve from the bulkhead beside the captain's narrow bed. The air smelled of ethanol and other chemicals, arrayed on a table beside an optical microscope. The microscope occupied the focus of the room, like an icon; I did not doubt such instruments were far rarer than slates, and that Randall and the captain had fought for permission to take one on the voyage.

Slices of a small unidentified scion were laid out on a board, pinned and labeled. But for their clothes—long shirts tied up with belts, loose pants and sandals—we might have been in a late nineteenth-century Earth laboratory.

“No one at Athenai is enthusiastic about this expedition. Some profess interest, some give encouragement, none show enthusiasm. Lenk himself wonders about its utility.” The captain finished signing and took up the newspaper. “Some of us at least have rediscovered ambition. What's your ambition?”

I said, “To learn about the ecoi and our place among them, Captain.”

“If the master says you're adequate, I won't contradict him. We'll sail short three hands—short ten, if we count seasoned sailors and A.B.s. But by Fate and Logos, we'll sail.” He plucked a sheet from the folder and waved it for Randall's benefit. “Received this while you were up the Terra Nova. Permission from the Administer of Science and Metallurgy at Athenai. Should have been here three months ago. We are forbidden to ‘risk the metal-containing ship Vigilant unnecessarily, or to report findings to anyone other than the officers and ministers of Able Lenk.’ ‘Science and Metallurgy’ indeed. As if the ship's metal is more important than crew or mission...” The captain thrust the permission form into the folder again. He shook the newspaper, turned the headline toward Randall, who bent to read it. “Villages raided on the north coast and around Jakarta, and upriver here at Moonrise. Ships taken. Crews let off in boats or rafts.” He drew up his cheeks, squeezing his eyes to slits, and sucked on his teeth, then straightened and lifted one hand, as if after all this meant very little.

“I've a hunger for knowledge,” I said. “I need passage for experience. I need to reach Athenai eventually—that's all. My mother and father told me to go where I can be educated. Apprenticed.”

“How old are you?” the captain asked. He had an odd habit of touching the prominent knob of his chin with his fingers and tugging until he had a space of one or two centimeters between his teeth, all the time keeping his jaw muscles clenched as if in defiance.

“Twenty,” I said.

“Family?”

“Datchetong. A branch not reassigned.”

“Proscribed, with no education, then?” the captain asked.

I appeared distressed, nodded.

“Bonded or linked?”

“No triad connections,” I said. “I've been in the silva for a couple of years, on my own. Trying to study.”

“Then at least you have some survival skills ... Shall I check with the disciplinary and make sure you're not fleeing his wrath?”

“We've both met the disciplinary,” Randall said quietly.

The captain leaned closer, eyes penetrating. “You know nothing about our expedition?”

“More now than I did a few days ago,” I admitted.

“Two years in the silva—Elizabeth's Zone? Breath of Logos, you're the mystery man, aren't you? From Moonrise?” He swung around on his seat to face Randall. “You didn't tell me that, Erwin.”

“I didn't want to prejudice you. We traveled back together.”

“I should have guessed ... And the disciplinary gives him a fair mark?”

“So far,” Randall said.

Keyser-Bach pulled his chin vigorously, glancing between Randall and me. “They say the Brionists and General Beys in particular are working several sea routes, commandeering ships. I don't believe them—I think the Brionists are blamed overmuch—but we can't afford not to be—”

“Vigilant,” I said.

Randall seemed to enjoy such cheek. The captain seemed less amused.

“This expedition has been in the making for ten years, and it starts without the enthusiastic support of anybody in power. We set out with faith and strong drive and not much more.” He puffed out his cheeks. “You'd be shocked at the youth around here, and the courage of our seagoing breed.

“But if the master thinks you're fit, we'll sign you on as an apprentice. Don't expect to do a lot of science. Expect calluses and shouting.”

I made my way around the boat before the assembling of the crew, and made my own assessment. In their decades on Lamarckia, the immigrants who had taken to these seas had pushed the words for things nautical this way and that, deleted or elided, added and compressed, but still, most were recognizable. Recognizable as well was the design of the Vigilant, a forty-meter three-masted full-rigged ship made largely of xyla, with brass and steel trim. A few details would have startled sailors on Earth (or in the fourth chamber of Thistledown, where a replica clipper ship had once plied the Lake of Winds): broad in the beam, forecastle prominent, the bow sharp but with a bulbous protrusion at the waterline. Seen from above, the overall outline of the ship would have resembled a short chisel with a drop of paint hanging from the angled tip. Two canvas-vaned windscrews rose abaft and slanted outboard of the sails, their rotors connected to generators within the hull.

What I knew of the Crossing showed that Lenk had handicapped his flock deliberately, choosing the most dedicated radical Naderites—who would, of course, eschew the fine technologies of the contemporary Hexamon. Certain instruments and technologies not available in the twentieth century—the batteries within the slates, for example—had been accepted by fiat among the divaricates. But with the significant exceptions noted in the history on Nkwanno's slate, the immigrants had come to Lamarckia remarkably innocent of such skills as engineering, mathematics, and physics, beyond the most basic sort.

Perhaps nautical engineering had not yet recovered from Lenk's choices. In strong winds, with a high forecastle and elevated poopdeck, the Vigilant would tend to roll; the windscrews seemed pasted on, and sailing downwind, or with the wind fine on the starboard or port quarter, could steal from the courses.

The dearness of iron showed. The Vigilant was xyla-hulled and solid enough, but with very few iron or steel parts; aluminum, bronze and brass, tin and copper were used sparingly. Sails and masts were suspended from and supported by a mix of rope and wire stays and braces; shrouds alternated rope and wire, and all ratlines were rope or lizboo. Where wire was used, and where rope, seemed to vary with whim; the main backstay being rope, forestay wire; and yet the backstay took the strain of the following wind. I felt a sudden shadow of worry. I hoped I was wrong, but for the Vigilant I judged there would be trouble at sea: continuous, nagging trouble.

Which could explain the loss of so many ships. As for the crew: thirty-one men to twelve women, the youngest apprentices delivered by their triad families to a sea trial, failures perhaps at Lenk school (despite the captain's speech to me); the eldest, largely able-bodied seamen or A.B.s, hired from the rejects of the none-too-large merchant fleets. Even with twenty thousand inhabitants, commerce was slow, sea travel haphazard and hazardous besides.

I saw more clearly why the captain had taken me on with so little resistance.

The sun hung within a few degrees of the hills behind Calcutta. After the last of our food and equipment had been lowered into the hold and stowed securely, the mate, a blocky, red-faced man of forty with the auspicious name of Salvator Soterio, assembled the crew on the deck before the wheelhouse. Randall sat on the capstan, arms folded, a roll of lizboo parasol under one arm. The sunset cast ship, crew, docks, and warehouses in a fiery glow; black dust from the silvas, blown far out to sea from the continent, made for spectacular day's-end colors.

Waiting for the captain, I stood among the apprentices and A.B.s, who, shuffling their feet, those who knew each other murmuring and exchanging knowing glances, ignored me but for sideling glances and occasional gruff instructions, one of them being to “Watch his way, watch your way. Learn and be meshed.” By which they meant, follow the example of experienced crew members and fit into the way of the ship.

The mate called us to respectful attention. The captain emerged from his quarters and gazed at the setting sun with a squint as if he were some bug emerging from under a rock. He came to the rail and swept his eye over the crew on the quarterdeck.

“We've received our orders and confirmed our mission,” Keyser-Bach began. “With first light tomorrow, we put out to sea. Most of you are new to the Vigilant. New to me and the master, as well. You've signed on from Tasman grain ships and merchant vessels and a few from pleasure boats, and you should know the Vigilant runs a different course. We are out for learning, not for trade. We will circumnavigate for the glory of knowledge.

“We'll chart the life of Lamarckia in its most extreme forms. It's been tried before ... Two missions, four ships, two of them sunk, Fate be kind and the winds rest above them. There are hazards enough where we'll go, some known, some not.

“We are as infants on the face of Lamarckia. I've spent twenty years on these seas and still know them only poorly. And half the world has yet to be seen at all. This voyage depends on all of us to keep our senses sharp.

“Because what is taught in Lenk schools, even in secondary, is so tentative and inadequate, I feel it is my duty to train you all to a finer sense of nature. That makes this as much a schoolship as a research and exploration vessel.

“Some of you will think me eccentric. And if my eccentricities spread rumor along the dock, and make me a laughingstock, so be it.

“So now all of you know my style. Fairness follows performance. We'll all make history, if we mind our weather and keep eyes bright and straight ahead.”

The gloom of the past few days was lifting. I glanced at the crew around me, at Randall. The master's face seemed to take on a new light, his weariness fading. They truly were in their early age of exploration here, hazards enough for any adventurer. I looked on the Vigilant, with all her eccentricities and inadequacies, with blossoming affection.

I was the last of the new crew. The navigator and provisions mate, French, whom I had met earlier, wrote me into the crew list and the supplies roster, gave me a thick oiled canvas coat and pants, a pair of boots more appropriate to shipboard duties, and took me to my assigned berth in the forecastle.

Thick-jawed, pouch-cheeked, with enormous shoulders and unforgiving black eyes, Soterio, the mate, called the crew together before sunset on the foredeck. Randall watched with little apparent interest, leaning on the starboard rail. I took my place with the apprentices, scrawny fellows, little more than gangling, uneasy boys.

“Good evening,” Soterio said, forcing what could be mistaken for an amiable smile.

“Good evening,” we murmured.

“It looks to be a glorious one, too,” he said, his face betraying no great enthusiasm. “I'll leave talk about pride and accomplishment to the master and the captain. I'm practical, myself, and care only for my life, my ship and my crew, in whatever order you find most comforting.” He huffed out his cheeks, shook his head. “But there's rules we lay down here and now.”

He paced before us, thick arms crossed over his chest, jaw thrust forward.

“What the master tells me, I tell you, and you do. No flarking, no stumping about, nothing lax. Flark and I'm on you. There's no ship on this world that runs herself, and none so complicated a fool can't learn her, but learn we must.” He huffed again. “This is no yacht, so put your days at Lenk school or wherever behind you. The Great Darwin is no lake, it's a sea, foaming and thick, as unforgiving as any sailed by man or woman on any world.” He glared at us through those cold black marbles.

“Yes, Ser,” we responded.

“And when the voyage begins, none of this ‘Ser’ stuff. It's the ‘sir’ of many seagoing centuries and not for politesse.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some have sailed before, some a lot, most not. Some have sailed under the master and me. But all will follow me around the deck this evening and learn this ship and her ways.”

Soterio then took us around the boat, stem to stern, talking rapidly for an hour. All that I had studied of ships and seamanship for this mission only began to prepare me for the shift of language, for the invention of the immigrants. Many sailing terms used by the mate were familiar, but the immigrants had built their ships without benefit of years at sea, using only what references they found in the slates they had brought with them. There were differences, and mixtures of nautical terms across the centuries.

The Vigilant was three-masted, full-rigged, by old Earth standards, yet here she was called a spankered three-tree. The masts, in the mate's lingo, were all trees and he named them foretree, maintree, and mizzen. The names of the major sails were easy enough to adjust to, the lowermost called courses and named after their trees—fore course, main course, but then, on the mizzen, the christian, called crojack or crossjack traditionally; the next pair, gallant and topgallant; above them, upper and lower topsails became hightop and lowtop. But the jibs from bowsprit and jibboom to foremast were called bellies, the outermost called (without a single smile among the apprentices) the flying belly. The seldom-used royals, above the hightops, took the name skysails. Stays supporting the masts remained stays, and the sails sometimes hung from them, staysails. Studding sails, however, were called wings, bent or fastened to extensions of the yards called outbrooms. “So it is,” the mate said, “when the Vigilant's going to sweep with the wind up her ass, we beat with our wings, bellies in the breeze, clear?”

He dared anyone to smile.

The halyards, braces, sheets and other rigging working all these reflected such changes. I labored to memorize—and to forget some of what I had learned on the Lake of the Winds.

Fortunately, on the upper decks and belowdecks, the names had changed little. Fore and aft still applied: bow, midships, stern; forecastle, foredeck or maindeck, quarter deck aft of the maintree, but the poop aft of the mizzen had reverted to the original Latin, puppis. The long superstructure on the puppis, which appeared top-heavy to me, was called, with affection, the pupcastle. On the Vigilant, the captain, master, doctor, and researchers kept quarters here, and the two laboratories were also in the pupcastle.

The ship's craft rates—Story Meissner, the dark, sepulchral sail-maker; the small, dour female carpenter Varia Gusmao; William French the navigator; stooped, grizzled and wrinkled Pyotr Khovansk the engineer; and Shatro, the only researcher already on board—bunked in the pupcastle as well, sharing a common cabin, or adjacent to their work-cabins. The able-bodied seamen or A.B.s, and apprentices (sometimes called monkeys, since they spent much of their time in the trees) were each allotted a bunk in the forecastle.

All below the craft rates served watches, four hours on and four off, divided into port and starboard. Each craft rate and A.B. and apprentice received three meals a day. Grain from Jakarta and Tasman provided the staple, supplemented by flockweed flour. The mainstay was freechunk, a paste made of soy and flockweed, served up fried or baked, or ground into flour and made into bread. Packed and dried river celery and diospuros served for essential vitamins. Fresh terrestrial fruits and vegetables, grown on plantations outside Calcutta, served as treats. Sailors, it seemed, did not favor scion fruits such as Liz cherries, and seagoing or pelagic scions, whatever ecos they came from, were by and large inedible, unlike their riparian counterparts, which could at times be nutritious and not provoke immune challenges.

There were plans (Soterio told us darkly) to feed the crew occasionally on land scions deemed edible by the cook—with the second opinion of the captain and the chief researcher, the mate added. This was obviously something of a sore point with the more experienced crew, since nearly all—according to whispers—had eaten one or another type of non-Liz scion that had not agreed with them.

The tour finished with a brief lecture from Soterio on discipline. “Each is expected to do his work. Favoritism of any sort is considered flarking.” The mate used the word “flarking” constantly, to describe anything in opposition to the ship's established order. Now, his brows almost obscured his black marble eyes, and he crooked his mouth as if remembering a bitter taste. “There is to be no sex between crew members at sea. No need to explain why. We are all equally valuable here, and such leads to serious disputes. Phylactics,” meaning drugs to dampen sexual drive, an interesting misuse of a word, “are available from the medical.”

The mate concluded this lecture with a list of punishments. “First-time offense, four hours at the skysail top. Second, confinement in stores antechamber for a time deemed sufficient by the captain and master. Third, we put you off at the next settlement landfall and take aboard someone more suited.”

The crew was then sent to arrange their personal effects. There would be no dinner served aboard this evening; instead, the crew could spend their last night in town.

In the forecastle, all had been assigned their bunks by number, but the A.B.s quietly and with little resistance traded assignments with the others for a section of their own. The social weaving took perhaps ten minutes, with the apprentices left a step behind, somewhat bewildered.

Talya Ry Diem, the senior female A.B., a grizzled, stocky woman with thick, well-muscled arms and legs and a bulldog countenance, took it upon herself to explain. “There's rates and there's ranks, even on a free citizens’ ship. More experience, more time at sea, more privileges. The A.B.s know enough to keep you from killing yourselves. It's only right. And what's more, it puts me in a better bunk.”

A curtain was drawn forming a partition for the twelve women. All the women were A.B.s, and they commandeered a portion of the elite section and put an angle in the curtain to mark their special territory. As there were no female apprentices, we could divide no farther, and received the least desirable berths—with so little difference between them that arguing was useless.

Names were exchanged again for the benefit of the newer crew members. I shook hands with my shipmates, a pot of Tasman tea was set boiling, and sweet biscuits passed around from Ry Diem's chest. “These are especially for the new ones, who don't know how this kind of ship works,” Ry Diem said. “We all have to get along in a special way—a seagoing way, that works across months or years without much in the way of fighting. If you have any questions or problems, you can come to me, or to Ser Shankara. Or to Meissner, the sail-maker. He's a good man. He and I have sailed before.”

The apprentices, after trying to brighten the picture of being closest to the bow, in the tightest spaces and with the smallest bunks, set to displaying and describing their few valued possessions, that all would know who might have stolen from whom. Already, two likely characters had been singled out as potential thieves: the youngest and scrawniest, both with narrow, lackadaisical faces, Uwe Kissbegh and Uri Ridjel, who seemed to wear perpetual smiles of shocked innocence.

A tall boy of eighteen, with a thick shock of brown hair, shaven thin at the sides, shook my hand with extra conviction. “My name's Algis Bas Shimchisko. My first ship. Yours, too?”

I smiled and nodded.

“Apprentices have to stick together,” Shimchisko said. “The A.B.s lord it if we don't. From Calcutta?”

“Jakarta,” I said.

“Meet Miszta Ibert,” Shimchisko said, putting his arm around the wide shoulders of a thin boy of sixteen or seventeen, with a small, mouse-like face and short foxfur hair. Ibert smiled. “We joined together. We've both taken science at the Lenk schools. We spent five months in the depths of Liz.”

“Inland from Cape Zhuraitis,” Ibert said. “We think we know Liz very well.”

“What does she think of you?” I asked.

The boys laughed loudly. Shimchisko slapped his knee. “We think she favors us, of course. All the women do.”

Among the other faces, I paid immediate attention to Ellis Shankara, senior male A.B., a quiet, dark-skinned man with humored eyes, large and examining, but a stern mouth. Shankara's alert expression and calm manner impressed me. I spent a few minutes watching a short-legged, round-faced woman A.B. with a quick, birdlike manner, whom I found oddly attractive, but whose name I did not then catch.

Kissbegh and Ridjel took it upon themselves to play an ill-timed jape as we put our valuables away in shallow drawers beside the bunks. Kissbegh leaped about in seeming abandon, claiming to perform a farewell dance to the land. Ridjel tootled him along with a raucous lip-warble, and as if by accident, Kissbegh swooped down upon, and fell through, the curtain separating our bow space from the space set aside for the female A.B.s. Hair on end like a furious cat, Talya Ry Diem yanked Kissbegh up with two strong hands around his jaw and ears and dragged him until she jammed him against the forward fiber locker. “I'm kind,” she growled, “but I'll kick your ass if you don't act the man.”

Saying not another word, glaring fiercely, she left him there minus his smile.

I liked all of this. It seemed very alive and boisterous. I might slip smoothly into the immigrant culture after all. Despite my earlier misgivings, and whatever their skills, and however isolated, these people seemed at heart decent and hard-working. They wished to learn what they could, and they were willing to take obvious risks to do so.

I could cheerfully go to sea with these people, work with them, learn what I could; I could even forget, for a time, what my mission was.

Before all introductions could be finished, with the crew's opinions of each other given an early shape, the mate returned. “You'll stare at every block and line for the next few years,” he chided. “Grab the shore for one more night.”

All but one of the women chose to stay aboard, boiling their own freechunk over a small stove, stringing mat fiber ropes to air their clothes. Most of the male A.B.s and apprentices, and several of the ranks, left the Vigilant just before sundown and took the Hill Step Road up and over a low rise, to that part of Calcutta where all sailors were supposed to go.

The nightlife of Calcutta had been walled off, concentrated and capped, in a district of town away from the center, surrounded by high stone walls, a dreary, river-damp set of narrow streets and low, ramshackle buildings the color of dust and cloudy sky. Here the cobbles had gaping holes—I saw a suspicious congeries of holes before an empty building with broken windows, a broken sign over the door reading ADVE—and the gutters had not been swept. It smelled anciently human, yet seemed quiet. The crews of several vessels wandered these few streets, mostly male. Without the women, the men became restless, peering into windows, making dull, unenthusiastic remarks, trying out their sailor's gaits, broad steps and arms swinging confidently, coming upon each other every third turn, looking for cheer and something to brace up their spirits for the coming absence from shore. Little cheer or support was to be found.

A brief flame of sunset turned our faces and the low, false-fronted buildings orange. Dusk followed quickly, gray and dismal. The fitful lighting, dim lamps on xyla poles at corners, made us all shadows. Three scattered knots of searchers, twenty in all—eight from the Vigilant including Shimchisko and Ibert; the eldest among us, Shankara; and the round-faced young female apprentice, Shift or Shirla—went from a small bar with five stools and two tables, serving bitter rum, to a larger establishment reputed to serve food, to the largest place of all, which the most experienced men seemed to avoid with dark faces. But this, the walk-in known as the Fishless Sea, was where we ended up.

Here was entertainment, the most perverse (and therefore fatally attractive) that the divaricate city could offer. Here a half dozen blank-faced women and a few pale men offered themselves for conversation or dancing or turns in the rooms upstairs. It was fairly ritualized and acceptable; divaricates had never been prudes. But something else hung in the air of the Fishless Sea, a restless, guilty anticipation made half of dread and half of curiosity. The best entertainment in this establishment, the older hands said, was supplied by Lamarckia itself.

Shankara led us through thick xyla doors into cool air, a small, dark room at the very rear, the sounds of the kitchen coming from someplace to my left. The rum buzzed in me, a novel and not unpleasant sensation.

I sat with my shipmates before a low stage daubed with tarry black paint. A short, slender woman with long brown hair and a fixed gaze, who some said was the owner, came on stage and stood beneath a bright spot. Her voice was deep and sandy and she did not look at her audience.

Some chewed mat fiber, tasteless but scented of sweetness and garlic and filled with a mild stimulant, and others drank more rum. The young, round-faced female A.B. sat beside Shankara and balanced a plate of indifferent gruel on her lap, eating slowly, staring up with doubtful but wide eyes.

“We've all lived our lives in the shadow of the silva,” the woman said in a breathless monotone. “We've been sampled, and the silva knows us. But can we ever know the silva? There are curiosities ... peculiarities. The zones, rich with life, do they resent us? Do they notice our existence? Can they truly see and think, or are they blind as stones? Sometimes we feel we are wrapped in the depths of a heedless mother, and we cry out in our sleep like children. There are mysteries no one will ever fathom. Absurd mysteries, unexplainable phenomena. How many have heard stories?”

A few hands rose, then others, taking encouragement in numbers.

“I've heard stories,” the woman continued, nodding to herself, her tone confessional, and then darkly mysterious. “Stories not to be believed. Terrifying, strange, but not... surprising. Does anything surprise us on this, our chosen world?” An edge of weary resentment in her words now, eyebrow raised, a flip of the long brown hair.

I sat with my hands gripping the sides of the seat of my chair. A fog of unreality stole over me, caused not by the rum, but by the sour animal smell of bodies in the close room, the rough lizboo between my fingers, the floor strewn with bits of dried parasol leaf to soak up spilled liquid. The cloying smell of mat drifted through the air, sweet and garlicky.

“When my husband vanished in Eastern Tasman, hunting curiosities in Baker's Zone, I took off to search for him. Long weeks and months by boat, then through thick swamp, over tall mountains—”

“Get on with it,” grumbled a bearded man near me, swaying slightly in his chair, jaw working a clump of mat.

“To find... something.”

“Something!” the crowd shouted in derision. “Show us!”

“Not pickled,” the woman said, leaning toward the crowd, hands sweeping out, fingers pointing, enjoying her own melodrama. “Not stuck in a bottle.”

“Not like us,” a man shouted, and the crowd laughed at itself, in a perverse humor.

“Not in a bottle. Alive. Alive and away from its land, and so very lonely,” she chanted.

“Like us,” several voices sang out. Nervous laughter now.

“Strange,” the woman said, “to stare into what it uses for its eyes, and wonder ... Does it think? Does it miss its home, thousands of kilometers away? Does it miss its queen, whom no one has ever seen? Was I cruel, to bring it here ... Was I seeking to avenge my husband?”

“Be cruel, be cruel,” a drunken man, not of our ship, shouted from the front.

This is the dream, Lenk’s dream, I thought. Get his people away from
Thistledown, from people no longer shaped like people, from the blasphemous Way...

The rum fogged and distorted and was no longer pleasant. I set my glass down, half empty, and drank no more.

Two brawny men in aprons rolled a large crate onto the stage. Liquid slopped from between the boards and ran thick and brown over the black tarry floor, lapping up against the raised edge, the fiddle I thought, testing out a nautical term, like old port spilled on a ship's table. Within the crate, a sigh, a clatter of sticks or branches.

“What possible use to its zone, to its queen?” the woman asked dreamily. “Such a monster, perhaps no use at all. A sport, a dream gone bad, a nightmare. The silva dreams and twitches in its sleep. We hear it, breathing its black breath across the land, over our heads, in our skin and hair. We cut its trees, harvest its leaves, fence its helpers and attendants ... Will it not someday know what we are, and hate us? What will it make next? Perhaps this is a test. Something that will eventually grow large, and attack ... Let's take a look, and perhaps see our future...”

“Naah,” a man sneered from the rear of the room, waving a hand. He stood and pushed through the thick xyla door. The woman on stage watched him leave with sad, tired eyes. The cool air settled again. The woman reached out for the crate, challenging the audience with a piercing stare...

Her hands fumbled at a corroded brass latch, opened the front of the crate wide with a groaning creak...

One of the burly men stood beside a stagelight and dropped a colored gel over the bulb. The stage became green, dark and cold.

“From the north,” the woman moaned, as if mourning. “It might have killed my husband. It wants to kill me and go home. A monster, a queen's own nightmare. Look upon it.”

The door swung all the way, and within, restrained by iron bars, a cage within the crate, long thin black legs, dozens of them, with red joints.

The round-faced woman leaned forward, eyes even wider. The audience fell silent. A chair leg racketed on the floor, several feet shuffled. “Fate and Pneuma,” said one voice.

“Hoping to kill us all,” the woman on stage suggested dreamily.

Lights switched on overhead, bathing the cage in brighter green and yellow. The form in the cage stirred, legs twitching. The woman pulled a large key on a brass ring from the folds of her dress, slipped it into a prominent lock on the cage within the crate, turned the key, and pulled open the cage door with a ghastly unoiled screech. The sailors in the first row of the theater pushed their chairs back with a clatter until outthrust arms and legs from the people behind would let them push no farther.

“What would we do if they freely walked among us?” the woman asked, spinning out her story, making herself a potential victim as the legs stretched reflexively across the stage toward her, flat cup-claw feet spatting into the leaking brown liquid. One sailor, a young fellow not from the Vigilant, bolted. Shankara looked after him and gave me a knowing smile.

The creature squeezed and squirmed slowly from its cage and stood in the sickly light, rising three meters in height, gangly, loose. I tried to discern its shape in the glare: thick trunk or abdomen dragging, thin upper body, disks half rotating at its shoulders, and emerging from the edges of the disks the long, half limp legs. It had no head, but a long stalk pushed up from the trunk and arched over the form, and from this hung two transparent globes—eyes, perhaps—that slowly rotated, black oblate pupils absorbing the sight of the crowd. It sighed, thorax expanding alarmingly, then shivered its legs together. The audience as one groaned and backed away, tables and chairs bunching, overturning.

The scion and the woman seemed to regard each other with equal detachment. “What is it you wish, monster?” the woman asked coldly.

The form lifted its legs as if beckoning.

“Me?” the woman asked, voice rising to a kind of cheery glee. “Me, as well as my husband?”

“Stop it!” shouted the man half seated in front of me. “For the love of God, it's just a scion! A silvan child! Let it be!”

The woman ignored him. The audience had come here for rough entertainment; she was determined to give it to them. The long pleats of her dress contained many things, apparently. She lowered one hand gracefully and brought out a machete. “Which is it to be?” she asked us. “Revenge ... or forgiveness? Respect, or anger given an edge?”

My own anger suddenly flared and I restrained myself with an effort. The woman's face fairly glowed with enthusiasm. She seemed half committed to chopping the form to bits; in the cloud of rum, I thought, No act, this. But the burly men emerged from the wings and restrained her, one grabbing the arm with the machete, both bodily lifting her, suddenly rigid as a board. The slow spidery creature, left alone on the stage, sighed, bunched its legs up and sidled back into its cage.

The stagehands returned without the woman and raised and locked the door of the crate, then lowered the curtains. The audience sat stunned for a moment; that was all? No exit music, no announcements?

Grumbling, disheartened, we passed through the glass doors to the bar. I stayed behind, stunned and heartsick, slumped in my chair. Somehow, this seemed almost as wrong and perverse as the slaughter at Moonrise.

The round-faced woman, Shift or Shirla, put aside her unfinished bowl of gruel and stood before the stage and curtains. She wore a kerchief around her head topped with a small black hat. Her face seemed childlike in the half light. She turned to Shankara. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing but a Tasman western scion,” Shankara said, half in contempt, half in pity. “Not eastern. Not from Baker. Probably from Kandinski's Zone. But I'm just guessing.”

“We'll see more like that?” the woman asked distantly.

Shankara gave a brief, hollow laugh and looked at me with dark brown eyes. “Shocking, eh? We live in the most boring zone on Lamarckia. We have to import our monsters.”

“It was wonderful,” the round-faced woman said, and seemed genuinely to mean it. “Poor thing. What does it do?”

“A mulcher, I'd guess,” he said. “Something that cleans arborid roots and prepares soil. About as dangerous as a cricket. I've served on merchant ships going to Tasman and seen stranger than that.”

We walked toward the door past the small tables and overturned chairs. “Your name is Olmy, isn't it?” Shankara asked.

“Yes,” I said. I looked at the young-faced woman. Her eyes flicked to meet mine, like a bird's.

“This is Shirla,” Shankara said.

“Shirla Ap Nam,” the woman added. “Junior A.B.” She picked something from her teeth with one finger and shook her head as we pushed through the heavy doors. “You know,” she said, “if we had a zoo or something...”

“The captain has a zoo,” Shankara said. “A small one, in bottles.”

“Not what I mean,” Shirla said. “If we could go see all the parts, all the scions, we wouldn't act like such damn fools.”

By midnight, beneath a cloudless sky filled with the double arc of stars and one small, lantern-bright moon, the crews wended their ways back to the docks and ships, neither wholly drunk nor satisfied. I walked a few meters behind Shankara and Shirla and the rest of the group from the Vigilant. Shirla kept glancing over her shoulder at me, as if I might be stalking her. With her last glance, she gave a little shiver and frowned in apparent disapproval. Somehow, this completed my sadness.

As they rounded a corner ahead of me, a man stepped from the shadows and held up an arm. I gave him a wide berth by instinct, but the man spoke my name. It was the disciplinary, Thomas. He wore a dull green overcoat and a small cloth cap with a tail that fell down his neck, into his collar.

“I had hoped you would stick around long enough to answer my questions. Now, you'll put out to sea ... On a research ship, no less.”

“Is that suspicious?” I asked. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “I'm interested in the zones. I always have been.”

Thomas looked at me with a bland, patient expression. “I've had time enough to run my checks. No birth records for an Olmy of the Datchetong. No Lenk school or residence records. Unless you come from Hsia, or some unregistered community, you don't exist.”

I felt distinctly uncomfortable. Then I took a chance. “Ser Thomas, nobody has complete records anymore.” I stood in the dark beside Thomas, and silence fell between us for several seconds. Finally, he looked away, then down at the stone paving. “I don't believe you're a Brionist. That doesn't make sense, judging from your behavior ... and how we met. You would have faded into the silva and taken a passenger boat later, or made your own. I've given a lot of thought to you. I think perhaps I will leave you alone and let you go where you wish.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“There was a small group of people, years ago, that kept a secret vigil. They called themselves Adventists. They were waiting for someone from the Hexamon to arrive.”

“Sounds Christian,” I said.

“'Advent’ means the coming of something big, something momentous. Nothing to do with Christians. Not all of them made their views known. One of them stole something and vanished. Nobody knows the details except perhaps Lenk himself. I had heard there was an Adventist in Moonrise. Was there?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Is it a crazy idea?”

“Why didn't they come years ago?” I asked.

Thomas smiled. “Now that I don't know, either. Some say we erased the path to Lamarckia and we'll be here forever, alone.”

“Suits me,” I said.

Thomas's bland expression returned. “If they did come, they would try to take us all back to the Way. That's the general opinion. I'm not so sure, now that we've been here so long, and we've grown in numbers. We own this world as much as any human owns anything.”

“We don't own the zones,” I said, trying to reestablish some fragment of my role.

“No-o-o,” Thomas said thoughtfully. “Promise me this, will you? Someday, if there's time, and if you can, unravel a few mysteries for me.”

I shook my head, grinned, looked away, as if to say, Crazy notions.

Thomas raised his hands, clasped them, and rubbed his palms together. “The citizens rank made their decision earlier this evening. Brionists or their renegades killed the citizens at Moonrise. Naderville will claim it was renegades. It's for the rank at Athenai to decide what to do. No need for more testimony from you. You're free to go wherever you please.”

With a curt nod, Thomas turned and walked up the street, past a feeble streetlamp and into shadows.

Calcutta was a dull town indeed, I thought to myself as I walked up the gangway to the Vigilant; at least as far as its vices were concerned. Divaricates had no flair for debauchery.

I was eager to get to sea.

I stood sleepless by the taffrail, staring astern at the cold black waters and the night, half-clouded, the void between black clouds thick-studded with stars. I thought about Lamarckia's sun and her five sister planets, about which I found very little in Redhill other than what the original surveyors had recorded—a remarkable lapse on the immigrant's part, or an oversight on Redhill's, I thought.

What I could see between the clouds, by eye alone, was tantalizing. Just a few degrees east of the main skysail yard shone one very bright bluish point surrounded by smaller points just outside its concentrated light: Pacifica, a gas giant with many moons that seemed to move as the minutes passed. High above the western horizon gleamed a yellowish point that I was fairly sure must be another planet, probably Aurum. All around shimmered the volumes and volumes of stars, including the double oxbow—part of the encompassing galaxy, analogous to the Milky Way seen from Earth. Randall's few books on astronomy called this blurred twin loop by several names: the Hills, the Kraken, or the Tetons. No astronomical authorities had authorized a final name, apparently. I preferred the Tetons myself. I hoped to find out more by examining the ship's chartroom.

I left my mates in their bunks in the forecastle when all seemed to sleep soundly. William French the navigator was snoring in his pupcastle cabin. The contents of the deserted chartroom, books and maps opened or drawn down quietly, lighted only by a single dim lantern, added much to what I needed to know about the immigrants’ present state of knowledge.

There were no complete and accurate charts of Lamarckia. No one had ever seen the planet from space; no satellites had ever been put into orbit, and the immigrants had much left to explore, including the entire hemisphere opposite Elizabeth's Land, called the Deep West by some cartographers, the Far East by others.

The star charts were fairly thorough, and some improvements had been made by the immigrants on the surveyor's originals. Ephemeris data was kept in several thick volumes in the chartroom, much amended by French's hand, and probably on the captain's slate as well. (Nkwanno's had no such data.) The sailors on Lamarckia did not lack knowledge of how to find their way around, and how to calculate latitudes and longitudes. Working with the planet's magnetic field was relatively simple: there were few compass deviations in this hemisphere, and those well understood.

Still, any sailor on Earth at the time of Thistledown's launch—or even by the close of the twentieth century—would have been appalled at the prospect of using such limited and inaccurate means. What little of Lamarckia had been charted in detail, had been explored by brave men and women indeed.

Lenk's first Captain of Voyages, Alphonse Jiddermeyer, with two sailing ships, had set off from new-founded Calcutta five years after the immigrants’ arrival. His two-year journey took him along the Sumner Coast, named after his first mate, to the northeast point of Elizabeth's Land, then south, discovering the violently volcanic Agni Islands that lay four hundred miles from the continent's eastern coast. (Those islands did not figure on later charts. Some of the histories mentioned enormous blasts heard fifteen years ago, and clouds of ash settling across southeastern Elizabeth's Land, the Darwin Sea, and even Hsia. Enormous waves had struck the eastern Cheng Ho Coast and Jakarta, causing considerable damage to the human settlement, and the islands were not seen again by merchant ships or later explorers. Penciled on the Vigilant's charts were specks in that general region, and question marks.)

After leaving these islands, Jiddermeyer's ships were relentlessly blown south by southwest, back to the southern extremities of Elizabeth's Land. Jiddermeyer and his researchers charted the visible boundaries of what later became known as zones five and six, Petain and Magellan. They sailed around Cape Magellan, depending in a drawn-up curve from the main body of Elizabeth like a giant fang in the upper jaw of a sabertooth cat, and found the Kupe Islands. Here, a storm sank one boat, and the second—with Jiddermeyer and two thirds of both crews—continued south. They found two long strips of land, named them the Alicias after the sailor who first sighted them, and then were blown swiftly west to the environs of the southern polar continent, La Pèrouse Land, seen only as a distant blue coast backed by huge mountains and glaciers.

Here, they had encountered vicious westerly winds they called the Ice Knives. The winds blew them east along La Pèrouse Land, the cold, stormy bottom of the world. This ended Jiddermeyer's plans of circumnavigating Lamarckia. Exhausted, Jiddermeyer slipped free of the Ice Knives, repaired his ship on Southern Alicia, and sailed due north, close-hauled against the seasonal northerlies. Their last discovery, all by chance, was Martha's Island, with its sterile surrounding sea and fertile, varied lone ecos. Thereafter, they turned southwest and put into port at Jakarta.

Jiddermeyer had taken an awful chance. No one knew whether edible scions existed in any of the zones away from Tasman or Elizabeth's Land. Indeed, no one was quite sure that the basic biology of these two continents would also be replicated in other territories. Jiddermeyer's head researcher, Kia Ry Lenk—Jaime Carr Lenk's sister—believed they would find only ecoi on Lamarckia. Others disagreed.

But she had been correct, and no other scheme of life had been discovered. And wherever they went, they found no scions willing to eat them—but sufficient edible forms to sustain the crew. The voyage had been horrific, nonetheless—improper nutritional balances and immune challenges had played havoc with the health of the expedition.

In the end, out of two ships and two hundred and five men and women, one ship and sixty-five had returned to Jakarta. The sinking of the second ship had drowned many of the crew, including Kia Ry Lenk and her husband and two sons.

Exploration lost its charms for Able Lenk. He never quite recovered from the death of his sister. He departed from Jakarta, sailing north to the smaller continent of Tasman, discovered three years earlier by merchant ships. There, he founded what was now Lamarckia's second largest city, Athenai. He had not since returned to Jakarta or Calcutta. This had left Elizabeth's Land to an uneasy kind of independence.

Shortly after, Hoagland and her splinter group had sailed for Hsia and founded Godwin, later Naderville.

Only one other expedition—led by Dassin Ry Baker and Lucius Shulago—had carried on from Jiddermeyer's example. Twenty-five years after the Crossing, they sailed from Jakarta across the Darwin Sea to Hsia, then down to the Cook Straits and Cook Islands, between Efhraia's Land and Hsia. They rounded Efhraia's Land, returned to the Darwin Sea, and sailed north until they reencountered Martha's Island, quite by accident. They headed south again, and one ship turned back, carrying all the records from that expedition. On the far side of Hsia, in an ocean still almost completely unknown, in search of two small continents rumored to have been seen by merchant ships blown astray—Basilica and Nihon—Baker and Shulago and the second ship vanished, after sending a weak radio signal that all was well.

Dawn began as a thin pink line against the eastern sky, much of it obscured by the low arborid-crowned hills directly east of Calcutta. The silva's great four-legged cathedral trees stood against the morning glow like sentinels, feathery fronds below their crowns waving gently with intermittent puffs of breeze that had not yet reached the harbor. The pink horizon turned briefly red, then pale violet; the stars gave way, and the entire sky began to fill with rays of gray and shallow blue.

I stretched and swung my arms, working the chill out of my body, then ran around the deck as warm-up, joining French the navigator and three others similarly engaged.

The sun stood half above the headland when wakeup was announced by the ringing of a brass bell.

Belowdecks, I joined the rest of the crew at the mess. The cook, Leo Frey, a peaceful-looking man of about forty with a thin body but a prominent belly and fat face, and the cook's sour-looking, heavy-set assistant, called simply Passey, dolloped gruel into xyla bowls and handed each of us a thick slice of river celery. Officers shared the same lines and ate the same food, but sat at a separate table in the officer's mess beyond a narrow open doorway. The rest of the crew—including the navigator, the engineer, the sailmaker, and other craft rates—sat around rough-planed tables in the crew mess in no particular order. The crew went through morning routine in stolid silence punctuated only by half awake grunts.

When breakfast was finished, in less than ten minutes, the crew lined up again to drop their bowls into a pot of boiling, frothing water outside the galley. A few minutes attending to personal hygiene (this was a clean ship, with a clean crew, for which I was grateful) and they all gathered on the upper deck to receive the captain's words, inaugurating the voyage.

Captain Keyser-Bach stood on the puppis, looking down on the crew with bright eyes. He stepped to the rail, smiling confidently, and his hands gripped the smoothly turned xyla. “Today we begin our journey to the extremities of this world, and to understand the life upon it. We bow, all of us, to Jiddermeyer, and to Baker and Shulago, but we will not repeat their mistakes. We add also years more experience on the seas, a better ship, and I am certain, a better crew.” He spread his feet wide, balancing from one to the other, clasped his hands, and bowed his head. The crew did likewise. “We set our faith in the lines drawn by Star and Fate, that all of our worlds here conjoin to make one rope, each strand a man or woman, all pulling in unison for the joy of life well-lived. In the name of Star, Fate, and Breath, illuminated by Logos, inspired by the example of the Good Man, we will not fail in our duties, though the seas roar and mountains shoot flame.” He added, in a voice barely audible, “And though our own kindred set against us.” With a shrug of his shoulder, three fingers rubbing his chin vigorously, he turned to Randall and said, “Set our slates for ship's time. We depart in fifteen minutes.”

The occasional puffs of breeze had finally come to the harbor in greater strength, united as a westerly blowing steady at five to seven knots. On the sea, distance and speed here as on Earth were measured in nautical miles and knots, or nautical miles per hour. For Lamarckia, with its radius of 5931 kilometers, a nautical mile came to about 1725 meters.

I took to the shrouds of the fore and main trees with the least senior apprentices—those who had been aboard the ship a month or less, six in all—and two junior A.B.s. My group of four set the fore course. Others unfurled the main course and main lower topsail. We then set the upper topsails and lower topgallants, and three of us—myself included—descended to the deck and forward to bend and raise the outer and inner bellies. With the breeze blowing across the beam—perpendicular to the ship—the captain and mate skillfully ordered us here and there, pulling on this halyard and that, and the ship began to work about, pushing from the dock in gradual zigs and zags.

On the dock, wives, children, family, and friends—a fair crowd of about two hundred—sat waving hands or hats or handkerchiefs, again in somber dignity, with few cheers. However momentous this occasion, however monumental the import of this expedition, the citizens of Calcutta did not reveal their emotions.

I remembered wedding or funeral gatherings on Thistledown among orthodox Naderites—emotion aplenty locked in each breast; but a strong, dedicated face to the world. That restraint had always made me uneasy. As a youngster, dreaming of glory and challenges, I had always wished for a more appreciative farewell from family and friends.

The Vigilant sailed with dreamlike smoothness toward the middle of the river. Both port and starboard watches were busy on the deck and in the rigging. The captain stood at the bow with one foot on the bowsprit, inspecting every meter of the water ahead.

I scrambled high up the ratlines, muscles aching, to adjust a jammed block. For a brief moment, I looked across the river and silva from a top, hands aching, toes and insteps of my feet feeling as if they had been broken. Then as quickly back down; on deck, dizzy with the height, I pulled on halyards with my team to raise the christian on the mizzen and secured them to belaying pins. Then we all scrambled aloft again.

The waters spread wide in the delta, flowing around dozens of sandy black islands. Beaches sparkled like diamonds against velvet in shafts of light breaking through the thick clouds. Avoiding darker shifting shallows and gnarls of rivervine required more deft maneuvering.

After an hour, we saw lines of breakers fighting through thick tangles of vine, an open channel forty meters deep and a hundred wide, and beyond that, blue-gray and finally slate gray, the Darwin Sea.

As we crossed to brackish and finally ocean water, the air took on a sharp tang. Captain Keyser-Bach remained on the bow, thin nose pointing due west. The breeze had stiffened to twelve knots and we were moving very briskly. “Shorten sail, Mr. Randall,” he instructed. “Take the main courses up two points, the fore topgallants two points, and let's loose and stow the windscrews for the time being. Steer her northeast by east until we cross the Sticks. Then due east.”

Hanging on to a yard, helping five other seamen lift and tie the points on the fore tree's upper topgallant, I felt the touch of a new kind of wind and air, and my skin prickled. The mix of minerals in these waters was not the same as in Earth's seas, not familiar to my blood; less sodium salt, more potassium, more dissolved silicates and carbon dioxide and oxygen. Yet despite the constant faint hiss of oxygen bubbles in the water, like a gassy soda, this was undeniably an ocean.

Later, as the wind strengthened even more, the captain amended, “Take in all but main and lower topsails. Once we're out in open sea we'll set for our best speed, and keep well away from shore.”

“Yes, sir,” Randall responded, and called the apprentices out again.

Twenty miles and two and a half-hours out of the delta, the foam of oxygen bubbles subsided. Surrounding Lamarckia's continents, and in many huge patches throughout the oceans, microscopic scions of pelagic ecoi dissociated seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. Reducing metabolisms had been chosen here, very early in life's history, as on Earth—the routes and processes were substantially different, however.

Ahead, spread across our course like thick straight fingers, five tall dirty-brown towers stuck up from the sea, each over a hundred meters high. Huge purple and red “sails” ballooned out from the tops of the towers, light-absorbing tissues each perhaps a hectare in area. From where I caught a few moment's rest on a top, I saw the towers were shot through with man-high tunnels.

“The Sticks. Bunyan's walking sticks,” A.B. Shankara said, clinging to the mast. “From zone five. The captain will thread them for luck, then we'll head east.”

The ship slipped between the southernmost two giants. We watched the waves swell and beat against their immense bases, sucking and booming through the worm-hole tunnels. Bulbous black shapes the size of cow's heads poked from some of the narrower tunnels, sporting three rows of eyes gleaming in the late-afternoon light as the sun flashed beneath a thickening deck of clouds. Shankara had something to say about them, too. “Sirens,” he shouted over the flapping of the sails and hum of wind, as we hung from a yard, tying reef points. “They watch all the time, everything. They watch our ships come and go. Spies for their zone. Their bodies...”

I held my breath against a sudden whoop of wind that sang through the braces and forced the sails aback, nearly knocking our boots loose from the footropes.

“They twist all through the insides, like worms,” he continued. “That's what I'm told. I've never explored the holes.”

“You think they're intelligent?” I yelled back at him.

“Hell, no!” Shankara said. “They just watch. Who knows what they see?”

“Work, don't flark!” the mate shouted from below.

A hundred miles out of Calcutta, the westerly picked up again, blowing at fifteen and then twenty knots, driving strong seas beneath night sky covered with a ceiling of black clouds. We rigged for a steady blow. The dinner was cold for the fifth watch—Leo Frey decided not to risk cooking fires in such a wind or drain the batteries with hotplates. Seven of the starboard watch and I descended to the mess as our watch ended, sitting to eat with stiff fingers our plates of freechunk and fruit, heads drooping in abject exhaustion. With the windscrews stowed, and the ship on backup batteries, the electric lights glowed fitfully and in alternation, first three on one side, then three on the other, as if trading duty. They cast long alternating flickers of brown shadow around us while we tried to eat.

With sails properly rigged, a storm watch was called, and the rest of the crew retired to take their dinner as well.

Randall stood at a podium forward of the tables and rang a small bell. Heavy heads rose, mouths doggedly chewing, and Randall announced that the captain wished to give a short lecture. The captain took the podium, grabbing it with both hands as a swell lifted and then dropped the ship.

“Each night,” he began, “I hope to continue our education on the goals of this journey, to discuss the nature of the ecoi and their benefits and potential dangers...”

Many of the newer members of the crew—myself included—did not yet have their sea legs, or rather, their sea lungs. It took some time to get used to the combination of the ship's motion and the invigorating but initially upsetting smell of Lamarckia's sea spray. One by one, cold paste heavy on our stomachs, but perhaps not heavy enough, the newer sailors begged the captain's pardon and retreated, either to go topside or to the heads, two fore and one aft. I counted six desertions as the ship pitched and rolled. My own stomach felt none too calm as the seas became rougher. The air was beginning to smell peculiar, like an old orange.

“Yes,” the captain said, watching his audience decline. Then, “Yes,” again, and finally he gave it up, postponing the talk until the morning.

“He's a good captain, really,” said Algis Bas Shimchisko. “The best on Lamarckia, I bet. A true seaman.”

Miszta Ibert went for a second helping of paste and brought it back, grinning as if he'd won a prize. “He's a very good captain,” young Ibert agreed, forking the paste hungrily. “Just enthusiastic, and who's to judge against that?”

I watched him eat and felt my insides quiver.

“Hooo,” said Shimchisko. “Lost a few this evening, haven't we, Mish?”

“A few,” Ibert said. “No more than I expected.”

“They'll get right after tomorrow. It's the sea,” Shimchisko explained. “Sometimes when even a good sailor spends some time ashore, the smell of the sea, the broad foaming sea, gets them.”

“You all right?” Ibert asked me.

“Never better,” I said. I refused to go topside.

Once my body had been equipped to handle almost any emergency, any illness, any unease. I was truly on my own now, this naked and natural body as unfamiliar as somebody else's, a complete stranger's, might have been.

The days passed in a way I had never experienced before. Time took on a new quality. The ship became a world unto itself; I had difficulty imagining anything else, especially during watches, when one assigned task succeeded another in dizzying succession. Steady, exhausting work, day and night, clutching ratlines or hanging onto yards during driving rain storms and rugged seas, watching foam-ribboned billows as high as the courses on each side ... Flat calms when Vigilant drifted motionless or slid ahead slowly on a single screw driven by her reserve batteries. Up the shrouds, into the tops and out on the yards, reefing or furling, setting brooms to take advantage of running downwind, bending new sails when the old needed repair, manning the winches when the electric motors failed (as they did more often than not).

Greasing the trees, the lowest and thickest trees consisting of three straight legs of a cathedral tree strapped together with thick iron bands; pulling mat fiber strands from great wads of junk and spinning them into twine; drawing the standing rigging taut as it stretched with use. Rubbing down the rippled patterns on the xyla deck with pumice holystones, raising a faint scent of cloves and garlic; performing the daily ablution of all deck surfaces...

Only as I rolled into my bunk, lost in an almost spiritual state of physical exhaustion, did I think of any prior life, of immense chambers within an asteroid and the dreamlike infinity of the Way. None of that seemed real. And yet I still did not feel firmly established on Lamarckia. It seemed anyone around me—wise old Shankara, nonchalant Ibert, clownish Kissbegh and Ridjel, cynical but intelligent Shimchisko, round-faced Shirla—could tell just by looking at me that I wasn't real.

Only the sensual details, minute by minute, gave my self a solidity memory could not corroborate: the invigorating smell of charged air as we sailed the edge of a brewing storm; towering cumulus clouds swelling into massive anvils over the flat sandy prairies and setback mesas of the Sumner Coast, the crimsons and siennas of vivid sunsets over the stern.

Under the chafing of ropes and wires, the press of capstan spokes, the palming of marlinspike, my hands became a maze of cuts, scratches, and bruises, until they seemed little more than bloody claws; what would have healed in minutes or hours on Thistledown, now took days. Still, they toughened, and I no longer flinched from actions that, in my inexperience of days before, might have caused me painful injury. I dodged, grappled, hung, pulled, shifted, learned when to groan and when to swear.

The sun burned bright most days and I tanned to pale chocolate. The skin on my arms flaked and peeled, and I followed the example of the experienced A.B.s and smeared my cheeks and arms with thick, milky lizboo sap scooped from ceramic jugs. To cut the glare, I smeared my lower eyelids with blackrouge—the fine powder that fell from all arborid scions in Liz's silva. My hair dried to a stiff wiry brush, crusted between infrequent fresh-water rinses with a residue of salt spray.

Ibert loaned me a pocket mirror. I did not recognize myself: white eyes underscored by blackrouge, dark-skinned, brushy-haired. A pirate.

I had not spoken much with Randall since being assigned to my berth.

After dinner, when weather permitted, the captain told us more about Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago's visit to Martha's Island. Martha's Island differed greatly from most of Elizabeth's Land. Volcanic, isolated from other landmasses by a thousand miles of ocean, a thriving ecos at the center of a sterile sea, it was a perfect site for Keyser-Bach's science. Little was known about most of the island; and over a decade had passed since Baker and Shulago's journey. Few ships crossed now between Hsia and Elizabeth or Tasman; none had passed Martha's Island since the visit by Baker and Shulago.

“We are engaged in primary science,” the captain enthused, standing before the lecture board, raising and fastening his sheets of illustrations from Shulago's artists, reproductions of photographs from Baker's cameras.

I examined the photographs of Martha's scions, and Shulago's drawings, with a growing bewilderment. Snakes without mouths, arborids that picked up their roots every few days and slunk across the rugged landscape like immense slugs; entire silvas migrating from one side of the island to the other in a few days’ time. Hard-carapaced guardians rolling on dozens of tough calcareous wheels propelled by vigorous tiny cilia, searching the beaches for intruders, “sniffing up” humans but paying them little attention...

Who could ever make sense of such diversity? The captain sometimes expressed his ideas of ecos organization, of hierarchies, but was reluctant to explain in detail. “All tentative,” Keyser-Bach said at the end of one lecture, answering questions from the researchers and crew. “We know some things ... but not nearly enough.” And behind it all, the unproven theory of central queens or seed-mothers, perhaps reflecting human needs for answers more than any reality.

After a few days, I relaxed completely and let the process of my absorption into the crew become complete. I quickly learned respect for nearly everybody on board, and for the ship itself, which I had underestimated. It gave us few problems at sea, or no more than any ship made of inadequate and primitive materials. Only Shatro, the researcher, continued to leave me unimpressed. Bulky, with large but soft muscles, shorter than me, with a boyish face on a wide head, he was prone to worries and enthusiasms, suspicions and confidences, in equal measure. He seldom spoke to me, but I could never tell whether he would treat me with suspicion or say something light and cheerful. He never said anything of much consequence, either way. He had a habit of stating the obvious and then being embarrassed about it.

I could not yet judge his scientific ability.

While at sea, the crew followed the first mate's rules about sex scrupulously, but flirting was rampant, and some couples were beginning to pair off in ways that might as well have involved sex. Men took on women's tasks, and women conferred grooming favors: cutting hair, tending to slight wounds. Some men actually hid their cuts and contusions from Shatro, who acted as ship's doctor, and revealed them to sympathetic female friends in privacy. I learned quickly that many of the women had brought aboard special bags or small trunks containing medicines and sweet or pickled treats, which they doled out to the men they favored.

Shirla Ap Nam, the round-faced A.B., reserved most of her attentions for me, and it would have been out of character, not to say rude, for me to decline. In time, I decided to relax about these matters as well. I was young, my body was in command of its own reactions and not buffered by implants. The flow of time complemented the flow of my hormones, and I realized, with some surprise, that socializing was a bodily function, regulated by deep instincts.

Aboard Thistledown, most of us—and nearly all in the Geshel communities—had acquired so many layers of conscious control and supplemental intervention that it seemed, from my new perspective, we might have lost sight of our true animal natures. And that, of course, had been the point. We had risen above our instincts and the rough grind of history; we had given human society a new and smoother character.

The immigrants had both the best and the worst of their own unenhanced natures.

At first I found Shirla attractive, but not deeply so. I would as soon have had the attentions of one or two of the other women, but did not encourage them. Shirla was pleasant, however, and her conversation interesting enough. She did not seem to take our flirtation with deep seriousness, so we avoided private admonishments from Talya Ry Diem, who regarded it as her duty to keep the younger women from being hurt, as apparently she had been years before, by shipboard trysts, even unconsummated ones. For the ship was small enough (and the mate rat-nosed enough) that sneaking off in privacy for anything more was almost impossible.

Randall and the first mate often deferred male-female disciplinary problems to Ry Diem. And partly through her vigilance, the mate did not have to follow through on his muttered threats to put various over-demonstrative couples into compartments in the bilge.

To my surprise, Ry Diem took Kissbegh and Ridjel directly in hand. Soterio was glad to leave the two problem children to her half-tender mercies. Ry Diem, Sonia Chung, Seima Ap Monash, and the other women A.B.s gave the crew its final social structure—that of an extended family, with Ry Diem as surrogate mother and finally, Shankara and Meissner as surrogate fathers. The captain became a tough taskmaster, combination peculiar god and professor, and more than once did I hear Ry Diem threaten Kissbegh with a tree hearing—being called up before Keyser-Bach for whatever infractions had most recently occurred. Kissbegh always relented.

We traveled for three days in the sea-chopping westerly, then turned south south-east, coming within a mile of the eastern Sumner Coast, though still sailing in deep water. So little of the coast had been explored or named, that a thousand miles of it, filled with shallow bays and backed by deserts and hills, carried only one designation: Sumner, after Lenk's second economist, Abba Sumner, who had also laid out Calcutta.

The currents flowed dark and rich beneath the Vigilant, and in what little time I had to spare, I stood by the rail peering into the clear water. Keyser-Bach had finally gotten the crew used to a nightly round of lectures, and most recently we had discussed zone five pelagic scions. I saw them swimming close to the surface: massive piscids called eggplant sharks, ten to fifteen meters long, deep purple-blue with white spots, thick-bodied and trilaterally symmetric, with blunt mouthless noses and lines of knife-shaped bony fins sweeping from nose to screw-like tails. They spun slowly in the water as they glided beneath the Vigilant. We also saw bowfish like gigantic tied ribbons floating on a gift-wrapped sea, long red streamers trailing from their winglike fins fifteen or twenty meters behind. Tangled masses of arm-thick vine seemed substantial as rope, yet parted like soapsuds as the ship passed through them, and regrouped in our wake.

A storm inland had broken loose balloon-trees, close relatives of lizboo, according to Randall; on the third day, the gas-bag of one floated off the starboard beam, twisting slowly, rumpled and half deflated, in the currents. As I watched, coiling ropes and splicing a broken line with a marlinspike, piscids the size and rough shape of harbor seals but black and silver in color tore at the balloon vigorously with external fangs, called thorn-teeth by the captain, then sucked the shredded fragments into orifices along their sides. Getting a closer look at one near the ship, I saw no head or mouth as such, only broad paddle-shaped fins with sharp white claws, and in a line on each side, the little mouthlike openings with sky-blue interior tissues revealed. They swam swiftly both backward and forward with rapid swishes, reversing their fins. Some, Shimchisko and Ibert among them, believed the cucumber sharks and other large piscids would eat anything tossed into the water. Shankara believed they acted more as clean-up crews, and did not actually digest the fragments they swallowed, but carried them to special stations where they were processed.

According to the captain, predation between ecoi was rare between Elizabeth's Land and Petain, or at least quite formalized. “They watch, they spy constantly, sending thieves or samplers, usually in the air but also underground, or skimming across the river or ocean. Between zones, the boundaries are clearly marked, but on rare occasion, parties of mobile scions will cross in a tight herd, grab what they can of arborids or phytids, and return ... We do not know why. Perhaps the zones need to challenge each other. Perhaps it is a kind of sport...”

Shirla equated it with love bites, but I could not tell if she was serious.

6

As evening approached and my watch ended, with the day's work done and the ship rigged to slice on a beam reach across the strengthening northerlies, I leaned on the starboard rail amidships and studied the shore from our distance of five nautical miles. The high cliffs of this part of the eastern Sumner coast were split with deep U-shaped grooves that spilled boulder-strewn floors into the sea, then thrust sinuously inland. I judged glaciers had once cut these grooves. A scattering of rangy short arborids covered the mesas and plains, and between them, a velvety, patchy carpet of blue and brown phytids spread in gentle mounds like fuzz on a rotting peach. The sun had reached its vernal zenith four hours before and now fled steadily westward, gently warming my face and hands, brightening the cloudless skies to a chalky enamel blue, almost white above Elizabeth's Land. The air smelled round and sweet, unlike any air I had ever breathed before, and the ocean sang its liquid rhythms against the hull, a metronomic slap of waves and hissing trill of swirling waters. Our wake fell astern in steady white smeared curves with a shiny roiling smoothness between, vanishing when the ship had advanced a few miles.

Randall strolled beside me and leaned on the rail, in a mood to talk. “We've been at sea a week,” he said. “The mate and I have kept our eyes on you.”

I nodded, unsure what to say.

“You told me you'd catch on fast, and you have. I'd swear you've sailed before.”

“I've dreamed of sailing all my life,” I said.

“You're the best apprentice on board, better than Shimchisko, even, and he's a decent fellow, though he does have a sharp tongue. You could go for your A.B. rate in short order if you wanted. I also notice you attend the captain's lectures no matter how tired you are.”

“They're fascinating.”

“Yes, well, he's a fine captain, but maybe the best scientist on La-marckia ... Or a close tie with Mansur Salap. We've traveled Tasman and Elizabeth and the Kupe Islands together for ten years now, at sea and ashore.” He let silence sit between us for several minutes, the sweet wind providing enough distraction. “It's your face that interests me, Ser Olmy. The apprentices, the A.B.s, they're familiar faces to me. I know their types. I have to judge people, and I think I'm good at it, but I cannot by face or Breath or Fate judge you.” He looked at me directly, elbows on the rail, hands clasped. “I swear you're older than you look and know more than you say.”

I raised my eyebrows to acknowledge these unwanted observations. First Larisa, then Thomas, now Randall. I seemed particularly transparent to these people.

“How do you feel you fit in with the crew?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“You don't scuffle, you don't argue, and you certainly don't aspire to a sailor's top bunk. You're calm and humble, Ser Olmy.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I've made friends and taken advice. Listening makes me popular, I suppose.”

He laughed. “But you're hiding something.”

“Sir?”

“I suppose having your family proscribed does something to your spirit. Two years in the heart of Liz. Witness to atrocity.” He shook his head, then clucked his tongue in sympathy. “No easy way to return to the bosom of society. What I'm coming round to, Ser Olmy, is that when we put into Jakarta and Wallace Station and pick up Mansur Salap and our researchers, there will be a lot of work that requires more than a sailor's skills. We are short of trainable assistants, with sharp eyes and sharp minds. From the moment we picked up the children above Calcutta, you've impressed me. I'll watch you the next few days—don't let it make you nervous—and after we pass through Jakarta, I'll consider suggesting that you become an assistant to the researchers. I think we understand each other.” He nodded as if greeting the coast and said, “I love this stretch. So different from the silva around Calcutta.”

As the starboard watch ended, Shirla and Talya Ry Diem called together a circle of apprentices and A.B.s. Shirla took my elbow and pulled me into the circle, and Meissner brought out two long stringed instruments, each with two parallel rows of four strings suspended above two adjacent resonating hemispheres made from dried phytid fruit. These were kimbors, developed by the immigrants in the first few years after the Crossing. Meissner handed one to Ry Diem and began to tune one himself. Ry Diem hummed and sang a sequence of clear notes on a pentatonic scale, and all around the circle, others joined in, tuning themselves to the instruments and Ry Diem. Their voices seemed to cut through the wind.

Shirla put a xyla shoe on one bare foot, took Ry Diem's kimbor, set up a steady beat on the deck with the toe of the shoe, and thumbed the lower bole with her fingers. Immediately the crew in the circle began a high, singing chant. Meissner provided a booming bass line, sounding like a talented bullfrog. Shimchisko stood with hands outstretched and began a falsetto vocal. The hair on my neck stood up; I'd never heard anything like this. It sounded primeval, but very complex. I had no idea the Lamarckian immigrants had developed such a different style of music.

Shimchisko sang a list of names, starting with the people in the circle, then growing more and more exotic, until they became nonsense words. Others picked up with words that pleased them, and soon twelve voices wove in and out around each other, until the whole became far too complicated. The song collapsed in laughter, and Shirla thumped the deck rapidly five times with her shoe.

Next came a quiet ballad, sung by Shirla and Meissner, in clear words describing the sweet romance between a young lad and the personified Queen of Elizabeth's Zone. This was an old song, apparently, and its sentiment struck Shimchisko and several others deeply. Meissner's eyes filled with tears as Shirla described the inevitable end of the queen's love, and the suicide of the boy, who leaped from a cliff into the depths of an unknown silva.

The singing went on for two hours, punctuated by sips from a jug of mat fiber beer. Randall joined in toward the last, singing a song his mother had taught him, about children naming the scions they met in a newly settled silva. His voice was gravelly but well-modulated; they all sang well.

The evening ended with Leo Frey serving small sweet cakes. Keyser-Bach came down from the puppis, and Gusmao—the reclusive carpenter—joined us also, which brought a toast from Soterio to the craft rates. A.B.s toasted the captain and master, and Randall offered a toast to the apprentices, “Just growing in the ways of Lamarckia's seas.” Kissbegh in turned toasted Talya Ry Diem, “Who cracked my head early, and gives this ship spirit!”

Ry Diem actually blushed.

The stars came out from behind thin clouds. Head filled with the music, I rolled into my bunk.

The ship sailed around a barren, wind-whipped promontory called Cape Sadness. Five ships had been wrecked there, I heard from Shimchisko. The captain surveyed the cape with a telescope, looking for scion activity. The winds and sea were favorable this day, and we rounded the cape without incident.

Fifty miles south of Cape Sadness, with Jakarta only a hundred miles away, the captain came on deck, swearing and waving the ship's slate. “We're warned off!” he cried out to Randall and the mate. “I've just spoken to the disciplinary and the port rank. They say they've spotted raiding parties off the Magellan shore. They say the parties are looking to come in by night and fire the town, and they'll take any ship they find at sea. They're refusing all ships for the next few days ... just in case the town comes under siege. Damn them all ... that's just not pure!”

I listened from the mizzen top. The trio conferred, joined by the sailmaker, Meissner, and the senior A.B.s. I was distracted by a silver sparkle to starboard: pterids, glittering scions shaped like boomerangs and trailing long fringes, swooped and flapped over the blue foam-streaked waves, dipping their wings and fringes in the water, flipping, miraculously recovering their flight, zipping on to the next wave.

“We can sail on to Wallace Station,” Randall suggested, but the captain was not willing to settle for that.

“We have supplies and two more researchers waiting for us,” he said. “I'll be damned if I'll let a bunch of flip-chipping bureaucrats keep us out of port!” He clapped his hands together, face red and eyes reduced to angry slits. Then, as if with a passing storm, the captain's face cleared. He forcibly put his hands at his sides and said, “Even so, I'd hate to run into one of Beys's ships at this stage—or any stage.” His pacing grew more purposeful, energetic; he nodded, then grinned. “Yes, yesss,” he said. The men talked in lower voices, heads together, then retired to the puppis and below to the captain's quarters. The mate, Soterio, came on deck to take the master's place and stared at the apprentices and junior A.B.s with a dour eye.

I and three apprentices descended the ratlines and stood on deck, awaiting further orders.

“You know what that means, don't you?” Ibert cried out, slinging a rope end sharply at the deck.

Shirla slapped the young apprentice soundly on one arm and told him to keep his voice down. “We signed on for years at sea,” she said. “Don't ache for a last day or two on land.”

“Not that at all,” Ibert grumbled, shouldering a coil of mat fiber rope.

“What, then?” Shirla asked.

“The best damned theater on Lamarckia,” Ibert said, stalking off. “And now I'll never see it.”

Shimchisko slung his leg over a spare yard. “Ibert loves the theater,” he said. “Live theater. Jakarta's famous for it.”

“I know that,” Shirla said, face screwed in irritation. “Such infants.”

The master emerged and conferred with the mate. “Close-haul!” Soterio shouted. “We'll anchor in the redwater at Sloveny Caldera.”

“Captain's going to wait them out,” Shimchisko said with some satisfaction. “Myself, I don't see why the towns are so aquiver.”

“You haven't been in a town that's been raided,” Kissbegh said.

“Have you?” Shimchisko asked, rushing for the shrouds at the master's second bellow.

“No,” Kissbegh said. “But I hear Ser Olmy has...”

I joined the apprentices aloft.

“Redwater,” moaned Shimchisko, hanging from the futtock shrouds upside down beneath the top. “Smells like a sewer in redwater.”

The ship sailed with the wind on the port quarter. We swiftly rounded a sea-jutting mountain covered with layered stripes of purple and red, as if painted with contours from an old topological map. The mountain, visible at sea for fifty miles, was cleft on its southwestern flank by an immense crater that seemed filled with thick, slowly waving hair; clouds streamed from the high, jagged rim of the crater. I did not have time to examine this sight in detail. The captain was on deck again, French the navigator by his side, steering the ship through narrow alleys between wave-smashed vine reefs. The sea swirled and sucked alarmingly just a few dozen meters from where the ship passed. Vines thrust above the waves and spread broad fans and bright red petals twenty or thirty meters wide, like enormous water lilies. The crew called them “castle flowers.”

“If we wreck ourselves, swim for the castle flowers. There's fresh water in their insides,” Shankara called out across the deck as we leaned into halyards.

“There'll be no wrecking of this ship,” Soterio grumbled, but he stared overside nervously.

We cleared the vine reefs. The port watch rushed around the deck under the barking orders of the mate. The steady wind was finally fading into bursts of light breeze, leaving calm water. A sour scent began to fill the air; even the cat's-paws couldn't clear it. The water alongside seemed quieter, less effervescent. We half drifted, half sailed into the mountain's afternoon shadow.

With some respite from hauling on the braces, I gulped great lungfuls of the lightly tainted air. “Get it while you can,” the master advised from the puppis. “It's going to stink like a sour paste pot.”

It soon became obvious that the mountain was merely a little sister, a parasite on the flanks of the massive Sloveny Caldera. The caldera sat a kilometer lower than the mountain but spread over eight kilometers in diameter. Its eastern flank had collapsed centuries ago and ocean had rushed in.

We passed under the clouds streaming from the higher, smaller sister, Mount Pascal, and the sea took a purple tinge in the shadow. The farther we drifted into the outlines of the bowl, the redder the water became, and the stronger the smell of hydrogen sulfide, until I spotted a solid mass of what looked like flame lying ahead, filling the western curve of the natural harbor. The air did indeed stink now, and flakes of red bobbed in the waves like lost chips of paint. With the sloping western wall of the caldera less than a hundred meters off, Vigilant set a sea anchor; the depth here was at least three hundred meters.

I helped the crew furl sails, then all scrambled down to the deck at the mate's orders and stood in rows on the main deck. The captain and Randall came aft and stood before the crew. Shatro joined them. Randall stepped forward. “I'll need twelve hands for a shore party. The captain proposes to go ashore and make observations, put our time to practical use until we can get in to Jakarta. I doubt any other ships will follow us here—it's not easy to get in or out, and it smells bad. The captain's been here before, as have I; the dangers are minimal, so long as we exercise caution. Ser Shatro and I, of course, will go. Volunteers?”

I raised my hand. Ibert scowled at me from one side. “It is a most unpleasant region,” Shimchisko whispered from the opposite side. Shirla, three places down in the same line, volunteered as well, and Shankara. Grimacing at me out of the sight of the master and the captain, Shim-chisko stepped forward, followed quickly by Ibert. In a few seconds, the captain had his list. Kissbegh and Ridjel seemed relieved.

The two boats pulled through the red-speckled and odoriferous waters with all but the captain, Randall, and Shatro taking turns at the oars. Between strokes of my oar, I saw the red flakes as more than just patches of pigment. They floated atop the waves with the insouciance of jelly fish—but these blood-colored scions were flat, fringed with tiny cilia that somehow steadied them and separated them from their fellows.

The captain directed us to a defile opened in the western wall thousands of years ago, through which a thin trickle of water now flowed, leaving a white and yellow mark on the black and brown rock. The boats were secured to outcropping rocks near a rugged, small, rock-strewn beach, and all but the two who were left behind to guard—Shimchisko and Ibert—waded ashore.

The sea water here felt rough between my fingers and curled around my waist with an unpleasant tingle. Once on shore, Randall offered all of us a bulb filled with white powder to puff on our clothes and skin. “Sodium bicarbonate,” he explained. “The water here is mildly acid, and while you are still damp, it is best to neutralize.”

The job was performed in a few minutes. Clothes still fizzing slightly, we formed a line, led by the captain and master, and marched up the cleft.

On all sides, the rock was covered with clusters of sulfur flowers. No life was visible; the air reeked and breathing was not pleasant. “Bear up, fellows,” the captain said. “It's only for a few hours.”

His cheer was not infectious. I felt my eyes sting and my lungs burn. Coming up behind, Shirla favored me with a smile of encouragement. “No worse than the latrines on ship,” she offered.

The defile led gradually to the top of the massive main body of the old volcano. Here, a broad black lava plain of broken chunks mingled with smooth rivers of once-molten rock. Open pits blew forth steam and clouds of yellow vapor. The wind drove these clouds away from the defile, but I worried the wind would shift and we would asphyxiate.

Randall and Keyser-Bach climbed to the crest of a pressure ridge and surveyed the terrain beyond with field glasses. The rest of the crew and I sat, catching our breath between the wafts of sulfurous gas. Shirla coughed into her fist and wiped her eyes with a small cloth.

Shankara, always calm, folded his leg, braced his foot against the rock on which he sat, and wrapped his fingers around his knee. “Don't rub your eyes,” he told Shirla. “It won't help; it could hurt.”

“You've been here before?” she asked.

“I've been near volcanoes before, in the west. Interesting places. Where I lived, the only mobile scions that survived around volcanoes were fume dogs,” he offered blandly.

“What did they look like?” one of the younger apprentices, a blocky, bright-faced fellow named Cham, asked. He kept his face covered with a noserag.

“The size of a young child. Bright red, like everything else alive around there. Long, six or seven legs—the last legs large, for jumping—covered with fur, with three or four eyes on the back or on the ‘head.’ They harvest fume fruit—florid scions clustered around fumaroles. Very sparse—just the dogs and the fruit.”

“Why is everything called a ‘dog'?” Shimchisko asked. “I've never even seen a dog.”

Shankara turned his attention to me, seated across from him on another black rock sloppily daubed with yellow and white.

We all held our breath as a cloud of sulfur stench wafted uncomfortably close. “My people were all intellectuals,” he said. “Not enough call for thinkers here, let alone researchers. So we work where we can. The same for you, I'd judge.”

“Um,” I said, adopting the best nonchalant nasal tone of Shimchisko or Kissbegh.

“You have the air of a man who wanders free from his family. I make it a study also to learn the people around me. By the end of the voyage, I'll know the crew as well as they know themselves.” His tear-streaked cheek, constant winking and stoic forbearance gave him an odd, Lewis Carroll aspect. He said, “I wish the captain would return.”

Randall, Shatro, and Keyser-Bach had dropped out of sight on the other side of the ridge. The master's head appeared first, and he quickly climbed to the crest, waving to attract our attention. “Up here!” he shouted. “Bring the equipment.”

We got to our feet with little enthusiasm, shouldered the bags, and hefted the boxes. I followed Shirla and Cham; Shankara followed me, and Shimchisko and Ibert trailed. We wound between chunks of lava and vents oozing viscous yellow smoke to join Randall. Beyond Randall, the captain and Shatro stood in a small depression that widened to the east into a larger valley.

“It's still here!” the captain shouted. “Just as I remember!”

The valley beyond was filled with large, bright red jug-shaped scions, the largest eight to ten meters across and twenty high. They protruded from the ground, mostly upright, like squat bowling pins stuck in the black sand.

We followed Randall, Shatro, and the captain between the red pins, deeper into the shallow valley. A smelly yellow ooze dripped from gashes in the side of the pins like sulfurous honey and gathered in pools to suck at our feet.

“It's the simplest sub-zone on record,” Keyser-Bach explained, forging ahead, pushing and slapping the red bulks as he passed them, like a lighthearted Samson. “This is where Jiddermeyer worked out his final theory. He reported his theory to Lenk twenty-four years ago today. It's worth celebrating.”

Randall struggled to pull his boot from a particularly obstinate patch of muck.

The pins grew higher toward the middle of the valley, and now cast considerable shade. Yellow mists drifted between the looming red scions. “Can you reason it, Ser Shatro?” the captain called over his shoulder.

“I've read about it in your books, sir.”

“Of course. But my books don't explain the mystery. Anybody care to reason it? Ser Randall ... Shankara...” The captain stopped and surveyed us with a devilish, almost leering grin. “Ser Olmy?”

“Ah, Olmy,” Shatro murmured, sticking hands in pockets and turning as if bored at this masque. “So good at theory.”

“I haven't seen enough yet, sir,” I replied. The question unanswered, we pushed over the thick, slowly sweeping scimitar-shaped roots, the yellow fluid swept along by their motion spilling over our boots and staining them.

Shirla passed by and muttered, “You'll soon help the captain peel scions and Randall pickle their guts. We'll miss you when you graduate, Olmy, sir!” She gave me a cheeky salute.

Ahead, I saw a clearing between the pins, a pool of standing water in the middle of the valley. We climbed on a platform of layered lava, above the sweep and slop of the yellow fluid.

Around the pool, built-up deposits formed an irregular wall that kept out most of the flow from the scimitar roots. In three places around the pool perimeter, purple and black valves laced with ornate red bands filled gaps in the wall, allowing dribbles of the yellow fluid into the pool.

I stared at the pool's glassy surface. Beneath the surface, layers of red and yellow minerals formed broad fans. Where the water intercepted the dribbles of yellow muck passed by the valves, oily sheens spread, casting rainbows where the sun struck them between the shadows of the surrounding pins. I felt uncomfortable here, and not just because of the smell.

“The puzzle isn't complete, by any means,” the captain admitted. “Harsh conditions force simplicity on an ecos. It hasn't the evolutionary versatility, the immense runs of time, the lack of concern for its offspring, that describe our evolutionary upbringing. There's energy here, nutrients to be had, but specialization is the key. And here's the miracle—these scions, the pins, belong to no ecos. They form a sub-zone of their very own, adjacent to and dependent on both Petain and Elizabeth ... And in a moment, if we're lucky, we'll see what Jiddermeyer saw. It happens every day, even in the worst weather.”

The captain told us to place our bags and boxes on the platform, above the yellow muck. “So human,” the captain mused, pulling glass jars and a metal tube from one box. “They are truly social, the zones. But they are also individuals. We are concerned for our arms and legs, as well as for our children—concerned for our friends and neighbors. The ecoi feel similar concerns for their scions. Now we wait for a few minutes. Something interesting will come by.”

I was struck by the similarity between the way Keyser-Bach and the gate opener Ry Ornis uttered that word, interesting. For the captain—even more so than for Randall—life was a steady succession of puzzles to be solved and eventually linked together.

A muffling quiet surrounded us, nothing but the sighs of wind through the bizarre colonnades, my breath harsh in an irritated throat, shufflings and whispers and grunts as we helped the captain take samples from the muck and the pool.

The captain had filled two jars and was examining them with immense satisfaction when a buzzing sound became audible at the far end of the valley. The captain and Shatro immediately pulled out box cameras and tripods, setting them up in the black sand and muck. “Bees, you'd think, coming to suck up the honey of these immense flowers,” the captain said, face glowing with enthusiasm. “Perhaps not so far wrong.”

I listened to the buzzing apprehensively. If they were bees, they sounded like very large bees. We all stared up at the sky above the tops of the huge red pins. The plume of cloud from the higher crater had shifted and now streamed over us, its contorted rolls of moisture arrayed in cross-currents of higher winds like fibers in the muscle of a fish. The plume blocked the sun, casting the valley and its scions in a cool half-light.

The stench was almost unbearable now. Shatro bent over the pool, inserted a thick metal pipette, and drew up a sample of the minerals beneath the glassy slick.

“Here they come,” the captain said. “Harvesters. Damnedest things you ever saw.”

The buzzing rose to a high, slapping drone, as if a hundred children were whacking long sticks together. Three furry black saucers like flattened beetles flew into view above the pool and hovered. Each was about a meter wide and sported two long thin limbs at the front, and a kind of tail at the rear, which flicked a few centimeters side to side with every adjustment in their hovering. One descended to the tallest squat pin-shaped scion on the edge of the pool and raised itself, limbs uppermost, tail drawn back delicately. The red surface of the pin abruptly split and formed five deep horizontal gashes—stomata. The saucer inserted its two limbs into the highest stoma and settled in, its buzzing subsiding to intermittent clacking.

The remaining two saucer beetles did the same with other pins around the pool. Piston noises surrounded us, and fine drops of yellow, stinking sulfurous dew sprayed over us, sticking to our faces and arms, our clothing.

“Wonderful!” the captain cried. Shatro snapped pictures quickly, adjusting the tripods. I held up a bag of instruments to protect my face from the spray. Peering from under the bag, trying to see how they flew without visible wings, I observed the leading edge of one saucer beetle. Eight or nine white rectangular apertures opened and shut rapidly, producing the buzzing, slapping noise. Somewhere within the flat carapaces, the saucer beetles pumped the air and ejected it from the rear.

“They're dirigibles,” I said, revelation coming upon me.

“Very good!” the captain said. “Any one of us could lift them like feathers. And they're not just here to suck out what they need—they feed the pins. Mutual needs met, from a sub-zone to each of at least two zones!”

Dozens more saucer beetles came blowing over the valley with a steady westerly breeze. As they hovered, darting back and forth with considerable dexterity, their companions, mounted on the pins, suddenly leaped back, leveled off in flight, and buzzed away. With a sidling motion, the pins whose production had been harvested pulled back slowly, a stately retreat that allowed other pins to come forward and take their places by the pool.

“We presume they fly back to some interior region, perhaps around a seed-mother, and drop their cargoes,” the captain shouted over the buzzing. “We've never traced their paths. I've always longed for a good airplane or helicopter to follow them. Perhaps we'd find our first queen!”

A fog of vapor now filled the valley with an almost unbearable smell. Everyone began to cough uncontrollably. Shatro grabbed his camera and retreated.

“All right, enough,” Randall cried, swiping his hands at the smoke.

The captain hesitated, said something about waiting for the next flight, but the vapor became unbearably thick. Coughing, he agreed. We picked up the bags and walked as fast as we could back to the caldera and the sea.

7

Unable to sleep, head resting on folded hands, I lay on my side in my bunk aboard the Vigilant, listening to an incessant spectral hooting from the mainland. A deep booming sound underscored the hooting and was itself topped by fluting trills.

We had weighed anchor in the early evening and sailed several miles southeast, out of the tricky waters in the shadow of Mount Pascal. We had then dropped anchor once more in a calm patch of ocean a mile outside the boundary of the sunken caldera.

The captain had been too tired that evening to give his customary lamplight lecture. If his lungs were feeling as tight and reluctant as mine, I didn't see how he could lecture. Here, the air at least was sweeter.

I took up Nkwanno's slate and scrolled to the last section I had read in his journals. The soft glow of the slate screen filled my curtained bunk with false moonlight.

Crossing 29, 125

We have survived this long, so many disasters, and have just begun to feel confident, and now the rules are changing and all that we have learned may become useless.

For weeks there have been rumors from trekkers and small villages in south Liz and at the head of the Terra Nova that something is happening in the truce between Liz and Calder's zone, where few of us live. Thief activity has increased across the truce, according to harvesters at Lake Mareotis, and the lake itself changed color from blue to orange along the east shore.

Yesterday, a delegation of Lenk's ministers—two men and one woman—returned from Mareotis and stopped here for the evening to rest. I went down to the docks with Johanna Ry Presby and met them walking up the path. They appeared tired and downcast and refused to answer questions at first. Johanna invited them to the refectory and we fed them a late cold meal. Their gloom seemed to deepen as they ate.

I tried to pry information from them. They were adamant about saying nothing, which angered us. “We should know, if it's something important, to give us time to prepare,” I insisted. “Keeping secrets will do no good.” The woman had tears in her eyes but no one would talk. “It will come out soon,” she said. They thanked us for our food and left early the next morning.

Radio messages from Athenai and Jakarta have been received, most in Lenk's code, but some have been open. The crisis has gradually been unveiled. From here and there, we are putting together rough pictures of a disaster—not truly a disaster, but momentous change, disastrous perhaps for us—but in truth we have no words yet to describe what is happening.

Crossing 29, 128

I have been invited to accompany Redhill and Shevkoti to Mareotis. Shevkoti became the village agro upon Ser Mural's death last winter. With Mayor Presby's blessing, we will go upriver and examine the truce near Mareotis, in hopes of learning for ourselves what the problems may be. We have become discouraged about learning from Athenai in time to prepare Moonrise for whatever may be happening.

Crossing 29, 134

At Mareotis for a day now. At some peril, we have hiked along the truce and seen wonderful, terrible things. The truce boundary—white dead soil between the ecoi—has become invaded with soil preparers, including what I am calling Tillers, a scion either unseen until now or new. These are massive and crudely made forms as much as eight meters long and five high, resembling wheeled spiders, that roll and crawl methodically—

I had been reading about wheeled scions but until now had not considered how seriously improbable such creatures were. With a little cross-referencing, I found a small piece in Redhill's encyclopedia about scions with wheels:

Wheeled forms defy practical explanation in terms of terrestrial biology. We must not forget, however, that scions are very likely not created from seeds containing their own genetic instructions, but are assembled in biological factories. Wheels and the creatures that bear them may not be made all at once and together, but at different times and separately. The difficulties of imagining a creature that can grow and maintain its own wheels are overcome. The wheels may even be thought of as separate scions, or as constructs made of organic materials, but no longer alive.

Observations from Kandinsky's zone in Tasman point to wheeled scions that may actually create their wheels from recycled, compacted arborid or phytid tissues, replacing or repairing worn wheels as needed...

I returned to Nkwanno's journal:

—churning the soil and preparing it for occupation. But among these forms dart many varieties of thieves and defenders, some sighted in the silva—though infrequently—and others never seen before.

The thieves and defenders do what they have always done, but on a scale and with a frequency never witnessed before. Defenders—serpents and arthropods, translucent five-legged ursids with shining glassy saber-teeth on the leading and trailing edges of their forelimbs—keep behind the old boundary of the truce, grabbing and dispatching scions that cross from the opposite side. But more and more scions cross, and the defenders are overwhelmed. We have seen worn-out defenders, sitting in the redefined silva like exhausted warriors, twitching and spilling their fluids from torn joints—and all around them, foreign scions pass, as if in glee at new freedom. Yet dead scions line the silvas on both sides. It seems that here, a war is being combined with an orgy.

Crossing 29, 136

Our food has run out, and we risk starving before we return to Moonrise. We stay nevertheless.

The carnage has increased to such a level that we can't imagine the outcome. Are the ecoi caught in a struggle to the death? Has one seed-mother or queen taken offense at the actions of its neighbor, and declared destruction that must inevitably become mutual?

What Shevkoti fears—and his fears translate easily to us, hungry and terrified—is that all of Liz's scions we have come to identify as edible or useful will be destroyed, leaving us with a much-reduced food supply.

Crossing 29, 137

New transporter forms have arrived and are carrying away dead and dying scions. The
once-fertile stretches along the truce and around Mareotis are denuded, or covered with a sad
wreckage of scions, which of course will not decay. Pink worms cluster on many of Liz’s
casualties, consuming much of the remains, but then the worms themselves die and liner the ground
... The process is never completed, and we can see only endless hectares of destruction and
waste.

Crossing 29, 139

We have begun to scavenge dead scions ourselves. With our small radio, we have kept in touch with Moonrise, and the destruction is happening there, as well. The villagers are terrified. We have actually fought against defenders and transporters trying to remove edible scions, but scavengers the size of ants enter our larders and remove any scion foodstuffs, however processed they may be. This is a purge, and all of the old forms must go.

I have sickened myself trying to chew on remains of scions we have collected as samples. Fortunately I have eaten nothing that has done more than make me violently nauseated, and I have recovered quickly. Shevkoti is less fortunate, and the lining of his mouth and his gums have become blistered and hang in shreds.

It is as if we begin all over again, in a new Lamarckia, with new perils.

Smaller transporters have begun to arrive, filled with young immobile scions whose eventual forms we can only guess at. Shevkoti, even in his agony, has discovered young arborids and classified them as combinations of elements from Liz's arborids and Calder's. He believes that in this conflict, Liz has predominated, however; we see many new scions that are quite familiar, though with some changes in design.

Crossing 29, 141

We must return to Moonrise to share our fates with those of our neighbors. We can't eat even the most familiar of the new scions, which are growing rapidly and replenishing the silva. In a few days we will die if we stay.

The truce has been erased. Zone one and zone two seem to have united. From Moonrise by radio we hear that Athenai's scientists believe this may be a kind of sexual act. They are describing this event as a sexing and a fluxing.

Our fields in Moonrise have been trampled by marauding scions, and our orchards destroyed. Buildings within the village itself have been damaged. I think this may be the end, unless we can somehow remove all the inhabitants of Elizabeth's Land to Tasman. But that will be an impossible task.

I turned off the slate and sat in the darkness for a few minutes, thinking of the terrors and hardships Lenk's people had passed through. I knew in rough outline the outcome of the sexing and fluxing between Liz and Calder. There were no complete explanations of what had actually happened, but Calder no longer existed, and Liz was forever altered.

I clasped the slate with an emotion I had never experienced in my brief and inadequate life: something like reverence. The body on the dock had been a powerful and experienced man, in some respects a better man than I. Yet he had been ruthlessly slaughtered.

I could not absorb it all. My mind was crowded and I felt half-sick with sadness and confusion.

But they survived. Without my help, without the help of the Hexamon, Lenk's people survived and returned to a kind of prosperity.

Sleep, it seemed, would finally come to me. I drifted in a dark, cloudy void, neither comfortable nor particularly concerned about comfort, thoughts flitting in and out of my awareness, which was fading into something deeper and more basic. I had not slept in many years, and the sensation was more unnerving than the sounds from the shore, or what I had just read in Nkwanno's journals.

I heard a rapping nearby, thought for a moment it was a group of friends in my apartment in Alexandria, in Thistledown, trying to fix a broken toy by striking it gently on the edge of a table ... And then I opened my eyes. Shirla's round face peered at me, half-hidden by the drape of my bunk's curtain. “Good,” she said. “You're awake. Randall and Shankara and the mate and a few others are talking on deck. They thought you'd like to join us.”

I foggily wondered if I was about to be drawn into a conspiracy to mutiny. The day had not been that miserable, however, and the captain had certainly not shown himself to be unfit for duty ... I crawled out of the bunk, slipped on my pants while Shirla waited, and followed her up the ladder to the forecastle deck.

A group of nine stood around two electric lanterns: Randall, Shatro, and the mate, the sailmaker Meissner representing the craft rates, Talya Ry Diem and Shankara for the A.B.s, and I supposed, Shimchisko and myself for the apprentices. Beyond the ship's bow, outlined by stars and clouds glowing dimly in the light of a single small moon, rose the distant black shadow of Mount Pascal. Having brought me on deck, at Ry Diem's request, Shirla stood to one side, out of the lantern light.

“The captain's asleep,” Randall said. “He's had a bit of a setback ... He overdid his stay on Mount Pascal, I'm afraid. He's asked me and Ser Soterio and Ser Shatro to talk about what we'll do if we can't finish this voyage, if Jakarta's taken, in short, what if the Brionists move in to Elizabeth's Land in force.”

“Which many think may happen soon,” Shatro said somberly.

Randall cleared his throat. His own voice sounded hoarse. “The captain's put his personal fortune into this ship. I've contributed what little I can spare. The rest of you get an adequate wage, but ... if we put out to sea, and nothing's certain on land, we could come back, find our money's no good—Brion's appropriated everything, shifted currency ... We don't know, because frankly, we don't have much experience with this sort of thing. So we've brought some of you together, members of the crew we place trust in, as intelligent types, to start sounding out individuals, see whether this voyage is feasible. If we can't go on beyond Jakarta, we need to know now.”

Shatro stepped to the center of the group and said, “Some of the crew may even sympathize with Brion and hope to join his forces.” He shifted his glance from face to face, fingered on mine, squinted, and moved on.

“I don't know much about Brion, except that he's taken over Hsia and been thieving and killing,” Ry Diem said softly, glancing around the circle.

“The captain had hoped we could spend a few days exploring the Chefla waste,” Randall said, “waiting to see if the Brionists left. Then put into Jakarta and pick up the supplies and the researchers. That's not possible. Seems the Brionists are in for a long blockade, to force some sort of settlement. Jakarta advises we just clear out. It might mean war.”

“We're not equipped for a war,” Soterio said in an undertone.

“We should get on to Wallace Station and pick up Ser Salap,” Ry Diem said wearily. “We should get on and do what we can.”

“That's what the captain thinks,” Randall said after a pause.

Shatro considered that for a moment. “Makes sense,” he agreed.

“But it puts us critically short of researchers,” Randall observed.

“Salap and I can do the work,” Shatro said. “Perhaps he can spare a few others from Wallace to come with us.” Clearly, Shatro regarded this as an opportunity. A junior, he might quickly advance. Ser Randall seemed less convinced.

“You think the crew will agree ... that we proceed down the coast to Wallace Station, and plot our course from there?”

Ry Diem shook her stiff, graying shag. “We're not amateurs,” she said. “Speaking for the A.B.s. We do our work. It seems worthwhile work to me.”

Shimchisko and I glanced at each other, and he nodded. “The apprentices have no other pressing duties,” he said. “Wherever we go, there might be war.”

“I agree,” I said.

Randall seemed relieved. “I'll tell the captain in the morning,” he said.

8

During our trip south, skirting Jakarta and sailing along the shaggy black and brown Cheng Ho Coast, the captain kept in constant radio communication with Salap at Wallace, less frequently receiving instructions or bulletins from Jakarta and Athenai. He shared these snatches of information only rarely, passing something along to Randall or Soterio for the consumption of the rest of the crew. None of the news sounded good. Perhaps Keyser-Bach wanted us to feel isolated from the unfolding history in Jakarta. He succeeded in part; we kept our focus on handling the Vigilant, though we always kept a sharp eye out for Brionist ships.

South of Jakarta, we saw no ships at all. There was little commerce in these waters. The coast north and south of Jakarta lay in Petain's Zone, which had been explored by harvesters and mineral prospectors under the leadership of Jorge Sao Petain just months after the immigrants’ arrival. They had sailed in crude boats along the Cheng Ho Coast south from Jakarta, venturing inland every few dozen miles, finding little of interest from the point of view of ores and mineral resources.

While Elizabeth's Zone, blessed with steady rainfall, seemed to concentrate on thick silva with four main types of arborid scions and perhaps thirty types of phytids, Petain's Zone, with many different climates, showed considerable variety, both on land and in the sea, which it favored. Most of Petain's variety was found in seas and rivers. The land south of Jakarta it covered with a desultory and uniform carpet of small black bushy phytids called sootbrush, seldom reaching waist-high. The captain, when he resumed his lectures, showed us photographs and drawings of these forms, and their attendants: blue crowflies—pterids the size of a human hand, which functioned as cleaners, scavengers, and defenders; deadeye trees, covered with shrunken white or gray berries that served as nutrients for various small arthropod scions, induding crowflies; and a dozen or more others, none as large or widespread as the pelagic forms.

It had been Jiddermeyer's main triumph to prove the original surveyors’ theory—using specimens returned by Petain, analyzed with standard medical equipment—that zone one was one individual organism and zone five another.

Jiddermeyer had first stated the firm principles of Lamarckia's biosphere, toppling centuries of evolutionary theory—for that was all it took, one exception to the established rules. There was no competition between what he first called “scions” within an ecos because they were in fact parts of one organism, one genetic individual, grown or created in some unknown fashion to play specific roles and accomplish certain tasks.

His colleagues and students—including young Baker and Shulago—had tried to chart the life cycles of scions, traveling deep into the silvas to find the fount, the birthplace or places of all scions. They had never succeeded. They had learned that arborids and phytids began as blue-gray sluglike forms, called pre-scions or neonatals, which traveled or were carried across hundreds or even thousands of kilometers, led by the silva's status singing to find sick or dying scions and replace them. Arborids and phytids performed the function of Earth plants, and made up ninety-eight percent of scions by count in Liz. Mobile scions, which fed from special stomata rather than consuming their comrades, tended the silvas, cleaning up the environs, consuming and removing dead scions, preparing the soil and growing beds, and in general acting the role of expert gardeners.

Other mobile scions, Jiddermeyer believed, acted as scouts, the eyes and ears of the hypothetical “queens” or “seed-mistresses.” Still others—such as samplers—monitored scion activities, searched for intrusions from other zones, or crossed zone boundaries to act as spies. Jiddermeyer first found and described examples of disguised intruders, boundary-crossing scions, the carcasses of failed mimics being cleaned up by processors and gardeners, or on several occasions successful mimics discovered quite by accident.

Each zone had managed, without direct competition, without obviously obeying the laws of survival of the fittest, to fill all the major niches available, to take complete advantage of sun, air, water, and minerals—Lamarckia's environmental qualities and resources.

The zones received their human-assigned numbers by order of discovery, not identification as separate organisms. Explorers heading upriver from Calcutta had first discovered zones two and three, followed by zone four along the western coast. Petain's expedition had set out shortly thereafter. What had astonished the early explorers—all searching desperately for good farmland and resources—was the lack of variety in the various zones. Most zones contained less than a thousand types of scions—including microscopic varieties. Even more astonishing had been the apparent lack of competition between scions, except at zone boundaries, where a kind of long-term “cold war” went on.

The evening before our arrival at the station, about half a day's sail if the wind maintained its present direction and speed, we saw the edge of a huge storm. As the sun burnished the storm's leading edge, turning it into a distant red and gold temple of clouds, the captain paced on deck, scowling deeply. He watched the storm closely through binoculars, swinging them east to west repeatedly.

True to his word, Randall invited me into the captain's study and lab for a conference among Shatro, the captain, and himself. I sensed my delicate position, having no established role in the proceedings yet, and listened attentively.

The captain was still agitated. He marched back and forth in front of the wall-mounted cages containing boxes of empty jars and shelves of books, arms swinging loosely at his sides. “We had hoped for time and purity of concentration,” he said. “We may have neither. Athenai may recall all shipping ... unless talks begin soon with Naderville. Good Lenk can't afford to lose his ships—whether to storms or pirates.”

Keyser-Bach stopped his pacing to peer through the small window on the wide cabin's port side. The storm clearly worried him. “Ser Salap wants us to spend two weeks at Wallace, so he can put a cap on this portion of his work there. He cares little for the Brionist troubles. I wish I could afford his nonchalance, but we can't spend more than two days at the station, much less two weeks.”

“Then our course is clear,” Shatro said firmly. His eyes shifted around the room, looking for the flow of consensus. “We need to pick up Sers Salap and Thornwheel and Cassir ... and get on with our voyage.”

The captain shrugged and turned away, staring again through the window at the wall of grayness beyond the horizon. “In this atmosphere, no storm should last decades.” He tapped his fingers on the sill. “We could be out of range of recall in a matter of weeks. Radio reception has always been chancy below these latitudes.”

“Not that chancy,” Randall said.

“A problem, Erwin?” the captain asked.

“I dislike avoiding or ignoring orders,” Randall said.

“As do I,” Shatro hastened to add. Then, unsure whom he might displease most, he stumbled on, “But the ... reception does fade now and then. South, below—”

“Not a matter of disobeying orders,” the captain said tightly. “More a matter of riding ahead of the storm. I am an Ahab with two white whales, but I don't seek them out, I flee from them.” He flashed a grin at this conceit. “One is politics, which has bitten one leg off, and which I shun at every opportunity—”

“Unless it furnishes your ship,” Randall said gloomily, hoping to head off this clumsy metaphor.

“And the other is that storm.” The captain pointed emphatically out the window. “It nearly overtook me when I dropped off Salap at his station two years ago. Which of my white whales is worse?”

Shatro shook his head, unable to follow the captain. “Sir, I am unclear about the promotion of Ser Olmy.”

“No doubt,” Keyser-Bach said with an acid tone. “I understand this young fellow is bright, and we are short of researchers. Salap tells me on the radio that he cannot spare more than two from Wallace to accompany us.” He held out his hand as if to cue Randall. “But how will Ser Olmy serve?”

“I leave that up to Salap,” Randall said. “I would like to have as many capable minds as possible at work on this expedition, and at the chief researcher's disposal.”

“How does one more mind help?” Shatro asked with a sniff.

“This expedition should not face the same problem we all face on this planet,” Randall said. “We came here knowing we would be a small group, and completely isolated. We did not understand what that would cost us intellectually and culturally.”

“What does culture have to do with it?” Shatro asked.

“I understand what Erwin is saying,” the captain said. “We face a huge puzzle that would challenge our greatest minds, even if they had access to all the resources of Thistledown. But we don't have access to those resources. And this ship—all due respect to all aboard at present—is not filled to overflowing with creative geniuses. Right, Erwin?”

“Though by no means a ship of fools,” Randall said, waggling one hand slowly.

“By no means,” the captain echoed, eyes half lidded.

Shatro shrugged and puffed out his cheeks.

“I recognized that Olmy was bright the day he came aboard,” the captain said. “But I feel little sympathy for those so-called explorers who launch themselves into the silva, uneducated and ill-prepared. I've seen too many of them come back wild-eyed mystics, if they come back at all. Did the silva give you a fit of vastitude, Ser Olmy?”

“I felt lost in it, sir,” I said. “Overwhelmed. But I came back still myself, if that's what you mean.”

“All right,” the captain said. “I will go along with this promotion, with Salap's approval, so long as we do not have to sail with one less hand.”

“I'll enjoy my work either way, sir,” I said, trying for the proper humility. Shatro scowled, then resumed his mask of patent neutrality.

“I'd like to be securely moored at the station by tomorrow morning,” the captain said.

Night had obscured the ocean and the coast as I came up on deck, but looking north, I saw bright flashes, orange and pink, dozens of miles away in the general darkness: the captain's immortal storm.

By morning, the storm had moved out of sight, and tension on the Vigilant eased. The wind held, and we sailed smoothly over deep blue water, beneath a sky filled with cotton-puff clouds and high, fleecy cirrus.

The land at the southeastern extreme of the Cheng Ho Coast consisted of a line of low, intermittent cliffs, dotted by granite domes, against which the sea broke in thin lines of breakers. Inland, what first caught the eye were twisted, squat towers like immense, thick thorn bushes trimmed by giant gardeners. As we sailed closer to the shore, these towers resolved themselves as thickly intertwined trunks spreading across several hectares of ground, rising to heights of more than a hundred and fifty meters, and crowned with brilliant red discus-shaped leaves as much as ten meters in diameter. Between the towers, a pale tan uniformity painted the low, gently rolling hills, giving the impression of featureless sand stretching to infinity. This was not sand, however, but Petain's prairie, which covered thousands of square kilometers south of the sootbrush country. The prairie was made not of dried grasslands, which might have been a second guess, but of a thick, shiny surface dotted every few meters with dimples deep enough to hide a human.

I performed my sailor's duties on the starboard morning watch with the other A.B.s and apprentices. Shirla had been part of the night watch, and passed me on deck with a weary, satirical grin. “Kiss-up,” she whispered. “Now you'll get the best duty. Never hang off a yard again...”

“Not so lucky,” I said. “You're stuck with me for a while.”

She stopped, surveyed me with an expression of mock disdain, hands on hips. “I hardly feel worthy of your company.”

I gave in to a flush of irritation. “Shirla, I am what I am. I can't help being interested in what the captain and Shatro study. Are you mad at me?”

She sneered. “Don't presume that you arouse such strong emotions, Sir Olmy. It doesn't become you.”

“No more sweets?” I asked. Now it was her turn to blush.

“Flirts with a higher rate are doomed, you know,” she said.

“We've been so involved,” I chided.

Her expression fell then, no mocking, and I realized I had caused genuine pain. “Screw that,” she said, and turned to go below.

The first mate glared at me, but before he could speak, I was down by the mizzen with Ibert and Riddle, unfurling the christian and raising the spanker before putting in to the cove near the station.

The captain came on deck with Randall and stationed Shimchisko and Cham fore and aft to drop depth lines and report. Ibert and Kissbegh climbed to the tops to look for shifting vine reefs, always a danger around Petain. Three miles ahead, five low brown huts stood on the beach above the wave line—there were hardly any tides on Lamarckia—while a few small boats bobbed offshore in the regular, gentle surf. The wind blew offshore at two or three knots, complicating our maneuvers; we tacked back and forth across several miles before dropping anchor in sixteen meters of effervescent water, about two hundred meters off the beach.

The captain ordered the longboat lowered. Randall and Shatro supervised the loading of boxes of provisions for the crew that would remain at the station and the packet of mail. It had been three months since the last ship visited this cove.

Shimchisko, Shirla, Ry Diem, Shankara, and I crewed the longboat. All but Randall and the captain pulled on the oars across the short distance. Ry Diem and I leaped out into the foaming, hissing waves, pushed through a thick line of sea crust—dried foam with the consistency of baked meringue—and tugged the boat onto the beach, tying the rope to a thick woody stem of sea vine rooted deep in the sand. We walked up the beach in line of rank.

Shirla pointedly said nothing, lips set tight. I wondered how much of this sea flirtation was a kind of hidden courtship, and what rules I had violated.

Five men and four women met us on the beach. The chief researcher, Mansur Salap, stepped forward and embraced Keyser-Bach with a warm smile. Salap was the eldest of the station's nine personnel, fifty-seven years of age, streaks of gray in his close-cropped black hair and narrow goatee. Dressed in loose black pants, black shirt, with a long black coat draped over them, feet shod in fiber sandals, he was smaller than the captain, and a touch thinner, though his thinness seemed more in proportion. In truth he was an elegant fellow, not a movement wasted, his long fingers on feminine hands making small, precise gestures as he spoke in a pleasant tenor, explaining the nature of their work the past few weeks. The captain walked beside him, chin in hand, nodding and frowning in concentration.

Thornwheel and Cassir, two of Salap's assistants at the station, were younger than I, though we appeared about the same age. Youth passed more quickly on Lamarckia than in Thistledown. The captain preceded us into the main lab building. The walls were made of thin frames covered with dark leathery sheets; the roof was thatched sea vine strips.

The captain took a seat and Salap gave us a tour of the apparatus on the tables within the lab, relating the outcomes of some of his most recent experiments. “The prairie is not just one continuous scion, as we thought a year ago ... It consists of at least five different types, adapted from one form across centuries or even millennia, a new kind of growth and development in our experience ... Instead of recalling and reshaping the scions at some point far from their habitat, the ecos provides them with modified templates and they change themselves.”

The captain listened attentively, clearly feeling at ease with Salap, and fascinated by his discoveries, but not eager to speak his mind.

“With the equipment on Vigilant, we could easily understand the prairie's relations to the sea vines and other pelagic scions. There is a reciprocal arrangement, of course, as Jiddermeyer thought—a constant for all ecoi—but the nature of the arrangement between land-dwellers and the pelagic or riparian scions has not been clearly established. Here, we've charted the deliveries of nutrients from the sea, measured and estimated the rates of exchange and what gets returned to the sea ... We begin to understand the metabolism, as it were, of all Petain.”

“Very good,” the captain said, tapping his chin with one finger.

Salap folded his arms. “Something you wish to say, Captain?” he asked coolly.

“We can't stay long. Two days at most—”

“Because of the troubles,” Salap said.

“Randall agrees with me,” the captain said, as if there might be a debate, and he wished to squelch it early.

The master sat on a stool across from the captain. He raised his eyebrows and smiled uneasily.

“Do you think it will be war?” Salap asked.

“It's going to be a bureaucratic nightmare, whatever it is,” Randall said. “We've endured enough of those.”

“We'll need as many researchers as you can spare,” the captain said. “Erwin's already been recruiting from among the crew.” He looked at me.

Salap stepped forward and looked me over critically, as if I were a peculiar animal, perhaps a scion. “This is... ?”

“Ser Olmy Ap Datchetong,” Randall said. “A student of Elizabeth. More competent than most.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Ser Olmy. The master has always had a soft heart,” Salap said. “Fortunately, he's also a good judge of people.”

“I'd like to leave as soon as possible,” the captain said.

Salap shook his head, clearly disliking the pressure. “Give me two days. We will pack up the equipment I need on the ship, transfer the equipment you are delivering to the station, and finish our measurements of nocturnal weather-born transfers.”

The captain looked surprised. “Weather-born?”

Salap gave us a coldly smug smile. “My special surprise. We've learned much about the storm that lies out there now, that chased us both around the Darwin Sea, but never caught us.”

“What have you learned?” Keyser-Bach asked.

“That it is alive,” Salap said.

9

By late afternoon, the last boatload had been delivered, and the captain and Salap stood on the beach, staring out to sea. The storm had swung in close to the coast again, thirty or forty miles offshore, filling the northern horizon almost east to west with pillars and whorls of cloud arranged in spreading, stacked layers. This close, the clouds had a scintillant quality, as if filled with flakes of mica.

Shatro, Thornwheel and Cassir stood by the boat, waiting to be taken to the ship. I stood beside Randall, a few meters from the captain and Salap.

“He still hasn't explained,” Randall said in an undertone. He looked around anxiously. “We should put out immediately or we'll be blown onto the beach or the vine reefs. I'd hate to weather that bastard in any case—but I'd rather meet it at sea.”

The captain motioned for all of us to join him and Salap. “We've been talking,” he said. “We both agree that things can be finished here by tomorrow afternoon, or by morning if we put our backs into it. We'll need to help rig and test the equipment we just delivered, and then we'll—” His words trailed off, and he stared at the storm as if lost in a dream.

“It never comes ashore. It sends emissaries,” Salap said.

“Mansur, you have my infinite admiration, but I'd like to know what to expect,” the captain said sharply, “in clear language.”

Salap seemed to enjoy the captain's discomfiture. “The emissaries are small fronts of cloud, rich with water and materials picked up within the storm itself. Difficult to describe.”

“How strong?” Randall asked.

“A few knots of wind. Enough to blow them in gently—not enough to hurt the ship, or rip up the fabric on the prairie.” Fabric was what Salap and the station's researchers had come to call the shiny brown tissue that spread over the prairie—and concealed the inner workings of the five types of scions. “In truth, the storm serves many purposes. It stirs the sea, grows nutrients like a gigantic bio-reactor ... and it controls the weather. For hundreds of miles, there is no storm but the one storm.”

The captain was torn between scientific elation, concern for the storm, as a sailor should be concerned about all storms, and what might have been incredulity. “A remarkable discovery,” he allowed, “but I think I'll feel more secure when we're all on the boat.”

The captain returned to the boat before dark, taking Salap with him to arrange the equipment and specimens aboard Vigilant. Shatro had been waiting for this moment, and when Randall was out of sight—walking off the dinner Salap had prepared, a dubious feast of unfamiliar bits of prairie fabric—the three researchers found me on the beach, watching the storm in its unmoving, ever-changing grandeur.

“We have some questions,” Thornwheel said amiably enough. He wore a roughly trimmed beard, which gave his high forehead and plump boyish cheeks some maturity, but not a great deal. They sat beside me on the mottled dark sand, picking at the rough rounded quartz and granite pebbles.

“Matthew tells us you have little formal training,” Cassir said. He gave me a hard look. “We wonder how little.”

“Enough to get by,” I said. Their expressions—a little flat, with unconvincing smiles—forecast some sort of trouble.

“We're just curious,” Cassir said. “We like to know who we're working with. What you're capable of.”

“I'm self-educated,” I said. “Lenk school, but no secondary after.”

“Shatro tells us you were lost in Liz for two years,” Thornwheel said.

“Hardly lost.”

“Liz is old and familiar by now,” Shatro said.

“I never got familiar with Liz,” I said.

Thornwheel chuckled. “Our scientific paramours, right? Scholar's mistresses ... books and dreams of queens.”

Shatro was not mollified. “What did you hope to learn? Without equipment, without training ... We've been trained by Salap and Keyser-Bach. There are no better teachers on Lamarckia.”

“I haven't been so fortunate,” I admitted, trying to avoid the confrontation Shatro seemed to want. “I spent most of my time trying to track the behavior of mobile scions. Whitehats, vermids, but especially aquifer snakes...” I had read enough in Randall's library about the kilo-meters-long fluid-bearing tubes, part of which I had seen outside Moonrise, that I felt I could hold up an argument for several minutes, at least.

“I tracked one when I was a second in Lenk school,” Thornwheel said. “Never found the beginning, and never found the end.”

“I tracked one that was three kilometers long, at least. It dipped into the Terra Nova at one end...”

“What about the pink shells?” I asked, trying to get the focus off me and my experiences. “I never did see where they came from. Do you think they're remains of scions?”

Cassir took the subject eagerly. “Whitehats,” he said.

“We don't know that,” Thornwheel said contemptuously. “Don't rely on folk gossip. But we've never seen living things inhabit the shells.”

“Salap says he's sure whitehats deposit them as soil enrichers.”

Thornwheel shook his head. “They're the cast-off remains of vermids.”

Shatro shook his head in turn, more vigorously. The third degree had been averted, at least for now. He took one last shot at me:

“What did you learn that we don't know anything about? You spent two years there—did you see pink shells being deposited? Did you see aquifer snakes hooking up to feed another scion, or water a silva bed?”

“No,” I said.

“Nobody's seen any of those things,” Thornwheel said. “There just aren't enough of us, and too many mysteries.”

Randall walked along the beach and joined us as the last ribbon of light in the west faded. “I'd like to try to reach Athenai on the radio, now that it's night,” he said. “The storm doesn't seem to want to throw much lightning now, does it?”

“No, ser,” Shatro said.

“Maybe we'll get lucky.”

Cassir got up and we retired to the small cabin the researchers shared with the small radio. We were not lucky, however. The radio produced nothing but hiss and voices too distorted to understand.

“The captain could do anything he wanted, under these conditions,” Shatro said. Randall gave him a passing glare, but said nothing.

In the morning, before dawn, I came awake from a vivid dream of Thistledown City. The city had been almost empty of people, and the buildings had become like limp balloons. The message was clear enough: a city was nothing without its people.

But what about people, without the city?

I walked along the boundary of the prairie, savoring its extraordinary monotony, wondering what Lamarckia had to offer that could replace a city, or all the components of civilization.

Salap and his assistants seemed contented enough. The captain and Randall found challenges enough to amuse them. But what about me? I wondered what I would grow to miss most...

Already I missed Thistledown. I missed the straightforward flirtations and courtships I had been so good at; there was nothing to either constrain or slake my physical needs but willpower, and that left me bluntly frustrated, unable to respond in kind to even the simplest gestures, which were all that Shirla seemed capable of.

Cassir and Shatro met me as I doubled back along the boundary. “Go ahead,” Cassir shouted. “Walk on it. It's like spongy wood.”

The edge of the prairie resembled knobby melted wax, slumping over the shingle beach. Cassir jumped up to stand a meter above us, hands outstretched, grinning. “Biggest single thing on Lamarckia, what do you bet?”

“Salap said it was made of five scions,” Shatro objected.

“All melted together. Only master researchers—such as Salap and yours truly—could discover the components. Come on.” Cassir walked inland. Shatro jumped up before I did, and we both followed. The texture of the prairie was very much like hard cork, springy and pleasant to walk upon. We left no lasting impressions. Cassir ran in a happy circle. “It's been great here, working with Ser Salap ... But I'm glad to be off, I'll tell you. What are the women like on your ship?”

“Hard-working,” Shatro said.

“The mate and a senior A.B. keep us in line,” I added.

Cassir grimaced. “Pity we can't go to Jakarta right away. I'd love to spend time in a city again. A real chance to mingle ... I'd even sign on with a triad, if that's what it took.”

“Who knows where we'll be going?” Shatro asked gloomily. “We'll probably end up kidnapped and working for Brion.”

Cassir said, “Matthew says you were in a village the Brionists pillaged.”

“Pretty awful,” I said.

“Sure it wasn't pirates?” Cassir asked. “We've seen ships with no flags. Had to happen eventually. Another thing the Good Lenk didn't consider when he brought us here.”

“What?” Shatro said. “Should he have expected pirates?”

“No,” Cassir said, laughing. He seemed ready to laugh at anything, refreshed to see new faces. “Fates, I'm giddy just to have company. We've been up all night talking, haven't we, Shatro?”

“And drinking,” Shatro said.

“Prairie solvent.” He pulled a small glass bottle from his pocket, filled with milky fluid, and offered it to me. I took a small taste. Like pure fire, and still with the bitter aftertaste of all alcoholic beverages on Lamarckia. “We took three scion membranes from part of the prairie, arranged them in a way Lamarckia and Petain did not intend, made ethyl alcohol ... and without yeast! Salap says we can make all sorts of materials from the scions we've found. We'll make this planet more pleasant, given half a chance ... And I hope Lenk gives us that chance.”

“He's ill, they say,” Shatro said. “Getting old.”

Cassir suddenly sobered, glanced at the bottle, and pocketed it. “We'll all get old. Nobody asked us whether we wanted to or not.”

He lifted up his shoulders, took a deep breath, and swung his arm out to take in the inland prairie. “Quiet, my God, until the rain falls, and then it's like a dull, soggy drum. Do you think it worries?”

“I never saw a queen, or anything that seemed intelligent,” Shatro said. “I like to think it's alive and thinking, somewhere.”

“Oh, it is that,” Cassir said. “Very much alive and thinking ... Somewhere. Deep in the interior. Compared to Petain, Liz is a sweetie. Petain ... I imagine it, or him if I be truthful, to be a crusty, conservative old miser, except when he sets foot in the sea ... Then he gets extravagant. If we have time before the boat goes, we should swim out with some masks and look at the vine reefs. Proper big nutrient factory out there. Giant anchored membranes like nets, just bubbling away. Fast piscids, dozens of varieties. All of them taste awful. Petain is spectacular out there, but hidden by all that water. That's Petain, however. Rich and not at all generous with his beautiful daughters ... Fates, I'm drinking too damned much.” Cassir reeled dramatically, drew himself up again with a grin, and stamped his foot on the slick tan surface of the prairie. “Rain due in a few minutes, I think.” He stared out to the sea, where a low front of oily-looking clouds were moving in rapidly. “Let's get off this or we'll be drummed and sponged. Stranded until it pushes the water and nutrients down below. You can't walk twenty feet when your feet keep getting mucked.”

Cassir ran swiftly for the edge of the prairie. We ran after, springing along on the surface, skirting the deep dimples.

“Does the captain make the researchers do sailor work?” Cassir asked as we leaped off the edge, landing in the empty sand and pebbles.

“Only Ser Olmy,” Shatro said. “He isn't quite a researcher yet, however.”

“Right,” Cassir said, as if it didn't matter. “I like to climb aloft now and then ... but not if someone orders me to.”

The clouds slid rapidly across the beach, bringing at first a curtain of fine mist that spun in the morning light like whirlwinds drawn in gold dust. A few small brown disks fell and clung to my hands and face. I shrugged them off with a convulsive shudder, as did Shatro, but Cassir plucked them off his bare arms and ate them. “Quite good,” he said. “Coins, we call them. Taste like bread, and no immune challenges.”

I tried one, biting it in half. It did taste like bread—stale bread. “What's in them?” I asked.

“What the prairie needs,” Cassir said. As the clouds blew inland, I saw a haze of coins falling on the broad tan surface. “Sucks them right up. The storm—the big storm our captain is so worried about—it makes food for the prairie.”

“Salap told us that,” Shatro said, blinking miserably against the mist and the tiny slaps of brown disks.

“Yes, but there's more than even that. It makes lots of food. Some of it we can eat. Petain keeps its sea creatures pretty unpalatable, but it seems to cater to the prairie—if the storm is really alive, and belongs to Petain, as Ser Salap thinks.”

“How could it be alive?” Shatro asked.

The rain fell in thick sheets now. “Run for cover!” Cassir shouted.

We joined Randall and Thornwheel in the cabin, listening to the rain on the prairie, like hundreds of animals running. Thornwheel brewed a kind of tea from prairie skin harvested near the beach. He explained the process as the water came to a boil. “We flense it with our knives, peel a sheet off about the size of a blanket, take it back, cut it up ... let it dry in sheds. Nothing ever stays dry outside here. The prairie grows it back next day. Amazing polysaccharide complexes, and fast duplication, too.” He poured the water over minced skin and handed me a cup. “Go ahead,” he said, expression humorless. Thornwheel seemed quite the opposite of Cassir. Handsome, a little somber and sad.

The women on Vigilant would have more variety now, and would give their sweets and medical attentions to the new men...

Especially Shirla. And what was that to me?

I sipped the tea cautiously. It tasted muddy and rich, like a yeasty broth. “Drop a few coins in ... lunch,” Cassir enthused, lifting his cup in a toast. “When we get to Jakarta and present our papers, we'll be famous. Enough food in Petain to feed millions.”

“If Lenk allows it,” Shatro said.

“Could use some spice,” Randall suggested.

The rain ended twenty minutes after it began, and the clouds blew clear, leaving bright sunshine. The storm had disappeared again, as if following some familiar and habitual track.

10

The Vigilant put out to sea late next evening. The captain was relieved to be away from Wallace. He walked the deck while deep in conversation with Salap, accompanied on occasion by Thornwheel or Cassir. My elevation to assistant researcher had not yet been approved by Salap; the mate still gave me orders, and I remained with the starboard watch, working hard from just before dawn until just after dusk.

In the twilight, most of the crew rested before dinner. The winds were light, the storm that worried the captain and that Salap claimed was alive seemed to have vanished for good, the air was fresh, and the sea frothed like beer in our wake, hissing softly, a susurration beneath every word, every shipboard sound. I mused over Cassir's description of the offshore membranes, bubbling away oxygen from water ... completing the two-part respiration cycle.

Shirla stood by the rail amidships, keeping away from the scattered labors of the port night watch, now occupied with binding a crack in the gaff on the spanker. Cathedral tree xyla was liable to split after a few years at sea; the Vigilant was ten years old and many of her yards and masts wore tight-wound rope binders to keep the splits from spreading.

I sat next to Shirla, back against the gunwale. She did not walk away, as I had feared she might. She smiled down upon me where I squatted, past irritations apparently forgotten, and said, “It's begun, you know.”

“What?” I asked.

“The pairing off,” she said.

“Don't tell Soterio,” I cautioned.

“It's a game,” she said. “You can't stop life even at sea.”

“I suppose not.”

“Talya fancies the sailmaker, but he's married,” she said. “Not that that will stop them if we get more than a day on shore. She likes his voice. They make good music together.”

Shirla was finely tuned to the wavelengths of the crew. She seemed in a mood to talk, both a little anxious and a little sad.

“Nobody's after my stern, of course,” she said, gaze fixed on the horizon. “I've never attracted fast eyes.”

“You reward close study,” I said, hoping to cheer her a bit.

“You'll never know,” she said lightly. “You're a loner. You don't want anybody knowing anything about you. So what can a mere woman do to you?”

I laughed.

She wrinkled her nose and flicked one of her ears with her fingers. “I heard Salap arguing with the master yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“They were arguing about you. In the research cabin.”

“How did you happen to hear?”

“I was painting the lizboo with choker oil. Soterio says I have a velvet brush hand. I didn't hear a lot, but Salap said he'd pick his own researchers.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Oh.”

“I didn't know you were held in such esteem.”

“Randall seems to like me,” I said.

“Maybe you should be after his stern,” she suggested, not so lightly.

“He's a married man with four children.”

Shirla squatted beside me, biting her lower lip. “I could match you with another woman,” she said. “The A.B.s in our bunk area talk about you. You attract some of them. Women with fast eyes like you.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but no. Besides, I favor you.”

Shirla stared at me as if mildly offended, then looked away, jaw clenched. “I'm no fool,” she said. “It's not as if I can't hold up my end of a conversation.”

“I never thought you couldn't,” I said.

“Don't tease me.”

“I don't mean to—”

She interrupted. “Salap said he'll watch you closely. The captain went back to the radio. He's been listening to it a lot.”

“What does he hear?” I asked.

She gave me a cautioning look. “He hears what he chooses to tell us. That's all he hears.”

“Oh.”

She paused, still squatting on her haunches, and said, as casually as if she hadn't just warned me, “Jakarta might be closed for months. We'll never get in. Salap said he was angry with Randall, but Randall got him to admit ... that they're going to need more researchers. So I guess you're in.”

“Thanks for keeping an ear out,” I said.

She shook her head, pursed her lips, and stood. “The engineer is elegant,” she said. “A firster. He came over with Lenk. Maybe I'll try him.”

Khovansk the engineer was perhaps seventy, the oldest man on the ship. He spent most of his time belowdecks forging old broken metal into new pieces. He also maintained the ship's feeble and primitive electrical system.

“Maybe the Brionists will capture us and we won't have to worry about anything,” Shirla concluded. She got up and walked forward, leaving me utterly confused.

Two days out of Wallace, the first mate spotted a pelagic scion floating listlessly off our starboard beam. It was far from Petain or any other zone ocean territories and seemed lost, its back burned gray and blistering in the sun. We circled, put out the longboat, and investigated the creature. Salap led the boat crew, and soon they had roped the scion and dragged it slowly back to the ship.

Alongside the Vigilant, floating in the ship's shadow, we had a much better view of the creature. The crew on free watch—eight of us, including myself, roused from my bunk by Shimchisko—watched from the gunwale as Salap supervised the floating of a xyla platform.

“It's still alive,” Ibert said, clucking sympathetically.

“Looking for its mama,” Shimchisko said, only weakly sardonic. The scion was a piscid, a slender orange and black torpedo shape with three lines of stiff dark purple fins spaced equidistant on back and sides.

The Captain watched from the puppis, tapping his fingers on the rail and murmuring comments to Randall.

“It's a long way from any of its brothers and sisters,” Shirla observed from the rigging above.

“No flarking!” the mate shouted. Curious onlookers scraping the decks or clinging to the shrouds, or bellied over the yards, working sails, returned to their jobs—but only for a few minutes. Soon, even the mate watched Salap and the researchers hoist the piscid onto the platform, measure it, and take pictures.

“Good Man preserve us...” sailmaker Meissner said, peering over the side in passing. He shuddered. “Hope it won't call its queen from the deep.”

Ibert scoffed.

Meissner shook his head darkly and walked on.

“Sailor's superstition,” Ibert said, but drew his lips tight as Salap prodded the piscid. The creature undulated slowly on the platform, lifting its pink, eyeless snout. It opened and closed a four-part jaw, each part sporting a horny serrated tooth.

“It's just a fish,” Soterio said, looking at us with an expression of mixed defiance and guilt, as if he might be blamed for this sacrilege. “A scavenger, I bet. The kind sent out to chew up lost scions from other ecoi or to recycle dead scions.”

“What's this?” Randall asked, approaching the group by the rail with a master's concern for brewing trouble.

“Sir, sailmaker Meissner commented we should be leaving this one alone,” Soterio said.

“We've never had trouble taking scions on land or in the rivers,” Randall observed.

“Rarely take them this far at sea, sir,” the mate continued.

“So? Most of them aren't even edible.”

“Ocean queens...” Soterio said in a lowered voice, shaking his head.

“Ah, that the queens live in the oceans ... I've heard that,” Randall said. “That they'll rise up and punish us someday. Good theory. I'll tell the captain.”

“Not my own theory, sir,” Soterio hastened to add.

“Of course not.”

“It is no longer alive,” Salap called up from the platform. He bent down, water slapping at his boots, and lifted the beaked snout. It fell back, limp. “Very far from its home waters. Lost in currents.”

“Use it,” the captain called from the puppis. Salap looked up, uncertain what the captain meant.

“Our first specimen,” the captain said. “Bring it aboard and we'll study it.”

“He thinks the queens won't know,” Shimchisko said to Ibert and to me.

“Why so afraid, all of a sudden?” Ibert asked his friend. “You don't respect anything.”

“Not afraid,” Shimchisko said huffily. “The Good Man taught proper respect for things in their places.”

“So,” Ibert said. “This poor fish is out of its place.”

Shimchisko, who had turned very pale, walked to the starboard side of the boat, to be away from the sight of the dead scion.

“What do I know, what do I know?” Ibert muttered, stalking off after Shimchisko.

That evening, Salap dissected the piscid on a table on the main deck, electric lights supplementing the twilight settling over our spot of the Darwin Sea. The water was calm, the wind steady; a light crew tended the ship, while most of us watched Salap at work, circled around the table like an audience at a sporting event.

Salap seemed to enjoy the focused attention. The captain stood by the piscid's tail as the head researcher cut and drew his knife along the thick, tough skin between rows of fins. This took several minutes of effort, drawing grunts from the usually unflappable Salap, but finally he revealed the piscid's interior—ropy, surrounded by pale orange fluid, interspersed with orange and purple grapelike clusters. A familiar gingery, garlicky smell wafted out of the carcass, making the crew murmur and shake their heads among themselves. It smelled like one of Liz's scions, yet Liz was not supposed to venture out to sea.

“We should not draw conclusions too soon,” Salap warned, listening to the murmurs. “We have no records of this kind of scion, though it does bear some resemblance to a river whale. Interior anatomy is not unfamiliar for a piscid—these extensive ropy tissues are muscular analogs, but of course there is no cellular structure as such. We call them tissues by comparison only. They are more like bundles of actin or myosin fibrils, surrounded by networks of macrotubules which transport cytoplasmic components, much as do microtubules in our familiar cellular structure.”

He lifted the grapey clusters. “All organelles are created and controlled by these, what Shulago called staphyloform masses, which also supply and direct the flow of chemicals and nutrients. Scions are self-repairing, and have sufficient instructional genetic material to carry out that function, but no scion can reproduce its own form. That is left to the reproductive centers of the ecos itself, which, of course, are mysterious.”

Salap sliced through the ropes, which sprang aside like stretched rubber bands, flinging orange fluid across his apron and into the captain's face. The captain shook his head and asked for a towel. Salap checked to see if any fluid had gotten into the captain's eyes, but it had not. “Pelagic scions contain many substances that can cause severe chemical or allergic reactions,” he warned the crew. “Not only acetic acid in various concentrations, but ethanol, methanol, and organic compounds ... amines, steroids, enzymes and other proteins, and many types of polysaccharides. Merchant ships becalmed, out of fuel, with starving crews...” He shook his head “Some have tried to eat piscids from the deep waters. Some have died.”

This was not news to the crew, of course. Heads nodded around the circle. Meissner, standing with arms folded two meters away from me, shook his head emphatically and said, “The queens protect their own.”

More crew gathered closer as dusk deepened. The piscid seemed to hold a fascination even for those disinterested in the ship's scientific mission. “Where's the brain?” asked a tall, nervous A.B. named Wernhard.

Salap turned to the piscid's “head” and took out a small bowed saw with a thin blade. He cut around the head between the beak and fins and pulled the skin aside. “No brain like ours,” he said. “Networks of tubules carrying free amino acids, chiefly lysine, and mildly acidic fluids, may act as primitive processing centers. Do they think? Not as we do. Do they see? This one has no eyes ... It probably tastes with its entire skin.

“No brain, and no digestive system. Its only source of energy, once it is set free upon the ocean, is photoreceptive pigment, an advanced form of rhodopsin, in translucent membranes just beneath the skin of its back and fins. Not as concentrated as similar membranes in phytids and arborids ... Its main function may be to gather dead sister scions or scraps from other ecoi, and return them to some central analyzer or digester, which then rewards the piscid by replenishing its energy stores, or absorbs it and makes more. Then again, maybe it is a thief or spy ... a kind of enlarged sampler, like some piscids in the rivers. In some ways, it is simpler than a planarian worm.”

Salap pushed his lips out as if about to kiss someone, eyes going slightly out of focus, an expression I had learned meant he was deep in some speculation. “Maybe this is a one-of-a-kind specimen, drawn from some past catalog of designs, sent out on a specific mission. Now it's worn and lost and useless.”

I wondered if that could ever describe me.

Salap cut away a grayish membrane and revealed a startling rainbow of components within the piscid's central cavity. The captain became involved. “As Ser Salap tells us,” he said, pulling on gloves and examining the organelles before dropping them in jars of water dosed with potassium salts, “scions are more like single cells than multicelled organisms. They have evolved—if I may use that word, with its Earthly connotations—to a condition that has been called megacytic.”

The captain stepped around the table and dug his hand deep into the cavity, felt for a moment with a squint at the starry sky, and pulled out a marble-sized lump. Smoothing away nacreous connective tissue, he held it up in the lantern light. “Scions carry their genetic material in stony nodules. Ser Salap is famous for being the first to analyze this material, and to discover its chemical and structural relationship to our own RNA and DNA. However, the amounts of genetic material—roughly one tenth of one percent of the DNA in our own cells—and the genetic grammar, even the ancillary support structures, differ from our own.

“Each ecos attempts to hide and protect its genetic material, perhaps with ornate codes or decoys, yet, for the most part, I believe ecoi can sample and analyze scions with fair efficiency. We have seen new scions quickly imitated by other ecoi, and that leads us to believe the ecoi spy on each other, and that they are master genetic engineers.”

Salap pulled forth a long translucent tube filled with a gelatinous fluid. “Swim bladder, very fine oily substance,” he commented, passing the tube to the captain, who lifted it, weighed it on a scale, and let it slide into a pan for later examination.

“Can anyone tell us why ecoi would want to disguise or encode their genetic information?” the captain asked, treating his crew once again as a class of students.

The A.B.s and apprentices shrugged, glanced at each other, smiled sheepishly. Finally, A.B. Talya Ry Diem ventured her opinion in a gruff voice. “Don't want others stealing their designs.”

“Precisely.” The captain smiled at Ry Diem, and she beamed like a little girl. “An efficient form requires much effort to design and create, much trial and error. Theft is easier. Baker witnessed scion kidnapping in Thonessa's Zone, a small zone on Tasman, near Kandinsky. He never saw actual analysis—no one has—but found the discarded carcasses in Kandinsky later. Shortly after, adapted copies of these scions from Thonessa were produced by Kandinsky.”

Salap lifted his slime-covered hands. “I suggest we name this form Elizabethae Macropisces Vigilans—though the connection with Elizabeth's Zone is unproved.” He pulling a cloth over the dead piscid. “We have so many questions to answer. How does an ecos deal with death? What is the nature of its energy cycle, its feeding and respiration? Why have the ecoi created an oxygenated atmosphere, yet rely primarily on a non-respiratory photosynthetic cycle? Do ecoi in fact reproduce over long periods of time, or do they merely sex and flux—merge with valuable sub-zones, or with each other? If they do reproduce, since virtually all the land and most of the ocean are already populated by ecoi, where do young ecoi go to grow and mature? Is it possible the young exist within the ecos, and we do not recognize them?” He bathed his hands in a tub of seawater, then removed his gloves. “Many mysteries indeed, and I for one am eager to solve them.”

Twenty-three days out from Calcutta, one of the younger apprentices, Cham, standing watch on the foretree top, spotted what he thought were ships to the southeast. The captain came up from the cabin, followed by Randall. Thornwheel and Cassir emerged, then Shatro. Salap came last, and binoculars were passed between them on the forecastle deck near the bow.

“They're coming closer,” Randall observed.

Ry Diem was helping me repair a net on the quarterdeck. “Fates and breath of us all,” she murmured, lifting her eyes. “Brionists.”

“Not ships,” the captain said, loudly enough for all of us to hear. “Moving quite fast, however.”

Salap took the binoculars eagerly. He seemed ready to leap into the water.

“Wonderful,” he cried. “Speeders, racers ... largest I've ever seen.”

“From where?” the captain asked.

“Petain, perhaps,” Thornwheel suggested.

“No way of knowing,” Salap said, binoculars focused on the objects, now visible to everyone about a mile from the ship and bearing down rapidly. “They are moving faster than thirty knots.”

The captain took the binoculars again. “Pelagic scions big as longboats. Biggest I've seen except for river whales.”

Four of the creatures zipped across the ocean's choppy surface, sending up spray from wavetops, bouncing like speedboats and alternately singing and droning. “Baker observed these,” the captain said, as if that might make them less interesting.

“I have seen smaller ones myself,” Salap said.

“What do they do?” the captain asked. “Where are they from?”

Throwing long rooster-tails, the high-speed scions circled the Vigilant at fifty or sixty meters. They seemed little more than a tall sail or stabilizer mounted on a flat body. The forward part of the body dropped two limbs or fins into the water, where they spread to form hydroplanes. The aft section of the body whirled long-bladed cilia like propellers, driving the animals over the ocean at high speed, at least compared to the Vigilant. They circled us for ten minutes, then one darted closer, flashing by the port beam. Its colors were blue and dark purple across the stabilizer, gray and white along the body and fins, with red trim on all forward edges. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

Shirla took my arm as we watched. I glanced at her and saw her face flushed with an emotion I knew I shared, but which was difficult for either of us to express.

“Blessings upon Lenk for bringing us here,” she said. She held my hand to her lips and kissed it, biting a knuckle gently, and ran aft to trim the maintree skysail with other A.B.s.

The captain and Salap argued over the sighting for hours after, reaching no conclusions they could agree upon.

Meissner spread a sail across the main deck to check his repairs. “Messengers, tattletales,” he muttered for the benefit of no one in particular. “Checking things out across the Darwin, reporting back to their queens.”

11

At the end of the fourth week, Martha's Island lay three miles off the port bow, due north, visible beneath puffs of gray evening cloud as a sawtooth of six jagged mountains. Dark spits of lowland connected the rugged main island to headlands east and west, giving the broader mass the look of a bird with a feathery head prostrate upon the sea, its wings spread flat with tips raised weakly for flight. The Vigilant proceeded slowly over shallow sandy banks devoid of apparent life, topsails and spanker taut in a steady breeze and all others furled. The sea spread calm and deep blue for miles around.

We had entered the protected void of Martha's Island, and approached the island's southeastern shore, the only safe place to land a boat on the mountainous main body. If we had tried to land on the lowland beaches or the headlands and hike inland, we would have encountered extremely rugged and barren terrain; so Jiddermeyer had learned on his first visit, and Baker and Shulago had confirmed.

Most of the crew watched our approach to the island, evenly spaced in the middle and port side on the shrouds, masts, quarterdeck, and on the forecastle deck with the master and researchers. The captain had unfolded his portable chair on the quarterdeck and surveyed the coast and mountains through binoculars. Shirla and Shimchisko and Ibert watched with somber expressions.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

Shimchisko hitched up his shoulders and shook his head with a whistling release of breath. “Martha's Island doesn't know us,” he said. “We'll be getting acquainted.”

Ibert nodded grim agreement. “Samplers aren't always the same,” he said. “Not always small. Not always gentle.”

“Nonsense,” Shirla countered. “Every ecos is ‘polite.'”

That expression found favor among a certain large segment of the immigrants, who idealized the landscape and ecos. A kind of mythology had sprung up. The “many mothers of life,” it was said, were “polite, always nurturing.”

“That's not what my father says,” Kissbegh observed. He had descended from the maintree shrouds with Riddle. Both had pushed their way through the crew to the port rail and stood beside us. “Jiddermeyer lost three of his crew here. Nobody ever found them. My father sailed with Jiddermeyer.”

We wondered why he had not mentioned this before.

“He did. Two men and a woman vanished and my father said they were sampled.”

“Why didn't you tell us about your father before?” Ibert asked.

“He wasn't proud of me. I'm a clown.”

Shimchisko snorted. Riddle and Ibert seemed more sympathetic.

“No, I know what I am, and so did he,” Kissbegh said. “But that's how I got my berth on the Vigilant. Not every zone need be as sweet as Liz,” he concluded portentously. “We should listen to experience.”

Shirla shook her head, unconvinced.

Rumors passed quickly. The crew's anxiety increased as we approached the eastern headland and sailed through more stretches of shallow, dead water. We could not make out any scions, even from a few hundred meters; the spits between the island's center and headlands were sandy desert.

As we prepared for our stay on the island, I helped Salap arrange his equipment in the longboat.

“I hear you do not have a strong family,” Salap said, helping me carry two crates of specimen jars to the boat.

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

He was a small man with a face that seemed suited to sardonic opinions, dark eyes set unevenly above strong cheekbones smeared with blackrouge, a finely trimmed, graying black goatee, and square patches of hair trimmed free, like islands, at his temples. He wore loose-fitting black pants and a long black coat that seemed to fill out his thin body. “The master tells me you learn quickly.” He gave me a look that seemed at once both unconcerned and challenging, as if daring me to disagree—or trying to provoke me. “So I have agreed to take you on.”

“I am honored,” I said, climbing the ladder to the longboat in its chocks and carefully lowering the box of bottles.

We loaded a wire-wrapped cube of stacked folding lizboo-mesh cages, for capturing small scions alive.

“Still,” he continued, “there could be resentment. If you boast, I will send you back to the apprentices. And your duties will remain those of a sailor when we are not ashore and I have no use for you. Does that seem fair?”

I nodded.

“Good. We will accompany the first party to go ashore.” He wiped his hands on a towel and looked across the blue sea to Martha's Island. “Shulago and Baker said the central island and Mount Jiddermeyer were covered with thick silva. Something has changed. Perhaps we won't need so many cages...”

The Vigilant weighed anchor in a small cove just below the tallest of the island's central peaks, Mount Jiddermeyer. The sun had dropped behind the western headland and the mountains were black against the yellow twilight sky. Electric lanterns were switched on and the deck became a patch of bright stars against the gray-blue ocean and the silhouette of the island beyond. The apprentices and A.B.s were relieved of their duties and sat on deck at leisure, enjoying the warm evening air, yet still keeping nervous eyes on the looming blackness of Mount Jiddermeyer, outlined by stars and faint ribbons of moonlit cloud. Dinner was served on deck as a kind of celebration, and the captain and officers and researchers joined the crew topside.

The other researchers took my promotion from the ranks with fated nonchalance. “It's only what I expect from Randall and Salap,” Shatro said to Thornwheel, just within my hearing. “Nine days out of ten, Ser Salap's a martinet and by the rules this, by the rules that. On the tenth he's as generous as a bottomless bucket.”

After dinner, a keg of mat fiber beer was shared out on the main deck. I sat on the port gunwale with Ibert, Meissner, Shimchisko, and Shirla. We dangled our feet over the side, backs to the light, facing the darkness and listening to the waves as we sipped the weak, bitter brew, with its faint ginger-garlic tang. From the nightbound shore came the soft grumble of breakers on the black lava sand beaches.

We had not seen any scions at all so far, even on the mountain slopes, and that worried the captain. “It's wrong,” he said from his chair as Randall brought him a mug. “Martha's Island had a rich and lively ecos when Baker and Shulago last explored, a full silva both sides of the island. We haven't seen anything. It looks as if the whole island is dead.” That seemed to excite him. He turned to Salap, who stood with arms folded a few steps away. “It'll be primary science, pure and direct, eh, Mansur?”

“It will, sir,” Salap replied, smiling calmly.

“By the Good Man it will,” the captain murmured, eyes glittering, and sipped from his mug. He licked his lips with broad satisfaction. “Think of it, friends...” He swept the deck with his happy gaze, taking in those of us who sat on the gunwale, his researchers, the other apprentices where they lounged and ate or drank. “How many scientists, how many humans over the years, have had a chance to do primary science?”

“We will not just clean up little details,” Salap said, echoing the captain's enthusiasm.

He rubbed his chin. “Here's to Ser Korzenowski, designer of the Way,” he said, lifting his mug. “To his audacity.”

The crew sat in silence, all conversations stopped in uncertain embarrassment. Salap's gaze met mine. He was as interested in my reaction as I was in his.

Randall broke the silence. “And to Good Lenk, who used the Way as it was meant to be used, and broke the evil slide of fate and pneuma.”

“Hear, hear!” the captain said, his face flushing deeper red. He lifted his mug. “To Good Lenk, who guides us all!”

The crew joined the toast. The awkward moment did not pass completely, however. The mood of the evening, set by the warm breezes and the comfortable bright glow of electric lights, the keg of mat fiber beer, broke, and the crew wandered about the deck, finishing up small chores, preparing to sling hammocks abovedecks and sleep in the warm night air.

When the others were settled, Shirla and I still stood by the gunwale, listening to the breakers. “We're awfully confused, you know,” she murmured. “I wish I knew what to think, sometimes.”

The longboat set out with first light, commanded by Salap; the captain stayed aboard for this first sortie, in case the island might prove dangerous. He clearly did not enjoy this precaution, and gave Salap detailed instructions on what to look for, what to record on both of their slates, and when to return with a preliminary report. On the boat were two apprentices, Scop and An Sking—low-profile types who seldom volunteered, but were picked by Randall for this reconnaissance—and Randall himself. Shatro, Thornwheel, and I filled out the complement.

The boat crossed the few hundred meters to the shore, a narrow black-sand beach scattered with lumps of pumice and broken bits of toughened scion fiber. We dragged the boat from the shallows up onto the beach, then walked up and down the strip of sand, the smooth glassy grains squeaking beneath our feet. Salap ordered us to gather several boxes of samples—the flotsam and jetsam of ecoi from around the Darwin Sea. “The ocean brings them to us for free,” he said.

Beyond the beach, a storm-eroded cliff ten meters high revealed layer upon layer of volcanic ash fall, alternating gray and black. Buried within the layers, Randall and Shatro found dessicated remnants of scions, perhaps centuries old. We dug out these delicate specimens with small rock picks and shovels—shriveled brown husks, victims of ancient eruptions from the same volcanoes that pushed up from the sea and gave birth to the island thousands of years ago.

“This much we know about Lamarckia,” Salap said, kicking at the black scoria capping the cliff. “It is younger than Earth by a billion years, more active volcanically—but five hundred kilometers less in diameter. There has been much less continental weathering of deposited crust from the era of lime testates, shelly microfossils. Nearly all the metallic ores are volcanic in origin. Likely if we really wish to find rich veins of metal ores, we will have to look five thousand meters beneath the continents, or deep beneath the waves.”

We left the boxes of dessicated scions on the beach, atop some low flat lava boulders to avoid the waves. Beyond the beach cliffs, gentle rolling hills—ancient fumaroles, eroded by wind and rain—stretched half a kilometer to the razor-ridged, steep slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer. Lava boulders, scoria, and crumbled, eroded flows of twisted lava covered the hills. The ground was cool, however, and no vapors emerged from the cracks or from the inland mountains.

Salap surveyed the mountains, sucking on his cheeks thoughtfully. With a small tongue-cluck, as if in moral disapproval, he turned to Randall and Shatro. “When Shulago and Baker were here, they could smell sulfur for dozens of miles out to sea. It's very quiet now, and no smell.”

“We'll spend a half-hour looking over this sector,” Randall said. “Chief objects of our search will be petrids.” He showed us a reproduction of a sketch by Baker of hand-sized flat scions clinging to lava, leaving trails of white behind. Serving the place of lichens, petrids or rock-grinders of various sizes and shapes were found in all known ecoi. “We'll also be looking for scion fumets.”

Droppings—generally flat, smooth disks, were rarely visible in active ecoi because of collection and clean-up. If this ecos was declining, we might find more droppings—or none at all. “Watch your step. Shulago calls this very treacherous territory—lots of old lava tubes and sinkholes.”

We spread out over the hills in the hot sun. I clutched a fiber hat and a bag for small specimens.

I fell twice before adapting to the terrain, skinning my knuckles and knees. The best place to look for fixed scions, I thought, would be inland a few hundred meters. I visualized them soaking up sun between the boulders. Think energy. An ecos manages energy the way any organism does. Sunlight, air, water, minerals ... Scions specifically adapted to taking advantage of certain niches for energy and raw materials.

Treading black sand paths through a maze of fragmented lava, I peered into shadows beneath overhangs, scuffing at the sand with my boots, scraping several centimeters deep with a small shovel. Nothing. When the half-hour had passed, we regrouped on the beach. Salap shaded his eyes against the sun and turned down his lips at our empty bags.

“So, the ecos is hiding, or...” He shrugged, refusing to speculate out loud. “We will find Shulago's trail, not far from here if it's still marked. There is a small sheltered valley at the base of Mount Jiddermeyer. It is a hike, but I believe we can find it and be back before the captain gets upset.” He gave us all an enigmatic look, partly conspiratorial, partly rueful. I detected a hint of rivalry here—Salap wanted to explore the island on his own terms.

As we walked down the beach and searched for the trailhead, Shatro picked up a piece of leathery scrap and passed it around for examination. Dark brown, dried to the consistency of xyla, it still held a few threads in punched holes.

“Part of a shoe,” Randall offered.

“Not a scion,” Shatro said.

“Disappointing,” Salap said, shaking his head sadly. “What has happened here?”

We did not find any trail markings, but a sandy path between the boulders showed promise, The path climbed the side of the mountain and veered around an andesitic outcrop.

“This is Shulago's trail, but the arborids are gone,” Salap said, pointing to empty circles of stones and conical depressions in the ground on either side. “When the arborids were here, they pushed boulders away and took root ... They have crawled away, or died.”

We followed the path for a hundred meters, around the outcrop, and then through a tumble of large boulders, some stacked in arches over the trail. The sun warmed my arms and made my scalp sweat within the hat. I felt sad and sleepy.

After four kilometers, a few purple and dark blue stalks showed over a close rise. “At last,” Randall said. “Something alive.”

Beyond the rise stood a copse of small, squat, palmlike arborids. Spiky leaves spread over round boles in a furry cap. Translucent brown roots formed nets over the ground between the arborids, and along the roots crawled shiny orange vermids—wormlike creatures, each about four centimeters long.

We paused by the edge of this pitifully small and confined silva. Randall, Shatro, and Salap examined the scions quickly, making notes on Salap's slate. I recognized none of them from the illustrations and photos of either the Jiddermeyer or Baker-Shulago expeditions.

“Big differences,” Salap said. “Fluxing and reissue of new scions. The island is no longer hospitable.”

“Competition?” Shatro asked brightly. “War ... a sexing?”

Salap looked to the skies and shook his head. “There was only one ecos on Martha's Island, and we're a thousand miles from Elizabeth's Land, fifteen hundred miles from Hsia. Scions from pelagic ecoi stick close to the islands and continental shelves; except for unfortunates who stray ... And both Shulago and Baker and Jiddermeyer said the ecos on Martha's Island dominated its zone, even out to a hundred miles from land. It was well fortified. How could there be a sexing, much less a takeover?”

Shatro was still hopeful his idea might be proven possible, if not correct. “We saw racers from Petain—or perhaps from Hsia or Efhraia's Land. Why are they out here, unless a zone senses opportunity?”

“What opportunity?” Salap asked, his temper rising. “It is empty, Ser Shatro! A zone has subsided here. It is in decline.”

“Old age,” I suggested, partly to break Salap's fix on the unfortunate Shatro. Salap rolled his eyes heavenward again but said nothing, walking ahead between the arborids, to the bottom of the small valley.

The air was cooler and moister in the shade of the arborids. It smelled of nothing in particular. I touched the trunks and leaves as we passed, but no stomata opened; there seemed to be only these two kinds of scions, unknown arborids and vermids.

“We haven't been sampled,” Randall said as we approached the lowest part of the valley, half a kilometer from the rise.

“That I don't miss,” Shatro said.

“Still, it's significant,” Randall said. “The ecos may no longer be curious. Unique in my experience.”

“We've only been here a few minutes,” Shatro said, glancing around. “Maybe they're waiting for the right moment.”

The trail broadened into a sandy flat. At the center of the flat, a hip-high wall of lava boulders surrounded a clear, sparkling pool. A spring bubbled to one side, and the waters rippled over a bed of black sand, sparkling in the bright sun. From the walled spring to the copse, a path was marked by smaller lumps of reddish lava.

“Not scions,” Randall said. “Someone's living here.”

We took the marked path back into the copse. Fifty paces from the spring, a dark gray, weather-beaten house rose on short stilts, surrounded by pink and gray arborids. The roof was made of some sort of gray leathery skin, as were the walls; the rest of the square, ungraceful structure was made of strips and beams of pinkish xyla.

At the sound of our voices, a woman stepped out onto the narrow porch, dressed in sacklike brown robes, face pale, her long black hair prominently streaked with gray. I guessed her to be about seventy years old. She stood with hands on the rail, staring at us for a moment with pale blue eyes. Her skin was dark, her limbs skinny, and she worked her mouth as if searching for words under her tongue.

“I am Liasine Trey Nimzhian,” she said in a squeak. She cleared her throat and repeated her name. “I live here. What do you want?”

“Are you alone?” Randall asked.

“Not to alarm you, Ser Nimzhian,” Salap said, touching Randall on the shoulder. “I am honored to meet you. I did not know you were still here.” He turned and whispered in Randall's ear.

The woman looked at us one by one, eyes wide. “My husband died five years ago. I've been alone since. Human voices and faces quite stun me.”

Salap introduced us formally, and then explained, “Sers Liasine Trey Nimzhian and Yeshova Nakh Rassik were feared dead. They were researchers with Baker and Shulago.”

“We did not choose to stay,” Nimzhian said. She held out her hands. “Do you have a ship? Of course, you must. I would dearly love to see a ship, to ... dine with the captain?”

“It would be our privilege,” Salap said, bowing his head.

That evening, most of the crew sat down to the best that Frey the cook could offer on board the Vigilant. I sat at the table next to the captain's, with Randall, the first mate, and the junior researchers, including Shatro. Nimzhian sat with the captain and Salap and Talya Ry Diem and Shirla, the female A.B.s at table to make her feel at home. Indeed, the women spent much time fussing over her as they might over a revered elder. Liasine Nimzhian seemed to fall into a trance even before the dinner began.

“So long...” she cooed as she sat at the head table in the mess. “This seems wonderfully elegant to me. It's been years since I ate human food ... Bread! And so much news! I do not believe all I have missed.”

“Your story must be extraordinary,” the captain said.

She drew herself up proudly. “I have lived on our island for twelve years now. The first years were good, but after my Yeshova died ... mostly work.” She leaned toward the captain. “You're following in the path of Baker and Shulago. You are going to circumnavigate.”

“That we are,” the captain said.

“That explains Ser Salap and his wonderful interest in Martha's Island. Who else would go this far out of the way, to visit such a lonely place? Well, for you all, then, I have a story to tell. It is about secrets, and the death of the only living thing I have come to know and to love, besides my husband.

“Tomorrow, I will show you where it all happened, and tonight and tomorrow, perhaps I can explain why.”

After the meal, we returned to the quarterdeck, to sit under the double oxbow and listen to Ser Nimzhian's story.

“When I joined the Baker and Shulago expedition, I was an agro—a farming specialist. I had learned how to care for terrestrial crops, without disturbing the ecos and bringing on a defensive response ... Something rarely seen now, I suspect, but common enough then. My sponsor was Yeshova, the man who would become my husband. Yeshova.” She lingered on the name in silence for a moment, smiling softly. “He thought I could teach Baker and Shulago a thing or two about specialization in ecos populations.

“We put to sea with two ships, the Hanno and the Himilco. They were smaller than this one, and less well prepared. Baker and Shulago may be heroes and martyrs to many now. I've only just learned they never returned ... That only Chuki made it back in the smaller ship.” She paused and drew several deep breaths, as if to calm herself. With one hand to her neck, absently stroking the brown and wrinkled skin there, she gathered her thoughts. “Not so long ago, it seems. My life has taken on a certain sameness the past few years.

“You know of our journey from Athenai to the northern continent, where no ecos grows, and from there to Hsia. We sailed along the western coast of Hsia, then south to the Cook Straits, and found a passage ... discovering six more zones on the Cook Islands, small, simple ecoi really, compared to Elizabeth's Land and Hsia.

“We captured specimens, dissected them, and wherever we went, the ecoi were curious. I was personally sampled thirty-three times.” She lifted her arms to show us tiny pockmarks, some as large as thumbprints. She also pointed out pocks on her neck and lifted her robe to show several on her ankles and legs. “We followed the eastern coast of Efhraia's land to the southernmost point, which we named Cape Manu, after our navigator. We rounded Cape Manu and returned to the Darwin Sea, rather than face icebound winter seas to the east.”

She looked up at her audience, face drawn with memories. “It was a difficult journey. We lost seven to accidents ... My brother among them. We could not fight the Westers south of the Shaft Island group. We could not cross in that direction ... We were running out of food. We put into the Shaft Islands. Shulago did not want to return to Jakarta, though it was only six hundred miles away at the time ... There were small farm towns in the Shaft Islands. We visited them. We were lucky to get enough supplies to go on.”

“All the islanders died during the famine of 26,” Salap said.

Nimzhian looked vague, as if this bit of history did not have any real meaning for her. Then she mustered what she thought would be a polite response. “I'm sorry. They were nice people, very eager to hear our stories. They thought Baker and Shulago were heroes. They thought we were all heroes. But we were just tired and hungry.”

Nimzhian seemed reluctant to continue.

“You sailed north ... so Chuki's journals say,” the captain prodded.

Nimzhian rubbed her hands together as if to warm them. “Baker and Shulago had an argument,” she said. “They always seemed like angry monkeys in too small a cage. Yet they always insisted on living aboard the same boat. They wanted to keep watch on each other.

“Baker wanted to head west, around Cape Magellan, but Shulago insisted it was the wrong season, that the westerlies would kill us. He may have been right. Eventually, we sailed north, to make the passage west between Tasman and Elizabeth's Land. My husband was arguing with Baker continuously by then. We found Martha's Island by accident ... Yeshova thought we could profitably spend years studying there. Well, we got our wish.”

She stopped again, jaw muscles tensing, and looked around the circle of faces, alternately smiling and shaking her head. “Baker was a very disagreeable man,” she said. “He must have felt Yeshova was too much of a disturbing influence. He arranged for us to go ashore together. The ships sailed while we were ashore. I don't know what he told them...”

“The journals were lost,” Salap said. “Chuki mentions nothing.”

“Well, Chuki sailed before the Hanno abandoned us. We were very afraid at first. We knew about the three members of Jiddermeyer's crew, lost here over a decade before. We never found them.” She rubbed her eyes with the fingers of one hand, then blinked in the light of the electric lanterns. “In a way, Baker did us a favor. We've had a good life here. Martha provides. We never starved, though we were hungry often enough, and sick a few times from eating the wrong things. We came to love her. She never bored us. Sometimes, Yeshova wondered if our work would ever be discovered ... We wondered why no one returned to Martha's Island. But we weren't unhappy.”

“There haven't been any expeditions since,” the captain said. “The island isn't on any of the shipping routes—and there isn't much shipping across the Darwin now, anyway. Unless it's Brionists.”

Nimzhian did not recognize the name. “Baker and my husband confirmed that the theories of the original surveyors and Jiddermeyer were correct. The only feasible explanation for Lamarckia's biological nature was inheritance from acquired traits ... And yet, inheritance was the wrong word. Jiddermeyer had speculated about the designers and observers, who took the specimens gathered by samplers and thieves and studied them. We have been adding more and more detail to that theory.

“We've seen an ecos die,” Nimzhian said. “We've seen its preparations for death. The island disrobed. It revealed its skeleton to us, in a way...”

“And was there a seed-mother, a queen?” the captain asked, tapping his fingers on his chin.

“I'll show you in the morning,” Nimzhian said craftily. She smiled and rocked back and forth on her chair, enjoying the hold she had on us. “I expect you'll want to explore before you move on.”

“You're welcome to travel with us,” the captain said.

She shook her head firmly. “Thank you, but no. I'll return to my island in the morning. Much work remains. I do hope you'll take our results with you, and carry them to Athenai or Jakarta.”

“We would be honored,” the captain said.

Nimzhian let the dark memories pass and was full of cheer now, basking in human company.

Three boats put out the next morning under a low ceiling of thick, knobby gray clouds. Puffs of cool wind and spatters of light rain greeted us as we put ashore where the longboat had landed the day before. With Ser Nimzhian taking the lead, walking along the black sand shore with a practiced leggy waddle, our party of thirty—the captain, Salap and the assistant researchers, myself, and eight of the crew who had chosen lots, hiked over the Shulago trail. The party formed a long line up the slope to the valley. Some of the crew sang songs at first, but the desolation, and windy silence, and the gray cast of the day, soon subdued them.

The researchers counted the circles of stones in the old silva and made an estimate of the extent of the silva and the past number of arborids. Nimzhian explained that the silva had declined from the shoreline inward, with scions disappearing night by night, their remains absorbed by ecos cleaners. Rock scrubbers had died after arborids, and then all the smaller forms, month by month ... and year after year. Inland, the larger scions had died first as well, and then the smaller. “The arborids and phytids gave nutrition to all,” Nimzhian said. “We believe they died because of the decline of microscopic scions.”

The decline's cause was unknown. At first, husband and wife had speculated that human-borne microbes were infecting the scions, but found no evidence supporting that hypothesis.

“We always blame ourselves,” Nimzhian said, approaching the rise with the last stand of arborids visible beyond. “We seem to be guilty about everything, even just being human. But soon we realized humans were trivial.”

She could walk and talk easily without losing her breath. We struggled to keep up with her.

“Martha tolerated us, even let us take a few of its phytids and arborids and other scions for food and materials. When Martha was alive, every spring season we would hike inland, into the mountains, to study the blazing red efflorescence, the shedding and bursting of new growth among the phlox trees and divericata, the huge and rare hemohamatids and the coastal halimids. Martha sampled us for five years after we first arrived as if we were new ... three-legged scions the size of mice springing out of the lower alsophileids, nipping our arms, late in the summer, with the penultimate warming of the Jiddermeyer current. That was unusual in itself ... We never discovered why Martha needed to sample us so often, and so regularly.”

She paused on the rise, bent to adjust her leggings and the socks that had slumped around her ankles. “Then, after eight years, all by itself, Martha began giving up and fading away. At night we heard what my husband called garbage trucks, the size of elephants, rolling down the naked hills into the ocean. There, they exploded like huge balloons, scattering half dissolved remnants to the waves and currents. The ecos took itself apart hectare by hectare, in an orderly fashion. I believe she knew she was dying, and wanted to leave the island clean after she was gone. I realize that is very anthropomorphic of me...” She glanced at us, face saddened by these memories. “We missed her being curious about us. We had taken comfort in those seasonal nips, those little samplings.

“We even came to believe the ecos watched over us, that she accepted us as independent parts ... But that was my husband's idea, mostly.

“Five years ago, Yeshova suffered a stroke, or something like a stroke. Something went badly wrong inside of his head. No doctors, no clues. The ecos didn't save him. He died after twelve days of paralysis. I buried him, but scavengers dug him up and put him with the other scraps, and carted him out to sea. Martha has always kept herself clean, very clean.”

We entered the grove as large drops of rain fell, drumming on the fine-fringed arborid leaves and dappling our clothes. “These are decadents,” Nimzhian said, touching the fringe of leafy growths with a gnarled hand. “They are barren, of course, like old bees dying on a dry rock.”

She pushed on, ignoring the rain, and the captain kept up with her, using his stick to prod aside brown creepers that writhed across our path. Salap peered at the leaves through a pocket magnifier, observing their reaction to the rain. “Ser Nimzhian,” he called up the line, just as we reached the house, “I believe this small silva takes all its water from the spring. Am I correct?”

“You are correct,” she responded, her voice rising over the hiss of falling drops.

Salap nodded in satisfaction and wiped moisture from his brow.

Nimzhian climbed to the porch and addressed us in the narrow courtyard. We were soaked by now, but the rain was subsiding, though thick gray curtains still cloaked the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer. “I have something to show you,” she said. “You can't all come in at once, but you're all welcome.”

We took our turns, in groups of six, climbing the steps and shaking hands with her, at which point she introduced us to her true treasures—cabinets filled with hundreds of watercolor sketches done by herself and her husband. Salap was speechless, and stayed inside with Keyser-Bach as each group came through, staring again and again at the paintings as Nimzhian revealed them, a new group for each party. She glowed with pride.

“When the silva was healthy,” she said, “it covered most of the center of the island, in two similar groupings, two silvas actually, as Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago saw ... As we saw when we first arrived. The mountains were more active then. There were even earthquakes a few times a year, and the beach where you landed was rich with fumaroles venting sulfur.”

The watercolors glowed with delicate life, revealing as much about their creators as they did about Martha's Island, sketched in with meticulous care using very fine pens cut from the central stalks of arborid leaves, colored by dyes taken from vermids and phlox trees high up in the mountains.

“We recorded all we could on the slate left to us by Shulago,” she said. “But it soon stopped taking data. We learned how to make a kind of paper, and taught ourselves how to paint. Martha was very generous. She supplied everything—pigments, stems for brush handles, even brush hairs.

“We ate her scions, and we painted her as a kind of gift ... Not that it was any true bargain.”

A set of paintings showed the vernal efflorescence in the high mountain valleys, when the arborids and phytids shed old growth and produced bright new leaves of vivid reds and oranges, sky blue, and dark purple. The ecos itself seemed to have a painterly plan, the hills covered with zebra stripes of purple against red and sky blue. “The air smelled like the sweetest, finest wine in the spring,” Nimzhian said, her fingers caressing the paintings, lifting them from their folders and replacing them with religious care.

Some of the paintings were of specimens of the largest arborids, named yggdrasils: hollow-cored nets of stiff creepers rising in fat cylinders up to a hundred meters high, throwing out tiers of purple-black sun-absorbing leaves. Yeshova had climbed into the hollow trunk of an yggdrasil and depicted it from the inside, like an intricate weavework narrowing to an open circle of sky.

“We used the few pieces of laboratory equipment, over and over again, until all was broken or ruined and we could only look and see and taste ... And sometimes what we tasted made us sick, and we noted the symptoms.” She shook her head ruefully. “Our own bodies became our laboratories. And then...” She flipped through sketches of barren lava, slumped and tangled yggdrasils, until the style became much simpler, cruder: the work she had done by herself, after the death of Yeshova.

The captain's eyes filled with tears and he dabbed at them with his knuckles, glancing around in some embarrassment. When all of us had seen the sketches, Nimzhian stood by the unglazed window, staring at the small grove circling the spring, her voice hoarse and cracking with weariness. “I need to rest before we do the next part of the tour.”

“Of course,” said the captain, and he ordered food brought out of our backpacks. We set up a picnic lunch around the house and on the porch, and Ser Nimzhian presided like a true matriarch, resting on her chair assembled from fallen yggdrasil leaf stems. She wore a broad, battered woven fiber hat to shade her eyes against the infrequent glare of sun peeping between the clouds.

“Captain,” she said, “I give all our work to you. I see it all in my head, and it can only be useful taken away from this island. I won't be alive much longer, and the weather would only break in again and ruin everything.”

The captain waved his hand as if dismissing her confession of mortality, and was about to speak, but she continued, “Four years ago, we lost fifty-nine sketches when the roof leaked. Months and months of work. Lamarckia is indifferent. And so was Martha, I suspect, but we loved her even so. They were comforting delusions, ghosts of benevolence and care when we were so alone.”

We rested in the flowing patches of sun and cloud shadow, alternately warmed and cooled, surrounded by the rustling furred leaves of the grove. Salap and the captain and Randall sat on the porch with Nimzhian, who had closed her eyes and slumped in her chair, her breast rising and falling evenly beneath the folds of her robe and jacket.

Shirla and Shimchisko lay on either side of me, Shirla on her back, eyes tracking the clouds above, Shimchisko dozing lightly.

“I'd like to sneak off and explore,” Shirla said. “I've been bunking on the ship too long, with the mate watching every tickle.” She rolled on her side facing me. “Shall we run off to the hills?”

I smiled. “No flarking,” I said. Shirla surveyed me critically, one eye half-closed, and lay back again.

“It's a bold offer,” said Shimchisko, waking from his doze. “What do you see in him?”

“I can't help myself,” she said lightly. “It's his mystery. Where did you come from? I know ... from Jakarta, before you lost yourself in Liz. But you don't talk like a Jakartan, and you don't act like anybody I know ... There's a coolness about you.”

“If mystery gets me out of cleaning the shithouse, I'll be mysterious.”

“Well said,” Shirla commented. “Droll defense. Come with me,” she whispered conspiratorially into my ear, “inland to the hills,” she lifted her chest and tucked in her chin, “and you'll see my tits.”

I nearly choked on my laugh, and she laughed with me. But her eyes had fixed on mine. “The old woman's going to walk us somewhere. I'd love to run away behind everybody and sneak back in later. If you don't want to see my tits, okay, but keep me company.”

The heat in me almost overrode my sense of duty—if that was what it was now. Duty had transmuted into a burning curiosity and a rush of other conflicting emotions: fascination, anxiety, even a kind of patriarchal concern. “I'd love to,” I said.

“Soterio will dock us,” she said. “You might be cut back to apprentice. Am I worth it?”

Shirla had never gone quite this far in her coquettishness.

“You are without doubt the loveliest creature on the ship,” I said.

“Tell me more,” she said.

“Much lovelier than Shimchisko here.” Shimchisko opened one eye, then closed it again. “And you're much too smart to ruin a good sea career.”

She poked her tongue out between her lips like a forgetful cat and broke our gaze, looking again at the clouds. “One day,” she said, “I will see your secret nakedness, and I will gloat.”

“You may see my nakedness any time,” I said, “by appointment.”

On Thistledown, I had been successful with women, too much so. I had come to think of them as delightful and valuable commodities, worth much effort, but not like me in any serious respect. I could see now, middled in this dreamlike experience, that my attitude carried a taint of youth and foolishness. Shirla was very much like me; Shimchisko was not, nor was the captain or Salap.

A steady patch of sun had settled over us, a long gap between clouds making the sun seem to roll down a race course, occasionally fetching up against a wall of cloud and flashing it bright yellow-white. “I'm too stupid,” I said.

“See?” Shirla said. “Nakedness. Show me more.”

I poked her calf with the toe of my boot. “Don't provoke me,” I grumbled.

Nimzhian had stood up from her chair. “I'm rested,” she announced. The captain, Salap, and Randall rose beside her like reverent servants. “Come with me,” she said, and descended the porch steps.

“You missed your chance,” Shirla said, getting to her feet.

“Foolish Olmy,” Shimchisko said with a grin.

The billows and runnels of clouds had fled towards the southeast. We marched inland, up the northern rise of Nimzhian's valley, the last preserve of Martha's motherless scions. The grove ended at the rim of the valley, and on the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer and the hills and mountains beyond, we found the trails and roads of the dismantling. Nimzhian pointed out various features as we walked on the path she and Yeshova had trained through the silva over their first eight years on Martha's Island: here, the site of the yggdrasil that had stood nearest the valley and their house, now a conical depression ten meters across, filled with sterile chunks of lava and a bottom of fine silty mud, cracking in the sun; there, the beginning of the path to the top of Mount Jiddermeyer, where they had found phytids and vermids suitable for making watercolor dyes; here again, a kilometer on, a lean-to they had made in case they were caught in a storm far from the house, now fallen to ruin, with nothing left to lean against. Higher still, in the cup between Mount Jiddermeyer and the central Mount Tauregh, after an hour of hiking, we stood for a moment in what had once been the thickest silva on the island.

“Millions of yggdrasils and tripod oaks,” Nimzhian said, shading her eyes at the glare. In a few hours, the floor of this décolletage between the mountains would rise to meet the sun, and all would be in shade. For now it was bright gray desolation, kilometer after kilometer of conical depressions filled with mud.

Shimchisko rubbed his knees as we paused and looked up at Shirla and me. “Suicide,” he said darkly. “The queen chose for her ecos to die. Out of shame.”

Shirla curled her lip. She had little use for Shimchisko's mystical theories.

The captain, Salap, the researchers, and Randall took in the view with puzzled awe. They could no more explain what had happened here than Shimchisko. I looked to the summit of Mount Jiddermeyer, however, and wondered at the dog that did not bark in the night: no more steam, no more earthquakes, no more sulfur from the fumaroles near the southern beaches.

Nimzhian sighed and waved us on. She took the lead, her long, scrawny legs pumping steadily, her tireless gait marked by a lean to the left with one step, a lean to the right with another. From ten or twelve paces behind, I listened to her exchanges with the captain and Salap.

Shimchisko complained beneath his breath about the altitude and the effort, about the shame of all this destruction; I shushed him so I could listen to Nimzhian, and he regarded me with mild resentment.

“We came to this place two years ago, before Martha finally died,” she said. “Yeshova and I toured around the island then, going where we could never have gone when the silva was so thick. With the phlox arborids and most of the phytids gone, we could go practically anywhere we pleased, and it was here we first came upon structures unlike any we had seen before, in any ecos. Yeshova named them palaces. I thought it a misleading word. Still, it's his.”

Between lava boulders worn smooth by rock grinders and the ceaseless rubbing growth and procession of the silva's tree-forms, we looked out across a deep bowl cut from the side of Mount Tauregh. “There are five other palaces, all similar to this one. When they died, Yeshova believed, Martha died as well. These ruins and the orphaned grove are the only monuments.”

The bowl stretched eighty meters edge to edge. Within, curving piers and crossbeams the color of old ivory radiated from the center of the bowl like giant rib bones arranged by an ancient hunting party. Dried shreds of membrane still clung to them. In the bottom of the bowl, beneath the tilted and fallen ribs, hexagonal chambers had been carved in the old lava flow. Rainwater pooled in the bottom of the chambers.

We gathered abreast, in a line along the rim of the bowl. The captain's face was pale. He prodded his jaw forcibly with an index finger and his lips twitched. Salap stood with arms crossed, lost in concentration, as if remembering a long-ago game of chess.

“The queen's chambers,” the captain mused. “What do you think?” he asked Salap.

“Perhaps.” The more intensely interested Salap became, the less he showed any reaction whatever.

“By the Good Man,” Shatro said tentatively, looking to the others to determine the depth of his own reaction.

“Bilge,” Nimzhian commented. “Hardly a queen's chambers. I never did like the word ‘palace,’ so misleading. We found five of these, all dead, all the same. The ‘queen’ theory allows only one.”

“Here,” said the captain, pointing to the chambers and vents in the rock along the outer walls of the chambers, “is where the scions are made and released. Given birth ... There must be outlets. We should search for them.”

“Night's coming in an hour, Captain,” Randall reminded him gently.

“Yes. Of course. But if we found the outlets—or even if we don't find them ... Here is where the central controller, the seed-mistress, or mistresses...” He turned to Nimzhian, who regarded him skeptically. “If there are five, what of it? If there is no central and unique site, no single palace, what of it? I'm not wedded to the notion of a lone and exclusive seed-mother. If there were five of them ... we might think of the others as chambermaids, helpers ... One might be larger.”

“They're all the same size, give or take a meter,” Nimzhian said. “All the same structure.”

“But you did not see them alive!” the captain fairly shouted. “One might have been festooned, plumed, with bright decorations, signifying her status, highest of all; the others secondary. There must have been... one controller, one head, one authority!”

He was still wedded to the queen, after all. Nimzhian tapped her walking stick on the ground, irritated in a way reserved for those who have been alone for a long while and are now subject to contrary company. “Have it your way,” she muttered.

The captain ordered Shatro and Thornwheel to begin measuring the palace and gathering samples of whatever remnants of tissue remained. Shatro gave me a lizard-lidded glance of satisfaction as he stepped past. I felt like punching him, not because the captain had chosen him for this task, but because he put so much store in it, and seemed to think I might care.

“Water from the bottom of the chambers...” the captain mused, oblivious of this brief interchange. “Might be tissues, residues, genetic material there still. We can preserve it now, read it later.”

Shatro, Thornwheel, and Cham began to climb down the rough scree to the chambers at the bottom of the bowl. A surveyor's measure was pulled from the equipment box, to be sited on by the captain's slate for later comparisons.

Randall glanced at the sun and then over his shoulder at the long, winding walk back to the beach.

“Captain, Ser Nimzhian probably wants to return to her house ... And we should get word back to the ship.”

Keyser-Bach stopped, his hands and shoulders quivering with excitement. His face screwed up like a little boy's. I thought for a moment he would pitch a tantrum, but he sat abruptly on a nearby lump of lava and clapped his hands on his knees. “All right,” he said softly, then, shouting to the men on the path down the slope, “Wait! We'll come back tomorrow. We'll bring more equipment ... Let's do this right.”

Randall nodded. Shirla and the rest of the crew were obviously glad not to be spending a night in this desolation. Shimchisko stared at the palace with dread. He would not tell Shirla or myself what made him so uneasy until we were back on the trail, walking through the empty conical pits in the failing light. “It's ugly,” he finally murmured, following a few paces behind me. “I thought they would be beautiful. Queens. But it's just like an old collapsed meeting hall. Roof-beams and rooms. Nothing more than a hotel.”

“We don't know what it looked like when it was alive,” Shirla said. “It might have been lovely.”

“Hidden. No one can get to them wherever they are,” Shimchisko said gloomily. “That means they're ugly, dead or alive.” He would not be persuaded otherwise. “And what killed them?”

I kept my ideas to myself.

In the grove of orphans, the captain inquired whether Ser Nimzhian would prefer sleeping on the Vigilant.

“Fates and breath, no, thank you,” she said. “I'm an old woman of deep habit. I came here with Lenk when I was a grown woman, and I married Yeshova when I was in my middle years, and now I am old and I have all my remaining family here.”

“Tomorrow, we'll return and conduct a full survey,” the captain said. “We'll set up a base camp and examine the other palaces. To be sure, we're beginning a long journey, but you'd be safer if you came with us...”

“No,” Nimzhian said. “I have no taste for another expedition.”

“We can provide comfortable accommodations...”

“Captain, I've spent the best years of my life here,” Nimzhian said sharply. “Baker and Shulago did us a favor. From what you've told me, we've made our world even more confused and contentious. I'm sure you know the profound peace of devotion to research—to seeing and measuring. I've been present at the end of an ecos—something no other has seen. But the story is not over yet. Why the orphans remain—how they manage to stay alive—why the palaces chose to dismantle themselves and die rather than move ... so many questions. Enough to fill the rest of my life.”

The captain smiled. “I am envious. But there are larger puzzles to solve.”

“This is a puzzle on my scale,” she said. “Do what you must, take our drawings and results with you. But I am content.”

Randall ordered Shatro, Cham, and Kissbegh to stay. The rest of us hiked back to the beach in the last of the twilight and returned to the Vigilant.

In the longboat, I took a spot on the thwart beside Shirla, who sat with head in hands, pensive. “Sad?” I asked.

She half frowned, drawing up her cheek and wrinkling one eye shut, then lifted her head and said, “A little lost.”

“Why?”

“Queens can die.”

“Yes?”

“It's not something I wanted to know, or ever wanted to see.”

“Everything dies eventually,” I said.

“Back on Thistledown—my father told me—people could choose to live forever. They had machines for inside the head, machines for the body. New bodies. Extra brains. I suppose I'd always hoped...” She threw up her hands. “Forget it. I can't even think straight.”

“You wanted the queens, the ecoi, to be stronger and better than anything human and to last forever.”

She shook her head, though a glint in her eye, a slight nod before denial, indicated my guess was close to the mark. “I wanted to visit a queen someday. I joined this expedition—went to Lenk school and specialized in ecology—and even though I didn't get on as a researcher, I shipped on as a sailor, an apprentice, just to meet a real queen. I suppose I wanted to sit down and talk with her.”

“One woman to another?”

“Of course. Mother Nature herself.” She grimaced, daring me to laugh.

“It's a lovely myth,” I said.

“Myth.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wanted her to tell me what was wrong with being alive.”

Uneasy myself now, I looked out across the water. The lights on the Vigilant sat on the border between the black sea and the starry night. I had never been comfortable around vague dreams and poetic associations. I had abandoned the Naderites in hopes I'd find a philosophy not fogged by uncertain wishes and self-enlarging dreams.

“But whatever they are, the queens here are just dead,” Shirla went on. “I still think we killed them. A disease or maybe just disgust.”

“What did Nimzhian or her husband or anybody else do to disgust Martha?” I asked in a jocular tone, hoping to break her mood.

“I heard what the old woman told the captain,” Shirla said. “Baker and Shulago left them here. Abandoned them.”

“Even if they were betrayed, what would that mean to a queen?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said quietly.

“A queen has to fight off other ecoi and protect a territory and make her scions. She brings them back when they're worn out and she makes new ones. She has to think about things differently. She couldn't have human concerns. I doubt she's a female at all.”

“I don't care about that,” Shirla said stubbornly.

Shimchisko, sitting on the thwart behind us, had listened without comment until now. “She may not be a female, but she's certainly a mother. That's the way I see her.”

Shirla stared at the bottom of the boat. In the light of the lantern on the longboat's bow, I saw tears in her eyes, and I was filled with a sudden urge to comfort her. I put my arm around her shoulder but she shrugged it off.

As we climbed up the rope ladder onto the main deck of the Vigilant, I took Shirla aside for a moment and said something that made little sense to either of us, but especially not to me.

“When we go into a live, lush silva,” I said, “and you ask me to go with you—if you ask me to go with you—I will go.”

She seemed about ready to snap back with some angry reply, and her face flushed in the deck's electric light. Then she pulled away from my touch and walked across the deck toward the forecastle. After a few paces, she stopped and came back, with a deliberate swing in her step. She put her hand on my forearm, looked up at me with stern eyes, and said, “Ser Olmy, I was joking.”

She swung around again and walked to the forecastle without looking back. But after helping the captain and Salap store the day's specimens in the cabinets outside the captain's cabin, I went to my bunk in the forecastle, and there I found two paper-wrapped sweets sitting on my pillow, given without clue or comment.

It was simply not in my nature to stay aloof and isolate myself. I had to blend in; Shirla would provide a kind of cover. That could be my excuse, at least. In fact, the gift of candy had brought back the hormonal heat. Her sadness, her graceful sway as she returned to give me my comeuppance, put her round face and dark eyes in a new light. By comparison, the women I had known on Thistledown all seemed deliberate and calculating. The comparison was unfair, of course, because my mood was determined by the setting, and the setting was dreamily exotic and more than a little eerie.

I, too, had stared at the ribs and remains of the palace and felt something I could not express. I, too, had secretly hoped that perhaps the ecoi represented something higher and better. But the death of Martha, made even more poignant by the sad grove of orphans, proved to me, as it might not yet have proven to Shirla, that Lamarckia was no heaven spoiled by the presence of humans.

Life here followed the same round of nature as on any other world. Things lived, competed, succeeded for a time or failed, and died.

We had sullied nothing.

Still, some of Shimchisko's mysticism had communicated itself to me. What was eerie, even frightening, as I lay back in my bunk and chewed the first sweet, was the inevitability of conflict, not just between humans, but between the ecoi and humans. The ecoi were curious. Perhaps we irritated them.

Perhaps they had a plan.

I awoke the next morning early with the starboard watch bell ringing. Those not on watch slept through the clamor. I rose and dressed and chewed the second sweet, back to thinking about my mission.

Without reason, these thoughts carried me back around to Shirla, and our flirtation on Martha's Island seemed absurd and not productive. Virtually all of my relations with women had taken on aspects of the absurd; especially my abortive attempt at bonding.

Naderite women—particularly divaricates—seemed a different breed from Geshel women. Somehow, when I had been younger, before and even a little after shifting my attitudes toward the Geshels, the characteristics of Naderite women stacked up in a different way, different results from the same general blend. I had taken up with Geshel women, and found them charming, but somehow less attractive, more deliberate, even harder. All women, I thought, were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. Naderite women, however—especially those born to the families and not converted—took on a gentler, more innocent approach to this calculation. They did not make you feel inferior when you did not measure up. They simply did not encourage you, or they let the press of social protections discourage you, all the while convincing you it was not their doing or actual opinion that you were unsuitable.

Uleysa had shown me how ignorant I was. In her gentleness, in her shy reticence and quiet style, I had found all I thought I needed. What I learned from her past lovers—for bonding among Voyager Naderites did not require eschewing all others—was that she presented very different faces to different men. She gave us what she thought we most wanted, and she was usually correct.

But knowing who Uleysa really was ... that I saw would never be possible. Her attempts to please hid something that disturbed me: a kind of underground disapproval, as if I might be a small boy who needed her, but whom she did not truly respect.

I knew of better places to search for uncertainty and mystery—and disapproval, hidden or overt.

But I still had a weakness for Naderite women.

An old story, I thought as I prepared the equipment and longboat for the third journey to Martha's Island. I saw Shirla, who would not go ashore this time. She regarded me wistfully. She could not know my thoughts. Fortunately, we would not be together enough, or alone often enough, for my attitude to make much difference. And I had my mission. Memories and sense of duty could quell the hormonal heat.

Over the next three days, we tramped the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer, and I accompanied a team to the summit, where William French surveyed the island, took elevations and compared them with measures made by Baker and Shulago. Nimzhian observed our comings and goings from her porch, accompanied teams on some hikes, and looked over our results. Her critical eye and experience was invaluable.

Working from the maps she and Yeshova had made, we walked the denuded mountain valleys flanking Mount Tauregh and examined the five other palaces, all in ruins, even more decrepit than the first. As Nimzhian had told us, there was very little difference between the debris-filled bowls. The captain took this information with a disappointed persistence I found irritating. If the evidence contradicted theory, I thought, then the theory should be discarded. Keyser-Bach was unwilling to discard his pet theory yet. He even came up with one of those smokescreen revelations that hide a weak theory in clouds of unverifiability.

“The additional palaces may be decoys,” he suggested blithely on the quarter deck of the Vigilant one evening. “Only one may be the real queen's domicile ... shell ... whatever.”

Salap seemed constantly irritated as the days passed. He barked his instructions to the junior researchers, and received their results with a nod and a scowl. Randall talked with him infrequently, and walked away grumbling that the island was not good for us. “Too damned bleak,” he said. “I'd just as soon leave.”

Shirla came ashore with Ibert and Kissbegh, but there was little contact between us. I was inland, measuring palace two; and by the time I returned, a day and a half later, she had been sent in a boat to accompany Thornwheel as he surveyed the western wing of the island and its bulbous headland.

In late afternoon, with the junior researchers and Randall off to the eastern wing of the island and the captain on the ship studying the results, Salap came to find me in the grove of orphans, where I was resting and eating a spare lunch.

“I think we should go dip our feet in the spring and talk,” he said.

Puzzled about what he was up to, I followed the head researcher through the arborids to the pond, which lay pale and still in the afternoon shadow of Mount Tauregh. “Erwin insists there is little for us here, and he may be right,” Salap said, removing his shoes and sitting on the edge of the pond.

The gravelly basin of the pool was empty, visited only by the roots of the scions. Nowhere on Martha's Island would we find any of the profusion of life that Earth's ecosystem would have quickly provided, given such a broad opportunity: no seeds, no microbes, no birds.

“I am afraid the palace chambers will be clueless, as sterile as the rest of this island. I do not enjoy being here, even among these orphans.” He gestured at the arborids. “She still has her place,” he continued, waving his hand around to the house, where Nimzhian sat alone, dozing on the porch. “She will happily die here. But...”

His voice trailed off. He splashed his feet in the water for a moment. “This place makes me feel my mortality like a knife in my ribs. And you?”

I shook my head. “It affects us all differently,” I said. The island did not disturb me as much as it did others. Salap had never before confided in me—or to my knowledge, anyone else. I was intrigued. The head researcher never did anything—even engage in casual conversation—without having some goal in mind.

“If this can die, then other ecoi can die as well—and perhaps they do. Can you imagine the effect on Calcutta or Jakarta if the zones were to die?”

“Disastrous,” I said.

“French tells me you are the best with the surveying instruments. Better even than my researchers.”

“I enjoy the work,” I said. “My privilege to help.”

“Yes, yes.” Salap dismissed that as so much camouflage. “Randall believes you should join the researchers. I have not been satisfied with them in all respects. You have only tagged along so far. Perhaps we should make it formal?”

“I wouldn't want to cause friction,” I said.

Salap gave me a piercing look. “Randall also says you seem to have some goal in mind, and it is not necessarily with the ship ... or with us. But I would like to speed up our work on this island before we all succumb to the bleakness. It is like conducting a huge autopsy. Will you agree?”

Salap looked away from me and stared across the pond, his toe making ripples in the clear water.

“I would be honored,” I said.

“Good. Do not worry about crew resentment. The captain will query you about your background again. He is ever proud of his own education. But I believe in native talent as well, as valuable as native ore. I will convince him.”

I nodded as humbly as possible. Salap dismissed my act with a wave of his fingers. “Sit here and tell me about this pond. I have my suspicions.”

“About the pond?”

“The spring and the pond. The orphans. Every so often, sitting here, I smell the faintest traces of hydrogen sulfide. The pool is mildly acidic.”

“I've tried not to advance opinions ahead of time...” I said.

“Yes?” Salap encouraged.

“We know so little about what an ecos needs to survive.”

“I suspect we think along the same lines, Ser Olmy,” Salap said, using the respectful form with me for the first time. He waggled his fingers, encouraging more.

“Vulcanism has died here. Mount Jiddermeyer was the last volcano to die. In time, the ecos would leach out whatever trace elements it needs—”

“Chromium, selenium, cobalt, zinc, manganese,” Salap suggested. “All found in scion tissues in stable concentrations, whatever the ecos, but seldom found in native soils.”

“And for an isolated ecos like Martha, there's no place else to go.”

“She withers,” Salap said. “But this spring...” He dipped his toe again.

“The last source of trace elements. A small fissure below ground, still warm.”

“She leaves her orphans here,” Salap said. “Perhaps for Nimzhian? A last gift between friends?” He sighed, the closest to sentiment I had seen him come.

I matched Salap's pensive silence for a while.

He looked up, dark eyes steady. “My greatest regret, living on Lamarckia, is the poverty of intellectual variety. It might take us several more generations to build a base of intellect sufficient to understand Lamarckia, to solve the biggest puzzles. When intellect is found, we cannot afford to ignore it.” He turned away and pulled his feet from the pond. “I will convince the captain.”

The captain had for the past two days been spending most of his time on the ship, taking advantage of unusual radio conditions and listening with some concern to messages between Hsia and Elizabeth's Land. He hadn't revealed the content of these messages to anyone but Randall, but Randall seemed twitchy and drawn as well. It did not take much foresight to recognize signs of growing tension in the small but extended political world of the immigrants.

The pools in the palace chambers had turned dark and opaque with debris from the leaking, brittle walls. One apprentice, Scop, had fallen into the pool when a wall collapsed, giving Randall the idea of cutting holes in the chamber walls to drain them, creating a kind of canal across the bottom of the palace.

I helped set filters to catch solid debris, and Salap took samples of the liquid in all the chambers before the breaching began. The water smelled of mud, coldly musty.

I spent half my time the next week ashore, and half on the boat, where my new status caused some ribbing among the crew, good-natured and otherwise. Shirla was polite, but little more. Was I above her, or still equal to her, in rank? Would I shun a mere A.B., even one with scientific pretensions?

For my part, I was much too busy to do more than sleep and eat on ship, and make preparations for the next trip to the island.

Around a cold camp dinner on the island one evening, we named the palaces after ancient royalty: Cleopatra, Hatshepsut, Catherine, Semiramis, and Isabel. On our twelfth day on the island, Salap and I presided over the draining of Palace One, Cleopatra. At the same time, Randall, Shatro, Cassir, and Thornwheel began to drain the other palaces.

The water from Cleopatra cascaded down the dry, rocky slopes for twenty minutes. A few centimeters of liquid remained in the chamber cells. Rising from the water, surrounded by watery reflections of the sky, lay the remains of the last scions of Martha. Salap climbed along the top of a chamber wall, beneath the curve of a dark ivory roof-beam, snapping pictures of the decrepit, half dissolved remains. We then brought up ropes and climbed into the chambers.

The melancholy that filled us was universal and difficult to explain. In a sodden mass at the bottom of the chambers lay half-formed larvae of arborids and phytids. Leached of color, mingling with their silvan cousins, were pterids with thin segmented bodies and leathery wings as delicate as sodden tissue paper, hundreds of them, each no more than twenty centimeters across. Salap lifted one on a piece of close-weave net and said, “These might have been Martha's eyes and ears. I think they are the same as Nimzhian's arthropterids.”

“Samplers,” I suggested.

“Perhaps. But are they all nascent, or were they brought back here for disassembly?”

“Nascent,” I said. “Remember, Nimzhian saw the dead scions being tossed out to sea.”

“Did Martha still have hope enough to make more children, then?” Salap asked. Ridjel and Kissbegh and Cham, standing in the pools or on the crumbling walls, said little as we passed up fragments of carapace, lengths of rubbery muscle cable, horny claws, brown “bones” arranged as long slender rods or delicate basket weaves, hanks of fibrous insulation. Clearly, some of the larval forms were pelagic. They might have patrolled Martha's offshore waters, guarding against intrusions and maintaining the sterile zone around the island.

Equally clear was the strong relationship between these scions and those in other ecoi; however independent the ecoi might have been, through convergent design or copying, many scions resembled their counterparts.

When Baker and Shulago had visited the island, however, years of isolation had produced many unique scions, some of unknown utility. We found early-stage remains of some of these in Cleopatra's chambers: legged balls connected by tough cables to form ambulatory chains; great drums with ridged grips along the rims and tight-fitting lids, perhaps to haul nutrients from one location to another, or to convey volumes of microscopic scions from the palaces; tiny four-limbed creatures with three equilateral snipping jaws that Salap called muscids.

By the end of the day, when we crawled out of the palace and rested on the barren hillside, we had cataloged seventy different kinds of scions, and found fragments of perhaps twenty more, too difficult to quickly reassemble and visualize. Of the seventy, twenty had been cataloged by Baker and Shulago, and forty-five more by Nimzhian and Yeshova. Five no one had ever seen before.

“Martha was creative to the very last,” Salap said, back propped against a boulder, lifting a jar filled with bony fragments and feather-edged scraps.

Early the next morning, Shatro stumbled into camp in the dark, awakening Salap first by nearly falling over him, and then shining his lantern on all of us. “Isabel,” he said, sucking in lungfuls of air. “Number five. Ser Randall says come quickly.” He knew nothing about what was so important, and his hike in the darkness across the rough terrain had taken his breath away. We packed quickly and refilled our canteens; there had been little rain the last few days, and there were not likely to be water-filled reservoirs in the rocks. Shatro led us back along the path in the dawn light.

Mount Bedouin stood between us and the sunrise, a black serrated triangle against the brightening sky. One small moon rose over the northern slope of the old volcano, and after a kilometer or so, we turned toward the moon and that slope, where Isabel lay. It was a ten-kilometer hike from Cleopatra, through what had once been impenetrable silva, and we reached the fifth palace by late morning. Randall and his team had drained the chambers and surveyed most of them by the end of the previous day, leaving only three chambers to breach. With a little energy left over, Randall and Cassir had decided to knock a hole in the wall of an inner chamber, to get a head start on the next morning's work.

“We were about to return to our tents when Cassir shined a lantern into the chamber,” Randall explained, taking us down into the bowl. We carefully avoided the crumbling supports for the roof beams, crawled through a succession of holes knocked through the chamber walls, and came to the second-to-last chamber. Randall had no words to describe what they had seen. He entered the chamber reluctantly behind Salap. Above, standing gingerly on the walls, Shimchisko—the only sailor present—waved down at me, but with little energy and no cheer.

“I've never heard of ecoi eating humans,” Cassir said, his voice quiet in the shadowed stillness. We splashed carefully between piles of odorless, colorless brown and white bones. From the walls, uncataloged scions the size of soccer balls, shriveled limbs tightly curled close, like dead spiders, hung from twisted brown cords. Drops fell from these into the dark, cloudy puddles below.

Salap pushed aside the piles to see what Cassir and Randall had spied from above. It lay half submerged, empty eye sockets staring at the sky, toothless lower jaw slumped to one side, giving it a grimly joking expression. Salap hesitated before stooping, and held his hands out for several long seconds before touching the round shape, or the scatter of slumped and broken bones and a section of feeble gray carapace, like a tarnished cuirass, covering what might have once been a chest or thorax.

“It's small,” Salap said. “Less than a meter long.”

“A child,” Randall said, his voice shaky.

“Never a child,” Salap said, shaking his head. “Not a human child.”

“The skull,” Shatro said loudly, lips curled as if offended.

“Leg bones and ... hands,” Cassir said.

I knelt beside Salap and turned my attention to the hands. They had five fingers, but the fingers were unjointed, flexible as rubber. The wrist was likewise one unit, and the joint that connected it to a long, two-boned forearm—the bones given one twist around each other, with a smooth cartilaginous material between—was not the joint of any human.

“I've doubted her story from the beginning,” Shatro said. “Why would they leave her here? What could she and Yeshova have done—or did she bury her husband—”

“This isn't Yeshova, or any other human, and there's been no murder here,” Salap concluded, standing and coughing. “Whatever it is, it isn't fully grown. It's unfinished.”

Randall's face became even more pale, his eyes staring at us as if we were dreadful angels. “My God, what, then?”

“Made here,” Salap said. He held up his left hand imperiously, palm up, and coughed again into his other hand. Something in the cloudy water irritated him. Then he looked between Randall and me, and said, “Get the largest jars. Throw other specimens out if you have to.” He suddenly swore under his breath and glared at the men and woman standing on the walls overhead, and peering through the hole gouged in the chamber. “Not a word of this to Nimzhian, and not a word to anyone on board ship. We will tell them after we've studied the specimen, and in our own good time. Master Randall, will you guarantee this for me?”

Randall nodded, face still pale.

“Good.”

Digging around the bottom of the chamber, within an hour we found three of the unfinished scions—if indeed that was what they were. I helped Salap photograph the remains, using our hands and a metric ruler for size comparison, in case the specimens disintegrated, as some already had. “Send down some hot wax,” Salap instructed as the glass jars were lowered. I filled the jars with water from the chamber, and one by one, we lifted the fragile remnants and lowered them delicately into the jars, through the muddy fluid to the bottom.

As he sealed the jars with paraffin, Salap looked up at me and said, “A fair imitation, no?” He gave me a grin that seemed more than a little ghoulish.

We stored the specimen jars in a small volcanic cave near the beach, out of the sun, and covered them with wet tarps to keep them cool. Leaving us to guard them, Salap and Randall took the longboat to the Vigilant and spent several hours offshore. Shatro and Cassir became involved in an argument about what the humanlike remains signified. Shatro was arguing for some sort of conspiracy between Nimzhian and the ecos queen; he had made some ridiculous elaborations on the captain's obsession.

Shatro, I saw, would always limit himself to the opinions of those in authority, and rather than improve upon those opinions, he would make them seem ridiculous.

Shimchisko had fallen into a silent funk, head bowed, staring at the sand between his feet as he sat near the cave entrance. I sat beside him, concerned that his cynical cheer had vanished so completely.

“Olmy, this is the worst thing that's ever happened,” he confided.

“Why?”

“It's going to tear us apart. Salap can't keep it secret forever. Randall doesn't like it; I don't like it.” He shook his hand loosely at Cassir and Shatro, as if dismissing them. “The first time we're in port...”

I was content just to listen for the moment. In truth, I was stunned myself.

“It shakes my faith,” Shimchisko said. “First, that this island has died. Now, that it was trying to make one of us...” He shrugged. Shimchisko was crafty, but not a quick thinker about large issues. “Why?” he stared directly at me.

“I don't know,” I said.

“They all sample us,” Shimchisko continued, frowning deeply. “They steal from each other—are they going to steal from us now?”

The captain came ashore with Salap an hour later. They entered the cave alone and Salap showed him the jars and described what was in them. When they emerged from the cave the captain seemed feverish. His face was flushed and he lurched a little and took Salap's arm. Looking at Randall and me, he said in a gruff voice, “We need to set sail in two days. We'll take a direct course to Jakarta. We don't know what we have. We could stay here and study for years. Primary science. But we don't have the luxury. Tell Nimzhian we'll be leaving. We'll deliver the supplies we promised tomorrow.”

“Should we tell her anything?” Shatro asked, deep into his suspicions of conspiracy. Everyone ignored him, and he lowered his head, staring at us sullenly.

The captain whispered in Randall's ear. Randall turned to Shimchisko and Shatro, lifted his hand, and swung it to include Cassir and me in the sweep of his orders. “Back to the boat. We need to talk in private.”

Thornwheel did not seem happy to be left behind.

“Let Olmy stay,” Salap said. “I'll need him.” The captain blinked at him, but did not argue. When Shatro's eyes met mine, he closed them and looked away in pure disgust. He joined the others as they walked toward the captain's boat.

“I wish I could talk to the good Lenk or some of his officers about this,” the captain continued. He pounded the black sand with his walking stick, staring out across the blue expanse of sterile sea. The sand made little barking noises with each poke. “What the radio messages say is that Lenk is on a ship to Jakarta right now. Brion himself is going to meet him there. There's going to be a conference. For now, we can't talk to Lenk, even if the airways are clear.”

Randall had apparently heard of this, but Salap had not.

“Why should we consult with Lenk?” Salap asked cautiously, puzzled by the captain's line of reasoning.

Keyser-Bach's face reddened to a shade of sienna, his cheeks and chin a brighter pink. “We have a responsibility here, and not just as scientists.”

Realization dawned on Salap but still eluded me. I had not worked with the captain very long and did not know his attitudes. Salap was ahead of me and Randall as well.

“You perceive this as a threat?” Salap asked.

“What else would it have been, if the ecos had survived? And for that matter, how do we know it hasn't merely gone dormant? Hidden the queen somewhere, encysted to ride out some condition or another...”

“I do not agree these are possibilities,” Salap said. “The grove is truly orphaned.”

“The danger is immense,” the captain said. “We've learned more on this expedition than any before us, in all the decades we've been on Lamarckia. And what we've learned burns.”

“Perhaps it is innocuous!” Salap argued, heat rising. Randall saw the argument coming and tried to intervene, but Salap and the captain both raised their hands, fending him off.

“Ser Salap, how can it be innocuous or innocent that an ecos seeks to mimic us?”

“They have always been curious!” Salap said. “We are strangers, a new kind of scion, but we do not evoke the responses that guard against thieves or spies ... We do not smell as a scion from another ecos would smell, perhaps. The samplers study our shape, take samples of every individual, carry them ... someplace, we assume for analysis. But these samples are much more enigmatic than the tissues of a scion from another ecos. The language of our genes is different in its very grammar. It takes a long time to puzzle out, even for a master ... or a mistress.” Salap's eyes burned with enthusiasm, as if he expressed his own secret dream or nightmare—a religious hope, perhaps. “Somewhere, there is a part of the ecos, a seed-mistress or queen, or many of them, examining the problem, studying our genetic material, laboring over the puzzles of human DNA, trying to understand the functions it codes for and duplicate them, beginning with the simplest proteins. They have so many problems to solve—there is an immense gulf between a megacytic scion and a many-celled organism.”

I pictured secret factories hidden in the silvas—perhaps in organic fortresses much like the palaces—where unknown intelligences worked tirelessly for decades...

We might as well call them queens.

“That much is obvious,” the captain said. “They feel threatened by us. We steal their scions, we cut them down and make ships of them, or we harvest them and eat them. We have the potential to fill Lamarckia and take all resources ... A queen would sense this, with whatever instinct she has. She would know. Ser Salap, didn't you expect to find something like the palaces, someday?”

“Yes, yes, of course! It was my great hope,” Salap said.

“I know what we have to do,” Keyser-Bach insisted. “We cannot take chances. We must make certain that Martha is dead.”

Salap seemed ready to spit. He walked back and forth on the beach, glaring at the captain, at us. “You would have us destroy all we have studied?”

“We keep our own samples, to show Lenk. But we burn the grove and try to find the hidden queen.”

“There is no hidden queen!” Salap shouted. He had lost all of his restraint and spittle flecked his black mustache. “Martha is dead!”

The captain flinched at this outburst. He set his stick down on the sand and squatted, laying his arms across his knees. Salap knelt beside him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“It is not necessary to act with such brashness,” Salap said, some of his calm returning. “Whatever Martha set out to do, clearly it has come to a stop for now. It appears at least to be dead, or so weakened and reduced that it might as well be dead. We have time to think and to consult. We go to Jakarta, we explain our discovery to Lenk. You can request an audience, even when he is busy with Brion. And you can ask Lenk and his councilors what should be done.

“They cannot deny us now,” he said. “Our own curiosity is not a luxury. We must answer our questions. We must understand these processes.”

The captain's face had come back from its dangerous color, and his anger and anxiety had cooled. “Do you think Nimzhian knew?” he asked.

“Shatro is a fool. She knew nothing,” Salap said. While the captain had cooled, Salap had become infected by an enthusiasm that he took some pains to hide. He knew he could win this argument and gain an advantage in a larger war. He approached me and said, loudly enough for the others to hear, “How ambitious are you, Ser Olmy?”

“I'm eager to learn,” I said.

“The captain and I, and the master Randall, have tried for ten years to make our case, that ignorance is dangerous, that we live on a dangerous world, however calm and benign it may seem. There are many more dangers than starvation.”

The captain looked up at his chief researcher with an expression mixing irritation, puzzlement, and wonder, one eye squinted, one hand pulling on his chin. Whatever his connections, Keyser-Bach had never been much of a political thinker. Salap, however, more than made up for that lack.

“We have fought and been denied too many times,” Salap said. “Our victory with this expedition—one ship, and a crew barely adequate—was a small one. But Martha has left a legacy more frightful than anything seen on Lamarckia. And more precious to us than any mountain of metals.”

The captain returned to the ship with Shimchisko, Shatro, and Cassir. The necessity for silence had been impressed on all by Salap. Shimchisko took the warning with a somber expression.

As they pushed the boat off, the captain said, “Give my farewells to Ser Nimzhian.”

“I will,” Salap said.

“Tell her...”

“I will tell her what she needs to hear,” Salap said. The captain seemed satisfied, and relieved not to have to come up with the words himself.

“Why doesn't he want to talk with her?” I asked Salap and Randall. Randall shrugged, but Salap's energy had spilled over, and as he went to prepare Nimzhian for our departure, he gave a long discourse on the captain's character.

“He is a scholar,” he said. “He is a shy man, actually, and sometimes a fearful one. He was raised by stern parents, as I was, but by and large my parents were correct; his were a little mad, I think. He has a fondness for hidden motivations that surfaces during the worst times. It's made his talks with Lenk's administers even more difficult. I believe he still holds the opinion that Nimzhian must be involved with this.”

“How could she be?” I asked.

“It is not my opinion, so I will not explain or defend it,” Salap said. “Although Shatro expresses it succinctly. Sometimes, he is like a younger, stupider version of the captain, with few of his redeeming qualities.” He glared at Randall. “You should not have brought him aboard.”

“Well, perhaps Ser Olmy makes up for my lapse in that regard,” Randall said.

“We will see,” Salap said.

Nimzhian seemed taken completely by surprise. “There's so much more to study,” she said to Salap, her face wrinkled with concern and disappointment. “Surely we don't have the broad picture yet.”

“No,” Salap conceded. “Yet greater storms are brewing. We believe our time is better spent elsewhere.”

She walked to the door of the porch. For a moment, I thought she might cry. “Half our drawings and paintings are still here.”

“They will be picked up tomorrow. And your supplies will be replenished from ship's stores.”

“I need so little, actually. I've enjoyed this company, all this talk. You're going to Jakarta next?”

“With perhaps one or two other stops, if the situation permits.”

Nimzhian sat in her graceful woven chair. “Is the captain coming back?”

“He expresses his deepest regrets, and says he will never forget our meeting, our association. Your work brightens our expedition.”

“Tell the captain I will miss his company. I admire his dedication. My husband would have enjoyed all of you.” She frowned and shook her head. “You seemed so interested in the palaces, so eager to understand them. Why, they could easily take years to study.”

“It is not entirely my wish that we leave,” Salap said. “As I said, there are pressures.”

“When you leave, will the Brionists come?” Nimzhian asked, her blue eyes wide. She lifted her hand and Salap immediately clasped it in both of his, a courtly gesture. Randall stood in the doorway, tall and stooped, lost in his own thoughts.

“I doubt they will stop here if they see the island is barren,” Salap said.

“But if scientists arrive, Brionist scientists, would you mind if I am candid with them, as well?”

“Not at all,” Salap said. “It is your duty. I hope truth will make us all reasonable. This is no time for division and war.”

The third boat had returned, carrying Shirla, Meissner, Ry Diem, and Thornwheel. The replacement party had hiked from the beach to the orphan grove and met us beside the pond as we left the house.

Shirla and I had a moment to talk as Salap relayed instructions to Thornwheel.

“We passed the captain's boat,” she said. “He said we're leaving, but to come ashore and keep Nimzhian company. He looks proper serious. Anything you can tell us, now that you're rank?”

I tried for a conciliatory smile. She gave in return a sharp sniff.

“Shatro looked like he wanted to kill somebody, and Shimchisko like he wanted to die. Is everybody crazy?”

I shook my head. “Pressures from across the seas,” I said, “and that's the main reason.”

“Brionists?”

I nodded.

“Where are we going, then?”

“To Jakarta. After that, to Athenai.”

“No lush silvas for me and thee, hm, Olmy, sir?”

She was clearly in a dirty mood. I found my own mood too complicated to tolerate any unpleasantry. I patted her arm and got in step behind Salap as we left the valley. Nimzhian watched after us, mouth open, head shaking slightly from side to side. Then she fell to talking with Shirla and Ry Diem.

We moved the specimens from the cave to the second boat and rowed them over mildly choppy waters to the ship. There, we carried them under blankets to the captain's quarters, where they were stowed in a locker behind the boxes of specimens already put aboard. A padlock was provided, and a bolt, and Randall installed them and handed the key to Salap.

“We will sacrifice one specimen to a general anatomical study this evening,” Salap said. “Olmy, you will assist.”

I went topside and observed the starboard watch performing their afternoon duties, clambering up the trees to prepare the sails for the next leg of the voyage. I felt a strong urge to join them. But I had made significant progress, and there was no returning to the comforts of an apprentice's life.

Twilight would be on us soon, and the sailor's hours of rest.

I thought of the gate opener's words in the Way. I look for things of interest to humans, Ser Olmy, and I find them.

If the captain was going to have an audience with Lenk, perhaps I could come along. I would be that much closer to finding the clavicle.

At dawn, one last party of twelve went to the island to deliver Nimzhian's promised supplies. I accompanied the party on the longboat. Shatro seemed resigned this morning to the shift in ranks. He sat on his thwart and pulled his oar with apparent good humor. Shimchisko, Kissbegh, Cham, and French the navigator were also on the boat. French wanted to check a few last elevations.

Nimzhian sat on her porch, barely glancing at us as we deposited boxes of food and supplies. Kissbegh and Cham began to stow the boxes beneath a shelter behind the house. French spoke to the old woman, but she merely nodded, saying little in return. He then went off into the interior for a few hours, accompanied by Shatro.

Nimzhian stood up after they had left and waved for Shirla and me to come up on the porch.

“I've been doing a great deal of thinking,” she said, “Could you relay my thoughts to Salap? They are not very complicated, certainly not complete.”

“I'll try,” I said.

“You're junior among the researchers, aren't you?” Nimzhian asked.

“Yes.”

Shirla gave me a wry, brief smile.

“I was junior aboard the Hanno, as well. Marrying Yeshova was a good social move for me. You and I haven't spoken much, but I feel it's right to talk with you. You'll take my thoughts to Randall and the captain. The captain ... may not be very clear about what is actually happening here. As for you, my dear Shirla, it's been so wonderful speaking with the women...”

Nimzhian's eyes moistened. “I must stay here. I'll miss the company, but my life is here. Yeshova is still here, his spirit.”

Shirla took her hand and stroked it. Nimzhian leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She seemed to have aged ten years since we arrived. Duty had kept her going this long; I wondered if she would pass on one final secret, and then be ready to die.

“Do you realize how simple and primitive all life on Lamarckia is? How delicately balanced? Yeshova and I, the more we explored and learned, became more and more astonished at the delicacy and crudity of Martha. It is all like a dream. And then we wake up.”

“Why like a dream?” Shirla asked.

“There is no competition or synergy between animals and plants to propel change. All change comes from within, from the observers, whatever and wherever they may be—queens or factories or palace wombs. And there's precious little competition between the ecoi. Day in, day out, nearly all of life on this planet struggles simply to get enough energy to stay alive ... Something is missing, some vital strategy or trick. Lamarckia may someday blossom. But are the hidden designers creative enough to supply what is missing?”

“Maybe we're what's missing,” Shirla said. She did not know about the half-formed skeletons. “But now we're here. The queens—the observers have to learn how to use us.”

“Admirably homocentric,” Nimzhian said softly, eyes staring between us dreamily. “That is part of our strength, to always place ourselves at the center. But despite all recent evidence...” She looked at me sharply, resenting the secrecy imposed by the captain. “Despite that, I do not think we are the missing element. I believe it is a technique, a trick, none of the ecoi have stumbled across. Poor Martha—so reliant on the stingy trace elements ... Martha did not have the strength to survive when things changed.”

She sat forward now, and gripped Shirla's hand tightly. “What is missing on Martha's Island, and everywhere else we've visited on Lamarckia?”

“What?” I asked.

“Green,” she said. “Brilliant, lovely green. Shirla, you were born here, and you spend little time thinking about Earth. But Earth was a green world.”

12

For two days after we left Martha's Island, the ocean overside and to the horizon lay glass-smooth and the still air hung hot and wet and smelled stale. Thunderheads towered in the west. Each evening, chores done—choke-oiling the decks, tightening the standing rigging yet again to take in a few centimeters slack (mostly, I think, a figment of Soterio's imagination), and spreading dragnets to catch samples (the ocean here was barren and the nets came up empty)—the crew not on night watch ate cold freechunk and dried fruit and drank mat fiber beer in the mess, then lay out on the deck as they had the day before, as they might the next day and for a thousand years after. Each took a piece of the deck for his or her territory. As they lay, flat and still, they watched the few unfortunates still in the rigging or hauling on sheets and braces and halyards, and spoke softly among themselves.

I stood on the puppis, waiting for the stifling laboratory below to cool. The researchers met in the laboratory next to the captain's cabin each day several hours after sunset, working in the coolest portion of the night, sometimes into the next morning, dissecting and measuring the components of a humanoid skeleton. This night, however, the air on deck was not much better than the air below. We all hoped for a cooling breeze, but no relief came.

Randall did not expect the discovery to stay secret for long, and it did not. The ship was dispirited. Randall sensed it; the captain was too preoccupied to care. Shimchisko carried the burden of his knowledge badly. While not telling the truth of the matter even to Ibert, his best friend, he had let on that something very bad had been found on Martha's Island, something important to all of them. The crew picked Ry Diem and the sailmaker Meissner—surrogate mother and father as they had become—to extract more from the captain and the researchers.

I felt guilty at not volunteering the information, but my allegiances had shifted, taking me away from the crew. Ry Diem and Meissner petitioned Randall, and Randall spoke to the captain in private. Finally he gathered a meeting of the entire crew and provided full details of what had been found on Martha's Island, in the palaces of the still-theoretical queens.

They were still digesting this news. It changed the way they thought about Lamarckia.

For Keyser-Bach, I thought, this voyage was at an end. He would sacrifice it for the chance at a larger, grander expedition. The captain was seldom seen without an expression of shrewd calculation, already adding up the pieces of equipment he might order made by Lenk's craftsman, or commandeer from around Elizabeth and Tasman. We had only to proceed to Jakarta and report our findings to Lenk's officers. The captain's cause—the cause of science and exploration on Lamarckia—would be elevated beyond all expectations.

At midnight, Salap climbed up onto the puppis, weary and oppressed by the heat, bare to the waist, brown skin shining in the lamplight. “We might as well get started. It isn't going to get any cooler.” Shatro, Cassir, Thornwheel, and I followed him below, to resume our studies of the homunculi.

Cutting cross-sections through the limbs, we found fibrous polysaccharides, not true calcium-rich bone. The “head” was made of three sections, and where the brain would have rested in a human, there lay a soggy lump of oily tissue supported by a mat of thin, translucent fibers. Cassir, who had had extensive medical training in Jakarta, commented: “Whatever Martha learned from sampling humans, she didn't learn how to make a brain.”

The captain performed this work with grim resolve. He did not like these poor imitations. They were his ticket, his shining hope, but it was obvious he regarded them less with scientific dispassion than revulsion.

Shatro, Thornwheel, and Cassir arranged these dissections so that I performed the simplest and least elevated tasks. I made sketches of the separated pieces of the pseudo-skeleton, laid thin sheets of gridded paper over them, and compared the dimensions with those for human bones. I fetched water for all, and mixed solutions for preserving the specimens.

After another few hours of work, Salap dismissed the researchers. I came up on deck and found the crew as I had left them, sprawled under the bright early-morning stars, the double oxbow rising, one lone moon casting a wan light in the west, sinking fast. They were restless, and most were awake and still talking.

I heard Kissbegh's scratchy tones and walked forward to listen. “If we're all going to be replaced by scions,” he said, “then why did Lenk bring us here?”

“He didn't know,” Ry Diem said with weary disdain.

“No, I mean, we've all been taught we owe so much to Able Lenk, for taking us away from the ‘distortions and presumptions of Thistledown.’ That's what my teachers called it.”

“They were right,” Shimchisko said. “Thistledown would have been worse.”

“But we're all going to die here,” Kissbegh said. “How could that be better, and why didn't Lenk at least sense what he was getting his people into? Aren't great people supposed to be lucky?”

“We don't know we're going to die,” I heard Shirla say. She sounded sleepy.

“If the zones rise up against us...” Kissbegh persisted.

“We don't know that, either. We don't know what Martha's queens wanted to do,” Shirla said. Her voice carried through the night, clear and sensible. I wanted to go down among them and sit next to her. We had not spoken for some days.

I felt more at home with the sailors than I had with any other people in my adult life—but I was no longer one of them. Their talk seemed at once naive and perfect—the talk of humans who lived their lives in a direct and simple fashion, without the kinks and knots I had twisted into mine.

“I wish I had a woman who loved me back home,” Kissbegh said. “I've always been too much the clown to make friends or attract serious women.”

“I'm your friend,” Ridjel said.

“You're no woman,” Shankara observed placidly.

“Thank our fate,” Ry Diem murmured.

“Yes, you're my friend,” Kissbegh said, “but you're here, and if I die, you'll probably die, too. I want someone alive to remember me.”

“My wife's a good woman,” Shankara said. “But she's a perfect sailor's wife. Right now that makes me sad.”

“Why?” Shirla asked.

“If I don't come back, she'll miss me for a while, but she'll get along. My being gone won't tear her heart out.”

“It's the way,” Ry Diem said, in a voice intended to soothe.

“I'd like someone to always miss me, always think of me,” Shankara continued. “My wife will find another husband and he'll fill her heart as much as I've ever filled it. Not that she's uncaring...”

“If I had a good woman on shore,” Ridjel said, “I'd love her so hard and so long she'd never forget me. Her heart would break if I didn't come home.”

“All memory's like this ocean,” Ry Diem said. A short silence followed as everyone thought this over, and then decided to ignore it—it could not be riddled quickly enough.

“Will Lamarckia remember us?” Shimchisko asked.

The talk turned to how much Lamarckia knew about each of us, and how much the queen (or now, the queens) of Elizabeth's Land or Petain would keep us in some sort of biological memory if we did not return to Calcutta or Jakarta ... or, by implication, if they actually did get around to replacing us. Shimchisko began to speculate wildly. He wondered whether they would duplicate us so completely we might live again, even if we died.

Randall stepped up behind me. “They're getting far too metaphysical,” he complained in a low voice. “Shimchisko's become a very religious fellow. But it's infecting us all.”

I nodded, but asked myself who, back on Thistledown, would ever remember me...

On Lamarckia, I would leave no impression at all.

My homesickness for Thistledown had become a dark shadow, mingling doubt and dream, wish and self-disgust. The flaws in my armor multiplied and were glaringly apparent: I did not know who or what I was, my past seemed a confused jumble, my present a mess I would never successfully resolve.

If I was any example, I doubted Lamarckia's ecoi could learn anything useful from humans, yet Nimzhian's last words before we left the island haunted me.

Lamarckia's marvels were truly simple and delicate, as if she had suffered some natural handicap at the beginning of her time. She had flowered in a wonderful but hesitant way.

Our natural passengers—the selected bacteria and viruses humans found valuable—had left no mark on Lamarckia's ecoi. But we ourselves were a kind of infection, injected into the planet's tissues by the most sophisticated of delivery systems—the Way itself, an infinitely long syringe with infinitely many openings. What would I report to my superiors in the Axis City and on Thistledown, if I could make a report now?

Lamarckia is still healthy. But humans and the ecoi will change each other immeasurably, and very soon.

Lamarckia is not for us.

We are far too robust.

We come from a green planet.

I did not have the luxury of time. To preserve Lamarckia, I had to act quickly. I had to locate Lenk's clavicle and report my findings to the Hexamon soon.

Fifteen days out from Martha's Island, our batteries drained, our windscrews idle, sharp-eyed Ibert stood his watch on the maintree top. Late in the morning, he spotted something on the horizon, and called down to the master. I sat repairing a dragnet on the forecastle deck near the bowsprit.

Soterio pulled himself out of his hammock belowdecks and groggily followed Randall forward. The captain stayed below. Randall surveyed the horizon following Ibert's directions—fine on the starboard quarter. I stood and shaded my eyes against the steady beat of the sun. At first, I could not see anything, but soon I resolved a thin line of smoke, and then another.

“No land here,” Ry Diem said, coming forward. “Couldn't be fires.” Shirla and Shankara followed, then Cham and Shimchisko. Soterio trailed Randall like a faithful dog, a worried expression on his dark-bearded features.

Salap emerged on deck, as elegant and seemingly unconcerned as ever. He glanced at the group of us near the bow, then sauntered around the skylight to join Randall.

“Is it a racer?” Soterio asked.

“Racers don't smoke,” Randall said. “Two ships. They're burning something.”

“Steamships, then,” Salap said.

“Likely.”

“Brionist,” Soterio said, hoping he would be contradicted.

“Sure as hell not out of Calcutta or Jakarta or Athenai,” Randall said. “Get the captain up here.”

Keyser-Bach came on deck in an apron, hands still gloved. He shed the apron and gloves and handed them to Thornwheel, then took the binoculars from Randall. After a few minutes’ scrutiny, he said, “No flags. Of course, that may not mean anything.” He looked up and shook his head. “We didn't set our flag after leaving Martha's Island. They're ten miles away. They've seen us.” He lowered the binoculars. “They're turning to cross our course.”

Shatro took the apron and gloves from Thornwheel and handed them to Cassir. They all needed something to do. Nobody spoke for a few minutes. Keyser-Bach watched the lines of smoke with a face as blank as a child's. Then he pulled his chin with three fingers and said, “Ser Soterio, bring her about and we'll hope for some wind.”

I looked up at the sails. A puff of wind had struck my back, and I saw the limp, sad cloths bat and slap. Every morning at this hour, winds of varying speed and direction would slip up on us, forming fine small chop on the water but neither refreshing the air nor offering much speed to the Vigilant. The wind did not mean much. There had been no good wind for four days.

The captain, however, started to whistle through his teeth. He strode to the bowsprit and watched the four of us gathered there. Soterio followed him and said, “There isn't enough wind to bring her about.”

“There will be,” the captain said, pulling the whistle back through his teeth, then sucking on the teeth speculatively, making a small, sharp hiss-squeak.

“He can feel it,” Randall said. They both looked up at the sails, and for a moment, I felt as if I were in a dream, an entertaining muse about being lost among superstitious savages somehow more deeply connected to nature, able to feel the presence of gods and spirits ... and wind.

“Can't you catch it?” the captain asked, as casually as if we were discussing tonight's dinner in the mess.

“The sea has the color,” Randall said.

Soterio peered over the gunwale, then straightened. He looked lost.

“If those are Brionists, and they're riding steam, they don't need any wind,” Shatro said, just to be part of the conversation.

The captain raised his binoculars and peered southwest, four points abaft the port beam. “There it is,” he said.

We all turned. A bank of thick cloud had risen beneath the southernmost thunderheads, like a predator stalking immense gray giraffes.

“We've been carried into its circle,” Salap said. “It's far north on its accustomed track.”

The captain raised his hands to his chest and gripped them there, supplicating.

Salap sat on the butt of the bowsprit. “It's been stroking us with its feelers for three days,” he said. “The little puffs of wind each morning.”

“What are you going to do?” Soterio asked, licking his lips and glancing around the small circle.

“Nothing right now,” the captain answered. “We'll wait until we see who's going to catch us first.”

“There'll be more wind,” Salap said. “Enough to maneuver. If we wait here, the storm will suck us toward it.”

The captain handed the binoculars around for us to see. Shatro took them from Thornwheel; I was still ranked last. He handed them to me after a few seconds, face pale. I looked.

“What do you see?” Salap asked.

“Sparkles,” I said. “Like mica flecks in water.” I swung the glasses around. Beneath the lines of smoke I could make out two funnels, one each surmounting long white hulls. The steamships were sailing at about ten knots. They'd be upon us within an hour and a half.

The storm's cloudy mass was perhaps forty miles away. The feelers, as Salap called them, had already gained strength.

“Should we hail them on the radio?” Randall asked.

“No,” the captain said. “I do not doubt where they're from, or why they're here. We're a prize if they can catch us.” He jerked abruptly, muscles taut in his jaw and neck, and gave his orders. The sails bellied and Soterio immediately pulled the starboard watch together to bring the ship about. We would face into the wind and tack across a course headed due south. The steamships would see the storm and perhaps decide they did not want us so much.

Soterio called out the port watch. Salap crossed the deck and put one hand on my shoulder, the other on Thornwheel's. “This is truly going to be what the captain calls primary science,” he said. The wind pulled his black beard and hair. “I will station all my researchers around the ship, and one in the tops ... Ser Shatro, please join Ibert on the maintree.”

Shatro put on a face of unexpected hurt, but went to the shrouds. He had climbed shrouds before, but not for some time. “Ser Olmy, you will stay at the bow with Ser Thornwheel. Ser Cassir, you and I will stand by the bulwarks port and starboard amidships. We will record wind speed and direction, and anything else that happens to be interesting.” He pulled slim paper notebooks from his pocket, and small carbon pencils.

The captain kept turning the glasses from the steamships to the storm.

“It is going to be very complex,” Salap said. “The sparkles in the clouds must be how it regulates its temperature and pressure. I suggest they are very light tissues of different reflectivity born by winds controlled and directed by formations in the ocean.”

A sharp gust hit us and the ship shuddered, swung around by the fore course and jibs like a horse on a rope. When the wind was on our port beam, Soterio ordered the jibs furled, the fore course reefed and the spanker raised. We practically spun about in the water.

“If we end up in the thick of it,” Salap said, “we can learn how it keeps itself going.” He clapped the captain on the shoulder and walked aft with Cassir. The captain did not seem to notice. The ship heeled over ten degrees. Salap lurched on the tilted deck, yet still kept some dignity, his long coat flapping out like a tail. Cassir grabbed a brace for support and Soterio snatched it from him. “Not that one, sir,” he said, chin jutting.

“Sorry,” Cassir murmured, and took his position.

Sails set, Soterio put Shirla at the wheel, replacing an exhausted Kissbegh, and stood behind her. Now came the waiting. The distance between the steamships and Vigilant briefly increased. Then they turned as one and followed, applying more steam. The smoke from their stacks billowed thick and gray like the breaths of two tiny volcanoes on the head of the sea.

“It's a chase, all right,” Soterio called from behind the wheel. Thornwheel, standing beside me, braced himself as the wind kicked at the ship from ahead with increased force. The deck lurched. Soterio ordered both watches to unfurl all courses and the lower topgallants and swing the yards about to take full advantage of running close-hauled. The captain was intent on narrowing the angle of each tack, to give us maximum speed away from the steamships.

But it was clear from the beginning that we were not going to win this particular race. The storm grew tall and showed long, thick black skirts; the sea became a lively green all around the ship, flecked by vigorous tall whitecaps. We veered onto the next tack and the ship heeled to starboard. After half an hour, with the storm barely thirty miles away and the wind increasing to twenty knots, the captain kept the ship on a steady course, running on a beam reach at ten knots, clearly hoping to round the northern extent of the storm and slip away from both storm and pursuing ships. But the ships were not dissuaded by the advance of the storm.

“They're fools,” Thornwheel muttered. “They don't know this monster.”

“Will the captain take us into the storm?” Thornwheel asked. “You've sailed with him longer than I have.”

“He might,” I said.

“But it terrifies him,” Thornwheel said, raising his voice over the hum and whistle of the wind in the rigging.

I shook my head and smiled. “Better that than Brionists. He's no coward. But he wants to get this ship to Jakarta.”

On the main deck, Cassir and Salap stood by the rails port and starboard. Aloft, Shatro clung miserably to the shrouds, and Ibert stared ahead and to the west intently, shouting observations to the captain and Soterio that we could not hear. Randall came forward, grinning like a happy dog. “Breath and fates,” he shouted at us, “we're in the claws now, if not the teeth. Time to show more courage, eh, Olmy?” I had never seen him in such a mood.

We tacked back and forth for another hour. The storm towered above us, having swallowed and decapitated the thunderheads, which spread out above the dark gray and brilliant white mass in long separate streamers of cloud. These were quickly dissipated.

I wondered if the captain had miscalculated. We might soon be faced with winds sweeping around from behind, hitting us from the starboard quarter, and we'd have to fight to keep from bring drawn into the body of the storm.

Somehow, it did not seem to matter. I had always known the triviality of my life, something not common among my peers, surrounded by the thick armor of Thistledown's immensity. I had always calculated the risks taken against my basically ephemeral nature, gambling the benefit of sensation and knowledge against the danger. To fall into this storm would be an experience to remember, and if that memory lasted only a short time, fell quickly into oblivion, at least there was the real moment of experience ... Like nothing I would ever have seen on Thistledown.

I held this brave attitude, stalwart and admirable, for only a few minutes before my unfettered body told me, without allowing for debate, that it was terrified. I sweated despite the chill of the winds, and my hands trembled. Thornwheel squinted west and then north, and tied a short coiled rope around the butt of the bowsprit. For a minute, I ran around the deck looking for another coil, cursing my luck, and finally found one hanging from a belaying pin. I wrapped it around the bowsprit and squatted on the deck. Along the length of the ship, sailors stationed on deck were tying similar lines from bulwark to bulwark, or to the hatch tie downs and the trees. Looking aft, as the fore and main courses were reefed to give the helm more control, I saw Shirla at the wheel, and Soterio behind her, and felt a stab of regret.

Then my calm returned. There was nothing more I could do. I held my pencil and notebook and clenched my jaw. Thick spats of rain hit the deck and blew across the sails.

Behind us, the flying jib tore with a loud bang and was carried out beyond the jibboom like a mad ghost. Kissbegh and Ridjel leaped past us and climbed out along the bowsprit to cut it loose.

Over my shoulder, I saw the sky suddenly dip below the bow, as if pushing hard on the horizon of rough water. The ship shivered and leaped. The sky suddenly retreated at the rise of a wall of water; the bow plunged into a trough between waves and we nosed into that green wall. It slammed against me and I snapped to the end of my line like a fish and seemed to half swim, half crawl along the submerged deck. Then the water fell away like a heavy curtain and sloshed to all sides, running in rivers, and I spread out on my back on the deck, coughing water, wiping my face. My pencil and notebook were gone. Forward, Thornwheel clung to the rail, hair in his eyes, sputtering. Kissbegh climbed back along the bowsprit, very lucky to be alive; Ridjel stood on the jibboom like a sea sprite, arms wrapped around the forestays, and I laughed at his grace and presumption.

“Shit on you!” Kissbegh shouted at me, scrambling onto the deck and helping Ridjel over the tangle of ropes. “Shit on you all!”

Thornwheel got to his feet despite the pitching of the deck. The waves had come on us so suddenly that the ship took several long, tense minutes to turn into them. Both watches reefed and furled sails frantically. The fore course had ripped halfway and snapped its ragged tails like a cracking whip. The wind now came strong from the starboard quarter, as I had feared, drawing us into the storm.

I could see nothing of the steamships. We had made our gamble, and chosen what suddenly seemed the greater of two evils. I could picture myself surviving among pirates; surviving the storm seemed much less certain.

“How many knots?” Thornwheel shouted. He still gripped his notebook, though it was sodden through.

I watched the spray being whipped from the dripping gunwales, and from the forestays and jib sheets. “Forty,” I guessed.

Thornwheel tucked one arm under his rope where it was tied to the butt of the bowsprit, squatted, and wrote the figure meticulously into the limp notebook. Then he looked up and cried out, “What time is it?”

I did not know.

Our world seemed confined to the forecastle deck. The storm and sudden waves had knocked loose all sense of minutes or hours. I could not get to my slate, still secure—I hoped—in my bunk a few meters below. “Afternoon,” I said. Thornwheel screwed up his face and shook the dripping notebook in disgust.

The wind quickly grew to fifty knots. The Vigilant was now rigged for a storm, all but her fore and main courses furled and those reefed close to their yards, straining alarmingly at their gaskets. I could see men and women running along the deck, a few descending the shrouds with exquisite slowness, hanging on for life, but could not pick out their features through the stinging spray. Personality did not seem to matter in the noise. So long as I kept my position, I could not be accused of shirking my duty—and that mattered suddenly more than I would have believed it could. I did owe everything to my shipmates, my captain, the ship itself; if I did not owe them all, then I was not part of something strong and capable of surviving. I might as well be lost in the foam on the waves. I could picture that vividly. I saw myself surrounded by volumes of cold water. My lungs halted in the sudden whoop of spray-heavy wind and my body thought I was drowning; it no longer trusted my senses.

The captain sidled forward, gripping the ropes tied at regular intervals between the mast bits and the gunwales. Salap followed, and at one point we shipped another sea across the port bow and both of them had their legs swept out from under. Standing again, tightening their safety ropes about their waists, they made their way to the forecastle desk, climbed up, and came to the bows.

Salap saw that I had no notebook and shook his head sadly. “Ser Olmy, how will you pass this on to posterity?” he chided. “I hope you've kept a record,” he shouted to Thornwheel.

“We don't know the time,” Thornwheel said.

That stopped Salap. He looked at the captain, who looked at all of us, and then broke into a braying laugh. “My god, it's half past sixteen hundred,” Keyser-Bach said. “I think.” We all seemed to be made equals by the storm, like small children at play.

“Cassir just dropped a note stuffed into a spare deadeye. Damned near brained the mate,” Salap said. “They claim to see still water ahead, about a mile off the starboard bow.”

“They're out of their minds,” Keyser-Bach yelled, straining to see through the spray from waves slapping at the striker and parting along the bow. The waves had declined a little in the past few minutes, however.

“Do they see any ships?” Thornwheel asked.

“No,” Salap said. “I hope the bastards sink!” His smile was broad and wild, his eyes black and wide like a man caught in a fight he deeply enjoyed.

The wind blew as strong as ever—the gauge registered fifty-five knots—and the ship climbed and bounced and cut through waves, but the waves were diminishing even more. I saw floating objects in the glistening hills of water flying past, gray and pink shapes like closed umbrellas rising from the water. We shipped another formidable scoop of ocean and clung miserably to our ropes and whatever else we could grab. Thornwheel raised his notebook triumphantly above a rushing floor of blue sea, then rose sputtering and whooping. Salap slipped and was washed along the deck until his line snapped him to a halt; he swung at the end of the line, his robe drenched and wrapped around scrawny, scrambling legs, his face and beard streaming. The captain managed to stay on his feet, but he looked battered and kept his eye out for the patch of calm as if it might be our only hope.

I looked up at the trees and yards, the furled sails, the rigging, the greenish-gray sky beyond. All leaped and surged but the sky, which formed thick gray bands perpendicular to the length of the ship. Within those bands I saw a constant twinkling, a coruscating flow of myriads of corpuscles one moment brilliant white and the next black.

The ship spun about like a skater suddenly thrown down and sliding on his rear. With a shudder, the Vigilant seemed to leap over the border between one kind of madness—the sea that threatened any second to break her back and kill us all—and another.

Astern, as the hull settled, its pitching and rolling much reduced, we saw furious waves and a haze of driving spume. But all around and for hundreds of meters ahead, the waves were flattened, subdued, by thick layers of brown and red and yellow pads. In the center of each pad rose a growth like a folded umbrella, and at the tip of each umbrella, a fan or paddle spread, perhaps two meters in diameter, black on one side, white on the other. We seemed caught on the field of some impossible sport. The wind still blew unabated through our rigging, but it could not ruffle this tightly controlled field of sea within the storm.

The wind blew off the starboard quarter. I turned and the wind whooped through my half-open mouth, making me a living bottle-organ. I struggled to pull air back into my lungs. Salap gripped the gunwale and leaned out to peer into the water beneath the bow. I did the same, and saw the cutwater pushing through the broad pads, shoving aside the fans, some of which bent and spun before our faces, just beyond the forward rails. On the edges of the pads, thick flattened growths like gear teeth meshed with adjacent pads and propelled them as they slowly spun. When the ship's bow forced the pads apart, with a sound like tiny suckers popping, the water between was black as night.

Above the ship, great flocks of silvery triangles from a few centimeters to half a meter on a side blew through the sky, half hidden, and then entirely revealed, in thick curtains of moisture. The air blew alternately freezing cold or hot and moist, as if the ship were caught in some uncertain gradient between winter and tropic summer.

“It is alive!” Salap shouted above the steady, shrill scream of the wind. “It's in control!”

“What?” Keyser-Bach shouted back. “What's in control?”

A flight of triangles caught up against the masts, shattered, and slipped away in the storm. Pieces fell and whirled forward, blowing and flipping across the deck like leaves.

“It's a storm-beast! It's master of the warm water and the rising and falling air. We're not yet anywhere near the middle of it. We're on its outskirts. What must it be like farther in?”

Thornwheel scribbled quickly in his notebook. The pages bunched and tore beneath his pencil. Still, he kept writing: wind speed, pressure, the things we saw in air and water around us. He looked up, lips pulled back, squinting into the hot and cold winds.

Salap pointed dead ahead. “Everything in here is alive and growing, prospering! A garden in a whirlwind! Even so, if this is a cyclonic, there must be a calm center!”

Randall worked his way forward, stepping carefully over each safety rope, fastening his line, tugging it free with the secondary loop-line, refastening. He climbed onto the forecastle deck. “We're taking water like a colander,” he shouted at the captain. “Every board's been jarred. I've got half the crew below pumping and caulking, but I don't think we can last more than another hour.”

“Set the fore course and main lower topgallants,” Keyser-Bach said. “Keep the wind on our port quarter.”

“That will put us right into the center!” Randall shouted.

“That's where Salap wants to be!” the captain replied. The winds nearly drowned him out.

“Fine!” Randall said, raising his hands and preparing to head aft. He shook his fists at the chaotic sky until he reached the ladder, then glanced back and said something that nobody heard.

I turned to sight along the bowsprit. The waving and whirling fans had passed. Ahead, the ocean seemed covered with silvery grass taller than our upper topgallants, making great steady clockwise waves like cilia on the skin of a cell.

“Storm cell!” I said to Thornwheel. Salap turned to me. Both called out, “What?”

“We're inside a storm cell,” I said, but I could not convey my joke, if it was a joke; it might have been a serious observation, a clever metaphor, a crazy way of dealing with incomprehensible phenomena. I did not care. I felt so battered and dazzled, beyond fear, sliding smoothly into exhausted disengagement. The waving silvery grass ahead could have become the hair of some huge giant, rising from the sea like old Neptune, and I wouldn't have been much surprised.

With the sails set, our speed increased, and Vigilant moved at fifteen or twenty knots toward the immense rolling wall. The crew worked steadily on deck and in the rigging, Soterio guiding them as best he could from the main deck. Randall had climbed halfway up the shrouds, inspecting something on the foretree. I wondered if Shirla had been relieved on the wheel. I saw Ry Diem and Meissner hauling the tattered remains of a blown-out sail aft.

The fore and main trees and sails stood out brilliantly in a shaft of light like a searchlight beam, and I turned into its dazzle, high above the wall of grass. The sparkles had coalesced into a concentrated shimmer, throwing light on the sea around us like a lens or concave mirror. The whole storm was a system of reflection and absorption of sunlight, the scions in the atmosphere encouraging the heating or cooling of the surrounding air even as they flew through it, turning silvery white or dark black. The scions on the ocean's surface shifted and controlled the surface winds, and perhaps also conserved or radiated heat from the water itself.

Salap marched back and forth across the forecastle deck, staring hawklike port and then starboard, trying to see and understand everything. The captain paid attention to little but the ship and its immediate obstacles. He lifted his arm, bellowed something, and we all turned to look off the port bow. If we could turn the ship a few points more on the starboard bow, we could pass through an opening in the wall of grass, a space of wide water like the gap left by a swinging scythe.

Randall came forward and the captain gave his instructions. The crew worked—Ridjel took a starboard brace with Shankara and Kissbegh and turned the fore course yard—and slowly, as the wall approached, Vigilant aimed for the opening.

“We're going into its belly,” Thornwheel said. “How far in are we already?”

“I don't know,” I cried. “Seven, maybe eight miles.”

“Twenty at least, with that wind,” Salap said.

On either side, the grass rose around us, silvery tops swaying. Vigilant sailed into the gap. Abruptly, the wind stopped and the sails hung slack.

Keyser-Bach looked at them with a furrowed brow, obviously stumped. What to do next—put on more sail to take advantage of what little wind remained, or drift and wait for another blow? Salap offered no advice. We were all beyond any human experience.

Alternating red and black disks covered the water around the ship, a polka-dot sea as lurid in the glittering light as any child's drawing. The disks rose and fell on a gentle swell, while above the grass, and beyond the opening of the gap, the wind wailed like a fading echo.

The sky above filled with thick black streamers of cloud. Rain spattered down. A warm wind blew from directly ahead and the ship yawed to starboard. The wind ceased as abruptly as it began.

We lay in stillness, if not complete silence. A current in the water around Vigilant pushed us slowly, smoothly ahead, along the curve of the gap between the walls of grass. Randall went belowdecks to supervise the pumping. I felt guilty at not pitching in; but Salap shook his head at the look on my face, pinched his lips together, said, “Eyes and ears. Let the muscles work now. We'll pitch in if the master demands it.”

This did not make me feel any more comfortable, but it was an order.

A few hundred meters into the gap, we heard a steady thumping sound, like the beating of a huge heart, though rapid as a bird's. The sails had been set to the captain's satisfaction, the hand pumps seemed to be gaining on the water in the hold, and both master and mate were on deck to take in the scene around us.

Thornwheel had made all the notes there were to make at this point. The wind was light and steady at about five knots, the grass undulated as it had for the past ten or fifteen minutes, and he had recorded the beginning of the sound. We glanced at each other, nodded as if making acquaintance across a busy boulevard, and returned to gazing at the grass, the polka-dotted water, the bands of cloud and spinning scions high above.

“Is it worth it?” the captain suddenly asked Salap. We had grown so used to shouting that his voice boomed across the deck.

“You mean, is it worth my life, to experience this?” Salap asked in return.

“We've seen a lot together,” the captain said. “It would be fitting to die like this.”

Lamarckia is a good place to die. Swallowed by a living storm, with no chance to be of any use to the Hexamon, no longer seemed the best end to me. I had answered their question hours ago, but had changed my mind since.

“I have a lot more I'd like to see,” Salap said. “Things even more remarkable. And to die without telling ... With what we know...”

“I don't intend to die,” the captain said. “But my intentions don't mean much here.”

Salap said, “Cassir and I are going to take a few specimens at the stern.” He descended the ladder and walked aft, taking Cassir from his post. Pieces of shattered wind-driven scions lay brown and withered on the deck, their glory of white and silver fading quickly. Cassir retrieved a few and bottled them, then stowed the bottles belowdecks and returned with a specimen net and gaff to join the head researcher.

The thumping grew louder. Ahead, the walls of grass turned reddish brown, though each blade was still silver-tipped. The tips became flattened, and the stalks shorter, the rhythm of undulation more rapid. Breaks in the walls to either side allowed strong breezes to blow across the ship, heeling and pushing it one way and then back the other.

Soterio came forward. The captain asked who was steering, and the mate replied that Shimchisko had replaced Shankara, and that Ry Diem was on backup. Shirla had been relieved just after the beginning of the storm.

It all seemed more than just dreamlike; it seemed feverishly mad. The light on our faces was mottled white and pink, with flashes of silver from the clouds above. The fore course luffed and bellied in the alternating winds. All around us, the waving blades rose no higher than the yard of the course, and from the tops, Ibert called down that he could see an end to the grass a few hundred meters ahead.

Vigilant emerged from the grass ten minutes later. Ahead, a dense wall of gleaming white cloud churned. In the broad lane of sea before this wall, dozens of different kinds of scions eeled and floated through the water, passing broad black masses like small low islands. Atop the masses rose translucent pillars that gleamed like glass, but shivered with each thump like stiff jelly; within the pillars, long gray and blue cylinders clustered like wires through insulation. The pillars were about twice as high as the truck at the top of the maintree and two-thirds as broad as the Vigilant's length from jibboom to stern.

Above and ahead, the sky filled with detail that eluded explanation, confusing my eyes and mind. I saw pinwheels of darkness spinning lithe as snakes that fell behind the wall of cloud. One of the vortices broke through the wall and fell apart, scattering as sheets of very dark rain into the sea, which seethed like living soup. The thumping began to hurt our ears, a rapid surge in pressure as much as a sound, and we could not talk at all and be heard.

Vigilant would not be controlled. No matter which way we set the sails or steered, the thick mass of scions around us carried us in the flow, leaving the waving grass behind, like brown beach cliffs rising to a silvery prairie on a sloping hill. All behind was wrapped in drifts of brilliant white cloud, pierced by searchlight beams; and above, rising several thousand meters into the air, an immense curtain of black shot with spreading fans of powdery gold. I had never seen anything so awesomely beautiful, not even the advancing wall of a Jart offensive...

I felt like a Jonah lost in the belly of a godlike monster, this storm-beast as Salap had called it, the captain's nemesis, and my chest hurt with fear and something like shame. My throat clutched and even if I could have been heard, I couldn't have said a word.

Suddenly all my thoughts focused on Shirla. She was the closest thing to a woman and a friend I had on this planet; she was female. Being near her seemed essential. I looked back along the deck, actually made a step to go aft, caught myself and looked over my shoulder at Thornwheel. He had put away his sodden notebook and now lay curled up by the bowsprit, hands over his ears, trying to hide from the pounding triphammer pressure. Salap had fallen to his knees beside the port gunwale, his safety line tangled around his legs. The captain still stood, but leaned against the curved black vent over the galley, his face locked in a grimace of pain, eyes mostly shut.

So much energy, I thought. I turned about myself where I stood, taking it all in, for the moment losing all the pain in my ears, my lips calling for Shirla. I wondered if she were dead or alive. If I got out of this, I thought, I would give up everything—my mission, my reluctance to become part of the immigrants—everything, just to be with Shirla.

But Shirla became an abstraction. Suddenly I missed Uleysa, on Thistledown. The faces of several dozen other women, friends and lovers, chance acquaintances, came with extraordinary clarity. I was surrounded by them. I saw my mother, her angular, half-angry, half-puzzled face unable to comprehend that she had just hurt her small son with a sharp, unsympathetic word, and I loved her, forgave her, needed her.

The thumping stopped. Vigilant floated for the moment in comparative quiet. The other sounds—whistle of wind from our starboard quarter through the rigging, sloshing and slapping of water and the confused sliding whisper of scions in that water, came back only gradually, as if having been in hiding and only now emerging.

The quiet seemed like an indrawn breath before a scream, but no scream came.

“We are going to get out of this,” Keyser-Bach said, enunciating each word like a schoolmaster. He went to the rail. “I hope to breath and fate Cassir is taking specimens.” He pointed into the water, lips counting softly. “I can't count how many different types of scion there are. What do they do?”

The water around the ship seethed with color and form, as if Vigilant had been scooped up in a net filled with the concentrated creatures of an entire terrestrial ocean. Soterio came forward, a dirty white cloth wrapped around his head and ears. He removed the cloth sheepishly and cocked his left ear close to the captain's mouth to receive orders. But the captain said one thing, then belayed it; another, and belayed that, as well. There was nowhere to go, no clear direction for safety. We were turned around in the creature, and our compass was of little use. The storm could have shifted course around us as much as we turned within it. We had been inside the system for five hours; we could be as much as thirty miles from the perimeter, or even forty.

“Shit,” the captain finally said, throwing up his hands. He turned, stared toward the wall of mist, turned again and looked down a corridor between the false brown hills and silvery grass prairie, his eye following the curve off into more mist, black shot with gold and silver. “It's pure instinct, or guesswork, Ser Soterio.”

“Let it be instinct, sir,” Soterio said.

Salap and Cassir came forward. Cassir deposited the contents of a bulging net into a barrel, then poured a bucket of water over the contents, which seethed. With a look of fascination and caution, and a touch of disgust, Cassir clamped the lid down on the barrel.

“What do you see?” Randall shouted to Ibert and Shatro in the maintree top. I shielded my eyes against another flash of light and saw the two draped limply on the small platform high over the ship. Shatro raised an arm and pulled himself to a kneeling position, gripping the shrouds. He scanned the surrounding sea.

“I don't know,” he called back.

Ibert stood beside him. “None of it makes any sense,” he added.

“We're looking for a way out! What do you see?” Randall called up angrily.

“What would it look like?” Ibert asked plaintively.

“A door,” Thornwheel said, uncertain on his feet. “With a big brass knob.”

A large drop of black ink fell at his feet, splashing his shoes and pants. He stared at it dumbly, then looked up at us, What next? More drops fell, steam rising from the spreading stains. One struck me on the back and was hot enough to sting.

“Wonderful!” Shatro screamed from the platform. “We've gone straight to hell!”

We scrambled on the deck to get away from the sudden barrage of hot inky drops. All around, the sea was dappled and roiled with the dark rain, and the mass of writhing scions sank with a chorus of bubbling gurgles. In the tops, Shatro and Ibert screamed. Ibert came down the shrouds as fast as he could, stopping to shriek as a splatter of steaming rain struck his head and back. He nearly fell. Shatro lay on the platform, hands wrapped behind his head, yelling incoherently.

There was no place to hide on the forecastle deck. I saw Meissner run forward with scraps of ruined sail, throwing them at sailors cowering on the deck. Ibert tumbled the last few meters from the shrouds, landing heavily on the deck, and snatched a shred of canvas from the sailmaker. Everyone, covered or not, made a dash for the hatches and pushed and shoved their way below.

In the press of bodies, I found myself standing beside the carpenter, Gusmao, in her workspace in the ship's waist, beneath the upper deck. She blinked at the unwelcome intruders. She had not been on deck since we entered the storm. She was not a curious sort.

“My god, you're a mess,” she said to the four of us. “What's going on up there?”

Nobody answered for long seconds. “Black rain,” said Kissbegh, his face covered with thick splotches, almost unrecognizable beside the stocky, oily-black figure of Ry Diem.

“Who's steering?” Shirla asked, walking down the aisle between the carpenter's shop and the sail locker.

“Shimchisko's still up there. Soterio's with him,” Shankara said. The ship rolled. The deck drummed with heavy rain. The air became stifling, and moisture thickened it until we could hardly breathe. Shirla put her hand on my arm, solicitous. I laid my hand over it and felt like a young boy. Thornwheel came down the aisle, calling my name. “Salap's forward,” he said, “in the lab. They got the specimens inside.”

I wiped black goo from my face. Where it had thickened, not quite dry, it caked and fell away, leaving no stain on the skin beneath. I touched Shirla's face and tried to wipe it. She held my hand and drew back slightly, but smiled. “It's in my eyes,” she said.

Gusmao recovered enough to order us out of her workshop. “I don't know what's happening topside, but the captain wants his barrels and boxes.” She shooed us into the corridor, where the air, away from the shop's vents, was even thicker.

“You're going to work in this?” Kissbegh asked, peering around the door into the carpenter's tiny workspace.

“I'm going to breathe, dammit,” Gusmao said, and shut the door in his face.

After a few minutes, the drumming stopped. We heard the wind pick up, and the creak of the trees and rattle of yards and rigging. We delegated Ridjel to poke his head up and see what there was to see. He climbed the steps, lifted the hatch cover, and said, “Salap's out there. The black stuff's stopped falling, but it's all over the deck. There's the captain—and Randall.”

We hastily climbed out on the quarterdeck and returned to where we had been before the black rain began, all but Ibert, who stood by the shrouds, calling up to Shatro. Shatro answered and said he was coming down. Soterio passed by, half-inked, half-clean, like a festival harlequin. He did not comment on Ibert's reluctance to go topside again.

All around, the ship drifted through twists and curls of fog. The air temperature had climbed at least ten degrees and our stained clothes clung to us. My throat was parched, but the water butts on deck had been bumped, losing their caps, and were fouled by ink. Leo Frey, the cook, and his assistant Passey emptied the contents of the butts and went below to bring up more water.

Salap's face and beard glistened with ink. His vivid white eyes stared from his black face, the ink glazed and cracking on his skin. “This warm water,” he said, “will be pushed outward, to power the outskirts of the storm. If we stay with it, we may get out.”

The captain stood beside Salap, a blackened towel in his hand. “Why do you think that?” he asked.

Salap lifted his hands. “Somewhere high up in the storm, scions spray black pigment into suspended moisture, and the pigment absorbs sunlight. When the clouds have reached their maximum temperature, they drop hot rain into the sea, warming it. It's part of this monster's infernal engine. Scions in the water absorb the black pigment, turn the sea milky, and ... it is pushed outward, full of heat...” He shrugged, as if this were elementary. “I imagine at the heart of this beast, there are great sheets of ice, like the inside of a freezer ... The air cools and falls.” He took the captain's towel and wiped his face. “The ship looks sad,” he said.

The captain shook his head. “We just follow the current.”

“It will get rough again, I imagine,” Salap said. “But perhaps we can get out, and get washed clean in the process.”

All around the ship, the sea was beginning to take on a milky pallor. Salap nodded his satisfaction. Thornwheel smiled and shook his head, as if amused by another magic trick.

The captain stood deep in thought, fingers tugging at his chin, eyes distant. “The storm will put this water on the outer edge sometime after dark. Is that what you're thinking?” he asked Salap.

“Precisely,” Salap said. “The night air will warm all around the edge, and rise rapidly as the surrounding air cools. The air over the center of the system will fall ... And the storm will build up enough energy for tomorrow.”

“We'll have two miracles to present to Lenk,” Keyser-Bach said.

The wind began to pick up again. Around the ship, processions of eel-like black scions, drawing long, thin curved lines following the direction of the wind, channeled the milky sea. We turned the ship to go with the wind, and slid between the lines as if following the surface of an immense chart. The waves grew as we sailed toward the wall of fog, now in ragged patches, revealing depths of tortured, billowing white cloud beyond.

Our passage out of the storm was little less remarkable or strenuous than our journey in. We were blown with the milky sea for dozens of miles, through rank after rank of mists, enveloping clouds, fleeting rain showers that left long streaks and smears and whorls of black stain on our deck and hull. The spanker, christian, and all the courses, unfurled to push us swiftly, carried smeared and bleeding meanders of black.

Behind us now, the thumping started again, triphammer pounding that cooled my blood. I did not want to ever hear such a sound again. I felt like a germ invading a huge pulsing heart.

I still expected to die. So did most of the crew, I think, and their behavior was a credit to them. They worked quietly, focused on the ship. There was certainly the temptation to stare at the mysteries, the powers surrounding us, until we were filled like bottles with terror.

Flights of batlike pterids filled the sky, piercing the boiling, ragged cloud-ceiling, rushing to some unknown place in the storm's scheme. The milky sea thrashed with eight-meter waves like peaks in living meringue, slapping pale spray and silvery rivulets across the deck; the waves increased to ten meters, and then became formless, all-consuming monsters again, the lines of eel scions vanishing in their fury.

Blasts of cooler air poured down through rents in the clouds, making the seas steam, until we could see nothing in a general white-out. Thornwheel and I continued to make measurements with the barometer and thermometer, holding the instruments up to our eyes in the impenetrable fog, trying to write them down in fresh notebooks, or calling out figures to the captain, who recorded them on his slate.

After a tense half-hour, the fog cleared.

Outside the storm, night was falling, but within, the sea scintillated with a pale radiance that bounced from the clouds. For the first time, lightning flashed in the clouds above us, silent and vague, like candles behind draped windows. These brief glows popped up here, there, ahead and behind, warm orange in the general lividity.

The water crashing across the bow and sloshing over the decks smelled remarkably like wet soil, and then began to give off an offensive stench, combining molasses sweetness with ammonia. We wrapped our faces in whatever fabric was available, including the crusty, smothering sheets of canvas Meissner had brought up to protect us against the rain of hot ink, but the smell persisted.

Since the black rain, the air around the ship, and across the sea, had generally been warm, topping out at thirty-two degrees. Now, more frequently, we sailed through the cool masses of air the sea was intended to warm. But in its silvery pallor, the sea could not release its heat efficiently. The next step—if I followed Salap's reasoning—would be for the ocean to turn black again, or to effect some other artifice to release the heat more rapidly.

The mate had gone below and checked the ship's clock. He told us it was eighteen-thirty hours—twenty minutes past sunset. We sailed in ghostly twilight, barely able to see across the deck, lanterns coming on fitfully as the engineer managed to put the windscrews to work. The ship's batteries had been soaked during the heavy seas; their membranes would have to be washed and the distilled water replaced before they would function again. We were working on circuits connected directly to the windscrews, and their vanes were wet and whirled uncertainly in the steady wind.

All I could see, staring ahead, were dull flashes of orange behind greasy black clouds and luminous wave peaks. The plunging and leaping of the ship made my knees and head hurt. I felt sick to my stomach—whether because of the stench, the pitching, or exhaustion, I could not decide and didn't care. Salap handed me a small thermometer and I read off the temperature every few minutes, and Thornwheel replied with the barometer. Atmospheric pressure at sea level on Lamarckia was about nine-tenths of Earth normal, rich for Thistledown's citizens, who were used to quite a bit less than that; and by consensus that was called one bar.

Thirty degrees and nine hundred and forty millibars. Thirty-one degrees and nine hundred and forty-three millibars.

The captain recorded our figures when he wasn't shouting orders to the mate, and we tried to keep them in our notebooks. After a while, sick as I was, I couldn't help laughing as we shouted out new figures. Thornwheel grinned as well, his face a smudge in the obscurity.

The lightning grew brighter just as we emerged from a thick wall of cloud. Ahead, lost in the miasma, we heard a chorus of chirrups and whistles, crossing from off the port bow to off the starboard bow, as if a flight of unknown birds taunted us in the dark.

Flashes of forked lightning revealed serpentheads rising from the water, outlined in pale blue, bobbing, chirping and singing.

“Sirens!” I shouted to Thornwheel. The captain glared at me, but the sound grew louder. I tried to see the serpents more clearly, but they were always featureless, smooth, rising and uncurling slowly, or sinking with tips half-curled, like limp hooks. Again we saw low, flat islands floating between the crowds of serpents, but lacking towers, covered instead with rounded bumps.

What little thinking I could manage was half delirious. I imagined cybernetic control systems within the storm, sensing and guiding, the queens of this storm-beast, sending forth flights of pterids this way, ordering the shoals of scions that way, bringing up serpents and lining eels across white seas, making the waves rise and the winds blow hot and cold. Somehow my thoughts became tangled and when I called out temperatures, the air seemed to respond; I believed myself in control, orchestrating all that we barely saw and did not even begin to comprehend.

We shipped a particularly large wave right over the bow, which plunged us all into a darker and deadlier night. Again I lost my notebook, slid to the end of my safety line and spun, then hit and rolled over the deck. In the water, I heard muffled sounds like murmuring, bubbling whispers, and felt something explore my leg. I reached down, blind, to push it away, and my fingers closed on a smooth, cold surface like hard rubber. It shifted beneath my fingers, and then it stung me. I almost opened my mouth to scream, but some instinct kept my jaws shut tight.

Eyes burning in the sea water, trying to find my way to the surface and safety, my head suddenly bobbed into air. I thought I had gone overboard for sure. The safety rope had broken. I hit hard on deck again, got to my feet, and resisted the wash of water into the scuppers. Lights burned above and to each side of me. I had been swept off the forecastle deck, onto the main deck. My crewmates huddled around me. “Where's the captain?” I shouted. “Where's Thornwheel?”

The nearest person to me, Meissner, had been washed against the bulwark and huddled there like a frightened child. I glanced at my hand in the light of the swaying lanterns, vision blurred, saw a thin trickle of blood from my palm, wondered if I was going to die, and then realized, I've been sampled.

That made me laugh again. Hearing Thornwheel call from the bow, and hearing the captain cursing loudly and shouting orders to keep the ship steady, I began to bray like a mule. Shatro rushed past, glanced at me, shook his head, off on some errand. That seemed even funnier. Cham and Shimchisko poked their heads over the edge of a hatch cover. Shimchisko came around the hatch and took my shoulders in his hands.

“Don't shake me,” I shouted. “I'm not hysterical. It's just funny.” To prove myself sane, I instantly made a sober face and poked my nose against his, peering with bloodshot eyes.

“The water's black!” he yelled, pulling back. I looked around, and indeed, the deck was covered with ink, as was I.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“I think it's good,” I answered. Then I yanked one of his hands from my shoulder, shook it vigorously, smiled, and headed forward to my post.

I didn't much care about anything for the moment but being alive. If someone had asked me about my mission, about any other secret I had ever held in sacred trust, I would have revealed everything.

Nothing mattered but the laughter and being alive.

13

The water's sudden blackness seemed to calm the waves, or at least reduce them to frisky youngsters no higher than the bulwarks. These hit the ship like a drummer's pounding fists, but the deck did not leap and roll nearly as much, and we had a chance to clear the broken yards and tangled rigging. Everybody pitched in, even the captain and Salap.

Soterio had broken his wrist in the deluge of water that had parted my safety line, but he let Cassir and Ry Diem set and wrap it, and gave us as much help as he could with his remaining good arm, though his face was gray with pain.

The black water carried the ship through dancing pillars of rising fog. The air was almost unbearably humid, and the wind came from the starboard quarter, no faster than the current that gripped the hull, so we seemed suspended in motionless air.

Through gaps in the thick deck of clouds, I could see patches of stars. French the navigator was quick enough at sighting constellations to get a rough idea which way we were being pushed—due south. No one was certain what that meant; the horizon was blocked by an impenetrable darkness, unrelieved by lightning or any other detail.

The water grew calmer still. We stood about the deck, wobbling with exhaustion; Kissbegh and Ibert lay where they fell, sound asleep. I managed to find Shirla in the dim light of the few functional lanterns and put my arm around her. She did not push it off; instead, she reached up and gripped my hand in hers, tugging on the fingers like a child. It was such a casual, familiar gesture that one might have thought we had been lovers for years.

“Did you know it would be like this?” she asked. Her eyes were

lovely, brown and alive.

“No,” I said.

“Do you think it's over?”

“No.”

“We're still inside of it?”

“I think so.”

Randall walked slowly along the deck. The work that could be done had been done, he said; it was time to get whatever rest we could.

Most of us collapsed where we stood and curled up on the deck in the thick, sticky puddles of black water and the wretched heat, sweating. Shirla lay beside me, knees drawn up, and immediately slept. We had been inside the storm-beast for nine hours.

My own need to sleep had fled. I was exhausted yet wide-awake. My mind, however, became as clear of thought as a fine summer sky. I stared up at the patches of stars and watched them be obscured, one by one. The clouds were thickening overhead.

Far to the east, the triphammer pulse continued. It did not shake the air or upset our bodies, though Shirla twitched and moaned.

Somewhere aft, the generators whined faintly and the windscrews stilled. I recognized the sounds of their gearing being disengaged. The remaining electric lanterns immediately went out. Someone, I could not see who, walked past with a small electric torch, whispering a string of curses.

Still inside. Still Jonahs.

The black water gave off its heat around the ship and, by morning, as grayish light filtered through the clouds and curls of mist, the sea acquired a dusty greenish color. I got to my feet, leaving Shirla to sleep as long as circumstances allowed, and looked around to see who else was up and about.

Salap stood on the puppis, facing forward. He saw me and nodded but did not smile. Cham squatted in a half-doze by the mizzen tree. The rigging pulled and caught with little popping sounds and the remaining yards creaked and rattled. The ship was riding in a normal sea—waves about half a meter at their crests, racing past us in long swells as if eager to win a race. Peering overside, I was left with the impression we were sailing backwards.

I joined Salap on the puppis deck. He had just finished trailing a net in the water, back and forth over the stern. He showed me the net: empty. The captain had gone below; Randall sat near the stern, behind the wheel, which was tended by Ry Diem.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” Salap asked.

“No,” I said. “How would I know?”

Salap chuckled humorlessly. “You're a smart man. I thought you had some consoling theories.”

“Well, I don't,” I said. Our time in the beast had changed me, at least for the moment, and I felt respect for no man, and no sense of discretion, either.

Salap seemed to find my new tone unexceptionable. Clearly, he did not care much for rank or protocol. “I would have guessed we'd be outside of the storm by now.”

“I'm surprised we're still alive,” I said. Ahead, the blackness had changed to an almost equally uninformative charcoal gray.

“There is a pattern, a process,” he said. For a moment, I expected him to reveal some religious belief, but he continued, “The storm is a well-organized system, maintained by hundreds of types of scions. I wish we could have captured a sample of each. We have a few of the flying forms, a barrel or two from the rich sea, and whatever else washed up on deck.”

“Something sampled me,” I said, holding up my hand. Salap stared at the gouge with interest.

“The storm is not part of zone five, then,” he said. Nearly everyone on Elizabeth's Land had been sampled by a river scion at one time or another, and these all came from Petain, so it was believed.

“I guess not.”

“It is a separate ecos. Yet it feeds the prairie.”

I nodded.

“So we learn more and more. The zones cooperate with sub-zones, as at the Chefla waste ... And the storm has some connection with Petain, though not a part of it. I am proven wrong all the time now.” He took a deep breath and smiled broadly. “It makes me feel young to be wrong so often.”

“The water here seems empty,” I said. “There were so many scions back there...” I waved my hand astern. “Why none here?”

“Even though we are not out of the storm, we must be near its farthest extension, its caudal portion, if I may be anatomical. There may be little of importance here.”

“I thought the black water would just push toward the outside of the cyclone, not toward the rear.”

Salap shrugged. “It was just a theory. A hope, perhaps.”

The grayness ahead parted as the dawn advanced. We seemed to be near land—a long dark line of hills rose on the horizon. Ry Diem said hopefully, “We can find a harbor and fix the ship.”

The captain climbed to the puppis, his head wrapped in a black-stained strip of cloth. “Good morning, if it is morning,” he said.

“It seems to be,” Ry Diem said. Randall pointed out the hills on the horizon. The Captain stared at it, jaw clenching and unclenching within the bandage. He glanced at me, hooded his eyes, and said, “Slammed my jaw last night. Ruined a few molars. Soterio up and about?”

“His arm's giving him hell, but he swears he'll be on deck as soon as he can get dressed. One of the women is helping him,” Randall said.

“That is not land, whatever it is,” the captain said. “There is no land in this part of the world.” He lifted his binoculars, then handed them around. All looked but Ry Diem. When my turn came, Shatro and Thornwheel and Cassir joined us, and I barely glanced at the formation before passing the glasses on to them. I could not make out any detail, just low knobby protrusions like hills, all of a uniform dark brown. The grayness above them seemed lighter, rent here and there to reveal darker, thicker clouds beyond.

“It's part of this damned beast still,” the captain said.

“We're coming up on it rapidly,” Cassir said.

“Cast a logline and let's see how fast we're going,” the captain told Randall. Randall assigned the task to Shankara, who came back a few minutes later with a speed of four knots. Keyser-Bach examined the distant mass, lips moving as if in calculation. “Our speed with respect to whatever that is, is about nine knots. And I'd guess it's no more than five miles away. Erwin?”

“Six at most,” Randall said.

“It's part of this beast and it's going to ram us.”

“Or we'll beach on it,” Randall said.

“It is not a solid mass, that I guarantee,” Salap said, shaking his head. “It must be divided into smaller structures.”

There was little wind to maneuver in. The captain ordered two boats put out with lines attached to the bow. This time I had to volunteer, if only to keep my sanity, and I clambered into the longboat. Neither Salap nor Randall objected. Shatro volunteered just after I did, loath to let me one-up him in any way.

Shirla climbed into the longboat and sat beside me, favoring me with a faint smile. Her skin was pale, however. She was terrified.

The mass was less than seven miles away by the time we had rowed the line taut and swung the Vigilant about. Twenty in the longboat, twelve in the captain's boat, we pulled with all we had.

Vigilant seemed mounted on the top of an underwater mountain, immobile. The sea barely stirred past the cutwater. The gloom all around had lightened to dismal light gray. Sweat stood out on my brow in the moisture and heat. My shirt clung to me. It seemed all wrong; I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. Shirla beside me, pulling with me on the oar, was small comfort. I knew, with an animal instinct I had not felt even during the storm, that something bad was coming.

Behind us, Shimchisko and Ibert shared an oar, swearing steadily and rhythmically under their breath, as if singing a sportster's chant. Across from us, on the same thwart, Shatro and Cham concentrated on their oar. Shatro glanced sideways at me, but our eyes did not meet for long. We worked too hard to care about anything but moving Vigilant.

It was useless. Half an hour and we reduced the ship's speed in the current by perhaps a knot. The captain ordered the boats back, but did not haul them aboard. Leaving crews of four in each boat, he ordered the rest of us to our stations. Soterio followed at the crew's heels, voice sharp.

Less than a mile away, the long dark mass whispered like children in a room, heard through a half-shut door. At its base, water foamed like breakers hitting a shore. The knobby surface now clearly resolved into vertical corrugations, not so much a range of hills as an irregular wall, cut like sliced cheese, bearing down on us. It extended to either side as far as the eye could see, no escape.

All around the ship, the water suddenly filled with scions. They rose and twisted and rolled like breaching whales, spraying thick dark plumes that floated off as brownish mist. Above, the cloudy ceiling showed patches of blue. Light shafted down through these patches across the awful fecund waters, and I thought of an ancient engraving, a phantasma of Earth's seas, filled with bat-finned, slack-jawed, many-eyed grotesques. These scions—what detail we could see in the masses—did not resemble any particular baroque creatures, sticking instead to the storm's steady run of designs: serpents of many colors; long black or purple piscids, featureless except for smoothly tapered fins; writhing hollow cylinders a meter wide, lined along their inner length with coarse bristles like hairy nostrils (and some of them turning inside out as I watched); three-cornered flat shapes reddish brown trimmed with blue that filled the interstices between all the others. I did not have the concentration to keep track of other designs; there were hundreds.

“They're spitting blood!” Shimchisko screamed. Before the advancing wall, the scions’ expelled vapors turned brilliant red. Less than half a mile away, we saw the wall push against the scions, bunching them at its base where they leaped and thrashed against the swell, then rushing over them it seemed, though they may have merely submerged and swum away. But before they vanished, they spewed plumes of brilliant red fluid that stained the wall. And when the wall whispered, the stain vanished, sucked within the sliced-cheese corrugations.

I last saw Captain Keyser-Bach on his knees, praying. We had abandoned our lines despite Soterio's yells, and finally even the first mate stopped his frantic shouting, for it no longer mattered. William French, Frey the cook, and Gusmao the carpenter—who had finally come up on deck—stood by the gunwale, transfixed. Shankara rushed past, heading forward.

Shirla and I met in the middle of the deck, as far from the bulwarks as possible, as if trying to stave off the rush of the sea. Salap I caught a glimpse of, heading to the bow with a bag in his hands. I suddenly realized the bag contained the remains of a humanoid skeleton; he was trying to save it.

Shirla clung to me. We knew we were dead. The wall's whisper, less than a dozen meters away, sounded like shrill fluting. The corrugations had become blades, the edges of knives pressed tight against each other and arrayed into an endless wall taller than the ship's highest mast by at least a hundred meters. The shadow of the wall fell over the ship and, almost gently, it bumped the stern. With a jolt, it pushed the ship, and for a few moments, we began to cheer, despite our terror. It had all been a false alarm: our fate was simply to be pushed along by the wall, perhaps forever. I imagined climbing the vertical face, seeing what was on the other side. I looked down at Shirla, folded in my arms, and she looked up, and we smiled.

Then the knives grabbed the stern and chewed it to splinters. The ship shuddered and lurched up and down, back and forth, caught in grabbing, grinding blades. Shirla and I fell down. Chips and splinters of xyla showered down on us. I heard the suck of a breached hull, water rushing in, and some of the hatches lifted or were blown aside as air pushed out. Cracks in the deck ran along board seams and puffs of caulk rose along their lengths.

Hauling Shirla up with all my strength, I held her hand and we both ran forward, to where we imagined the boats still were, somehow managing to stay on our feet as the deck tilted five, then ten degrees. Others had the same idea. Cham, Ibert, Kissbegh, Riddle, the sailmaker Meissner and cook Leo Frey and Passey and Thornwheel, Gusmao, Pyotr Khovansk the engineer, all ran with us. I saw Khovansk slip into a crack, which clamped down on his leg; he shrieked in agony. The ship rolled to port and Kissbegh fell and rolled with it, behind us.

The masts and rigging that had survived all of the storm-beast so far now gave way and yards fell, their parrels strained open, striking people to each side. Cassir was crushed. The forecourse yard writhed on the foretree, then broke loose and fell directly before us, pulling blocks and sheets and shrouds down about us. I lay stunned under a web of fallen ratlines and shrouds. Shirla cut me free with her knife.

“No boats,” she said, pulling me out. Ahead, we saw both boats loaded with five or six crew, pulling for all they were worth.

The ship had been half chewed to pieces. The deck canted back at twenty degrees, awash behind us, scions crawling and flopping across the wreckage before the grinding wall.

“We'll have to swim,” I said, and Shirla shook her head, lips tight. The deck rolled to starboard this time, and we came up hard against the splintered shaft of the foremast, then fell and rolled to the bulwarks. Shirla's face was bloody. Water sprayed over the gunwale and sluiced her clean. Immediately her nose and a cut on her cheek began to bleed again.

“Jump!” I shouted.

“We're dead!” she screamed. She did not want to join the thrashing scions. Neither did I, but Vigilant had no future. We could last a few seconds or minutes longer in the water. I grabbed her by the upper arms and jumped, carrying both of us over the bulwark.

We went in headfirst. Water filled my nose and I thrashed through rubbery, slippery masses, trying to fight my way to the surface. Shirla and I came up at the same time. She gasped and screamed as a large gray shape slithered through the water between us. Blood-red spray shot up a few meters away and drifted across us, a choking mist that smelled of sour breath and fresh bread.

Shirla could swim as well as I, but the scions blocked our efforts to move away from the Vigilant. I managed to push through the welter to her, and together, we fought to stay afloat and to get away from the hull, now more than halfway chewed. I had no time to think of anyone else; Shirla seemed an important obligation, but I was willing to give her up, give up anything to keep my head above water, to keep from being dragged under by the mash of frantic bobbing, slapping creatures around me.

We managed to stay afloat independently. Facing each other, separated by a couple of meters of hissing, blood-spraying, multicolored soup, she cried out, “Where?”

“I don't know,” I said. A massive eyeless snout poked up beside us, striped blue and gray lengthwise, its slashed skin flapping back in ribbons. It sank with a sucking wash that nearly pulled us under.

“The ship,” Shirla called after spitting out water. I turned my head around to see what was left of the Vigilant, still uncomfortably close—five or six meters away. The packed, oscillating knives that formed the wall had chewed it to within seven or eight meters of the bow, pushing ropes, yards, and chunks of cathedral xyla into a tangle that threatened to topple on us at any moment. I could see no one on deck. Everyone had leaped off, yet I saw no one around us. We seemed to be alone.

Bloody spray shot up on all sides. I reached for Shirla, one last touch before we died; and then the waters swirled violently and we were pulled apart. Unable to breathe in the thick red vapor, I spun in an eddy, choking and thrashing my arms and legs. My eyes filled with the yeasty mist, leaving me almost blind.

I gained a dark and blurred impression of walls rising, masses passing to each side. Shirla moaned and I heard other voices now, some praying, others simply screaming. My vision cleared to see the Vigilant's stempost looming over me, rising and falling with majestic slowness. Ridjel clung to the shattered bowsprit like a monkey, eyes tight shut.

The hull turned between two advancing walls, dragging me in its wash.

Everything whirled violently and I sank for a few seconds. Eyes open, I saw pale shapes around me, some sinking into darkness, others twisting and writhing in the water. I had no doubt at all that I was dead. All I had to do was open my mouth and I wouldn't prolong the agony.

My mouth stayed shut. I kicked and waved my arms. The water around me seemed clear; I could not feel the passing bodies of scions, or anything else. I rolled in a universe of bubbles and lancing beams of sun. Gradually, I oriented myself and floated toward the brightness, arms hanging limp, legs dangling, my body an enormous burning hunger for a single breath.

I lay my head back, and my face broke the surface. I exhaled, felt my lungs catch as if a tight band constricted them, and then my chest filled like a balloon. I became giddy with air.

I floated on my back, rising and falling in a gentle swell, the sky above cloudless and blue. When I rose to the crest of the swell, I saw a sloping shore, dark brown and corrugated, capped by a thick brownish mist. In the water around me, tiny brown disks floated like chips of xyla. At first, I thought they were remains of the Vigilant, but small piscids rose and plucked them from the surface, leaving spreading ripples across the smooth rolls of ocean.

Still alive. Still breathing, still floating. None of it seemed real. With a lazy nonchalance, I turned over in the water and tried to look around. I could not remember at first what had happened. I knew there had been a ship, and crewmates in the water, but nothing else seemed clear.

I found the ship—the bowsprit and prow rising and bobbing in the water a dozen meters away, ropes dangling. Ridjel had vanished from the bowsprit. Bits of wreckage slid down the gentle slopes of sea. I reached out for a long yard, perhaps from a lower top-gallant, but it passed by and I could not grab it. A flat piece of xyla, part of a hatch cover, caught my attention, and I swam toward it, grabbing the frame and crawling halfway out of the water. It made a fair raft, two meters on a side, two edges chewed, but floating even under my weight.

Memory came back as I realized I did not need to die soon. I thought of Shirla and clumsily pushed up onto my knees on the chewed hatch cover, shielding my eyes against the sun's glare. A body floated facedown about thirty meters away, on the other side of the ship's bow and the swaying bowsprit. I recognized the thick shoulders and short hair of Talya Ry Diem. I moaned and turned again, hoping to see someone alive.

I looked back at what Salap had called the caudal end of the storm. More wreckage drifted in that direction, a trail of broken planks, snakes-nest rigging, a few round objects that were either fiddleblocks or deadeyes ... or bobbing heads.

I tried to get to my feet, but the hatch cover tilted dangerously and I fell back on hands and knees. “Shirla!” I yelled. “Salap! Captain! Anybody!”

Two or three weak voices answered. Among them, a woman—too hoarse to identify immediately. I grabbed a splintered lizboo plank and began to paddle toward the bobbing heads. Awkwardly, I whirled this way and that until I found the best part of the hatch cover to assign as a bow.

The storm still filled the eastern horizon, columns of brown mist rising in air currents, parting in distinct streams, and being sucked back into gray masses of clouds on either side. It was about six miles away. I rowed and watched the remaining brown disks being plucked from the surface by stray scions, and tried to piece together what had happened, how we had survived, but my thinking was too ragged.

Three people hung along the length of a slender skysail yard. They could not all rest their weight on the yard or it would sink, so two were swimming and a third was resting. They called to me hoarsely, voices mere squeaks above the slosh and hiss of the wreckage in the gentle waves.

“Olmy,” said one, and left the yard to swim toward my hatch cover. I saw it was Shatro and was very disappointed. But then I saw Shirla clinging to the yard, her face smeared with brown, hair in sticky strands, but alive, and I welcomed Shatro aboard as if we were the best of friends. Together, we paddled with hands and the single plank toward the yard, and Salap, wearing only black pants, swam weakly toward one side of the hatch. Shirla held out one arm and I pulled her onto the other side. Four were too many, and the hatch began to founder, so I jumped into the water and let them settle themselves as best they could while I clung to one side.

We were all too exhausted and emotionally drained to say much. Shirla took hold of my hand and patted it, looking at me with wide, haunted eyes and a weak smile. “Where?” she said, and coughed. “Wherever,” I answered.

Shatro stared over our heads blankly.

“Have you seen Randall or the captain?” Salap managed to ask,

balancing himself half-on, half-off the unstable raft.

“No,” I said.

“The others,” Salap said. “They might have been swallowed...”

“We were spat out,” Shatro said. “I saw it. The wall broke in two and let us slip through.”

“Not before it ate our ship,” Shirla said.

“A tiny morsel it did not want,” Salap said. Resting on the hatch cover, breathing for once without swallowing water, they seemed to revive a little. The water was cooling rapidly in the wake of the storm. Soon it would be chilly. The sun, on the other hand, was brilliant and would soon toast us.

Salap studied the departing mass of clouds with half-closed eyes. “The whole expedition,” he said, and shook his head, his face hard and eyes narrowed.

For a long time nobody said anything. I tried to feel something, grief or elation at having survived, but my thoughts were jumbled and I felt nothing clearly.

“Where now?” Shirla asked again.

“Nowhere,” Shatro said.

From a few dozen meters away, another voice called. With a sudden burst of energy, we arranged ourselves to swim and push the hatch cover toward the new voice. Erwin Randall clung to a large piece of hull, five meters long and two meters across, still attached to several ribs. This floated planks-up and he lay flat on it. With a quick reconnoiter, we lashed the hatch cover to the larger piece of hull and all climbed from the water.

“The captain's dead,” Randall said. “I saw his body before the storm spat us out.”

Salap rubbed his cheeks wearily with his palms and nodded, down-turned lips and deep black eyes asking without words, What is there to be done?

We lay back to contemplate our last hours in this, or any, world.

Night came as a great relief. We were very thirsty and the sun only made our condition worse. We bobbed gently under the pure welded-metal smear of sunset, in a cloudless twilight sky, the water splashing us, stinging cold at first, then numbing. Salap and Shirla slept for a while. A few small meteors lanced the starry night. I felt dead weary but not sleepy. I realized with a calming certainty that we were as isolated as could be, on a sparsely populated world, and that death was the only likely outcome.

Randall did not agree, however. He responded to my unspoken gloomy certainty with, “You know, there's still the steamships.”

Shatro grumbled. I did not want to argue the point. My mouth was dry and my tongue stuck to the roof so tightly that I thought I might choke. The ocean waters of Lamarckia were notoriously drying. Potassium salts and other minerals crusted on my legs and arms.

“We could catch a scion,” Randall continued, his words thick. “We really should paddle around and look for others.”

I made no response. We had no tools, no bait a scion would go for—all the brown disks left by the storm had been gobbled before nightfall. We could have eaten them ourselves, had we had the presence of mind to scoop a few out of the waves.

“Thirsty,” Shatro murmured. He curled up on the far end and slept, snoring loudly in bursts every few minutes.

I had heard that disaster bred a wonderful clarity of thought. All I felt was layers of thick tangled fuzz pulled through my brain. I would die comfortably enough: as I was too dumb to remember anything, death would merely snuff a dull instant of unconnected being. Olmy was already gone.

I gave little thought to my responsibilities back on Thistledown. Family, Nexus, the Hexamon itself—secret duties—seemed like half remembered dreams.

“The captain was a fine man,” Randall said.

Salap had awoken. “He was.”

Shatro and Shirla still slept. I pulled her close for warmth, and she moaned, but shut her eyes tighter.

“I wish there could be more like him on this world,” Randall said.

“Lenk chose it so,” Salap said, his tone neutral. “The best divaricates. Few like the captain or like us.”

“Pneuma forbid,” Randall said, and he repeated this several times, voice fading, before he fell asleep.

“Olmy,” Salap said. “Are you curious about the storm-beast?”

I did not know whether Olmy might be curious or not. I cared little, myself.

“I see a diagram of its anatomy in my head,” Salap said. “A loose anatomy. It came to me while I napped.”

“Good,” I croaked.

“A central void, like the eye of a storm, filled with bergs of ice. Air and Ocean are brought together, mixed violently, churned to control the energies used to grow the scions within. The caudal portion must be a vast factory of nutrients, nourished within the storm and harvested by the wall of knives. Scions, perhaps those no longer useful—worn out by the action of the inner storm—are sacrificed, transformed into the brown disks, which are whisked away to the upper reaches, and spread out much later over land ... or wherever the storm has forged alliances with other ecoi. I am sure the storm is a separate ecos, all to itself. Master of its circle of the Darwin Sea.”

I thought vaguely that he had been talking a very long time.

“We weren't tasty, I assume,” he concluded, and fell silent.

More meteors. That meant there were comets and other latent debris in the Lamarckian system, as well as the five planets spotted by the original surveyors. No asteroid belts; all swept away by gigantic Pacifica, visible to me now as a brilliant blue point, brightest of all the points in the sky. This level of thinking astounded me. I did not know where it came from.

“Do you know much about Ser Randall?” Salap asked later, interrupting my survey of the stars, which I had done many times already, forgetting the patterns I saw each time.

“No,” I said. “I like him.” It seemed a pleasant thing to say, if meaningless.

“He speaks highly of you. But then, he believes you're special. He believes you're recently arrived from Thistledown.”

This was interesting enough to arouse a few brain cells, and I tried hard to focus on what Salap was saying.

“He heard this from Thomas the disciplinary at Calcutta. Many people in positions of authority have been expecting an appearance such as this ... as this might be, at any rate. Randall told me you're different, that you have a quiet about you not found here. He used a few code words ... Yes, I know them. I used to be one of the Adventists, years ago. In my student days at Jakarta.”

“Adventists,” I croaked.

“Waiting for the Hexamon to open another gate. I imagine if a gate was opened, Lenk would know about it, since he has the remaining clavicle. Keeps it always close to him.”

“There was an old man in Moonrise,” I said. “When I found him, he thought I was from Thistledown.” I laughed, making an unpleasant half-croak, half-bark. “I wish I was,” I said. “Somebody would come rescue me now. A gate would open right over us.” I sketched the phenomenon against the stars with a trembling finger.

“Randall took you on the ship and elevated you, he was so certain.”

“Oh.”

“Few know that we were Adventists. It doesn't lead to many promotions.”

Randall stirred, and Shirla began to push against my chest. Salap, a blurred shadow in the bright starlight, held his finger to his lips. “Dying people say things. Stupid things. Confidences.”

“What's stupid?” Randall asked.

Neither of us answered. Shirla stretched, pushing her foot into the cold water. She jerked it back.

“No ships?” she asked over the slap of the waves.

“No,” I said.

Shatro stopped snoring and sat up abruptly. Wide-eyed, he said, “Did somebody try to push me off?”

“No,” Shirla said. “But I've been asleep.”

“I belong here as much as any of you.”

“No denying it,” Shirla said softly, as if to soothe him.

“I'm still strong,” Shatro said, shaking his head like a tired bull.

Randall leaned over and touched his shoulder, patting him as if he were a child. Shatro gave him a sideling look, eyes hooded, and hung his head between his knees.

Dawn was a long time coming. Shirla and I held each other, and Salap talked now and then of the storm's design, and Shatro kept his silence. Randall sat upright on the planks, twitching his bare toes.

Sometime in the dark, the water all around us whispered, and long, blunt-headed necks or trunks rose from the sea. Curdlike clouds dappled what old cowboys would have called a buttermilk sky, swimming in star-thick black whey. The tall shapes glittered in the broken starlight, and they stood steady, patient, and I could not help but think they were interested in us. I lifted a hand and said, “Take a bite. You'll know who I am.”

But they slipped back into the water, and the whisper in the low waves stopped.

With morning, a feverish clarity gripped me.

14

The sky to the east grew yellow, then copper, and spread its smooth sheet of faded blue westward. A few dying shreds of clouds lurked to the south, none overhead. The steady weather in the wake of the storm-beast was becoming more changeable.

I saw my companions, the planked remains of the Vigilant, the somewhat rougher waves around us, with the sharpness of a fine line drawing, each line vibrating faintly and seeming to zizz in my ears. I knew with absolute certainty that we were not going to die. There was a great drama playing itself out here, and we were in the center of it: the gate opener had placed me in an event of great interest, the humanizing of Lamarckia. Humans would populate the planet to exactly one-half its capacity, and humanoids would fill the other half. The dividing line would be the equator. I chose the northern portion for the humans, to avoid inconvenience. I seemed to hear Shimchisko telling me details. Time smudged itself and some things happened before their proper place in the sequence of second to second, and some happened after.

What came late was Salap's hoarse cry that he saw a ship. Of course he does, I thought. It's inevitable. If we're not going to die, there must be a ship.

“One, two, three,” he said. “Four ships. Two steamships, and two schooners, fore and aft rigged ... Must be from Athenai. They like schooners there.”

I looked with little interest in the direction of his finger. Two stripes of smoke rising high over the cold stale sea, and in tow perhaps, sails slack or furled, two sailing ships. They were quite close—perhaps a mile off. Salap stood. Shatro tugged on his ragged black pants, imploring him to sit down.

“If they have steamships, they're Brionists,” Shatro insisted, hunching his neck.

“They're our only hope, wherever they come from,” Randall said, and stood awkwardly, making the raft sway, to join Salap's arm-waving.

Shirla watched them, mouth open to keep from pressing and splitting her dry lips. We were ghostly things, crusted white with salts, hair standing up thick from our heads.

“They won't see us,” Shatro said miserably.

“They're turning,” Randall said, and grinned down at us like a small boy who sees his father coming home.

“I believe they see us,” Salap agreed.

All inevitable.

It took the ships half an hour to surround us and send out a lifeboat to pick us up. The steamships were a hundred meters in length and about twenty-five meters across the beam, the largest ships I had seen on Lamarckia. Their broad, bulbous white-painted hulls were made of thick planks, but long sweeps of metal formed much of the superstructure. Each ship carried two-barreled guns fore and aft, and a single smokestack put forth an opaque cloud. Within their hulls sounded the great thumps of powerful engines. The ships were blocky and ungraceful, but they looked sturdy.

Men and women in gray and black uniforms stood by the rope railings and near the bows, watching and talking among themselves as a boat was lowered from one of two schooners.

The schooners had dropped the towlines. The wind was picking up, and crews were setting the broad sails on each of their three trees, getting ready to proceed once we were aboard. They were longer than the Vigilant but not as thick across the beam, and they looked fast, like slender greyhounds beside the powerful barrel-chested mastiffs of the steamships.

Shirla kneeled on the planking as the boat approached, her arms crossed over her breasts. Five occupied the boat, four rowers and a plump man in the prow, dressed in white and wearing a small black cap.

The steamships displayed numbers on their white-painted bows, 34 and 15, but no names. The schooners were simply labeled Khoragos and Cow. Cow seemed an odd name for so graceful a ship.

The plump man in the bow of the boat waved to us, smiling cheerfully enough. “What ship, and from what port?” he asked as the boat came within twenty meters.

“From Vigilant out of Calcutta,” Randall said.

“What happened?”

“Sunk in a storm,” Randall explained.

“How long ago?” the man asked, face showing great sympathy.

“A day. Maybe two.”

“Three-treed full-rig?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Randall said.

“We saw her, and we saw the storm. A terrifying thing. We pulled out of its paws just after we lost sight of you.”

“Your ships?” Randall asked, and the boat pulled up beside our raft. “We did not see any schooners.”

“We were way behind. The steamships look ugly, but they're fast, especially when the wind's asleep.”

“Who are you?” Shatro asked.

“We're out of Athenai,” the plump man said, looking uncomfortable. “Bound for Naderville. The steamships are escort. They came from positions off Jakarta, I understand. My name is Charles Ram Keo.” He offered his hand and Randall shook it. Then they helped us aboard. Once on the boat, we saw how flimsy our raft had been. But it was the last we saw of any of the Vigilant, and as the rowers pulled us toward the Khoragos, I felt sad at the sight. Shirla stayed close to me, accepting a cup of water poured from a jug, while a thin woman with a worried face asked about our health, what we had had to eat, and other questions. She was Julia Sand, a physician aboard the Khoragos.

“They wouldn't have sunk us,” Shatro murmured. Salap seemed very solemn, unwilling to speak much. I wondered if he had guessed at something we were missing.

Randall was ebullient. “You're a true gift of the winds,” he told Keo, sipping from his cup as instructed: small swallows.

We were near the larger of the two schooners when Salap leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Khoragos. That means a leader of a chorus. She is Able Lenk's boat.”

He pulled back. Keo and Randall had caught part of his whisper and the plump man looked even more uncomfortable. “You'll have to come with us, of course,” he said. “You know what's happening, I suppose.”

“Is Lenk on board?” Randall asked.

“He is,” Keo said.

“Going to Naderville ... to negotiate with Brion,” Salap ventured.

Keo did not reply.

We were brought aboard in slings and deposited on the deck of the big schooner. The other ships had already pulled away. They were now spread across nearly a mile of water, the two steamships leading the way.

Lenk was going to parlay.

15

The Khoragos was a solemn ship. Of the seventy aboard, her crew was made up of thirty A.B.s, five apprentices (all children of Athenai citizens of rank, we were told), and fifteen craft rates and officers. The remaining twenty were advisors, diplomats, and aides, and there was of course Lenk himself. The Cow carried a crew of forty and fifteen more diplomats.

No restrictions were placed upon us, other than that we were not to bother Able Lenk should we meet him on deck, which was unlikely. He spent most of his hours in the largest cabin, the captain's quarters in the forecastle, in the company of his advisors and diplomats, working day and night, Keo said. From this Randall and Salap surmised the ships were indeed going to Naderville.

Officers and selected guests of rank bunked in the stern. The crew bunked amidships. The berths on Khoragos were all filled. We were provided with new clothes, and Randall, Shatro, Salap and I were given places in a private cabin formerly occupied by three junior A.B.s. Where they went we were not told. Shirla shared a berth with two female A.B.s.

We were being treated with remarkable politeness, and I soon discovered why. Keo, assigned to make sure we were comfortable, informed us that the Good Lenk was greatly upset at news of the loss of Captain Keyser-Bach and the Vigilant. “He believes the captain could have opened our eyes about Lamarckia,” Keo said, standing in our cabin, handing out shirts and pants. Salap surveyed these fresh clothes with some displeasure—they were not black, and not loose—but put them on without complaint. “Able Lenk looked forward to hearing about his discoveries in person.”

“We have lost all of our evidence,” Salap said. “Still, I request an audience with the Good Lenk, on behalf of Captain Keyser-Bach.”

“I'm sure he plans to meet with all of you,” Keo said. “You will dine with the officers and crew this evening. Food will be brought to your cabins this afternoon, should you request it.” He smiled at us rosily, as if he were a steward welcoming us to a luxury cruise. “I'm glad to hear you are little the worse for your ordeal.”

Shatro fingered his red face delicately and winced. “What's going to happen in Naderville?” he asked.

Keo shook his head. “Not my place to say. Eventually, we'll return to Athenai.”

Randall finished buttoning his shirt and stood, stooping to avoid the beams of the low ceiling. “I need to make a report on the loss of a ship to the captain and first officer,” he said.

“Of course. I'll arrange for a formal hearing tomorrow.”

“There's no blame, no reason for an inquest,” Randall said softly. “The storm killed our ship. The captain did the best he could.”

“I'm sure of it,” Keo said, appearing as solemn as was possible for him. “We need to assess the losses for the shipping board in Athenai, of course.”

Randall nodded gloomily.

Keo asked what else we required. Shatro wondered if any lizboo sap was available. “For our burns,” he said, poking at his arm and wincing again. We were all red, our skins in sad shape from sun and exposure to the water.

“I'm sure we have something similar,” Keo said, and closed the door behind him.

“It's all funk,” Shatro said as we heard Keo's footsteps down the corridor outside.

Salap patted the thin mattress and blankets on the upper bunk, peered through the single porthole, lifted a ceramic washbasin.

“Are you going to tell them about the skeletons?” Shatro asked.

“Yes,” Salap said.

Shatro's face suddenly seemed to collapse and he covered it with his hands, not crying, but rubbing fiercely, as if to wipe away the burn and all that had happened in the past few days. “Everything we worked for. My training, education...”

“We're lucky to be alive,” Randall said.

I touched Shatro's arm, pained by what he was doing to himself.

“Leave me alone,” he growled, jerking away.

“Please,” I said. “Don't rub your face like that.”

“What do you care?” he demanded, standing up from the lower bunk and bumping his head on the rail.

“Enough,” Salap said. “Why are you so angry with this man?”

Shatro stood in silence for a moment, hands limp by his sides.

“We're all equal now,” Randall said dryly. “Let's make the best of it.”

“It will be a long time until we are back in Calcutta,” Salap said.

Shatro went to the porthole and looked out at the ocean, his face peachy-red in the glare.

“I request to be relieved from my contract,” he said. “I may seek employment in Naderville.” He glanced around at us. “I'm sure they need researchers.”

“They probably do,” Randall agreed. “Though I doubt that Good Lenk will appreciate it.”

Shatro dismissed this with a wave. “He's going to Naderville to surrender,” he said. “Brion isn't coming to him.”

Again, Shatro stated what seemed obvious to all.

In the afternoon, after a lunch of real wheat bread and salted redbriar cheese—a delicious specialty from Tasman's silva—I walked with Shirla around the ship, examining the Khoragos's graceful lines, admiring the craftsmanship of Lenk's personal ship. It was said that Lenk had turned down his advisors when they suggested such an appurtenance, and it had taken them years to convince him to change his mind. He needed to be able to travel in comfort with the people necessary to the growing government, of which he was still spiritual and political head. His presence on the ship gave the Khoragos a special quality that Vigilant had lacked: a sense of grandeur. In design and rig, however, she was simply graceful, and very well-appointed.

In truth, I devoted less attention to the ship's details than I did to Shirla. Between meetings with curious crew, who exchanged greetings and asked about our health, we walked in silence, shoulder to shoulder. There was no longer a Soterio to catch us “flarking” or a Ry Diem to cluck at us in her motherly way, and no real sense of direction or duty; we had been relieved of that.

Nearly being relieved of our lives had sparked something in me I could neither deny nor justify—an immediate need for confirmation. My life was too flimsy not to get on with basics, and Shirla satisfied one very real basic: female companionship.

How far we were to go, I did not give much thought to. The direction seemed obvious. If and when the time was right, I would make love to her.

As we walked, I examined Shirla with different eyes. She was not beautiful, not ugly; face and arms red with exposure, skin shiny with ointment and beginning to flake, hips ample, legs short but well-shaped, trunk long, neck long, head and face round, hair of course ragged, brown eyes small but intense and focused, she seemed ready at any moment to become satirical or critical, but she did not. In her motions and few words she seemed very vulnerable, very open.

On the bow, away from the general activity of the crew, we watched the broad blue ocean and cloudy, milky sky, the blurred ball of the sun. “Do you ever think we should have died?” she asked, eyes crinkled, lips drawn up in a half grimace.

“Why?” I asked.

“They were our shipmates. Our captain died.”

“No reason for us to join them,” I said, with perhaps too much briskness.

“I wonder...”

“Don't,” I said, irritated. “That nonsense just makes things worse. We're here because we survived, by chance and our best efforts. We can't be blamed for their deaths.”

“Will you ever be part of anything?” she asked, glancing at me with quizzical eyes.

I could give no honest answer.

“You have always been a terrible risk, Ser Olmy,” she said, looking away.

I tried to steer our talk in another direction. “I've been incredibly lucky, actually,” I said.

“Why lucky? And why do you never—”

“I was lucky to find a berth on Vigilant. I was lucky to survive its sinking. And now I'm lucky to be sailing to Naderville with Able Lenk.”

She could not guess how true this was. If I was to be at the center of things, I had been placed in remarkably apt situations many times. The gate opener had found his mark with supernatural skill.

She puffed out her cheeks dubiously. “You don't make any sense,” she said.

“I'm lucky to be placed beside you.” There; the maneuvering was fairly begun again.

“You want to see my tits?” she asked, totally serious.

Again I laughed, and this time her eyes narrowed in pain.

“You are remarkable,” I said.

“Do you know what I mean when I say that?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“The obvious. I'm joking, and this time, I'm not joking. All right?”

She had me baffled.

“Ser Olmy, whoever you are, whatever you really want, I think I know one thing about you, one thing certain right now. We almost died. That makes us horny. Your body wants me. You want to take me someplace private but we'll do our little social dance on the deck first. Your mind thinks you'll make a small commitment and that'll be enough, and that I'm weak enough and my body wants you enough to make it happen.” While she said this, a little smile formed. “And you're not wrong.”

“Your body wants me?”

She nodded. “When the time is right. It isn't right now, of course, because we're very tired, and I'm sad. But I'll get over that. And when I do, you'd better say yes and make your move the next time I ask, or you'll never get a chance again.”

In all my experience with women, I had never encountered such an analytical and verbal approach. In the company of lovers on Thistledown, the graces of centuries of spaceborn civilization, of the highest of technologies and the closest of associations, the most sophisticated of cultural educations, had finally produced so many easeful ways for partners to join in the physical act of love that, it now seemed to me, much of the interest in such proceedings had been drained away.

I had some small clue for the first time why I had broken my proposed bond in Alexandria.

I stared out over the rail.

“I put you at a loss,” Shirla observed.

“Not for the first time,” I said.

“My tits,” she said, “are not my finest feature.”

“What is your finest feature?” I asked.

“My heart,” she said. “It is a strong heart. It could beat with yours.”

The warmth spread from my cheeks through the center of my chest, to my groin. I was in the presence of natural genius.

As castaways, we were treated with a delicate deference, as if we were ghosts or small gods of ill omen. Castaways rarely survived on Lamarckia. Humans were few and far between on this world. Losing a ship was tantamount to losing your life. Still, the officers and politicians treated us politely enough, and around our first dinner, in the rank's mess, Randall told our story to the assembled officers and craft rates.

The captain, Lenk himself and most of his aides were not present, but Lenk had sent his second, a slender woman of middle years named Allrica Fassid, who listened to Randall's telling with solemn fascination.

He did not mention the humanoid skeletons, by prior agreement with Salap, who thought that news should be reserved for Lenk's ears only. I suspect they still thought they could get another expedition out of the news, once these troubles blew over. After the story, the first officer, a tall, well-built woman named Helmina Leschowicz, called for a toast to “survivors, one and all.”

Three stewards cleared the tables efficiently and sharp Tasmanian wine was served in crystal goblets. I had still not developed a taste for Lamarckian alcoholic beverages, but Salap, Randall, and Shatro savored theirs with an intensity that brought smiles from the assembled men and women. Shirla accepted her glass, but barely touched it.

The lights over the long table swayed in the gentle sea. Around the walls, A.B.s and some apprentices had crowded in to listen to the proceedings.

“Your story is grim,” Fassid said, as we worked in traditional fashion toward another toast. “Your survival is surely a gift of fate. Your courage is an example to us all.”

Lifted glasses around the table.

“Beyond the loss of good humans, the greatest loss is wit and knowledge,” she continued. “Lenk himself funded Captain Keyser-Bach in his endeavors.”

I studied Fassid, but she was too practiced to reveal much about herself. As with the best politicians I have known, she seemed at once present and real, yet gave out little useful information. She had learned her trade in rough times, at the knees of a master.

As we left the officers’ mess, she approached Salap and whispered something in his ear, then hurried off. Salap approached Randall, who stood by Shirla and myself in a corner. Shatro stood in the shadow of a doorway. When we were on the deck and alone, a firm cool breeze blowing on us all, Salap said, “Able Lenk requests our presence later this evening, about midnight.”

Shirla sighed. We were all still very tired.

Salap continued, “He wishes our advice. There is disturbing news from Hsia, from Naderville. Lenk only brought one expert researcher with him, thinking this would be purely a political journey. We may be of use.”

“Shall we tell them tonight about what we've seen?” Randall asked.

Salap frowned and cocked his head to one side. “I do not know. None of this feels right.”

We had four hours between the end of dinner and our scheduled appointment with Lenk. The deck was lightly crewed at night, in such fine weather. Shirla and I walked the deck again, saying little, but keeping our eyes open for privacy. At the bow, behind an equipment locker, a bale of mat fiber lay in shadow. The moons were down and we sat in starlight only, and after five minutes talking undisturbed, we undressed each other to the extent that caution and need demanded.

She accepted me with a tense and earnest eagerness that I found very exciting. I had seldom made love with such simplicity and speed—fashions and centuries of development on Thistledown had given sex a rich clutter of nuance as formal as a ceremonial feast. Shirla knew none of this. As she had said, her body wanted me, and that was more than enough. When we finished, her face was slick with both sweat and tears and gleamed in the starlight. We caught our breaths, then fumbled to clothe ourselves in the dark.

“You haven't done this in a long time,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Have you?”

“No,” I answered.

“I didn't show you everything,” she said.

“What, your tits?” I asked, but my face was in shadow and she could not see my smile.

“No, idiot,” she said gently. “In my village, when a woman chooses a man—”

“Not the other way around?”

She put her finger on my lips. “When that happens, we make a fine picnic and take it in a basket into the silva, find an open place, maybe beneath a cathedral tree, spread a blanket ... I ask about your family, and you ask about mine. We talk about mutual friends, what our plans are. The rule is that we have children soon. We talk about that.”

“I've met a woman here who resented being made into a brood mother.” After saying this, I realized the phrasing might seem odd. I was speaking like a newcomer. Shirla mulled in silence before asking,

“Who was that?”

“The master's bondmother. In Calcutta.”

We sat up on the makeshift mattress. Shirla idly poked fiber back into the bale. “Some women feel that way. Maybe more than just a few.”

“And you?”

She lifted her eyes. They glittered faintly in the dark. “I think Lamarckia will be the next Earth,” she said. “I don't know why, but I see us prospering here ... And I still do, despite what Salap found.”

“So you won't mind having many children.”

“I've never had any,” she said. “Would you mind?”

I had never given the least thought to having children. On Thistledown reproduction was if anything more ritualized and nuanced than sex; most Geshel couples chose ex utero births. Many Naderites did as well; it was cleaner and certainly less painful. But none of that had ever seemed real to me. I was much too young to be a father. The one artificial capability not removed from my body was conscious choice of whether or not to be fertile.

“I asked you first,” I said. My throat caught and I coughed.

“Makes you nervous.”

“I suppose it does. It certainly should.”

“Me, too. I've always been a little odd. I don't know whether the world needs children like me.”

“Everybody feels that way,” I said, though I could hardly know that.

“Not my sisters. They're already lost in thickets of kids. At any rate...” She held my shoulders and squeezed lightly. “I do not do this to obligate you.”

I said nothing. I could not tell her how unobligated I was forced to be.

“But I've never protected myself, either. I follow Lenk's dictates. I'm a little in awe that he's on the same ship with us...”

I had a sudden image of Lenk personally encouraging Shirla to propagate.

“He'll be such a somber man now,” she said. “And old. All this must wear him down.”

“What, meeting us, out here?”

She pinched my nose. “I've always had bad taste in men.”

Salap, Randall, Shatro, Shirla and I walked forward along the corridor to Lenk's quarters. Keo met us midships. The craftsmanship on the Khoragos was particularly beautiful as we approached the forecastle. The walls gleamed black and gray and brown, using the inlaid cores of some Tasman arborid I could not identify. Electric lights gleamed steadily every two meters, shining down on elegant carpet woven in earthly floral patterns. Our muffled footfalls alerted a male guard, who came to stiff attention, a short, broad rifle cradled in his thick brown arms.

“This is the first time in our history on Lamarckia that Able Lenk has felt it necessary to keep armed security around him,” Keo explained, nodding at the guard, who glanced at us with flat, emotionless eyes. It was warm in the corridor and his face beaded with sweat.

Keo knocked on the door twice. It was opened by a thin, graceful young man dressed in a formal gray suit. He swung his arm wide with a cautious smile. “Able Lenk is just finishing a nap. He'll be with us in a few minutes. My name is Ferrier, Samuel Inman Ferrier.” We shook hands formally.

A mechanical clock mounted on the bulkhead over the door chimed midnight. Salap sat on a couch. Shatro sat beside him, eyes darting nervously, as if he were a little boy about to see a doctor. Shirla, Randall, and I sat in individual chairs spaced around the cabin, which stretched across the bow of the ship. The cabin beyond, Lenk's sleeping cabin, was much smaller. I thought it odd that he would choose the bow; apprentices much preferred to stay out of the bow, especially in heavy seas. Perhaps he had a perverse sense of asceticism.

Shelves on the bulkhead opposite my seat contained a few dozen books, none of them ornately bound, and all of them well-used. They seemed to include statute books and city record summaries.

I wondered where the clavicle was kept. Would Lenk take it with him on a journey as uncertain as this?

Ferrier served us mat fiber tea on a black lizboo tray. As we drank, I heard faint shuffles behind the door of the sleeping cabin.

The door opened, and Jaime Cart Lenk entered. I had seen pictures of him from forty-five years before. Then, he had been a vigorous man of natural middle age, handsome and conservatively dressed, with a presence even in the records that radiated assurance and power. Now, Lenk was still tall, unbent by his years, his hair still mostly dark, his face deeply wrinkled but in all the right places: laugh lines at corners of lips and eyes, lines of sternness near the laugh lines, and a brow that seemed monumentally smooth and untroubled, a tall, unfurrowed brow whose owner had slept cleanly and in assurance of the truth for many decades. He wore a simple long green robe. His sandaled feet, peeking from beneath the hem of the robe, were broad and splay-toed. He slowly turned to face us and shake hands all around.

“Thank you for being patient,” he said, staring at us one by one as if we were old friends. “Ferrier, I'll take a cup of that tea.” He sat in a large black high-backed chair bolted in the corner, beneath the books, and when he was settled, he looked up in sadness and said, “I deeply regret the loss of Captain Keyser-Bach and his researchers. The loss of a ship full of men and women is one thing, evil enough and hard to bear, but the death of such a man...” He shook his head and accepted the cup of steaming tea, then set it on a side table, ignoring it. “I am gratified, of course, that you survived. Sers Keo and Fassid have told me some of your story—about the storm, how our escort of Brion's ships may have frightened you into its winds...” He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in his wrinkled, corded throat. His sadness was genuine. Despite his clear brow, he had obviously experienced a lot of sadness recently.

“You could not have known, Ser Lenk,” Salap said. “It is remarkable fortune to be rescued by you.”

“These seas are so rarely traveled ... If any ships would have picked you up, that they would be part of this absurd entourage only adds a peck to the improbability. And that is the main part of our problem, no? I go to Hsia, to Naderville, precisely because we have had so little traffic with the people who live there.” He examined us closely, his jaw working. He lifted the cup and sipped from it. The warm liquid seemed to invigorate him. “You are Ser Salap.” He turned his head to Randall. “And you are Ser Randall. Both of you sailed often with Captain Keyser-Bach. When he made his request, he spoke of you as necessary members of the expedition.”

Randall inclined his head, then looked up at Lenk with calm, large eyes.

“We've made important discoveries, Ser Lenk,” Salap said.

Lenk followed his own line of thought. “I'll read your reports when they're written. Now, there's so little time ... I have been in need of more researchers. Questions of considerable importance have arisen. Difficulties of some magnitude.”

Salap, rebuffed so smoothly, stared a little pop-eyed at Lenk, but even he lacked the gall to interrupt Jaime Cart Lenk.

“The Naderville researchers claim to have made great strides with the ecos on Hsia. The researcher on my ship does not credit these reports. I don't know what to think.”

“What sort of strides?” Salap asked.

Lenk looked over our heads and lifted his cup. He smiled as if at some great joke, too large to deserve laughter. “Queens and hidden masters, palaces in the clouds, Cibola, Atlantis, the Afterlife. I do not know which Brion means. But I see his ships, and I know the power that he shows us, that he's amassed in the past two years and has used against us.” He made a little shrug and lowered the cup. “He is not mad, whatever his generals do.”

“Blockades, sieges, piracy,” Randall said.

Lenk leaned his head to one side, scratching at the lobe of one ear. “General Beys accompanies us,” he said.

“He raided nineteen villages before we left Calcutta,” Randall continued. His face colored with anger. “Stole tools and metal stores. Took children. Killed some or all of the citizens.”

“It pains me to think of the children and citizens,” Lenk said softly. “I hate to bargain under those circumstances, but there was no choice.”

“Brion denies it all, of course,” Allrica Fassid said, entering the cabin on soft slippered feet. She closed the door behind her, nodded casually to Lenk, gave Randall a stern, half-puzzled look, and apologized for being late. “I've just come back from number fifteen. Beys and Captain Yolenga say they've received their final instructions. May I speak before our guests?”

Lenk gave permission with a lift of his hand.

“We're to sail to the main port and up a canal to an inland lake. Our charts indicate this canal has been modified by the ecos, and that the lake is isolated from Naderville proper. It may be the site of these alleged researches. Ser Keo, have you told our guests what to expect?”

“As much as we know,” Keo said. “A magnificent lack of detail.”

“Good. We'll have little time to talk once we arrive, and not much more on the way there. But you must keep your eyes open and digest what you see. It may be crucial to our negotiations.”

“We need to know if it's a bluff,” Keo said, then his face flushed as if he had spoken out of turn.

“No bluff,” Lenk said, shaking his head.

“Not everyone agrees with you, Jaime,” Allrica said. “I personally regard Brion as a compelling liar.”

“He is a force of nature,” Lenk said. “I unleashed his kind when I brought us all here.”

“We shouldn't confuse Brion with the Adventists.” Her glance at Salap seemed particularly significant. “Brion has no honor. He's interested in power and position. He uses Beys as his iron fist, and hopes to isolate himself from the moral consequences.” Fassid stood beside Lenk and examined him solicitously, touching his wrist like a doctor. “You're tired, Jaime,” she said. “Time for a good night's sleep.”

He stared at us with a wry smile. “I do not sleep the night through. That leaves me with far too much time to think. But Allrica, Ser Salap seems to have something he wants to tell us...”

“Can it wait?” Allrica asked Salap, eyes flashing a challenge.

“I would prefer to speak now,” Salap said calmly.

“So important?”

“We believe so.”

“What is it?” Lenk asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees, clasping his hands.

I glanced at Shirla and Shatro. Shatro seemed lost in his own thoughts, staring at the richly woven carpet on the floor. I wondered about his quiet concentration.

Shirla appeared out of her depth, frightened by the social altitude, yet fully alert.

Salap told them what we had found on Martha's Island, concluding with the loss of all our specimens in the storm. Allrica's lips pressed together until they formed a grim straight line. Lenk's shoulders hunched around his neck.

“Dear God,” Lenk said. He gave no sign of either believing or disbelieving.

“That doesn't make sense,” Fassid said, though without conviction. Keo and Ferrier stood in silence, as if absorbing news of the death of a loved one.

“It is true, whatever we wish to believe,” Salap said.

“Some misinterpretation ... Remains of humans, not scions,” Fassid murmured. “You said three vanished from the Jiddermeyer expedition ... and her husband's body was exhumed and carried off by ... scions.”

Salap shook his head, and Randall finally spoke. “The captain and I saw them. They were not the remains of humans, and they were real. Are real. There may still be specimens on Martha's Island.”

“We all saw them,” Shatro spoke up, still staring at the carpet.

“Another expedition,” Fassid huffed. “The captain pressed us hard for years ... Now after hearing this, we're to start all over again. This sounds much like Brion's idiocy.”

Salap let this pass without reacting. Randall edged forward on his seat, but Salap touched his arm and he remained silent.

“We'll be in Naderville in two days,” Lenk said softly. He stood and Ferrier and Fassid each took an arm, helping him toward the door to his sleeping quarters. Ferrier opened the door, and Lenk turned to Salap before passing through. “Was I mistaken to bring us here? Are we to be rejected like a plague by the entire world?”

No one spoke. Fassid saw him through the door, and Ferrier accompanied him. Then she turned to us and her eyes drilled into Salap. “How dare you,” she spat. “How dare you bring us such nonsense for your own political gain!”

Salap's eyes became hooded and dangerous and he gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles whitened.

“This wonderful man has the weight of the entire planet on his shoulders, and you bring him ghost stories! All to maintain your beloved scientific stature!”

Randall sat up, his voice harsh in the small cabin. “Ser Fassid, you're very mistaken—”

Fassid pushed her hands out in disgust and turned away. Keo seemed in an agony, caught between supporting Fassid and remaining a genial host.

Randall squared off with her in the middle of the cabin. “I have had enough of ships and the sea for a lifetime. I will gladly retire to Jakarta or Calcutta, or Naderville, if it comes to that ... But that will not stop the truth of what we saw.

“You opposed all our research out of ignorance and devotion to some faded philosophy that has served none of us well,” Randall continued, his words sharpening to hisses or dropping to growls. “Captain Keyser-Bach debated you over and over, hoping to find some shred of sense. You have poorly advised Good Lenk, Ser Fassid. And if you continue to play the fool, I will bring you low.”

The grim pronouncement carried an element of comic opera, but it was heartfelt.

Fassid's eyes seemed lost in shadow. “There's no time for this,” she said smoothly. “Whatever happens in the next few days may bring us all low. Compared to General Beys, your threats are small rain.” She walked around Keo and left through the port side door.

Randall took a deep breath and looked at Keo as if he had a little more anger to vent should anyone want to challenge him. Keo raised his hands. “I think we should all rest,” he said. “It's been very tense.”

“I'm sure it has,” Salap said, taking Randall's elbow. Randall took a deep breath, stared around the room, and lowered his head. “Let's go.”

We retired to our own cabins.

Randall joined Shirla and me on the deck the next morning to survey the ships and the surrounding waters. The weather was calm, the ocean smooth. “Salap's asked for notebooks. He's preparing a full report for Lenk,” Randall said. He shook his head sadly. “I should have kept my mouth shut. I've just made us a stronger enemy.”

16

Hsia became a dark line on the horizon early in the morning, half obscured by thick patches of cloud heavy with rain. As the four ships drew closer to land, we were hit by several squalls, and with their passing, Khoragos and Cow took advantage of a fresh, vigorous wind, set their sails, and cast loose of the steamships.

Ten miles out, all four ships were met by three fast sloops. One carried two pilots for our schooners, and they boarded to guide us into the harbor. Our pilot took his post by the wheel and gave quick, precise orders.

I knew their type. Young, earnest, nervous, terribly afraid of making a mistake. They had been raised under harsh conditions, I guessed, in a society pushed to the very edge.

Shirla stayed by my side. “I don't like it,” she said. “The steamships, the crews, the pilots ... They all look stiff.”

The clouds blew south. Lenk's ships put on a glorious show, sails brilliant white in the morning sun, and even pulled ahead of the steamships for a time, until the pilots ordered us to furl our sails.

Us. Our. I had taken sides in this dispute. Perhaps from the moment I arrived and saw the slaughter at Moonrise, I could not be objective. The more I saw, the firmer my commitment became. Yet I could not simply dump all my objectivity. I owed nothing to anyone but the Hexamon, and all of these people were equally in violation...

The coast of Hsia was painted by bright sun. From the sea, the shore had appeared deep brown, spotted with red and dark purple. Now, from less than two miles, Hsia's zone showed itself as a forbidding hedgerow tangle fifty or sixty meters high, dark and uniform, its upper surface covered with leathery growths that screened all sun from the ground below. The dark thicket stretched back to far mountains topped by white clouds.

Baker had believed that Hsia was older than most other ecoi, and had developed early in the biosphere's history, before oxygen had reached current levels. The leathery covering on the hedgerow silva might have protected against ultraviolet light, which penetrated the atmosphere easily before the buildup of an ozone layer.

I thought of the immigrants surveying Lamarckia from the hastily opened gate, trying to pick the best place to settle, choosing Elizabeth's Land because it most resembled an Earth landscape, even though the colors were wrong.

Salap came on deck, notebook under his arm, and looked at the coastline, black hair tossed by the wind. He squinted and pointed a long finger. “It is like this everywhere on the continent,” he said. “Dreary. A terrible place to settle. Hoagland's followers had to hack their way in, do without sun for months at a time, live like beasts in a cave. Still, for all that, they founded a city.”

Naderville was smaller than Calcutta; even now, according to the best guesses, it contained less than four thousand citizens. I had to adjust my sense of scale to regard such a limited population as a military force to be reckoned with.

Shirla and I sat near the bow, a little awkward that there was no work for us to do. The habit of the sea had gotten into her more than into me, and the nervousness of being on a ship and not working made her open up as she never had before. She told me about her family in Jakarta—actually, in a little village called Resorna at the tip of a spit of land five miles south of Jakarta. The past did not come out of her easily, and she frequently had to pause, eyebrows drawn in concentration, not because her memory was faulty, but because she had expended so much effort to forget the hard times.

During the fluxing, when she was a young girl, her family had taken her from Calcutta and traveled with a dozen other families to Jakarta, in Petain's Zone, where edible phytids grew in more abundance, and where some land had sufficient natural minerals and was easily cleared for farming. The winters in Jakarta were always mild, but there had still been hardship. Petain's Zone had prepared itself for some onslaught by the newly united zones, and most of its scions—arborids, phytids, and mobile types alike—had coated themselves with waxy armor and gone dormant for three months.

“We had enough food from our own crops, by then,” Shirla said. “But I was scared. My brothers and I kept a pet scion, a dipper, and I found it sealed up on the porch in front of our house one morning. The next day it was gone. It had broken its rope somehow ... It had never done that before. Then, Petain returned to normal. I guess it decided Elizabeth wasn't going to attack.”

She told about her family: uncles and aunts, first father and first mother—her biological parents—and her second father, and second mother, who had no children of their own and treated her and her brothers with doting kindness. She remembered no third set of parents. That made sense; triad families, designed by a society where children seldom numbered more than two to a set of parents, became unwieldy when there were six or seven children to each mother and father. She was lucky, she said, to have had a second set, though she felt sorry for them, not having biological children.

She talked about several women in her village coming down with an odd malfunction, not exactly a disease; some sort of immune challenge that caused their ovaries to become inflamed. Several had had to have their ovaries removed. “The rest were fortunate,” she said. “They kept their ovaries.” That seemed to her more important in a way than their survival.

Something had changed in the divaricates on their arrival in Lamarckia. Lenk had encouraged new births, of course. But divaricates had generally had no more children on Thistledown than other Naderites, no more even than most Geshels. On Lamarckia, having children had become a ruling passion, as if some hidden drive had been awakened, and the human race—isolated as this weak little seed on a huge world—had needed to spread its limbs and foliage far and wide once more.

The ships were guided into Naderville's harbor in the early afternoon. The city perched on a headland on the northern side of the harbor, its back to a wall of thoroughly tunneled hedgerow thicket; to the south was a natural spit of rock and sand that served as a breakwater.

Naderville looked remarkably like Calcutta, golden and beige and white buildings rising on low hills facing the harbor. On the eastern extension of the headland, however, in the crater of a small extinct volcano, a military encampment had been established some five years before. The Khoragos's physician, Julia Sand, had been to Naderville some years before as part of an abortive diplomatic effort, and explained these features to Shirla and me. Farther inland, the harbor connected with a wide canal, which may have once been a natural river, but had been adapted by the ecos to its own needs.

Sturdy little tugs took us in tow, then pulled us to the western extent of the harbor, and the mouth of the great Hsian canal. I watched the steamships as we drew apart, wondering if I might ever meet General Beys in person.

A sharp, buttery scent mixed with something herbaceous, like oregano, and an undercurrent of tar, blew with the wind from inland. It was not unpleasant, but I thought in time such a smell might grow irritating.

We cruised with great dignity behind the tugs for several miles, then were taken north through a narrow brickwork gate into a small lake. Hills rose on all sides, covered with dark, ancient thicket; on the higher hills, a few small white and sky-blue buildings seemed to clamber up the thickets and perch on top. I could make out holes hacked through the thickets like tunnels where roads might pass; on a bluff at the northern end of the harbor, the thicket had been cleared completely, leaving chalky barren soil and buildings, a watchtower and storage sheds.

Julia Sand had not seen this part of Naderville in her last visit. “It's all new to me,” she said. On one side of the lake, ramps and large drydocks stood, a shipbuilding and repair site now idle.

Randall and Salap came forward to join us. Shatro was still belowdecks. He seemed to be depressed and we had not seen much of him for a day.

“It's a dreary land,” Randall commented.

Salap scanned the small lake and announced, “Three ships. I was expecting many more.”

The three ships in the lake were not even steamships; two were sloops, and one was a catamaran with tattered fore and aft rigged sails hanging on two masts. It was not much of a navy.

“They're all out raiding or keeping a blockade on Jakarta,” Shirla said.

“Perhaps,” Salap said, but he seemed dubious.

The pilots guided us past the empty drydocks, toward a small pier at the northern end of the lake. I estimated there was room for perhaps five or six ships the size of the steamships, no more. That would be a substantial navy on Lamarckia, but there was no way of telling how many steamships had been built. I looked for fuel bunkers—whatever the fuel might be—but could not find any. A few dozen men and women stood on the docks, watching us, but the pier was empty. No formal reception committee awaited Lenk's arrival.

The tugs let us loose. The light breeze was sufficient for our schooners to moor at the pier.

Ferrier and Keo came up on deck dressed in dark gray pants and long black coats, formal wear for a solemn occasion. They surveyed the pier with wounded expressions, like dogs who half expected to be struck. Both shook their heads at the indignity. “This is no way to treat the Good Lenk,” Keo said. “I wonder why we came at all, if they're going to rub our noses in it.”

“It's weakness,” Ferrier said with an edge of anger he had not revealed before.

Keo took his arm and they assumed their positions by the gangway. Lenk came up from below on the stairs, aided by Fassid, who blinked at the bright sunshine. Lenk wore sunglasses. He seemed for a moment to have gone blind, stumbling slightly, smiling, reaching for Fassid. But he removed his sunglasses after a moment and stared at us owlishly, then studied the drydocks south of us, the western shore of the lake, the pier.

Five men and three women stepped out of a gray shed and waited for our ships to maneuver close. Three young men near the bow tossed lines to them, and our ship was pulled in and tied up. All sails were furled.

We waited several minutes. The lake was still and quiet; the silva had not made a sound since our arrival. A single road stretched from the harbor through the hills to a tunnel in the high thicket beyond. It did not look promising.

“Are they expecting us to walk?” Ferrier asked in disgust.

“Intolerable,” Fassid said, but Lenk raised his hand.

“He's feeling his power,” Lenk said. He pressed his teeth together and drew his shoulders up. I thought I saw a brief spark of anger, but it might have been some internal twinge, a sore joint or other infirmity of age. “Let him have that much.”

A reception committee, of sorts, was just now coming down the road. An electric truck passed through the main gate to the harbor and pier, followed by four small electric cars and a wavering line of men and women on bicycles.

Shirla whistled at all the vehicles. “There aren't that many in all of Calcutta,” she said. “Except for tractors.”

What had seemed at first glance, then, to be a paltry show of ceremony, was sufficient to impress the people around me. The gangway was pushed across to the dock and secured. The dockhands arranged along Khoragos's moorage craned their necks curiously, looking for Lenk. Whatever Brion's social changes and political pressures, the citizens of Naderville still expressed an interest in the Good Lenk who had brought them here.

The truck and cars and bicycles rolled out onto the pier. The truck whined to a stop. The cars parked behind, and the bicyclists, all dressed in gray and brown, braked to a halt around and between them. Everybody paused for several seconds, waiting, and then the doors of the truck opened and a man and a woman got out. The cars’ drivers opened their doors and got out as well. They all wore black, with little round hats pulled tight on their heads like swimming caps.

The man and woman from the truck were dressed in white formal suits. They resembled socialites at an early first-century Thistledown full-dress occasion. Producing a walking stick, the man stood beside the woman, and they advanced together toward the gangway, where they paused. Clearly, they expected our party to disembark now. Up to this point, however, not a word was said on either side. The only voices were those of the crew, arranging the sails and rigging, and even they spoke in hushed tones.

Ferrier and Keo crossed the gangway first and bowed to the man and woman in white, who returned their greetings with slightly reduced bows. Allrica Fassid came next, advancing her hands along the rope guards in nervous arcs, gripping the ropes carefully, as if someone might tip the platform and make her fall into the water between the dock and the ship.

After them came Lenk, marching across to the dock by himself with a good show of assurance and vigor. Five men and four women followed, all wearing green and tan, the colors of Lenk's personal guard. Last of all, three men we had not met—elderly enough to have served Lenk since the immigration—joined the party on the dock, giving and receiving brief bows.

We were not going ashore, apparently. Salap smiled his most philosophical smile and turned back to go below. Randall watched the crew reclaim the gangway and close the gate in the bulwark. “I'll be damned,” he said.

Shirla sighed as much with relief as disappointment. “I don't like being at the center of things,” she said.

Randall said, “I feel about as necessary as a man's nipples.”

A few minutes later, a train of four gray electric buses hummed through the gate to the docks and parked by the Khoragos and Cow. Twelve grim-looking men in gray and black stepped down from the buses and spoke to their colleagues on guard by the gangways.

Guards came aboard the ships and informed the masters and mates that all but a skeleton crew of four would have to get on the buses. The ships were going to be impounded, it seemed.

Randall watched these activities with a heavy frown. “That's not diplomacy,” he muttered. “It's an act of war.”

We sat crowded three to a seat, two seats across and seven deep, on rough unpadded benches made of pithy thicket-xyla. The buses were driven by older men in white and gray. Seeing the preponderance and variety of uniforms, I felt a shiver of recognition: a regimented society, each job given its rank and place and dress, ancient grand schemes reenacted on Lamarckia.

The buses took us into the tunnels through the thickets and we were surrounded by intense gloom. Shirla huddled close to me, Shatro beside her. In the gleam of headlights reflected toward the back, I saw Shatro staring grimly ahead, sweating though it was cool. He had said very little the past few hours, and did not look at anyone for very long.

Randall sat on the bench ahead of us, and Salap two benches behind. We did not talk. We all felt as though we were going to an execution, perhaps our own.

The tunnels formed a kind of road network through the thicket and the drivers seemed to know the routes well. After twenty minutes, we saw daylight ahead, and the buses emerged into a broad natural clearing. Behind, the thicket rose up in a gentle curve like the rim of a bowl, and we seemed to be in a broad crater painted with red and brown foliage.

Ahead, across a level plain covered with a carpet of mottled orange and brown phytids, the interior of this part of Hsia's ecos was hauntingly terrestrial. We might have been crossing a tropical grassland, but instead of trees, tangles of thicket woven from meter-thick vines rose like watchtowers, capped with spreading branches whose tips lanced skyward. Farther inland, after another ten minutes of travel, we saw great purple hemispheric mounds like mold growths, but each perhaps two kilometers wide and a kilometer high. At the top of the mounds, a single monumental black spike rose, a thorn to prick the thumb of a god.

The guards on the bus took this all in without excitement; this was their landscape, familiar for decades. Salap seemed as little interested. Shirla, however, leaned forward and looked past my chest through the window.

“They're taking us to a grand hotel,” said the man behind us, dressed in a white uniform—one of Khoragos's stewards. “They'll feed us like kings.”

“Tom's the joker,” grumbled a woman across the aisle. The bus lurched and we turned onto a dusty bare dirt road. Ahead, another wall of thicket loomed, but this was brilliant green—the first green I had seen in a Lamarckian silva, topped with red lances. Above this thicket flew batlike pterids with wingspans of at least a meter. As we approached, the pterids all dropped and grabbed hold of the red lances, like flies alighting on the bloody points of swords.

The buses swung into another dark tunnel, following closely through the darkness, lights blooming and fleeing on the backs of our heads. “Inner compound,” the bus driver called over his shoulder, voice husky. “We'll all get out here and walk into the Citadel.”

“Citadel,” Shirla repeated, eyebrows raised.

The buses drew up in single file beside a road paved with broad flat black stones, white cement between. We left the buses and stood in groups on the edge of the road, the sun brilliant and hot overhead, the sky tinted orange. Shading my eyes, I saw the sky was filled with tiny flying things, orange, yellow and brown, each no more than a centimeter square, flocking in thick clouds about twenty meters over our heads.

At the end of the road, a blocky stone wall rose high enough for its top to be blurred and half obscured by the yellow and orange clouds. The wall reached across a gap between two stretches of green thicket.

The guards took us from the buses with a minimum of cordiality, lined us up in two rows, and urged us forward, toward the stone wall. Shirla stayed resolutely beside me, Shatro, Randall, and Salap ahead.

“Excuse me, is this where Able Lenk is staying?” a sailor from the Cow asked a bulky, thick-faced guard. The guard shook his head, raised his lips in what might have been a smile but more resembled a grimace of discomfiture, and pointed to the wall. I studied the faces of the guards without catching their attention. Flat expressions and muscle predominated. Hair cut short but for a lock on the left side, which trailed to the shoulder. Uniforms neatly pressed, but judging from their movements, only fair military order. Some managed to talk or smile briefly to the two lines as we were marched, but their character and behavior did not reassure me. I felt as if I were back in the slaughtered village of Moonrise, and my neck hair bristled as it had not even during our time in the storm-beast.

The longer I stayed on Lamarckia, the more I felt sure I was going to die here, in an ancient and degrading fashion. I longed for Thistledown and could not imagine why I could ever have accepted such an assignment.

“I wish the storm had eaten us,” Shirla muttered.

I touched her elbow with my hand, a brushing gesture that still caught the attention of the thick-faced guard. He gazed at me out of the corners of his eyes, pulled his lips together, and shook his head slightly.

At the gate in the wall, a small deep-sunk pair of doors barely wide enough for two to enter abreast, the lines were halted and the guards milled about, making last-minute checks for anything we might be carrying. They poked and prodded us like animals, conferred, and then the senior officer—a tall, stoop-shouldered fellow whose uniform sleeves rode up on his arms—called out, and the doors swung wide.

We entered the wall.

17

Dark stone, cool shadow for several meters, then an intense milky green light that seemed to hang like a canopy of fog. The air smelled sweet and slightly bitter.

“Don't be alarmed,” the stoop-shouldered senior officer called out as the lines marched into the greenness. “It's no worse than taking a shower. We've all done it. Your Able Lenk has done it and said it was a pleasure.”

Small scions, no larger than midges, filled the air in a swirling mist and lighted on our skin and crawled beneath our clothes until we each wore a pale green coat. Shirla squirmed and tried to brush them off, but they clung tenaciously, like living green oil.

“Do not be alarmed,” the guards repeated, and the thick-faced fellow reached a xyla stick past me and poked her in the back, bobbing his head at her. I restrained a strong urge to grab the stick and shove it back. “These are servants, not pests. They clean you up for your visit with Ser Brion.”

After a few minutes of mild discomfort—more at the thought than the actual sensation—the tiny creatures rose into the air again and hovered above our heads, filling the upper reaches of a large, white-walled cell, open at the top to the sky. I turned to look at Randall and Salap. Salap lifted his arms, the last of the tiny scions rising from him like green steam. He seemed stunned, his face slack, more surprised than he had been upon seeing the humanoid skeletons.

Never, in the history of the immigrants on Lamarckia, had scions ever served humans, or strongly interacted with them in any way.

Randall stood stiff as a board, eyes half closed, and shook his shoulders to make sure he was free of the creatures. The guards moved us through the door at the opposite end of the white cubicle, and we came to a broad courtyard surrounded by densely packed, flat-fronted gray brick buildings. The courtyard, except for us, was empty, and it quickly became obvious that we were not in Naderville proper, but in some special compound—the most likely conclusion being that this was a kind of prison. Shirla took hold of my arm despite the poking stick of a guard. When the guard poked at her hard, making her flinch, I could not stand still any longer. I turned and grabbed the stick, wrenched it from his grip, and broke it in two.

The thick-faced fellow stared at me in dumb surprise. Around us, the other guards began to break us into groups of four or five. Still, I met the thick-faced man's stare for several seconds, until he pointed to the broken stick on the ground and said, “Pick it up.”

Shirla stooped to do so, but I brought her back to her feet with a not-very-gentle jerk. She looked between us with eyes squinted, but took hold of my arm again.

“Pick it up,” the guard repeated, his face reddening. He advanced a half step. None of the guards had guns. All my senses sharpened and I examined the situation almost dispassionately, seeing how many guards were close, judging how my fellow captives would react to an incident.

Randall intervened. “What in the name of the Good Man is this about?” he shouted, charging between us and standing stiff-legged, arms held up, fists clenched, as if he meant to fight the man himself. “What is this brutishness?”

The tall, stoop-shouldered officer had also seen the brewing confrontation, and strode to Randall's side. “Pardon this, please,” he said, his voice soft. “No harm is meant. No harm is meant.” Thus soothing and separating us, the incident was brought to an end, and we were divided peacefully enough and led through different doors around the compound. Shirla and I were separated, but there was nothing we could practically do, other than provoke another incident, which I felt we would not be able to conclude in our favor. Shirla looked at me, eyes wide, then swung her head away abruptly and walked with her group of women through a narrow xyla door. I could not tell whether she felt betrayed or simply had resigned herself to whatever was going to happen.

She hated confinement. I dreaded the prospect myself.

The rooms within the gray brick buildings were uniform, four on the ground floor and I presumed four on the upper floor, accessible through a stairwell rising from the middle to the rear. Each room was equipped with a single small square window, two double bunks, a table, and chairs. They smelled clean enough, but the sanitary facilities were primitive: a hole in the floor in one corner, a single tap for water that also served to flush the hole.

“You won't be here for more than a few hours,” the thick-faced guard said. He closed the door on Salap, a steward named Rissin, myself, and a young sailor named Cortland.

We settled ourselves as best we could, introduced ourselves, tried to pass the time. Lying in my bunk to doze, I saw something scratched into the bricks of the wall: a crude drawing, a head with round eyes and a downturned mouth, arms and legs sticking out of it, hair in jags. Beside this figure, five crude letters: B-O-B-R-T. We looked for and found other drawings scattered around the room, on the floors or walls.

“Children,” the young sailor, Cortland, said.

Salap let his shoulders droop, and lay on his bunk with a sharp expulsion of breath. “Ser Olmy, I am ashamed,” he said.

I shook my head, but could not think of anything to say.

The hours passed, and it grew dark outside. No one came for us, and no one brought information.

A single light bulb came on within the room, casting a dismal pale pink glow, a sick and depressing color under the circumstances.

“Do you think they're going to kill us?” Rissin asked.

“No,” Salap said.

Rissin began to fidget on his bunk above mine. “This is not what I thought would happen,” he said. “Not as long as we were with Lenk.”

I tried to puzzle the situation through. Either the Brionists were savages on the order of the worst human history had produced, or we were simply in crude detention, until Brion and Lenk had finished negotiations. I tried to imagine what strengths Lenk would negotiate from.

18

The door opened and the thick-faced guard watched as a man and a woman in light blue aprons brought four covered plates. The guard was now armed, I saw—a small pistol. We took our plates and the door was closed. The plates contained a thoroughly cooked green vegetable and a scoop of paste-thick wheat gruel.

The light went out. The steward and the young sailor did not notice; they were asleep. Salap gave a little grunt and moved around in the darkness.

“Olmy, are you awake?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Lenk said Brion had a great secret. Do you think he meant using the scions as servants?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you know what that implies?”

“I think so,” I said.

“It could dwarf the importance of our little skeletons,” Salap said. “It changes the way we have to think about the ecoi...”

He lapsed into silence, standing in the middle of the room, facing the dim glow of the square window. “I am lost,” he said. “Everything I knew is turned upside down. All my studies ... Everything the explorers found, or thought they found. Brion has gone beyond us all.” Salap came closer to my bunk and whispered, “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to stay here, like you, until they come and get us.”

“Unless you're from the Hexamon.”

“What do you think, that they'd send some sort of superhuman? You want me to break down the walls and let us escape?”

Salap chuckled dryly. “If you were from the Hexamon, would you reveal yourself to Brion, or to General Beys? It could make a significant impression.”

“This is stupid talk,” I said. “The disciplinary was crazy. Randall was gullible. I'm no superhuman.”

Salap stood. I heard him rubbing his hands together in the dark. “I have no wife and children, no alliance with a family,” he said. “I have never cared much for family life. But I have always taken care of my researchers, my assistants, my students. I've failed.”

“We're all helpless,” I said.

“You don't get my meaning. I have always seen a single bright thread of destiny stretching ahead of me. And I've felt those around me would be safe, as long as that thread stretched taut...”

“We're not dead yet,” I said, finding this line of talk no more useful than the last.

“I have never known what to think of the Good Lenk,” Salap said. “When we followed him here, he seemed all-knowing, very thorough. But he has not handled the factions well. So much rancor, so little resolve ... Unwilling to crack heads, I believe.”

“You think he should have cracked a few heads?”

“I think he should have been prepared to do what needed to be done. Ready for what happened. Perhaps the dream is over for Lenk.”

Cortland stirred and poked his head over the edge of the bunk. “Have some courage,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Don't speculate about things you can't know. Brion may be in for a surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?” I asked, suddenly intensely curious. The situation had been entirely too simple, when history demanded that it should be complex and dynamic.

“I'm just a sailor. I don't know much of anything. But Lenk never plays from weakness.”

Salap made a small chuff of disbelief. “Let him surprise me, and I will be in his debt even more.”

“We're all in his debt,” Cortland said with little-boy confidence. “He took us from Thistledown. General Beys doesn't know everything.”

“You were born here,” Salap said. “You never saw Thistledown.”

“How old were you when you came here?”

“Twenty,” Salap said.

“And you?” the sailor asked, aiming his voice in the dark to where I sat on the lower bunk.

“I was born here,” I said. “I never saw Thistledown. I've read about it.”

Salap said nothing.

“I never liked hearing stories about Thistledown,” Cortland said. “Too much for any human to think about.”

“And Lamarckia is not?” I asked, chuckling.

“Lamarckia is like Lenk,” the sailor said. “Benevolent, but full of surprises.”

“The green,” Salap said.

“Yeah,” Cortland said. “Why green?”

Salap did not answer.

Rissin the steward snored on.

I dozed a few hours and came awake just before morning. Through the window, I saw a reddish natural stone surface mottled with drooping dark green shapes like melted fern fronds. Banging noises in the courtyard of the compound awoke Salap, Rissin, and Cortland. They used the meager facilities and we stood expectantly near the door, awaiting breakfast, freedom, or whatever might present itself.

The thick-faced guard opened the door and waved us outside. We stood blinking and stretching in the brightness, watching others emerge from the doors around the courtyard. Salap adjusted his long shirt and pants, saw me observing him, and smiled at his pretensions.

Tables had been set up in the center of the courtyard. Shirla stood by one, and I glanced at the guards, who seemed to have their attention on other matters—conferring with more servers in blue aprons, or counting the people coming through doors. I walked across the stone floor of the compound and hugged Shirla.

“Not a comfortable night,” she said, clinging to me. With a small shudder, she let me go and looked around the courtyard, lips pressed tightly together. “But we aren't dead. This seems to be breakfast...”

Servers brought plates on rolling carts and food in big ceramic bowls. Randall, his stiff brown hair awry, sat at the table across from Shirla and me. We were served more greens and gruel. The guards stood back as if we were not important, or perhaps not even there. All were armed.

Randall ate his serving in silence, staring at nothing in particular. Shirla spoke about the accommodations, no different from ours, and then asked, “I see Salap, but where's Shatro?”

“Not here,” Randall said.

“Why?”

“Said he had something to tell Brion. The guard let him out last night.” Randall gazed at me over a poised spoon. “He's going to tell them about you.”

Shirla turned and asked, “What about you?”

I frowned and shook my head in disgust. “A stupid story,” I said.

Randall focused on nothing again.

The stoop-shouldered officer walked to the northern side of the compound, followed by another guard carrying a small crate. The guard placed the crate on the ground and the officer stepped up onto it, shifting one of the odd curved batons from hand to hand. The thicket above and behind the western buildings of the compound glowed brilliant gold-green in the morning sun.

All around the compound, a distant whirring alternated with faint, high-speed chuckle-ducks—the first sounds I had heard that seemed to come from the ecos.

“Hello,” the officer said to the assembly around the tables. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, clutching the baton in both hands now, ill at ease. “I realize this part of your visit has been a little boring, but I hope you understand. I can tell you that talks between Ser Able and Ser Brion have been going well.” He stopped here, and we glanced at each other, clearly not feeling much encouraged.

“There is no danger. Our manner may seem harsh, but we mean no harm. We have reacted to very difficult circumstances with increased resolve and order. You should not believe all those stories ... those things that we have been accused of.” This awkward phrasing seemed to irritate him, and he drew his eyebrows together, slipped the stick into a loop in his coat, and clasped his hands before him. “Now that you've finished your meal, we will clear the tables, and you will...” He conferred with the guard, who whispered in his ear. “You will gather in a single group in this corner of the compound.” He withdrew the stick again and used it to point to the northwestern corner.

“What the hell is that?” Shirla asked. “A whip?”

“Looks like a thin boomerang,” said an older woman A.B. beside her.

“So please, let us begin,” the officer concluded. Then, as an afterthought, “My name is Pitt, Suleiman Ab Pitt. Your host attendants will answer individual questions.”

Shirla's concern of the night before had dissolved into quiet contempt. “What a cargo,” she muttered. “They think we're idiots.”

All around, with fatuous smiles, the guards urged us to our feet and we followed them to a broad double door at the far end of the courtyard, still in shadow. Brion must have had some reason for subjecting newcomers to this passage through door after door, I thought, but none came to mind. My old cynicism returned in force. Nothing made sense. I tried to keep my mind blank. The only positive in this personal cloud of negative emotions was Shirla's closeness. It seemed that through her, I could attach myself to the simple fact of being human; however much bad examples came to mind, she countered them.

But Shirla was not in an optimistic frame of mind, either. We followed the stoop-shouldered officer, Pitt, surrounded by guards, through the broad door, four and five abreast, and came to a flat green space on the other side. For a moment, my eyes refused to believe, but then I saw it for what it was: a well-manicured lawn, covering perhaps fifty acres. Trees—terrestrial varieties, oaks, maples, elms—rose all around, throwing their shadows through a rising, patchy ground mist. At the borders of this garden, intensely green thicket rose in a tortured wall to a height of twenty meters, casting its own shadow over the grass. The guards encouraged us to walk onto the lawn. Salap bent down and touched the grass, and across the nine or ten meters between us, his eyes met mine. He seemed now always to seek out my face when confronted by the unexpected, as if I might explain things to him.

But he called out, “Not grass.”

Shirla's shoulders trembled and she shivered all over, as if touched by a ghost. “I've never seen grass,” she said.

“We didn't bring this kind of grass with us,” Randall said. The sailors and other members of the crews stood like sheep on this unexpected sward, uncertain what was expected of them.

“Brion shows you the beauties of the world he foresees,” Pitt called out. The role of master of ceremonies did not suit him. His eyes remained flinty, his shoulders drawn down, no matter how broad his smile and generous his tone. “We have formed an alliance with the ecos, and it works with us, for us.”

Salap shook his head, still disbelieving. One by one, embarrassed but gaining in courage, the crews kneeled and felt the grass, or walked over to the nearest trees and touched the apparent bark, the branches and leaves.

Not a leaf out of place, the lawn as perfect as a carpet.

I kneeled and touched the blades. They were cool and stiff, much stiffer than the grass I had walked across in parks in Thistledown.

A commotion began at the south side of the garden. I looked up from several blades of grass I had pulled loose: they writhed slowly in my hand like tiny worms.

Keo and Ferrier were arguing with several guards. Pitt walked over briskly like a tall gray crow, pointing his baton straight down by his side. More words were exchanged. Salap and Randall came closer to Shirla and me. “Someone's upset,” Salap said.

A tall woman with golden-brown skin and long black hair, wearing a rich white and gray gown, entered the garden and took Pitt aside. Pitt listened intently.

Keo and Ferrier looked on in some satisfaction. The crews stood frozen, scattered across the false lawn, watching the woman and Pitt as if their lives might depend on the result.

Finally, Pitt approached a group of four guards, gave them quick instructions, and shouted, “There has been a misunderstanding. The following people will come forward.” He took a list from Keo and read: “Nussbaum, Grolier, Salap, Randall, Olmy, Shatro.”

Shirla let go of my arm and stepped away. I glanced at her, puzzled, but she nodded toward Ferrier, Keo, and Pitt. “Go,” she said.

I did not want to leave her. Salap walked a few paces and stopped, looking back. Randall joined him, and Shirla gave me a nudge. “Maybe it's something important,” she said. “Come back and tell me.”

Keo and Ferrier greeted Nussbaum and Grolier, and then turned toward us. “Able Lenk didn't suspect they'd take you off the ship,” Keo said, walking toward the gate. “He's very upset.” We all followed. The tall woman in white and gray stayed behind, still talking to Pitt. “He's calling for his researchers. Where's Shatro?”

“He left the compound last night,” Randall said. “We don't know where they took him.”

“Well, we'll find him. We've seen pretty terrifying things. Changes our perspective, I'll tell you.”

We passed through the doors and crossed the compound.

“Grass,” Ferrier said, shaking his head in amazement.

19

“Brion's confessed to sending the pirates,” Keo said. We walked between three guards and behind the auburn-haired woman, whose ubiquitous presence had not yet been explained. We did not even know her name. “Everybody else denies it. I think he may be a little mad.”

“He is not mad,” the woman said sharply. She carried herself erect, footsteps delicate and precise, gliding over the ground, her dark-red gown swishing around her ankles with a sound like little rushes of water. Her skin was a rich, pale brown, and her eyes deep black, surrounded by ivory-colored sclera. She did not seem at all impressed by us.

Keo cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows. We came to a wall made of round stones the size of a human head and smooth as pearls, glued together with a translucent, glistening mortar. The wall rose almost fifteen meters and was capped by the drooping, melted fern shapes I had seen through the window of our room in the compound. A hole had been knocked in the base of the wall, and a smoothly planed xyla door had been set in the hole. It looked out of place. Salap touched the surrounding stones lightly as we passed through.

Our eyes adjusted slowly to the dark beyond the door. The auburn-haired woman took a lantern from the wall and switched it on. From all around, the stones returned muted reflections, surrounding us with thousands of dim, sleepy eyes. The stones rose in a free-form arch that came to a point about ten meters overhead. Beyond the arch, pillars marched unevenly into gloom relieved only by a few lanterns. The floor felt resilient underfoot.

I strongly doubted that Brion's people were responsible for this construction. It seemed poorly adapted for human use. If the architecture called to mind anything, it was the palaces on Martha's Land. While these chambers were empty, however, they were not in ruins. Hsia seemed to build for the ages.

The woman guided us through the pillars toward a point of orange light, surrounded by a peculiar granular halo, twenty or thirty meters away. The light and halo resolved into a large lantern mounted on the pearl-stone wall beside another inset doorway. The wall around the door glowed faintly, sunlight seeping through the translucent mortar surrounding the stones.

A guard stepped forward and opened the door. Temporarily blinded by daylight, we stepped through into a rich vegetal tangle of green vines, smooth branches, spreading leaves, helical creepers and aerial roots, melted ferns, pendulous waxy fruits: an orgy of green growth.

Bright late-morning sun cast speckles of tinted light on a carpet of discarded and shriveled leaves and branches. Randall muttered something I did not hear clearly. Salap wore a wise half smile, as if nothing would surprise him now.

“This is the vivarium,” the woman said. “My sister spent much of her time here, before she died.”

“It's wonderful,” Salap said.

The woman walked ahead.

A few dozen meters down a trail, we came to a broad clearing covered with the same stiff, well-manicured “grass” we had seen before. A lattice of smooth bright-green branches, like the weave of a wicker bowl, overarched and shaded three square gray brick buildings on the edge of the clearing.

“Some of your people are quartered here,” the auburn-haired woman said. She stopped at the door to the nearest building, still refusing to look directly at us.

The guards stood aside and we passed through the door. Inside, a small, square room with narrow windows, lighted by two electric lanterns on poles, was furnished with couches and two chairs.

Allrica Fassid entered through a door opposite the entrance, skin pale, deep lines around her nose and lips and across her brow. She whispered a few words to Keo, then faced Salap, Randall, and me. She pushed her shoulders forward and inclined her head, looking to one side, like a young girl about to perform some unpleasant chore. “One of your researchers tried to visit Brion. It appears Brion received him. We don't know what they talked about.” Her face tensed and her eyes bore into us, but that passed and her weary expression returned. “Did Ser Keo tell you what we've learned?”

“Only that Brion has done some confessing,” Randall said.

“Of a sort,” Fassid said. “I'd call it bragging. He has a smile that makes me want to kill.” She sniffed and drew her head back, speaking more forcefully. “He's made some unbelievable claims. We need all the expertise we can muster to evaluate them.”

“They've done extraordinary things with the ecos,” Salap said. “That's obvious.”

Fassid faced Salap squarely and took a small, shivering breath. She was swallowing pride, anger, and frustration, and the effort made her seem like a marionette in the hands of a nervous puppeteer. “My apologies. I wish I could apologize to Captain Keyser-Bach, as well.”

Salap's grin faded. He stared at her with the complete lack of emotion that I had learned to interpret as extreme irritation. “Why?” he asked.

“Brion has caught us by surprise,” Fassid said. “If we had known more ... about Lamarckia, about Hsia, we might have anticipated some of what we've seen the past few hours...”

Salap folded his hands, taking no obvious pleasure in this triumph. “How can we help the esteemed Lenk?” he asked quietly.

20

Lenk stood by a broad window overlooking the vivarium. The furnishings and decor of the large but spare rooms assigned to Lenk and his aides fit the deliberate air of drabness seen everywhere. Brion did not revel in luxury.

Lenk showed all of his eighty-four natural years, and more. With his slumped shoulders and inclined head, his chin drawn deeply into his neck, he looked painfully old.

“Brion keeps referring to his triumph,” Fassid said, pressing the window with one extended finger, until the adjacent knuckles met the glass. “He also calls it his mistake. He says he made Hsia an offering. Somehow, he's collaborated ... allied himself with the ecos.”

“Is that certain?” Salap asked. We sat on frame chairs opposite the window, suffused by the cool green light of the vivarium's lush growth.

“It's what he says,” Lenk murmured.

“What does your researcher say?” Salap asked

“Ser Rustin won't venture an opinion,” Lenk said.

“Brion and his wife somehow persuaded the ecos to grow them food,” Fassid continued. “They brought Naderville out of the worst famine they had experienced, but according to our intelligence, Brion very nearly had a rebellion on his hands. Some of his people thought a sacrilege had been committed.”

“We did not hear that from Brion,” Keo said dryly.

“Brion's tenure here has not been all that smooth. But our information about Hsia has always been fragmentary,” Fassid said. “We learned even less after Brion gave almost all government authority to Beys.”

Salap shook his head, plainly trying to get past what were to him irrelevancies.

“There was so much of our own pain to deal with,” Lenk said, his deep voice quavering.

Randall asked, “Do you know where Shatro is now?”

“No,” Keo said. “Our chief negotiator says he's offered his services to Brion.”

“He's been through a lot of trouble,” Salap interceded, like a mother protecting a wayward child. This sudden mildness surprised both Randall and me. Salap regarded us with eyes half closed, the elfin smile back on his lips. “He would not be much help to us now. Strictly a technical fellow. No brilliance in him.” Salap folded his hands in his lap.

The door to the room opened and a tall, loose-jointed man about my age, with sandy brown hair and a broad, sheeplike face, came in, followed by a short young woman with intelligent eyes. Fassid introduced the man, Lenk's head researcher, Georg Ny Rustin. Salap and he seemed to know each other, and Rustin was not comfortable in Salap's presence.

“We've learned nothing new,” Rustin said to Lenk, Keo, and Fassid. “Nothing more surprising, at any rate.”

Salap turned toward Lenk's researcher. Rustin had been on the Cow and, until this moment, we had not met. “Ser Rustin, I assume we will be working together...”

“I disagree that I've reached my limits,” Rustin said quickly, glancing at Fassid and Lenk. Then, realizing he had showed his suspicions too plainly, he said, “Of course, I welcome your opinions.”

“Is it your opinion that the ecos here has understood our genetic language?”

“Not at all,” Rustin said. “All we've been shown so far could be adaptive imitation. We've seen it before. Imitation of the outward physical form of scions, but not the internal structure.”

Salap leaned his head to one side. “These forms that resemble terrestrial plants ... are purely imitative?”

“I've only been able to make preliminary tests, and that woman Chung has hovered around us ... but yes, I'd say they're purely imitative, with little deep-structure resemblance.”

“Have Brion's researchers learned whether these new forms ... these collaborations, let's call them ... use our genetic methods? Terrestrial genetic syntax?”

Rustin shook his head again. “They do not. They're megacytic, with fluid-filled spongelike tissues rather than true cellular structure. We've confirmed that positively with samples put through our own lab kits.” The dark young woman lifted a black case that presumably contained the lab kits. She seemed eager to speak, but protocol held her back.

“Have you given any thought to what Brion intends to do with these new forms?”

Rustin shook his head. “Other than what we've been told ... no.”

“Well,” Salap said. “You were never one for going beyond the immediate evidence and drawing far-fetched conclusions.”

Rustin did not know whether to receive that as a compliment.

“Are these new green scions similar to the food varieties Brion claims saved them?”

“I don't know,” Rustin said.

“You have found chlorophyll in these imitations?”

“We've examined the entire pigment range. Besides the usual varieties of Lamarckian pigments, they contain chlorophyll alpha and beta. These pigments do not occur elsewhere on Lamarckia,” Rustin said.

“And what does that imply to you?”

Rustin blinked nervously. “It's new,” he said. “It's possible Brion's somehow managed to...” He raised a hand, waved it vaguely. “Pass on clues to the ecos. But I don't see how.”

Salap turned his gaze to the red-haired woman. “You are Jessica McCall, or do I remember incorrectly?”

“You have a marvelous memory,” the woman said, clearly pleased to be in his presence.

“What do you think, Ser McCall?” Salap asked.

McCall swiftly studied the faces of Fassid and Rustin, glanced at Lenk, who had his back turned to us, and said, “I'm very concerned, Ser Salap. If the ecos understands the benefits of these far more efficient photosynthetic pigments—”

“I am also concerned,” Salap interrupted. “Ser Rustin, you have done your job well.”

“Brion's people are not at all cooperative,” Rustin said. Then, in a frustrated rush, “This Hyssha Chung in particular has been very difficult. She claims the vivarium is a memorial to her sister. She refuses to let us conduct thorough studies on the remarkable scions it contains.”

Salap made a humming noise and nodded. “Able Lenk, I would like to reorganize this team of researchers ... to take advantage of all our talents in the most efficient manner.”

“Why?” Rustin asked, Adam's apple bobbing, dismayed by the sudden request.

Lenk looked at Salap sadly, one eyelid twitching. “If it's necessary,” he said.

“It is,” Salap said.

Rustin began to stammer a few words about resigning. Salap laid one hand lightly on his shoulder and said, “We have no time for social games.”

“I have earned this position, and I have always relied on the confidence of Able Lenk!” Rustin cried out, tears rolling down his flat, red cheeks.

“We can all be useful,” Salap concluded after a moment of painful silence. Rustin wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, blinking rapidly.

“I would be honored to have Ser Salap tell me what's happening here,” Lenk said.

“Clearly, Brion reveals part of the truth,” Salap said. “Some form of collaboration has occurred.”

“Are they capable of doing more?” Fassid asked.

“What do you fear them doing?”

“You mentioned Martha's Island making human-shaped scions.”

Salap shook his head. “That may mean nothing here. What Brion has done could be much more dangerous. Brion may be right—it could be both triumph and mistake.”

“He's not an easy man to understand,” Fassid said.

“I understand him well enough,” Lenk said.

“What else did Brion confess to?” I asked before I gave the words much thought.

Fassid looked at me as if I were some sort of noisy insect.

“Ser Olmy witnessed the death of a village, not too many months ago,” Randall said, neatly giving me a reason for speaking up, stepping out of my place. All but Lenk and Fassid nodded sympathetically. There were many undercurrents in this room, and I could not track them all.

Lenk turned back to the window.

“It's a good question,” Keo said. “Brion has given military and even most civilian authority to General Beys. Beys has been making most of the major policy decisions for at least two years. He began sending ships out to gather supplies—that is, raid villages—last year. This year, he accompanied the raiders personally, planning to force Able Lenk to concede authority. He raided all around Elizabeth, and he stole children. He built sail barges along the coast and sent the stolen equipment and food and children back to Naderville. They're alive, Brion says, and are being well-cared for.”

“Their parents are dead,” Fassid said bitterly. “I despise the man.”

“Why did Beys take the children?” I asked. Lenk looked directly at me, as if to reevaluate what he had seen earlier. Randall and Salap regarded me with a fixed intensity that might have been fascination, or a warning.

“They lost over half of their children in the famine,” Keo said. “It was that bad.”

“He did not come to me,” Lenk said. “If we had known, we would have shared what little we had.”

“He didn't want your help because it would have made him look weak,” Fassid said. “Beys may not have acted on his direct orders, but he knew what Brion wanted. A future, a people to rule.”

Randall said, “Children were kept in the compound where we spent the night.”

“Yes. Some of the children are here,” Lenk said. His throat bobbed and his eyes narrowed. “Makes things very complicated. Hostages now.”

The children could not be considered hostages unless Lenk was being pressured to do something, to agree to something—or unless he planned to exert pressure himself, and felt Brion might refuse.

“I don't see that this talk gets us anywhere,” Rustin said. “We're here to discuss the ecos and what Brion has accomplished.”

“So we are,” Salap said, eyes languid.

Lenk's face became lax, almost dead-looking. I saw again the features of the soldier on the prow of the flatboat. In the grip of overwhelming history. Not all the truth was being told; perhaps very little.

I had hoped to admire Lenk in some way, for his leadership and presence, as a force of divaricate society. Instead, he made me uneasy. I felt his power, could not help but respect his presence, but it seemed only half the man was truly with us. The other half was hidden and would never be shown.

“We have no further meetings scheduled.” Fassid said. “Brion canceled tomorrow's meeting with Able Lenk. He's suggested we discuss certain issues with General Beys—”

“I will not meet with that man,” Lenk said.

“No, we've agreed that Brion is who we must talk with,” Keo said with a regretful sigh. “He is an enigmatic and difficult man, and this Chung woman is another enigma.”

“She escorted you here,” Fassid explained. “Caitla Chung, Brion's wife, was her sister. I think she's also Brion's mistress, though that's hard to judge—he could have so many of them.”

Lenk's face underwent a sudden and very brief transformation. In what had, until now, been flat weariness, I saw pass a shudder of deep anger. In a blink, the weariness returned.

21

I awoke in darkness and did not immediately know where I was or where I had been. I remembered being in brightness going down a long hallway, perhaps into another room. That was a dream. Finally the dreaming had begun.

I did not welcome the returning memory of where I was: still in Brion's nightmare. I felt strongly that another gate would open soon and I would be taken to the presiding minister for debriefing. It would be a grim story but not so grim as the fear I had felt in the dream at the thought of going into that other room. I rolled over in the bunk and pinched my earlobe until it hurt, struggling to sharpen my thoughts.

An electric light came on in the darkness.

I sat up. The room seemed even more drab and impersonal than it had the night before. Salap, Randall, and I had each been given private quarters near the compound, away from the palace of stones and the vivarium. There were no windows; it was little different from a prison cell, but for the furnishings, which were at least comfortable, though worn.

The electric light on the ceiling sang faintly. Through the door, a woman's voice said, “Ser Olmy, you are expected.” It was Hyssha Chung.

“By whom?”

“Ser Brion and General Beys.”

I swung my legs out of the bed. “I'm getting dressed,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Early morning.”

Chung regarded me with some interest this time, as I came through the door. “Your shirt is out in the back,” she said. From her, that seemed a statement of great affection. It almost made her charming.

I tucked my shirt in and followed her out of the building onto a dirt path between high brick walls. Beyond, the tall, dense thicket began, and we entered a tunnel through the densely woven growth. The walls of the tunnel rustled slightly as we passed through, dark intertwined branches moving less than a centimeter as the great mass of the thicket above our heads made minor adjustments.

“Do these tunnels ever fill in, or grow back?” I asked Chung.

“No,” she said.

We met up with Salap and Randall at a juncture of four tunnels. They were accompanied by two male guards. Each guard wore a holstered pistol. Electric lights hung from the roofs of the branching tunnels, suspended from dry, hard vines as thick as a man's leg. Chung took the left-swinging branch—I believed it headed south, but could not be sure—and we followed, the guards close behind.

Fifty meters down the tunnel, we came to a bend, and around the bend we saw daylight. The tunnel ended, and we emerged at the bottom of a bowl-shaped crater, perhaps a kilometer across. We stood in a gap where the crater wall had collapsed and the gap had been filled in with thicket.

The air within the crater was warm and still. The thicket above and behind rustled like waves on a distant beach.

In the center of the crater, a mass of shiny black hemispheres, studded with spikes and surmounted by arches, resembled a pile of huge, dead spiders. A path led down the rocky bottom of the crater to the pile. Chung proceeded down the path, and again we followed. I wondered if she relished the role of silent guide.

The crater appeared barren. It reminded me of Martha's Island, but here and there, steam and drifts of sulfurous gas still rose from vents around the bowl.

“Do you come here often?” Randall asked.

“Too often,” Hyssha Chung said.

The path skirted the base of a shiny arch, curved between two black hemispheres as perfect as blown glass bubbles, and we stood before a small, low white stone building that had been hidden until now.

“This part we made,” Chung said. She opened a double door of thicket-xyla, cleverly fitted and interwoven, and we entered a cool, dark room that smelled strongly of cut grass. A radiance of long gaps in the ceiling allowed sun to draw bright lines on the lava gravel floor.

I looked up from the sunlines to see two men standing in shadow by a table at the center of the whitewashed block-walled room. We crossed the room, feet crunching in the lava gravel, dazzled by the brilliant shafts of sun.

This room contained shelves lined with large bottles of liquid, most of them green or dark brown in color. The smooth concrete floor sloped to a drain at the center. The floor was covered with green and brown stains, despite its appearance of having been recently scrubbed. Damp spots and a rivulet of water darkened the concrete.

The air smelled overpoweringly of vegetation. Three electric lights in the ceiling came on, and I saw the two men clearly for the first time, in the center of the room.

A small sinewy man stood to the right of the table, his face thin, pushed-up nose and high, hollow cheeks giving him an exaggerated boyish appearance, verging on the simian. He seemed at first glance to be my height, but he stood a few centimeters shorter. Lank brown hair hung past his ears. His eyes were large and liquid, dark green, and his skin was sallow. He seemed ready to smile with any provocation: glad to see us, as if we were friends long absent. He wore a simple silver-gray coat and pants, the coat laced at the front, half open to reveal a collarless white shirt, and his hands were covered by dingy brown gloves. In one hand he carried a piece of string, which he wound and rewound around the finger of his other hand.

“Ser Brion, General Beys, these are Sers Salap, Randall, and Olmy.” Brion looked me over shrewdly, rubbing his shoulder with one hand as if it pained him, then tapped his fingers in a silent tattoo on his biceps. He approached and looked me over as if he were deciding whether or not to buy me. He smiled. “General?”

Beys wore a gray tailored suit. Little taller than Brion, he was thickset and broad shouldered, a small bull, powerful, with thick, ruddy hands. His eyes seemed almost merry, set deep in a milky countenance above reddish cheeks. Beys shrugged. “I can seldom judge men by their appearance. We hide ourselves so well.”

Randall stood stiffly, hands clasped behind his back, eyes focusing on the others in the room, one at a time, mechanically. I could sense by his posture and the tight, white-jointed tangle of his fingers his passion against Beys and Brion.

Brion lifted his eyes and stared directly at me, his smile genuine, his eyes gleaming with intense interest. “All right. Show me something. Kill me now rather than wait. I'm sure you've been filled with hatred by Lenk's people.”

I think he half expected me to lift a finger and blast him to ashes. He seemed happy with the thought, and a little disappointed when I did nothing. His eyes dulled and his smile weakened.

“You don't want to kill me?”

“No.”

“Could you kill me if you wanted to?”

“I don't have any weapons,” I said.

He examined me again, as if the first time had not been sufficient. “Inside or out?”

“No weapons,” I said.

He focused suddenly on Salap. “You are Mansur Salap. I know your name, of course. Your assistant, Shatro, seems to think he's been useful to me. Actually, I've been aware of Ser Olmy's presence on Lamarckia for some time now.”

He turned his gaze on me again and his smile grew, as if he were reading my thoughts. “Usually I hear about poseurs and unfortunates. In your case, my contacts may have stumbled on the real thing.” Brion's smile broadened. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

“One hundred and forty-three days.”

“Does Lenk know who you are?”

“I don't know.”

Brion stepped back but still stared at me. “I expected the Hexamon would send an army to punish us and take us back to Thistledown.”

“I never expected that,” Beys said mildly.

“Well, I hoped for one,” Brion said. He motioned for us all to sit on the thicket-xyla chairs. We formed a circle around the table in the center of the square room. “Ser Shatro thought he would gain some advantage or revenge by turning you in. He doesn't like you. He doesn't like anybody much now. He's a very disappointed man.”

“Not my best student,” Salap said.

“It's interesting, the first time I have a chance to meet with Lenk, and he brings people far more interesting than himself ... Among them, key scientists rescued from a shipwreck. A ship captained by Keyser-Bach. I'd have enjoyed meeting that man. I regret his death. I'm honored to meet you, Ser Randall, and you, Ser Salap. I've received copies of all your journals and publications.”

Salap nodded, but said nothing. My admission had thrown this meeting into confusion. Only Brion seemed to have a sense of direction.

He turned to me, hands on his knees, and asked, “Are you here to judge us?”

“I'm here to see if humans have damaged Lamarckia.”

“It's taken them a long time to get around to us,” Brion said. “Time enough for a new generation to be born—and for a lot of us to die. Is the Hexamon going to descend on us and reclaim our planet?”

“I'm not in communication with them.”

“Do you have a clavicle?”

“No.”

“No way to communicate with Thistledown?”

“No,” I said.

“Did Lenk bring his clavicle on the ship?” Brion asked Beys.

“Yes,” the general answered, lifting his chin and scratching his neck. His fingers left pale marks on the reddish, stubbled skin there. His eyes seemed small in such a broad face, one eye brown, one eye pale green.

“It doesn't work anymore,” Brion confided. “He still carries it with him, but he broke it in anger years ago. That's supposed to be a secret.” Brion sniffed and flicked his gaze back to me with birdlike speed. “So, if nobody comes for you, you can't return to the Way. You're one of us now.”

Beys shook his head. “He can never be one of us. Shatro tells us you witnessed the destruction at a village on the Terra Nova River.”

“I did,” I said. “The village of Moonrise.”

“Are you here to judge us for that, and pass word back to the Hexamon that we're criminals?”

I did not answer.

Beys shook his head again, slowly. “Something's gone wrong, hasn't it?” he asked. “They don't think it's worthwhile to send an army.”

“Maybe they can't open a gate long enough,” Brion said.

“I was fifteen years old when my parents brought me here,” Beys said. “I suffered starvation and illness. I watched my sister and my mother die in childbirth. Lenk did this to us all. If the Hexamon comes, I am prepared to be judged. We have done what we must to survive.” He turned away. “He's an agent,” he concluded, looking down at the floor. “He has the look. None of the others did. We probably should kill them all.”

Brion seemed mildly alarmed by that suggestion. “I don't think they're a threat to us.”

The news—or rumor—about Lenk's clavicle was slowly sinking in. If it was broken, and nobody else had arrived on Lamarckia by now, there was little chance I'd ever finish my mission.

Or rather, my mission had become my life.

That disturbed me more than I wanted to deal with now. I had to keep calm before this boyish, simian-faced man and the cheerful, stocky Beys, with his merry cheeks and deadly words.

“Still, you have some interest,” Brion said. “I've respected Ser Salap for many years. Some of his works have given me the clues I've needed to make my biggest discoveries. General Beys shares much of the responsibility, as well. He's given me the time to concentrate.”

“I hope we have time, later, for a long conversation,” Beys said. “I regret I won't be able to stay much longer. I'd enjoy hearing about what's happened on Thistledown and in the Way.”

“There's diplomacy to be taken care of, more discussions with Lenk,” Brion said. “If they can be called that. The Able Man doesn't do much listening. So many things to plan, arrangements to be made. We all have to be watchful. Ser Salap, why did you come to Lamarckia?”

“I believed in Lenk,” Salap said.

“Do you believe what you see here—the vivarium, all our work?”

“Yes.”

“A collaboration, communication?”

Salap nodded.

“Ser Randall?”

“It seems real,” Randall said.

Brion chuckled. “All of this—the crater, the stone chambers—used to be the home of a seed-mother. Thousands of years ago, the seed-mother moved to another location, up the canal. That's where we'll go. I want to show you some of what we've done. My wife and I. I haven't been up the canal for months. But with such learned gentlemen here, and Ser Olmy, a very special visitor, I think the negotiations can wait.” He nodded decisively. “It's more important that you all see what we've managed to do.”

Brion leaned toward me, as if addressing a child. “I can't tell what you're thinking. You have some character and discipline, Ser Olmy. That makes you different from most of us. We were brought here by a fool, on a promise that was broken as soon as we arrived. We've been sinking ever since.

“Come with me up the canal tomorrow and I'll show you how much further we have to go before we reach bottom.”

General Beys regarded me with his small deep-set eyes and crinkled his pink cheeks in a friendly smile. He nodded as if saying farewell to a fellow soldier.

This time, the guards put us together into a single room along another tunnel, presumably closer to the lake. I did not sleep much that night. I lay in my narrow, hard bunk and wondered what other agents would have done, sent to Lamarckia. Would they have revealed themselves to so little purpose?

Salap stirred on the bunk above me. He descended the ladder. “It feels like morning to me,” he said. “I feel like a damned soil tender, walled up in here.” At the bottom, he straightened his black robe and ran his hand through his hair, then went to the wash basin and splashed water on his face.

Randall swung his legs over the edge of his bottom bunk and stretched. “What do you think they're up to?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Salap said. “I refuse to be surprised.”

Randall turned his gaze to me. “Anything you can do that will surprise us?” he asked.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“How are you any different from Mansur or me?” he asked.

“I've never claimed to be different.”

“You were all they could send—a scout, to check out the territory? And nobody after you?”

“I assume that's what's happened.”

Salap stood with one hand braced against the brick wall.

Randall looked up at the wall, eyes moist. “All these decades we've been waiting like children for someone to rescue us from our own stupidity. And all the Hexamon sends is one man.”

“A mortal, like us,” Salap murmured.

“Both of you were Adventists?” I asked.

Salap nodded. Randall said, “I sympathized, but I knew which side to stick with.”

Salap smiled like a devil that understands human nature only too well. “Do you think Ser Shatro was listening, on the raft?”

“Apparently,” I said.

“It might have been better if you had just told the first person you met who you were,” Randall said.

“The first person I met was Larisa Strik-Cachemou,” I said. “It didn't seem a good idea at the time.”

22

The boat waited beside the ministerial dock on the canal, its two-man crew dressed in immaculate white. The boat was ten meters long, made of white-painted xyla with a single metal tree amidships, on which flew a gray flag with a central white spot. Two electric motors waited beneath a bare metal compartment at the rear. A white canopy ahead of the tree shaded a square of padded benches, sunken below deck level. Forward of the canopy, a small cabin and galley waited to serve Brion and his guests.

Salap and I walked down the dock and boarded the boat, escorted by our guards. Randall had not been invited.

What made Brion different—more like Lenk than like any leaders on Thistledown—was his apparent role as the figurehead in a cult of personality. Leaders on Thistledown generally ruled like bureaucratic administrators—hence the unglamorous titles of their higher offices. Brion was a tribal ruler, given unlimited discretion by his people, but with limited resources and limited numbers of people to rule. Understanding him, knowing what to say and to anticipate, could save our lives. I hoped Salap was thinking along similar lines, and I was glad Randall was not accompanying us. Randall had had enough of Naderville and Lenk and Fassid and the mess of Lamarckia's human world-lines. He might not care what would trigger Brion's anger.

Brion arrived several minutes later, with four armed soldiers and a lithe brown man with spiky, short-cut black hair. Brion seemed anxious. “This is Ser Frick,” Brion said. “He's been with me for many years, since I came to Godwin.”

We introduced ourselves as if we were going on a social cruise, then settled on the padded seats, and our guards and three of the armed men returned to the dock.

Brion wore gloves, khaki-colored pants, and a dark brown shirt. In one hand he carried a piece of string wrapped tightly around his index finger.

Frick wore a thin, loose black coat, faded rose-colored vest, and baggy dark brown pants. “The weather's going to be warm up the canal today,” Frick said, settling into the bench seat. “She's been keeping it warm for weeks.”

Brion nodded and stared across the canal at the opposite shore, one eyebrow raised. He wound and unwound his string.

“How long is this trip?” Salap asked.

“Two days up, two days back,” Frick said.

The pilot switched on the electric motors and the boat pushed out into the stream, which flowed west from the interior of Hsia.

“That woman is awful,” Brion said a few minutes later, lifting his chin from his hand and sitting straight on the seat.

“Which woman?” Salap asked.

“Fassid. We had a bad discussion this morning, very unfair. I explained my position yesterday very well, I think, telling them I could do little more even if we negotiated for months. They asked me again to keep General Beys and his soldiers here, and I told them I was unable to do that.”

“Beys kidnapped children and slaughtered villagers,” I said.

“I do not defend all of his actions, but he is much too useful for me to just recall him. He's a thorn in Lenk's side.” Brion would not meet my eye, but his face went through a spectrum of twitches and half frowns as he gazed across the river. “I doubt I would defend my own actions, if you decided to challenge me in a Hexamon court,” he continued.

Salap sat like a patient cat, face relaxed but eyes alert. We both knew these men could order the crew to kill us and throw us into the canal at any moment, and there would be few if any repercussions.

Clouds moved in above the canal and surrounding thicket-silva. The dark cliffs of arborid growth declined to heights of less than a dozen meters as the boat pushed up the canal, and broad areas had been burned and cleared for farms. The open fields of chalky rubble beneath the thickets had apparently yielded little in the way of crops, however, and the land seemed to have been abandoned, leaving sad, naked scars along the canal.

A white-jacketed steward stooped out of the forward cabin and served us glasses of water and slices of sweet green melonlike fruit. Frick persisted in asking for details on Thistledown as we ate.

“What's it like there now? I've tried to grasp the possibility of time lags in the geometry stacks ... How many years have passed there, since we left?”

I saw no reason to dissemble. “About five years, Way time.”

Frick's face fell. “That's all? I've spent my whole life here and I'm less than five years old...”

“No one understood what we would be facing, least of all Lenk,” Brion said.

“I think Able Lenk recognizes his mistakes,” Salap said softly. “It is too late to wallow in accusations and recriminations.”

“If we judge who will lead, and who will prevail when major decisions have to be made,” Brion said, “surely we must judge. Mistakes matter.”

“Lenk regrets not sending more help to you,” Salap said.

Brion's eyes narrowed to slits and his lips curled with contempt. “It was a policy, not an oversight. First Godwin, and then Naderville, was an affront to his legitimacy, to his record.”

“I am concerned with what you are going to show us,” Salap said. “I am less concerned with how you and Lenk disagree, or who is going to overcome whom.”

“I appreciate your bluntness,” Brion said. “It's what I expected of you, Ser Salap. So few people care to speak directly to me. I'm treated like a willful child. I'm not all that temperamental.” He seemed to relax. “I don't worry about my mistakes with Lenk, or the mistakes of my predecessors. Though they truly established our isolation before I ever arrived ... But perhaps you're right. There's no end to that kind of recrimination. Lenk is no saint. No saint at all.”

I quelled the urge to ask about the orders given to General Beys, and whether there would ever be an accounting and reckoning for him. However well Brion took Salap's words, he might react quite differently to mine.

The steward laid out breads and small, bluish grapelike fruit on a tray.

“We have fundamentally misunderstood this planet,” Brion said. “I'm as much to blame as anyone. We looked at it with blinkered eyes, expecting simple relationships between simple organisms, however large. We thought in terms of central authorities, self-aware intelligence or personality. There has been neither self-awareness nor personality on Lamarckia. There has been vital direction, order, and of course change. Sometimes frantic change. But not what we could call a self.”

“What were your mistakes?” Salap asked after a moment of silence. I wondered if perhaps Salap had not been such a fortunate choice after all. Randall might have shown more discretion. I hoped he knew what he was after, and what it might cost us.

“I was grieving,” Brion said. “I was not rational. I felt I had no friends on this world, except for the land, the ecos. I felt very close to it. I still do. My greatest mistake.”

“Why grieving?” I asked.

“Caitla died,” Brion said. “My wife. Hyssha's sister. We were born in the same triad family on Elizabeth's Land, grew up together, lived together practically all our lives. We were the first to travel to the head of the canal. I depended on her.”

Frick, out of Brion's view, lifted his fingers to his lips and shook his head slowly, warning us away from these topics for now.

I suddenly cared little for Lamarckia's secrets, as if Brion's interest and passion had tainted them.

Hour after hour, kilometer after kilometer, the canal threaded due east into Hsia's interior with a series of barely perceptible bends and jogs, faint curves on its steady journey. The waters, Brion said, had been flowing here for at least ten million years; the canal and the hundreds of branch canals that drew from these waters, suffusing them into the inland reaches like blood into tissue, had once been parts of a natural river system, but had been adapted by the ecos to its own purposes.

“Until recently, these waters carried replacement scions in floating clusters, like rafts,” Brion said. “The canal was thick with them.”

The waters flowed clear and empty.

“What happened to them?” Salap asked.

“They stopped coming down about a month ago. Something's going on, perhaps a fluxing. I haven't been up the canal to the Valley of Dawn in several months ... I left Caitla there, and ... I suppose I didn't have the courage to return. Besides, preparing for Lenk's visit has distracted me. Now that he's here, I wonder why I've worked so hard.”

Frick tried to change the subject, to steer him back to affairs in Thistledown, anything to keep Brion occupied and his mind off this subject, but the small man gravitated back to it.

“I've become lonely without my wife.” His face went blank as he stared in my direction. “Being with her is a different kind of loneliness.”

“Your wife?” Salap asked, puzzled.

Frick's face went pale.

“No,” Brion said distantly. “Caitla died.”

“I'm most curious about the current Nexus's attitude toward Lamarckia,” Frick said, fidgeting on the bench. Brion turned to him, his large liquid green eyes filled with hurt as if Frick had somehow insulted him. Frick's jitters became serious. For a moment I thought he might suddenly spring out of the boat.

Brion looked away from Frick, and his eyes focused on mine.

“I get very dark, thinking about it,” he said. “It makes me feel so inferior. And I've worked hard to earn this pride. I've taken the wreck I found in Godwin, and patched it, and steered it through bad storms. It's a miracle any of us are alive—and no thanks to Lenk.

“I should be free to have my pride, but she's taken it from me. I'm sure she has. The canal's been empty for weeks now.”

Salap gave me a lidded, dubious look. Conversation lapsed, much to Frick's relief.

The sun emerged from behind clouds and the air became thick and humid. We had passed the barren gaps of old farmland. Along the shore, the black cliffs of the thickets towered thirty and forty meters above the canal, and the water echoed and splashed as it raced down side tunnels like so many swallowing throats.

The steward laid out padded sleeping mats on the deck and we slept under the double arc of stars. I stared up at the stars through a thin night haze over the canal, wondering if I would dream again when I slept.

My mother would recognize me now. Helpless, mortal, sleeping, and with dreams.

The canal water lapped at the hull of the boat, lulling me. Toward the bow, Brion and Frick slept, one of them snoring faintly. Salap lay on top of the cabin. If he slept, he did not snore.

“Unless you know where you are, you don't know who you are.”

I began to know where I was.

We awoke in a golden fog. The mist-thick morning air burned gold over the canal. The steward brought a hot, yeasty decoction in a silver pot and poured it into cups, then served warm, crisp cakes for breakfast. We sat beneath the canopy as the fog burned off, all but Brion, who kept to himself near the bow.

Frick chatted lightly about incidentals, filling the time with stories of trivial social events surrounding Brion. I did not find his stories amusing, but what he said filled the time and offended no one.

My butt became sore with sitting. I stood and walked aft, standing near the stern to watch our wake in the empty water.

On the shores of the canal, the thickets became gnarled, their black clipped edges turning light purple and irregular, lumpy. Only once did I see something moving through the branches, like a huge brown earthworm. Salap came aft to sit beside me as the hours passed into evening.

“The captain and I studied this coast years ago,” he said. “Though we never went up this canal, or even as far as the lake. Within the thickets, there are many dozens of types of scions. That was back when Lenk was trying to romance the women who ran things in Godwin. Bring them back into the fold ... But I don't see much scion activity now. Perhaps Brion is right, and some sort of fluxing is imminent.”

“Are you sure there's no other ecoi on Hsia?” I asked.

“None that have been discovered. This one is old, old, perhaps older than any other on Lamarckia. Baker thought it might be the ancestor of all ecoi. I believe it covers the entire continent.”

That afternoon, we passed a large flatboat loaded with mounds of dark, fine dirt—some sort of ore. Brion sat on the bow with knees drawn up and watched it pass down the canal. Several bare-chested men on the flatboat waved cheerfully, and Brion waved back once. He said to Frick, “A lighter haul again. She's not piling it up like she used to.”

Salap squatted beside me and frowned. “Who is this ‘she’ he keeps talking about?” he whispered. “What does ‘she’ have to do with piles of dirt? I'm sick of mystery.”

“It's his show,” I said, and thought of the Fishless Sea and its mystery attraction.

As evening came, we passed another flatboat, half loaded with piles of brown and red logs like stacked sausages.

“Food,” Frick said. “More than we could ever hope to grow ourselves.” But something bothered him about the boat, and he went forward to stoop beside Brion. They talked in whispers for a while, and Brion became agitated, finally waving Frick away.

Ahead, the canal broadened into a small lake. All around the lake shore, long dark structures like huge cocoons, with fibrous gray walls, protruded halfway into the water. Between the cocoons lay flat open spaces, and offshore from one of these spaces, a floating crane with a shovel attachment was busily clearing four mounds of ore and loading them into a third flatboat. The ore lay in diminishing piles in a clearing that might have once held a dozen or more mounds of similar size.

“Are you curious?” Brion called back to us.

“Very curious,” Salap answered.

“Let it build, let it build,” Brion said. “It's seldom I have so many intelligent witnesses. Allow me a little drama.”

Salap tapped his fingertips on the rear gunwale, head lowered. “Pity us, Ser Olmy. Lenk has always behaved like one kind of child. Brion is another.”

There had been a maxim in Thistledown political science classes: that the governed shaped their governors. This was not quite the same as saying that the people got the government they deserved, but it pointed in that direction. What galled me was the pain and suffering of the innocent, those too young to make a choice, those born on Lamarckia.

But Brion had been one of those, too.

“If I had been a scientist on the Thistledown, or in the Way,” Salap said, “how many more intelligent, more capable men and women would stand ahead of me, occupying the finest positions, making the greatest discoveries?”

“So?” I asked, puzzled.

“I know myself, Ser Olmy. I am one of the most intelligent people on this planet.”

“And that worries you,” I said.

“It terrifies me. I long for my superiors.” He peered across the calm waters at the shores of this strange lake. “Who mines the ore? Where does it come from?”

“She does,” I suggested. “His dead wife, Caitla.”

Salap mused, “We are in a land of dreams, Ser Olmy.”

The lake passed behind, the canal narrowed and deepened, and we saw no more flatboats, or any other boats at all. The pilot pushed us against the slow steady waters, the electric motors humming, the screws leaving a shimmering wake behind, set with jewels of fire from the westering sun. The sunset light made Salap a gilded pirate. We said little to each other.

I think both of us expected to die soon; either Brion's premonitions of change would be true, and the change, whatever it was, would kill us, or Brion himself would change and kill us...

Our chances seemed slim.

I thought often of Shirla, and hoped she was being treated well, but in truth, all the people we had left behind—dead or alive—seemed to retreat in memory as well as time. My universe narrowed to the boat, the canal, Salap, and Brion. All others—even Frick and the boat's crew—were supernumeraries.

Frick crept aft often enough and spoke to us. He seemed even more acutely aware of his mortality. His nervous chatter became an irritation, and was seldom informative. He would not answer direct questions, deferring instead to Brion, who sat near the bow like a sad, unappeasable monkey.

Before our dinner was served, I walked forward and stood beside him. I was catching some of Salap's attitude and feeling impatient, even reckless. He peered up at me expectantly.

“You make everybody nervous,” I said softly. “Is that what you want?”

“I am a powerful man, Ser Olmy. But I'm not capricious. I've ruled this part of Lamarckia with a steady hand and done well, under the circumstances. Rough times make for rough decisions.”

“At the risk of displeasing you, I'd like to describe what I saw upriver from Calcutta.”

Brion turned away with a roll of his eyes. “No doubt some of General Beys's doings,” he said.

“Not one of his successes.”

“I haven't spoken about such things with General Beys,” Brion said.

“You gave him orders to look for resources, to gather children and equipment from undefended villages?”

“I know him well. He is not a monster. I appointed him after the worst famine, after he had lost his children and his wife ... He had no family at all then. He had a look in his eye that told me he would be useful. So little left to live for.”

“I arrived on Lamarckia near a village called Moonrise. Nearly everybody in the village had been killed. They would not agree to give Beys small deposits of ore. I presume Beys wanted to take the ore without working through Lenk ... and that the ore you get here was not sufficient.”

“Are you going to put me through some sort of inquisition? I gave up self-criticism after Caitla died.”

“I just want to pass on this bad memory.”

He blinked slowly. “If you have to.”

I told him about the bodies piled high within the buildings in Moonrise, the implacable soldiers on the flatboats on the Terra Nova, about the trap above Calcutta and the children spilling into the river. I described the expression on the face of the soldier as he methodically and dispassionately fired his rifle from the prow of the flatboat. “He was shooting at everybody. Even at the children in the river.”

“He was frightened out of his wits,” Brion said.

“He was your hand,” I said. “Your killing hand.” My anger had built so suddenly I heard a hissing in my ears, my heart pounded, and I bit my lip until I felt under control again.

Brion had been saying, almost unheard, “I don't understand what you mean. He was a soldier.”

“You made him,” I said, voice low. Salap came forward, concerned. I was putting us in danger. I was the one who should have stayed behind.

But Brion's face was bright, almost cheerful. “Tell me how you think I am responsible for everybody on Lamarckia,” he said. “That's a curious idea.”

“What good does it do your people when you set loose monsters and fools, who kill without need, who destroy what you can't use?”

“I expect better from the Hexamon. Are you sure you're not a pretender?” He chuckled and shook his head.

He was right, of course. I was not expressing myself clearly. “General Beys did nothing to help Naderville or you,” I said. “You have caused people to be killed for no reason. You've opened the gates to old, evil history. You won't be able to close them when Lenk is gone.”

Brion leaned forward, eyes wide and sharp, lips drawn back in a feral grin. “I have thought long and hard about these things, Ser Olmy. What you call ‘old, evil history’ is the growth and maturation of small groups of humans. If Lamarckia were ever populated to the density of Thistledown, we'd behave very differently. Lenk opened the doors to history when he brought us here, four thousand people alone on a huge world. If you want to find the father of that poor bastard on the flatboat, don't look to me ... Look to Lenk.”

He waved his hand then, and Frick hastened us back to the benches amidships, under the canopy, telling some inane story about how many celebrations there had been when the food on the flatboats first began arriving.

A light shower fell as evening set in. Brion stayed out in the wet, staring at the northern bank of the canal, now and then wiping the rain from his face with a measured and exactly duplicated swipe of his hand.

The steward, a man whose qualifications were efficiency, quiet reserve, and such a presence that he would fade from memory and pass unnoticed, served a dark sweet beer and cold cakes with a tangy syrup. He switched the lights on around the boat. We kept to the center of the canal, the motors humming and pushing us along at seven or eight knots, the boat a small spot of light in fixed and endless obscurity.

Brion came back to the seats beneath the canopy, dripping and soaked, his hair hanging dark and shiny, and accepted a towel from the steward.

“I'm no monster,” he said.

“I'm no monster,” he repeated after he sat, hoisting the glass of sweet beer. “I did not come here to impose a single mind's philosophy on strangeness and wonder. I did not convince four thousand people that my every word was truth and that the world they had grown up in, that had shaped their thought, was an evil place full of evil schemes that had to be escaped from.”

“You blame all this on Lenk,” I said. “Even what you do, or order done.” Frick sank back into a shadowy corner. Salap murmured that this discussion was useless.

But Brion flared. “Do you know how this all began, Ser Olmy? Has anyone discovered my little personal bit of history in Lenk's private domain? Caitla and I loved each other from a very young age. We went to Athenai as Lenk school teachers, and were privileged enough to meet with Lenk himself, Good Lenk, Able Lenk. Lenk became enamored of Caitla and her sister—”

“Ser Brion—” Frick attempted to interrupt. He seemed ready once again to leap overboard.

“This is my story, damn us all,” Brion said, reaching out and pushing against Frick's outstretched hand. “If Ser Olmy is from the Hexamon, then he plays a judge—he must! he cannot do otherwise—for the people I would most like to emulate. I was very young when my parents brought me here—seven years old. I had no choice. Neither did Caitla.”

He leaned back against the rear pad of the bench and glared at me, then cursed under his breath and leaned forward, folding his hands as if in prayer, touching his nose to his thumbs. “Lenk became enamored of Caitla. He paid formal suit to her. He was already married, of course, and she refused him. He would not take her refusal. He was an old and revered man, to us. Hyssha knew we were in love and went to him. He took her ... But that was not enough. He wanted Caitla. Finally, Caitla and I had no choice but to leave Athenai. We could not go anywhere in Lenk's domain without being found and brought back. He would not kill us, no, he was not that kind of monster. But he considered certain things his privilege, his payment for being who he was, what he was to all of his people. He would take a few choice tidbits now and then, to make up for the misery of being a leader, a prophet, almost a god. So we stole a boat and crossed to Hsia, to Godwin. That's how it began, Ser Olmy. Ten years ago.”

Frick closed his eyes and sat across from Brion, trembling as if with his own grief.

“We grew up in Lamarckia. To me when I was young it seemed a rich and wonderful world that did not actively fight us, but did not accept us, either. I learned early that we are not part of the flesh of this living place. We have suffered and died because we stood between two philosophies—to make this place ours, and make it fit our rules, and to let it develop as if we never existed. Lenk ... could not decide.” He stared at me, the whites of his eyes prominent.

“What have you decided?” I asked.

“I am all for Lamarckia,” Brion said. “Yet I have fought against it, ordered its tissue ripped away and the land exposed for human farms making human food—and when the crops died, tried to harness the ecos, to fit my people in to what was available ... And still we starved. Because I loved my people, I profaned this continent, as others had before me. Until I learned another way.

“I did not bow down to Lenk, would not surrender my wife to him, so he let my people die without lifting a finger.”

“He claims you did not ask for help,” Salap said.

This finally drew out Brion's full fury. He turned to Salap, face twisted, cheeks red, with red spots and a vein standing out on his forehead. “Dear Fate and Breath, I told him all that was happening! I had responsibilities. I asked for his help despite my hatred. There were no secrets between us about how my people suffered!”

Salap remained cool as ice. His thin black mustache barely twitched at one corner. “Whether Ser Olmy is here to judge us or not, I expressly do not judge, and I have been sequestered from politics for so long I am clearly out of touch.”

Brion stared between us with a wild, despairing expression for long, painful seconds. Then his expression returned to alert calm with a speed that could be explained only by great skill, or the presence of a deep chasm in his emotions, a kind of fault-line through his being. I had seen the ability in other leaders, to assume masks so often and with such conviction even they could not know their true feelings. Self-truth is a luxury leaders can seldom afford, or perhaps tolerate. But in Brion, the talent had become something more, even an illness.

I had Brion's measure now. He was not a great man, not even in the impure sense of prompting or guiding great events. He was a man of small, specific talents. And he had been badly scarred. Whether he told us the truth, I could not judge, but the pain was real.

“Lamarckia is about to flower,” he said softly. “Caitla and I did that, at least. And when it does, what place will she give us, what place can we have?”

The countryside covered by thicket, the black or purplish edges of which rose along the sides of the canal like topiary walls, came to an end as the boat pushed into morning. I awoke having dreamed of a hall and the unpleasant door again, to the smell of cakes sizzling in a pan, and something else pungent and herbal, like fresh hot tar mixed with black tea, molasses with roses, spruce gum with the scent of new-mown grass—a perfume I have not since been able to replicate either in life or memory: the smell of the living palaces of the great seed-mothers of all Hsia.

We had come into a huge fresh-water inland sea or lake, the southern and eastern shores lost beyond the horizon, the northern close by, perhaps two kilometers off. The waves lapped crystal blue around the boat, and from the shore—a brilliant green shore, low and flat, covered with immense tapering green stalks like the shoots of young plants but without leaves—came a windy, shooshing, trilling sound, as alien as anything I ever heard on Lamarckia.

“Earth was a green world,” Nimzhian had said on Martha's Island. Nowhere on Lamarckia had there ever been this immensity of green.

Brion stood on the bow, caught half-dressed and transfixed by the sight. Salap calmly washed his face in the lake water, glancing up at me as I put on my shirt and accepted a cup of yeasty broth from the steward.

“Look at all she's done!” Brion called out. “It's been only three months, and how many thousands of hectares she's changed!”

Salap stood beside me forward of the single metal tree and stared at the shore, eyes narrowed. The steward brought a tray of cakes forward and offered them. Frick leaned on the canopy. A light wind blew through his hair, his white shirt hung open beneath his faded rose-colored vest, and he grinned as if drunk.

“How do you claim to have done this?” Salap asked Brion.

“I don't just claim it,” Brion said. “I know the truth, because after she made the ones in our own shape, and we showed her where she had gone wrong ... After she made the food we could eat and filtered from her ground the ores and placed them where we could gather them, I paid her back. I have studied her for years, and I knew her weakness, her inefficiency.” He stared at Salap, eyes blinking rapidly.

“What did you give her?” Salap asked.

“What is she?” I asked simultaneously.

Brion shook his head, plainly awed and even a little frightened by what he saw on the shore. He scrambled aft and grabbed a cake from Frick's tray, gobbling it like a hungry child.

“More than I could have imagined,” he said. “Forget trying to replace our dead children. Forget trying to teach her scions to speak. None of that meant anything to her. She did not understand. She could imitate, but she could not understand. It was our bottle that she took and gloried in.”

“We don't understand,” Salap said patiently.

“I distilled it and purified it from weeds in a pond outside our sleeping quarters. Decorative weeds Lenk brought from Thistledown, lovely simple things. Easy to isolate what she needed and present it to her in a bottle, concentrated, unmistakable.”

“Chlorophyll,” Salap said.

Brion smiled. “Lamarckia's weakness,” he said, crumbs falling from his mouth. “Not just chlorophyll, but the chloroplasts, the whole intricate photosynthetic structures of our plants, isolated and in context. Starches and sugars and the entire cycle, all in a bottle. And she understood. She gave us the experiments you saw in Naderville. Caitla's garden. The cleansing airborne phytids. More food. I could have signaled Beys to return home, because I knew then that we had won. We would be able to feed our people and make machines and create our little enclave ... We did not need anybody else.”

“But you didn't call him back,” I said.

“No. Caitla said we had to be true to our promise. We had to look for you, Ser Olmy, the agent or agents of the Hexamon, and we had to bring Lenk low, to make it clear that humans could not survive here. And then we would leave Lamarckia with the gift we had given her.”

“You keep mentioning a she. Who or what is she?” I asked again. “The seed-mother, the queen?”

Brion pointed to the east. Above a blue horizon haze, we saw seven huge black trunks or towers rising inland. Each was at least four or five hundred meters tall, and seventy to a hundred meters across at the base. “I don't know what she is, exactly. What part she is, with a new shape, I mean ... Or whether she's something completely new. She may not have even been created yet. But we will know her when we see her.”

Brion turned toward Salap and me. His eyes wavered between us, then fixed on me with a look of both determination and desperation. “The Hexamon must come and take us back. She has what she needs. No other ecos can challenge her now.”

The pilot pulled the boat into a narrow inlet that curved east and then north from the shore of the lake. We motored quietly between dense walls of intense blue-green growth, broad fernlike leaves with water glistening on the myriad tips, thin helical stalks corkscrewing through the growth and rising dozens of meters above this moving, shuddering mass, the immense green stalks or shoots we had seen from the distance, sprouts the size of giant sequoias. Salap wore an expression I had not seen on him even when we found the homunculi on Martha's Island: baffled wonderment. “It is a new silva,” he said. “Everything is different.”

The late-morning light reflected from this new ebullience of green made us all look like creatures swimming in ocean shallows. Brion's pale skin in particular took on a greenish cast. He crouched on the bow, elbows on his knees, fingers straightening and folding like spider's legs, and licked his lips constantly.

“I hope we can find the landing,” he called back. “It's not far now ... I hope she hasn't knocked it down in her enthusiasm.”

The scions in the vivarium had imitated specific varieties of terrestrial plant life. Here, the imitation was superficial or parallel. Clearly, whatever controlled the new growth was starting from simple beginnings and creating new plans and schemes at a prodigious rate.

Shadows passed overhead: immense balloons trailing long black cables passed over the new silva, their undersides festooned with lacework baskets filled with green balls the size of my fist. The cables curled and danced over the silva, touching down, contracting, pulling the balloon in one direction, and then another cable jerking it at a thirty or forty degree angle in another direction. The balloons traveled at five or six knots, and three passed over us before we reached the landing Brion was searching for.

The pilot worked the boat carefully back and forth to bump against the tip of the xyla dock, which had almost been overgrown. Brion jumped onto the dock and lifted his arms. A thick tangle of fernlike leaves and yellow-green stalks curled up and parted at his feet like grass rolled in a man's palm.

“She remembers?” Brion said. “Come on. It's a brisk walk from here—three kilometers to the towers.”

The crew of the boat and Brion's guards would not be coming with us. They seemed relieved.

Frick took several bags of food and four canteens from the steward, who looked at the teeming silva nervously. Before we stepped off the boat, Frick pulled a slate from his pocket and unfolded it, then gestured for Salap and me to look at the screen. A dark-haired woman, somber and coldly beautiful, with a distinct resemblance to Hyssha, looked back at us with skeptical eyes. “This was Caitla,” he said softly. Then he nodded for us to proceed.

Brion plunged through the parting growth with manic energy, like a boat plowing its own wake in reversed time. After several minutes we could not see him, but followed on his path through the new silva. Salap asked Frick, “How does he know which direction to go?”

“It's making a trail. It shows us where to go,” Frick said, sweating in the humid heat. I caught a faint whiff of sulfur—more volcanic activity. Every few dozen meters, we passed through a kind of clearing where the new green scions clung low to the ground, and we could see the towers. They were hung with a thick pelt of creepers and growths not green, but purple or black. We made steady if not beeline progress toward them.

Another dark balloon jerked and glided overhead, bearing its cargo to the west.

“It experiments with the new green forms,” Salap said, “but keeps its central parts unchanged.” He pointed to the towers. “Is he taking us there?” he asked Frick.

Frick nodded. “I've been here with them five times,” he said. “It's never looked like this.”

After fifteen minutes of steady walking, we caught sight of Brion. He stood facing north at the top of a hill rising ten meters above the level ground, covered with a knee-deep tangle of long green creepers little thicker than strings. He turned to call down the slope to us, “You can see what she's up to. You can see the whole plan from here.”

We climbed the hill and stood beside him. The smell of the creepers, pressed against our shoes, was intensely fruity, and tiny puffs of red dust shot up above our knees. On a level now with most of the new silva—only the immense green shoots rose higher than the hill—we saw a spreading carpet of intense blue-green, banded with concentric loops of lighter yellow-green. We could see the edge of the growth to the north, and a boundary between old silva and new—green supplanting brown, black, and purple thicket. Across the ecoscape, emerging from between the seven pillars, an effervescence of hundreds of black and purple and red transporter balloons tugged and drifted to the outer perimeters, replacing dying scions from the air with new green growths.

“How long until this reaches Naderville?” Frick asked.

“I don't know,” Brion said.

“A week or less, I estimate,” Salap said. “Are your people prepared?”

“I don't know how we can be prepared,” Brion said. He started down the opposite slope of the hill. I turned and surveyed from our relatively high vantage, locating the inlet, the waters of the lake reaching to the horizon in the south, and back around to the pillars again. A breathy warbling whistle, soft and plaintive, came from the south, perhaps from the lake shores. The sound made me shiver. That so much power and moving change would make such a simple, birdlike noise, seemed both typical of Lamarckia, and terrifying.

To the west, cumulus and glowering thunderheads built soft mountains. Brion called from the margin of the silva, as it again parted before him, “The ecos makes its own weather. There will be rain within a few days—wait and see.”

“Yes,” Salap muttered. “We've experienced that phenomenon.”

We caught up with Brion again five minutes later. He stood in a blind alley, the scions ahead refusing to part. He paced back and forth, sweat streaming down his face. Frick handed him a marked canteen and he drank deeply and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Frick handed us other canteens. Brion drank from his own and nobody else's.

Brion took a deep breath. “It wouldn't lead us this far and no farther...” He continued pacing, brushing past me. Again, from the south, the breathless warbling. Salap took advantage of the pause to more closely inspect the morphology of these new green scions.

“I think they are all experimental varieties of food-makers,” he concluded. “She—the ecos, I mean—is experimenting with the most efficient structures. Storing nutrients, using them to promote scion production in the center ... Where we are going.”

Beneath our feet, brown tangles and shreds like twisted and splintered dead branches formed the floor of the silva. Pale white tubes pushed through the detritus. Where one of us had stepped on a tube near the surface, it leaked a milky fluid in steady drips. Salap applied a drop of the fluid to his tongue. “It's sweet,” he said.

A new machine, a new experiment.

“Would you have done this?” I asked Salap as Brion restlessly stalked back along the trail, out of hearing.

“I don't know,” Salap said thoughtfully. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “If I had thought of it, who knows what I would have done? We do not know what he was bargaining with ... What sort of form, organism, he and his wife were communicating with. Or how they communicated.”

“I saw them,” Frick said, hunkering down to wait. He nodded and wiped his forehead with a cloth. “They were small, black worm things, on seven or nine legs. They made sounds like human speech, and they took things from us, our food and equipment, and brought back other things in exchange. Brion and Caitla showed them plants in pots and in bottles, and in days, the black things brought back imitations. Caitla was ecstatic. Later, on the third trip, I saw the first one that tried to look human. It even tried to speak. We communicated by gestures, but it didn't have real eyes. It—she ... it tried to appear female—tracked us by our heat, I think. Ser Brion and Caitla showed it more plants. Caitla's favorites. It made even better imitations and we took them back with us to the vivarium.

“But I've never seen her. The one he's hoping for. When we were last here, after Caitla died, I stayed on the boat. None of this jungle was here.”

“Is he hoping for something like his wife?” I asked. “An imitation?”

Frick didn't enjoy that thought at all. He shifted from one crooked leg to the other and wiped his eyes with his fingers, grimacing. “I knew Caitla,” he said. “She was a stern but fine woman. She suited Ser Brion wonderfully. When she died, we all felt her loss deeply. Ser Brion was devastated. Hyssha, too.”

I could not equate any of this with the raids and murders. In the middle of so much change, death and cruelty and incompetence might lose all their importance. My own death might be completely appropriate, or meaningless. I would give up trying to reconcile those cruelties. After my outburst in front of Brion, I had lost any sense of mission or role; I was no better, no more powerful, than Frick. I had finally earned my humility, my perfect sense of mortality.

I wondered what it would be like to be in the middle of this greening, growing silva, alone, for days or weeks.

Shirla provided the only frame of reference I could not shake myself loose from. I wanted to see her, to make sure she was well. If we could meet again, I would have new bearings, a new sense of purpose, free of Thistledown and the Way.

Brion returned to the trembling barricade again and stood silent, head bowed. “I am patient,” he murmured. “I am patient.”

Still, the barricade remained.

“We have enough food and water,” he said. “We'll wait here until tomorrow. I'm sorry. This hasn't happened before.”

“None of this has happened before,” Salap said.

We slept on the detritus with the silva shivering and growing around us. Every few hours, a sudden rush of motion through the walls around the path made a sound like wind blowing through trees. I slept fitfully and did not remember any dreams, and awoke feeling groggy, not prepared for anything. Several minutes after waking, after eating a cake and drinking from the canteen Salap and I shared, I regained my alertness. The ration of water was not sufficient and I felt thirsty, but not parched.

Brion knelt before the barricade. “She's preparing something,” he said. “She would not lead us this far just to block us.”

“She is intelligent, then?” Salap asked.

Brion laughed and shook his head. “How many times have I asked that question? How many times did Caitla and I talk about it? And after Caitla died ... Of course, I would like her to return. That would be wonderful. To have her somehow absorbed in all her beauty, her thoughts ... by something larger. Intelligent.”

I thought of the discussion on the Vigilant. Lamarckia would be a poor substitute for eternal bliss, but a fair compromise compared to the nullity of empty death.

In the cleared path behind us, we all heard simultaneously the tones and gutturals of human voices. Brion jerked his head sharply around. The look of panic that came to his face, and the searching of his eyes across the whispering, trembling walls flanking the trail, struck me almost like a knife. Here was the face of a man who did not actually want to see the ghost he desired above all else.

Frick's conscience might have been clear. At any rate, it was he who first recognized the voices. “It's Hyssha,” he said. “And Grado, I think ... And Ullman.”

A tall man with close-cropped black hair and suspicious black eyes came around the corner ten meters from the path's dead end, saw us, and stopped. He glanced to his right down the path and made a small gesture with his half-raised hand, as if he had come upon wild beasts and whoever followed must be as quiet as he.

The stately, somber woman with auburn hair, Hyssha Chung, walked around him without hesitating and approached us, or rather, approached Brion, for she did not pay any attention at all to Frick or Salap or myself.

“You shouldn't be here,” she admonished. “Damn your breath, you should not be here, and certainly not now!”

Brion raised his hands as if in defense. “There's nothing happening back there,” he said.

“What is more necessary and immediate here?” she asked. For an instant, she seemed to acknowledge that I at least existed, with a flicker of her eye in my direction, but then her scowl deepened and she leaned toward Brion, whose hands rose higher. “Lenk is packing up his people and preparing to return to their boats. Fassid says your absence leaves them no choice.”

“They won't talk with Beys?”

“What made you think they would?”

“Beys handles all that. What difference does it make where I am?” Brion asked. “And what can Lenk do, anyway?” Before this resolute woman, his voice took on the tone of a defensive child.

“How do you know what Lenk can or can't do?” Chung pursued, pushing her nose almost into Brion's face. “There's more than this monstrous silva at stake.”

“Look how it's changed,” Brion said, holding his ground against the taller woman, but hoping to persuade, not chastise.

Frick looked on this exchange with something like boredom. Chung did not overawe him—at least not when she had her attention on Brion.

“I don't give a damn how it's changed.” Her voice broke and she took his hands in hers. “What can you do here?”

“Our legacy is here,” Brion said. His face creased like soft leather and he shook his wrists gently, not to break her grip on them, but to make some obscure point physical. “She is here. I hoped to convince the Hexamon—”

Now Chung rounded on me, with utter disdain and contempt. “Fassid told me about this pretender,” she said. “They've been embarrassed by him and by this foolish man's gullibility.” She pointed to Salap. “Even Lenk couldn't think of a way to use him against us. But you believe!”

“He has no proof,” Frick said in a mild conversational voice, “but he is very convincing. I think Ser Brion is justified—”

She threw her hand out and nearly struck him in the face. “Who or what he is doesn't matter. Where are the armies, the forces that would pull us out of here?”

“They haven't come,” Brion said, as if that were a trifle.

Her brown eyes narrowed and her lip curled again. She regarded me from the corner of her eyes. I could not help my reaction. I had never been the most gentlemanly when faced with rampant female anger. In truth, histrionics of any kind had not been a regular part of my life on Thistledown.

I laughed. Chung did not move or change her expression.

“You are dead men,” she said quietly to Salap and me. “You will not carry any of our words back to Lenk.”

“Hyssha,” Brion said, pulling her hand from his wrist, “None of that means anything. What Lenk does means nothing, and what I do ... Nothing. Look at the green. I've given her the tools. The advantage. I made my request clear.”

“Caitla is dead,” Chung said. “My sister won't come back.”

The wall of green at the end of the path trembled violently, a cleft forming in the middle and deepening, while the edges pushed to either side. In this parting green sea, our biological Moses seemed as surprised as any of us. A haze of red dust lingered in the air, drifting slowly back to the ground. The path soon extended a hundred meters beyond where we stood, to the inner edge of the new silva, and the beginning of the grounds whose boundary posts were the pillars.

“It wouldn't open for me,” Brion said to Chung. “It's opening for you. She smells you. You smell like Caitla.”

Chung stared down the trail, far less contemptuous and angry than a moment before. Her dignity broke and her arms shook, and she looked to Salap. “That's ridiculous,” she said.

“Let's go and see,” Salap said, following Brion, who had already resumed his walk.

“She is dead,” Chung said to Frick and me, with no certainty. “Nothing can bring her back.”

23

At the end of the trail lay a desolate stretch of broken lava chunks no bigger than my hand, as regular as gravel in the bed of an ancient river. This field of broken lava stretched across several kilometers, interrupted by six squat dark reddish-brown mounds, each fifty or sixty meters high, capped with craters rimmed with pale yellow, like miniature mountains tipped with impure snow. Hot springs flowed from the center of these mounds and made irregular darker slicks down their sides, pooling around the bases.

Spaced around the perimeter of the lava field, the vine-covered purple and black pillars cast long late-morning shadows over the gravel and two of the mounds. Surrounding the field, the new green silva contrasted sharply with the flat dark colors of lava and the brilliant yellow-white caps of rime on the mounds.

In the sky over the field, their numbers increasing with the warming rays of the noonday sun, hundreds of balloons lifted their cargoes of larval scions, cables dropping straight to the lava plain, only their tips moving, touching delicately on the inhospitable gravel and jerking back like the weary ends of octopus tentacles, pulled from a familiar sea. The balloons rose from the center of the field, hidden from our view by the nearest mound.

Salap could not conceal his enchantment. “We have seen a great many things and survived, Ser Olmy,” he whispered to me. “But we have never seen anything like this.”

Directly in front of us, a pool of steaming reddish-brown liquid—not lava, but supersaturated, mineral-rich hot water, the consistency of molten glass—rose between the chunks of lava and solidified with small crackling sounds, its smooth surface darkening and fogging. Beyond that pool, a number of pools had already hardened, making a series of smooth trails across the rugged gravel. Brion stood on the fogged brownish surface, then walked lightly to the next.

The vitrified pools led us around the nearest mound. Sulfurous water, steaming, bubbling, slipped down the side of the mound barely ten meters from us. On the other side, we had a clear view of the center of the field. A dark red hemisphere as large as a stadium lay at the end of the trail like an immense bubble of blood, but solid and glistening in the sun.

Around the hemisphere, the laden balloons rose slowly, doggedly, from red-rimmed craters, and began their aerial crawl to the greening silva and beyond.

“It's no different. Except for the balloons, this hasn't changed,” Brion called over his shoulder, jumping from step to step.

All of our faces took on a bloodred tinge as we approached the dome. Chung's earlier bravado had subsided; she watched everything with quiet, nervous alertness. Brion, on the other hand, had become manic, darting back and forth in the red glow of the hemisphere, eyes flashing with tears, as if he had finally come home.

Salap walked apart from all of us, lost in his own contemplations, planting his feet carefully, as if the brownish steps of the trail might crack and suck us all down. Frick stayed close to me.

The trail ended at a puckered line like a scar drawn in the dome. Brion touched the long scar in the dome's side, but by himself could not get it to expand.

Salap took Chung's elbow, pushing her to stand beside Brion. “Your place,” he murmured as she resisted.

“She smells you. She believes in you,” Brion told her. “She believes in us.”

With Chung by his side, the scar parted with a tiny sucking noise, and the edges withdrew like a curtain to form a smooth round orifice in the side of the hemisphere.

We walked through. Inside, our eyes adjusted to a blood-colored shadowy interior. Translucent arches lifted from the floor on our left, supporting the dome's perfect exterior. A few dozen meters to our right, another set of arches rose. Between the arches, suspended on thick knotted slings, or depending directly from the inner curves of the arches, enormous sacs like deflated balloons hung, their lower extremities bulging round with deposits of dark fluid.

To left and right, translucent blisters interrupted the resilient floor, each three to four meters broad and rising above the level of our waists. Within the blisters, coiled tubes and flattened oblongs pressed together against the membrane, pale in themselves, but surrounded by a dark, thick fluid like petroleum.

A dozen steps ahead, the arches met at an inner chamber, its walls curved inward, like the cubic intersection between six enormous bubbles. All the surfaces within the hemisphere were sections of large bubbles, expertly fashioned and cut or intersected by other bubble surfaces of varying diameters. We might have entered the interior of a vast radiolarian, one of the silicate-skeletoned microscopic sea creatures of Earth's oceans.

We walked slowly between these mingled wonders. A new odor filled the air, sweet as perfume, musky.

“The outer veil. Smell it,” Brion said, waving his hand. “There are eight veils, eight airborne layers of scent. I carried a small scion here once, six months ago. It struggled in my arms, and when it passed through the third scented veil, it collapsed in a thick liquid and fell through my fingers. What lies within tolerates none of its children ... unless they have permission. And the only scions who have permission are the spies, the samplers and gatherers that bring information. What lies within is always hungry for patterns, blueprints, diagrams ... information.”

Halfway across the interior, we saw a storage area for slabs and chunks of rock—slates, sandstones, conglomerates, flints, and other varieties, arranged in piles with little apparent sense of order, covering perhaps a hundred square meters in the overhang of a main supporting arch. The piles rose over our heads in the center, and just to one side, an elephant-sized, many-clawed scion stood unmoving except for a slight trembling of its forward limbs: many-spiked-gripping claws as long as my legs, some with sharp chisel-shaped tips. At its base lay split sections of stone, revealing beautiful impressed fossils. Brion stepped between two stacks and pulled out a shallow slab of limestone about thirty centimeters on a side. “She had these rocks collected and brought here. She uses them as a kind of library.”

He held the twenty-kilogram slab out to us. Embedded in the limestone was a black outline, a many-legged arthropod surrounded by broad feather-shaped feelers. “When my wife and I first came here, she couldn't see. She stored these fossils and studied them without eyes, tasting and feeling them.”

Salap stood beside Brion, hands held out, fingers greedily spread. He took the fossil, eyes nearly starting from their sockets. “Was this a scion?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Brion said. “It's at least tens of millions years old. If it's older, it comes from the era of shelly creatures that covered so much of Lamarckia with thick layers of limestone and made it so difficult to find metals and other minerals. How old do you think the ecoi are?”

“I've guessed hundreds of millions of years...” Salap said.

Brion shook his head. “Hsia was the first, and it may be less than twenty million years old. As for the rest, at most they're only a few million years old. Life was small and very simple before Hsia.

“When Hsia ventured out on land, there was very little oxygen, and no ozone in the upper atmosphere. It covered itself with a thick, protective layer. It may have taken fifteen million years for oxygen to reach its present levels.”

From ahead came a sharp, sweet smell. As we advanced to the inner cube, we passed through several varieties of this same smell, like veils of scent surrounding the body of a revered saint.

Brion stopped. The shriveled husks of what appeared to be human bodies lay crumpled at the spreading foot of an arch. The arch rose at least sixty meters to the vague red-suffused heights of the dome. The bodies ranged in size from less than a meter to over two meters, desiccated tissues stretched over internal frames that only crudely resembled skeletons. Blank hard-tissued faces stared at us with glazed eyes, the heads of dolls manufactured by a toymaker who had failed, and cast the inanimate results aside.

“These were experiments,” Brion said in a low voice. “She showed some to us the first time we came here. She knew what she wanted—something to communicate with us. She knew we weren't part of any ecos, and she desperately needed to discover what we were. The best way for her to learn ... her way of learning ... was to imitate us.”

The cubic frame ahead was larger and farther away than I had first thought. It lay fifty or sixty meters beyond the graveyard of rejected human-shapes. The last of the distinctive scents wafted around us, this one at once primally offensive and startlingly attractive: baking bread, hot tar, methane and hexane, smelling salts, and much more.

Brion approached the frame at the center of the hemisphere, walking like a tired old man. I tried to imagine his emotional state and could not. What he expected, what it was possible he might see, would have driven many men mad. As he walked ahead of us, he gave a broken explanation, in slow fragments, of his last visit. He had brought his dying wife inside the blood-bubble hemisphere, stayed with her, listening to her last breaths, her last words.

“She was in pain,” he said, voice shaky and hoarse. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, the string still wound around his finger. “Nobody could save her.” He touched the membranous wall of the frame and looked back at me. “She was extraordinary. We both prayed for the Hexamon to come and bring the medicine of Thistledown that Lenk left behind. He finally had his revenge on us. A lot of my people died the way she did. She lasted longer than most. Her liver and kidneys were rotting away. Such a simple disease to cure on Thistledown. But you did not come. When she died ... She died.” He pulled his hand back. “It was a relief. I felt as if I had died with her, and that was a relief, too. I placed her on the floor, inside ... I left and camped for five days on the edge of the lava field. Ser Frick brought me food from the launch. Nothing happened; nobody came out of the dome. I couldn't go back inside. We all returned to Naderville.”

Frick stared at the deepening shadows on all sides with a fearful squint. Hyssha Chung stayed close to Brion. Looking at me, she had only hate in her eyes. I represented all lost hope, final disappointment. I was a failure to all of them: no rescue imminent, no change and explanation, no reembracing in the arms of secure and all-knowing parents.

“She's in there,” Brion said huskily. “I mean, she's all around, but the heart of her heart is in there. Heart of Hsia's life.”

Outside the hemisphere, clouds must have covered the sun, for shadow enveloped us. All around, faint gleams pricked against the deep red and brown gloom, like stars in the heavens. Violet luminosity flickered within the frame. A low sound grumbled beneath our feet. Meters away, beyond several ranks of translucent walls and braces, something swelled like the throat on an enormous bullfrog, then subsided, expelling a sweetly repulsive scent of tar and burning resin.

Brion leaned against the wall of the frame, a pale shape against the darker membrane. This time, there was no preference for Hyssha. The wall seemed to absorb him, and the tissue beneath our feet grumbled again.

We heard a remarkable voice, and Salap jumped as if poked in the ribs. High, sweet, like the chirrup of a large insect mixed with a whistling flute, childlike, yet mannered and mature, it came from within the frame.

“Names clear now,” it said. “Names all are and clear?”

24

Time has become very unclear. My recovery is going smoothly, the attendants tell me. I am a celebrity in the Hexamon. Yanosh floats beside my couch.

“Was it Brion's wife?” Yanosh asks me.

We are in the Way, in free fall, in the hospital unit of the Axis City. I do not know for certain if I am dreaming or even dead. I remember telling my story to Yanosh and perhaps to others, but it has taken some time—some indefinite time—to reach this point. Events are jumbled.

Yanosh has changed. He has assumed an older face, to give the appearance of many decisions made, of political maturity. Only a few years have passed here, perhaps ten. What does that mean?

“Was it Brion's wife?” he asks again, patiently. He is first assistant to the newly elected Geshel presiding minister but has been spending much time in my unit, talking to me, awaiting the return of all my memories.

I know I am an old man, ninety or ninety-one Lamarckian years. I must be dead, or dying, and this is all a shrinking fragment of imagination.

“She was dead,” I manage to say.

“What spoke to you, then?”

His curiosity offends me, as if his wishing to know what the seed-mother or the queen looked like betrays a childish and trivial frame of mind. So much else of more importance. What Lenk did, or allowed his people to do. The greening, a wave of change, a fluxing across the generations, Hsia's use of Brion's gift, his name.

All seems compressed to me, and I have to regather my thoughts and find the thread again. Flight added to pain and starvation. The migrations from wherever the greening struck, wherever Hsia dominated. And how the name of Brion's wife was given to this tide they had begun, this transformed ecos now called Caitla, a vast vibrant specter that had so much to do with that voice, and nothing to do with Caitla herself, for she was dead. Her body lay untouched where Brion had placed it, within the frame, in the depths of the seed-mother's arena, the huge foam-bubble the color of blood.

“Nobody behind the voice,” I say.

“You mean, no intelligence.”

“No me, no you. No her.” I remember pain in my legs, in my arms, all my joints burning, having burned for years. That pain is gone now. I move my fingers and their joints bend with a purity, a smoothness I have forgotten.

“I do have work to do, Olmy,” Yanosh says. “I can't stay here forever. I did order the massive effort to open the geometry stacks. I won't take credit for proposing you be given a second incarnation. You earned that and the Nexus approved it, and it will not even count against your allowed rebirths...”

I am not grateful. I understand the value of death. My body—the body I no longer have—prepared my soul by decaying across a full and natural span of life. Because of so many years of starvation and flight, of grief and trial, my body became tough, and refused to die easily. But my mind knew the value of death. I am not grateful if life is what has been given back to me.

I had outlived two wives. My people had settled in the Kupe Islands, embraced by Cape Magellan in the south of Elizabeth's Land. I only remember broken pieces of Yanosh's agents entering my hut and finding me on a soft cot of mat fiber reeds, a special bed for dying.

“Elizabeth knew how to die,” I say to Yanosh.

“The ecos,” he says.

“Yes. The ecos. My wife's name was Rebecca.”

“She would not leave to come here,” Yanosh says. “She told us we were angels and we could have you, take you back to where you were born.”

“Yes.”

“She was your third wife.”

“Yes,” I say. “Do you want me to tell you everything that happened? I've lived a very long time, Yanosh.”

Yanosh appears genuinely distressed. “It was not our intention to abandon you, Olmy. You must believe that. The Naderites came to power and we could not mount the effort for years. When the Geshels took power again, the Jarts pressed us back. And when we finally returned, the geometry stack had become even more tangled, and we could not open a gate. We thought Lamarckia was lost.”

“I understand,” I say. My tone is still that of a tired old man, though my voice sounds young. I do not care to press blame. I have had a long and full life. I knew Shirla, and after her, Sikaya, and finally, Rebecca, who was an old woman when I discovered her beauty and loved her.

With my death, I will finally be human. I will know where I am.

“You want to know what she looked like,” I say.

“Nothing of the field or the dome exists anymore,” Yanosh says. “The pillars are bare, the dome is gone. The jungle took over everything. Only what you saw and remember remains.”

He calls it a jungle, not a silva. And that is what it had become. “All green. The last of the old on Hsia.”

I see ghosts around him, incorporeal images of others listening in. I am telling all the Hexamon. I am a celebrity.

25

I approached the frame. Chung would not enter. Frick followed Brion next, for he had been here before. He did not like being here, but he was loyal to Brion. Salap was having an epiphany. His face glowed with enthusiasm, skin creamy with brown shadows in the redness and murk as blocks of storm clouds crossed the sky above the dome. He patted my shoulder, smiled broadly, and passed through the curtainlike membrane, into the inner chamber. The membrane sealed smooth behind him, like the inverted wall of a thick soap bubble.

The voice spoke again, perfect and high. I heard Brion sobbing like a child. I pushed my hand against the membrane, felt it rush around my fingers and wrist and arm like a lip of slick flesh.

Within the frame, she stood in the middle of a mass of shiny black hemispheres, studded with black spikes and surmounted by black arches. She wore no clothing and her skin moved, rippling slightly as if she were a badly projected image.

Brion stood two steps from her, Frick by his side. Brion shook his head, chest wracked with sobs. Salap came closer to the female shape, chin in hand, studying her. Her hair hung long and muddy red, motionless and dull, in tufts and spikes to her shoulders. Her face was crudely fashioned, the face of a puppet made by a talented amateur. She paid none of them any attention.

Her mouth did not move as she spoke. “Know not names.” Or, “No not names.”

“May I speak to it?” Salap asked.

Brion dropped to his knees and lowered his head to the floor, palms flat against the ridged, humped surface that slowly raised and lowered him as if on a swell of ocean.

Frick said, “It isn't what he was hoping for.”

Salap approached the shape. “My name is Mansur Salap. I would like to speak with you,” he said, as if introducing himself at a soirée.

The shape inclined its head in his direction, but its eyes—pallid gray-blue within fixed eyelids, without expression—could not meet his. It lacked refinements and could not express anything human except in broad strokes. Whatever it had learned, it was woefully incomplete.

“You represent another, don't you?” Salap asked.

“Brion with names not,” the voice said, coming from all around. The walls of the frame vibrated like diaphragms, making the sounds, along with other noises: windy flights of whispering, a steady low frog-throat grumble.

“Do you recognize Brion?” Salap asked.

“Talks.”

“I talk and my name is Salap.”

“I brought Caitla here. Where is she?” Brion asked. Another membrane of tissue withdrew, and the body was visible on a raised hump in the living floor, slack with death, months into its own private decay.

“You understand us,” Salap said.

Chung had entered without my noticing and stood one step behind me. “Star, Fate, and Breath,” she said.

The figure turned toward her voice. “Two speak gave and use what use. Two now here.”

Chung seemed aghast to be confused with her sister again. “I am not Caitla,” she said. “You've tried to become Caitla.” She shouted at Brion, “She's dead, and you wanted to bring her back!”

Brion had stopped weeping and stood before the figure, examining it critically. “You could try again. More work ... More detail.”

“It will take a long time to understand us,” Salap said.

“Why?” Brion asked. “Why so long? It samples us, it must know what we're like...”

“We've been mistaken,” Salap said.

The figure, I realized, had not taken a step. It grew from the floor and could not lift its feet. It was only a little more sophisticated than the discarded husks behind us.

“Caitla and I gave her the chlorophyll,” Brion argued. “She took the bottle and used it. She made Caitla plants for her garden, working with the real plants Caitla showed her.”

Salap looked back at me. “Can you tell him, Ser Olmy? Bring the sophistication of the Thistledown to this little exercise in monstrosity?”

For a moment, I hadn't a clue what Salap wanted me to say. Then a thought that had been below conscious expression for some months broke through. “They've never sampled our genetic structure.”

“Yes?” Salap encouraged, face seeming to glow again like a beacon. The figure shivered, some rudimentary adjustment in turgor.

“Sampling is a way of identifying other scions. Each ecos carries its own markers, its own chemical scheme. We don't fit any schemes. We don't come from other ecoi. They can't analyze our structure from the level of our genetic material. So they have to copy us from the evidence of other senses.”

“But what about the chlorophyll?” Brion demanded.

Salap said, “It understands chemistry. It can test and find uses for organic substances. You must have provided the final clues necessary ... given the pigments a context it could understand. But it can't break our genetic code. We are too different.”

“Names,” the figure said. “Names know not.”

Chung seemed startled. “Does she actually understand what we're saying? Or is she ... is it just stringing words together?”

“She understands,” Brion said.

“That's a miracle by itself,” Chung said. She stepped closer to the figure and to Brion, overcoming some of her repugnance.

“What did you talk with before?” Salap asked Brion, pointing at the figure: before this was created.

“When Caitla and I came here, this inner room was filled with tissues ... tools. It was a prototype factory. Part of a scion could be grown here, another there ... We saw them being carried by giant hairs—cilia—across this chamber, and matched with other parts. And we watched them being dissolved in large pools, turned into jelly or slime. Rejected.

“Caitla realized what this was. She said that we were in a huge cell, all of its parts made large, but because of that, not a cell at all ... None of us knew why we had been allowed to come in here. On our last visit, before Caitla became ill, the seed-mother...” He gestured around the chamber. “She showed us the best of her human-shaped scions, still much cruder than this. It could only hum and whistle and make parts of words. Caitla spent a week teaching it, her, before we had to return to Naderville. We knew she wanted to communicate with us directly.”

“Bring,” the voice said. “Know bring names.”

“I brought Caitla back here when she was dying. Caitla told me to leave her here. ‘Put me where we put my plants,’ she said. We knew she could do better.”

Brion turned, staring up at the red walls of the frame. He seemed uncertain whether to address the figure directly, or speak to the frame, the hemisphere as a whole. “There is so much more you can do!”

“No making more for this child,” the voice said, acquiring a cello-like timbre. It had also taken on a quality I might have called conviction if it had been human. “New names, no making more, no making more, for this child.”

“Why?” Brion asked, dismayed.

The figure swelled again, filling itself with fresh fluids from below. It raised its arms. The color of its skin improved, and the motions in the skin subsided, coordinated, more nearly like the movement of muscles. I watched with queasy fascination the development of its facial features, the refinement of abdomen and breasts, still doll-like, but a better imitation of what Caitla might have looked like. Or Hyssha.

“It's learning from you,” Salap said to Chung. She looked up at the gloomy heights of the frame, searching for eyes among the glints and tiny sea-floor glows.

Brion seemed stung by this. He took a step back. “It isn't Caitla,” he said.

“It never will be,” Salap said. “You've misunderstood what the ecos can do ... We've all misplaced our nightmares and our hopes.”

The figure turned its head, opened its mouth, and the voice issued from the mouth now. “Sounds like smells, names deeper than I know. Two are not one, yet cling. Make third, but within. Third is child, but not like this child. Not of I, not of any I, from where.”

Then it added the lilt of question: “From where?”

None of us quite understood.

“We're not from this planet,” Brion said quietly, as if this were a devastating admission. I think he was trying to shed the last hope for Caitla, and it was costing him dearly. He had some courage or some curiosity left, to speak with the figure at all.

“There only is. There only is.” The figure lifted one foot, turned slightly on the other, and placed the free foot down awkwardly, bending forward to compensate. It returned to its original posture, but where the foot had lifted away, a small pucker remained. Though it knew the figure of Caitla/Hyssha would never pass, never enter the realm of a human ecos undetected, it still worked to finish its peculiar scion, the interface for its own selfless and eternal curiosity, the purest and most biological urge to know.

“There's more,” Brion whispered. “Planets and planets and planets. In the sky. Wherever there are stars.”

At the mention of stars, the lights within the inner frame, scattered in profusion over the braces and walls, dim blue and white, shone out in sudden splendor.

“Stars,” the figure said.

Brion turned to Frick and Chung. “I know it isn't Caitla. I know I'll never see Caitla again. But I could stay here and tutor her. I could be happy doing that.”

Frick rubbed his hands together in front of him, not relishing what he had to say. “Ser Brion, you are needed. We need you.”

Brion's brief resurgence of hope withered. He screwed his face up and imitated Frick's gesture of rubbed hands, then pushed his nose with the tips of his fingers. “Beys can take care of those things,” he said.

Chung said, “You put far too much on Beys. Someday he'll discover he doesn't need any of us.”

Brion jerked his head up at that, as if to make a sharp reply, but his eyes turned inevitably to the figure, and all expression melted away.

“You have other responsibilities,” Salap said soothingly. “Everybody else here has other responsibilities. None of you ... pardon me, Ser Brion, not even you ... is prepared to study and teach here. I am.”

“What would you teach her?” Brion asked resentfully, unwilling to give up this last possibility of fulfillment, of peace.

“I would study her,” Salap said. “And then I would watch her die. I do not think this palace, this field, will be alive much longer, nor any of its kind across Hsia. You and Caitla gave her a very powerful ‘name.’ I think she uses ‘name’ to mean the chlorophyll you presented to her. She used the name. And that changes everything.”

“The balloons,” I said.

Salap nodded. “They carry larval seed-mothers, not just scions. If I'm right, in a few weeks, all this will wither.”

“Old names die,” the figure said.

“Nightmare,” Brion said, words venomous with disappointment. “It's all nightmare.” Brion turned to me. “Ser Olmy, you know history. That much change means death and destruction everywhere. The Hexamon must come. I've said it ... I've felt it. You must repair Lenk's clavicle, tell the Hexamon what's happened here.”

There was nothing I could say. For Brion to make a plea on behalf of the humans on Lamarckia seemed ludicrous. Yet he was right. There was one last thing left to do: find the clavicle, and see if it could be repaired.

Brion stepped closer to the figure and touched its face. It did not react, but even as he stroked its cheek, it said, “Are more names? Bring more names.”

We left Salap with several weeks’ worth of food from the two boats, Brion's and the one that had carried Hyssha Chung and her attendants.

“I won't die here, no fear of that,” Salap told me, walking back with me through the sea of green. “I'm a tough old vulture, as you doubtless know. Brion, on the other hand...”

Brion had returned to the boat in an impenetrable daze, ignoring us all, and squatted on the bow, staring down the waterway. He had let the string unwind and carried it pinched between thumb and forefinger, lying in loose coils on the polished and painted xyla deck.

“Watch him,” Salap told me. “He still holds a dangerous amount of political charge, as does Lenk. They must be eased together ... or apart.”

We stood on overgrown dock, with the new silva—the jungle—rustling like grass in a wind, though there was hardly a breeze. Salap held me by my shoulders. “Even if you never get through to the Hexamon, even if they never come, some of us can survive.”

26

“Did you ever find the clavicle?” Yanosh asks. I am finishing my story outside the hospital. Yanosh has been dragged away by greater responsibilities, and has returned to find me making progress. We leave the hospital to see some of the sights of the Axis City.

I am removing myself from the memories of one long and difficult life.

Now we drift and tract beside each other in the Wald, the great weightless and terribly green forest in Axis Euclid. My body is so much sweeter and more comfortable, yet I still miss my old life, my impending death, and still ache so much I have incessant thoughts of suicide. If I return through the gate to Lamarckia and try to find Rebecca...

But I can't do that. Yanosh tells me the gate is sporadic, that years have passed on Lamarckia even since I was retrieved. I do not want the new life, but I will not reject it. In this I have a sense of duty to something much higher than the Hexamon.

“I found it,” I say. The Wald's green oppresses me, as it did on Lamarckia, where we ran from continent to continent, and finally from island to island...

Fleeing the power of the “name” of chlorophyll.

“What did you do?” Yanosh asks.

What he really wants to know is, did I finally act? The story I have told so far is one of observation and hiding, of trying to put pieces together and understand a pattern. But I never did understand completely. The pieces never fit smoothly.

I made my decision in ignorance and uncertainty.

27

Brion did not say a word to anybody in the eighteen hours it took us to navigate the length of the canal, back to Naderville. The green had progressed dozens of kilometers through the silva, and along its borders with the thicket, the old growth had wilted, making way for the new. Balloons dotted the horizon and flew overhead, lifting free of the land, blowing with the winds outward.

I watched this with a grim numbness and a sense of abject failure. I could not judge Brion as I once had; if anything, I had become more angry with Lenk. But Lenk was old and could not bear the weight of all blame.

The futility of blame was apparent, but did not lift my gloom. I needed Shirla to bring back my sense of life and reality.

Frick took coded messages on the radio within the cabin, and brought them forward for Brion to read. He read them and handed them back, shaking his head. Frick became increasingly agitated. Something was happening.

Brion sat on the bow, arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees, and stared into the sunset, eyes almost closed, lips drawn into a simian grimace of puzzlement.

We motored past the entrance to the lake. I tried to persuade Frick to return me to the lake so that I could rejoin the ships docked there. He looked at Brion, shook his head as if I were a buzzing fly, and finally just ignored me.

The guards stood on the rear deck of the small, elegant boat, watching me intently. I thought of diving into the canal and swimming to the shore, or up the offshoot to the lake, but knew they would shoot me if I did.

Smoke rose above the tall cliff edge of the silva as we approached Naderville, but for some minutes, the town itself remained hidden. The harbor came into view first, and it was filled with sailing ships. I counted eight, ten, twelve, and as the full harbor was revealed, seventeen—of all types, full-rigs, schooners, big-bodied four-masters, small barks. Flashes erupted from the sides of several of the ships, followed by the heavy blasts of cannon fire and the rushing whistles of falling shells. More flashes from the shore, puffs of smoke, and deep thumps announced explosions.

The pilot immediately increased the speed of Brion's boat, and Chung's boat hastened to keep pace. As the boats cruised out of the canal entrance, I saw Naderville again, hundreds of homes and buildings arranged along several hills, backed by high dark thicket.

Gouts of flame crept from street to street up the hills, and more shells fell, shearing the roofs off buildings and sparking more fires. At least a third of the town had been set ablaze. Shouts and screams carried far and thin across the harbor. Brion stared at the black pillars of smoke with an astonished, hurt expression, then crawled the middle of the boat and ordered his binoculars.

“Lenk lied,” Brion said tightly, swinging the binoculars right and left across the city. “He used himself as a blind.”

Brion lowered the glasses and screamed across the water, “Why didn't Beys know? General Beys, where are you?”

We swung toward the northern shore and docked in the early evening at a small private wharf. Chung's boat pulled alongside, and Chung stared at us, grim and frightened. Her assistants, Ullman and Grado, leaped from the boat and tied it, then helped her ashore.

A hundred meters away, warehouses burned sluggishly, throwing up thick, sour black smoke. The house adjacent to the wharf was beginning to burn as well as embers landed on its roof.

Brion stood with one foot on the gunwale and stared down at me in utter contempt. “You are nothing,” he said. “The Hexamon has sent us nothing.” He seemed ready to order me shot, but he shook his head and took Frick's hand, climbing up onto the wharf wall.

Brion, Chung, Frick, and all the servants and guards ran from the wharf, leaving me alone in the boat. They ran up the harbor road that pointed to Naderville.

For a few minutes, I could not move. My legs and arms tingled. I was mesmerized, watching the fire sweep down toward the wharf and the boats, the xyla burning with slow, curling orange flames, thick oily smoke smearing across the dark blue sky. I climbed out of the launch and stood on the harbor road. Wind blew against my back, rushing to feed the fires in Naderville. A woman in a long black dress with a sash of red ran along the shore road, alone; this part of the town had already been evacuated, probably as soon as the ships appeared in the harbor.

My first impulse was to get back on the boat and cross the harbor, wait on the south shore until the conflagration and fighting had settled. I knew my mission: I was not to interfere, and I was to bring information back to the Hexamon. I could not do that if I was dead.

I searched the ships in the harbor for Khoragos and Cow, but as I had suspected, neither were visible. Lenk was no doubt keeping them out of the harbor and away from the fighting. I hoped Shirla was with him, and of course Randall.

I was sick of the divaricates and their politics; Lenk's obsessions and calculations, all gone wrong, and his hounding of Brion and Caitla (if in fact that was true). I could not fathom Brion's handing power to Beys, and Brion's gift of green to Hsia seemed to me obscene, the ultimate monkey-play arrogance.

If a gate was to open now and pluck me out of the pilot's seat on the boat, and close forever on Lamarckia, I would not regret leaving—

Except for Shirla. She was essential, an anchor against my drift into this madness. She was not particularly beautiful, not particularly intelligent; nothing about her shone with an ineffable flame. She was merely a woman with a decent set of presumptions and a simple set of goals. She wanted to live a life among friends and peers, live with and love a decent man, raise children to be human beings in a known and familiar place.

I loathed any part of me I had seen reflected in Lenk or Brion. Their smallnesses and failures could easily be my own. Even Brion's grief for Caitla seemed cheapened by his arrogance, his presumption that people of such a high standing could not die, that some magic must keep them alive.

How did that differ from me? On Thistledown I would undoubtedly opt for juvenation—life extension and even body replacement.

Caitla and Brion had acted on their beliefs, however skewed or inadequate, and so far, I had done nothing—used none of my expertise, exercised none of my (admittedly few) options, managed to always find myself in positions where aloofness was the best choice.

Lenk's activism had brought his people here and subjected them to immense suffering. Brion's brash militancy and drive had led to war and murder and had culminated in the madness of the spreading green. What had once dwelled in comparative balance was now overturned and could not be set upright again.

My inaction seemed saintly by comparison.

Shirla's face kept popping into my thoughts.

My mission was over.

I had to make a decision, or I would be nothing more than a man filled with vacuum, a nonentity standing always on some thin line.

I stepped back from a rush of flame as the wall of the house collapsed. The gust of burning hot air and embers jarred me and I turned toward the wharf.

With the flames roaring behind me, I studied the harbor, judging the strategic position of the ships and boats, the layout of Naderville itself. There was fighting in the town—I could see troops moving through the streets, hear the crack and continuous popping of small-arms fire.

Lenk had indeed lied to Brion, or expected the worst, and had been prepared. He had kept in reserve a ragtag navy assembled of merchant ships and transports. They were now laying siege to Naderville. The fourteen vessels had crept into the harbor a few hours before, perhaps signaled by the departure of the two diplomatic ships Khoragos and Cow. The steamships were not visible—Beys must have taken them out of the harbor, perhaps heading back to put more pressure on Jakarta. Lenk's ships had surprised the small defense force and had landed several hundred troops. It had all happened very quickly.

There were no masters on Lamarckia, there were only children. Some of the children, however, were more crafty than I had imagined. Lenk had turned out to be smarter—or luckier—than Brion, after all. I suspected that Lenk had the superior force, selected from the more capable of the angry citizens of Tasman and Elizabeth's Land. Brion's troops—to judge by the poor fool on the flatboat—might turn out to be little more than opportunistic thugs, poorly trained and cruel, no match for that kind of avenging passion.

All of Brion's invincibility had crumpled. The ultimate failings of a frightened, grieving, and angry little man were written all over the hills and streets of Naderville.

As the flattened house behind me crackled and exploded, I returned to the deserted boats and examined their supplies and reserves of power. The batteries in Chung's boat were almost drained. Brion's boat, however, had a spare set, fully charged. I carried the spare set of batteries to Chung's boat—less identifiable than Brion's elegant launch—removed the flag at the bow, and prepared to push off. I cruised quietly through shrouds of dense, choking smoke, not to the south side of the harbor, where there were few if any buildings and no visible fighting or shelling going on, but west, along the shore, under the line of fire of the ships in the harbor.

Twilight was fading fast. I guided the boat around a smoldering hulk that had once been a wooden merchant vessel. Its crooked trees stuck up out of the water like broken fingers. I wanted to thoroughly understand the strategic situation, find the best vantage point, and then walk into the town and join Lenk's troops.

The gate opener had placed me in a very interesting time indeed, stuck me here like a fly in amber. There would be no returning.

Naderville rested on two main hills, with a line of smaller hills along the peninsula between the harbor and the ocean to the north. East of the two main hills, between the town itself and the lake and Citadel, a patch of thicket silva had been allowed to remain. The silva would be mined through with tunnels, and if Beys or his subordinates had positioned any last defensive troops—or hoped to fight a final action—I surmised they would be hidden in that patch of thicket, or perhaps at the Citadel itself, and when opportunity arose, certainly after the artillery barrage, storm up one or both of the hills.

I saw a group of soldiers marching down a street on a hill, almost hidden in the shadows of a row of buildings still intact in that quarter of town. They marched about a kilometer and a half from the boat. I could not tell whose troops they were, of course—it was possible that none of Lenk's troops had uniforms, but I couldn't make out the cut of their clothes, or even determine the color.

It was necessary to survey the town from farther south, to get a better view of the streets and buildings, the centers of potential conflict. I guided the boat south, away from Lenk's ships. Locking the wheel for a moment and searching through the cabin, I found a piece of paper in a drawer, and quickly sketched the harbor, the town, and the streets visible. I used the binoculars to gather details—likely administration buildings, a water tower, and what seemed to be a radio mast on the western side of the town. Any one of these could be crucial objectives.

By this time, I was starting to attract unwanted attention from Lenk's ships, less than two kilometers away. A gunner had targeted the boat and a shell landed barely a dozen meters away. I did not know what type of guns they had, and how accurate they might be, but I could not risk staying on the water any longer. I headed for the docks again. Another shell drenched me with spray. I was less than a dozen meters from shore when a direct hit split the boat in two and flung me backward into the water.

Dazed, I floated on my back in the black water of the harbor for several minutes before swimming for the docks. I crawled up a ladder and stood in the darkness between two warehouses, one of them shattered by the shelling but not on fire. I tried to get my wits together. A piece of xyla had cut a bloody groove across my forehead. I wiped the blood away with my wet sleeve. The map was gone, but I had most of the details firmly in memory.

Naderville was divided by four main east-west streets and seven or eight wide streets running north-south from the harbor to the hills. The buildings that seemed most likely to be administrative—still intact, surprisingly—lay on the slopes of the easternmost hill, off of a north-south boulevard. I walked toward these buildings.

A few civilians still lingered in the town, and the scenes I saw, heading for the eastern hill, could have been several thousand years old. Bodies littered a small courtyard where a shell had exploded: two large ones, two small. Children. I wondered if Lenk had killed some of his own children.

Five older men and several women, heads wrapped in cloth against the smoke, pushed their belongings on a makeshift cart through brick and xyla rubble.

I hid in the half open doorway of a hollowed-out building to avoid a straggling line of young men and women, not knowing whether they were soldiers; they crossed along an east-west street, shouting encouragement to each other. A few carried electric lanterns.

By the glare of one lantern, I recognized a face—Keo, one of Lenk's assistants, following close on the line. I called out his name and he jerked around, then raised the lantern and spotted me in the doorway.

“Olmy! Fate's breath,” he said. “You're still alive! We were sure you'd all have been killed when the attack started.” He shouted at the retreating backs of the young men and women, “Hold on!” They turned and clustered around us, the whites of their eyes showing like startled deer, breathless, at once frightened and cocksure.

“What's happening?” I asked.

“Where's Salap?” he asked in return.

I did not want to waste time by explaining. “Is the town taken?”

Some of the young people shook their heads. Several laughed nervously, milling like dogs. I counted heads and sexes: eight men, five women.

“Not yet,” Keo said. “There's an action up around Sun Road. Lots of resistance. Beys was back at sea—missed our ships—but swung around to the northern side of the peninsula, landed troops. They're moving back into the town now, to replace the soldiers who went to the western peninsula. A diversion. Lenk's auxiliaries—we're all auxiliaries now—grounded a small ship there and burned some houses and buildings. I didn't know about this—” Keo's chest jerked. He was hyperventilating in his nervousness. “Randall told us ... before he left, and ... about you...”

“Is Shirla with Lenk?”

Keo's face fell. “The woman? No,” he said. “She and Randall were taken by Brion's police two days ago, just after you and Salap left with Brion.”

“We have to go,” shouted one of the young men, an apprentice sailor from one of the schooners to judge from his clothing. He confronted me. “Whoever you are, we can't stay here clacking teeth—we have to report if there are any troops coming around to the east of town.”

“That's true,” Keo said, clearly uncomfortably with leadership.

“He's the Hexamon man,” a young woman said, peering at me curiously. Dirt and sweat streaked her lean face and she seemed stupid with fear and excitement. “He was on Khoragos. He's the one they've been talking about.”

I hardly heard all this. My thoughts raced, trying to think of where they might have taken Shirla. She could still be back at the lake, hidden in the buildings within the old seed-mother palace.

“I've been out in the harbor, and there's no action to the east—not yet,” I said. “But there could be a contingent of troops back at the lake. Beys might use them to pinch us all ... Where are his steamships?”

“North of the peninsula, the last we saw.”

Clearly, Beys's most likely plan—the best plan under the circumstances—sketched itself in my head. He had landed the soldiers traveling with the ships in the north, perhaps two companies of well-trained men and women, a fair force under the circumstances, but not enough to have much impact. Troops at the old palace could number in the hundreds. If the town had been lightly defended—concentrating the troops in Beys's ships and around Brion's quarters—then that was likely all Beys had to work with, a few hundred troops. The rest would be working Tasman and Elizabeth's Land.

“How many soldiers does Lenk have?”

Keo stared at me, uncertain, sweating in the lantern light. Stars poked through drifting patches of smoke. The shelling had stopped for now. “You're a soldier from the Hexamon,” he said. “Who are you for?”

“Not for Brion,” I said. “I need to find Shirla ... and you need to secure the town. As you said, I'm a soldier—I have a lot better training than Lenk, and probably better training than Beys.”

I could almost see the outline of Keo's thoughts. He had been put in command of these young men, but he had no military education—few coming to Lamarckia had. They would make a haphazard force at best. I had no idea of the level of their strategic planning—clearly, Beys had been unprepared for anything like this, but he was likely to put together an effective defense soon. Keo was smart enough to see this.

“Lenk didn't confide in us until the last,” he said. “We have maybe six hundred volunteers.”

“Seven or eight companies,” I said.

“Lenk has them ordered differently, I think.”

“Who's his general?”

“He designed the operation. Fassid helped.”

I shook my head in disgust. Keo started to defend Lenk's expertise, but I cut him off. “You have to set up a strong defense in the eastern part of town. At least two hundred troops. Beys will almost certainly deploy the forces at the lake. Do you have a radio?”

“Yes,” Keo said. One of his men, little more than a boy actually, lifted a small box. “Not a lot of range, unfortunately.”

The young men and women clustered around us, no longer protesting. I felt a queasy exhilaration.

Here, among amateurs, going up against a butcher who was sly at best, I could be useful. Lenk's soldiers occupied the cape and headland in strength, Keo said. To the north and west, positions had not yet been consolidated.

“I need five of these good soldiers,” I said. “We should split into two groups.”

“I have a map ... of sorts,” Keo said, lifting a cloth satchel and pulling out a small, folded piece of paper. He spread it out in the lantern light. It was an original sketch in pencil and ink, and supplied more detail to what I had seen from the harbor, in particular charting the roads through the silva from Naderville to the lake. The Citadel area was not shown.

“We can use it. You take one group and keep watch on the eastern edge of the town. I'll take my five, and we'll reconnoiter the silva between Naderville and the lake. For now, tell Lenk's commanders—or Lenk himself, whoever's in charge—that he needs to post at least one hundred well-armed men to meet you at the edge of town.”

“I don't think we have one hundred well-armed men,” Keo said. “Not that we can spare.”

What had seemed a major coup in the beginning was looking more and more uncertain. No masters, only children. “Don't tell Beys that,” I said. I picked the five who seemed most fit and enthusiastic, and Keo's group and mine ran in two lines along the street, until we came to a clearing beyond the last of the houses. Beyond lay the cliff edge of the thicket silva and the dark holes of two tunnel roads.

“Good luck,” Keo told me.

I felt incredibly alive, and very, very stupid.

28

We made our way down Sanger Road, through a thicket tunnel. Sanger was one of two parallel roads the map showed going to the lake. The tunnel lights had gone out; we probed ahead with a lantern. I expected to meet a contingent of Beys's troops at any time.

The nighttime thicket was still. We walked down the tunnel road for thirty minutes, then emerged under a brilliant star-rich sky, the double oxbow rising in the east. A few lights flickered ahead. We were in a broad clearing, once perhaps a farm area, now barren fields. The road crossed the field toward another thicket, perhaps a kilometer off, and entered another tunnel at that point. I guessed the Citadel lay about two kilometers beyond.

I did not know the palace grounds thoroughly; we could easily get lost.

A small young woman named Meg, with a smooth dark face and wide eyes, kept close to me. She carried one of the three guns Keo had been willing to spare. “This is going to be rough, isn't it?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“Do you know where we're going?”

“I've been there.”

“And you say there are a lot of soldiers.”

“Meg worries for us all,” said the oldest male, a tall, stooped fellow of twenty-five named Broch.

“There are a lot of soldiers,” I said. “But we're going to avoid them. We don't want to fight; we want to learn things.”

“How?” Meg asked, licking her lips and staring ahead of us, at the wall of the next stretch of thicket silva.

“We're going to hide between the tunnel openings. That is, the five of you are. I may take one with me. I'm going on to the old palace. Soldiers will likely come through one or both of the two tunnels. You can see both roads from where you'll hide. If they appear before I get back, we send the fastest runner—”

“That's Youk,” said Meg, pointing to a small, slender woman with fawnlike features.

“Youk,” I said, “You run ahead of the soldiers, and report to Ser Keo. He'll give warning with his radio.”

“What if they use trucks?” Youk asked.

“Then we'll change our plans. But the troops will probably be on foot.” From what I had seen, Beys had concentrated all their vaunted technology where it would be highly visible. I doubted that they had many more transports or tractors than Calcutta.

“What will you do?”

“I'm going to the old palace,” I said again. “The Citadel.”

“You keep saying ‘palace'... What kind of palace?” Rashnara, the shortest male, asked.

“It's where Brion lives,” I said. No need to explain further.

Closing on the opening to the next tunnel, we cut away from the road catercorner toward the thicket wall between the north and south openings. I stumbled once and Youk helped me to my feet. The ground was hard and chalky and had not been plowed for months, perhaps a year. We hugged the thicket, backs against the smooth outer trunks of the arborids that intertwined to make a flat dark wall.

“Why did Ser Keo turn us over to you?” Meg asked.

“We're not supposed to ask that kind of question,” Broch said.

“It's a good question,” I said. “Always ask questions.”

“Why, then?” Meg asked. We were about fifty meters from either road. We could see the pavement of each road clearly enough, thin lines of lighter gray against the gray-black soil.

“A friend of ours told him I had been a member of Hexamon Defense once.”

Broch sniffed in the dark. “Are you that old?”

“No,” I said. “Not so very old.” Not much older than these kids, I reminded myself.

“So what does that mean?” Meg persisted.

I saw something block out stars and looked up. Balloons floated across the night sky. One dropped its trailing tentacles onto the field, scraping them across the dirt barely twenty meters from where we squatted.

“What is that?” asked Olivos, a short, bristle-headed man with a brushy beard. Youk stood to run out and investigate, but I grabbed her arm.

“It's from the interior,” I said. “A new kind of transporter.” I stood and looked down at them. “Ser Broch, you have a gun. Will you come with me?”

“You're asking, not ordering?” Broch said, incredulous.

“Yes, because what I have to do is partly personal.”

Broch stood. “You worked in Way Defense?” he asked.

“A long time ago.”

“I'll come,” he said.

“If we're not back in two hours, you can assume we've been captured,” I told the rest. “Meg, you're in charge.”

“Thank you, I think,” Meg said. “Does anybody have a watch?”

Nobody did.

“Count, then,” I said.

Broch and I walked north to the Godwin road and stood in the middle of the stone slab and gravel pavement, staring into the tunnel's impenetrable darkness. We had no lantern. The tunnel was quiet, except for the sound of dripping water. “Let's go,” I said.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“See what the troops are up to, and rescue a friend,” I said. “If they're still there at all.”

“You think they might have come by water?”

“Not if they're smart. The harbor belongs to Lenk for the time being.” It seemed likely Beys would try to retake the harbor. I hoped we could be back before that happened. “We're not going to talk while we're in the tunnel, okay?”

Broch nodded.

“Brush your hand against the left side. I'll stay to the right.”

We walked for fifty meters in complete darkness. The air was getting thick and smelled stale. Broch coughed and apologized in a whisper. Whiffs of an ammonia-like smell, tangy and very unpleasant, met us farther down the tunnel. Sounds from above filtered down to us: rustling, shifting. With some relief, we came to the end of the tunnel and stood in a field. A few lights gleamed across the field, electric lanterns bobbing to and fro, and we heard subdued voices.

From the west, more explosions and the distant pop of cannon. I guessed we were at the northern end of the lake, west of the Citadel. I could barely make out the black shapes of buildings. A light came on in a distant window. A voice called out, and the light was quickly extinguished.

“Brion's soldiers,” Broch whispered, standing close beside me.

“They could be evacuated civilians,” I said. “We don't know yet.”

I doubted anyone would see us if we cut across to the right, where the silva massed again as a solid wall. With a few words and gestures, I made our route clear, and we set out across a flat, empty field that had never been plowed.

“Give me your gun,” I said.

“Why, Ser?”

“Do you want to have to kill someone?”

He handed me the gun. It was a heavy, short-barreled rifle of simple design.

We followed the line of the thicket slowly, trying to keep on our feet over the uneven ground. A shape sprawled across the dirt a few meters in front of us, a black blur in the star-lit darkness. I thought for a moment it was a human body, but it gave off a thick ammonia smell. I bent over it briefly and saw a tangle of limbs, a long cylindrical body, sharp digging barbs around its tail. My neck hairs tingled. It was a dead scion. Nothing had come to pick it up and take it away. This was the smell of death on Lamarckia. The closeness in the tunnel had also been death.

“Fate and Breath,” Broch said. “What is it?”

“A scion,” I said. “It's dead.”

“Why don't cleaners come and get it?”

“Things are changing,” I said. We edged around it. I had little doubt it was one of the thicket's mobile scions, so seldom seen outside the tangle of arborids. The thicket silva, after tens or hundreds of millions of years, was being told to die.

In buildings to our left, we heard footsteps and voices, orders given. Soldiers were getting organized. I heard snatches of conversation. “...We'll get them in a vice at Jalipat...” “They're fools. Blood-thick fools.” “Who's got the squadron radio?”

So these were the troops, comprised of most of the old palace's guards and security. I could not judge how many there were; at least a hundred.

“Form up,” a loud, authoritative female voice said. “West in ten minutes.”

I stopped and Broch bumped into me. “Hear that?” I whispered very softly in his ear. He nodded. “That's what we need to know. Run back and tell the others to report this to Ser Keo.”

“You're not coming with me?” he asked. He was clearly unhappy at the thought of going back alone; unhappy, also, I surmised, at the thought of going back down the strange-smelling tunnel. “I thought you needed me.”

“I needed you for this. It's time,” I said. “You have your duty. I'm going to find my friends.” I handed him the rifle. “Take this with you. I hope I won't need it.”

Broch hesitated for a moment, backed away with arms folded, then dropped them by his sides, turned and walked into the darkness. He skirted the dead scion and I could no longer make him out in the darkness.

Somehow, I had contrived to be alone again. I had always preferred working alone, even in Way Defense. I wondered if one's life history was the result of world-lines collapsing in response to simple force of character. The dilemma had not been solved in a thousand years of human philosophy.

I walked quietly and quickly between two buildings. A single moon rose and cast some extra light. That was not good. I tried to stay in deeper shadow wherever possible. I had to be within a hundred meters of the old palace complex.

I entered a courtyard through a narrow open corridor. A fountain in the center of the courtyard threw a steady ribbon of water into the air, splashing and chuckling to itself. Staying close to the wall, my feet scuffing lightly on a gravel-covered walkway, I passed a line of doors and darkened windows, through another corridor. A few lights danced in an alley between the courtyard and a wall. I flattened myself against the wall and felt large, smooth round stones: the old palace. The lights—two men gripping lanterns—moved past the entrance to the alley.

If whoever was in charge felt the situation was desperate, and Brion was no longer here, this area might be almost deserted.

In a couple of hours, dawn glow would begin lighting the sky. I followed the curve of the ancient stone wall for fifty or sixty meters before reaching a gate. Three men stood by the gate, talking softly in the darkness. I pitched my voice to just the right volume and tone of concern.

“Excuse me. Don't be alarmed. Ser Frick—”

All three guns instantly pointed at me, and I heard three simultaneous snick-clacks as rounds were chambered.

“I'm one of Brion's guests. I'm not armed. Ser Frick left me in a boat at Naderville.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Olmy,” I said.

“Frick isn't here,” the tallest guard said, a bulky shadow with a gravelly voice.

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“We don't have any instructions about you.”

“Ser Brion told me to come back here on the water, but the boat was destroyed ... I had to walk. It was frightening.”

“You were with Brion?” the gravel-voiced guard asked.

“I've heard about you,” another guard said, and they conferred in whispers for a moment. “You went with Frick and Ser Brion ... didn't you? Where did you go?”

“Up the canal,” I said.

“Come here.”

I stepped up and the tall guard allowed a thin beam of light to play across my face from a slit in his lantern.

“I think he's the one,” the second guard said. “Go inside and find out if anybody wants him.”

29

Hyssha Chung stood in the vivarium, the early dawn casting a blue and indistinct light over her sister's garden. The smell was atrocious—ammonia and still, stale air. All around her, the garden lay in dark tatters. The two guards who escorted me covered their noses with cloths to filter the dust raised by our feet.

“Have you found your gate back to the Way yet?” Chung asked, her voice tired but still acid.

“No,” I said. “I've come back to see where my friends are. A woman named Shirla. And Randall, the scientist who worked with Salap.”

Hyssha said nothing for several seconds, then dismissed the guards with a wave, saying she knew me, and I was no risk.

The guards departed, and we were alone in the tainted stillness.

“You managed to get in here without being killed. That's a kind of magic,” she said.

“I acted stupid and innocent,” I said. “Lost.”

“You may be the only innocent person on this planet,” Chung said. “Innocence is a luxury for outsiders.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I don't want to watch the fighting.”

“Where's Brion?”

“In Naderville. Maybe Beys picked him up. Actually, I don't know where he is. Your woman and your friend Randall ... I think Beys took them with him on the ships.”

I felt sick. “Why?”

“I don't follow Beys closely. We don't like each other much.” She looked around her, staring at the dead garden with lips set in a rigid line. “A balloon transporter dropped a few larval seed-mothers here yesterday. All of Caitla's creations ... dead in hours. The food supply ... gone. Rotted. There's probably very little food anywhere in Naderville by now. The air is filled with instructions from the green seed-mothers ... orders to die and rot in place, to make nutrients for the new forms.”

“You know for sure that Shirla and Randall aren't here?”

“I don't care where they are. We're all going to die, unless Lenk wins and sends us food, or Brion wins and we all sail to Elizabeth's Land or Tasman. She did this to us.” Then, stepping closer and looking into my face, she said, “You hate Brion, don't you?”

“Yes,” I said. The emotions were not so clearly expressed, but to say anything else would have been lying.

“You'd kill him if you could?”

“No,” I said.

“And Beys?”

“I'm not here to kill,” I said.

“You think Brion's weak now, and Beys is going to return and take over completely.”

“He already has, hasn't he?”

Hyssha Chung bit her lip, her eyes filling with tears. “I feel what Caitla would feel,” she said. “Everything wasted, all the suffering and dying. She was devoted to Brion. He loved her very much. But love doesn't excuse us, does it?”

“No.”

“You have judged us, haven't you?”

“Not you,” I said. “I don't know much about you.”

“An accomplice,” she murmured. “Will Lenk take us back with him?”

“I don't know,” I said.

She touched her finger to her cheeks and smeared her tears. “You don't believe in drama, do you? Brion believes in drama, too much, I think. But Beys is like you ... He has your woman and your friend. Maybe he'll be expecting you. Go kill Beys.”

30

Dawn had turned the sky gray-green in the east. The guards stood by the main gate into the old palace, saying nothing, holding their rifles with barrels raised a few degrees above horizontal, as I walked away. I expected a bullet in my back at any moment. The path back through the buildings to the road was deserted. The troops from the Citadel had departed hours ago.

On the Godwin road, heading west, I found two bodies in the barren fields: Broch, lying face down in the dirt, had been shot in the chest and jaw. Youk, the fast young runner, lay on the other side of the road a few meters away, on her back, calm eyes staring at the dusty morning sky. Ahead and behind, the thicket silva made ugly groaning and rattling sounds, settling, throwing up billows of gray dust. The tunnel was a nightmare, dust falling all around in drifts like ash, sections half-collapsed, the air almost unbreathable. I thought I would suffocate before I stumbled out into daylight again. Behind me, the tunnel collapsed and I was surrounded by a thick cloud of acrid powder and ammonia. I closed my eyes and ran clear, then lay gasping on my knees by the road, eyes burning, covered with clinging grime. My skin itched furiously.

I had sent Broch to his death, I had guided Youk and perhaps the others into death, and I did not know if I had accomplished anything. The soldiers had passed through the roads and might be in Naderville even now, fighting Keo's unprepared young men and women. Lenk would lose; Beys would command.

I pictured Shirla already dead, and Randall with her. As I lurched along the road, rubbing the skin on my arms and chest and head, I stopped my scratching long enough to reach up to the skies and shout, “Come take me now! Where are you? Take me now!”

I think I was asking for a gate to open, but I might have been asking to die.

31

Yanosh and I have settled in a secluded district of the Wald. We are eating a midday meal and sharing a bottle of wine. I have paused from my story, trying to keep my composure, even after all these decades and into the full-grown infancy of a new life.

Yanosh fills in for a few minutes with tales of his months as assistant to the presiding minister. Then we drift in silence, and finally, as if to get me going again, he says, “I'm listening.”

This is a part I know I will have great difficulty describing. It has been sixty years and more since that day, by the time of my older body, now abandoned somewhere, all of its history so much useless tissue.

“The town wasn't pretty, was it?” Yanosh asks.

“The ships had destroyed about half of it. The soldiers from the old palace fought their way through the eastern part of town to go north. There was still fighting in the north. The battle between Lenk's troops and the soldiers from the old palace ... quick and bloody. I found Keo, dead, and two of his boys stumbling around through the bodies of their friends. Lenk had not sent reinforcements.”

Yanosh looks off across the green expanses of grass and spherical trees and huge thick vines and long, interwoven tree trunks that form a lacework around the perimeter of the weightless Wald. “Some would say that such destruction is trivial, compared to what's happened between us and the Jarts. There was a time two years ago when we thought they would capture Axis City—”

I shake my head in violent disagreement. “Nothing that fills an eye with horror is trivial. It was on a scale that I could almost get used to it. That horrified me.”

“Lenk had been building weapons for some time, then,” Yanosh says. “In secret.”

“He didn't think Beys or Brion would listen. He made cannons out of cathedral tree limbs, hardened by heating over fire and then steaming. They could only shoot four or five times, but he filled his ships with replacements...” I don't like talking tactics and logistics. That has all become vague and uninteresting to me. When humans set their minds on something, when we are forced into a corner, we can work miracles of destruction.

“Tell me what happened to Shirla. She must have been a fascinating woman.”

“She was simple. When I was with her, I was simple.”

“Tell me,” Yanosh says.

I am back at Naderville again. It is remarkably the same as my first hours in Moonrise. I am back where I began in Lamarckia.

Bodies lay in the streets, men and women, a few children. Brion had valued his citizens, and especially children, so much, needing them for a future on Lamarckia that he later abandoned, and here were so many, wasted, and the bodies of Keo and his young men and women lying with them. The fighting had been fierce and Keo had taken many with him.

I walked through the streets weeping, and finally I would not look at the dead. Medical teams—I did not know whether they were Brionists or civilians—had set up camps in the center of town, at the base of a low hill, and I carried a few injured people there from the blocks nearby that had been shelled into utter rubble. Nobody asked who I was or where my sympathies lay.

Naderville was finished. Brion's political movement was at an end. All around the city, the silva was turning gray and crumbling. The great dark thickets were collapsing, roads were being cut off by falling debris, balloons were dropping their cargo and some had even fallen in the rubble of the town.

I had to go where the fighting was. I heard shots and more cannon fire to the north, so after doing what little I could at the eastern end of town, I walked north.

Empty buildings, shattered houses and markets, warehouses, the ruins of the administration building, I passed them all, my thoughts clearing again. From the top of the western hill, I looked across the harbor and saw one steamship coming around the western headland, leaving a trail of gray smoke. Most of Lenk's ships had left the harbor. Only four remained, and they immediately fired broadsides on the steamship. Several shells made direct hits. The steamship's guns were still active, however, and it closed.

The big guns boomed once, and the direct hit on the southernmost of Lenk's vessels broke the ship in half.

The remaining three ships had reloaded and fired again. The steamship took two more hits and for a few minutes, it slowed and followed a gentle curve to the middle of the harbor. My heart rose; I hoped it was disabled. But again the guns fired, fore and aft, and two more ships took large shells, one in the middle, one forward, blowing the bow off.

One ship remained. I did not want to see any more, but I could not leave. There was an even chance that Shirla and Randall were aboard the steamship, that they had already been injured or killed by the cannon shells.

The last of the sailing ships in the harbor fired two more cannon shots. The first raised a tower of spray fifty meters in front of the steamship. The second blew the bridge to pieces. The steamship drifted first left, then right, leaving a frothing wake, and then settled against a sand bar and rolled on its side. The stern sank below water.

The remaining sailing ship stood out in the harbor, triumphant, but only for a moment. Fire had started on her deck and was spreading swiftly. The trees and furled sails caught and flared, and smoke drifted across the harbor, to the south. I had had enough.

I walked another block along Sun Street, to where I could see the northern edge of the peninsula on which Naderville sat. A thick fog covered the ocean there, but through the fog I heard more cannon fire, and saw a bright orange flash. A mushroom puff of smoke and flying debris rose above the ceiling of fog, about three kilometers from the shore.

A deafening thud went off, seemingly at my feet. I swiveled and looked to my left, along the northwestern extent of the peninsula. A lazy curl of smoke and the residue of flame still hung from where a large gun had been fired. It had been dragged on a wheeled carriage along a dirt road and was now mounted under camouflage, backed up against thick, low-lying arborids at the top of the hill west of where I stood. I wondered who commanded the gun, and quickly decided it must be Beys's forces.

The fog would soon be lifting. Somewhere out there, very likely, was the second steamship, wreaking havoc on Lenk's sailing ships. The gun was useless for now, firing once just for practice, but when the fog lifted, it would quickly finish the job.

I ran down a street to the east, past bewildered civilians returning to this part of the town now that the shelling and fighting had subsided.

I encountered the first pickets for Lenk's troops on the outskirts of the low hills. I knew they belonged to Lenk because they wore no uniforms, as Beys's troops did, and because their discipline had broken completely.

They saw I was unarmed, and were too exhausted to pay me much attention. The fighting here had also been vicious, and bodies littered the thin scrub of phytids and arborids in the fields around the hills. A few shacks had been reduced to rubble, and men and women—mostly men—rested while others went among them with water and medicine. Moans and shrieks broke out from the wounded, laid out in rows on the ground, watched over by exhausted medical attendants.

It looked like any ancient battle, any fragment of war long past, something I had once thought would never be possible for humans again, and certainly not humans born in Thistledown.

I came upon four men standing together beside a lone stone wall, passing a bottle. They eyed me suspiciously as I approached.

“Who's in charge?” I asked.

“Nobody, now,” one of the men said. “The ranks are back on the cape, or dead. We're waiting to be called back ... to wherever. Who are you?”

I told them my name and pointed out that a gun was in place and would soon be firing on the fleet. I was about to lay out a plan for taking the gun, knowing I had to begin somewhere, when a fleshy man with a patchy beard and thick eyebrows lifted a thick fist and poked his finger at me.

“You're the Hexamon agent, aren't you?” he asked. “You're going to bring a gate down and take us back to Thistledown.”

I stared at him for a moment, taken by surprise, not sure what to say or do.

“We're sick of this,” the fleshy man said. “I killed four people today. I killed a woman. That's mortal error.” He backed away, head dropping. “I killed a woman.”

“You can take us back now, can't you?” The youngest in the group reached out to grab my arm. Battle shock and hope gave his face a pallid glow. “We need to go home. Something awful is happening here. Can't you smell it?”

“Are you what they say?” the tallest and oldest of them asked. He was about my age, and he had bandages wrapped around his arm and leg. “I don't know what we'd do if you turned out to be a lie.”

I heard a commotion behind us. A few men with rifles ran to confront an approaching group of uniformed Brionists, ten or twelve in all. They held several white flags and carried no weapons. They were quickly surrounded, and the shouting died down into tense discussion, gun barrels pushed against hands held up, palms out, heads leaning, subdued words passing quickly.

“They can't be surrendering,” the bandaged man growled. “They're just resting before they push us back out to the headland.”

I heard wind-blown scraps of the conversation and walked toward the group. Again I felt the queasy excitement, the tingling sense that something significant was happening.

“That's him,” one of the Brionists said, pointing at me as I approached the crowd. I recognized the officer who had addressed the ships’ crews at the Citadel and tried to remember his name: Pitt, I thought. His uniform was torn and covered with mud. He approached me with hands outstretched. “I know who you are. Word has been passing everywhere that you're here.” He stared at me with wolflike intensity. “Your name is Olmy. You know what's happening. The silva is dying. You know.”

My hands seemed to pulse. “I do know,” I said, letting some deeper instinct, deeper personality take over. “You came with the troops from the Citadel?”

Pitt nodded. “We fought west of here.” He glanced at the encircling men and women, eyes jerking back and forth between stiff, unsympathetic faces. “The thicket is dying. We can smell it. Scions are crawling out everywhere and dying. The food is rotting in the storage houses.”

“Are you in charge?” I asked.

“I am a captain, rank second over my company.”

“Are you done fighting?”

“What good is it? What can we do?” he asked plaintively. “The food is going bad. The food in our kits is turning into dust. Since last night ... All the food from the silva, all of it. We rely on it. There is so little of anything else...”

Most of the able-bodied men and women on the hill, about a hundred and fifty of them, had gathered around, looking to me for explanations. Voices clamored for answers. I saw the gray Brionist uniforms absorbed in the motley of Lenk's soldiers, exhaustion and battle and common fear removing the last barriers.

I felt a roaring in my ears and my vision tunneled for a moment as blood pumped into head. I found a low broken wall and climbed precariously on top of the ragged stones. “Listen,” I shouted, raising my hands. “Ser Brion has let loose something new on Hsia. I spoke with him; I saw it. The ecos is in a major fluxing. In a few days or weeks there isn't going to be any food from the ecos, and very few are going to be able to survive here. The battle is over.”

“It's dying,” voices cried out.

“We have to let everybody know so the fighting will stop.”

“We don't have any more radios,” the bandaged man shouted at me. “The ranks have them.”

I looked down at Pitt. “Do you have radios?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They're controlled by General Beys's attachés,” he said.

“Where is Beys?” I asked.

“On the 15,” Pitt said, pointing north. “They're going to sink the rest of Lenk's fleet. They hope to catch Lenk and kill him, as well.”

“Able Lenk,” a woman muttered. I could not tell whether she was correcting Pitt's disrespect or expressing her own.

I bent over on the wall and put my hand on Pitt's shoulder. I had managed to lose all sense of my limitations. A small rational voice told me, Now you really are like Lenk and Brion.

But there was nothing else I could do, nothing else to be done, but follow the inner pressure. I had fleshed out a legend, once half-dreaded, a bogeyman of another place and time. I could feel a coalescing, upturned faces, despair and hope and weariness all around me, weaknesses and passions into which I could fit like a plug in a socket and where no one else could fit so well.

“How many soldiers will follow you?” I asked Pitt.

“Fifty,” he said. “They're waiting for me to come back. I remembered you when the word started spreading. There was a message from the Citadel, telling about you. Some others saw you walking through the town.”

I scanned the crowd again for the face of the bandaged soldier, saw so many bandages, so many wounds and dirty, frightened faces, found the man again. I fixed on him. “How many here will follow me?”

“What are we going to do?” the bandaged man asked.

“There's a large gun on a hill below us. It's going to help Beys sink Lenk's ships. We need those ships. We need to capture that gun.”

Pitt's face wrinkled again, this time in genuine anguish. I bent down again and shook his shoulder firmly. “You've come here for a reason,” I said. “Beys will never give up, will he?”

“I don't know what Beys will do,” Pitt said.

I picked up the phrase the fleshy, bearded man had used. “Beys has led you into mortal error.”

Pitt closed his eyes and took a deep breath, brows squeezed together. “If the ships are sunk ... What can we do?” I asked.

“They won't need the gun. 15 can destroy most of the ships by itself.” Pitt's face gleamed one last time with esprit de corps. “Lenk slipped his ships into the harbor when our steamships were out to sea. Beys came back as soon as he heard, and Lenk ordered his ships out of the harbor. But Beys pushed them up against the bight north of the peninsula, and now, the ships are as good as sunk.”

“Beys will never give up,” I repeated.

A quiet fell over the crowd. Those attached to Lenk knew the truth of this, and the soldiers of Beys and Brion were absorbing the implications.

“Ser Brion did this?” voices among the gray and tan uniforms asked. “He poisoned the silva?” Heads shook, and bitter whispers passed.

Pitt roused himself, making a decision with a quick spasm of his body. “There was a rebellion two years ago. We felt the ecos might have been profaned. We warned him and his Caitla Chung, but then Brion brought us the food. We were hungry.”

The crowd absorbed this information in silence. I examined the faces, trying to find where the river of consent and passion would flow. A wrong word, a jarring phrase, could shatter this crowd like a crystal vase. The Brionist soldiers would be beaten to death, the battle would resume, and I would be able to accomplish nothing. I thought of common sufferings and deep fears.

“No more food,” I said.

“Join us!” the bandaged man shouted.

The crowd coursed around me, arms raised, hands gripping in the air. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The crowd had become one, and was ready to absorb more.

32

The gun, Pitt informed us, was approachable only by the dirt road. The fog north of the peninsula was already thinning, patches of ocean and a few ships revealed, and morning was giving way to noon. We had Pitt's fifty soldiers and, keeping well behind them, fifty of Lenk's troops, all of them now following me.

I considered the situation carefully. If we put the gun out of action, Beys's steamship could still cause considerable damage to Lenk's fleet. With four ships sunk in the harbor, having taken the 43 down with them, there were ten vessels still in the fog, at severe risk.

The situation was also clear to Pitt. He sat on a rock at the bottom of the hill road, just below a detachment in place to guard the road. The detachment had already exchanged a few words with Pitt and recognized him.

I sat beside Pitt. Kristof Ab Seija, the bandaged man, stood behind us.

“I can talk to them some more,” Pitt said, “but I don't know what good it will do. They're a special crew. They take orders directly from Beys and no one else. After the steamships, that gun is his pride.”

“We don't have much time,” I said.

The gun blasted a great gout of flame and smoke from the side of the hill. The shell flew out over the water, sounding like a huge shoe grinding boulder-sized gravel. Seconds later, kilometers away, an explosion answered like the same heavy shoe dropping.

“It can shoot seven kilometers,” Pitt said. “Maybe more.”

“We may have to kill them,” Seija said.

Pitt lowered his face into his hands and rubbed his eyes. “It's not easy,” he said.

“To kill them?” Seija asked.

“To be a traitor,” he replied sharply, and looked up at me, eyes pleading for some sort of inspiration. I had put myself into this position; I could not back down now.

I listened intently to the conflicting messages inside me, trying to find that conviction of invincibility I had known before.

My neck hair tingled again. Interest. The word that described so much and explained so little. I heard more voices coming from the flat between the hills, mostly female.

The bearded man, Hamsun, ran up to join us. The detachment farther up the dirt road began to mill restlessly, weapons raised, sensing something was about to happen.

“Women,” Hamsun said, out of breath, panting heavily. “From Naderville. Older women coming back. Now that the fighting. Has stopped.”

In a town or city as small as Naderville, everybody should know everybody else. They had shared mutual grief and misery; I tried to imagine the depth of the social connections, the influence some people might wield. Beys might have been a true aberration, his support shallow; the dull calm on the face of the man in the flatboat could as easily have been numb acquiescence.

And now the women were here, perhaps the mother or wife of that man. For a moment I felt lost in this new sympathy. All the energetic loathing I had carried left a confusing vacuum.

“Ser Pitt,” I said, “can you explain things to the women? Bring some of them up here?”

“You want them to go up the road first?”

“Mothers, sisters, wives,” I said.

Pitt stood. “I'll try to explain,” he said. “I know some of the gun crew. I know their families.”

Yanosh is trying to absorb this. “So you became a general,” he said. “You learned how to move the masses.”

His words are ironic, perhaps a little disbelieving. “Pitt and I walked with the women. We walked up the road. The soldiers could not shoot their own women.”

“You told them about the food,” Yanosh says.

“It was more than food,” I say. “It was exhaustion, and thirty-seven years of frustration and recrimination and misery. And now the profanation of a sacred thing.”

“That is what I have the most trouble understanding,” Yanosh says. “How could anyone revere such a thing as the ecos? Wasn't it part of their misery?”

“No,” I say, not knowing exactly how to explain. Yanosh will never see the ecoi as they were. Nobody will ever see them again.

The women walked past the guards and the chain barrier and up to the gun. Lenk's troops stayed behind; they were not necessary.

The gun crew were not the devoted warriors Beys might have hoped. They succumbed rapidly to the pleas of their wives and mothers, and radioed for instructions to 15. Beys could not explain the fluxing to his soldiers, nor why they should continue supporting Brion when the sustenance of their homeland was rotting.

The gun did not fire again. Beys had lost his constituency, and word was spreading against Brion.

Pitt sat with me afterward, and the captain of the gun crew joined us in the shadow of the big weapon, looking out across the ocean at the steamship and Lenk's bottled-up fleet. The captain tossed his hat down into the dust beside the massive wheel. “I have two young ones,” he said, glancing at me like a shy, frightened child. “My wife didn't come here with the others.” He swung his hand at the women on the road and surrounding the emplacement. “If they're still alive, where will they go? What will they eat? I tried to speak with Beys, but he hasn't answered the radio since we stopped firing.”

“Is there a boat?” I asked.

“On the beach,” the captain said, pointing down the hill.

The launch had once served the government's needs on the northern side of the peninsula. Less fancy than Brion's launch, or Chung's, it still had a fully charged set of batteries and a sturdy electric motor. Pitt stepped aboard with me, carrying a radio from the gun crew. Hamsun followed. Seija would stay behind to keep the peace between the Lenk troops, the gun crew, and the rest of the Brionist soldiers, many seeing their wives and mothers for the first time in days.

On the beach beside the launch lay wilted gray devastation. The beachfront thicket had died. A balloon had dropped the last of its green larval seed-mothers and now lay half-collapsed on the spit of black sand and lava gravel nearby, pushed at by slow, persistent waves. The new, young seed-mother had taken residence in a tangle of phytids the night before and had immediately enslaved them, to protect itself against whatever weather there might be. They had formed a small shelter over its delicate green body, and in the middle, beneath the canopy, it grew and sent forth broad flat green folia, spreading wide in the afternoon sun.

The balloon's wrinkled, rapidly deflating bag rolled back and forth in the low surf. As we prepared to board the launch, the green center beneath the dry, crumbling protection of the phytids exploded and threw out tiny corn-kernel grains. They immediately pushed probing tendrils into the dirt and wet sand.

Pitt regarded the new ecos with disgust. I did not bother to tell him what it was; we had little time.

The steamship sailed in a tight loop four kilometers offshore. The last of the sailing ships that had dropped off Lenk's troops and shelled Naderville had gotten themselves into a tight situation, bottled up in a bight that stretched seven kilometers north from the peninsula. It was obvious from the steamship's threatening posture and strategic position that if they tried to leave, they would be shelled, probably demolished. But for the time being, no action was being taken. The sailing ships could not shell 15 at its present distance from them, but it could certainly fire on them, and Beys seemed to be weighing his options.

Hamsun and Pitt insisted that they be allowed to run the boat. “You need time to think,” Pitt said. His deference made me nervous. Again, all my confidence had fled. The way Pitt looked at me made my stomach churn.

I dreaded the thought of meeting with Beys. I knew his kind of evil would rise above any small talent I might have at persuasion and politics. He would know I was no prophet; he might simply shoot me, or order me shot. I did not fear that, however. Death seemed the least of my worries.

I hoped Shirla was on board, and Randall. On the other hand, I was uncomfortable at the thought of her seeing me in this new, false role, of diplomat and putative avatar. She would instantly know it for the sham it was. If Beys saw her reaction, he would know, then, also.

And yet—what could Beys do? He could kill us. He could fire on the sailing ships. But Lenk and the Khoragos were not in the bight. Without support from Naderville, Beys was nothing more than a pirate. His strength would rapidly wane.

The situation in Naderville was far from stable, however. Brion could reappear at any moment, from wherever he was hiding, and draw his people back together, back to their accustomed ruler and ways. He was far better at playing his role than I could be. Beys might be in touch with Brion; the pair of supposed opposites might again be drawing lines of force between them, north pole and south, on the brink this time of regaining not just Naderville but all the other human settlements as well.

Pitt had told the steamship that we were approaching, and that I was aboard to parley. He stood beside me on the prow; Hamsun piloted the boat from the stern.

“Will he blow us out of the water?” Pitt asked.

“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” I said. “I feel sick to my stomach,” Pitt said. “So do I.”

Pitt squinted up at me. “The general is a powerful man,” he said. “I think he'll squash me like a bug.”

“What does he believe in?” I asked.

Pitt frowned. He was a thin, weary bureaucrat in a uniform that no longer seemed to fit him. His long wrists hung out of the sleeves, and he clasped his bony hands together tightly. “A few hours ago, I would have said he believed in Brion and Naderville. In bringing rational planning and thought to Lamarckia. I was a student in the academy before my enlistment began and the call-up put us all in uniform. I didn't see any duty away from Naderville ... I stayed here and watched things change. Brion became more aloof. Beys more prominent. I did not disapprove. Should I have?”

I shook my head. If I could not judge Brion, surely I could not judge this man, or any like him. The confusing vacuum persisted.

No right, no wrong, only forces of nature, like winds blowing us back and forth. My stomach knotted tighter. We were less than a kilometer from 15. The steamship had slowed. She had dropped a sea anchor to maintain her position. Pitt rubbed his nose and said that was a good sign.

“15's given us permission to put alongside,” Hamsun called from aft.

Pitt arranged his uniform and smoothed back his hair, blown about by the sea breeze. The smell of ammonia and flat staleness was apparent even this far from shore; on the land it must have been awful.

“Some of us worshipped Hsia,” Pitt said. “It wasn't her fault she couldn't feed us. Some thought she did what she could, that we had just overstepped our bounds. That's why so many were upset when Brion said he was going to make her fruitful, he was going to change her. Brion almost lost everything then. But he brought the food down the canal in ships, and we had been so hungry for so long ... The rebellion ended before it really got started.

“The last two days ... I don't know. I've lived here all my life. The thicket silva's been here for millions of years, so they say. I think if I were someone else, I'd cry. How could Brion have done something like this?”

I could not give any useful answers.

The launch pulled alongside the steamship and a gangway was lowered level with our deck. We lashed the launch to the gangway and climbed the steps. A narrow-faced man with a short stiff cap of brown hair greeted us stiffly at the rail.

“General Beys is busy now. He'll be with you shortly.”

We were taken forward, past the big forward gun, sea-based twin of the gun that had been rolled up the hill. It must have taken immense effort to make such weapons, and yet, they had not saved 43 from being sunk by primitive xyla-wrapped cannon. I could not fathom the reasoning behind such a military buildup. Had Brion or Beys anticipated a major showdown at sea?

The bristle-haired man introduced himself as Major Sompha, then sat us under an observation canopy erected in front of the forward gun. “Is it as bad as it looks?” he asked softly, nodding in the direction of the mainland. From where 15 floated, the stretches of silva looked pale and irregular, the sharply defined boundaries turning ash-gray as the day progressed.

“It's all changing,” Pitt said.

“What's the worst of it? We haven't heard much.”

“The food,” Pitt said. Hamsun described the situation in the storage barns. Major Sompha took it with as much stoic calm as he could muster, but it obviously hit him hard. He asked about his family in Naderville.

“Some are coming back into town, but...” Hamsun shook his head. “Are you with Lenk?” Sompha asked me.

“No,” I said.

“He says he's from the Hexamon,” Pitt said. “A lot of people believe him.”

Sompha nodded, putting facts together and drawing his own conclusions. “I think General Beys believes him,” he said. “Why let you come here, otherwise? We're waiting for nightfall, and then we'll sink Lenk's ugly fleet one by one.”

“There's no food,” Pitt growled. “What good will it do to sink the ships that might take some of us away, or bring food from Tasman or Elizabeth?”

“Lenk wouldn't do a thing for us before,” Sompha said.

“I need to know if there are two people on board,” I interrupted, my patience ending. “A man and a woman. One is named Shirla Ap Nam, the other is Erwin Randall.”

“The hostages,” Sompha said. “They're here. Beys is keeping them below. Maybe he is worried about you.” He shrugged and left us sitting out of the milky sunlight, in the shade of the canopy.

An hour passed, and Sompha returned with glasses of water. He stood with us for several minutes, grimly staring across the water at the ash-colored shore. “Looks like a huge fire hit it,” he said. “Do you think it's happening everywhere?”

“It will,” I said.

“We'll put in to the harbor tomorrow morning, after we sink these ships, if it's clear,” Sompha said. “I need to see things for myself.”

An hour later, he returned again. The distant shore appeared creamy white in the late-afternoon light. The sun crept toward the western horizon. Within the bight, the remains of Lenk's fleet had anchored.

To the men and women on those ships, I thought, it must seem as if the world was ending. They'd probably try to break out in an hour or so, and chance that Beys's monster would miss a few, not be able to track them down, or that they could return sufficient fire to put the steamship out of action. I imagined myself on one of those ships.

“General Beys says he's ready to meet with you now,” Sompha said. We stood and Sompha placed himself in front of me. “If you are the judge, from the Hexamon, I need to tell you something now. My wife and I were ordered to take in three children from Elizabeth's Land,” he said. “We were ordered to. We have taken good care of them.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, and then Sompha turned away, murmuring, “I just wanted you to know that.”

He led us to the bridge, up a steep companionway and around an outside passage to cabins on the upper deck. Sompha opened a door, and an imposing dark woman, taller than I and probably stronger, stared at us with sharp clear eyes, then stood aside.

General Beys sat at a table within the cabin. All was painted white, and the table was set with a white cloth. A glass pitcher of water and several cups had been placed around the table, and folding xyla chairs drawn up.

Beys looked at the men beside me. “You're Rank Two Suleiman Pitt. I don't remember this man's name...”

“Hamsun, sir. Tarvo Hamsun.”

“Is it as bad on shore as it looks?”

“Yes, sir,” Pitt said.

Beys indicated we should sit. His ruddy cheeks had blued to a pale violet in the last few days, and his skin was sallow from fatigue. His left hand trembled slightly on the white cloth of the table until he removed it and hid it beneath the table. “Brion should have killed you all, and Lenk, days ago,” Beys said. “We had Lenk in our hands. We both miscalculated badly.”

“What good to kill more?” I asked.

“My mistake,” Beys said shortly, his voice clipped but calm. “I underestimated Lenk, and in my profession, that's a crime.”

He leaned forward. “Still no help from the Hexamon? Lenk's clavicle no good for you?”

“I haven't seen it,” I said.

“Brion took you up the canal and showed you more than you cared to see, I'll bet.”

“He took us up the canal,” I said.

“The scientist, Salap ... what did he think?”

“He's still there.”

“Is Brion responsible for what's happening on shore? He and his wife?”

“It looks that way,” I said.

“He knew, damn him,” Beys said, looking up at the ceiling, then back at me. “He behaved like a kid whose dirty little secrets are going to come out soon. Do you know where he is?”

I shook my head.

“Neither do I. I can't reach him by the radio, and no one on shore has seen him.” Beys leaned back and glared at Pitt and Hamsun. “Get out,” he ordered loudly. They stood quickly and the imposing dark woman escorted them through the hatch. “Aphra, shut the door behind you and stay outside yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said.

Beys put both hands on the table. “We're equal now. Fate damn either one of us who lies.”

“All right,” I said.

“The oath assumed,” he added, staring at me with brows drawn together.

“The oath assumed.”

“Brion gave you the impression that I'm responsible for all the mayhem, didn't he?” Beys asked.

“I believe you carried out your interpretation of vague orders.”

Beys thrust his jaw out and leaned his head back. “Did Brion show you the army he wanted to make? Or rather, have the seed-mother make?

“Designs for scion soldier-weapons... ?” He read my features intently. “No,” I said.

His face shifted from a wry smile to disgust. “He wanted to start over again. He wanted all of Lenk's people to realize what Lenk had done to us. Anything to further that cause ... was legitimate. We were working to stabilize all settlements on Lamarckia, to transform this planet. Food was the first accomplishment. The scion soldiers would have been next ... But his wife died. That broke him. I thought he was strong, or I wouldn't have allied with him, but that broke him.”

Beys met my silence with a lift of his lip and a cluck of his tongue. “If I destroy this fleet of Lenk's in the next hour, what will you do?”

I avoided directly answering that question, instead explaining about the larval seed-mothers, the rotting scions of old Hsia. “Everyone in Naderville will starve,” I said.

“If I let Lenk go free, and ... whatever you might think is honorable or just, what will you do?”

“Naderville will need to be evacuated. That could take months. A lot of people will die, but not all of them.”

Beys considered this, rubbing his cheek with a short, fat finger. Then he lifted one eyebrow. “What would you have done, if you were me?”

“Why did you kill so many?” I asked in return.

Beys jerked slightly in his chair, but his expression did not change.

“Why kill the adults?” I asked, taking another angle.

“Irrational loyalty to Lenk and all he stood for,” he said.

“Yes, but why kill them?”

“To end the old and begin the new. How would you have done that, if you were me?”

“You really don't know why you ordered them killed, do you?”

Beys lowered his eyelids until he resembled a sleepy farm animal, a dog or a pig. “You judge me. Have you judged Brion?”

“I'm not a judge,” I said.

“Brion believed you were powerless,” he said. “He thought you were a gnawed-off piece of some aborted effort. I told him the Hexamon does not work that way. He laughed and said I was an idealist. I think that all you have to do is wink just the right way, and all this will end. Why not wink?”

I did not answer.

He refused to look me in the eye, and I saw sweat on his lip. “I have something for you. Brion asked that I take your companions, Ap Nam and Randall, with me on this ship. He learned that you and Ap Nam were lovers. They're here.”

“I'd like to see them,” I said.

Beys clenched his hands on the table and knocked it sharply with his knuckles. “I would have done anything to have never come here. I would have worked my way up in Way Defense.” His voice tensed. “I am in a backwater, with nowhere to go. When my family died, Brion was all I had.”

“Show me Shirla and Erwin,” I said.

“If I give them up to you, and let the fleet go, what then?”

I did not hesitate to tell a half-lie. “I will not turn you over to Hexamon justice.”

“Where will I live?”

“Wherever you can travel without my help.”

Beys mulled this over. “You can have this ship. It's hell to maintain. I can take one of Lenk's schooners and a crew of ten. I can manage with ten. If you want, I'll sink this ship.”

“We'll need all the ships,” I said.

His once-florid face had taken on the cast of wet freechunk paste. Beys lifted his eyes to meet mine. “A small ship. A boat. Where do you suggest I go?”

“I don't care,” I said.

“Lenk might have shelled his own children, you know,” Beys murmured. “They might have been kept in Naderville as protection.”

“Were they?”

“If I had thought about it, I would have ordered them kept there, but I was sixty miles out at sea when the attack began. I was going to Jakarta, and then to Athenai.”

I shook my head.

“I stay here on Lamarckia, whatever happens. You will not let them take me back to the Way.”

“All right,” I said.

Beys brought his hands up on the table. Star, Fate, and Pneuma be kind, I shook hands with that man.

Shirla and Randall stood in the shadow of the aft gun, guarded by three soldiers in gray and tan, and Pitt and Hamsun waited nearby. I walked along the passage to the rear deck. Shirla saw me and ran forward. Nobody tried to stop her. She grabbed me and I squeezed her tightly, burying my face in her neck and sweat-scented hair. We said nothing for a time.

“Are you a prisoner, too?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Are we going back to Liz now? I keep hearing that we can't possibly stay here, that the ecos is sick.”

So word was spreading around the ship. I wondered if Beys or Brion could possibly survive.

“I hope we can go, and soon,” I said. “There's a lot of work to do. A lot to prepare for.”

“No magic?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I'm afraid not.”

“Just you?”

“Just me,” I said.

Randall came closer and joined us. “I hope you'll be enough,” he said.

33

Yanosh and I have made our way to my newly assigned apartment. He has to leave soon; the presiding minister has been affording him considerable time to arrange for my care and debrief me, but other matters are pressing hard, and Yanosh can assign only so many incorporeal ghosts to do his work before his embodied authority becomes necessary.

Much has changed in the Hexamon in ten years. The art of ghosting—of projecting partial personalities to do one's work—has advanced to astonishing sophistication.

“Did you ever learn why Lenk destroyed the clavicle?” Yanosh asks.

Shirla was with me when we went ashore, in Lenk's main party, to pay homage to the dead. Brion, Hyssha Chung, and Frick had been found murdered, their bodies mutilated. Lenk claimed disgruntled soldiers from Brion's army had caught them and killed them. I never heard any reason to believe otherwise. Their alleged killers were going to be put on trial in Tasman.

They were being buried with a full divaricate Naderite funeral, allowing Lenk to show that time and honor can heal all wounds.

A few days later, the Khoragos departed Hsia. Because of the extraordinary fluxing, boats were being sent from Tasman and Elizabeth's Land, and some effort was being made to evacuate the citizens of Naderville. It would take months, and Lenk did not want to be there if things went wrong. He insisted Shirla and I accompany him to Tasman.

Beys left Naderville in a small schooner, with a five-man crew, all that would go with him.

None was ever heard from again.

Shirla sat on the deck of the Khoragos in a small folding chair, sipping from a bowl of tea. She smiled up at me as I approached, afraid but trying hard not to show her fear. I sat beside her and she offered me the cup. I took a sip.

“When is he going to show us?” she asked.

“Tonight. He's busy arranging things now. He's still Able Lenk.”

Shirla gazed out to sea and her teeth began to chatter. With a jerk, she stilled the quiver in her jaw and looked miserable. “You'll be going soon,” she said. There had been so little time to talk, so many meetings and arrangements before leaving Hsia. None of this had been worked over between us.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“If you can fix the clavicle...”

“Ferrier says he doesn't believe that's possible, now.”

“But if you can ... You'll go back to the Way.”

I took her hand. “I don't know what will happen.”

“You come from a larger place than anything I can conceive of,” Shirla said. “I've been taught all my life to be afraid of that place, to despise it. Now you're my love and you come from there.”

“We all come from there,” I said.

“But I don't want to leave here. You must.”

I squeezed her hand. In truth, nobody knew what would happen. “He wants you to be there, too,” I said.

“Good Lenk invited me?”

“He did.”

“Olmy,” she said, putting her other hand over mine, “I wanted—”

She tried valiantly again.

“I wanted—”

Tears dripped down her cheeks.

“I wanted,” she managed again, and shook her whole upper body to rid herself of this foolishness. “Never, ever, ever want anything with all your life, ever. Never want. They will take it away. You will go away.”

“I want, too. I know where I am now,” I said.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Lenk sat in the cabin where we had met it seemed years earlier. Allrica Fassid stood beside him, but left as Shirla and I came in. On the table before him was an ornate xyla box.

“Nobody can offer any proof that you are from the Hexamon,” he said as we sat in two chairs opposite. “That is remarkable. I accept that you are, because of what you have done. I know the ways of history, and it all smells right to me.” He turned to Shirla.

“You are a good woman, and have never wanted more than to have a family and live a decent life.”

Shirla blinked at him, then looked at me, too stunned to answer.

“Isn't that so? There's no need to be shy.”

She nodded. It was so. Lenk knew his people well.

“You have made love with this man, in a certain way, under difficult circumstances, and that means you are committed to him, and believe he is committed to you. Do you accept him for what he is?”

“I don't think we came here to talk about that,” Shirla said softly.

Lenk focused his deep-set, dark-lidded eyes on me. For a moment he looked remarkably like a dead man. “I hear that Brion and Beys thought you could pass judgment, that Beys worried you would split him like a ripe fruit. They were cowards. The Hexamon cannot judge us.”

He leaned forward and opened the box. Inside, the clavicle lay in many pieces, some of them melted. Even after years, at the end of two projections within the shattered sphere, a tiny bit of glimmer showed, the last trace of a small finite artificial universe sympathetic with the Way. None of the controls remained, however, and I saw it could never be repaired.

“You were a fool to come here alone,” Lenk said. “Whoever sent you here was a fool. I have withstood Lamarckia and treachery and the devils of my own nature. I do not fear you or the Hexamon. Brion is dead, and that is a kind of waste—though he had too much of the Hexamon in him—and Beys is gone. So what are we to do, you and I?”

I stared across the table at the man who had started all this, saw his weary defiance and his strength. I saw that Shirla was still in awe of him. He had his center of power, and the force necessary to oust him from that center would cause more bloodshed and, in the end, with all of Lamarckia changing, do nobody any good.

“You've made a beginning for yourself,” Lenk said. “You've gathered a following. You could be like Brion, only I suspect you'd be a little colder than he was, and never trust someone like Beys. You could be formidable, Olmy.”

I studied Lenk and felt the remains of my hate dissolve, not because of any lessening of indignation and anger, but because he was part of a river of human history that could not be shifted without immense pain. He was not the worst, far from the best; but inevitably, he was in his place, and for me to oppose him would be another kind of cruelty, not to him—he might relish the battle—but to his people.

To Shirla.

I could guarantee nothing. The Hexamon might never come, and I could not return to the Way.

My mission was over.

After a moment, Lenk leaned back and said, “I thank you for what you've managed this far. I bless you for your work. You're a smart and decent man, Ser Olmy, but you are not like me, and not like Brion. Go and live a life with this woman.”

I did not want my children on Lamarckia. Shirla wanted children; we compromised.

Shirla and I lived in Athenai for ten years. It was there we adopted our first boy, Ricca, one of the many orphans called Beys's children. I came in time almost to forget the Hexamon. For weeks on end I thought little or nothing of my past. I was well-known wherever we lived for being the Hexamon agent, but even in the worst of times, nobody resented me, or at least nobody expressed their resentments to me. The Adventists, what remained of them, came now and then, and Lenk did not oppose their coming. He knew I would not encourage them.

When Lenk died, Allrica Fassid took over the reins of power for a while, but the first starvation set in five years later, and she committed suicide. Others followed. The divaricates kept their political scheme, and never did I sense a place for me in that scheme. For this, Shirla was grateful.

We left Tasman after it began its own fluxing. We adopted our second son, Henryk, in Calcutta.

As the years passed, more and more the change spread. So much of the beauty and variety of Lamarckia was fleeing before Brion's gift of green. What replaced it was simple and direct, tiny ecoi, covering only a few acres, and getting tinier. Some of the scions—phytids, even mobile scions—seemed capable of independence, and perhaps even replicating on their own. Randall studied them closely and wrote more papers. We visited often.

Shirla and I and our two sons had our happiest five years together in Jakarta. Petain's Zone resisted the green longer than any but the island zones in the south, where most of the survivors clustered for decades. In those five good years, however, Jakarta became a wonderfully feverish city, an island of creative ferment and relative prosperity in the change.

We actually saw Salap again. Yes!—he had survived, and was back at Wallace Station, but he made a trip to Jakarta.

Many of us were dying from new immune challenges as Petain tried different defenses against Hsia and the green. Salap had been charting the spread of new scion chemistries, and he arrived when Shirla was very ill, making the trip especially to see us, I suppose, but also as part of the research effort.

Shirla and I met with him in her room. Henryk and Ricca, ages ten and fifteen then, came in and out, carrying food, clean bedding, water. Shirla had become a real mother to them, and I had done my best, in my distracted way, to be a real father.

Salap made his tests, took samples from her withered body, told us that there might be ways to turn back such challenges in a few months. Idle hopes, as it turned out.

Salap finally related the story of his last few days with the female figure in the hemisphere. “She struggled to become human,” he said. “Having watched the Chung sisters and Brion, and finally paying close attention to me, the only model left to her—observing me while I observed her—we taught each other many things. But she could never think like us, much less understand our shapes. She was never more than a meticulous and crafty observer, without the cycling knot of self-awareness that must always separate us from the ecoi. At the last, though, she broke her second foot free and became independent for a few days. She managed to walk. She did pretty well, under the circumstances.”

“What did she want?” Shirla asked.

“The ecos had observed humans having sex. It was curious about the process. Thought it might result in another ‘name,’ like Brion's gift of chlorophyll. She actually became seductive, at the end.” He stared at us, eyes flicking back and forth. For the first time, Salap seemed ill at ease.

“Did you?” Shirla asked.

Salap smiled and leaned his head to one side. “Three months after you left, the hemisphere withered,” he continued. “The last of the balloons had been manufactured and sent away with the winds.”

“What happened to her? To the imitation of Caitla?” Shirla asked.

“She withered, too. She maintained her interest to the end, trying to speak, trying to extract biological secrets, hoping for more gifts of ‘names.’ Finally, she could not move, and she made only shrill whistles and rasping, barking sounds.

“When she died, I cut her open and studied her, but there was nothing particularly novel about her anatomy. I buried her beside the body of Caitla Chung, in the new silva.”

“She was a queen,” Shirla said, and she swallowed and stared up at the mat fiber ceiling, and then looked at me. “You saw a true queen, Olmy. I wish I could have seen her. I don't think we'll ever have that chance again.”

Shirla died that winter. So many died that winter, as the weather itself changed, and Petain began its final decline. The green arrived with its own disastrous spring, but by then I was a different man, without Shirla. I flowed with the people, with Lenk's river of history.

34

I go with Yanosh down the Way in a flawship to the gate on the geometry stack. Transport ships are loading the last of the evacuees from Lamarckia. The situation there has become critical, and the Hexamon has ordered that all be removed.

Because of the difficulties of a gate in the geometry stack, fifteen years have passed since I was retrieved. Rebecca has died.

All but three hundred of the remaining nine thousand Lamarckians have been brought through the gate. My two sons are not among them. They have chosen to remain, to ride out the worst of the changes, though their chances of surviving are almost nil. Somehow, I feel that I have given them a part of myself, made them like me, and done them no favor.

I watch from a deltoid craft as the last of the Hexamon agents evacuate the gate.

The gate is closing by itself, the stacks becoming unstable despite the best efforts of the best gate openers.

The wall of the Way glows brilliant violet, then flashes rich, vibrant green. The dimple fills and smooths over, and the surface assumes the color of fresh-cast bronze.

The green flash lingers in my eye.

I become who I am now.

Eon

Greg Bear

For Poul and Karen

with much appreciation

and love.

Prolog - Four Beginnings

One - Christmas Eve 2000

New York City

"It's going into a wide elliptical Earth orbit," Judith Hoffman said. "Perigee about ten thousand kilometers, apogee about five hundred thousand. It'll make a loop around the moon every third orbit." She pulled back from the video screen to let Garry Lanier have a look from where he sat on the edge of her desk. For the time being, the Stone still resembled a baked potato, with no meaningful detail.

Outside the door to her office, the noise of the party was a distant reminder of ignored social obligations. She had brought him into the office just a few minutes before.

"That must be an incredible fluke."

"It's not a fluke," Hoffman said.

Tall, with close-cut dense black hair, Lanier resembled a pale-skinned Amerindian, though he had no Indian blood. Hoffman found his eyes particularly reassuring—gently scrutinizing, the eyes of a man used to seeing across great distances. She did not put her trust in people on the basis of looks, however.

Hoffman had taken to Lanier because he had taught her something. Some had called him bloodless, but Hoffman knew better. The man was simply competent, calm and observant.

He had a kind of blindness to people's foibles that made him peculiarly effective as a manager. He seldom seemed to recognize petty insults, bitchiness or backbiting. He saw people only in terms of their effectiveness or lack of it, at least as far as his public reactions showed; he cut through their surface dross to find the true coin beneath. She had learned some interesting things about several people by observing their reactions to Lanier. And she had adapted her own style, picking up on his finesse.

Lanier had never been in Hoffman's at-home work area before, and now, in the video's cool light, he inspected the shelves of memory blocks, the broad, empty desk with its basic secretary's chair, the compact word processor beneath the video.

Like most of the party-goers, he was a little in awe of Hoffman. On the Hill, she was called the Advisor. She had acted in official and unofficial capacities as a science expert for three presidents. Her video programs reviving and re-exploring science had been popular in the late 1990s, in a world just recovering from the shock of the Little Death. She had served on the board of directors of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now ISCCOM—the International Space Cooperation Committee. Though she could not disguise her solid build, her taste in clothes was immaculate. There was a conscious limit to her style; however; her fingernails were short and unpainted, well-manicured but not elegant, and she wore little makeup. She allowed her brunette hair to find its own shape with a minimum of interference; it tended to make a nimbus of fine curls around her head.

"You must be on the Drake Hookup," Lanier said.

"I am, but this is a Deep Space Tracking picture. The Drake is still locked on the Perseus Gemstar."

"They won't turn it on the Stone?"

She shook her head, grinning wolfishly. "Feisty old bastards are on a tight schedule—won't turn it around even for a look at the biggest event of the twenty-first century."

Lanier raised an eyebrow. The Stone, as far as he knew, was just an asteroid. The oblong chunk wasn't going to hit the Earth, but if it was going to orbit, it would be in perfect position for scientific probes. That was interesting, but hardly worthy of so much enthusiasm.

"Twenty-One isn't until next month," he reminded her.

"And that's when we'll be getting busy." She turned toward him and folded her arms. "Garry, we've been working together for some time now. I trust you a lot."

He felt a tightening at the base of his spine. She had seemed tense all evening. He had dismissed the fidgeting as none of his business. Now she was making it his business.

"What do you know about the Stone?" she asked.

He thought a moment before answering. "DST located it eight months ago. It's about three hundred kilometers long, a hundred kilometers across at midsection. Medium albedo, probably a silicate body with a nickel-iron core. It had a kind of halo around it when first spotted, but that's dissipated. That made a few scientists speculate it was an exceptionally large old comet nucleus. Some conflicting reports on low density revived the old Shklovskii Mars-moon speculation."

"Where did you hear the density reports?"

"I don't remember."

"That reassures me a little bit. If you haven't heard much more than that, probably no one else has, either. DST had a leak, but we've plugged it now."

Lanier had entered her circle while working as a public relations manager for AT&T Orbicom Services. Before being employed by Orbicom, he had spent six years in the Navy, first as a fighter pilot, then flying high-altitude tankers. He had flown the famous Charlie Baker Delta route over Florida, Cuba and Bermuda during the Little Death, refueling the planes of the Atlantic Watch whose vigilance had played such a crucial role in limiting the war.

After the armistice, he had received an OK from the Navy to take his expertise in aerospace engineering over to Orbicom, which was tuning up its world-wide civilian Mononet.

There had been a few calls at first to Orbicom headquarters in Menlo Park, California, then requests for help on position papers, then an abrupt and unexpected transfer to the Orbicom building in Washington, which he later learned had been engineered by Hoffman. There was no question of romance—how often had he quelled that rumor?—but their ability to work together was remarkable in a Washington atmosphere of perpetual partisan bickering and funding squabbles.

"Why the secrecy?" he asked.

"DST has been ordered to mask all data given to the community." By which she meant the scientific community.

"Why in hell should they do that? Government's relation with the community has been awful the last few years. This certainly won't help."

"Yes, but I concur this time."

Another chill. Hoffman was very dedicated to the community.

"If there's a blanket over everything, how do you know?" Lanier asked.

"Connections through ISCCOM. I've been put on oversight by the President."

"Jesus."

"So while our friends are partying out there, I need to know if I can rely on you."

"Judith, I'm just a second-rank PR type."

"Bullshit. Orbicom thinks you're the best personnel coordinator they have. I had to wrestle Parker for three months to get you transferred to Washington. You were lined up for a promotion, know that?"

Truthfully, he had hoped to avoid another promotion. He felt he was getting away from the real work, higher and higher up the tower of power. "And you got me transferred, instead?"

"Pulled enough strings to look like the puppet master I'm supposed to be. I may need you. You know I don't pick candidates unless I'm sure they'll yank my ass out of the fire later."

He nodded. To be part of Hoffman's circle was to be groomed for importance. Until now, he had tried to overlook that as a truism.

"Do you remember the supernova sighted about the same time as the Stone?"

Lanier nodded; it had made a brief splash in the journals, and he had been too busy to find that low-profile coverage odd.

"It wasn't a supernova. Just as bright, but it didn't match any of the requirements. In the first place, it was first recorded by DST as an infrared object just outside the solar system. Within two days, the flare became visible, and DST detected radiation of frequencies associated with every atomic transition. The flare temperature started at a million degrees Kelvin and peaked at just over one billion degrees. By that time nuclear explosion detectors on satellites—the new GPS super-Vela—were picking up thermally excited gamma rays from nuclear transitions. It was clearly visible in the night sky, so DST had to make up a cover story, and that was the discovery of a supernova by space defense installations. But they didn't know what they had."

"And?"

"The display went out, everything got quiet and then a visual sighting was made in the same portion of the sky. It was the Stone. By that time, everybody knew they weren't dealing with a simple asteroid." The video pictures flickered and a chime sounded.

"Well, here it is. Joint Space Command has taken over the Drake and rotated it."

The Drake was the most powerful orbiting optical telescope. There were bigger instruments being built on lunar farside, but none yet in operation matched the Drake. It had no Defense Department connection. Joint Space Command legally had no jurisdiction—except in time of national security crisis.

The Stone appeared on the screen greatly enlarged and cradled in numbers and science data graphs. Much more detail was evident—a big crater at one end of the oblong, smaller craters all over, a peculiar band running latitudinally.

"It still looks like an asteroid," Lanier said, his voice lacking conviction.

"Indeed," Hoffman said. "We know the type. A very large mesosiderite. We know the composition. But it's missing about forty percent of its mass. DST confirmed that this morning. That chunk's profile through the center resembles a geode. Geodes don't occur in space, Garry. The President has already accepted my recommendation that we organize an investigation. That was before the elections, but I think we can push it with the new administration—cracker-barrel mentality or not. Just as a precaution, we're scheduling six orbital transfer vehicle flights before the end of February. And I'm laying my bets down early. I think we're going to need a science team, and I'd like you to coordinate for me. I'm sure we can arrange something with Orbicom."

"But why the secrecy?"

"Why, Garry, I'm surprised." She smiled warmly at him. "When the aliens arrive, the government always goes in for secrecy."

Two - August, 2001

Podlipki Airfield, near Moscow

"Major Mirsky, you are not concentrating on your task."

"My suit is leaking, Colonel Mayakovsky."

"That is irrelevant. You can stay in the tank for another fifteen or twenty minutes."

"Yes, Colonel."

"Now pay attention. You must complete this maneuver."

Mirsky blinked sweat from his eyes and strained to see the American-style docking hatch clearly. The water was already up to his knees in the pressure suit; he could feel the stream entering through the seam at his hip. There was no way of telling how copious the flow was; he hoped Mayakovsky knew.

He had been instructed to wedge the bent metal bar into the two sensor ports. To get the necessary traction to jam it home, he hooked his ankle and right wrist to the circular lip of the hatch, using the L-shaped attachments on his boots and glove. Then with his left hand

—(how they had tried to discourage him in school in Kiev, now gone, all of his teachers and their nineteenth-century ideas; how they had tried to get him to use his right hand exclusively, until finally, in his late teens, an edict had come down officially pardoning gauche children)—

Mirsky slammed the bar. He unhooked his wrist and ankles and pushed back.

The water was up to his waist.

"Colonel—"

"The hatch will pause before opening. Three minutes."

Mirsky bit his lip. He twisted his neck around within the helmet to see how his teammates were doing. The five lined-up hatches were manned—two men and Yefremova. Where was Orlov?

There—pushing his helmet back, Mirsky saw Orlov being hauled to the surface of the tank, three wet-suited, scuba-equipped divers assisting him to shadowy obscurity. The surface, the lovely surface, sweet air and no water streaming in. He couldn't feel it now. The level was above his hip.

The hatch began to move. He could hear the mechanism whining. Then it stopped, only one-third open.

"It's stuck," he said, stunned. He was reasonably sure the exercise was supposed to be over as soon as he could enter the hatch, and the hatch was supposed to be foolproof, it was supposed to open when properly jimmied—American word, American technology, reliable, no?

"Loosen it. Your bar is obviously not positioned properly."

"It is!" Mirsky insisted.

"Major—"

"Yes, yes!" He jammed the heel of his heavily gloved hand against the bar again. He hadn't hooked his ankles and right wrist; he floated away from the hatch and had to waste precious seconds reeling in his line and dragging himself back. Hook. Pound. Unhook. No result.

Water up to his chest, cold, slopping past his neck seal into his helmet when his angle shifted. He swallowed some accidentally and choked. There. Colonel will think I'm drowning and show mercy!

"Jiggle it," the colonel suggested.

His gloves were almost too thick to reach into the groove where the bar now resided, held in place by the partly open hatch. He pressed, his sleeves filled with cold and his fingers numbing. He pressed again.

His suit was no longer neutrally buoyant. He was starting to sink. The bottom of the tank was thirty meters below, and all three of the divers had accompanied Orlov. There was nobody between him and drowning if he could not make it to the simulated Soviet hatch on his own power. And if he did not leave now—

But he didn't dare. He had wanted the stars since adolescence, and panicking now would put them out of his reach forever. He screamed in his helmet and slammed his glove tip into the groove, causing a sharp freezing jolt of pain to go up his arm as his fingers crammed into the inner fabric and casing.

The hatch began to move again.

"Just jammed," the colonel said.

"I'm drowning, goddammit!" Mirsky shouted. He hooked his wrists onto the lip of the ring and sputtered water from his mouth. The suit's air entered and exited just above the neck ring of his helmet, and he could already hear the suck and gurgle.

Floodlights came on around the tank. The hatches were suspended in watery noon brightness. He felt hands under his arms and around his legs and saw the three other cosmonaut trainees vaguely from the corners of his foggy faceplate. They kicked away from the hatch complex and hauled him higher, higher to his grandmother's archaic and welcome heaven.

They sat at their special table away from the two hundred other recruits and were served fine thick sausages with their kasha. The beer was cold and plentiful, if sour and watery, and there were oranges and carrots and cabbage cores. And for dessert, a big steel bowl of fresh-made, rich vanilla ice cream, unavailable for months while they trained, was set before them by a smiling mess officer.

When dinner was over, Yefremova and Mirsky strolled across the grounds of the Cosmonaut Instructional Center with its hideous black steel water tank half-buried in the ground.

Yefremova came from Moscow and had a fine eastern slant to her eyes; Mirsky, from Kiev, could as easily have been German as Russian. Still, coming from Kiev had its advantages. A man without a city: this was something Russians could sympathize with, feel sad about.

They spoke very little. They thought they were in love but that was irrelevant. Yefremova was one of fourteen women in the Space Shock Troops program. Her femaleness kept her even busier than the men. She had trained as a pilot in the Air Defense Forces before that, flying Tu 22M training bombers and old Sukhoi fighters. He had come into the military after graduating from an aerospace engineering school. His deferment had been most fortunate; instead of being inducted into the army at eighteen, he had qualified for a New Reindustrialization scholarship.

In the engineering school, he had gained excellent marks in political science and leadership, and they had earmarked him immediately for the difficult position of Zampolit in a fighter squadron in East Germany, but then had transferred him to Space Defense Forces, which had only been in existence for four years. He had never heard of it before the transfer, but such a stroke of luck. . . He had always wanted to be a cosmonaut.

Yefremova's father was a high-ranking Moscow bureaucrat. He had put her into what he thought would be a safe military training program rather than let her run wild with Moscow's infamous Young Hooligans. She had turned out to be very capable and very bright; her future was promising, though not what her father had expected.

Their backgrounds were worlds apart, and chances were they would never even have a chance to date, much less conduct an affair or get married.

"Look," Yefremova said. "You can see it clearly tonight."

"Yes?" He knew immediately what she meant.

"There." She leaned her head close to his and pointed above the summer's long blue twilight to a tiny spot of light just beside the full moon.

"They will get there before we do," Yefremova said sadly. "They always do, now."

"So pessimistic," Mirsky said.

"I wonder what they call it," she said. "What they will name it when they land."

"Not 'the Potato,' surely!" Mirsky chuckled.

"No," Yefremova agreed.

"Someday," Mirsky said, squinting to make the spot out more clearly.

"Someday what?"

"Perhaps the time will come when we will take it away from them."

"Dreamer," Yefremova said.

The next week, a two-man vacuum chamber imploded on the outskirts of the airfield. Yefremova was testing a new suit design in one half of the chamber. She was killed instantly. There was great concern about the political repercussions of the accident, but as it turned out, her father was not unreasonable. Better to have a martyr in the family than a hooligan.

Mirsky took an unscheduled day's absence with a bottle of brandy smuggled in from Yugoslavia. He spent the day alone in a Moscow park and did not even open the bottle.

After a year, he finished his training and was promoted. He left Podlipki and spent two weeks in Starry Town, where he visited Yuri Gagarin's room, now a kind of shrine for spacefarers. From there, he was flown to a secret facility in Mongolia, and then. . . to the Moon.

And always he kept his eye on the Potato. Someday, he knew, he would go there, and not as an ISCCOM exchange Russian.

A nation could only stand so much.

Three - Christmas Eve 2004,

Santa Barbara, California

Patricia Luisa Vasquez opened the car door to release her seat harness. She was anxious to get into the house and start the festivities. The psychological testing at Vandenberg the past few days had been exhausting.

"Wait," Paul Lopez said. He put a hand on her arm, then stared at the dashboard. Vivaldi's Four Seasons played on the car stereo. "Your folks aren't going to want to know—"

"Don't worry about it," she said, pulling back a strand of very dark brown, almost black, hair. The lower half of her round face was illuminated by an orange streetlight, light olive skin pink in the sodium glow. She regarded Paul solicitously, tying her hair into two braids parted in the middle. Her square, intense eyes reminded him of a cat's gaze just before pouncing.

"They'll love it," she said, laying hand on his shoulder and stroking his cheek. "You're the first non-Anglo boyfriend I've ever introduced them to."

"I mean, about us rooming together."

"What they don't know won't hurt them."

"I feel a little awkward. You keep talking about your parents being old-fashioned."

"I just wanted you to meet them, and to show you my home."

"I want that, too."

"Listen, with the news I have tonight, nobody's going to worry about my maidenhood. If Mom asks how serious we are, I'll let you answer."

Paul grimaced. "Great."

Patricia pulled his hand toward her and made a rude sound against the palm with her lips, then opened the door.

"Wait."

"What now?"

"I'm not. . . I mean, you know that I love you."

"Paul. . .”

"It's just. . .”

"Come on inside and meet my family. You'll calm down. And don't worry."

They locked the car door and opened the trunk, pulling groceries out of the back. She huffed up the front walk with a box, her breath clouding in the cold night air. She wiped her feet on the front step mat, swung the screen door wide, caught it with her elbow and shouted, "Mama! It's me. And I brought Paul, too."

Rita Vasquez took the box from her daughter's arms and laid it down on the kitchen table. At forty-five, Rita was only slightly plump, but the clothes she wore invariably conflicted with even Patricia's rudimentary sense of fashion.

"What is this, a care package?" Rita asked. She held her arms out and folded Patricia in them.

"Mama, where did you get that polyester suit? I haven't seen one of those in years."

"I found it in the garage, packed away. Your father bought it for me before you were born. So where's Paul?"

"He's carrying in two more boxes." She removed her coat and savored the smells of tamales steaming in corn husks, baking ham and sweet potato pie. "Smells like home," she said, and Rita beamed.

In the living room, the aluminum tree was still bare—decorating the tree on Christmas Eve was a family tradition—and a gas log burned brightly in the fireplace. She reacquainted herself with the old plaster bas-reliefs of grapes and vines and leaves beneath the cornice, and the heavy wooden beams across the ceiling. She smiled. She had been born in this house. Wherever she went, however far, this would be home to her. "Where are Julia and Robert?"

"Robert's been stationed in Omaha," Rita answered from the kitchen. "They can't make it this year. Be out in March, maybe."

"Oh," Patricia said, disappointed. She returned to the kitchen. "Where's Papa?"

"Watching TV."

Paul came in the kitchen door heavily loaded. Patricia took one of the boxes from him and laid it on the floor next to the refrigerator for unloading. "We were expecting an army, so we brought lots of stuff," she said.

Rita pushed through layers of food and shook her head. "It'll get eaten. We're having Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz from next door, and cousin Enrique and his new wife. So this is Paul?"

"Yup."

Rita hugged him, her arms barely meeting around his back. She took hold of both his hands and stood away, surveying. He smiled. Tall, thin Paul, with his brown hair and light skin, looking more Anglo than the others. Still, Rita smiled as they talked. Paul could hold his own.

She walked down the hall to the den where her father would be sitting in front of the television. They had never been well-off, and the TV was a twenty-five-year-old model that made a rainbow ghost whenever it received 3-D transmissions.

"Papa?" Patricia said quietly, sneaking up behind him in the half-dark.

"Patty!" Ramon Vasquez looked around the rear cushion of his chair, a big grin lifting his pepper-gray mustache. He had been partly paralyzed by a stroke three years before and even with surgery hadn't fully recovered. Patricia sat on the divan beside him.

"I've brought Paul home with me," she said. "I'm sorry Julia can't be here this time."

"Me, too. But that's air force." Ramon had been in the air force for twenty years before retiring in 1996. Except for Patricia, the family was enmeshed in the air force. Julia had met Robert at a party on March Air Force Base six years ago.

"I've got something to tell everybody, Papa."

"Oh? What's that?" Had his speech improved since they last talked face to face? It seemed so. She hoped so.

Rita called out from the kitchen. "Daughter! Come help me and Paul put away this stuff."

"What're you watching?" Patricia asked, reluctant to leave.

"News."

A commentator—and his scarcely less formidable ghost—was leading into a story about the Stone. Patricia lingered despite her mother's second call.

"As more and more personnel are sent to the Stone, citizen and scientific groups are asking for an open forum. Today, in the fourth year of a joint NATO–Eurospace investigation, the cloak wrapped around the Stone is as impenetrable as ever, and—"

So it was no news after all.

"—Russian participants are particularly unhappy with the requirements for secrecy. Meanwhile, protestors from the Planetary Society, the L-5 Society, the Friends for Interstellar Relations and other groups have gathered around the White House and around the so-called Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, California, protesting military involvement and alleging a cover-up of major discoveries within the Stone."

An earnest, clean-cut and conservatively dressed young man appeared on the screen. He stood in front of the White House and spoke with exaggerated gestures. "We know it's an alien artifact, and we know there are seven chambers inside—huge chambers. We didn't put them there. There are cities in every chamber—deserted cities—all but the seventh. And there's something incredible there, something unimaginable."

"What do you think it is?" the interviewer asked.

The protestor flung his hands up. "We think they should tell everybody. Whatever's there, we as taxpayers have the right to know!"

The commentator added that NASA and Joint Space Command spokespersons had no comment.

Patricia sighed and placed her hands on Ramon's shoulders, automatically rubbing his muscles.

Paul watched her closely at dinner, waiting for her to find the right opportunity, but she didn't. She felt uncomfortable with the friends and neighbors present. This was something only her immediate family should know, and she couldn't tell even them as much as she wanted.

Rita and Ramon seemed to accept Paul. That was a plus. Eventually, they would have to know about the living arrangements—if they hadn't figured it out already: that Patricia and Paul were more than just dating acquaintances, that they were living together in that haphazard way reserved for coed dormitories.

So many secrets and discretions. Perhaps they wouldn't be as shocked as she expected—wanted?—them to be. It was a little disturbing to think that her parents might regard her as a grown-up, sexual being. She was not nearly as open about it as most of her friends and acquaintances.

Eventually, she and Paul would be married, she was sure. But they were both young, and Paul was not going to ask until he felt he could support them both. Or until she convinced him that she could—and even with her doctorate, that wasn't likely for several more years.

Not counting, of course, the pay she would receive from Judith Hoffman's group. That money would go into a separate security account until her return.

When the dishes were cleared and everyone had gathered around the tree, family and friends helping to decorate, she signaled her mother that they had to talk in the kitchen. "And bring Papa." Rita helped Ramon into the kitchen on his aluminum crutches and they sat around the battered wooden table that had been in the family for at least sixty years.

"I have something to tell you," Patricia began.

"Oh, madre de Dios," Rita said, clasping her hands and smiling rapturously.

"No, Mama, it's not about Paul and me," she said. Her mother's face stiffened, then relaxed.

"So what, then?"

"Last week, I received a phone call at school," Patricia said. "I can't tell you all about it, but I'm going to be gone for a couple of months, even longer. Paul knows about it, but I can't tell him any more than I've just told you." Paul entered the kitchen through the swinging doors.

"Who was it called you?" Ramon asked.

"Judith Hoffman."

"Who's that?" Rita asked.

"The woman on television?" Ramon asked.

Patricia nodded. "She's an advisor to the President. They want me to work on something with them, and that's as much as I can tell you."

"Why should they want you?" Rita asked.

"I think they want her to build a time machine," Paul said. Whenever he had said that before, Patricia had become angry, but now she shrugged it off.

She couldn't expect Paul to understand her work. Very few people did—certainly not her parents and friends. "Paul has some other crazy theories, too," she said. "But my lips are sealed."

"Like a clam," Paul said. "She's been hard to live with the past few days."

"If you wouldn't keep trying to get me to talk!" She sighed dramatically—she was doing a lot of that lately—and looked at the cream-colored ceiling, then turned to her father. "It's going to be very interesting. Nobody will be able to reach me directly. You can send mail for me to this address." She drew the phone pad across the table and wrote down an APO address.

"Is this important to you?" Rita asked.

"Of course it is," Ramon answered.

But Patricia didn't know. It sounded crazy, even now.

After the guests had left, she took Paul on a nighttime tour of the neighborhood. For a half hour, they walked in silence, passing from one streetlight glow to the next. "I'm coming back, you know," she said finally.

"I know."

"I had to show you my home, because it's very important to me. Rita, Ramon, the house."

"Yes," Paul said.

"I think I'd be lost without it. I spend so much time in my head, and what I do there is so different. . . so bizarre to most people. If I didn't have a center, a place to return to, I'd get lost."

"I understand," Paul said. "It's a very nice home. I like your folks."

She stopped him and they faced each other, holding hands at arm's length. "I'm glad," she said.

"I want to make a home with you, too," he said. "Another center, for both of us to come back to."

Her expression was so intense she seemed about to leap on him. "Cat's eyes," Paul said, grinning.

They circled back and kissed on the front porch before going in to join her parents for coffee and cinnamon cocoa.

"One last pit stop," she said as they prepared to drive back to Caltech.

She walked down the hall to the bathroom, past the graduation pictures and the framed contents page of the issue of The Physical Review her first paper had appeared in. She stopped in front of the cover and stared intently at it. Suddenly, her heart seemed to miss a beat, leaving a peculiar hollow in her chest, a brief, almost pleasant sensation of falling, fading, then returning to normal.

She'd felt it before. It was nothing serious, just a cold wind down the middle of her chest, every time she truly accepted the idea of where she was going.

Four - 1174, Journey Year 5 Nader,

Axis City

The Presiding Minister of the Axis City, Ilyin Taur Ingle, stood in the broad observation blister, staring out across the Way through the city's blue glow at lanes bright with the continuous flow of traffic between the gates. Behind him stood two assigned ghosts and a corporeal representative of the Hexamon Nexus.

"Do you know Olmy well, Ser Franco?" the Presiding Minister picted, using graphicspeak.

"No, Ser Ingle, I do not," the corporeal representative replied, "though by reputation he is famous in the Nexus."

"Three incarnations, one more than law allows because of his extraordinary service. Olmy is one of our oldest citizens still corporeal," the minister said. "An enigmatic personality. He would have long since forfeited his majority rights and retired to City Memory if it wasn't for his usefulness to the Nexus." The P.M. instructed a sprayer to release his special variety of Talsit. The mist filled a cubic area surrounded by faintly glowing purple traction fields. Ingle entered the field and took a deep breath.

The ghosts hadn't moved, their images fixed until called upon, visible only to indicate their City Memory personalities were tuned in to the chamber, listening and watching.

"He is of Naderite background himself, I believe," the corporeal assistant said.

"Yes, he is," the minister said, nodding. "But he serves the Hexamon regardless of who is in power, and I have no doubt where his loyalties lie. A most unusual man. Tough, in the old sense of the word—a man who has lived through great changes, great pain. I've had him recalled from one point three ex nine. He's been supervising our preparations for the Jart offensive. But he can be of more use to us here. He is the one to send now. Axis Nader can't disagree with him or accuse us of partisan assignment; his reports to them are always detailed and accurate. Inform the President that we are accepting the task and sending Olmy."

"Yes, Ser Ingle."

"I believe the ghosts have their questions answered, now?"

"We listen," said one ghost. The other did not move.

"Fine. Now I will meet with Ser Olmy."

The ghosts faded and Corprep Franco left, fingering his neck torque to pict a flag of official business over his left shoulder.

The P.M. turned off the traction fields and the chamber became smoky with more Talsit. The smell was disconcerting, sharp like old wine, as Olmy entered.

He approached the minister quietly, not wishing to interrupt his reverie.

"Forward, Ser Olmy," the minister said. He turned as Olmy walked up the steps to the blister platform. "You're looking fit today."

"And you, ser."

"Mm. My wife made me a wonderful forgetting last turn. Removed much unpleasantness from my twentieth year. That was not a good year, and the loss was a relief."

"Excellent, ser."

"When will you marry, Olmy?"

"When I find the woman who can purge my twenty-first year, first incarnation."

The minister laughed heartily. "I hear you keep a fine advocate company in Axis Nader. . . . What's her name?"

"Suli Ram Kikura."

"Yes, of course. . . She's been active smoothing things between the Nexus and the Korzenowski hot heads, has she not?"

"Yes. We seldom discuss it."

The minister sucked in his breath, looked concerned and stared down at the platform. "Well, just so, then I have a difficult mission for you."

"My joy to serve the Hexamon."

"Perhaps not this time. No mere investigation of illegal gate commerce. Every few decades, we send someone back to the Thistledown to check stability. But we are doubly motivated this time. The Thistledown has been reoccupied."

"Someone crossing the Forbidden Territories?"

"No. More puzzling. Nothing has disturbed our sentries at the first barrier. Apparently the occupants have entered the Thistledown from outside; perhaps more startling, they are human. Not in great force, but they're organized. There's no use speculating where they come from; the information is too equivocated. You'll have authority, of course, and the necessary transportation. Ser Algoli will inform you about the other requirements. Understand?"

Olmy nodded. "Ser."

"Good." The minister leaned over the railing and peered at the surface twenty kilometers below. A maelstrom of lights swirled around several of the lanes. "There appears to be a jam-up at that gate. Ah, it's the season for worries. The month of the Good Man." He turned to Olmy. "Good luck. Or, as the Eld put it: Star, Fate and Pneuma be kind."

"Thank you, ser."

He stepped back from the platform and left the chamber, taking the lift up the long, slender pylon to the Central City, where he arranged his affairs for a protracted absence.

The assignment was a privilege. Return to the Thistledown was forbidden for any purpose not essential to the Nexus. Olmy hadn't been there for well over four hundred years.

On the other hand, of course, it could be a very dangerous mission—especially with information so equivocated. He could help ensure his mission's success by bringing along a Frant.

If there were humans in the Thistledown, and they weren't city renegades—the most likely explanation—then where did they come from?

Far too narrow and equivocated for his ease.

Chapter One

April 2005

On the first leg of the trip, in the passenger cabin of the long-bed shuttle, Patricia Vasquez had watched the Earth's cloud-smeared limb on a video monitor. Before her own transfer, cameras mounted in the shuttle bay had shown her the long waldos maneuvering the huge cargo out of the bay into the waiting arms of the OTV—orbital transfer vehicle—as if two spiders were trading a cocoon-wrapped fly. The operation had taken an hour, and with its slow fascination had distracted her from thoughts about her present circumstances.

When her own turn came and she donned the passenger bubble to be guided across the ten meters to the OTV's lock, she worked hard to appear calm. The bubble was made of transparent plastic, so she did not suffer from claustrophobia—almost the opposite, in fact. She could feel the immensity of the blackness beyond the spacecraft, though she could not make out stars. They were outdone by the glow of the Earth and the close, brightly lighted surfaces of the OTV, a train of clustered tanks, balls and prisms wrapped in aluminum beams.

The three-man, two-woman crew of the OTV greeted her warmly in the narrow tunnel as she "hatched," then guided her to a seat just behind theirs. From that vantage, she had a clear, direct view, and now she could see the steady pinpoints of stars.

So confronted, with none of the comfortable separation of a video monitor frame, space seemed to extend into a mating of infinite, star-cluttered halls. She felt as if she could walk down any one of the halls and become lost in altered perspective.

She still wore the black jumpsuit she had been handed in Florida just six hours before. She felt dirty. Her hair, even though tied up in a bun, let loose irritating wisps. She could smell her own nervousness.

The crew floated around her, making last-minute checks, punching readings into slates and processors. Patricia examined their colored suits—the women in red and blue, the men in green and black and gray—and idly wondered how they were ranked and who commanded. Everything seemed casually efficient with no deference in voice or manner, as if they were civilians. But they were not.

The OTV was a registered unarmed military vehicle, subject to the restrictions imposed after the Little Death. It was one of dozens of new vehicles that had been constructed in Earth orbit since the appearance of the Stone, and it differed substantially from the vehicles that had serviced the Joint Space Force's Orbital Defense Platforms. It was larger and capable of traveling much greater distances; by treaty, it could not carry cargoes to the ODPs.

"We're leaving in three minutes," said the shuttle's copilot, a blond woman whose name Patricia had already forgotten. She touched Patricia on the shoulder and smiled. "Everything will be hectic for a half hour or so. If you need a drink or have to use the lavatory, now's the time."

Patricia shook her head and returned the smile. "I'm fine."

"Good. Virgin?"

Patricia stared.

"First flight, she means," the other woman clarified. Patricia remembered her name—Rita, just like her mother.

"Of course," Patricia said. "Would I be sitting here acting like a cow in a slaughterhouse, otherwise?"

The blond laughed. The pilot—James or Jack, with beautiful green eyes—looked over his shoulder at her, his head framed by the belt and sword of Orion. "Relax, Patricia," he said. So calm. She was almost intimidated by their professional assurance. They were spacefarers, originally assigned to the near-Earth orbit platforms and now working the distances between Earth, Moon and Stone. She was just a young woman fresh out of graduate school, and she had never in her life even left the state of California until traveling to Florida for the shuttle flight from Kennedy Space Center.

She wondered what her father and mother were doing now, sitting at home in Santa Barbara. Where did they imagine their daughter to be? She had said good-bye just a week ago. Her stomach still churned at the memory of her last few moments with Paul. His letters would get to her, that was guaranteed—forwarded through the APO address. But what could she tell him in her return messages? Very likely, nothing. And her time in space had been estimated at two months, minimum.

She listened to the rumble and purr of the OTV machinery. She heard fuel pumps, mystery noises, gurgles like large water bubbles popping behind the passenger cabin, then the sharp tings of the attitude motors driving the craft away from the shuttle.

They began rotating, their axis somewhere near the middle of the cocoon cargo, clamped where a spare hexagonal fuel tank would have otherwise been. The OTV lurched forward with the impulse of its first engine burn. The blond, still not in her seat, landed on her feet against the rear bulkhead, flexed her knees with the impact and finished her sequence on the processor.

Then everyone buckled in.

The second burn took place fifteen minutes later. Patricia closed her eyes, nestled into the couch and resumed work on a problem she had put aside more than two weeks before. She had never required paper during the initial stages of her work. Now, the Fraktur symbols paraded before her, separated by her own brand of sign notation, invented when she was ten years old. There was no music—she usually listened to Vivaldi or Mozart while working—but nevertheless, she became immersed in a sea of abstraction. Her hand went to the pack of music coins and the slate stereo attachment in her small effects bag.

A few minutes later, she opened her eyes. Everyone was in their seats, staring intently at instrument panels. She tried to nap. Briefly, before dozing off, she ran through her Big Question again:

Why had she, in particular, been chosen from a list of mathematicians that must have been meters long? That she had won a Fields Award didn't seem reason enough; there were other mathematicians of far greater experience and stature. . .

Hoffman hadn't really offered an explanation. All she had said was, "You're going to the Stone. All that you'll need to know is up there, and it's classified, so I'm not allowed to give you documents while you're here on Earth. You'll have a hell of a lot of studying to do. And I'm sure it will be glorious fun for a mind like yours."

As far as Patricia knew, her expertise had no practical use whatsoever, and she preferred it that way.

She didn't doubt her talents. But the very fact that they were calling on her—that they might need to know about (as she had expressed it in her doctoral dissertation, Non-gravity Bent Geodesics of n-Spatial Reference Frames: An Approach to Superspace Visualization and Probability Clustering)—made her even more apprehensive.

Six years ago, a Stanford math professor had told her that the only beings who would ever fully appreciate her work would be gods or extraterrestrials.

In the dark, sleepily drifting away from the OTV noises and the sensation of her stomach pressing always upward, she thought of the Stone. The governments involved did not discourage speculation but provided no fuel to feed the fires. The Russians, allowed on the Stone only the last year, hinted darkly at what their researchers had seen.

Amateur astronomers—and a few civilian professionals who hadn't been visited by government agents—had pointed out the three regular latitudinal bands and the odd dimples at each pole, as if it had been turned on a lathe.

The upshot was, everyone knew it was big news, perhaps the biggest news of all time.

And so it wasn't incredible that Paul, putting a few odd facts together, had told her he thought she was going to the Stone. "You're just too far-out a mind to be going anywhere else," he had said.

Gods and extraterrestrials. Still, she managed to nap.

When she awoke, she saw the Stone briefly as the OTV swung around for its docking maneuver. It looked much like the pictures she had seen many times before published in newspapers and magazines—bean-shaped, about a third as wide in the middle as it was long, heavily cratered between the smoothly artificial excavated bands. Ninety-one kilometers in diameter at its widest, two hundred ninety-two kilometers long. Rock and nickel and iron and not nearly as simple as that.

"Approaching south polar axis," the blond said, leaning around in her chair to look back at Vasquez. "A little briefing, in case they haven't told you already. Blind leading the blind, honey." She glanced meaningfully at her shipmates. "First, some facts and figures important to mere navigators. Note that the Stone is rotating on its long axis. That's nothing surprising—everyone knows that. But it's rotating once every seven minutes or so—"

"Every six point eight two four minutes," James or Jack corrected.

"That means," the blond continued, unfazed, "that anything loose on the outer surface will fly away at a pretty good clip, so we can't dock there. We have to go through the pole."

"There's stuff inside?" Patricia asked.

"Quite a lot of stuff, if they're keeping everything—and everyone—we've been bringing up in the past few years," James or Jack said.

"The Stone's albedo matches any of a number of siliceous asteroids. Apparently, that's what it was at one time. Here's the south pole now," Rita said.

In the middle of the large polar crater was an indentation—judging from the scale of the Stone itself, quite tiny, no more than a kilometer deep and three or four kilometers wide.

The Stone's rotation was easily discernible. As the OTV matched course with the Stone, then began its approach along the axis, the crater enlarged and showed even more detail. With hardly any surprise at all, Patricia realized the floor was marked by shallow hexagons, like a beehive.

At the center of the indentation was a circular black spot about a hundred meters across. A hole. An entrance. It loomed larger and larger but lost none of its intense blackness.

The OTV slid into the hole.

"We have to maintain our position about five minutes, until they bring the rotating dock up to speed," James or Jack said.

"We did all this?" Patricia asked, her voice unsteady. "In just five years?"

"No, honey," the blond said. "It was here already, I'm sure you've heard the Stone is hollow inside with seven chambers. We have a fair number of personnel and thousands of tons of equipment in there, doing God knows what and finding things we'd give our eyeteeth to see, believe me. But this is where our knowledge stops, and we've been instructed not to pass along rumor. You won't be needing it."

"We've been riding a docking signal for the last seven minutes," James or Jack said. "Voice contact any second."

The radio chimed. "OTV three-seven," a calm tenor male voice said. "We have prime dock rotating. Advance at point one meters per second."

Rita flipped a switch and the OTV's floods came on, partially illuminating the inside of a gray cylinder that dwarfed the craft. Four rows of lights appeared ahead of them, wobbling back and forth slightly as the rotating dock adjusted its speed. "Here we go." The OTV advanced slowly.

Patricia nodded and held her hands tightly in her lap. The bump was hardly discernible as the OTV motors went ting all around and brought them to a stop inside the tunnel. A hatch opened ahead of the ship and three men in space suits floated into view, carrying cables. They used suit thrusters to fly around the OTV and tie it down.

"You're hooked, OTV three-seven," the radio voice said a few minutes later. "Welcome to the Stone."

"Thanks," James or Jack said. "We have a big load in the hopper and precious cargo up front. Treat them gently."

"Foreign or domestic?"

"Domestic. Best California vintage."

Patricia didn't know whether they were talking about a cargo of wine or her. She was too nervous to ask.

"Got you clear."

"Any more mysteries to leak to us, guide?" the blond asked.

"My people want the hopper cargo released in five minutes."

"Timing on."

"More mysteries. Let's see. Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

"Bastard. I'll think on it," James or Jack said. He switched off the mike and floated up from his couch to help Patricia with her belts. "Closemouthed, all of them," he said, guiding her to the lock access corridor. "I leave you to their tender mercies. And promise us, someday—pretty please?—" he patted her shoulder paternally "—when all this is settled and we're reminiscing in a bar in Sausalito. . .” He grinned at her, knowing how ridiculous the image was. "Tell us what the hell happened up here, step by step? We'll savor it the rest of our lives."

"Why do you think they'll tell me?" Patricia asked. "

"Why, don't you know?" Rita joined them in the lock. "You've been given top billing. You're going to save their collective hide."

Patricia climbed in to the transfer bubble and they closed the lock behind her. Watching through the lock port, she could see the curious hunger in their faces. The lock hatch swung open and two men in spacesuits reached in to pull the bubble from the OTV. She was passed along hand-to-hand through a circular opening in the dock's dark gray surface.

Chapter Two

Twenty-five kilometers below the axis, the Stone's spin produced a force of six-tenths of a g. Garry Lanier took daily advantage of that to perform gymnastic feats difficult or impossible for him on Earth. He swung back and forth, blowing out his breath forcefully and grunting, holding his legs straight together and propelling himself high over the parallel bars and the pit of fine white sand. It was easy to twist and reverse his position. Almost as easy was swinging his legs into the air, spinning and doing a reverse that way.

The exercise cleared his mind of everything else—for a few minutes, at least—and took him back to his days as a college gymnast.

The Stone's first chamber, viewed in cross section, resembled a squat cylinder, fifty kilometers in diameter and thirty across the floor. Since each of the Stone's first six chambers were wider in diameter than in length, they resembled deep valleys, and that's what they were sometimes called.

Lanier paused for a second with toes pointed together and stared up at the plasma tube. Rings of light passed through ionized gas only slightly denser than the near-vacuum around them, sweeping along the axis from the bore hole to the opposite side of the chamber with such speed that the eye interpreted their passage as a continuous hollow shaft or tube. The plasma tube—and extensions in the other chambers—provided all the light for the Stone's interior and had been doing so for some twelve centuries.

He dropped to the sandy bed and rubbed his hands on his sweatpants. He worked out for an hour—no more—whenever his schedule allowed, which wasn't often. His muscles were feeling the lack of Earth gravity. At least he was acclimated to the thin air.

He ran his hand through his short black hair, face expressionless, pumping his legs slowly to cool them down.

Soon, back to the small office in the administration bungalow, back to signing slates allocating materiel to the various experiments, looking over the science team shifts in the five cramped labs, scheduling equipment and central processor time. . . back to the memory blocks and the information coming out of the second and third chambers. . .

And to the security squabbles, the Russian team's constant complaints about limited access.

He closed his eyes. Those things he could handle. Hoffman had once called him a born administrator, and he didn't deny it—handling people, especially brilliant, capable people, was his meat and drink.

But he would also go back to the tiny figurine in the top drawer of his desk. For him, the figurine symbolized everything peculiar about the Stone.

It was a lifelike three-dimensional image of a man, encased in a block of crystal. On the base of the block, which stood just under twelve centimeters high, a name had been engraved in neat round letters: KONRAD KORZENOWSKI.

Korzenowski had been the main engineer on the Stone, six hundred years ago.

That was where it began—the Library Beast, he thought of it, threatening to consume him—the knowledge that had every day taken a bit of his humanity and rubbed it thin, pushing him closer to some sort of personal crisis. There was no way—yet—to deal with what he knew—he and only ten other people. Soon, an eleventh would arrive.

He felt sorry for her.

The gymnastics pit was half a kilometer from the science team compound, midway between the compound and the barbed wire fence that marked the boundary beyond which no one could go, unescorted, without a green badge.

The valley floor was covered with a soft, sandy layer of soil, not dusty though dry. A few scrubby patches of grass grew out of the soil, but for the most part the first chamber was arid.

The compound itself, one of two in the first chamber, resembled an old Roman encampment, with an earthworks rampart and a shallow, dry moat surrounding the buildings. The rampart was topped with electronic sensors mounted on stakes every five meters. All these precautions dated back to the days when it was reasonable to suspect there might still be Stoners in the chambers and that they might present some danger. Out of force of habit—and because the possibility had never been completely ruled out—the precautions were maintained.

Lanier crossed the sturdy wooden bridge spanning the moat and climbed a set of steps on the rampart, waving his card at a reader mounted on one of the stakes.

He passed the men's and women's barracks and entered the administration bungalow, tapping his finger on Ann Blakely's desk and waving as he walked past. Ann had served him as secretary and general assistant for over a year. She swiveled on her chair and reached for the memo slate.

"Garry—"

He shook his head without looking at her and continued on up the stairs. "Five more minutes," he said.

On the second floor, he slipped his card into the verification lock on his office door, pressed his thumbs onto the small plate and entered. The door swung shut automatically behind him. He removed his sweatpants and shirt, substituting the blue science team jumpsuit.

The office was neatly organized but still looked cluttered. A small desk manufactured from OTV tank baffles was flanked by chromium bins filled with rolls of paper. A narrow shelf of real books hung next to racks of memory blocks sealed behind tough, alarm-equipped plastic panels. Maps and diagrams were taped to the walls.

A broad window looked out over the compound buildings. North across the valley's barren floor of dirt, sand and scrub loomed the massive gray presence of the far chamber cap.

He sat on a lightweight director's chair and propped his feet on the window frame. His dark eyes, underscored by fatigue lines, focused on a distant point at one o'clock high where the plasma tube butted up against the cap. Through the tube's diffuse glow, it was difficult to make out the hundred-meter-wide bore hole that pushed through the cap into the second chamber. The bore hole opened five kilometers above the atmosphere in the chamber.

In two minutes, his private time would be over. He organized his slates and processors, looking over the day's schedule, preparing himself mentally to be a mover-and-shaker.

There was dirt beneath one fingernail. He removed it with another fingernail.

If he could only explain the simple things—the figurine, the barbed wire used to string up the fence, the crate wood used to make the bridge over the moat—it would all fall into place.

The Stone would explain itself.

The only explanations he had now were much too incredible to be sane.

His comline hummed.

"Yes, Ann."

"Are you on duty now, Garry?"

"That I am."

"Transmission down the hole. OTV approach."

"Our savior?"

"I presume."

Hoffman had said this young woman was important, and the Advisor's word was one of the few things Lanier felt he could count on. In the four years since that night at the party, he had learned a great deal about politics in and out of world capitals, and how nations handled crises. He had come to realize how truly extraordinary Hoffman was. Capable, and with uncanny intuition.

But at that party, she had been dead wrong about one thing. The Stone's appearance did not signal the arrival of aliens, not in the strict sense of the word.

He picked up two slates and a processor. "Anything else?" he asked, standing by Blakely's desk.

"In and out," she said and handed him a cube of messages.

There was always a mild, cool breeze flowing down the almost vertical slope of the cap. Sometimes snow fell, piling up in drifts against the nickel-iron wall. The elevator entrance, a perfect semicircular arch, had been blasted out of asteroid material, as had all the tunnels, serviceways and bore holes of the Stone, by a fusion torch of extremely high power and efficiency. The sides of the short hall had been polished smooth and etched with acid by the Stoners to reveal the beautiful triangular Widmanstätten patterns, veined with rocky troilite intrusions.

The elevator was cylindrical, ten meters in diameter and five meters high, and was used for both personnel and freight. There were handgrips along the perimeter and tie-downs dimpled the floor. It followed a sloping tunnel to the staging areas surrounding the external bore hole. As the elevator climbed, its angular velocity declined, weakening the centrifugal force of the Stone's rotation. By the time it reached the vicinity of the bore hole, the spin produced only one-tenth of one percent g.

The trip took ten minutes. The elevator decelerated smoothly and stopped, its opposite hatch flush with a pressurized tunnel leading to the staging areas.

Taking an electric miner's cart, one of the two dozen or so brought up from Earth, Lanier rose most of the remaining distance along a magnetic rail.

The cart whined to a stop and Lanier drifted the rest of the way, pulling himself along guide ropes.

The first landings in the bore hole had been tricky. There had been no power to the rotating docks at that time, and very little illumination. The OTV pilots had proved their skill again and again. The first spacesuited explorers had shown great courage in leaving their craft and approaching the bore-hole walls, which rotated at about three-quarters of a meter per second. Now that the dock and staging area equipment had been refurbished and brought back into operation, the transfer process was much easier.

The three docks were simple, massive and efficient. Cylinders within the hole rotated to compensate for the Stone's spin, each accelerated like the rotor in a giant electric motor. One engineer in a booth below the prime dock controlled all of the docks, opening and closing hatches, coordinating cargo and passenger unloading.

The staging areas themselves had been thoroughly customized by the engineering team, outfitted with near-freefall workshops and machine shops. Here was where bulky cargoes were checked out, repackaged and either shipped down the elevators to the valley floor or flown along the axis to the next hole and chamber down the line.

The director of the engineering team, Lawrence Heineman, was talking to a slight, dark-haired young woman in the prime dock staging area as Lanier pulled himself in. They stood in a broad oval of light, hands on guide ropes, watching as large vacuum doors slid across to reveal the OTV's cocoon cargo resting on joists. The cargo dwarfed them.

Heineman, a short, crew-cut, muscular aerospace technician from Florida, smiled broadly and waved his hands, explaining something to the young woman. As Lanier approached, Heineman turned, held out the palm of one hand and bowed slightly in his direction. "Patricia, this is Garry Lanier, the closest thing to a civilian boss we have. Garry, Miss Patricia Luisa Vasquez." He shook his head and blew his breath out with an enthusiastic "Whoo!"

Lanier shook Vasquez's hand. She was small and pretty in a fragile way. Round face, silky dark brown hair, thin wrists, narrow legs, broad hips for her size: an altogether unpractical-looking woman, he thought. Beneath wide square eyes as black as his own, and a small, sharp nose, she had drawn her mouth into a tight line. She looked scared.

"My pleasure," Lanier said. "Larry, what have you told her so far?"

Heineman parried the question with a sidelong glance. "Patricia, I'm only a blue-badge for now—and I hear you're going to get a green. Garry is worried I might pass along some of the ignorant suppositions of an axis-hugger. I've only been telling her about this level of operations, I swear." He held up his right hand and clapped his left to his chest. "Garry, I've read some of this lady's papers in a half-dozen math and physics journals. She's fantastic."

There was a question on his face, however, which Lanier had no trouble interpreting. What in hell is she doing here?

"So I've heard." He pointed at the cocoon. "What's that?"

"My ticket to a green badge, finally," Heineman said. "Packing slips say it's the tuberider. And the V/STOL is coming in on the next OTV, a few hours from now."

"Then let's get it unwrapped and see what sort of modifications we'll have to make."

"Right. Pleased to meet you, Patricia." Heineman started to leave, then stopped and turned back slowly with a puzzled expression. "What you write about, it's really more a hobby for me, way beyond my expertise." He raised his eyebrows hopefully. "Maybe we can talk more later, though, when I get my green badge?"

Patricia smiled and nodded. Teams of men and women in gray jumpsuits were already gathering around the cocoon like ants tending a queen. Heineman joined them, calling out orders.

"Miss Vasquez—" Lanier began.

"Patricia's fine, really. I'm not very formal."

"Neither am I, if I can help it. I'm the science team coordinator."

"So Mr. Heineman told me. I have so many questions. . . Mr. Lanier, Garry, is this really a spaceship, a starship, the whole thing?" She swung her arm wide, her feet lifting from the deck momentarily.

"It is," he said, feeling the familiar, peculiar pleasure. Even though the Stone had nearly driven him crazy in the past few years, with its endless layers of surprise and shock, he was still more than a little in love with it.

"Where did it come from?"

Lanier held up his hands and shook his head. Vasquez suddenly noticed how exhausted he appeared, and that subdued her excitement some.

"First, I'm sure you'll want to rest and get cleaned up. Our facilities in the valley—the chamber floor—are quite nice. Then you can visit our cafeteria, meet a few of the team scientists, take it from there. One step at a time."

Vasquez examined him intently. Her eyes made the inspection seem less than sympathetic, even aggressive. "Is something wrong?"

Lanier raised his brows and glanced to one side. "We have a name for what this place does to you. We call it getting Stoned. I'm just a little Stoned, is all."

She looked around the staging area and experimented with the centrifugal force, pushing herself up a few centimeters with a nudge of her toe. "It looks so familiar," she said. "I expected an alien artifact to be mysterious, but I can identify almost everything, like it was built on Earth, by us."

"Well," said Lanier, "Heineman and his people have been busy up here. But keep an open mind. If you'll follow me, we'll descend to the floor of the first chamber. Use the ropes. And if Larry hasn't already said it, allow me to welcome you to the Stone."

Chapter Three

Patricia lay on the air mattress, keeping still so the synthetic fiber sheets wouldn't squeak against the vinyl. Surrounded by darkness, she was clean, warm, well fed—the cafeteria food had been more than palatable—and now that she wasn't walking around, not nearly so breathless. Tired but unable to sleep. Her memory kept tossing up visions:

The thirty-kilometer-wide chamber floor, a mottled gray-and-brown valley landscape, capped at each end by impassive rock and natural metal walls, run through by the glowing plasma tube.

The peculiar perspective as she stood outside the valley level zero elevator entrance, facing the immensity, the landscape for kilometers around looking flat and normal, a desert on a bright cloudy day. Off to either side, however—spinwise and counter-spinwise—the curve became more pronounced. She seemed to stand under a vast arching bridge with the plasma tube a bright milky river flowing overhead. Directly north, the land rose to curve in snug conformity with the circular cap. Looking up, everything distorted as if seen through a fish-eye lens, the cap accepted the embrace of the opposite side of the chamber, completing the circle behind the plasma tube.

The Stone was still active, even though these chambers had been deserted centuries before.

Lanier hadn't answered many questions, telling her it was "the process" to let her see and experience the Stone, step by step. "Otherwise," he had said, "why should you believe what we tell you?" That made sense, but she was still frustrated. What was so mysterious? The Stone was magnificent and startling, but not—so far as she could tell—anything to arouse her professional interest. Straightforward physics, however advanced.

It was simple, really. Take one large asteroid, rock with a core of nickel-iron—your average billennia-old chunk of primordial planet-stuff—and push it into an orbit around your planet. Hollow out seven chambers, each connected by an axial bore hole, then worm-hole some of the remaining volume with tunnels, accessways, storage depots and elevators. Bring up supplementary carbonaceous and ice-volatiles asteroids and begin transferring their material into the chambers. Send it on a journey into deepest space, and voila!

The Stone.

She had learned a few key facts so far. Each chamber floor was connected by tunnels dug through the intervening asteroid material. Many of the tunnels were part of an extensive train transport system. There were no trains in the first chamber because it had served as a reserve and storage area and had been infrequently visited in the time when the Stone was populated. The seventh chamber had apparently served a similar purpose, which made sense—the outermost chambers doing double duty as buffers against damage to the comparatively thin ends of the asteroid. The wall between the first chamber cap and space was only a few kilometers thick in places.

But there was something peculiar about the seventh chamber. She had felt it in Lanier's voice and seen it in the expressions of those she had met in the cafeteria. And there had been the rumors on Earth. . .

Somehow, the seventh chamber was different, important.

She had met five team scientists so far, three in the cafeteria: Robert Smith, tall and bird-boned with red hair and down-angled eyes that made him seem sad, an expert on asteroid formation; Hua Ling, the slender and intense senior member of the Chinese team and a plasma physicist who spent most of his time at the south polar bore hole; and Lenore Carrolson, a round-faced woman of fifty with gray-blond hair and a permanently friendly, sensual expression, heavy-lidded eyes surrounded by smile lines.

Carrolson had greeted Patricia with motherly solicitude. It had taken Patricia several minutes to realize that this was the Lenore Carrolson, Nobel laureate, the astrophysicist who had discovered and partly explained gemstars eight years before.

Carrolson had taken Lanier's hint that it was her duty to show Patricia the women's quarters in the compound. They were in a long, fiberwall barracks on the north end of the quadrangle. The rooms were small and spare but comfortable in their own ingenious ways, everything lightweight and compact. In the building's lounge, Carrolson had introduced her to two other astronomers, Janice Polk and Beryl Wallace, both from the Abell Array in Nevada. They sprawled on couches that looked as if they had been assembled out of scrap metal in a high school shop class. Polk resembled a fashion model more than Patricia's image of an astronomer. Even in a jumpsuit, her dark beauty was elegant and distant, her expression not so much disapproving as skeptical. Wallace was attractive enough, but about twenty pounds overweight. She seemed perturbed about something.

Carrolson had pointed out the social roster located near the main door. "There are thirty women here on the science team, and sixty men. Two married couples, four committeds—"

"Five," Patricia had added.

"And six married but spouses back on Earth. I'm one of those. That means slim pickings for the single men. But committed or not, you're fair game if you put your name on the roster. There's an old saying that has to be bent a bit here: 'Don't dip your pen in the office ink.' Since office ink is all there is, some pen dipping is inevitable. But nobody has to take abuse." Carrolson glanced at Polk and Wallace. "Right, girls?"

"Paradise," Polk said flatly, looking up from her slate and widening her eyes. "Better than university."

"Any trouble," Carrolson said, "and you just tell me. I'm senior female here, in age at least."

"I'll do fine," Patricia had replied.

She had never been a social butterfly, tending to fall hard and fast—and usually without reciprocation. Still, with Paul to think of, that was the least of her concerns here. Although—and she smiled in the darkness—Lanier was a pretty fellow. So worried, though.

Patricia wondered if she would look just as worried when she had the whole picture.

Without knowing she had slept, she heard the chiming alarm on her comline. Beside her bed, a pleasant amber light switched on with the signal. She blinked at the bare, off-white walls and had no trouble remembering where she was. She felt right at home, in fact, and a little excited. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed.

Patricia had never been adventurous. Hiking and camping had not been missing from her life, but she had never felt inclined toward outdoor activities other than bicycling. Every six to eight months, she became an avid bicyclist, spending two hours each day riding around the campus. The urge would pass after several weeks and her sedentary habits would return.

There had always been too much to do in her mind or on paper. The mindwork could be done almost anywhere, but not while climbing precarious trails or being dead tired after a long march.

But here. . .

Sometime in the night, she had made the Stone her meat and drink. She was familiar with the feeling, having approached math problems with similar zeal. She was exhilarated, her pulse was up and she colored like a young girl.

When Lanier knocked, she had dressed and combed her hair. She opened the door with eyes wide.

Carrolson stood behind him. "Breakfast?" Lanier asked. Wearing the standard zipper-and-button blue jumpsuit of the science team, she looked more practical, he thought.

The clear pale light of the plasma tube never varied and cast only the vaguest of shadows beneath their feet as they walked. The cafeteria, adjacent to an experimental agricultural station, was feeding breakfast to the 1500–2400 shift. "Night" for Patricia had been from six in the "morning" to two in the "afternoon." Lanier said he slept irregularly; Carrolson was just finishing her shift.

About twenty of the science team clustered around a video screen at one end of the cafeteria. Lanier joined them briefly, then came back while Carrolson and Patricia sat down with dinner and breakfast. An automatic chef produced trays of food, each segment at the proper temperature, each dish surprisingly tasty. A tap near the unit carried a sign announcing, "Genuine STONE water—an experience not to be missed. H_2O from the stars!" The water was flat but not unpleasant.

Lanier gestured at the group around the screen. "Football," he explained. "Hunt and Thanh have patched into the bore-hole microwave and the outside array. Some commercial outfit is relaying a scrambled game to subscribers and we happen to be in the same section of the sky as the satellite. They've unscrambled the signal."

"Isn't that illegal?" Patricia asked casually, sorting out the bites on her tray.

"Height hath its privileges," Carrolson said. "Nobody will ever prosecute."

Fresh orange juice was available. Citrus trees prospered under the tubelight. The maple syrup on her pancakes was also genuine, but not homegrown. Lanier noticed her expression of surprise.

"What we can't grow in the Stone, we might as well ask for the best from Earthside. It's so expensive to ship up anyway, quality only hikes it a fraction of a percentage point—and we have them convinced we should be fed at least as well as submariners and lunar settlers. Eat hearty—that's a two-hundred-dollar breakfast."

Carrolson chatted amiably through the meal, talking about her husband's work on Earth—he was a mathematician employed by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology. Lanier said little. Patricia was also quiet, taking her cues from him, watching him from the corner of her eye whenever she thought no one would notice. His Indian features attracted her, but the dark circles under his eyes made him look as if he hadn't slept in weeks.

"—really good for you," Carrolson was saying.

Patricia regarded her blankly.

"The tubelight, you know," Carrolson reiterated. "Has everything we need, and nothing harmful. You could lie out under it for days and not be burned, but you'd get your share of vitamin D."

"Oh," Patricia said.

Carrolson sighed. "Garry, you're having that effect again."

Lanier seemed puzzled. "What effect?"

"Look at the girl." Carrolson drummed her fingers on the lightweight metal table, rigged out of OTV tank baffles, as was so much furniture in the compound. "Watch out for him, Patricia. He's a heartbreaker."

Patricia glanced between them, mouth open. "What?"

"I'm going off shift now," Carrolson said, picking up her tray. "Just keep it in mind. Every woman on the team has had their letch for Garry. But he's responsible to someone back home—someone very important." She smiled mysteriously and walked toward the dishwasher unit.

Lanier sipped his cup of coffee. "I'm not sure she's reading you correctly."

"She most certainly is not."

"She means I'm responsible to the Advisor—to Judith Hoffman."

"I met her," Patricia said.

"And I'm not on the social roster because there's too much work to do here and not nearly enough time. Besides, there's rank to consider." He finished the cup and set it down.

"You'd think with so many intelligent people around, rank wouldn't be that much of a factor," Patricia said. She felt naive the instant the last word was out of her mouth.

Lanier folded his hands on the table and looked at her directly until she glanced away.

"Patricia, you're young, and this might seem very romantic to you, but it's deadly serious. We're working under agreements which took years to iron out—if they're ironed out even yet. We're an international team of scientists, engineers and security forces, and whatever information we find is not necessarily going to be available to every person on the globe, not for some time yet. Since you'll have access to almost everything, you must be particularly responsible—as responsible as I am. Please don't waste your time concerning yourself with. . . Well, I suggest you stay off the social roster. Another time, another place, sure, romance and adventure. But not on the Stone."

She sat stiffly, hands knotted in her lap. "I have no intention of going on the roster," she said. She hadn't been called on the carpet, exactly, but she was still upset.

"Good. Let's get your green badge and take a ride across the valley." They deposited their trays in the scrubber and left the cafeteria. Lanier walked a few steps ahead of her, eyes on the ground as they approached a small building near the northern side of the ramparts. A stocky broad-shouldered woman in a black jumpsuit, with a green belt and red sergeant's stripes on her sleeve, opened the door for them, then sat behind a desk made of more baffle metal to fill out forms. When they were done, she opened a locked box and pulled out a green badge with an outline of the Stone printed in one corner, surrounded by a silver circle.

"Our security is tight here, Miss Vasquez," she said. "Make sure you know the rules. A green badge is a great responsibility."

Patricia took the indelible pen and signed the badge, then pressed her fingers onto an ID scan plate for storage in the security system computers. The woman clipped the badge to her breast pocket. "Pleased to have you with us. I'm Doreen Cunningham, head of security for First Chamber Science Compound One. Any questions or problems, feel free to visit."

"Thank you," Patricia said. Lanier led the way out of the guardhouse and up the rampart steps.

"If you like to exercise, we have a running path around the inner perimeter of the compound, with an extension that takes you to the second compound. There's a gym pit not far from here. I recommend pretty strenuous exercise whenever possible. The low-g is a bit easy on us. I tend to get flabby if I don't maintain. And exercise will acclimate you more quickly to the air pressure."

"I think the low-g is pleasant," she said as they walked to the front of a wide plastic-sheet quonset hut. "Buoyant."

Inside the hut were two vehicles resembling large snow-cats, mounted on six rubber-tired band-steel-spoke wheels instead of treads. Patricia bent down to look beneath, then straightened. "Very rugged," she said.

"Our trucks. Easy to drive—you'll learn soon. But today, you're just going along for the ride. Keep your eyes peeled."

He unlocked a door and helped her up the high step into the shotgun seat. He paused before closing the door. "I'm sorry I came down on you so hard. I'm sure you understand how important you could be here, and—"

"I don't understand," Patricia said. "I haven't the faintest idea what use I'll be."

Lanier nodded and smiled.

"But you were right, anyway. If I'm so important, then I need to keep my nose to the grindstone."

"Looks like the Stoned work ethic will come natural to you," Lanier said. He climbed into the driver's seat and reached into his pocket, pulling out a slate. He offered it to her. "Slipped my mind. You'll probably want to make notes at some point or other. Government issue."

He switched on the electric motor and drove the truck out of the shed. "We're going into the second chamber now, into the first city. We'll spend a few hours there, then take you on the Thirtieth Century Limited."

"One of the trains?"

He nodded. "We'll skip the third chamber today—too much, too soon. It could overload you. We'll stop at the fourth chamber security compound for a break and lunch, and then go right through to the sixth chamber."

The truck approached a chain link fence stretching for several kilometers east and west.

"Would it be premature to ask questions now?"

"We have to start somewhere," Lanier said.

"That's real dirt outside. You could grow things in it."

"It's moderately fertile," Lanier said. "We have several farming projects under way, mostly in the fourth chamber. Most of the dirt is straight carbonaceous asteroid material, with supplements."

"Mm." She turned to survey the scrub and the low plume of dust behind them. "Is the Stone still powered-up—I mean, can it leave?"

"It's still powered-up," Lanier said. "We don't know whether it can leave or not."

"I was wondering. . . if we could be trapped inside, if it decided to leave. Then we would need to farm, wouldn't we?"

"That's not why we're farming," Lanier said. She waited for him to elaborate, but he stared straight ahead, slowing the truck as they approached the gate in the wire fence.

"The motors are very old. Some of the engineers think they're worn out," he said, as if he had half listened to her and half followed his own chain of thought. He removed an electronic key from his pocket, dialed a number and opened the gate with a radio signal. "We don't understand the drive yet. The motors' last effective act was to slow the Stone down for insertion into the present orbit. They used chunks of mass removed by robots from the outside of the Stone—mostly in the deep bands. Mass-drivers lobbed the chunks towards a point just above the northern crater. That end is sealed off—you'll soon discover a second reason why. What happened to the chunks at that point, we don't know; the documentation is difficult."

"I should imagine."

The truck hummed through the gate and across a track marked by tire ruts and an absence of scrub.

"All that chain link," Patricia said. "Once you prescreened everyone coming up here, you'd think that would be enough security. Must have cost a lot to have all that stuff shipped up here. Could have shipped up science, instead."

"The chain link wasn't shipped here. We found it."

"Chain link fence?"

"And figurines," Lanier said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Humans built the Stone, Patricia. People from Earth."

She stared at him, then tried to grin.

"Built it twelve hundred years ago. At least, it's about twelve hundred years old."

"Oh," she said. "Pull the other one."

"No, I'm serious."

"I don't expect to be made fun of," she said quietly, straightening in her seat.

"I'm not making fun. Do you think we'd ship eight or nine kilometers of chain link?"

"I'll believe that before I believe Charlemagne or whoever had the Stone made to order."

"I didn't say it came from our past. Before this goes any farther—please, Patricia, be patient. Wait and see."

She nodded, but inside she was furious. This was some sort of initiation. Take the young woman out on a ride, terrorize her, stick her hand into a spaghetti-worm mystery, bring her back and have a good laugh. She's now a true Stoner. Great.

She had never stood for that sort of treatment, even as a thirteen-year-old whiz-kid at UCLA.

"Look at the scrub," Lanier said. "It's grass. We didn't bring it with us."

"It looks like grass," she acknowledged.

The ride across the valley took thirty minutes. They approached the slate-gray cap. A silvery metal arch stood before the entrance to the tunnel, which was about twenty meters wide. A ramp rose from the dirt to the entrance. Lanier accelerated up the ramp.

"How is the air maintained?" she asked. The silence made her uncomfortable. Lanier switched the truck lights on.

"The middle three chambers have large ponds buried beneath them. The ponds are shallow and filled with several varieties of duckweed, water hyacinth and algae. Plus some other plants we're still identifying. The biggest pond is shaped like a doughnut and circles the fourth chamber. There are ventilation ducts in the caps at about three kilometers—you can see them with binoculars, or if you have sharp enough eyes—and the Stone is honeycombed with other shafts and ducts."

Patricia nodded, avoiding his eyes. She's going to be Stoned soon, Lanier thought. Resentment was the first sign. Resentment and disbelief were much easier than acceptance. And the most careful introductions to the Stone didn't prevent the cycle. Here, everyone came from Missouri. Everyone had to be shown first. All other learning and refinement came later.

Six minutes after entering the tunnel, they came to a heavy chain link hurricane fence completely covering the tunnel mouth. Lanier opened another gate with his key, and they emerged in the second chamber.

The ramp leading down from the tunnel had been fortified on each side with masonry walls. More fence had been strung between the walls, and a guardhouse stood to one side of the next gate. Three marines in black jumpsuits came to attention by the guardhouse as the truck rolled toward them, its tires grumbling on the ramp paving. Lanier braked the vehicle and shut it off, then swung down from his seat. Patricia remained where she was, staring at the vista before her.

Beyond the ramp was a two-kilometer-deep shelf of parkland, irregularly spotted by copses of trees and numerous broad, flat white concrete structures, resembling thick building foundations. Beyond the parkland, a narrow lake or river about a kilometer across ran east and west completely around the chamber. A suspension bridge with tall, slender, curved towers crossed the water, set between massive concrete anchors.

The bridge pointed toward a city.

It could have been Los Angeles on a very clear day, or any other modern terrestrial city, except for the surreal exaggeration. It was bigger, more ambitious and ordered, more architecturally mature. And scattered throughout the city, like bumpers on a pinball board, were the biggest structures she had ever seen in her life. Easily four kilometers tall, they resembled upright chandeliers made of concrete, glass and shining steel. Each facet of the nearest chandelier-structure was as large as entire buildings in between. The chandelier resemblance increased as she looked up and saw them suspended from the chamber floor overhead. Across the two layers of atmosphere, fifty kilometers away, the city became beautifully unreal, like a model behind dusty glass in a museum.

Her eyes swept to either side, head swinging as if she were watching a slow tennis match between progressively taller players.

"Good morning, Mr. Lanier," said the senior officer, approaching to inspect his badge. "She's new?"

Lanier nodded. "Patricia Vasquez. Unlimited access."

"Yes, sir. General Gerhardt passed the word yesterday to expect you."

"Any activity?" Lanier asked.

"Mitchell's survey squad is going through the K mega now, at thirty degrees and six klicks."

Lanier leaned back into the cab. "The 'megas' are the big buildings," he explained. She shielded her eyes against the plasma tube, trying to see the opposite side of the chamber more clearly. She could make out parks and small lakes, systems of streets—laid out in alternating concentric circles and square blocks.

She was as far from the opposite wall as Long Beach was from Los Angeles. Despite its scale, the city was definitely human-built.

Lanier stepped up on the running board and asked if she would like to stretch her legs before they continued.

"What do you call it?" Patricia asked.

"Its name is Alexandria."

"You named it?"

Lanier shook his head. "No."

"We're going all the way to the seventh chamber today?" she asked.

"If you're up to it."

"How long do we stay here?"

"A few hours at most. I want you to get a look at the library before we continue."

"A library?"

"Indeed," Lanier replied. "One of the highlights."

She settled back in her seat, eyes wide. "Is the city deserted?"

"Most of us think it is. We've had scattered reports, but I put it up to nerves. Boojums, the security team calls them. Ghosts. We've never found a live Stoner."

"You've found dead ones?"

"Quite a number. There are mausoleums in this chamber, and in the fourth chamber. The main cemetery in Alexandria is at two-six degrees and ten kilometers. Do you understand the coordinate system?"

"I think so," Patricia said. "Measure from the axis for angle, then distance from the cap. But what's zero, and which cap?"

"This is the zero bridge, and we measure from the south cap."

"This isn't an initiation, then—you weren't telling me a story. Humans built the Stone."

"They did," Lanier said.

"Where did they go?"

Lanier smiled and waggled a finger.

"I know," Patricia said, sighing. "Wait and see for myself." She stepped down from the truck and stretched, then rubbed her eyes. "I'm impressed."

"The first time I saw Alexandria, I felt kind of at home," Lanier said. "I was raised in New York, moved to LA when I was fifteen—lived in big cities all my life, practically. But this really impressed me, even so. We could move twenty million people into just this chamber and still not be crowded."

"Is that why the Stone is important—as real estate?"

"No," Lanier said. "We don't plan on selling condos. We have fifteen archaeologists on the team, and they'd kill anyone who even suggested it. They hold briefings every few days—I'm sure you'll attend several soon. They're working around the clock, and have been since we brought them up here three years ago. They haven't let us touch anything since that time, except when one of the security team commanders or myself has overruled them. And even then, we needed damned good excuses."

Patricia nodded to the three guards, who returned the greeting cordially, one tipping the visor on his cap. A radio in the guard house beeped and crackled. The senior officer answered. Patricia couldn't catch the guttural message, but the guard replied in what sounded like Russian.

"I could have sworn they were all clean-cut American soldiers," Patricia said.

"They are. There are Russians working with Hua Ling in the southern cap bore hole."

"The marines speak Russian?"

"This one does, obviously. And three or four other languages. Cream of the crop."

"Is there anybody up here who isn't brilliant?"

"No common grunts, if that's what you mean. We can't afford them. Everyone has to do double and triple duty." He sat in the driver's seat again. "When you're ready, we'll cross the bridge and drive to the library."

"Anytime," Patricia said, resuming her seat.

Lanier advanced the tractor and the gates swung wide for them, then closed after.

They crossed the four-lane bridge, tires chattering and whanging on the asphalt. Patricia reached into her pants pocket to pull out the slate. Using its ten-key shorthand board, she typed:

Weather—or rather, the absence of it. Sky is quite clear. Perspective—really startling. Land appears flat nearby, then just above the horizon (looking north) seems to curve, the curve getting more radical up the side of the valley. The chamber overhead has lots of detail, visible through slight haze.

She played back what she had keyed in, hunting for errors. She had learned to type on a slate in high school, but that had been many years ago, and she preferred writing by hand. Paper, however, was obviously an expensive commodity on the Stone, to be used sparingly.

She continued to type as they passed down a broad thoroughfare. Street about fifty meters wide, divided down the middle by what might have been grass at one time, and trees. Two lanes each side. None of the plants look healthy. Gardening systems deteriorating—not working at all? Shop windows on street level, nearly all broken. Lobbies of businesses, agencies, open to the air. One window—humanoid mannequin. Long-necked. Poised, but nude.

She spotted a sign above what might have once been a jewelry store. "Kesar's," she read. Latin alphabet—and on the other side of the sign, as they moved on, she saw that the same name had been spelled out in Cyrillic. Some shops had Oriental ideograms—Chinese and Japanese. Others were in Laotian and the modified Vietnamese–Roman alphabet.

"Lord," she breathed. "I could be back in LA."

There was something peculiar about the shops, the designs, even a few window displays. She squinted, trying to resolve the discrepancies. "Wait a minute," she said. Lanier slowed the truck. "This is all supposed to be quaint, isn't it? I mean, like back home, where we have shopping malls built to make us think we're in Old England. This is supposed to be old-fashioned."

"As good an observation as any I've heard," Lanier said, shrugging. "I've never really paid this area much attention."

"Garry, I'm very confused. If the Stone was built a thousand years ago, how does all this fit in?"

Lanier swung around a gentle curve and brought the truck to a stop in the middle of the street. He pointed to a large, umber-toned building on the northern edge of the greenspace. "That's one of the libraries—one of two we're investigating now. All the others are closed off."

Patricia clutched her lower lip between her teeth. "Should I be nervous?" she asked.

"Probably. I would be."

"I mean, it's as if—" She shook her head. "Why should I go in there? I'm a mathematician. I'm not an engineer or a historian."

"Believe me, nobody enters the libraries on whim. You're uniquely qualified. You've been working in an area with no practical value—until now."

"I'm going to stop asking questions," Patricia said, sighing. "I don't even know the right questions to ask."

Electronic sensors had been placed around the building. Chain link fences topped by wicked-looking razor-wire curls enforced the gentle suggestions of sensors and cameras. Four guards stood before the entrance, carrying Apples—anti-personnel lasers—and looking very serious. As Lanier and Vasquez approached, an amplified voice boomed out, "Mr. Lanier. Stop and allow scan. Who's that with you?"

"Patricia Vasquez," he said. "Index under science team, reference memo from General Gerhardt."

"Yessir. Advance and present ID."

They left the truck and walked to the gate. "We brought the razor wire and sensors up from Earth two years ago," Lanier told her. "When we began to realize what we had, in there."

They presented their IDs and laid their hands on a plate carried by a woman in black and gray. After being cleared, they entered the enclosure.

The ground-floor windows had been broken here, as well. No signs or maps were evident within, but it had the definite feel of a library—though once again, it seemed artificially quaint. The interior was dark and deserted.

"The outside guards can't enter the library, only special security—black-and-gray uniforms. There's one person on duty inside at all times, with a video monitor—the voice we heard."

"Very fancy," Patricia said.

"Necessary."

A strip of fluorescent lighting hanging from the ceiling on a bolted track flashed on. More strips glowed in sequence, making a path of light across the ground floor and up a flight of steps near the center of the building.

"We have portable generators at four locations in Alexandria," Lanier said as they walked down the path. The floor was bare and dusty, with a few well-cleared tracks in the dust. "Most of the city's power nets aren't functioning. We haven't tracked down the power supplies yet, but they're probably not discrete plants. The Stone itself seems to carry a reserve of power, with concentrations in supercooled batteries."

Patricia's brow wrinkled. "Batteries?"

"Like the hundred-meter cells in Arizona and the Greater African Conservatory."

"Oh." She wasn't much on practical physics, but she didn't want Lanier to know that.

"The electrical system is pretty conventional, otherwise. Control and information channels are optical, more so than back on Earth. The buildings are dark because most of the circuit breakers—or whatever served that function—have been tripped, and nobody's going to reset them until we know more about fire hazards."

"Why are the windows broken?" Patricia asked as they continued climbing.

"Glass gets brittle with age, slumps. Pressure surges in the atmosphere crack the windows."

"Weather?"

"Of a sort. There are high- and low-pressure systems in the chambers, updrafts and coriolis, downdrafts near the caps. Even storms. Snow in some of the chambers, infrequently. Most of it seems controlled, but we don't know whether the controls are built-in, static, or whether machines are still hard at work someplace."

In the shadowy halls beyond the light strips on the second floor, she saw man-sized metallic cylinders arranged in rows, marching off into obscurity.

"We've been pulling data out of these storage banks for a year," Lanier said. "The programming languages weren't familiar to us, so we've only had success producing readable copy and useful images for about six months. As it turns out, the library in the next chamber is even larger, so we're concentrating on it, now. But. . . I still prefer this. There's an extensive hard-copy center on the fourth floor. That's where I did my early research, and where you'll be doing some of yours."

"I feel like I'm on the Mary Celeste."

"The comparison's been made," Lanier said. "At any rate, here or anywhere else, the rule is, Don't disturb anything you can't put back exactly the way it was. The archaeologists are just finishing their gross surveys and they're still touchy. We have to break the rule now and then—repairing necessary equipment, tinkering with the computers—but no excess meddling is allowed. If the Stone is a Mary Celeste, we can't afford not to know why."

On the fourth floor, they entered a large room filled with reading cubicles, each with a viewer and a flat gray panel mounted in a small desk. One of the desks had been equipped with a recently imported Tensor lamp connected to the new power supply. Lanier pulled out a chair for her. She sat.

"I'll be back in a moment," he said. He walked to the opposite side of the room, passed through a door and left her alone. She fingered the viewer on the desk—was it for video, microfilm? She couldn't tell. The screen was flat and black as ebony, no more than a quarter of an inch thick.

There was something unusual about the chair. A small cylinder was mounted horizontally in the middle of the seat, fitting with some discomfort between her buttocks. There might have been cushions at one time, covering the cylinder—or perhaps the chair created its own cushion when powered up.

Patricia glanced nervously at the rows of empty cubicles, trying to imagine those who had last used them. When Lanier returned, she was very glad to see him. Her hands were trembling.

"Spooky," she said, smiling weakly.

He held out a small book bound in milky plastic. She thumbed through the pages. The paper was thin and tough. The language was English, though the typeface was unusual—too many serifs. She opened to the title page.

"Tom Sawyer," she read, "by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain." The publication date was 2110. She closed the book and put it down, swallowing hard.

"Well?" Lanier asked softly.

She looked up at him, frowning. Then a kind of understanding passed between them. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it again.

"You've wondered why I'm so tired looking," Lanier said.

"Yes."

"Do you understand, now?"

"Because of this. . . library."

"Partly," he said.

"It's from the future. The Stone is from our future.

"We're not certain of that," he said.

"But that's why I'm here. . . to help you figure out how."

"There are other puzzles, equally mystifying, and perhaps they all tie together."

She opened the book again. "Published by Greater Georgia General, in cooperation with Harpers of the Pacific."

He reached down and took the book from her hands. "That's enough for now. We'll go outside. You can rest for a bit, or we can spend a couple of hours at the security base."

"No," she said. "I want to go on." She closed her eyes for a few seconds. He left to reshelve the book, then returned and walked ahead of her to the ground floor.

"The subway entrance is  two blocks from here," he said. "We can walk it. Exercise clears the head."

She followed him across one corner of the park, looking at without really seeing the buildings and their signs in the various languages of Earth, knowing she was past the point of assimilation.

They passed beneath a half-moon arch and walked down a double-back incline into the subway station.

"You said the Stone wasn't from the future," Patricia commented.

"From our future," Lanier corrected. "It may not be from our universe."

Her skin felt warm. She blinked rapidly, not sure whether she was going to cry or laugh. "Damn."

"My sentiments exactly."

They stood on a broad platform, near a wall ornamented with large, flat, rose-colored crystals arranged in irregular tesselations. Direction signs hung from the ceiling, letters scabbed and peeling: "Nexus Central, Line 5" "This side for Alexandria" "San Juan Ortega, Line 6, 20 minutes." More of the ebony-black flat display screens hung near the signs, all blank.

Patricia felt a small tremor of dizziness. Was she really where she was, or suffering through a work-induced dream?

"You're getting Stoned," Lanier said. "Watch yourself."

"I am. Yeah. Watching myself getting Stoned."

"Depression is usually the next step. Disorientation, fantasies, depression. That's what I went through."

"Oh?" She looked down at the white tiles beneath her feet.

"Should be a train coming in the next five, ten minutes," Lanier said. He put his hands in his pockets and joined her in regarding the floor.

"I'm doing fine," Patricia said. She didn't believe herself, but on the other hand, she had felt worse before exams than she did now. She'd hold up. She had to. "I'm just wondering if there are better ways to indoctrinate newcomers. This seems pretty haphazard."

"We tried other ways."

"Didn't work?"

"No better, some worse."

A puff of air advanced out of the train tunnel. Patricia thought to peer over the edge of the platform to see what kind of mechanism the subway cars rode on. The floor of the channel was featureless, no rails or guides of any sort.

Out of the tunnel hissed a giant aluminum millipede, its nose windowless and crossed by a radiance of green lines. It stopped with neck-jarring suddenness and hummed softly as its doors slid open. A marine guard stood in the lead car, holstered pistol and laser rifle prominent.

"Mr. Lanier," he greeted, saluting smartly.

"Charlie, this is Patricia Vasquez. Another green badge. Patricia, this is Corporal Charles Wurtz. You'll probably be seeing a lot of each other. Charlie is our main man on the zero train line."

"Keep all the boojums from bumming a lift," Charlie said, grinning and shaking Patricia's hand.

Lanier beckoned for her to enter first. The interior, examined for basics, was like any reasonably new rapid transit system vehicle. The plastic seats and metal fixtures were in good repair. The cars had obviously not been designed for crowding—no handstraps or rails for standing passengers—and the arrangements were spacious, with lots of leg room. And no advertising. Indeed, within the car there were no signs at all.

"Like an old BART in San Francisco," Patricia said. She hadn't ridden on the BART or the LA Metro in years.

They settled back in their seats. There was no sensation of motion until she looked out the large round windows spaced at irregular intervals along the sides of the car. The station was a passing blur. Then there was only darkness relieved by flashing white vertical bars.

"It just doesn't look that much like the future," she said. "It's recognizable. I always thought the future would be so different, it wouldn't be recognizable. Particularly a thousand years in the future. But there are buildings, subways—I mean, why not matter transmitters?"

"Alexandria and this rail system are a lot older than other parts of the Stone. When you get around and see things in more detail, you'll notice big differences between our technology and this. Beside. . .” He paused. "There's history to consider. Delays. Handicaps. And holdovers."

"Which I'll know about soon enough."

"Right," Lanier said. "Did you feel any motion just now? Acceleration?"

She frowned. "No. But maybe we started out slowly—"

"The trains accelerate at four g's."

"Wait." She turned to a window and looked at the passing bars of white, then frowned. "Alexandria. . . I mean, it wasn't designed right."

Lanier regarded her patiently. She was supposed to be brilliant, but in many ways she was so young. Struggling to maintain her decorum as if she were a schoolgirl.

"The Stone has to accelerate and decelerate, right? Just like this train. But I don't feel any motion now, and. . . the chambers should have angled floors, to compensate for the thrust, for the wash of water in the lakes and ponds—higher walls on one side. Acceleration slosh. Angled walkways to compensate."

"There aren't any provisions for acceleration in the chambers," Lanier said.

"So they accelerated slowly?"

He shook his head.

"They had some way to compensate?"

"The sixth chamber," Lanier said. "But that's part of the big picture, too."

"You're making me sort everything out for myself."

"Whenever possible."

"As a test."

"No," Lanier said emphatically. "The Advisor said you can help us. I don't doubt that. But if this were a test, you'd be doing just fine." Though he had reservations.

The tunnel walls passed behind them and the train rushed into light. They passed over water, doing at least two or three hundred kilometers an hour. "In the elevated stretches, there are three rails under the cars, magnetic induction," Lanier said.

"Oh." She turned her attention to the sea, a uniform expanse of rippling blue-gray, stretching north to a bank of fog against the cap. Above the gray expanse she could see the chamber's arch, and to the northwest and northeast the distant edges of the fog bank, and a shoreline at three o'clock high.

About seven kilometers from the train, its lower extremity hidden in white mist, was the hexagonal top of an upright tower, perhaps fifty meters tall and half as broad. Another tower appeared only a kilometer or so distant, fully visible and mounted on a slender round pylon.

The fog rushed up to meet them, and suddenly, they were over land. Rich pine forest blurred beneath, appearing healthy—if slightly blue—in the tubelight.

"Fourth chamber was a recreation center, as near as we can tell," Lanier said. "And of course, a reservoir and air-purification system. There are four distinct islands here, each with a different habitat. There were underwater habitats, too—coral gardens, freshwater ponds and river systems. Resort, wildlife preserve, fish farm—it's all returned to an untended state, a bit wild but prospering."

The train slowed and slid with a faint humming noise over an elevated platform. Two men in black jumpsuits ran next to the cars as they came to a stop. Lanier stood and she followed him to the door. It opened as silently as before.

Forest, water, dirt—all in one glorious sniff.

"Later, Charlie," Lanier said. Charlie saluted smartly and took a stance in the doorway behind them.

A platform guard stepped up to examine Patricia's badge. "Welcome to summer camp, Miss Vasquez," he said. She looked down from the platform railing. They were six meters above the ground. The platform was surrounded by a compound much like the one in the first chamber, with fiberboard buildings and earthen ramparts, but a much larger greenhouse-agriculture laboratory.

Everyone in the compound wore black, in combinations of black and khaki, black and green, and one black and gray. "Security forces?" she asked. Lanier nodded as they descended the platform stairs.

"We keep a small science group here, and we let people take their vacations or liberty here, when there's time for such things, which isn't often. This chamber is strategic. It divides the relatively livable parts of the Stone from the business end."

"The propulsion system?"

"That, and the seventh chamber. Anyway, you'll have a chance to stretch your legs, assimilate what you've seen so far."

"I doubt it," Patricia said.

Lanier guided her to the compound cafeteria.

In most respects, the cafeteria was little different from the one in the first chamber. They sat at a table with British and West German soldiers. Lanier introduced her to the German commanding officer, Colonel Heinrich Berenson. "He'll assume command of the seventh chamber security forces a week from now. You'll be working together quite a bit."

Berenson was a colonel in the West German Space Force, sandy-haired and freckle-faced, as tall as Lanier but more obviously muscular. He appeared more Irish than German; with his non-German name and sophisticated manner, he seemed truly international to Patricia. His manner was friendly but slightly distant.

She ordered a salad—fresh greens from the agrilab—and looked at the faces of the men and women around her. Not all of them had green badges.

"How does the badge system work?" she asked Lanier. Berenson smiled and shook his head, as if this was a sore point.

"Red badges are confined to the bore hole in the first chamber," Lanier said. "Mostly engineering support. Blue can go anywhere in the Stone except the sixth and seventh chambers, but in all chambers but the first, must be escorted and must be performing specific duties. Green badges can go to any of the chambers but are always subject to security checks."

"I am here more than three years," Berenson said, "and I only get a green three months ago." He glanced down at her badge and nodded meaningfully. "Fortunately, I found a loophole. I can be considered to have escorted myself."

Lanier grinned. "Let's just be thankful things are going as smoothly as they have been."

"Amen," Berenson said. "I would hate to see true confusion."

"For green badges, there are three levels of clearance. Level one is lowest—no access to designated secret areas. Level two is limited access for duty purposes—the special security guards have level two green badges. Level three is the clearance we share."

"I will be level two," Berenson said.

As they returned to the train, Patricia asked, "Being level two means he won't know exactly what the Stone is?"

"When you get to the seventh chamber, you have to know a lot."

"But not about what's in the libraries."

"No," Lanier said.

That sobered her. Berenson was morose, and he didn't even know about the libraries.

The four spacesuited soldiers ran in long, graceful leaps across the lunar surface with only the stars and a quarter-Earth to light their way. Mirsky watched them from the top of a boulder, only his white helmet showing. In his right hand, he held an electric torch, pointed back toward his team comrades waiting in a gully carved by a rolling rock millions of years before. When the four were in the proper position, he flashed the light on and off three times.

The objective—a mock-up of a lunar settlement bunker—lay a hundred meters beyond the boulder. The four defenders were now by the airlock. Mirsky raised his AKV-297—automatic vacuum-adapted Kalashnikov projectile rifle—and pointed it at the airlock hatch.

The hatch opened and Mirsky raised the rifle slightly, centering it on a cross-barred target near the hatchway signal lights. With one gloved finger, he depressed the side-mounted trigger and felt the rifle kick three times. A thin line of burning gunpowder discharge from the barrel glowed briefly in the darkness. The target blew out in tatters of plastic as the door opened.

Mirsky heard the exercise supervisor read off the numbers of the four space-suited defenders and order them to assume a reclining posture. "Your airlock is also incapacitated," the supervisor added laconically. "Fine work, Lieutenant Colonel. . . You may proceed."

Mirsky and his three comrades advanced toward the mock-up. The defenders lay on the lunar soil outside the open hatchway, motionless except for the advancing numbers of their backpack life support displays. Mirsky leaned over and winked at one of them through his visor. The defender glared back at him, not in the least amused.

"Look over your shoulder at two o'clock, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel," one of his men advised. Mirsky turned around and followed the line of the corporal's thickly protected arm and gloved finger.

The Potato, a sharp point of light with a clearly discernible oblong shape, had just risen above the Moon's horizon.

It seemed that all his life, people had been pointing it out to him—Yefremova three years before, the first among them.

"Yes, I see," Mirsky acknowledged.

"That is why we train, is it not, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?"

Mirsky didn't answer. The supervisor cut in and demanded they stop the useless chatter.

"The stars have ears, Corporal," Mirsky advised the soldier. "Let's take our objective and get home in time for more political lessons." The corporal met Mirsky's glance and grimaced but said nothing more.

In their own bunker, four hours later, the exercise supervisor walked down the aisle between the sleeping slings of the victorious team, shaking hands and congratulating them warmly, and then handing out letters from home. All the men received letters, if only from party cell coordinators in some outlying village. The supervisor stopped by Mirsky's sling last.

"Only one letter for you, Comrade. . . Colonel," he said, handing Mirsky a thick and carefully sealed and taped envelope. Mirsky took the envelope and stared at it, then at the supervisor.

"Open it."

He carefully tore off the end and took out five folded sheets of paper, "A promotion," he said, unwilling to be very emotional about the whole thing.

"And your orders, Comrade," the supervisor said. "Gentlemen, are we interested in discovering where our new Colonel Pavel Mirsky is going?"

"Where?" several asked.

"Back to Earth," Mirsky said.

"Back to Earth!" the supervisor echoed. "This is, what—your fourth training tour on the Moon in two years? And now back to Earth."

The men watched him carefully, grinning.

"To the Indian Ocean," Mirsky said. "For final training as battalion commander."

"To the Indian Ocean!" the supervisor shouted, pointing one finger at the floor—symbolically indicating the Earth—and then raising both his hands, looking upward and nodding at the ceiling.

The men cheered and broke into applause.

"Now, you will have the stars you have always wanted, Colonel," the supervisor said, shaking his hand firmly.

Chapter Four

The rest of the fourth chamber slipped by the train windows quickly, a blur of hilly terrain, small lakes and outcroppings of what looked like granite.

"The line ends at the sixth chamber. We'll be met by Joseph Rimskaya and some of the Chinese team at the terminal annex."

"Rimskaya? I had a teacher with that name at UCLA."

"Rimskaya is why you're here. He recommended you."

"But he left the university to join the Bureau of Math and Statistics."

"And he met the Advisor while working in Washington," Lanier added.

Rimskaya had been her professor in a special math seminar. She hadn't liked him much; he was a tall, blocky man with a wiry red beard, loud and assertive, a political science professor and expert in statistics and information theory. A rigorous mathematician but not, in her opinion, in possession of the insight necessary for truly valuable research, Rimskaya had always seemed the perfect academician to her: rigid, demanding, an unimaginative taskmaster.

"Why is he here?"

"Because the Advisor finds him useful."

"His specialty was statistical theories of population behavior. He belongs in sociology."

"That's right," Lanier said.

"How—"

Lanier appeared irritated. "Think, Patricia. Where did the Stoners go? Why did they go there, how did they get there?"

"I don't know," she answered quietly.

"We don't know, either. Not yet. Rimskaya is head of the sociology group. They might be able to tell us."

"This is such an ass-backwards way of teaching."

"I'll be patient if you will," Lanier said.

Patricia was silent for a moment. "No guarantees," she said. "I wish you'd stop seeming so peeved at me when I just ask straightforward questions."

Lanier raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Please don't take it personally."

So he's under strain, she thought. Well, so am I. Only he's had time to get used to it. If you can ever get used to something like the library. . . or the Stone itself. Then again, there's almost certainly more. . . .

She had the sudden vision of a maze of chalkboards waiting for her in the seventh chamber, filled with wandering mathematicians working on some grand, unified problem. Over them all, on a huge video screen, the Advisor watched patiently, like God. Lanier was her avatar.

"Rimskaya's half Russian," Lanier continued. "His grandmother was a widower and an immigrant and her name was applied on the U.S. entry papers to her son, as well. He speaks Russian like a native. Sometimes he acts as interpreter between the Russians and us."

The train's hum increased in pitch and they plunged into the fourth chamber's northern cap.

The fifth chamber was darker than the previous sections she had visited. A canopy of flat gray clouds painted the cylinder's upper atmosphere, cutting out half the tubelight. Beneath the clouds was a Wagnerian landscape of barren mountains, resembling ragged lumps of anthracite mixed with dark-rainbowed hematite. Between the mountains were rusty abyssal valleys, cut by waterfalls feeding into quicksilver rivers. The mountains toward the middle of the chamber floor were startling in their contortions—arches, giant rugged cubes, broken-tipped pyramids and causeways of irregular slab steps.

"What in hell was this?" she asked.

"A kind of open pit mine, we think. Our two geologists—you met Robert Smith, he's one—speculate that when the chambers were hollowed out, the fifth wasn't finished off. They left it for raw material. And the Stoners used it. These are the scars."

"Perfect for fans of old horror movies," Patricia said. "Can't you just see Castle Dracula here?"

They said nothing throughout the short trip down the next tunnel into the sixth chamber. As the train's hum decreased in pitch and the tunnel dark brightened, Lanier stood and said, "End of the line."

The lower terminal was a cavernous construct of unpainted slabs of reddish concrete and mottled gray-and-black asteroid rock. The platform was marked with faint lines, as though long winding queues had once formed there.

"This was a worker's station once," Lanier said. "When they modified the sixth chamber, this served as a debarkation point. Six hundred years ago, perhaps."

"How long has the Stone been deserted?"

"Five centuries."

They walked up a ramp into a building constructed mostly of thick transparent panels, giving an excellent view of the sixth chamber.

The valley floor was layered with gigantic inert mechanical forms, cylinders and cubes and stacks of circular plates laid on edge, resembling a monstrous circuit board. Just outside the terminal building, a row of spherical tanks marched off to a distant wall. The wall was at least a hundred meters high, and the tanks half that in diameter. Below this level of the terminal, between the spheres and a parallel row of cylinders resting on their sides, was an immense gully filled with glistening water. The channel was lined with pipe ends and cyclopian pumping apparatus. Over it all, thick black clouds floated in clumps, dropping curtains of rain and flurries of snow. Somewhere was a constant pulsing, less heard then felt, like the infra-sound beats of moving mountains or the grinding of distant sea bottoms.

Looking up at an angle, between decks of clouds, she could dimly see the opposite floor of the chamber, bumped and ridged with a carpet of mysterious mechanism.

"No moving parts in the whole chamber except for large pumps, and not many of those," Lanier said. "The builders relied upon a built-in weather cycle. Rain falls, picks up heat, flows down channels into shallow ponds, evaporates, carries heat up, and the atmospheric maintenance systems drain it off, we're still not sure how."

"What does it all do?"

"When the Stone was first designed, the sixth chamber was going to be another city. But the builders had specified that the Stone could only accelerate at three percent g. Just before the Stone was outfitted—and before the completion of the major excavation—they found a way to allow the Stone to accelerate to the limit of its power. The method was complex and expensive, but it gave the Stone a versatility the builders couldn't pass up. So the sixth chamber was equipped with selective inertial damping machinery, which makes up a small fraction of what is here now." He nodded at the vista through the glass. "That's why none of the chamber floors are inclined, and none of the ponds or rivers are equipped with slop barriers. They don't need them. The sixth chamber can selectively damp the effects of inertia on any object in the Stone. On a large scale, it overcomes acceleration and deceleration of the entire ship. On a small scale, it prevents inertial effects in the trains. It's self-regulating, though we haven't found any 'brain' yet."

The rain hit the transparent roof and ran down the forty-five degree slope over the stairwell. Lanier paused to look at the beads and rivulets of water.

"Since that time, the machinery has been modified and expanded. It once covered about three square kilometers, and the rest of the sixth chamber was used for industry and research, things that couldn't be done in the cities. Now, it maintains the seventh chamber as well."

Four people, all clad in yellow rain gear, marched along the edge of the channel beyond the terminal. They had parked their truck a few meters away, on a raised roadbed.

"Our reception committee," Lanier said. They walked to the head of the staircase. Cold air pooled in the stairwell, and Patricia shivered as an outside gust blew some of it over them. Rain sang softly overhead. Between the rivulets on the glass, through a trench-like break in the clouds, Patricia saw the opposite northern cap. All the other caps had been virtually blank, featureless. This one was furrowed by a row of rectangular boxes, spaced at equal intervals like a steep flight of stairs. On the face of each box was an elliptical design. The boxes, she estimated, were at least a kilometer wide, and the ellipses half that along their major axis.

The first of the four to reach the top of the stairs doffed his rain cap. Patricia looked down to see her former professor, his face ruddy and bearded, eyes small and suspicious as if from some long-harbored hurt. Rimskaya was just as she remembered him. He returned her stare defensively, then nodded to Lanier. Behind him, a tall, even-featured blond woman and two Chinese, a man and a woman wearing green caps, removed their gear and shook water off onto the floor.

Rimskaya approached Patricia, his every gesture conveying aloofness, if not disgust. "Miss Vasquez," he said. "I hope you are up to this. I hope you do not make me seem like a fool for choosing you."

She opened and shut her mouth like a carp, then laughed too loudly. "Professor, I hope so, too!"

"Don't mind him," said the blond woman, her voice pleasant and deep, with a faint British accent. "He's said nothing but good about you for four months now." She clutched her own cap under her arm and held out her hand. Patricia shook it. Her grip was firm and warm. "I'm Karen Farley, this is Wu Gi Me, and Chang i Hsing." Chang smiled broadly at Patricia, her straight black bangs hanging down over her eyebrows, the latest Chinese fashion. "We're from Beijing Technological University."

Rimskaya still studied Patricia. His gray eyes narrowed. "You are healthy, no space sickness, no emotional distress?"

"I'm fine, Professor," she said.

"Good. Then you—" he indicated Farley, Wu and Chang "—you take care of her. I'm going to the first chamber to rest. I'll be gone a week, perhaps longer." He held his hand out to Lanier and they shook once, firmly. "I am tired," Rimskaya said, "not least because I have no idea what this all signifies. I have never been an imaginative man, and this place. . .” He shuddered. "Perhaps it will suit you better, Miss Vasquez." He bowed stiffly to his colleagues, then picked up his gear and walked toward the ramp leading to the train platform.

Patricia looked after him, nonplussed.

"I envy him. . . a bit," said Wu in perfect California English. He was about her height, just on the edge of plumpness, with a stiff crew cut and a childlike face. "I have read some of your papers recently, Miss Vasquez."

"Patricia, please."

"They are quite beyond me, I'm afraid. Chang and I are electrical engineers. Karen is a physicist."

"Theoretical physics. I've been very impay-tient to meet you," Farley said.

"'Impay-shent,'" Lanier corrected.

"Yes." Farley grinned at Patricia's puzzlement. "I'm a Chinese citizen also. I can fool most people most of the time. Correct me, please, when I blunder."

Patricia looked between them owlishly. She felt a bit strung-out, not yet ready to meet new people and stretch her sociability.

"We're escorting Patricia to the seventh chamber," Lanier said. "But she may want to rest here awhile."

"No." Patricia shook her head firmly. "I'm going for the big picture today."

"That's a woman," Farley said. "Suicidal doggedness. Something I admire. Chang has it. Gi Me—we call him Lucky—Gi Me's a lazy fellow, though."

"Both she and Professor Rimskaya are slave drivers," Chang said. Her English accent was markedly less proficient than Wu's and Farley's. She produced two packets of rain gear from a pouch in her own coat and gave them to Lanier and Patricia. They suited up quickly and left the shelter of the annex.

The air smelled of clean rain, ozone and metal. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the snow had stopped. Water slid in sheets from sloping metal walls below the elevated road, collecting in gutters and washing to a catch basin meters below. Patricia peered into the basin and saw the smooth funnel of water descending into darkness.

The truck on the roadbed was a replica of the vehicle which had taken them across the first chamber. Farley offered Patricia the shotgun seat again, and the others climbed into the back, pushing aside boxes of fabric-wrapped scientific gear. Farley edged the truck forward, then brought it up to speed.

The roadbed expanded into a broad flat ribbon, winding through complexes of tanks and gray shapes hidden behind a rapidly spreading fog. Wu leaned between the two seats. "This stuff that looks like asphalt—it isn't. It's asteroid rock, all the metals removed, ground up and mixed with a plant-based oil. Very tough, no cracks. We wonder who's going to patent it."

Somehow, Patricia found the dreariness invigorating. There was a bluish quality about the fog that made her feel as if she were within a sapphire. The rain resumed, and the drum of water on the truck's roof—combined with a gentle surge of warm air from the heater—made everything seem secure, no more strenuous than watching an entertainment on a video.

She snapped herself out of that feeling quickly. Lanier was watching her. She angled her face toward him and then looked away. How could they consider her so important? In the face of this monumental mystery, what could she possibly do?

The size alone was enough to paralyze thought. Looking up through gaps in the cloud cover to the opposite side, she could just as well have been looking from the window of a shuttle reentering the atmosphere.

The truck followed the gently curving highway and crossed the sixth chamber in twenty minutes. The familiar arch and tunnel entrance loomed ahead. Farley switched on the lights as the tunnel enveloped them.

After the stormy sixth chamber, the clarity and brightness of the unhindered plasma tubelight was welcome.

"You can almost hear the birds singing," Patricia commented.

"I wish," Farley said. They descended the ramp. Ahead stretched an arrow-straight road, about half as broad as the sixth chamber highway and made of the same material. To each side of the road, sandy hummocks topped with stiff yellow grass dotted the floor for several kilometers. A short hike away were stands of low, scrawny trees. To the west, up the curve of the chamber floor, Patricia saw small lakes and what looked like a river emerging from one of the cap tunnels. A few fleecy clouds clung to the cap. The landscape was equally homogenous and bland right up to the limits of the tubelight both east and west. The plasma tube itself emerged from the center of the cap in a straight, unobscured beacon.

Patricia could feel the anticipation building in the cabin, centering on her. They were waiting for her reaction.

Reaction to what? If anything, this chamber was less impressive than the first. Her shoulders tensed. So what was she supposed to say?

Lanier reached between the seats to touch her arm. "What do you see?" he asked.

"Sand, grass, lakes, trees. A river. Some clouds."

"Look straight ahead."

She looked. The air was clear. Visibility was at least thirty kilometers. The northern cap seemed to be obscured, not nearly as obvious as the looming gray presence in the other chambers. She looked up and squinted, trying to make out the end of the plasma tube.

It didn't end. It went on, certainly more than thirty kilometers, getting dimmer and thinner until it almost merged with the horizon.

Of course, on a non-curved surface—as the cylinders were, viewed parallel to the axis—the horizon was much higher. Given unlimited distance, the horizon would begin at a true vanishing point in the perspective. . .

"This chamber's longer," she said.

"Yes," Wu agreed cautiously. Chang nodded, grinning as if at some joke, her hands folded demurely in her lap.

"Now, let me get this straight. We've traveled about two hundred and twenty kilometers into the Stone, which is about two hundred and ninety kilometers long. So this chamber could be, maybe, fifty kilometers across." Her hands were trembling. "But it isn't."

"Look closely," Lanier said.

"It's an optical illusion. I can't see the northern cap."

"No," Farley said, all too sympathetic.

"So?" Patricia looked around the cab. The others kept their faces impassive, except for Chang's secretive smile. "What the hell am I supposed to see?"

"You tell us," Lanier said.

She figured furiously in her head, looking up at the opposite side of the chamber, trying to calculate distances in the strange perspective of the huge cylinders. "Stop the truck."

Farley brought the vehicle to a halt and Patricia descended from the cab to stand on the roadway. Then she clambered up a ladder to a platform on top of the cab and looked down the straight line of the road. The road went to its own vanishing point—no cap, no barrier. Above, the rest of the landscape did much the same.

"It's bigger," she said. Farley and Lanier stood by the truck, looking up at her. Wu and Chang joined them. "It's bigger than the asteroid. It goes beyond the end. Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"We don't tell," Lanier said. "We show. It's the only way."

"You're trying to tell me it doesn't stop, it goes right on out the other end?" She heard the touch of panic and high-pitched fascination in her own voice.

The Stanford professor, six years before, had been wrong. Someone besides extraterrestrials and gods could appreciate her work. She now knew why she had been brought up from Vandenberg, carried to the Stone by shuttle and OTV.

The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside.

The seventh chamber went on forever.

Chapter Five

Patricia had slept—she checked her watch—nine hours. She lay on the cot, listening to the gentle sound of tent canvas clapping in the breeze.

In at least this region of the seventh chamber, there was little need for solid-walled buildings. The weather was dry and mild, the air temperature warm. She stared up at the awning stretched between aluminum poles, at the smoky outline of the plasma tube through the cloth.

I am here. This is real.

"You bet your life," she whispered. Inside the tent, a complex of partitions and tarp floors covering about a hundred square meters, Farley and Chang were speaking Chinese in muted tones.

The first few hours in the chamber, while they had arranged a cubicle in the tent for her and prepared for a cookout, Patricia had been hyperactive, darting about like a moth, asking questions that sometimes made little sense. Lanier had watched her glumly for a while; she had felt she was somehow disappointing him. But later he had joined the others in laughing at her—with her—and had produced a surprise bottle of champagne. "To christen your new self," he had said.

On the first round, they had tried to find something more fitting in the way of names for what everyone had, heretofore, referred to simply as the "seventh chamber," or "the corridor."

"Spaghetti world," Farley had suggested. No, Wu countered—more like macaroni world, hollow in the middle. Chang tossed in pipe world. "Tube" and "tunnel" had already been appropriated for other parts of the Stone; the words and shapes seemed to echo against each other, a sexually charged confusion of fittings-within-fittings.

A couple of glasses of champagne and Patricia had become desperately drowsy. They had barely set up a cot under the awning before she was sound asleep.

She stretched and propped her head on her elbow, looking across the scrub and sand, and up at the enormous cylinder of land stretching into the haze. Farley came out of the tent and sat beside the cot.

"Dreaming?"

"No," Patricia said. "Musing."

"When Garry gave us the grand tour, a year and a half ago, I thought I'd go crazy. What's your opinion of the indoctrination? I mean, it's really just beginning for you, but. . .” She trailed off, regarding Patricia with very blue eyes. Farley was perhaps ten years older than she, and there was humor evident in the lines around her lips and eyes. She had a demanding directness in her manner—almost a female version of Lanier, Patricia thought.

"Seeing is not quite believing," she answered. "So just hearing about it certainly wouldn't be enough."

"After a while, we tend to become complacent," Farley said, staring down the gray-green road. "It worries me sometimes. When new people arrive and see what we see every day, we're shaken back into realizing how strange it really is. Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don't understand everything." She sighed. "I'm not sure Garry approves, but I think you should be warned about the boojums."

"He mentioned them. What are they?"

"Some of us have seen boojums. Spooks. I haven't, and none of our group have. The consensus is they're psychological, a sign of the strain. There haven't been any really clear sightings, photographs or anything. So be wary of what you see. And be doubly wary—no one has proven that the Stone or the corridor is completely deserted. We're just too few to adequately explore and police all the chambers. So if you see anything, report it, but don't believe it." She smiled. "Does that make sense?"

"No," Patricia said, swinging her legs over the side of the cot. "Do I have a work schedule, some idea of what I'm supposed to be doing, when?"

"Garry will tell you all about that in a half hour or so. He's sleeping now. Exhaled. I mean, exhausted. We're all a bit worried about him, you know."

"You and the others—you have green badges, but do you have third level clearance?"

"Heavens, no." Farley laughed, tossing her long blond hair back over her shoulders. "We're Chinese. We're lucky to have gotten this far. We're here by courtesy and because our governments happen to be friendly this decade. All the same, we're much better off than the poor Russians. They get to study the bore holes and the plasma tubes, and very little else. Everyone perceives plasma physics to be their specialty, so they're stuck on the axis. Americans have no conception what fine archaeologists they have. Now, as for their sociology. . .” She shook her head ruefully. "I'm a born and bred Marxist, but I'm not sure the Stoners would fit strict Leninist dogma."

"Garry hasn't given me any details on the agreements. I read about them at home. . . . But I know we weren't told everything."

"NATO–Eurospace vessels were the first to reach the Stone and begin exploration. By the ISCCOM agreements, NATO has the right to control exploitation, and NATO is dominated by the United States, of course. The Russians have protested this is a special case, but they haven't gotten anywhere so far. The Chinese have never been tebbly—terribly—interested in deep space, so we've accepted what little we've been allowed. By being quiet and subservient, we've come much further than the Russians. No Russians in the seventh chamber, you'll notice."

"You don't sound Chinese."

Farley laughed. "Thank you. Everyone says my accent is good, but sometimes my words. . . Well. What you're really saying, I think, is I don't look Chinese. I'm a second-generation Caucasian immigrant. My parents were British expatriates in Czechoslovakia. They were agricultural specialists, and China welcomed them with open arms when they emigrated in 1978. I was born there."

"I've spent all of my life in California," Patricia said. "I feel so protected compared to you. Out of touch with the real world."

"The world of intrigue and international politics? Me too. I spent most of my life on a farm in Hopeh. Rather cut off. And now. . . we're both here." She looked down at the ground, shaking her head. "For various reasons, there are a lot of things we shouldn't talk about. Garry trusts me, and I respect his trust. We've all done our best to be courteous and trustworthy. That's why we've come this far. So. Technical matters directly relating to our work, that's okay. But anything having to do with subjects off limits to Wu, Chang and me—no discussion. None at all."

"Okay," Patricia said.

Farley looked north, directly down the throat of the corridor. "The Stoners made this. They were humans, just like you and me. Beyond that, we're encaved—in the dark. But sometime, we will run into them—or something even stranger." She smiled thinly. "Is that a prediction strong enough for you?"

Patricia nodded. "Anything more specific, I'll get the shakes."

Farley patted her on the shoulder. "Must get back. Garry will be with you shortly."

She entered the tent.

Patricia stood and smoothed down her jumper, then walked a few dozen meters across the sand. She bent down and ran her hands through the blades of a clump of grass.

The length of the corridor was so startling, compelling, that her breath slowed. It was spare, economical, incredibly beautiful. The even lighting, the gradually receding but nevertheless clear details; the sand, the bushes, the lakes and rivers flowing from southern cap condensation. . .

Despite what Farley had said, Patricia felt safe walking another dozen or so meters west. And having gone that far, still within a few minutes' run of the tent, it seemed no big deal to go an equal distance beyond. She reached the edge of the dwarf forest in ten minutes, then glanced back to orient herself to the tent and the ramp emerging from the cap tunnel.

The trees resembled scrubby pines, none more than two meters tall, their gnarled branches intertwined into an impenetrable thicket. She had never seen anything precisely like them on Earth, but their needles were similar to those on the Douglas fir Christmas trees her family used to buy before settling on an aluminum substitute.

She bent down to peer under the low canopy but saw no sign of life.

How strange, that the Stoners should take every living, moving thing with them. Stripping the Stone. Where did they all go?

That much was obvious, now. She could feel the compulsion each time she looked down the corridor. They headed into the infinite north, if the corridor truly was infinite.

"Patricia!" Lanier called from the tent. She jumped, slightly guilty, but there was no urgency or rebuke in his voice.

"Yes?"

"Work to do."

"On my way." She returned to the tent.

They sat by a folding table arranged under the awning. Lanier took a slate and plugged in a memory block, then set the apparatus between them. "You should have some idea now why we need you here. We have a couple of mysteries to figure out, and that"—he pointed down the corridor—"may not be the greater."

"I wouldn't think so," she said.

"I've already programmed a first-draft schedule for you. You'll get a tour of the third chamber city—concentrating on a library there. That city was called Thistledown, just like the Stone itself. It's a couple of centuries newer than Alexandria. And you'll make several return visits to the library in the second chamber. That'll take a week or two, just getting you started." He pointed to the slate and tapped a RUN button. Instructions scrolled down the screen. "Here's how to use the subways, schedules, and precautions. Obviously, I won't be able to guide you all the time, or even very often. Work piling up all over. And I'll probably be returning to Earth for a short while. During that time, you'll report to Carrolson. Most of the facts you need to know, regarding security, are in that block. Who to talk to, who not, protocol, that sort of thing. Farley, Wu and Chang are fine people, but be circumspect. Be circumspect around anyone who doesn't have the same privileges you do."

"Who else can I talk to, besides you?"

"Carrolson. You can talk to her about everything but what you read in the libraries. I'm working to get her clearance for that, too. But not yet. You'll meet others in a couple of days. Some will have library clearance, and you'll be working with them, coordinating, cross-checking. Clear enough? For the next couple of weeks, it's going to be study, study, study."

"How far from the camp can I go?"

"As far as you can walk, but take along a radio. We have a security base about fifty kilometers down the corridor, with sensors set to pick up any activity in the corridor for several hundred kilometers. If they call a retreat, get back to the tunnel as soon as possible."

"What's the likelihood of that happening?"

"Small." Lanier shrugged. "Maybe nonexistent. Hasn't happened yet. I hope you don't resent kid-glove treatment. If anything happened to you, the Advisor would have new hairless rugs all over her floor."

Patricia grinned. "So who's my duenna?"

"Until Carrolson gets here, Farley. Questions?"

"Let me get started, then I'll ask questions."

"Fair enough." Lanier left her at the table. She picked up the slate and began the first memory block.

Chapter Six

Lanier left on the next shift, saying he would be back in two days to begin the next part of her education. Carrolson arrived a few hours later, carrying a box of memory blocks and a more powerful processor recently shipped from Earth. "At least I can take part of my work with me wherever I go," she said. Farley, Wu and Chang immediately began submitting some of their problems to the new processor.

Patricia studied the cubes that contained information on the corridor. The length of the corridor was unknown, but radar signals sent from the bore hole had not yet returned after the passage of four months. It was assumed that either the corridor had no end or that the signals had been absorbed in some as-yet-unexplained way.

Exploration teams had made several forays into the corridor, but until recently, none had proceeded farther than five hundred kilometers. To that point, the corridor was indistinguishable from the seventh chamber it adjoined: a thick layer of dirt, atmosphere at Stone-normal pressure—650 millibars—and the normal intensity of flux tube lighting.

The corridor differed from the seventh chamber in one respect: 436 kilometers down the line, it was surrounded by a circuit of artificial structures, four motionless cupolas floating without support above wide dimples in the soil. Each of the four cupolas stood alone, spaced at equal distances from the others around the circumference. What they were made of was unknown, but the substance didn't match any of the characteristics of matter except for solidity. Eight hundred seventy-two kilometers down the line was another circuit, and a new expedition was exploring in that area now.

Patricia tapped the slate's burnisher against her tooth, then reached into her personal effects bag and brought out the stereo attachment and a coin of Mozart. The attachment lifted easily in the standardized socket and played The Magic Flute as she read on, undisturbed.

She cut the music and took a break after an hour and a half.

Despite Carrolson's protestations that she wasn't Vasquez's nursemaid, to Patricia that described her role exactly. She had no immediate duties in the seventh chamber, and her expertise wasn't complementary to Patricia's. Still, there was a certain comfort in having the older woman around. She was relaxed, self-confident and easy to get along with. A good person to ask questions of, if only to bounce thoughts around.

The intricacies of Stone protocol and organization were not easy to master. A chart in the memory block Lanier had left with her showed it all clearly. Under the supervision of the ISCCOM regulatory committee, NATO–Eurospace—more directly, NASA and the European Space Agency—were in charge of the Stone's exploration.

The Joint Space Command had a very large say in how the studies were conducted. Despite the civilian overgarments, this was largely a military operation. Judith Hoffman, nominally coordinating the civilian and military agencies from her offices in Sunnyvale and Pasadena, tempered this reality a little.

The Stone security team consisted of some 300 Americans (about half), 150 British and 100 Germans; the remaining 50 were from Canada, Australia and Japan. France was not a member of NATO–Eurospace and had declined an invitation to send its nationals to the Stone, no doubt partly in protest of NATO pressure to join in the major rearmament of the first two years of the twenty-first century.

Through their respective commanders, the Stone security team took orders from U.S. Navy Captain Bertram D. Kirchner—commander of external security—and Army Brigadier General Oliver Gerhardt, in charge of internal security.

The six hundred team members worked throughout the Stone to defend the civilians in case of attack. Who might attack was unspecified, but in the beginning, obviously, attack was expected from the seventh chamber, or from hidden elements in the unexplored second and third chamber cities.

Lanier acted as Hoffman's direct voice on the Stone. He coordinated science, engineering and communication. Carrolson was the senior science supervisor; Heineman was in charge of civilian engineering; and a woman named Roberta Pickney, civilian communication.

The structural breakdown of the science team was informative. There were mathematicians, archaeologists, physicists, social scientists (including historians), computer and information specialists, and medical/biology experts. There were also four lawyers.

Engineering consisted of support—with a military adjunct—and mechanics. Communication also had a military adjunct, in charge of coded transmission. Pickney, assisted by Sylvia Link, was responsible for internal Stone communications and Earth-space-station-lunar settlement networks.

Patricia thought she would never be able to remember even the most important names. Names had never been her strong suit—faces and personalities she did better with.

Besides the United States and Eurospace civilian personnel, representatives from Russia, India, China, Brazil, Japan and Mexico had been invited to serve on the science team. Some Australians and one Laotian were to arrive soon. Carrolson intimated there had been trouble with the Russians. They had only been on the Stone for a year, after finally agreeing to certain restrictions. Despite their agreement, they had been demanding (reasonably enough, Patricia thought) access to all information on the Stone, including the libraries. The libraries, Carrolson explained, were a purely American preserve, by direct order of Hoffman and the President.

"They'd save us all a hell of a lot of trouble if they just opened everything up to everybody," Carrolson said. "I despise secrecy." But she enforced her orders.

"So who's handling the science team while you're here with me?" Patricia asked.

Carrolson smiled. "I put Rimskaya on it. He's snarly, but efficient. And people will certainly think twice before coming to him with complaints. Me, I'm just a pussycat. I need this kind of vacation."

Lanier's memory block specified precisely whom she could talk to, and whom not, about her studies. If she wished to discuss the library, she could only speak with Rimskaya, Lanier and one science team member she hadn't met yet—Rupert Takahashi. He was on the current corridor expedition.

Patricia ate lunch with Carrolson and the three Chinese, napped for half an hour, then took her slate and a camp stool across the flat to the dwarf forest, where she sat and began to make her own notes. Carrolson joined her an hour later, carrying a thermos of iced tea and a couple of bananas.

"I'll need some tools," Patricia said. "A compass, a ruler, some pencils, or. . . I've been thinking. Is it possible that one of the engineers or electronics people could make a tool for me?"

"Name it."

"I'd like to know what the value of pi is in the corridor." Carrolson pursed her lips. "Why?"

"Well, so far as I've read, the corridor is definitely not made of matter. It's something else entirely. Last night—I mean, last sleep, Farley and I talked and she explained what she knew. This morning I peeked at some of the papers Rimskaya and Takahashi put together before my arrival."

"Back in the amateur days of superspace mathematics," Carrolson said wryly. "Rimskaya probably should have stuck to his expertise."

"Perhaps, but he made some interesting suggestions. Tomorrow, Karen is going to take me to the bore hole." She pointed up at the plasma tube and the southern cap axis. "If I can have a pi-meter by that time, maybe I can learn some things."

"Done," Carrolson said. "Anything else?"

"I don't know if it's even possible, but as long as we're measuring pi, I'd like to measure slash aitch and the gravitational constant, whatever else they can think of pertaining to the qualities of the universe. A kind of multi-meter."

"You think the constants will vary here?"

"Some of them, at least."

"Slash aitch, the quantum of momentum? We wouldn't even exist."

"There could be a difference in ratio. I'd just like to know."

Carrolson stood, picked up the empty thermos and the banana skins and returned to the tent. Minutes later, she and Wu left in the truck, taking the tunnel back to the sixth chamber.

Patricia stared down the corridor, frowning slightly.

She had very real, if limited, power. She had just made a Nobel laureate jump to do her bidding.

For much of her life, Patricia had spent her most important moments in her head, lost in a world that would have been completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people on Earth. Now, sitting by the dwarf forest, listening to the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and staring down the length of the corridor, she felt at first nervous, then irritated that the state wasn't coming fast enough.

She knew where to begin. If the corridor wasn't made of matter, there were only a few alternatives. Either it was a tube of restraining forces, passing beyond the end of the asteroid through some superspace trickery, or it was not. If not, then it was likely to be constructed itself of superspace trickery. (She considered, and dismissed as philosophically useless—for the moment—the notion that the corridor was an illusion.)

Superspace trickery was the more difficult concept to work with. If the Stoners had used the machinery in the sixth chamber to distort space-time, there would be consequences. When the multi-meter arrived—if it did what she had requested—she could begin laying down parameters. Curved space on the scale of the corridor would probably produce fluctuations in the value of pi, since the diameter of a circle, in any seriously distorted manifold, would vary in relation to its circumference. Other constants would vary depending on distortions in higher geometries.

She gave up trying to force the state after a while. The facts weren't sufficient to warrant straining herself.

There was nothing she could do, for the moment, but relax and read. She plugged another memory block into the slate.

"How long did it take you to get used to living without night?" Patricia asked. Farley tapped her fingers impatiently against the wall of the arch, waiting for the axis elevator. They stood fifty meters east of the tunnel ramp, on a smooth-polished square of nickel-iron.

"I'm not sure I am used to it," Farley said. "I live with it, but I miss starry nights."

"With all their technology, you'd think the Stoners would have come up with some way to have darkness."

"Shutting off the plasma tube would be a huge waste of energy," Farley mused. "Especially for the seventh chamber. I mean it does seem to go on forever—and how could you shut off something like that?"

Patricia pulled out her slate and typed, Seventh chamber plasma tube—power supply? Maintenance? Same as other chamber tubes?

The elevator door opened and they entered the large circular cabin. The door closed as Farley pressed a button. They both grasped bars mounted in the walls. At first, the acceleration of the elevator increased their total weight, but as they rose—approaching the axis—the effects canceled out. The elevator reached a steady velocity after traveling about a third of the way up the shaft. Their weight had decreased considerably by then. Shortly after, they began to decelerate, slipping smoothly into near-weightlessness. The door opened and a guard in black and gray greeted them.

The axis compartments surrounding the seventh chamber bore hole had been pressurized and heated, but otherwise they remained much as the Stoners had left them, centuries before. Ribbons of newly wired lighting crisscrossed the cavernous staging area.

"We're going to the singularity monitor," Farley said. The soldier gestured for them to board a cart. They followed the ropes and took their seats, buckling themselves in.

"I have a feeling you're going to show me something else astonishing," Patricia said accusingly. "I'm not even used to the other wonders yet."

"Ancillary wonder," Farley said mysteriously. "A result of the other wonders, if you follow Rimskaya and Takahashi's theories. But you're the space-time expert here."

"I'm not so sure," Patricia said distantly.

"If the corridor is a matrix of bent geodesics, a warped tube of space, what would you expect to find at its center?"

"I wondered about that yesterday afternoon." She paused as the cart neared the end of the staging area. "It's not going to work down the center. There's going to be a region where all the rules fail."

"Precisely."

"A singularity?"

"That's where we're going," Farley said.

The guard pulled the cart alongside an airlock mounted in the rock wall. Farley gripped a guide bar and helped Patricia out of her belt. The guard saluted and said he would wait for them.

They entered the airlock. Farley switched on a light and pulled down two rumply, one-size-fits-all pressure suits from a rack. "You can snug the arm and leg lengths a bit with these straps. Mobility and finesse aren't really needed here, just pressure and temperature and air. This isn't the most visited spot on the Stone."

The rear wall of the airlock was equipped with a broad-runged ladder, ascending to a wheel-opened hatch in the ceiling. Bits and pieces of equipment—some obviously long-abandoned—lay stocked in the corners and under the ladder.

"Just watch your step. Take everything slowly. There's no danger if you're careful. If anything happens to your suit—very unlikely—we can be back in the lock in less than two minutes."

Farley checked Patricia's suit seals and pressed a red button on a panel mounted near the ladder. The air was quietly pumped out of the chamber until Patricia could hear only her own breathing. Farley switched on their suit radios.

"Up the ladder," she said.

"I've never been in a spacesuit before," Patricia said, climbing the rungs after Farley.

"You didn't get spacesick, according to the OTV crew."

"Being weightless is fun."

"Hmm. Took me three days to get used to it."

Farley spun the wheel on the hatch and pushed it open. It glided slowly upward, then stopped until she ascended another rung and gave it a push. It swung out of the way. Compact floodlights had been installed in the bore hole, though the opening to the seventh chamber was only a dozen meters away, and the milky glow of the inner plasma tube spread faintly throughout.

Patricia turned to look south. The walls of the bore hole—rough and grooved with irregular lines—faded into inky blackness. At the end of the blackness was a circle of light the size of a BB held at arm's length. She looked up as best she could and saw a wide intrusion of dark rock in the asteroidal metal.

"Plasma tube begins anew in each chamber," Farley said. "It butts against the caps, sustained by a very weak bottle. The bottle also acts to keep the atmosphere in—otherwise, it would all have licked out through the bore holes. Leaked, I mean. Leak?"

"Leaked is fine," Patricia said. "Wouldn't air be kept down in the chambers because of the rotation?"

"Scale height is the key. Without the bottle, the atmospheric pressure at the bore holes would still be about a hundred and eighty millimeters of mercury."

"Um," Patricia said.

"We think there are charged plates inset in the cap material around the circumference of the tube, but we haven't investigated yet. And the corridor tube is quite a different thing from the other tubes. We have even less idea how it works."

They moved along the bore-hole wall using the ubiquitous ropes and stanchions. Near the rim of the hole stood a scaffold about fifty meters high. Running from the bottom to the top of the scaffold was a ladder in a long cylindrical cage.

"You first," Farley said. Patricia entered the cage and pulled herself up hand-over-hand, letting her legs swing unused behind, as she had seen Farley do in the airlock. "When you're above the cage, link your suit ring to a cable. If you somehow manage to float free, I'll come after you with a tether."

At the top of the scaffold, now aligned directly on the Stone's axis, Patricia took hold of the safety cable and pulled herself out of Farley's way. Another cylindrical cage poked five or six meters beyond the rim. Farley gestured, and they climbed out over the sloping walls of the cap.

"The plasma's pretty clear from this angle, as you can see," Farley said. They had an incredible view of the corridor. Without the obvious clues of distorted perspective, the landscape could have been painted on a huge bowl. The details were rendered faintly milky by the plasma tube, which concentrated into a bright circle at the center of the far cap.

"The Russians aren't allowed this far. They're working in the other bore holes, however."

At the end of the second cage was something that gave Patricia's eyes a twinge. Farley motioned for her to approach.

"This is it," she said. "Where everything goes haywire in the corridor."

It resembled a half-meter-wide pipe made of quicksilver, stretching off to its own vanishing point, not in a straight line and not in a curve, not moving and not standing still. If it could be said to reflect at all, it did not behave like a mirror, imaging instead barely recognizable imitations of its surroundings.

Patricia approached the singularity, trying not to look at it directly. Here, the laws of the corridor were twisted into a neat, elongated knot, a kind of spatial umbilicus.

It distorted her face as if with a gleeful malevolence.

"It doesn't look straight, but it is. It resists penetration, of course," Farley said, reaching out with a gloved hand to touch the blunt end. Her hand slid gently to one side. "It seems to produce the force that acts like gravitation in the corridor. The net effect is an inverse-square force which is ineffective within the length of the seventh chamber but goes to work right outside the connection with the corridor. The transition is very smooth. Out in the corridor, the farther from the singularity you are, the greater the force, until you reach the corridor walls. Makes it seem like the walls are pulling you. Voila!—weight."

"Is there any difference between walls pulling and singularity pushing?"

Farley didn't answer for a moment. "Damned if I know. The singularity stretches down the middle of the corridor within the tube. There's speculation it has something to do with maintaining this plasma but. . . honest, we're all ignorant here. You have a wide-open field to explore."

Patricia reached out with her hand. The twisted-mirror surface reached back to her with an out-of-focus something, not a hand. The hand and its opposite met. She felt a tingling resistance and pressed harder.

Her hand was gently pushed down the length until she lifted it away. Patricia—somewhat to her surprise—understood the principle immediately.

"Of course," she said. "It's like touching the square root of space-time. Try to enter the singularity, and you translate yourself through a distance along some spatial coordinate."

"You slide along," Farley said.

"Right."

Patricia maneuvered herself to the rounded beginning—or was it the end?—of the singularity, then reached around the zone with both arms as if to hug it. Her fingers squeezed the twisted surface and she was pulled against the base, then bounced back.

"Touch it," Patricia said, "and it repels the pressure with a force parallel to the axis." She touched it twice in succession. The ring and cable stopped her reacting twist. "I pinch it at this angle, I'm propelled by the singularity, going north. The opposite angle, south. No torque—unidirectional. Either I'm pushed straight outward, or I'm shunted along the line."

Farley smiled enviously through her faceplate. "You catch on fast."

"Glad you think so," Patricia said. She sighed and backed away. "Okay. Let's go back. I'm going to have to think this over."

Farley took hold of her shoulder and directed her back along the cage, down the scaffold and into the airlock. Patricia was already glassy-eyed, musing.

She hardly noticed the elevator ride. At the tent camp, she sat down with the slate and Carrolson's processor. Farley wandered off for a few minutes to eat. When she returned, the linked processor and slate were flashing requests for the next sequence of instructions. Vasquez appeared to be napping. Farley glanced at the slate display.

From the—a future (?) Singularity. Longer—passing through the asteroid wall. Inverse-square repulsion increasing. Where did the Stoners go? Why, down the corridor, of course.

No set curvature near the twisted mirror. Must have the multi-meter to check that out—certainly seems likely, however. If I regard the setup as predesigned technology, technology manipulating geometry, use of spaces and altered geodesics as a tool. A singularity, perhaps infinitely long, beginning here, just before the boundary where chamber and corridor meet.

Energy to maintain plasma tube in the corridor. Could that be made a function of the separate universe the corridor obviously is? Where did the matter come from—all that dirt, and the atmosphere? Not from the Stone, not all of it; that's obvious.

The warm air coming down the corridor lapped at the tent, brushed the grass near the camp and mingled with the cold air pouring down from the cap, forming dust-devils.

Chang and Wu played chess under the awning.

After a time, Farley took a nap, too.

Chapter Seven

Heineman murmured to himself testily. Walking slowly along the Velcro pad surrounding the assembly area, he scrolled through the cargo manifest on the slate. The cargo—removed from its cocoon and assembled—fit all the specifications the engineering team had made up six months before. That had been a crazy time—trying to design a device which had ridiculous properties to do a job that none of the engineering team understood. But back then, green badges had been very rare items.

There was no way now for anyone to deny him a green badge. He was the only one who could test the device and teach others how to use it.

It was a beautiful piece of work: a hollow cylinder twenty meters long and six wide, resembling a giant jet engine with all its guts removed. He peered down the middle of the assembly at the sickle-shaped metal pieces that would clamp down on the mysterious something the cylinder would surround. The clamps now rested on plastic inserts, which would be removed when the device was in place.

It was called a tuberider. Sitting next to it—brought up in three cocoons by a subsequent OTV—was a highly modified Boeing–Bell prop-driven vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft, V/STOL for short, model number NHV-24B.

It was the most peculiar aircraft he had ever seen. Developed initially for the U.S. Air Force, designed for search and rescue missions, it could rotate its two wingtip-mounted engines through 120 degrees. The five broad blades of each prop could be folded back into the engine nacelles. And in the tail, aimed slightly above the centerline, was a kerosene-oxygen rocket engine, no doubt to provide extra thrust—but under what conditions?

Its wings were rakishly forward-swept and were mounted three-quarters back on the fuselage, almost touching the V-tail. It could carry eighteen people and a crew of two, fully loaded, or fewer passengers and a lot of equipment. It was at once airplane and helicopter and rocket.

He loved it just from reading the specs. He had always had a weakness for Rube Goldberg gadgets.

The V/STOL could be fitted to the tuberider in three positions: like an arrow sticking from the side of a log, nose and refueling nozzle inserted mid-cylinder; in the configuration of its first mission, inserted "up the cylinder's ass" as Heineman thought of it, as its rocket propelled the tuberider down the middle of the plasma tubes and bore holes to the seventh chamber; or clamped to the cylinder along its belly.

He didn't have the slightest idea what it would do once it was in place. From an aeronautical or astronautical perspective it was pure craziness. How would the cylinder be stabilized on its track—whatever that was—while the V/STOL docked? The cylinder had no maneuvering engines. The whole contraption would be just barely stable enough to ride down the axis with the rocket pushing—

'Tis not mine to reason why, he thought, marking the final check on the slate. Despite his initial enthusiasm, no aircraft, Heineman felt, was truly beautiful until he had flown it—and survived.

The cocoon had also contained contraband. Not on the manifest—not the official one, at any rate—were two metal boxes the size and shape of coffins. Heineman had a good idea what they contained—high-speed radar-controlled Gatling guns.

He could also guess where they would be installed, and for what reason. They were Joint Space Command items, and the only man who needed to know about their arrival was Captain Kirchner. They were in direct violation of ISCCOM guidelines for the Stone.

Heineman was used to serving two masters. He knew Kirchner and JSC had their reasons for breaking the rules. He knew Lanier and Hoffman would appreciate those reasons when the time came.

Heineman made sure the crates were delivered to the external security staging areas and then forgot about them.

He floated past the assembly and looked at his watch. Garry was late.

Lanier pulled himself along the ropes to the third dock staging area. The tuberider and V/STOL occupied center stage like grand ladies of the theater awaiting costumers' attentions.

Heineman eyed him unenthusiastically as he approached. "You look exhausted," he commented, handing the slate over for inspection. Lanier handed it back without a glance or comment. "You'll spook people, coming out of the chambers like that."

"Can't be helped," Lanier said.

Heineman shook his head and let out his breath in a dubious low whistle. "What in hell have you got down there?"

"Are they ready?" Lanier asked. Heineman nodded and pulled the box of memory cubes out of his beltsack.

"For now. I'm pushing them down the tube next week. If I get my badge. . .”

Lanier reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a green badge, flipping it around to show Heineman. "Yours. Second level. Go and find out for yourself. You're so eager."

"That's my nature," Heineman said. He clamped the badge to his lapel. "How's the girl doing? She any help?"

"I don't know," Lanier said. "She's resilient." He raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. "Seems to be a survivor." He seemed anxious to change the subject. "I'll have provisional greens for your flight crew."

"I'm going to fly it into position alone," Heineman said. He was surprised when Lanier simply nodded; he had expected some argument. "Who'll take the first sortie with me?"

"I will, if I have time," Lanier said.

"You haven't flown in years."

Lanier laughed. "Neither of us has ever done this kind of flying. Besides, it's not a skill you forget. You should know that."

A guard drifted across the staging area toward them. Lanier glanced in her direction, held out his hand and received a sealed envelope. She left without a word being exchanged.

"You expected that," Heineman said.

"I did." He opened the envelope, read the enclosed note, then stuck it in the pocket where Heineman's badge had resided. "My orders Earthside. I'm going to spend another couple of days here, then take the next OTV. Larry, get the tuberider in position, prepare for a flight test, but hold everything until I return."

"Advisor wants you?"

Lanier patted his coat pocket. "Priority. But I have to make sure Vasquez is going to work out." He turned toward the hatchway.

"I'll be waiting," Heineman called after. He looked at the tuberider and V/STOL, eyes bright.

Chapter Eight

Lanier escorted Carrolson in a truck to the seventh chamber. In the tunnel, Carrolson turned on the cab light and removed a pouch from the box in her lap. "Give electronics high marks this week," she said. "Patricia asked for something and they got it to me in twenty-four hours."

"What is it?"

"You really want to know? It might upset you."

He smiled. "It's my job to be upset."

"She asked for a meter to check out local values of pi, Planck's constant—slash aitch, rather—and the gravitational constant. Electronics threw in speed of light, ratio of proton mass to electron mass, and neutron decay time. I don't know whether she'll use them all, but she's got them."

"Sounds pretty high-tech to me."

"I asked how they managed to squeeze some of the tests into a package this size. They smiled and said they've been building defense satellites for CSOC for years, and the multi-meter was easy in comparison. They scavenged circuits from some surplus security devices. I don't know how it works, but it does. At least, it seems to. Look." She pushed a button marked with the Greek letter pi. The luminous display read "3.41592645 stable."

"My calculator will do that."

"It won't tell you if pi changes."

"So who's this billed to?"

"Science, of course. Is there no poetry in your soul—does everything reduce to billing?"

"It's in my blood. Anyway, remove it from science and charge it to a new, special category. Mark that category 'Vasquez' and keep the expenditures confidential."

"Yes, sir." Carrolson put the multi-meter back in its felt bag as they came down the ramp into the tubelight. "Will she be expensive?"

"I don't know. I want to separate science in the first six chambers from anything done here. I'll be back on Earth in a couple of days, and part of my time may be spent arguing money with senators and congressmen. It's a complicated subject."

"My curiosity is checked," Carrolson said. "You think she'll work out?"

Lanier cast a peeved glance at her. "Don't you start. Give her whatever she wants, treat her kindly, keep her on the straight and narrow after I'm gone. She'll do fine."

"Because the Advisor says?"

Lanier halted the truck near the tent. "She seems to get along well with Farley. If something important drags you away, what say we have Farley chaperone her? Even if she is Chinese."

"I don't foresee any problems there."

"Nor I. You'll take Vasquez back and forth to the libraries, with a military escort, not Farley. That's my only stipulation."

"Fine. Now for some real sore points," Carrolson said.

"What?"

"The Russians are grumbling about pulling out their members. If the Russians go, my sources tell me the Chinese might pull out as well. A knee-jerk response. They've been complaining, too, and they don't want anyone to think they're more gullible than the Russians."

"Hell, Farley's been feeding them stuff about the seventh chamber for months now. That doesn't keep them happy?"

"No. The Russians know the basics, too."

"The hell with all of them," Lanier grumbled. "That sums it up."

"Admirably." Carrolson grinned.

"Just make sure Patricia doesn't talk to anyone she shouldn't."

"Got you."

"Including you."

Carrolson bit her lower lip, crossed herself and shook her head fervently. "Hope to die. Seriously, aren't I just about due for my upgrade?"

"I hope to bring it back with me. I'll be talking with Hoffman. Patience."

"Patience is," Carrolson said.

Lanier stared at her sternly, eyes flickering back and forth across her face. Then he cracked a broad smile and reached up to touch her shoulder. "Our watchword. Thank you."

"De nada, boss."

Wu approached the truck as Carrolson and Lanier stepped down. "Expedition to the second circuit is back," he said. "They're about sixty kilometers away. Security has them on track, and messages have been relayed."

"Good," Lanier said. "Let's get ready for the homecoming."

The second expedition consisted of four trucks and twenty-six people sitting near the dwarf forest, Patricia watched the column of dust as the vehicles approached. She picked up her slate and the processor and strolled back to the camp.

Two more trucks entered from the sixth chamber tunnel, rumbling and whanging down the ramp. They parked by the tent and Berenson—commander of the German security forces, and now in charge of security in the seventh chamber—stepped down from one, Rimskaya and Robert Smith from the other. Rimskaya nodded cordially at Patricia as he passed by. His mood’s improved, she thought.

Lanier and Carrolson emerged from the shadow of the tent overhang.

"How far did they go?" Patricia asked Lanier.

"Nine hundred and fifty-three kilometers—half battery range." He held the felt-bagged instrument out to her. "Your multi-meter. We've logged it into the equipment list, and now it's yours. Treat it carefully. Electronics won't be able to duplicate it quite as quickly."

"Thank you," Patricia said. She removed the instrument and the instructions on a folded slip of paper. Carrolson looked over Patricia's shoulder.

"It has a range of about ten centimeters," she commented. "Strictly local."

Rimskaya came up behind them and cleared his throat. "Miss Vasquez," he said.

"Yes, sir?" Old habits die hard.

"How do you like the problem?"

"It's marvelous," she said, her tone level. "It will take time to solve—if it can be solved."

"Certainly," Rimskaya said. "I trust you have become aware of our hypotheses?"

"Yes. They've been helpful." They had been, too. She didn't want to overstress the point, however.

"Good. You've been to the singularity?"

She nodded. "I wish I'd had the multi-meter." She passed it to him and he examined the device, shaking his head.

"A fine idea. I see you are making progress. Much better than I. That is as it should be. There is a gentleman on the expedition who might be able to help you more. His name is Takahashi, the expedition's second-in-command. A very experienced theorist. I trust you've read some of our joint papers."

"Yes. Very interesting."

Rimskaya fixed his stern gaze on her for an uncomfortably long five or ten seconds, then nodded. "I must speak with Farley now," he said, walking away.

The expedition trucks parked twenty meters from the camp. Lanier walked out to meet them. Carrolson stayed with Patricia. "That's as far as we've gone down the corridor," she said. "From what they radioed back, we still haven't found much."

The arrival was something of an anticlimax. Nobody left the vehicles; and one by one, at Lanier's instructions, they moved past the camp and up the ramp into the tunnel, vanishing into the sixth chamber.

Lanier returned with three memory blocks. He gave one to Carrolson and one to Patricia, pocketing the third. "Expedition report, unedited," he said. "Nothing spectacular, according to Takahashi, except. . .”

He glanced behind him, down the corridor.

"Yes?" Carrolson urged.

"The second circuit is more than just floating cupolas. There are openings beneath the cupolas. They appear to be wells of some sort. They didn't find out where the wells lead, but they're definitely open."

"Then the corridor has holes," Carrolson said. "All right, Patricia, it's time we made plans for a trip to the first circuit. When are you going to be free?"

Patricia took a small breath and shook her head. "Any time. I can work wherever I am."

"Make it day after tomorrow," Lanier said. "Patricia and I have to spend some time in the library." He discreetly gestured to Carrolson: time to leave. She made her excuses and glanced back at them as she entered the tent.

"Part two of the indoctrination will begin next shift," he said. "The most difficult part of all. Are you ready for it?"

"I don't know," she said, feeling her chest contract. "I must be. I've survived so far."

"Good. Meet me at the ramp in twelve hours."

Chapter Nine

The Axis City had moved a million kilometers down the corridor since its construction five centuries ago. Olmy and the Frant had covered that distance in less than a week, flying their craft in a smooth stretched spiral around the plasma tube.

In the history of the Thistledown and the Way, no one had ever entered the asteroid from the outside.

Olmy and the Frant had surveyed the Thistledown's new occupants for two weeks and had learned a great deal. They were indeed human, and not even Korzenowski himself could have expected what Olmy now knew.

The Thistledown had come full circle. Geshels had warned there might be displacement, but no one had suspected what kind of displacement, or what the results might be.

Having completed his principal duties for the Nexus, Olmy then turned off his data and mission recorders and returned to his old home in the third chamber. The cylindrical apartment building where his triad family had lived, where he had spent two years of his childhood, stood right at the edge of Thistledown City, not quite a kilometer from the northern cap. Once, the building had held twenty thousand people, chiefly Geshels, technicians and researchers employed on the Sixth Chamber Project. It had then served as temporary home for hundreds of orthodox Naderites expelled by the Nexus from Alexandria. Now, of course, it was empty; there was no evidence it had even been visited by the asteroid's new occupants.

Olmy walked across the lobby and stood near the credit counter, one eyebrow lowered as if in puzzlement. He turned to the broad illusart window and spotted the Frant in the courtyard, sitting patiently on an empty light-sculpture pedestal. The window made it appear that the Frant was in a luxurious Earth garden, complete with glowing sunset. The Frant would appreciate that, Olmy thought.

He picted graphicspeak at the credit counter and received a confidential response: the apartment was blocked, as were all apartments in the building. None could be occupied or even viewed until the present interdict was revoked.

Those orders had been issued after the last of the Naderite families had been transferred from the cities. Only public buildings had been left open for the use of the last scholars, finishing their exodus studies. The Earth people had already put some of those facilities to use, the Thistledown City Library chief among them.

He picted a Nexus coded icon into the credit counter and said aloud, "I have authorization to temporarily revoke interdict."

"Authorization recognized," the counter replied."

“Open and decorate unit three seven nine seven five."

"What decor do you wish?"

"As it was when occupied by the Olmy-Secor-Lear Triad family."

"You are of that family?" the counter asked politely.

"I am."

"Searching. Decoration completed. You may ascend."

Olmy took the lift. In the round cloud-gray hallway, walking a few inches above the floor, he felt a most unfamiliar and unpleasant emotional tug—the long-past pain of dreams forgotten or lost, of youthful hopes destroyed by political necessity.

He had lived so long his memories seemed to contain the thoughts and emotions of many different people. But one set of emotions still transcended the others, and one ambition remained foremost. He had worked for centuries on behalf of the ruling Geshels and Naderites, never playing favorites, that someday he might be allowed this opportunity.

His apartment number glowed red at the base of the circular door, the only glowing number in the hallway. He entered and stood for a moment in the surroundings of his childhood, engaged in a brief moment of nostalgia. The furnishings and decor were all here, reflecting his natural father's attempt to duplicate the apartment they had been driven from in Alexandria. They had spent two years here, awaiting decisions on their case before their triad family could be moved to the newly finished Axis City.

They had been the last family to live in these buildings, and Olmy had had considerable opportunity to explore the co-op memory and experiment with programming. Even in his childhood, he had shown a proclivity for things technical that dismayed his orthodox Naderite parents. And what he had discovered in the building's memory five centuries ago, quite by accident, had changed the direction of his life. . . .

He sat in his father's sky-blue chair before the apartment data pillar. Such pillars were now obsolete in the Axis City, used only as charming antiques, but he had spent hundreds of hours as a child in front of this very device and found it familiar and comfortable to work with. Picting his own coded icons, he activated the pillar and opened a custom channel to the building's memory. Once, the memory had served the needs of thousands of tenants, keeping their records and acting as a depository for millions of possible decor variations. Now it was virtually blank; Olmy had the impression of swimming in a vast dark hollowness.

He picted a stack and register number and waited for coded questions to be picted. As each appeared before him, he answered precisely and correctly.

In the hollowness, there appeared a presence, fragmented, grievously incomplete, but powerful and recognizable even so.

"Ser Engineer," Olmy said aloud.

My friend. The nonvocal communication was level and strong, if toneless. Even incomplete, Konrad Korzenowski's personality and presence were commanding.

"We've come home."

Yes? How long since you last spoke to me?

"Five hundred years."

I am still dead. . . .

"Yes," Olmy said softly. "Now listen. There is much you must know. We've come home, but we are not alone. The Thistledown has been reoccupied. It is time for you to come with me now. . . .

Chapter Ten

Patricia and Lanier passed through the fence and security checks, entered the second chamber library and followed the strips of lights across the empty floor and up the stairs. On the fourth floor, they entered the reading area with its dark cubicles. Lanier sat her down in the lighted cubicle and went off into the stacks, leaving her alone to again feel the chill, the spookiness that seemed—even amid all the strangeness—reserved for the library alone. When he returned, he held four thick books in his arms.

"These are among the last books printed for mass distribution, before all information services became solid state. Not on the Stone, but on Earth. Their Earth. I suppose you've already guessed what sort of library this is."

"A quaint one. A museum," she said.

"Right. An antique library, better suited to those with antique habits, no? When you get to the third chamber library, you'll become acquainted with the Stoners' state-of-the-art systems."

He held out the first volume. It was printed in a style similar to that of the Mark Twain book, but with heavier boards and thick, even tougher plastic paper. She read the spine. “‘Brief History of the Death, by Abraham Damon Farmer.'" She opened to the printing history and read the date. "2135. Our calendar?"

"Yes."

"Are they talking about the Little Death?" she asked hopefully.

"No."

"Something else," she murmured. She read the chronology heading the first chapter. "'From December 1993 to May 2005.'" She closed the book on her thumb. "Before I read any more, I want to ask a question."

"Ask away." He waited, but it took her some time to phrase it properly in her head.

"These are history books about a future, not necessarily our own, correct?"

"Yes."

"But if this chronology is. . . right, appropriate. . . if it could possibly be our future. . . then there's going to be a catastrophe in less than a month."

He nodded.

"I'm supposed to prevent it? How? What the hell can I do?"

"I don't know what any of us can do. We're already working on that angle. If. . . a big if. . . it's going to happen at all. At any rate, it should be obvious to you, as you read these books, that the Stone's universe is not the same as ours in at least one important respect."

"And that is. . . ?"

"In the Stone's past, no giant asteroid starship returned to the Earth–Moon vicinity."

"That might make a difference?"

"I'd think so, wouldn't you?"

She turned the page. "How long do I have?"

"I'm leaving tomorrow for Earth. You'll be going to the first circuit the day after."

"Two days."

He nodded.

"I'll be staying here?"

"If you find it acceptable. There's an office behind the stacks outfitted as a sleeping area, with food and hot plate. Porta-potty. The guards will check on you every couple of hours. You're not to tell any of them what you're reading. But if you feel any sort of distress, let them know immediately. Any sort of distress. Even just getting sick to your stomach. Understand?"

"Yes."

"I'll stay here with you this first time." He squeezed her shoulder gently. "Take a break with me in a couple of hours, okay?"

"Sure," she said.

She watched him settle into a cubicle seat. He took a slate out of his pocket and quietly typed on it.

She turned the page on the first chapter and began. She did not read in a linear fashion, instead skipping from the middle of the book to the beginning, then to the end, looking for pages where the major events were synopsized, or conclusions were drawn.

Page 15

In the last years of the 1980s, it became apparent to the Soviet Union and its client states that the Western world was winning—or would soon win—the war of technology and therefore ideology both on Earth and in space, with consequences unforeseen for the future of their nations and their system. They contemplated several ways of overcoming this technological superiority; none seemed practical. In the late 1980s, with the deployment of the first United States space-based defense systems, the Soviet states stepped up their efforts to obtain technological "fixes" through espionage and importing of embargoed goods—computers and other high-technology equipment—but this was soon shown to be inadequate. In 1991, the space-based defense systems they themselves had deployed were shown to be inferior in design and ability, and it became obvious to the Soviet leadership that what had been predicted for years was in fact happening; the Soviet Union could not compete with the free world in technology.

Most Soviet computer systems were centralized; privately owned or noncentralized systems were illegal (with a few exceptions—namely, the Agatha experiments), and the laws were rigorously enforced. Young Soviet citizens could not match the technological "savvy" of their counterparts in the Western bloc nations. The Soviet Union was soon going to suffocate under the weight of its own tyranny, remaining a twentieth- (or nineteenth-) century nation in a twenty-first-century world. They had no choice but to attempt, in the football (q.v.) terminology of the time, an "end run." They had to test the courage and resolve of the Western bloc nations. If the Soviets failed, then by the turn of the century, they would be far weaker than their adversaries. The Little Death was inevitable.

Patricia took a deep breath. She hadn't seen reports of the Little Death handled from quite so distant—so historical—a perspective. She remembered nightmares as a girl, after living through the incredible tension and fear, and then seeing the results on television. She had learned to cope since, but these cold, critical evaluations—ingested in such an authoritative environment—brought back the shivers all too effectively.

Page 20

By comparison, the Little Death of 1993 was a low-technology bungle. A minor contretemps causing embarrassment as much as horror, it resulted in an insincere international resolve that resembled the mocking promises of young children. Afraid of their weapons, during that first conflict, the Western bloc and Soviet forces constantly "pulled their punches," relying on the tactics and technology of past decades. When the engagements became nuclear—as all in command knew in their hearts they would—the space-based defense systems, still young and unproven, showed themselves to be remarkably effective. They could not, however, stop the near-shore submarine launches of the three missiles which destroyed Atlanta, Brighton and part of the coast of Brittany. The Russians could not protect their city of Kiev. The nuclear exchange was limited, and the Soviets and Western bloc countries capitulated almost simultaneously. But the rehearsal had already been conducted, and the Soviets had emerged with fewer "hits" than their adversaries. They had gained nothing but a deadly resolve: that they would not be defeated under any circumstances, nor would history overtake their outmoded system.

The Death, when it came, was completely earnest and open. Every weapon was used as it had been designed to be used. There seemed to be no compunction about consequences.

Page 35

In retrospect, it seems completely logical that once a weapon is invented, it will be used. But we forget the blindness and obfuscation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the most destructive weapons were regarded as walls of protection, and when the horror of Armageddon was seen as a deterrent no sane society would risk. But the nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. . . .

Page 3

The Little Death resulted in 4 million casualties, most in Western Europe and England. The Death resulted in approximately 2 1/2 billion casualties, and the numbers will always be uncertain, for by the time the body counts were "completed," it is possible that as many bodies had rotted as had been counted. And, of course, as many more had been completely vaporized.

Patricia wiped her eyes. "This is awful," she murmured.

"You can take a break if you want," Lanier said solicitously.

"No. . . not yet." She continued skimming, back and forth. . . .

Page 345

In summation, the naval battles were hideous jokes of technology. During the Little Death, submarines were hunted (and in some cases, sunk) up to and even after the capitulation, but the great fleets only skirmished. In the major conflict, once the war began in earnest, about two hours after the first hostile actions, the navies of East and West went "in harm's way." In the Persian Gulf, the Northwestern Pacific, the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean (Libya had provided the Soviets with a Mediterranean base in 1997) the battles were fierce and quick. There were few victors. Sea battles during the Death lasted an average of half an hour, and many took less than five minutes. On the first day, while strategic intentions were being tested and before the large-scale escalations, the navies of the Eastern and Western blocs destroyed each other. They were the last great navies allowed on the oceans of the Earth, and their radioactive scrap still pollutes the waters, 130 years later.

Page 400

A peculiar phenomenon of the latter half of the twentieth century was the increase in "retreatists." These people—usually in groups of fifty or less—staked out isolated country tracts as their territory, expecting a disaster of major proportions to destroy civilization, resulting in anarchy. With their stores of food and weapons and their "strictly survival" attitude—a willingness to isolate themselves morally as well as physically—they embodied the worst aspects of what Orson Hamill has called "the conservative sickness of the twentieth century." There is no room here to analyze the causes of this sickness, where individual power and survival counted above all other moral considerations and where the ability to destroy was emphasized over any nobility of spirit, but the ironies of the outcome are rich.

The "retreatists" were right—and wrong. The catastrophe did come, and much of the world was destroyed, but even in the Long Winter that followed, civilization did not crumble into complete anarchy. Indeed, within a year, highly cooperative societies emerged. The lives of one's fellows became almost infinitely precious—and all of the Death's survivors became fellows. Love and support of neighborings groups were essential, for no single group had the means—or the stamina—to survive long without aid. The retreatist enclaves—heavily armed and viciously indiscriminate about how they defended themselves or whom they killed—soon became targets of hatred and fear, the sole exceptions to this new perception of brotherhood.

Within five years after the end of the Death, most of the retreatist enclaves had been sought out and their half-crazed members killed or captured. (Unfortunately, many isolated "survivalist" [q.v.] communities were also included in the sweep. The distinction made between these branches with similar inclinations is a historical one, and was ignored by the authorities of that time.) Many of the retreatists were put on trial for crimes against humanity—specifically, for refusing to participate in the recovery of civilization. In time, these purges extended to all who advocated the right to bear weapons, and even, in some communities, to all who favored high technologies.

Those military personnel who had survived were forced to undergo social reconditioning.

The landmark trial of 2015—where high-ranking politicians and military officers of both the Eastern and Western blocs were accused of crimes against humanity—capped this grim but not-unexpected reaction against the horrors of the Death.

It didn't seem real. She closed her book and shut her eyes. Here she was, reading a book about events that hadn't taken place—yet—and had happened in another universe.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. If it was real, and if it was going to happen, then something should be done. She leafed through the appendices.

On page 567, she found what she was looking for. Every city in the world that had been bombed was listed in the next two hundred pages, with approximate casualties and deaths. She searched for California and found it: twenty-five cities, each receiving from two to twenty-three warheads. Los Angeles, twenty-three, spaced over a two-week period. ("Spasm," an asterisked footnote commented.) Santa Barbara, two. San Francisco—including Oakland, San Jose and Sunnyvale—twenty over a three-day period. San Diego, fifteen. Long Beach, ten. Sacramento, one, Fresno, one. Vandenberg Space Operations Center, twelve evenly spaced along the coastal strip.

Air bases hit in or near the cities, including civilian airports which could be used for military purposes: fifty-three. All space centers around the world had been destroyed, even in noncombatant countries (again the footnote: "Spasm").

Patricia felt dizzy. The book seemed to recede from her. There was no tunnel vision, no loss of sensation, just a kind of isolation. She was Patricia Luisa Vasquez, twenty-four, and because she was young she would have a long time to live. Her parents, because she had known them all her life, would not die for a very long time—an inconceivably long time. And Paul—because they had just begun knowing each other, because he was the one man she had met who had even tried to know what she was about—Paul would be safe, too.

And all of them lived in zones that would be (might be) vaporized from the face of the Earth.

It was simple, really. She would take this book with her when she left, which would be soon, days perhaps. She would take it back to Earth and show people. (Perhaps something like that had already been done.)

And if the universes were close enough that a similarity in immediate futures was possible, then people would be forced to act. Faced with the prospect of nuclear war, people would start disarming, start apologizing, Jesus, I'm sorry we came so close; let's take this as a blessing and—

"Oh, CHRIST!" She closed the book and stood.

Lanier walked with her through the decrepit park near the library. She cried for five minutes, then pulled herself together. The questions she wanted to ask were so difficult to express in words. And if she knew the answers, she might go mad. . . .

"Has anyone made comparisons? I mean, between their history and our own?" she asked.

"Yes," Lanier said. "I have, and so has Takahashi."

"He knows as much as we do?" Lanier nodded.

"What did you find? I mean, are the universes similar?"

"The differences in the history records are small enough that they can be interpreted as differences of fact between two sources. No major differences. Until the Stone."

"And the situations these books describe—they sound like what's happening on Earth, now, don't they?"

"Yes."

"The Little Death didn't teach anybody a thing?"

"Perhaps not."

She sat beneath a dead tree, on a concrete planter wall. "Do they know, down on Earth?"

"Eleven people know, here and there."

"What are they doing about it?"

"All that they can," Lanier said.

"But the Stone can change things. It's the crucial difference. Isn't it?"

"We hope so. In the next few weeks, we'll need all the answers we can get—to questions about alternate time-lines, universes, where the Stone came from. Can you help?"

"You need to know why the Stone is here, and how similar the universes might be, to decide whether we're going to have a war on Earth?"

Lanier nodded. "Very important."

"I don't see how any results I get can be detailed enough."

"Hoffman believes that if anyone can tell us, you can."

Patricia nodded and looked away. "Okay. Can I make conditions?"

"What sort of conditions?"

"I want my family evacuated. I want some friends taken into the countryside, put under protection. Put where the generals and politicians will be."

"No." He walked around the tree slowly. "I'm not angry with you for asking, but no. None of us has asked for anything like that. Thought about it, certainly."

"Do you have family?"

"A brother and a sister. My parents are dead."

"Wife? No. You're single. A girl friend, fiancée?"

"No major attachments."

"So you can be more objective than I can," Patricia said angrily.

"You know that has nothing to do with it."

"I'm going to work up here, for you people, and wait until my parents, my boyfriend, my sister, all the people I love die in a disaster I already know about?"

Lanier stopped before her. "Think it through, Patricia."

"I know, I know. There are hundreds of people aboard the Stone. If we all know and ask, things go haywire. That's why the libraries are off limits."

"That's one reason," Lanier said.

"And to keep the Russians from knowing?"

"That too."

"How smart." Her voice was soft, just the opposite of what he had expected. She sounded rational and if not calm, not terribly upset, either. "What happens when I get mail from home?" she asked. "What if I don't write back?"

"It won't matter much, will it? The dates are only a few weeks away."

"How will I feel, getting letters? How will I be able to work?"

"You'll work," Lanier said, "knowing that if we get the answer soon enough, we might be able to do something about it."

She stared hard at the ground with its dry, yellow grass. "They said shuttle landing areas were bombed. In that book."

"Yes."

"If it happens, we'll be stuck up here, won't we?"

"Yes. Most of us. We won't want to go back soon, anyway."

"That's why you've started farming. We won't get anything from Earth for. . . how long?"

"If there's a war, and it's as described, perhaps thirty years."

"I. . . I can't go into the library now. Is that all right, if I stay out here for a while?"

"Sure. Let's return to the first chamber and have dinner. And remember—I've had to live with this information for some time now. There's no reason you can't, as well."

She got to her feet without responding. Her legs and hands were steady. She was in amazingly good shape, considering. "Let's go," she said.

Chapter Eleven

The travelers gathered by the truck two hours into the morning shift, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of backpackers about to set off on a hike. The truck was very full after loading.

Patricia sat between Takahashi and a brawny mohawked marine named Reynolds. Reynolds was armed with an Apple and a compact machine pistol. Carrolson sat beside the driver, American navy lieutenant Jerry Lake, a tall outdoorsy-looking fellow with sand-colored hair. Lake glanced over the back of his seat to see that everything was in order, nodded to Takahashi and smiled at Patricia. "My men have orders to protect Miss Vasquez at all costs. So don't run away without permission."

"Yes, sir," Patricia said quietly. Takahashi—short, half Japanese, well muscled, with close-cropped black hair and large self-assured green eyes, returned Lake's nod. Takahashi was the only one wearing Earthside clothes—a cotton shirt, windbreaker and denim pants. "Dispensation," he had explained back by the tent. "I'm allergic to the dye in the overalls."

Lake urged the truck forward. Carrolson checked off their equipment as Farley read a slate list.

The truck carried a total of eight passengers, four military men and four "principals," as Carrolson referred to the scientists and Patricia.

Patricia kept her eyes on the seat in front of her. In her pocket was a letter from Paul, delivered to her in the first chamber the shift before.

Dear Patricia,

Wherever you are, my mystery woman, I hope all is well. Life here is mundane—especially when I think of where you might be—but it goes. I keep in touch with your folks—Rita's a doll and Ramon and I have had some pretty good conversations. I've learned a lot about you behind your back. Hope you don't mind. My applications to Prester and Minton (two software manufacturers) have been processed, I hear, but things are on hold until the Defense Platform appropriations bill passes. There's some talk about a filibuster and that could screw things up for months.

Enough talk of that. I miss you desperately. Rita asked me if we were going to get married and I kept mum, just as you want. I do want to; you know that. I don't care how weird you are, or where you are right now; just come back and give me a nod. We'll find our own home. Don't be too stubborn this time. Well, enough of this; you probably have other fish to fry, and my particular floppings and slappings on the bank—where you have beached me with your line—are just distractions. (Now, you know I can't end a letter without something clumsy and confusing.) I love you. Neat, prim kisses.

Paul

She had typed up a long, self-censored reply, showed it to Carrolson for approval, and had it sent Earthside on the next OTV.

Surprisingly, writing the letter had been easy. In it, she said all the things she knew Paul would want to hear, all the things she thought needed to be said if, indeed, Paul was going to be dead in a few weeks. Not that she had really accepted that possibility. If she had, she wouldn't be as calm as she was.

Lanier was on his way to Earth by now. Patricia envied him. She would rather be on Earth, waiting to die, than up here, facing what she knew.

No, that wasn't really true. She closed her eyes and cursed herself. This was the most responsibility she had ever had. She had to overcome her crazy grief and fear and work as best she could to prevent.

And—she almost hated herself for it—she was working. Her mind was in the state, finally. Solutions were starting to come to her, presenting themselves like suitors, all formally dressed in equations, each rejected when its inadequacies became apparent.

Takahashi seemed a bright and conscientious fellow, but Patricia hadn't felt like talking as the expedition had gathered, and so she knew little about him. Takahashi and Carrolson would be her seconds in almost everything from now on, Lanier had said.

The road ended fifty kilometers from the base camp. The truck lurched into a shallow gully, its rubber-tired band-metal-spoke wheels making their queer singing noise on the dirt. The forward aspect of the corridor didn't change as they advanced. The southern cap receded slowly, steadily, and became less overwhelming. Patricia didn't feel comfortable angling for a view, however, so she caught only brief glimpses as they traveled. Carrolson, Farley and Takahashi played chess on a slate as Patricia watched inattentively.

"Halfway," Lake said two hours later. The chess players recorded their moves and cleared the slate as the truck slowed and came to a smooth stop. The doors slid aside and the marines climbed down with groans of relief. Patricia slid after them and stood on the dry dirt, stretching and yawning. Carrolson came around from the opposite side of the truck, water cooler in hand, and poured drinks into their cups. "All the luxuries," she said.

"Beer?" Reynolds asked.

"Sacrificed to science," Carrolson said. "Anybody hungry?"

Patricia removed a sandwich from the kit and walked with Takahashi a few dozen meters away from the truck. For a time, she had felt a floating sense of anxiety and nausea, but that had dissipated. How could there be anything to fear in an endless stretch of desert, devoid even of insects? The very blandness was comforting, a blank slate.

"'The sea was wet as wet could be, the sand was dry as dry,'" she said.

"Indeed," Takahashi agreed. She squatted on the dirt and he sat beside her, folding his legs into an easy lotus. "Do you know why I'm along on this trip?"

His approach was awkwardly direct. She looked away from him. "No doubt to keep an eye on me."

"Yes. Lanier said you should be observed diligently. How are you holding up?"

"Well enough."

"The library. . .” He lowered his voice and stared back at the cap. "It isn't easy."

"Pretty soon I'm going to feel like a royal princess, surrounded by retainers."

Takahashi chuckled. "It won't get that bad. I'll keep Lanier's worries in check. But I have to ask one important question. Can you work?"

Patricia knew precisely what he meant. "I am working. Right this minute."

"Good." No more needed to be said on that topic.

She plucked a branch of scrub to see if the growth differed from the variety near the camp. It didn't—small leaves, waxy surfaces. Even the dry grass was the same. "Not a garden spot," she said. "At least I expected some more dwarf forests."

"It gets worse," Takahashi said.

"Have you ever considered how much dirt they had to bring into the corridor?" she asked, standing up. She had taken only a few bites from her sandwich. She hadn't been hungry for two days. "If the dirt is about a quarter kilometer deep—"

"So we estimate from sounding," Takahashi said.

"And let's say the corridor is a billion kilometers long. . .”

"Why that figure?"

"Just a guess," she said. "That makes about forty billion kilometers of dirt."

"If we broke the Earth down and paved the corridor with it—crust, magma and core—we could cover about thirty billion kilometers." Takahashi poked his finger into a sandy patch.

"What if they have mountains farther on? Even more dirt and rock required, then."

"That's possible," Takahashi said, "But the big question is, Where did they get it all? And don't forget the air. It's about twenty kilometers deep, so that would make. . . one point six trillion cubic kilometers of air, at just over a gram a liter—"

"You've worked all this out before."

"Of course. Many times. Rimskaya started it, and the statistics people carried on. I kibitzed. So many questions about logistics and design. How does the air get renewed in the corridor? The Stone's regeneration ponds couldn't possibly keep up with it, not if there's any sizable population of animals farther on. So maybe there's just enough air to last a few thousand years."

"That doesn't seem right," Patricia said. "Whoever—or whatever—set this up, designed it for eternity. Don't you get that feeling?"

"Sometimes. Doesn't mean it's a valid assumption."

"Still, there must be some kind of corridor maintenance system."

Takahashi nodded. "Rimskaya theorized there would be openings in the corridor even before we discovered the wells."

Carrolson joined them. "Ever notice what the corridor smells like?" she asked.

Patricia and Takahashi shook their heads.

"Smells just like before a storm. All the time. But the ozone levels aren't very high. Another mystery."

Patricia sniffed the air. It smelled fresh, but not like a brewing storm.

"I was raised in storm country," Carrolson said defensively. "That's the smell, all right."

Back in the truck, continuing the journey, Patricia spent much of the time doing problems on the processor, figuring volumes and masses and putting them all into a small table.

An hour later, Takahashi pointed out the first circuit, four wells at the quadrilateral points of a ring. Each well sat in the middle of a dimple about half a kilometer in diameter and twenty meters deep. In the center of the dimple was an inverted bronze-colored dish fifteen meters wide, suspended eight meters above the bowl. The dish hovered in empty air, unsupported.

The truck slowed near the rim of the dimple. At Takahashi's request, Lake drove them around the well before stopping. They climbed down and approached the rim.

"We've made about twenty trips to this circuit," Takahashi said. "Beaten a path, almost."

Patricia held her multi-meter before her. The value of pi held steady. She knelt down and hung the instrument over the rim. The readout remained the same.

"Now step into the depression," Takahashi suggested. The marines, Farley, Carrolson and Takahashi stood beyond the rim in a group. She wrinkled her nose at them. "Another initiation? You first, then."

"That would spoil the fun," Carrolson said. "Go ahead."

Patricia pushed one foot forward, then put her weight onto the sloping, sandy soil.

"All the way," Lake urged.

She sighed and walked into the dimple. Ten meters from the rim, feeling peculiar, she looked back. Her body was not inclined at the same angle as the others. Dizzy, she tried to right herself and almost fell over. The natural stance was along the radius of curvature, as if the corridor force followed the curve of the bowl. Yet there was no local distortion of space registering on the multi-meter. The rest of the group followed after.

In the shadow of the floating dish was a slightly protruding bronze-colored plug about half as wide. Takahashi walked across the plug to show it was safe. Patricia followed, multi-meter again at the fore. No change.

"Any idea what holds the dish up?" she asked. Farley and Carrolson shrugged. The marines sat in the sand around the well, looking bored.

"That may not be an appropriate question," Takahashi said. "Look at the material of the dish and plug—up close. As far as we can tell, it's the same stuff as the corridor walls."

Patricia kneeled and ran her hands along the plug's surface. The color was not uniformly bronze. There seemed to be red and green streaks, even spots of black, merging, separating and twisting in the surface like worms.

"This stuff is geometry, too, then?" Patricia asked.

"It isn't matter," Carrolson said. "We ruled that out just after the wells were discovered."

"It took us all some time to get used to the idea of using space as a building material," Takahashi said. Farley nodded emphatically.

"Not at all," Patricia said coolly. "I wrote about it four years ago. If nested universes are somehow kept from assuming one definite state, a barrier against penetration will form due to continuous opposed spatial transforms."

Takahashi smiled but Carrolson and Farley simply stared. "So," Takahashi said, "nothing supports the dish. It doesn't have any real existence. It's simply a shaped jam-up of probabilities. Makes perfect sense."

"Oh," Farley said.

Lake sat in the middle of the plug, Apple lying across his knees. "I'm just a small-town boy from Michigan," he said. "But it sure feels solid. It isn't even slippery."

"Good point," Patricia said. She reached down to feel it with her palms. "There apparently isn't total separation of probabilistic states. Some interaction between matter and the surface is allowed, besides resistance to intrusion." She put her multi-meter directly on the surface. The value of pi fluctuated wildly, then stabilized: 3.141487233 continuous. "Pi's down," she said. She invoked the other constants. "Gravitational constant is nominal, speed of electromagnetic radiation is nominal and stable."

"Slash aitch?" Carrolson asked.

"The same. What purpose do the wells serve?"

"This circuit is capped, so it serves no purpose we can determine."

"The wells may give access to something outside the corridor," Takahashi said. "We decided against finding out where they lead. But the wells were not plugged, and the sand was kept out of the central hole by a spongy field of force, nature unknown. The only thing we could see was red light coming up out of each well. We sent a little drone helicopter into one well. It didn't come back. Our viewing angle was such that we couldn't see it after it traveled about ten meters. We decided against sending anybody after it."

"Wisely," Carrolson said.

Lake, still sitting, said laconically, "My men are ready to go as far as you'd like, any time you like."

"We appreciate that, Lieutenant," Carrolson said. "But we have good reasons for taking these things slowly."

"Give me an all-environment suit and a weapon, a couple of backups. . .” He grinned.

"You'd really go down?" Patricia asked, turning to the officer with an incredulous expression.

Lake grimaced. "If we were reasonably sure about the general category of things to see and experience, I'd go. We'd all go." The marines nodded in unison. "Duty here hasn't been all that exciting. Outside of the obvious scenic values."

"We dug all around the dimple," Takahashi said, edging up the slope and pointing with extended arms to indicate placement of the holes. He picked up a handful of dirt and let it sift between his fingers. "The dirt in all the wells is dry. No microorganisms, no large life forms, no plants."

"No living things. . . except us," Farley said.

"And no radiation," Takahashi continued. "No traces of unusual chemistry. So maybe these closed wells are just survey markers."

"Benchmarks of the gods," Carrolson intoned.

"Each well is alike?" Patricia asked.

"As far as we know," Takahashi said. "We've only examined two circuits."

Reynolds stood and brushed sand from his overalls. "Hey, Lieutenant. Maybe this is where boojums come from."

Lake rolled his eyes.

"Have you ever seen a boojum?" Patricia asked, looking intently at the marine.

"I don't think anyone has," Carrolson said.

"Mr. Reynolds?"

Reynolds glanced between Lake and Patricia. "Am I really being asked?"

"Yes," Patricia said. "I'm asking." She tapped her badge, uncertain whether that carried any weight with the marines.

"I've never seen one," Reynolds admitted. "But others have, others that I trust."

"We've all heard about 'em," another marine named Huckle said. "Some guys are full of stories."

"Still," Lake said, "these men aren't prone to seeing things that aren't there. The reports are few, but interesting."

Patricia nodded. "Are there any plans to descend into a well?"

"Not so far," Takahashi said. "We have other problems to face."

She looked down at the plug, rubbing her boot across the surface. "I'd like to see the complete expedition report when we get back," she said.

For the first time, a solution had presented itself—even as they talked—that had survived the first level of criticism. She looked up at the inverted dish, at the minutely active colors.

"Shall we return, then?" Takahashi asked.

"I think so," Patricia said.

The Frant used an adapted pictor to project the objects and landscapes around them and camouflage their activity in and about the tent. The two guards, dressed in black, might hear Olmy if he was especially noisy, but they wouldn't see him. He walked within a few dozen centimeters of one guard on his way to the box that served Patricia Luisa Vasquez as a desk.

He was particularly interested in the young woman; from what he had heard, she was becoming central to the group's endeavors. And if she was the same woman he had heard the Engineer speak of. . .

On the box, notes filled perhaps fifty sheets of paper, arranged in no apparent order. Many of the notes were scribbled over or heavily blacked out; sometimes entire pages, except for a few square centimeters of equations or diagrams, were obscured by hard-pressed pencil marks. He leafed through the sheets quietly, puzzling over Patricia's private notation.

A slate lay on one corner, its silver-gray screen blank. A memory block had been plugged into the aperture in the right side of the slate, just above the small keyboard. Olmy glanced around, checking for the position of the guards, and kneeled beside the slate, turning it on. Learning how to use the antique was not difficult; in a few minutes, he had it rapidly scrolling up the contents of the memory block. He recorded the series of files in his implant for later analysis; this took about four minutes.

From what he could see and understand of her work, she was quite advanced for her century.

He was arranging the papers into their previous order when a guard came around the corner of the tent and stared in his direction. Olmy stood slowly, certain the picted camouflage was still effective.

"You hear anything, Norman?" Sergeant Jack Teague asked his colleague.

"No."

"Puff of wind or something? I could have sworn I heard these papers moving."

"Just another boojum, Jack."

Teague approached the box and looked down at the papers. "Jesus," he murmured. "Wonder what this stuff is." He bent and ran his fingers just above the line of symbols. There were cursive letters mixed with bold black lowercase letters; double upright bars reminiscent of the matrix symbols he had studied in flight school, integral signs, exponents containing German gothic letters and Greek letters, squiggles and triangles and lopsided circles with double dots in the middle, letters with single and double dots like umlauts over them. . .

"What a mess," Sergeant Teague said, rising again. His neck hair bristled and he sniffed the air, twisting suddenly.

Of course, nothing was there. What did he expect?

Chapter Twelve

Lanier had slept through most of the two-day OTV ride, head full of weightless dreams indiscriminately mixing the Stone and Earth, past and future.

He looked at his watch and then at the face of the secret service agent sitting beside him in the limousine. There was an eighteen-hour lag between the time he had landed at Vandenberg and the time he would report to Hoffman's office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Outside the smoke-colored car window, desert flashed by. The air pressure was high and the gravitation oppressive. Even through the dark windows, the sun was hot and yellow.

He missed the Stone.

"I have some spare time," he said.

"Yessir." The agent looked straight ahead, face pleasantly bland.

"You fellows are discreet."

"Oh, yessir. We are that," the driver said. The agent seated beside the driver glanced back at Lanier.

"Ms. Hoffman says we're at your disposal, but we're to have you in Pasadena, alive and sober, by eight o'clock tomorrow morning."

Lanier wondered how Hoffman would react to being called "Ms." "Gentlemen," he said. "I've been celibate for more months than I care to count. Rank hath its responsibilities. Is there a safe place in Los Angeles where one can get. . .” He searched for a phrase as antique as "Ms." ". . . one's ashes hauled? Discreetly, charmingly, cleanly."

"Yessir," said the driver.

He was allowed two drinks in a fancy but ancient hangout known as the Polo Lounge, surrounded by aged relics of the bad old days of network television. By three o'clock in the afternoon, two suites in the Beverly Hills Hotel—directly opposite one another—were checked out. The agents efficiently inspected the suite where he would stay and pronounced the rooms safe with a nod to each other.

He finally had some illusion of privacy. He took a shower, lay on the bed, almost drifted off. How long would it take for him to get used to the extra weight? How would it affect his performance?

The woman who arrived at five was stunningly beautiful, very friendly, and ultimately—through no fault of her own—unsatisfying. He judged his performance as adequate, but the act brought little joy. She left at ten.

Lanier had never resorted to a prostitute before. His physical passions, with a few notable exceptions, had never been as persistent as those of other men.

At ten-fifteen, there was a light knock on his door. He opened it, and the agent who had driven the limousine from the desert landing site passed him information on two memory blocks. "Ms. Hoffman sends these to you with her compliments," he said. "We'll be just across the hall, if you need anything."

The memory blocks he had brought with him from the Stone—more precious than Lanier himself—had been transferred to separate, more secure vehicles and driven carefully into Pasadena that day. No doubt, the Advisor would be going over the blocks even now.

He shut out all the lights and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering how many of the aged executives in the Polo lounge the call girl had serviced in her young life.

He had never been comfortable with desire. This time, he had not felt desire as much as obligation to the flesh. After so many months of deprivation—more like a year, actually—it seemed likely the body had requirements it was no longer communicating to him.

That at least would have hinted at normality. He had always felt vaguely guilty at his coolness—if that was the right word. Guilty and grateful. It gave him much more time to think, without constant distraction or diversion of purpose.

The coolness had also kept him a bachelor. He had had his share of lovers, but work and accomplishment had always won out. Lovers had become friends more often than not—and had married other friends.

A very civilized situation.

Sleep. Gravid dreams, heavy and dark. He was captain of a huge luxury liner on a black ocean, and each time he peered over the side to check the water level, the ship dropped a meter or two. By the end of the dream he was in a panic. The Earth's gravity was dragging the ship beneath the sea, and he was the captain, and the ship was the most beautiful he had ever commanded. He was losing it, and he simply could not abandon it by waking up. . . .

At eight o'clock the next morning, Lanier walked across the concrete quadrangle of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, briefcase in hand, accompanied by two new agents. He enjoyed the bright sun and the increased weight more now and almost regretted the thought of spending the day in air-conditioned offices. The first of two, perhaps three scheduled sessions would take place in the VIP conference room.

He popped a pill to knock down a runny nose, drank from a bronze fountain in a newly planted park, and slowed to a saunter past the broad black-background panel displaying JPL projects. Mars development activity schedules vied with Solar Sail reports and a hologram of the proposed Proxima Centauri probe.

There was no mention of the second ABE—asteroid belt explorer—launched two years ago.

Lanier and his gray-suited shadows climbed the steps slowly, allowing for his gravity fatigue, and passed through heavy-glass security doors. He presented his card to a monitor, and the steel gate swung wide with a pleasant hum. The agents did not enter with him. Beyond was a hallway lined by display cases. Intricate small-scale replicas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's past triumphs glittered in their plastic boxes: Voyager, Galileo, the Drake and the Solar Sail. There were also OTV models and diagrams explaining the Star Probe concept.

He took an aging elevator to the sixth floor, staring up at the glowing blue numbers.

Another secret service agent awaited him and asked for his ID again as the elevator door opened. Lanier took the card from his pocket and lined it up beside his badge. The agent thanked him and smiled as he walked on, unaccompanied, to the conference room.

Hoffman sat at the end of a long black table. Piles of paper, two slates and a clutter of memory blocks were arranged before her. To her left sat Peter Hague, the President's representative to ISCCOM, and on the other side, Alice Cronberry, advisor on aerospace security and project manager of the second ABE. Lanier walked around the table and shook hands, Hoffman's first—warmly cupping her hand in both of his—then Cronberry's and Hague's.

"I see Joint Space Command and the Joint Chiefs have no representatives here," he said, sitting at the opposite end of the table.

"We'll get to that in a moment," Hoffman said. She had aged since he last saw her; her hair was grayer, she looked more matronly and her wrinkles had transformed from smile to frown. "You're looking fit, Garry." She was being polite.

"Feeling less fit."

"How is Patricia Vasquez doing?"

"As well as can be expected. I was called away before I had much chance to see her at work, or before she came up with any results."

"I take it," Hoffman said, "that means you're uncertain about her."

"I am," Lanier said. "Not because I don't think she's capable, or the best in her field—whatever that may be—but because she's young. The library was quite a shock to her."

Cronberry put her right hand flat on the table, leaning away from him slightly. "It was a shock to all of us," she said.

Hoffman passed a sheet of paper down to him. "We've studied the material you brought with you. We've already made our final report to the President."

"Before Vasquez tells us anything?"

"I doubt she'll tell us what we'd like to hear. Call it instinct, but I think we're in deep trouble." Hoffman's eyes focused on an empty space over Lanier's shoulder. "We've verified some of the information from the library."

Lanier inspected their faces intently. They were all unhappy; even trying to hide their emotions, they revealed that much. "And?"

"There are divergencies."

"Thank God," he said. Hoffman raised a hand.

"Not broad divergencies. The consensus here is, given the information from the library and what we've discovered since—from the second ABE and elsewhere—war is a definite possibility. We've verified the historical references to Party Secretary Vasiliev. He has restructured the Defense Council just as the library said he would. The Russians are deploying SS-45's on their Kiev-class carriers and Kirov-class guided missile cruisers, and of course the Typhoon and Delta IV supersubs, to match our Sea Dragon program. They do indeed know how to foil our multi-spectra laser communication systems, which puts them in violation of the 1996 Arms Elimination Accords. . . not that that is in itself important, since no arms were ever eliminated.”

Lanier nodded.

"We had to get tough to pry the information about the multi-spectra systems out of the Joint Space Force," Cronberry said. "That's one reason why the DOD and Joint Chiefs have no rep here."

"That's not the worst," Hoffman continued. "Congress is beginning inquiries on our budget. We've been well within appropriations, so that doesn't make sense, unless we take into account a push to discredit the library, the Stone, all of us. The President is convinced—has been convinced by several members of his cabinet—that the Stone is either fraudulent or irrelevant."

Lanier's clenched his jaw tightly, making his cheeks ache. "Why?"

"I suspect the President is incapable of understanding what you've found on the Stone. He's a solid midwestern liberal, very weak on science and technology. An administrator, no imagination. He's never been comfortable with space matters, and this is simply beyond him."

Cronberry pulled a copy of a letter on White House stationery out of her briefcase and handed it to Lanier. It said, in effect, that the President was considering launching an investigation into the way research was being conducted on the Stone. "That was written after we began passing reports to the White House from the Second ABE imaging team, and after confirmation of the library evidence."

"We wanted to get the Vice-President up to the Stone by week's end, but he's declined the invitation," Hoffman said.

"What's the Russian position on the Stone?" Lanier asked.

"They secretly launched their own asteroid belt probe two years ago. That probe returned confirmation to them before or about the same time as ABE. They know that there is indeed a very large asteroid which precisely matches the Stone."

"Juno?"

"Yes. The imaging match is perfect, allowing for the excavations."

Lanier hadn't heard about the confirmation from the second ABE until now. "So Juno and the Stone really are the same."

Hoffman passed down a file of ABE and near-Earth surveillance photos. One ABE picture showed Juno, a sweet-potato-shaped chunk of primordial planetary material covered with craters and rills. The Stone was identical, but lined with excavations and dimpled with the bore-hole depressions. "God," Lanier said.

"I don't think He's the one to blame," Hoffman said. "Perhaps your Konrad Korzenowski is."

"At any rate," Hague said, "the Russians are going to pull their team out within three weeks, perhaps sooner. They're upset because we deny them complete access, when we allow the Chinese as far as the seventh chamber. That's their excuse, and frankly, it's a good one. I'd be pissed, too. But it doesn't explain everything."

"They agreed to those divisions a year ago, when we set up team responsibilities," Lanier said, frowning.

"Yes, but apparently there have been more leaks," Hague said.

"Oh, Christ." Who?

"And," Hague continued, "they are now claiming that we misled them as to the contents of the libraries."

"Which we did," Hoffman said, smiling faintly.

"Can the science team get along without the Russians?" Cronberry asked.

"Yes. They're mostly working on inner-chamber plasma tube power-supply theory. We can get along without them, but a lot of important research will slow way down, perhaps come to a stop. What about Beijing?"

Cronberry leafed through a folder of personnel papers. Hague reached across and drew one out. "Karen Farley is a Chinese citizen, and she's working for you on theoretical physics, correct?"

"Yes. She's made herself useful in all sorts of areas." Oh, please, not Farley—not Wu and Chang—

"She and her colleagues are to be withdrawn if the Russians leave."

"Why the coordination?" Lanier asked.

"The Chinese smell a rat," Hoffman said. "Or a rout. If the Russians feel they are being misled and kept out of important decisions, the Chinese have similar grounds for complaint. Their own presence might be more advantageous to us than to them."

"I can't believe either group would give up a place on the Stone. I wouldn't."

"They won't," Hoffman said. "We have evidence that both the Russians and the Chinese have clandestine operatives in the security team, perhaps even in the science team. And there have been interesting activities in Russian orbital space and on the Moon. Not to mention heightened activity at Tyuratam and the Indian Ocean launch site."

"Invasion from Earth and Moon?"

Hoffman shook her head. "Look, this is all chickenshit compared to the big question. Has Vasquez come up with anything? What does she have to say about parallel worlds, alternate histories?"

"She hasn't had time to say much of anything," Lanier said quietly. "In a few weeks, we might know."

"I understand the President's point of view. I find this very hard to believe," Cronberry said. "Is it your opinion that the Stone comes from our future?"

"No," Lanier said. "The Stone comes from another universe, not precisely our own. That much is certain. There's one obvious difference."

"No Stone in the Stone's past," Hague said.

"Exactly."

"And we have no way of knowing how much the Stone is affecting the course of our history."

"It's changing things a lot, I'd say," Hoffman remarked. "If anything, the Stone has made things worse." She held up a memory block marked "Plant Physiology Changes under Plasma Tube Conditions." "You made this copy yourself?" She passed it to Cronberry, then to Hague.

Lanier nodded. "It's in S-code," he said. "It's a summary from the best sources, mostly from the third chamber library. Vasquez should be going into the third chamber in a few days."

"What does it summarize?" Hague asked, hefting it.

"The first two weeks of the war."

Cronberry flinched.

Hoffman took a slate, programmed it for reading S-code, plugged in the block and skimmed over the material. Her face went ashen. "I haven't looked at this before," she said.

"It's mostly historical photographic records made by the armed forces on both sides. Some of the stuff toward the end chronicles the Long Winter."

"So that's not just theory anymore," Hague said.

Lanier shook his head.

"How long was. . . will. . . the winter be?" Cronberry asked, reluctantly accepting the slate from Hoffman.

"One or two years in its major effects."

Hague took the slate from Cronberry. "You guarantee this material is from the third chamber library?"

Lanier swallowed before answering, irritated. "I could hardly have conjured it out of thin air."

"Of course not," Hoffman said. "If the libraries are correct—if our universes coincide in this one way—then we have about sixteen days?"

"One way or another, we'll know by then," Lanier said. "Although the knowledge of the events will almost certainly shape the results. If. If they happen at all."

"We're scheduling a meeting with the Russians tomorrow at noon," Hoffman said. "Strictly informal. They've asked that you be there. Mr. Hague's department has pushed very hard for State Department and DOD approval of the meeting. If those talks succeed, there will be other meetings below the cabinet level. And if we can convince the President before next week, perhaps a summit will be arranged." She blinked slowly in his direction, still focusing somewhere over his shoulder—not quite the thousand-yard stare of a battle-weary veteran, but very nearly.

Chapter Thirteen

The third chamber city was the next step.

Having made the trip to the first circuit of wells, and having absorbed as much as she could from the books in the Alexandria library selected for her by Lanier, Patricia felt herself numbing nicely to the whole subject. It was a game, an exercise, no more real than the odd mathematical exercises she had made up as a teenager.

She had ridden the trains beneath Thistledown City so many times in the past two weeks, but the third chamber was the most closely guarded of the first five. The trains had never stopped—until now.

Rupert Takahashi escorted her from the subway station to the ground-level walkways.

Takahashi served the science team in an unusual capacity. His title of mathematician was hardly sufficient description of what he did; he seemed to move from interest to interest, working with one group on one day and another the next. He was more than a generalist—he was a generalist with a specific purpose, to oversee the mathematical and statistical rigor of the various groups within the science team. That explained how he had come to work with Rimskaya on preliminary corridor theory; they had discussed the topic while Takahashi double-checked Rimskaya's population studies.

Thistledown City was astonishing, newer than Alexandria by two centuries; it had been built after the Stone's launch, incorporating designs not thought of until the inhabitants had had long experience with their environment. Here the Stone architects had allowed themselves complete freedom. Treating the chamber as a giant valley, they had strung cables from cap to cap and hung buildings from them in graceful curves. Taking advantage of the upward slope of the floor, they had built arched structures fully ten kilometers long, bands of steel and processed Stone material interacting in patterns of silver and white, casting soft-edged shadows over the neighborhoods below. Some of the structures rose to the very limits of the chamber's atmosphere; these were actually thicker at the top than the bottom, like golf tees.

Even empty, Thistledown City seemed alive. It would take only the merest suggestion of people to come to life, Patricia thought; a few hundred citizens, moving from building to building, dressed in outrageous clothes—colorful, flowing garments suited to the curves and vaults and arches, bright colors to contrast with the muted creams, whites and metallics of the city.

The main library was practically hidden beneath a sprawling annex of one of the smaller golf-tee structures. Takahashi had said it was within easy walking distance, so they strolled across plazas, over pedestrian bridges, alongside service roads that at one time would have teemed with traffic—mostly computer-controlled and unoccupied vehicles. "All the vehicles are gone," Takahashi said. "We only know what they looked like through the records. They must have been put to use in the exodus."

She tried to imagine tens of millions of Stoners—such a population could easily have been accommodated by Thistledown City alone—tooling off down the corridor in their robot cars.

The library entrance was a solid sheet of a material resembling black marble. As they approached, an amplified voice asked them to halt for identification. They stood for a full two minutes before being cleared to enter.

A broad half-ellipse flowed aside in the black expanse. Beyond waited the ubiquitous security team in gray and black, passing them through after more ritual. The interior of the library was fully illuminated; no additional strip lighting was necessary. "No circuit breakers in Thistledown," Takahashi said. "We're not even sure how the power gets to the lights, much less where it comes from."

The library proper was smaller in overall volume than its cousin—or ancestor—in Alexandria and had no visible stores of records. The main floor was a pastel-blue-carpeted plaza beneath a sheet of softly glowing white material which stretched without support for a hundred meters. The plaza was dotted with at least a thousand lime-green padded seats. In front of each seat was a chromium teardrop on a slate-gray pedestal.

The fabrics and materials in the library showed no sign of wear or decay.

Takahashi led her to a seat. Recording and monitoring equipment surrounded the seat, looking out-of-place and obviously rigged by the investigators. "We use this one normally, but the choice is yours."

She shook her head, "I don't like all this stuff," she said, indicating the equipment. Moving through the ranks of seats, she chose one about twenty meters from the edge of the array and sat.

Takahashi followed. "You can show yourself the entire Stone from here—as it used to be," he said. "Would you like a tour of the cities when they were occupied?" He pushed aside a fabric-covered lid on her seat arm and showed her how to use the simple controls on the panel beneath. "These are just the basics. There are hundreds of other tricks possible. Feel free to experiment. Think of it as a vacation. It's no fun to watch, and I have no real business here except to show you the ropes, so I'll wait outside. Join me when you're done—say in an hour or so?"

She didn't feel easy about being on the plaza alone, and she had deeply appreciated Lanier's staying with her in the Alexandria library. Still, she agreed with a nod and settled into the seat, manipulating the controls with one hand. A simple circular graphic display hovered before her, as crisp and clear as something solid. Takahashi had misinformed her on one point, and her fumbling triggered a tutorial. It corrected her errors and informed her—in only slightly accented American English—how to operate the equipment properly. Then it provided her with call numbers and codes for other types of information.

She called up a student's basic guide to the second chamber city. In an instant, Alexandria surrounded her. She appeared to be standing on the portico of an apartment in the lower floors of one of the megas, looking down on the busy streets. The illusion was perfect—even providing her with a memory of what "her" apartment looked like. She could turn her head and look completely behind her if she wished—indeed, she could walk around, even though she knew she was sitting down.

In both her ears—or somewhere in the middle of her head—a voice explained what she was seeing.

She spent half an hour in Alexandria, observing the clothes the people wore, their faces, their hair styles and expressions and ways of moving. Some of the outfits attracted her. Others were positively puritanical—in a slinky sort of way. One of the most popular styles at the time of the record, for women, was an opaque robe—usually in pink or dusty orange—with hood, capped by a small crimson disk of some feathery material. Some women wore hexagonal blue designs on their left shoulder blades—

("?"

(For information on insignia of office and rank, positively and silently vocalize the following code string. . . . )

—and others red ribbons draped over the right shoulder, terminating in gold beads. Men's clothing was no less flamboyant, or somber; the distinctions seemed to point up sexual attitudes quite different from those in her time, her world.

She heard them speaking. It was a peculiar speech, resembling Welsh but occasionally understandable as English or French.

("What language did you—this unit—speak to me, and how did you know?"

(Late twenty-first-century English, the earliest accessible without specific code, selected because of your conversation before access to data.)

While ethnic populations still retained versions of their mother tongues, many of the languages had mutated into a common tongue—though she was informed subliminally that fashions in language were much more variable over shorter periods of time. Rapid changes were possible because learning had been accelerated by tutorial devices such as those in the library. One could learn any new language or variation in a few hours, or mere minutes.

For the written languages she understood, many of the spellings had been simplified or—paradoxically—made more complex. Had there been a time when flowery spelling was in vogue?

(This is the famous Nader Plaza, which won awards for architectural excellence before the Thistledown vessel left Earth behind. . . . )

She listened attentively, completely lost in the experience. Some men wore kilt-like skirts and unyoked sleeves, others wore business suits that would not have been out of place in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Shoes seemed to have gone completely out of fashion, perhaps because automated sanitation kept everything spotless.

(What about social deviation? Ghettos and tenements?)

The scene shifted dizzily.

(Social unease in Alexandria and the rest of the Stone is not unknown. Certain districts have been kept free of constant city maintenance. The citizens living in these districts have chosen to avoid all modern conveniences, and shirk any equipment invented after the twentieth century. Their wishes are strictly observed; they are often honored citizens, and they are entitled to their belief that technology led to the Death, and that God wishes us to live with no supports not mentioned in the works of the Gentle Nader and his Apostles of the Mountain.)

She had heard the name Nader mentioned several times, but it took her some time to get around to toggling a different branch of the "footnote" function. As she did so, she asked for explanations of several other things any Stoner would have taken for granted. That triggered an elementary, synopsized history of the Stone, and of the time between the Death and the construction of the Thistledown.

She was more than a little shocked to discover that the Gentle Nader was, in fact, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and independent investigator who had made a big stir in the 1960s and 1970s. He was still alive, back on Earth—her Earth, her time—but in the library records his name was always used reverently. He was always "Gentle Nader" or "the Good Man." Those who took his name—the Naderites—were a powerful political force, and had been for centuries. Or. . . would be. She vowed to use the physicist's concept of time from here on, with events strong along a line, and no particular breakdown into past, present or future.

After the Death, the hideous Long Winter and the Recovery Revolutions, a Spaniard named Diego Garcia de Santillana rose to power in the remains of Western Europe, under the banner of the Return to Life movement. He initiated a tentative push for world government. The next year, in 2010 (just five years from now, she thought, breaking her vow) the first Naderite coalitions formed in North America. Nader—"martyred" during the Death—had been chosen for his stand against nuclear energy and excessive technology; however just or unjust the elevation, he became a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland still filled with fear and rage against what the human race had done to itself. In 2011, the Naderites absorbed the Return to Lifers, and the re-emerging governments of North America and Western Europe made pacts of exchange and cooperation. Naderite governments were put into office by landslide elections and immediate curbs were sought on high technology and nuclear research. "Agrarianize!" became the rallying cry of a third of the world economy, and the Raiders—an elite, somewhat shadowy organization—fanned out around the world to "persuade" reluctant governments to join in. In Russia, the revolution of 2012, staged by Naderite sympathizers, brought down the last Council government of the USSR, which had already retreated into its center of power, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Nations throughout the Eastern bloc regained their political sovereignty, and most of them went over to the Naderites.

That, at least, explained the prevalence of Nader's name in the records. Between 2015 and 2100, the followers of the Good Man consolidated their power over two-thirds of the world. The only dogged resistance in those decades was in Asia, where the Greater Asian Cooperative—made up of Japan, China, Southeast Asia (occasionally) and Malaysia—renounced Naderism and returned enthusiastically to scientific research and high technology, including nuclear energy. The first real opposition to the Naderites in the West began in 2100 with the Volks movement in Gross Deutschland—

She switched off the machine and lay back in the chair, rubbing her eyes. The information had come in printed displays, selected visuals and even more selected sounds. Where documentation of the multimedia sort was lacking, print took over, but with subtle and clear vocal accompaniment. Compared to this, simple reading was torture and current video methods as archaic as cave paintings.

If she were so inclined, she could pleasantly spend the rest of her life here, an eternal scholar parasitizing the knowledge of centuries neither she nor her ancestors had lived through.

Considering the alternatives she faced, that prospect was very attractive.

The hour was almost up.

She returned to the system briefly to look up information on the corridor, the exodus of the Stoners and the desertion of the cities. In each instance she was met with a very graphic floating spiked ball signaling no access.

Meeting Takahashi outside, where he was calmly smoking a cigarette—the first she had seen on the Stone—Patricia stretched her arms and neck. "I'm going to have to come back."

"Of course."

"Where to next?"

"A short tour. We can't walk to where we're going in any reasonable time, so we'll use a truck."

The garage for the third chamber trucks was a sheet metal shed nestled incongruously at the base of one of the chamber-spanning arches. A subway entrance opened nearby; the transit lines that had once served Thistledown City were no longer operative, however, and to get from one subway junction to anywhere else in the city, it was necessary to drive trucks along the narrow service roads.

"I can't access anything in the libraries on the exodus," Patricia said as Takahashi inspected a truck. He bent down to peer beneath the chassis, then stood straight and brushed his hands together.

"The archaeology group is working that out now. We should be back in time for their weekly report; that's at eleven hundred hours." He glanced at his watch. "It's oh nine hundred now. Everything seems to be shipshape. Shall we be off?"

He held the driver's door open for her. "Had your truck lessons yet?"

Patricia shook her head.

"It's about time, then, don't you think?"

She shrugged nervously.

"Not hard at all. Especially here. The service roads are easy to follow. We've learned the code for the signs on the walls that service machines used—not that different from bar codes on Earth. Replaces street signs. I just shine a pen reader on the signs near the corners and we know where we are. I tell you when to turn. . . you turn. All the service roads are surrounded by walls; you can't fall off anything even if you try. Okay?"

"Okay."

He climbed into the shotgun seat and showed her the column guidance system. "It's like an airplane in one respect—push the column forward and the truck moves forward; the farther you push, the faster it goes, up to a hundred klicks. Slow down by pulling the stick back to upright; reverse by pulling the stick toward you. Maximum speed in reverse is about ten klicks. Gear shifting is automatic. Grip the handles on the horizontal bar and twist the bar the direction you want to go. If you want to make a complete about-face without moving forward or back, just hold the column on the center line and twist the bar as far as it will go. The truck will rotate around its center line. Want to practice?"

"Of course." She maneuvered the truck back and forth around the garage. Using the stick as a brake took some getting used to. When she felt she was reasonably proficient, she smiled at Takahashi. "Let's go," she said.

"Catch on fast, don't you?"

"Don't speak too soon," she warned.

"Okay. Spin us around." He pointed out the nearest service entrance.

The walled service roads wound through and under the city's buildings, usually avoiding grades steeper than ten or fifteen degrees. In one section, however, the ride resembled a roller coaster. Takahashi coaxed her up and down the slopes. "We just passed over the main plumbing for this neighborhood," he explained.

Where the service roads became tunnels, and where the arches and other structures blocked out most of the tubelight, large milky panels cast a soft illumination. The city was without appreciable shadow; everything was cast in a rich and even light.

Takahashi suggested she slow down as they approached a branch in the serviceway. He took a pen reader from his pocket and pointed it at a squiggle of lines of uneven thicknesses near the end of the left-hand wall. The pen was hooked to his slate, which displayed a map, a digital coordinate and directions to nearby points. "Left," he said. "We'll be entering the apartment building soon. By the back door, so to speak."

The serviceway soon passed beneath the plaza of a dazzling gold-surfaced cylindrical tower. Lights flashed at them as they passed, but the shape of the truck—or their presence within—did not trigger any automatic responses.

"Stop at that open door ahead," Takahashi said.

A sign mounted on a chain blocked the passageway to vehicle traffic. Patricia read the sign after stopping the truck and setting the parking brake.

NO TRUCKS OR PEDESTRIANS BEYOND THIS POINT

BY ORDER OF Y. JACOB

DIRECTOR ARCHAEOLOGY TEAM

"And he means it, too," Takahashi said dryly. "That's virgin territory beyond that sign. They've checked over this building, and that's why we're allowed in—but don't touch."

They climbed up a meter-high ledge and stooped over to enter the hatchway. Recently installed locks and chains held more doors open. Patricia noticed other sensing devices—some covered with silvery tape—mounted on the walls, floor and ceiling.

"The machines would offload food, equipment, whatever the building needed through these halls. Automatic carts would deliver the goods to the appropriate chutes and they would lift them to different parts of the building. From this point on, though, we're not cargo; we're people."

Another open hatchway gave access to a large ground-floor reception area. Free-form seats and couches—apparently made of natural wood—furnished a sunken conversation pit near a broad, one-piece window that stretched at least twenty meters to the ceiling. A well-maintained flower garden stretched beyond the window. She was completely taken in by the illusion until she realized the garden was illuminated by sunlight and that blue sky showed through the trees. She stopped to stare and Takahashi waited patiently with hands folded.

"That's lovely," she said.

"The garden's real; the sunlight and sky are fake," he said noncommittally.

"I was wondering how they got along without sunshine and blue skies."

"If you went outside, you'd see the window's having us on."

"It looks very real."

The floor resembled shiny stonework but felt carpeted. Patricia shuffled her feet experimentally but her efforts produced no sound.

"Going up will take some will power," Takahashi warned. At the far end of the reception area were two open shafts sunk into the wall. "Not recommended for those with vertigo." They entered the left-hand shaft. Takahashi pointed down and reached out with his foot to tap a red circle on the floor. The circle glowed. "Seven," he said. "Both of us."

The floor receded. With no visible support, they flew up the shaft. Except for the appearance of motion there was no sensation whatsoever. Patricia's eyes widened and she reached for Takahashi's arm. Above the reception area, the shaft was featureless. There was no way of telling how many floors were passing.

"Only takes a second," he said. "Don't you love it? I don't know how many novels I've read with this sort of thing in them. In Thistledown City, it's real." This was the first time Patricia had heard him express delight. He seemed intensely interested in her reaction: Another spaghetti worm mystery, she thought. See how the girl screams.

She let go of his arm just as a portion of the shaft became transparent in front of them. They were smoothly, gently deposited on the floor beyond.

Patricia swallowed hard. "I am amazed," she said with some effort, "how well everything is working here, while nothing much works in the second chamber."

Takahashi nodded, as if acknowledging that was an interesting problem, but he was unable or unwilling to provide the answer. "Follow me, please."

The hallway curved off to either side. It was round in cross section, and its color varied smoothly from rich forest green to dark maple. Always they seemed to walk in a circle of warm light. Patricia looked down and noticed that their feet touched an invisible plane above the floor of the hallway. "We're walking on air," she said, suppressing a nervous tremor.

"Favorite illusion for the Stoners. Gets dull after a time." They stopped and Takahashi pointed down at the floor to their right. "756" glowed in red beneath a faint leaf-green line. "This is a door, and it happens to be the door we want. Now, you do the honors. Hold your hand up to the wall and press anywhere."

She reached out and did as he suggested. A seven-foot-high oval vanished from the wall, revealing a white room beyond.

"The archaeologists found this one by accident. Apparently it was vacant before the exodus and this is the way prospective tenants checked out the apartments. All the other doors in the building are personality coded or otherwise blocked to visitors. And—as you know if you tried—information on interiors of private spaces in Thistledown City is not available in the libraries. Welcome."

Patricia entered the foyer ahead of him. The quarters were pristine white, furnished with ungraceful white blocks barely suggestive of couches and chairs and tables. "It's ugly," she said, taking a turn around the windowless living room. Oval doors led off to two equally white and blocky bedrooms—at least that was what she assumed they were. The beds could have been settees.

The only object in the apartment that was not white was a chromium teardrop on a pedestal. Patricia paused next to it. "Like the ones in the library."

Takahashi nodded. "Off limits." He indicated the little box attached to the base of the pedestal. "Any tampering and alarms go off in the security offices."

"It's a home library unit?"

"We assume so."

"It works?"

"As far as I know, nobody's tried. You might ask Garry."

"Why no windows? Is this an inner apartment?"

"None of the apartments had simple windows."

"And why so ugly?"

"If you mean plain, that's because nobody has chosen an environment. No design because nobody's living here. Vacant, you see."

"Yes. What would it take to decorate it?"

"Some sort of rental contract, I assume," Takahashi said. "Then it might respond like everything else around here. You could decorate by voice."

"Wonderful," Patricia said. "Nobody's entered any other living quarters?"

"Not in the third chamber. Locked up tight as a drum."

"Then how did they find this one? Just by accident?"

"Yitshak Jacob went from floor to floor, alone, and walked around the circumference of the building on each floor. This was the only apartment that had a number glowing."

"How would anyone know when they were home?"

"Maybe their number would glow and the door would open as they approached. Maybe they had other ways. We're far from understanding such basic things."

If we don't know the basics, Patricia thought, how can I ever hope to understand the embellishments. . . the sixth chamber, the corridor?

"We'll go back the way we came," Takahashi said, "and try to get to that meeting before it begins."

They barely made it. The cafeteria in the first science team compound had been rearranged, and a low stage, lectern and rows of seats now occupied the dining area. Rimskaya stood near the stage as interested team members entered the cafeteria, talking and looking for good vantage points in the rows.

Patricia and Takahashi entered at precisely 1100. Most of the seats were filled, so they sat in the back. Karen Farley turned in her seat and waved at them. Patricia returned the wave and then Rimskaya came to the lectern.

"Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, our report this morning has to do with the exodus from the Stone. We have made substantial progress with this problem and can now present our conclusions with some degree of confidence." He introduced a slight man with wispy light brown hair and delicate Apollonian features. "Dr. Wallace Rainer of the University of Oklahoma will present our conclusions. Today's meeting should not last more than thirty minutes."

Rainer looked to the back of the more, received an affirmative nod from a woman on the projection system and stepped up to the lectern, brandishing a collapsible metal pointer. "All of the archaeology group has worked on this report, and several members of the sociology group as well. Dr. Jacob is indisposed, and I drew the short straw."

Amused chuckles from the audience. "Jacob never delivers reports," Takahashi said. "Very shy. He prefers deserted ruins."

"There has always been some puzzlement as to the coexistence of the second chamber city, known as Alexandria, and the far more advanced Thistledown City in the third chamber. We've all asked the question at one time or another: Why did the Stoners keep Alexandria in its earlier state, rather than rebuilding and modernizing? Certainly people with our present-day temperament would feel awkward living in comparatively primitive surroundings when more modern facilities could be had for the price of a little urban renewal.

"We know a great deal now about living conditions in Alexandria but substantially less about Thistledown City. As you know, security—Stoner security—is very tight at Thistledown City, and unless we want to do some extensive breaking and entering, we have only one location where we have access to living quarters. Alexandria is more open, in some ways more friendly, if I may be excused a very unanthropological judgment.

"All of us here have level two security; we are aware the Stoners were humans, and that they came from a culture remarkably similar to our own. In fact, they come from a future version of the Earth. We know that there were at one time two major social categories: the Geshels, or technically and scientifically oriented peoples, and the Naderites. I'm wondering, by the way, who's going to tell Ralph about this."

Weary laughter from the audience. "Old joke," Takahashi whispered to Patricia.

"We now know that Alexandria, before the exodus of the Stoners, was occupied largely by orthodox Naderites. They seemed to cling to technologies and styles predating the twenty-first century."

Patricia, with something of a jolt, realized none of these people except herself, Takahashi and Rimskaya would know the reason why that particular dividing line was important.

"In this way, they were something like the Amish. And like the Amish, they made concessions—the megas and other architectural innovations among them. But their aim was clear; they chose to retain the style of Alexandria and rejected the more advanced style of Thistledown City. We are not at all sure when this division of the orthodox Naderites and their more liberal fellows and Geshels occurred, but it was not early in the Stone's voyage.

"We are fairly certain now that Thistledown City had been evacuated and locked up at least a century before Alexandria. In other words, the exodus had occurred in the third chamber almost a hundred years before the final evacuation of the second chamber. There is substantial evidence that the second chamber was finally emptied by force.

"The Stone was emptied, then, not simply because of a mass social migration, but to fulfill a definite plan. The people behind the plan apparently gave their more conservative fellows a century to comply, and when they still proved reluctant, moved them out against their will. Oddly enough, we have evidence that some of the orthodox Naderites were forced to live in Thistledown City for a few years.

"We assume that all the Stoners exited by way of the corridor. We have no physical proof of this, and no knowledge yet why the exodus occurred, or why the powers behind the exodus wished the Stone to be completely deserted."

The presentation ended with a series of projected pictures showing living quarters in Alexandria and diagrams of theorized population levels for different centuries in the second and third chambers. To scattered applause, Rainer returned the lectern to Rimskaya.

"The anthropology and archaeology groups have done a wonderful job, don't you agree?" he prompted, gesturing to those in the front row of seats.

Patricia stood as there was more applause. Takahashi followed her out of the cafeteria and into the tubelight.

"That's fascinating," she said, "and I appreciate the tour today. They're working in the dark, aren't they?"

Takahashi shrugged, then nodded. "Yes. The sosh and anthro groups don't have level three clearances. Rimskaya guides them as best as he can without breaching security."

"Don't you get sick of this charade?"

Takahashi shook his head vigorously. "No. It is essential."

"Maybe," Patricia said doubtfully. "I have a lot of work to do before Lanier returns."

"Certainly. Do you wish an escort?"

"No. I'm going back to Alexandria for a while. Then I'll be in the seventh chamber if you need me for anything."

Takahashi paused, hands in his pockets, and nodded, then returned to the cafeteria.

Farley came out seconds later and caught up with her by the garage outside the compound. "Hitch a ride?" she asked.

"Rupert's given me driving lessons. I think it would relax me to drive for a while."

"Certainly," Farley said. They signed out a truck and climbed aboard.

Chapter Fourteen

The room smelled of stale smoke, air conditioning and nervous labor. When Lanier and Hoffman entered, there were four others already inside, all men. Two wore silver-gray polyester suits; bulky, balding, comic-opera Russians. The other two wore tailored wool worsteds; their styled hair and their girths were just barely respectable. Hoffman smiled at all as amenities were exchanged, after which everyone sat around an oval conference table. An awkward silence drew out through several minutes as they waited for Hague and Cronberry to arrive.

When the groups were evenly matched, the senior Russian official, Grigori Feodorovski, removed a single sheet of paper from a cardboard folder and laid it on the table. He then pulled a pair of wire-frame glasses over his nose and behind his ears with one smooth sweep of a hand gripping the temple piece.

"Our governments have some necessary points of discussion concerning the Stone or, as we call it, the Potato." His English was excellent. His expression was calm and unhurried. "We have presented these objections to ISCCOM, and now we must hear what you have to say."

"While we concede under protest that primary exploration rights go to those who first visited the Stone—"

That, Lanier recalled, had been a concession two years in coming.

"—we feel that the Soviet Union and our allied sovereign states have been cheated of their rights. While Soviet scientists have been allowed on the Stone, they have been constantly harassed and not allowed to conduct their work. They have been denied access to important information. In light of these and other grievances, which are at this moment being presented to your President and the Senate Space Advisory Council, we feel that ISCCOM has been compromised, and that the Soviet Union and sovereign ally states been. . .” he cleared his throat, as if embarrassed—"treated most malignantly. Our fellow states have been advised that further participation in the multinational Stone investigation, dominated as it is by the United States and NATO–Eurospace, will serve no purpose. Therefore we will soon withdraw our personnel and support for this enterprise."

Hoffman nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. Cronberry waited for the requisite ten seconds to consider the statement, then spoke. "We regret your decision. We feel that allegations made against ISCCOM, NATO–Eurospace and the Stone personnel in the past have proven unfounded, based on unfortunate rumors. Is the decision of your superiors final?"

Feodorovski nodded. "The ISCCOM agreements made with regard to the Stone demand the withdrawal of all Stone investigators until these issues are resolved."

"That's completely impractical," Hoffman said.

Feodorovski shrugged, pursing his lips, "Nevertheless, that is what the agreements stipulate."

"Mr. Feodorovski," Hague said, putting both hands on the table, palms up, a gesture which Lanier studied closely, "we believe there are other reasons, not yet stated, for the withdrawal of your personnel. May we discuss these things?"

Feodorovski nodded. "With the warning that none of us are empowered to negotiate or make formal statements."

"Understood. Neither are we. I think we all need to relax a bit, to see our way clear to. . . deal honestly, forthrightly, with each other." He looked at Feodorovski and the others, eyebrows raised in query. They nodded. "Our President has been informed that the USSR believes dangerous information of a technological, weapons-oriented nature has been discovered on the Stone," Hague said.

Feodorovski's face was blank, held in an attitude of polite attention.

"While it is true that NATO–Eurospace has begun the investigation of certain heretofore neglected aspects of the Stone's second and third chambers—"

"Against our wishes and protests," Feodorovski said.

"Yes, but with your final agreement."

"Under duress."

"Indeed," Hague said, again raising his brows and looking down at the desk. "While this has been our ceded area of investigation, there has been no such information discovered aboard the Stone."

And indeed, there had not. The libraries contained no specific information on weapons.

"Under the agreements, any such discovery would be reported immediately to the arbitration board in Geneva."

"That may be so," Feodorovski said. Lanier wondered what purpose the other three served—place-keepers? Backups? Overseers keeping tabs on Feodorovski? "But we are not concerned with such reports. Let me speak frankly." Now he, too, placed both hands on the table, palms up. "I cannot speak formally, remember. As a private citizen, allow me to express my concern in this matter." He took a deep breath, full of worry. "We are all, in a sense, colleagues. We have many of the same interests. Let me say that this report about new weapons technology, this is not an important issue. My government, and the governments of our sovereign ally states, are far more concerned about reports that libraries on the Stone, in the second and third chamber cities, to be specific, contain accounts of a future war between our countries."

Lanier was stunned. He had thought security aboard the Stone—certainly around the libraries—was extremely tight. Would he be held responsible for such a hideous leak—or was the leak from another source, perhaps the President's office, or Hoffman's?

"This is a highly unusual situation," Feodorovski continued. "Frankly, my colleagues and I have a difficult time believing we are not living a fairy tale." The other three nodded, not quite in unison. "But these reports are reliable. What do you have to say about them?"

"The libraries have been approached cautiously," Hague said. "We've just begun to process the information stored there."

Feodorovski looked up at the ceiling, exasperated. "We have pledged to speak frankly with each other. My government knows such information exists in the libraries. In fact, we are certain that the accounts of this future war are already in the hands of your President."

He looked around the table. Lanier met his gaze steadily and noticed a flicker of smile on his lips. "Yes," Feodorovski said "We know, of course, that humans built the Stone, or will build it, centuries from now. We know that it will be constructed from the asteroid known as Juno. We know this because in every particular the asteroid Juno and the Stone are identical. Our spacecraft in the asteroid belt has confirmed this."

"Mr. Feodorovski, we are dealing with a very unusual problem," Hoffman said. "We are certain that the Stone does not come from our universe, but from an alternate universe. We strongly believe that the information contained in the libraries could be misinterpreted. They may not predict conditions in our world in any way. The scientific data could be useful, and we are studying that closely, but releasing information haphazardly could be disastrous."

"Nevertheless, there is such a history."

Cronberry said, "If there is, we are not privy to it."

Lanier felt his heart sink. He hated lies, even necessary lies. He hated being a party to lies. Yet he no more wanted the Russians to get the information in the libraries than Cronberry and Hague. That made him a liar.

The Russian seated closest to Feodorovski—Yuri Kerzhinsky—leaned over to whisper in his ear. Feodorovski nodded. "Mr. Lanier," he said, "do you deny the existence of this information?"

"I don't know anything about it," Lanier said smoothly.

"But you concede, do you not, that if such information exists, being aware of it, knowing certain dates, even certain hours, knowing the situations and consequences in advance would be of great strategic value, and also would put a very great strain on you individually?"

"I imagine it would," Lanier said.

Hague interrupted. "Mr. Lanier is not to be badgered—"

"Very sorry," Feodorovski said. "My apologies. But our concern is larger than individual politenesses."

Kerzhinsky stood up abruptly. "Gentlemen. You realize there is now very grave tension between our nations, perhaps the gravest since the 1990s. It is our opinion that troubles aboard the Stone are jeopardizing world peace. The Stone is increasing tensions, particularly with regard to this issue about libraries. It is obvious that we cannot resolve these difficulties at this level of dialogue. Therefore, I see no further need for discussion here."

"Mr. Kerzhinsky," Hoffman said. "I have a paper here I believe your Party Secretary should see. It states the position of all the scientists aboard the Stone with regard to cooperation. And I think it clarifies the rumors of harassment."

Kerzhinsky shook his head and tapped his forefinger on the table several times. "We are no longer interested in such posturings. Harassment is not the issue. The libraries are the issue. Talks are proceeding at a formal level right now. We can only hope for better results there." The four stood and Hague escorted them to the door.

Outside the door, a secret service agent took them in charge. Hague closed the door and turned back to the others. "That," he said, "is that."

"Makes me sick," Lanier said in an undertone.

"Oh?" Cronberry said, rising halfway from her seat. "And what would you have us do, Mr. Lanier? You're the one responsible, you know that? You didn't keep a tight rein on security, and now we have this mess. . . this goddamn diplomatic catastrophe. Why did you ever open the libraries in the first place? Couldn't you just smell the trouble they'd cause? I would have smelled it, by God. The whole place must reek."

"Shut up, Alice," Hoffman said quietly. "Stop behaving like an ass."

Cronberry glared at them all, then sat down and lit a cigarette. The way she fumbled at the lighter and clenched the cigarette between tight fingers made Lanier queasy. We're way out of our depth here, he thought. Children playing with real guns, real bullets.

"The President called yesterday," Hoffman said. "He's very angry about the libraries. He wants them closed and all research halted. He says we've let things get out of control, and I can't really disagree with him. Garry is no more to blame than any of us. At any rate, the President is going to order the Stone Congressional Oversight Committee to put all research on hold until further notice. The Russians are going to get what they want."

"How long do we have?" Lanier asked.

"Until the order goes through channels? A week, probably."

Lanier grinned and shook his head.

"What's there to be amused about?" Cronberry asked coldly, wrapped in a loose shell of smoke.

"The records say we have two weeks before the war."

Hoffman invited Lanier to her office for drinks that evening. He arrived at seven, after a quick dinner in the JPL cafeteria, and again checked his agents at the door. Hoffman's JPL office was as sparce and utilitarian as the one in her home in New York, the major difference being more shelves of memory blocks.

"We tried," she said, handing him a Scotch neat. "Well." She toasted him with a raised Dubonnet on the rocks.

"We did," he said.

"You look tired."

"I am tired."

"Weight of the world on your shoulders," she said, looking at him cautiously.

"Weight of a couple of universes," he said. "I'm discovering how tough a bastard I am, Judith."

"Me too. I talked to the President again this afternoon."

"Oh?"

"Yes. I'm afraid I called him an idiot. I'll very likely be fired or forced to resign by the time you're in orbit."

"Good for you," Lanier said.

"Sit. Talk to me. Tell me what it's like. I want to get up there so badly. . . .” She pulled out chairs and they sat across from each other.

"Why?" Lanier asked. "You've seen the blocks, all the information."

"That's a stupid question."

"It is," Lanier admitted. They were both getting slightly tipsy before the alcohol could possible have had time to take effect. Lanier had noticed the condition before, in times of stress.

"Goddamn, I sure understand what the Russians are worried about," Hoffman said after a moment's silence. "For the last ten years we've been beating the pants off of them in every area—diplomatically, technologically. In space and on Earth. Hares to their tortoise. They're dinosaurs and they hate anything faster and more adaptable. Why, young Ivan doesn't know a computer terminal from a tractor wheel. Even the Chinese are beating them."

"The Chinese might edge ahead of us in a generation or two."

"Good. Serve us right." Hoffman said. "Now the Stone comes down, and we intercept it, claim it, let them have little useless nibbles of it in the interests of international cooperation. . . . And whatever's on the Stone, it might just as well be a tombstone for the Eastern bloc. We'll be in control of unimagined technology. Jesus. I wish we could sit down with them and reason. . . but they're too scared, and our President is too damned stupid."

"I don't think stupid is the right word. Shell-shocked, perhaps."

"He knew a little about the Stone when he ran for office."

"He knew it was coming," Lanier said. "None of us knew much more than that."

"Well, fuck him if he can't take a joke," Hoffman said, staring at the shutters on the window. "When you were a pilot, way back when," she continued, "you crashed once. Where did you want to be before your plane went down?"

"At the controls," Lanier said without hesitation. "I wanted to save the plane so badly I couldn't even think about punching out. I thought it—the plane—was absolutely beautiful, and I wanted to save it. I also wanted to keep it from killing other people. So we both landed in a lake."

"I'm not nearly so brave," Hoffman said. "I think the Earth is beautiful, and I want to save it. I've been working my buns off to do so. Now all I get is shit. Your airplane didn't thumb its nose at you. It didn't call you on the carpet for your best work, did it?"

Lanier shook his head.

"That's what's happening here. So now I'm saying to myself, 'The hell with 'em.' I want to be up on the Stone when it happens."

"If everything goes to hell on Earth, we're not going to get down from the Stone for years. Not even the lunar settlement will be able to help us."

"Earth will survive?"

"Barely," Lanier said. "A year of sub-zero temperatures throughout the northern hemisphere, plagues and starvation, revolutions. If the libraries reflect our reality, maybe three or four billion people will die overall."

"But it isn't the end of the world."

"No. It may not even happen."

"Do you believe that?"

Lanier kept his silence for a long moment. Hoffman waited, hardly blinking. "No. Not now. Perhaps if the Stone had never arrived."

Hoffman put down her drink and ran her fingers around the rim of the glass. "Well. I'm going to try to get up there. Don't ask how. If I make it, I'll see you on the Stone. If I don't. . . You've been good to work with. I'd enjoy working with you more." She reached out and drew him to her, kissing him on the forehead. "Thank you."

A half hour later, after they had drained three drinks apiece, she escorted him to the door. She took a folded piece of paper and pressed it into his hand.

"Now take this and use it however you will. You can give it to Gerhardt if you want, or you can destroy it. It's probably not that important now."

"What is it?" he asked.

"The name of the Russian operative on the Stone."

Lanier's hand tightened on the paper, but he did not unfold it.

"The President is moving quicker than I thought he would," Hoffman said. "Sometime tomorrow, you're going to be ordered to close the libraries. He wants to convince the Soviets we're on the up-and-up."

"That's insane," Lanier said.

"Not very. It's politics. He's got big problems. Did I just say that? Yes. I even understand the President now. I must be drunk. Anyway, does it matter?"

"It sure as hell could."

"Then do what you wish. It'll take them a couple of weeks to find out and mount an effort to remove you." She smiled. "As soon as Vasquez does her stuff, you let me know somehow, okay? Not all the cards have been played yet. There are senators and a couple of members of the Joint Chiefs still on my side."

"I'll do that," he said. He took the paper and put it in his pocket.

She opened the door for him. "Good-bye, Garry."

The agent several steps down the hall regarded him with a deadpan expression.

Do I really want to know?

He had to know.

He had to get the Stone ready for whatever would come.

Chapter Fifteen

Heineman piloted the V/STOL alone, using the aircraft's rocket to push the tuberider along the axis from the first chamber bore hole. It had been only forty minutes since he had linked the tuberider and V/STOL in the south polar bore hole. The "ground" surrounded him on all sides, giving him a peculiar sensation of vertigo at first; which way should he orient? But he adapted quickly.

Using radio beacons set up in each chamber, coordinating through the V/STOL's guidance computers, he could tell his position within a few centimeters. Cautiously and lovingly, he eased the assembly from chamber to chamber, using temporary propulsion packs on the tuberider and the aircraft, coordinated through the aircraft's own customized guidance system.

Coming up on each bore hole was a thrill that raised the hair on his neck. In the center of the massive gray caps, that tiny hole—wider than a football field, no challenge really, but from a distance almost invisible. . .

He flew steadily over the fifth chamber's darkly Gothic landscape of clouds, mountains and chasms. Entering the bore hole between the fifth and sixth chambers, he issued a terse instruction to a crew of his engineers waiting near the seventh chamber singularity: "Take 'er down. I'm coming through in a few minutes." They acknowledged and began to dismantle the top of the research scaffold.

It was Heineman's intention to thread the needle without readjustment, slowly but expertly.

The mated vehicles were monstrous from an aerodynamic viewpoint, and cumbersome from any perspective, but the flight was not difficult. The near-vacuum of the Stone axis offered no resistance.

Even concentrating on the last phase of the delivery, Heineman couldn't stop thinking about flying the aircraft.

Reentry was the uncertain part. Once the tuberider was threaded and steady on the singularity, Heineman would test the clamps by moving thirty-one kilometers down the axis. Descent would be much less complicated—so he was told—that far down the corridor; he could descend in almost a straight line instead of the spiral necessary within the rotating chamber.

The V/STOL would unlink and propel itself away from the axis with short bursts from hydrogen peroxide motors. Then it would fall steadily, encountering resistance at the level of the atmosphere field barrier and plasma tube, about twenty-two kilometers above the chamber floor, three kilometers from the axis. Jets and upwellings from coriolis and compressional heating made the first thin kilometer of air tricky; the V/STOL's pilot would have to forget a lot of the truisms learned on Earth.

The designers had estimated the aircraft's fuel use. It could make twenty ascents and descents, and fly approximately four thousand kilometers at cruising speed in the air, before having to tap the tuberider fuel, oxygen and hydrogen peroxide tanks. Fully loaded, the tuberider could refuel the V/STOL five times. And when it was clamped to the singularity, the tuberider could travel indefinitely using the spatial transform effect.

Now, both plane and tuberider were traveling light. Once they were threaded, crews could load them with fuel and oxygen from the staging area of the seventh chamber bore hole.

The sixth chamber rotated around him, a cylindrical cloudscape with broken patches revealing the machines he had only learned about three days before.

He was half-convinced the archaeologists and physicists had conspired to keep him away from the most interesting parts of the Stone out of sheer spite. "No moving parts," Carrolson had said. "We didn't think you'd be interested." He gritted his teeth, then blew out his breath with a whistle. The sixth chamber machinery was overawing. He had never dreamed he would see anything like it, even on the Stone. It almost took his attention away from piloting the tuberider and V/STOL.

The last bore hole approached rapidly. He slowed the assembly and nudged the craft one last time. Allowing for some mid-hole corrections and drifts caused by irregularities imposed on the Stone by its Earth–Moon orbit, he would be able to slide right onto the singularity, slow the assembly with the clamps and then proceed with the tuberider test.

"There it is," Carrolson said, pointing. She stared through the polarized and filtered binoculars at the plasma tube where it joined the southern cap, then handed the glasses to Farley. Farley squinted through them and clearly saw the mated vehicles, seemingly poised without support; the singularity was impossible to make out from this distance.

"He's going to fly it down today?"

Carrolson nodded. "Heineman will try it out and stay here until Lanier returns."

Rimskaya walked up behind them and stood silent while they passed the glasses back and forth. "Ladies," he said some moments later, "we have work to do."

"Certainly," Farley said. Carrolson grinned behind Rimskaya's back. They returned to the tent.

Chapter Sixteen

Vasquez continued her tour of the third chamber city by way of the library simulation. She discovered she could wander at will through the record, taking any route she chose, although she was still unable to enter private spaces.

Mostly, she used the tours to relax between long periods of heavy brainwork. She also made tours on foot; the independence she felt, going from place to place in the Stone with a pocket map or slate and memory blocks—no one questioning her about her intentions—was exhilarating. She could almost shut out the dark thoughts—but not quite.

She rode the trains from the sixth to the third chamber at least once every twenty-four hours. Occasionally, she used the second chamber library, sometimes staying over and sleeping on the cot in the darkened reading room. That wasn't her favorite place to sleep—she much preferred the tent in the seventh chamber, near people—but it was the most private. Not even Takahashi used the second chamber library often.

The libraries were the two foci of her work. As the problems moved from point to point on their routes through her mind, she occupied herself with gathering more information than she actually needed, and reveled in the intellectual luxury.

When she asked for reference materials having to do with Stone design, the library displayed its solid-looking and convincing black sphere surrounded by an outward-facing circle of spikes. A pleasant voice would announce: "There is no current access to that material. Please consult an active librarian."

Early on, she sensed a pattern, and it proved very frustrating. Virtually all material dealing with the theory and construction of the sixth chamber was inaccessible. There was no material on the seventh chamber and the corridor—the response for her queries in that area was simply, "Not in records," accompanied by a black bar.

While fuming over these rebuffs, it occurred to her that she might go back through the records and look up her own papers—even future papers—to see if she had a counterpart, and if that counterpart had made a mark in the Stone's universe.

But she had an almost superstitious reluctance to probe that deeply. When she finally did come across her own name, it was by accident.

The only real clues to the sixth chamber were in the Alexandria library, bound into a seventy-five-volume set of basic instruction manuals that looked as if it had been printed for handymen and engineers as a collector's edition, or a testimonial for retirees.

It was in the forty-fifth volume, a hefty tome of two thousand pages containing theory of early sixth chamber machinery and inertial damping, that she found her name in a footnote.

In the dark reading room, with the desk lamps and strip lighting providing the only illumination, she stared at the reference, her back stiffening.

"Patricia Luisa Vasquez," she read, as if the sounds were magic, "Theory of n-Spatial Geodesics as Applied to Newtonian Physics with a Special Discourse on ρ-Simplon World Lines." She had never written a paper with that title—not yet, at any rate.

It would be published in 2023, in an issue of the Post-Death Journal of Accepted Physics.

She would survive the Death.

And contribute, at least in this small way, to the construction of the Stone.

She found the article in the Thistledown City library, where it was apparently regarded as too archaic to be interdicted. She read it, palms damp, and found much of it very difficult. Weaving her way through the unfamiliar symbols and obscure terminology, trying to get the gist of what her counterpart would write, eighteen years from now—or had written, centuries past—a ghost of an explanation occurred to her.

In the Stone's revised original plans, the sole purpose of the sixth chamber machinery had been to damp the momentum of selected objects within the Stone, in directions roughly parallel to the axis. This function had eliminated the need for banked channels of rivers, special architecture for buildings, even for a different design in the chambers themselves.

At the beginning of the Stone's construction, an upward limit had been placed on the Stone's acceleration and deceleration of 3 percent g. With the sixth chamber machinery, there was no need to limit the acceleration at all. The Stone's chambers became part of a controlled and separate reference frame, independent of outside influence.

Chapters in the manuals explained how the damping system did not operate universally; if it had, the Stone's rotation would have been useless, and everything within the chambers would have floated around weightless. The damping was highly selective.

And that was super-science. The implications were astonishing. What the sixth chamber machinery did, in effect, was alter the mass-space-time character of everything in the Stone.

That was little short of being able to manipulate space and time in such a way as to create the corridor.

Yet the Stone did not travel faster than light, and it did not possess artificial gravity—not in the first six chambers, at any rate. Those achievements could also have been expected in light of the theory of inertial damping. Why hadn't the Stone's engineers and physicists been able to close the conceptual loop?

She returned to the Alexandria library and skimmed the manuals, but in themselves they provided no answer, concerned as they were with theory and maintenance of specific Stone machinery.

On her cot in the reading room, she buried her face in her palms, squeezing the bridge of her nose and rubbing her eyes. Her brain felt tight. Too much concentration. Too little time, trying to force the queued problems, trying to emerge with answers ahead of schedule.

She had to have a break. She stood and followed the strip lighting to the lower floor, emerging in the tubelight and sitting on a bench surrounding a treeless concrete planter.

She tried to shut out all conscious thought, to get back into the state, but she couldn't.

Thoughts of Paul and her family kept interposing.

"I am losing myself," she murmured, shaking her head. She was becoming nothing but a series of thoughts floating in gray void, a cerebral point. Overworking.

Then—a gap in the void.

She had once studied fraction spaces—individual dimensions operating without counterparts, and dimensions of less than unit numbers. Time without space; length without breadth, depth or time. Probability without extension. Half-spaces, quarter-spaces, spaces composed of irrational fractions. All to be handled by fractional transforms and fractal geometric analysis. She had even begun to chart the geodesics of higher fractional spaces, and the way these geodesics might project in five- and four-space.

She dropped her head between her knees. Her thoughts were zagging. No order, no discipline.

The corridor—just an extension of the sixth chamber machinery, designed for inertial damping.

On a journey of centuries, the Stoners had changed their minds, or perhaps lost sight of the original goals. A world unto itself, the Stone had impressed upon succeeding generations its own character, until it seemed perfectly natural to live in rotating cylinders, hollowed out of asteroid rock. In time, perhaps even the asteroid had seemed to fade out of immediate awareness, leaving only life within cylinders.

Squeezed and confined across centuries, nurtured by the perceptions of the Stone, the Stoners' genius erupted. They became nothing short of godlike, making their own universe, and shaping it in the image of the world they were most familiar with.

When they found a way out of the Stone without compromising the ultimate mission—

When they found they could create an incredible extension of their world—

Would any of the Stoners have been able to resist the temptation? (Yes. . . the orthodox Naderites—and they had stayed behind for a century.)

So the sixth chamber engineers, headed by the enigmatic Konrad Korzenowski, had created the corridor, imbued it with certain properties, played with its potentials. They had created the wells and found some way to fill the corridor with air and soil, with landscapes equal if not superior to the valley floors of their everyday lives.

Her body relaxed. She sat up. Some of the symbols in her as-yet-unwritten article made sense to her now; she could riddle their meaning. Her mind unfogged and she seemed to see all the problems interacting at once, like workers in a skyscraper with glass walls and floors.

The Stoners had created the corridor to relieve cramped conditions, confinement of the mind if not any real confinement of their personal space. (The records made it clear that the Stone had never become overcrowded.)

But the corridor—and this came to her abruptly, without precedent—the corridor carried a certain unexpected liability, a side effect they might not have been aware of at first. . . .

Or never became aware of.

By creating the corridor, they had knocked the Stone out of its own continuum. The image that came to mind—all too irritatingly specific, since she wasn't at all sure it was accurate—was that of the corridor as a length of whip, and the Stone as the tip. With the creation of the whip, and its inevitable uncoiling in superspace, the tip had been snapped out of one universe—

And into hers.

Four hours later, she woke up, her body stiff and her mouth tasting like mud. She lifted her aching back from the bench and blinked in the tubelight. Her head ached abominably.

But she was on to something.

Discovering they had made it impossible to fulfill the Stone's original mission, in time all the Stoners had migrated down the corridor.

She stood and brushed down her jumpsuit. Now she had to go back and put foundations beneath all the hypothetical air castles she had built.

And find some aspirin.

Chapter Seventeen

Lanier had kept the paper unread in his pocket on the shuttle and OTV, dreading that moment when he would have to know and have to act against a colleague, even a friend.

The OTV had docked with the Stone and he had disembarked, made a brief report to Roberta Pickney and the staging area communications team, and passed on his recommendation to Kirchner that Stone external security should be especially watchful.

As for internal security—

It wasn't really supposed to be his job. Had Gerhardt already received the same information awaiting him in the folded paper? How had Hoffman come across the name, and why had she given it to him?

He received reports from the various team leaders by way of a messenger bearing a slate. He floated in a small anteroom adjacent to the staging area, wrapped in one of the mesh cylindrical slings that served as bunks for axis-bound workers; he read, and absorbed, and realized he was only delaying the inevitable.

Boarding the zero elevator, accompanied by a taciturn marine guard, he removed the paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

"As soon as possible, I'd like to take a truck to the second well circuit," Patricia said. Takahashi held open the tent flap for her and she entered. Carrolson and Farley napped in one corner of the central room; Wu and Chang worked over slates and processors in another. Takahashi followed her inside.

"On a mental roll?" he asked. Carrolson and Farley grumbled awake simultaneously and blinked at the intrusion and noise.

"We have to make space-time spot checks," Patricia said. Her face was drawn and there were pastel purple smudges of fatigue under her eyes. "I've asked Mr. Heineman to help. There's a directional beacon on the airplane and we can pick up that signal with some security team equipment, feed it into a frequency analyzer, find out if we're moving faster or slower in time by comparing our readings as the plane passes overhead."

"You've reached some conclusions?" Carrolson asked, sitting up on her cot.

I think so," Patricia said. "But nothing's definite without evidence. I've made some predictions and if they're corroborated, then I might hypothesize."

"Want to tell us about the predictions?" Takahashi asked, sitting beside Carrolson on the cot.

Patricia shrugged. "Okay. The corridor could be dimpled. Each dimple is a fluctuation in the corridor's space-time, marking some point of potential entry into another universe. The dimples should reflect a minor change in geometric constants like pi; maybe in physical constants as well. Wherever there's a dimple—or a potential for a dimple—we may also find time fluctuations."

"Does that mean the corridor is full of potential wells?"

"I think so. Only a few have been selected—tuned, as it were." She looked up at the roof of the tent, trying to find a way to explain what she saw in her head. "The dimples butt up against each other. There could be an infinite number of them. And a well opened in a dimple—potential or already tuned—could lead to another universe."

Takahashi shook his head. "This is getting entirely too weird."

"Yeah," Patricia said. "I'd like to hold off on more explanations until Garry returns."

"He's coming down any time now. He entered the bore hole a few hours ago," Carrolson said. She slapped her knee and stood up. "Which reminds me. We're having a dance tomorrow in the first chamber. All are invited. It's not exactly Garry's homecoming, but it will serve as such. We all need to let down our hair a little bit."

"I'm a good dancer," Wu said. "Foxtrot, twist, swim."

"Listen to him! You think we thirty years behind the times," Chang said.

"Forty," Wu corrected.

"And if we can peel Heineman away from his toy," Carrolson said, "I'll teach the old coot a few hot steps."

Lanier dropped the paper on his desk in the science team compound office and reached for the com button. He hesitated before pressing it.

He thought he had figured out why Hoffman had given him the name. "Ann," he said. "I want to see Rupert Takahashi in the compound as soon as possible."

He hoped he was doing what Hoffman had hinted he should do: defusing the bomb the Stone had become. . . .

Lance Corporal Thomas Oldfield, twenty-four, had spent the last six months on the Stone, and he regarded them as the most exciting time of his life, though in fact there wasn't much overt excitement. Most of the time he stood guard duty in the second chamber, just outside the tunnel to the first chamber. He spent many of his hours alternately keeping an eye on the road, the zero bridge and near city, and examining the distant curve of the opposite side. He was usually accompanied by at least one colleague, but today a special detail had been ordered to accompany a scientist into the first chamber from the subway terminal in the city, and now he was left alone. He didn't expect any trouble. In the entire time he had spent on the Stone, nothing untoward had happened. He had never even seen a boojum.

He didn't believe they existed.

Oldfield whistled to himself as he stepped outside the booth and looked down the length of the bridge. Deserted. "Fine day, Private," he said briskly, saluting ceremoniously. "Yes, sir. Fine day, sir. Always a fine day."

He wondered if technically speaking it had been the very same day since he had arrived. One long-drawn-out day, no intervening night. The weather changed now and then—rain, sometimes mist from the river. Did that serve to divide the time?

He inspected his Apple and tested it behind the booth on a cement block lined with foil ration packages. Each invisible tooth of light blew a foil package off the block. When he was relieved, he would line up the pierced foil packages for the next watch to test their weapons. It had become a ritual.

He walked around the booth to the door, stopped and turned.

He couldn't begin to describe what he saw.

He didn't even think about the Apple. He thought about reports and making a fool of himself.

It stood about seven feet high, skinny, narrow head like a sidewise board with two jutting and unblinking eyes regarding him calmly. Its two long arms emerged from the torso well below where the shoulders should have been and were covered with something similar to the foil ration packets. The legs were short and powerful looking. Its skin was smooth and reflective—not shiny or slimy, but polished like old wood.

It acknowledged his presence with a polite nod.

He nodded back, and then, under the pressure of all his past training, raised the Apple and said, "Identify yourself."

But by that time it was gone.

Oldfield had the impression it had entered the tunnel, but he couldn't be sure.

His face reddened with anger and frustration. He had had his chance. He had seen a boojum and he hadn't buzzed it down so others could see it. He had followed the pattern of everyone who had ever claimed—officially or unofficially—to have seen one.

Oldfield had always thought he was made of sterner stuff. He pounded his fist against the booth and punched the emergency button on the com.

Chapter Eighteen

Lanier met Takahashi in a conference cubicle at the end of the second floor hall. Carrolson had joined Takahashi and the escort, unaware of Lanier's purpose. That wouldn't cause any problem, Lanier decided; best to keep up an atmosphere of normality. He asked for lunch to be brought to his office and they ate quietly before he outlined his new orders. When he was finished, Carrolson shook her head and sighed.

"Vasquez wants to mount another expedition, this time to the second circuit," she said. "I'm sure she won't like being barred from the libraries."

"Nobody goes into the libraries," Lanier said. "They're strictly off limits. And no second expedition. We freeze all activity on the Stone. I want the archaeologists back at the compounds, and the bore-hole studies shut down, too."

Takahashi regarded him dourly. "What happened with Hoffman?" he asked. Lanier didn't look at him; eating lunch together, he thought, was the last amenity in their relationship. But now was the time. As gracefully as he could manage, he asked Carrolson to leave. She gave him a puzzled look, but he barely noticed her going out the door. All his attention was focused on Takahashi.

"I'm going to defuse a very bad situation," Lanier said when they were alone. "I want you to help me with the defusing, and I want you to report it to your bosses."

"Pardon?" Takahashi asked. The mathematician's hand was a little less steady around the glass of orange juice he had been drinking.

"I want you to report it to your superiors, however you've been doing that."

"I don't understand."

"Nor do I," Lanier said, unmoving in his seat. "I'm not informing Gerhardt, though my instincts tell me I should. You will remain free to observe that we are shutting everything down until negotiations have resolved our differences. You will personally investigate and verify that we have found no information about weapons in the libraries."

"Garry, what are you talking about?"

"I know you are an agent for the Soviets."

Takahashi's jaw muscles tightened and he regarded Lanier from under straight, tense brows.

"There's a dance tonight," Lanier said. "Carrolson will expect all of us to attend. And we will. Gerhardt will be there. He won't be told, because he'd slap you in the bore-hole detention center and ship you back on the next OTV run, in irons, so to speak. I don't want that."

"Out of respect?" Takahashi asked, blinking.

"No," Lanier said. "I don't fall for that old shit about just doing our jobs. You're a goddamned traitor. I don't know where it all began, but it ends here, and I want it to end well. The information you fed back to Earth has damned near started a war. Inform your superiors that everything is cooling off, that we are backing away from the libraries and that in the long run, we may evacuate the Stone. Pull out, let everybody settle their differences. Understood?"

Takahashi said nothing.

"Do you know what's happening on Earth?" Lanier asked.

"No, not precisely," Takahashi said solemnly. "Perhaps we should explain a few things to each other. To help defuse the situation, as you say. Their stake in this is as big as ours."

"Ours?"

"I am an American, Garry. I did this to protect us as well."

Lanier felt his stomach go sour. He clenched his teeth together and turned his chair away from Takahashi. He fought back an urge to ask Takahashi if there had been a lot of money involved; he did not want to know.

"Right. Here's how we stand."

And he told Takahashi what he had learned on Earth.

He hoped to hell this was what Hoffman had intended.

Late in the afternoon, the sociology group presented another team report in the main compound lecture hall. About twenty team members were in the audience; not many more than sat on the low stage, behind the lectern. Rimskaya stood to one side while Wallace Rainer introduced the first of four sociologists.

Lanier watched and listened from the back, slumped in the seat. Ten minutes into the first presentation, Patricia sat beside him and folded her arms.

The first speaker outlined a brief hypothesis of Stone family groupings. She went into some depth on triad families, chiefly found among the Naderites.

Patricia glanced at Lanier. "Why am I barred from the libraries?" she asked in an undertone.

"Everybody is," he said. "As of today."

"Yes, but why?"

"It's very complicated. I can explain later."

Patricia turned away and sighed. "Okay," she said. "I'll do as much as I can outside. That's still allowed."

He nodded and felt a sharp surge of empathy for her.

The second speaker was Tanya Smith—no relation to Robert Smith—and she briskly elaborated on the previously presented report on the evacuation of the Stone.

Patricia half listened.

"It now seems apparent that a resettlement committee handled applications for corridor migration and coordinated transportation—"

Patricia glanced at Lanier again. His eyes met hers.

It was all crazy, no way to run a railroad, much less a huge research effort.

In its most crucial hour, the human race was represented by a team of blindly searching, hog-tied and gagged intellectuals. Thinking of Takahashi, and how useless all the security had been, Lanier's stomach went sour again.

The plan, of course, had been to allow researchers on the lower levels of security clearance and badge status to do their work as best they could, watched over by a senior member with almost full clearance. Their findings would then be filtered and collated and assembled into final statements, checked with corresponding documents in the libraries. It had to be that way. With so few people cleared to do research in the libraries, and with lifetimes of information stored away, decades would have passed before substantial overviews emerged.

That had been the reasoning, at any rate. Lanier had gone along because he was still, after all, a military man at heart, obeying if not implicitly trusting those beyond Hoffman in the chain of command.

Not that it mattered.

Not that it mattered one goddamn bit, because it was all being shut down anyway. They were going to pack up and go home and Takahashi would (if all went well) report that a good-faith effort was being made to placate the worried Soviets.

But the Soviets would still not be allowed into the libraries. Unless the President was totally mad. Only one hand in Pandora's box at a time.

He had seen some of the material on the Stoners' technological advances. He had experienced the education system used in the library. He had touched on the ways the Stoners had tampered with biology and psychology. (Tampered—did that betray a prejudice? Yes. Some of it had shaken him to his core and contributed to his worst bouts of being Stoned.) He was uncertain what his own beloved country would do with such power, much less the Soviets.

Patricia sat in on the charade a few more minutes, then left. He stood to follow after her and caught up near the corner of the women's bungalow.

"Just a minute," he said. She halted and half turned, not looking at him but at a potted lime tree growing in a wide space between two buildings. "I don't intend for you to stop your work. Not at all."

"I won't," she said.

"I just wanted to make that clear."

"It's clear." Now she faced him directly, hands slipping into her pockets. "You can't be happy with the way things are going."

His eyes widened, and he drew his head back, feeling a sudden anger at her presumption, obtuseness, whatever it was she rolled up into one short sentence.

"You can't be a happy man, keeping us here, knowing all that."

"I'm not keeping you here."

"You've never talked to me, to any of us that I've seen. You say things but you don't talk with us."

The anger evaporated and left behind an equally sudden pit of lostness, aloneness. "Rank hath its privileges," he said softly.

"I don't think so." Squinting at him. She wanted to challenge, to provoke. "What kind of person are you? You seem kind of. . . solid. Frozen. Are you really, or is that just a privilege?"

Lanier lifted a pointed finger and waggled it at her, his face creasing with a grim smile. "You do your job," he said. "I'll do mine."

"You still aren't talking."

"What the hell do you want?" he said in a harsh undertone, stepping closer to her, shoulders hunched forward and chin drawn back almost into his neck, an incredibly tense and uncomfortable posture, Patricia thought. She was startled by the sudden breakthrough.

"I want somebody else to tell me what to feel," she said.

"Well, I can't do that." Lanier's shoulders corrected themselves and he extended his jaw. "If we start thinking about anything—"

"But the work, the work," Patricia completed, on the edge of mockery. "Jesus, I'm doing the work, Garry. I'm working all the time." There were tears in her eyes, and to her further shock, she saw tears in his. Lanier's hand moved to his face but he held them back and one tear fell to his cheek, then down the furrow at the side of his mouth.

"Okay," he said. He wanted to leave but he couldn't. "So we're both human. Is that what you wanted to know?"

"I'm working," Patricia said, "but inside I'm just bloody. Maybe that's it."

Quickly, he wiped his eyes. "I'm not a snowball," he said defensively. "And it isn't fair to expect anything more from me, right now, than what I'm giving. Do you see that?"

"This is really peculiar," Patricia said, lifting her hands to her face, as if to mimic him. Her fingers went no higher than her cheeks, which were hot. "I'm sorry. But you followed me."

"I followed you. Shall we leave it at this?"

Patricia nodded, ashamed. "I never thought you were cold."

"Fine," Lanier said. He turned and walked quickly toward the cafeteria.

In her room, she pressed her fists into her eyes, now dry, and tried to mouth the words to a song she had dearly loved as a child. She couldn't quite remember them—or wasn't certain she remembered them correctly. But wherever you go, she ventured to accompany the tune, whatever you do, I'll be watching you. . . .

Chapter Nineteen

Patricia sat in a director's chair on the roof of the women's barracks. She glanced at the date on her watch as those attending the dance gathered in the science team compound. The war was scheduled to begin in seven days.

Everything was coming down on her too quickly. She could render opinions but she could not convince herself of their accuracy. She could, for example, tell Lanier that the Stone could not have been shunted very far from its original continuum. Stone history and their current reality would not differ substantially. Perhaps not enough to prevent war.

Perhaps the Soviet knowledge that a war was imminent would turn them around, make them back off, prevent the war. . . .

Perhaps the presence of the Stone, and the clear technological advantage that it gave to the Western bloc countries, would push the Soviets over the edge anyway. . . .

Perhaps the Stone simply made an effect and canceled that effect, and would leave hardly a ripple on the immediate future of the Earth. . . .

Carrolson and Lanier entered the compound. Patricia could see them greeting team members as they arrived from the other chambers.

The ragged, bloody feeling inside had passed. She didn't feel angry or sad. She didn't really even feel alive. The only thing that gave her any joy now was sinking into the state, continuing her work, bathing in the brilliance and majesty of the corridor.

She would have to make an appearance, however. She expected it of herself. Patricia had always resisted playing the reclusive genius and avoiding contact with others. Resisting was not the same as denial of the urge's existence; she did want to stay away, to go to her quarters and work. The thought of dancing under the eternal tubelight (the dance was being held in the open) and making small talk—essentially, of going on the social roster, if only for a few hours—frightened her. She wasn't sure she could maintain her temper, the balance that kept her from dissolving into tears of rage and frustration.

She descended the stairs and left the barracks, hands in pockets, forcing her chin higher as she approached the milling crowd.

Two soldiers, two biologists and two engineers had built their own synthesizer and electric guitars out of discarded electronics. The story had been circulating for some weeks that the band was tolerable—perhaps even good. This was their first time in front of an audience, and they seemed coolly professional as they tuned and adjusted the amplifiers.

Loudspeakers of a peculiar design had been cadged by archaeologists working in Alexandria and offered up for the dance as a kind of goodwill sacrifice, an atonement for their fussy protectiveness. The speakers had been set up at corners of the rectangular dance area, an unused acre reserved for future buildings. No wires went to the speakers; the music was broadcast to them on a special frequency through a low-power transmitter. The sound coming out of them was somewhat metallic, but they were serviceable. Heineman inspected one casually and said, "I'm not sure what this is. It isn't a loudspeaker."

"It's working, isn't it?" Carrolson said, sticking close to her intended dance partner.

Heineman agreed that it was producing sound from the beamed signal, but went no further than that. The question was never satisfactorily settled.

Beneath the steady tubelight, security team members took turns dancing with the scientists and technicians. The Soviet group stood together to one side, playing wallflowers. Hua Ling, Wu, Chang and Farley joined in energetically, though they had already been informed of the shutdown.

The band switched to older acid rock for a few selections, but that didn't suit the mood and they reluctantly returned to more modern music.

Patricia danced once with Lanier, one of the Japanese waltzes that had become popular in the last few years. At the conclusion, as they held hands at arm's length and bobbed around one another, Lanier nodded mysteriously and smiled at Patricia. She felt a flush work up her neck to her face. At the dance's conclusion, he held her close and said, "Not your fault, Patricia. You've done great. A real team member."

They separated and Patricia retreated to the sidelines, confused, her sensation of nullity broken. Had she really expected or wanted approval from Lanier? Apparently; his words pleased her.

Wu asked her to dance and proved to be a capable partner. She then sat out the rest of the festivities. Lanier rejoined her during a break; he had been dancing rather feverishly with a number of partners, Farley and Chang among them.

"Enjoying yourself?" he asked.

She nodded. Then she said, "No, not really."

"Neither am I, if the truth be known."

"You're a good dancer, though," Patricia said.

Lanier shrugged. "Have to stop thinking sometime, right?"

She couldn't agree with that. There was so little time. "I have to talk to you," she said.

"On recreation time?"

"Is here okay?" she asked, simultaneously. The noise was loud enough that they could hardly be overheard.

"As good a place as any, I suppose," Lanier said. He looked around for Takahashi; he was on the opposite side of the dance quad, nowhere near the Russians.

She nodded and again her eyes filled with tears. Because he had said something nice to her, now she would open up and express her worst fears, her darkest opinions. "I've tried to calculate how big a snap the corridor's creation would have given the Stone."

"How big?" Lanier asked, keeping an eye on people passing close enough to hear.

"Not very big," she said. "It's a complicated question. But not big at all."

"We're on, then?"

Her throat tightened. "It's possible. Is that why you really wanted me on the Stone? Just to say that?"

He shook his head. "Hoffman wanted you here. She told me I was responsible for you. I just put you to work." He reached into his pocket and brought out an envelope, opening it and withdrawing two letters. "I haven't been able to give you these before. No, amend that. It slipped my mind until now. I brought them back with me on the shuttle."

She took the letters from his hand and looked at them. One was from her parents, the other from Paul. "May I write back?" she asked.

"Say anything you like," he said. "Within reason."

The postmarks were a week old.

A week passed. The day scheduled for Armageddon passed.

Patricia stayed in her quarters, working harder than ever with the resources left to her.

She could not change her initial opinion.

Each day, then, was a victory, with reality showing her how wrong she could be.

Chapter Twenty

Lanier exited the elevator and took hold of the cable, maneuvering into the cart. The slightly built driver—a woman in air force blue coveralls—moved the cart off its normal route and followed a track into Kirchner's staging and practice area. Lanier had been there only twice before, each time to meet with the admiral. He clung to the cart handgrips and tried to prepare an answer for the questions he knew would be asked.

Hoffman had hinted in her last communication that the information she had given him had finally reached the Joint Chiefs. That meant Kirchner and Gerhardt had it now.

Gerhardt's aide met him in the short tunnel before the converted cargo storage area where Kirchner's bore-hole team practiced. He led Lanier into a bare-rock cubicle lined with makeshift file cabinets. One wide vein of nickel-iron had been polished and wire-brushed to serve as a projection screen. Kirchner floated into a harness, viewing readouts on a slate, as Lanier was escorted in and announced. Gerhardt pushed himself along the hall and entered after him.

Kirchner nodded at them both. The admiral did not appear comfortable.

"Mr. Lanier—used to be lieutenant commander, did it not?" Gerhardt asked brusquely. He was a squat, trim man with wiry black hair and a broad squashed nose. His dress differed little from that of his internal defense marines: green uniform, black boots with soft rubber soles for traction.

"Yes, sir." Lanier waited out the pause.

"You did not inform us that Takahashi is a Soviet operative, Mr. Lanier," Kirchner said.

"No, I did not."

"You learned of this almost two weeks ago and did not inform your security team leaders of the breach?"

Lanier said nothing.

"You had your reasons," Kirchner offered.

"Yes."

"May we be informed?" Gerhardt asked, his tenor voice tightening slightly.

"It was our intention to give the Russians a little breathing space, to let them see we were backing off. We could not do that if Takahashi was locked up."

"Which I would have done," Gerhardt said.

Lanier nodded.

"You're right. I would have. Do you realize this could put our whole operation in jeopardy? Takahashi could have witnessed our maneuvers here, our preparations for the assault—"

"No, sir. He's kept to the compound except to send messages." Kirchner, his usual taciturn self, was letting Gerhardt administer the dressing-down.

"And he's been sending those messages right over our heads, right along with our alignment beams for OTV docking. Wonderful. I am arranging for his arrest now. I want him shipped back to Earth immediately and I want him tried for treason. Christ, Garry." Gerhardt shook his head vigorously, as if to frighten away insects. "Hoffman wanted this?"

"She implied it."

"She gave you the name. Any results? I mean, have the Russians decided to negotiate yet?"

"No, not that I've heard."

"You're damned right they haven't. They know what we're holding here. You expected them to believe we would just pull back and share it all with them?"

"I thought we needed a breather. Chance to reassess."

"Did Hoffman know what information Takahashi was passing along?" Kirchner asked.

"Yes. Material about the libraries."

"Jesus, Garry, the clown had access to places Kirchner and I can't go. If you ask me, you've screwed this operation up royally. Is there anything I should know that he knows? Or that your sweet little female student has learned?"

"Yes, undoubtedly," Lanier said, keeping calm, letting the general blow off steam. "And you know I won't tell you. You'll have to ask your superiors."

Gerhardt smiled. "Yes. A President—off the record, Garry?—a President who's living in some antebellum dream of democracy, can't even talk about space much less think about it; a Senate composed of his stooges and ass-backwards Republicans grinding out bills on southern reapportionment. . .” He glanced at Kirchner, who shook his head, smiling slightly and looked off at the asteroid rock wall. "Nobody's giving half the attention to the Stone they should—or am I wrong?"

"You're right and wrong. At this moment, I don't think there's any more important topic to the governments of the world than the Stone. Everybody's speculating. The Russians are scared shitless we'll have a technological drop on them. We already do, but the Stone cinches it, doesn't it?"

"What are Kirchner and I doing up here, Garry? Why aren't we kept informed, like you? The Stone's security relies on the Captain and me, but those bastards have pulled curtains around us. We can't get into the libraries, can't see documents. . . . I don't understand. . . some of the weirdest things I've been hearing. It's going to drive me nuts. Isn't it time we cooperate with each other?"

"They have their reasons," Lanier said.

"I've watched you, Garry. You've gone downhill the past year. I don't want to know your secrets for my health's sake. What in hell have we got here?"

Lanier pulled himself into a second harness and gripped the straps. "What are your orders from Earth, Oliver?"

"I am to prepare for imminent assault on the Stone and for the possibility of nuclear confrontation on Earth."

"Can the Russians take the Stone?"

"If they put everything they have in space against us, yes," Kirchner said.

"Do you think they will?"

"Yes," Kirchner said. "How, I don't know. But we're thinking day and night trying to second-guess. On our next close approach, they'll use little skirmishes on Earth—at sea and in Europe—to distract attention from the Stone. They'll come at us and try to take it from us. Or they'll try the Stone first. I don't know."

"Can they succeed?"

Gerhardt raised his hand to interrupt. "Will you level with me on what we're facing, Garry? And let me lock the bastard away?"

Takahashi had probably served his usefulness.

"Yes," Lanier said. "Get him off the Stone as soon as you can. Let the State Department take care of him once he reaches Florida."

"You'll let us into the libraries?" Gerhardt asked.

"No. They're closed. I'll tell you what you need to know."

"Then I'll answer your question," Kirchner said. "The Russians can succeed. They can take us over. If they put everything they have into it, we can't really stop them short of sealing off the bore hole, and we can't do that without sealing ourselves in. We've been ordered not to do that."

"Of course," Lanier said. That would have ended all doubts for the Russians.

"Good talking with you, Garry," Gerhardt said sharply. "Now, let's get busy and move those sons of bitches off the Stone."

"Only Takahashi. Don't touch the Russian team."

"God, no," Gerhardt said. "We won't do that until it's too damned late for anyone to be sensitive."

Chapter Twenty-One

Within the belly of the ocean-launched heavy-lift cargo vehicle, battalion commander Colonel Pavel Mirsky listened to the technicians of Orbital Sentry Platform Three refueling the tanks surrounding and below the cramped aft compartment, preparing them for the next step of the journey.

Mirsky had learned to enjoy weightlessness; it reminded him of skydiving. He had spent so much time falling from airplanes (and floating in the bellies of falling airplanes) in Mongolia and near Tyuratam—and experiencing the real thing during his training in orbit—that weightlessness seemed only natural.

The same could not be said for many of his men. Fully a third were in the throes of desperate space sickness. The three tight, stuffy compartments, stacked atop one another along the heavy-lifter's centerline, had not been designed for comfort. The orange bulkheads and dark green quilted pads snapped over most surfaces did little to make anyone feel secure.

The troops had already spent twenty hours in confinement. In that time they had been subjected to the stress of lift-off and now weightlessness. The motion sickness medicines had turned out to be long past their shelf life, pharmaceutical antiques in plastic bottles.

Mirsky took such things in stride and offered what support to his men that he could.

"What do you think of history now, eh, Viktor?" he asked his deputy commander, Major Viktor Garabedian.

"Fuck history," Garabedian said, waving his hand listlessly. "Shoot me now and get it over with."

"You'll be fine."

"Fuck health."

"Drink some water. Yes, and fuck it, too, if you wish." They hung in their slings in the forward compartment, surrounded by the smells of sickness and tension and the sounds of men trying to be quiet, lying in their slings, some eating out of ration pouches and tubes, most not.

When they had launched out of the Indian Ocean, just over the southern extremity of the Carpenter Ridge, they had used a slot scheduled for resupply of a near-earth Sentry platform. They were the fourth of seven heavy-lifters, one launched from the Moon. The seven bore the code names Zil, Chaika, Zhiguli, Volga, Rolls-Royce, Chevy and Cadillac. Three of the heavy-lifters, including Volga, their own, carried generals—code-named Zev, Lev, and Nev, after a popular comedy dance troupe. Six of the ships carried two hundred men and the small arms and contingency supplies they would need if they succeeded in the first part of their mission. The seventh—Zhiguli—carried heavy artillery, extra supplies and fifty technicians.

If they did not succeed, there would be no need for more supplies. If they did, they would be able to live for years without support from Earth or Moon. So the tacticians had claimed, based on their intelligence.

Mirsky wondered about details that had not been included in his briefings. The method of entry seemed logical enough; there was only one way in, and one way out, both the same. The heavy-lifters were masked, supposedly difficult to detect—great dark bloated cones topped by three blisters containing the cockpit and weapons. Leading surfaces of the vehicles were armored beneath their disposable heat-diffusing panels. The armor had been covered with reflective anti-laser shields. How much that would help them as they entered the very throat of the beast—best not to think about that.

He shut his eyes to review their actions once they had entered. Each of them carried a lightweight spacesuit in a plastic bag; bulky helmet strapped to one side with coiled and tied connectors; backpack with two hours' oxygen and battery power; and in another bag, a parachute and a folded aerodynamic shield. Each also had a kit containing small vapor propellant rocket. The rockets had three nozzles only a few centimeters across, aimed radially outward when attached to the bottom of the backpacks. They were controlled by buttons on flexible cords that laced through loops and fit into pockets just below the gloves. The nozzles in their plastic packages were folded inward and the propellant sloshed gently when moved.

So equipped, clutching their laser rifles and Kalashnikov AKV-297 vacuum projectile weapons (just machine guns with bigger clips and folding stocks, modified not to jam in airless condition) they proposed to win back the honor and historical place of the Soviet Union and its concerned allies. Not that their briefings had included such phrases—no leader would ever admit that honor and place had been lost.

Mirsky was a practical man, however.

In the half-darkness, another man began retching miserably. Perhaps they would be over it in a day or so. That is what the medical experts had told them; no worse than the first few days on a troop ship. Russians had spent enough time in space that what the experts said had to be based in fact.

He tugged on his sling. When the time came, it would convert into a harness. They would all be hitched to the dispersal trolley and pushed, one by one, out of the ship. From that point on, they would be free agents until they gathered within the Potato—the Stone.

Mirsky wondered how the bore hole was defended, and what lay beyond. Details were tantalizingly specific while the overview remained sketchy; they had been told the absolute minimum necessary to let them do their work.

No objective in orbit had ever been assaulted by troops before.

There was no way of knowing or even guessing everything that could go wrong.

Not that any soldier had ever expected to live through a battle. In the Great War, his grandfather had died along the river Bug when Hitler's troops had made their first crossing, and of course there was Kiev. . . .

Russians knew how to die.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hoffman had taken only the most essential items; seven high-density memory blocks out of perhaps two thousand, a few personal effects and two pieces of jewelry given to her by her late husband, ten years before. She had left the Taos home with the doors open; should any vagabonds chance upon it, she would let them have a few days of pleasure.

There was nothing more she could do. She had asked for a few return favors. There was no doubt what was going to happen within the next four days; no one she had talked to had ever seen tensions so high.

Operating on the instinct which had served her so well in the past, Judith Hoffman was on her way to the Stone. She hoped she hadn't started out too late.

She drove the innocuous second car—a leased Buick—for hours across the desert and open countryside, through small towns and medium-sized towns, trying not to think or feel guilty. There was nothing more she could do.

She had been stripped of all authority by an angry and foolish Chief Executive. Three cabinet members had accused her of actually starting this entire mess.

"The hell with them," she whispered.

Beside the turnoff to Vandenberg Launch Center, in a small complex of civilian stores serving the base personnel, she saw a garden shop. Without hesitating, she pulled into the parking lot.

Inside the store, she found a skinny young male clerk in a leaf-green apron and a Robin Hood hat. She asked where the seed racks were. "Vegetable or flower?" he asked.

"Both."

"Aisle H, just across from hand tools, next to mulch."

"Thank you." She found the racks and took one package of everything she could see, two or three of some of the vegetables and fruits. When she was done, her basket was filled with about ten pounds of seed packages. The clerk looked at the pile in bewilderment.

Hoffman threw two hundred-dollar bills down on the counter. "Will that be enough?" she asked.

"I think so—"

"Keep what's left over," she said. "I'm in a hurry and I don't have time to count them all."

"Let me get the manager—"

"I don't have time," she repeated, and she took out another bill and laid it next to the two.

"I'm sure that will cover it," the clerk said quickly, swallowing.

"Thank you. Put them in a box for me?"

Hoffman picked up the box and returned to the car.

Lanier was asleep in his cubicle when the comline chimed. He reached over to press the button, but no message awaited, only silence.

He rubbed his eyes clear, blinking. Then he heard the other comlines in other rooms throughout the barracks, all chiming. Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

He punched a number into the unit. A shaky voice answered, "First chamber communications."

"This is Garry Lanier. Are we having a central alert?"

"Yes, Mr. Lanier."

"Why?" Lanier's voice was infinitely patient.

"I'm not sure, sir."

"I want to speak with axis communications right now."

"Yes, sir."

When a woman's voice answered some seconds later, he requested a briefing.

"We have DefCon three from London and Moscow," the woman said. "Radar activity is up, especially orbital tracking. There's been some action against communications and navigation satellites."

"Any messages from Florida or Sunnyvale?"

"None, sir."

"Messages from the lunar settlement?"

"Nothing to us, sir. They're farside to us now."

"I'm coming up to the axis now. Tell Link and Pickney to set up a special situation room with seating for about fifteen people."

Roberta Pickney's voice interrupted. "Garry, is that you? Everything's already set up, Kirchner's orders. He wants science and security coordinating on this. Get up here immediately."

In the elevator, surrounded by security personnel and baffled engineers who hadn't heard details yet, Lanier tried to think of all the things left to be done, all the preparations yet to be made. He felt his rough, unshaven chin.

It had all been hypothetical, a long-running nightmare. Down below, where he had spent most of his life, where most of the people he loved—and how few they were!—still lived, it was probably beginning.

He couldn't block images of what people back home were doing at this moment. He had lived through it as a pilot, but never as a civilian. Listening to radios, to sirens, to civil defense instructions never comprehensive enough to be of real value. Orders to evacuate, issued over cable communications from neighborhood to neighborhood. People afraid, people throwing things into automobiles or scrambling for buses or trains or Civil Defense trucks. . .

He tried to quell such thoughts. He needed his wits about him.

At the axis chambers, the security guards organized the people into priority tram groups. He was plucked from crowd by three young marines and ushered almost forcibly into a special car.

The center of Stone external communications was a walled-off area about twenty meters square in one corner of the prime dock staging area. Six marine corporals stood by the door, rifles at ready, their boots hooked into special loops to brace them in case they needed to aim and fire. Lanier passed between them. Inside the room, ten people had gathered. They watched him closely as he pulled himself into a seat.

Four video screens were mounted in one wall. Innumerable repeaters had been wired into most of the consoles. Only one of the big screens was on, showing a fuzzy picture of the Stone itself surrounded by data readouts. That was a picture from the Drake: just as he had first seen the Stone, four years ago.

Pickney handed him a pair of Velcro galoshes. "It hasn't started yet," she said. "But there's been an alert. Something's hit the fan but we're not sure what it is. Put this on." She wrapped earphones and mike around his head. "I've been getting everything coordinated for the past half hour."

"Orders yet?"

"Nothing specific. Just the alert."

He sat where he was told and a bank of keyboards and viewers was moved near to him. Captain Kirchner and his aide, a young mustachioed lieutenant commander dressed in khakis, entered a few minutes later and were seated a few meters away in similar accommodations.

Kirchner, in charge of external Stone defense, was really the central figure now. Gerhardt was in the first chamber, making preparations; but for the moment, what happened in the chambers was incidental. "Get fifteen men outside the bore hole with portable detection systems," Kirchner said. "I want them hidden behind those honey-comb walls, out of sight—no heat signatures. And get those goddamned Gatling guns in position."

Quiet descended. Pickney, earphones clamped over her short, bobbed hair, listened intently. A burst of static issued from a speaker on the other side of the room.

On the largest screen before Lanier, a picture flicked on, wavered and steadied into crystal clarity. The source was a camera just outside the bore hole, in the honeycombed dimple. The camera was oriented toward the Earth at that moment. The limb of the Earth, still in darkness, came into focus. The picture shuffled twice as enhancers did their work. Lanier could then make out continents, cloud patterns, city lights in the night. They were within a few minutes of being nearest their orbital path to Earth—less than three thousand kilometers.

A crackly radio voice came over their headphones. "Heavensent, Heavensent, this is Red Cube. Alert situation Remarkable."

"Shit," Kirchner murmured.

"Bears have just announced their end run. Captain Kirchner, we are devising responses now. Your situation is unknown. Please advise."

"We are secure and making preparations," Kirchner said.

Red Cube—the Joint Space Command western headquarters in Colorado—came back with, "You are now out of our response pattern, Captain. We must conduct affairs as if you did not exist. The steam in the sweatbox is thick. Looks like they're going to take out our near-Earth capability. Understood?"

"Understood. Hope to God you can keep them in line, Red Cube."

"Heavensent is now on its own, Captain."

"Yes, sir."

The transmission ended.

"My screen shows an OTV approach," Kirchner said. "Is it identified?"

"OTV forty-five, carrying supplies and reinforcement personnel, launched nine hours ago from Station Sixteen," Pickney said. "We've been monitoring."

Kirchner's aide confirmed that the marines in the dimple had picked up a blip on their scanners.

"Take it aboard," Kirchner said. "We're going to be getting a lot more in a day or so if this goes all-out."

"Yessir—several more launching already."

A screen before Lanier rolled up a picture of the OTV approaching the bore hole. Suddenly, the OTV expanded into a glowing sphere. Silently, quickly, the sphere dissolved at its edges and darkened to dull orange. Debris scattered in silhouette against the diffuse shells of gas.

"Sir," Kirchner's aide said, "they're seeing dark transits out there, blocking stars. Behind the OTV."

"The OTV's gone," Lanier said. "Captain, they've snuck in behind our ship."

"My God," exclaimed a voice over the hissing and crackling loudspeaker. Pickney had opened the marines' frequency to all in the room. "Something's taken out our ship. Am I seeing—"

"Transits, transits! No blips."

"Durban here. I'm getting dark spots but they have to be retinal."

"No way. I didn't see the flash and I'm getting four, five, six transits blocking stars. Big suckers."

"They're going to come down the pipe," Kirchner said. "Get the OTV tanks rigged to block them. Team A, release your cables."

Cameras in the bore hole showed ghostly infrared- and low-light-enhanced images of men in suits moving behind the first rotating dock. Mortar-like cannon fired coiled steel cable across the hundred-meter diameter of the bore hole. Harpoons fixed the cables in the opposite wall. Seven were fired in rapid succession, making a web in the bore hole. Three discarded OTV tanks were maneuvered up from the sides and fixed in position with more cables. All this was done in less then ten minutes.

"They won't come into the staging areas," Kirchner said confidently. "It would be a waste of time. If they come down the pipe, they'll go for the chambers. They can mop us up later. I hope Oliver's soldiers are prepared."

In the commotion, Lanier had directed his eyes away from the screens displaying the Earth. He returned his attention to them.

Tiny orange spots blossomed along the Soviet coast west of Japan, simple suborbital rockets deploying solid debris to bring down low-orbit satellites and battle stations. "Pop-ups," Kirchner said.

One of the marines outside the bore hole said something garbled. Then, as Pickney enhanced the reception, the voice continued, "Sir, they're blowing the masks."

The large screen switched to a view down the bore hole. Stars twinkled beyond the flare-lit rotating dock and the outer lip of the bore hole. Three shadows moved against the stars. Then, fire rimmed the shadows and pie slices of black material drifted away, revealing shapes difficult for the eye to define. The mirrored noses of the intruders were reflecting the dark interior of the bore hole and the illuminated prime dock. "Signature," Kirchner's aide said. "They're Russian, ocean-launched heavy-lift cargo vehicles. First is in the pipe."

Twenty meters wide, the Russian ships resembled Christmas decorations as they entered the bore hole. Invisible beams of energy from guns hidden beyond the rotating dock were already making parts of the leading heavy-lifter glow orange. Lanier could not begin to keep track of what was happening. His eye moved from screen to screen; Kirchner spoke rarely now. The procedures had already been outlined; his men were doing all they had been trained to do, all they could do.

"Pickney, patch me through to seventh chamber," Lanier said.

"Everyone's in first and fourth chambers by now," Gerhardt said.

"Then get me fourth chamber. Wherever. I want Heineman."

"Lead ship returning fire," said an anonymous voice from within the bore hole. "Looks like they're aiming for the tanks, maybe the cables."

"Maybe they don't see the cables," another voice suggested. The tone of both soldiers was calm, expectant.

Lanier noticed a monitor showing the tiny star of Station Sixteen, in low Earth orbit of one thousand kilometers. As he watched, the star became a glowing smudge of white light. The light winked out.

"Heineman on your button five," Pickney told Lanier. He punched the button.

"Lawrence, this is Garry."

"I was almost out the door and they pulled me back in. I'm in fourth chamber, Garry. I was on my way—"

"Lawrence, we're in—we're being attacked. Just get to the V/STOL and take it up. Hitch to the tuberider and take it down the line. Stay there until we call you back."

"Got you. I was on my way."

The button popped up and dimmed.

More brilliant white flowers grew from pinpoints to blue-white smudges over Japan and China—four in all. These were orbital nuclear bursts, designed to incapacitate communications and power nets with intense flashes of electromagnetic interference—the source of more static over the speakers. As the Stone moved in its counterclockwise orbit, and as the Earth turned beneath them, he saw more bursts over the Soviet Union and Europe—fourteen in all. A veritable nuclear springtime. They had upped the ante since the Little Death. No strategic exchanges yet—but no unshielded electronics or communications systems would survive these preliminary steps in the dance.

The smaller viewscreens showed pictures intercepted from those scanning satellites still intact and broadcasting.

The coast of North America, southern and Baja California prominent, came into dawn, high-altitude glows casting an eerie light across the ocean and land, like penlights on a relief map. The carnage still hadn't begun. What was the plan—bluff? Deception?

The negotiations would have begun already. What has been done, what will be done unless. . . How to scale back, defuse, settle for a limited confrontation. . . Who was bluffing whom, and how far they would go.

Who would surrender.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Colonel Mirsky gripped the edge of the hatch leading to the ship's cockpit. There was no direct view of the bore hole; the laser shield and armored outer hull covered the forward windows. He couldn't understand the displays before the two pilots; they were a confusion of vague lines, spinning circles, things like Easter eggs rolling and precessing in a grid pattern. "Get your men ready," the ship's commander said, glancing over his shoulder. "Tell them to stay close to the bore-hole walls until they exit into the first chamber. They have men with lasers waiting. Sting like bees."

Heavy fists seemed to slam on the outside of the hull in a rapid tattoo. Alarms went off. "Naughty fellows; that was a Gatling gun," the copilot said. "Laser shields penetrated. Minor outer hull breach."

Mirsky backed out and closed the hatch behind him, the commander's comment about bees still echoing in his mind. Mirsky had once tended bees on a city co-op in Leningrad as a student project. We invade the hive, he thought. Naturally, they try to sting.

He floated across the first compartment, picked up his helmet and issued terse instructions. The sergeants—squad leaders for the second and third compartments—pulled themselves through the hatches to alert their men. Minutes and it would begin.

"Why so glum, Alexei?" he chided a soldier inspecting his helmet. "Friends, are your weapons charged?"

They pulled their rifles out of a charging rack and checked the glowing LEDs.

"Line up," Mirsky said. In the second and third compartments, he heard orders being barked. The first company commander, stationed in the first compartment, Major Konstantin Ulopov, was already in his helmet, with the cannon-bearer Zhadov tugging experimentally at the connections and seals on his suit. When he was given the okay, Ulopov would in turn assist Mirsky.

None of them had much protection against laser or projectile hits. In this sort of warfare, an AKV or even a pistol—prepared for the vacuum, but with standard-issue bullets—was as effective against a soldier as antipersonnel lasers.

Mirsky approached the small group surrounding "Zev," Major General Sosnitsky. "Our battalion is prepared, Comrade General," he reported.

Sosnitsky's staff of three officers—with the Zampolit, Major Belozersky, standing nearby—were checking and re-checking the general's suit, like chicks around a hen. Sosnitsky lifted a gloved hand over the commotion and offered it to Mirsky. Mirsky grasped it firmly. "The Marshall would be proud of you and your men," Sosnitsky said. "Today—or tonight or whatever it is—will be glorious."

"Yes, sir," Mirsky said. Even though his thoughts about the command structure bordered on the cynical, Sosnitsky had the power to make him feel emotion.

"We will give them something back for Kiev, won't we, Comrade?"

"That we will, Comrade General."

He glanced up at Belozersky. The political officer's expression was a mix of exaltation and borderline panic. His eyes were wide and his upper lip was damp.

Mirsky wiped his own upper lip. Moist. His whole face was moist. Then he backed away from the group and resumed his position.

The queuing lights near the three circular exit hatches came on and the craft began its erratic tumbling, designed to offer unpredictable targets for marksman as the soldiers leaped forth. It would also scatter them like chaff inside the bore hole; the partners would grip each other's harnesses and jump as a group to stay together until they had their bearings.

They would not fire randomly; there was more chance of hitting one another than an antagonist. Only in direct combat with clearly seen opponents would they fire, and they were not to waste their time even with that if it could be avoided.

Everyone was suited and lined up. The emergency airlock surrounding number two exit hatch had been dismantled and stowed against the bulkhead. The pumps began to evacuate the compartments with throaty grumbles and a high pud-pud. The connecting hatches between the compartments slid shut. The lights were extinguished. The only thing Mirsky's soldiers could see now were the queuing lights above the exit hatches and the luminous glows of their guide ropes.

"Check radios and locators," he said. Each soldier performed a quick diagnostic on his communications gear and the all-important beacon locator.

The queuing lights flashed at half-second intervals. Everyone made sure they were connected to the trolley which would guide and tug them around the compartments until it brought them to their exit hatch.

Ten seconds until hatch opening. The motion of the ship—jerking, pitching and rolling as its maneuvering jets fired unevenly—was beginning to affect even Mirsky.

He could no longer hear the pumps. They were in vacuum.

The hatches slid open abruptly and the queues began to spill out into darkness and silence.

Two squads destined for the first chamber—twenty men in all—went out in the first queue.

Mirsky was third in his queue. Ulopov went ahead and Mirsky held him by a strap attached to his thigh. Mirsky in turn was held by Zhadov, who kept the laser cannon strapped to his side. The trio gripped the hatch edge and kicked away in unison, as they had been trained, flying from the craft like a precision skydiving team, a little star of six legs in the vast darkness.

His eyes adjusted quickly and he switched on his locator. For a heart-stopping moment he thought all was lost; he could not hear even a whisper of signal. Then came the steady high-frequency CHUFF-chuff-chuff of the beacon, placed by some unknown compatriot—perhaps dead already, murdered by the Americans—in the bore hole leading into the second chamber.

And he could make out the tiny spot of light that was the opening to the first chamber.

Stuff floating around. Bumping, smearing. Dark drops fuzzing out. Large chunks of metal in his helmet beam, sections of torn bulkhead and rippling sheets of steel. . . a ship!

Tangled in something invisible ahead, the wreckage of one of the heavy-lifters vibrated ponderously, fly caught in a web, surrounded by drifting bodies, most without helmets. Pieces of limbs and trunks drifted past.

A blinding nimbus surrounded them all. High-intensity spotlights played around the ships and their disgorged soldiers, dead and alive. Zhadov let go of Mirsky's strap, and Mirsky instinctively reached for the man's weapon but caught his arm instead. The suit squirmed in his grip and the body twisted fiercely, almost dragging Mirsky away from Ulopov. Zhadov's suit had been holed and the venting gas whirled him about like a released balloon. Mirsky reached out as far as he could and gripped the cannon. He handed it to Ulopov.

(As clear as reality—clearer, at the moment—he stood in a grassy field and contemplated this nightmare. He gathered his chute up from the yellow grass and shook his head, grinning at his imagination.)

Soldiers filled the bore hole, hundreds of them, and all around he could instinctively feel the invisible laser needles and projectiles searching, piercing, picking away.

Mirsky pulled Ulopov to him and swung his helmet beam around, looking for the wall they should be approaching. It was not visible. Zhadov's death had knocked them off course.

"Use your rocket pack," he told the major. "We break up now."

"Spshhome potato," the Major commented dryly, the voice-activated microphone cutting off the first sound of each phrase. "Sphshhotter than an oven. Spshhust be baked. Shhpood luck, Colonel!"

Mirsky let go of the strap and fired his thruster. He swung outward, away from the entangled wreckage and awful corpses. He cut the thruster and switched on his helmet display. Before his eyes, the beacon and his relation to it appeared on a small luminous stage. He adjusted with another thrust, as did hundreds of his comrades—how many hundreds he could not say.

He suddenly remembered the number of the entangled wreckage, now far behind. That had been the lunar ship—filled with those most recently and thoroughly trained for low-gravity combat. Their best.

Mirsky, alone now with his signal and his thruster—unconcerned for the moment about how many of his men were behind or ahead—flew down the bore hole toward the tiny circle of light.

"They've broken through," Kirchner said, slamming the side of his palm against the chair arm. "There's nothing in the bore hole but bodies and wreckage. About three heavy-lifters have backed out; we must have disabled the rest. Nobody's getting away, though—they can't go home."

"The pilots will wait until we're taken," Gerhardt said wearily on the comlink. He was now overseeing evacuation of the civilian teams to the forth chamber.

"You don't sound in the best of spirits, Oliver," Kirchner said. "Your turn now."

"We have some transmissions from the Persian Gulf," Pickney said. "We can unscramble them. Captain, would you like to listen in?"

"Let's hear them," Kirchner said.

A man's voice, sounding almost mechanical after the processing of the signal, said, "One K that is Kill Seven, One K that is Kill Seven, have smoked the circle; repeat, have smoked the circle. Vampires, fourteen count, range fifty klicks, source Turgenev small platform. Repeat, fourteen vampires. Six down. Sweep two commencing. Smoking circle, up with directed fry, nine down; up with knives, eleven down. Three vampires, twenty-klicks. Priests out. Priests and vampires engage. Advising salamander crews. Starfish launched. Sea Dragons alerted. Two vampires, six klicks. Sweep three commencing. Foaming now. Short eyes out, blades out, Guardians out, knives inboard." A pause. "Two vampires, three klicks." Another pause, then, softly, "Good-bye, Shirley."

"That's the cruiser House," Kirchner said quietly, rubbing his eyes with his hands. "She's gone."

"Another," Pickney said. "Coast of Oman."

"Let's have it," Kirchner said, glancing at Lanier.

"—CVN ninety-six, group Hairball," the signal commenced, "second launch Feather Two, repeat, Feather Two, commencing Chigger, repeat, Chigger. Special fourth class nuke, postal authorities will advise."

"The carrier Fletcher is sending in strategic aircraft for a midrange coast sortie," Kirchner translated.

"CVN eighty-five, code Zorro Doctor Betty, Postal authorities withdraw your permit. Claws will scratch Chiggers. Sea Dragons alerted. Slow wall up and Turkey Feathers down. Repeat, slow wall up and—"

"Group Hairball, Leading Man, Groom, and Alpha Delta Victor. . . Best Man, Chambermaid, luncheon postponed—"

"CVN ninety-six, I count thirty-eight vampires, source deep-blue Turgenev-class platform, range ten klicks, knives up, short eyes, Sea Dragons alerted. Priests and vampires engage angels two, Jesus Christ"—an obvious expletive, not code—"they're at two klicks—"

Kirchner flinched as the message was cut off. "I should be down there," he said. "Right in the middle of the barbecue."

"How many OTVs did Station Sixteen get off?" Lanier asked.

"Besides OTV 45, five. Three are coming for us. Two for the Moon."

"Warn the three we are under attack and may not be able to receive them. Suggest they divert to the Moon."

"If they can make it," Pickney said.

The evacuation of the low Earth orbit platforms and other stations had already begun. The war was expanding now; not just beam defense platforms, but research and industrial stations were becoming targets.

"Some diversion," Pickney said bitterly. "Looks like it's getting out of control."

"Of course it is," Gerhardt said on the comlink. "Only an idiot or somebody very desperate would have thought otherwise. Garry, you done all you can there. I'll need you in the first chamber in a few minutes. I'm on my way back now."

Chapter Twenty-Four

Vasquez slept on a bunk beneath the tent, exhausted after seven hours of intense work. Two slates, an expanded processor and several dozen sheets of paper littered the tent floor around the cot.

Patricia, Carrolson, Farley, Wu and Chang—and of course Heineman in the V/STOL—made up the only group not confined to the first and fourth chambers. Lanier had decided her work was too important to stop completely.

She dreamed about a drugstore on Earth. She was being refused the opportunity to buy an ice cream cone. The dream transformed and she stood by a blackboard in a large classroom, trying to explain abstruse problems to a sea of unruly students. They began throwing pieces of chalk at her. With an absolute conviction of reality, she watched the chalk hit the equations on the board. Hold it, she cried, Stop! The class ceased its commotion. She picked a piece of chalk off the floor and circled the areas of the equations that had been marked by hits. Of course, she said, these would show—

Carrolson grabbed her shoulder and shook her awake, Patricia pulled aside wisps of black hair and looked up at the woman through sleep-puffy eyes.

"We have to get to the fourth chamber," Carrolson said.

"Why? I'm working—"

"Work's over, honey. There's a truck waiting. The Chinese are going, too. All of us. Move!" Her tone was acid. Patricia picked up her bag and stuffed the slate, memory blocks, multi-meter and processor into it. Carrolson made as if to knock the bag out of her hands, then pulled back, arms clutching her own shoulders. "We don't need those now," she said. "We really don't."

Tears slid down Carrolson's cheeks and spotted the breast of her coveralls. "Everyone's saying it," she continued. "I haven't seen, but there's stuff coming in on that hookup—the one for filching satellite broadcasts."

Patricia clutched the bag to her breast and ran ahead of Carrolson to the truck, cursing under her breath.

How funny she was behaving, she thought in a part of her mind where reality had not yet penetrated. How hysterical. After all, she had known. She should have been prepared.

Carrolson, Wu and Chang climbed into the truck behind her. Farley drove them up the ramp and into the tunnel.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Mirsky was terrified. Pushed ahead by the vapor thrusters, periodically trailing a thin and quickly dissipating cloud of hydrogen peroxide, he aimed along the beacon. On every side, ground awaited him; his stomach told him he was falling in all directions. Ahead was a gray-black expanse. Clouds drifted in curving sheaths above, below, behind, before. He could not close his eyes; he had to keep the helmet display centered on the beacon signal.

He caught sight of several fellows, their thruster bursts resembling contrails from the wings of a jet drifting in and out of moist air. How many? he asked. What countermeasures would the Americans have taken?

He had to cross this beautiful horror, this place without top or bottom, and fly down a second bore hole. Only in the second chamber would he be able to drop away from the center and unfold his airfoil/shield, following the simple map that would be projected on his helmet display.

Slowly his fear turned into exhilaration. The longest jump he had ever made on Earth had lasted for six minutes, better than lovemaking, better than the day he received his wings. But here he had been flying steadily, accelerating with each new burst, for ten minutes, fifteen.

If he died upon landing, it would be worth it. To have seen a place where the land was the sky, where he could dive any direction and come to ground. Worth it all. Worth even the nightmare of the bore hole and the drifting, torn bodies of his comrades, faces bloated and livid in the vacuum, eyes protruding beyond their lids and ghastly white.

"Pssolonel Mirsky, is that you?"

"Yes! Identify."

"Pshlopov. I've seen others from our ship—and hundreds more! Pshare like angels, Colonel. PshCHKCHKirst squads have dropped away, look behind PSCKHHolonel."

He carefully inclined his neck, keeping his eye on the beacon alignment, then looked behind and below. He could see tiny white dots—parachutes—in the bluish haze above the floor of the chamber. He twisted smoothly and saw more at another quadrant—coming down, as planned, to take control of elevator entrances in the first chamber's southern wall. Pride swelled in him. Who else could have even succeeded this far? History!

He could see the darker hole in the center of the forward wall. None of them had more than two hours of air in their suit tanks—how much longer until he could drop away?

In the fourth chamber compound, Carrolson had given up trying to organize the members of the science team. Most of the security team had been deployed, leaving the barracks, cafeteria and grounds to the evacuees.

Patricia sat in the cafeteria, numb, snot crusted under her nose, half-listening to the sporadic radio signals coming over the cafeteria loudspeakers. The signals from the external satellite feed were still being directed down the bore hole to transponders at the entrance of each chamber. Electronic chatter of robots calmly sacrificing themselves in orbit, seeking orbiting outposts and battle stations, or going silent as they reentered the atmosphere to search out a few million more human beings, enacting a deterrence policy now guaranteeing only more and more death.

Out of control, Patricia thought.

Spasm. The motions a dying person makes, or the twitches in a corpse. San Diego, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara. Spasm.

Farley and Chang wept in each other's arms. Wu was silent and stolid, sitting on a table like a piece of sculpture. Rimskaya stood in a corner with a bottle of Scotch, almost certainly contraband, taking a gulp every few seconds until he fell down.

A few ex-defense workers, reverting to the old banter, the old assessments and guesses, conducted a calm analysis of who was winning, who was still capable of fighting, which hardened weapons sites would open next. "Submarines under the ice caps?" "No—both sides will hold those in reserve for after." "What after? "Who cares?" "What about those trucks—you know, the reverse ground-effect vehicles, hug the ground when the shock wave passes over." "Fuck 'em all."

Spasm.

She closed her eyes as if to block an image of her home absorbing the sudden burst of light and radiation, becoming a carbonized mockery of walls and roof.

And within, slightly protected by the shadow of the house—roasted alive, but not quite carbonized—and then being blasted to fine ash by the shock wave—

Rita and Ramon.

Farley approached Patricia and tapped her on the shoulder, disrupting her reverie. "We can't go back," she said. "The engineers say none of the spaceports are left by now. Vandenberg, the cosmodromes—Kennedy Space Center, even Edwards—gone. We can't get to the Moon, either. Not enough ships or fuel. Nobody'll come up for ten, maybe twenty years. That's what the engineers are saying. We might have a few good fields left in China, but there aren't going to be any shuttles in orbit to rendezvous with the OTVs even if we could go back."

Wu joined them. "Nothing out of China now," he said. "Russia still throwing things. Every city I live in, gone by now. We used to get civil defense instruction in school. We knew where bombs would drop. Russian bombs and maybe even American bombs. Every city had its bombs."

"When's the funeral?" someone asked in the background. There was no laughter, only silence. It was an extraordinarily insensitive joke. Except that it couldn't be a joke. There had to be a funeral when somebody died.

But when billions of people were dead or dying?

Carrolson sat down beside Patricia. "Office ink is all there is," she said laconically. "Wayne is gone, and our son. They're dead by now, I'm sure. You know, in a little while this is going to hurt like hell. Adjusting is going to be. . .” Her cheeks twitched, spotted red as if she were breaking out in a rash. "Rimskaya drank all the booze, the bastard."

"I'm going to the library," Patricia said. "

"Can't," Carrolson said. "Off limits."

"I need something to do."

"Of course." But she offered no suggestions.

"Hey, we have more pictures from the external cameras!" someone yelled. The wide-screen video was wheeled out and connected to the central cafeteria hookup.

Patricia did not look at the video screen. She had seen satellite and lunar telescope pictures of the conflagration in the Thistledown City library. Somewhere on Earth—in Washington or in Pasadena in Hoffman's office—copies of those pictures were being embraced by the destruction they depicted, an ouroboros of doom.

Carrolson watched, however, eyes narrowed, lips drawn back.

One by one, the cities blossomed. The atmosphere rippled over each explosion, as if a giant steel ball had been dropped in a pond.

Over the western limb, beyond the Atlantic, a brighter-than-dawn glow was creeping, now yellow, now purple, now green.

The whole world was being swept by a crown fire, with the flames leaping not from tree to tree, but from city to city, continent to continent.

People were no more substantial than pine needles.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Gerhardt and Lanier stood near several squads of soldiers guarding the entrance to the zero elevator. Gerhardt held up the field glasses. "Little specks," he said. "Mosquitoes. Most of them are coming down in this chamber. But quite a few appear to be crossing over." He handed the glasses to Lanier.

"Into the second chamber." The cool wind sliding down from the cap played with Lanier's hair. Lanier kept track of two of the specks in the glasses, following their contrails along the axis. He lowered the glasses to inspect the defenses around the two science team compounds.

"Yeah. Expecting us to have a bigger force here, which we do."

He raised his glasses again and saw broader white dots at a much lower angle, near the southern cap. "Parachutes," Lanier said. "Some are in the atmosphere now."

"Jesus, what an effort," Gerhardt said in admiration. He picked up his radio. "Zero south tunnels, forces coming your way. Bore hole, keep your eyes open."

Lanier could not concentrate. He kept thinking of the diversion; had they set fire to the world just to gain an advantage here? Hoping they could control the results with negotiation, keeping the casualties close to those of the Little Death? He suddenly grew sick of all the thousands of artificial modes of behavior conjured up by representatives of government, by military men, by patriots and traitors and fighters and—

He wanted to crawl away and sleep.

He could not keep from seeing in his imagination an image of Hoffman, on the road to Vandenberg in her limousine, hoping to escape the madness, to leave the dying aircraft and bail out—to come here, where the madness had spread, and not making it anyway; facing the blasts over Vandenberg.

"Do they know?" he asked.

"Know what?" Gerhardt said.

"Do the Russians know the Death has come?"

Gerhardt, who had never been in the library and had had none of Lanier's forewarning, frowned at him. "What are you asking, Garry?"

Lanier pointed up. "They're about to engage us in battle, but do they know neither of us have supreme commanders anymore?"

"Some leadership will survive," Gerhardt said.

"Oliver, does it matter?"

"You're goddamn fucking right it matters!" Gerhardt screamed at him, spittle beading on his chin. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his overalls, shaking his head and turning away, face reddening. "Don't go under now, Garry. We need everybody we can get."

"I'm going to fight," Lanier said.

"It won't be the first time, will it?" Gerhardt asked, his voice strained and harsh.

"On the ground, yes." Modes of behavior. No rest, no end, even after doomsday. "Where's my weapon?"

They had made it through the second bore hole, despite sporadic fire from troops stationed there. More had died, but not many. . . .

Would he ever stop falling?

Mirsky spun in his path to survey the city—

He had never seen such a city!

—as his thrusters pushed him a hundred meters away from the bore hole, then two hundred, then three. He spotted the landmark he was after—the zero bridge spanning the chamber-circling river—and pushed himself away from the Potato's axis, toward the thin glow of the plasma tube.

Other soldiers had already fallen free through the atmosphere barrier and the plasma tube. Their informant had assured them passage was safe, as long as they did not linger—but Mirsky trusted only experience and survival. He could not see whether his comrades were alive or dead—when he saw them at all, they were too tiny to make out details. They were dwarfed—how could a few hundred soldiers command an object as big as a republic?

The perspective changed very slowly as he fell away from the axis.

He felt no wonder whatsoever at how selfish his emotions were now, and how much hate filled him. Mirsky had felt these emotions many times before, during training or the horrid endurance tests. These were the emotions of soldiers in battle, hard and bitter, touched with fear but mostly with overwhelming self-interest.

He could not have cared less about the state, the Motherland, the revolution. There was no shame in him.

Only falling. Spiraling outward as the great cylinder turned around him. He kept pace with the landmarks using his thrusters. Silence, not even the sound of wind yet. He prepared his air-sled, fanning out and locking its segments.

Then he noticed he was drifting some degrees away from the bridge. He corrected with another thruster burst. There was so little sensation he might go mad. . . and yet he had been falling for only a minute or so, very slowly. . . .

He felt—perhaps only in his mind—a tingle and knew he was passing through the plasma tube. Below that, but only by a few hundred meters, lay the upper limits of the atmosphere, beyond the restraining barrier. He braced himself behind the sled and strapped his arms and legs to the concave inner surface. Whatever angle he first brushed the atmosphere, the sled would flip him around to the shape of least resistance. He would plummet through the upper air until he could hear the whistle of its passage, then he would kick free of the sled and begin his fifteen- or sixteen-kilometer dive, releasing the chute only two or three kilometers from the floor of the chamber. He would be lighter, falling; the impact would not be very hard at all.

Another soldier came close enough to wave—one he didn't recognize, with the insignia of Sixth Battalion, from Rolls-Royce. Mirsky waved back and motioned for him to prepare his sled. The soldier held it up—folded, in tatters from a projectile impact—and shrugged, flipping it aside. They were to maintain radio silence, but the soldier used his rockets to approach close enough that they could read lips.

—Can I survive without?

—I don't know. Tuck up into a ball and present your back to the air. . . if you can.

That was difficult to convey with lip movements, so Mirsky mimed by folded himself up as best he could behind the shield, drawing up his knees and wrapping his arms around him.

The soldier nodded and signaled okay with his thumb and index finger. They drifted apart—the soldier falling more slowly because of his thrust toward Mirsky. Mirsky watched the soldier thrust again to move away from the cap surface, toward which he was drifting, and then busied himself preparing for the entry.

He checked his position with relation to the bridge. One more adjustment with the thrusters. He could feel some pressure now against the sled. A vibration, weak nudges.

He made one more thrust and, then unfastened and discarded the rocket pack. Where it fell he did not care, so long as it didn't land on him.

For an instant, through the preparations and the near-fury of anticipation, he looked again at the city and wondered what the Potato's secret actually was. Why were they fighting for it? What could it bring them?

How would the West react, facing the theft of its greatest prize? Or the attempt (he had heard rumors) to take out its orbital platforms and spy satellites?

How would Russia react in the same circumstances?

He shuddered.

The sled jerked and whirled around. He blacked out for a moment, then came awake to a bone-crushing slam and a high-pitched, wavering scream.

Coming down.

The sled swung around again and bucked but was now committed to one orientation. He was pressed against its inner surface, padded elbows and knees braced, hoping he had broken no bones. It had been more violent than the falls from three meters in training. He tasted blood in his mouth. He had bitten almost through his inner cheek—he could flap the tissue with his tongue. He closed his eyes against the pain—

(And gathered up his chute in the golden grassy field, smiling at the burning sun, looking for his comrades, shielding his eyes to spot the distant speck of the transport plane—)

And fell. He hastily unbuckled from the sled. The air roared around him. Then he grasped the straps loosely in his hands. He flipped the sled over and it was torn from his fingers.

Made it!

From here on it was a simple freefall and parachute exercise. He tucked to roll, and spread his arms and legs to flatten out and stabilize. The bridge was still only a line of white over the blue-black river. Was it really the right bridge—really the zero bridge?

Yes—he could spot the tiny speck of a guard shack nearby and make out lines of defense and sandbag emplacements. And he couldn't have fallen so far wrong as to traverse a third of the chamber's arc. . . . He was right on, too close in fact—he would have to drift away some.

The wind hummed mildly past his helmet now. He checked his laser and Kalashnikov and made quick surveys of his equipment belt.

Chute release had to be gauged purely by eye. There was no sense counting from the axis, since everyone would fall at a different rate. He held out his thumb. It covered the length of the bridge.

He pulled the rip cord and the chute leaped away, billowed, collapsed and billowed again, spreading wide in the shape of a package of small sausages.

Mirsky jerked and dangled and gathered his guidelines in both hands, pulling one, then the other, spilling a little air from one side of the chute to move in one direction, then from the other side.

He saw with relief that he would land some five kilometers from the objective. Unless they had far more men than reported—and radar-aimed automatic guns within the chambers, which their informant had told them they did not—they would probably not bring him down.

He saw others coming down beside him and above him, only a few below. In all, hundreds of them.

Mirsky tried to hold back tears and could not.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

"Where's Patricia?" Carrolson looked around the mess.

"I don't know," Farley said. "She was here a few minutes ago."

"We should go find her."

"I'll go," Carrolson said. She had to get outside anyway; she wasn't sure she could stand the scene in the cafeteria any longer.

She stepped out under the tubelight and looked back and forth across the compound. Her eyes fixed on something astonishing. Against the dark gray southern cap, tiny points of white were falling like snow—dozens, then hundreds of them. A marine ran by carrying two Apples. "Look!" she cried, pointing and turning a half-circle. No one paid her any attention. The marine jumped onto the tailgate of one of the fully loaded troop trucks rumbling out of the compound.

Carrolson shook her head to clear it. She was drunk with grief and anger; any solid thought seemed to be vomited away by a nauseated mind. She couldn't afford such a handicap now. She had to think clearly and she had to find Vasquez.

On the opposite side of the compound, a train pulled away from the elevated station. She glanced at her watch; as scheduled, the fourth chamber stop, 1400 hours. The platform was empty; none of the trains were being used for troops, only trucks. The trains were doing their automatic best to keep everything normal.

"Jesus," she said, suddenly realizing. Vasquez had wanted to return to the library. Which one did she mean?

Farley ran up beside her. "We're being invaded," she said, astonished. "Paratroopers. Russian soldiers. Cosmonauts. Whatever they are, they've come down in the first and second chambers. They're coming down here, too."

"I've seen them," Carrolson said. "Patricia's gone to the library. We have to find her—"

"How? The train's gone. Not another for half an hour. We can't take a truck—they're all in use."

Carrolson had never felt so helpless and out of place. She stood with fists clenched, facing the southern cap. Most of the parachutes had descended below their line of sight.

Patricia stared at the seat ahead of her, biting her lower lip. Nobody was guarding the train; that was either an oversight, or providential.

She had been in a dream ever since leaving Earth. Was it possible to be trapped in a dream?

In a dream, you can do anything, if you learn how to control, to shape and command.

And the equations hit by the chalk. . .

If what she had seen in the equations was correct, then at this very moment, there was a place—a curve—where Father sat in his chair, reading Tiempos de Los Angeles, and the corridor would pass right near it. She only had to search for the right door, the right section of the corridor, and she could find Rita and Ramon, Paul and Julia.

She could hardly wait to tell Lanier. He would be pleased. Rimskaya would be proud he had recommended her. She had solved the secret of the corridor—the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place in a dream, no less.

She could take them all home again.

The train came to her stop and she exited, climbing the stair to the ground level.

"Miss Vasquez?"

Patricia turned to face a man she had never met before. He sat on the concrete edge of the underground entrance. His hair was black and short and he wore a close-fitting black suit.

"Excuse me," she said, her eyes not really focusing on him. She was in the grip of a powerful working state. "I don't know who you are. I can't stay."

"Nor can we. You must come with us."

A tall creature with a head almost as narrow as a board and jutting eyes rose from behind the ceiling. Its shoulders were wrapped in silvery fabric; otherwise it wore nothing. Its skin was smooth as fine leather and just as brown.

She stared, inner concentration evaporating.

"Things are in quite a riot here, aren't they?" the man said. Patricia realized that he had a nose but no nostrils. His eyes were pale blue, almost blank, and his ears were large and round.

"Excuse me," she said more softly. "I don't know who you are."

"My name is Olmy. My companion is a Frant; they don't have names. I hope you don't mind our intruding. We've been watching everybody very closely."

"Who are you?" Patricia asked.

"I lived here, centuries ago," Olmy said. "And my ancestors before me. For that matter, you could be one of my ancestors. Please. We don't have time to talk. We must leave."

"Where?"

"Down the corridor."

"Really?"

"That's where my home is. The Frant and his people come from elsewhere. They. . . well, working for us doesn't quite describe it."

The Frant shook its head solemnly. "Please don't be frightened," it said, its voice like a large bird's, low and warbling.

A breeze from the northern cap pushed through the outskirts of the third chamber city, rustling the nearby trees. Following the breeze came a slender craft about ten meters long, shaped like a cone flattened lengthwise, with the nose truncated. It drifted gracefully around a tower and landed on the point of a single central pylon.

"You're done some remarkable work," Olmy said. "There are people where I live who will be very interested."

"I'm trying to go home," Patricia said. She realized she sounded like a lost child speaking to a policeman. "Are you a policeman? Do you guard the cities?"

"Not always," Olmy answered.

"Please come with us," the Frant said, stepping forward on long and oddly bent legs.

"You'll kidnap me?"

Olmy held out his hand, whether supplicating or indicating the situation was not his to control, she could not say.

"If I don't go willingly, you'll make me?"

"Make you?" He seemed puzzled, then said, "You mean, force you?" Olmy and the Frant exchanged glances. "Yes," Olmy said.

"Then I had better go with you, hadn't I?" Her words seemed to be spoken by a distant and heretofore unknown Patricia, calm and better versed in the analysis of nightmare.

"Please," the Frant said. "Until things are better here."

"Things are never going to be better here," she said. Olmy took her hand with a courtly bow and led her to the open oval hatchway in the craft's flat nose.

The interior of the craft was confined, a T expanding at the rear, the walls like abstract billows of polished marble, all white curves. Olmy took hold of a soft bulkhead and stretched it out to form a couch. "Please lie here." She lay in the softness. The substance firmed up beneath her, molding to her body.

The narrow-headed, knock-kneed brown Frant climbed farther back through the whiteness and nestled into its own couch. Olmy pulled out a section across the aisle from Patricia and sat in it, again touching his torque.

He smoothed his hand over a bulge before him and the curved surface erupted into an intaglio of black lines and red circles. Beside her, the whiteness faded to an elongated transparency, forming a long elliptical window. The edges of the window remained milky, like frosted glass.

"We're going to leave now."

The third chamber city glided away beneath her. As the craft banked, the window filled with the austere grayness of the northern cap.

"I believe you'll truly enjoy where we're going," Olmy said. "I've grown to admire you. You have a remarkable mentality. The Hexamon will be impressed, too, I'm sure."

"Why don't you have a nose?" the distant Patricia asked.

Behind them, the Frant made a sound like an elephant grinding its teeth.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Soviet troops assigned to the second chamber had come down on a two-hundred-meter-wide strip of parkland separating the river from the southern cap. The squads had regrouped at two points on opposite sides of the zero bridge, each about three kilometers from that objective. Communications with the squads on the opposite side of the bridge were good.

Mirsky's group had taken shelter in a dense forest of gnarled pines; they had determined the bridge was heavily guarded and would soon be reinforced; they had to strike now. The equipment had not yet been dropped from Zhiguli, heavy-lifter seven, and fully three-fourths of the thirty squads were not up to full strength. Attrition in the bore hole had been hideous, and of those who survived the bore hole, about one out of twenty had not completed the journey and para-sail drop.

The squads were designed for flexibility; surviving sergeants shepherded broken squads together to form new ones. Mirsky had only 210 soldiers in his immediate command and, of course, little hope of getting more. Nobody knew how many had survived the drops in the other chambers.

Twenty SPETSNAZ diversionary troops assigned to Mirsky's battalion, communicating by radio after swimming the river, had established lookouts in the second chamber city.

They had been in the chamber for two hours now. The NATO troops at the bridge had not made an offensive move; this worried Mirsky. He knew that in the defenders' situation, the best plan would be an immediate and devastating offensive. They could conceivably have attacked as his men came down from the axis; apparently, they had been confused and not yet up to strength.

Between his group and the objective, there was the forest and several broad concrete foundations of unknown utility. While there was sufficient cover for his troops, momentarily, the cover could easily be turned into a series of disastrous pindowns.

General "Zev"—Major General I. Sosnitsky—had survived his descent into the second chamber but had been injured on landing, breaking both legs when his para-sail ripped at a hundred meters. He was now sedated, lying concealed in a copse of trees and guarded by four soldiers Mirsky could ill afford to do without. The political officer Belozersky had—of course—survived also, and stayed very close to the general, like a hopeful vulture.

Mirsky had spent a few weeks training with Sosnitsky in Moscow. He respected the major general. Sosnitsky, about fifty-five but as fit as any thirty-year-old in the training regiments, had taken a shine to Mirsky and no doubt had had something to do with his rapid promotion on the Moon.

No one of higher rank than colonel had come down in the second chamber besides "Zev." Effectively, that meant Mirsky was in control. Garabedian had survived the drop—and that gave Mirsky some assurance. He could hope for no better deputy commander.

Mirsky led three squads to the forward concrete structure, still a kilometer from the bridge. The top of the foundation was flat and covered about three hundred square meters. The upper surface offered no protection. The concrete was two meters high, practically a wall behind which they could walk upright. Even such protection wasn't enough, however; Mirsky worried about the firing angles and opportunities offered by the chamber's curve. Did the enemy have lasers or small projectile weapons that could penetrate twenty or thirty kilometers of air? If they did, his men could be picked off easily wherever they hid.

He aimed the radio at the southern bore hole and searched for the transponder signal. Finding it, he transmitted a message to Lieutenant Colonel Pogodin in the first chamber, asking how many troops he had and what his situation was. Pogodin had been aboard Chaika with "Nev."

"I have four hundred," Pogodin returned. "Nev is missing. Colonel Smirdin is badly wounded. He probably won't live. Have captured two compounds and taken ten prisoners. We control zero elevator."

From the fourth chamber, Major Rogov reported a hundred men in position, but no objectives taken; the tunnels were heavily defended. He was contemplating moving his men to an island by rubber rafts captured at a recreation site. "Lev" had not survived the collision of Chevy with obstacles in the bore hole. Colonel Eugen was dead, and there was no sign of battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Nikolaev.

Their command structure was in a shambles.

The hatred rose in him again, making his throat clutch and his stomach burn. "Fan out and pick your targets," he ordered the squad leaders on the near side of the bridge. He waved his arm to both sides and stayed behind the concrete to direct the other squads.

A rattle of small-arms fire greeted his men as they broke cover and spread in groups of twenty for trees and other foundations to either side of Mirsky. There was no way of telling how many laser weapons were being used; they were silent and invisible except in moist or dusty air. He lifted his radio and spoke with the captain in command of the squads on the far side of the bridge.

"Cross fire," he said. "Rush and divert."

Then he called up another three squads and ran them in a different pattern toward the river shore, where they took firing positions in the woods and behind a circular foundation.

With his binoculars, he could make out the faces of the defenders behind their plastic shields. His men had no such shields; only his binoculars were proofed against laser blinding, if the defenders possessed such systems; almost any laser cannon could be converted to spread a barrage of blinding beams. There were any number of weapons the NATO troops could have and could use, which he did not. . . .

The defenders had set up sandbags in lines paralleling the bridge road. Not all the positions were manned; if he could get his troops to the lines before the positions were up to strength, they would have almost a clear run to the bridge.

He popped up to sweep the positions again with his binoculars and then dropped down to pass instructions to the opposite squads. The air was broken by a hideous crackle; Mirsky's eyes widened and he subconsciously prepared for death. He should have known the Americans would have something advanced and deadly up their sleeves; they were fiends for surprise weapons—

The crackle sounded again and was followed by an extremely loud voice. The voice spoke Russian with a strong German accent, but the words were clear.

"There is no need for fighting. We repeat, there is no need for fighting. You may hold your present positions for the moment, but do not advance any farther. It is imperative you listen. There has been a disastrous exchange of nuclear weapons on Earth."

Mirsky shook his head and switched on the radio again. He could not waste time listening—

"We have sufficient weapons and personnel to annihilate you. There is no need. You have compatriots among us already—the Russian science team. And there is corroboration from your comrades in the heavy-lifters. Your communications can be fed through to them; they are waiting outside the bore hole."

Mirsky pressed the transmit button and ordered the attack forward. He then ordered his remaining squads to take the river shore and join up with their opposites beneath the bridge abutment. The cover looked good to that point—and once beneath the bridge, they could fire along the Americans' lane of sandbags and prevent them from being manned.

"Fighting us is useless. Our supreme commanders are dead or out of communication, perhaps for years. Your deaths would be meaningless. You may hold present positions, but signify your acceptance or we will open fire."

Then another voice identified itself, distorted but familiar to Mirsky—Lieutenant Colonel Pletnev, squadron commander of the heavy-lifters. Either he had capitulated or he was still outside the bore hole; there was no way he could have been captured; he would have died in the bore hole entry, not been taken alive.

"Comrades. Our countries are at war on Earth. There is devastation in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Our plan is no longer effective. . . .”

The hell with him. Mirsky moved his men up from both sides. Take this objective, and then the next, and then perhaps talk—

"Psshkommander Mirsky," his radio hissed. "Enemy reinforcements crossing the bridge."

The gunfire started again and Mirsky for the first time in his life, heard the screams of dying men.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Heineman squirmed in the V/STOL's pilot seat, listening to the exchanges in Russian, English and German. Transponders in the bore holes were automatically carrying radio signals from chamber to chamber and down the corridor; why hadn't they been switched off? Perhaps they had—perhaps he was picking up signals from Russian transponders.

He had propelled the tuberider beyond any conceivable danger; he was now a thousand kilometers down the corridor, stationary on the singularity, feeling useless. He had programmed communications processors to track on multiple bands and retrieve all messages, storing concurrent messages for separate playback. He had a ringside seat; there was even some video coming down the bore hole.

He witnessed the crown fire sweeping the Earth before the signal gave out.

It was purely by accident that he looked over his shoulder and spotted the moving glimmer of white. It swung smoothly over his head and to the opposite side. Whatever it was, it seemed to be spiraling around the plasma tube, staying within the plasma layer; its wake was a visible shadow within the general glow.

There were no other aircraft within the Stone—none that he had heard of, at any rate. He doubted the Russians had anything sophisticated enough to follow such a difficult course.

What was it, then?

A boojum. In the middle of all the excitement, he had seen his first boojum. That's always the way, isn't it? He switched on the' aircraft's tracking systems.

For a moment, he had a clear blip on the screens and even a computer-enhanced magnification of the craft's general outline. It was sleek and resembled a blunted arrowhead. He recorded about five seconds of information on it before the trackers suddenly wheeped and lost the target.

Patricia felt icy cold inside. She stared through the transparency in the side of Olmy's craft, watching the even tan and pale gray landscape passing below. Two personalities conflicted within; her; one, by far the stronger, forbade any motion or outward reaction. The second was a normal, fascinated, even slightly amused Patricia. If she spoke, she knew the second Patricia—the distant, uninvolved one—would try to be funny and make light of what was happening. But the first had grown to a position of control and she did not speak. She did not even move her head. She simply stared at the walls of the corridor turning and passing behind them.

"Are you hungry or thirsty?" Olmy asked. She did not answer. "Are you tired, do you need to sleep?"

Nothing.

"We'll be some time. Several days. The Axis City is a million kilometers along the Way—the corridor—now. Please let us know if you're in need. . . .”

He glanced back at the Frant but received only an outward-turning of one eye, indicating nothing to suggest.

Patricia could feel it all coming apart; all the tight-wound ambition and hope could not hold back this inevitable shattering. Her shoulders began to shake. She looked around at Olmy and quickly turned away. Her eyes seemed to float; tears gathered and broke away when she shook her head, drifting around her. She slowly raised her hands and held them before her face; the teardrops touched and spread on her fingers and palms.

All going now, all the glue going—

Her chest heaved. "Please," she whispered.

They're dead. Really gone. You didn't save them.

"Please."

"Miss Vasquez—" Olmy reached across to touch her, then drew his hand back as she flinched away.

"Ah, Jesus y Maria." Her body jerked and her legs shook with the force of her sobs. Each tore something out of her chest and pierced the dark behind her eyelids with jagged red. She clutched her shoulders with her hands and rocked back and forth in the couch, back arched, teeth clenched and lips drawn back.

Her spine reversed of its own will and she curled her chest and knees together. Is this a fit?

This is grief.

This is loss. This is awareness. This is not fooling yourself.

Olmy did not try to restrain her. He watched the woman weeping for a world lost—to his kind—for thirteen centuries. Ancient woman, ancient agony.

Patricia Luisa Vasquez grieved for dead billions and ways of living unknown to him.

"She is an open wound," the Frant said, moving forward to crouch by Olmy's shoulder. "I wish to help, but I can't."

"Nobody can help," Olmy said. Even across thirteen hundred years, the Death bent and hobbled his people with scar tissue. That became clear to him, looking at her, gauging her differences; the Nexus had been forged in the Death, the Naderites had come to power as a result. . . . And how many of their prejudices, how much of their willful blindness, was a drawn-out echo of Patricia's pain?

"If help is impossible for her, then it hurts me to think," the Frant said.

Chapter Thirty

Gerhardt carried the roll of maps from his makeshift command headquarters.

"They control the southern end of the first chamber—including the science team compounds—and the elevators to the south polar bore hole. They're still fighting us in the second chamber, but it looks like a stand-off—Berenson sent half his troops from the fourth chamber as soon as the alert was sounded. They crossed the bridge under heavy fire. The Russians didn't try anything in the third chamber—and they're scattered in the fourth, not very effective." Gerhardt smoothed the map down with a sweep of one hand. "We don't have the strength to wipe them out, but they don't have the strength to take more ground than they already have. And so far they haven't responded to our overtures."

"We still have people in the staging areas?" Lanier asked.

"Yes, and they can hold out there for months—we hadn't shipped down the last load of food and supplies. Fourth chamber is self-sufficient, and Berenson's troops are definitely in control there, so it looks like the only problem will be the first and second chambers. Our soldiers have supplies for about two weeks. Unless we drop supplies to them from the axis—we're studying that proposal now—they'll run out."

"How are we handling the heavy-lifters outside?"

"Still haven't let them in. There's one we suspect is carrying heavy equipment to be dropped into the second chamber from the axis. We don't want them breaking through the barricade. They don't sound happy, but they can cool their heels for a few days without any problems."

"They've offered to surrender?"

Gerhardt shook his head. "No. Pletnev broadcast his little speech, but he's not going to turn his ships over yet. He's offered to try to negotiate an end to hostilities. The heavy-lifter crews want to join their comrades. They know they can't go home, and I suspect they know their troops inside are under strength because of the carnage in the bore hole."

"Such a goddamn desperate maneuver. . .”

"It didn't work. . . anywhere," Gerhardt said grimly. "But it's put us in an uncomfortable position. The Stone is a capped bottle as far as we're concerned. Not that we particularly want to leave, or could go anywhere if we did. I'm worried about SPETSNAZ, myself. They could have assassins and sappers spread throughout the second chamber by now, and they'll find their way to us in a few days; we don't have the troop strength to keep them out of the third chamber, or the fourth. They're nasty individuals, Garry. Dedicated and well trained. The longer we wait, the more they'll drain us."

"So we're at an impasse in the second chamber?" Lanier asked, his eyes darting nervously to the maps.

"Everywhere. Nobody's going to move. The only thing progressing will be casualty counts."

"Do you think they know that? I mean, will they acknowledge it to themselves?"

"Having come all this way, with all the training that would require, I think we can safely say their COs aren't fools."

"What about the grunts?"

"Like us, I doubt they have any grunts."

"How long before they start listening to reason?"

"Hell, Garry, they may be listening now. They're just not showing any sign. We stick our heads up, they start shooting, and vice versa."

The sergeant stood before his superiors with a troubled expression. His face was covered with scratches from crawling through undergrowth in the patches of forest. He saluted and bowed in Mirsky's direction.

"Colonel, they have found our transponders in the bore holes. We cannot communicate with any other chambers."

"Now I ask you," Mirsky said, "is that a sign they want to lay down their arms and welcome the wolves into the sheep pen?" Garabedian took his binoculars and surveyed the forests and fields between them and the bridge, a kilometer away. He then looked at the shell-pocked, laser-scored bridge—marred but still very much functional—and returned the glasses.

"Pavel," Garabedian said, "we should cut that bridge, don't you think?"

Mirsky looked at his deputy commander disapprovingly. "And what other way do we have to cross? We can walk fifty kilometers or more to the next bridge, or we can swim."

"Then they cannot cross, and they cannot get any more reinforcements from this chamber—"

"No, but they can be reinforced from the first chamber. We have no idea how many there are in there."

"Trapped like pigs—"

"We keep this bridge intact," Mirsky said. "Besides, we can ill afford to lose more men on a desperation move. Or to lose them from snipers while we swim!"

"It was an idea," Garabedian said.

"I am not short on ideas, Viktor. I am short of laser cannon and artillery. We can assume Zhiguli with all our artillery and supplies did not make it through, and will not now, since they have obviously reinforced the bore holes enough to find our transponders. We can assume our operative has been captured and the Russian science team is ineffective, either by choice or because they are in stockade. And we can also assume that our heavy-lifter pilots and crew do not relish staying outside for weeks while we get ourselves killed in here."

"What are you saying, Pavel? Be blunt." Garabedian smiled. With his undershot jaw, he had always reminded Mirsky of a sturgeon.

"We are not getting the support we need."

"Do you believe the war has been fought on Earth—and lost?"

Mirsky shook his head. "I believe we have taken out their orbital capability. That would make quite a show from up here—"

"Pavel, they surely can tell the difference between an orbital showdown and holocaust."

Mirsky clamped his jaw and shook his head stubbornly. "We are here to fight and take an objective. There must be a reason."

"Ask the Zampolits. We are here to spread Socialism and safeguard the future of our State and our country."

"Shit," Mirsky said, surprised at his vehemence. He hated the Zampolits. He had always hated all Zampolits wherever he had served. As usual, the company's political officer—Major Belozersky—was in the rear, issuing orders that sometimes conflicted with Mirsky's own. "Yes, fine, they've cooked the Earth. So what are we to do, abandon the fight and—what? Go home to ashes? This time, it would not be a little exercise in the schoolyard between hero and bully. It would be a flaming rubber-stamp skull and crossbones across the northern hemisphere!"

"That's what they're saying has happened. Pletnev backs them up. Surely we couldn't expect to take out their orbital defenses and have them kick their heels in the air and scream for mercy."

"They are corrupt," Mirsky said. "Weak and fearful."

"Pavel, I do not like playing your Armenian voice of reality. You, of all people, should face facts and their implications. Do not underestimate the enemy. Do weak and decadent people march ahead of you in almost every sphere?"

"Oh, shut up and let me babble," Mirsky said, cradling his head between his hands. He glanced up at the sergeant. "Get out of here," he said wearily. "Bring me good news or none at all."

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said.

"Pity we don't have any penal battalions to send on ahead to glorious sacrifice," Garabedian said. "That's how we've won wars in the past."

"Don't let Belozersky hear you say that. I have enough trouble with him—and with you—as is. We keep the bridge intact," Mirsky said. "That's final. And we make our move in the next hour."

There was no arguing with Mirsky when he used that tone of voice. Garabedian paled slightly, then pulled out a stick of stale gum and inserted it into his mouth, savoring the sugar.

Mirsky's radio clicked softly. He keyed the receiver and acknowledged. "Comrade Commander, this is Belozersky. 'Zev' wishes to speak with you. . . in person."

Mirsky swore and replied that he would be there immediately. "More shambles, I think," he said to Garabedian.

Twenty-six hours into the stalemate, the results of the survey were brought into Gerhardt's makeshift command post. The lieutenant who had conducted the survey, a thin-faced man with deep-set eyes, delivered his findings in an Appalachian drawl.

"We've peeped on every one of their positions and counted them from some distance—from the bore holes and from positions up the curve. They have six hundred or so men still alive and moving, maybe fifty or a hundred more we can't be positive about. They've lost a lot of senior officers—one general wounded or dead and several colonels. That leaves one colonel in the second chamber and two lieutenant colonels and a colonel in the first. There may be other generals—we've been hearing radio talk about 'Zev,' and 'Nev' and 'Lev.' Some of us think they're talking about three generals."

"Can you identify them?" Lanier asked.

"No, sir. They don't exactly have name badges on. But we think someone in the Russian science team might recognize a few. These troops have to be pretty highly trained, with lots of cosmonaut background, and they must have brushed up against some of the space people in the science team."

"Do you have photos of the officers?" Gerhardt asked the lieutenant.

"Yessir, most of them, pretty clear ones, too. Couple of good profile shots."

"Show them to the Russian science team members and see if we can get an identification. Garry, I think you should mediate. We'll talk to Pritikin on the Russian team—he's a straightforward fellow. We'll let one of those heavy-lifters dock—the one with Pletnev. If he or Pritikin can get through to their senior officer by radio, and if he can arrange a meeting, maybe they'll do more than just listen to reason."

"If I mediate then I should know how to speak Russian," Lanier said.

"One of our fellows can help. Rimskaya, or that German lieutenant, Rudolph—or whatever—Jaeger."

"Rimskaya's good, but perhaps not good enough for diplomatic nuances. Jaeger could be useful. But I won't take the job unless I work with the Russians directly, no insulation. I can take the ninety train into the third chamber and learn while you're arranging for Pletnev to come aboard."

"We don't have weeks, Garry."

Lanier shook his head. "It won't be that long. Hours, perhaps." He took a deep breath and leaned forward. "Do you see any reason not to put a stop to all the secrecy?"

Gerhardt thought for a moment. "Internally? I'm not sure."

"Wouldn't you like to know what all this is about?"

"Of course. I mean, I'm not sure who would authorize relaxing the restrictions."

"Kirchner was told we were no longer part of Earth's military strategy; we're on our own. Can't we assume the same is true politically?"

"We're our own masters, you mean."

"Exactly," Lanier said.

"That's a can of worms I don't even want to peek into right now."

"Well, I'll take responsibility for making one move, at least. The libraries are no longer closed. The information contained in them is available to everyone."

"Even the Russians?"

"Even the Russians, if they negotiate for peace with us," Lanier said. "I'll learn Russian, you straighten out the negotiating procedures and we'll offer them a share of all we have left."

"Kirchner won't like letting the bastards dock. And he certainly won't like making concessions."

"Who's in charge of internal security?" Lanier asked pointedly. "And do we have any choice?"

Patricia awoke to find the cabin in semidarkness. She had rolled to face the window. More than twenty kilometers below, the corridor's surface was dark and scarred. Great gashes crisscrossed the mottled ground, the edges shining dully.

She rolled to look across the cabin. Her captor lay wrapped in a net of twinkling blue and green lights. Sparks shot between each light in the net, and within, his body was enveloped in a translucent greenish fog.

She had enough weight in the cabin to feel the difference between up and down. Slipping out of her molded berth, she reached across to touch the net of lights and see if it was real. Before her fingers made contact, a voice stopped her.

"Please do not disturb." Olmy stood at the front of the cabin. Patricia looked between the figure in the couch and the Olmy that had just addressed her. "I am a partial personality, an assigned ghost. Olmy is resting, performing Talsit meditation. If you have any business with him, please allow me to substitute."

"What are you?" Patricia asked.

"An assigned ghost. While he rests, I perform any duties he may have which do not require physical activity. I have no substance. I am a projection."

"Oh." She frowned at the image. "What's he. . . doing? What's happening to him?"

"Talsit meditation is the process of being surrounded by carriers of Talsit data. His body is cleansed of impurities and his mind of obstacles to clear thought. Talsit data informs, reorganizes, criticizes the mental functions. It is a kind of dreaming."

"Are you just a recording?"

"No. I am connected with his thought processes, but in a way that does not interfere with rest."

"Where's the—" She was about to say, "boojum." She looked to the rear and saw the flat-headed, knock-kneed brown creature curled in its own berth, watching her with calm, slowly blinking eyes.

"Hello," it said musically.

Patricia swallowed and nodded. "What was your name again?"

"I have no name. I am a Frant."

"Who's piloting?"

"The ship controls itself at the moment. Surely you people have craft that can do that," the Frant said, its tone admonishing.

"Yes. Of course." She turned back to the image. "Why has the corridor changed?"

"Centuries ago, there was a war here. The surface material brought into the Way—the corridor—was severely disturbed. In places you can see the Way itself."

"A war?" Patricia peered down at the mottled landscape.

"Where Jarts occupied the Way. They had traveled from gates hundreds of thousands of kilometers farther down. Those gates have since been blocked or tightly regulated. When the Axis City attempted to pass, and to regain control of the Way, the Jarts resisted. They were driven out, and this stretch of the Way, the entire distance to the Thistledown, is now blocked and deserted."

"Oh." She lay back and watched the lights twinkle around Olmy. She was exhausted. Her eyes were sandy and her throat scratchy; her chest ached and her arm and leg muscles were tense and sore. "I've been crying," she said.

"You have slept for the last twelve hours," the Frant said. "You seemed at peace while you slept. We did not disturb you."

"Thank you," she said. "This Axis City—that's where we're going?"

"Yes," the Frant said.

"What will happen to me there?"

"You will be honored," Olmy's image answered. "You are from our past, after all, and very brilliant."

"I don't like. . . fuss," Patricia said softly. "And I want to go back and help my friends. They need me."

"You are not crucial there, and we decided it was dangerous."

"I still want to return. I want you to know you are taking me against my will."

"We regret that. You will not be mistreated."

Patricia decided it was useless to argue with a ghost, assigned or otherwise. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and watched the raked and blackened landscape far below. It was difficult to feel anything for the past now, for whatever had happened before she entered the craft. Did she really want to return? Was there anything so important to her, anywhere?

Yes. Lanier. He expected help from her. She was part of his team. And Paul, her family. Dead. She felt for the letters in her pocket, and then reached for the bag containing the multi-meter, slate and processor. They had not been disturbed.

Sosnitsky was dying. Of the five corpsmen who had accompanied the battalion, two had made it into the second chamber, and they were in no mood to hide the facts from the general. One, a small, balding slight fellow with a bruise across half his face, took Mirsky aside as he approached the copse of trees

"The general has internal injuries—ruptured spleen the least among them. We don't have the blood or plasma we need, and we don't have the proper conditions for operating. He will die in an hour, maybe two. . . he's strong, but he's no superman."

Sosnitsky lay on his side in a cot made out of backpack fabric and tree limbs. He blinked twice in succession every two or three seconds, and his face was pale and damp. Mirsky kneeled beside him and Sosnitsky took his hand. The general's grip was still surprisingly strong.

"My own bones have become shrapnel, Comrade Commander," he said. "I understand neither 'Lev' nor 'Nev' made it down." He grimaced, or grinned—it was difficult to tell which—then coughed. "I am about to confer a dubious honor on you, Colonel Mirsky. We need a division commander. The only other colonel left alive is Vielgorsky, and I do not want a political officer in command of our troops. I am giving you a very big field promotion, Comrade, one that may not be approved back on Earth. But then, if what we hear is correct, on Earth nobody cares now. I have witnesses—Belozersky here is one, and I will confirm the promotion by radio to other battalion commanders before I die. So I must work fast. You are now a Lieutenant General. I give you my insignia." He passed the stars to Mirsky with his right hand, face strained by the pain. "There might be trouble with. . . others in line. But these are my wishes. I trust you, General Mirsky. If what our squadron commander says is true—and it does not seem impossible—then you must negotiate. We may be the last Russians. . . . Everyone else burns. In fire." He coughed again. "Until then, you hold your ground. But who am I to tell you what to do? You're a General now. Please tell Belozersky to bring the radio."

Belozersky passed with an angry look that had something else in it—a kind of pleading. He doesn't know how to treat me yet, Mirsky thought. The general made the announcement to his surviving staff. Belozersky gently informed him that the bore-hole transponders were inoperative, but he insisted on radioing the message anyway.

"The Americans know now that we will have a leader," he said. Minutes later, he lapsed into coma.

It took Mirsky some time to accept what had happened. He thought it best to continue as he had before, so he returned to the foundation and conferred with Garabedian.

Despite setting his deadline, Mirsky did not order any action at the end of the hour. He knew it would be suicide. He had had some vague hope of the heavy-lifter's suddenly coming through and beginning to drop, but the hope was gone now, and with it any real ambition to continue.

Major General Sosnitsky was, of course, correct.

From the very beginning it had been an extremely risky gamble. If what the enemy said was true (and surely the squadron commander Pletnev would not lie to his own men just to save his skin)—if that was all true, no victory was possible.

Garabedian approached with a tube of rations. Mirsky waved him aside. "We must eat," Garabedian said, "Comrade General."

Mirsky frowned up at him. "Why? What use is it? They will keep us here till we starve or become foxes raiding the farmer's coops. We're stuck."

Garabedian shrugged. "All right."

Mirsky turned away from his former deputy and held out his arm abruptly, making grasping motions with his hand. "Give it to me, you bastard. I don't want you eating it."

Garabedian grinned and passed him the tube.

"It's lousy," Mirsky said, squeezing the fish paste into his mouth. "Tastes like shit."

"In my hometown, we call shit sausage and fight over it," Garabedian said. "So why should you be depressed?"

"I liked Sosnitsky," Mirsky said "And then he goes and makes me a general."

Chapter Thirty-One

Lanier stood in the broad, clear luminosity of the library, face twitching. He hadn't actually sat down before one of the chromium teardrops for months. He didn't wish to, even now. The experience had not been physically unpleasant, but it seemed that all his present troubles had emerged from one of those seats—the one now festooned with inactive equipment.

Three Apple- and Uzi-armed marines stood uneasily behind him; Gerhardt had insisted they accompany Lanier, in case any of the Russian SPETSNAZ had this far infiltrated.

He walked between the seats. Like Patricia, he eschewed the cluttered seat. He stopped and turned around to survey the plaza, then sat down on the chair and flipped open the control box. At the press of his fingers, queries floating before him. The library still addressed him in clear twentieth-first-century English. Perhaps it remembered him; perhaps it knew who they were, even why they were here.

"I need to learn twenty-first-century Russian," he said. "Early twenty-first. Pre-Death. How long will that take?"

"Do you wish a reading knowledge, speaking knowledge, colloquial facility, or all of these?" the library narrator asked.

"I need speaking knowledge, colloquial, right away. I suppose the others as well, if it doesn't take much more time."

"You can be taught a command of spoken colloquial and technical Russian in two hours. An additional hour will be required to teach you to read and translate."

"Then give me all of it," he said.

"Very well. Please relax; you are a little tense. We begin first with the Cyrillic alphabet. . . .”

I am relaxing, he realized with some surprise. As the lessons developed, he slipped into the bath of knowledge with a deep mental sigh. I'm enjoying this.

He had never had a talent for languages. Nevertheless, within three hours, he spoke Russian like a native Muscovite.

Muscular, balding and florid-faced squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Alekseivich Pletnev and his four crew disembarked the tethered heavy-lifter from the aft hatch and were guided into the first dock airlock. By the agreement negotiated several hours before, the remaining heavy-lifters maintained their positions outside the bore hole.

The Russians removed their suits and were escorted by seven Apple-bearing marines across the staging area and into the communications center. Kirchner greeted him—his words translated by Lieutenant Jaeger—and explained the procedure.

"The senior officer for your men in the Stone is in our second chamber. According to a message from your Major General Sos—Sos—"

"Sosnitsky," Jaeger finished for him, translating.

"Sosnitsky has promoted an officer named Mirsky to lieutenant general. That means we have to negotiate passage across the first chamber; your comrades have us blocked off here. Our only alternative is to fly you across the axis, and I don't think anyone relishes that thought."

Pletnev listened to Lieutenant Jaeger, and nodded vigorously. "I will speak to them again," he said. "This time directly."

"You don't have seniority over them. They may think you're a traitor."

"I can only try," Pletnev said. "Perhaps I go down alone, or with my crew, and try to convince them. . . .”

"They don't seem anxious to be convinced. Your transmissions have been broadcast to the troops and they've continued fighting."

"Yes, so?" Pletnev blustered, his face becoming even redder. "We try again."

"We try again," Kirchner agreed. "First, we'll let you transmit to the first chamber. Tell them everything; what our situation is here, what you plan on doing, what happened on Earth."

"Yes, I am no idiot. That is what I will tell them." He glared at Kirchner and then offered his hand again. "You butchered us," he said.

Kirchner hesitated, then shook the hand firmly. "Your men fight bravely."

"Show me where to go now." Pickney suggested he follow her to a communications post. She pinned a wireless microphone to his lapel and tuned the equipment to a frequency used by the Russians.

Pletnev spoke with a Lieutenant Colonel I. S. Pogodin in the first chamber. The German translated most of the rapid exchange for Kirchner.

"—You cannot have forgotten me, Pogodin. I instructed your class in Novosibirsk."

"Yes, indeed, you sound like Pletnev—"

"Lay down your fears, Pogodin! The battle is over. I need to cross your territory to speak with Colonel Mirsky—now Lieutenant General Mirsky. Will you allow—" He glanced at Kirchner.

"Yourself, one of your crew and an escort of four marines," Kirchner said.

"Two of us and four of them to cross?"

There was no reply for a moment. "We have no communication with the second chamber, or any other chamber. Our own Colonel Raksakov is dead. I am not senior officer in this chamber—there is Colonel Vielgorsky."

"Then get together with Vielgorsky and make a decision, Pogodin."

There was a few minutes' wait until Vielgorsky came back with a reply.

"You may cross unarmed. I will want to speak with you in person."

Pletnev cast a querying look at Kirchner. "Unarmed? Is that acceptable?"

Kirchner nodded.

"We will come down, then—"

"By the zero elevator to the science team compound," Kirchner instructed, and the German translated. "We'll need a truck released from the compound to cross the chamber."

Pletnev passed on the requirements. Vielgorsky added that one of his men must accompany them in the truck to the second chamber. After a moment's consideration, Kirchner again agreed. He then spoke with Gerhardt and confirmed the plan.

"Lanier and two of my men will be on the opposite side of the bridge as soon as we reach an agreement with whoever's in charge of the second chamber," Gerhardt said. "Lanier's learned Russian. We think one of the Russian science team should go with him, too, if everyone's agreeable."

Pletnev pursed his lips and mumbled something the German could not understand. Then, in passable English, he asked, "Pliss, is there washroom? I have occupied suit for a week now."

Belozersky crouched beside Mirsky as the cease-fire instructions were relayed over the loudspeaker in the enemy camp.

"This could be very tricky," Belozersky said, shaking his head. "We cannot be sure what sort of misinformation they will bring."

Mirsky did not react. He listened intently, then passed orders through Garabedian for his battalion to heed the instructions. "Pletnev will be here in an hour," he said as he took a cigarette offered by Garabedian. "We can question him to our heart's content. If what he says is indeed, true, then we negotiate."

"There must be no retreat from principles," Belozersky said grimly.

"Who suggested retreat from anything?" Mirsky countered. He disliked the little martinet with his tight-pressed lips and nervous gestures.

"If Pletnev tells the truth," Belozersky pursued, "then we must establish a stronghold of the revolution right here, on the Potato."

"They call it the Stone," Garabedian said.

"The Potato," Belozersky repeated, glaring at him.

"No one disputes you," Mirsky said with perhaps too much patience.

"We must be equal partners in this venture."

"They have all the women," Mirsky observed. Belozersky scrutinized him as if he had made a bad joke.

"Yes? Comrade General, I do not see—"

"We cannot go home—if Pletnev is correct," Mirsky said. "To carry on the ideals of the revolution, there must be. . . women. That seems obvious."

Belozersky had nothing to say to this.

"Perhaps on our science team. . .” Garabedian suggested.

"Most of them are men," Mirsky observed. "Remember the briefings? Very prestigious assignment, the Potato. Senior academicians and their assistants only. Maybe fifteen women. Spread among seven hundred soldiers." He laughed and squashed the quickly smoked cigarette butt against the concrete foundation.

Belozersky sat with his back against the concrete and stared down at his clasped hands where they rested on drawn-up knees. "Not everything in Russia has been destroyed," he murmured. "There are redoubts, fortresses. You have heard of these, Comrade General, surely."

"They reveal nothing to those who do not need to know," Mirsky said. "Rumors don't equal reality."

"But at Podlipki—the secret hangars, the helicopters and airplanes waiting. . . surely the Party Secretary, the Defense Council—"

"Perhaps," Mirsky said, more to shut the man up than to agree.

"They will communicate with us, then." Belozersky looked up, eyes bright. "We must have our own outside channel of communication. If we negotiate, we must demand—"

"I have thought of that already," Mirsky said. "Now please be quiet. I have a lot of thinking to do before Pletnev arrives."

The truck rolled past the lines of foxholes and the barbed wire fences scavenged from the science compound. Russians in incongruous arctic camouflage peered at them, some still wearing their spacesuit helmets. The suits themselves had long since been discarded—they littered the drop zones in the first chamber, along with the para-sails and bodies of unlucky soldiers.

"Never such an action as this," Pletnev said flatly. "Never."

Major Annenkovsky—the representative of the Russians in the first chamber—stared sadly through the truck windows and ran his hands through brick-red hair. "I am grateful to be alive," he said.

Lieutenant Rudolph Jaeger translated for the two marine escorts in a low voice. The truck passed through the checkpoint by its demolished guardhouse and headed north.

At the northern end of the zero bridge, Lanier glanced at his watch: 1400 hours. The marines nodded to each other and they began crossing on foot, as agreed.

"I just hope those damn insurgents got the word," the young sergeant said, looking back at Alexandria.

Through cameras in the first chamber bore-hole opening, Kirchner monitored the progress of the truck on the same console that had conveyed photos of Earth's death just thirty hours before. Behind him, Link jerked up in her seat and quickly tuned in a signal.

"Incoming OTV," advised one of the soldiers on watch in the exterior dimple. "Not a Russian. One of ours."

Link gestured with one hand, the other punching buttons in rapid succession. "Captain Kirchner, we have an OTV from Station Sixteen. It's damaged and couldn't go to lunar settlement. . . . Sir, they say they have Judith Hoffman on board."

Kirchner swiveled in his chair. "I'm not surprised," he said laconically. "Bring 'em in. Miss Pickney, where did I leave my jacket?"

Chapter Thirty-Two

Mirsky crossed the field slowly, not so much out of caution as to display his dignity, and to gain some idea of their losses. Lanier, Lieutenant Jaeger, Major Annenkovsky and Pletnev advanced more rapidly, until only a few yards separated them. Pletnev stepped forward to grasp Mirsky's hand and upper arm, then backed away, standing alone.

Mirsky looked at the bodies spaced haphazardly on the field. Two lay half-in and half-out of an unfinished foxhole, several small burned holes and slashes of cooked flesh showing through melted gaps in their uniforms. He had counted twenty-eight corpses so far. There were at least twice that many on the field. His thoughts strayed away from tactical considerations and lingered on the unsimple fact of dead countrymen.

The forty-one wounded in the second chamber were being tended by only two corpsmen. Sosnitsky had died the day before, never emerging from coma. The wounded died two, three and four daily.

Mirsky turned to Pletnev. "What they have broadcast to us—your words, your information—it is true?"

"Yes," Pletnev said.

"Were there any instructions from Earth?"

"No."

"And how bad?"

"It is very bad," Pletnev said softly, scratching his cheek. "There will be no victors."

"No instructions from anywhere? From the Defense Council in a redoubt, from the party, a platform, from some surviving officers?"

Pletnev shook his head. "Nothing. They could not be concerned with us."

"Did you witness engagements?" Mirsky asked, his face tightening.

"We saw Russia glowing at night. All of Europe is on fire."

"Which one of you speaks Russian?" Mirsky asked sharply, glancing at Lanier and Jaeger.

"We both do," Lanier said.

"Are your countries victorious, then?"

"No," Lanier said.

"We are all pigs," Mirsky said.

Pletnev shook his head. "We did our duty, Comrade General. You have accomplished a marvelous—"

"How many ships survived?" Mirsky interrupted.

"Four," Pletnev said. "And how many men?"

Lanier, Jaeger and Major Annenkovsky waited for Mirsky to respond.

"Two hundred—no, about one hundred eighty here." Mirsky frowned at Lanier. "I haven't heard how many in the other chambers. Maybe seven hundred in all. General Sosnitsky died yesterday."

"Then you are the senior officer," Pletnev said.

"We should begin talks now," Lanier said. "I don't see any need to resume fighting."

"No," Mirsky said. He surveyed the field, shaking his head slowly. "If we are all that is left. . . No need to fight."

"Earth is not dead, Colonel," Lanier said. "It is very badly hurt, but it is not dead."

"You sound certain," Mirsky said. "How can you be so sure?"

"Yes," Pletnev said in English. "So you have communication with your superiors?"

"No," Lanier said. "I read about it, and watched it happen. It's a long story, General Mirsky, and I think the time has come to make it known to everybody."

While the bodies still lay where they had fallen, the Russians were guaranteed access to the first four chambers, in return for guaranteeing the Western bloc personnel access to the compounds and zero elevator in the first chamber. Promises were made that bilateral security squads would police the travel routes. With that agreed to, the debris and bodies were cleared from the southern cap and the bore hole and the remaining Russian heavy-lifters were given permission to dock.

The negotiations were conducted in the first chamber, in the first science team compound cafeteria. Half of the second compound barracks was temporarily given over to house Russian soldiers; a line drawn in white paint divided the sectors and was guarded on one side by five marines, on the other by five tired-looking Space Shock Troopers.

Eventually, the Russians indicated, they would move most of their soldiers out of the first chamber and claim a large section of the fourth chamber.

Gerhardt spoke through Lanier and Jaeger to Mirsky. Colonel Vielgorsky—a darkly handsome middle-aged man with jet-black hair and green eyes—advised Mirsky on political considerations. Major Belozersky was always lurking nearby. The third political officer, Major Yazykov, assigned to the fourth chamber, part of a Russian survey team.

They worked through the early evening of the second day of the truce. During a break for coffee and lunch, Kirchner appeared in the cafeteria entrance with a guest and two guards. Lanier looked up at the group and slowly lowered his cup of coffee.

"Looks like you don't need much help," Judith Hoffman said. She was pale and her hair was uncharacteristically mussed; she wore an outsize jumpsuit and one of her hands was wrapped in a bandage. In the other, she carried a personal effects box from the shuttle. Without a word, Lanier pushed back his chair and crossed the room to wrap her in a tight hug. The Russians watched with mild irritation at the interruption; Vielgorsky whispered something to Mirsky, and he nodded, sitting up in his seat.

"Jesus," Lanier said softly. "I was sure you hadn't made it. You don't know how good it is to see you."

"As good as it feels to be here, I hope. The President fired me and the whole board four days before. . . Before. I pulled in some favors and took a VIP tour of Station Sixteen the next day. I was arranging for an OTV flight—not easy. I was persona non grata with the politicos, and that worried the brass, but two shuttle jocks were willing to smuggle me aboard. We were all fueled and ready to go when the. . . war began, and we got away with six civilian evacuees just before they—" She swallowed. "I'm very tired, Garry, but I had to see you and let you know I'm here. Not as your boss. Just here. There are nine others—four women, two men, three crew. Let me sleep and then tell me how I can help."

"We haven't worked out chain of command yet. We don't even know whether we're an outpost or a territory or a nation," Lanier said. "There'll be plenty for you to do." His eyes were watering. He wiped them with the back of his hand and grinned at Hoffman, then pointed to the bargaining table. "We're talking. The fighting's over—for now, perhaps for good."

"I always knew you were a good administrator," Hoffman said. "Garry, I have to sleep. I haven't had a good sleep since we left the station. But. . . I brought something with me."

She put the box on the table and undid the metal clasps. Raising the top, she dumped the packets of seeds across the tabletop. Some slid over to the Russian table. Mirsky and Vielgorsky seemed stunned by the display. Mirsky picked up a packet of marigold seeds.

"Please, keep what you want," Hoffman told them. She looked up at Lanier. "They're for all of us now."

Kirchner took her by the elbow and led her away.

Lanier returned to the table and sat, feeling magnitudes better. Belozersky, standing behind Vielgorsky and Mirsky, looked down on the pile of seeds with unconcealed suspicion.

"My chief political officer wants to know if you have received instructions from any surviving governmental organization," Mirsky said. Jaeger translated for Gerhardt.

"No," Lanier said. "We're still operating on our own."

"We recognize the woman you spoke to," Vielgorsky said smoothly. "She is an agent of your government and the perpetrator of your policies on this asteroid."

"Yes, she is," Lanier said. "and when she's feeling better, she'll join our negotiations. But she was. . .” he searched for the word, "removed from her position before the Death."

He wondered at how easily that word came, designating past, not future.

"When did she arrive?" Mirsky asked.

"I don't know. Not too long ago."

"We insist," Belozersky said, "that any Warsaw Pact survivors be welcomed on this asteroid as well. Military and civilian."

"Of course," Lanier said. Gerhardt agreed with a nod.

"And now," Lanier said, "for perhaps the most important issues. Disarmament and territorial rights. . .”

"We will work out a rough draft of these agreements and ratify a formal document later," Mirsky said.

"We insist on sovereignty of all Warsaw Pact peoples on this asteroid," Belozersky said. Vielgorsky pursed his lips. Mirsky backed his chair away from the table sharply and led Belozersky to a corner. There, they engaged in a quiet but heated exchange, with Belozersky casting furious glances at Lanier and Gerhardt.

Mirsky returned alone. "I am in command of Soviet soldiers and citizens," he said. "I am the principal negotiator."

Lanier's office and bunkroom had been ransacked but not seriously damaged during the occupation. He slept for five hours and then took a rationed breakfast from the food vendor in the cafeteria.

Kirchner met him at the front entrance of the women's barracks. "I'm going back to the bore hole," he said. "There's still an unholy mess up there. We're bringing down bodies now—ours and theirs. Is there a service scheduled?"

"I've suggested a single service sometime in the next twenty-four hours. More than just mourning for the dead here. . .”

Kirchner pursed his lips. "It's not going to be easy standing around those bastards."

"Has to start somewhere. How's Hoffman? Has she slept?"

"From what I've heard. Two of your astronomers took her in and kicked me and the guards out." He narrowed his eyes and nodded in the direction of the cafeteria. "What's my role going to be when you fellows are done?"

"Captain, USN, I presume," Lanier said. "In charge of external security. I'm not going to hand them the Stone on a plate."

"Have they agreed to disarm?"

Lanier shook his head. "Not yet. They want to set up a secure camp in the fourth chamber, then they'll discuss disarmament. I'm giving Mirsky a private tour later this afternoon. . . the libraries, the cities."

"Jesus, I'd like to go with you."

"You'll get your chance soon. As far as Gerhardt and I are concerned, it's all open. No monopoly."

"Even the seventh chamber?"

"In time. They haven't asked about that yet."

Kirchner raised his eyebrows. "Weren't they told?"

"I have no idea what they tell their military men. Certainly they'll know pretty soon. The Russian science team is not exactly mixing with the soldiers—military doesn't count for much in their eyes, apparently. But word will get around." He paused for a long moment. "Any word from Earth?"

"Not a thing. Some radar activity in the Arctic Ocean—maybe a few surface ships. Can't see much. Smoke is covering most of Europe, Asia, the United States. They can't be concerned with us, Garry."

Kirchner walked across the compound and climbed into a truck going to the zero elevator entrance. Lanier knocked on the barracks door. Janice Polk answered.

"Come on in," she said. "She's awake and I took her some food a few minutes ago."

Hoffman sat on the couch in the small lounge. Beryl Wallace and Lieutenant Doreen Cunningham, former head of compound security, sat on chairs across from her. Cunningham's head was bandaged, evidence of the laser burn she had received before the surrender of the first compound.

They stood as Lanier entered; Cunningham made as if to salute, then smiled sheepishly and lowered her hand.

"Ladies, Mr. Lanier and I have some catching up to do," Hoffman said, placing a half-full glass of orange juice on the tank-baffle table. When they were alone, Lanier sat and pulled the chair closer.

"I think I'm ready for a briefing," Hoffman said. "I haven't heard anything since I left Earth. Was it like what the libraries showed us?"

"Yes," Lanier said. "And the Long Winter is starting."

"Okay." She pinched her nose with two fingers and rubbed it vigorously. "End of the world. All that we know." She sighed and the sigh threatened to shudder into a sob. "Shit. First things first."

Lanier held out his hand and she shook it.

"They'll think we're lovers," she said.

"A purely Druckerian relationship," Lanier said.

She laughed and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

"How are you doing, Garry?" she asked.

He didn't answer for a long moment. "I lost my aircraft, Judith. I was in charge—"

"Bull."

"I was in charge, and I did everything I could to prevent the war. I failed. So I can't really say how I am, just yet. Maybe not too well. I don't know. I'm giving them tit for tat in the negotiations. But I'm very tired."

She tapped his hand with her fingers and nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on his. "Okay. You still have my full confidence. You know that, Garry?"

"Yes."

"After things settle down, we can all take our turn sticking our heads through the hole in the Sisyphus mural. Now tell me about the invasion and everything that's happened since."

Lanier had a vague daydream of taking Mirsky to the second chamber library alone, or with at most only one bodyguard apiece. When he arrived at the cafeteria negotiating tables, Mirsky, Garabedian, two of the three surviving political officers—Belozersky and Major Yazykov—and four armed SSTs awaited him. He quickly asked Gerhardt and Jaeger to accompany him, and to balance the forces, four marines joined the group.

They rode in silence from the first chamber to the second chamber's zero bridge. One of Mirsky's troopers drove the truck for the first half of the short journey. Mirsky glanced at Lanier several times during the trip through the city, sizing him up, Lanier suspected. The Russian lieutenant general was a closed book to Lanier; not once had Mirsky revealed any of his private side. Still, Lanier had a much higher regard for Mirsky than for Belozerksy. Mirsky might listen to reason; Belozersky wouldn't even know what reason was.

Halfway across the bridge, the truck stopped and a marine took over the driving duties. They passed through the shopping district Patricia had described as "quaint" and then disembarked in the library plaza. One marine and one SST stayed behind to guard the truck. They squared off at opposite corners of the vehicle and studiously avoided conversation.

Gerhardt engaged Belozerksy in conversation through Jaeger. This gave Lanier an opportunity to lead Mirsky a few steps ahead and prepare him for what they would find.

"I'm not sure what your commanders told you about the Stone," he began, "but I doubt you had the complete story."

Mirsky stared ahead stonily. "The Stone is a better name than the Potato," he admitted, lifting his eyebrows. "Calling it the Potato makes us worms, no? I have been told the Stone was built by humans."

"That's not the half of it."

"Then I am interested to hear the rest."

Lanier told him the story in some detail as they entered the library and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

In the reading room, Lanier found a section of Russian volumes in the stacks and emerged with three, handing one to Mirsky—a translation of the Brief History of the Death—and one each to Belozersky and Yazykov.

Belozersky stood with his book firmly clutched in both hands, staring at Lanier as if he had been insulted. "What is this supposed to be?" he asked. Yazykov opened his volume hesitantly.

"Read it for yourself," Lanier suggested.

"It is Dostoevsky," Belozersky said. He traded books with Yazykov. "And Aksakov. These are supposed to interest us?"

"Perhaps if you would look at the printing dates, gentlemen," Lanier said quietly. They opened their books, read and then closed them sharply, almost together.

"We must explore these shelves thoroughly," Belozersky said. He did not sound happy at the prospect.

Mirsky held his book open in both hands, thumbing through it and returning several times to the publication notice, once touching the date with his finger. He closed the book on his thumb and tapped its spine on the surface of the reading table, looking up at Lanier. The second chamber library seemed, if anything, darker and gloomier than before.

"This tells the history of the war," Mirsky half asked, half stated. "It is an accurate translation of the English edition?"

"I believe so."

"Gentlemen, Mr. Lanier and I must be alone for a few minutes. Comrade officers, you will please wait with General Gerhardt and his men, and you will take our men with you."

Belozersky placed the book on an empty reading table and Yazykov followed suit. "You should not be long, Comrade General," Belozersky said.

"As long as it takes," Mirsky said.

Lanier had brought along a canteen half-filled with brandy, hopeful of just such an opportunity. He now poured out a cup for each of them.

"This is much appreciated," Mirsky said, lifting the cup. "Special service," Lanier said.

"My political officers would accuse you of trying to get me drunk and pump me—that is the idiom?—for information."

"There's not enough left to get drunk on," Lanier said.

"Pity. I am not strong enough for. . . this." Mirsky gave the library two widely spaced jabs with the empty cup. "Maybe you are, but I am not. It frightens me to death."

"You'll find strength after a while," Lanier said. "It's as attractive as it is frightening."

"You have known this for how long?"

"Two years."

"I think I will let others find the attraction," Mirsky said. "My people will now have access to all this—unrestricted, any of us, the soldiers and officers, too?"

"That's the agreement."

"How did you learn to speak Russian? In school?"

"In the third chamber library," Lanier said. "It took me just over three hours."

"You speak like a Muscovite. One who has been overseas for a few decades, perhaps, but still. . . a Muscovite. Could I learn English that quickly?"

"Probably."

Lanier split the last of the brandy and they toasted each other.

"You are a strange man, Garry Lanier," Mirsky said solemnly.

"Oh?"

"Yes. You are turned inside. You see others but don't let them see you."

Lanier did not react.

"There, see?" Mirsky grinned. "You are that way." The Russian's eyes suddenly resumed their sharp focus on him. "Why didn't you let the world know about this from the beginning?"

"After you've spent a little more time here, and in the third chamber, ask yourself what you would have done."

It was Mirsky's turn not to react. "There are bitter grievances between our people," he said, dropping the book on the table with a thump. "They will not be easily laid to rest. In the meantime, I do not understand this place. I do not understand our position here, or yours. My ignorance is dangerous, Mr. Lanier, so I will come here, or to the other library, when time permits, and educate myself. And I will learn English using your method, if that is possible. But, to prevent confusion, I do not think all my people will be allowed to come here. Would it not be wise for you to look to similar restrictions?"

Lanier shook his head, wondering if Mirsky even saw his own contradictions. "We're here to break the pattern of the past, not continue it. As far as I'm concerned, it's open to all."

Mirsky stared at him for an uncomfortably long period of time, then stood. "Perhaps," he said. "That is much easier for you to say than for me. My people are not used to being well informed. Some of my officers will find the thought frightening. Some will not believe any of this. . . they will assume it is an American trick. That would be very comforting."

"But you know it isn't."

Mirsky reached out to touch the book. "If a truth is dangerous," he said, "then perhaps it is not true enough."

The strip of parkland in the second chamber where Mirsky's battalion had landed now took the bodies of the dead. A hundred and six American, British and German soldiers had died in the battle and lay in aluminized sacks down a long trench opened by one of the anthropology team's excavators. Three hundred sixty-two Soviets lay in four more trenches. Another ninety-eight Soviets and a dozen Western bloc soldiers were missing and presumed dead, either destroyed in the battle or drifted out of the bore hole to become freeze-dried mummies in orbit around the Stone. A special marker had been set up for the dead of OTV 45 and the crews of the lost heavy-lifters.

Two thousand three hundred people gathered around the trenches. Mirsky and Gerhardt spoke in Russian and English, keeping their words brief and to the point. They were burying more than just their fellows; though there was no marker yet for the dead of Earth, they were burying distant family members, friends; distant cultures, histories, dreams.

They were burying the past, or as much of it as they could part with. The Soviets stood together in ranks. Within the Soviet group, the members of their science team remained isolated, selected out.

The Soviets stood in silence as a Chaplain Cook and Yitshak Jacob, acting as a rabbi, administered last rites and kaddish. A Soviet Uzbek Moslem stepped forward to offer his prayers.

Mirsky threw the first spade of dirt into the Soviet graves. Gerhardt threw a spadeful into the NATO grave. Then, without planning or warning, Gerhardt took a shovel of dirt from the mound to be pushed over his men, and carried it to the first Soviet trench. Mirsky did the same without hesitation.

Belozersky watched with a face permanently locked in disapproval. Vielgorsky kept a silent, dignified demeanor. Yazykov seemed to be somewhere else, and his eyes were moist.

Hoffman and Farley stepped forward and laid a wreath at the head of each site.

As the crowd moved away, the archaeology team immediately began filling in the trenches. The Soviets divided to return to the first and fourth chambers. Farley, Carrolson and Hoffman joined Lanier and Heineman at the zero bridge. They watched people crossing to go to the train terminals. Carrolson edged closer to Lanier and touched his arm.

"Garry, there's something we have to talk about."

"Let's hear it," he said.

"Not here. In the compound," Carrolson said, looking to Hoffman. They gathered in the trucks and crossed the first chamber. Carrolson, Farley, Heineman and Hoffman accompanied Lanier to the deserted administration building, where they gathered around Ann Blakely's desk on the first floor.

"Sounds like bad news coming," he said. His eyes widened in prescient realization. "Oh, my God," he said. "Where's—"

Carrolson interrupted him. "You've been too busy until now. We're not sure what's happened, but Patricia can't be found anywhere. There are two reports, but one's Russian and it may not be credible. Rimskaya heard it when he was talking with the Russian science team. The other's from Larry. We thought we'd find her, that maybe she was just hiding out somewhere, but—"

Heineman nodded. "What I saw just seems to add to the mystery," he said.

"Patricia left the fourth chamber compound last Wednesday," Farley said. "Nobody saw her go, but Lenore is convinced she must have taken a train to the third chamber."

"She said she was going to a library. We were all a little crazy then, and she was taking it very hard," Carrolson said.

"The Russian team says that a Soviet soldier saw an aircraft land near one of the subway terminals in Thistledown, on the northern side—the zero line terminal," Farley said. "Two people got aboard—and something the Russian called a devil. One of the. . . humans was a man and the other a woman, and the woman fits Patricia's description. The aircraft flew off. White, spade-shaped, but with the nose blunted. It didn't make any noise."

Heineman stepped forward. "I saw a boojum go past when I was down the corridor. Arrowhead-shaped, blunt nose. It was traveling in a spiral around the plasma tube, heading north."

"There hasn't been time until now to put it all together," Carrolson said. "I'm sorry about the delay."

"It doesn't make sense," Lanier said, shaking his head. "Maybe she was just captured by the Russians. Maybe—"

"Rimskaya's asked around. He thinks not," Carrolson said. "There wasn't anybody in Thistledown but a few Soviet paratroopers off course—no diversionary troops, none of our troops—not at that time. Nobody but Patricia."

"And a boojum," Heineman said. "The coincidence is too close, Garry."

He continued to shake his head. "It's over. Please. I just can't handle much more," he said. "Judith, tell them. I can't do anything now. There's the negotiations, and the—"

"Of course," Hoffman said, gripping his shoulder firmly with one hand. "Let's all get some rest."

Lanier held one hand to his face, as if to smooth the deep grooves of anguish around his mouth. "I'm supposed to take care of her," he said. "She's important. Judith, you told me to take care of her."

"It's all right. There wasn't anything—"

"Goddamn this place, Judith!" He raised his fists and shook them helplessly. "I hate this fucking rock!"

Carrolson began to cry. Farley held her. "Not just you," Carrolson said. "You put her in my charge."

"Stop it," Hoffman said quietly, looking away. Heineman stood back, embarrassed and uncertain what to do.

"I'm not going to just give up on her," Lanier said, lowering his arms and opening and closing his hands. "She's not just gone. Larry, can we have the tuberider fueled and ready to go soon?"

"Any time you give the word."

"Judith, I think you chose wrong," Lanier said.

"I don't think so. What do you mean?"

"I'm not going to see it through. I'm going to run off on a foolish rescue mission, not stay here and argue with a bunch of Soviets. You know me. You know I'm going to do that."

"Okay," she said. "You'll go after her. There are other reasons."

"What?" Lanier asked.

"We're stuck here, aren't we?" Hoffman said. "We have to find out what's down there soon anyway. Larry, does the V/STOL work? The tuberider?"

"They work fine," Heineman said.

"Then we'll plan. But we'll do it carefully. Is that okay, Garry? Not right away, but soon?"

"Okay," Lanier said meekly.

"I think we all need to relax and eat and rest," Farley said, looking around for agreement.

They stood in silence, a bit shaken by how close to the edge Lanier had come—and by the realization of how close they all were.

"I'd like to go, too," Carrolson said.

Chapter Thirty-Three

So I suppose you want to get away from it all. Feel like it's very remote.

—Yes.

Go chasing down the corridor after her. Why?

—To save my goddamn soul, that's why.

You haven't done badly.

—The Earth is in ruins, the Stone is half-occupied by surly Russians, and I've lost the one person I was specifically told to protect.

But the Stone is still here, and the situation seems to be stabilizing—

—Belozersky. Yazykov. Vielgorsky.

Old-liners, hard-liners. Yes. They're trouble, and shouldn't you stick around to blunt their particular axes?

—No.

You'll leave Hoffman with all the problems—

—She'll let me go because she knows I'm at the end of my rope. I can't take any more. I'm of no use to her or the Stone. . . except to go find Patricia.

Lanier opened his eyes and looked at his wristwatch: 0750 hours. He felt paralyzed. The voices continued in his head, back and forth. His mind was trying to cope with the intolerable—and to find his place in a new situation.

He kept thinking of Earth, of people—friends, co-workers, perhaps the very people he had met a few weeks before—crawling through the rubble. Very likely, there was not a single person alive on Earth whom he knew personally. That was good statistics but a lousy thought, lousy psychology. Most of his contacts (his people) had lived in cities or worked in military centers.

One exception was Robert Tyheimer. A submarine commander, he had been married to Lanier's sister, who had died of a stroke two years before Lanier was assigned to the Stone. They hadn't talked since a year after her death. Tyheimer might still be alive, under the ice, waiting. If he hadn't already contributed to the general destruction, then Tyheimer would guard his warheads and wait. . . and wait. . . for the next exchange. For the final blows.

"I hate you," Lanier said out loud, eyes closed again. He didn't even know whom he meant. Three psychiatrists gathered in his head and discoursed; one, a cliché Freudian, always twisted the worst and most sordid interpretation out of his every fleeting glimmer of thought. Yes. . . and your mother. . . and what did you say then? Meant yourself, didn't you?

Another sat quietly, smiling, letting him hang himself in his own ropy confusions.

And the third—

The third nodded and recommended work therapy. The third resembled his father.

That interested the first.

He turned over in the bed and opened his eyes again. No sleep, no rest. How long would it take for the people on the Stone to crack? How many, and how seriously? Who would contend with the problem, himself or Hoffman?

But the decision had already been made. He had given Hoffman the grand tour—and had encountered Mirsky in the third chamber library, sitting before a teardrop. The Russian lieutenant general had been accompanied by three bodyguards, even though the library was otherwise empty. He had appeared exhausted, and ignored them.

Showing Hoffman to a seat some distance away from the Russians, Lanier had taught her how to use the facilities. He had passed the keys to her, and she had welcomed them.

He sat up and flipped on the intercom. Ann Blakely was back at her desk and still in charge of the central switchboard. "I can't sleep," he said. "What's Heineman's schedule now?"

"He's awake, if that's what you want to know," she said.

"Fine. And in the seventh chamber, no doubt."

"No, schedule here says staging area in the southern bore hole—"

"Call him, please."

"Will do."

"Tell him I want to leave tomorrow, early, eight hundred hours."

"Yessir."

The crew of the V/STOL had already been chosen: himself, Heineman, Carrolson—perhaps the only one Hoffman would have difficulty doing without—and Karen Farley. The mission was simple and direct: they would travel a maximum of one million kilometers down the corridor, assuming it extended that far, stopping at several points along the way and descending to the floor. Who knew what the nature of the corridor would be that far north? They would then return, with or without Patricia or any evidence of her whereabouts.

There were a lot of uncertainties, but they were of a type Lanier welcomed. He had been dealing with horrors for so long that a sleek, cleanly dangerous adventure seemed like heaven.

He dressed and gathered his personal kit into a little black bag. Toothbrush, razor, change of underwear, slate with package of memory blocks.

Toothbrush.

Lanier started to laugh. The laughter seemed forced, but it gathered in waves until he was helpless. He lay on the bunk and doubled up, his face knotting painfully. Finally he stopped, gasping, and then thought of the tiny lavatory on the aircraft, with its tiny shower. He thought of taking a crap as they rode the singularity and the laughter broke out anew. Minutes passed before he could control it, and then he sat up straight on the edge of the bunk, taking deep breaths and rubbing his sore jaw and cheek muscles. "God in heaven," he sighed and stuffed the toothbrush into the little black bag.

The dead Soviet trooper floated twenty meters from the research scaffold in the seventh chamber bore hole. How he had gotten so far was anybody's guess. He did not seem to have been wounded; perhaps he had feared the fall and stayed near the axis until his air gave out. He was slowly drifting back down the bore hole, toward the sixth chamber. There wasn't enough time to snag him and bring him down. He cast a tangible gloom over the farewells. He seemed to watch with great interest, his pale face visible behind the faceplate, eyes wide.

Hoffman hugged Lanier, Carrolson and then Farley, their bulky suits interfering with the intent if not the emotion. Heineman was already aboard the V/STOL, which was attached remora-like to the tuberider.

They stood around the blunt end of the singularity for a moment, silent, and Hoffman said, "Garry, this isn't a wild goose chase. You know that. We need that little Chicana. Whoever took her away from us may have known how much we need her. Of course, I'm suspicious by nature. At any rate, you folks are on a very important mission. Godspeed."

Farley turned toward Hoffman. "We reached a decision last night—Hua Ling and the rest of us, all the Chinese. It wasn't to be announced until this evening, but nobody will object if I tell you now. We are with the Western bloc. The Soviet science team made some overtures, but we decided to support you. I think the Soviet scientists wish they could follow our lead. But I just wanted you to know, before we left."

"Thank you," Hoffman said, gripping Farley's glove. "We'll be curious. No need to tell you that. Learn all you can. There's a few hundred or more of us who wish we could go along."

"That's why I volunteered first," Carrolson said.

"Time's a-wastin'," Heineman drawled. "All abroad."

"Shut up and let us be sentimental," Carrolson scolded him.

"Everything will be fine," Hoffman told Lanier as they hugged again and held each other back to peer through faceplates.

"Let's go," Lanier said. They hooked their safety lines to a long pole stretched out near the aircraft and kicked away one by one to enter the hatch. Two people fit into the airlock; they cycled twice, Lanier waiting until last. With the hatch sealed and air pressure restored, he removed his suit and folded it into the compartment beneath the airlock controls.

With only four passengers, the aircraft interior was spacious. The forward part of the cabin was filled with boxes of scientific equipment; Carrolson and Farley checked them out before strapping in Lanier joined Heineman in the cockpit.

"All fuel and oxygen cables clear," Heineman said, checking the instruments. "I've run the diagnostics on the tuberider. Everything's go."

He looked expectantly at Lanier.

"Then go," Lanier said.

Heineman swung out the pylon which held the tuberider controls and locked it before him. "Hang on," he said. Then, over the intercom, "Ladies, barf bags are in the pouches of the seat in front of you. Not suggesting, you understand."

He depressed the clamp controls. Slowly, smoothly, the tuberider began to slide along the slender silver pipe of the singularity. "A little more," he said. Lanier felt himself pressed back into his seat. "And a little more still."

They were heavy now, lying on their backs in a cockpit and cabin suddenly upended. "Last bit," Heineman said, and they effectively weighed half again more than they would have on Earth. "There's a rope ladder I'll unroll down the aisle, just in case anybody has to go to the bathroom." He grinned at Lanier. "I don't recommend the lavatory in these conditions. We didn't get enough specs to design for comfort. I'll let up on the clamps if anyone gets desperate."

"Count on it," Carrolson said from the cabin.

Lanier watched the corridor moving slowly, majestically around them. Through the windscreen, the floor of the corridor merged in the distance with the pearly central glow of the plasma tube. . . stretching perhaps forever.

"The ultimate escape, isn't it?" Heineman asked, as if reading his thoughts. "Makes me feel young again."

Chapter Thirty-Four

After three separate occasions where Olmy wrapped himself in his isolating net of lights, Patricia decided there was something faintly unsavory about Talsit. Perhaps it was addictive—whatever it was.

They had been flying for at least three days—perhaps as many as five—and while Olmy and the Frant were unfailingly polite and answered her questions with seeming sincerity, they were not exactly voluble. She spent much of her time sleeping fitfully, dreaming about Paul. She often touched his last letter, still in the breast pocket of her jumpsuit. Once she awoke screaming and saw the Frant jerk spasmodically in its berth. Olmy had half fallen from his couch and was staring at her with evident alarm.

"Sorry," she said, looking between them guiltily.

"Quite all right," Olmy said. "We wish we could help. We could, actually, but. . .”

He didn't finish. A few minutes later, when her heart had stopped racing and she realized she couldn't remember what had made her scream, she asked Olmy what he meant by saying they could help.

"Talsit," he said. "Smooths the memory, rearranges priorities without dulling memory. Blocks subconscious access to certain disturbing memories. After Talsit, such memories can only be opened by direct conscious will."

"Oh," Patricia said. "Why can't I have some of this Talsit?"

Olmy smiled and shook his head. "You're pure," he said "I'd be reprimanded if I brought you into our culture before our scholars had a chance to study you."

"Sounds like I'm a specimen," Patricia said.

The Frant again made that sound of amplified teeth-grinding. Olmy looked at it reproachfully and swung down from his berth. "You are, of course," Olmy said. "What would you like to eat?"

"I'm not hungry," Patricia said, lying back in her couch. "I'm frightened, and I'm bored, and I'm having bad dreams."

The Frant peered down at her, its large brown eyes unblinking. It held out one hand, spread its four slender fingers and curled them again. "Please," it said, its voice like a badly tuned calliope. "I cannot help."

"A Frant always wishes to help," Olmy explained. "If it cannot help, it feels pain. I'm afraid you're quite a trial to my Frant."

"Your Frant? You own him?"

"It. No, I don't own him. For the time of our assignment, we are duty-wed. Rather like social symbionts. I share its thoughts and it shares mine."

Patricia smiled at the Frant. "I'm okay," she said.

"You are lying," the Frant judged.

"You're right." Patricia reached up hesitantly and touched the Frant's arm. The skin was smooth and warm but not resilient. She withdrew her fingers. "I'm not afraid of you, either of you," she said. "Did you drug me?"

"No!" Olmy answered, shaking his head vigorously. "You must not be interfered with."

"This is so strange. I don't even feel it's real, but I'm not afraid."

"Perhaps that is well," the Frant said solicitously. "Until such time as you awake, we are a dream."

After that exchange, they did not speak for hours. Patricia lay facing the window, noting that the corridor had changed its character yet again. Now it was covered with lines resembling densely clustered freeways. As they spiraled around the plasma tube, one turn every fifteen or twenty minutes, she saw that the entire floor was covered with the designs, whatever they signified. There didn't seem to be anything moving, but across a distance of more than twenty kilometers, she couldn't be sure.

The aircraft's spiral course was hypnotic. With a start, she realized she had been staring at a new phenomenon for several minutes without conscious awareness. The dense-packed patterns on the floor of the corridor now crawled with moving lights. Strung along the "freeway" lanes were lines of red and intense white beads. Lances of light swung up in arcs above the patterns and illuminated the edges of low-flying disks. Girdling walls at least two or three kilometers high broke the flow at regular intervals of about ten kilometers.

"We are nearing Axis City," Olmy said.

"What's all this?" Patricia asked, pointing.

"Metered traffic between domestic gates," Olmy said.

"What are gates?"

"You called them wells when you discovered the first and second bands. They lead to spaces beyond the Way—the corridor."

Patricia frowned. "People go between the wells, enter and leave the corridor?"

"Yes," Olmy said. "The Axis City regulates the flow along a billion kilometers."

"But the wells—the gates—they can't possibly open into our universe, not in present time."

"They don't," Olmy said. "Now please, hold your questions until after we arrive. Too much information could reduce your purity."

"Excuse me," Patricia said with false contrition.

"However, you must not miss this," Olmy said. "Please look straight ahead, at the wall over your couch."

She stared at the smooth white surface. Olmy made a few quick clicking noises and the surface rippled like a disturbed pool. The ripples spread wide into a broad rectangle and solidified. The rectangle became black, then filled with colorful snow. The snow attracted her eyes and the rectangular frame blurred, passing from her notice.

She might have been flying through the corridor alone. All around, the glowing, pulsing lights traveled their complex paths along the floor. Ahead, a dark circle was strung on the singularity, stretching from one side of the plasma tube to the other. Interrupted by the circle, the plasma tube changed color from white to a vivid oceanic blue.

"The Axis City lies beyond that barrier," Olmy said nearby. "We'll be given clearance soon, and pass through."

She turned her head and the illusion dissipated.

"No, no, please," Olmy said. "Keep watching." His tone and expression were almost little-boy eager, proud. She faced the rectangle of snow again.

The barrier filled her view. It was a somber dark gray-brown, shot through with radiating pulses of red. Where the singularity intersected it, the barrier glowed like molten lava.

Voices began speaking words she couldn't understand, and Olmy responded in kind. "We've been acknowledged," he explained to her. "Keep watching."

Directly ahead, a section of the barrier bubbled toward them and dissolved in a scatter of red pulses. They passed through.

Her first impression was that they were suddenly underwater. The plasma tube had ballooned out in all directions, widening by several kilometers and glowing the oceanic blue she had seen around the circular barrier. The floor of the corridor was still visible on all sides but reduced in definition and overlaid by the plasma's new color.

Directly ahead, two broad cubes were strung in succession along the pale thread of the singularity. Each of the visible faces of the cubes were marked with a broad horizontal cleft; the front of the foremost cube welcomed the singularity through a large hemispheric dimple, marked by glimmering spokes. At the center of the indentation was a red hole, and there the singularity was engulfed.

Beyond the cubes—and several times as broad—was a cylinder, rotating around its central axis, the line of the singularity. Its outer surface sparkled with thousands of lights; the side facing her was dark but for a series of five radiating arrays of beacons.

Next in line after the cylinder, three curved vanes stretched outward to the structure's maximum radius, perhaps ten kilometers. The vanes seemed to touch or support the plasma tube, making it glow blue-white around the outermost edge of each vane. Whatever else was beyond the cylinder was effectively blocked from view.

"Home," Olmy said behind her. She turned and looked at him, blinking. "The first segments are navigation and power stations, all automatic. The rotating cylinder is Axis Nader. We can't see them from this perspective, but beyond lie Central City, Axis Thoreau and Axis Euclid."

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"We'll enter a dock in Axis Nader."

"How large is the city?"

"Do you mean, how extensive, or how many people?"

"Both, I suppose."

"It stretches forty kilometers down the Way, and it has a population of about ninety million—twenty million corporeal, embodied; seventy million stored in City Memory."

"Oh." She turned back to the screen and watched in silence as the craft moved inward, past the doubled cubes and along the dark side of the rotating cylinder.

"I suppose, in your time, you would have called Axis City a necropolis, a city of the dead," Olmy continued. "But the distinction isn't so precise for us. I, for example, have died twice performing my duty to the Nexus."

"They revived you?" Patricia asked.

"They made me over again," he replied.

She did not turn away from the screen, even though her back prickled.

The Presiding Minister had advised Olmy to report to Ser Oligand Toller immediately upon his arrival. Toller, advocate for Tees van Hamphuis, the President of the Hexamon Nexus, was a radical Geshel who had chosen to maintain a completely human appearance. That the appearance bore no relation to his natal design—it had been adapted for maximum leadership qualities—did not mitigate the unusual conservatism; most radical Geshels, including the President, had chosen neomorph shapes, which bore little relation to natural human forms.

What Olmy had to say, the P.M. judged, would be of extreme interest to the President. The President himself was unavailable, involved in a long-term conference on the problem of the impending Jart offensive; Toller was a kind of unofficial replacement.

This did not please the Naderites, or even the members of van Hamphuis's immediate staff. Toller was not an easy man to deal with. Olmy had met the advocate once before, and had not liked him at all, though he had gained a healthy respect for his abilities.

Toller kept his office in the most desirable professional wedge of Central City, no more than a few minutes tracting and just a few seconds shaft ascent from the Nexus Chambers in the precinct's core. Once Olmy had made arrangements for Patricia's quarters, but before he had had a chance to confer with his own advocate, he went to Toller's office.

Toller had decorated the small rectangular space in the most simple and adaptable Geshel style. Decoration was spare; the major texture theme was platinum and steel, and the overall effect was harsh and unyielding.

The President's advocate was not pleased with the news Olmy brought.

"The P.M. had no suspicion of this when you alone were sent?" Toller picted. The symbols that flashed between the two men came from pictor torques around their necks, devices which generated and projected the graphicspeak that had developed over the centuries in the Thistledown and in the Axis City.

"His information was highly equivocated," Olmy said. "All he knew was that the Thistledown had been reoccupied."

Toller picted an unpleasant image of a roiling nest of snake-like creatures. "This is extraordinary news, Ser Olmy. Coming from anyone else, I would find it difficult to believe. . . . But then, you've brought one of them back with you, haven't you?"

"Her name is Patricia Luisa Vasquez."

"A genuine. . . ancestor?"

Olmy nodded.

"Why did you bring her back? As evidence?"

"I could not leave her; she was close to discovering how to modify sixth chamber machinery."

Toller raised his eyebrows and picted four orange circles of surprise. "What is this woman?"

"A young mathematician," Olmy said, "highly regarded by her superiors.”

"And you did nothing else to correct this situation you found on the Thistledown?"

"The situation is highly unstable there; they will not be able to organize for some time, and I thought it best to consult with the President and the Nexus."

"I'll inform the President, but you're aware we have our own major difficulties now. This conference. . . it could determine the whole course of the Axis City. And there's been considerable unrest and speculation among the Naderites—especially the Korzenowski faction. If they learn of this. . .” The picted nest of serpent-like creatures glowed a furious orange-red. "Seclude this woman and keep your information to your immediate superiors."

"She is secluded, and of course, I perform my duties as instructed," Olmy said. "She will have to have an advocate assigned to her, however."

"If we can avoid that, we should." Toller regarded him with obvious suspicion and unease.

"It is law. All noncitizens in the city, without defined legal status, must be assigned an advocate immediately."

"There's no need for you to quote city law to me," Toller said. "I'll find an advocate and assign—"

"I've already assigned one," Olmy interrupted.

Toller's expression changed to deep distaste. "Who?"

"Ser Suli Ram Kikura."

"I'm not acquainted with her." By the time he had finished the statement, Toller had a complete file on Kikura on hand, ready to be picted and interpreted. He scanned the file rapidly, shifting to implant logic, and found nothing he could criticize. "She seems acceptable. She will be sworn to keep Hexamon secrets."

"She has that clearance already."

"We're sitting on political chaos as it is," Toller said. "What you've done is bring back a lit fuse for Axis City's bomb. All, of course, in the name of duty."

"You will inform the President immediately?" Olmy asked, picting a sidebar request for permission to return to his work.

"As soon as possible," Toller replied. "You'll prepare a full report for us, of course."

"It is prepared," Olmy said. "I can transfer it now."

Toller nodded, and Olmy touched his torque. High-speed transfer of the report was accomplished in less than three seconds. Toller touched his own torque in acknowledgment of receipt.

Suli Ram Kikura lived in the outer layers of Central City, in one of three million tightly packed units reserved for single young corporeals of middle social and job standing. Her rooms were smaller than they appeared; the reality of spaciousness was far less important to her than it seemed to be to Olmy, who kept more primitive and larger quarters in Axis Nader. But part of what attracted her to Olmy was his age and differing attitudes, and his habit of, every now and then, giving her something truly interesting to work on.

"This is the biggest challenge I've ever faced," Suli Ram Kikura picted at Olmy.

"I couldn't think of anyone more capable," he replied. They floated facing each other in the subdued light of her quarters' central space, surrounded by picted spheres on which were projected various interesting and relaxing textures. They had just made love, as they almost always made love, without enhancement and using nothing more complicated than the quarters' traction fields.

Olmy gestured at the spheres and made a face.

"Simplicity?" Ram Kikura asked.

"Simplicity, please," he affirmed. She dimmed the lights on everything but themselves and erased the spheres from the decor.

They had first met when he had inquired into the licensing process for creating a child. He had been interested mostly in a personality meld between himself and someone unspecified. This had been thirty years ago, when Ram Kikura was just beginning her practice. She had advised him on the procedures. Permission was easy enough to obtain for a corporeal homorph of his standing. But he had not carried it to the point of making a formal request. She had gathered that Olmy was more interested in the theory than the practice.

One thing had led to another. She had pursued him—with some elegance and no small persistence—and he had acquiesced, allowing himself to be seduced in a hidden corner of Central City's forested, zero-g Wald.

Olmy's work often took him far afield for years at a time, and what they had together, to most observers, would have seemed transitory, an on-and-off thing. Indeed, she had had relationships since, none permanent, even though it was once again the fashion to have relationships for ten years or longer.

Whenever Olmy had returned, she had somehow managed to be free of commitments. They never pressured each other. What existed between them was a relaxed, but by no means trivial sensation of comfort and a high level of mutual interest. Each genuinely enjoyed hearing about the other's work and wondering where future tasks would take them. They were, after all, corporeal and usefully employed; theirs was a position of considerable privilege. Of the ninety million citizens in the Axis City, corporeal or in City Memory, only fifteen million had important work to do, and of those, only three million worked more than a tenth of their living hours.

"You seem to enjoy the task already," Olmy said.

"It's my perverse nature. This is by far the oddest thing I've found you associated with. . . . It's positively momentous."

"It could be of staggering importance," he said out loud, his tone mock-sepulchral.

"No more picting?"

"No, let's think and talk this through slowly."

"Fine," she said. "You wish me to be her advocate. How much of an advocate do you think she'll need?"

"You can imagine," Olmy said. "She's a complete innocent. She'll need complete social and psychological adjusting. She'll need protection. When her status is revealed—which is inevitable, I think, whatever the President and Presiding Minister wish—there will be a sensation."

"You're putting it mildly," she said. She ordered wine brought to them, and three static-controlled liquid spheres drifted into their light. She handed Olmy a straw and they sipped. "You've seen Earth yourself?"

He nodded. "I went down the bore hole with the Frant on my second day in the Thistledown. I didn't think remotes would convince me quite as much as seeing with my own eyes."

"Old-fashioned Olmy," Ram Kikura said, smiling. "I'm afraid I would have done the same thing. And did you see the Death?"

"Yes," he said, staring up into the darkness. He rubbed two fingers along the black fuzz dividing his three bands of hair. "Only by remote at first—there was a battle in the bore hole and I couldn't possibly have gotten through. But after the fighting stopped, I took the ship out and saw."

Ram Kikura touched his hand. "How did you feel?"

"Have you ever wanted to cry?"

She looked at him carefully, trying to gauge how serious he was. "No," she said.

"Well, I wanted to. And I've wanted to many times since, thinking about it. I tried to purge the feeling with Talsit on the way back—quite a few sessions. But Talsit couldn't cure all of it. I could feel our beginnings. . . a smudged, dirty, dead and dying world." He told her about Patricia's grief. Ram Kikura turned away in distaste.

"We cannot release as she did," he said. "It isn't in us anymore, and perhaps that's something else we've lost."

"Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status."

"There are orthodox Naderites who still have the capacity," he said. "They find grief a noble sentiment. Sometimes I envy them."

"You were organically conceived and born. You had the capacity at one time. You knew what it was like. Why did you give it up?"

"To fit in," Olmy said.

"You wished to conform?"

"For higher motives, yes."

Ram Kikura shuddered. "Our visitor is going to think us all very strange, you know."

"It's her privilege," Olmy said.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The storm began as a series of accelerated risings and fallings of air, circular cells rubbing against each other and generating a thick, tortured layer of clouds throughout the first chamber. Western bloc scientists in the middle of the chamber along the zero road made quick measurements before retreating to their trucks. Dust and sand were kicked up in immense, slender twisters, which in turn uncoiled and gave way to thick curtains of dust. The dust clouds billowed and spread, bouncing from cap to cap like waves in a channel. Cameras at the bore hole recorded the phenomenon, but there was nothing that could be done to control it. Either the storm was a planned part of the chamber's weather system, or the chamber had no effective weather control. It had not, after all, been a steadily occupied part of the Stone. Weather control might not have been thought necessary.

In the years of the Stone's reoccupation, nothing of this violence and strength had ever happened. The dust clouds covered the valley floor and slowly settled into a soupy, opaque layer a few kilometers thick. Above the dust, water clouds became darker and darker.

By 1700 hours, 6 hours after the storm's first high winds, rain fell through the dust and landed as great drops of mud. In the first compounds, people huddled in the bungalows, both alarmed and thrilled by the sudden change.

Hoffman watched from her mud-splattered window, chewing on a knuckle with eyebrows raised. The surcease from tubelight was welcome. This was the closest to night that anyone had experienced on the Stone, and it made her feel drowsy and content.

Lightning crackled throughout the chamber and engineers and marines braved the wind and rain to fasten conducting rods to the buildings.

In the Russian command bungalow, at the middle of the second compound, the storm and darkness were ignored. The argument over the political and command structure ran late into the sleeping period, with Belozersky and Yazykov most vehement, and Vielgorsky staying in the background.

Mirsky insisted on a military organization and refused to reduce his power in any way, or to share it equally with (and he emphasized the point) junior officers.

Belozersky proposed a true Soviet structure, with a central party committee, led by a general secretary—Vielgorsky was suggested—and a president and premier acting through a Supreme Soviet.

Just the day before, Mirsky and Pogodin—the commanding officer in the first chamber—had supervised the beginning of construction on a Russian compound in the fourth chamber; permission had been granted to harvest wood from the thick forests. Tools were at a premium; everything was at a premium.

Negotiations over the second chamber had grown heated when NATO archaeologists protested the potential desecration of what they regarded as their site. Mirsky had brusquely informed Hoffman that the Potato was no longer a monument; it was a refuge.

That had worn him down. His long sessions in the third chamber library—often instead of sleeping—had added to his fatigue; and now, this.

"We must situate our people before we decide the final political structure," Mirsky said. "All we have are makeshift tents and this compound, and Hoffman—"

"That bitch," Belozersky commented dryly. "She's worse than the fool Lanier."

Vielgorsky touched Belozersky's shoulder and the martinet sat down obediently. Vielgorsky's ascendancy among the political officers did not surprise Mirsky; neither did it please him. Mirsky was sure he could handle Belozersky, but with Vielgorsky's cunning, reserve and authoritative speaking voice—and Yazykov's razor-sharp legal mind—Mirsky felt a nasty challenge brewing.

Was there some way he could "turn" Vielgorsky and Yazykov, put their talents to his own advantage?

In his favor, he felt, was his continuing education. Or, perhaps more accurately phrased, his enlightenment. Never before had he been able to wander at will through such a huge and diverse source of information. Soviet libraries—military and otherwise—had always been severely restricted, with books available only to those with a demonstrable need to know. Simple curiosity was frowned upon.

He had been unsure even about the geography of his own country. History had been a subject in which he had never felt much interest, other than the history of space travel; what he learned in the third chamber library was turning him around completely.

To his colleagues he revealed none of this; he took pains to conceal the fact that he now spoke English, German, and French and was working on Japanese and Chinese.

"On the contrary," Belozersky said, glancing at Vielgorsky, "political considerations must always be foremost. We must abandon neither the revolution nor its ideals; we are the last fortress of—"

"Yes, yes," Mirsky said impatiently. "Now we are all tired. Let us rest and start again tomorrow." He glanced over his shoulder at Garabedian, Pletnev and Sergei Pritikin, senior engineer from the science team. "Comrade Major Garabedian, will you escort these gentlemen to their tents and make sure our perimeters are secure?"

"There is more to be discussed than we have time for," Vielgorsky said.

Mirsky fixed his gaze on him and smiled. "True," he said. "But tired men become angry men, and frustrations make for bad thinking."

"There are other. . . things which lead to weakness and bad thinking," Vielgorsky said.

"Indeed," Belozersky concurred.

"Tomorrow, Comrades," Mirsky persisted, ignoring the barb. "We need to be fresh when we face Hoffman and continue the negotiations."

They filed out and left Pritikin and Pletnev with Mirsky. The senior engineer and former squadron commander sat down at the tank-baffle table and waited as Mirsky rubbed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "You realize what happens if Vielgorsky and his puppets take control," Mirsky said.

"They are not reasonable men," Pritikin said.

"Yet I believe about a third of the troops supports them wholeheartedly, and another, third supports nobody—general malcontents," Mirsky said. "I am the commander, so the malcontents dislike me. If it was Belozersky alone, I wouldn't worry—the malcontents hate political officers even more. But Vielgorsky has a velvet tongue. Belozersky lashes with words, Vielgorsky strokes. He can control a dangerous majority."

"What do we do then, Comrade General?" Pletnev asked.

"I want five men to guard each of you. Hand-picked by Garabedian or me. And I want four squads with AKVs around this bungalow. Pritikin, I want the science team confined to the fourth chamber by the day after tomorrow. Vielgorsky will not trust intellectuals; he may not tolerate their existence if push comes to shove."

The two left and Mirsky was alone. He sighed and wished for something to take his mind away for the rest of the evening—a bottle of vodka, a woman. . .

Or more uninterrupted hours in the library.

Never in his life had he felt more aware, and more hopeful, then he did now, even though surrounded by ignorant vipers.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The tuberider was on automatic pilot and all four of them slept in the cabin.

Heineman had limited the tuberider's speed to nine kilometers per second. Something in the tuberider's construction caused a violent shudder beyond that.

Lanier lay awake, restless, strapped to his reclined seat and staring up at the softly glowing orange light overhead. Heineman was breathing steadily across the aisle from him; the women slept behind a curtain Carrolson had rigged across the middle of the cabin. Carrolson snored faintly. From Farley he heard nothing.

Sexual passion had seldom dominated Lanier; his drives were normal enough, but he had always been able to ignore them, or control them in inappropriate situations. His two-year celibacy on the Stone had been less a hardship for him than it might have been for others. Nevertheless, he had never been hornier in his life than he was at this peaceful moment.

Despite the advantages, he had always felt faintly shamed of his lack of masculine anguish, as if it made him some sort of cold fish. Now the passion was upon him with a vengeance. It was all he could do to keep from stealing back through the curtain and fondling Farley. The desire was both funny and agonizing. He felt like a pubescent teenager, sweaty with need and unsure what to do about it.

The psychiatrists in his head worked overtime. Death, said the Freudian, only strengthens our desire to procreate—

So he lay sleepless, erect, unable to think clearly and refusing to masturbate. The very idea was ridiculous. He hadn't masturbated in well over a year, and never except in complete privacy.

Did the others feel this way? Heineman certainly never let on. Not once, in fact, had Lanier ever heard Heineman make a sexual comment except in the most isolated and theoretical sort of joking.

Did Farley feel this way?

Just as a test, one hand reached up to pull aside the thin thermal blanket covering him. He forced the hand to pull it back. Madness.

Finally, after an eternity, he slept.

At 100,000 kilometers, the V/STOL's forward-looking radar reported a massive obstruction ahead in the corridor. Heineman searched the corridor bore-hole science records for any echoes from such a distance and found none. "Looks like the physics people just shot a radar beam along the singularity," he said. "And what we're looking at now is a circular wall with a gap in the middle."

The wall obstructed passage to a height of twenty-one kilometers, leaving a hole in the middle about eight kilometers across. The plasma tube and singularity were not interrupted.

"Let's pass through and see what's on the other side," Lanier suggested. "Then we'll decide where we want to come down."

At a mere six thousand kilometers per hour, Heineman eased the tuberider down the singularity. The wall was a dirty bronze color, smooth and featureless. As they approached the hole, Carrolson trained a telescope on the wall's upper surface—with some difficulty.

"It's only a meter thick at the top," she said. "Judging by the color, I'd guess it's made out of the same stuff as the wells and the corridor."

"That is, nothing," Farley said. "Patricia's spatial building blocks."

Heineman reduced speed to a few hundred kilometers an hour and they glided through the hole. On the opposite side, the view of the corridor floor was crystal clear, unobstructed by atmosphere. The floor was a chaotic mess of hundred-kilometer-long gouges, black marks and broad strips of revealed bronze corridor surface. The instruments confirmed their suspicions.

"No atmosphere," Farley said. "The wall's a plug." Heineman decelerated until they came to a stop two thousand kilometers past the wall, now reduced in size to a tiny patch in the corridor's merciless perspective. "What'll it be?" he asked.

"We slide back and find a well circuit," Lanier said, "just like we planned. We check that out, then we proceed—and we don't waste time. Research is really secondary."

"Yessir," Heineman said. He swung the V/STOL around on the tuberider to face the opposite direction. "Hang on; full reverse coming up."

Four hundred kilometers south of the wall, they located a circuit of wells and slowed to prepare the V/STOL for its descent. All loose objects were made fast while Heineman unlocked the aircraft from the tuberider. With a gentle nudge of the attitude jets, they eased away from the singularity. Heineman oriented the craft with its nose toward the corridor floor.

Unlike in the asteroid chambers, where some sort of push was required to move away from the axis, the V/STOL began a slow, accelerating descent immediately, repelled by the singularity—or attracted by the floor, whichever way they cared to think of it. After falling four kilometers, Heineman kicked in the rocket engine for three short bursts and pointed the plane's nose north. "I wouldn't land this way in a chamber," he said, "but it's the best tactic in the corridor. We won't hit the atmosphere on a spiral course here. So I'm going to take advantage of a long glide down. Garry, take hold of your controls and get the feel of what I'm doing."

Lanier gripped the wheel and felt Heineman's motions as he pulled the nose up. A rippling series of shudders announced atmospheric buffeting; outside the walls a whimpering whine began to decrease in pitch and increase in loudness. Heineman brought down flaps to decrease their airspeed and gently swung the V/STOL to the right, lowering the nose and deploying the prop blades from their receptacles in the engine nacelles. The smooth, beautiful roar of the twin turboprops made him smile like a little boy. "Ladies and gents," he said, "we are now an airplane. Garry, like to take it down?"

"My pleasure," Lanier said. "Passengers will please keep their seatbelts on."

"Aye-aye," Carrolson said.

"That was fun. Let's do it again," Farley called forward.

"Terrain looks smooth enough, but we'll fly over and decide whether we want a short landing or a vertical touchdown," Heineman said.

Lanier banked the aircraft and circled around a well, then flew over the cupola at about fifty meters, slowing by angling the props up. Heineman peered at the prospective landing sights and signaled thumbs-up. "Short roll; it's smooth sand down there."

Lanier brought the V/STOL down on the corridor floor at fifty kilometers an hour, gently and easily, nose pointed at the dimple and cupola of the well. He then reduced the pitch on the props and taxied, nose bobbing, to the edge of the dimple, pivoting the plane until it was tangent to the well's outer circle. The engines' roar dropped rapidly to silence.

"Bravo," Heineman said.

"God, that was great," Lanier said. "I haven't flow in six years. . . and I've never flown like that. Jesus, you look at the ground and it seems like you're always going to fly right into it."

"If you two flyboys will give us a hand," Carrolson interrupted, "we'll get our work done faster."

Carrolson took photographs and Farley made instrument readings as they skirted the dimple. The well was open—that much was obvious even from a distance. Ten or eleven meters from the floating cupola was a platform cradling two irregular red-and-black-checked spheres, each three meters in diameter and sporting a pair of waldos front and back.

They descended the slope of the dimple and inspected the platform. Heineman climbed a ladder built into one side of the platform and walked along a scaffold passing above the checked spheres. "Spacesuits," he said. "Tough ones, too."

"Here's a message," Farley called out. She pointed to a bronze-colored plaque mounted on a pedestal near the mouth of the well. The alphabet was Latinesque, with discernible A's, G's and E's, but none of them could decipher the words. "It's not Greek, and it's not Cyrillic," Carrolson said. "It must be Stoner. Some new language." She photographed it from three sides and beneath.

"I never encountered anything like it in the libraries," Lanier said. He stepped beyond the plaque and felt a sudden, molasses-like resistance around the lip of the well.

"WARNING," a deep, forbidding masculine voice announced out of nowhere. "WARNING to be heeded by speakers of twentieth-century English. Do not attempt to enter any gate in this region without proper environmental protection. Conditions of high gravitation and corrosive atmosphere prevail beyond the gate entrance. Suits are provided for your protection. WARNING."

Carrolson touched the plaque and whistled. "Look," she said. The letters of the plaque had reformed into Roman alphabet English and repeated what the voice had said aloud. "Now that's service."

Heineman ran his hands along the upper surface of one of the spheres and found a depression in a black square. He pressed it cautiously; nothing happened.

"Excuse me," Farley said to no one in particular. Lanier turned toward her and she smiled, embarrassed, and held up her hand. She then addressed the underside of the cupola. "Excuse me, but if we wish to enter the well—the gate—how do we use the suits, the. . . pathoscapes—"

"Bathyscaphes," Carrolson corrected.

"Yes. . . how do we use whatever they are?"

"Vehicles respond to vocal commands and can be adjusted to your language. Do you have proper authorization for a gate excursion?"

"What sort of authorization?" Farley asked.

"Authorization from the Nexus. All gates are controlled by the Nexus. Please present authorization within thirty seconds or this band of gates will be locked against tampering."

They stared back and forth at each other as the time passed. "No authorization," the voice announced without inflection. "These gates are now closed until a survey team investigates and corrects the situation."

Lanier pulled back from the invisible barrier. The twenty-meter-wide opening at the center irised in silently and formed a smooth bronze bulge. On the scaffold, Heineman yelped and jumped clear as the spheres and cradle slowly sank into the surface of the dimple, vanishing without trace.

Farley swore in melodious Chinese.

"Oh, well," Carrolson said, sighing. "We didn't have time to be tourists anyway."

The bland landscape around the well consisted of flat stretches of sand without any sign of life. The air was dry and soon their noses and throats were parched; it was with some relief that they boarded the V/STOL, sealed the hatch and prepared to return to the tuberider.

"This is fun," Heineman said. "She works like a charm." He lifted the V/STOL from the ground and increased their speed by inclining the engine nacelles forward. They climbed steadily, until they were within a kilometer of the plasma tube and the upper limits of the atmosphere. "Abracadabra," Heineman said, withdrawing the blades into the nacelles and activating the tail rocket.

With a sharp surge forward, they punched through the atmosphere barrier and plasma tube and entered the vacuum surrounding the singularity. Heineman guided the V/STOL with little pushes from the attitude jets, bringing it up beneath the tuberider and completing the linkup under direction of the plane's computers.

"She's a beauty, isn't she?" he enthused, then shook his head and let out a puffed whooo.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

"We're not going to get a disarmament agreement out of them any time soon," Gerhardt said as he preceded Hoffman down the platform steps into the fourth chamber compound. "They're more afraid of each other than they are of us, right now, and nobody's going to hand in their weapons until the situation is settled."

"Who do you think will come out on top?"

Gerhardt shrugged. "No bets. They're all tough sons of bitches; my hopes are for Mirsky."

"He's been in the third chamber library more often than any of us," Hoffman said.

"He has more to catch up on," Gerhardt said. "Russians don't want soldiers with a liberal education."

"I suppose we should be happy with a cease fire and separate camps."

Gerhardt opened the mess door for her and she passed through into the cafeteria. Four agricultural scientists—one man and three women—waited for her with charts and slates. She shook hands with all of them and took a seat. Gerhardt received a meager lunch from the vendor and sat at the next table; this was not his direct concern.

"Food programs," Hoffman said. "Farming and subsistence. Okay. Show me what we have to do."

Push came to shove barely eighteen hours after the conference in the bungalow. The first chamber storm settled even more quickly than it started; the winds suddenly stopped, the clouds unleashed a few more drops and then dissipated. The tubelight brightened and the air felt warmer.

Belozersky ordered a platoon to surround the bungalow and capture Mirsky. The ostensible reason was Mirsky's lack of dedication to the cause of socialism; but all three Zampolits felt the Lieutenant General was weak and would soon make concessions to Hoffman that the Soviets could ill afford.

The platoon moved in quickly and surrounded the command center, bringing their AKVs to bear on the twenty guards. The guards surrendered without resistance and Belozersky approached the bungalow door to place Mirsky under arrest. Three burly troopers kicked in the door and poked their rifles through, keeping their heads and bodies back.

"Comrade General!" Belozersky shouted, his voice breaking. "You have violated the confidence of your men. In the name of the newly reconstituted Supreme Soviet, you are under arrest!" The troopers swung around the door frame and into the bungalow. Pletnev sat up on a bunk, blinking sleepily.

"General Mirsky's not here," he said thickly. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

Vielgorsky had napped briefly after the conference with Mirsky, then taken advantage of the weakening storm to move three trucks with fifty soldiers out of the first chamber, and to ride the ninety tube train—reserved exclusively for Russian use—into the fourth chamber.

The plan was to have him out of the way when Belozersky arrested Mirsky, just in case something went wrong. For a few hours, then, he could enjoy the fourth chamber woods. He especially enjoyed the sight of soldiers in the Development Detail bringing down trees and hauling them to the water. Stories of the conquest of the east and the building of the trans-Siberian railway had enchanted him as a boy; now he visualized something similar in the Potato, a series of Soviet settlements linked by roads, clearing fields for farms and building cabins. Something good might come out of this fiasco after all, he thought—a purer, less corrupt and more tightly controlled socialist community, which could eventually take over the asteroid and return to Earth to complete the task Lenin had begun eighty years before.

Things were moving with astonishing speed already; only nine days ago, they had made their landing, and now they had been ceded territory in the most attractive of the Potato's seven chambers. If this didn't demonstrate the weakness of their opponents, what possibly could?

Three SSTs approached him. The lead trooper carried a few papers, no doubt for him to sign in his capacity as director of fourth chamber exploitation.

"Colonel," the first soldier said, pulling a pistol from behind the papers. He pointed the pistol at Vielgorsky and tipped his cap higher.

"Mirsky," Vielgorsky said, losing none of his control.

The other two soldiers were Pogodin and the scientist Pritikin. Each carried an AKV slung over his shoulder. Mirsky took Vielgorsky's arm and poked the pistol into his side, near the kidneys. "Not a word, please."

"What are you doing?" Vielgorsky whispered harshly. Mirsky thrust the pistol forward with more force.

"Quiet. Your rat is gnawing a hole in my bungalow."

They walked with measured steps to a truck waiting by the lakeshore. Pogodin unceremoniously pushed Vielgorsky into the back and threw a tarp over him, climbing in after and lightly tapping the barrel of the AKV on the bulge his head made.

Mirsky climbed behind the steering column and looked across the dark sand to the soldiers in the woods. Another group was playing lapta—a kind of baseball—with branches and pinecones; none seemed concerned with the truck or its occupants.

"Where are we going, General?" Vielgorsky asked from the rear, voice muffled by the tarp.

"Quiet, sir," Pogodin said, prodding him again with the AKV.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The chaotic and scarred section of the corridor stretched for half a million kilometers, airless and barren. Plans for a second sortie to the floor were abandoned; without an atmosphere, ascent and descent would use an exorbitant amount of fuel. If the barren segment continued past their million kilometer turnaround point, they would abandon the mission and reverse course, Lanier decided.

"Do you think all of it's like this?" Farley asked, sitting next to him. "From here on?"

Lanier shook his head. "They took Patricia somewhere."

"Have you thought about the wells? Perhaps they left the corridor, and we can't follow."

"I've thought of that—and I have a hunch they didn't use a well."

"Another wall!" Heineman announced.

They gathered in the cockpit, Carrolson sitting in the copilot's seat and Farley and Lanier jammed into the hatchway. Lanier was all too aware of the press of Farley's body.

The tuberider's passage through the corridor was dizzying; it reminded Lanier of running through a drain pipe. The corridor fled past on all sides, purple and brown and black with its scars, the revealed corridor surface dirty bronze. The Forward-Looking Radar returned a steady beep at half-second intervals.

"Seats please," Heineman said. "We're going to slow this sucker down. Reverse seats this time; I want to keep our FLR facing forward, and there'll be about two-tenths of a g. . . .”

Carrolson strapped herself into the copilot's seat with a pixie grin at Lanier. "Backseat, boss," she said. "I was here first."

Lanier and Farley crawled past the equipment boxes and sat next to each other. Lanier took a deep breath and closed his eyes; the urge was almost unbearable.

"Something wrong?" Farley asked.

"Not at all." He touched her hand reassuringly with his own and drew it back.

"You feeling all right?"

He smiled unconvincingly and nodded.

“Something's wrong, Garry. I've been around you long enough—"

"We'll be there in an hour or so," Heineman announced from the cockpit.

"So what is it?" Farley pursued.

He took a deep breath and his face reddened. "I can't help it, Karen. It's crazy. I've been. . . horny for the last twenty hours. It isn't going away."

She regarded him without expression, and then her eyes widened the merest fraction.

"You asked, dammit," he said.

"Just in general?"

"No."

"Someone in particular."

"Yes," he said.

"Who. . . or is that asking too much?"

He raised a finger and pointed it at her, shaking with stifled laughter. His face was red as hamburger now and he sounded like he was choking.

"That's funny?"

"No-oo-o," he said, finally controlling his laughter. "It's crazy."

“You've never been interested in me before?"

"No—I mean, yes, you're attractive, obviously, but—"

"Then shut up." The deceleration had already started. She unbuckled her belt and fell slowly toward the cockpit, easing herself along with the handgrips on the side of the seats and storage racks overhead.

"Wait," Lanier said, reaching for her and missing. He looked back over the neck rest. "Karen!"

Farley hung in the cockpit hatchway. "Wake us when we're at the wall," she said pointedly, sliding the partition shut with a decisive snick of the bolt. She pulled herself back along the aisle and braced one knee against his seat and the seat opposite.

"I'm sorry—" Lanier began.

"Not at all," Farley said. She tugged at her jumpsuit zipper and pulled it down, revealing a T-shirt with the Chinese character

on the front, signifying "whale," the Chinese name for the Stone. She shimmied it off quickly and removed white cotton panties.

Lanier watched in shock.

"You should have said something sooner," she admonished. "Anything that keeps you from thinking straight is a detriment to our mission." She pulled the T-shirt over her head and stuffed all the clothes in a rear seat pouch.

He removed his jumpsuit, glancing nervously at the cockpit partition. She lay on the rear of the two opposite seats; the tuberider's deceleration provided an effective if skewed sense of direction. "You never did put yourself on the social roster," Farley said, taking his hand and pulling him toward her. "Not because you were shy, surely."

Lanier touched her breast, his heart hammering. He gently rubbed the knuckles and backs of his fingers along the line between her hips and stomach. "I've never needed anyone more in my life," he said.

Carrolson ascended the ladder up the middle of the aisle. Farley and Lanier had dressed and seated themselves opposite each other. "Ten minutes and we'll be there," Carrolson said, deadpan. She looked at Farley and then turned her head toward Lanier, her eyes lingering for a moment on Farley's face. "It seems like the same sort of wall as the last one, but this one rises even higher above the level of the atmosphere with a narrower clearance—no more than a hundred meters—around the singularity. We should run the same tests we did before, though."

"Agreed," Farley said.

"Garry—" Carrolson began, regarding him intently.

"What?"

"Never mind." She descended the ladder and returned to the cockpit.

"Jesus, I'm embarrassed," Lanier muttered.

"Why, because you're human?" Farley asked.

"I have responsibilities," he said.

"There isn't a person on the Stone who doesn't," she said. "And there was an awful lot of hamky-pamky going on while I was there."

Despite himself, he chuckled. "That's 'hanky-panky.'"

"Whatever. Don't tell me you didn't notice?"

He shook his head. "No, I honestly didn't. The boss is the last to know."

"Only if the boss has his eyes shut. I doubt Hoffman is letting such things escape her."

"All right, so I'm a. . . I don't know. I'm not a prude, but I'm maybe a bit innocent."

"Not innocent at all," Farley said, reaching across to touch his arm. "And don't worry. You're still the boss."

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Vielgorsky had difficulty keeping his calm. He sweated profusely and smelled bad. His voice was hoarse. Mirsky almost felt sorry for him.

The black entranceway to the third chamber library opened impressively, and Pogodin and Pritikin urged the captive through with a few well-placed jabs of their AKVs. Mirsky followed at a more leisurely pace.

"This is where you've been wasting your time," Vielgorsky cried over his shoulder.

"You've never been here?" Mirsky asked, pretending surprise. "At the very least I would have thought you'd be curious."

"It's useless," Vielgorsky said. "It's filled with American propaganda. Why waste my time?"

Mirsky laughed out loud, more in anger than humor. "You poor son of a bitch," he said. "The people who built this starship were no more American than you or I." They halted before the ranks of chairs and chromium teardrops.

"If you kill me, Belozersky and Yazykov are fully capable of carrying on," Vielgorsky said.

"I'm not going to kill you," Mirsky said. "We need each other. I want you to sit down."

Vielgorsky stood his ground, shivering like a cold dog.

"The chairs won't eat you," Pogodin said, prodding him again.

"You cannot brainwash me," Vielgorsky blustered.

"No, but maybe I can educate you. Sit."

Vielgorsky slowly lowered himself into the nearest chair, facing the teardrop apprehensively. "You will force me to read books? That will be very silly."

Mirsky came around behind the chair and reached over to flip the control cover. "Would you like to learn how to speak English, French, German?"

Vielgorsky didn't answer.

"No? Then perhaps you'd like to learn a little about history. Not from an American point of view—from the viewpoint of our descendants. The Russians who survived the Death."

"I don't care," Vielgorsky said, his pale moist face almost all nose in the teardrop reflection.

"This is what the Americans were hiding from us," Mirsky said. "Isn't it your duty to inspect the treasure we were fighting for? Your superiors cannot. They are dead, or soon will be. The entire Earth will be covered with smoke for years to come. Millions will starve to death or freeze. By the end of this decade, there will be less than ten million of our countrymen left alive."

"You're talking nonsense," Vielgorsky said, wiping his face with his sleeve.

"Our descendants built this starship," Mirsky said. "That's not propaganda, it sounds like fantasy, but it's truth, Vielgorsky, and all our squabbling with each other cannot conceal the truth. We trained and came here and fought and died to find the truth. You would be a traitor to turn away from it."

"Are you proposing we share power?" Vielgorsky asked, glancing up at him. Mirsky swore under his breath and turned on the machine.

"It will speak to you in Russian," he said. "It will answer your questions and it will teach you how to use it. Now ask."

Vielgorsky stared at the floating library symbol, eyes wide.

"Ask."

"Where do you want me to start?"

"Start with our past. What they taught us in school."

The symbol changed to a question mark.

"Teach me about. . .” Vielgorsky looked up at Mirsky.

"Go on. It isn't painful. But it is addictive."

"Teach me about Nicholas I."

"That's pretty safe," Mirsky said. "Too far back. Ask it to teach you about the grand strategic plan of the Soviet Army from 1960 to 2005." Mirsky smiled. "Weren't you ever curious?"

"Teach me. . . about that, then," Vielgorsky said.

The library silently searched and organized its presentation, numerous colorful utility symbols flickering around Vielgorsky's field of view. Then it began.

After a half hour, Mirsky turned to Pogodin and Pritikin and told them to go back to the fourth chamber. He nodded at the entranced Vielgorsky. "He'll be no trouble. I'll watch him."

"When will we get our chance?" Pritikin asked.

"Anytime you're free, Comrade," Mirsky said. "It's open to all."

Belozersky jerked the muscular Pletnev up from his chair and swung him around with surprising strength. "I know fantasies when I hear them," he growled.

"It's easily proven," Pletnev said, his head turned to one side to avoid Belozersky's fist on his collar. "We must go there—comrades Pritikin and Sinoviev have told us as much as they know. The seventh chamber does not stop. It goes on forever."

Belozersky let him go and backed away slowly, fists clenched. "Deviationist crap. Pritikin and Sinoviev are intellectuals. Why should I believe them?"

Yazykov motioned for the three soldiers to take Pletnev by the arms. "You sold us into defeat for your own miserable skin," he said. "It was your duty to die out there, not come sniveling to the Americans."

"It was finished," Pletnev said. "We had no other choice."

"This rock can be ours!" Yazykov shouted. "Now, where is Mirsky?"

"I've told you. He's in the fourth chamber."

"Shit. He's in his beloved library," Belozersky said.

"Then that's where we'll arrest him," Yazykov said. "Now we should find Garabedian and Annenkovsky—they're Mirsky's men as well. Comrade Pletnev, I will personally execute you against the far wall of the seventh chamber. I will spread your blood and counterrevolutionary brains on solid proof of your gullibility." He threw his hands up in the air in disgust. "Keep him here until we find the others."

Rimskaya walked across the compound with the message from Belozersky in his hand. He climbed the steps to what had once been Lanier's office, and was now Hoffman's, and knocked on the door. Beryl Wallace answered.

"Message from the Soviets," he said tersely. His face was pale and he looked as if he hadn't slept in days.

"Something important?" Beryl asked.

"Beryl, don't play the protective underling with me. Where is Judith?"

"She's downstairs in conference with the medical supervisor. I'm not being officious, Joseph, but she's very busy."

"Yes, well, the Soviets are busy being Soviets, and I think there's going to be trouble." He wiped his eyes and blinked owlishly.

"I'll get her. She'll meet you downstairs by the secretary's desk."

Rimskaya grunted and clumped back down the stairs.

Hoffman emerged from the executive conference room and took the slate from Rimskaya's hand, reading it over quickly. She also looked exhausted, though less so than Rimskaya. Her eyes were rimmed with purple and her cheeks were puffy from lack of sleep.

"What is Belozersky. . . position, rank?"

"A Zampolit—political officer," Rimskaya said. His hands were shaking. "Major. I've talked with him once or twice."

"What did you think of him?"

Rimskaya shook his head grimly. "Hard-liner, ignorant and unimaginative. These other two, Yazykov and Vielgorsky, they worry me. They're smarter, more dangerous. If they say they've deposed Mirsky and we have to deal with them directly, they've probably done it."

"Then arrange a meeting. We can't just stop talking because of their internal squabbles. And find out from—what's his name?—Sinoviev or Pritikin. Find out from one or the other what's going on and how this affects the Russian civilians."

"They aren't around. They may be in detention or dead."

"You think it's gone that far?" Hoffman asked.

"They're acting very Russian," Rimskaya said, spreading his hands.

"I'll be in this conference for another hour or so. Get them to meet with us in an hour and a half."

"Better to let them suggest the time, and then make them wait a while," Rimskaya suggested.

"You take care of it."

She watched the tall, dour mathematician walk out the door and then stared at a blank space on the wall over Ann's empty desk. The secretary was in the cafeteria on lunch break.

"Just thirty seconds," Hoffman said, focusing on nothing. She stood alone, breathing steadily, one finger tapping lightly on the corner of the desk, beating time to some internal meditative clock. When half a minute had passed, she closed her eyes tightly, opened them wide, took a deep breath and turned back to the hallway and the conference room door.

Chapter Forty

The tuberider slid slowly past the second wall. On the opposite side, beginning about a kilometer from the wall and paralleling it around the circumference of the corridor, a series of dark brick-colored structures squatted on the bare bronze floor. Each sat on a square base about two hundred meters on a side, rising in a series of steps, each step-level twisted slightly, creating a rounded, half-spiral pyramid.

"Bingo," Heineman said, pointing down the throat of the corridor. The floor was alive with moving lights channeled into lanes, the lanes piled many layers deep like a super-dense freeway system. "We are not alone."

"How far have we come?" Carrolson asked.

"Seven hundred and seventy thousand kilometers, give or take two," Heineman said. "Garry, could you pilot for a bit? I'm going to run more tests."

"We'll just keep moving ahead slow, ninety or a hundred kilometers an hour," Lanier said.

"That's about right. I don't feel very easy about meeting the inhabitants, whatever they may be," Heineman said, shaking his head as he climbed out of the seat. They were weightless again, moving at a steady velocity.

"Why would we worry, I mean, besides the obvious reasons?" Farley asked.

"The obvious reason would be bad enough, but frankly, I'm not happy about coming along the singularity. It's just occurred to me whoever's down there might not like people traveling this way. Maybe there are other vehicles—authorized vehicles. Maybe there's something else. Whatever, if we were to come zipping along at eight or nine klicks a second, anything we hit would be in serious trouble. That's enough to get us a moving violation, wouldn't you say?"

"I hadn't thought of that," Lanier said, settling into the pilot's seat.

"Yes, well, now that your head is more clear. . .” Heineman glanced at him sternly and then patted him on the shoulder. "Girls, let's find out what all the fuss is."

They replaced various instruments in ports along the floor of the aircraft and installed new sensors in ports so far unoccupied. Lanier stared overhead at the corridor floor, fascinated by the procession of lights. Even with binoculars, he couldn't make the lights resolve into anything but bright spots, contrasting against the black of the lanes.

Something large and gray covered his field of view in the binoculars and he pulled them down. A disk at least half a kilometer wide floated slowly above the lanes, moving south. Another disk followed a similar course twenty or thirty degrees to the west.

"Absolutely no coherent radio signals," Heineman said. "Waste microwaves and heat and a little X- and gamma-ray activity and that's it. Radar—the repeater back here shows something substantial about a quarter of a million kilometers ahead—surface area of at least fifteen square kilometers, right on the axis—dead center."

"I see it," Lanier said, looking at the primary display. "Objects moving around it, and all along the wall of the corridor."

"Don't ask me what they are," Heineman said, peering through the windscreen at the gray disks. He squinted in puzzled anxiety. "And don't ask me how long we're going to stay up here unmolested."

"At least we're small," Farley said. "Maybe they won't notice us."

"That big thing up ahead, whatever it is, will notice us," Heineman said. "Ten to one it's riding the singularity, too."

Five hundred kilometers past the wall, four large brick-red twisted pyramids rose above the tangle of lanes. From their spacing—equidistant around the circumference, at the quadratic points—Lanier surmised they were built over wells. From this distance, they appeared the size of a commemorative postage stamp held at arm's length—which made them perhaps two kilometers on a side, and a kilometer high. Kilometer-wide clear lanes extended straight north from each structure, for as far as he could see.

"I think we're in over our head," Lanier murmured.

Farley put her hand on his shoulder and pulled herself into the co-pilot's seat. "We've been over our heads for years, haven't we?"

"I'd always assumed the corridor was empty—I don't know why. Perhaps because I couldn't have imagined this."

Heineman floated between them and gripped a bar on the instrument panel to steady himself while he programmed a flight plan. "We're going to accelerate to ten thousand klicks an hour, get as close as we can to that big object on the singularity—slowing down on the approach, so they won't think we' re going to ram them—then reverse and hightail for home. That is, of course, if you approve." He raised an eyebrow in Lanier's direction.

Lanier weighed the risks and realized he had no idea what they were.

"If we reverse now, what can we tell the folks back home?" Heineman persisted. "It's obvious this place is important. But we have no idea what is it, or what it means to us once we're back on the Stone."

"You're stating the obvious, Larry," Lanier said. "Now tell me whether we'll survive or not."

"I don't know," Heineman said. "But I'm having the time of my life. What about the rest of you?"

Carrolson laughed. "You're crazy," she told him. "Crazy jock pilot engineer."

Heineman wagged his head back and forth and proudly lifted the breast pockets of his jumpsuit out with his thumbs. "Garry?"

"We have to find out somehow," he admitted. "Let's go, then." Heineman began the sequence on the computer pilot and the tuberider bore down on the singularity, once again putting a sense of direction into the V/STOL cabin.

When the acceleration stopped and the tuberider coasted at ten thousand kilometers an hour, Heineman distributed supper—sandwiches in foil packets and bulbs of hot tea. They ate in silence, Carrolson and Heineman strapped to the bulkhead behind the cockpit. The corridor's passage was steady and easily perceptible.

Another circuit of rectangular structures passed, and several minutes later, yet another—all connected by the four straight clear lanes and the crowded tangled lanes of lights.

Lanier vacated the seat to Carrolson and took a nap while Heineman trained the women in the fine points of tuberider control. He dropped in and out of a dream about flying a light plane over jungle and tangled rivers. Somehow, that segued into a track meet. He awoke with the aftertaste of tea in his mouth and undid the seatbelts, pulling himself forward. Farley was adjusting instruments in their ports and replacing memory blocks on the slates collecting and collating the data. She dropped full blocks into a plastic sorting tray and slipped it into a file box. Then she held up one of the auxiliary multi-meters built by engineering before the Death, pointing out the display for Lanier's inspection.

"Yes?" he asked, looking down at the flickering numbers.

"It's kaput," she said. "Putting out nonsense. So are most of our instruments. We'll be lucky to interpret half the data we've gathered."

"Reasons?"

She shook her head. "Wild guesses, and that's the best I can do. Other electrical systems seem to be working—so it's possible we're passing through control fields like those that selectively damp inertia on the Stone. These fields damp other effects. . . distorted geometry's effect on activity in the nucleus, changes in slash aitch. . . Or the equipment may be clapping out all at once. Warranty expires today—surprise!"

"The equipment's fine," Heineman called out from the copilot's seat. "Don't blame my machines."

"The man's so proprietary," Farley marveled. "He gumbles every time I question quality control."

"Grumbles, not 'gumbles,' Lanier said.

"Whatever."

"Your turn," Lanier told Heineman, indicating the rear of the plane with his thumb. "Naptime. We'll all need to be bright and cheerful."

Heineman adjusted the tuberider's roll and floated past Lanier. "Wait," Carrolson said. "What's that?"

The singularity ahead of the tuberider was no longer a shiny cylindrical surface. In intermittent pulses, it glowed orange and then white, like a hot steel wire.

"No rest for the wicked," Heineman said, replacing Lanier in the pilot's seat. He applied the tuberider clamps to the singularity to brake. The craft suddenly bucked and rolled violently, tossing Lanier and Farley against the storage rack and pinning them there until Heineman released the clamps.

"We're accelerating," Heineman shouted over the roaring shudder of the tuberider and airplane. "I'm not in control anymore."

Lanier slid toward the rear of the cabin, banging into seats with his arms and legs as he tried to grab hold of something. Farley clung to a seat tenaciously and struggled to swing around and sit in it.

The singularity now drew a long, steady red line down the middle of the plasma tube. Lanier strapped himself into a seat and reached across to help Farley climb into hers. Equipment bounced and fell to the rear, striking storage racks, bulkheads and other equipment.

"Can you reverse us?" Lanier shouted over the tumult.

"No way," Heineman answered. "If I clamp down, we start bucking. Thirty thousand and still accelerating." The tuberider rolled again and Lanier and Farley shielded themselves against another onslaught of rebounding memory block racks, test kits and coiled light cables.

"Forty," Heineman said a few moments later. "Fifty."

The radio crackled and chuffed and a genderless melodic voice began in mid-phrase:

"—violation of the Law of the Way. Your craft is in violation of the Law of the Way. Do not resist or your craft will be destroyed. You are under the direction of the Hexamon Nexus and will be removed from the flaw in six minutes. Do not attempt to either accelerate or decelerate."

The message ended with a soft burst of white noise.

Chapter Forty-One

Belozersky stood stiffly to the rear of Yazykov at the conference table, hands locked behind his back. Yazykov sat with his hands folded on the table. Hoffman looked over the demands and wrote out a quick translation on her slate for Gerhardt. Gerhardt read them quickly and shook his head.

"We reject your demands," Hoffman said flatly in Russian. She, too, had spent time in the third chamber library.

"These men are criminals," Yazykov said. "They have kidnapped one of our colleagues and hidden in one of the cities where we cannot find them."

"Whether that's true or not, we already agreed to separate governmental and judicial systems. We can't help you find these men without breaking our agreement."

"They are hiding in sectors dominated by your people," Belozersky said. "You yourself may be hiding them."

"If that's the case, then I've been told nothing about it," Hoffman said. "I doubt it."

"Surely you support our attempt to form a civilian government," Yazykov said.

"We don't support it, and we don't oppose it," Hoffman said. "That's your concern. Our concern at this table is with our peaceful coexistence. Nothing more."

Yazykov rose quickly and nodded at Hoffman. They crossed the cafeteria and exited through the rear door.

"What do you make of that?" Hoffman asked Gerhardt. The general shook his head ruefully and grinned.

"Mirsky's stolen their main man," he said. "Looks like he anticipated them and made the first move."

"What's your opinion of Mirsky?"

"Hard-line Soviet military or not, I'd rather deal with him than with Yazykov or Belozersky."

"So do we help him?"

"Help Mirsky? Hell, no. First instincts are best. We stay out of it and let them settle it themselves. Besides, Mirsky won't ask for help. We just have to hope it doesn't come to a fight. We might not be able to stay out of that."

Mirsky and Pogodin removed Vielgorsky from the third chamber city in the truck, following a tortuous series of service roads until they found a main artery that crossed the remaining twenty kilometers in a straight line. The artery emerged through a number of open half-moon gates onto the ninety tunnel leading to the second chamber.

Mirsky examined several buildings along the second chamber thoroughfares before picking one that suited him. It was hidden between one of the giant chandelier-skyscrapers the Americans called megas, and a long row of hundred-meter-high asteroid-rock towers of no apparent utility.

The building was only four stories tall and seemed to have once been a kind of school. Long rows of connected seats filled the three rooms on each floor, facing slate-black walls rimmed with silvery glass.

In the easternmost room of the top floor, they spread their supplies, and Mirsky sat down with a much quieter and even more somber Vielgorsky. Pogodin went to hide the truck.

"I don't thank you," Vielgorsky said. He lay back on a bench and stared at the gold stars on the dark blue ceiling. "My father died in Afghanistan. I was told nothing about his death. . . state secret. I still don't know. But that it was all a military exercise. . . to battle-test the army. . .” He shook his head wonderingly. "A ten-year exercise! To find—" he coughed into his fist, "to find that all one has believed has been an orchestrated lie—"

"Not all," Mirsky said. "Much, but not all."

"Having one's eyes opened doesn't make one grateful."

"We've always known bits and pieces, haven't we?" Mirsky asked. "About the corruption, the inefficient and incompetent and venal superiors. . . The State preserving itself at the expense of revolutionary ideals."

"Every man must work with such things, if not accept them. But using our finest athletes and dancers as concubines—"

"Hypocrisy mixed with stupidity."

"How much worse for a government that says it is above scandal, and cannot do wrong! At least the Americans wallow in their scandal."

They talked for two hours. Pogodin returned. He listened attentively, his brow wrinkling when they discussed things that pained him. He interrupted only once, to ask, "Haven't the Americans discovered how corrupt they are?"

Mirsky nodded. "They have always known, or at least as often as their press could uncover the facts."

"Their press is not controlled?"

"Manipulated, yes," Mirsky said. "Never completely controlled. They had thousands of historians, each with his own perspective. Their history was confused, but deliberate distortions were usually found out."

Pogodin looked between Vielgorsky and Mirsky and then turned away to walk to the entrance of the room.

"What we've been told about Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev—" Vielgorsky let his words trail off with a shake of his head.

"Is different from what our fathers were told," Mirsky finished for him, "and their fathers before them."

And they talked for another hour, this time about life in the army. Mirsky described how he had nearly become a political officer. Vielgorsky outlined the accelerated training courses he and the other Zampolits had been given before being launched with the Space Shock Troops from the Indian Ocean.

"We are not so far apart after all," Vielgorsky said as Mirsky poured him water from a thermos. Mirsky shrugged again and handed him the cup. "You know the responsibilities of a political officer. . . the duty to party, to the revolution. . .”

"What revolution?" Mirsky asked softly.

Vielgorsky's face reddened. "We must still be loyal to the revolution. Our lives, our sanity depends on it."

"The revolution begins here, now," Mirsky said. "We are unloaded of the past."

They regarded each other for an uncomfortably long time. Pogodin returned to find them silent, and sat to one side, gripping the index finger of one hand with thumb and forefinger of the other and tugging it uneasily.

"The power must be shared," Vielgorsky said. "The party must be reestablished."

"Not by murderers and louts," Mirsky said sharply, jaw muscles tensing. "We have had enough of them. Russia has been raped by murderers and louts too long in the name of revolution and the party. No more. I will end it all here rather than bring this back to our children on Earth."

Vielgorsky fumbled at his pocket, pulling out an antique gold watch. "Belozersky and Yazykov will be frantic by now. There's no telling what they will do if they don't hear from me."

"That weakens them," Mirsky said. "Let them sit for a while, or hang themselves."

Vielgorsky grinned wolfishly and shook his finger at Mirsky "You bastard. I know what you are. You're a visionary. A deviationist visionary."

"And I'm the only one you can be comfortable with, sharing the power," Mirsky said. "You know they will come after you eventually. You can no more trust them than you can trust a mad dog."

Vielgorsky did not look convinced.

"Maybe now we understand each other."

Vielgorsky shrugged and turned down the corners of his mouth.

At 1200 hours the next day, Pogodin aimed the truck's antenna toward the southern bore hole, and Vielgorsky sent a message to Yazykov and Belozersky:

"Our fourth chamber troops have captured Mirsky and henchmen in third chamber library. Join us there. Trial will be held in library."

Chapter Forty-Two

They watched in silence as the red line of the singularity guided them toward the black shield. Lanier joined Farley and Carrolson in the rear, trying to make sense out of the instruments. They periodically registered meaningful data, but not often enough to be of much use.

"Something approaching along the singularity—It's a machine, big and black," Heineman said. "Coming up fast. . .” Lanier pushed himself forward.

Straddling the glowing red line, a machine twice as thick as the tuberider, round in cross section, bore down on them, its surface a glossy black. Bright purple lines on the machine's surface outlined squares and rectangles in symmetric arrays. Lanier watched in fascination as the squares and rectangles opened to extrude grapplers and a variety of jointed arms. It now resembled a deep-ocean submersible—or a madman's Swiss Army knife. "What's it going to do?"

"It's matching speed. Looks like it's—"

Colored lights flashed in the cabin. Heineman flinched and drew back; Lanier closed his eyes and batted out with his hands. "What was that?" Carrolson called from the rear. Red and green translucent objects danced again before Lanier. He reached out to touch one, but it was insubstantial.

"They're symbols or something," Heineman said. "You see them?"

"I see them," Lanier said. "I don't know what they are, or where they're coming from."

The radio hissed again. "Please state your identity and reason for approaching the Axis City shield."

Lanier took the mike from Heineman. "I'm Garry Lanier." That'll clue them, he thought ruefully. "We're exploring. If there are problems—"

"Do you wish an advocate?"

"I'm sorry—what?"

"You will be assigned an advocate immediately. Are you a corporeal human claiming the appropriate rights in the Hexamon Court?"

"Say yes," Carrolson advised.

"Yes."

"You will now be removed from the flaw and escorted to Axis Nader."

The machine ran one arm down the underside of the tuberider. Flying sparks obscured the windscreen; the V/STOL rolled and vibrated. Gas hissed against the fuselage and alarms went off in the cockpit; there was a wrenching sound, and with a jerk, they floated free.

The tuberider had been cut from the singularity and cast adrift. The V/STOL had then been removed from the tuberider.

Heineman peered up at the bright red line and the dark machine, which still clung to the stern of the mangled and useless tuberider. "It's pulled us out of the mounting," he said, voice thick with anger. The aircraft had drifted thirty or thirty-five meters. "I'm going back to check integrity."

Lanier pulled himself into the copilot's seat. He methodically strapped himself in and tried to control his breathing. Just like ditching, he thought. No worse, perhaps better—

"I don't hear any leaks, but I'd still rather be down in an atmosphere," Heineman called from the cabin.

The machine abandoned the tuberider and spread its grapples wide as it drifted toward the V/STOL. Heineman came forward again, brushing between Carrolson and Farley.

"Shit," he said. It was the first time Lanier had ever heard him swear.

The machine's bulk obscured the windscreen and the plane twisted. Floating in the cockpit hatchway, Heineman did not roll with the craft. Lanier rotated around the startled engineer, then reversed. "Hang on before the next one," he shouted. Heineman grabbed for the pilot's seat with one hand. The airplane spun around again and, like a martial arts master, used Heineman's own mass to dislocate his shoulder.

The engineer screamed and let go, now rolling in the opposite direction of the cabin. Lanier watched helplessly, waiting for the motion to stop. When the lull stretched out to four seconds, he unbuckled and held Heineman around the waist, pushing him gently toward the rear. The engineer's face was a mask of pain; he opened his eyes wide like a child cruelly injured by a friend.

Carrolson and Farley had sustained bruises but no worse before grabbing handgrips. Farley held Heineman's head and Carrolson took his kicking feet while Lanier inspected the arm.

"Son of a bitch!" Heineman howled. "Leave it alone."

"The longer it's out, the longer it'll hurt," Lanier said. "I don't think anything's torn. Jesus, how do I reset in zero-g?"

"Here, brace your foot in one of these stanchions and we'll grab his torso," Carrolson said. Heineman squirmed, wild-eyed. His short hair stuck out in all directions. Lanier hitched one foot under a rung and pressed the other against Heineman's ribs. Carrolson and Farley tightened their hold on the engineer.

"Let me go," Heineman said weakly, his face slick with sweat and tears.

Lanier grabbed one arm and forearm and pulled, braced and twisted all at once. Heineman screamed again and rolled his eyes until only whites showed. There was a satisfying billiard-ball snick, and the arm was back in place. His head rolled limply and his mouth gaped. He had passed out.

"He'll never forgive us now," Carrolson said.

"Wrap the shoulder in a cold compress," Lanier instructed. He pushed his face against the side port again. The machine obscured the windscreen.

"Do not attempt to accelerate," the radio voice advised again. "Do not activate your drives. You are being taken to Axis Nader."

Farley helped Heineman into a seat. He lolled his head back to look at Carrolson, his face pasty. Carrolson inspected his eyes, prying the lids open with two fingers. "Shock," she said. She opened the first-aid pack and took out a prepackaged syringe, injecting it into his uninjured arm.

Lanier sat in the cockpit and tried to get whatever information he could from the instruments. The V/STOL was moving rapidly; that much and little else was apparent.

Olmy entered the flaw monitor room, picting his Presidential access pass at the corporeal guard. The room was a high, oval chamber filled with out-of-focus information picts directed at two neomorphs on monitors duty. He floated to their position and was surrounded by detailed readouts on the destroyed and drifting tuberider and the airplane, now in control of a flaw maintenance vehicle. "This is a security operation, by extended order of the President," Olmy picted at the senior neomorph.

"I cannot accept that," the neomorph replied. "This is a serious breach and must be reported to the courts at once. They will be assigned an advocate—"

They already have an advocate. You must accept a direct order from a representative of the President," Olmy said. The neomorph—shaped like an egg, with traction field grappling arms extended to each side and a human face on the forward, large end of the egg—surrounded itself with a picted white circle, signaling compliance under duress. But that was not enough for Olmy.

"By order of the President of the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, authority of the Presiding Minister, you are removed from this duty," he said. The neomorph protested furiously in garbled sound and red-shifted picts as it exited the chamber.

Olmy took the position, exchanging glances with the remaining neomorph. "This will not reach the court," he stated.

"It has already been relayed," the second neomorph said. Olmy telepicted a message to Suli Ram Kikura's office in Central City. A stylized personal emblem appeared before him. "Ser Ram Kikura is not available at the present. This is one of her partials. May I help?"

"This is an emergency. We have more guests. They are in violation of Hexamon law, and their case needs to be suppressed in court immediately, authority of the Presiding Minister." He picted the code authority.

"Received," the partial said. Then, in a completely lifelike image, the partial shook his head. "Really, Olmy, you bring us so much trouble." The partial signed off, and Olmy opened another channel to Axis Nader, requesting that the Frant escort Patricia from her quarters to the inspection hangar. He ordered the clearing of all passageways between. That would arouse some suspicion and resentment, but he could see no way around it. "And we'll need more quarters space." The Frant also took his coded authority and signed off.

Olmy then turned his full attention to the flaw maintenance device and the aircraft. "They are uninjured?" he inquired, his picts demandingly purple-tinted.

"They have not been harmed by this station," the neomorph answered, appearing alarmed.

"You realize the secrecy of this operation?" he asked. It assented in the meekest shade of green. "Good. Then direct your vehicle and the violators to the inspection hangar."

Olmy pushed himself from the station and the chamber and found the quickest shaft to Axis Nader.

"How many individuals are there within your craft?" the voice asked.

"Four," Lanier said. "One injured."

"They are all corporeal humans?"

"We're all humans. What are you?"

"You are now in a reception area for illegal vehicles. Do not attempt escape; the area is sealed."

The machine removed its grapples and lifted away from the aircraft. Lanier saw they were in a broad, uncluttered hangar-like enclosure, the walls smooth black and gray. Slender silver cables coiled before the cockpit windscreen. The plane hung from cables attached to a pale silver torus suspended below the hangar ceiling. Three large metallic gray mechanical workers surrounded the aircraft, pushing it along. They moved on four delicate jointed legs, their bulky bodies divided into hemispheres connected by a narrow flexible casing.

There was no sign of human life in the hangar. At two points, elliptical portals about four meters wide opened in the walls, but they gave no clue as to who was preparing to greet them.

"Will you address the person who has tentatively confirmed your identity?" the voice asked, still as pleasant and melodic as ever.

"Who is it? I mean, who identified us?"

The next voice was instantly recognizable. "Garry, its Patricia. There are four of you? Who are they?"

"That's her—we've found her," Lanier said. "Or she's found us."

"I thought someone would come after me—it's just like I said. They're my friends." Patricia leaned forward, hoping to receive the picted images more clearly. She had spotted Lanier inside the cockpit. "They must all be terrified." She watched the black flaw patrol machine rise into its cavity above and behind the aircraft.

"They could be in serious trouble with the city authorities," Olmy said. "I'm trying to get the case cleared and suppressed, but I can't guarantee anything."

"They've come looking for me," she said. "You can't blame them for that."

"They rode the axial flaw, and that's strictly forbidden."

"Yes, but how could they know?"

Olmy didn't answer. "I know who they are," he said. "Your boss Lanier, the scientist Carrolson, the Chinese Caucasian called Farley, and the engineer, Heineman."

"You recognize them? You kept track of all of us, didn't you?"

The mechanical workers pushed and guided the aircraft into a dilated entrance to a side chamber. The iris closed behind the plane and the hangar lights darkened.

Patricia stepped out of the chamber and took Olmy's proffered hand. He led her to the inspection hangar lock.

Suli Ram Kikura entered the chamber. She had not yet met Patricia, but she had become fully acquainted with her. The advocate picted a brief conversation with Olmy. Patricia was not in line to pick up the exchanged visual symbols—not that she could have understood many of them, anyway—but she could get the gist from the woman's attitude. The woman was a corporeal advocate. She was taking Olmy's deposition and relaying it to the pre-trial court.

The V/STOL hatch opened. A worker settled on its jointed haunches a few yards away, sensors fully extended to record the disembarking of the passengers.

History, Patricia thought. We're all history here.

Lanier came out first. Patricia restrained an urge to wave to him; instead, she lifted up on tiptoes and nodded. He returned the nod and descended the hatch steps. Farley came next. Carrolson waited in the doorway. Lanier pointed back into the cabin and said loudly, "We have an injured man inside. He may need assistance."

Olmy and the woman conferred again and the woman touched her silver torque. As she did so, she glanced at Patricia and smiled. Her pictor projected an American flag above her left shoulder; she had American ancestors and was proud of it.

"What do we do?" Carrolson asked. "Leave him there?"

"Tell your friends a medical worker is coming," Olmy said in an undertone.

"He'll be okay. Help is coming," Patricia said. Lanier tried to approach but was blocked by a worker.

"Let him pass!" Patricia pleaded. "Olmy, what harm can they do?"

"They're in quarantine," Olmy said, pointing to the glowing red line surrounding the V/STOL at chest level.

Patricia turned to Lanier, holding up one hand. "They're not going to hurt you. Everything's okay. Just wait a moment."

"It's good to see you," Lanier said, keeping an eye on the scuttling workers. "We had no idea we'd ever find you."

Patricia swallowed back a lump in her throat. She turned to Olmy. "We have to stay together," she told him. "We have to help each other."

Olmy smiled at her, but that didn't mean assent; he picted with the woman again and she touched her necklace once more.

"A decision is being made now," he said.

"Whether they're criminals or guests?" Patricia asked.

"Oh, they will be guests," the woman said in perfect English.

"They will be sampled now," Olmy said. "Perhaps it would be best if you told them."

"Garry," Patricia said, "they're really interested in our skin cultures. One of the workers—the machines—is going to approach you and collect skin scrapings. It doesn't hurt. And the cabin's waste tank—they'll want that, too."

"Here's the medical team," Olmy said. He would have to contact everyone involved later and have them swear out statements of secrecy. Two more corporeal citizens and a smaller worker entered the chamber and approached the red line. As they passed through, red chevrons appeared over their shoulders; they were now in quarantine also.

Lanier, Carrolson and Farley allowed the medical worker to pull back the sleeves of their jumpsuits and take samples. The worker then withdrew, touching the red line. It was instantly surrounded by a lovely lilac glow; when the glow dissipated, the worker crossed the line and came to a halt.

The medical team—all homorphs—entered the aircraft hatch. A few minutes later, Heineman walked out on his own power between them. The lead homorph picted a message to Olmy.

"He was in pain but not seriously injured," Olmy told Patricia. "They have relieved his pain but have not yet given him healers."

"Virgin specimens, like me, right?" Patricia asked. Olmy agreed and walked with her to the line.

It vanished as they approached. "Quarantine is over," the lead medical homorph stated. He picted a few simplicities at Patricia and she acknowledged the politeness. Then she rushed forward and hugged Lanier, Carrolson and Farley, lingering with each. When Heineman's turn came, she hugged him more gingerly.

"Don't spare me—I feel pretty good," he told her. "Where in hell are we?"

"I'm receiving a judgment," said the advocate, still flying the American flag on her shoulder. She approached the group with hands extended.

"She has an implant, they all do," Patricia explained to Lanier, touching her head. "She's listening to the court decision now."

"The case is cleared from all pre-trial court records, and negated by circumstance," the woman announced. "You are all guests of the Axis Nader." With a meaningful glance at Olmy, Ram Kikura added, "By authority of the Presiding Minister."

Chapter Forty-Three

Vielgorsky stood in front of the black panel which marked the entrance of the third chamber library. Across the plaza, almost shadowless in the tubelight, Belozersky and Yazykov walked cautiously toward him. Behind them followed two squads of SSTs, their rifles unslung.

Mirsky and Pogodin watched from the abandoned NATO security post, a small room in the overhang equipped with a video monitor. Mirsky toyed with the loud-hailer switches.

Pogodin looked at him. "We're taking a chance now," he said.

"I know."

Pogodin turned back to the screen. Mirsky aimed the American listening device at them and increased the volume.

"We won't need more soldiers," Vielgorsky said. "I have already sent Mirsky and Pogodin to the fourth chamber for detention."

"He seems to be cooperating," Pogodin said quietly.

Mirsky nodded. There was indeed a risk here; it had become apparent to him in the past couple of days that without Vielgorsky, he could not rule; he had neither the experience nor the inclination to engage in political intrigue and survive for long. Vielgorsky was the best of the political officers. If he and Mirsky could not work together, then no cooperation was possible. Mirsky doubted that he could kill all of them, which was the alternative. It would be better for him to turn himself over to the Americans or become lost in the cities and fend for himself.

"I think it is time you see what we fought for, and learn how to use it," Vielgorsky said.

"I have no desire to imitate Mirsky," Belozersky said. "I do not care for that place."

"Comrade," Vielgorsky said patiently, "knowledge is power. Do you want to be more ignorant than the rest? I have been in there, and I am still Vielgorsky, still Party Secretary."

"Yes. . .” Yazykov said. "It doesn't frighten me."

"Nor I," Belozersky said hastily. "But—"

"Then let's enter and see what Mirsky was up to, spending so much time here."

Mirsky trained the video cameras on them until they passed out of view. There was something else at stake. Was it possible to be ignorant of the character of one's own country, after having spent one's entire life within its borders? Yes; there was no basis for comparison, and however much he knew, without comparison the knowledge was dormant. Even with the library's information, he had to conduct an experiment.

However unfair the test was, he would now judge his country and all it stood for by how Vielgorsky acted.

"He'll take their weapons," Mirsky said. "We can't have them armed when I appear."

"You're going down there now?" Pogodin asked.

"Yes."

"You trust Vielgorsky that much?"

"I don't know. It's a risk."

"Not just for you," Pogodin said. "We cooperated with you—Pletnev, the scientists, myself, Annenkovsky, Garabedian."

Mirsky headed for the stairwell. His back crawled as he descended the stairs. He was more afraid now then when he had leaped from the heavy-lifter in the bore hole. Strangely, he felt like a child again. And he was tired. He had observed the same weariness in the American, Lanier.

Opening the door.

Stepping out onto library floor. Only the three Zampolits had entered: Vielgorsky, holding a pistol on Belozersky, Yazykov standing to one side staring at his fellow political officer in dismay. Their rifles lay scattered on the floor, kicked out of reach.

"Come forward, Comrade General," Vielgorsky said. He took several steps to one side, still pointing the pistol, and bent to pick up an AKV. Belozersky stared at Mirsky with uncomprehending hatred. Yazykov's face was blank, tightly controlled. Mirsky walked across the plaza toward them.

When he was five meters from the group, Vielgorsky turned the pistol away from Belozersky, lifted it and sighted along the barrel at Mirsky. "I do not thank you, Comrade," he said. He squeezed the trigger.

Mirsky's view of things skewed, as if the anamorphic lens on a motion picture projector were suddenly twisted. One side of his head seemed very large. He fell on his knees and leaned forward, bowed, then fell over, his cheek smacking sharply against the yielding floor. That hurt more than whatever had happened to his head. His one good eye blinked.

Vielgorsky lowered the pistol, handed it to Belozersky, walked toward the scattered rifles, picked up and aimed an AKV at the chairs and globes on the plaza and began firing a clip. Teardrops shattered and bullets ricocheted, the sound somewhat distant and unimpressive in the large hall, even with the echoes.

Belozersky's yell of triumph and delight was cut short by a very big sound, impossible to describe. The three political officers twitched; Vielgorsky dropped his weapon and jerked his head back. Yazykov clapped his hands to his ears and mouth. All three collapsed. White streamers jetted from the ceiling all around the plaza and untwisted into thick fog.

The fog lay down over them and Mirsky closed his eye, grateful at last for the undisturbed slumber.

Chapter Forty-Four

Lanier—lying on the couch, hand gripping the African print upholstery, staring up at the featureless cream-colored ceiling, ostensibly resting—knew this much, and very little more:

Their quarters were located in the outer reaches of the rotating cylindrical precinct called Axis Nader: five apartments along a hallway, each with a bedroom, a bathroom and a living room; at the end of the hallway, a communal dining area and a large, circular lounge. The centrifugal force at this level of the precinct was just slightly less than at the Stone's chamber floors. All the quarters were closed off and lacked real windows, though illusart windows of idyllic terrestrial scenes in the apartments and lounge provided a sensation of spaciousness which was hard to deny.

Someone had gone to considerable effort to make the accommodations pleasant and familiar. What Lanier gathered, from all the fuss, was that they were important people. Whether they were prisoners or honored guests, it was impossible to tell for the time being.

He turned his head to one side, reached over to a stack of magazines on the coffee table near the couch, picked up a copy of STERN and flipped through it, not really looking at the turning pages. His eyes kept tracking the apartment, lingering on little details—the art glass vase in one corner of a bureau, red and purple with overlaid gold threads; the rich-feeling couch fabric; the books that lined one shelf; and the memory cubes stacked in an ebony wood holder nearby.

He was about to put the magazines down on a frosted glass coffee table when he realized he hadn't looked at the issue's date. March 4, 2004. Over a year old. Where did they find it?

Or any of the objects in the apartments?

"May I come in?" Patricia asked. The apartment door became transparent and he saw her standing in the hallway. Judging by her attitude, she could not see in.

"Yes," he said. "Please do."

She continued standing outside. "Garry, are you home?"

He puzzled this over for a moment; she hadn't heard him. Symbols appeared in the air to one side of the door, flickering rapidly, little marvels of calligraphy—picts, Patricia had called them, statements made up of single symbols called icons. When nothing happened, he approached the door and the room voice, sexless and melodic, asked, "You have a visitor, Mr. Lanier. Would you like Patricia Luisa Vasquez to enter?"

"Yes, please, let her in," he said. The door became opaque again and then slid aside.

"Hello," she said. "We're all meeting in a half hour—getting together with the woman who was in the hangar. Olmy says she's our 'advocate.' I thought I'd talk things over with you first."

"Good idea," he said. "Let's sit."

He took a comfortable leather-upholstered chair and Patricia sat on the couch. She folded her hands in her lap and regarded him steadily, her lips pursed as if to hold back a smile.

"What in hell happened to you?" Lanier asked.

"Isn't it obvious? I was kidnapped. I think we were being invaded or something. I was half-crazy then. Maybe more than half. So I took a train to the third chamber, and Olmy found me there. He had a Frant with him—a nonhuman."

"Who is Olmy?"

"You met him—the one who took us here and arranged for the quarters to be done in period."

"Yes, I met him, but who is he, what rank, what importance?"

"He's an agent of some sort. He does work for the Nexus—the main governing body of the Hexamon. He's been my teacher for the past few days, ever since we got here. Were we being invaded?"

"Yes," Lanier said. "By Russians." He told her what had happened and she listened intently.

"I think that's one reason Olmy wanted me out of the chambers," she said. "He thought I might be in danger. I'm not yet sure why he chose me in particular, but. . .” She shrugged. "I have some ideas. They've already put me through tests. They'll test you, too. Diagnostics, psychological, everything—all in a few minutes. It doesn't hurt. They're really interested in our bodies. We're historical curiosities."

"I'll bet. At any rate, when I heard you had been kidnapped, I went a bit crazy myself. Judith Hoffman made it up to the Stone from Station Sixteen—"

"How wonderful!" Patricia said. "Was anybody with her?"

"Yes—nobody we knew."

Patricia's expression of joy stiffened.

"She obviously decided I wasn't going to be very effective anymore. You were the last straw, I think."

"Me?"

"Hoffman told me to take care of you. I couldn't prevent what happened on Earth, and I lost you, besides. I don't take failure very well, Patricia." He rubbed his cheeks and eyes. "Failure. Yes. I suppose you could call losing the whole Earth failure."

Patricia gripped her hands tightly between her knees. "Not lost," she murmured.

"So Hoffman authorized an expedition to find you."

"It's good to have you all here—my friends, my helpers." Her sudden cheeriness had an edge.

"We're really guests here, then?" he asked.

"Oh, yes. They weren't expecting you—though when Olmy first heard, he knew it had to be the tuberider. They consulted him right away since he had been down the corridor most recently."

"Do they knew about the Stone—what we've been doing?"

"Yes, I suppose they do—Olmy must have told them."

"And do they plan to do anything with us? I mean, I assume they're still interested in the Stone. . . .”

"I'm not sure. Some of them are. It's confusing, and I've only been taking lessons steadily for the last couple of days. It's all very political, that's what Olmy tells me."

"They're advanced, aren't they?" Lanier asked.

"Oh, yes, but not so much we can't understand a lot of things. Our rooms, for example—they're not very different from that apartment in the third chamber. The one Takahashi showed me."

Lanier hadn't mentioned Takahashi's treason. He didn't think it necessary now.

"All the decorations are illusions," Patricia said. "There's a pictor—a kind of projector—in each room. It makes our minds feel and see the elaborations. The furniture is here in basic shape and function, but everything else is projected. They've had this technology for a long time, centuries. They're as used to it as we are to electricity."

Lanier reached out and riffled the copy of STERN, then pulled a copy of TIME from beneath it. "These magazines, that vase"—he pointed to the art glass—"are just records stored somewhere, projected?"

"I suppose they must be."

"Are they watching us now?"

"No. They told me they aren't, anyway. Privacy is very important here."

"You said you had an idea why they wanted you."

"Well. . . just a guess. Olmy might have been worried I would find a way to change the sixth chamber machinery."

"But he wanted to keep you safe."

"Out of trouble." She stood and nodded at the decorations. "Do you like what they've done?"

"It's thorough." He shrugged. "It's comfortable."

"They're good at matching decor to people. My rooms are comfortable, too. Not very much like home, though. I'm. . .”

The edge in her cheerfulness became fully visible for an instant, making her eyes hard and determined. "I'm not taking everything well. Some parts of me are pretty messed over."

"That's. . . not unexpected," Lanier said.

"They're going to help," she said. "They're going to help me find home. They can, you know. They don't know it yet. But they will. I've learned that much since I've been here. The corridor is very twisty." She tangled her fingers and tugged her arms against them. "Let's go join the others."

Olmy stood in the center of the circular lounge, Suli Ram Kikura beside him. He introduced her to each of the five, formally and at length; telling her the functions they had served on the Thistledown. Lanier was impressed by how much Olmy knew; he seemed to have kept a dossier on all of them.

“And this is Ser Suli Ram Kikura, your advocate. Your arrival on the tuberider was highly illegal, so she's been of service to you already. She had your court case negated because of the circumstances."

"And under authority from the Presiding Minister," she added. "It's not something an advocate of my standing could have accomplished on her own."

"She may underestimate herself," Olmy said.

"Now that we know each other's names, I think we'd better get everything out in the open," Ram Kikura said. Olmy took a seat and folded his arms. "First of all, most of the citizens and clients of the Axis City and the communities along the Way—what you call the corridor—talk to each other by picting." She touched the torque around her neck and looked at Heineman. Flashes of light darted before his eyes. "I'm wearing a personal pictor. You will all be given pictors in a couple of days. It won't be absolutely necessary for you to learn the graphicspeech, but it will be very helpful. Lessons should take no more than two or three days. Miss Vasquez, I understand, already has a rudimentary knowledge of picts."

"Amenities," Patricia said.

"I speak American English, and have for years, because I am proud of my ancestry, which is North American, specifically United States of America, even more specifically, California.

"When you first saw me, you might have noticed I was picting a flag from the U.S.A. over my left shoulder. This is frequently done by Ameriphiles; it symbolizes our pride. After the Death, it was considered shameful to claim either Russian or American heritage. Those who did so were persecuted. Americans were persecuted more than Russians. When South Americans and Mexicans repopulated large sections of North America, people claiming to be citizens of the United States were arrested. The Naderites of that time were trying to create a unified world government, and there was resentment against the former Superpowers."

"That's changed?" Heineman asked.

Ram Kikura nodded. "The United States gave us most of our culture, the foundations of our laws and government. We feel about America as you might feel about Rome or Greece. Citizens take considerable pride in having American ancestors. If your presence becomes generally known—"

Lanier clenched one hand tightly, worried by the implications of indefinite secrecy.

"—then I will have to act as your theatrical agent, I'm afraid." Her smile seemed to indicate both humor and confidence. Lanier released some of the tension in his fist.

Farley shook her head. "I'm Chinese. Do I miss out?"

Ram Kikura smiled. "Not in the least. Those with Chinese heritage make up at least a third of the Hexamon—far more than Americans.

"As for your status—for the time being, your presence here is being treated as a Hexamon secret. You will not have any further contact with citizens of the Hexamon until that situation changes. Nevertheless, you have all the rights accorded to Hexamon guests. Not even the President himself could take those rights from you. One of them is the right to have an advocate represent your interests and advise you. Should anyone here object to my being your advocate, let me know immediately, and another will be assigned." She looked from face to face. There were no objections; she hadn't expected any.

"Your status here is that of potential client innocents. That is, you may be of service to the Hexamon, and such services will gain you advantages—what you might term payment—but for the moment you are not to be disturbed. As innocents, you will be studied—unless you object—and the knowledge gained from these studies will be invested for you in certain Hexamon information banks. It will also be available to the Nexus and other governing bodies of the Hexamon, whether you object or not."

"I have some questions," Lanier said.

"Please ask them."

"What's the Hexamon. . . and the Nexus?"

"The Hexamon is the totality of human citizens. You might call it the state. The Nexus is the main lawmaking body of this city, and of the Way from the Thistledown and the forbidden territory to mark two ex nine. That is, the two-billion kilometer point of the Way."

"You're all descended from the Stoners—the people who lived in the Thistledown?" Carrolson asked.

"Yes," Ram Kikura said.

"Excuse me," Heineman said. "How many people live here? How large is this Axis City?"

Ram Kikura smiled and picted instructions to the empty walls. There were no data pillars anywhere—apparently their functions had been integrated into the inconspicuous room pictors.

A very solid looking image of the Axis City appeared next to her, rotating slowly. Heineman leaned forward in his seat, frowning in concentration.

"One hundred million humans occupy the city and the Way. Ten million live off-city, along the Way, chiefly traders and coordinators of the five hundred and seventy-one active wells. Ninety million live in the Axis City. Of these, seventy million are in City Memory. Most of those have lived out their legal two incarnations and have retired their bodies to exist as personality patterns in the City Memory environment. Under special circumstances, they may be assigned new bodies, but most often they are content in Memory. Some five million deviant personalities—those who are incomplete or deranged in such a way they cannot be redeemed, even with extreme methods of therapy—are kept inactive."

"People don't die?" Carrolson asked.

"Death and dying here usually refer to loss of corporeal states, not mental states. In a word, no, or very rarely," Ram Kikura said. "All of us are equipped with implants." She touched a spot behind her ear, then moved her finger to a spot above the bridge of her nose. "They supplement our reasoning, and should an accident occur, they retain a record of our most recent experiences and personality. The implant is almost indestructible—it is the first thing we recover from the victim of an accident. Every few days, we update our backups in City Memory with records from these implants. That way, a personality can be quickly reconstructed. All we need to do is make a final update and inhabit a new body, and the resurrection is indistinguishable from the original."

She looked around the room, ready to field more questions. There were none; implications were beginning to sink in.

"I'll use Olmy as an example," Ram Kikura said. "With his permission. . . ?"

Olmy nodded.

"He is something of a rarity because of his age and history. His original body was born five centuries ago. His first death was by accident; the destruction was not total, so he was reconstructed. Since he was considered important to the Hexamon and was involved in dangerous work, he was allowed three incarnations, rather than the usual two. His present body is adapted for specialty work; it's a popular type and is completely self-contained. His waste systems are also closed. Within his abdomen there is a small power supply; all his wastes are reprocessed internally. He needs to replace his power source and bring in supplementary materials only once a year. He requires water every three months."

"Are you human?" Carrolson asked Olmy pointedly.

"I am," Olmy said. "I presume you're curious about my sexuality?"

"What. . . Yes, frankly," Carrolson admitted. Heineman squinted one eye and raised the opposite brow.

"I am fully masculine by birth and choice, and my sexual organs are functional."

"They are, indeed," Ram Kikura said. "But natal sexual orientation, even in those born naturally, is not necessarily permanent."

"You mean, once a man, not always a man?" Farley asked.

"Or a woman. Or man or woman. Many neomorphs today have no specific sexual orientation."

"You talk about those born naturally," Heineman said. "You have test-tube babies, that sort of thing?"

"At the risk of shocking you—which may be unavoidable—most people today are not born of man and woman. Their personalities are created by one or more parents through the merging of partial personalities in City Memory, with the infusion of what we call Mystery from at least one individual, usually a parent. The young personality is educated and tested in City Memory, and if it passes certain tests, it 'matures,' that is, it earns its first incarnation, most often as a mature young adult. The corpus the personality inhabits may be designed by the parents, or by the individual. If in time the corporeal citizen uses its two incarnations, it then retires to City Memory."

Carrolson started to say something, thought better of it, then decided to speak anyway. "Are the people without bodies—in the computers—are they human, are they alive?" she asked.

"They believe so," Ram Kikura said. "They have specific rights, and certain duties, as well, though by necessity their say in government is less than that of corporeal citizens. But if I may suggest we are not discussing the subjects of most immediate importance. . .” She pointed toward the rotating image of the city.

"This is where you will stay. For the time being, you cannot return to the Thistledown. Your home will be in this precinct, Axis Nader, where conditions are reasonably familiar—design, culture, people. Though you may not meet them for some time, this precinct is inhabited by orthodox Naderites.

"Miss Vasquez has told Ser Olmy that some of you are aware of the basics of our history. Then you will understand that orthodox Naderites typically prefer conditions as close to those of Earth as possible. This section contains many areas of natural beauty—and as few illusions in the public thoroughfares as possible. There are two other rotating precincts—Axis Thoreau and Axis Euclid—spaced beyond the Central City. Axis Thoreau is also occupied by Naderites, though of a more liberal persuasion."

"More questions," Lanier said. "When can we return to our people?"

"I don't know. That decision isn't ours to make."

"Can we send a message to them?"

"No," Olmy said. "Technically, your people are in violation."

"Isn't the situation a little unusual?" Lanier asked. "Now that the Thistledown has returned to Earth. . .”

Olmy looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Unusual. And very complicated."

Patricia touched Lanier's hand and gave a slight shake of her head: enough for now.

"After you've eaten, you will have time to become reacquainted and learn how to use your accommodations. Then you may rest. Tomorrow morning, you will be awakened in your rooms. Please return here."

In the hallway, Patricia walked close to Lanier. "We're pawns," she said in an undertone. "We've set off alarms." She held her finger to her lips and darted into her doorway.

Chapter Forty-Five

Wu and Chang walked arm in-arm from the train station to the library plaza, saying little but obviously content with each other's company. They had decided, hours before, to go to the library together, to make the pilgrimage that so many were planning but few had time to actually do. Singly and in groups, perhaps a total of twenty members of the NATO and allied forces and the science teams had gone and had returned with awed reports of the library's potential. This impressed Wu; he had asked permission of Hua Ling, and since their studies had been reduced in scope, the leader of the Chinese team had agreed.

But something was wrong. Russian soldiers milled outside the library in some confusion. As they spotted Wu and Chang crossing the plaza, alone, they dropped prone on the pavement and raised their rifles. Wu held up his hands instinctively; Chang backed away a step and seemed ready to run.

"No, my love," Wu whispered.

"What are they doing?"

"I don't know. I recommend we make no fast moves."

She edged up beside him and raised her hands high as well, glancing at him for approval. He nodded.

They maintained this position for several long and unpleasant minutes while a few of the soldiers crawled toward each other and conferred. Then a command was barked and all but two of the Russians stood and slung their rifles.

"Can we move now?" Chang asked.

"No; we are still in danger."

Two Russians walked across the plaza toward them. Some meters distant, they stopped. "Do you speak Russian?" one asked, in Russian.

"I do," Chang replied in kind. "My English is better."

"My terrible English," the spokesman said, demonstrating his point. "You are Chinese?"

"Yes. We were on a walk," Chang said. From this point on, they spoke Russian.

"I am Corporal Rodzhensky, and this is Corporal Fremov. Something has gone wrong in the library; we are not sure what. We cannot allow anyone to pass; besides, the building is closed and will not open for us."

"Do you have any idea what the trouble is?" Chang asked, struggling to appear especially interested and polite.

"No. We heard gunfire, and then the black. . . wall closed, and would not open."

"Why was there gunfire?"

"We do not know," Rodzhensky said, glancing nervously at Fremov. "We have communicated with our superiors in the fourth chamber, but they have not arrived yet."

"We will help any way we can," Chang said. "Or, if you wish, we will leave."

"No. . . Perhaps you can approach the door, try to make it open. It may be ridiculous, but then again. . .” Rodzhensky shrugged, then suddenly realized guns were still being trained on the pair. "Do you have weapons?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at the prone riflemen.

"No. We are scientists."

Rodzhensky called out for the riflemen to put away their guns. "We are not familiar with this place," he said. "It makes us nervous. Especially now. Our officers are inside that building—searching for a fugitive." He frowned and seemed to realize he was revealing too much to outsiders. "Please, come with us and see if the door will open for you."

Chang explained what had happened to Wu, who maintained a look of intense interest as they were escorted to the library entrance. The soldiers milled around in some confusion. Wu approached the black wall, hands held up, and touched the smooth surface with his fingers and palms.

It did not dilate, as he had been told to expect. He stepped back and lowered his hands. "Sorry," he said. "It doesn't seem—"

A low, vibrating series of tones issued from the wall, and repeated, followed by a voice. "Police attention required in this precinct," the voice said in Russian. "No entrance to unauthorized personnel. Please alert medical and police authorities immediately. No entrance allowed." It then repeated its message in English and Chinese.

The soldiers backed away, AKVs unslung and pistols drawn.

"Something must have happened inside," Chang said calmly to Rodzhensky. "Perhaps we should tell our own superiors. Wouldn't that be wise?" She looked up at the Russian with her narrow almond eyes, her face a mask of persuasion and equanimity. Wu felt tremendous admiration for her. He had never seen her react to this sort of crisis.

Corporal Rodzhensky thought that over, shook his head firmly, then slumped his tension-hunched shoulders and seemed to reconsider. "What do we do if it doesn't open?" he asked.

"It doesn't open now."

"Our leaders are inside—all of them," he said.

Chang maintained her intent gaze.

"Yes—all right," Rodzhensky finally said. "Please go and bring your own superiors."

"Thank you," Chang said. She took Wu by the arm and walked with him back across the plaza.

"Very strange," she exclaimed, shaking her head in wonder. "Most strange."

"You were wonderful," Wu said, awestruck.

"Thank you." She smiled appreciatively.

Chapter Forty-Six

He had buried his parachute and now lay down in the long, sweet-smelling dry yellow grass near the road. Hands over his eyes, he waited for a truck or car to come along, so he might hitch a ride back to Podlipki—or was it that base in Mongolia with only a number, 83?

Not that it mattered. The sun was warm, and except for a slight headache, Major Mirsky felt grand. He had fallen so far off course that he might take hours to reach the base, missing dinner, but also missing the political instruction. He would gladly trade kasha for a few hours alone to think.

At length a dusty, long black Volga came down the road and stopped beside him. The rear window rolled down and a bulky, beefy-faced man in a gray fedora stuck his head out, frowning at Mirsky.

"What are you doing here?" the man asked. He resembled Major General Sosnitsky, but he also looked a bit like poor Zhadov, who had died in the bore-hole massacre, wherever that was, and whenever. "What's your mother's name?"

"Nadia," he said. "I need a ride—"

"And what did you have for a cake on your eleventh birthday?"

"Comrade, I don't see—"

"It's very important. What did you have?"

"Something with chocolate, I think."

The man in the fedora nodded and opened the door. "Get in," he said. Mirsky squeezed in beside him. The seat was wet with blood; the man's three companions were corpses, all alike, all with their heads bloody and brains leaking. "Do you know these people?"

"No, I don't," Mirsky said, laughing. "We haven't been introduced."

"They are you, Comrade," the man said, and the dream faded to grayness. Once again, he buried the parachute. . . .

He began to get suspicious. Finally, after he had been picked up for the seventh or eighth time—the car minus its corpses—and the man in the fedora asked him about his Komsomol days, Mirsky decided to ask some questions of his own.

"I know I'm not dreaming, Comrade. So where am I?"

"You have been very badly injured."

"I don't seem to remember that—"

"No, but you will. You were shot in the head and suffered severe trauma. Parts of your brain are missing. You will never remember your life in quite as much detail, and you will never be quite the same person again."

"But I feel whole."

"Yes," the man in the fedora agreed. "That is normal, but it's an illusion. Together we've been exploring, finding out what you have left. There is quite a lot, actually—surprising, considering the damage—but you will never be quite the—"

"Yes, yes," Mirsky interrupted. "So will I die?"

"No, you are out of danger. Your head and brain are being repaired and you will live. But you have decisions to make."

"What sort of decisions?"

"You can live with the missing portions left blank, or you can receive prosthetic neurological programming and artificial personality segments tailored to fit those remaining to you."

"Now I'm really confused."

The man pulled a picture book out of his satchel. When he opened it, the pages were filled with beautiful complex designs, some in garish color, others muted and metallic, still others stimulating tastes and bodily sensations. He took the book and read through it. When he was finished, he asked, "Will I know what is mine and what is not?"

"If that's what you want."

"And without all these. . . prostheses? What will I be?"

"A cripple. You will have memories," the man explained, "though some will be difficult to recall clearly and others will have curious gaps. It will take you weeks to learn how to see again, and you will never see very well. You will never recover your sensations of smell or the sensation of touch on the left side of your body. Your mathematical reasoning abilities will be intact, but your speech will be impaired and may never return."

Mirsky looked at the man's face until it seemed to fade into the sky beyond the car's side window. "It doesn't sound like much fun," he said.

"It is your choice."

"You're in the library, aren't you?"

"Not what you're seeing," the man said. "I am a city function shaped to be acceptable to you in your present condition. Human medical authority is not available, so the city has taken it upon itself to repair you."

"Okay," Mirsky said. "That's enough for now. I want to have nothing but darkness."

"Yes, that will come naturally after you give us your answer."

"I mean, I wish to die."

"That is not an option."

"Okay, then yes." He made the decision quickly so as not to have to consider all the possibilities, all the horrors.

"You consent to prosthetic programming?"

"I consent."

The man ordered the car to stop and smiled. "You may get out," he said.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Mirsky left the Volga and closed the door. "Oh, one more thing," the man said, leaning out the window. "Did you have any plans to harm either Belozersky, Vielgorsky or Yazykov—particularly Vielgorsky?"

"No," Mirsky said. "They irritated me, and I would have rather done without all of them—except maybe Vielgorsky—but no, I didn't plan to harm them."

"Thank you," the man said and rolled up the window.

"You're welcome again," Mirsky turned away from the road and it was night. He lay down in the grass and stared up at the blackness.

Chapter Forty-Seven

"I'd like it dark, please," Lanier said. The rooms darkened. He sat upright on the illusory couch and mentally repeated what Patricia had said after the meeting. Alarms set off. Did she mean that the Axis City had known they were in the Stone since their arrival? How long had self-contained, self-powered Olmy been watching them?

As he mulled, he felt the ineffable tension in the lower part of his abdomen and realized that mentally he was as uninterested in sex as he could be, but his body was disregarding his brain.

The door voice announced, "Karen Farley is in the hallway and requests entrance."

"Why?" he asked abruptly, angry at the convenience, the coincidence. "Wait—is she alone?"

"Yes."

"Send. . . let her in." He stood and smoothed down the jumpsuit he had worn on the V/STOL, now cleaned and pressed. He had ignored the robe laid out for him on the elliptical bed in the single bedroom.

Karen had not. As the door irised open, the lights came up and she entered in a very similar robe, this one a golden beige rather than midnight blue. "Pardon my comeuppance," she said, smiling and lifting her hands as if to fend off a rebuff.

"What?"

"Is that the right phrase?"

"I don't think so," Lanier said. "What can I do for you?"

"I've been talking with Patricia," she said, "or rather, she came to me, and I thought you'd like to know a few things."

He indicated a chair opposite the couch. "She and I had a conversation before the meeting, but it was more confusing than informative."

"Heineman and Carrolson are together tonight," Farley said, sitting. "Patricia didn't tell me that—Lenore did. And before we left the Stone, I noticed Wu and Chang were sneaking away together." She smiled at him, a brisk, armored smile with a touch of puzzlement and irritation.

Lanier lifted his shoulders and clapped his hands together softly, then rubbed them. "That's normal," he said.

"Yes. But I caught you when your guard was down, didn't I? I mean—"

"I appreciate what you did."

"I don't know what to say." She looked around the apartment curiously. "I've never really had a leech for you—"

"Letch," he said, grinning.

"Oh, yes, my God. Letch. I haven't. But you looked so lost. And I was feeling lost, too. Honest, you're still the boss."

"That's not important," he said. "What did Patricia—"

"It is important," Farley said flatly. "I enjoyed you. I believe you enjoyed me. It was healthy too. I just wanted you to know I thought so and don't resent you."

Lanier said nothing for a moment, regarding her with his dark, falsely Amerindian eyes. "I wish I spoke Chinese so we could really understand each other. I could learn. . .”

"That would be useful, but not necessary right away," Farley said. She smiled. "I could teach you."

"What did Patricia say?"

"She thinks we're being used by somebody—Olmy or somebody else—to some end. Olmy has been talking to her a lot, and she's even had some conversations with the Frant. She thinks there's a lot of politics in the Axis City, and we can't possibly know what any of it means. Not yet. Also, she says the data service in her apartment actually accesses less information than the ones in the third chamber city. She thinks they may be censored for us."

"That doesn't sound good," Lanier mused. "Or rather, it might not be good—it might not mean anything. They might want to treat us gently, let us get accustomed slowly."

"I told her I thought that, and she just smiled. She's behaving strangely, Garry. She also said she has a way to get us all home. There was a real tinkle in her eye when she said that."

Lanier did not correct her. "She told me that, too. Did she elaborate?"

"Pardon? Oh, yes. She did. She said the corridor moves forward in time about one year every thousand kilometers. And she said it's the most beautiful curve she's ever conceived. Garry, they kidnapped her—she believes this—they kidnapped her because they were afraid we might interfere in the sixth chamber. Remember all the people—all those Naderites in the second chamber being forced to move out, years after the third chamber exodus?"

He nodded.

"Patricia says she thinks they were forced out against their will, because the people on the Axis City wanted the Stone empty. No interference, no sabotage. That's why she thinks we're stuck in the middle of politics. There is still division between Naderites and Geshels."

"Has it occurred to anybody that no matter what we're told, these rooms are bugged?" Lanier asked. "That perhaps we shouldn't be discussing these things here?"

"Where can we discuss them?" she asked innocently. "They could follow us anywhere they wanted and listen to us, maybe even read our minds. We're children here, very ill-educated children."

Lanier looked down at the milky-translucent table between the couch and the chair. "That makes sense. I really like the way this apartment is decorated."

"Mine's nice, too."

"And how would they—the rooms, I presume—know what we like?"

Her expression became conspiratorial. "Right," she said. "I've asked the room voice and it just says, 'The rooms are made to suit."

Lanier leaned forward on the couch. "This whole place is incredible. Unbelievable. Are we dreaming, Karen?"

She shook her head solemnly.

"All right, then. Is Patricia dreaming she's found a way out, a way to go back to Earth?"

"Oh, she doesn't want to go back to Earth the way it is now. She says she can take us 'home,' whatever she means. And she's serious. She'll explain later, she said."

"You're a physicist. Is what she says possible?"

"I'm just another child here, Garry. I don't know."

"What else did she say?"

"That's it. And. . .” She stood. "I'll go now. But I didn't just. . . Oh." She clasped her arms around herself and looked at him. "Not just to tell you what she said. To make sure you understood I wasn't taking advantage."

"I understand."

"It's just, like you say, healthy, though I've been worrying."

He hadn't called it healthy; she had, but he found the transference acceptable.

"Don't."

"Okay," Farley said.

He stood. "In fact. . .” His face flushed again. "I feel just like a teenager when I. . . when you're here and we talk like this."

"I'm sorry," she said, her face falling.

"No, that's good. Until now, I've felt like a very old man, losing all my marbles. I would enjoy it if you stayed with me tonight."

She smiled, then abruptly frowned. "I will enjoy that, and I will stay," she said. "But it worries me about Patricia." "Yes?"

"She is now the only one of us sleeping alone."

Chapter Forty-Eight

Step by step, Patricia traced the progress of the curve through five dimensions, watching it unfold like some nightmare staircase, one part shadowing, one part a necessary negative of the primary curve. Her eyes were closed so tightly they hurt, and her face was convulsed into an expression between ecstasy and grief. She had never known an intensity of thought like this, so deep an involvement in her inner calculations. It frightened her. Even when she opened her eyes to the twilight blueness of the ceiling and rolled over on her side, one hand reaching into the emptiness beyond the bed—

Even then, her finger traced a part of the curve, a projected and living snake in the air. Clenching her fist, she saw little spots of light gather along the path her finger had made. She closed her eyes again.

And immediately slept, dreaming the curve. She was still half-aware in her sleep, and she watched from a distant vantage point as her brain continued, though at a reduced level, the work she could not put a stop to.

Only a few hours later, she came instantly awake, realizing she needed to reexamine her seminal article—the one she had yet to write, which she had found in the third chamber library. With some apprehension—the data service, in the four times she had resorted to it, had not always provided what she needed—she got out of the oval bed and donned her lavender robe, tying the belt as she walked through the dimly lit living room.

"Data, City Memory," she said. An armillary sphere appeared before her, its bands glowing red and gold. Two circlets, one above the other and twice the diameter, followed, a replacement for the antiquated question mark.

"Access to article by Patricia Luisa Vasquez. . . Oh, Lord, I've forgotten the exact title and date. Do you need them?"

Complicated picts flashed until she deactivated them and requested spoken language only. "Do you wish to see a complete list of the short works of Patricia Luisa Vasquez?" the data service voice asked.

"Yes," she said, again touched by the prickling spookiness of what she was doing.

Roman alphabet listings appeared before her as if on an extensive sheet of white paper. About midway through the list appeared, Theory of n-Spatial Geodesics as Applied to Newtonian Physics with a Special Discourse on p-Simplon World Lines.

"That's it," she said. "Display."

She reread the paper carefully and drummed the fingers of her free hand on the edge of the seat. "It's brilliant, she said grimly, "and it's wrong." It might have been an influential paper, but it was obvious to her now that it was an early and primitive work. "Please display the list again."

The service obliged and she picked out a later piece and requested that it be displayed.

The old and familiar symbol of the spiked ball appeared. "Interdicted," the voice said.

She chose another, feeling her anger rise. "Interdicted."

And another, toward the end of the list, written when she was—would be—about sixty-eight. "Interdicted."

"Why are my papers interdicted?" she asked angrily.

The spiked ball was the only reply.

"Why is this service being censored?" She suddenly experienced the neck-itching realization she was no longer alone in the room. "Olmy? Lights up." The room brightened. No answer.

She stood up and looked around slowly, her whole back tensing.

Then she saw the intruder, hovering near the ceiling, a gray baseball-sized roundness with a face in the middle. For a moment, she did nothing but return the face's scrutiny. It seemed masculine, with small dark Asiatic eyes and a pug nose. Its expression was hardly menacing; if anything, it was intensely curious.

She backed up against the wall. The face did not move, but its eyes followed her closely.

"Who are you?" she asked. Symbols appeared around the room, incomprehensible to her. "I don't pict," she said. "Please, what are you doing here?"

"True, I'm not supposed to be here," the face said. It fell a couple of feet, the ball assuming the color of a rosy dawn. "But then, I'm just an icon myself. Please don't be alarmed."

"I am alarmed. You’re scaring me. Who are you?"

"I'm from City Memory. A rogue."

"I don't know you," she said. "Please go away."

"I can't possibly harm you. Irritate you, perhaps. I only need a few questions answered."

The globe dropped and fleshed out like a vampire in an old horror movie to form a masculine body, clothed in loose white shirt and forest-green pants. The figure seemed to solidify. In her room now stood a small, delicate man appearing slightly younger than middle age, with long black hair and a weary, thin face. Patricia's heart slowed and she moved a few inches out from the wall.

"I pride myself in my accomplishments," the image said. "I have access to the very best records. Forgotten records, actually. There's such an awful clutter in the lower levels of City Memory. And what I've found is the partially purged record of a court case. . . . Something serious, actually. Violation of flaw security. Bits and pieces of information pointed here. . . . Subtle connections, I admit, but intriguing."

The figure seemed familiar, as if she had met him or seen him somewhere else. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm a rogue. A rather violent one, actually, though you wouldn't know it to look at me. I go where I please, and so long as I'm careful, I maintain. I've been non-corporeal for a hundred and fifty years now, supposedly condemned to inactive Memory. Of course, there's only a copy of me inactivated. Sometimes I'm hired for various jobs. Usually I duel with other rogues. I've taken down sixty in my time. Lethal chess."

"You haven't answered my question." She was close to tears now. She couldn't think who the rogue reminded her of. "Leave me alone. I just want to think."

"Rogues are never very polite. You're attracting a lot of attention in Axis Nader. I hadn't any idea where you were, though, until you used the data service just now. A tracer found you—one of my very best tracers. Based on the patterns of a mouse."

"Please!" Patricia shouted to the apartment. "Get him out of here!"

"It's no use," the rogue said. "Where are you from?"

Patricia didn't answer. She edged toward the bedroom door.

"I've been commissioned to find out where you're from. I've been paid in advantages over a very long-term adversary. I will not leave until you tell me."

"Who hired you?" she shouted, really frightened now.

"Let's see. . . I'm speaking twentieth-century English—American, actually. That's very surprising. Only the most die-hard Ameriphiles actually learn to speak the language as well as you do. But why would anybody be interested in an Ameriphile?" The image followed her into the bedroom. "They aren't paying me for guesswork. Tell me."

Patricia ran to the main door and ordered it to open. It did not. She gulped a breath of air and turned to face the image, suddenly determined not to lose control. "What. . . what do I get in return?" she asked. "If I tell you?"

"Maybe we can trade."

"Let me sit down, then."

"Oh, I wouldn't stop you from doing that. I'm not cruel, you know."

"You're a ghost," she said decisively.

"More so than most ghosts you meet," the image elaborated.

"What's your name?"

"I don't have one now. Spoor, but no name. Yours?"

"Patricia."

"Not a common name."

Suddenly, she retrieved the memory of the rogue's face. Just as suddenly, she rejected the clue; it was ridiculous. "I'm really an American," she said.

"What percentage? Most are happy to claim three or four percent, though statistically that has to be a pose—"

"One hundred percent. I was born in the United States of America, in California. Santa Barbara."

The image wobbled again. "Not much time, Patricia Luisa Vasquez. What you say doesn't make any sense, by itself, but you seem to believe it. How did you grow up so uncluttered and primary?"

"Where I come from—and when"—she took another deep breath to calm herself—"that's almost all the choice there is." She cocked her head to one side. "I know you," she said. "You look like Edgar Allan Poe."

The rogue betrayed some surprise. "Fancy you recognizing that. Fancy that indeed. Did you know Poe?"

"Of course not," Patricia said, feeling an incongruous tingle of delight beneath her fear. "I read him. He's dead."

"He's my chosen mentor. Such a mind!" The rogue surrounded itself with rapid picts of sepulchral figures, live burials, ships in whirlpools and arctic wastes. "Patricia Luisa Vasquez recognizes Poe. Claims to be a twenty-first-century American. Fascinating.

"I have to go soon. Ask me what you need to know, and then I'll ask you one more thing."

"What are they going to do with us?"

"Us? There are others?"

"Four others. What are they going to do?"

"I really don't know. I'll try to find out. Now, my last question for this visit. Why are you so special to them?"

"Because of what I just said." To her surprise, all her fear was gone. The rogue or ghost or whatever it was seemed to be willing to cooperate, and she saw no reason to be foolishly loyal to their kidnappers.

"We can help each other, I think. Did you know your data service has a block on it? They're keeping you here and they're selectively cutting off your access. If you tell them I've been here, I may not be able to come back, and I won't be able to answer your question. Think about it. Until next time," the rogue said, and vanished. The apartment suddenly found its voice.

"Ser Vasquez, are you well? There has been interference—"

"Don't I know it," Patricia said.

"Could you describe the difficulty?"

She bit on her knuckle for a moment, then shook her head. "No," she said. "It wasn't much of a problem." The image had frightened her—but it had told her a number of interesting things, too. She doubted the incident was a test or experiment. The rogue might prove a useful source of information. . . .”Must have been a short circuit or something, in your works, you know."

The room did not respond for some seconds. "Repairs will be made, if necessary. Do you need anything?"

"No, no thank you," Patricia said. She looked at the pictor, frowning, and again bit at her knuckle.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Presiding Minister of the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, Ilyin Taur Engle, kept his quarters in one of Central City's six broad ventilation shafts, buried deep in the spreading Wald. Olmy had never wished to settle into a primary home, but he envied the P.M. his quarters nonetheless. There was such an air of isolation and peace in the Wald, and such a fantasy of elegance in the quarters themselves.

The six shafts ran straight from the outermost facets of Central City to the governing spheres at the precinct's core. Within each shaft, as many as ten thousand corporeals lived among the winding paths through the Wald. Their homes varied from thick clusters of communal glass floats anchored to the broad aerial roots, to small free-moving cells adequate for one or at most two homorphs, or no more than four of the average neomorphs.

The Wald was both decoration and a nod to Naderite philosophies; about a third of Central City's atmosphere needs were taken care of in the shafts, with Geshel-designed scrubbers doing the rest. Thousands of varieties of trees and other plants—some food-bearing—had been genetically altered and adapted to weightlessness. Fully a third of the Axis City's biomass was botanical and concentrated in the Wald.

One of Olmy's great pleasures was to tarzan through the Wald, flying from root to limb, drifting down the paths without benefit of traction fields. There were designated sport paths and quickways with many exercising homorphs and a few whizzing neomorphs and virtually no vehicles; he had timed himself on a thousand different occasions on the more difficult of these and had honed his time down to as little as fifteen minutes from outer facet to shaft bottom.

Now, however, he felt no need to race. He tarzaned at a leisurely pace, arms folded behind his back, legs cocked like a skater's, kicking from broad leaf to smooth-worn root surface, following well-traveled courses down the path. More valuable than speed was the time to think.

Plastic tubes containing thick luminescent soups of bacteria, known as light-snakes or glow-worms, wound through the Wald, each a meter thick and sometimes half a kilometer long. In glades, they would macrame across one side in dazzling bright patterns, proximity making some glow peach and red, others dull down to a rich dark gold. Homorphs often gathered in the glades to bathe in the light from the patterns; Olmy barely glanced into the few glades he passed, intent on his steady progress down the shaft.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the Presiding Minister's quarters. He left the main path by way of a narrow fork, and drifted through the flowering hoops formed by a tormented root. The quarters floated in the middle of the P.M.'s private glen.

The residence was designed like an old eighteenth-century terrestrial English manor house, with many modifications to allow for the lack of up and down. There were three roofs, and ways to enter the house from six different angles. Bay windows opened on three axes. Geometric cypress growths screened one window against a glow-worm pattern at the far end of the glen.

Monitors flew up to him as soon as he emerged from the flowering hoop tunnels and identified him positively, retreating to their other duties: hedge trimming, insect watch and keeping track of the P.M.'s pets.

The house voice welcomed him and requested he enter by the bright door, facing the glow-worm pattern. The P.M. would be with him directly.

Olmy braced himself into a dormier and watched with a mix of condescension and boredom a brief picting of the household's recent activities. When the pictor cleared, he saw an unfamiliar neomorph preceding the P.M. into the waiting room. The neomorph—vaguely fish-shaped, limbless—regarded Olmy with a crystalline fox face and picted casual greetings, but no ID. Olmy returned the greetings with a similar deletion, recognizing one of Toller's aides. The neomorph exited through the bright door, surrounded by its own midge-cloud of compact monitors.

"Getting more and more daring, aren't they?" the P.M. asked, extending his hand. Olmy shook it. "Now I ask you—would you trust somebody you can't shake hands with?"

"I've not trusted many I could shake hands with," Olmy said.

The P.M. regarded him with a mixed expression of humor and not-quite-hidden irritation. "You've come to brief me on our newest ancestral guest." He ushered Olmy into his broad duodecahedral internal office. The P.M.'s round desk gimbaled on the single rod at the center; seven of the walls were covered by rootword cases containing antique books and message blocks. Other walls held fine illusart and false windows opening onto time-delayed scenes of other rooms in the house, edited to take out whatever occupants were in them.

"The President is still upset," Ingle said, tucking his elbows in to sit behind the desk. "I'm afraid most of the President's council are finding it difficult to understand why you brought the five back with you."

"I only brought one," Olmy corrected. "The others followed on their own, unexpectedly."

"Yes, well however they got there, they're trouble. Secessionists are seeking advantages already, and concessions. They're not far from getting all their groups together—and this certainly could unite them. It could also convert the Korzenowski faction from a radical party to a popular front. The President's position could be endangered. Even so, he feels he doesn't have the time to oversee these difficulties directly, what with the Jart conferences still filling his days, so he's assigned Ser Oligand Toller—whom you've met, I believe—and myself."

"Bearers of bad news are never appreciated," Olmy said.

"Yes? Well, whether the news itself is actually good or bad depends on how we react, does it not? Frankly, I don't share all the President's misgivings—some, but not all. I feel we can turn the situation—and the news—to our advantage. Perhaps we can even achieve the consensus we need to face the Jarts effectively. Now, your message said you had more news."

"Someone has hired at least one rogue in City Memory to penetrate the guest quarters. Someone is desperate to find out what all the fuss is."

"Yes, that much I could have guessed," the P.M. said. "Well, then, perhaps it's time we released all we know. It's probably going to be common knowledge in a week or less, especially if rogues are in on it. What's your opinion, Ser Olmy?"

"I've voiced it before, Ser; I should testify before the Nexus."

The P.M. considered that for a moment. "I still have my doubts as to the wisdom of that. But you may be right. If the truth must be unveiled, let us do the unveiling, no? But delicately. Millions of neomorphs are already scared silly by the secession talk. Drop a bombshell into the middle of it—saying the Thistledown has returned to Earth? Not an easy decision. At any rate, we can't call a full Nexus because of the Jart conferences. A partial will have to do." He left the desk, betraying his nerves. "I'll need a heavy session of Talsit this evening." He crossed his arms and floated in the middle of the office, his voluminous black robes assuming billows of repose. "You will testify in person, then, as an agent of the Hexamon?"

"The Frant and I," Olmy confirmed.

"The Frant won't testify; it's against their creed to take an oath."

"It will confirm my testimony. That's allowed."

"And what then, Ser Olmy? How can we restrain our curious ones—whoever hired the rogue—or the Korzenowski faction, Pneuma be kind, after that?"

"That may not be our greatest problem. There are still two thousand humans in the Thistledown; sooner or later, we have to bring them under our control. Our first guest, Vasquez, was already very close to learning how to manipulate the sixth chamber machinery. I assume others will eventually duplicate her work, despite the interdictions in the Thistledown libraries."

"Star, Fate and Pneuma never see fit to limit our troubles, do they?" the P.M. said with a sigh that upset the billows of his robe. "Logos be praised."

"Logos," Olmy echoed doubtfully.

"We share a certain Geshel incredulity, don't we?" the P.M. said, watching Olmy's reaction carefully. "Not wise to reveal it to everyone, however, not from this lofty position, anyway. Is there immediate danger of our. . . ancestors! Such a word—is there much chance of their disturbing the sixth chamber soon?"

"Not with Vasquez in the Axis City. Not in a matter of months, or even a year."

"Very well. First things first. I'd say it would be in our best interests, if we reveal at all—and that seems unavoidable now—to make a public show of our guests. They are extraordinary—and they might give us an advantage over the President's opposition. I'll have my secretaries plan an agitprop. Their advocate—your partner, Suli Ram Kikura—has she been useful?"

"Very," Olmy said. "But her work has hardly begun."

"Excellent," the P.M. said. "But we mustn't be too confident. If the Jarts start their offensive early—or, heaven forbid, decide to open a gate into a star's heart—then our visitors will mean next to nothing." Ingle shook his head, picting a chain of symbols—a gnat being consumed in a solar prominence.

Chapter Fifty

Corporal Rodzhensky lay with his back against the black library wall. Before him were scattered ration packets and tins, some Russian, most American. He snored lightly and regularly. Beside him, Major Garabedian had squatted to eat an American dinner of ham and potatoes au gratin, imported from the fourth chamber as part of the as-yet-unratified treaty agreements.

As he ate, he kept a wary eye on the American soldiers lounging several dozen meters across the quadrangle. The forces were exactly equal; ten Russians, ten Americans, all armed with rifles but without lasers. There would be no silent assassinations.

Tensions had calmed slowly after the Americans had arrived at the behest of Corporal Rodzhensky and the Chinese man and woman. The library had been sealed ever since, with Lieutenant General Mirsky, Colonel Vielgorsky, Majors Belozersky and Yazykov and Lieutenant Colonel Pogodin held incommunicado. There had been some suspicion at first that American trickery was involved; Garabedian had decided otherwise after several hours of talks with Pritikin, Sinoviev and the American civilian leader, Hoffman.

No one knew what had happened within the library, although Hoffman had expressed an all-too-plausible theory that made no one happy. Garabedian still mulled the theory over, shifting his eyes between the implacable black wall and the American soldiers.

The Zampolits, Hoffman suggested, had tried to kill General Mirsky. Whether or not they succeeded, the library building had sealed itself off to prevent further violence and perhaps preserve evidence.

All they could do was wait.

It had been a week. During that time, Garabedian and Pletnev had managed to keep the Russian troops from doing anything unwise—factionalizing, spreading agitation or unfounded speculation. Work had proceeded on construction of their quarters in the fourth chamber. A few Russians—fifty-two, at last count—had simply left the camps and vanished into the fourth chamber woods. Five had been found so far, well fed—the woods were full of various edible plants. But three of those five had been fetal-curled and withdrawn in delayed shock.

American psychologists had offered to help; there had been similar cases among the Americans, most notably Joseph Rimskaya, who had been stricken just three days before. He had wandered into the main Russian camp in the fourth chamber, weeping uncontrollably, his clothes and back in shreds from self-flagellation. He had been returned to the Americans. But Garabedian did not think it wise to allow Russian soldiers access to American psychologists.

What he felt, above all, was sadness, a sense of loss which almost overwhelmed his sense of duty. He—like Mirsky and most of the young officers—had been part of the new Russian military experiment, begun to fix the problems highlighted by the manifold failures of the Little Death. They and their colleagues had worked with each other as a team, not as brutal antagonists in a throwback nineteenth-century system. They had achieved great things, increasing efficiency and decreasing alcoholism, desertion, violence and suicide.

They had been the new breed, and their successes had made them cultural heroes. The conquest of the Potato would have brought them untold glory; instead, through some error he could not yet comprehend, they had failed miserably, and their heritage was now ashes.

Garabedian understood all too well the pressures which drove his comrades to swim to the fourth chamber islands and lie down on the forest floor, pulling humus and mold over their soaking fatigues.

The director of the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, Hulane Ram Seija, could trace his ancestry back to the Greater East Asian Geshels who had first returned man to space, thirteen centuries before; yet he looked less human than the Frant. In this, he was typical of many neomorph citizens occupying Central City.

Ram Seija was round, one-half of his body brushed silvery metal, the other half an elegant black-and-green-swirled mineral shell from the worlds accessible through the 264 gate. His face, which could be projected to any of three different positions on the sphere, had large, inquiring eyes and a sharp-toothed grin which was definitely not designed to mask his basic aggressiveness. His two muscular arms had the twin advantages of human appearance and prosthetic adaptability; they could stretch two meters if need be.

He had no legs, using his arms and the ubiquitous traction fields to get from place to place.

He was less than a century old and this was his second shape; for his first thirty years, he had been as homorphic as any orthodox Naderite. It was in those years that Ram Seija had made his contacts and learned the basic political skills. To Olmy, he exemplified the quintessential Journey Century Twelve Radical Geshel.

Ram Seija was number four in the power hierarchy of the Hexamon, behind the President, the Presiding Minister of the Nexus and the Minister of the Joint Axis Council.

In the Nexus Sphere, located just outside the flaw passage near the core of Central City, Ram Seija had convened twenty-three corporeal representatives and five senators in a discovery session. Twenty of the Nexus members were present incarnate, which was a word that had lost much of its meaning centuries before; now it meant little more than being in primary physical form. Such form did not necessarily include much flesh. By law, no partial personalities were allowed in the chambers—however convenient that would have been for those still confined to the Jarts conference, being held on Timbl, the Frant home world.

Ram Seija guided himself to the middle of the sphere and took on the golden armillary bands of light to announce the meeting's start.

Olmy drifted at the outside, the Frant curled up beside him, only neck and head extended. Olmy had ended an exchange with Corprep Rosen Gardner some minutes before, on an apparently disputatious note; the New Orthodox Naderite leader of the Korzenowksi faction had wanted a little preliminary testimony, and Olmy had resisted. Gardner was one of the few corpreps who broke procedure often and was tolerated nonetheless; he was also one of the few Korzenowski factioners who was reasonable in a debate. In the eyes of the radical Geshels, this—and his large following of Naderites—made him a particularly dangerous opponent.

"In the name of Star, Fate, Pneuma and the Good Man, who sought equality and fair deals for all consumers, and who sought the end of overwhelming and inhuman technology, this meeting of the Infinite Hexamon Nexus convenes. There is news, gentlepeople," Ram Seija announced, "there is news."

"Our testimony is from Ser Olmy. We also have corroboration from one of our valuable allies, who helped Ser Olmy with his investigation."

Olmy and the Frant advanced to the center and received their armillary bands.

"I have spent the past year in the Thistledown, at the request of the Presiding Minister," he said. "This Frant accompanied me. Together, we investigated an unusual intrusion. Do we have permission to playback our records and to testify by picting?"

Ram Seija gave his permission.

For each of the senators and corpreps, the seven chambers of the Thistledown were displayed in considerable detail. In a few minutes, they became acquainted with the new human occupants of the Thistledown's chambers. Olmy and the Frant had managed to record some five hundred individuals on their instruments. The compounds were shown, along with a few building interiors. Olmy then demonstrated that the various languages spoken by the new occupants derived from pre-Death Earth.

The point of view of the picted testimony took a dizzying climb up the south polar cap of the first chamber and zoomed down the bore hole. The reactivated rotating docks and staging areas were briefly shown, and then the point of view emerged from the bore hole.

At a distance of some thirty thousand kilometers, the crescent Earth dominated the darkness, the sun emerging from behind its limb in the west.

The reaction in the Nexus chamber was extraordinary. Homiform corpreps gasped; all registered strong emotions in various ways.

Gardner spoke first. "Blessed Konrad," he said. "He found a way to bring us home again."

"Stricken; not testimony," Ram Seija decreed abruptly.

"It is truly Earth," Olmy said. "The Thistledown has returned to its construction orbit, automatically and without our knowledge. The creation of the Way did not remove us from all familiar spaces. It is possible that the Thistledown could have completed its intended journey. It did not. Instead, it sought out the sun and altered its course to return home.

"But we did not escape all effects of the Way's creation. The Thistledown was indeed shifted into a neighboring continuum, but also into the relative past. It entered its current orbit some three centuries before its launch."

The chamber was silent, stunned by the implications of what Olmy was saying.

The picted testimony continued. In less than four minutes, it showed the beginning of the Death and concluded with the spectacle of Earth covered with a thick gray pall of smoke, on the threshold of the Long Winter.

The stillness in the chamber was profound. Olmy quickly pushed on.

"I returned to the city with one of the new occupants, a corporeal woman named Patricia Luisa Vasquez. Subsequently, four others violated the axis flaw by riding a vehicle near the city. They have been acquitted and made guests of Axis Nader. All of them, of course, are corporeal and primitive, of primary form and unsupplemented mentality. They are our pre-Death ancestors."

The armillary bands now glowed around the first senator assigned to speak. She advanced. Olmy recognized Prescient Oyu, daughter of the still-regnal Gate Opener Ry Oyu. Senator Oyu had worked with Suli Ram Kikura, two years before, to exempt victims of sex-retrovirus from the limit of two incarnations; she was known to have Naderite sympathies, though her background was moderate Geshel. She was a homorph with elaborations designed to heighten both sexual and leadership traits.

"The Thistledown returned to Earth at the precise moment of the Death?" she asked.

"That is in testimony," Ram Seija reminded her.

"Not precisely," Olmy said. "The Thistledown entered the solar system five and a half years before the Death. I have evidence—presented in subtext—that our arrival in fact triggered the Death. It is possible that without the Thistledown's presence in orbit around the Earth and Moon, the earth in this continuum would have escaped the Death."

Gardner raised his hands in horror. "This is an abomination," he said. "Blessed Korzenowski could never have intended this."

"All credit to the Hexamon Nexus," Prescient Oyu continued, "but a question arises as I look over the précis on the agenda. Why has this news not been broadcast through the entire city? I suggest we make an unequivocal report public and convene an emergency full Nexus convention."

Her bands of light changed to amber and she receded a meter. Ram Seija extended both arms and spread his fingers wide to have Nexus attention. "The news is startling and important, but it also could have adverse social consequences. We wish to release the news in the most constructive fashion."

Corprep Enrik Smys, a moderate Geshel with past service to the Hexamon in a capacity similar to Olmy's, objected that the Jarts conference certainly held precedence. The Jarts showed every sign of preparing to advance beyond 2 ex 9. "And even our subject today, compared to that, is trivial."

"Perhaps not, Corprep Smys," said Rosen Gardner. "All these questions may yet be tangled."

"Did you find evidence of deliberate reprogramming of the Thistledown guidance system?" Ram Seija asked.

Olmy rotated to face the center. "I did not," Olmy said. "But the system erased all instructions immediately after arrival. There is no way of knowing."

Gardner formally requested the armillary bands. Ram Seija, with some hesitation, assented.

"It is time once more to ask for a search in City Memory," he said. "There is one who can tell us all we need to know—"

"The Engineer is dead!" Ram Seija objected vehemently.

"We are aware he is inactive," Gardner said with uncharacteristic control. "But Blessed Korzenowski knew of the danger to his patterns when he retired his corpus. We must authorize a search for any parts of his personality not purged by the assassins."

"Overruled," Ram Seija said.

"I request a hearing before the full Nexus," Gardner persisted.

"Disallowed."

"Procedural inquiry," Gardner said coolly. Ram Seija's face rose to the top of the mineral half of his sphere and he glowered at the corprep. Only in extremus was a procedural inquiry called for; he had played right into the corprep's hands by going beyond his jurisdiction.

"Seconded," Senator Oyu said, turning her elegant eyes to the surprised Gardner.

"Procedural inquiry," Ram Seija assented; he had no choice. But his expression—now in the middle of his sphere—made it clear Corprep Gardner's standing in the Nexus would be weakened by any means in his power.

Olmy listened to the discussion without much interest from that point on and, when his release was given, left the sphere with the Frant to return to Axis Nader. He took a rapid lift to the circle and quadrant where the terrestrials were being secluded.

Escorting the Frant into the kitchen lounge area, he credited an open meal for his companion.

"You are gracious, Ser Olmy," the Frant said, eyes narrowing as it surveyed the feast possibilities. "I assume I am to remain here for a time."

"We'll introduce you to the others a little later," Olmy said, his thoughts far away.

"I am content."

Olmy keyed open the entrance to the secluded sector. The Frant squatted at the arena of shelves which was a traditional Frant dining table, then turned to blink at Olmy.

"You did not expect so much trouble, did you?" the Frant said. Olmy smiled at the Frant from the dilated doorway. "You'd be surprised," he said and entered the sector with a wink.

Chapter Fifty-One

The zero elevator to the bore-hole staging areas was seldom used now. Only two people continued their work in the staging areas—Roberta Pickney and Silvia Link. Hoffman considered their work important, however, and made it a point to visit them personally at least once a week.

The broad spaces and comparatively low ceilings of the staging areas reminded her of a parking garage or convention center. With her two marine guards, she took a tracked cart to the communications and control center beneath the prime dock and walked alone into the quiet room.

Silvia Link was asleep in a sling. Roberta Pickney greeted Hoffman quietly and showed her the intercepted transmissions from Earth and the Moon.

"Lunar settlement seems to be doing well," she said. There were heavy bags under her eyes; she looked ten years older than when Hoffman had first met her. "There are still people on Earth, but they're only using low-power transmitters—working off batteries and windmill generators, I'd guess. I think one or two small cities are still transmitting these low-power signals—areas that may have been protected by orbiting platforms. I send out our own signals every now and then, but nobody's called back yet. It's only a matter of time."

"There're people, at least," Hoffman said.

"Yeah. At least. But nobody much cares about us, and why should they?"

"You should get into the fourth chamber for some R and R," Hoffman suggested. "You don't look too well."

"I feel pretty lousy, too. But this is all I have left. I'll make it as long as there're voices down there. You're not going shut us down, are you?"

"No, of course not," Hoffman said. "Don't be silly."

"My privilege to be paranoid," Pickney said, thrusting her lower jaw forward and pulling it back, with an audible grind of molars. "When Heineman gets back, I'll go to work with him refurbishing the shuttle. I'd like to get to the Moon. I have friends there."

"No word on the expedition," Hoffman said. "They're late, but that's not much reason to worry. . . yet. I may get some of Heineman's fellows working on the shuttle soon. Give us all something new to think about."

"What about the missing Russians?" Link asked from her sling, blinking at them sleepily.

"Still unavailable for comment," Hoffman said. She took Pickney's hand and squeezed it. "You're needed," she said. "Both of you. Don't overdo it."

Pickney nodded without much conviction. "All right. Have Janice Polk and Beryl Wallace spell us in a day or so. We'll go get some tubelight and see the sights."

"Fine," Hoffman said. "Now show me where the signals are coming from. . . .”

Chapter Fifty-Two

The rogue reappeared before Patricia as she slept and awoke her by tickling her ear. "Miss Patricia Luisa Vasquez, late of Earth—the late Earth," he said. "I'm here with some answers."

She rolled over and rubbed her eyes. The rogue's appearance had changed; he now seemed to wear baggy pants and a cardigan sweater. His hair was styled in a loose shag, and a watchless fob hung from a belt loop, terminating in a hemline pocket in the sweater. The rogue was in the height of 2005 fashion. She leaned over the bed and examined his shoes. Huaraches and Japanese tabi socks completed his wardrobe.

"They're on to me," he said. "I had to slip in a different way. I'm using the auxiliary pictor; the primary is locked. And I've reprogrammed the apartment privacy unit to edit us both out of any record while we talk. I've found there is a way to get into the city record. Very disappointing; to the Nexus, apparently nothing is sacred."

Patricia blinked and then got out of bed, reaching for her robe. "Do you do this all the time?"

"No," the rogue replied. "Takes a lot of effort to get this far. I'd much rather be playing games in City Memory, but my employers are handing out incredible advantages for the information. Luckily, I sent mine in just before the general release—now everybody knows you're here."

"We've been told that already."

"Right," the rogue said. The lights in the bedroom came up. Patricia examined herself in the lavatory mirror and decided there wasn't much that could be done in a hurry. She looked exhausted and her hair was tangled from restless sleep.

"Anyway, answers," the rogue said, "more answers than questions asked. You're going to testify before the full Nexus in a couple of days—nobody knows that yet but me and those who should. Then you're going to be included in the Last Gate ceremony. That's not its official name, but that's what it amounts to—you'll meet the Prime Gate Opener at the one point three ex nine segment and witness the opening. They may close it just after—Jarts coming down fast."

"What are Jarts?"

"Fleas, the Nexus will tell you—parasites, monstrously aggressive and not in the least cooperative. The Way was in place a thousand years before it was finally connected to the Thistledown—Way time, of course, which wasn't congruent until the linkup. The Jarts entered through a test gate and took up residency before it was opened. They matured in the Way and we had to fight them back. They know how to open gates and they control between two ex nine and, we think, four ex nine. But look, this is all in the Memory and I don't have much time. I have news about Olmy. You know about the orthodox Naderites and the Geshels?"

"Yes," Patricia said.

"Well, they have two contingency plans should the Jarts overpower us, which seems all too likely now. The Geshels want to mobilize the entire Axis City, grab the flaw and ride it at near-light-speed over the Jart territories, and at the same time blow the Thistledown off the end of the Way."

"What? Why?"

"That could seal the Way—cauterize it. And eliminate the danger of the Thistledown's being reoccupied and having the entire Way controlled by Jarts. The other alternative is to guide the Thistledown to a habitable planet and simply abandon the Way—or close it down, eliminate it. The Axis City could escape by passing through the end of the Way, blowing off the Thistledown and going into orbit around the planet. That would take time. . . or would have, until now. The Thistledown is in Earth orbit, an ideal situation for abandoning the Way. Everybody knows that. So the orthodox Naderites—especially the Korzenowski faction—"

"Who are they?" Patricia asked, all her muzziness vanishing at the rogue's mention of the familiar name.

"They're descended from the engineers who once supported the Way's designer, Konrad Korzenowski. The core is a small, conservative group—return-to-Earthers, most of them. Geshels regarded them as candidates for inactive Memory, until now. The Naderites and Korzenowski people are calling for reconsideration."

"They want to blow up the asteroid and take the Axis City into Earth–Moon orbit?"

"That's it. Now—my time's running out fast. I'm going to trigger all sorts of safeguards shortly, and I won't be able to visit you again—this is my last avenue. Olmy isn't what he seems. He's—"

What happened next, happened so fast Patricia could hardly follow it. The rogue's image wobbled violently and something fizzled in the far wall. A jagged beam of red shot from the auxiliary pictor across the room and hit her slate on the nightstand. The rogue vanished. The bedroom lights dimmed.

The furniture and walls were indistinct and gray. "Brighter, please," she said.

"Many regrets," the room voice, now harsh and dissonant, replied. "Pictors in your quarters are malfunctioning. Please be patient. Repairs are in progress."

She sat on the edge of the bed. As her eyes adjusted, she realized that all detail had gone out of the room. She sat on a basic white bed-form, surrounded by basic white furniture-forms. The walls were blank. She picked up her slate to see if it had been damaged by the flash.

On the screen, a crude line drawing of the rogue in his high-fashion togs appeared, followed by a string of numbers and then an end-of-string triangle. Beyond the triangle, in the next register, were three equations and a code equivalency. She integrated the two registers and performed a basic operation with the equations.

Words appeared on the slate, flashing: Olmy knew Korzenowski. Knows him yet. In Thistledown City.

Olmy's quarters were in Axis Nader most of the time; he never kept a residence beyond four months, but he did stay in that section of the Axis City more often than not. He never decorated his quarters, relying on a minimum of elaboration to make the rooms livable. He seemed, in fact, to avoid as many as he could of the services most Axis Citizens regarded as basic.

Yet he was not an ascetic. He simply had no need for such accoutrements; he did not criticize those who did.

He sat in the all-white living room, waiting for his trace to be completed. Olmy had patterned his tracer after the central mental programs of an old terrestrial species of dog known as a short-haired terrier, supplemented with several of his own partial personalities. It was a tough trace to elude, hardy and resourceful. It rarely failed him.

By Axis City law, rogues in City Memory were fair game. Citizens could not wipe the rogues they located, but they could corner them and call down an immediate inactivation.

Olmy was not interested in inactivation. He simply wanted to maintain a steady trace on the rogue—and to keep pressure on him, to heighten the sensation of illicit activity. The rogue was of very high quality; he had outlived dozens of duels, some extending across decades, which meant virtual millennia in City Memory. He kept no name, not even adequate spoor; he had designed his active persona to be efficient, elusive and only as egotistical as necessary to provide motivation for duels.

The tracer had caught the rogue in Patricia's quarters, and Olmy had then commanded it to back off, in such a way that the rogue would be led to believe it had escaped.

Olmy was well-acquainted with the personality of the average rogue. Most had been born during the final stages of City Memory construction—a task that had taken over five hundred years, beginning in Thistledown City before the creation of the Way.

A number of citizens, generally young, had found ways to create loopholes and to circumvent the ultimate penalties being put into effect to deter crime—recycling of the citizen's body and inactivation of the stored personality. The most popular method was making an illegal duplicate personality which would remain inactive in City Memory; if the citizen received the ultimate penalty, the illegal duplicate would be activated, guaranteeing continuity.

These "rogues" had then engaged in all manner of criminal activities, some of them resorting to acts of violence not seen in the Axis City since the expulsion of the orthodox Naderites from Alexandria. Most were caught, tried and sentenced, and the punishment carried out—releasing a virulently destructive group of personalities into City Memory. As time passed, some of the rogues were convinced by Hexamon agents that the best way they could spend their time would be to engage in duels—searching out and eliminating other rogues. That solved much of the problem. Dueling caught on, and within a decade, half of the rogues had been eliminated by their own confreres.

Many had survived, however—the smartest and most inventive, and therefore, ultimately the most dangerous.

In recent decades, one of the Nexus's most pressing problems was to make City Memory completely safe for all citizens. The Nexus had made little progress—a stubborn residue of resistance remained, creating mischief and occasionally disrupting important functions.

Hiring a rogue was always risky, Olmy knew. The patron could not expect complete loyalty—a rogue stayed loyal only so long as advantages and interest remained high.

To that end, Olmy rewarded the rogue richly with access to several private data banks—and made doubly sure that no one would ever discover who had done the hiring, especially the rogue himself.

Chapter Fifty-Three

The dark library brightened slowly, allowing his eyes to acclimate. Pavel Mirsky stood blinking on the far side of the plaza of seats and teardrop globes.

His first impulse was to look for the damage done by Vielgorsky's spray of fire. There was none. All the globes were intact. Mirsky raised his hand to the side of his head, and then to his nose and chin. No scars. In his head, a tiny, unobtrusive signal told him he was using part of his brain that did not originally belong to him.

He walked back and forth, noticing a distinctly unpleasant sensation of inexperience behind his eyes. Then he circumnavigated the banks of chairs and approached the black wall, still closed and featureless. Frowning, he called out, "Hello!" Nobody responded. "Hello! Where is everybody?"

Perhaps he had been left alone. The others may have exited the library after shooting him. But there had been the white, curling mist—and he remembered the three officers with their heads jerked back, jaws slack.

"Pogodin!" he called. "Pogodin, where are you?"

Again, no answer. He crossed the dark corner of the library to the little doorway that led to the observation booth. The door was open. He climbed the stairs and entered the booth.

Pogodin stretched on three chairs, breathing steadily, apparently sleeping. Mirsky shook his shoulder gently. "Pogodin," he said. "Time to leave now."

Pogodin's eyes opened and he regarded Mirsky with surprise. "They shot you," he said. "They took half your head away. I saw it."

"I've been dreaming," Mirsky said. "Very odd dreams. Did you see what happened to Vielgorsky—to Belozersky and Yazykov?"

"No," Pogodin said. "Just mist all over me, itching. And now this." His eyes widened and he sat up, lips quivering. "I want to leave," he said.

"Good idea. Let's find out what happened." Mirsky preceded Pogodin down the stairs to the black wall. "Open," he said.

The half-moon doorway irised open silently.

Annenkovsky stood at parade rest with his back toward Mirsky and the door, holding his rifle by the barrel with the stock on the paving.

"Excuse me, Major," Mirsky said. Annenkovsky tensed and swung around on one foot, lifting his rifle and fumbling it. "Careful," Mirsky cautioned.

"Comrade Colonel—I mean, General—"

"Where are the others?" Mirsky asked, looking at the troops in the quadrangle.

"Others?"

"The political officers."

"They haven't come out. Excuse me, General, but we must go to our camp right away—we must contact them by radio and—"

"How long have I been gone?"

"Nine days, General."

"Who's in charge?" Mirsky asked. Pogodin stepped up just behind him.

"Major Garabedian and Lieutenant Colonel Pletnev for the moment, sir."

"Then take me to them. What are the NATO troops doing here?"

"Sir. . .” Annenkovksy seemed ready to faint. "There has been a lot of tension. Nobody knew what happened in there. What did happen?"

"Good question," Mirsky said. "Maybe we'll find out later. For now, I'm fine—Pogodin is fine—and we need to go to the camp. . . in the fourth chamber?"

"Yes, sir."

"Let's go. And why are our men stationed here?"

"Waiting for you, General."

"Then they'll come back with us."

"Yes, sir."

In the train, Mirsky closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. I am dead, he thought. I can feel it—parts of me missing, replaced—fill dirt in gaping trenches. That means I'm a new person; I'm dead, come alive again. New, but stuck with the old responsibilities.

He opened his eyes and looked at Annenkovsky. The major regarded him with an almost fearful expression, which he quickly wiped away and replaced with a wan smile.

Chapter Fifty-Four

"Let's sum it up, then," Lanier said. They had gathered again in Patricia's quarters, to hear her story about the rogue and reach an agreement on their common behavior. "We're guests, but not exactly. We're protected, which means our condition bears some resemblance to being prisoners."

"Our data services are censored," Farley said.

"We can't go back to the Stone," Heineman said.

"And—if what Patricia has learned is true—we're about to become celebrities," Carrolson said.

"Did the rogue say whether anyone expected the Stone to return to Earth?" Lanier asked.

"No," Patricia said. "But I don't think so. If I'm right, they thought it would simply continue through space, too small to be noticed, and never end up anywhere in particular—because of the snap when they opened the corridor."

"So what's our position on all this?" Lanier asked. "Larry, Lenore?"

"What does it matter, what we want? What can we do?" Heineman asked, spreading his arms.

"Think, Larry," Carrolson said, putting a hand on his knee. "We're celebrities. They can't just ignore our wishes."

"Oh, no!" Heineman said. "They can just brainwash us. They're not even human anymore, some of them!"

"They're human," Patricia said. "Just because they can choose what shape they want to be, or what talents or abilities they'll have, doesn't mean they're no longer our descendants."

"Lord," Heineman said, shaking his head. "This is beyond me."

"No, it isn't," Carrolson insisted. "If I can handle it, you can." She pinched his knee.

"If we put forward a united front, we'll get more concessions," Lanier said. "If we're celebrities, or even curiosities, we could have some control over how we're treated—and not so incidentally, how our people on the Stone are treated."

"So what are we going to demand?" Carrolson asked.

"First, we insist that our data services be uncensored," Patricia suggested.

"I haven't even used mine," Heineman said.

"We make every attempt to get permission to communicate with the Stone." Lanier looked around the room. "Are we agreed to that?"

They were.

"We make sure that we travel in a group; we should never be separated," he continued. "If we are, we protest—"

"Hunger strike?" Farley said.

"Whatever works. It seems obvious to me that our hosts are not ogres, and it's not likely we'll be mistreated—dazzled a bit, perhaps, subjected to all kinds of future shock, but. . . We can handle that. We all survived our time on the Stone, so we can survive this. Right?"

"Right," Farley said, regarding Lanier with an expression of something more than respect for authority. Patricia glanced between them and put on what Lanier thought of as her sharp cheery look—a smile with an edge, her square eyes intense.

Carrolson inspected all three intently.

"Olmy's in the lounge," Patricia said. "He has Ram Kikura with him. I told him to wait until we were finished—but they want to talk to us."

"So are we united?" Lanier asked.

"Of course," Heineman said softly.

Olmy and Ram Kikura entered Patricia's quarters and sat in the middle of the group, legs crossed. Ram Kikura smiled happily; to Lanier, she looked hardly more than Patricia's age, though she had to be much older.

Lanier presented their demands. To his surprise, Olmy agreed to almost everything, excluding only communication with the Thistledown. "That I cannot grant you right now. Perhaps later. We can allow you uncensored access to data, but that will require some education," he said. "Full access to data is very complicated, a great responsibility. There is potential for abuse. For a start, would you accept the help of a pedagog? Ram Kikura could assign a ghost—a partial personality base on her own. This pedagog will perform searches for you, as well as instruct. Our younger citizens use them all the time."

"It will let us research anything?" Patricia asked.

"That is a difficult request," Ram Kikura said. "Not even a citizen has access to everything in City Memory. There is much that could be dangerous for the untrained—"

"Like what?" Heineman asked.

"Programs that alter personality, or merge different personalities. Psyche enhancement. Various high-level fictions and theoretical programs. You may wish to explore these later, but for now a pedagog will protect you from inadvertently. . . let's say, getting in over your head."

"Or under," Carrolson said.

"Are we still being kept pure?" Patricia asked.

"To a certain extent," Olmy admitted. "But the tests have been performed—"

"They have?" Heineman betrayed his shock.

"Yes. While you slept."

"I think we should have been advised what was happening," Lanier said, frowning.

"You were. Your sleep personas guided our inquiries, and we did nothing they did not agree with."

"Jesus," Carrolson said. "What in the hell are sleep personas?"

Ram Kikura raised her hands. "Perhaps now you see why your legal status is that of children, or at best adolescents. You are simply unprepared for full exposure to all the Axis City has to offer. Please don't be offended. I'm here to help whenever possible—not to hinder or frustrate you. I'm also here to protect, and I will do that over whatever objections you may have."

"Is that what advocates do?" Heineman asked. "I mean, are they lawyers, or what?"

"An advocate is both a guide and a legal representative," Ram Kikura said. "We advise on courses of action, based on researches our assigned ghosts perform in City Memory and elsewhere. We have many advantages—access to private memory collections, for example. While we cannot divulge the contents of those collections, we can act on what we learn—within limits. Some advocates—myself included—offer what in your time might have been called psychological counseling."

"Basically," Olmy said, "Ser Ram Kikura will provide another layer of protection—against abuse from higher authorities. Do you have any other questions?"

"Yes," Carrolson said, looking to Lanier. He nodded and she continued. "What's going to happen to our people on the Stone—in the Thistledown?"

"We don't know yet," Olmy said. "That decision hasn't been made."

"Will they be treated properly?" Farley asked. "Americans and others?"

"I can guarantee they won't be harmed," Olmy said.

"Do you have any idea when we can communicate with them?" Lanier asked.

Olmy tapped his index fingers together before his chest and said nothing.

"Well?"

"As I said, that question has not been decided. There is no immediate answer."

"We'd like to know as soon as you learn," Lanier said.

"You will," Olmy assured them. "You have been protected and isolated. That will change somewhat now that your presence is no longer secret. You recognize your potential popularity; there will be ceremonies and tours. You'll probably be quite worn out by the attention."

"I'm sure," Lanier said dubiously. "Now, Ser Olmy, just between the seven of us—if you're just one person, as you seem to be, and there's nobody peering over your shoulder—what stake do you have in us?"

"Mr. Lanier," Olmy said, "you know as well as I that now is not the time to be perfectly frank. Frustrating as it may be, you simply do not understand, and if I were to try to explain, I would only confuse you. I will explain, eventually, but first you must experience our city, our cultures. Since you are now free to use the data services—"

"Relatively free," Lanier said.

"Yes, free with protections. . . You may wish to spend the next twenty-four hours 'boning up,' if that's the right idiom."

"Do we face any other restrictions?"

"Yes," Olmy said. "You cannot leave these living areas. Not until your schedule has been made up and the Nexus has arranged for your. . . let's call it a debut. And before that happens, we suggest you become fully informed about the Axis City and learn at least a little of the ways we live."

He looked from face to face, his eyebrows raised to solicit any more questions, but none were asked. Lanier clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back on the couch.

Ram Kikura programmed the pictors from where she stood. "There is now a pedagog, based on my personality," she said. "You may use the data services from any of your apartments and the pedagog will help you. It would be best to begin with the city and Way description. . . agreed?"

The seven of them watched in silence as the Axis City was projected before them in hypnotic detail. They seemed to approach the city from out of the north, swooping along very close to the singularity—the flaw—and passing through several dark shields.

Their point of view then fell to very near the wall of the Way, until they seemed to hover a few hundred meters over the flowing lanes of traffic. Heineman twitched when he saw rushing tank-like cylinders conveyed along multiple tracks below them, each cylinder equipped with a circle of brilliant forward-facing searchlights on the nose and three bands of running lights along the side. In the distance, a four-kilometer-wide gate terminal accepted thousands of the cylinders from all directions. (A visual appendix briefly showed them the interior of the terminal—a maze of multilevel switching yards, cylinders being rerouted, guided into sheds to be loaded or unloaded, the contents being transferred to different containers for their trips into the gate. The gate itself was much wider than the ones they had encountered—a stepped hole at least two kilometers wide, resembling an open-pit mine but more regular and much more crowded with machinery.)

The Axis City was awesome from any angle, but from near the surface of the Way, it was overwhelming. The pictor highlighted the northernmost parts of the city and explained their functions, then their point of view moved south.

The farthest southern extension of the city was a broad Maltese cross, extended from two cubes mounted one behind the other on the flaw. The center of the cross accepted the flaw, which then extended through the cubes. Here was the machinery which powered, propelled and guided the city along the singularity. The same effect that could move the city along the flaw, and had propelled the tuberider, also provided much of the city's energy. Generators within the cubes were spun by turbines whose "blades" intersected the singularity and were subjected to the spatial transform.

(Where does the energy ultimately come from? Patricia asked herself. Did the question even have meaning?)

Beyond the two cubes was a wineglass-shaped buffer, the broad end placed flush against the first spinning cylinder, Axis Nader, where their quarters were located. Axis Nader was the oldest section of the city. After the final transfer of the orthodox Naderites from the Thistledown, they had been moved into Axis Nader, which became a kind of Naderite ghetto.

The then-expanding populations of neomorphs had moved north to Central City and the other rotating cylinders, newer and therefore more desirable in terms of real estate. Axis Nader rotated to produce a centrifugal force at its outermost levels about equal to the force in the Way. Its population was still largely orthodox Naderites, which, it went without saying, were almost entirely homorphic.

Beyond Axis Nader was Central City. The geometry of Central City's architecture was dazzling by itself. Lanier's curiosity triggered a graphic breakdown of the shape, beginning with a cube. Each face of the cube supported a squat pyramid, the "steps" rotated slightly with respect to each other, creating a half-spiral. The overall shape could fit within a sphere about ten kilometers across and was rather like a Tower of Babel, as conceived by the twentieth-century artist M. C. Escher if he had collaborated with architect Paolo Soleri; in all respects, Central City was the showpiece of Axis City. The "twisted pyramid" motif seemed to be universal; it was also the shape of the gate terminals.

Beyond Central City was Axis Euclid, which contained a mixed population of neomorphs and homorphs of both Geshel and Naderite sympathies. Axis Thoreau and Axis Euclid counter-rotated to offset the rotation of Axis Nader, which was slightly larger than either of them.

The projected point of view returned to the Maltese cross at the southern end of the city. Within the center of the cross they found themselves in a docking facility, witnessing the outfitting of a much larger, much more sophisticated version of their own destroyed tuberider. Called a flawship, the craft was about a hundred meters long, shaped like an ocarina pinched in the middle. The two segments of the spindle were almost featureless, one shiny gray-black, the other blue-violet.

Facts and figures accompanied the display. The flawship—one of a fleet of more than a hundred—could travel at five thousand kilometers a second. It could disengage from the flaw to allow other traffic to pass—though Heineman confessed he didn't see how this was done, since the flaw passed right down the center of the ship—and it could also send out smaller craft for landing parties and reconnaissance.

Near the surface of the Way, the immense disks they had seen on their approach provided transportation for cargo and passengers on less extensive trips. The picted tour ended with a gold-and-silver armillary sphere whirling before them.

"Ser Olmy," Lanier said.

"Yes?"

"Are we guests, or prisoners?"

"Neither, actually," Olmy said. "Depending on who you ask—and how honestly they answer—you are assets, or you are liabilities. Please remember that. We have three receptions planned," he said. "One before the Hexamon Nexus, the second on the Frant homeworld, Timbl, where we may be able to meet with the President, and the third at one point three ex nine, where a new gate is to be opened."

Lanier stood slowly and pinched the bridge of his nose. "All right," he said. "We've gone public and now we're being used for purposes of propaganda. It'll take us years to become sophisticated here—maybe we'll never make it, since we don't have implants. But at least you're showing us more than before. We're no longer unblemished specimens of pre-Death Homo sapiens." He paused, uncertain where he was heading.

"But—"

"You'll never be completely happy with my explanations," Olmy interrupted. "You sense however much we tell you, there's a subtext you cannot understand. And you're right. You'll notice that I have never asked you to trust me. That would be more than I could reasonably expect. But for this once, it should be obvious that we can help each other enormously. You want to communicate with your fellows—and the Nexus must come to grips with your very presence, and what that implies. In the next few days, you're going to learn more about the Way, and our mission here—more than even the data pillar could tell you. I'll escort you, and Suli Ram Kikura and I will do everything in our power to plead your case—first, because it is just, and then because I believe that what is in your best interest, also serves the Nexus."

Lanier looked at the other four, his gaze lingering on Farley and then Patricia. Farley smiled encouragement; Patricia's expression was less clear.

"You have our cooperation, within reason, for seven more days," Lanier said. "If it isn't obvious to me that our interests are being mutually served, and if we haven't been allowed to communicate with the Thistledown, the cooperation stops. I don't know how much of a threat that is," he said, taking a deep breath. "For all I know, you can create computer-generated images of us and make them do whatever you want, or even manufacture look-alike androids. But that's our position."

"Agreed," Olmy said. "Seven days."

Olmy and Ram Kikura left them. Heineman swung his head back and forth slowly, then looked at Lanier. "Well?"

"We keep on studying," Lanier said. "And we bide our time."

Hoffman stood before the small mirror in her "cardboard condo," as she had come to call the room in the women's bungalow. She decided she didn't look too bad. She had been sleeping better the past few days.

The suicide rate had declined; her people—Hoffman always thought of them that way, soldiers and civilians—seemed to be accepting their fate, and plans were under way to re-outfit the shuttle and some of the Russian heavy-lifters and see if a trek to the Moon was possible. A few were even discussing an expedition to Earth—Gerhardt and Rimskaya leading that group.

Rimskaya had recovered with remarkable speed from his "lapse," as he referred to it. He had been acutely embarrassed, and had finally requested—somewhat paradoxically—that people stop being so understanding. "Be as hard on me as I would be on you," he had demanded.

Hoffman had immediately put him in charge of logistics, an area she knew he would handle well. Always put a tough (but very smart) sonofabitch in front of the food and supply lockers. He would coordinate well with the Russians and he would take that load from her back. In his spare time—what little there was of it—he could confer with Gerhardt on their Earth plans. Hoffman had her own unique ways of being hard on people. Rimskaya seemed to flourish under the new and extensive work load.

Her only major worry, for now, was the fate of the tuberider expedition.

With the return of Mirsky, and the disappearance of the three political officers, the Russians were becoming more and more cooperative. There was the problem of a shortage of women—there had been two rapes and several near instances, but that was fewer than she had expected. Many soldiers—NATO and Russian—had donated small arms to the women. They had not had to use them yet.

Hoffman had an appointment to meet with Mirsky in the fourth chamber in an hour. It would be their second meeting since his return, and the agenda up for discussion was long but not riddled with crises.

With Beryl Wallace and two marines, she rode the zero train from the first chamber to the fourth, then transferred to a truck in the NATO compound. The Russian compound had split into three during Mirsky's absence; it now occupied a long stretch of shore and two offshore islands. Two large rafts had been slung together out of logs, and boats were being constructed slowly and painstakingly; there were no facilities for processing lumber yet, though it seemed there might be in a couple of months, and the materials available to the boatbuilders were primitive.

The spinward trip through the forest was pure pleasure for Hoffman. The Russian "mainland" compound was near the ninety train platform, about forty kilometers from the NATO compound. Some of the most rugged terrain and deepest woods surrounded the Stoner-built road. There was even a gentle rain that beaded the truck windows.

Wallace talked about the resumption of science in the sixth and seventh chambers; Hoffman listened and nodded, but found the subject somehow uninteresting. Wallace sensed this after a few minutes and allowed her to sink deeper into her reverie.

The Russian mainland compound resembled an old Western fort. Tall saplings had been stripped of branches and bark and erected to form a secondary wall of defense beyond a high rampart of dirt. Russian soldiers swung wide the gates at their approach, and swung them shut behind.

The first thing that caught Hoffman's eye was a gallows. It stood—unoccupied, she thanked God—in the center of a quadrangle cleared of all grass and foliage and demarcated by head-sized boulders.

Other log buildings were under construction; the most ambitious was going to be three stories tall, designed along the lines of an old Russian country house.

Soldiers motioned them to park the truck behind a long, narrow building made of split logs. Mirsky received them informally at a desk in the east end of the long building. There were no walls; other work areas and sleeping slings were open for all to see. Hoffman and Wallace shook his hand and he motioned for them to sit in the canvas chairs. The marines stood outside, solemnly flanked by two Russian troopers.

He offered them tea. "Part of our allotment from your commissary, I'm afraid," he said. "But it is good tea."

"You're making progress with the camp," Hoffman said.

"Let's speak English," Mirsky suggested. "I need to practice." He poured the dark amber tea into three lightweight plastic cups.

"Fine," Hoffman said.

"I can't take credit for the progress," Mirsky said. "You know I was not here when most of this work was done."

"Everybody has been curious. . . .” Hoffman said.

"Oh? About what?"

Hoffman smiled and shook her head. "Never mind," she said.

"No, I insist." Mirsky's eyes widened. "What?"

"Your disappearance."

He looked between them. "I was dead," he said. "Then I was made well again. Does that answer your question?" Before she could reply, he said, "No, I wouldn't think so. Well then, I don't know. It's as much a mystery to me as to you."

"Well, whatever," Hoffman said, relaxing her smile. "We're glad you're back. There's a lot of work to be done."

First on the agenda was a discussion of the unloading of the heavy-lifter carrying equipment and supplies. It had remained docked in the bore hole since the Death; the crew had been allowed to evacuate, but no agreement had yet been reached on disposition of the cargo. In a few minutes, Hoffman and Mirsky negotiated a satisfactory procedure. All armaments would be left in a locked chamber in the staging area, guarded by Russians and NATO personnel; other materials would be delivered to the Russian fourth chamber compound. "We need material to barter as much as we need the supplies," Mirsky said.

The status of the Russian science team was next. Hoffman maintained that team members who wished to remain with the NATO group should be allowed to do so; Mirsky thought in silence for a moment, then nodded. "I need no more people uncertain about my rule," he said, regarding them both with eyes wide and facial muscles taut. He blinked twice, rapidly.

Hoffman glanced down at her notes. "This is going even more smoothly than last time," she said.

Mirsky leaned toward her, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. "I am tired of disputes," he said. "I have the calm of a dead man, Miss Hoffman. I'm afraid I unsettle some of my comrades."

"You keep saying you were killed. That doesn't make sense, General."

"Perhaps not. But it is true. I do not remember everything. But I remember I was shot in the head. Pogodin tells me they—" He held up his hands. "You can deduce who killed me. Half my head." He waved his hand away from the right half of his skull. "Killed, and then I was brought back to life again. I am thankful I was unarmed, or I might be where Belozersky, Vielgorsky and Yazykov are even now."

"And where is that?"

"I'm not positive," Mirsky said. "In detention, perhaps. It seems Thistledown City still has the means to carry out its own law."

"I thought that might be what happened. That means Thistledown City is still capable of making decisions and judgments, and acting on them."

"We must watch our behavior there, no?" Mirsky suggested.

Hoffman nodded and returned to the agenda. One by one, within forty-five minutes, all the items were covered, negotiated and agreed to.

"It's been a pleasure," Mirsky said, standing and offering her his hand. Hoffman shook it firmly and he escorted them to the truck.

"What about the gallows?" Wallace asked as they backtracked anti-spinward to the zero compound. "What are we going to make of that?"

"No more Mr. Nice Guy," Hoffman suggested idly. "Maybe it's just a warning."

"He's spooky," Wallace said.

Hoffman agreed. "Very," she said.

Chapter Fifty-Five

From their quarters in Axis Nader, the five were taken by Suli Ram Kikura and the Frant to the flaw passage, around which the cylindrical precinct rotated. Their transportation was an empty shaft three kilometers long; their fall was similar to a ride in the apartment building elevator in Thistledown City, and therefore—mercifully—not too unexpected.

Carrolson enjoyed it the least of them; she had a distinct fear of precipices; not of heights per se, but of edges. She managed, however, with both Lanier's and Ram Kikura's encouragement. "I'm not a goddamned old woman," she said resentfully as they fell.

The flaw passage was a half-kilometer-wide pipe through the Axis City, with the singularity at its center. Hundreds of thousands of citizens lined the walls and floated in clutching, roiling yet very coordinated clusters along their path. Ram Kikura and the Frant conferred with the passage engineer, a female homorph who, like Olmy, was also self-contained and lacked nostrils.

The five were then introduced to the first of many city officials, the Minister of Axis Nader, a gray-haired, distinguished and hale-looking orthodox Naderite who flew a Japanese rising sun over his left shoulder. He seemed to have not an ounce of Oriental blood, but then, his form could have been artificial—probably was—and no one had time or much inclination to inquire. "You may call me Mayor, if you like," he said in perfect English and Chinese. These languages were now the rage of the four precincts, extending even beyond those who claimed specific ancestry.

On the flaw was a beetle-like, black maintenance vehicle not dissimilar to the one that had dismantled the tuberider. It was larger, however, equipped with a wide and well-appointed cabin, liberally decorated with rare (and genuine) red bunting. Pictors projected very convincing fireworks around the vehicle and the flaw as Ram Kikura, the mayor and the Frant stood aside, allowing them to enter first. They took seats in a half-circle behind the controls and were gently clamped in by something they could not see.

The mayor took the controls—a Y-shaped black pillar with receptacles for the fingers of two hands—and the hatch irised shut silently.

They moved down the flaw, preceded by a faint pulse of red. Fireworks still blossomed on all sides, sometimes harmlessly intersecting parts of the crowd.

"It's not enough just to see you on the pictors," Ram Kikura said. "People haven't changed much. I'd guess that maybe a third of those out there are ghosts—picted themselves, with monitors at the center of their images. See and be seen."

"Where's Alice?" Heineman grumbled.

"Alice who?" Ram Kikura asked.

"Just Alice," Heineman said. "I can't help feeling we're in Wonderland."

"Are we missing someone?" the mayor asked, turning his head and appearing concerned.

"No," the Frant said, making its tooth-grinding noise.

The journey took a half hour, covering fifteen kilometers from the vicinity of Axis Nader to the Central City. Here, the crowds were even more dense—and more disorderly. Individuals—neomorphs predominating—tried to block the slow progress of the maintenance vehicle and were gently brushed aside, by the uncurling sheets of traction fields rippling ahead of the craft.

Patricia sat patiently, saying little, occasionally stealing glance at Lanier. Lanier's face wore a constant half-puzzled frown. He lifted his lip slightly at the appearance of some of the neomorphs—elongated snake-like curls, shiny as chrome; fish, birds and radiolarian spheres like the silicate shells of plankton; varieties of human shape that went beyond the basic description of homorph. Farley absorbed it all with gape-jawed fascination.

"I'll bet I look like a rude," she said at one point, then glanced at her companions, realizing nobody understood her. "What's the word I'm looking for?" she asked Lanier.

"I haven't the faintest idea," he replied, grinning affectionately. She put her hand on his. Patricia withdrew a little into her seat.

So what is this? she asked herself. A little jealousy? Being unfaithful to Paul? Why should Garry pay any attention to you to at all? He came to find you—out a sense of duty.

She shut off that area of inquiry, seeing no need to invade a territory of great pain and uncertainty and guilt.

They left the maintenance vehicle—and the mayor of Axis Nader—behind, escorted now by the neomorph Minister of Central City and Senator Prescient Oyu. Olmy greeted them at the broad circular entrance to the Hexamon Nexus Chamber. Within the chamber, there was confusion on all sides; homorphs, neomorphs, some with American flags picted over their shoulders—and at the center, near the podium, two wide and vibrantly living images of the flags of the Republic of China and the United States.

Cheers and music, boisterous and welcoming.

Heineman blinked and Carrolson took his arm as they were pushed along a traction field by Olmy and Ram Kikura. Prescient Oyu, as beautiful and graceful as any woman Lanier had ever seen, took his arm and Patricia's, and the Minister of Central City entered beside Farley.

Lanier saw several senators—or were they corpreps?—wearing the Soviet hammer and sickle. And then they were in the center of the Nexus Chamber. The senators and corpreps became quiet and all displays faded.

Director Hulane Ram Seija came to the podium and told the Nexus that their guests would soon be going to the Frant gate, to see the workings of commerce in the Way. And after that, they would be taken by Senator Prescient Oyu to meet with her father, who even now presided over the preliminaries to a gate opening at 1.3 ex 9.

Lanier had been elected spokesperson for the group. Suli Ram Kikura had suggested—against Olmy's mild objections—that he might use this opportunity to state his case.

He moved unsteadily along a traction field to the podium and received the armillary bands of light.

He looked to all sides—and behind—before starting.

"It's not an easy thing talking to one's descendants," he said. "Though. . . I never had children, so I doubt if any of you are even remotely related to me. And of course, there's the matter of different universes. Discussing these things makes me feel like a Stone Age tribesman seeing his first airplane—or spaceship. We are completely out of our element, and while we have been welcomed here, we cannot call this place home. . . .”

He caught Patricia's eye and her brief expression between fear and expectation. Of what?

"But the one place we can call home is now in ruins. This is our tragedy—our mutual tragedy. For you, the history of the Death is remote, but for us it is immediate and very real. We still suffer from our memories, our experiences, and we will grieve for years to come, probably for the rest of our lives." What he needed to say came clear to him then, as if he had been thinking about it for days—and perhaps he had, but not consciously.

"Earth is our home—your home, your cradle, as well as my own. It is now a place of death and misery, and it is beyond the power of my friends and colleagues to remedy that. . . .

"But it is not beyond your power. If you would celebrate us, and celebrate our unlikely presence in this chamber, then would it not be appropriate to help us? Earth needs your help desperately. Perhaps we can rewrite history, and correct it.

"Let us go home together," he said, feeling his throat catch.

In the first ring of seats, Olmy listened and nodded only once. Just beyond, in the second ring, Oligand Toller, the President's advocate and representative in this session, locked the fingers of his two hands in his lap, his face impassive.

"Let us go home," Lanier repeated. "Your ancestors need you."

Chapter Fifty-Six

Pletnev blew out his breath and wiped his red face with a scrap of towel, dropping the ax into a tree stump. A few meters away, a stack of notched logs waited assembly into a cabin. Pletnev had also made a trough for mixing mud to daub into the cracks between the logs, and cleared a site in the woods near the beach.

Beside him, Garabedian and Annenkovsky stood with arms crossed, faces intently surveying the ground.

"Are you saying," Pletnev began, after blowing out again, "that he has changed so much we can no longer rely on him?"

"He isn't concentrating on his command," Annenkovsky said. "He holds us back."

"Holds you back from doing what?"

"For one thing," Annenkovsky continued, "he treats Vielgorsky's followers as if they were merely errant children, and not dangerous subversives."

"Well, perhaps that's wise. There are too few of us to purge willy-nilly."

"That is not the only problem," Annenkovksy said. "He frequently leaves the compound, takes the train and a truck to the library, and just sits there, looking confused. We think his brain is addled."

Pletnev looked to Garabedian. "What do you think, Comrade Major?"

"He is not the same man," Garabedian said. "He himself admits it. And he keeps claiming he is dead. Resurrected. It isn't. . . appropriate."

"Is he still General Pavel Mirsky?"

"Why ask that? Ask if he is a good leader," Annenkovsky said. "Any of us could do better."

"He's been negotiating with the Americans. . . has he negotiated badly?" Pletnev asked.

"No," Garabedian said. "Smoothly, if anything."

"Then I don't understand what we have to complain about. He'll return to normal. He's had a traumatic experience—and a mysterious one. We can't expect it not to change him some."

Annenkovsky frowned and shook his head. "I disagree that he's negotiated well for us. He's made many concessions he shouldn't have."

"And he's gained concessions very useful to us," Pletnev said. "I know. Because of the agreements, we may be able to move into the cities soon."

"He is no longer in his right mind!" Annenkovsky said heatedly. "He talks about not being the same person—he does not have the. . . the touch a commanding general should have!"

Pletnev looked between the two majors and then glanced up at the plasma tube, squinting. "What would Vielgorsky and Yazykov and Belozersky have done for us? Nothing. Made things worse. Killed all three of us, more than likely. I say, do not trade the devil you know for the devil you don't. Mirsky's a mild sort of devil."

"He's a lamb, not a devil," Garabedian said dubiously. "I regard him as a friend, but. . .”

Pletnev raised his eyebrow in query.

"Well, in a crisis, I do not know how he would behave."

"I think the crises are over," Pletnev said. "Now forget this talk. Go. Do not rock the boat. Let me build my cabin in peace."

Garabedian nodded, stuck his hands in his pockets and turned to walk away. Annenkovsky stayed for a moment, watching Pletnev trim a notch in a log.

"We were thinking of making you our leader," Annenkovsky said quietly. "We would not harm General Mirsky."

"I do not accept," Pletnev said without looking up.

"What if he goes completely crazy?"

"He won't," Pletnev said.

"Where are you?" Mirsky shouted for the dozenth time.

He stood in the middle of the array of library seats and data pillars, fists raised in the air. His cheeks were red and wet and his neck was ribbed with anger and frustration.

"Are you dead, like me? Did they execute you?"

Still no answer.

"You murdered me!"

He clenched his jaw and struggled to control his breathing. He knew if he tried to say anything more, the words would come out in mangled fragments. The little signal in his mind—a brief, explanatory warning, You are now using material not native to your personality, was about to drive him over the edge. So much of what he thought and did was punctuated by this message. He had explored those boundaries thoroughly—lying in his sling at night, trying to sleep, realizing he did not need to sleep.

He had the sensation that much of what he remembered about his life consisted of logical reconstructions. The entire left side of his body felt fresh and new, had a different odor, as it were. He realized it wasn't the body that was new, but the corresponding section of his head.

The first few days, Mirsky had thought all might go well. He believed he could become used to his status as a Lazarus; he made it seem like a joke, that he was back from the dead, this to gently discredit Pogodin's testimony that Vielgorsky had blown Mirsky's brains out. But the joke had not worked.

To the soldiers who had stood guard outside the library, it had seemed as tightly sealed and oppressive as a tomb. And what did you find in a tomb. . . ?

His joke had then become a grim evaluation of reality. Nobody dared flout his rule now; he was a ghost, not the freshly promoted Colonel suddenly made Lieutenant General, not Pavel Mirsky, but a stranger from the depths of the third chamber city.

Superstition. An incredible force among soldiers.

And so, after a week of rule, of struggling to be what his past demanded he be, he had returned to the library. He had been afraid to come back until now, worried that the three political officers would be there to greet him, shoot him all over again.

Superstition.

He had waited for those inside to leave—first, the Chinese man and woman, and then a single Russian, Corporal Rodhzhensky. Only when the library was empty had he entered.

And he had shouted himself hoarse.

He sat in a chair, hand fumbling at the data pillar controls, lifting the lid and dropping it. Finally, he inserted his fingertips into the five hollows. "Law," he demanded. "Law in a deserted city."

The library asked more questions, narrowing his search to a manageable subject.

"Murder," he said.

The material was rich and detailed. Murder was an offense punishable by psychological evaluation and retailoring of the personality, if such was called for.

"What if there is nobody to carry out the punishment?"

It is not punishment, the research voice said, it is redemption, a refitting for society.

"What if there's no law, no police, no judges, or courts or psychologists?"

Suspects can be detained for nineteen days. If that time passes and no judgment is made, or charges specified, suspects are released to the custody of a reintegration counseling clinic.

"And if there's no clinic?"

Suspects are released on their own recognizance.

"Where will they be released?"

Unless otherwise requested, at the scene of their incarceration.

"Where are they taken after capture?"

If they are captured in a structure of adequate size for an emergency medical facility—

He saw a portion of the library, behind a seamless door in the north wall, used as an example: two small, equipment-packed rooms.

—then they are held under sedation until authorities retrieve them or nineteen days have passed. Medical workers serve as police units in emergency.

He had two more days.

Mirsky returned to the fourth chamber and made a pretense of being the commander for a few hours. He met with Hoffman and Rimskaya to continue discussions about opening the second and third chamber city spaces to "settlers."

He then sneaked away, picked up an AKV and returned to the third chamber. Five people were in the library, Rodhzhensky again and four NATO people, one of them a United States Marine. Mirsky patiently waited for them to go, and entered the library with rifle in hand.

He had given the political officers one chance. If they were released, they would only come for him again. He would stay in the library for the next two days, waiting patiently. . . .

The library remained deserted for several hours. In that time, he realized that his plan was useless. The library would not stay deserted for long. He had to carry out his executions—murders—in secret, or they would be worse than useless. Unless he destroyed the three political officers even more thoroughly than they had destroyed him, they would be resurrected, and he would be incarcerated for nineteen days, and it would all begin again—a cycle of insanity and violence beyond the dreams even of Gogol.

He walked to the wall behind which the three political officers waited, unconscious, and lowered the rifle to the floor at the northern edge of the array of seats, blinking rapidly.

"I'm not the same person you killed," he said. "Why should I take revenge?"

Even if he felt that he was the same person, this could be an excuse. He could do what he realized he had wanted to do for years. Perhaps the clarity had been brought on by the destruction of some irrational section of his thinking, releasing another impulse, truer and cleaner.

Mirsky had always wanted the stars, but not at the price of his soul. And working within a Soviet system—even one such as he would have tried to establish—would always mean working against people like Belozersky, Yazykov and Vielgorsky. Their faces kept reappearing throughout Russian history: the vicious lackeys and the capable but cruel and slightly askew leader.

He would break from the cycle. He had the chance now. His homeland was gone. His duty was over; he had already died for his men once. Perhaps if Major General Sosnitsky had survived. . . But then, if the Major General were still alive, Mirsky wouldn't be in this position. Sosnitsky would be.

He left the library and rode the train to the fourth chamber fort. There, he gathered supplies into a truck—nobody questioning his intentions, not even Pletnev, who regarded him from some meters away with a look of mild puzzlement.

"They'll be glad to be rid of me," Mirsky thought. "They can get on with their intrigues and cruelties. The political triumvirate will return to take their rightful places. I've been an impediment all along. . . .”

His last duty was to write a message for Garabedian.

Viktor:

The three political officers will return. They will be in the third chamber library sometime within the next forty hours. Accept them as your leaders if you wish; I will no longer impede them.

Pavel

He left the message in an envelope in Garabedian's tent.

Mirsky drove the truck into the woods, heading for the as-yet-unexplored 180 point. There he could be alone, perhaps build a raft and pole across a shallow lake to a tree-covered island, or just explore the thick woods visible fifty kilometers directly overhead.

And he would decide what to do next.

He did not think he would return.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

The flawship's interior, crowded with privileged citizens and dignitaries, was even more free-form than Olmy's craft. The surfaces varied from oyster pearl to abalone gray, and there seemed to be no edge or corner; only one spacious, long cabin, wrapped around the three-meter-wide flaw passage and propulsion machinery. People of a bewildering variety of body styles tracted from point to point in the cabin, exchanging picts or conversing in English or Chinese. Some sipped drinks from free-floating charged globules of fluid, which somehow managed to avoid passersby with both grace and anticipatory intelligence.

Lanier had barely gotten the hang of maneuvering with the traction fields. Farley seemed more adept—a natural gymnast, which caused him some chagrin. He applied himself more diligently to learning the skill. "This is lovely," she confessed, spinning slowly next to him, then reaching out and braking against the gently glowing violet sheet of a field.

Heineman and Carrolson helped each other along between the homorphs and neomorphs, smiling stiffly and nodding, hoping that—as Olmy had told them—they would find it almost impossible to do something socially unacceptable. Anything they did, any mistake they made, would be considered charming. They were, after all, "quaint."

Patricia tried to keep to herself, clutching her bag containing slate, processor and multi-meter. She was not in the least successful at being inconspicuous.

Suli Ram Kikura tracted toward Patricia and intercepted the rapid pictings of a man whose skin had the sheen of black hematite. The man apologized in a few simple picts for his assumption that Patricia knew the highest degrees of graphicspeak. Then, in moderately accomplished English—no doubt picked up in a quick gloss a few minutes before boarding—he launched into a complicated discussion of early terrestrial economics. Kikura had wandered off to smooth over another complication—Lanier was being determinedly, if slowly, pushed into a broad dimple by two lean and striking women. The women were dressed in full-length leotards with long, alternately stiff and supple fantails of fabric stretched between their legs and under their arms. They resembled fancy goldfish; there was little he or Farley could do to discourage them.

Patricia listened to the man's discourse for several minutes before saying, "I'm pretty ignorant about that. My specialty is physics."

The man stared at her and she could almost hear him switching over to a recently programmed portion of his implant. "Yes, that's fascinating. So much of physics was in ferment in your time—"

Olmy moved in quickly and picted something Patricia did not understand. The man moved away resentfully, a thin circle of red around his face.

"Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea," Olmy said, escorting her to where the Frant was engaged in conversation with two neomorphs, one a radiolarian, the other recognizable as the Director of the Nexus, Hulane Ram Seija.

"I suppose we have to get used to it," Patricia said. Why get used to it? she asked herself. She didn't plan on staying forever.

"Ser Ram Seija," the Frant said, turning toward her, "here is our first guest." The Frant's wide-extended eyes seemed to naturally convey humor and good spirits. Though she found the word guest euphemistic, at best, she did not resent the Frant's using it.

"I've been looking forward to a chance to talk with you, someplace out of chambers," Ram Seija said. "Though this hardly seems the best time. . .”

Patricia focused on his face, projected at mid-level on the sphere that was his body. She had a distinct impression she was on a ride in Disneyland, seeing something extraordinary with a perfectly mundane explanation. She didn't answer for some time, and then snapped herself out of her reverie, saying, "Yes, certainly."

"You'll enjoy Timbl, our world," the Frant said. "We've been long-time clients of the Hexamon. It's a very tame gate, long established."

"We'll go there first," Ram Seija said. "A journey of four hours to the Frant gate at four ex six, and then a leisurely two-day rest stop. We're hoping the President can break away from his conference to meet us."

Four ex six—four million kilometers down the corridor—merely a hop, skip and jump, she thought. And for every thousand kilometers, an advance of one year in time; for every fraction of a millimeter, entry into an alternate universe. . .

How much closer to home?

"I look forward to meeting it—him, and to visiting Timbl," she said, acquiescing to the spirit of the occasion.

"We're requested at the bow," Lanier said, brushing by with Farley. Heineman and Carrolson were already on their way. The crowds parted before them; she had never seen so many smiling faces, or felt so much interest in her person. She hated it. She wanted to run and hide.

Feeling through her jumpsuit for the letter from Paul, finding it and pressing it, she followed the Frant and Olmy toward the bow of the flawship.

Senator Oyu was there, with three Naderite homorphs from Axis Thoreau, all historians. They smiled and made room for the five. The flawship captain, a neomorph with a masculine human trunk and a serpentine body from the waist down, fully three meters in length, joined them last.

"The honor for starting our short journey goes to the first guest to arrive at the Axis City," the captain said. Patricia took his hand and tracted into position at the bow, near the flaw passage. "Miss Vasquez, would you like to do the honors? Simply ask the flawship to begin."

"Let's go," Patricia said softly.

A sharp-edged circle about five meters in diameter cleared to one side of the flaw passage, offering them a view of the Way. They seemed to float high above the lanes of traffic and the gate terminals. The ineffably glistening line of the singularity glowed hot pink just beyond the bow; for the moment, there was no sensation of motion.

Patricia turned to look back at Olmy, Lanier and Farley. Lanier smiled at her; she smiled back. Despite everything, this was kind of exciting. She felt like an indulged and pampered child, visiting a party of very peculiar adults.

We're the larvae, they're the butterflies, she thought.

Within a half hour, the flawship was moving so rapidly—just over 104 kilometers per second—that the walls of the Way became a slick blur of black and gold. They had already traveled some 94,000 kilometers and were still accelerating. Ahead, the flaw pulsed deep red. Patricia felt Farley's hand on her shoulder.

"It's amazing how much this is like a party on Earth," Farley said. "Not in Hopeh, but in Los Angeles or Tokyo. I went through Tokyo to get to Los Angeles, and then on to Florida. . . . There were quite a few receptions. The embassy party . . .” She shook her head and grinned. "Where the hell—what the hell are we, Patricia? I am very confused."

"They're people, just like us," Patricia said.

"I just don't—can't always believe what's happening. Inside, I go back to when I was a little girl in Hopeh, listening to my father teach. I escape."

Bringing Ramon Tiempos de Los Angeles to read. . .

"All parties get boring after a while. I'd rather be working," Patricia said, "but that wouldn't be sociable. Olmy wants us to be sociable."

Suli Ram Kikura approached them, looking concerned.

"Has anybody offended you?" she asked. "Or made improper offers?"

"No," Farley said. "Patricia and I are just watching."

"Of course. . . you're getting tired. Even Olmy forgets these necessities—sleep and rest."

"I'm not tired," Patricia said. "I'm very alert, in fact."

"I, as well," Farley agreed. "Perhaps 'dazed' is a better word."

"You may seclude yourselves any time you wish," Ram Kikura said.

"We'll just stay in the bow and watch," Patricia said. She floated with legs crossed in a lotus, and Farley did likewise.

"We're fine," Farley said to the advocate. "We'll rejoin everybody shortly."

Ram Kikura tracted aft to a group of neomorphs challenging each other with complex puzzle-picts.

"It's not a bad place to be," Farley offered after a few minutes of silence. "These people aren't cruel."

"Oh, no," Patricia said, shaking her head. "Olmy is helpful, and I like Kikura."

"Before we left, she was talking to Garry and me about our rights in selling historical information. Or exchanging for advantage, she called it. Apparently we can access all sorts of valuable private data banks for what we have in our memories."

"So I've heard," Patricia said.

After an hour, Patricia, Heineman and Carrolson secluded themselves at the rear of the cabin. The Frant fended off the curious as they napped. Lanier and Farley were too wired to relax; they remained at the bow, watching the corridor race by. At the midpoint of their journey, after accelerating at just under six g's, the flawship was traveling some 416 kilometers per second; it then began to decelerate.

In another two hours, the flawship had slowed to what seemed a crawl, only a few dozen kilometers an hour. Below, many of the broad silver-gray disks flew majestically above the lanes. Four large twisted-pyramid structures were discernible in the distance: the terminals covering the four gates to Timbl.

Two homorphs joined them—slightly more radical models of Olmy's ilk, self-contained and largely artificial. They were dressed in blue-and-white body-suits that ballooned dramatically around the calves and forearms; one was female, though her hair was cut much like Olmy's, and the other was indeterminate. They smiled at Patricia and Farley and exchanged simple picts. Patricia touched her torque and replied; Farley flubbed her answer and made them laugh good-naturedly. The indeterminate one stepped forward, a Chinese flag suddenly picted above the left shoulder.

"We have not met," it began. "I am Sama Ula Rixor, special assistant to the President. My ancestors were Chinese. We have been discussing morphology of those times. Miss Farley, you are rare, are you not? You are Chinese, yet you have Caucasian features. Is it that you have had. . . what they called cosmetic surgery, available even then?"

"No. . .” Farley said with some embarrassment. "I was born in China," she said, "But my parents were Caucasian—"

Patricia tracted away from the stern, toward Lanier, Carrolson and Heineman. Ram Kikura glided up to them and indicated they would be leaving the flawship soon; a VIP disk shuttle was already leaving the gate terminal to take them aboard.

Heineman was questioning Olmy about the identity of the Frant that had accompanied them, suspicious that it might have changed places with one of the nine other Frants riding with them. "It looks different. Are you sure it's the same Frant?"

"They all look alike when they're mature," Olmy said. "Why does it matter?"

"I just want to know where I stand with somebody," Heineman responded, reddening.

"It's really not important," Olmy said. "Once they've homogenized and passed current memory to each other, one can take up where the other leaves off."

Heineman wasn't convinced, but he decided it wasn't worth pursuing.

The VIP transportation disk was as wide as the flawship was long. It ascended to within thirty meters of the axis, surface crawling with glowing sheets of charge picked up in the plasma field. The glow slipped away from the disk's upper surface like phosphorescent sea foam, and a circular opening appeared in the center.

The flawship's hatches opened then, and the guests leaped out through the connecting fields in orderly pairs and triplets, hanging on to each other, tracing to the opening in the disk. Olmy took hold of Farley and Lanier and Lanier held Patricia; Ram Kikura took Carrolson's and Heineman's hands. Together, they flew with the rest of the group.

The disk was little more than an enlarged version of the cupolas that had covered the gates just beyond the seventh chamber; except for a webwork of glowing lines, it had no visible lower half, and to Heineman's consternation, no platform or support to rest on. The party simply floated in the space immediately beneath, suspended in an invisible and all-enveloping traction field which was in turn shot through with smaller visible fields. All that separated them from the vacuum—all that lay between them and the walls of the Way, twenty-five kilometers below—was a barrier of subtle energies.

Lanier saw several homorph and many more neomorph pilots and workers at the edges of the disk, segregated from the entourage. He watched a spindle-shaped neomorph weaving its way through purple traction sheets, followed by boxes from another section of the flawship. On the opposite side, the eight Frants also waited to disembark. Their own Frant had returned to its fellows and had already homogenized with them, rendering Heineman's question academic.

Lanier reached out for a tenuous purple traction line and twisted around to look at Heineman.

"How're you feeling? He asked.

"Lousy," Heineman said.

"He's a sissy," Carrolson said, a little pale herself.

"You should love this," Lanier chided him. "You've always been in love with machinery."

"Yeah, machines!" Heineman growled. "Show me any machines! Everything works without moving parts. It's unnatural."

The disk began its descent as they spoke. The clusters of passengers excitedly exchanged picts; Patricia floated with arms and legs spread, one hand grasping the same traction line as Lanier.

She stared down at the terminal, watching the disks enter and exit ports near the base from four directions. Many more disks waited in stacks like so many pancakes, or fanned out in spirals within a holding column.

The disk descended slowly, giving them plenty of time to inspect the wall traffic around the terminal. Most of the lanes were filled with the cylindrical container-vehicles of many diverse shapes—spheres, eggs, pyramids and some of a blobby appearance, composed of many complex curves. Lanier tried to make sense out of it all, using what the data pillar had taught them, but couldn't—there was apparent order, but no easily discerned purpose. Patricia tracted in his direction.

"Do you understand all that we're seeing?" he asked her.

She shook her head. "Not all."

Ram Kikura broke from a cluster of brightly dressed homorphs and came their way. "We'll pass through the gate in just a few minutes," she said. "You must know, if Olmy and the Nexus allow it, that I can make you very wealthy people."

"Wealth still means that much?" Carrolson asked dubiously.

"Information does," Ram Kikura replied. "And I've already picted with four or five powerful information distributors."

"Send us on tour like circus freaks," Heineman grumbled.

"Oh, give me some credit, Larry," Ram Kikura said, touching his shoulder. "You won't be abused. I wouldn't stand for it, and even if I turned out to be—what did you call them?—a scheister, Olmy would protect you. You know that."

"Do we?" Heineman undertoned as she departed.

"Don't be a grouch," Carrolson scolded.

"I'm being on my guard," Heineman said testily. "When in Rome, watch out for public restrooms."

Lanier laughed, then shook his head. "Hell, I don't even know what he means," he confided to Patricia. "But I admire his caution."

The disk was now level with a broad, low port in the eastern side of the terminal. The surface of the building was coated by a material resembling opalescent milk glass, with bands of brassy orange metal spaced at seemingly random intervals on the horizontal planes.

"It's beautiful," Farley said. Patricia agreed and then felt her eyes grow warm and moist; she couldn't be sure why. Her throat clutched and she wiped her cheeks as drops broke free.

"What's wrong?" Lanier said, edging closer to her.

"It is beautiful," she said, stifling a sob. Involuntarily, Lanier felt his own eyes moistening.

"We can't forget them, can we?" he asked. "Wherever we go, whatever we see—they're with us. All four billion of them."

She nodded rapidly. Olmy came up behind them and held an archaic and unexpected handkerchief over her shoulder. She took it, surprised, and thanked him.

"If you keep this up," he warned in a whisper, "you might be surrounded in a few minutes. We are not used to seeing people cry."

"Jesus," Carrolson said.

"Don't judge us on that basis," Olmy said. "Our people feel as strongly, but we differ in how we express ourselves."

"I'm fine," Patricia said, dabbing ineffectually at her eyes. "You carried this just in case we. . . ?"

Olmy smiled. "For emergencies."

Lanier took the handkerchief and finished wiping her face for her, then waved the cloth through the air to catch a few stray drops. "Thank you," he said, returning it to Olmy.

"Not at all."

They entered the terminal. Within the hollow structure, beams of light outlined paths for vehicles to take. In the center, still perhaps a kilometer below them, was the gate itself—a vast, smooth-lipped hole leading into a featureless blueness.

"This is our second biggest gate, five kilometers in diameter," Olmy said. "The largest is seven kilometers wide and leads to the Talsit world at one point three ex seven."

"We're going down—through this one?" Heineman asked. The disk was already resuming its descent.

"Yes. There's no danger."

"Except to my mental health," Heineman said. "Garry, I wish I'd been a house painter."

They were directly over the gate now, but no detail was visible beyond the blueness. Five smaller disks moved in a squadron below, clearing a path for them. At the rim of the gate, hundreds of cylinders and other vehicles cascaded from the lanes in majestic, controlled fall.

Light guidelines rearranged to surround their disk in a column. When they had descended to a point where they were approximately level with the edge of the gate, Lanier suddenly made out details in the bottom, directly beneath. The Frant world was actually visible in the blueness, as if distorted in an old painting-on-a-cylinder that could only be seen when placed on a circular mirror. He could make out oceans distant mountains black against an ultramarine sky, the elongated brilliant orb of a sun.

"Jesus," Carrolson said again. "Look at it."

"I wish I wasn't," Heineman said. "Do you think Olmy has any Dramamine?"

The floating clusters of homorph and neomorphs picted bright circles and bursts of color in appreciation. The disk vibrated, and the landscape slid smoothly into proper perspective. The guiding column of light beams vanished and they completed their gate passage, suddenly sweeping low over a dazzling white surface.

Lanier, Carrolson and Patricia tracted to a lower point of the disk, near the boundary of the webwork lines of force, so that they could see the horizon of the Frant world. To each side, lines of cylinders and other vehicles were spaced between hovering disks disgorging cargo. Lanier turned full circle, surveying the mountains and sea beyond the white-paved gate reception area. He had never seen a sky so intensely blue.

Like a blowtorch describing an arc in the sky, a meteor plummeted toward the distant sea's surface. Before it struck, a web of pulsed orange rays lanced out from the horizon and shattered the meteor. More beams sought out and destroyed the crazily weaving fragments. Only dust remained to hit the ocean or land.

"That's the story of their life, in a nutshell," Ram Kikura said, pointing to where the meteor had met its end. "That's why the Frants are Frants." She took Lanier's hand and then reached for Patricia. Olmy gathered the other three around them. "Come. We'll disembark soon. It's a bit heavier here; you'll need belts at first."

The disk came to its assigned landing area. The transparent fields beneath them rearranged as they approached the white pavement, and the webwork of bright lines reformed into a vortex.

"The President's advocate and the Director of the Nexus will go down first," Ram Kikura said. "We follow, and then the Frants, and then the rest."

Oligand Toller, Hulane Ram Seija and their aides—two fish-shaped neomorphs and three homorphs—drifted toward the center of the vortex and were smoothly deposited on the pavement beneath the disk. Olmy urged his group down, and they tracted along the same path, feet touching ground a few meters from the President's party.

After months in Thistledown and the Way, Timbl's pull was something of a shock, like suddenly being saddled with heavy bricks. Patricia's knees sagged and her leg muscles protested. Heineman groaned and Carrolson's face looked strained.

Bus-sized, square, low-slung vehicles rolled up on large white wheels. As each person entered, Frants wrapped lift belts around them to lessen the effect of the heavier gravitation. Neomorphs, practically helpless without traction fields, were given special full-float belts that could be adjusted to fit their wide range of shapes.

"You should enjoy this," Ram Kikura told them as the bus rolled off the white pavement onto a broad, brick-colored road. "We're going to the beach."

The Frant world, she explained, served as a resort for humans and several other oxygen-breathing beings in the Way. Because the level of ultraviolet from the bright yellow-dwarf star was higher than humans were used to, an atmospheric shield had been erected over several thousand square kilometers. The resort lay in the shield's shadow.

"The ocean has few large carnivorous life forms—none that would want to eat humans, anyway—and the environment is clean. It's ideal. The vacation spot of choice for all who can afford to go—which is virtually any corporeal citizen."

The resort's long, low main building was in an ideal location, fronting a broad white quartz-sand beach on one side of a half-moon harbor. Each room had a patio and transparent doors with a choice of undisguised real scenery or various illusart displays. The furniture, in keeping with the Old Terrestrial motif of the resort, was real and unchangeable.

They ate lunch, their first meal on the Frant world, in a restaurant decorated in late-twentieth-century style, the food served by homorphs. Mechanical workers were not in evidence. After lunch, they walked to the resort buildings and Ram Kikura inspected their rooms carefully before letting them enter. They still wore their belts, though Lanier felt he was up to doing without. He would only remove his when Heineman did, however, and Heineman seemed content to leave it on.

Patricia looked around her room, then joined the others on Lanier's patio. Ram Kikura told them they could rest and swim for a few hours, and that she and Olmy would be nearby if they were needed. "They're taking a room for themselves upstairs," Carrolson said in a confidential tone after she had left.

"I think they're lovers."

Patricia opened the patio's metal gate. "I'm going to take a walk," she said. She glanced at Lanier. "Unless you think we should stick together all the time."

"No, We're probably safe enough here. Go ahead."

Lanier watched her walk down the beach, stiff-legging through the sand past homorphs and even a few belted neomorphs. Nobody paid her much attention. He shook his head, smiling. "Could be Acapulco," he said, "with a few odd balloons drifting around."

Farley put her arm around him. "I've never been to Acapulco, but I don't think it had a sky that color."

"Lovebirds," Carrolson sniffed, glanced reproachfully at Heineman. "You never treat me that way."

"I'm an engineer," Heineman said. "I don't pamper, I just make things run right."

"You do indeed," Carrolson said.

"My God, listen to us, we're cheerful," Lanier said.

"Patricia isn't," Carrolson said. "I've seen her putting on her stern look when she sees you two. I think she's jealous, Garry."

"Christ." Lanier sat down in a patio chair and stared across the dazzling beach and intense green-blue sea to the knife-sharp horizon. "She's been an enigma since I first met her."

"Not to me," Farley said. All faces turned to her. "I understand her at least a little," she continued. "I was like her—less brilliant, but inner-directed. Stubborn. My life was miserable until I was twenty-five or twenty-six, and I decided to be more normal—exterior normal, anyway."

"She'll be twenty-four tomorrow," Carrolson said.

"That's her birthday?" Farley asked.

Carrolson nodded. "I've told Olmy and explained about birthday parties. He thinks it's a good idea. Apparently they don't have birthdays here—so few people are actually born, biologically speaking. There are naming days, maturity celebrations—mostly in Axis Nader. I gather that age doesn't mean as much to them as it does to us."

"So what kind of party will it be?"

"I suggested we keep it small—ourselves, Olmy, Ram Kikura. He agreed."

"Lenore, you're a marvel," Lanier said, unconsciously adopting Hoffman's tone of voice. Carrolson curtsied and dimpled her cheeks with her twisting index fingers.

"We're more than cheerful," Heineman said, staring at her. "We're absolutely nuts."

Patricia had gone about half a kilometer down the beach when she saw Oligand Toller standing on the sand ahead of her. He wore shorts, revealing blond-haired, well-shaped legs slightly bowed, and a loud Hawaiian-print shirt. "Do you like it?" he asked, modeling for her.

She gawped, not knowing what to say.

"Well, I tried," he said, seeming chagrined. "I'd like to talk with you, if you don't mind."

"I'm not sure—" she said.

"It might be important. For all of you."

She stood her ground, head bowed slightly, staring up at him, but said nothing.

"We can keep on walking," Toller said. "I'd like to explain some things before you meet with the President—if he can make time for us."

"Let's talk, then," she said, walking past him. He took two running strides to catch up with her.

"We're not your enemies, Patricia," Toller admonished. "Whatever Olmy may have told you—"

"Olmy's said nothing against anybody," Patricia said. "This is just my way," she said. "We're—I'm not very happy these days, for obvious reasons."

"Most understandable," the advocate said, keeping pace with her. None of the other bathers or floating neomorphs seemed to find it unusual for the President's advocate and a woman from centuries in their past to be walking together. They were casually ignored. "I find the resort here wonderful—I come often. Reminds me of what it is to be human. . . do you understand?"

"To see things that are real," Patricia said.

"Yes. And to get away from the problems for a while. Well, this is obviously a working vacation, and brief at that—we can't stay more than two local days. But we thought it worthwhile to show you how our system works. We are trying to enlist your support—Patricia? May I call you that?"

She nodded.

"Because of the way things have worked out, you people can be very influential. We won't force you into our ways or opinions—that's not how our government works. Modeled on your own, after all."

They stopped at a natural basalt breakwater pointing out to sea. Patricia turned and saw a small, bright meteor pass across a few degrees of the horizon. No beams reached out to destroy it—it was small enough to disintegrate harmlessly on its own.

"We helped the Frants install their Sky Lance," Toller said. "When we opened the gate, they were still in the early atomic age. We arranged for some exchanges of information, set up a client–patron relationship and gave them what they needed to protect their world against the millennial comet sweeps."

"What did you get in return?"

"Oh, they received much more than Sky Lance for what they gave. We opened the Way to them. They're full partners in three gates now, commerce with three worlds and the normal-space trading systems around them. In return, they leased raw material and information rights to us. But the most valuable commodity they contribute is themselves. You met Olmy's partner. We find them ideal to work with—resourceful, reliable, unfailingly pleasant. And as far as anyone can tell, they genuinely enjoy working with us."

"Makes them sound like good pets," Patricia said.

"Yes, there is that aspect," Toller admitted. "But they're at least as intelligent as we are—unsupplemented, of course—and nobody treats them as if they were second-class citizens, or pets. You may have to drop some of your past prejudices to see our situation clearly, Patricia."

"My prejudices are dropped," she said. "I'm just being. . .” She raised her hands and shook her head. Not once since their meeting had she looked directly at Toller's face.

"Before we came, every thousand years, Timbl would pass through a sweep of old comets. They'd regularly lose more than half their population. All this ocean is cometary water—gathered across billions of years. Apparently, there was a long lull about a million years ago, and in that time the Frants evolved to their current form and built up basic cultures. Then the sweeps began again. Gradually, the individual Frants became more and more alike, passing information and personality traits on through chemical messengers, then through cultural means. They became a holographic society, the better to absorb the shock of the sweeps. But they had never realized their potential, and weren't about to, until our gate was opened. Now they have some of our own technologies—using high-speed pictors to update each other, or even exchanging partial personalities. All in all, I'm not sure who was the more lucky—the Frants, or ourselves. We might have lost to the Jarts centuries ago if the Frants hadn't helped us."

Patricia listened intently, filling in what she hadn't had time to research in the data service. "Why can't you establish some sort of client–patron relationship with the Jarts?" she asked.

"Ah! The Jarts are quite another story. You know, of course, that we found them occupying the Way when we first connected it to the seventh chamber."

"So I've heard," she said, remembering what the rogue had told her.

"The Engineer had the misfortune of opening an experimental gate on the Jart home world. Time in the Way was not yet matched with our own time. They were able to spend about three centuries in the incomplete Way, making it their home, even learning to open crude gates. When the Way was connected and opened, there they were—much as they are today. Strong, intelligent, aggressive, absolutely convinced they're destined to populate all universes. We fought a violent war with them and pushed them back in the first decades. Then we opened selected gates and filled the first segment of the Way—down to one ex five—with soil and air. All the time we were building the Axis City, we fought skirmishes with them, pushing them back farther and farther, closing their gates. Finally, they retreated to two ex nine, and we established a barrier at that point. We tried reasoning, making exchanges. They wouldn't have it. We knew we couldn't rid the Way of them—we weren't strong enough."

Patricia sat on the lowest step of a stairway leading to the top of the breakwater. "And how can we help you?"

"That's a complicated question, actually," Toller said. "You can best help us by supporting us. Or—by not opposing us."

"You can all go home now," Patricia said. "Such as it is."

Toller paused for a moment, puzzled by the abruptness of her leap of ideas. "Exactly." He sat beside her, and she edged a few centimeters away. "Such as it is. Personally, despite Ser Lanier's most heartfelt plea, I see little reason to return to Earth now."

"You could help the survivors."

"Patricia, they—you—become us. I see nothing iniquitous with letting a world heal itself. The fact that we've made a causal loop—that we can return to the worst point in our world-line—is not what I would consider an opportunity. At the moment, it's a handicap. Has Olmy explained how we hope to push the Jarts from the Way? For good?"

She shook her head.

"It's an ambitious plan. You've heard rumors about secession—having the Axis City divide in two?"

She decided to play dumb and shook her head again.

"Our flaw research group discovered, years ago, that the Axis City could be accelerated to near c—to near light-speed. There would be no damage to the city itself, and the citizens would experience only minor discomfort—"

"I think we should all hear about this," Patricia decided suddenly, standing up. "I mean, all of my group. Not just me."

"They can learn as much as they want. You can guide them when they get back to the Axis City—it's all available in City Memory. Or Olmy can explain it to you."

"Why hasn't he told us already?"

"Patricia, our world is extremely complex, as you know perhaps better than I. I doubt Olmy has had the opportunity to educate you on a thousandth of the more important things there are to know about us."

"Okay," Patricia said, stepping onto the sand and facing Toller. "I'm listening."

"It would take over a day to approach that velocity, accelerating at about three hundred g's—which is very close to the theoretical limit for the inertial damping systems, and for something as large as the Axis City, traveling on the flaw. The flaw would be seriously stressed, producing hard radiation and heavy particles. . . . But within the Way, even a velocity of one-third light-speed would create a space-time shock wave. We would reach that velocity at about one point seven ex nine. We would pass through the territories held by the Jarts with devastating effect. The relativistic distortions within the Way would be incredible. The shape of the Way itself would be altered as we passed, and whatever gates the Jarts have opened would be smoothed out of existence"—he slid his hand in a flat-out gesture—"like ironing a piece of fabric in one of your world's laundries."

Patricia's eyes became distant. Her mind was racing now to absorb the idea of a relativistic object within the Way—and the realization that within the Way, an object traveling at only one-third c would be relativistic.

"A grand scheme, don't you think?"

She nodded abstractedly. "How far would you travel down the Way?"

"That's still being debated."

"And what are the alternatives?"

"The conference is considering the alternatives even now—and have been for over three weeks. We believe the Jarts will break though our barriers in a matter of years, perhaps months. They'll overrun our most extended gates—we'll shut them down and withdraw, of course—and eventually, by the end of the decade, they'll push us back into the Thistledown. We'll have to evacuate, and to keep them from following us, we'll have to destroy the Way. That would be an incredible calamity."

"You're certain about this?"

Toller nodded once. "We cannot hold them for long. They've grown quite strong, and they've enlisted the help of other worlds—by opening gates all up and down their segment of the Way."

"Couldn't you do the same?"

"As I said, they've occupied the Way for several centuries longer than we have. They're more familiar with it, in some ways, than we are, even though we created it."

Toller wasn't telling her about one of the alternatives the rogue had mentioned—blowing the Thistledown from the end of the Way and "cauterizing" it, sealing it closed so it would continue to exist, independently of the sixth chamber machinery. She decided not to ask him about that possibility. "It's fascinating," she said. "Gives me a lot to think about."

"Yes, well, I'm sure I've violated all the rules of etiquette, Patricia. You've been very kind to listen to me. Our time is quite limited, as you see, and you've brought an additional element into the equation. . . .”

"I'm sure we have," Patricia said. Perhaps more than you know. . . “I'd like to walk back now."

"Certainly. I'll accompany you."

She smiled at him, eyes still distant. Toller said very little as they retraced their steps up the beach to the resort buildings, and that suited Patricia.

She was already slipping into the state, her mind working, conjuring up her personal notation. Passing quickly through Lanier's room, she made a few excuses and retired to her own quarters, lying down on the bed and closing her eyes tightly.

Toller greeted the others and spoke with them for several minutes, explaining he had had a good conversation with Patricia concerning subjects of importance to all of them. After he left, Lanier knocked on Patricia's door, and received no answer.

"Patricia?" he called.

"Yes," she said softly, scrunching up her face.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm resting," she said. "I'll join you for dinner."

He looked at his watch; their second meal on the Frant World, ostensibly supper, would begin in an hour. He returned to his room.

"How is she?" Carrolson asked.

"Fine, she says. She's napping."

"Not likely," Farley said. "I wonder what Toller told her?"

Chapter Fifty-Eight

The meeting between the three men who had taken Mirsky's mantle of authority began and ended in half an hour. It was held in Pletnev's private cabin, with Annenkovsky standing guard outside to make sure nobody listened in.

The topic was Mirsky's message to Garabedian. The solution to the problem they now faced, Pletnev insisted, was simple.

At first, Garabedian and Pogodin were hesitant. Pletnev had insisted they had no other choice, however. "Look, they tried to kill Mirsky, and they were locked away," he said. "Now they'll be released. Isn't it obvious? It's what the American woman thought. It makes sense to me."

"So what do we do?"

Pletnev hefted his Kalashnikov. Most of the laser weapons had long since run out of charge, and besides, he had always preferred bullets.

"Won't we be locked up?" Garabedian asked.

"Was anyone locked up after all the fighting?" Pletnev asked. Pogodin shook his head.

"Then we'll just kill them away from the city."

"I don't like the idea of killing them without a trial."

"We don't have any choice," Pletnev said. "Shit, Mirsky left you the message, but I'm the one who understands what he was really saying. Vielgorsky still has his supporters. Without Mirsky, the three of us can rule reasonably, but if the Zampolits return, we'll all be shot. We meet them, and we do what we must. Agreed?"

Pogodin and Garabedian agreed.

"Then let's go," Pletnev said. "We'll wait them out. Better to be early than to miss them."

Mirsky had abandoned the truck on the water's edge and walked inland with his backpack filled with dry rations. Fingerlakes were plentiful in this area of the fourth chamber, and the fishing everywhere was excellent. He had little doubt he could survive. These forests were not meant to be harsh environments. In the regions where it snowed—roughly one-fourth of the chamber, in an area whose outer boundary was the 180 line—the snow was light, and it rained just often enough all over to maintain the chamber's plant life.

He would hardly be "roughing it."

The first few days he had spent peacefully, doing little besides making an adequate fishing pole. He had read the American biologist's reports on the fourth chamber and knew there would be earthworms and grubs to use as bait. His anxiety tapered off, and he wondered why he hadn't bothered to leave sooner.

He seldom encountered the boundary markers of his new mentality now. Either they were fading with use, or he had learned to ignore them.

On his fifth day in the woods, he found signs that he was not alone. A Russian ration packet and an American plastic container revealed that one or more Russian soldiers had found their way here. The discovery didn't bother him. There was room enough for virtually everybody, and in privacy besides.

On the seventh day, he met a Russian at the edge of a grassy clearing. He did not recognize him, but the soldier knew Mirsky and quickly faded back into the woods.

On the eighth day, they saw each other again across a narrow lake, and the soldier did not run away.

"You're alone, aren't you?" the soldier asked.

"Until now," Mirsky said.

"But you're the commander," the soldier said resentfully.

"No more," Mirsky said. "What's the fishing like here?"

"Not so good. You notice there are mosquitoes and flies everywhere, but they don't bite?"

"Yes, I've noticed."

"I wonder why?"

"Good design," Mirsky suggested.

"I wonder if it ever snows."

"I think it does, once every year or so," Mirsky said. "But it doesn't get very cold. Not like Moscow."

"I would like for it to snow," the soldier said. Mirsky agreed, and they met at one end of the lake and walked through the woods together, in search of a better fishing spot.

"The Americans would say we were Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer," the soldier observed as they dipped their threadlines into a stream. "You know, the Americans aren't as bad as they were on Earth. I thought about defecting before I decided to leave for the woods."

"Why didn't you?" Mirsky asked.

"I didn't want to be around anybody. But I'm not sorry you're here, General." The soldier bobbed the tip of his pole, hoping to entice a trout. "Restores my faith in humanity. Even a general wants to get away from it all."

The soldier, who never told Mirsky his name, had left the compound weeks ago, before Mirsky's death in the library. He knew nothing of what had happened, and Mirsky did not tell him.

He was beginning to feel like a normal human being again and not a freak or a ghost. Having the time to sit and admire a drop of water on a leaf, or the way water rippled outward from a fish rising for an insect, was wonderful. It no longer mattered who he was, simply that he was.

Two more days passed, and Mirsky began to wonder if anybody would come searching for them. High-power telescopes could spot them easily, and with infrared sensors, it wouldn't matter whether they were hidden under trees or not. By now, he suspected, the Zampolits were free again, consolidating their position of power—if Pletnev and the others hadn't acted on his warning.

He was only faintly curious about what had happened.

What he missed most of all was night. He would have given anything to spend a few hours in pitch darkness, to be able to close his eyes and see nothing, not even the faint brown glow of shadowy forest light through his eyelids. He also missed the stars and moon.

"Do you think anybody we know on Earth is alive?" the soldier asked one morning as they cooked trout in a flat press of stripped branches over a small fire.

"No," Mirsky said.

The soldier bobbed his head, and then shook it in wonder. "You think not?"

"It's not very probable," Mirsky said.

"Not even in the high command?"

"Maybe. But I never really knew any of them."

"Mmm," the soldier said. Then, as if it was relevant, he said, "You knew Sosnitsky."

"Not really."

"He was a good man, I think," the soldier said, removing the trout and filleting it expertly with his shroud-cutting knife. He handed half to Mirsky and threw the head and bones into the bushes.

Mirsky nodded and ate his fish, skin and all, chewing thoughtfully until he spotted a silvery glint in the trees behind the soldier. His chewing stopped. The soldier saw him staring and turned his head.

A long metal object floated between the trees and stopped a few meters away. Mirsky's eyes widened; it resembled a chromium Russian Orthodox barred cross, with a heavy teardrop on its lower extremity. At the junction of the angled bar and the horizontal post of the cross was an intense glowing red spot.

The soldier stood. "Is it American?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Mirsky said, also standing.

"Gentlemen," a female voice said, speaking English. "Do not be alarmed. We intend you no hurt. Our detectors tell us there is a corporeal individual here who has undergone supplementary surgery."

"It is American," the soldier said, backing away and preparing to run.

"What are you?" Mirsky asked, also in English.

"You are the one who has received supplementary surgery?"

"I think so," Mirsky said. "Yes."

The soldier made a peculiar grunt deep in his throat and crashed off through the trees.

"I'm the one, don't bother about him."

A woman dressed in black walked slowly between the trees. Mirsky thought for a moment that she had to be American, because of the uniform—but he noticed the style was quite different. And her hair—shorn to fuzz at the sides, with a sweep of crown hair cascading behind her head—was certainly not American. It took him some seconds to see she had no nostrils, and her ears were small and round. She stood beside chromium cross and held up her hand.

"You're not a citizen of the Axis City, are you?" she asked. "Not an Orthodox Naderite?"

"No," Mirsky said. "I'm a Russian. Who are you?"

She touched the bar of the cross and flashes of light passed through the air between them. "Will you accompany me? We are gathering all the occupants of these chambers. No harm will come to you."

"Do I have any choice?" he asked, still calm. Could a man who had died once already feel any fear?

"I'm sorry, no," the woman said, smiling pleasantly.

Judith Hoffman had just completed a marathon nine-hour session on the restructuring of the legal system for the NATO personnel on the Stone. Beryl Wallace had insisted she return to the women's bungalow afterward. Hoffman had fallen asleep in her room immediately, so exhausted that it took her some time to crawl up to awareness, and a few seconds more to realize what had awakened her. The comline alarm was chiming. She hit her switch. "Hoffman," she said, her tongue thick and unwieldy.

"Joseph Rimskaya in the fourth chamber. Judith, we're having a rash of boojum sightings—I've seen two myself."

"So?"

"They're metal, cross-shaped, zipping over our compound and over the Russian territories, too. We've followed some of them with our trackers. There must be twenty or thirty of them in this chamber alone. They're all over."

Hoffman gritted her teeth and rubbed her eyes before glancing at her watch. She had been asleep less than an hour. "You're at the zero compound in the fourth chamber now?"

"That I am."

"I'm on my way."

She shut off the comline just as she received another call. This time, Ann cut in and was dickering with the voice on the other end as Hoffman answered.

"Judith, I'm sorry," Ann said hastily. "Beryl told me to let you sleep and I was away for just a second—"

"Miss Hoffman, this is Colonel Berenson in the seventh chamber—"

"Please, Colonel," Ann cut in.

"This is an emergency—"

"Ann, let him talk," Hoffman said.

"Miss Hoffman, our sensors are picking up dozens—maybe hundreds—of objects, large and small. Some have entered the bore hole, almost certainly, and are in the sixth chamber by now—"

"They're in the fourth chamber, at least," Hoffman said. "Colonel, coordinate with Rimskaya. He's made sightings, too. I'll be in fourth chamber on the next train."

She packed her small emergency case and ran down the hall, stumbling and almost falling at the head of the stairs. She grabbed a railing until her dizzy fatigue passed, then pumped down the stairs as fast as she could without breaking her neck. Ann met her at the bottom with a mug of water and stimulant tablets.

"Shit, what are these?" Hoffman asked, downing them.

"Hyper-caffeine," Ann said. "Lanier used them all the time. "

Hoffman slugged back two pills and the water.

"What is it this time?" Ann asked, her face pale. "Not another attack?"

"Not from outside, honey," Hoffman said. "Where are Wallace and Polk?"

"Second chamber."

"Tell them to be in fourth chamber, zero compound; tell them to meet me there or at the zero train."

Hoffman ran from the bungalow, shouting for a truck to take her to the second chamber. General Gerhardt ran on his stubby legs from the cafeteria, radio in hand, calling for marines, and waved for her to follow him. Doreen Cunningham met them at the security fence and pointed wordlessly to two trucks idling beyond the ramparts.

They were climbing into the nearest truck when the science compound alarms went off. Hoffman stepped away from the truck hatch and jerked her head back instinctively. Overhead, a barred silvery cross drifted at leisure. The heavy lobe on its end gave it a sinister and silly appearance at the same time. It reminded Hoffman of some outlandish weapon in an eighties martial arts movie.

"That's not Russian, is it?" she asked, still slightly addled from interrupted sleep.

"No way, ma'am," Gerhardt said, hand shielding his eyes from the tubelight. The cross circled the compound, then rose to a needle-point speck against the plasma tube and vanished. "It's a real one. A boojum."

With sunset, the sky dimmed to midnight blue overhead. Where the final flat reddened edge of the sun was being swallowed by the ocean, a dark brown shadow line of cloud began, twisting and veering from the horizon to zenith, where it broke down into frothy streaks, the edge of each streak catching an electric purple gleam. Farley and Carrolson had retired an hour earlier; Frant world days were about forty hours long. Lanier was thinking steadily and was not ready for sleep. He watched the sunset from the patio, Heineman by his side. Patricia had not yet come out of her room after the conversation with Toller.

Barefoot, dressed in shorts and a long-sleeve blue jacket, Olmy walked across the sand a few meters away, spotted them and approached. "Mr. Heineman, Mr. Lanier," he said, and they greeted him with nods, for all the world like upper-class gentlemen lacking only pipes, formal wear and evening drinks to complete the picture. "Enjoying our stay here?"

"Very much," Lanier said. "The first real weather I've seen in a couple of months."

"A year, myself," Heineman said.

"Much longer for me," Olmy said. "I haven't had duty on an outside world in"—he seemed to look inward—"fifteen years. And I haven't visited this world in fifty."

"They keep you busy, Mr. Olmy?" Heineman asked, squinting at him.

"Very. How is Patricia? I understand Ser Toller had a talk with her, and she's been in her room since."

"Yes," Lanier said. "I'm going to check up on her in a few minutes. See if she'll eat some food."

"She has been under strain for some time now, hasn't she?"

"Ever since she came to the Stone—the Thistledown," Lanier said. "We put an awful lot of responsibility on her shoulders—too much, really."

"You thought she might riddle the mystery of the Thistledown?"

"We thought she might tell us whether what was in the libraries would also hold true for our world. As it turned out—"

"It did, and it didn't," Olmy finished for him.

Lanier stared at him, then nodded again, looking back at the declining twilight. "She's been acting strangely—even considering the circumstances."

Olmy leaned on the patio rail. "After we arrived in the Axis City, she and I had a very long and interesting conversation. She was eager to learn about the city, about us, and she was eager to fit in. She especially wanted to learn about gate opening. That's one of the reasons we're attending a gate-opening soon. Had she told you about her ultimate plans?"

"I don't think so," Lanier said. Heineman leaned forward, meeting Olmy's gaze earnestly.

"Before she was captured, she was going to the library to do some final work. She had a hypothesis that she could proceed down the Way and find a place between the gates, in what we call the geometry stack regions. It fascinated me that she knew about such regions—that she had calculated their existence, because to understand the rudiments of Way theory is not necessarily to understand all the implications. She believed that she might be able to construct a gate opening device and probe the geometry stacks."

"What are geometry stacks?" Heineman asked, his voice froggy. He cleared his throat and glanced at Lanier.

"Gate regions are placed in specific rhythm along the Way. They open onto clearly defined locations in universes slightly different from our origin. Each gate opening, heading down the Way, will advance in time by approximately half a year in each universe. Patricia understood this very early, from what she tells me. But it took her some time to realize that the infinity of alternate worlds must be bunched by the existence of such clearly marked gate regions. The bunching occurs in the regions of stack geometry, and the distortion caused by the bunching leads to gross displacement of some universes, both in superspace and in Way time."

"I'm not following you," Lanier said softly.

"She believed she could open a gate into an alternate universe, an alternate Earth, where the Death did not take place, yet where things were very little different from her world. She understood that gate-opening devices are tunable to a certain extent. It is her theory that with one of our devices, she can open a precise path to an alternate and hospitable Earth."

"Can she?" Lanier asked.

Olmy didn't say anything for a moment. "We will consult with two gate openers. One is here on Timbl, the other is the prime opener, Ser Ry Oyu, father of Senator Prescient Oyu, and he awaits us at one point three ex nine."

"Is that another reason why we've been removed from the Axis City?"

Olmy smiled and nodded. "My reasons for bringing Patricia back with me were quite sound. But your arrival has caused no end of trouble. One visitor we might have been able to keep secret—though that seems doubtful now. Five visitors, impossible. The President hopes to make you assets rather than liabilities."

"Thirteen hundred years, and people are still people," Heineman mused with an edge of bitterness. "Still squabbling."

"True, and not entirely true," Olmy said. "In your day, many people were so severely handicapped by personality disorders or faulty thinking structures that they often acted against their own best interests. If they had clearly defined goals, they could not reason or even intuit the clear paths to attain those goals. Often adversaries had the same goals, even very similar belief systems, yet hated each other bitterly. Now, no human has the excuse of ignorance or mental malfunction, or even lack of ability. Incompetence is inexcusable, because it can be remedied. One of Ser Ram Kikura's services is to guide people in selecting appropriate skills and attitudes for their work. They can assimilate the necessary adjuncts, whether it be a set of memories or even a personality supplement."

"So why do they still disagree?" Heineman asked.

Olmy shook his head. "Know that, and you understand the ultimate root of all conflict in the realm of Star, Fate and Pneuma. In all the universes accessible to us."

"It's unknowable, then," Lanier said.

"Not at all. It's all too clear. There can be more than one ultimately desirable goal, and many equally valid ways to achieve those goals. Unfortunately, there are limited resources, and not everyone can follow the paths they want. That is true even for us. Our citizens are for the most part good-hearted, capable and diverse. I say for the most part, because the Axis City system is by no means perfect. . . .”

"What you're saying is, the gods themselves would have war. . . .”

Olmy agreed. "Interesting how the crude myths of our youth come back as eternal truths, no?"

Lanier knocked on Patricia's door and called her name. A few minutes, and several more knocks later, Patricia opened the door and motioned for him to come in. Her hair had been mussed into twisted strands. She wore the same clothing she had worn at the beach.

"Just checking to see how you're feeling," Lanier said, standing awkwardly in the main room, not sure whether to fold his arms or let his hands hang down at his sides.

"I'm thinking," Patricia said, turning to look at him. Her eyes were plaintive. "How long has it been?"

"Since you left the beach?"

"Yes. How long?"

"Twelve hours. It's dark outside."

"I know. I turned on the lights before letting you in. This place is just like a hotel room. That's what it's supposed to be, I guess. Quaint. Back to basics. That's what the President said."

"You don't sound right," Lanier said. "Something's wrong."

"I can't stop thinking. I've been in the state—that's what I call it, deep thinking—I've been here for twelve hours now. I'm in it now. I can just barely talk to you, you know."

"Thinking about what?"

"Going home. It all comes down to that."

"Olmy said—"

"Garry, I'm losing touch. I'm going to end up like that rogue, all distorted and unreal. I can't stop thinking. The President's advocate said. . . Garry, I need help. I need something distracting."

"What?" Lanier asked. She extended one arm and spread her hand, gesturing with her fingers. He gripped the hand.

"I'm human, aren't I? I'm real. I'm not just some toy or program."

"You're real," Lanier affirmed. "I'm touching you."

"I can't be sure of that now. You wouldn't believe what's in my head. I'm seeing. . . I mean, it's not artificial, not an adjunct or anything. It's from inside me, all the calculations, theorizing. I'm seeing universes bunched up like Bible leaves, and I know the page numbers. Olmy didn't believe me, not completely. But I still think I'm right. They have these gate-opening devices, some big, some small. If I could get one of those, I could take all of us home right now. Back to where everything is all right. I know the page number."

"Patricia—"

"Let me talk!" she said fiercely. "Back to where there is no nuclear war. Where my father reads Tiempos de Los Angeles. Where Paul waits for me. So I'm thinking, but not just about those things. The President said they could send the Axis City down the corridor, the Way, at relativistic speeds. Relativistic. Wipe out their enemies. It would work. But. . .”

"Slow down, Patricia."

"I can't, Garry. I need touch. I need Paul, but he's still dead until I find him." She gripped his hand tighter. "You'll help. Please."

"How?"

She scrunched her eyes up as if facing into a wind and forced an uncertain smile. "The Way would expand like a bugle. If there was a large relativistic object traveling the singularity. It would balloon. It would shut gates, just fuse them closed."

"How can I help? I'll get Carrolson—"

"No, please. Just you. I've been making notes." She held up her slate. The screen was covered with figures that made absolutely no sense to Lanier. "I have the proof. Let me go to the point in the stack geometry. . . and I can take us out. But I can't stop this."

"Patricia, you said I could help"

"Make love to me," she said abruptly.

Lanier stared at her in shock.

"I'm just a thought right now. Give me a body."

"Don't be ridiculous," he said, angry—doubly angry because he felt a sympathetic response.

She flinched. "Paul's dead. It won't be cheating on him. When I open the gate, he'll be alive again, but right now he's nowhere. I know you've been staying with Farley. . . . And Hoffman. . .”

She had almost said the wrong thing, almost brought up the question of his responsibility for her, and both of them knew it. "I am jealous, and I'm not," she said. "I like Karen. I like all of you. I've felt apart from you, different, but I've wanted to be. . . with all of you. I've wanted you to like me."

"I will not take advantage when you're vulnerable," Lanier said.

"Advantage? I need you. I'd be taking advantage of you. I am taking advantage, I know, but—I just know what would help. I'm not a little girl. Right now, I have thoughts in my head even these people haven't come up with. Olmy knows that. But if I think any more, I'm going to loose all of it. Snap."

She clicked the fingers of her free hand.

"I'm probably not very good in bed," she said.

"Patricia," Lanier said, trying to remove his hand from hers, yet not wanting to.

She stepped closer to him and laid her hand on his stomach. "I'll be unfair if I have to be. Body's a tiger, brain's a dragon. Feed one to keep the other."

"You'll drive me over the edge, too," Lanier said quietly.

She lowered her hand to his erection. "I'm not just an awkward little genius."

"No," he said.

Patricia leaned her head back, feeling him, and smiled ecstatically, eyes closed. There was no more resistance left in Lanier. She let go of his hand and he reached up to unbutton her blouse.

When they were naked, they held each other tightly. Lanier kneeled to kiss her breasts. His eyes moistened at the feel of her nipples between his lips. Her breasts were medium size, very slightly pendulous, one noticeably larger than the other, the skin between them freckled a darker brown. Their size and shape did not matter. Lanier felt a sudden clean flow of passion, taking away all conflicting emotions. She led him to the bedroom and lay beside him as they kissed, nested shallowly together. He took hold of her hips and angled them and slipped deep inside, the muscles of his stomach and buttocks tight, compulsive. Then they rolled over, Patricia on top, and she slid against him, eyes closed but relaxed, as if she were making a gentle wish. She raised herself up and Lanier watched their connected motion without his usual isolation, knowing instead a completion and wholeness that made no sense. There had been not a hint of this between them—simply of duty, working together. He had had that with others.

And now he was in bed with Hoffman's little Chicana genius. He had been dismayed on first seeing her, he realized only now; his respect for Hoffman's judgment had hidden that initial reaction to Patricia's apparent fragility. He was inside that fragility, taking pleasure from her, all in the name of duty and that was a laugh.

Part of his dismay had been attraction.

Patricia moved of her own volition to the expected climax. With Paul, she had found herself to be a natural at lovemaking. She could feel the state subsiding, storing itself away rather than dissipating. Her thoughts became pellucid. Here was a focus.

She came and, after a short respite, continued moving. Lanier's hips arched once, then he fell back, and then again, higher, and he groaned against her lowered shoulder, and then her cheek, and opened his mouth in a stifled, quiet, hoarse scream. With the thrusting and release he felt everything loosen, years of tension he hadn't even consciously known about.

They lay together, silent, for long, damp minutes, listening to the grinding breakers beyond the glass doors.

"Thank you," Patricia said.

"Jesus," Lanier said, and he smiled at her. "Better?"

She nodded and burrowed her nose into his shoulder. "That was very dangerous," she said. "I apologize."

Lanier turned her face toward him and clutched her head between his shoulder and his cheek. "We're both odd birds," he said. "You know that?"

"Mm." She nestled into his shoulder, eyes shut tight. "You shouldn't sleep here tonight. I'll be okay. You should sleep with Karen tonight."

He examined her face carefully. "All right," he said.

She opened her eyes—wide and square—and stared up at him. Now she seemed less a cat than some strange inversion of the neomorphs they had seen the past few days. They were human within, with strange exteriors.

But there was something inside Patricia Luisa Vasquez—something that had perhaps been there all along—which was not precisely human.

Only gods or extraterrestrials.

"You're looking at me funny," she said.

"Sorry. Just thinking how upside down everything is."

"No regrets?" she asked, stretching, eyes reduced to slits. "No regrets."

As he left her room, he felt his skin prickle. Looking down at his arms, he realized that of all the things he had seen in the past few days, none had given him gooseflesh. . . .

Until now.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

While day had not yet come to the resort, Olmy led the five of them to a waiting bus. Carrolson called them puppy-buses, because of their large white tires. The air was still and cool, and the stars gleamed clearly and steadily in the powdery blue-blackness.

Patricia was quiet, showing no sign of what had happened between her and Lanier the night before. Nor did Farley betray any awareness; Lanier had returned to their room to find her asleep. Sleep had come with much more difficulty for him; not since his adolescence had he put himself in such a situation.

Ram Kikura ran across a stretch of blue-green grass and boarded the bus a few minutes later.

"The President is unable to join us," she said.

"How disappointing," Carrolson said, not sounding terribly sincere. "Troubles?"

"I don't know. Ser Toller, the President and the Presiding Minister's partial are meeting now. You go on ahead; I'll stay here and follow the situation."

The bus's Frant driver looked back at Olmy, who nodded. They rolled smoothly across the lawn to a road paved with fine gravel, then to a whitetop highway that circled the resort and aimed toward the dawn, now deep red on the inland horizon. Patricia smelled something sweet, quite unlike the rich sharp smell of the Timbl ocean; a breeze was blowing over fields of low-lying thick yellow stalks growing outside the resort boundaries. In the fields, Frant farmers in red, many-pocketed aprons, accompanied by small automatic tractors, were already at work.

"They're harvesting biological personality elements," Olmy explained. "Tailored plantimals replicate complex biological structures, right down to preassigned memories. A cottage industry, you might call it—very advantageous."

"For humans or Frants?" Lanier asked.

"The plantimals can be adapted for most organics," Olmy said. "Installation of genetic codes is not difficult for carbon-based forms."

Lanier had meant whether the industry was more advantageous to humans or Frants, but decided not to restate his question. The bus took the white road through the fields and crossed the densely populated coastal plain. For dozens of kilometers in both directions along the coast, and for at least ten kilometers inland, the plain was covered with Frant villages.

As many as ten villages occupied tracts of land barely three kilometers square. Each village consisted of several nested circles of low-roofed rectangular houses. At the center was a stupa-like structure, often as much as fifty meters tall, draped with many-colored banners. As the sun brightened, the inland-facing banners on the stupas changed color, waving slowly in the gentle breezes like despondent rainbows.

"How advanced are the Frants, compared with your people?" Carrolson asked.

"More basic, but not primitive," Olmy said. "Their grasp of technology and science—I assume that's what you're referring to—is extensive. Do not be misled by styles of philosophies, or even by gentleness. Frants are resourceful. We rely on them a great deal."

Beyond the fields and villages, the road spiraled around a low mountain crested with sky-pointing prisms of translucent gray rock. At the top of the mountain, resting on a plateau formed by the prisms, a squat white-and-copper-banded dome rose some sixty meters higher, ballooning at its base into a broad pavilion. The bus drove under the outlying skirt of the pavilion and stopped.

Olmy led them toward the well-kept but obviously ancient bronze, black iron and white enamel works beneath the hollow dome. Standing beside a five-meter-wide horseshoe-shaped mount was a muscular, apparently middle-aged man, naked from the waist up, a tool kit hanging from his broad belt. His skin had a deep brown color, with a faint rainbow sheen. Three Frants stood at other points around the equipment, talking among themselves in low tones as they worked with polishing cloths. Above them all towered a huge cage of crisscrossing black iron bars, like a misplaced Victorian bridge.

"It's a telescope," Heineman said. "It's beautiful!"

"It is indeed a telescope," the brown man said, smiling. "The last the Frants built before our gate opened."

"This is Ser Rennslaer Yates, secondary gate opener," Olmy explained, introducing them around. "He will accompany us to one point three ex nine."

Yates unhitched his tool kit. "This meeting has been long expected. Ser Olmy has kindly kept me informed about all of you. The Frants indulge me by letting me tinker with their historical treasures." He pointed with one hand to the telescope and the dome and pavilion, then donned a blue cloth shirt and closed it by pressing along a seam. "There's not much need for gate openers now. The primary can do most of the work very well without us." He approached Patricia. "Olmy's told me a fair amount about you. You've made some impressive discoveries."

Patricia smiled but said nothing. Her eyes, however, were bright and square: cat with a secret. Lanier felt a surge of—pride? something else?—as he realized how much she had improved since last night.

"I'd love to tinker with that," Heineman said wistfully.

"Perhaps someday you will—or one like it. Frants are not much for preserving their past, I'm afraid." He patted the telescope mount. "I will not be back here for some time," he said sadly. To Heineman and Carrolson, he confided, "I'd ask them to keep up the work, but they'll be reassigned—wander off and homogenize, as Frants do—and it will start decaying all over again. In its day, you know, this instrument and fourteen others like it were kept busy from dusk to dawn, searching for the comet sweeps." He waved his hand, bidding them to follow him beyond the rim of the pavilion and across a narrow, flat field.

At the lip of the steep precipice, they looked across the flatlands and the sea beyond. "The Frants were already moving into the space age when we arrived. They had built thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads—fantastic, ingenious and very jumbled technologies; jerry-rigged could you call them? It had been over nine centuries since the last major impacts, and they were waiting.

"If this instrument or any of the others had sighted comets, then trajectories would have been computed by thousands of Frants linking minds. Years it might have taken them, but otherwise they had only primitive computers. The villages would have been moved, placed in safer areas. Every village on the planet in motion! They were saved from that. Still, this"—raising his hand to the dome—"was a noble instrument." He shook his head. "Ser Olmy! Lead on. I am done here." He hugged each of the Frants and touched their hands in the homogenizing gesture, though for a human it was purely a formality.

They were about to board the truck when one of the Frants, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the pavilion, whistled and pointed toward the coast. Sweeping inland, three tiny white points were approaching the telescope. Olmy frowned.

"Mr. Lanier, please take your people back to the telescope. Ser Yates, could you stay close to them?" Yates agreed and followed them back to the center of the pavilion.

"What's happening?"

"I don't know," Olmy said. "We weren't scheduled to be met by gate police."

The three white points grew rapidly to full-sized, blunt-arrowhead craft. The craft circled the telescope and settled on the flat field to the north. The nose hatch of one craft opened, and out stepped Oligand Toller, four gate district representatives and a Frant marked with the green sash of diplomatic authority. Toller walked quickly toward Olmy, eyes directly on his.

"There are difficulties in the Axis City," he said. "I'm instructed to cut off your visit and return all of you to the Axis City immediately."

"Please explain," Olmy requested. "What are the difficulties?"

"Korzenowski factioners and orthodox Naderites have taken illegal authority and cut communications between the precincts. The President has adjourned the Jart conference and left Timbl and is now on his way back to deal with it. We must leave now."

"Wouldn't it be best to keep everyone here?" Olmy asked. "Until the situation becomes more clear."

"It is very clear. The secessionists are trying to force the issue." Toller resorted now to tight-beam picts. The color of his message was an agitated red-edged purple: "Our guests are key figures in this dispute. You know that, Ser Olmy."

Olmy did not pict. "I understand, Ser Toller. But you miss my point. Ser Yates is now ranking human on Timbl, if the President has left."

Toller sized the situation up quickly. "You refuse to release them? I am operating under authority of the President."

"I don't refuse to release all of them," Olmy said. "Only two will remain with us. You may take the others."

Lanier began to protest, but Olmy shot him a glance that demanded silence.

Toller backed a step away. "I could order the gate authority to arrest all of you."

"No bluffing, please, Ser Advocate," Yates warned. "Even an inactive gate opener is obeyed by gate authority. Who is the other you wish to stay with us?" he asked Olmy.

"Mr. Lanier," Olmy said.

"Are you with the secessionists?" Toller asked him, clearly angry now. Olmy did not answer.

"We will keep Patricia Luisa Vasquez and Garry Lanier," he said. "You may take the others."

"We refuse to be separated," Lanier said, stepping forward despite Heineman's hand on his arm.

"You have no choice," Olmy said. "We're past the point of euphemisms and diplomatic games, Mr. Lanier. I choose you in order that you may assist us with Miss Vasquez. The others will be safe."

"We guarantee the safety of all," Toller said. "Except those who go with you, Ser Olmy."

"Ser Ram Kikura is their advocate. She will accompany these three, wherever you take them—and watch out for them," Olmy instructed.

Mechanical workers emerged from the craft and rolled or floated to surround Farley, Carrolson and Heineman. "Garry," Farley said, her voice strained.

"They will not be harmed," Olmy reiterated. "This is not that kind of struggle."

"The Thistledown is being cleared at this moment," Toller said, hoping to arouse more defiance. "Corprep Rosen Gardner is in charge of a campaign to evacuate the asteroid."

Olmy nodded as if that were obvious.

"What will you do with Vasquez and Lanier?" Toller asked.

"Please take the others now," Olmy said. "They are your responsibility."

"This is intolerable. When word gets down the Way, gates will be closed, lanes cleared—"

"That's what the Geshels planned anyway, isn't it? To expedite clearing the Way of Jarts. That's the decision the conference was about to reach, at the suggestion of the President, or am I wrong?"

Toller glanced nervously at the secondary gate opener. "You are cooperating with this. . . secessionist?"

Yates merely smiled, removed his torque from the tool-kit, and picted a symbol of Earth wrapped in a circular string of DNA.

Shaking his head, the advocate gestured to the workers, who guided Farley, Carrolson and Heineman toward the waiting craft. Carrolson was livid with anger. "Are we just going to go along with this?" she cried.

"I don't think we have any choice," Heineman said, his expression long and solemn. "There goes Patricia's birthday party. Watch your step, Garry."

Farley looked over her shoulder at Lanier, tears flowing down her cheeks. "Garry?" she called back.

"You sons of bitches," Lanier said to Olmy and Toller. "Patricia was right. We're nothing but pawns."

"Don't underestimate yourselves," Toller said. He returned to the craft with the gate district representatives in his train. The diplomatic Frant stayed behind. The craft took flight again, heading toward the gate reception area.

"My apologies for your distress," Olmy said. "Now. We must proceed to one point three ex nine immediately. Things are happening much sooner than expected."

Wu Gi Me and Chang i Hsing carried boxes of equipment and papers out of the tent with the help of Berenson's troops, loading them into the back of a truck. A cool breeze descended from the southern cap, stirring the tent fabric. Except for their heavy breathing and footsteps, and occasional guttural exclamations from Berenson, the evacuation was conducted in silence.

Six metal double-barred crosses hovered three meters above the road, their red spots seeming to watch every move the soldiers and scientists made. Far above, at the center of the plasma tube, something long and black was aligned on the singularity, no more than fifty meters from the opening of the bore hole. Examining it through binoculars, Wu estimated it was 150 meters in length. It had arrived less than ten minutes earlier, prompting Berenson to order the evacuation.

When the truck was full and the tent empty, the soldiers crawled on top and the Chinese took the remaining two seats in the front. Berenson grabbed a handgrip along the roofline and stepped up on the side ladder. The truck jerked forward and swung around to roll up the ramp.

With the chamber deserted, the crosses bunched into a cubic formation, then flew off to circumnavigate the chamber floor.

From the vantage of the flawship, twenty-five kilometers above, an assigned ghost of Corprep Rosen Gardner watched the proceedings, relaying everything by direct beam down the Way to the Axis City.

In the Axis City itself, communications between the three rotating cylinders and Central City had been severed. Axis Nader was completely blocked off from the transport systems. And major sections of City Memory—usually active around the clock—were now isolated and quiet. The tide had turned; the radical Geshels had tripped themselves up in their own haste to take advantage of Olmy's news and the five guests.

The incarnate Corprep Rosen Gardner had moved to the Nexus Chambers a few hours before, risking the uncertain location in Central City to be at the center of all Axis City activity. He had created four partials to handle the details of the revolt.

None of his factioners or supporters called it a revolt; for them, it was a necessary maneuver to protect their rights against action by radical Geshels. Whatever it was called, it was hideously complicated.

Word from the Thistledown was incomplete, but that was the least of Gardner's worries now.

His partials were in the three Axis cylinders and in the offices of the Way Commerce Committee at nine ex six. His militant factioners held all strategic transport sites within the Axis City, and along the Way nearby. Through City Memory and deep within the Axis City's infrastructure, orthodox Naderites and Korzenowski factioners—his people—were consolidating the gains made in the past few hours. Sympathetic personalities in City Memory, including his father, oversaw the interdicted communications nets.

Everything was proceeding as planned. Yet Corprep Gardner was more unhappy than he had ever been in his two centuries of life. He cared little for the accusations of the Presiding Minister or the President. He had opposed them often enough in the past, and felt the sting of their power, to relish watching them squirm.

What made him miserable was the knowledge that the action violated all he had stood for in the Nexus, and all he had espoused before his election as Corprep by the New Orthodox Naderite precincts of Axis Nader. He felt peculiarly vulnerable, as if one of his own partials might chastise him for a breach of honor and faith.

Already, his factioners were preparing to move the city south along the flaw, toward the Thistledown. They would have to remove barriers as they went; that would take time.

In the center of the empty Nexus Chambers, surrounded by the armillary information rings, he awaited the return of the President and the senators and corpreps now convened on the Jart question. When they attempted to reenter the Axis City, and were denied, what Gardner called the action wouldn't matter.

Then the revolt would have truly begun.

A partial of the President appeared to one side of him and awaited his attention. Gardner took his time. Finally, satisfied that all was going well—and that the partitioning of City Memory had been particularly successful—Gardner allowed the partial to pict.

"Do you have the support necessary?" the partial asked. "My original is on his way. Director Hulane Ram Seija has already filed court proceedings. Needless to say, you haven't followed the usual Nexus procedures."

"No. Emergencies and opportunities." His last statement picted a wide range of emotionally charged symbols: the complex Naderite sign for home, consisting of Earth surrounded by a circle of DNA; this symbol engulfed in fire, replaced by a singed animal skull; and the requisite meaning qualifiers. Then, more straightforward, "Ser Ram Seija can try his case after secession. In absentia. Besides, we are working now to have him tried for violation of Nexus procedure."

"I've heard nothing of this," the partial said, incredulous.

"You've been busy, Ser President." He regretted the tone of his response; the President had been working hard on the Jart problem, and he did not wish to imply any dereliction of duty; it was enough for his people to have taken advantage of the President's absence. "It was a minor infraction, but I am within my rights. As long as there is a court question, all of Ser Ram Seija's duties are suspended. Senator Prescient Oyu is his replacement in command—she has left a partial here, to carry on her duties."

The partial of van Hamhuis then picted that he had protested the insurrection and tried to muster the votes necessary to override Corprep Gardner. Gardner already knew this; by legal maneuvering, and with the advice of Senator Prescient Oyu's partial, he had declared the vote invalid—lacking a quorum of incarnate senators and corpreps, and called by a partial instead of an incarnate.

The fight was far from over. The incarnate Tees van Hamphuis would be in the vicinity of the Axis City in just a few hours.

Chapter Sixty

At the limit of the plasma tube in the first through fourth chambers, arrow-shaped craft patrolled back and forth. Other larger craft flew at will above the valley floors, and the double-barred crosses were everywhere.

In the fourth chamber zero compound, Hoffman realized that any attempt at defense would be useless. The technology and the force they were up against was insurmountable.

"There's no doubt they're from the corridor?" she asked Berenson in the middle of the compound as they stood by a truck prepared to evacuate them.

"No doubt," Berenson said, accent thick with nerves.

"Then we can hope for the best."

"And what would that be?" Polk asked. Her hair was wildly astray; for impeccable Janice Polk, that was a definite sign of frayed nerves.

"That they're human. Our descendants."

Rather than risk wholesale slaughter, she instructed Gerhardt to tell his soldiers not to fire unless directly assaulted. She could not, of course, instruct the Russians—they would have to figure out the situation on their own.

Wallace and Polk helped with the communications. They spoke with several Russians on the radio, but the Russians refused to provide any information on their situation—though, in all fairness, neither of the women were able to get in touch with an officer. Rimskaya stepped forward and offered to take a message to the Russian leaders, on foot if necessary. That was gallant, but Hoffman refused. By the time the Russians received the message, the situation would probably have changed.

Three crosses in a triangle formation flew over the compound. One broke away at the southern cap and returned to hover directly over the center, and over Hoffman. Bright flashes of light appeared between Berenson and Hoffman. Hoffman jerked and stumbled against Rimskaya; Berenson stood his ground with eyes wide and nostrils flared.

Then the cross spoke, its voice that of a woman.

"You are not in danger. Under no circumstances will you be harmed. You will also not be allowed to harm each other. All occupied chambers are under Axis City jurisdiction."

"So what do we do? Kowtow?" Beryl Wallace asked.

Gerhardt approached them slowly, one eye cocked toward the hovering cross. "Jesus, that's scary," he said to Hoffman in a whisper. "My people don't know whether to piss down their legs or bow in submission."

"Sorry I can't reassure them," Hoffman said.

"What in hell is 'Axis City?’" Berenson asked.

"I could hazard a guess," Hoffman said. "Where everybody lives down the corridor—on the axis."

Rimskaya nodded too eagerly. "Talk to it, then," he suggested.

Hoffman looked up and squinted. "We intend no harm. Please identify yourself."

"Are you the leader of this group?"

"Yes," Hoffman said. She pointed to Gerhardt. "He's a leader, too."

"Are you the leaders of all groups in the chambers?"

"No," Hoffman said. She didn't volunteer any more information, deciding a witness's approach to questioning would be best.

Two of the larger blunt-arrowhead craft flew by slowly and took up positions at the north and south ends of the compound, hovering about twenty-five meters above the surface.

"Do you guarantee the safety of a negotiator?" the voice from the cross asked.

Hoffman glanced at Gerhardt. "Make sure," she said. Then, more loudly in the direction of the cross, "Yes. Give us some time." Gerhardt used his radio to contact the units in all chambers.

"Are you prepared now?" the voice asked.

"Yes," Hoffman said, at a nod from Gerhardt.

The craft at the southern point dropped gracefully to the ground ten or eleven meters from the center of the compound, lowering a single pylon as it touched down. A hatch in the nose dilated.

A man in a black suit stepped from the hatch and quickly examined the compound, then focused on Hoffman. He had walnut-colored hair cut in three stripes, with shorter fuzz between; he lacked nostrils and his ears were large and round.

"My name is Santiago," he said as he approached. He held out his hand to Gerhardt, who was closest; Gerhardt took it and shook it once, then backed away. The man approached Hoffman and offered his hand again. Hoffman grasped it lightly; the man squeezed no harder than she did. "I apologize for your distress, whatever the necessity. I am instructed to tell you that all of your people are now honored guests of the Axis City," he said. "I'm afraid you can't stay in the Thistledown much longer, however."

"We don't have anyplace else to go," Hoffman said, feeling overpowered, more helpless than she had felt even when leaving Earth on the shuttle.

"You are in my care," Santiago said. "We must gather everybody together—your researchers, soldiers, your people in the bore holes—the Russians. And we must do it soon."

Mirsky disembarked from the craft and blinked at the bright tubelight. The interior of the craft had been quiet and dark, in sharp contrast to the bright glow of the seventh chamber. For the first time, he stared down the length of the corridor and felt as undeniable truth what he had hitherto only heard described. There had been so little time; the library had taken up whatever effort he had spared from being a leader. . . .

Five other Russians disembarked behind him. All had been deserters in the woods near the 180 line in the fourth chamber. They, too, blinked and covered their eyes. They, too, stared in awe down the corridor, the implications of that vast distance becoming more and more clear.

A kilometer to the west, hundreds of people gathered near the zero tunnel. They were mostly NATO personnel, Mirsky saw, also being evacuated. The Potato was being cleared, for whatever reason hardly mattered right now.

The Russian he had met in the woods touched Mirsky's arm and pointed east. Hundreds of Russian soldiers squatted in a square, flanked on all sides by at least a dozen crosses and three people he didn't recognize, dressed much like the woman who had taken him captive.

More blunt-arrowhead craft descended and landed near the chamber's southern cap, disgorging more people. Mirsky wondered idly if they were all going to be killed. Did it still matter? Having died once? He decided it did.

He still wished for the stars. Now the possibility of attaining that wish was remote, yet the wish itself informed him he was essentially Pavel Mirsky. He still had a connection with the five-year-old boy who had stared up at the stars over winter-bound Kiev. In fact, that memory was pure, not reconstructed but original; Vielgorsky had not blasted that most basic experience from his head.

He wondered idly if Vielgorsky and the other political officers were in the crowds of captives. What could they do to him now? Nothing.

Only a Russian, Mirsky thought, could draw a free breath in such a situation as this.

Senator Prescient Oyu joined them at the resort and informed Yates and Olmy that the Frants were planning to close the gate, standard procedure in any temporary emergency involving the Way.

Olmy acted quickly. Before the gate could be closed, Yates requested that a small defense flawship be prepared to ferry the secondary gate opener and his guests. The request was denied, but Yates tested his authority on the Frant side of the gate by appropriating one of the two Axis craft left on the reception field. The human defense forces there—mostly Naderite homorphs—decided to abide by the letter of the law, and not Toller's parting instructions, and gave the secondary gate opener what he asked for, as well as two guards and a mechanical defense worker.

Taking the craft through the gate and up to the axis, they found three flawships that had been disengaged from the singularity to allow Toller's craft passage. One was unoccupied; it had been parked just minutes before and abandoned by its Naderite crew in a near-axis inspection area, tethered to the flaw by traction fields. Again, following the letter of the law, the crew had retired their small flawship for an inspection after a hundred thousand hours of active duty.

Yates's authority easily overrode the flawship's ambiguous instructions.

They boarded and restrung the flawship on the singularity. The flaw passage through the center of the ship simply extended to the outer bulkheads, reshaping the craft's nose-in-profile from an O to a U, and then closed around the flaw. They accelerated toward 1.3 ex 9.

"You have a lot of support, don't you?" Lanier asked Olmy as they watched the Way blur into black and gold.

"More than I would have gambled on," Olmy said.

"Radical Geshels have walked on the edge for decades," Senator Oyu said. "They have not been bad leaders, but they haven't prepared adequately for the fulfillment of their plans. And they have exacted a kind of revenge on the orthodox Naderites by benign neglect. Now you see some of the results."

"Are you all orthodox Naderites?" Patricia asked.

"No," Olmy said. "I've long since given up that heritage, and Sers Yates and Oyu were raised Geshel."

"Then why are you doing this?"

"Because there is a way for both sides to achieve their goals—if reasonable people intervene," Senator Oyu said.

The small flawship was designed for speed and rapid acceleration. They averaged some 4,900 kilometers a second, and reached the first defense station at 5 ex 8 within 28 hours.

The stations were located at three points along the Way from 5 ex 8 to 1.3 ex 9. Each was a solid fifty-meter-thick black layer hugging the corridor's floor for a hundred kilometers, the surface dimpled with weapons emplacements and field generators.

At all three stations, the crews requested their mission and authority. Yates identified himself, and since the station personnel had no orders to prevent craft from moving down the Way, they were allowed to pass. A hundred thousand kilometers beyond each station, mechanical flaw defense vehicles cleared the Way for them, then resumed their posts on the singularity, vigilant for Jart flawships or flaw-riding weapons.

Within fifty hours, Olmy decelerated their little craft and approached the atmosphere barrier at 1.3 ex 9, passing through the axial hole at little more than a crawl—a few dozen meters per second. What lay on the other side of the barrier was unexpected—and enchanting.

For as far as the eye could see, the Way resembled the fourth chamber in the Thistledown. If anything, it was even greener and more luxuriant. Clouds drifted at leisure beyond the plasma tube, over a landscape of forested hills partaking of a palette of greens and grassy golds. Rivers cut bright paths through the hills, reflecting the tubelight at every point to take on an aspect of shimmering silver.

Patricia floated in the nose of the flawship, arms crossed. Prescient Oyu explained that this segment of the Way was being adapted for eventual human settlement. The project had been started by those who wished to relieve the tensions arising from overcrowding in the Axis City. Even City Memory's enormous capacity was being filled and would soon need extensions.

The Way had other, smaller segments adapted for human living, but on the whole it had been reserved for commerce. The segment at 1.3 ex 9 was to have been devoted to homorphs and their special needs—in short, it had been chiefly intended for orthodox Naderites.

A year before, the settling of this segment had been delayed by a Jart incursion beyond 2 ex 9. Now the delay was indefinitely extended; the Jarts and their allies had grown in strength, and it seemed they might break through to 1.3 ex 9. Still, the humans did not pull back. They did not settle the segment, but they conducted other activities—including opening a gate at 1.301 ex 9.

The verdant areas of the segment extended for only a few thousand kilometers. The flawship passed over a terminal building covering the gate through which the segment's soil and atmosphere had been brought into the Way; they were accelerating again, over a stretch of sandy, barren territory much like the region just beyond the seventh chamber, and then through another atmosphere barrier.

There was no commerce in the next segment. No other gates had been opened; except for three more defense outposts, the Way was a featureless, darkly bronze tube along the entire million-kilometer stretch. Patricia contemplated the geometry of this undisturbed section of corridor. The geometry stacks would be of a different configuration without gates to bunch them, but they would exist—in fact, this segment might be ideal for her search. . . .

"Would you like to test your ideas here?" Olmy asked her quietly. She turned, startled, and nodded.

"Ser Yates and I have been discussing your theories," Olmy said. "We feel you should present them to Ser Ry Oyu. . . .”

Patricia's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Would this have anything to do with Korzenowski?" she asked, deciding now was as good a time as any to probe Olmy's secrets.

Olmy lifted a finger to his lips conspiratorially. "If you wish to test your ideas. . . perhaps. But no more talk until our audience."

At 1.301 ex 9, they passed through another barrier. Beyond, a segment barely sixty kilometers long lay velvety green under a thick and hazy atmosphere. Four small terminal buildings—little more than a hundred meters on each side—were spaced around the as-yet-unopened circuit at the middle of the segment.

A disk a third as wide as the one that had transported them to the Timbl terminal ascended from a white landing field near the zero terminal, climbing toward the flawship.

Patricia's jaw hurt. She realized she was clamping her teeth and forced herself to relax. What was Olmy up to—and what would he and the gate openers possibly want with her? What could she exchange in return for the opportunity?

They descended to the surface in the smaller disk. This disk was clearly more utilitarian in design; its bottom half was opaque, and its only illumination was the steady glow of traction fields.

A pie-shaped segment of the disk slid aside, and traction field chutes lowered them gently to the landing area. Olmy disembarked last. Prescient Oyu led them toward the terminal.

"We can walk," she said. "I think it would be best to meet with Ser Ry Oyu immediately."

They crossed the white pavement and then stepped on thick, fine-bladed grass. Oaks and maples were spaced evenly around the park-like grounds; beyond the trees, the yellow terminal pyramid possessed only four steps, each twisted in relation to the one below.

To one side of the terminal, a series of four traction pipes, each about three meters in diameter, wound for several kilometers around the terminal grounds just above head level. Within the pipes, suffused by a faint violet glow, shapes not even remotely human tracted over the landscape.

"Our clients and allies," Olmy said. He pointed to one individual, an eight-legged cylinder with a mane of fuzzy antler-like appendages surrounding its bifurcated, round "head." "Talsit," he said. "Tertiary form. They're a very old race—their history goes back at least two billion terrestrial years. You'll meet another Talsit soon—one serves as assistant to the primary gate opener."

The terminal was little more than a shell, about 100 meters high and 150 wide at the base. Within the terminal, a series graceful gun-metal-blue scaffolds curved above the smooth-lipped pit about 50 meters in diameter.

Hanging from the center of the scaffold in an intersecting radiance of traction fields was an object tiny in comparison, no broader than three hands. To Patricia, it resembled an old-fashioned Japanese pillow, with its neck-receiving curve. The base was forked, however, like the handlebars on a bike. She stopped by the edge of the scaffold to inspect it, knowing almost by instinct what it was, and how important it could be to her.

To Lanier, it looked like a divining rod with a radar dish attached.

"What is that?" Patricia asked, her voice small.

"That is what a gate opener uses to dilate the Way manifold," Olmy said.

She seemed to shudder. "What's it called?" she asked.

"A clavicle. Only three exist. Ry Oyu has charge of this one."

"Where's yours?" Patricia asked Rennslaer Yates. "Inactive," Yates said. "Each is tuned to a gate opener. When the gate opener is not performing his official function, the clavicle is deactivated."

She reluctantly looked away from the suspended clavicle and followed the others to the western end of the terminal building. There, under an incomplete cupola roughly sketched from racing black and gold lines, a tall, thin man with close-cut Titian-red hair stood next to a data pillar. Patricia looked first at the man, then at the cupola.

"Friends," Prescient Oyu said, "this is my father, Ser Ry Oyu." She introduced Olmy and Lanier. The primary gate opener nodded to each in turn.

"And this is Patricia Luisa Vasquez," Yates said, hand on her shoulder.

"I've learned the old language just to speak with this woman," Ry Oyu said. "And the old cultures and ways. Yet she gives me such a peculiar look!"

Patricia straightened and cleared a slight frown from her face.

"You were expecting something more impressive, weren't you?" Ry Oyu said. "Not the Wizard of Oz, I hope." He extended his hand to her, eyes narrowed in amusement. "I am deeply honored."

Patricia shook his hand, her thin black eyebrows drawn together.

Ry Oyu patted her hand paternally and glanced uneasily at Olmy. "Now this branch of the conspiracy is gathered. My researchers are at the first-quarter location now; they'll join us in a few hours. They have no idea what's happened here. I'm not sure how I'll explain it to them—a person in my position, engaged in petty intrigues. Miss Vasquez—"

"I prefer Patricia," she said, voice still small, subdued.

"Patricia, do you have any idea what we've brought you here to discuss?"

"Some idea," Patricia said.

"Yes? Tell us."

"It involves my work on the corridor—the Way. And it somehow involves Konrad Korzenowski."

"Very good. How did she discover these things, Olmy?"

"I arranged for a rogue to visit her."

Patricia stared at him in shock, eyes square, touched with anger.

"I see. And?"

"The rogue revealed certain facts to her."

"Something of a risk, don't you think?"

"A very minor one," Olmy said. "She has the Mystery, after all."

"Does she, now." Ry Oyu approached Patricia. "Do you know what he's talking about—the Mystery?"

Patricia shook her head. "No."

"Do you know how important this might be to us? No, of course not. Too many questions. . . Patricia—"

"Olmy knows where a complete record of Korzenowski is," Patricia said abruptly. It was a wild guess—but she hated appearing completely ignorant.

"Actually, I doubt that," Ser Oyu said. "There are no complete records—not since the assassination."

Olmy tied together what she had already heard bits and pieces of: the story of Konrad Korzenowski. Called the Engineer, he had designed the inertial damping systems for the Thistledown, and had overseen the in-flight maintenance of the Beckmann drive. Working from inertial damping theory, he had then designed the sixth chamber machinery that created the Way.

That project had taken thirty years, and had been accomplished by forging an alliance between the largely Geshel governing bodies of the Thistledown, and the orthodox Naderites inhabiting Alexandria in the second chamber. Korzenowski himself—like Olmy—had been a Naderite by birth, and had given his word that Naderite wishes would be carried out. What the Naderites demanded was that the creation of the Way not alter the original mission, which was to find an Earth-like planet circling the distant star Epsilon Eridani. The Naderites believed their principal mission of settling distant worlds in the name of Earth was a sacred obligation, the only truly acceptable reason for venturing beyond the Solar System.

But Korzenowski had not reckoned with a number of problems. First, he had not known that the linking of the way with the Thistledown's seventh chamber would, in effect, whip-snap the asteroid starship out of its native universe, and into another. And he had not figured on the incredibly bad luck of having the experimental gates, opened by remote manipulation before the connection, allow Jarts into the Way and give them centuries to exploit their position.

Korzenowski had retired his corpus into Thistledown's City Memory soon after the first Jart wars, in the wake of the ensuing scandal. Even there, he had been harassed. Finally, radical Geshels, judging him to be a Naderite traitor, had arranged for the purging of his personality records—in effect, assassinating him.

"Then he is dead?" Patricia asked, confused.

"No," Olmy said. "In City Memory, he was supervising the construction of the Axis City. To do that, he placed partials of himself in different locations, to carry on his work more rapidly. The most extensive partials were retrieved by his fellow engineers and entrusted to a woman, who placed them in secret storage. This woman died in an insurrection in Alexandria, a century after Korzenowski's assassination. She was an orthodox Naderite, and at that time her sect did not allow implants. Her death was final.

"A century after that, the final Naderites were driven from Alexandria, and for a time some were kept in Thistledown City. I was born there. And while I was experimenting with the abandoned private memory banks of our apartment building, I discovered the hidden partials of Korzenowski. I was very young then. I only had a few years to become acquainted with the Engineer. But in that time. . .”

Olmy glanced at Ser Oyu. He had kept this secret for centuries and was reluctant to reveal it even now that the time was right. Ser Oyu nodded encouragement.

"In that time, I learned that the Engineer had sought to repay his people for the injury he had done to them, however inadvertently. After the Jart wars, the Geshel-ruled Hexamon decided it was unnecessary to proceed to Epsilon Eridani; the Thistledown's course was uncertain, and, to be truthful, they simply thought there was more potential for settlement and exploration in the Way. They were right, but that did not satisfy the orthodox Naderites. They had lost not their mission in life, but their Earth, and their home universe. So before retiring his corpus, Korzenowski secretly reprogrammed the Thistledown guidance systems. The ship sought out and located the home Solar System, and began a return journey."

"I don't see how I can help," Patricia said.

Korzenowski's partials, when assembled, almost equal the original," Ser Oyu said. "We lack only the final impressed shape, the Mystery, to have him back with us. In his way, we hope to repay him for what he gave us. We hope to let him see his success."

Patricia glanced at Olmy to Oyu, and then to Yates.

"And what will you give us?" she asked.

"Your colleagues will have their choice of returning to Earth or proceeding down the Way with the Geshels. You, on the other hand, will be given the means to play out your dream."

"My dream?"

Ry Oyu walked to a smooth black cabinet under the center of the shimmering cupola. He opened the cabinet and brought out a small pearl-white box. Returning, he held the box to Patricia and instructed her to open it.

She lifted the lid. Within, lying in a hollow of green velvet, was a miniature version of the clavicle that depended from the scaffold. Yates looked upon it with her and sighed.

"We're offering you an exchange, a trade in which you lose nothing," Ry Oyu said. "You let us copy your Mystery, to complete the Engineer's personality record, and we will let you search for your home."

"You're saying that my soul, and Korzenowski's, are identical?" Patricia asked.

"'Soul' is an imprecise term," the gate opener said. "'Mystery' at least has the advantage of a more precise application. When everything in a personality—memory, thought patterns, skills—has been abstracted out, the sum of their parts is still not the whole. There is a super-pattern which colors the entire psyche, and which can be lost when even the great majority of fragments are reassembled. This is called the 'Mystery.' We have never been able to synthesize it. It is ineffable, and it can only be transferred by an imposition of all the patterns of one person on the assembled personality fragments of another. What is already present in the other is rejected; what is not present, the Mystery, is retained. That is the gift you could give to us—to Korzenowski."

She took hold of Lanier's hand, suddenly afraid. This was not in the same league with the things that had gone before; it seemed abruptly mystical and unconvincing. For a time, she had thought that nothing could remain unknown to these descendants, and yet here it was, primary and basic; elaborated upon, manipulated, but not solved.

"You could take it from me by force," she said. "Why try to convince me?"

"Force is not useful in these circumstances," Ry Oyu said. "Either you give voluntarily or you do not give at all."

"Why do you want him back? Hasn't he served his purpose?"

"It's a matter of honor." Olmy smiled. "If the Knights of the Round Table could have brought King Arthur back, don't you think they would have? The Engineer must see that his plan has come to fruition."

"But not as he expected."

"No," Olmy admitted.

Patricia looked down at her clasped hands. "Do I lose anything?"

"No," the gate opener said patiently.

"And in exchange, I get to use this. . . .” She pointed to the miniature clavicle. "Why is it so small?"

"It has been deactivated," Yates said.

"It's yours?"

He nodded.

"Yates will transfer its power to you, and you will learn how to use it during the ceremony," Ry Oyu said. "You will stand by my side."

"Is Korzenowski here—I mean, his fragments?"

"He is within me," Olmy said, pointing to his head.

Patricia looked at Lanier, her expression that of a little girl uncertain whether she was being told wonderful lies, or incredible truths. She shifted her gaze to Olmy. "He's in your implant?"

Olmy nodded. "I carry additional implants in my body, sufficient to contain him."

"Something big is going on in your city, isn't it?" Patricia asked.

"Very big. Your companions back on the Thistledown should know more about it by now."

"That's why the President couldn't stay with us?"

"Yes."

"We have to rest," Lanier interrupted. "We haven't slept or eaten for hours—"

"You're going to push the Axis City into orbit around the Earth? Destroy Thistledown?"

"Not precisely," Ry Oyu said. "But enough for now. Mr. Lanier is right. After you've rested, we'll resume. Talk shop, I believe you call it."

Patricia narrowed her eyes and shook her head slowly. "I don't know what you people would want to talk with me about. I have to be a complete amateur, a primitive, compared with you. . . .”

"If we haven't convinced you of your value, and your influence, then we are not being sufficiently clear," Olmy said. "You are the source of Korzenowski's work on the Way. You laid the theoretical foundations. That is why we believe you can share the Mystery with him. He was your greatest student.

"You were the teacher, Patricia."

Mirsky hunted through the crowd of Russians for Pogodin, Annenkovsky or Garabedian, keeping an eye on the crosses passing overhead. The soldiers that had once been under his command eyed him sullenly, moving out of his path with fated indifference. He lifted up on his toes, trying to scan the sea of heads, and spotted Pletnev's red face and fuzzy short-cut crown of hair. Maneuvering in that direction, he came up behind the former heavy-lifter commander and laid a hand on his shoulder. Pletnev turned quickly and brushed the hand away, then cocked his head to one side on seeing Mirsky.

"Where are the others?" Mirsky asked.

"Who? The other assassins? You left us with a hellish mess, Comrade General." Pletnev's voice was thick, his words mushy, frightened and angry at once.

"Pogodin, Garabedian. Annenkovsky," Mirsky prompted.

"I haven't seen them since this. . . whatever it is," Pletnev said. "Now leave me alone."

"You were with them," Mirsky persisted. "What happened?"

"What do you mean, what happened?"

"To Vielgorsky, and the other political officers."

Pletnev surveyed the sky suspiciously, looking for crosses. "They're dead, Comrade General. I wasn't there, but Garabedian told me. They were shot." He turned away from Mirsky, murmuring, "I hope to God these hounds of heaven don't know."

More crosses flew overhead, causing heads to turn like a sea of wheat in a wind. Mirsky walked away, hands in pockets, bumping shoulders and ploughing his way through the men, face creased in concentration.

This must have been what it was like for the Stoners when the last holdouts were evacuated, Hoffman thought. Shuttle after shuttle of blunt-nosed craft flying back and forth to the bore hole and the huge tuberider Berenson said was waiting there, loading in groups of twenty from each chamber. She was glad Wallace and Polk were in her group; she had grown to rely on them. Ann was not; she was apparently still in the first chamber, or aboard already.

The woman in black, left behind by Santiago, tended her group of four hundred with all the mastery of a shepherd over a flock. Her dogs were the chromium crosses, which gently and insistently brooked no dissent, at least not dissent in terms of wandering away. Hoffman wondered vaguely if mood-altering devices were being used on them; she felt calm, not at all apprehensive, and clearheaded, even rested. Better in fact than she had felt in weeks.

About half in her group were Russians. By a kind of mutual consent, the Russians divided from the Americans, though the craft had brought them in mixed. Mirsky, as far as she saw, was not among them; nor were the officers who had taken command in his place.

Hoffman's time came. The woman asked them to step forward, pointing to each in turn, until twenty had been separated from the larger group. The blunt-arrowhead craft had landed as they were being chosen.

She took a deep breath when her turn came. In a way, this was a relief. All responsibility was gone now. This was a schism with all that had happened before. She found it surprisingly easy to let go.

Sheep-like, she boarded the craft with the others.

Chapter Sixty-One

Patricia and Lanier were given their privacy in a small cubicle at the south end of the terminal, to sleep and have time for Patricia to think. A pictor provided some semblance of familiar surroundings, using the same basic decor as Patricia's quarters in the Axis City, but Lanier was scarcely comforted; he was angry and confused.

"You don't have any idea what they're talking about," he told her as they sat on opposite ends of the "couch." "For all we know, they're out to steal your soul. . . . And I don't care what they say, it does sound suspiciously like that, doesn't it?"

Patricia stared steadily at the illusart window opposite, with its view of pine trees and bright blue sky beyond. "I suppose they could do that if they wanted," she said.

"Damned right they could. We don't know anything about them—they've manipulated our view of them ever since we arrived."

"They've tried to educate us. We know a lot more then we did then. What Olmy and Ram Kikura have been saying makes sense."

Lanier shook his head vigorously. He was having none of that; anger was a slow, smoking coal inside, and he could not damp it. "They aren't really giving you a choice—"

"Yes, they are," Patricia insisted. "They won't take anything from me I won't volunteer."

"Bullshit," Lanier exploded. He stood and felt wildly for the boundaries of the cubicle, which he knew was no more than three meters on a side. He could not feel them. The illusion was complete, even to the distance between them as he walked across the room. "Everything's a sham here. For all we know, nothing we've seen is real since we arrived. That would make sense. Why show us more than they have to?"

"They're not. . .” She tried to find the right word. "Not bad people."

"You accept that crap about your being the teacher, the precursor?"

"Why not?" Patricia turned to him and held out her hand. He walked back to the couch and took it. "I've seen some of the papers I will write. . . .” She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head, putting her other hand to her cheek. "I probably will never write them. . . but someone else who is me will, or has written them. And they really do point to all this. It's what's been in my head, unformed, for years now. I've known for almost as long that I was the only one, in our time, our world, thinking seriously about such things. So, ego aside, I don't disbelieve that." She smiled up at him. "Judith Hoffman thought I was the only one. You accepted that."

"You love being a cultural hero? Is that it?" Coming down on her too hard, he thought. Ease up. And why are you angry?

"No," she said softly. "I don't care, actually. There's not much I do care about now."

Lanier let go of her hand and backed around the table, rubbing his chin, glancing at her repeatedly from the corners of his eyes. "You just want to go home."

She nodded.

"You can't go home again."

"I can."

"How?"

"You know the basics, Garry."

"I want specifics. How can you find your home?"

"If they teach me how to use a clavicle, I'll return to the blank section of the corridor we passed through, and I'll search through a geometry stack. For them, geometry stacks have been garbage areas—useless, or worse than useless. But that's where I'll find a way home."

"Not very detailed plans, Patricia."

"They'll teach me," she said, regarding him with her large black eyes, not square at all now, not feline, but round and calm.

"And what will they take?"

"Nothing!" She leaned her head back on the couch. "They'll copy, not take."

"How can you trust them?"

She didn't answer.

"You really didn't need time to think, did you?"

"No," she admitted.

"Christ."

She stood and hugged him firmly, touching her cheek to his shoulder. "I don't know what we are to each other, but I have to thank you."

He cradled her head with one hand and stared away at the juncture of wall and ceiling, blinking, lips drawn down at the corners. "I don't know either."

"I was beginning to think I wasn't human."

"You. . .” He didn't finish.

"What I've been thinking. . . in some ways, that makes me more like them than like you. Do you understand that?"

"No."

"I suppose it also makes my Mystery appropriate for Korzenowski. He thought similar thoughts, and he had similar goals. He wanted to take his people home."

Lanier shook his head, rejecting everything.

"They're not going to hurt me. They're going to teach me. I have to say yes."

"They're blackmailing you."

She raised her head suddenly, frowning. "They aren't," she said abstractedly. "No more than I'm blackmailing them. Garry, I just thought of something. . . and why didn't I think of it before? Why are they opening another gate?"

"I don't know," Lanier said quickly. Her question seemed completely irrelevant.

"I'll ask them."

He laughed. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"That's why we were brought here, to witness the ceremony. . . . Well, that's obviously not the main reason, but it was part of the package."

He thought for a moment, still holding her. Despite, everything, despite his doubts and fears and suspicions, he had to admit. . .

That was something he would like to see.

"I think we should sleep," Patricia said.

It was not incidental that they made love, but Lanier realized the act was not necessary to Patricia. She was in sight of her goal; everything else, like the decor and the very bed they lay on, was window dressing.

That made him feel insignificant. And it made him wonder what Patricia had become since her arrival on the Stone.

"Am I human?" she asked as they lay together.

"Probably," he said, trying to keep his voice steady, and not completely succeeding.

By the time van Hamphuis's flawship arrived at the position formerly occupied by the Axis City, all gates up and down the Way had been closed and the lanes between them cleared. The situation was unprecedented in the history of the Way.

The Axis City had moved on. Under Corprep Rosen Gardner's direction, the city's flaw power stations had been seized from the last holdouts. Those who had been killed had had their implants carefully retrieved—some 183 citizens so far. The toll disturbed Gardner, but their deaths were not permanent. With the flaw shaft under his control, he had accelerated the Axis City, moving south toward the Thistledown. The journey had taken sixteen hours; van Hamphuis's flawship had followed, but there was little the President could do.

In the Thistledown's sixth chamber, four members of Gardner's Korzenowski faction had committed the ultimate crime—they had tampered with the Way machinery. The tampering was minor, but the penalty for even minor offenses was discorporation and complete wiping of all personality records. At this point, Gardner knew, there was no turning back.

The flaw did not need to extend beyond the actual northern boundary of the seventh chamber; its present extension, near the chamber's bore hole, had been purely for convenience during the final stages of the Thistledown's evacuation and the construction of the Axis City. The machinery was now adjusted to reduce the flaw's length by twenty kilometers.

Four teams of three citizens apiece then exited to the exterior of the asteroid, riding elevator shafts undiscovered by the recently arrived visitors. These shafts opened directly onto buried Beckmann drive units.

Using these drives, the rotation of the asteroid was slowed, and then reduced to zero. The result at first was fairly minor in all chambers but the fourth, where wave action in the broad expanses of water forced huge globules into the air. There wasn't time to damp the effects. Gardner was working on a tight schedule.

Radical Geshels, and the moderates who had never actually committed themselves, were given the opportunity to join Gardner's factioners. For many, there was no choice—Gardner's plans had little room for radical neomorphs. Populations were shuffled between the various precincts as quickly as possible, and City Memory was rearranged and sectioned, all in preparation for the next step of Gardner's plan.

The Axis City was partially unstrung from the flaw, the section containing Axis Nader and Central City first. It was Gardner's plan to reverse the city, leaving these precincts for the Geshels who wished to travel down the Way at near light-speed and force out the Jarts. What he needed to complete his plans were the two rotating cylinders of Axes Thoreau and Euclid.

The re-tuning of the gravity gradient between the Thistledown and the Way was extraordinarily delicate. The engineers within the sixth chamber had their hands full, especially when the large mass of Central City and Axis Nader was shunted to one side within the seventh chamber, allowing the remaining precincts to be unstrung.

The entire procedure took five hours. By the time it was done, Axis Nader and Central City had reversed position on the flaw with Axes Thoreau and Euclid. The two pairs of precincts and their related structures were separated by a kilometer, and the pair reserved for the Geshels—Central City and Axis Nader—moved slowly north along the flaw.

The visitors had been informed of their choice. Of the roughly two thousand captives, only four decided not to cast their lot with the group planning a return to Earth.

Among them were Joseph Rimskaya and Beryl Wallace. The other two were Russians: Corporal Rodzhensky and Lieutenant General Pavel Mirsky.

The asteroid was then set into rotation again. Within all the chambers, some damage was unavoidable, but in the fourth chamber, the results were catastrophic. The water globules slowly broke over the basins and land, billions of gallons snapping trees, scouring the forests and forming new rivers as the centrifugal force returned.

The plasma tubes within all chambers were suddenly extinguished. The atmosphere barrier fields remained in force, but the chambers were plunged into abyssal night for the first time in twelve centuries.

And in the seventh chamber, at the boundary of the Way and the end of the chamber itself, mechanical workers began setting powerful charges to blast the northern end from the asteroid and cauterize the Way.

There was little the President or his followers could do. Gardner's organization was masterful, and the dedication of his followers complete. Once again, human history proved that the worst mistake possible in politics was underestimating one's opponents.

Van Hamphuis had no choice but to accept Gardner's offer of a settlement and take control of the precincts allotted to the radical Geshels.

Within Central City's Wald, weightless, assigned to a neomorph Geshel guardian, Pavel Mirsky began to regret his decision. He seemed lost in a Boschian nightmare, and he asked himself if the urge for exploration and new things was worth the strangeness and anxiety.

There were always some disadvantages to completely abandoning one's past and culture. . . .

And Mirsky had committed himself to what amounted to the grandest defection of all time.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Olmy stood alone by the scaffold, staring at the clavicle. He wished the Engineer could interact with his thoughts, comment on his actions either positively or otherwise, but Korzenowski was stored inactively.

Vasquez and Lanier were still in their cubicle. For Olmy, the notion of sleeping for eight hours at a time was at once peculiar and attractive. To have a long, blank period in one's life, every day; to have that time free of thinking and immersed in a kind of other-world nothingness. . . Talsit cleansing was much more effective, but he was amused to find a primitive part of himself still longing for simple sleep.

He had never given deep consideration to the differences between humans of his time and theirs, except insofar as he had to plan for their needs. Even with all the accoutrements and additions and manipulations of his time, the similarities far outweighed the differences.

Yates crossed the smooth green carpet of lawn to the scaffold. His face was grim.

"Our time is limited," he picted to Olmy. "The defense station at one point nine ex nine says it's detecting excessive flaw radiation. The Jarts could be preparing to open a new, very large gate."

"Gate to a star's heart?" Olmy asked.

"That's the supposition. Station personnel are preparing to pull back."

The idea had been discussed in upper-level defense circles for decades. It was simple, if drastic: the Way at many points touched on stellar bodies. Since the Way was essentially a hollow, evacuated tube, opening a circuit of massive gates into the heart of a star would suck up the high-pressure, superheated plasma and distribute it throughout the Way. Barriers—though constructed of modified Way space-time—would transmit the extreme heat and finally break down, becoming level with the walls. The Way itself would remain intact, but everything else for billions of kilometers would simply dissolve to component particles in the fury.

"How fast would the plasma front travel?" Olmy asked.

"It would only be slowed by turbulence effects. Its final velocity could be about six thousand kilometers per second."

"Then we'd have about thirty-two hours to evacuate."

"If they can't open a gate remotely. . .”

The thought of the Jarts' being able to manipulate Way gates from a distance had sobered defense planners for years. The Jarts had never demonstrated such a capability within the human-controlled sector, but data from Way disturbances had led many gate researchers—including Ry Oyu's team—to believe they were doing so beyond 2 ex 9.

"I've passed word on to Senator Oyu," Yates continued. "Her father is with his researchers now. She'll tell him when he's available."

Olmy saw Patricia and Lanier emerge from the cubicle in the living quarters on the north side of the terminal shell.

"Will Ser Vasquez agree, do you think?" Yates asked. "You've spent much more time with our guests than I."

Olmy picted a symbol of uncertainty, carrying implications of resigned humor: an incomplete neomorph choosing between two high-fashion body designs.

"I wish I had your calm," Yates said. "I could use a Talsit session right now."

Patricia spotted Olmy and Yates and waved at them, then touched Lanier's shoulder. Both crossed the grass toward the scaffold.

"I have to see Ser Oyu," she told Olmy. Lanier seemed haggard, his eyes darting back and forth.

"He's in conference with his researchers. Senator Oyu will relay any message," Yates told her.

"Well, I suppose I don't have to tell him in particular. Olmy. . .”

Lanier focused on Olmy, his expression unhappy and resentful.

"I've decided. I'll make the bargain."

Olmy smiled. "When would be convenient?" he asked.

"Our time is limited," Yates said.

Patricia shrugged. "I suppose now is fine. Any time."

"I'll hold you personally responsible," Lanier said to Olmy, emphatically jabbing his finger at him.

"I take the responsibility," Olmy said solemnly. "She will be protected."

Yates went to inform Senator Oyu that they were about to begin. Olmy led them to the unfinished cupola where they had first met Ry Oyu, and picted instructions to a monitor floating nearby. "It will summon a medical worker. I'll make a few modifications in the worker and transfer the partials. You will then offer your Mystery and the patterns will be conformed. It's quite simple."

"If it works, it's a goddamned miracle," Lanier said under his breath, "and you say it's simple."

"'Lazarus come forth,' from your perspective, correct?" Olmy asked, hoping to amuse him.

"Don't patronize us," Lanier said. The man's anger was obviously building. Olmy thought he could understand why. Now that Patricia had made her decision, Lanier was cut out of the process. He was simply an appendage. Patricia had obviously ignored his misgivings.

The medical worker—an upright, elongated egg-shaped device about a meter tall, delineated with purple to show where manipulators and other instruments would emerge—approached them, floating a few centimeters above the grass.

Olmy picted modifying instructions and the worker extended a small cup-shape at the end of a thick metallic gray cable. He placed the cup below his ear and closed his eyes. Patricia watched, eyes wide, crossing and uncrossing the fingers of both hands. Her calmness seemed artificial now. Lanier's stomach knotted.

Prescient Oyu and her father joined them just as Olmy removed the cup. They said nothing, standing a few meters away to watch.

The medical worker moved closer to Patricia. A traction field spread out into a kind of cot before it, and Olmy asked her to lie down. She complied. The worker then spread a fan of black cables around her head like a hairnet.

The net adjusted itself, squeezing her hair. Patricia reached up to feel it. "I should never go out in public with this thing on," she joked.

Lanier knelt beside the cot and took her hand. "Just a couple of Hottentots," he said. "Blowing in the wind."

Patricia made a face, then rolled her head to look at Olmy. "I'm ready," she said.

"There's no pain, no sensation whatsoever," Olmy said.

"Well, whatever, I'm ready." She pressed Lanier's hand and released it. He stepped back.

The net tightened, and she winced at the pressure, not painful but strong nevertheless. Lanier winced in sympathy but did not move. Prescient Oyu walked to his side and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"She carries a part of our dream," the senator said. "Do not worry." Lanier squinted at her.

Patricia seemed to be concentrating, her eyes barely closed. Lanier felt a sick kind of fascination. There was no sound, nothing overt whatsoever, simply the transfer of whatever they were borrowing from her, copying.

She opened her eyes and turned her head toward him.

The net withdrew.

"I'm okay," she said, sitting up on the field. "I don't feel any different."

"The combination will take a few hours to mature," Olmy said. "Then Korzenowski should be with us again."

"Will he have a body?" Lanier asked. Patricia stood by him.

"He'll occupy the worker until one can be made," Olmy said. "He can project an image of himself, however. That would be one sign of his complete reconstruction."

Patricia took Lanier's hand in hers again and squeezed it firmly. "Thank you," she said.

"Thanks for what, for Christ's sake?"

"For being brave," she said.

Lanier stared at her in complete amazement.

Patricia, Lanier and Olmy followed the medical worker to the quarters where they had spent the night. Olmy judged it would be best if Korzenowski's first perceptions were in reasonably familiar surroundings—a normal room, sparsely decorated and without too many people—or nonhumans. Ry Oyu and Yates agreed. "Besides," the gate opener said, "you've been waiting for this moment for five centuries. It's your moment much more than ours."

In the quarters, they waited for fifteen minutes before Olmy prompted the worker to display an image showing the progress of the personality it contained. Patricia raised her hand to her mouth as the image manifested before them.

The image was grossly distorted, one-half of the body large and bulbous, the other small almost to vanishing. Its apparent solidity was imperfect, with some parts opaque and others transparent. Its color was predominantly blue. The elongated, side-slipping head seemed to watch them, turning from face to face.

"Don't be disturbed," Olmy warned them. "The awareness of body shape is the last thing to mature."

Across a period of minutes, almost imperceptibly, the distortions corrected themselves. The overall blue color became more natural, and the patches of translucency filled in.

When the adjustments were completed, Korzenowski's image was fully and accurately formed, Olmy noted with satisfaction. It matched the appearance the Engineer had once chosen for the official portrait miniatures: a slender, dark-haired man of medium height, with a sharp, long nose and inquisitive, humored black eyes, his skin colored light coffee.

Olmy still searched for deviations. The Mystery imposed upon the partials, however close to Korzenowski's original, was not exact. However, it was sufficient to return Korzenowski to full awareness, and that awareness would be patterned by the virtually complete memories of the partials to reproduce closely the personality that had been erased—assassinated—before Olmy was born.

"Welcome," Olmy said aloud.

The image regarded him steadily, then attempted to speak. Its lips moved, but produced no sound. The image wavered abruptly, and when it was solid again, said, "I know you. I feel much better—very different. Have I been reconstructed?"

"As best we can manage," Olmy said.

"I remember so little—like bad dreams. You were a child. . . when we first met."

Olmy felt the rise of another emotion that Ram Kikura might have regarded as atavistic. "A boy, five years old," he said. He clearly remembered first seeing the Engineer's partials in the apartment memory, remembered his child-self frightened and fascinated at meeting someone famous—and dead.

"How long have I been incomplete, dead, whatever I was?"

"Five centuries," Olmy said.

The Engineer's expletive would have been extremely crude in his day; for Olmy, now, it was archaic and quaint. "Why was I brought back? Surely everyone was better off without me."

Oh, no," Olmy said sincerely. "We are honored to bring you back."

"I must be completely out of date."

"We can correct that in a few hours."

"I don't feel. . . finished. Why is that?"

"You have to mature. Your reconstruction is still finding its pathways. You don't have your own body. You're occupying a medical worker."

Again the expletive, even stronger. "I am behind the times. Only a mental midget could have fit into the most advanced worker. . .” The image tilted its head forward, regarding Olmy from beneath its brows, eyes questioning. "I was damaged, wasn't I?"

"Yes," Olmy said.

"What's missing?"

"The Mystery. We had to work from partials only."

"Whose Mystery replaced it?"

Olmy pointed to Patricia.

"Thank you," Korzenowski said after a moment of thoughtful silence.

"You're welcome," Patricia said lamely.

"You look familiar. . . I've seen you before."

"This is Patricia Luisa Vasquez," Olmy said.

Korzenowski's expression was at first incredulous. The image extended its hand to Patricia. Patricia grabbed the hand, no longer surprised by the solidity and warmth of projections. "

"The Patricia Luisa Vasquez?"

"One and only," Patricia replied.

Korzenowski's image leaned its head back, grimacing. "I have an awful lot to catch up on." He released her hand, apologizing under his breath. He took Lanier's outstretched hand and shook it more briefly, his grip firm but not insistent.

Lanier was more than a little awed to meet the man who had designed the corridor. "I have a small. . . I don't know what it is, statue, hologram, whatever, of you. Back in my desk. You've been a puzzle to me for years. . . .” he realized he was babbling. "We're from Earth," he concluded abruptly.

Korzenowski's face was unreadable. "Where are we?" he asked.

"In the Way, at one point three ex nine," Olmy replied.

"Where is the Thistledown?"

"In orbit around the Earth and Moon."

"What year?"

"2005," Patricia said.

"That's Journey year?" Korzenowski asked hopefully.

"Anno Domini," Olmy said.

The Engineer suddenly looked very tired. "How long before you can educate me?"

"We can start now, even before your personality is mature. Is that what you wish?"

"I think we'd better, don't you?" Turning to Patricia again, he said, "You're very young. How much work have you done. . . how many of your papers?"

"None of my most important ones," she replied.

"This is not something I anticipated. . . . It is not an obvious result of our work. I mean to say, how could I have missed it? And you must tell me how you got here. . . and why you?"

Even before Olmy could arrange for the update of information, Patricia and the Engineer were deeper in discussion.

Within four hours, the researchers, representing seven of the species that utilized the corridor, had gathered around the scaffold. Each of these species had demonstrated its usefulness to the human patrons, though by no means their subservience; they were full partners in the venture of the Way, and they came in a wide variety of forms—though not necessarily much wider a variety than the neomorphs of the Axis City, Lanier thought.

There were three Frants, cloaked in the shiny foil jackets that seemed to be their usual clothing away from Timbl. A being shaped like two upside-down U's connected with a thick, gnarled rope of flesh—lacking visible eyes, its skin as smooth and featureless as black glass—stood unmoving on its four elephantine feet a few meters from the Frant, surrounded by a red line of quarantine. It apparently did not find the atmosphere uncomfortable, however.

A Talsit researcher stood on its eight limbs beside Yates on the north side of the scaffold, surrounded by a traction bubble containing its particular mix of atmosphere—very little oxygen, with a much higher percentage of carbon dioxide, at temperatures low enough to make condensation form on the field's flexible boundaries. Its mossy "antlers" were in constant motion. All the other nonhuman researchers were surrounded by similar fields, the most striking being a sinuous, snake-bodied, four-headed being suspended in coils in a levitated sphere of deep green liquid, like a preserved specimen.

From the evidence, human-form beings were not common.

Before the gathering, Lanier and the Talsit had engaged in a strange conversation—strange in its clarity and uncanny familiarity, as if they had been no stranger to each other than new neighbors at a block party.

The Talsit had stood on the north side of the scaffolding, conversing with a Frant while a second Frant waited silently nearby. The Frants had homogenized several hours before; there was little need for the second Frant to contribute to the conversation, unless parallel thinking was required. Lanier and Patricia had eaten as much from a bountiful floating lunch table as they cared to. Patricia had then gone off with Olmy to resume her conversation with Korzenowski.

Lanier found himself speaking with the Talsit almost by default. The Talsit had approached Prescient Oyu to discuss her father's plans for the ceremony's aftermath. Their conversation had been picted at first, and then she had shifted to English, introducing the Talsit to Lanier. The Talsit spoke perfect English, though nothing moved anywhere on its body in any way to show sound production.

Lanier didn't even bother to be curious; he had had a surfeit of marvels, minor and major. It took his full attention just finding the right words to explain how they had come to be here. In conversation with a being not even remotely human in shape, and of unknown psychological character (if it could speak perfect English, surely it could also provide a screen for its real thought processes), he talked casually enough about the Death, about alternate universes and invasions in space. The Talsit, in turn, discussed its own kind. Lanier found himself nodding in understanding to a story that would have been incomprehensible to him only a few short months ago.

The beings called Talsit were offshoots of a unified biological-mechanical intelligence that had once occupied the fourteen planets of a very old solar system. At one point, the intelligence had been entirely stored in memory banks, with no physically manifested individuals—not unlike the Axis City Memory. But gradually the intelligence had broken down into individuals—a condensation of consciousness within the system—and the individuals had created new forms for their physical manifestation. These had been the parent species of the Talsit. The parent species, this Talsit seemed to imply, still existed, but were introverted and isolationist; they had created the Talsit to act as mercantile representatives, consultants to younger civilizations. A circuit of gates happened to open onto one of their worlds, and they had begun trading, first with the Jarts who had opened the gates, and then with humans after the Jarts had been pushed back.

By implication, the Talsit and their ancestral forms were at least a hundred times older than humanity.

"Then why even bother communicating with us?" Lanier asked.

"Consider it a hobby of one's old age, or senility," the Talsit said, without a hint of condescension or dissembling. "My kind have services—particularly regarding the cleansing and reordering of information—which humans and others find invaluable. It pleases us to be useful, and in turn we acquire information of great value to us."

The call to the ceremony came a few minutes later, one of the Frants ringing a high-pitched, sweet sounding bell hung from a bar on the south side of the scaffold.

Lanier stood at parade rest, hands behind his back, next to Korzenowski's image and Prescient Oyu, while Patricia took a position of honor between Yates and Ry Oyu.

Ry Oyu's ceremonial clothes were simple, consisting of rough white cloth shirt and black pants. He wore black cloth slippers. Yates wore a forest-green robe, showing some signs of wear.

Ry Oyu stepped to the stairs that curved over the top of the rounded scaffold. He stood for a moment, head bowed, and then beckoned for Patricia to follow.

"You must learn this," Ry Oyu said to Patricia at the top of the scaffold. "The clavicle can tell you where a gate is to be opened, but only in part; you must also sense the point, and tune it to that desired world. There is as much of what you would call intuition as calculation."

He bent down and gripped the handles of the clavicle, removing it from its holder at the center of the radiance of traction lines. Patricia stared down and became dizzy; the top of the scaffold was at least sixty meters from the pit bottom.

"And there is also ritual. It tunes the mind," the gate opener said. "It prepares. It may not be strictly necessary, but I've always found it useful. Now." He held out the clavicle and closed his eyes. "We're not looking for the usual game today. I've been seeking this junction for fifty years at least, and until now, it's always eluded me." He opened one eye and gave her a querying half-smile. "You've been wondering why we're still here, opening another gate that we must inevitably close when the Jarts come or the Axis City passes over. Haven't you been wondering?"

Patricia nodded.

"Because whatever our disloyalty to the present Geshel rulers, I remain faithful to the Hexamon. I will serve the Hexamon even if they believe I'm a traitor, as they must if they know the role I've played in the secession. So to redeem myself, I open this gate."

"I still don't understand," Patricia said, head cocked to one side, eyes on the clavicle.

Ry Oyu removed one hand and spread his fingers, swinging his arm to indicate a circle. "All gates have been tuned to open onto worlds, planets. The Way passes an infinity of possible junctions with other worlds, and we must choose from a large subset of that infinity when we tune at each optimum point. You've noticed, perhaps, that our gates are always spaced at distances no less than four hundred kilometers. That's because of the rhythm of the geometry stacks. Do you understand that rhythm?"

Patricia nodded. "Yes."

"We do not venture into the stacks themselves. They commingle alternate universes and timelines in a way not useful to us. We work between." He axed the air with the edge of his hand. "We work within a range of ten meters, and within that range, there are perhaps a billion vantages. We tune as closely as we can to the location of an object with planetary mass; the clavicle tells us the mass by picting directly to our minds, giving us all the necessary information. Feel this." He took her hand and placed it on the opposite grip of the clavicle. Her mind was flooded with images, information. "Now look at me."

She stared at Ry Oyu, and into her head he picted a rapid, steady flow of techniques. "It would be much easier if you had an implant, but at least you have the inclination—and the motivation to learn. I cannot give you all the skill, but I can help you hone your intuition." He delivered another series of instructions. Hand still on the clavicle, she felt the flows of data merge.

"I can't help you find your way home," he said, tapping her hand to get her to remove it from the grip. "I won't be with you, and neither will Yates or Olmy. We all have business to attend to. But if your theory is correct—and I see no reason why it shouldn't be—then you can find the proper gate within the geometry stack. You have sufficient knowledge for the attempt. Now watch carefully. We do not open onto another world today. We open onto the Way itself."

Patricia frowned.

"You've seen the curve, Patricia; I'm sure you've calculated the curve of the Way."

"Yes," she said.

"Have you seen where it crosses itself?"

"No."

"It's a very subtle crossing, and the points are far-separated. At such distances, the Way's character may be very different.

"The Axis City will eventually reach those sectors in its travels, perhaps in millions of years, much sooner if the Geshels carry out their present plans. When we open the gate at this junction, we will know what the Way actually is, what we have created and perhaps how extensive it is. We redeem ourselves to the Hexamon by pioneering. Now do you understand why we have stayed here?"

Patricia nodded.

Ry Oyu turned to the researchers and his colleagues at the base of the scaffold. "Is the Engineer ready to witness?"

"I am here."

"Can you experience everything clearly?"

"Yes. I think so."

The gate opener took a deep breath and glanced sidewise at Patricia. "Today, we are all privileged," he said to her.

The clavicle hummed as he stepped down onto the traction field. He beckoned for Patricia to accompany him. She stood on the lines beside him, and the field dimpled downward where they stood, forming a cup around them. They were within a few meters of the floor of the pit when they stopped their descent. Ry Oyu kneeled and replaced the clavicle in its holder. "I've narrowed the region down to a few centimeters," he said.

Lifting his head, to Patricia's surprise he began to chant.

"In the name of Star, furnace of our being, forge of our substance, greatest of all fires, Star give us light, give us even in darkness the gift of right creation."

He adjusted the clavicle and gripped it tightly with both hands, closing his eyes and lifting his face to the heights of the terminal shell.

"In Fate we lay our trust, in the Way of Life and Light, in ultimate destiny's pattern, which we cannot deny, whatever we choose, however freely we choose.

"In the name of Pneuma, breath of our minds, wind of our thoughts, born of flesh or carried in machine, guide our hands, enthuse us, that we may create in truth ourselves, that we may manifest what is within, without."

Lanier saw Korzenowski's image mouthing the words along with Ry Oyu. Had the Engineer written the ceremony the gate opener now used?

The clavicle's hum rose in pitch. Patricia clenched her hands together in front of her, realizing that she was making a gesture of prayer. She could not persuade herself to untangle her fingers and put her hands to her sides.

"And in the name of the Eld, some of whom are with us this occasion, those born of flesh and those resurrected by the gifts of our past creativity; in the name of those who burned that we might find a truer path, who suffered the Death that we may live. . .”

Both Patricia and Lanier felt tears brim over and spill down their cheeks.

"I lift this clavicle to worlds without number, and bring a new light to the Way, opening this gate that all may prosper, those who guide and are guided, who create and are created, who light the Way and bask in the light so given."

He brought the clavicle out of its field receptacle and lifted it between his knees. The stream of picts issuing from the clavicle lit up his face with a fire-like intensity. The humming had passed out of range of hearing.

"Behold."

"I open a—new world. . . .”

The bronze surface of the Way beneath them seemed to degenerate into a crosshatching of black and green and red lines. Ry Oyu stood, keeping the clavicle level in his hands.

At the edge of the pit, standing as close as they could to the scaffold, the researchers, Yates, Prescient Oyu, Lanier and the image of Korzenowski stared down into the silent storm of the gate's beginning.

The traction cup lifted the gate opener and Patricia a few meters. Patricia became dizzy again, staring into the pregnant, whirling illusion of color and infinite possibility.

The illusion parted, an oily black circle forming at the center.

Ry Oyu handed the clavicle to Patricia. She took its grips firmly in her hands.

"Now feel the power of what is happening," he said in English. "Learn the sensation of a correct opening."

The clavicle was alive in her hands, part of her, connected with her by its constant picting. Ry Oyu's instructions to her had been quite detailed and were now fixed in her head.

The power was exhilarating. She felt like laughing as the clavicle broadened the hole in the surface of the Way. Overhead, the incomplete cupola that had sheltered Ry Oyu's work area now moved into position on its own, seeking the center of the disturbance.

"This is a dangerous time," Ry Oyu said to her. "If it gets out of control, the cupola encloses us and smooths out the disturbance. If that happens, we are forever lost to the Way. We go wherever the aborted gate takes us, and we cannot come back. Do you feel that potential?"

She did. Her exhilaration changed into a sensation of having something indescribably nasty and unfriendly by the tail. She kept her eyes on the clavicle.

"That's it," Ry Oyu said. "Olmy could not have been more correct. You're more of our time than your own."

The cupola's sketchy, racing lines shrank into the familiar active bronze coloration they had seen at other gate sites. At the center of the pit, the vortex surrounding the black circle began to rise, and the traction field carried them higher still.

"Follow me," Yates told Lanier as the researchers moved outward. They regrouped about fifty meters from the scaffold, near the site of the gate opener's work area. The ground around the pit was buckling, breaking up and forming a tumulus over the rising slope of the gate.

The scaffold and traction lines remained level. Ry Oyu resumed his grip on the clavicle. "A hundred thousand possibilities here," he murmured. "Through the clavicle, I can feel them. . . experience them. I learn about a hundred thousand worlds now, but I only want one. I listen for it. . . I know its character. . . I know the particular tangent it occupies. The clavicle controls its own probing, keeping its position steady, but I direct. . . . And find."

His expression was exalted, triumphant. The oily black circle widened and became an intense cerulean blue. Around the circle, the bronze Way material again took on definition, forming a smooth-lipped depression with the blueness at its center. The depression deepened; Patricia could not avoid characterizing the process as space-time healing, growing accustomed to the unnatural intrusion.

Around the circumference of the blueness, she received a camera-obscure, fish-eye-lens view of something long, bright and flowing, surrounded by massive dark objects.

"The gate is opened," Ry Oyu said, shoulders slumping. He slipped the clavicle into its receptacle and stretched out his arms. "Now we find out what lies on the other side."

"Do we enter?" Patricia asked.

"No," the gate opener said with a hint of amusement. "We send one of our mechanical friends. It makes its report, and we make our decision without immediately risking our lives."

The traction field cup brought them level with the steps at the top of the scaffold. Ry Oyu motioned for Patricia to precede him, and they joined the others near the work area.

A cubic monitor about half a meter on a side—large for such devices—floated up the new slope and passed through the bars of the scaffold. It slipped quietly into the depression and through the gate. Yates activated a pictor and tuned it to the monitor's signals, relayed by scaffold transponders.

To Lanier, Patricia's stature seemed to have increased. She appeared more self-assured, calm. Taking his hand and squeezing it between both of hers, she smiled at him and whispered, "I can do it. I felt it. I'll be able to follow through."

The monitor image had not yet come into focus. Yates translated picts carrying information about the conditions on the other side. "The monitor is in a high vacuum," he said, "with a very low radiation count. If we are indeed in another section of the Way, the flaw is particularly inactive and stable."

"There doesn't seem to be any flaw," Ry Oyu commented, squinting in concentration.

The visual image clarified.

"It's enormous," Senator Oyu said quietly.

At whatever point the gate had intersected the Way, the tube-shaped universe had expanded to a diameter of at least fifty thousand kilometers. "Geodesic drift," Patricia said.

"Well, that might account for it," Ry Oyu said. "But it may not be inherent."

Lanier didn't bother asking for an explanation; he doubted he could absorb it.

The Way was filled with cyclopean structures, dark crystalline masses thousands of kilometers long, some floating free, casting broad shadows against the opposite walls of the Way as they passed before an intense, meandering, snake-like plasma tube.

"Surface attraction is about one-tenth g," Yates said. "The parameters are substantially different, Ry. Do you suppose it's another Way, not our own?"

"Do we have reason to believe anyone else would have made a universe like this one?" the gate opener asked.

"No," Yates admitted.

"We imposed our own heritage on the shape of the Way when we made it cylindrical—I strongly doubt others would duplicate it. Not with the endless possibilities available."

"Still, there's a convenience to such a shape, a practicality if commerce is desired. . . .”

Ry Oyu agreed to that much with a curt nod. He seemed angry, surveying the results of his work. "It's very strange there," he said. "No detectable flaw, and the plasma tube is highly irregular. I'd say it's been tampered with."

"By Jarts?"

"No," the gate opener said. "Those structures are very un-Jart-like. I'm not sure I can conceive any practical uses for them—they're either distortions in the geometry, space-time extrusions and crystallizations, or. . .” He shook his head. "Or they're beyond our comprehension. And besides, I doubt very much if Jarts could have progressed so far. This junction—if it is a junction—has to be beyond one ex fifteen—over a hundred light years down the Way."

"There can't be any gates there, then," Patricia said.

Yates raised his eyebrows. "Why not?"

"Because that's beyond the end of our universe, in time. Gates would open onto. . .” She held up her hands. "Nothing. Null."

"Not necessarily," Ry Oyu said. "But you have an interesting point. The Way is adapted to fit conditions in its epoch of origin. Where it surpasses those conditions—extends beyond them—it may naturally reach other accommodations."

"Can the Axis City ever travel that far?" Prescient Oyu asked.

"I don't know. If the flaw ceases to exist, they would have to make adjustments. . . it would be difficult. And if there's no flaw beyond a certain point—"

"The Way is self-sustaining," Yates finished for him.

"It is indeed. It doesn't require sixth chamber machinery or any connection with the Thistledown."

"It looks empty," Lanier said, unsure he should enter into the discussion. "I don't see any traffic—there's no movement."

Yates instructed the monitor to survey the region. The images became greatly magnified, revealing the cyclopean crystals in more detail. The Way was filled with them—some soaring from one side to the other across tens of thousands of kilometers, the plasma tube curving around them.

All of the structures—even those floating free—were covered with cupola-like disks, each protecting the obvious blisters of open gates. The image magnified several more times. Shimmering strands of light passed in thick nets between the densely packed gates. There was traffic—commerce of some sort—but on an inconceivably vast scale, and of a different kind than they had ever witnessed.

More picts flashed beside the images. "Definitely no flaw," Yates affirmed. "The Way at this point is completely stable and self-consistent."

Patricia appeared half-asleep. She was in the state again, Lanier realized. She was struggling to understand what was happening—it was completely beyond him.

"It's causally connected," she said thickly.

"Pardon?" Lanier asked, glancing at the others and cupping her elbow in his hand. She opened her eyes wide and stared at him.

"If the Axis City travels at near light-speed down the Way, this is what will happen—even before the journey begins. The Way lies essentially outside time and has to accommodate any event within its length. This is what will happen—especially if the Thistledown end is sealed off."

"Yes? Please continue. . . .” Yates urged.

"She's right," Korzenowski said. "It's perfectly obvious. And you have somebody—not humans, not Jarts, not even of our universe—taking advantage of the adaptation."

Ry Oyu smiled broadly. "I'm afraid it isn't obvious to us. Please go on."

Patricia looked at the Engineer and felt a stir of recognition. Herself. . . Something about herself. Korzenowski nodded to her. "You're doing fine," he said.

"We're looking at the results, carried along superspace vectors, of what is about to happen in the Way," she said. "I was thinking about this before we left for Timbl, after the rogue came to my quarters. If the Axis City travels faster than one-third light-speed, it will twist the Way and create a space-time shock wave that will exceed light-speed, moving ahead of it. The shock wave will operate outside of time, arriving before its cause. The shock wave has already passed this point—perhaps centuries ago, perhaps even before the Way was opened. Something traveling at near light-speed on the singularity, the flaw, will strain it beyond its endurance. It will convert virtual particles into energy—radiate, 'evaporate.'" She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, seeing the mathematics being done even as she spoke. "The Way has been forced to expand to a stable configuration. The flaw has vanished."

Olmy said nothing, calmly listening to Korzenowski and Patricia. He's proud, Lanier thought.

"For several light-years, until the Way expands and the city's shock wave dissipates, everything will be sterilized ahead of the city. Nothing will exist in these segments but the city. All features will be wiped out, all gates fused shut." She pointed to the structures. "Obviously, the Way has expanded here, and relativistic objects along its length won't bother it quite as much."

Lanier tried to puzzle out the flaw's vanishing even before the construction of the object that would force its "evaporation." He quickly lost himself in contradictions, but the contradictions didn't seem to bother Korzenowski or the gate openers.

"When we've prepared the documentation—you can do that, can't you, soon?—" he asked Patricia.

She agreed. "With Ser Korzenowski's help."

"—Then we will know most of what we need to know," Ry Oyu said. "We can present our report to the President. His faction can do with it what they please." He smiled. "What, apparently, they must."

Bright red picts appeared before the defense monitor, signaling an urgent message. Olmy went to receive them. When he returned, his expression was jubilant—paradoxically so, considering what he said next. "The Jarts have opened their gate. It's a remote, at about one point five ex nine. They've cut off the last defense station. There's a plug of plasma reaching top velocity—it's about seven hours from us. We have to leave now."

Prescient Oyu looked to her father. "The Geshels will refuse to let the Jarts push them out," she said.

"Then the President has no choice now, does he?" Ry Oyu said. "The Way writes his destiny, and so do the Jarts. He must take his precincts, and we must take ours, and follow our separate paths."

Chapter Sixty-Three

Mirsky and the three other "defectors" had been given small spherical quarters in the Central City Wald. Three Geshel homorphs—two females and one of uncertain sex—had been assigned to host them and guide their short-term education and accustomization.

Mirsky sat within his sphere, tuned to various channels of picted information—some translated for them by pedagog partials of their hosts. He and Rodzhensky had accepted temporary implants to help speed tutoring and interpretation. They watched and listened and said little. Rodzhensky stayed close to him, while Rimskaya—the American with the feminine name—kept aloof. The others he paid little attention to. They were very small ciphers in a huge mystery.

The hosts came to them, incarnate to minimize alarm, and taught brief, high density classes while their guests absorbed as much as they could.

The sense of urgency was thick in the air; except for their hosts, the Geshels paid little attention to the defectors. The Wald was almost deserted, most of its occupants taking new work positions to ready the precincts for whatever might come.

The reports from the farthest-flung defense stations had reached the now-divided Axis City. The Jarts had opened a remote gate and allowed the deep interior plasma of a star to enter the Way.

It would take about seventy hours for the destruction to reach the end of the Way, but the occupants of the Geshel precincts of the Axis City had to decide their course of action quickly. If they wished to remain in the Way, and not give it over to the Jarts, they had to have their precincts up to at least one-third light-speed before encountering the plasma front.

With the entry of star's material into the Way, the plasma temperature would drop considerably below the level required for fusing, but would still remain in the neighborhood of nine hundred thousand degrees. The passage of the Geshel precincts would change that, however.

When they actually hit the front, their space-time shock wave would smash the superhot plasma into a thin film. The film, lining the Way after their passage, heated to temperatures far beyond those necessary for fusion, would then fill the Way with an even more powerful plasma. In effect, the precincts would convert the plasma and the Way into a tube-shaped nova.

Mirsky, trying to keep track of the public discussions, thought their plans were deliriously, deliciously insane. Whether he died or not seemed minor; he was in the middle of a grand scheme, far more ostentatious than anything he could ever have imagined.

The Geshel politicians, given their freedom by the secessionists, made frantic plans. There had to be sufficient shielding front and rear to prevent the precincts' being flooded with hard radiation; that would place a heavy strain on the four main flaw generators left to them, which would be burdened enough with having to contact the flaw at such high velocities. Could it be done?

Yes, the physicists decided. But just barely.

There would also have to be shielding along the flaw passage. The flaw itself would be emitting very high levels of lethal radiation. Could all the required shielding be maintained?

Yes. But with even stronger reservations.

Despite the doubts, there was a surprising consensus among the precinct's occupants. They did not wish to return to Earth; they looked to the future, not the past. And having fought Jarts for centuries, they were not about to give up the Way to them now.

Rimskaya, drifting through the woods outside his sphere, avoided hearing all the details. He prayed devoutly, not caring who saw him or what their reaction was. His principal worry was, could God hear prayers spoken outside of normal space-time? Would there come a moment when they were completely cut off from God?

His assigned host, a female homorph, kept her distance at his request, realizing there was little she could do to assure him.

For her, his questions fell into an extinct classification of knowledge, as meaningless as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Waiting for the news of the final plans to reach them, Rodzhensky and Mirsky floated a few meters from each other in the greenery. A macrame pattern of light-snakes brightened a deep three-dimensional glade beyond their quarters, casting leaf shadows over them.

Mirsky studied the young corporal carefully, noting the shine of his skin, the loose excitement around his lips, the way his eyes started from his face. The future is a drug for him, Mirsky thought. Was it that way for himself, as well?

"I understand so little," Rodzhensky confided, pulling himself along a branch closer to Mirsky's position in a crook. "But I feel I will understand—and they are so helpful! We are strange to them—don't you feel that? But they welcome us!"

"We're novelties," Mirsky said. He did not want to exhibit his own misgivings to the corporal. His own heart beat faster each time he thought of what they faced.

The female homorph assigned to the morose American tracted toward them.

"Your friend worries me," she said. "We're considering returning him to your people. . . . He won't admit it, but I think he's made the wrong decision."

"Give him time," Mirsky said. "We've all left a lot behind. We'll be very homesick. I'll talk to him."

"I will, too," Rodzhensky said enthusiastically.

"No," Mirsky said, holding up his hand. "Just me. We talked when I negotiated with the Americans, and we volunteered together."

Rodzhensky, abashed, agreed with a sharp nod.

Mirsky knocked on the pearl-colored translucent outer surface of the sphere. Within, Rimskaya answered, "Yes? What?" in English.

"Pavel Mirsky."

"No more talking, please."

"We don't have much time. Either you go back now, or you face up to our decision."

"Leave me alone."

"May I come in?"

The sphere's door dilated and Mirsky pulled himself inside. "They'll be leaving soon," he said. "There won't be any choice after they get started—you'll be here forever."

Rimskaya looked terrible—pale, his red hair sticking out in all directions, his face scruffy with a four-day's growth of beard. "I'm staying," he said. "I've made up my mind."

"That's what I told your hostess."

"You're speaking for me?"

"No."

"What does it matter to you? You're back from the dead. You don't give a damn about your position—your own people tried to kill you. Me, I've left. . . responsibilities, loyalties."

"Why?" Mirsky asked.

"Shit, I don't know."

"Maybe I do."

Rimskaya regarded him doubtfully.

"You want to see the ultimate," Mirsky said.

Rimskaya simply stared, neither confirming nor denying.

"You, me, Rodzhensky, maybe even the woman—we're misfits. We aren't happy with just living one life. We reach out." He held up a grasping hand. "I always wanted to see the stars."

"You wanted to see stars, so you went into space to fight a war!" Rimskaya said. "We don't know what we'll see. More of this godforsaken corridor." He wrapped his face in his hands. "All my life, I've been a hard-liner. Everyone thought I was a passionless old. . . asshole. Math and sociology and university. My life, held within four walls. When I was sent to the Stone—God, what an experience! And then this opportunity. . .”

"We know it will be interesting, far beyond what we could find on Earth."

"The others are going back to save Earth," Rimskaya said, fists curled tight against his sides.

"That makes us irresponsible? Perhaps. But no more so than all the people in this half of the city."

Rimskaya shrugged. "Look, I've made my decision, and I'm sticking with it. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."

"That's all I wanted to hear," Mirsky said.

"Are you wearing the implant they gave you?" Rimskaya asked.

Mirsky pulled his right ear forward and turned his head to show he was.

"I still have mine," Rimskaya said. He opened one fist to reveal the peanut-sized device.

"You'll need it," Mirsky said. He lingered a moment longer, and the American slowly raised the implant to his head and positioned it behind his ear.

Chapter Sixty-Four

"We leave each other now," Ry Oyu told his daughter and Yates. He held out his hand, and the Senator grasped it between hers. Olmy, Patricia, Lanier and Korzenowski waited for them beside the disk.

"What's he planning?" Patricia asked.

"He's going through the gate," Olmy said. "The Talsit will accompany him; one of the Frants, as well. All the rest are coming with us."

"He can't survive," Lanier said. "They can't possibly take enough food, oxygen—there isn't time to prepare—"

"He's not going incarnate," Olmy explained. "None of them are. They'll transfer personality to a long-term gate worker. They can research as much as they wish—open other gates, wait for the Axis City if it reaches that distance. They have millions of years of energy."

Prescient Oyu shook her head slowly, watching her father's face. "You've done well with me," she said. "It won't be easy, not being able to speak with you. . . ever."

"Come with the Geshel precincts," Ry Oyu said. "We might meet again, far down the Way. Who knows what their plans will be, if they succeed? And besides, somebody can always reopen this gate, find us again. . . .”

"No one will ever find this gate again," she countered. "Only you could find it and open it."

"She's right," Yates said. "It was your skill."

Ry Oyu nodded in Patricia's direction. "Korzenowski, or the Earth woman. They could. . . but then, Korzenoswki's returning to Earth, and she goes hunting for something even more elusive. Well, at any rate, nothing is final."

"This is," Prescient Oyu said. "I'm going back to Earth. It's what we've been working for." She let go of his hand.

The gate opener picted a symbol to her: Earth, blue and green and brown, clouds vivid and alive, and surrounding it, a loop of DNA; and around that, the simplified equation that Korzenowski had taken from one of the elder Vasquez's papers.

The Talsit in its cold bubble and a Frant in a white coat of permanent parting—unpacked just moments before—stood behind Ry Oyu. Prescient Oyu reached across and kissed him, then turned to join the rest at the disk.

The gate opener and his companions moved toward the workshop and the tumulus around the new gate.

"He fulfills his pledge to the Hexamon," Prescient Oyu said as the disk closed around them. "He'll guide the Axis City if it comes his way." She reached out to Patricia, whose eyes were again moist and touched the Earth woman's cheek. Removing a tear, Prescient Oyu placed it on her own cheek.

Olmy instructed the disk to take them out of the terminal, and up to the waiting flawships.

Both of the flawships, the gate opener's staff vessel and the defense craft they had arrived in, had removed themselves from the flaw and hung tethered by traction fields, a precaution in case evacuating defense ships came from the north. Olmy chose quickly; they needed speed, and the smaller defense craft was the faster.

They had to meet the accelerating precincts before they had reached one-third light-speed. There were two options then: the precincts could briefly pull in their generators and flaw grips, and allow the defense flawship to move through the passage; or the defense ship would have to disengage, hug the wall, and weather the pressure wave of particles and atoms pushed before the city.

But before they encountered the precincts, he had to fulfill his promise to Patricia.

In the barren sectors where she was likely to find the geometry stacks she needed, she would be sent with a clavicle to the surface of the Way. She would have very little time to accomplish her work; the plasma front would be right behind them.

Yates took Patricia to an isolated section of the ship and gave her final instructions on the use of the clavicle. "Remember," he told her when he was finished, "you have the instinct, and the desire, but not much skill. You have the knowledge, but not the experience. You must not be rash, you must be deliberate and careful." He took her by the shoulders and faced her directly. "Do you know your chances of success?"

She nodded. "Not very good."

"And you'll still take the risk?"

She nodded again, without hesitation. Yates let her go and produced the small box from his pocket. "When I press the clavicle into your hands and transfer its services to you, it will grow to its active size. It will work for you only; if you die, it will crumble to dust. So long as you live, it will serve you—though what use it will be if you succeed, I don't know. It will open new gates only from within the Way, not from without. It will recognize the existence of prior gates, even should they be closed. . . .”

Yates removed the clavicle, now little more than twelve centimeters long, and pressed it into her left hand. "Take both grips," he instructed. She held both between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. The clavicle picted a steady stream of red symbols at Yates.

"It doesn't recognize you now," he said. "It's asking for instructions from its last master. I will reactivate it." He instructed the clavicle in picted code.

The device slowly enlarged in Patricia's hands, until it was the same size as the clavicle used by Ry Oyu.

"Now I pass its control to you." More instructions in code, and Patricia felt a sudden warmth between herself and the device.

Korzenowski watched from a few meters back. Lanier floated behind him, near the flaw passage.

"I can talk with it now," Patricia said in wonder. "I can tell it things directly. . . .”

"And it can communicate with you. It is active, and you are its master," Yates said. There was a touch of sadness in his voice.

Korzenowski came forward. "I have some thoughts on your search—suggestions for technique," he said.

"I'd love to hear them," Patricia said.

At a steady acceleration of twenty g's, the flawship moved south along the Way.

The plasma front reached the sixty-kilometer sector reserved for the last gate opening, slamming against the barriers, the extreme heat upsetting their subtle geometry. Down came the first barrier, and the little oasis was incinerated; the circuit of wells was fused shut, and the surface of the Way became smooth and undisturbed.

Final messages from gates along the human-controlled length of the Way told of evacuations. Millions of humans decided to remain on the worlds beyond their assigned gates, rather than choose between the separated sections of the Axis City. The last remnants of Way commerce were shut down, and the gates were sealed, preparing both for the passage of the Geshel precincts and the arrival of the plasma front.

Despite the nearness of the plasma front, Olmy began decelerating. The flawship had two blunt-arrowhead flyers; Prescient Oyu was outfitting one for Patricia's journey.

Patricia went to Lanier and hugged him strongly.

"I appreciate all you've done for me," she said.

Lanier wanted to convince her not to make the attempt, but he didn't try. "You've come to mean a great deal to me," he said.

"Not just a green kid you have to look after?" she asked, smiling.

"Much more than that, I. . .” He looked away from her, face working through a variety of discomforts, and then shook his head. "You're something, Patricia." He laughed sharply then, through tears. "I'm not sure what, but you're really something."

"Would you like to go with her?" Olmy asked, tracting aft. In each hand, he held a small black spherical monitor.

"What?" Lanier asked.

"She'll need help. I'm going."

Prescient Oyu saw Lanier's confusion and explained. "You'll create a partial. The monitor will project the partial. It won't be able to report back to you, of course, since we must move on as soon as we release Patricia."

"The partials will die?" Lanier asked.

"They will be destroyed along with the monitors," Olmy said. "But we won't."

Lanier felt an eerie wind through his head. "Yes," he said. "I'd like that very much."

Ramon, reading Tiempos de Los Angeles, Rita fixing a meal for the homecoming. Coming home. Paul, waiting. What will I tell Paul? "You wouldn't believe. . .” Or, "I've been unfaithful, Paul, but—" Or just smile at him, and start over again. . .

Olmy and Lanier—rather, their partials—sat beside Patricia in the flyer. She carried the clavicle in her lap. The screen before her showed the barren, smooth surface of the Way. She held the clavicle grips tightly, feeling the quality of the superspace at each point "beneath" the surface, transmitted through the clavicle.

What she was looking for was far more difficult to find than a particular grain of sand on a beach. She was searching for a universe without the Death, and without herself, also—where the Stone had arrived, but not caused war, and where her alternate had somehow died.

Not finding that (and she was far from sure she could be that precise—though such a place would exist, and would be distinct from all the others), she would settle for a universe where there would be two of her. She would settle for anything that would take her home. She glanced at Lanier's image. He smiled at her, encouraging and uncertain at once.

And suddenly, without any reason, without any certainty of her success, she felt wonderful. Patricia Luisa Vasquez existed in a bubble of joy, independent of all that had gone before, not caring what would come after. She had never experienced anything like it. It had neither confidence nor euphoria in its character; it simply was an appreciation of all she had experienced, and would experience, a fulfillment of the compulsion she had had since childhood not to be normal. Not to live a normal existence, but to subject herself to the most extraordinary experiences she could possibly have. The world being what it was, she had long since decided she would have to create those extraordinary conditions in her head. And then, the world turned upon itself. The universes had twisted in some incomprehensible fashion and delivered to her an experience drawn from the visions in her head, made even more wonderfully strange and outré by history, by the actions of tens of billions of people, and who could tell how many nonhumans?

Her moment was not solipsistic; she did not feel in the least isolated or unique. But she realized how extraordinary her life was. She had already fulfilled her wildest and most deeply held dreams.

Anything else is gravy, she thought. Even going home.

The flyer landed smoothly on the surface of the Way. In her hands, the clavicle emitted a pleasant, busy hum, telling her that they would have to be several kilometers south. She informed Olmy's partial, and he lifted the flyer up for another short hop.

Overhead, the flawship accelerated south again.

She closed her eyes, letting the clavicle's sensations stream through her. She seemed to see a kind of digest of every cluster of alternate universes, tasting them, being part of them; but she could not grasp them. She could not do anything more with the sensations than guide the clavicle. No detailed knowledge about the other realms was conveyed; only the fact of their existence, and whether or not they fell within the range she was seeking.

The partials would not need a protective field, but she would. Olmy prepared a traction bubble and environment for her. Lanier stayed beside her. How much of him is here? she wondered. What is it like when a partial is destroyed?

Then she turned her full attention to the clavicle. The nose hatch opened and Patricia stepped out onto the surface of the Way, surrounded by the flexible, faintly glowing traction bubble. Lanier and Olmy followed, walking beside her without aid in the high vacuum.

"You have about half an hour," Olmy said, his voice conveyed from the monitor to her torque. "After that, the radiation from the plasma front will be dangerously intense. Will that be time enough?"

"I think so; I hope so." Patricia checked her bag and found everything in place: multi-meter, processor, slates and blocks.

She held the clavicle before her, searching. For ten minutes, she walked back and forth, north and south, the clavicle conveying the enormous stretches of alternate worlds she crossed with each step. She discarded impressions from nearly all of them, trying not to jam her senses.

Within another ten minutes, she had located a line several centimeters long that seemed to harbor the point she was searching for. She kneeled, the traction bubble comfortably flexible beneath her. The clavicle guided itself within this tiny space, her hands merely completing the causal connection.

In five more minutes, she had the search down to fractions of a millimeter. The information from each separate universe was much more complex now; she was indeed close to an alternate Earth, and the time period was approximately correct—within a few years.

"Hurry," Olmy said. "The plasma front is near."

It was very difficult. Her theories proved to be not quite as precise as she had hoped. Within even the smallest segments of the geometry stack, worlds of substantial degrees of difference interwove. She could see now why Korzenowski and his followers had initially regarded the regions of geometry stacking as useless.

The clavicle stopped. She could not tell if she was tuning the region finely enough, but she could spend days searching and not be any closer. She closed her eyes and gave it one final tweak.

"I'm ready," she said.

"Then do it," Lanier said. She looked back at the partial and smiled her gratitude.

"Thank you—for everything."

Lanier nodded. "You're most welcome. It's been fascinating."

"Yes. . . hasn't it?"

She began the gate dilation. To the north, the corridor was filling with a reddish glow. As the seconds passed, the glow progressed higher through the spectrum—orange, an awesome greenish blue—

The clavicle's whistle was painfully intense. She saw a circle of whirling possibilities at her feet, and then she saw the circle—little more than a meter wide—clarify, presenting a distorted picture of blue skies, something bright tan, large shapes and water—

She did not have the precise location. She would be on land—she could sense that much—but had no idea where on Earth that land would be. Wherever, the traction field would protect her.

Lanier's partial bent through her traction field to give her a parting kiss. His lips felt pliant, warm.

"Go!" Olmy commanded.

She stepped through the gate. It was like sliding down a hill. Everything twisted and spilled around her. She released the clavicle and then grabbed it again with one hand. There was the sound of water, something huge and sharp and white not far away, blinding sun—

Lanier and Olmy faced the oncoming radiation.

It's not like dying, Lanier thought. There's another, complete me escaping even now. But he will never experience these things. I'll never "report" to him.

They were surrounded by an intense brightness that went beyond light or heat. Olmy grimaced and grinned at once, relishing the sensation. He had sent partials to die before and had never known what their sensations were like. Now, he would experience it directly—

And the original Olmy would still never know.

"The monitors will last a fraction of a second in the plasma front itself," he explained to Lanier. "We'll spend the briefest moment inside a star. . . .”

Lanier, without pain, without much fear, faced directly north and looked into the heart of the furnace rushing down on them at six thousand kilometers per second.

There was not even time to savor the sensation.

On the flawship, perilously close to the ravening plasma, Lanier closed his eyes and told himself, again and again, that he had carried out his responsibilities and accompanied his charge to the very last.

Still clutching the clavicle, bag strapped to her shoulder, Patricia fell from an altitude of five or six meters into water.

She was not even wet. She lay in the bottom of the floating traction bubble, stunned. The water—a river or canal—carried her several dozen meters from the gate. She looked to one side to see where she was.

That was just as well. An intense, blue-white plume flowed from the gate and blasted the water behind into steam, covering everything with a thick white cloud. Fortunately for her, and for everything within a few hundred meters, the gate was fused permanently shut within millionths of a second.

She lay back in the bubble, partly blinded, with one hand over her eyes, and drifted for several more minutes until she grounded against a sand bar. Her sight had recovered well enough by then.

Standing, she surveyed the territory, heart pounding.

She was on the shore of a broad straight canal, the sluggish water a deep muddy brown. The bank was lined with tall green reeds. The sky was an intense, pale blue, cloudless—and the sun was very bright.

With some qualms, she shut off the traction bubble and took a deep breath. The air was sweet, clean and warm.

She was heavier than she had been since leaving Timbl. This time, she had no floater belt to buoy her up. The gravity was uncomfortable.

But this was undeniably Earth, and she was not in a nuclear wasteland. In fact, the scenery was hauntingly familiar. She had seen it all before. . . in the Bible classes Rita had insisted she take as a child.

Shading her eyes, Patricia looked to the west.

Across the canal and on a plateau were brilliant plaster-white pyramids, kilometers away but sharp in the clear desert air. She felt a moment of excitement.

It was Egypt. She could travel from Egypt—that would be a minor problem. She could get home from here.

She turned around. On a rickety-looking scaffold emerging from the reeds stood a small, slender brown girl, no more than ten or eleven, naked except for a white cloth tied around her hips. Her hair was done up in many long, close-knotted braids, each tipped with a blue stone. The girl regarded Patricia with slack-jawed wonder mixed with fear.

"Hello!" Patricia called, trudging up the sandy bank. "Do you speak English? Can you tell me where I am?"

The girl turned deftly on the scaffold and fled. For a horrible moment, Patricia wondered if she had slipped several millennia in time. . . if in fact she was in ancient Egypt.

Then she heard a distant rumble and looked up. Her relief was so great she almost whooped. There was an airplane, probably a jet, flying high above the desert.

Walking along the edge of the canal, clutching her clavicle and considering whether or not to reactivate the traction bubble—the sun was becoming uncomfortably hot—Patricia found a road and followed it. Beyond a grove of date palms, she came upon a little, square town made of whitewashed brick, the houses as blocky as benches and about as uniform. Very few people were about; it was just past high noon, and no doubt they were all resting until the day cooled.

Something bothered her. She hadn't thought about it before, but now that she remembered. . .

Putting the clavicle down on the stone roadbed, shading her eyes with both hands, she looked west again. From this vantage, she could see that the pyramids were surrounded by thick groves of trees, she couldn't tell what kind. That didn't seem right. Weren't the Egyptian pyramids in desert?

And how many large pyramids had there been on Earth? Three?

She counted eight smooth-surfaced white pyramids in a row, filing off to the horizon.

"Wrong-o," she said softly to herself.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Lanier floated in the flawship's prow, alone and content to stay that way for a long time. Kilometer after thousands of incommensurable kilometers flowed by, black and gold and indistinct.

What it had all come down to was that he owed more to Earth than he did to Patricia. And he could not help her complete her journey—see her through safely—because it was not his journey to make.

Did she survive? Reach her destination?

Even if she did, in this half-dream, half-nightmare Way of stacked universes, she was as far from him—and as inaccessible—as if she had died.

Olmy tracted behind him, clearing his throat.

"I'm fine," Lanier said testily.

"That was never at question," Olmy said. "I thought you might wish to know our situation. We're well ahead of the plasma front. The radiation is tolerable—though I'd suggest a thorough physical Talsit session when we arrive."

"What about the precincts?"

"We've communicated with them. As we suspected, they are accelerating toward us now. They've agreed to lift their grips and let us pass through them."

"Can we do that?"

"With some luck yes," Olmy said. "They'll be at thirty-one percent light-speed."

"I suppose that will be something to see," Lanier said.

"I doubt we'll 'see' much of anything," Olmy said.

"Figure of speech."

"Yes. There's food available if you wish it. Ser Yates is equipped to eat and would enjoy your company."

"How long until we meet the precincts?"

"Twenty-seven minutes," Olmy said.

Lanier swallowed hard and rotated. "Sure," he said. "I could eat."

He ate very little, however, glancing nervously about the cabin—at the nonhumans, secluded in their traction bubbles, dormant or disturbingly active (the snake with four heads was doing a quick, jerky ballet in its greenish fluid); at Prescient Oyu, who frankly returned his look; at Yates as he ate, the most human-seeming of them all, the most natural in his habits, and yet an opener of gates.

Olmy was quiet and still. Not far from him, the worker that held Korzenowski's reconstructed personality—and part of Patricia as well—floated wrapped in traction lines, its image shut off as it continued the long process of final maturation.

Lanier put aside the rest of his uneaten meal and said he would rather wait at the bow. Olmy agreed.

They crowded forward, Lanier beside Olmy and Yates, with the odd U-shaped beast on the opposite side of the flaw passage, still surrounded by its quarantine field. The two Frants relaxed behind them all, curled up with only necks and heads extended.

Ahead, the black and gold became a warmer orange and brown. The flaw pulsed faintly pink, disturbed by their acceleration.

"Just a few seconds," Olmy said.

The Way appeared to balloon outward in all directions. Lanier felt his hands tingle and his eyes grow warm. The flaw vibrated and glowed to a searing blue. The transparent bow grew darker and darker to compensate. The flaw passage through the middle of the ship vibrated and groaned.

Just a few seconds of life—less—

Lanier felt as if he were exploding. He yelled in pain and surprise and flung out his arms and legs.

Then it was over. He drifted against a net of traction lines, blinking. The Way was black and gold again. The flaw glowed faintly pink.

"There's no damage," Olmy said.

"Correction," Yates said, holding a hand over his eye. Lanier had struck him with an elbow. He apologized.

"Nothing to be upset over," Yates said. "All the more excuse for some Talsit. Quite exciting, actually."

Behind them, accelerating at four hundred g's, the linked Axis Nader and Central City met the plasma front with their building shock wave of space-time, beginning the process of converting the Way into an elongated nova.

The radiation level outside the flawship increased sharply.

The charges around the perimeter of the seventh chamber were set. Engineers had gone throughout the Thistledown, making final structural checks and testing the sixth chamber machinery. When the asteroid was blown from the beginning of the Way, the sixth chamber machinery would face an enormous strain—the end of its duties as stabilizer of the Way, and a sudden and violent increase in its policing of destructive forces inside the chambers.

The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid had been moved north a hundred thousand kilometers from the seventh chamber. Within the twin cylinders, the confusion was enormous. Most of the Axis citizens—the Naderites, orthodox and otherwise, and a surprising number of homorph Geshels—had been reassigned to new quarters; few were completely familiar with their new precincts. There was a sense of holiday, of triumph, and also a heavy air of anxiety.

By the hundreds, the Earth people filled the processing halls, tended by Geshel doctors and watched over by advocates.

A male homorph—Hoffman noted the word and added it to her rapidly growing vocabulary—took skin samples from his group of twenty Earth people. She was seventh in line. For each he had a smile and a few well-chosen words of encouragement. He was handsome, but not to her taste—a little too finely honed, his characteristics not noticeably different from those of a dozen other homorphs. Or perhaps her senses weren't sophisticated; she was used to the broad varieties of physiognomy from her time, when unavoidable defects—misshapen noses, corpulence, dental misalignments—produced a medieval carnival of features.

When the samples had been stored, he produced a face-shaped cup from his floating toolbox. "This performs a number of medical analyses," he told them. "These tests are also voluntary—but your cooperation will be most helpful."

They all cooperated, peering into the cup and watching a series of complex patterns for several seconds.

Throughout the proceedings, she felt a sense not of coming misery or servitude, but of camaraderie. So many of the attendants proudly flew projected flags over their left shoulders. Flags of India, Australia, China, the United States, Japan, the USSR, and other nations. All were willing—eager, even—to speak to their charges in native tongues.

When the medical exams were completed, they were led off to a series of elevators opening on one side of the hall. Ann Blakely, Lanier's secretary and now Hoffman's, crossed over from another group. With her was Doreen Cunningham, former head of security in the science compound.

"Everybody's so tense," Cunningham whispered to Hoffman.

"Not me," Hoffman said. "I feel like I'm on some kind of holiday. The big folks are taking over now. Oh, Lord." She had just peered into their elevator. It didn't have any floor. Even with explanations and a demonstration from the attendants, it took some coaxing to get them to move forward.

They hung on to each other as a group of sixty ascended. Cunningham kept her eyes closed. Most of the Russians were resigned to the worst, she told Hoffman; their gloomy pessimism kept them pretty much to themselves.

"Somebody told me a few of our people have defected," Hoffman said, keeping her eyes resolutely on the back of the person in front of her. The elevator walls were too uniform to show motion, and there was no sensation, unpleasant or otherwise, but she still wasn't enjoying the trip.

"Four—two Russians and two Americans; that's what I've heard," Ann said.

"Anybody know who?"

"Rimskaya," Cunningham said. "And Beryl Wallace."

"Beryl. . .” She raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

"I wouldn't expect that from her. . . or Rimskaya." Did she feel they had betrayed her? That was ridiculous. "What about the Russians?"

"One of them is Mirsky," Ann said. "I didn't recognize the second name."

Mirsky didn't surprise her at all. She could read strangers clearly but not the people in her own command. So much for the instincts of a master administrator.

Their quarters were spread through the precincts. More homorphs met them as the groups were further divided and escorted to apartments on different levels.

"You'll be sharing quarters in parties of three," their escort told them. "Space is at a premium now."

"Roomies?" Cunningham asked Hoffman and Blakely.

"Roomies," Hoffman said. Blakely nodded.

Their group of twelve dwindled rapidly as attendants shunted them into vacant quarters. They were the last three, escorted by a single female homorph, who picted a Russian flag over her shoulder. Their apartment was at the very end of a long, gently curved cylindrical hallway. Green numbers beneath the door glowed brightly as they approached.

The rooms were small and very blank. The homorph remained to give them basic instructions on use of the data services. She then wished them well and departed.

"Such a hurry," Blakely said, shaking her head.

"Since we're out of the action," Hoffman said, "or along for the ride, whatever, we might as well settle in."

Within minutes, they were eagerly discussing the possibilities of decor with an assigned ghost from the library. They had several hours before the Breakout, as it was being called; Hoffman used that time to contact others in the precinct who had been assigned quarters.

Blakely and Cunningham decided on an interim decor which gave some color and shape—and considerably more apparent living space—to the apartment. Hoffman joined them to examine the facilities, and to sample the food provided by an automatic kitchen tucked in one corner.

Citizens and Earth people alike, the assigned ghost informed them, would be able to witness the breakout, almost in its entirety. Monitors placed throughout the Thistledown would transmit detailed views of the events and their results; everyone had a ringside seat, if they desired one.

No longer hungry, or very interested in playing with the quarters, the three women sat before a continuous documentary of what was happening in the asteroid and the precincts.

The images were almost too real. After a few minutes, Cunningham turned away from the display and began giggling uncontrollably. "This is ridiculous," she said, clutching her cheeks and rolling back on the apparent Oriental-pattern carpet. "It's terrifying." Blakely caught the bug next.

"We're hysterical," she said, and that sent them both into fresh paroxysms. "We don't have any idea what's going on."

"Oh, I do," Hoffman said solemnly, feeling left out.

"What?" Cunningham asked, trying to be serious.

Hoffman rolled one hand into a near-cylinder. She peered through it at them. "Blow one end off—the end no one ever tried to drill through. The north pole."

"Jesus," Cunningham said, her giggles gone as quickly as they had started. "What would have happened it we had tried to drill through it? Where would the drillers have ended up?"

"Blow the north pole off," Hoffman resumed, ignoring the unanswerable question, "and knock the Stone off the corridor. And after that—"

"What?" Ann asked, owlish now and also very serious.

"This half of the city leaves the corridor. We become a space station."

"And the Stone?" Cunningham asked.

"Another moon."

"And we go back to Earth?" Blakely asked.

Hoffman nodded.

"Damn," Blakely said. "It's a. . . I don't know what it is. A fairy tale. Maybe it's the day of resurrection. What did they call it? Rapture. Dead people flying up through the freeways. People leaving their cars right through the roofs." Embarrassed, Blakely turned back to the projected display. "That doesn't make any sense, does it? No freeways, no cars. Only angels coming from the sky."

Hoffman made a deep, shuddering sigh. "You're right," she said. "It's a fairy tale." Then, abruptly, she broke into laughter, and couldn't stop until her lungs ached and her face was wet with tears.

An hour before the scheduled breakout, Corprep Rosen Gardner picted a personal message to Hoffman requesting that he be allowed to visit. A few minutes later, he arrived at the apartment door in person—"incarnate," Hoffman reminded herself. She invited him in. By that time, they had all regained some semblance of control.

Gardner's political work on behalf of the divided Hexamon and the Naderites was no longer necessary, he explained; he had volunteered to act as Corprep in the New Nexus for the Earth people, and chose Hoffman as the most logical person to speak with. He offered to keep her informed by linking her with his private memory and information service.

Her vacation was over, she thought, not without some regrets. She was on call again.

"I also bring news," he said, standing before her with his hands behind his back. She was beginning to get a sense of the orthodox Naderites—dedicated, almost chivalric, not unlike some of the political conservatives she had dealt with on Earth. "We have word of Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the four who were sent to find her."

"Yes?"

"Three of the four have returned to our precincts. They are Lawrence Heineman, Karen Farley and Lenore Carrolson. They were kept as captives for a time, I am ashamed to say, by the Geshels in Axis Nader and Central City. They were released just before the Geshel precincts began acceleration. They will join your people shortly."

"And the others?"

"Patricia Luisa Vasquez was given an opportunity to find her way home," Ser Gardner continued. "What that means, precisely, I am not sure; the details are sketchy. She and Garry Lanier were detained and sent with the gate opener and his party to one point three ex nine; many in that party, including Lanier, are now on their way back, and have passed through the accelerating precincts safely. They will not return to our sector in time to join with us, however."

She had no idea what a "gate opener" was and didn't feel it was appropriate to ask. She could look it up later. "Are they going to leave the corridor?"

"I do not know," Gardner said. "Their leader, Ser Olmy, has been informed of the timetable. He believes they can escape the sealing of the Way. They have been delayed by stopping at several reopened gates to drop off nonhuman clients."

Hoffman absorbed the news quietly, slapping her left hand lightly against her thigh. She had assumed the four searchers and Vasquez had died or been irretrievably lost in the shuffle. For the time being, she had managed to forget about them. Now she once again had something to worry about, with little knowledge of the perils involved, or their chances for success.

"Our zero hour will be in forty-three minutes," Corprep Gardner said. "By the way, I thought I would inform you that numbers of Hexamon citizens have been solicited by a small group of your people. There is a 'wild party' going on in the quarters of Axis Thoreau. Some of your female personnel are bartering sexual favors, for what commodities I don't know. I have placed that party off limits to my people."

Hoffman looked at him, startled, not sure how to respond. "That's wise," she finally managed. "I don't know who would corrupt whom the most."

In the stone:

From end to end of the seven chambers: darkness and quiet. In the first chamber, clouds had built up since the re-rotation; rain threatened in the darkness.

In the bore holes, the absolute silence of vacuum, and no activity but the occasional flight of a tiny monitor.

In the second chamber, a faint whistle of wind as the atmosphere regained its equilibrium. More windows had broken out, and some buildings—including a mega—had collapsed despite the efforts of the engineers.

In the third chamber, much the same, though no buildings had collapsed. The scattered glows of still-active illusart windows in Thistledown City resembled a swarm of fireflies.

In the fourth chamber, the washed-out forests and unleashed waters had finally made their peace with each other. The compounds formerly occupied by Eastern and Western bloc personnel had been washed away, their debris carried down to the lakes or jammed up against trees near the shorelines.

Those who had died to invade or defend the Stone—the Potato—the Thistledown—still lay in their graves, unseeing, their patterns flown, personalities vanished, Mysteries made even more mysterious.

The fifth chamber: as dark and hollow as a vast cavern in the Earth, with only the eternal sound of waterfalls and rivers.

The sixth chamber, vigilant, the only chamber besides the seventh still illuminated by a plasma tube, although that was uncertain and unreliable.

The plasma tube flickered and was extinguished. No matter. All the preparations had been made, and now only monitors patrolled the Thistledown's vastness.

The seventh chamber. A wind blew gently down from the cap, rustling the copses of scrub forest; it lazed through the abandoned tent with a faint whistle, flapping the canvas. A section of the tent sagged where a pole had drifted loose during the de-rotation. Surprisingly little else had been disturbed.

The detonators waited patiently beside their charges.

The joined precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were too far down the Way to be visible from this point without the aid of a high-powered telescope. The Way seemed empty, infinite, eternal and serene: the greatest thing ever created by human beings.

Outside the Thistledown, black space and stars and Moon and poor battered, burned, winter-besieged Earth, where few if any were even thinking of the asteroid or the possibility of rescue. How could there be rescue from such total misery and death? History had passed them by.

The asteroid's overhauled Beckmann drive engines prepared for their part in the drama, stockpiling reaction mass to be slung out and dematerialized in the combined beams. They would reduce the kick of the separation, and the combined kick and counter-thrust would maneuver the Thistledown into a circular orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of some ten thousand kilometers.

The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid began their acceleration, in an apparent suicide run to smash themselves against the seventh chamber cap. Within, twenty-nine million human beings—corporeal and otherwise—did the various things humans do while waiting to see if they will live or die.

Behind the precincts, half a million kilometers down the Way, a tiny defense flawship was decelerating drastically, the flaw ahead of it brightening to violet and blue. It had to slow to Earth orbital velocity by the time it followed the linked precincts out the end of the Way—if it managed that feat at all.

The charges buried in the walls of the seventh chamber synchronized.

The grips of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were withdrawn, and the huge cylinders coasted south toward the seventh chamber cap at just a little over forty thousand kilometers per hour, or eleven kilometers per second.

The detonators reached their appointed microsecond.

Within the seventh chamber, there was a noise beyond human description. Billions of tons of rock and metal rushed in toward the axis from the seven charge points, and immense fissures shot outward to the vacuum of space.

Around the northern pole of the asteroid, dust and debris spread out in a wide circular fan, followed by a white glow more brilliant than the sun. The glow faded to red and purple. A seventy-kilometer-wide monk's cap of rock was propelled away from the asteroid. The asteroid withdrew much more slowly from its severed end, and for the briefest moment, between them, there was a hole in space, filled with the light of the plasma tube, showing an infinite perspective—

Out of which flew the linked precincts of Axes Euclid and Thoreau, barely missing the asteroid itself, shunting aside debris with conical traction fields. Through the fading glow and spinning chunks of rock and metal, the precincts passed out of range of the Thistledown's Beckmann drives. The drives then fired to maneuver the Thistledown into orbit.

The Way was now an independent entity. The hole in space began to heal, wrapped in a thousand varieties of darkness—violet and sea green, carmine and indigo—venting winds mightier than a thousand hurricanes into the vacuum.

Closing.

Sealing itself off forever from this universe.

Olmy sat back and closed his eyes. Yates was more animated, rubbing his hands together. Senator Oyu appeared as cool as ever, but Lanier noticed her eye movements were frequent and jerky.

If Prescient Oyu was even slightly nervous, and Olmy resigned, then Lanier figured he had every right to be terrified.

"Are we going to make it?" he asked.

"Just barely," Olmy said, eyes still shut.

Lanier faced the bow.

The brightness of the seven coordinated blasts had reduced the bow to opacity. Now it cleared and gave them a view of the Way's beginning. Within a glowing circle of molten asteroidal debris and frozen streaks of rushing water vapor was a circle of blackness.

The circle was shrinking, being taken over by an iridescent nullity that hurt the eyes: the new terminus of the Way.

And then, within the diminishing black circle, Lanier saw a dull white crescent. He blinked.

The Moon.

The flawship twirled in the outrushing atmosphere. The iridescent nullity had almost completed its task; it seemed to take them forever to approach the rapidly shrinking blackness and crescent Moon.

Chunks of soil rose from the walls and shimmied up the fresh, nacreous boundary. The boundary eclipsed the Moon.

"Oh, God," Lanier said. He clasped his hands and closed his eyes.

Epilog - Four Beginnings

One - 6 P.D.

And all the king's horses, and all the king's men. . .

The phrase occurred to Heineman often as he piloted a blunt-arrowhead flyer from point to devastated point around the globe. What the Death itself had not incinerated or poisoned, the Long Winter had ravaged; it had seemed for a time that even the ingenuity, technology and power of the New Hexamon itself could not make the situation right.

Yet, as Lenore—his wife of four years—reminded him during his worst, most discouraged moments, "They managed to climb back up even without our help—our presence has to make things move faster."

But even hope and the prospects of a brighter future could not take the edge off, or reduce the bitter gall of what he saw in the course of a single day's surveying.

India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and much of South America had emerged from the Death with minor damage. North America, Russia and Europe had been practically sterilized. China had lost a quarter of its population in the nuclear exchange; another two-thirds had died of starvation during the Long Winter, which was subsiding only now, with help from the orbiting precinct. Southeast Asia had crumbled into anarchy and revolution and genocide; the destruction there was almost as complete.

Ashes, barren plains, snow-covered valleys and hills soon to become glaciers; scudding gray, snow-thick clouds casting black shadows over fallow earth; continents given over to bacteria and cockroaches and ants, and among these new ecologies, a few scattered animals who had once called themselves human beings, who had once lived in comfortable houses and known the basics of electrical wiring and taken newspapers and subscribed to provincial points of view about reality. . .

Who had once had time for the luxury of thought.

It was heartbreaking. Heineman came to think of his kind—the engineers and scientists and technicians of the Earth—as the very tools of Satan himself. His latent Christianity returned with a vengeance. He knew he severely tried Lenore's patience, but from his meandering visions of apocalypse and angels and resurrection he could at least take some solace, find meaning, and search for destiny and God's plan. If he had once been an agent of Satan, now—without switching occupations—he was an agent of the angels, of those who would transform Earth into paradise. . . .

Lenore tried, again and again, to point out that engineers were as much responsible for saving the Earth as for destroying it. Without the orbital platforms and the whole paraphernalia of space-based defense, the Earth would have been wiped utterly clean of life; the NATO and Soviet platforms managed to destroy some forty percent of all missiles.

Not enough, not enough. . .

And how many children, how many animals, how many innocent and—

But, Lenore would counter, no one born with a mouth and a need is innocent. . . .

She was often right, of course.

The masters he served now were not perfect, hardly angelic. They were intelligent, powerful, reasonable; their leaders lacked the ignorant erratic blindness of Earth's leaders. But they still differed with each other, sometimes strongly.

So Heineman, with his wife, flew the skies of Earth and charted the damage, and hoped for a day when grasses would grow and flowers bloom, when snows would recede and the air would be clear of radioactivity. He worked hard for that day.

And he was faithful to his new masters, for he was born again in more ways than one. On his first day back on Earth, he had suffered a fatal heart attack.

Larry Heineman was on his second body. Lenore assured him it was better than his first.

He had his doubts, but it certainly felt better.

New Zealand dusk, with another spectacular sunset in the offing. Overhead, the large beacon of the Thistledown rose clear and unobscured, and not far away, the speeding point of the orbiting precincts crossed the sky in the opposite direction.

Garry Lanier emerged from the Talsit tent and saw Karen Lanier speaking with a group of farmers at the camp fence. The farmers had brought their children to the camp two weeks before for Talsit cleansing; they, at least, would not give birth to monsters, or suffer the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. But for the adults, there was still much suspicion and distrust; the early rumors of alien invasions and hordes of sky-traveling devils had seemed peculiarly convincing in the aftermath of the world's end. Karen's obvious pregnancy—six months along—did much to reassure them they were dealing with real human beings.

Lanier still had not told their story to any Earth-bound survivors. Who could absorb such an incredible and complicated tale when one's thoughts were on simple survival and the health of one's children, or sheep, or townspeople?

He stood with his hands in his overalls pockets and watched Karen talking quietly with the shepherds. They had lived and worked together since returning to Earth and had married two years ago. Their life was busy, and they were good for each other, but. . .

He was not yet content, not yet free of the manifold neuroses he had picked up in the past decade. At least he could feel the edges of his mental wounds puckering and healing, scarring up, perhaps even smoothing away.

Lanier only took physical Talsit sessions to cleanse his body; they were required at least every six months to prevent ill effects from the atmospheric radiation. He did not indulge in mental Talsit, whatever Olmy's urging; he was, after all, a rugged individualist, and he would rather accomplish those things on his own.

In a few months, he and Karen, if they could be spared from their labor here, would join Hoffman and Olmy and perhaps even Larry and Lenore. They would reload their temporary implants with new training, new data, and work with Earth's corprep, Rosen Gardner, and Earth's senator, Prescient Oyu, to coordinate the massive task of cleansing the atmosphere and reorganizing the survivors.

Paradoxically, the Naderites would soon have to deal with the infant cries of their own creed, which was rapidly gaining power in areas not yet touched by the reconstruction.

Lanier did not often think of the Way now, or of what had happened years past. His mind was too occupied with more immediate concerns.

But every now and then he would shut his eyes for a moment and open them again. He would turn to Karen and meet her sunny smile and run his hands through her yellow hair.

No sense worrying about those who were farther away than the souls of the dead.

Two - Journey Year 1181

Olmy stood in the Axis Euclid public observation chamber, hands folded behind his back, waiting for Korzenowski. Together they would try to convince Earth's chief advocate, Ram Kikura, that the legal rights of the survivors on Earth could not supersede the New Hexamon's duty to eventually force them to undergo Talsit purging. He gathered his arguments in his head:

If they were not purged mentally as well as physically, the condition of their thinking would be such that strife and discord would tear the Earth apart again, in centuries if not sooner. They had to be mentally healthy to face the future the New Hexamon was already structuring for them; there was no room for the kind of archaic, sick thinking that had led to the Death in the first place.

Olmy was not sure he could convince Ram Kikura, however. She had been rereading the Federalist Papers and consulting ancient constitutional law cases.

Korzenowski arrived, late as usual, and together they spent a few minutes watching the passage of continents, seas and clouds below. The horizon was still orange and gray with dust and ash in the stratosphere; where clouds parted, much of the land was covered with snow.

"Is your woman going to give us a hard time today?" the Engineer asked.

"No doubt," Olmy said.

Korzenowski smiled. "I have a confession. Another young woman has been giving me difficulties lately. Oh, I realize we should all be concentrating on the reconstruction. . . but I think you'll understand why my mind wanders."

Olmy nodded.

"She probably did not succeed," Korzenowski said.

"At going home?"

"It's very unlikely. I've been thinking about Way theory. Part of me keeps pursuing those problems. We understood the geometry stacks so little. When Patricia expressed her theories, they seemed right at the time. . . and they very nearly were. But not right enough to take her home."

"So where is she now?"

"That I cannot say." Korzenowski held one hand to the side of his head. "This persistence, though. . . this pressure to keep working on the problems. . . I can't say I object. The theory is fascinating. Thinking about it is one of the most enjoyable things I can do. And perhaps some day we can try again."

"From Earth?" Olmy asked.

"We still have the sixth chamber," Korzenowski said. "It wouldn't be nearly as difficult as it was before. And we could do it better."

Olmy didn't reply for some moments. "It may be inevitable," he conceded, "but let's not mention it to the Nexus right away."

"Of course," Korzenowski said. "After all this time, we—I am very patient." The Engineer's intense, sharp gaze, like that of a cat waiting to pounce, made the hair on Olmy's neck tingle.

He hadn't experienced such an atavistic response in years.

"Let's go fight the good fight with your advocate," Korzenowski suggested. They turned away from the view of Earth and took an elevator to the Nexus antechambers, where Suli Ram Kikura waited.

Three - Pavel Mirsky: Personal Record

If I am not too far off—or the distorting effects of our journey are not too difficult to calculate—then today is my thirty-second birthday.

I have settled in to life in the Central City, taking part in the rituals and exchanges of the Geshel life. I update my personality copies each week and make the acquaintance of dozens of citizens every day, many anxious to converse with me; and I work.

I study history. Those who assign work here believe that my perceptions and abilities make me a unique lens through which to view and interpret the past. Rodzhensky helps. He has adapted far more completely than I, and even plans, in his next incarnation, to take on a custom neomorph body.

I often meet with Joseph Rimskaya, but he is still morose and not very stimulating. I believe he is homesick and perhaps should not have defected. He plans to undergo Talsit therapy soon, though he has said that before. Beryl Wallace, the other American, we seldom see. She has been assigned to an observation party; a unique and sought-after job, in which I believe she must be serving more as a mascot than anything else, but I could be wrong. The implants can perform wonders.

I was never an intellectual. Philosophy bored me; questions of ultimate meaning and reality seemed pointless. I did not have the capacity for far stretches of the imagination. With the implants, all that has changed. I have taken a dozen more steps on the road to being a different person.

We have voyaged a considerable distance since achieving near light-speed. I do not believe anyone expected what is happening now. The Way is so complicated; even those who created it could not predict all of its possibilities.

We now journey down a ghost Way, its local nature altered by the violence of our near light-speed passage. It has no diameter or boundaries as such; objects with mass simply cannot exist beyond a distance of more than twenty thousand kilometers from the course on which we ride. (The flaw, or singularity, vanished three months ago. Simply evaporated in a pulse of newly created particles, some of them unknown even to the Geshels.)

We have traveled beyond the domain of the super-set of external universes which encompassed all our various world-lines. Even were we to stop now and open gates to the "outside," whatever that may be, we would encounter realms without matter, perhaps without form or order; it is highly doubtful we would find anything familiar.

There are an infinite number of alternatives to the Way, each originating in an alternative world-line, yet reaching beyond that world-line. Until now, Way researchers have not known quite how the alternate Ways were stacked or arranged, or indeed whether they could even be considered real. Since the Way intersects a large group of alternate world-lines—perhaps all—could there be more than one Way?

But by traveling close to the light-speed within the Way, we have answered these questions and found new ones to ask. We have distorted Way geometry in more than the requisite four dimensions; we have also contracted the fifth dimension, drawing the alternate Ways together. The Way boundaries have become transparent in a wide variety of frequencies, and we can perceive the shape of other Ways. We can select which Way we wish to inspect, using devices similar to the gate-opening clavicles. It is in observing these alternate Ways that Beryl Wallace is now occupied.

We can even see (and in some instances, communicate with) beings in other Ways.

So there are an infinite number of world-lines, and because of this one human artifact, an infinite number of connections between them. Our researchers devise schemes to allow us to cross over to other Ways, other super-sets of world-lines, but even with implants I have difficulty understanding what they are discussing.

This much I do know. There are Ways where the beings of thousands of completely different universes hold commerce, exchanging in some cases only information, in other cases actually exchanging different types of space-time. Is it possible to conceive of the potential that would exist between two universes of differing qualities? Would that potential be called energy?

Rimskaya, morose as he is, has continued working, and has even made some significant contributions to the researches. He believes he has found a definition of information: the potential that exists between all time-like dimensions (time itself, and the fifth dimension separating world-lines, for instance) and space-like dimensions. Wherever space and time interact, there is information, and where information can be ordered into knowledge, and knowledge can be applied, there is intelligence.

Lest anyone reading this journal of a primitive man should think we spend our time mired in abstractions, let me also say that I am discovering the richness available to those who are willing to alter their major characteristics. The variety of emotions available to a reconfigured human mind, thinking thoughts impossible to its ancestors. . .

The emotion of -*-, describable only as something between sexual love and the joy of intellection—making love to a thought? Or &&, the true reverse of pain, not "pleasure" but a "warning" of healing, growth and change. Or (^+^), the most complex emotion yet discovered felt by those who consciously endure the change between mind configurations, and experience the broad spectrum of possibilities inherent in thinking and being.

I have barely begun to taste the varieties of human love. Personalities are not necessarily isolated here; I can belong to a wide spectrum of personality aggregates, and yet still retain my individuality. . . . I lose nothing and gain a thousand new tastes of human affection.

What use is it to try to measure the distances we have traveled? What use is the personality of the old Pavel Mirsky to comprehend them? Soon, I firmly resolve, I will gather up my courage and join with the extended personalities in City Memory.

And yet with all this to occupy me, I still mourn. I still weep for the lost part of myself, still feel sad for a land I cannot return to, a land doubly inaccessible now. But the weeping is buried deeply, where even Talsit sessions have difficulty reaching. . . perhaps lodged in the one area it is illegal to modify, known as Mystery. How ironic, that in this way I still feel like a Russian, and that so long as any part of me exists, it will be Russian!

Because I share the same Mystery with the old Pavel Mirsky, I feel continuity. I feel. . .

An urge for the stars, yes, but more than that.

When I was a child in Kiev (or so a few dim portions of my memory inform me) I once asked my stepfather how long people would live when the Worker's Paradise was achieved. He was a computer technician, very imaginative, and he said, "Perhaps as long as they wish. Perhaps a billion years."

"How long is a billion years?" I asked him.

"It is a very long time," he said. "An age, an eternity, time enough for all life to rise and all life to end. Some people call it an eon."

In geological terms, I learned later, an aeon is indeed a billion years. But the Greeks who coined the word were not so specific. They used it as a pointer to eternity, the lifetime of a universe, far more than a billion years. It was also the personification of a god's cycle of time.

I have survived the Worker's Paradise. I have survived the end of my universe, and may survive countless others.

Dear stepfather, it looks as if I will outlive the gods themselves. . . .

A true eon.

So much to learn, and so much change to look forward to. Each day I breathe deeply, count my choices and realize how lucky we are. (If only I can convince Rimskaya! Sad man.)

I am free.

Four - Aigyptos,

Year of Alexandros 2323

Young queen Kleopatra the 21st had just spent a long and drowsy four hours listening to the complicated testimony of five ostracized congressmen from the Oxyrrhynkhos Nome's Boulē. Their complaints, her most trusted counselor decided, were without merit, so she dismissed them with a stern smile and warned them not to take their complaints outside Aigyptos, to any other polity, or they would be exiled from the Alexandrian Oikoumenē and forced to wander east or west in the lands of the barbarians, or even worse, in Latium.

Three times a week, Kleopatra received such complaints, selected from thousands of cases by her counselors, well aware they were mostly for show and had been predecided. She was not entirely happy with the limitations of royal power imposed by the Oikoumenical Boulē in the time of her fathers, but it was that or exile, and an exiled eighteen-year-old queen had few places to go outside the Oikoumenē. How things had changed in the past five hundred years!

Kleopatra looked forward to her next visitor, however. She had heard many stories about the head priestess and sophē of the Hypateion in Rrodos; the woman was legendary not only for the tale of how she had come to the Oikoumenē, but for her accomplishments in the last half-century. Yet queen and priestess had never met.

The sophē Patrikia had flown in from Rhodos two days before, landing at the Rakhotis airport just west of Alexandria and then taking up privileged residence in the Mouseion until an audience could be arranged. In those two days, the sophē had been taken on the virtually mandatory tours of the pyramidons of Alexandros and the Diadokhoi to observe (how tiresome, Kleopatra thought) the gold-wrapped mummies of the founders of the Alexandrian Oikoumenē, and then through the surrounding pyramids and tombs of the Later Successors. It was said that the sophē had borne the tours well, and some of her observations had been recorded for broadcast to the eighty-five nomes of the Oikoumenē.

Heralds arrived to announce that the sophē had come to the Lokhias Promontory and would shortly be at the royal residence. The counselors cleared the court and Kleopatra was surrounded by her flies, as she called them—her chamberlains and makeup maids, wiping sweat from her brow, powdering her cheeks and nose, arranging her robes around the golden throne. Across the courtyard, standing half in shadow and half in sun, was the phalanx of royal security. When they divided into two lines, one on each side of the portal, Kleopatra would assume her Attitude and welcome the sophē.

The lines formed and the heralds went through their wearisome rituals.

The date was Sōthis 4, old-style, Arkhimēdēs 27, new-style.

Kleopatra sat patiently on her throne, made of cedar from the troublesome hierarchy of Ioudeia, sometimes called Nea Phoenikia, sipping sparkling water from Gallia out of a cup manufactured in Metascythia. Thus in every single day she tried to utilize goods from the nomes, polities and friendly nations all around, knowing that they would feel honored and that their peoples would feel proud for serving the oldest of the old empires, the Alexandrian Oikoumenē. It would be well for the sophē to see Kleopatra fulfilling her duties, for in truth the young queen had little else to do; the Boulē and the Council of Elected Speakers now made the truly important decisions, in the Athenian manner.

The great bronze doors of Theotokopolos swung wide and the procession began. Kleopatra ignored the rapidly swelling crowd of courtiers and chamberlains and petty politicians. Her eyes went immediately to the sophē Patrikia, entering the chamber supported on the arms of her two sons, themselves middle-aged.

The priestess wore a gown of black Chin-Ch'ing silk, simple and elegant, with a star above one breast and a moon above the other. Her hair was long, still luxuriantly thick and dark; her face appeared youthful despite her seventy-four years, her eyes black and square and penetrating. Kleopatra met those eyes with difficulty; they seemed dangerous, too provocative.

"Welcome," she said, deliberately eschewing all the ceremony. "Come sit. I am told we have things to discuss."

"Oh, yes, we do, my beautiful queen," the sophē said, stepping away from the arms of her sons and approaching the throne, one hand lifting the long hem of her gown. She was very spry, actually; no doubt she retained her sons in the temple for their own good, and not hers; the Oikoumenē was not the easiest place to find employment these days.

Patrikia sat on the pillow-covered chair, a body length below the queen's throne, and lifted her face to Kleopatra, eyes bright with excitement.

"I am also told you have brought some of your wonderful instruments, to show them to me, and reveal their purposes," Kleopatra said.

"If I may. . . ?"

"By all means."

Patrikia gestured and two Hypateion students carried up a wide, shallow wooden case. Kleopatra recognized the wood: pigeon's-eye maple from Nea Karkhedon across the broad Atlantic. She wondered how their revolution was coming along; little news leaked out from the blockaded coastal territories.

The priestess ordered the case to be set down on a wide round table of beaten brass chased with silver. "Perhaps your Imperial Hypsēlotēs knows my story. . . ?"

Kleopatra nodded and smiled. "That you dropped from the sky, chased by a furious star, and that you were not born on this Gaia."

"And that I brought with me. . . ?" Patrikia prompted, for all the world like one of Kleopatra's tutors. The queen didn't mind; she enjoyed tutoring and learning. Indeed, she had spent most of her life in classrooms, learning the qualities and extent of her realm, and the languages, as well.

"You brought marvelous instruments, for which there are no exact equivalents in our world. Yes, yes, these stories are well known."

"Then I now tell you things known only to myself," Patrikia said. She glanced around the court and then returned her extraordinary gaze to the young queen. Kleopatra understood and nodded.

"This will be a private audience. We will adjourn and meet in my chambers."

The court was quickly cleared, and Kleopatra unceremoniously dropped her heavy robes and gathered a light cloak of byssos around her shoulders. With only two guards and the sophē's sons accompanying them, they strolled to the queen's chambers. Trays of quail and crystal goblets of wines from Cos awaited them, and the sophē ate with the queen, a very rare privilege.

When they were done, the sons ate, and Kleopatra and Patrikia made themselves comfortable on pillows in a corner. Chamberlains drew curtains around them for privacy.

Then and only then did Patrikia open the lid of the wooden case. There, in thick Tyrian purple felt—the felt from Pridden and the dye from Ioudeia—rested a silver-and-glass, palm-sized flat object, a second slightly smaller object and something saddle-shaped with protruding handles.

These objects were almost as famous as the Cache of General Ptolemaios Sōtēr, especially among scholars and philosophers. Few had ever seen them, not even her mother and fathers.

Kleopatra regarded them with unabashed curiosity. "Tell me, please," she said.

"With this," and Patrikia pointed to the smaller flat object, "I can measure the qualities of space and time. Years ago, when I took refuge in the Hypateion, after the death of my husband, the tekhnai there made me new batteries, and these devices function again."

"I must commend them," Kleopatra said. Patrikia smiled and waved her hand as if at trivial matters.

"The philosophy and tekhnos of your world is not so advanced as mine in some respects, though very nearly. But you have wonderful mathematicians, wonderful astronomers. My work has progressed."

"Yes?"

"And. . .” Patrikia lifted the object with handles from the case. "This instrument tells me when others are trying to open passages to our world, this Gaia. It senses their workings, and it tells me."

"Does it have any other purpose?" Kleopatra asked, aware she was already out of her depth.

"No. Not now, not here."

To her astonishment, the queen realized that the old priestess had tears in her eyes. "I have never given up my dream," Patrikia said. "And I have never given up my hope. But I am growing old, my Imperial Hypsēlotēs, and my senses are not so keen. . . .” She lifted herself up in her seat and resettled, with a deep sigh. "Still, I am certain now. I have been given the proper signs by this device."

"Signs of what?"

"I do not know why, or where, my queen, but a passageway has been opened on our world. This device in its presence, and so do I. Somewhere on Gaia, my queen. Before I die, I wish to find this passage, and see if perhaps there is some slight chance I might fulfill my dream. . . .”

"A passage? What do you mean?"

"A gate to the place from which I came. They have reopened my gate, perhaps. Or—someone has created an entirely new road to the stars."

Kleopatra was suddenly troubled. The instincts of a hundred and twenty generations of the Makedonian Dynastic Succession were not idle in her blood. "Are those in your world people of peace and goodwill?" she asked.

The priestess's eyes became momentarily distant and cloudy. "I do not know. Probably they are. But I ask the queen to locate this passage, this gate, with all the means at her disposal. . .”

Kleopatra frowned and bent forward to see the priestess's face from a better perspective. Then she took one of the sophē's withered hands in hers.

"Would our lands benefit from this passage, this gate?"

"Almost certainly," Patrikia said. "I am a very minor example of the wonders that could lie beyond such an opening."

Kleopatra frowned and pondered this for a moment. The Oikoumenē was beset with many problems, some of them, her counselors assured her, insurmountable, the problems of an elderly civilization on the wane. She did not believe this—not entirely—but the thought frightened her. Even in an age of airplanes and radio, there had to be other things, other marvels, which would rescue them from their plight.

"This is a shortcut to distant territories, places where we might extend our trade, and learn new things?"

Patrikia smiled. "Your understanding is quick, my queen."

"Then we will search. I will decree that all our allied states and empires will search as well."

"It may be hidden, very small," the priestess warned. "Perhaps only a test gate, as wide across as a man's arm is long."

"Our searchers will be thorough," Kleopatra said. "With your guidance, they will find this gate."

Patrikia squinted at her with almost insolent suspicion. "I have long been regarded as a crazy old woman, despite these marvels," she said, resting her hand on the case. "Do you believe me?"

"Yes, upon my heritage as a Queen of Alexandros's Egypt and the Makedonian Dynasty," Kleopatra said. She wanted to believe the priestess. Life in the court had been very dull the past few years. And the queen did indeed exercise some powers, chiefly in matters involving the political spirit and aims of the state. She could fit this quest into those territories nicely.

"Thank you," Patrikia said. "My husband never truly believed me. He was a fine man, a farmer of fish. . . . But he worried about me and said I should live this life only, and not dream of others. . . .”

"I hate limitations," Kleopatra said vehemently. "What will you do if we find this passage?"

Patrikia's eyes widened.

"I will go home," she said. "Finally, however futile it may be, I will go home."

"Not before you have finished your work for us, I presume."

"No. That will be my first priority."

"Good. So be it, then."

Kleopatra called in her counselors, warned them sternly this was an Imperial decree not subject to dissension, and issued a command that the search begin.

"Thank you, my Imperial Hypsēlotēs," the priestess said as they strolled back to the court. Kleopatra watched Patrikia leave through the Theotokopolos door, on her way back to the Hypateion until such time as the search would begin. Then the queen closed her eyes and tried to imagine. . .

The old woman's home. Where would such a woman have come from? A place of gleaming towers and mighty fortresses, where people might be more like gods or devils than the men and women she knew. Only such a place could have produced this small, intense sophē.

"How strange," Kleopatra murmured, resuming her throne. The heavy robes were wrapped around her shoulders again. She felt a shuddering thrill. "How wonderful. . .”

"Unless you know where you are, you don't know who you are."

—Wendell Barry

Acknowledgements

A book as complicated as this one cannot be written alone, and thank God for those willing, even eager, to help. My deepest appreciation to (in no particular order) Rick Sternbach; Ralph Cooper; John S. Lewis; Louis A. D'Amario; David Brin; Anthony and Tina Chong; Craig Kaston; LCDR Patrick Garrett, USN; LCDR Dale F. Bear, USN RET.; the Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy; and of course Astrid.

Errors and misconceptions no doubt remain, and are my own.

Eternity

Greg Bear

For David McClintock; friend, fellow admirer of Olaf Stapledon, and above all, bookseller.

Only when space is rolled up like a piece of leather will there be an end to suffering, apart from knowing God.

vetvatara Upaniad, VI 20

Contents

1 Recovered Earth, Independent Territory of New Zealand, A. D. 2046

2 Terrestrial Hexamon, Earth Orbit, Axis Euclid

3 Gala, Island of Rhodos, Greater Alexandreian Oikoumenē, Year of Alexandros 2331-2342

4 Terrestrial Hexamon, Axis Euclid

5 Earth

6 Thistledown

7 Gaia, Near Alexandreia, Year of Alexandros 2345

8 Earth

9 Thistledown

10 Gaia

11 Earth

12 Gaia

13 Thistledown

14 Gaia

15 Thistledown City

16 Gaia

17 Thistledown

18 Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

19 Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

20 Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

21 Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

22 Gaia, Alexandreia

23 Thistledown

24 Gaia

25 Thistledown City

26 Gaia

27 Thistledown, Fourth Chamber

28 Earth

29 Thistledown

30 Gaia

31 Gaia

32 Thistledown City

33 Thistledown City

34 Thistledown City Memory

35 Rhita

36 Thistledown

37 The Way

38 Thistledown City

39 The Way

40 The Hawaiian Islands

41 Thistledown

42 Hawaii

43 The Way, Efficient Gaia

44 Thistledown City

45 Thistledown, the Orbiting Precincts, and Earth

46 Thistledown

47 Earth

48 Thistledown

49 Earth

50 Thistledown

51 Thistledown

52 Efficient Gaia

53 Earth, Thistledown

54 Earth

55 Thistledown

56 Earth

57 Halfway

58 Thistledown

59 Thistledown City

60 Earth, Christchurch

61 Thistledown City

62 Thistledown

63 Earth

64 The Way

65 Thistledown City

66 The Seventh Chamber

67 The Way

68 Between

69 The Beginning of the Way

70 The Way

71 Thistledown

72 The Beginning of the Way

73 Thistledown

74 The Way

75 Axis Euclid

76 Earth

77 Thistledown City

78 The Way

79 Axis Euclid

80 The Way

81 Home

82 In the Flaw

83 Timbl

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the end, there is cruelty and death alone over the land. Not in a single ray of light or grain of sand will you find solace, for all is dark, and the cold gaze of God’s indifferent, heavy-lidded eyes falls on all with equal disdain. Only in your inner strength is there salvation; you must live just as a tree must live, or the cockroaches and fleas that flourish in the land and ruin of Earth. And so you live, and feel the sting of knowing you live. You eat whatever comes to hand, and if what you eat was once a brother or sister, so be it; God does not care. Nobody cares. You whore, and if you whore with man or woman, nobody cares; for when all are hungry, all are whores, even those who use the whores. And disease flourishes when all are whores, for germs must live, and spread across the land and ruin of Earth.

Some say we will climb back to the sky on our own. Some say we all should have died; should have died, for penance. But that was not to be. For by time’s freak and history’s whim, the angels come from the Stone, to march over the land and offer what solace the land cannot; to push back the clouds and smoke and let sun pass through, to sow our crops and harvest our food, then to pass the plows on to us. You marvel at this, and do not curse the angels in the madness of your guilt; for they are a glory like a dream, and you do not truly believe.

They minister to your disease, and in time you join them to minister unto others. Medicine becomes religion; help the sole commandment; healing the greatest gift to God one can imagine.

They bring miracles from out of the Stone. They stay among us, but are not of us, and a few grumble, but the few are ignored as the chaff is ignored. What the few grumble about is division and dissatisfaction, for we are never happy. And never content, and never satisfied. But the angels do not listen.

And then from the Bible Lands and points east, from the Lands of the Book and out of the People of the Book comes rebellion. For their lands have not been scorched and they can still find strength in the soil, and they are ingenious and know the Law of Tree and Flea. Because they are Chosen of God, they fight these angels who are not angels, but devils to them; they fight and they are subdued by miracles and made pacific. And the People of the Book sleep the sleep of the pacific, building and working but not fighting. So it is in the land where humankind first opened its eyes.

And then in the land sunk in evil at the tip of the Heart of Darkness, like white dregs in a black bottle, from this land comes speakers of Afrikaans and English in their fine uniforms, driving ahead of them their slave armies, to despoil all the untouched Southern Lands of the Earth. They fight and they are subdued by miracles and made pacific, in their way. And they sleep the sleep of the pacific, building and working and not fighting. So it is at the bottom of the amphora of Africa.

Light and learning begin again above the soil, for strength returns to the soil, and to the flesh. All this we owe to the angels. And if they are only men, only our own children come back clothed in light, what is that to our gladness and gratitude?

They lift us from the Law of Tree and Flea, and make us human again.

—Gershom Raphael, The Book of the Death, Sura 4, Book 1.

1

Recovered Earth, Independent Territory of New Zealand, A. D. 2046

The New Murchison Station cemetery held only thirty graves. Flat grassland surrounded the fenced-in plot, and around and through the grassland a narrow runoff creek curled protectively, its low washing whisper steady above the cool dry wind. The wind made the blades of grass hiss and shiver. Snow-ribboned mountains shawled in gray cloud glowered over the plain. The sun was an hour above the Two Thumb Range to the east, its light bright but not warm. Despite the wind, Garry Lanier was sweating.

He helped shoulder the coffin through the leaning white picket fence to the new-dug grave, marked by a casually lumpy mound of black earth, his face a mask to hide the effort and the sharp twinges of pain.

Six friends served as pallbearers. The coffin was only a finely shaped and precisely planed pine box, but Lawrence Heineman had weighed a good ninety kilos when he died. The widow, Lenore Carrolson, followed two steps behind, face lifted, puzzled eyes staring at something just above the end of the coffin. Her once gray-blond hair was now silver-white.

Larry had looked much younger than Lenore, who seemed frail and phantasmal now in her ninetieth year. He had been given a new body after his heart attack, thirty-four years before; it was not age or disease that had killed him, but a rockfall at a campsite in the mountains twenty kilometers away.

They laid him in the earth and the pallbearers pulled away the thick black ropes. The coffin leaned and creaked in the dirt. Lanier imagined Heineman was finding his grave an uneasy bed, and then dismissed this artless fancy; it was not good to reshape death.

A priest of the New Church of Rome spoke Latin over the grave. Lanier was the first to drop a spade of damp-smelling dirt into the hole. Ashes to ashes. The ground is wet here. The coffin will rot.

Lanier rubbed his shoulder as he stood with Karen, his wife of almost four decades. Her eyes darted around the faces of their distant neighbors, searching for something to ease her own sense of displacement. Lanier tried to look at the mourners with her eyes and found only sadness and a nervous humility. He touched her elbow but she was having none of his reassurances. Karen felt as if she didn’t belong. She loved Lenore Carrolson like a mother, and yet they hadn’t talked in two years.

Up there, in the sky, among the orbiting precincts, the Hexamon conducted its business, yet had sent no representative from those august heavenly bodies; and indeed, considering how Larry had come to feel about the Hexamon, that gesture would have been inappropriate.

How things had changed…

Divisions. Separations. Disasters. Not all the work they had done in the Recovery could wipe away these differences. They had had such expectations for the Recovery. Karen still had high hopes, still worked on her various projects. Those around her did not share many of her hopes.

She was still of the Faith, believing in the future, in the Hexamon’s efforts.

Lanier had lost the Faith twenty years ago.

Now they laid a significant part of their past in the damp Earth, with no hope of a second resurrection. Heineman had not expected to die by accident, but he had chosen this death nonetheless. Lanier had made a similar choice. Someday, he knew, the earth would absorb him, too, and that still seemed proper, though not without its terror. He would die. No second chances. He—and Heineman, and Lenore—had accepted the opportunities offered by the Hexamon up to a certain point, and then had demurred.

Karen had not demurred. If it had been her under the rock slide, rather than Larry, she would not be dead now; stored in her implant, she would await her due resurrection, in a body newly grown for her on one of the precincts, and brought to Earth. She would soon be as young or younger than she was now. And as the years passed, she would not grow any older than she wished, nor would her body change in any but accepted ways. That set her apart from these people. It set her apart from her husband.

Like Karen, their daughter Andia had carried an implant, and Lanier had not protested, something that had shamed him a little at the time; but watching her grow and change had been an extraordinary enough experience, and he realized he was far readier to accept his death than this beautiful child’s. He had not overruled Karen’s plans, and the Hexamon had come down to bless the child of one of their faithful servants, to give his own daughter a gift he did not himself accept because it was not (could not be) made available to all the Old Natives of Earth.

Then, irony had stepped in and left a permanent mark on their lives. Twenty years ago, Andia’s airplane had crashed in the eastern Pacific and she had never been found. Their daughter’s chances for a return to life lay in the silt at the bottom of some vast deep, a tiny marble, untraceable even with Hexamon technology.

The tears in his eyes were not for Larry. He wiped them and drew his face into stiff formality to greet the priest, a pious young hypocrite Lanier had never liked. “Good wine comes in strange glass,” Larry had once said.

He came into a wisdom I envy.

In the first flush of wonder, working with the Hexamon, all had been dazzled; Heineman had after all accepted his second body gladly enough, and Lenore had accepted youth treatments to keep up with her husband. She had later dropped the treatments, but now she seemed no more than a well-preserved seventy…

Most Old Natives did not have access to implants; even the Terrestrial Hexamon could not supply everybody on Earth with the necessary devices; and if they could have, Earth cultures were not ready for even proximate immortality.

Lanier had resisted implants, yet accepted Hexamon medicine; he did not know to this day whether or not that had been hypocrisy. Such medicine had been made available to most but not all Old Natives, scattered around a ruined Earth; the Hexamon had stretched its resources to accomplish that much.

He had rationalized that to do the work he was doing, he needed to be healthy and fit, and to be healthy and fit while doing that work—going into the deadlands, living amidst death and disease and radiation—he needed the privilege of the Hexamon’s medicine.

Lanier could read Karen’s reaction. Such a waste. All these people, dropping out, giving up. She thought they were behaving irresponsibly. Perhaps they were, but they—like himself, and like Karen—had given much of their lives to the Recovery and to the Faith. They had earned their beliefs, however irresponsible in her eyes.

The debt they all owed to the orbiting precincts was incalculable. But love and loyalty could not be earned by indebtedness.

Lanier followed the mourners to the tiny church a few hundred meters away. Karen stayed behind, near the graves. She was weeping, but he could not go to comfort her.

He shook his head once, sharply, and glanced up at the sky.

No one had thought it would ever be this way.

He still could hardly believe it himself.

In the single-story meeting room of the church, while three younger women set out sandwiches and punch, Lanier waited for his wife to join the wake. Groups of two or three gathered in the room, ill at ease, to step forward as one and pay their respects to the widow, who took it all with a distant smile.

She lost her first family in the Death, he remembered. She and Larry, after their retirement from the Recovery ten years ago, had behaved like youngsters, hiking around South Island, taking up various hobbies, occasionally going to Australia for extended walkabouts, once even sailing to Borneo. They had been or had seemed carefree, and Lanier envied them that.

“Your wife takes this hard,” a red-faced young man named Fremont said, approaching Lanier alone. Fremont ran the re-opened Irishman Creek Station; his half-wild merinos sometimes spread all the way to Twizel, and he was not considered the best of citizens. His station mark was an encircled kea, odd for a man who made his living from sheep; still, he had once been reputed to say, “I’m no less independent than my sheep. I go where I will, and so do they.”

“We all loved him,” Lanier said. Why he should suddenly open up to this red-faced half-stranger, he did not know, but with his eye on the door, waiting for Karen, his mouth said, “He was a smart man. Simple, though. He knew his limits. I…”

Fremont cocked a bushy eyebrow.

“We were on the Stone together,” Lanier said.

“So I’ve heard. You were all confused with the angels.”

Lanier shook his head. “He hated that.”

“He did good work here and all over,” Fremont said. Everybody’s decent at a funeral. Karen came in through the door. Fremont, who could not have been more than thirty-five, glanced in her direction and then turned back to Lanier, speculation in his eyes. Lanier compared himself with this young and vigorous man: his own hair was solid gray, hands large and brown and gnarled, body slightly bent.

Karen seemed no older than Fremont.

2

Terrestrial Hexamon, Earth Orbit, Axis Euclid

“Let’s talk,” Suli Ram Kikura suggested, turning off her collar pictor and folding up in a chair behind Olmy. He stood by her apartment window—a real window, looking through the Axis Euclid’s interior wall at the cylindrical space that had once surrounded the Way’s central singularity. Now it revealed swimming aeronauts with gauzy, bat-like wings, floating amusement parks, citizens tracting on causeways formed by faint purple fields—and a small arc of darkness to the left, near-Earth space visible beyond the interior wall.

The colors and activity reminded him of a French painting from the early twentieth century, a park scene suddenly bereft of gravity, strolling couples and children of orthodox Naderites scattered crazily every which way. The view changed constantly as the axis’s body rotated around the hollow at its center, a streaming display of Hexamon life and society, of which Olmy no longer seemed a part.

“I’m listening,” he said, though he did not look at her.

“You haven’t visited Tapi in months.” Tapi was their son, created from their mixed mysteries in Euclid’s city memory. Such conception had only returned to favor the past ten years; before that, when orthodox Naderites had dominated Euclid’s precinct government, natural births and ex utero births had been the order of the day, and the hell with centuries of Hexamon tradition. Hence, the children playing in the Flaw Park beyond Ram Kikura’s window.

Olmy blinked, guilty about avoiding his son. The point was always quickly reached with Suli Ram Kikura. “He’s doing fine.”

“He needs us both. A partial on demand is no replacement for a father. He’s up for his incorporation tests in a few months and he needs—”

“Yes, yes.” Olmy almost wished they had never had Tapi. The weight of responsibility now, with his researches also heavy on him, was too much. He simply did not have time.

“I don’t know whether to be mad at you or not,” she said. “You’re facing something difficult. I suppose a few years ago I could have guessed what it is…” Her voice was rich and even, well-controlled, but she could not hide concern mixed with irritation at his quiet obtuseness. “I value you enough to ask what’s bothering you.”

Value. They had been primary lovers for more decades than he cared to count. (seventy-four years, his implant memory stores reminded him, unbidden), and they had lived through—and taken part in—some of the Hexamon’s most turbulent and spectacular history. He had never seriously courted any woman but Ram Kikura; he had always known that wherever he went, whomever else he established a brief liaison with, he would always return to her. She was his match—a homorph, neither Naderite nor Geshel in her politics, lifelong advocate, one-time senior corprep for Earth in the Nexus, champion of the unfortunate, the ignored and the ignorant. With no other would he have made a Tapi.

“I’ve been studying. That’s all.”

“Yes, but you won’t tell me what you’ve been studying. Whatever it is, it’s changing you.”

“I’m just looking ahead.”

“You don’t know something I’m not privy to, do you? Coming out of retirement? The trip to Earth—”

He said nothing and she pulled back, lips tightly pressed together. “All right. Something secret. Something to do with the re-opening.”

“Nobody seriously plans that,” Olmy said, an edge of petulance in his voice unseemly in a man over five centuries old. Only Ram Kikura could get through his armor and provoke such a response.

“Not even Korzenowski agrees with you.”

“With me? I’ve never said I support re-opening.”

“It is absurd,” she said. Now they had both probed beneath armor. “Whatever our problems, or shortages, to abandon the Earth—”

“That’s even less likely,” he said softly.

“—And re-open the Way…. That goes against everything we’ve worked for the past forty years.”

“I’ve never said I wanted it,” he reiterated.

Her look of scorn was a shock to him. Never had their distance been so great that either could have felt intellectual contempt for the other. Their relationship had always been a mix of passion and dignity, even in the years of their worst dispute…which this showed signs of equaling or surpassing, though he refused to admit disagreement.

“Nobody wants it, but it sure would be exciting, wouldn’t it? To be gainfully employed again, to have a mission, to return to our youth and years of greatest power. To open commerce with the Talsit again. Such wonders in store!”

Olmy lifted one shoulder slightly, a bare admission that there was some truth in what she said.

“Our job here isn’t finished. We have our entire history to reclaim. Surely that’s labor enough.”

“I’ve never known our kind to be moderate,” Olmy said.

“You feel the call of duty, don’t you? You’re preparing for what you think will happen.” Suli Ram Kikura uncurled and stood, taking him by the arm more in anger than affection. “Have we never truly thought alike? Has our love always been just an attraction of opposites? You opposed me on the Old Natives’ rights to individuality—”

“Anything else would have damaged the Recovery.” Her bringing the subject up after thirty-eight years, and his quick response, showed clearly that the embers of that dispute had not died.

“We agreed to differ,” she said, facing him.

As Earth’s advocate in the years after the Sundering and in the early stages of the Recovery, Ram Kikura had opposed Hexamon efforts to use Talsit and other mental therapies on Old Natives. She had cited contemporary Terrestrial law and taken the issue to the Hexamon courts, arguing that Old Natives had the right to avoid mental health checkups and corrective therapy.

Eventually, her court challenge had been denied under special Recovery Act legislation.

That had been resolved thirty-eight years before. Now, approximately forty percent of Earth’s survivors received one or another kind of therapy. The campaign to administer treatment had been masterful. Sometimes it had overstepped its bounds, but it had worked. Mental illness and dysfunction were virtually eradicated.

Ram Kikura had gone on to other issues, other problems. They had stayed lovers, but their relationship had been strained from that point on.

The umbilicus between them was very tough. Disagreements alone—even this—would not cut it. Ram Kikura could not, and in any event would not cry or show the weaknesses of an Old Native, and Olmy had given up those abilities centuries ago. Her face was sufficiently evocative without tears; he could read the special character of a Hexamon citizen there, emotions withheld but somehow communicated, sadness and loss foremost.

“You’ve changed during the past four years,” she said. “I can’t define it…but whatever you’re doing, however you’re preparing, it diminishes the part of you that I love.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You won’t talk about it. Not even with me.”

He shook his head slowly, feeling just another degree of withering inside, another degree of withdrawal.

“Where is my Olmy?” Ram Kikura asked softly. “What have you done with him?”

“Ser Olmy! Your return is most welcome. How was your journey?” President Kies Farren Siliom stood on a broad transparent platform, the wide orb of the Earth coming into view beneath him as Axis Euclid rotated. Five hundred square meters of stressed and ion-anchored glass and two layers of traction field lay between the president’s conference chamber and open space; he seemed to stand on a stretch of open nothingness.

Farren Siliom’s dress—white African cotton pants and a tufted black sleeveless shirt of Thistledown altered linen—emphasized his responsibility for two worlds: Recovered Earth, the Eastern hemisphere of which rolled into morning beneath their feet, and the orbiting bodies: Axes Euclid and Thoreau and the asteroid starship Thistledown.

Olmy stood to one side of the apparent void in the outer shell of the precinct. The Earth passed out of view. He picted formal greetings to Farren Siliom, then said aloud, “My trip was smooth, Ser President.”

He had waited patiently for three days to be admitted, using the time for the awkward visit to Suli Ram Kikura. Countless times before, he had waited on presiding ministers and lesser officials, fully aware, as centuries passed, that he had developed the old soldier’s attitude of superiority over his masters, of respectful condescension to the hierarchy.

“And your son?”

“I haven’t seen him in some time, Ser President. I understand he is doing well.”

“A whole crop of children coming up for their incorporation exams soon,” Farren Siliom said. “They’ll be needing bodies and occupations, all of them, if they pass as easily as I’m sure your son will. More strain on limited resources.”

“Yes, Ser.”

“I’ve invited two of my associates to attend part of your briefing,” the president said, hands folded behind his back.

Two assigned ghosts—projected partial personalities, acting with temporary independence from their originals—appeared a few meters to one side of the president. Olmy recognized one of them, the leader of the neo-Geshels in Axis Euclid, Tobert Tomson Tikk, one of Euclid’s thirty senators in the Nexus. Olmy had investigated Tikk at the start of his mission, though he had not met with the senator personally. The image of Tikk’s partial looked slightly more handsome and muscled than his original, an ostentation gaining favor among the more radical Nexus politicians.

The presence of projected partials was both old and new. For thirty years after the Sundering, the separation of Thistledown from the Way, orthodox Naderites had controlled the Hexamon and such technological displays had been relegated to situations of extreme necessity. Now the use of partials was commonplace; a neo-Geshel such as Tikk would not be averse to casually scattering his image and personality patterns about the Hexamon.

“Ser Olmy is acquainted with Senator Tikk. I don’t believe you’ve met Senator Ras Mishiney, senator for the territory of Greater Australia and New Zealand. He’s in Melbourne at this moment.”

“Pardon the time delay, Ser Olmy,” Mishiney said.

“No fear,” Olmy said. The audience was purely a formality, since most of Olmy’s report was contained on record in detailed picts and graphics; but even so, he had not expected Farren Siliom to invite witnesses. It was a wise leader who knew when to admit his adversary—or adversaries—into high functions; Olmy knew little about Mishiney.

“Let me apologize again for disturbing your well-deserved retirement.” Earthlight flooded the president. As the precinct rotated, the Earth again seemed to pass below them. “You’ve served this office for centuries. I thought it best to rely on someone with your experience and perspective. What we’re dealing with here, of course, are largely historical problems and trends…”

“Problems of cultures, perhaps,” Tikk interposed. Olmy thought it brash for a partial to interrupt the president; but then, that was neo-Geshel style.

“I assume these honorables know the task you set for me,” Olmy said, nodding at the ghosts. But not the whole task.

The president picted assent. The moon slipped beneath them, a tiny bright platinum crescent. They all stood near the center of the platform now, the partials’ images flickering slightly to indicate their nature. “I hope this assignment was less strenuous than the ones you’re famous for.”

“Not strenuous at all, Ser President. I’ve been afraid of losing touch with the details of the Hexamon—” or indeed the human race, he thought, “—living so calmly and peacefully.”

The president smiled. Even for Olmy, it was hard to imagine an old warhorse like himself living a life of studious leisure.

“I sent Ser Olmy on a mission around the Recovered Earth to provide an independent view of our relations. This seemed necessary in light of the four recent assassination attempts on Hexamon officials and Terrestrial leaders. We in the Hexamon are not used to such…extreme attitudes.

“They might be the last vestiges of Earth’s political past, or they might indicate breaking strains we are not aware of—reflections of our own ‘belt-tightening’ in the orbiting precincts.

“I asked him to bring me an overview on how the Recovery was proceeding. Some believe it is finished, and so our Hexamon has designated the Earth itself ‘Recovered,’ past tense, job accomplished. I am not convinced. How much time and effort will be necessary to truly bring the Earth back to health?”

“The recovery goes as well as could be expected, Ser President.” Olmy consciously altered his speaking and picting style. “As the senator from Australia and New Zealand is aware, even the Hexamon’s vast technologies cannot make up for a lack of resources, not when you wish to accomplish such a transformation in mere decades. There is a natural time required for Earth’s wounds to heal, and we cannot accelerate that by much. I estimate that about half the task has been accomplished, if we say that full recovery is a return to economic conditions comparable to those preceding the Death.”

“Doesn’t that depend on how ambitious we are on Earth?” Ras Mishiney asked. “If we wish to bring Terrestrials to a level comparable with the precincts or Thistledown…” He did not finish his sentence; it was hardly necessary.

“That could take a century or more,” Olmy said. “There’s no universal agreement that Old Natives want such rapid advancement. Some would doubtless openly resist it.”

“How stable are our relations with Earth just now?” the president asked him.

“They could be much improved, Ser. There are still areas of strong, overt political resistance, Southern Africa and Malaysia among them.”

Ras Mishiney smiled ironically. Southern Africa’s attempted invasion of Australia was still a sore memory, one of the greatest crises in the four decades of the Recovery.

“But the resistance is strictly political, not military, and it’s not very organized. Southern Africa is subdued after the Voortrekker defeats, and Malaysia’s activities are unorganized. They do not seem worrisome at the moment.”

“Our little ‘sanity plagues’ have done their job?”

Olmy was taken aback. The use of psychobiologicals on Earth was supposed to be highly confidential; only a few of the most trusted Old Natives knew of them. Was Ras Mishiney one such? Did Farren Siliom trust Tikk so much that he could mention them casually?

“Yes, Ser.”

“Yet you’ve had qualms about these mass treatments?”

“I’ve always recognized their necessity.”

“No doubts whatsoever?”

Olmy felt as if he were being toyed with. It was not a sensation he enjoyed. “If you’re referring to the opposition of Earth’s former advocate, Suli Ram Kikura…we do not necessarily share political beliefs even when we share beds, Ser President.”

“These are past matters now. Forgive my interruption. Please continue, Ser Olmy.”

“There’s still a strong undercurrent of tension between most Old Natives and the ruling parties of the orbiting bodies.”

“That’s a painful puzzle to me,” Farren Siliom said.

“I’m not sure it can be surmounted. They resent us in so many ways. We robbed them of their youth—”

“We pulled them up from the Death!” the president said sharply. Ras Mishiney’s assigned ghost gave a faint smile.

“We’ve prevented them from growing and recovering on their own, Ser. The Terrestrial Hexamon that built and launched Thistledown rose from just such misery, independently; some Old Natives feel perhaps we’ve helped too much, and imposed our ways upon them.”

Farren Siliom picted grudging agreement. Olmy had noticed a hardening of attitude against Old Natives among Hexamon administrators in the orbiting bodies the past decade. And the Old Natives, being what they were—many still rough and uneducated, still shocked by the Death, without the political and managerial sophistication earned through centuries of experience in the Way—had grown to resent the firm but gentle hand of their powerful descendants.

“The Terrestrial Senate is quiet and cooperative,” Olmy said, avoiding Ras Mishiney’s eyes. “The worst dissatisfactions, outside those already mentioned, seemed to be in China and Southeast Asia.”

“Where science and technology first rose after the Death, in our own history…willful and strong peoples. How resentful are the Old Natives overall?”

“Certainly not to the point of worldwide activism, Ser President. Consider it a prejudice, not a rage.”

“What about Gerald Brooks in England?”

“I met with him, Ser. He is not a threat.”

“He worries me. He has quite a following in Europe.”

“At most two thousand in a recovered population of ten million. He’s vocal but not powerful. He feels deep gratitude for what the Hexamon has done for the Earth…he merely resents those of your administrators who treat terrestrials like children.” Far too many of that kind, he thought.

“Resents my administrators.” The president paced on the platform. Olmy watched this with a deep, ironic humor. Politicians had certainly changed since the days of his youth—even since the Sundering. Formal deportment seemed an art of the past. “And the religious movements?”

“As strong as ever.”

“Mm.” Farren Siliom shook his head, seeming to relish bad news to fuel a smoldering irritation.

“There are at least thirty-two religious groups which do not accept your administrators as temporal or spiritual rulers—”

“We don’t expect them to accept us as spiritual rulers,” Farren Siliom said.

“Some officials have tried several times to impose the rule of the Good Man on Old Natives,” Olmy reminded him. “Even on the honorable Nader’s contemporaries…” How long ago had it been since a fanatic orthodox Naderite corprep had recommended using an illegal psychobiological to convert the faithless to Star, Fate and Pneuma? Fifteen years? Olmy and Ram Kikura had helped suppress that notion before it had even reached a secret Nexus session, but Olmy had almost converted overnight to her radical views.

“We’ve dealt with these miscreants,” Farren Siliom said.

“Perhaps not harshly enough. Many are still in positions of influence and continue their campaigns. At any rate, none of these movements advocate open rebellion.”

“Civil disobedience?”

“That is a protected right in the Hexamon,” Olmy said.

“Used very seldom the past few decades,” Farren Siliom countered. “And what about the Renewed Enterprisers?”

“Not a threat.”

“No?” The president seemed almost disappointed.

“No. Their reverence for the Hexamon is genuine, whatever their other beliefs. Besides, their leader died three weeks ago in the old territory of Nevada.”

“A natural death, Ser President,” Tikk said. “That’s an important distinction. She refused offers of extension or downloading to implants—”

“Refused them,” Olmy said, “because they were not offered to her followers.”

“We do not have the resources to give every citizen of the Terrestrial Hexamon immortality,” Farren Siliom said. “And they would not be socially prepared, at any rate.”

“True,” Olmy acknowledged. “At any rate…they never opposed Hexamon plans beyond their immediate territory.”

“Did you meet with Senator Kanazawa in Hawaii?” Ras Mishiney asked with a hint of distaste. Olmy suddenly understood why the senator was attending. Ras Mishiney was heart and soul in the camp of the orbiting bodies.

“No,” Olmy answered. “I wasn’t aware he had been anything but cooperative with the Hexamon.”

“He’s gathered a lot of power to himself in the past few years. Particularly in the Pacific Rim.”

“He’s a competent politician and administrator,” Farren Siliom said, reining in the senator with a glance. “It isn’t our duty to keep power forever. We’re doctors and teachers, not tyrants. Is there anything else of significance, Ser Olmy?”

There was, but Olmy knew it would not be discussed before these partials.

“No, sir. The details are all on record.”

“Gentlemen,” the president said, raising his arms and opening his hands to them. “Have you any final questions for Ser Olmy?”

“Just one,” Tikk’s partial said. “How do you stand on the re-opening of the Way?”

Olmy smiled. “My views on that issue are not important, Ser Tikk.”

“My original is most curious about the views of those who remember the Way vividly.” Tikk had not been born until after the Sundering; he was one of the youngest neo-Geshels on Axis Euclid.

“Ser Olmy has a right to keep his opinions to himself,” Farren Siliom said.

Tikk’s partial apologized without any deep sincerity.

“Thank you, Ser President,” Mishiney’s partial said. “I appreciate your cooperation with Earth’s parliament. I look forward to studying your complete records, Ser Olmy.”

The ghosts faded, leaving them alone above the dark fathomless void, now empty of both Earth and Moon. Olmy looked down and spotted a glimmer of light amidst the stars: Thistledown, he thought, and his implants quickly provided a calculation that confirmed his guess.

“One last question, Ser Olmy, and then this meeting is completed. The neo-Geshels…if they manage to get the Hexamon to re-open the Way, do we have the resources to continue the Earth’s support at present levels?”

“No, Ser President. Successful re-opening would cause long delays at the very least in major rehabilitation projects.”

“We’re already strapped for resources, aren’t we? More than the Hexamon is willing to admit. And yet, there are Terrestrials—Mishiney among them—who believe that in the long run, re-opening would benefit us all.” The president shook his head and picted a symbol of judgment and a symbol of extreme foolishness: a man sharpening a ridiculously long sword. The pict symbol no longer had a connection with war, per se, but its subtext was still a little surprising to Olmy. War with whom?

“We must learn to adapt and live under the present circumstances. I believe that deeply,” Farren Siliom said. “But my influence is not boundless. So many of our people have become so very homesick! Can you imagine that? Even I. I was one of the firebrands who supported Rosen Gardner and demanded a return to Earth, to what we thought of as our true home—but no one alive in the Way had ever been to Earth! How sophisticated we think we are, yet how irrational and protean our deepest emotions and motivations. Perhaps a better grade of Talsit would help, no?”

Olmy smiled noncommittally.

The president’s shoulders slumped. With an effort, he squared them again. “We should learn to live without these luxuries. The Good Man never availed himself of Talsit.” He walked to the edge of the platform, as if to avoid the abyss beneath their feet. Earth was coming into view again. “Have the neo-Geshels carried their activities to Earth? Beyond people like Mishiney?”

“No. They seem content to ignore the Earth, Ser President.”

“The least I’d expect from such visionaries. That’s a political wellspring they’ll regret overlooking. Surely they can’t believe the Earth will have no say in such a decision! And on Thistledown?”

“They’re still openly campaigning. I found no sign of subversive activities.”

“Such a delicate balance a man in my position holds, trying to play so many factions against each other. I know my tenure in this office is limited. I’m not good at hiding my beliefs, and they are not the easiest beliefs to hold these days. I’ve fought the notion of re-opening for three years now. It will not die. But I can’t help believing that no good will come of it. ‘You can’t go home again.’ Especially if you can never decide where home is. We’re in a delicate time. Shortages, weariness. I see the inevitability, someday, of re-opening…. But not now! Not until we have finished our tasks on Earth.” Farren Siliom regarded Olmy with an expression near pleading. “I’m as curious as Senator Tikk, I’m afraid. What are your opinions about the Way?”

Olmy shook his head slightly. “I’m resigned to living without it, Ser President.”

“Yet you won’t be able to renew your body parts soon…or are the shortages already acute?”

“They are,” Olmy admitted.

“You’ll resign yourself to city memory willingly?”

“Or death,” Olmy said. “But that won’t be for years.”

“Do you miss the challenges, the opportunities?”

“I try not to worry about the past,” Olmy said. He was being less than candid, but he had learned long before when to be open, and when not.

“You’ve been an enigma for all your centuries of service, Ser Olmy. So the records tell me. I won’t press you. But in your brief…considerations of the problem, have you thought of what might happen to us, should we re-open the Way?”

Olmy did not answer for a moment. The president seemed to know more about his recent activities than Olmy found comfortable. “The Way could be reoccupied by Jarts, Ser.”

“Indeed. Our eager neo-Geshels tend to overlook that problem. I can’t. I’m not unaware of your researches. I believe you show extreme foresight.”

“Ser?”

“Your researches in city memory and the Thistledown libraries. I have my own active rogues, Ser Olmy. You seem to be accessing information with a direct bearing on re-opening, and you’ve been studying for years, at some personal cost, I imagine.” Farren Siliom regarded him shrewdly, then turned back to the railing, knocking it lightly with the knuckles of one hand. “Officially, I’m releasing you from any further duties. Unofficially, I urge you to continue your studies.”

Olmy picted assent.

“Thank you for your work. Should you have any further thoughts, by all means let me know. Your opinions are valued, whether or not you think we need them.”

Olmy left the platform. The Earth had rotated into view again, perpetual responsibility, unfamiliar home, sign of pain and triumph, failure and regrowth.

3

Gala, Island of Rhodos, Greater Alexandreian Oikoumenē, Year of Alexandros 2331-2342

Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza grew wild on the shores near the ancient port of Lindos until she was seven years old. Her father and mother let the sun and sea have their way with her, teaching her only what she was curious to know—which was a great deal.

She was a brown, bare-limbed wild thing, wide-eyed and elusive among the brown and white and faded gold battlements and columns and steps of the abandoned akropolis. From the bright expanse of the porch of the sanctuary of Athēnē Lindia, palms pressed against the crumbling walls, she stared down the cliffs into the azure unending sea, counting the steady, gentle march of waves against the rocks.

Sometimes she crept through the wooden door into the shed that housed the giant statue of Athēnē, rising thick-limbed and serene in the shadows, looking decidedly Asiatic, with her radiant brass crown (once gold) and her man-high stone shield. Few Lindians came up here; many thought it was haunted by the centuries-dead ghosts of Persian defenders, massacred when the Oikoumenē regained control of the island. Sometimes there were tourists from Aigyptos or the mainland, but not often. The Middle Sea was not a place for tourists any more.

The farmers and shepherds of Lindos saw her as Artemis and believed she brought them luck. In the village, her world seemed full of welcoming smiles from familiar faces.

On her seventh birthday, Berenikē, her mother, took her from Lindos to Rhodos. She did not remember much about the island’s biggest city besides the imposing bronze Neos Kolossos, re-cast and erected four centuries ago, and now missing all of one arm and half of another.

Her mother, with red-brown hair, as wide-eyed as her daughter, led her through the town to the whitewashed brick and stone and plaster home of the first-level Akademeia didaskalos—the master of children’s education. Rhita stood alone before the didaskalos in the warm sunny examination chamber, barefoot in a plain white shift, and answered his simple but telling questions. This was little more than formality, considering that her grandmother had founded the Akademeia Hypateia, but it was an important formality.

Later that day, her mother told her she had been accepted into the first school, her lessons to begin at age nine. Then Berenikē took Rhita back to Lindos, and life went on much as before but with more books and more lessons to prepare her and less time to run with wind and water.

They did not visit the sophē on that journey; she had been ill. Some said she was dying, but she recovered two months later. This all meant very little to young Rhita, who knew almost nothing about her grandmother, having met her only twice, in infancy and at age five.

The summer before she began her formal schooling, her grandmother called upon her to return to Rhodos, and to spend some time with her. The sophē was reclusive. Many Rhodians thought she was a goddess. Her origins and the stories that had grown up around her supported their beliefs. Rhita had no fixed opinions. What the Lindians said and what her father and mother told her were confusingly far apart on some points and close on others.

Rhita’s mother was almost frantically thrilled by this privilege, which Patrikia had accorded to none of her other grandchildren. Her father, Rhamōn, accepted it with the calm, self-assured air he had in those days, before the sophē’s death and the factional fighting at the Akademeia. Together, they took her to Rhodos by horse cart, driving along the same cobbled and oiled road they had followed two summers before.

Patrikia’s house stood on a rocky promontory overlooking the Great Naval Harbor. It was a small gypsum-plaster and stone dwelling, in late Persian style, with four rooms and a separate study on the low cliff above the beach. As they walked up the path through the vegetable garden, Rhita looked over a brick wall at the ancient Fortress of Kamybsēs across the harbor, rising like a huge stone cup from the end of a broad mole. The fortress had been abandoned for seventy years, but was now being refurbished by the Oikoumenē. Workmen clambered along its thick crumbling walls, tiny as mice. The Neos Kolossos guarded the harbor entrance a hundred arms beyond the fortress, still armless, standing with more dignity withal on its own massive block of brick and stone, surrounded by water.

“Is she a witch?” Rhita asked Rhamōn softly at the front door.

“Hsss,” Berenikē warned, crossing Rhita’s lips with her finger.

“She’s not a witch,” Rhamōn said, smiling. “She’s my mother.”

Rhita thought it would be nice for a servant to open the door, but the sophē had no servants. Patrikia Vaskayza herself stood smiling in the doorway, a white-haired brown-skinned dried stick of a woman with shrewd, deep-seeing eyes wreathed in leathery wrinkles. Even in the heat of summer, the wind blew cool on the hill, and Patrikia wore a floor-length black robe.

She touched Rhita’s cheek with a dry finger tip, and Rhita thought, She’s made of wood. But the sophē’s palm was soft and warmly sweet-scented. From behind her back, she brought out a garland of flowers and looped them around Rhita’s neck. “An old tradition from Hawaii,” she explained.

Berenikē stood with head bowed, hands pressed firmly to her sides. Rhita saw her mother’s awe and vaguely disapproved; the sophē was very old and very skinny, to be sure, but not frightening. At least not yet. Rhita tugged at the flowers around her neck and glanced at Rhamōn, who gave her a reassuring smile.

“We’ll have lunch,” Patrikia said, her voice husky and almost as deep as a man’s.

She walked slowly ahead of them into the kitchen, measuring each step precisely, slipper-shod feet scuffing the rough black tile floor. Her hands touched a chair back, as if she were greeting a friend, then tapped the rim of an old black iron basin, and finally smoothed along the edge of a bleached wooden table laden with fruit and cheese. “After my son and daughter-in-law—sweet people that they are, but they intrude—after they go home, we can really talk.” The sophē glanced sharply at Rhita, and despite herself, the girl nodded agreement, conspiring.

They spent much of the next few weeks together, Patrikia telling her tales, many of which Rhita had already heard from her father. Patrikia’s Earth was not the Gaia Rhita had grown up on; history had gone differently there.

On a warm hazy day when the wind was still and the sea seemed lost in glazed sleep, her grandmother walked slowly ahead of her in a nearby orange grove, a basket of fruit slung over one arm. “In California, there used to be orange groves all over, beautiful big oranges, much bigger than these.” Patrikia lifted a reddish, plum-sized fruit in her thin, strong fingers. “The groves had almost disappeared by the time I was your age. Too many people wanted to live there. Not enough room for the groves.”

“Is California here, or there, Grandmother?” Rhita asked.

“There. On Earth,” Patrikia said. “There’s no such name here.” She paused, staring up at the sky reflectively. “I don’t know what’s happening where California would be in this world…I suppose it’s part of Nea Karkhēdōn’s western desert.”

“Full of red men with bows and arrows,” Rhita suggested.

“Maybe so. Maybe so.”

After eating alone together in the kitchen, Rhita listened quietly to the sophē in the welcome cool of the summer’s evening, an old oil lamp glowing and smoking sweetly on a wicker table between them, supplementing the twilight as they shared glasses of warm tea. “Your great-grandmother, my mother, comes to visit me now and then…”

“Isn’t she in the other world, Grandmother?”

Patrikia smiled and nodded, her face a mass of wrinkles in the golden-orange light. “That doesn’t stop her. She comes when I sleep, and she says you’re a very bright girl, a wonderful child, and she’s proud to share her name with you.” Patrikia leaned forward. “Your great-grandfather’s proud of you, too. But don’t let us get you down, dear. You’ve time enough to play and dream and grow up before your day comes.”

“What day, Grandmother?”

Patrikia smiled enigmatically and nodded at the horizon. Aphrodite dazzled and shimmered over the sea like a hole in a dark silk lamp shade.

Rhita returned to Patrikia’s house two years later, no longer a wild child made polite by the presence of an impossibly old grandmother, but a studious, well-groomed young girl intent on becoming a woman. Patrikia had not changed. To Rhita, she seemed like a preserved fruit or an Aigyptian mummy that might survive forever.

Their talk this time was more about history. Rhita knew quite a bit about Gaia’s history—and not precisely as the Oikoumenē wanted it taught. The Akademeia Hypateia used the distance between Rhodos and Alexandreia to some advantage. Decades before, the Imperial Hypsēlotēs Kleopatra the Twenty-first had given the sophē far more discretion as to curriculum than the royal advisors found pleasing.

At eleven, Rhita was already aware of politics. But she was proving even more adept at numbers and the sciences.

In the long evenings on the porch, watching the death of days along purple and gray and red horizons, Patrikia told Rhita about Earth, and how it had almost killed itself. And she told Rhita about the Stone that had come from the stars, hollow like a gourd or some exotic mineral, built by Earth’s children from a future time. Rhita puzzled over the subtle geometries that allowed such an enormous object to be whipped back through time into another closely similar universe. But her head seemed filled with sunlit bees when Patrikia described the corridor, the Way, that Earth’s children had attached to the Stone…

She slept restlessly and dreamed of this artificial place shaped like a never-ending water-pipe, with holes leaking onto an infinity of worlds…

As they gardened, weeding and killing insects, planting barricades of garlic around tender young flowers, Patrikia told Rhita the story of her arrival on Gaia. She had been young then, sixty years ago, when she had been given the chance to seek a gate in the Way that might take her to an Earth free of nuclear war, where Patrikia’s family might still live.

Instead, she had miscalculated and come to Gaia.

“I became an inventor at first,” she said. “I invented things I knew from Earth. I gave them the bikyklos. Farm tools. Things I remembered.” She waved her hands as if to dismiss them. “That lasted only a few years. Soon, I was working for the Mouseion, and people began to believe my stories. Some treated me as if I were more than human, which,” she shook her head firmly, “I am not. I will die, my dear, probably very soon…”

Within five years of her arrival on Gaia, Patrikia had been called to the palace to meet with Ptolemaios Thirty-five Nikephoros. The old ruler of the Oikoumenē had questioned her closely, examined the devices she had brought with her and managed to keep safe, and proclaimed her a true prodigy. “He said I was obviously not a goddess, and not a demon, and attached me to the court. Those were hard times. I made the mistake of describing Earth’s weapons to them, and they wanted me to help them build bigger bombs. I refused. Nikephoros threatened to imprison me—he was feeling quite pressed by Libyan desert armies then. He wanted to wipe them all out with one blow. I told him again and again what the bombs had done to Earth, but he didn’t listen. I went to prison in Alexandreia for a month, and then he released me, sent me to Rhodos, and told me to start an akademeia there. He died five years later, but the Hypateion was well established. I dealt with his son well enough…a nice boy, rather weak. And then his granddaughter…first her mother, of course, a strong, willful woman, but brilliant, but then the Imperial Hypsēlotēs herself as she came of age…”

“Do you like it here?” Rhita asked, adjusting her broad straw sun-hat. Patrikia pushed her wizened lips out and shook her head ruefully, admitting and denying nothing.

“This is my world, and it is not my world,” she said. “I would still go home, given a chance.”

“Could you?”

Patrikia nodded at the bright sky. “Perhaps. But not likely. Once, another gate opened on Gaia, and with the queen’s support, I spent years searching for it. But it was like a marsh ghost. It vanished, reappeared somewhere else, vanished again. And now it has been gone for nineteen years.”

“Would it take you to Earth, if you found it?”

“No,” the sophē said. “It would probably take me back into the Way. From there, however, I might be able to go home.”

Rhita felt sad, hearing the old woman’s soft voice fade on the last word, her face deep in shadow under her hat, feline black eyes closing, opening halfway, infinitely tired. The sophē shuddered and looked appraisingly at her young granddaughter. “Would you like to learn some interesting geometries?”

Rhita brightened. “Yes!”

She lay half-asleep on her cot in the bare whitewashed room, listening to waves from a distant storm breaking just a few dozen arms away, great poundings of Poseidon’s fists on the rocks, coinciding in her dreams with the slow thump of the hooves of a huge horse. Moon filled a near corner with cold light. Rhita opened her eyes to slits, feeling a presence in the room with her. A shadow crossed the moonlight, carrying something. The girl stirred on her leather bed, still not fully awake, her body lost in comfort.

The shadow came closer. It was Patrikia.

Rhita’s eyes closed and then opened slightly again. She was certainly not afraid of the sophē, but why was she in her room at this late hour of the night? Patrikia grasped her granddaughter’s hand in her own dry, strong fingers and placed it on something metallic, hard and smooth, unfamiliar yet pleasant to touch. Rhita murmured an incoherent question.

“This will know you, recognize you,” Patrikia whispered. “By your touch, you make it yours, years from now when you mature. My child, listen to its messages. It tells you where, and when. I am too old now. Find the way home for me.”

The shadow passed from her room, and the moonlight faded. The room filled with darkness. Rhita closed her eyes and soon it was morning.

On this new morning, Patrikia began teaching Rhita two languages that did not exist on Gaia, English and Spanish.

The sophē died, attended only by her three surviving sons, in the bare room where five years before her granddaughter had slept and dreamed of horses. Now a young woman, beginning her third-level studies at the Hypateion, Rhita hardly knew what emotions she felt. She was of middle height but gawky, her face bluntly, boyishly attractive, her figure slight; her hair was reddish brown, and her brows arched quizzically over green eyes, her father’s eyes in her mother’s face. What part of her was Patrikia? What did she carry of the sophē?

Her father was a slow, careful man, but his grief and worry were evident as he led the stade-long funeral procession across the sun-beaten carved stone roadway to the Merchant’s Harbor, taking the sophē’s frail body to the boat that would carry it out to sea. His two brothers followed, Rhita’s uncles, teachers of language in the Hypateion; after them came the entire faculty of the four schools, dressed in gray and white. Rhita walked a step to one side and behind her father, saying to herself, I do what she wanted me to.

Rhita studied physics and mathematics. That was what she carried of the sophē.

Her talents.

One year after the funeral, as spring greened the orchards and the vineyards and olive groves came into flower, Rhita’s father took her to a secret cave a dozen stadia northwest of Lindos, not far from where she had been born. He refused to answer her questions. She was a grown woman now, or thought she was. She had already taken a lover, and she objected to being ordered about, being led mysteriously to places she knew and cared nothing about. But her father insisted, and she did not enjoy defying him.

The caves were blocked by thick, narrow steel vault doors, ancient with rust but with hinges well-oiled. Overhead, a flight of Oikoumenē jet gullcraft maneuvered, probably from desert aerodromoi in Kilikia or Ioudaia, leaving five nail-scratches of white against the soft blue sky.

Her father opened the vault doors with a ponderous key and nine twists of a combination dial hidden in a locked recess. He preceded her into the cool darkness, past casks of wine and olive oil and dry stores of food hermetically sealed in steel drums, through a second door into a tiny rear tunnel. Only when the gloom became impenetrable did Rhamōn press a black button and turn on a light.

They stood in a low, wide cavern, the air sweet with the smell of the dry rock. In the yellow glare of the single light bulb, her father advanced behind his looming shadow to a rough-hewn, stout wooden cabinet and pulled out a deep drawer. The wood’s groan sounded heavy and sad between the hard walls. Within the drawer were several fine wooden boxes, one as large as a traveling case. He withdrew that one first and carried it to where she stood, kneeling before her and unlocking the lid.

Within, surrounded by a cushion of velvet molded for something at least three times its size, was an object barely as wide as her two palms spread together. It resembled a pair of handlebars from one of the sophē’s bikykloi, although much thicker, with a curved saddle pointing away from the juncture.

“These are yours now, your responsibility,” he said, lifting his hands as if refusing to touch the box any more. “She was saving them for you. You were the only one she thought could take up her work. Her task. None of her sons were up to the job. She thought we were suited for administration, not adventure. I never argued with her…these things scare me.” He stood and backed away, his shadow swinging off the box and its contents. The sculpted-looking thing within gleamed white and pearl.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It is one of the Objects,” he answered. “She called it a ‘clavicle.’”

The sophē had brought three Objects with her from the Way in her wonderful journey to this world. Their powers had never been explained to Rhita; Patrikia had simply told her what some of them did, not how. Her father brought forward the other boxes, laying them on the dry floor of the cave, opening them. “This was her teukhos,” he said, indicating a flat metal and glass pad a little larger than her hand. He reverently touched four small shiny cubes nestled next to the pad. “These were her personal library. There are hundreds of books in these cubes. Some have become part of the Hypateion’s sacred doctrine. Some have to do with Earth. They’re in languages that don’t exist here, mostly. I suppose she taught you some of them.” His tone was not resentful, merely resigned; perhaps even relieved. Better his daughter than him. He opened the third box. “This kept her alive while she came here. It gave her air to breath. All of these are yours.”

Bending over the largest box, she reached for the saddle-shaped Object. Even before her finger brushed the surface, she understood that this was the key that opened gates from within the Way. It was warm and friendly, not unfamiliar; she knew it, and it knew her.

Rhita closed her eyes and saw Gaia, the entire world, as if marked on an incredibly detailed globe. The globe spun before her and expanded, drawing her down to the steppes of Nordic Rhus, Mongoleia and Chin Ch’ing, lands beyond the power of the Alexandreian Oikoumenē. There, in a shallow swale, above a trickling, muddy stream, glowed a brilliant red three-dimensional cross.

She opened her eyes, terrified and pale, and stared down at the clavicle. It was three times its former size now, filling the molded velvet cushion.

“What’s happening?” her father asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t want these things.” She ran to the cave opening and into the sunshine. Her father trailed after, slightly hunched, almost obsequious, calling out, “They are yours, my daughter. No one else can use them.”

She outran him and hid in a cleft between two weathered boulders, wiping tears from her eyes. She suddenly hated her grandmother. “How could you do this to me?” Rhita asked. “You were crazy.” She pulled her knees up to her chin, bracing her sandaled feet against the rough dry rock. “Crazy old woman.”

She remembered the shadow in the darkness when she was a girl and kicked out against the stone until her heel was bruised. The months Rhita had spent almost alone with her, listening to her stories, thinking of that fabulous world…she had never imagined that it actually existed, as real as Rhodos or the sea. Patrikia’s world had always been as far away as dreams, and as unlikely.

But Grandmother had never lied, never even stretched the truth, about anything else they had discussed. She had always been perfectly straightforward, treating her as an adult, explaining carefully, answering her questions with none of the dissembling adults often hid behind.

Why should she have lied about the Way?

As dusk softened the outlines of the tree branches overhead, visible through the cleft, Rhita emerged from the rocks and walked slowly down the slope to the cave. There, her father waited, sitting beside the vault door, a long green stick held in both hands across his knees. She didn’t even consider the possibility he might hit her; Rhamōn had never physically punished her. The stick was just something to fiddle with and contemplate.

Gentle, careful Father, she thought. Life was complicated for him. The politics of succession at the Akademeia was getting nasty. He didn’t need any more grief.

He stood, threw the stick away and wiped his hands on his pants, staring at the ground. She went to him and hugged him fiercely. Then they returned to the cave, gathered up the Objects in their cases and, fully burdened, carried them down the hill to the whitewashed house where Rhita had been born.

4

Terrestrial Hexamon, Axis Euclid

The journey into Axis Euclid city memory was brief. Olmy chose a downline link and dropped a complete copy of himself into the matrix buffer to await entry into the central crèche. His body appeared to sleep; in fact, a partial in his three implants was processing data on recorded Talsit ambassador interviews, searching for behavioral oddities that could give him clues to true Talsit psychology. He knew he had no time for rest; he could feel it as well as think it, an itch, a compulsion, a restless impatience difficult to control.

If he felt a personal kinship to any male beside Korzenowski, it was Tapi, his son. He had known many children in the city memory crèche, sometimes as a tutor, sometimes as a judge; few were as high in quality as Tapi, and Olmy was convinced his opinion was objective. In less than five years of city memory education, the youngster was progressing to a level of sophistication rare in the crèche. Olmy doubted the boy would have any difficulty earning an incarnation; still, the exams were not easy.

He had resented Ram Kikura’s motherly suggestion that he visit Tapi; and yet, without her making the suggestion, he might have sacrificed such a luxury to his work…

Fatherhood was not a simple proposition.

They had applied to create Tapi seven years ago, two years after Olmy’s official retirement. At that time, the conflicts between the orbiting bodies and Old Natives on Earth had not seemed particularly strong or destructive; the Recovery had seemed on track, and both had felt there would be time to create and nurture a child. They had planned the boy’s mentality in close cooperation, deciding against the orthodox Naderite fashions of less structured creation as well as physical childbirth. Ram Kikura, with a feminine sensibility that had struck Olmy with its strength and conviction, had said, “A mother and father are not made by a few hours of pain and awareness of bad physical design…”

They had referred to the great philosophical treatises on mentality, and used classic design templates for non-parental aspects that Olmy (actually, Olmy’s tracer) had found uncatalogued in Thistledown’s third chamber library. Working in city memory for eight days (almost a year in accelerated time) they and their partials had combined the parental mysteries, selected large blocks of parental memory for endowment at certain growth stages, and overlaid the templates with great care to create the mentality they would call Tapi. The name came from Tapi Salinger, a twenty-second-century novelist they both admired.

Some conceived in city memory had as many as six parents. Tapi was biparental, with a predisposition toward masculinity. He had been born, achieving active status, six years before, both parents in attendance, one of only thirty children quickened in city memory that year. His body image at that time had been a six year old boy, Polynesian in appearance—Polynesians and Ethiopic blacks had been considered the most beautiful of the human races in Ram Kikura’s youth—and extremely puckish in behavior. Indeed, Ram Kikura had begun to call her son Robin instead of Tapi, but as he had matured and sobered (though never losing the spark of Robin Goodfellow), Tapi prevailed. For the first year of their son’s life, Ram Kikura and Olmy stayed in constant personal attendance, leaving city memory only for pressing duties, which were few. They had established several fantasy living spaces, allowing Tapi to grow in several simulated eras almost simultaneously.

The wonder of city memory was the flexibility of mental reality. With most of the resources of Hexamon libraries a part of the memory matrix, construction of simulated environments was a matter of a few moments’ effort. The wisdom of historic time—as documented and as perceived by the Hexamon’s greatest scholars and artists—was available to Tapi, and he had thrived on it.

Then difficulties had arisen, not with Tapi but with the Hexamon itself. The political winds had shifted and some had even hinted at re-opening the Way. The neo-Geshel party had grown in strength, countering the best prognostications of the Naderite political advisers. Olmy had felt the cold draft of history compelling him to prepare…

And as the next few years passed, he spent less and less time in person with Tapi, leaving the duty of fatherhood to permanently downloaded partials. Ram Kikura had also found less time, but still maintained close contact with Tapi. Tapi had never shown resentment, nor had his growth slowed, but Olmy often felt the pangs of regret.

The downline buffer was given access and Olmy’s original was loaded directly into the city memory crèche. Tapi waited for him, his self-designed image now that of a young man, a good approximation of what a natural son of his parents might have looked like—Olmy’s build and unaltered eyes and lips, Ram Kikura’s nose and high cheekbones, a handsome young male with the few stylish flaws that were the hallmark of intelligent body-design. They embraced, an electric concatenation of physical and mental mergings that in an earlier time might have been considered embarrassingly intimate for father and son, but which was the norm in city memory. Olmy measured his son’s progress from that embrace, and Tapi was given a healthy dose of parental approval.

Picts and speech were unnecessary in city memory, but resorted to nonetheless; direct mind-to-mind communication was laborious and time-consuming, used only when precise communication was necessary.

“I appreciate your coming, Father,” Tapi said. “Your partials were growing tired of me.”

“I doubt that,” Olmy said.

“I kept testing them to see if they matched you.”

“Did they?”

“Yes, but I irritated them…”

“You should always be polite to a partial. They carry tales, you know.”

“You haven’t accessed their memories?”

“Not yet. I wanted to see you fresh.”

Tapi projected a haze of body plans for Olmy’s approval. The young man’s body would be self-contained, but without the reliance on Talsit parts and other maintenance items in short supply. His design would not be able to exist so long without maintenance and nutrition, but for these times it was a better design than Olmy’s. It was certainly more practical. “What do you think?”

“It’s very good. You’ve earned council approval?”

“Provisional.”

“You’ll get it. Elegant adaptation,” Olmy said, and meant it. He almost wished he could apply for reincarnation and try it out. Still, he had lived with Talsit parts for so long…

“Do you think they’ll re-open the Way?”

Olmy gave him the mental equivalent of a grimace. “Don’t race ahead,” he said. “I haven’t got more than a few memory hours, and I don’t want to spend them discussing politics. I want my son to teach me all he’s learned.”

Tapi’s enthusiasm was electric. “Wonderful things, Father! Did you ever study Mersauvin structures?”

Olmy had, but only briefly, finding them tedious. He didn’t tell his son this.

“I’ve made the most remarkable correlations,” Tapi continued. “At first I thought they were tedious abstractions, but then I plugged them into analysis of synthetic situation and found the most incredible judgments. They allow the most complex predictive modeling. They act as self-adapting algorithms for social scaling and planning…they even model individual interactions!”

Tapi moved them into a private buffer. “I decorated this myself,” he said. “Nobody’s seen fit to overwrite yet. I think that’s a compliment from my crèche mates…”

It certainly was. Private buffer decors in the crèche were usually as vulnerable and fleeting as ice in a fire. The decor, to Olmy’s view an exhausting array of mental tests and demonstrated algorithms, was far more complex and accomplished than anything he could have done.

“I took some liberties with my formal lessons,” Tapi continued. “I applied the Mersauvin structures to external events.”

“Oh? What did you learn?”

Tapi displayed a jagged and discontinuous curve. “Many breaks. The Hexamon is under severe strain. We’re not a happy society any more. We were once, I think; in the Way. I compared the present dissatisfaction with psychological profiles of nostalgia for previous stages of life in natural-born homorphs. The small mimics the large. The algorithms show that the Hexamon wants to return to the Way. My teachers haven’t graded me very well on this, I’m afraid. They say the results lack rigor.”

“What you’re saying is, we all want to go back to the womb. No?”

Tapi agreed with smiling reluctance. “I wouldn’t put it so baldly.”

Olmy studied the jagged curve with a combination of pride and the familiar sinking feeling. “I think it’s very good. That’s not a simple parental compliment, either.”

“You think it will predict?”

“Within limits.”

“I…may be acting foolishly, but I thought there was strong predictive value here, too. So I’ve made my decision on primary vocation. I’m training for Hexamon defense.”

Olmy regarded the boy’s image with more pride, and an even stronger sensation of sorrow. “Like father, like son.”

“I’ve studied your history, Father. It’s admirable. But there are ways I think I can improve on the pattern.” Tapi’s image burst into an enthusiasm of colors and then reshaped itself, dressed in defense force black. “I will try to aim for higher office toward the latter stages of my career. Within one or two centuries of active duty, normal time. I wonder why you never made the move toward leadership roles.”

“If you’ve studied your father closely enough, you’ll know.”

“The old ways. Old disciplines. Once a soldier, always a soldier. The best and highest expression.”

Olmy nodded; those were honest sentiments.

“But your abilities…you’ve tended in recent years to feel less regard for your superiors. You say to yourself this is because their abilities have declined…But I think it may be suppressed and diverted expression of your own desires to shape history.”

That’s my son, Olmy thought. Quick and to the point. And doubtless right on the mark. “Leaving partials with you is like leaving lambs to guard the lion.”

“Thank you, Ser.”

“You’re probably correct on all counts. But if you enter that hierarchy, you’ll have to suppress and divert your own cocky compulsions, too. The most difficult road to leadership is through the defense forces.”

“Yes, Father. That would instill discipline and self-control.”

Unless it shapes you in a mold you’re reluctant to break, Olmy thought.

“Do you approve of re-opening?”

No escape, not even in crèche.

“I observe and I serve.”

Tapi smiled. “I’ve missed you, Father. Not even correct partials shine like the original.”

“I have…apologies to make,” Olmy said. “For past and future actions. I’m going to be very involved in work from here on, more so than in the past.”

“You’re working for the defense forces again?”

“No. This is personal. But I may not be able to meet with you any more often than I have in the past few years…maybe less often. I want you to know that I am proud of you, and appreciate your growth and maturity. Your mother and I are both exceptionally pleased.”

“Proud of mirror images,” Tapi said with a hint of self-deprecation.

“Not at all,” Olmy said. “You’re more complex and organized than either of us. You’re the best of both of us. My absence is not disapproval, and it is not…what I would choose.”

Tapi listened, smiling.

“My consent for incarnation is on record,” Olmy said. “I’ve assumed responsibility in the Hexamon for your actions. Your mother has done the same.”

Tapi was suddenly solemn. “Thank you. For your confidence.”

“You are no longer our creation,” Olmy said, following the long-established ritual. “Now you make yourself. I’ll recommend a commission in the defense forces. And I’ll try to visit you…” Honesty, he thought, would be the best policy. “But that’s probably not going to be often.”

“I will do you honor,” Tapi said.

“I have no doubt.” Olmy glanced around the decor. “Now, I’m interested in these Mersauvin structures. Let’s quiet this place down a bit and I’d like you to show me how you reached your conclusions.”

Tapi set about eagerly to do just that.

Olmy departed from Axis Euclid within six hours, one of three passengers in a shuttle to Thistledown.

He didn’t feel like conversing. The other passengers were too self-absorbed to pay him much attention.

5

Earth

Lanier sat on the edge of the bed to put on his hiking boots. He allowed himself a small grimace as he bent over to tie the laces. It was nine o’clock in the morning and a brief squall had passed over the mountains, dropping a freshet of rain and casting a sweet draft of wind from the sea. The bedroom was still chill. His breath condensed in front of his face. Standing, stamping his boots on the worn rug to settle them, testing the tightness on his ankles, he frowned again at a different kind of ache, another memory he could not blank.

Donning his jacket by the broad window in the living room, he looked over a few hedges and tall ferns at the green and craggy hills beyond. He knew his route through those hills; he had not walked there for years, but today seemed like a good day to reacquaint himself. He sought no panacea, no rigorous exercise to bring back a youth he had rejected; merely a diversion from his thoughts, which of late had been particularly bitter.

Three months had passed since Heineman’s funeral.

Karen had not said goodbye before leaving on an errand to Christchurch. She had taken the new Hexamon five-wheel truck; the roads were still rugged in the wet, and the old truck was not always up to country barely fit for horses. Someday, he thought, he would become ill in this house, and it would be a half hour or more until an emergency vehicle would reach them, and then, like Heineman, he would be dead.

One way to rid himself of the bad memories.

“Toll, toll, pay the toll,” he sang softly, his voice husky with the cold. He coughed; age not disease. He was healthy enough. Years more would likely pass, too many, before the memory blotter came and sucked his cares away.

He had done so little in his decades of service, as far as he could tell. The Earth after forty years was still a gaping wound, despite its official name; on its way to recovery, to be sure, but a place of constant reminders of death and human stupidity.

Why did the past come back to him so vividly now, of all times? To distract him from the frustrations of his widening rift with Karen? She had been positively stony since the funeral.

Twenty-nine years ago. A nameless town deep in the forests of southeastern Canada, a cold and snowy trap for three hundred men, women, and children. The men emerged from their solid, low-slung log cabins, emaciated beyond even Lanier’s experience, to confront the sky-travelers. Lanier and his partners, two Hexamon operatives, a man and woman, were well-fed and healthy, of course. They walked resolutely across the snowy field between their craft and the nearest hut, addressing the men in French and English.

“Where are your women?” the female operative asked. “Your children?”

The men stared at them, eyes elfin with starvation, ethereally beautiful, faces white, hair gray and patchy. One man staggered forward, jaw slack, arms out, and hugged Lanier with all his strength. Like being squeezed by a sick child. Lanier, close to tears, supported the man, whose yellowed eyes shone with something like adoration, or perhaps just relief and joy.

A rifle shot rang out and the female operative spun back across the snow, her chest a well of gore.

“No! No!” cried another of the men, but more shots clipped bark from trees, splashed snow, sang off the hull of the craft. A single middle-aged man with a thick black beard, less emaciated than the others, carrying a rifle that seemed even more nourished and fleshy than he, stood in the town’s lone road, cursing loudly, “Eleven years! Eleven! Where have you gods been these eleven awful years?”

The male operative, whose name he could no longer recall, knocked the man over with a hot flash of ball lightning spun from their only weapon. Lanier stood over the wounded operative, quickly assessing her condition. She would not survive unless they retrieved the marble of downloaded personality from the back of her neck; Lanier bent down and felt her pulse, letting her eyes flutter shut, allowing her to enter the first stage of death. Ignoring everything around him, he took out a folding scalpel and sliced open the woman’s neck just below the skull, feeling with his fingers for the black marble, pulling it from its socket, slipping it into a small plastic bag, as he had been trained.

While he did this, the town’s men slowly and methodically stomped the rifleman to death. The male operative tried to pull them away, but however weak they were, he was one and they were dozens. The man who had hugged Lanier kept his silence during the operation, frightened out of his wits at this outrage, and then got down on his ragged knees and pleaded with Lanier not to destroy their town.

The women and children emerged from the log huts, more dead than alive.

The people of this makeshift town had survived eleven winters. even the hard first two winters, but they would not have survived this one.

“For whom the bridge tolls,” he muttered. My wife is vital and young. I am old. We make our decisions and we pay the tolls.

He stood still in the hallway for a moment, eyes tight shut, trying to force the fog out of his head. Woolgathering, his grandfather had called it. Appropriate in New Zealand. This wool was thick with brambles, however.

We did not save everybody. Not even all the strong and capable. The Death was too universal even for angels from heaven to spread succor to all.

He had not worried about such things for decades, and it irritated him that these thoughts came to him now like pale substitutes for guilt, a guilt he did not believe he should feel. I did my job. God knows I devoted thirty years to the Recovery.

And so had Karen, but she did not look like a worn-out rag.

Picking up his stick, he opened the door. Gray clouds still skated overhead. If he could catch pneumonia the old man’s friend he might deliberately try to do so. But among the benefits conferred upon all Old Natives by the Terrestrial Hexamon was freedom from most disease. Their resources in that regard had been ample; every man, woman and child on Earth carried organisms that policed their bodies against any possible outside invaders.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the front porch door’s storm-glass pane, face strong but deeply lined, the lines around his mouth curved down, clefts on each side of his nose, eyes sad, upper eyelids drooping, making him appear worldly-wise. It was with a mix of satisfaction and perverse disgust that he realized he felt older than he looked.

Lanier regretted his vow to scale the first leg of the high switchback before resting. At the second bend of the mountain trail, doubled over, hands gripping his trembling knees, he sucked in jagged volumes of air and puffed them out, sweat dripping from his brow. He hadn’t done much hiking or even exercise for years, and unless he truly wanted to end this life, to overexert on his first long hike was a foolish luxury. The miracles of Hexamon medicine could only do what he had allowed them to do; that is, keep him reasonably vigorous for his age and disease-free and unaffected by excess radiation, of which he had an abiding horror.

His breath coming back to him, the pain in control now, he looked down from the precipice trail at the valley floor three hundred meters below. Flocks of sheep—maybe they belonged to Fremont, the young owner of Irishman Creek Station—flowed across the mottled green and sun-yellow grasslands, echoed by great rain-heavy gray and white clouds crossing their own intense, dust-blue pastures. Overhead, an eagle soared, the first he had seen this season. The wind this high was cold and bracing even in the November springtime; a thousand and more meters up the mountain there were still patches of snow, dotted with the inevitable filamentary scarlet fungi the shepherds and farmers called Christsblood.

He finally allowed himself to sit on a rock. His shins ached. His calf muscles threatened to knot. For the first time in months, maybe years, he actually felt pretty good, justified somehow for existing.

The wind called his name. Startled, he turned around, looking for a hiker or shepherd on the trail below or above, but saw no one. Satisfied the sound had been an illusion, he pulled a goat-cheese sandwich from his backpack, unwrapped it and began to eat.

The wind called him again, this time more clearly, closer. He stood and glanced up the trail, frowning. The call had come from that direction, he was sure of it. Stuffing the sandwich back in its wrapper, he marched around the second bend and a hundred yards up the trail, boots grinding into the pebbly surface and sliding on succulent grass still damp with dew. He was alone on the trail.

Singing to keep his rhythm, he paused to catch his breath and let the clean air pass into his blood, clear his mind of cobwebs gathered from months of sitting indoors.

He needed to riddle his situation.

While pitying his fellow humans, he had also come to hate them. It seemed that in their agony, more often than not they flailed about in a way that made things worse. Sometimes, those who had been treated cruelly—losing homes, family, cities, nations—had reacted by treating other survivors even more cruelly.

Lanier’s favorite reading of late had been the twentieth-century philosopher and novelist Arthur Koestler, who had thought humankind fatally flawed in design. Lanier had few doubts.

He had seen men, women, and even children subjected to deep psychological probing and treatment, plucking out their demons, leaving them better adjusted and better able to effectively confront the reality around them. Lanier had simply stayed quiet in the dispute over such “healing.” The treatments had cut decades off the Recovery, yet he still could not decide whether he approved. Were human beings such weak, ill-designed machines that so few could heal themselves, self-diagnose, self-critique? Obviously. He had become a pessimist, perhaps even a cynic, but there was a part of himself that hated cynics; therefore, Q.E.D., he was not fond of himself.

A wide mantle of cloud drifted over the land, a circular hole precisely in its middle. He resumed his seat on the boulder by the trail and squinted at the brilliance of the broad beacon of sunlight crossing the valley. So full of warmth, so hypnotic, that kilometer-wide patch; if he simply let his mind rest, sunlight on grass might answer all his questions. He felt vague, sleepy, ready to set all his burdens down, lie back, let the sun dissolve him like warm butter.

A few hundred meters up the trail, a man dressed in black and gray and carrying a hiking stick descended toward him. Lanier wondered if this was the voice in the wind; he wasn’t sure whether he appreciated company or not. If the man was a shepherd, fine, he could get along with rustics; but if he was a daytripper from Christchurch…

Perhaps the other hiker would ignore him.

“Hello,” the man greeted him, boots crunching in the gravel behind Lanier. Lanier turned. The hiker stood before the brilliant leading edge of the cloud bank. His hair was dark, cut short; he was just under six feet tall, young-looking, broad-shouldered, upper arms heavy with muscle. He reminded Lanier of a young bull.

“Hi,” Lanier said.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come up here and lead me down,” the man said, as if they were friends of long standing. Lanier identified his mild accent: Russian.

Lanier frowned at him. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“Perhaps.” The man smiled. “Our acquaintance was brief, many years ago.” Lanier’s mind refused to dredge up where he had seen the man before. Puzzles irritated him.

“Memory fails me, I’m afraid.” He turned away.

“We were enemies once,” the man said, seeming to enjoy the exchange. He did not come any closer, however, holding his stick in front of him. Lanier glanced back at him again. He wasn’t warmly dressed and carried no backpack. He couldn’t have been on the mountain for long.

“You’re one of the Russians that invaded Thistledown?” Lanier asked. His question, asked of a man so obviously young, was not stupid, though it might have been once. The hiker didn’t appear to be over forty; still, he might have undergone youth therapy on one of the orbiting bodies or in the Hexamon Earth stations.

“Yes.”

“What brings you all the way out here?”

“There’s some work to do, important work. I need your help.”

Lanier held out his hand. “I’m retired.” The stranger helped him to his feet. “Those days were very long ago. What’s your name?”

“I’m disappointed you don’t remember me,” the man said petulantly. “Mirsky. Pavel Mirsky.”

Lanier laughed. “Good try,” he said. “Mirsky’s the other side of heaven by now. He rode the Geshel precincts and the Way sealed up behind him. But I appreciate your joke.”

“No joke, friend.”

Lanier searched the man’s features carefully. By God, he did resemble Mirsky.

“Did Patricia Vasquez ever find her way home?” the man asked.

“Who knows? I’m not in the mood for guessing games. And what the hell do you care?” Lanier surprised himself with his vehemence.

“I would like to find her again.”

“Fat bloody chance.”

“With your help.”

“Your joke is in lousy taste.”

“Garry, it is no joke. I am back.” He stepped closer. The resemblance to Mirsky was uncanny. “I’ve been waiting up here for you to come, someone who recognizes me, and can take me to the right people. You have been important in the Recovery, no?”

“I was,” Lanier said. “You could be his brother.” His exact twin, actually.

“You should take me up to Thistledown. I must speak with Korzenowski and Olmy. They are still alive, are they not?”

Konrad Korzenowski had designed the Way, once attached to the seventh internal chamber of the asteroid starship Thistledown. Thistledown and two sections of the Axis City were still in a ten-thousand-kilometer orbit around the Earth, one polar “cap” removed, exposing the seventh chamber. The Thistledown had been blown from the end of the Way to allow the escape of the Naderite portions of the Axis City, forty years ago. The Way had briefly opened into empty space: it had almost immediately sealed itself, closing its infinity off from this universe forever. Those who had elected to stay within the Way—Pavel Mirsky among them—were more distant than the souls of the dead, if the dead had souls.

Lanier stammered something unintelligible, then coughed at a catch in his throat. His neck hair bristled. “Jesus,” he said into his hand. “What’s going on here?”

“I’ve traveled a good distance in space and time,” the man said. “I have a very strange story to tell.”

“Are you a ghost?” That was an old, useless thing to ask; he did not mean “ghost” in the Hexamon sense. His face flushed.

“No. You shook my hand. I’m solid flesh, mortal…in a fashion.”

“How did you come back?”

“Not by the shortest route.” He grinned hesitantly and set his stick down in the grass beside Lanier’s boulder, then sat. Mirsky—if indeed it was Mirsky, something Lanier was not willing to concede—looked across the valley with its movements of sheep and cloud shadows, and said again,

“I must speak to Korzenowski and Olmy. Can you take me to them?”

“Why not just go directly?” Lanier asked. “You’ve made it this far. Why come back here?”

“Because I think in some respects, you are even more important to me than they are. We must all meet and talk. How long since you last spoke with them?”

“Years,” Lanier admitted.

“There is a crisis coming in the government.” Mirsky glanced up at Lanier, face calm, serious. “The Way is going to be opened again.”

Lanier didn’t react. He had heard rumors, but nothing more. Still, he had isolated himself from Hexamon politics.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“No, it is not, actually,” Mirsky replied matter-of-factly. “Either physically or politically. It is like a drug, that kind of technology, that kind of power. Even the pure of heart cannot hold their convictions forever. Will you arrange a meeting?”

Lanier’s shoulders slumped. He felt defeated, too weak to muster up the proper words and defend his sanity. “I have a radio, a communicator, in my house,” he said, “down in the valley.” He straightened his back. “You’ll have to prove you are who you say you are.”

“I understand,” Mirsky said.

6

Thistledown

Olmy sat before a personal quarters library terminal in Alexandria, the second chamber city, in a district not yet repopulated. He had installed the terminal just a few days before, in the apartment where he had spent his later childhood—and where Korzenowski’s unassembled partials had been hidden, all that had been left of the Engineer after his assassination centuries before. Olmy had located those partials as a boy, and had later been responsible for reassembling and reincarnating Korzenowski, with the help of Patricia Vasquez.

In this obscure location, on a supposedly untraceable private terminal, Olmy received a message from an old acquaintance. The picts, loosely translated, read:

“Have something for you. Crucial to your work.”

The message was completed by coordinates for an abandoned station in the fifth chamber and a time for meeting—“Alone,” the picts strongly implied. It was signed with the chop of Feor Mar Kellen.

Mar Kellen was an old soldier and gate police comrade, about Olmy’s age. He had been born during the later Jart Wars, the biggest push against the Way’s invaders before the Sundering, when the Jarts had been repelled beyond two ex nine—two billion kilometers down the Way. Those wars had lasted forty years and had scoured hundreds of thousands of kilometers of the Way. The territory gained had been fortified and gates had been opened to uninhabited worlds ripe for mining. These worlds had supplied the raw materials for the early Axis City, and then had supplied the atmosphere and soil which covered much of the Way’s surface.

Those years had been horrible and glorious, years of death and annealing; the Hexamon had emerged from them stronger, ready to command the paths between gates, attracting patrons and partners from inhabited worlds accessed through those same gates. In some instances, the Hexamon had assumed trade abandoned by the Jarts; in this way it had established strong mercantile bonds with the enigmatic Talsit. It was the Talsit who had told them the name of their enemies, as closely as it could be translated into human speech.

The Jarts had not been defeated, of course; merely pushed far down the Way, and kept there by a series of powerful fortresses.

Mar Kellen had survived the last twenty years of the wars, and had then served in the fortresses beyond 1.9 ex nine. Even those frontier outposts had not challenged him enough. He had joined the gate police, and there had met Olmy.

They hadn’t seen each other for centuries. Olmy was surprised to learn Mar Kellen was on Thistledown; he would have thought him the type to join the Geshels in their push down the Way.

Clandestine arrangements irritated him; he had long since ceased to enjoy intrigue, especially when it was unavoidable…. But Mar Kellen had suggested he had something Olmy could not ignore; and whatever his old friend’s peculiarities, he had never been deceitful.

The fifth was Thistledown’s gloomiest chamber, a kind of vast cellar. Many train lines passed through on their way to the sixth and (at one time) seventh chambers, but only one still stopped there, and that infrequently, by special request. There were few restrictions on travel to the only unoccupied chamber in the Thistledown, and each month a few hardy mountain climbers and river rafters visited the grim, cloud-shrouded landscape of raw asteroid mineral, sculpted by centuries of mining into fantastic gray and black and orange peaks and abysses. The excess waters of Thistledown ran red there, thick with rust and other dissolved minerals, not recommended for drinking without having chelation implants to handle the metal content.

The fifth chamber on average was only forty kilometers wide. At the beginning of Thistledown’s journey, it had been thirty-eight kilometers wide; the removed material had been used for construction and to replenish volatiles lost through the inevitable leaks in the asteroid’s recycling systems. Nobody lived there on a permanent basis; it was patrolled only by remotes.

Olmy took the empty train from the fourth chamber, sitting with arms folded as the black kilometers of asteroid wall between the chambers flowed smoothly by.

Mar Kellen’s message had been so unexpected that he did not even try to guess where this would all lead.

Assuming nothing, Olmy wasted little thought on what lay ahead and instead re-explored what little Talsit cultural information had been acquired and stored in the libraries of the Axis City and Thistledown. He had been over this material frequently, and was now methodically churning it over again, hoping to answer a few intractable questions.

The short journey gave him little time, however, and he watched the tunnel walls give way to a wild, improbable relief of thick black clouds broken by shafts of silver tubelight, racing between sawteeth of somber red and green and gray-blue. The train had emerged from the exit of the curved tunnel at a cant, with windows on the right side pointing up at almost thirty degrees.

He had always found a grim emotional solace in these barren regions.

The train slowed and moved along its three cradling rails to a small cupola-covered station nestled between two rugged walls of dull, oily-looking nickel and red iron. Rain splattered the stone platform beyond the cupola. Not far away came the roar of a tumult of water seeking one of the broad brown lakes that dotted the chamber.

Mar Kellen waited for him inside the small deserted terminal, sitting on a stone bench that seemed more suited to resting machinery than humans. Thunder growled outside, a sound Olmy had seldom heard in Thistledown; but then, he had seldom had time to visit the fifth chamber, where thunder was common. Mar Kellen lifted two antiquated umbrellas in greeting. He projected a series of biographical picts at Olmy, with sub-signs to indicate degrees of truthfulness and where it might, and might not, be polite to inquire more. Inquiries seemed to be generally discouraged. Olmy did likewise, though with even more equivocation and brevity. The rest of the conversation used both speech and picting.

“I’ve followed your career, Ser Olmy, as much as was made public. You’re an illustrious fellow and a credit to the Naderites.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry to say I’ve lost track of you, Ser Mar Kellen.”

“Glad to hear it, myself. I made it my duty to be as obscure as possible without downloading into city memory and going rogue.” He picted an image of himself as a free-spirited rogue, crudely sketched, suggesting he might not be terribly successful. They both laughed, although Olmy’s humor was more forced.

“I hoped you didn’t learn too much about me.” Olmy countered.

“No. Your career was obscure, as well. But parts have become history. And I’ve learned, perhaps impolitely, of your current interest.”

“Oh?”

“You seem to believe we’ll be confronting non-humans again soon. Perhaps even Jarts.”

Olmy said nothing, his lips pressed into a wry smile. His private researches had been surprisingly public, it seemed; at least for those who thought it worthwhile to know. Mar Kellen’s obscurity became more understandable; this man had not downloaded, but he was a rare phenomenon—a corporeal rogue. Olmy picted a yellow half-circle indicating interest and full attention.

“I’ve come across something you might find useful. A holdover from centuries past. Rather like the Engineer’s record.”

“Here?” Olmy asked.

The old soldier nodded solemnly. “Do we have an arrangement, should you be interested? I assure you, you will be.”

“I’m not a wealthy man. Not even a particulary powerful man.”

“I understand, Ser Olmy, but you still have the support of the Hexamon. You could provide me with all I require in the way of access and privileges, since I’m hardly a fool for Earth’s gold.”

Olmy examined the man and closely analyzed his picting style. Mar Kellen was sincere, not bluffing, as far as Olmy could tell.

“I’m retired,” Olmy said. “My influence isn’t nearly as great as it used to be. Within the limits of my present status…”

“Sufficient status to procure my needs.”

“If you truly have something I can use, agreed.”

Mar Kellen’s abrupt broad smile was wicked. “Agreed. Come with me.” He handed Olmy an umbrella and showed him how to spread it wide. “This belonged to my Beni. You’ll need it. Shields our tired old bones.”

Olmy held the umbrella over his head and followed Mar Kellen on a narrow trail away from the station. The trail had been cut into a slope of rock and wound through a gorge above a steady red rush of water. Here, tubelight barely filtered through clouds and rain. The landscape was lost in a shadow almost as deep as Earth night. Mar Kellen brought out a light and showed Olmy the way up an incline. The beam caught a hole in the rock. “It’s warm and bright beyond that doorway. Come. Just a few more minutes.” They had been hiking for half an hour.

“I found this while investigating resources for the Thistle-down repopulation project,” Mar Kellen said. “Routine work for a gentleman of leisure. It had been erased from all resource maps but one, and that one must have been an oversight…. It didn’t seem important to the project, so I didn’t tell anybody. But I mentioned it to my Beni, and she—she was my mate,” he confided suddenly, pausing on the incline to look over his shoulder at Olmy. “Only thirty. Born since the Sundering. Imagine, an old war horse finding a young lady…truly a lady. Old Naderite family. But she had adventure in her blood. She far outstripped me for enthusiasm. She wanted to explore. So we explored. We came here, and found—”

He took a spry leap up into the cavity. Olmy followed, more gracefully but with less drama. A smooth black wall at the rear of the cavity reflected a meager dot from the light. Mar Kellen slammed his hand against a smooth black wall with painful force, face locked in a momentary grimace. “When we found it, it looked just like this. I knew the look. A security wall. Then I became enthusiastic. Nothing like a code to crack! Not easy, though. I had to crack thirty different coded blocks, using analysis invented only in the last century. Math has become my hag, Olmy.” He stroked the blackness, looking between it and Olmy. “But it’s a hag I’ve mastered. Once upon a time, this place was very secure…”

He picted a quick flash of symbols and the black wall brightened to gray then simply vanished. Beyond was a well-lit tunnel.

“Once inside, I suspected there were many lethal security measures. We looked for them, and found them—more than I would have thought necessary to guard anything. Most had reached their mandated limits of five centuries and had automatically deactivated. Obviously, nobody knew about it—not even presidents. Or so I assume. I may be wrong there.” Again, the wicked smile.

They approached the wide, half-circle archway entrance. A mechanical voice of ancient style—at least as old as similar voices in Alexandria—requested their identity.

Mar Kellen announced a series of numbers and displayed his palm to an ancient ID panel near the opaqued doors. “I’ve recoded with my own patterns,” he told Olmy. The doors cleared and opened slowly. Within, a bare, stripped-down reception area waited in semi-darkness. Mar Kellen beckoned Olmy through, and took him down a hallway to a small room, also lacking furniture or decor pictors.

Mar Kellen stood in the middle of the room’s blank white walls, shadowless, hands folded in front of him. Olmy stayed in the doorway. “This room is the gateway to a very great secret,” Mar Kellen said. “Of no practical use to anybody…not now. But once, it must have been very useful indeed. Maybe it was used, and none of us heard about it. Maybe it was considered too dangerous. Come in, come in.”

With Olmy standing beside him, Mar Kellen lifted one hand, extended one finger, and pointed it at the floor. “Down, please.” The floor vanished. The room was a lift shaft. They dropped quickly, without sensation, into darkness. Every few seconds, a thin illuminated red line marking some unknown depth passed. This went on for several minutes.

Olmy had never heard of inhabited tunnels extending more than two kilometers into the asteroid. They must have descended at least twice that far.

“More and more interesting, hm?” Mar Kellen said. “Buried very deeply, very securely. What could it be?”

“How far down?” Olmy asked.

“Six kilometers into the asteroid wall,” Mar Kellen answered. “The lower levels have their own power grid. It doesn’t show up on any chamber accounts.”

“It’s an illegal data dump,” Olmy guessed. He had heard of such things, super-secure dumps used by police and politicians who in centuries past had feared falling out of favor with the Hexamon. But he had never actually seen one.

“Almost correct, Ser Olmy, but not illegal—extra-legal. The lawmakers had this built. Can the lawmakers do anything illegal, strictly speaking?”

Olmy didn’t answer. It was a truism, even in the highly ethical world of Hexamon politics, that no governing system could survive a totally rigorous enforcement of its own laws.

A white square rose beneath them to become the floor again. A door opened, and Mar Kellen led him down a short hall into a dim cubical cell, barely three meters on a side.

“This is the memory access terminal,” Mar Kellen said, sitting on a curved metal stool before a broad featureless steel panel mounted at stomach level in one wall. “I played with it…and I found something horrible.”

He touched the panel and faint round lights appeared in two places. “Access, general key-code. I am Davina Taur Ingel.”

That name would have belonged to an ancestor, probably female, of the former Infinite Hexamon presiding minister, Ilyin Taur Ingel. Mar Kellen handled the board as if he had had some practice.

“This was the tough part. The security systems have deactivated, but there were access mazes in place beyond them, built into the memory structure. They were very careful, our mysterious extra-legal people. If there had been no mazes, I might have given this to you, for free, just one old friend passing something useful to another. But I wasn’t alone when I made this discovery. I had Beni with me…”

Olmy detected a sharp rise in Mar Kellen’s emotions. The old soldier was experiencing grief, anger, and finally a grim kind of triumph. Mar Kellen was sincere, but was he sane?

He motioned for Olmy to step forward and place his hand on the panel, below a green light.

“Don’t worry, just keep your personal barriers ready. You can handle it. I barely managed, but it caught us by surprise.”

Mar Kellen said, “Access occupant, guest of Ingel.”

Olmy’s head jerked back and all his muscles locked. He was getting impulses from something within the panel, something not used to a human body. He saw snatches of visuals, more than just distorted; almost incomprehensible. And he heard a voice far more alien than that of a Frant…or even a Talsit messenger.

>> Time concern. Duty concern. Inactive unknown time. <<

Olmy jerked back his hand with considerable effort.

Mar Kellen’s features had contorted into a rictus of enthusiasm. The old soldier was sincere, but he was also irresponsible. He had been shocked by his experience here, perhaps even emotionally damaged, and yet had managed to almost completely conceal his condition from Olmy until now. Mar Kellen laughed and sucked in his breath to regain composure. “It killed Beni. After we riddled the maze. It distorted all her neural paths, even reached into her implant memories and scrambled them. There wasn’t anything left to download into city memory, but her body was perfectly intact, alive. I killed what was left of her and disposed of it myself. That’s why I have to charge you.” His face was blank and pale. “For her loss. For her pain. What do you think they stored in here?”

“I don’t know,” Olmy confessed.

“I have a good theory. If I’m right—” He stuck his chin out and grinned his wicked grin. “—They must have captured it a long time ago. They must have downloaded its personality or whatever the equivalent is, in secret, in this clandestine memory store…And then they abandoned it. It waited all these centuries, dormant, for Beni and me to stumble across it. You believe we’ll face Jarts again, am I right? What would the mentality of a captured Jart be worth to the Hexamon if that happens, heh?”

Olmy shook his head, too stunned to answer.

“Come look at this. I didn’t find it until after she was gone, after we’d…Yes. Come.” He stepped toward the wall opposite the doorway. The wall separated in five L-shaped segments and withdrew silently, smoothly. They entered a large dark chamber, cool air eddying around them.

“Show yourself, you bastard.” Lights came on in a circle high overhead. A block of transparent crystal lay in the center of the octagonal chamber, occupied by a creature unlike anything Olmy had ever seen. It had a large, blue-gray vertical hammer-like head cut through with three horizontal clefts. Out of the uppermost cleft protruded shimmering white tubes tipped with black—eyes, perhaps—and out of the two lower, long black tufts of hair. Behind the oversized head—roughly the size and shape of a man’s trunk—stretched a long, smooth green horizontal thorax. Bifurcated pale pink tentacles each as thick as Olmy’s wrist and as long as his arm rose in a crest along the back. To the rear, behind the tentacles, was a bristle of short red barbs or feelers. A thick uplifted tail ended with a purple bugle flare. Perhaps strangest of all, seven pairs of lower “legs” or supports lined both sides of the body, not legs or limbs in the traditional sense but poles or long sharp-tipped spikes, each the color of obsidian, and just as shiny. Below the head, or perhaps emerging from the lower head itself, were two sets of many-jointed arms, one set tipped with appendages remarkably like hands, another with pink translucent palps.

Despite his years of experience dealing with non-humans, Olmy shuddered. As he stepped closer, against his strongest instincts, he frowned, appreciating a deeper truth about the creature; that this body was not alive, merely preserved so that it would not decay. There was something undignified, disordered about its awkwardness that told him it must be dead.

“Beautiful, no?” Mar Kellen circled the transparent block. The creature, fully extended, would have been about four meters long from vertical head to uplifted tail. “Our ancestral defenders, perhaps people we knew…people who trained us…they caught a Jart, and he or she or it is stored right here. But why not spread the news? This sort of thing would have been sensational, invaluable…”

Olmy knew what he meant. With the weapons possessed by both sides, battles were infrequent and cataclysmic. The Jarts had never responded to diplomatic overtures; in truth, after a few decades of the war, humans had stopped making them. Neither side could ever be certain what its enemies looked like. Decoys and deceptions had been used by both sides; information of any sort was suspect. To capture a Jart—even a dying or dead Jart—and understand something of its thinking…

That would have been special, indeed. Why keep it so secret, even down the ages? What had they discovered about their prize that required such caution?

Mar Kellen shrugged, his pictor casting a stray, context-free blue symbol on the ceiling. “Unless it’s not real. Maybe it’s a failed simulation….” He tapped the console. “But I suspect it’s real. Our simulations weren’t worth much. Though we never encountered Jarts face to face. Nobody ever has, we were told, and returned to tell the tale. But this…was kept secret from us all. Whatever, it must be worth something, Ser Olmy.”

The old soldier pointed out a white plate to one side of the block. “There are other ways of examining it. I tried them after Beni—my mate—after she died. I wouldn’t touch the direct feed for months. But this is less dangerous. Puts the damned thing on display, an analog of its mental activity. I suppose experts could read the signs back then. I can’t.”

Olmy watched the plate. A luminous cylinder formed above the plate. Like a geometric flower, it blossomed and extruded a haze of spinning lines. The lines danced hypnotically. The lower portion of the cylinder splayed out and assumed a tessellated variety of colors; black against gray, blood red against green, white against green, red against black, and so on, fixed and unmoving.

“Tame so far, hm?” the old soldier asked.

Olmy glanced at him, then back at the display. He could not begin to riddle what was being shown. “This is a diagram of the being’s mind?”

“It’s a Jart,” Mar Kellen said, agitated. “It must be. This shows the Jart’s mind and its memories. I’ve spent hours here, watching it. Sometimes, I’ve said to myself, ‘This is what killed Beni…’ Then I’ve had to leave or risk going mad.”

Olmy contemplated the pattern, fascinated. He had touched the very edge of the being’s personality; not enough to determined whether it was whole or a partial, damaged or intact, or even to guess whether it had been in active memory or inactive. But here was an unparalleled opportunity—and an impenetrable mystery.

Olmy felt his body stabilize a hormonal surge.

“Gives one a chill, doesn’t it?” Mar Kellen asked. “Too many mysteries.”

“Indeed.” He approached the preserved body, letting his own mind and implant processors mull over the problem. “You’ve shown this to nobody else?”

Mar Kellen shook his head. “I’ve been out of touch. Beni was…” His eyes met Olmy’s, half-lidded, face wrinkling in pain. “Healing me. Bringing me back.”

Olmy turned away from the old soldier’s anguish.

He had gone in harm’s way more often than he could remember. He had tried his courage with perverse regularity. Not even pure Talsit—something he hadn’t enjoyed in four years—could relax the hard little knot of desire for challenges. Yet he did not so much relish danger as experience. There had been very little extraordinary experience in the last few decades. He, too, had finally wearied of Earth, with its quagmire of needs and excess of misery.

But never in all of his lives had he felt the kind of fear he did now. Whatever lay within the memory storage—almost certainly a Jart personality, if Mar Kellen’s suppositions were correct—had been strong enough to kill Mar Kellen’s mate and damage Mar Kellen.

“Don’t thank me,” Mar Kellen said, smile gone. “Now that I’ve brought you here, I’m…” He picted a fury of red and yellow symbols, personal symbols, meaningless to Olmy but structured in an old Naderite prayer-form. “I don’t want anything, really. I don’t even care about advantages. There isn’t much I do care about, now. I killed her, bringing her down here….”

Olmy broke from his reverie. “You’ve found something very important,” he said. “I’m not quite sure what it is, yet….”

“I’m not curious any more. If it’s important, I leave it to you. I’ve really lived too long,” Mar Kellen said softly, his face glowing by the light of the Jart patterns. He blinked slowly, then licked his lips and glanced at Olmy. “Haven’t you?”

7

Gaia, Near Alexandreia, Year of Alexandros 2345

Rhita stood on the aft deck of the steam ferry Ioannes, plying the waters between Rhodos and Alexandreia. To keep away the winter sea chill, she wore an Akademeia brown cape and a butter-colored Rhodian wool gown. Her eyes soft-focused on the ocean and the ferry’s broad, churning wake. She was accompanied by a lone gull perched a few arms away on the dark oak railing, beak open, curiously turning its head back and forth. The somber gray sky brooded over a calm ocean the sullen color of iron. Behind her, large motor wagons from Rhodos, Kōs and Knidos hunkered in the shadow of the covered main deck.

At twenty-one years, she felt even more mature than she had at eighteeen, and that made her very mature indeed. At least her keen sense of fun had not yet deserted her; she had a healthy awareness of her own capacity for foolishness, and regretted finding little time to indulge it now.

Her hair had kept its luminous reddish-brown shade of childhood, but now she cut it shorter. Little changed were her large, quizzical green eyes, pale skin, and her stature. She had not grown beyond middle height, though her shoulders had broadened somewhat. She had inherited her father’s quiet physical strength, as well as long-fingered hands and long legs.

Rhita had visited Alexandreia only twice, both times before she was ten years old. Her mother, Berenikē, had thought it best to keep her only child close to the Hypateion and away from the cosmopolitan seductions of the Oikoumenē’s central city.

Berenikē had been an avid disciple of Patrikia, and had married Rhamōn, the sophē’s youngest son, more out of duty than love. She had loved her daughter fiercely, seeing in her a young image of Patrikia herself. In looks, however, Rhita resembled her mother more than her grandmother.

Now, with her mother dead a year, and Patrikia dead almost nine years, and her father still locked in a struggle for control of the Akademeia—in competition with theocratic elements her grandmother had openly despised—it had seemed best for her to take her talents and learning to the place where they might do the most good. If the Akademeia declined, at least she would be elsewhere, perhaps to establish a new Hypateion.

These worries were not foremost in her mind, however. They made her feel almost comfortable and secure when compared with her major concern.

For sixty years, Patrikia had searched for an elusive opening into a place she had called the Way. This gate had proven elusive, appearing at various times in various parts of the world only long enough to entice, never to be precisely located. Patrikia had died without finding it.

Rhita now knew precisely where the gateway was. It had stayed in one fixed position for at least three years. Such knowledge did not comfort her. She had become accustomed to her role, though hardly less resentful.

Knowing about the gateway had robbed her of her own life. Her grandmother, she thought, had imposed an almost impossible burden on a young girl by setting the instrument to recognize her touch, and hers alone.

Perhaps Patrikia had been a little crazy that year before she died. Crazy or not, she had given her granddaughter a terrible responsibility.

Everything else—her petition to study at the Mouseion, her personal life, everything—was subordinate to her knowledge.

She had not even told her father.

Rhita had hoped for a quiet life, but with a sigh, watching the seabird preen a wing, she knew that was not possible, not in this world. Even without the Objects, life at the Akademeia was going to be rough. All that she loved and was familiar with lay over the blue-black sea behind her.

She carried the clavicle and life-support machine in a large locked trunk; in a smaller suitcase, she also carried her grandmother’s “slate,” an electronic tablet for reading and writing upon. These were guarded by Lugotorix, her Keltic bodyguard, in her cabin. Lugotorix was unarmed, bowing to the sophē’s abhorrence of weapons and warfare, but hardly less lethal for all that. Rhamōn, for all the Hypateion’s pacifist philosophy, was a practical man, on occasion surprisingly resourceful and worldly. Lugotorix’s service was being paid for in goods more valuable than money; his two brothers now studied at the Akademeia. With such an education, they might overcome the prejudices that had handicapped those of Keltic descent since the uprising of century twenty-one.

Rhita felt a steady, unobtrusive connection with the clavicle; if anything happened to it, she would know, and she would probably be able to find it, wherever it was taken. With Lugotorix standing guard, few would try to take it; but not even the Kelt knew what he was protecting.

In good time, Rhita would petition Queen Kleopatra for an audience. She would present her evidence.

What happened after that, she did not care to dwell upon.

Having had enough sea air for the time—it was thick with cinders as the smoke shifted on the changing wind—Rhita returned to her small, stuffy cabin, sending the hulking, quiet black-haired Kelt to his own cabin for a rest. She removed her clothes and put on a simple Hindi cotton nightshirt. Crawling between the short bunk’s thin blankets, she switched on a feeble electric lamp and removed from her suitcase the smaller wooden teukhos, the book-box containing her grandmother’s slate and the cubes of music and literature, including her own diaries.

Nothing like the slate existed on this Earth, though in a few years the Oikoumenē mathematicians and mekhanikoi promised to create great electronic calculating machines. Patrikia had provided some of them with the theory of such machines, in meetings conducted just before her death.

Rhita realized her responsibility in caring for these Objects. In a real sense, she carried the fate of the Rhodian Akademeia with her; the Objects were proof of Patrikia’s truth-telling. Without them—if, for example, the ferry were to sink in the sea and the Objects were lost—there would be no proof, and in time Patrikia’s story would be considered myth, or worse, a lie. But whatever the danger, wherever she went, Rhamōn had ordered that Rhita was to have these objects with her always.

Rhita had read her grandmother’s notes many times, comparing the history of her Earth with the history of Gaia. She took comfort in the notes on the slate, as she might have taken comfort from reading familiar fairy stories.

The modern Earth her grandmother described was such a fabulous, if horrifying place—a world that had burned itself alive with its own genius and madness.

One cube held several complete histories of Earth. Rhita had read these carefully, coming to know the other world’s story almost as well as the story of Gaia. She knew that on Earth, Megas Alexandros had tried to conquer Hindustan and had only partly succeeded, as he had on Gaia. But on Earth, Alexandros had not fallen from an overturned ferry into the swollen river Hydaspes, had not contracted pneumonia and been forced to lie sick for a month, to fully recover and live to a ripe old age. On Earth, the Great World-Master had been forced to turn back by his troops, had fallen sick in another location and died young in Babylōn…And there, Patrikia had told her, was the juncture where their two worlds had separated.

Rhita often thought of writing fantastic novels of that other Earth, what her grandmother would have called romances. Perhaps in time she would; she favored literature when she wasn’t deep in her studies of physics and math.

But who could imagine a world in which the Oikoumenē had fragmented among the loyal Successors? Wars between the Successors, the transformation of Alexandros’s empire into competing kingdoms; Egypt dominated by Ptolemaios’s dynasty, Syria by the Seleukids, and eventually, with the rise of Latine, all of the Middle Pontos coming under the control of Rhoma…

Rhoma, in Rhita’s world, was a small, troubled city in strife-torn Italia—hardly the successor of Hellas! Yet on Earth, Rhoma had risen to destroy Karkhēdōn—Carthago in the Latin language—ending that trading empire’s history a century and a half before the birth of the little-known Ioudaian Messiah Jeshua, or Jesus. Karkhēdōn would never have gone on to colonize the New World, and Nea Karkhēdōn would never have rebelled from its mother country and asserted itself on the Atlantian Ocean, to become, along with the Libyans and Nordic Rhus, one of the enemies of the Oikoumenē…

On Gaia, Ptolemaios Six Sōtēr the Third had defeated the tribes of Latinē, including the Rhomans, in Y.A. 84, thereby guaranteeing that the Ptolemies would be rewarded with perpetual stewardship of Aigyptos and Asia.

On Gaia, there were nuclear power plants, huge experimental things built in the Kyrēnaikē west of the Nilos. There were jet gullcraft and even rockets putting satellites but not men into orbit; but there were no atomic bombs, no continent-shattering missile barrages, no death-ray battle-stations in orbit around the world. Many of these wonders were part of the secret lore of the Akademeia; Patrikia had learned hard lessons in her encounters with Kleopatra’s grandfather.

Gaia, despite its troubles, seemed a more secure and livable place to Rhita. Why, then, go hunting Earth? Why ask for that kind of trouble?

She wasn’t sure. In time, perhaps, she would understand her own compulsions, her own loyalties. Until then, she simply did what destiny had bid her do from childhood; what her grandmother had, without words, asked of her.

Rhita “scrolled” through the slate texts recorded by her grandmother, and came to the description of the Way, reading it through for perhaps the hundredth time. Here was a world even more fabulous and strange than Earth. Who in the Oikoumenē, or in all this world, could understand or believe such things? Had Patrikia dreamed at least these wonders, made them up out of her nightmares? Humans without human form, a man who had survived death several times, a cosmos shaped like a water-pipe and immensely long…

In time, she napped. Soon, the dinner bell rang, and she dressed again, leaving her cabin once more in Lugotorix’s charge. He ate alone from a pail provided by the ship’s galley.

Rhita ate with her fellow passengers, mostly Tyrians and Ioudaians, in the cramped dining hall above the main deck, ignoring the licentious stare of a richly-dressed Tyrian trader.

She would miss the Hypateion and its easy equality of the sexes, as well.

The skies over Alexandreia were clear, as they almost always were.

The ferry smoked past the four-hundred-arm-high Pharos Lighthouse at dawn the next morning. Rhita stood bundled against the cold at the stern. This Pharos was the fourth of its kind, the tallest of all, an iron, stone and concrete monster built a hundred and sixty years before. The crowded buildings on the low hills of Alexandreia glowed pink in the morning light, dusky green in the shadows. The marble and granite palace buildings on the Lokhias promontory were an orange blaze above the placid gray-blue Royal Harbor. The great caissons, sunk into the harbor floor northeast of the promontory to hold the harbor water back from subsided palace buildings, studded the shore like ivory game pieces, linked by lines of piled stone and masonry.

To Rhita, it hardly seemed real, this most famous of the world’s cities, the center of human culture and learning—Oikoumenē culture, at least.

The ferry docked in the Great Harbor and disgorged its motor wagons across a broad steel tongue. Greasy smoke and escaping steam wafted from the wagon deck to the passenger ramp where Rhita and the Kelt lugged their bags.

Crossing the ramp amid Aithiopian businessmen in their formal skins and feathers and Aigyptian hawkers, raucous and insistent in their black robes, the pair managed to cross the quay unmolested. Rhita kept her eye out for somebody to meet them, not knowing quite what to expect if indeed her grandmother’s influence still reached to Kleopatra. Off to one side of the pier, in a narrow corridor reserved for motor taxis and horse-drawn cargo trucks, a long, shabby black passenger wagon puffed steam while its driver smoked a foot-long black cigar redolent of cloves. A slate chalked with the message “VASKAYZA-MOUSEION” leaned against one open door.

“That’s ours, I think,” Rhita said. It wasn’t the most elegant of receptions. There were no security guards present—none she could see, anyway.

As they approached the passenger wagon, she felt bucolic in her innocence. The city, a palpable, odoriferous presence now—thick acrid fuel oil, sweet spattering clouds of steam, gassy horse dung, unwashed masses of travelers and merchants—could swallow her whole, chew her up, and not be held to any kind of account. For the first time, Rhita acutely felt her lack of power. Her grandmother had always seemed so self-assured; how could she possibly be emulated, in the face of such a huge, overpowering place?

Rhita and Lugotorix presented themselves to the driver, who stubbed out his smoke against an often-smudged door guard, stuffed the butt into a grimy pants pocket, and climbed into the elevated front seat. They boarded the wagon. With a hiss and a jerk, the wagon labored them down a broad boulevard lined with ancient marble colonnades. Turning left into a high marble archway, it took them onto the grounds of the Mouseion, the great Library and University of Alexandreia.

“She’s a very handsome young woman,” said the bibliophylax of the Mouseion, adjusting his floor-hugging stool before the queen. “She has more of her mother’s looks than her grandmother’s, but her former pedagogue assures me she is the equal of the sophē Patrikia. She’s arrived in the harbor with some great Northern brute, a servant, my scouts say, and will be in her temporary quarters within the hour.”

Kleopatra the Twenty-first shifted her short, stout body on the informal throne. The scar that sucked a line across her face from left temple to right cheek, marring the bridge of her nose and half-closing one eye, was a pale shell pink against her fair, otherwise smooth skin. She had little of the beauty of her youth; the Libyan hasisins had seen to that twenty years before, during her state visit to Ophiristan. Having no further interest in lovers—she had lost her three favorite consorts on that one hateful day—she did not mind her appearance any more. Kleopatra was simply thankful she still had her health and a sound, agile mind.

The famous dry Alexandreian sunshine crossed the foot-worn white marble of the royal dwelling’s inner porch in a golden stripe and touched the queen’s left slipper, highlighting an unpainted but finely manicured toe. “You know I indulged that sophē beyond reason,” she said. Her grandfather had decreed that Patrikia Luisa Vaskayza set up an akademeia on Rhodos. The Rhodian Akademeia, named the Hypateion after a woman mathematician none in Alexandreia had ever heard of, had for the last fifty years competed with Kallimakhos’s Mouseion for research funding, more often than not receiving substantial royal awards. Useful and even startling work had come out of the Rhodian Akademeia, but everyone in the palace—and in much of the popular press—knew that the sophē’s highest priority had been finding a way to return to her home. Most had thought her more than a little mad.

“You are stating a royal opinion, my Queen.”

“Be straight with me now, Kallimakhos.”

The bibliophylax’s syrupy expression acidified. “Yes, my Queen. You overindulged her at the expense of far more worthwhile scholars, with more formal backgrounds and useful proposals.”

She smiled. Hearing this from the bibliophylax made it seem less true. “No one in the Mouseion has done so much for mathematics and calculation. For cybernetics,” she added, pronouncing the word as the sophē would have. She dabbled her toe in the sunshine as if it were a stream of water. For a moment, the simple color of the sunlight—warm and full of God—and the dry, cool breeze from the sea took her away from reality. She closed her eyes. “Even a queen needs a hobby,” she murmured.

Kallimakhos kept a respectful silence, though he had much more to say. The Oikoumenē Mechanikoi League had made its weapons procurement proposals to the palace two weeks ago. The rebel government of Nea Karkhēdōn, across the Atlantian sea, had twenty times in the past year raided the Oikoumenē’s southern hemisphere supply routes. The rebels had, a decade before, repudiated all contracts made by Karkhēdōn and were forming an alliance with the island fortresses of Hiberneia-Pridden and Angleia. The bibliophylax hoped that all the necessary defense work could mean fine rich contracts for his Mouseion. Instead, he sat discussing the sophē Patrikia’s granddaughter. The sophē and her family had dogged his footsteps for all the thirty years he had been in office, and the footsteps of his predecessor more decades before that.

Kleopatra smiled at Kallimakhos, a sympathetic, motherly smile despite the scar, and shook her head. “You must take her into the Mouseion. She must be accorded the rank of her father—”

“No match for his mother, that man,” Kallimakhos said.

“And she must be allowed to continue her search.”

“Pardon my insolence, dear Queen, but why does she not stay at the Hypateion in Rhodos? Surely she could better carry on her grandmother’s tradition there.”

“Her petition states she wishes the assistance of your mekhanikos Zeus Ammōn Demetrios. Demetrios has agreed, in a private conference with me. I hope this does not tread on your toes, beloved Kallimakhos.”

She knew it did, and she gambled he would ignore the slight. He benefited too much from his relationship with her highness to let small, if constant irritations like the Vaskayza family irritate him unduly. “Your will be done,” the bibliophylax said, bowing and touching the collar of his black scholar’s robes to the floor.

Overhead came a shrill hawklike scream, followed by a shudder in the palace foundations and a distant, innocuous crump. Kallimakhos got to his feet as the queen rose and followed her deferentially, hands folded, onto the outer porch. She leaned on the railing and saw a pillar of smoke in the Brukheion, right in the middle of the Jewish quarter. “Libyans again,” she said. He could see deeper red in her scar, but her voice was smooth and calm. “Have we any news from Karkhēdōn?”

“I do not know, my Queen. I am not privileged in such communications.” The Jewish militia would be even more irritated by this, and already it was common knowledge they did not favor Kleopatra; he wondered how he could use this new outrage to his benefit.

Kleopatra turned around slowly and returned to the inner porch, where she picked up the mouthpiece of an ornate golden telephone. With a nod, she dismissed the bibliophylax.

Within the hour, after a conference with her generals and the head of the Oikoumenē Security Staff, she dispatched a squadron of jet fighter gullcraft from Kanopos to bomb the Libyan rebel city of Tunis.

She then returned to her simply decorated private quarters and sat cross-legged on a Berber wool rug. Eyes closed, she tried to still her deep rage.

She had very little time indeed for her hobbies, but her word was still law in the Mouseion, if not always in the contentious Boulē. Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza…

Kleopatra no longer believed a doorway to another world would ever be found. But even in a time of horrible civil strife, and the worst threat to the Oikoumenē in her lifetime, she believed in allowing herself a just foolish obsession.

8

Earth

Half of the Laniers’ house was century-old stone and rough wood, perched on a stone and concrete cellar and foundation dug deep into a tree-shaded hillside. The other half, added forty years before when they had first moved in, was more modern in appearance, white and austere, though well laid out and comfortable, with a new kitchen and accommodations for the equipment he had needed for his work. That equipment still waited against one wall of the study, a small console of communicators and processors that had allowed him to keep track of the state of virtually any spot on Earth; his link with the Terrestrial Hexamon, through Christchurch and the orbiting precincts. He had not entered the study for six months.

Lanier’s neck hair constantly reminded him of his guest’s presence on the road beside him. They climbed the steps up the hill, Lanier’s leg muscles already aching, and stood on the broad covered porch as Lanier opened the unlocked door. He did not know whether Karen had returned home or not; frequently, when busy on her own missions, she stayed overnight or longer in Christchurch or some of the nearby villages. It actually concerned him little that she might have one or more lovers (though he would have resented it if she had taken Fremont into her bed); he had no evidence of such, and besides, Lanier had never been susceptible to that kind of jealousy, sex being among the weaker of his passions.

She was not at home. That relieved him; he didn’t know how he would describe or explain their visitor. Still, surveying the empty house, he felt a brief, sharp stab of grief. They had lost so much in the past few years, almost all that had consoled them over the hard cruel decades of the Recovery.

“Come in, please,” he invited. Across the years, he had adopted Karen’s precise, almost Oxfordian style of English. Mirsky, or whoever this man actually was—Lanier had an explanation nearly as ludicrous as the visitor’s own—, wiped his boots on the porch mat and entered, smiling with pleasure at the house’s antiques.

“A fine home,” he said. “You’ve lived here since…?”

“Between missions, since two-thousand-seven.”

“Alone?”

“My wife and I. We had a daughter. She’s lost. Dead.”

“I have not been in a normal house for…” Mirsky lifted his eyebrows and shook his head. “You can talk to Olmy and Korzenowski from here?”

Lanier half-shrugged, half-nodded. “In my study, at the back of the house.”

Lanier hesitated at the closed study door, glancing back at the man. His theory, which seemed more convincing every minute, was that this fellow did indeed resemble Mirsky, but was not—could not be him. Somebody had created a duplicate of Mirsky, though he could not imagine why. How would he explain to Olmy or Korzenowski—or anybody? They’d simply have to see for themselves.

“Come in,” he invited, opening the door and liberating a faint smell of dust and old, cool air.

From this room, Lanier had worked after his official retirement to advise and guide those following in his footsteps. Karen had wanted them both to continue on full active duty, but he had refused; he had had enough. Perhaps that had been the beginning of their rift. More unpleasant memories returned as he stared at the projectors and control console mounted in the south wall of the room. So much misery and confusion communicated; so many missions assigned here, leading to the diagnosis or treatment of so many indescribable horrors.

Mirsky entered the room. “Your own Earth station. Very important for you even now?”

Lanier half-shrugged again, as if to be rid of it all. He sat at the console and activated it. A rolling red status pict formed and then resolved into a live picture of Earth as seen from the Stone, wrapped in a coil of DNA. A smooth simulated voice asked, “What services, please?”

“I need to speak to Olmy. Prior reference individual. Or to Konrad Korzenowski. Either or both.”

“Is this official communication or personal?”

“Personal,” Lanier replied.

The rolling status pict returned, a beautiful spherical skein of intertwined red strands.

“Do you want to meet with them personally?” Lanier asked Mirsky. The man nodded. Lanier lifted his eyebrows and faced the pict again. More suspicious. Yet who could or would want to mount an assassination attempt? Such things were not unheard-of-Terrestrial Hexamon politics—not recently, at least—but they were rare. And Old Natives did not have the technology to create physical duplicates. The more complicated his surmise became, the easier it was to assume the man actually was Mirsky.

“Ser Olmy refuses communication at this period,” the console informed him. “I have located Konrad Korzenowski.”

An image of Korzenowski appeared in the study, projected two meters to one side of Lanier. The legendary Engineer, who had retired from the Recovery to do basic research, glanced with intense eyes at Lanier, smiled abruptly, and faced Mirsky. The image resonated slightly with some unavoidable energy lag or off-world interference, then steadied, seeming as solid as anything else in the room. “Garry. It’s been years. Is Karen well? And yourself?”

“We’re fine. Ser Korzenowski, this man tells me he must speak with you.” Lanier cleared his throat. “He claims to be—”

“He bears an amazing resemblance to General Pavel Mirsky, does he not?” Korzenowski asked.

“I didn’t know you had ever met,” Lanier said.

“We did not meet in person. I’ve studied the records many times since. You are Ser Mirsky?”

“I am, sir. I am honored to meet such a distinguished individual, and pleased that you are well.”

“Is this man Pavel Mirsky, Garry?” Korzenowski asked.

“I don’t see how he could be, Ser Konrad.”

“Where did he come from?”

“I don’t know. He met me on a mountainside near my home…”

Mirsky listened to this without comment, face bland.

Korzenowski considered briefly. He still carries part of Patricia Luisa Vasquez, Lanier thought. It’s obvious in his eyes. “Can you bring him to Thistledown, first chamber, within two days?” the Engineer asked Lanier.

Lanier felt a mix of deep anxiety, resentment, and an old, contradictory excitement. He had been away from important affairs for so long…

“I think I can arrange that,” he said.

“Is your health good?” Korzenowski asked, some concern in his voice. None but Old Natives and the most fanatically orthodox Naderites refused all methods of prolonging life and health. Lanier was ridiculously decrepit by almost any accepted standard today.

“I’m doing well enough,” he answered shortly, feeling the ache in his legs and now his back.

“Then I will meet you on Thistledown shortly after you both arrive, however long that may take. Ser Mirsky, I must say I am not completely surprised to see you.” The image faded.

Mirsky met Lanier’s astonished glance. “A knowing man,” he said. “Can we leave soon?”

Lanier turned to the console and made the necessary arrangements. He still had influence, and he had never been displeased to exercise influence.

The situation was evolving; Lanier was no less baffled, no less resentful, but more intrigued.

9

Thistledown

Accompanying the old soldier to the first chamber, Olmy had helped Mar Kellen book shuttle passage to Earth. Mar Kellen seemed to have gained a kind of mystic serenity after revealing his secret. They walked toward the bore hole elevators, Mar Kellen smiling faintly, shaking his head as he ran his eyes along the ground, scuffing his heels on the stone paving.

“All I need is a few weeks to think things over. Might as well do it on the birth world. Beni was not quite orthodox, but she would appreciate my going down there. She told me it was beautiful…”

“Star, Fate and Pneuma be kind,” Olmy said.

“Formula, hm? Between two cynical old soldiers?”

Olmy nodded. “Comforting sometimes.”

“Fairy tales after what we’ve seen and done.” Mar Kellen looked up at the tubelight, squinting unnecessarily. “Maybe you’ll need comforting now. I’m almost sorry for you. I thought you were the only one who could handle it. But maybe I did the wrong thing.”

“You didn’t,” Olmy said, not sure himself.

“I’ll climb a mountain for you,” Mar Kellen said. “A real one, not something in the fifth chamber, all carved away by machines. Tall, with wide glaciers and deep places. Taller than anything on Thistledown.” He winked. “Good-by.”

Olmy watched Mar Kellen enter the elevator. He received a mental impression—perhaps intuition, perhaps a quick subliminal pict from Mar Kellen’s mind—that the old soldier would hike into wilderness, deep into a mountainous region, where he could be sure of never being found.

Olmy returned to the old apartment, relaxing, contemplating. He used the library terminal to communicate with various legitimate (and discreet) research programs in Thistledown’s extensive memory stores.

When he had made certain his channels were secure—taking extra precautions to keep Farren Siliom’s tracers ignorant of his present location—he called in an old ally, a tracer he had built himself from the memories of a short-haired terrier. The tracer had proven itself to be remarkably thorough, and it seemed to enjoy its work—if enjoyment could be ascribed to something that was, after all, not a complete mentality.

Olmy set the tracer one task: to find any and all references to the downloaded Jart in the records of Thistledown or the orbiting precincts. Many record centers within the asteroid were no longer active; some were carefully hidden. But the tracer could maneuver into the most inaccessible memory, so long as some potential information link existed.

Olmy backed away from the teardrop terminal and folded his hands, face set in an expression of patient watchfulness, eyes glancing this way and that at the picts thrown up almost at random by the tracer’s beginning progress reports. This would take time.

He had ascertained that Mar Kellen’s implant memory was antiquated and minimal. Beni, as a “not quite orthodox” Naderite, had had only the legally required memory backups. The Jart records had somehow killed the woman, scrambled her backups, and driven Mar Kellen to the edge of insanity, in less than a second of contact.

It seemed unlikely, but it was possible that beyond the security maze the records had been left open and on download status—ready to be transferred. But the console only supported transfer to human minds or implants—there were no connections for transfer to external storage. He could, of course, rig such an interface…But there had to be a reason one did not exist in the first place.

A rapid download of channeled information into an unprepared and unaided brain could, in theory, fatally disrupt someone’s mentality. But what kind of machinery or safety circuit would allow any damage to an unsuspecting investigator? Obviously, unsuspecting investigators were not expected…Only experts.

Prepared experts.

If extreme secrecy was desired, the machinery might be designed to scramble intruder’s minds, but Olmy had never heard of Hexamon agencies taking lethal protective measures against citizens in the entire history of Thistledown and the Way.

Beni’s first encounter, without implants to buffer the flow, might in fact have kicked in some kind of safety circuit…Thus, when Mar Kellen tried the second interface a moment later—not realizing Beni was injured—the safety circuit and the buffer of his more extensive implants might have blunted the flow enough to disrupt but not kill him.

So many mysteries and questions…

In all of his exploits, Olmy had exercised a maximum of caution, commensurate with the time he was allowed to plan and act. Even so, he had been killed twice…

He took risks gladly enough, but he did not seek them. If there was a safe and easy way to accomplish his task, that was the method he used.

Now he was about to break his own rule. He knew he would not go to the Hexamon authorities with Mar Kellen’s discovery. That would have been safe, and theoretically his duty would have been fulfilled. Instead, he told no one and pondered different alternatives, all of them deliriously mad.

Olmy had lived through enough history to realize that at most times, major human events were shaped not by rational acts, but by guesswork and something akin to instinct.

To take proper advantage of this mystery, in the time allotted to him, he would have to act alone. Turning it over to the Hexamon authorities would mean delays, investigations by committee, the usual bureaucratic dance around a controversial asset that could very easily be a debit. He strongly suspected—as Tapi’s work had probably confirmed—that within less than a year the information this discovery contained would be needed desperately.

Total caution was impossible, even inappropriate. Especially when all that he put at risk—for the time being—was himself.

He journeyed again to the fifth chamber, this time through the bore hole, traveling alone on a small private shuttle. He climbed the trail, followed Mar Kellen’s instructions to open the security door, and descended into the asteroid’s thick, ancient walls.

In the Jart’s crypt, he contemplated the creature’s static mind patterns.

The image had changed little since Mar Kellen had first brought up the display for him. He walked around the image, again studying the Jart’s preserved body. It was as ugly as he had suspected a Jart would be—and as strange. Perhaps stranger than anything they had met in the Way, and that had included some very odd beings indeed—some difficult to define as “alive” but for their mental activity. What creature had ever walked on solid sharp-ended poles? How did it eat? It was obviously not designed for speed or flexibility. What function did the tentacles and cluster of spikes serve? How could that narrow body service such a large head?

Olmy sat in the tiny chamber, subduing an old, pale fear of very small places. There was no chair, so he sat on the smooth ancient floor, back against the wall.

Why is it here? A question equally as unanswerable as Who brought it here? or How was it captured?

Why would a Jart allow itself to be captured and have its personality downloaded?

He stood and stretched his muscles and joints. His body still felt young, fully capable. His mind was equipped with sufficient implant memory and processing modules to house several human personalities beside himself; he hadn’t used the excess since he had carried Korzenowski, prior to the Engineer’s reincarnation four decades ago. But it was still available. There were few people on Thistledown or anywhere else who matched Olmy’s potential either physically or mentally.

Given a few weeks, he could probably riddle the buried chambers and discover how to use the equipment properly. But why would he do that?

For the same reasons he had spent the last few years studying all that was known about the psychology of non-human intelligences. The Terrestrial Hexamon, after decades of concentrating on very different problems, was not prepared strategically or tactically to return to the Way.

Yet they would almost certainly do so. He could feel the pressure of history; a familiar pressure.

If Olmy could give them expert advice, the Hexamon might survive its own foolishness. And of all the beings most likely to confront them in the re-opened Way—

The Jarts were the most formidable. Even captured, imprisoned, quiescent for centuries, somehow they could still kill.

It was essential that Olmy extract what information he could from this source, at any personal cost.

With a grin, he realized much of his rationalizing was to hide a basic truth. He did not trust the present leadership. They condescended to the past rather than understanding it. His ingrained sense of soldier’s superiority had finally triumphed over his faith in the rightness of the command structure.

“I’m going rogue, myself,” he confessed to the Jart’s ancient corpse. “Damn it all to hell.”

10

Gaia

Alexandreia was a lot filthier than she remembered from her visits years past; it seemed to wear a cloak of smoke and soot as protection against its many troubles. The fabulous marble causeways were pitted with decay. Many of the statues had been shrouded in great sheets of oilcloth.

The representatives of the bibliophylax, the director and archivist of the Mouseion, hurried her and her luggage off the street before the Mouseion’s famous Eastern Stoa, then put her in a rickety cart, insisting that she ride rather than walk.

The women’s residence hall was a brick and stone two-story block dropped inauspiciously in a dusty, treeless corner of the Mouseion grounds. Rhita’s heart fell when she saw it; Lugotorix, riding beside the driver on the cart, gave a low whistle of contempt.

They pulled into the broken brick and pounded-dirt courtyard. An elderly woman in a black shawl swept dust and sand half-heartedly in the shade of the inset double doorway, giving them barely a glance. The door opened and a blond, matronly young woman about the same age as Rhita stepped out with hands clenched over her head in greeting.

“Welcome! welcome!” she shrilled, clicking her tongue and dropping her hands to lift her long brown robe out of the dust. “You are from Rhodos? From the Hypateion?”

Rhita smiled and nodded at her. The cart jerked to a sudden stop and the driver gave the Kelt some small assistance in dropping her luggage to the curbside. “You can’t stay here, you know,” the woman told the Kelt sharply. “No men here.”

“He’s my bodyguard,” Rhita said.

“My dear, bad as things are for us in the Mouseion, none of us need bodyguards! He’ll have to stay elsewhere. You are Reee-ta Berenikē Vaskayza?”

“Yes.”

The woman hugged her briskly. “I am Jorea Yallos, from Galatia. Your houseguide. You study mathematics?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating. I study animal husbandry in the school of agriculture. I have been told to show you your quarters and answer your questions.”

Rhita’s hopes fell when Yallos urged her to the upper floor and bustled before her along a dark hallway. “We appreciate your coming here. I’m sorry we can’t do better for you. In the summer, these rooms cool off more quickly at night. In the winter, that’s not what you want. They’re comfortably warm during the day, however.” She withdrew a large iron key and inserted it into the padlock, pocketed both lock and key, and pushed and kicked the thin wooden door open. It scraped sadly over the broken tile floor.

“Are you a daughter of Isis?” Yallos asked.

Rhita entered the room. It was like a cell in a monastery, with a pair of small windows mounted high in the outer wall and a leather bed pushed into one corner. Behind the door, a wobbly stand supported a chamber pot and bowl. Against the right hand wall, a scabrous wooden desk had been propped under a faded mural of the Kanopic Isis with her small, wide-eyed, feathered infant son and protective snake.

“No,” Rhita managed to answer.

“Pity. Dorca, the woman here before you, a lovely helper, she was quite fond of Isis. You can’t redecorate without the women’s council’s permission.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rhita said. She gestured for Lugotorix to bring in her luggage. He squeezed through the door with traveling case and wooden boxes under both arms, gently lowered them to the floor, and stood to one side, away from the suspicious Yallos.

“He’s a Kelt, isn’t he?”

“From the Parisioi,” Rhita affirmed.

“There are plenty of Kelts in Galatia,” Yallos said. “I’m of Nabataean and Hellenic ancestry, myself.”

Rhita nodded politely.

“We have a group council at the first hour of sunset. If you’d like to join us, you’re welcome. Let me know if you need anything. We women have to stick together here. They don’t much care for us, Kallimakhos and his people. We’re not good for his defense contracts.” Yallos stood in the doorway. “The Kelt has to come with me now. I’ll get him a room in the old baths, where the groundskeepers bed down.”

Lugotorix flicked his slitted eyes from Yallos, whom he clearly loathed, to Rhita. “Go,” she told him. “I’ll be okay here.” She was none too sure of that, however. She already felt homesick and out of place. The Kelt shrugged and followed the houseguide. Rhita suddenly thought of something and called to her in the hall. “Can I have the lock and key?”

“No locks,” Yallos said.

“I need a lock,” Rhita persisted, irritated now and worried for the safety of the Objects.

“Come to the council meeting. We’ll discuss it. Oh…if you’re not a sister of Isis, what are you?”

Rhita made up her answer with surprising speed. “I belong to the sanctuary of Athēnē Lindia.”

Yallos blinked. “Pagan?” she asked.

“Rhodian,” Rhita replied. “It’s my birthright.”

“Oh.”

Rhita shut the door and faced her squalid cell. So much for her reception in the Mouseion. Her grandmother’s shadow obviously did not stretch this far. Was this the queen’s doing, or was Kleopatra even aware of Rhita’s arrival?

She sat for a while, shivering in the gloom. A single electric light over the bed cast a yellow glow over that corner and little else. It was already midday and the room was just beginning to warm. How much risk should she take with the Objects, not to mention her own safety? How much risk would she take before—if—she reached her goal?

Prying at a shutter jammed over one small, deep-set window, she broke an already-short fingernail to the quick. She swore beneath her breath, one green eye bright in her meager success, a thin line of indirect sunlight.

Rhita wiped gritty dust from the desk, used a frayed withy broom to sweep the floor, and opened her trunk to put her clothes away. In the late afternoon, the guides had told her, she would meet with the bibliophylax.

She did not look forward to it.

11

Earth

The Russian—so it was most convenient to think of him, at least for the moment—stood with Lanier on the porch, waiting for the wink of a shuttle’s lights. The night sky was a smear of aluminum dust across solid black, depth upon depth of stars. The air had cleared since the Death, Earth’s natural healing mechanisms removing most atmospheric traces of the conflagration. There were few pollution sources anywhere now, even with the Recovery well along. Hexamon Technology was non-polluting, self-contained.

The first lights they saw were not in the sky, but along the road leading up the side of the valley to the cabin. Lanier pursed his lips and met the Russian’s glance with a shrug. “My wife,” he said. He had hoped to get the Russian away before her arrival.

The rugged All-Terrain Vehicle, modeled after types used by the first investigators on the Stone, ground its tires along the gravel drive to one side of the cabin and stopped, its electrical motors cutting abruptly. Karen swung down from the cabin in the automatic glare of the outdoor floodlights, saw Lanier on the porch and waved at him. He waved back, feeling older just looking at her.

In their life together, he had seen her age a decade or two, grow old along with me, then regress under therapy, the same therapy he had turned down. She looked a youthful forty at most.

“I’ve been in town,” she called out in Chinese as she dragged her duffel from the rear of the ATV. “We’re setting up an artificial social network, so the—” She saw the Russian and stopped on the porch steps, biting her lower lip. She looked over her shoulder at the drive; no other vehicles. Then she queried Lanier with one raised eyebrow.

“This is a visitor. His name is Pavel,” he said.

“We have not met,” the Russian said, stepping forward and extending his hand. “I am Pavel Mirsky.”

Karen smiled politely, but her instincts had been aroused.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, shifting her eyes to her husband. She glanced between them quickly, brow furrowed.

“I’m fine. His name,” Lanier repeated with some deliberate drama, “is Pavel Mirsky.”

“I know the name,” she said. “Wasn’t that the Russian commander on the Stone? Went with the precincts down the Way…didn’t he?” Her eyes fell accusingly on Lanier: What is this? She had seen pictures of Mirsky in the history tapes. The game was up. She recognized him. “You look just like him.”

“I hope I haven’t disturbed you,” the Russian said.

“He’s a son, a look-alike?” she asked Lanier.

He shook his head.

She stood on the top step, hands clasped before her. “You’re sure everything is all right? You’re joking with me.” She climbed up one step, paused again. Then, in Chinese, she asked Lanier, “Who is this man?”

In Chinese, Lanier responded, “He’s a good imitation, if not the real thing. I’m taking him to meet with Korzenowski.”

Karen walked slowly before them, examining the Russian, biting her lower lip. “Where did you come from?”

The Russian looked between them. “I have not explained that yet,” he said. “Better to wait until it all comes out.”

“You can’t be Mirsky,” Karen said. “If you’re trying to hoodwink my husband…All we heard would have to be a lie.”

Surprisingly, Lanier hadn’t considered that possibility. He had not, of course, actually seen Mirsky go down the Way.

“No lies,” the Russian said. “I am pleased to finally meet you. I have always thought your husband a fine man, a true leader, with sound judgment. I congratulate both of you.”

“Why?” Lanier asked.

“On having found each other,” the Russian explained.

“Thank you,” Karen said sharply. “Have you offered our guest any refreshment, Garry?” She carried her duffel into the cabin. Her suspicion had turned into anger.

“We’re expecting the shuttle any minute,” he answered. “We’ve eaten a little, and had a beer.”

The Russian smiled at the mention of the beer. His enjoyment had been obvious.

Karen made various small noises in the kitchen, then continued her interrupted conversation through the screened window opening onto the porch. “We’re going to get twenty or thirty village leaders and political science students from Christchurch and fly them to Axis Thoreau. It’s going to be a kind of conference, all in city memory, to establish social ties it would take years to make otherwise. They’ll all act as if they were family afterwards, if it goes well. Think of all politicians having family ties with each other, and their constituents? It could be wonderful.” Her tone had changed; now she was ignoring the mystery.

Lanier suddenly felt exhausted. All he wanted was to lie back on the old couch before the cabin’s fireplace and close his eyes.

“Here comes the shuttle,” the Russian said, pointing. A blip of white soared across the opposite side of the valley, then swooped in low, just above the trees. Karen returned to the porch, face strained, and looked up at her husband.

“What in hell are you doing?” she demanded in an undertone. “Where are you going?”

Lanier shook his head. “To the Stone.” Everything was losing its edge of reality. Nothing seemed very probable. “I don’t know when we’ll be back.”

“You shouldn’t go alone. I can’t go with you,” she said. “I have to be in Christchurch tomorrow.” She glanced at Lanier. Karen was no fool, but she was having a difficult time shifting gears. Her expression said that she knew just how odd this really was; and how important it might be. “Maybe you can explain to me after you get to the Stone?”

“I’ll try,” Lanier said.

“I am sorry for the disruption,” the Russian said quietly.

“You shut up,” Karen cried, turning on him. “You’re just a goddamned ghost.”

At that, Lanier smiled. He put his hand on Karen’s shoulder, both to reassure her and stop her from saying more. The gestures come easily enough, he thought. Why not the feeling?

They were off, cushioned in the free-form white interior of the shuttle, flying high above the dark Earth. In the sky, staring out across the black, ridged horizon, where bloom of stars met mountains, Lanier felt free. He hadn’t flown in years, had almost forgotten the feeling. As soon as the shuttle pointed its blunted nose straight up, and the view through the transparency in the hull tilted, his exhilaration changed to an opposite dread.

Space.

How nice just to fly in the thin film of air, and avoid the larger issues. Flying was like a marvelous kind of sleep, above the hard reality of waking, but below the greater blackness of death…

Across the aisle, the Russian stared straight ahead, not bothering to examine the view, as if he had seen it all so often it could not affect him one way or the other. The Russian did not look thoughtful. He did not look concerned. There was no way to know what all this meant to him, or how he felt about the meeting with Korzenowski…or about returning to the Stone.

If he was Mirsky, his return to Thistledown should hold a true emotional charge. The last time he had entered the Stone, it had been through a fury of projectiles and laser beams, as part of the Russian invasion force, just before, perhaps as prelude to, the Death.

Lanier realized that if this was Mirsky, then from that fateful moment until he came to the valley, he had not seen Earth again.

The flight, smooth and quiet, seemingly effortless, did not reduce Lanier’s sense of unreality. If he is Mirsky, where has he been since—what has he seen?

12

Gaia

The Mouseion had expanded considerably into the Neapolis and Brukheion—the Hellenic quarter—since ancient times, and had even set a foot—the school of medicine—into the Aigyptian district. The buildings of the school of medicine, the Erasistrateion, abutted the smaller, less reputable Library of Domestic Oikoumenē Studies, the one-time Serapeion. The university, research center and library—actually, seven buildings spread around the original library—occupied a square about four stadia on a side in the middle of the city. Scattered throughout the older marble and granite and limestone buildings were new, boxy iron and glass centers for the study of science and mechanics. On top of the steep hill of the former Paneion, the university had installed, five centuries before, a huge stone observatory. It was more a relic than a functioning center of astronomical research, but its grandeur was impressive.

Rhita’s neck ached from twisting back and forth. Her carriage rolled with an irregular rhythm over the cobbled and slated paths, between feathery trees and stately date palms. The sun dipped in the west, throwing an orange light across the city, just as she had seen it the day before on entering the Great Harbor. Smoke drifted in thin dark ribbons from a tall brick stack appended to one science building. Students in white and yellow academic robes—mostly male—passed them on the path, eyeing Rhita curiously. She returned their stares frankly, calmly, though feeling none too calm inside. She didn’t like this place much—not now, perhaps not ever—and that bothered her. This was the center of culture and science in the Western World, after all. There was much for her to learn in Alexandreia—if the circumstances had been such that she could just study.

The oldest intact building in the entire Mouseion, the original central library, now housed the administrative offices and academic quarters. Once it had been ornate and lovely; now it looked a little bedraggled, though still magnificent, three stories of marble and onyx, decorated with gold-leaf-covered bosses and thousand-year-old grotesques from the time of the Second Occupation, during the Third Parsa Uprising. Sheets of paler marble had been added less than fifty years before to repair time-damaged walls. Thus far, none of the Libyan rockets falling on the delta had struck the Mouseion grounds.

The path led through an archway into the courtyard, polished granite and onyx paving stones arranged in a checkerboard cross with exotic plantings from Aithiopia and the Southern Great Sea occupying the corners, and an Arsakid Parsa stone lion fountain adorning the center.

The cart lurched to a stop and she stepped down. A young, small man in a black tunic and Teutonic-style leggings—a popular street fashion in the city now—came forward, a large toothy grin on his narrow brown face. “I am very pleased to meet the granddaughter of the sophē Patrikia,” he said, dipping forward slightly and passing his hand over his head in salute. “My name is Seleukos, and I am from Nikaea near Hippo. I am assistant to the bibliophylax. Welcome to the Library.”

“Thank you,” Rhita said. He dipped again and beckoned her to follow. She closed her eyes briefly, checking on the status of the clavicle—it had not been moved or approached—and then walked after the young man.

The ground-floor office of the bibliophylax was not large for his station. Three male secretaries worked busily at a triangle of desks in one corner, beneath the light of an open window. Beside them, a press reaching to the ceiling overflowed with stacks of papers. A large electric graphomekhanos hummed and clunked on a heavy wooden stand beside the press. The bibliophylax himself worked behind a four-part Ioudeian hand-carved cedar screen, beneath the largest window in the room, in the opposite corner. The young man ushered her politely behind the screen.

The bibliophylax raised his shaven head and surveyed her coolly, then smiled the merest hint of a smile. He stood and passed his hand over his head. Rhita did likewise, and took a withy-cane seat at his request.

“I trust everything is in order with your quarters?” he asked. She nodded, reluctant to quibble about small things. “It is an honor to have you here.” He pulled forward a file—a finger’s-width of papers pressed between two paper-board sheets—and pulled out a long document. She recognized it as the transcript of her Akademeia studies and appended progress report. “You are a distinguished student indeed, especially in the area of mathematics and physics, I see. And you have chosen a similar curriculum here. Our professors have much to offer you. We are, after all, a much larger institution than the Akademeia, and we draw our teachers from around the Oikoumenē, and even outside.”

“I look forward to beginning my studies.”

“One thing interests me. You made an unusual request, even before you arrived,” the bibliophylax observed. “Besides your appointment to the office of the mekhanikos Zeus Ammōn Demetrios, unusual in itself, you wish a private audience with the Imperial Hypsēlotēs. Can you tell me the purpose of your visit to her?”

Before Rhita could speak, the bibliophylax raised a hand and said, “It is our business, because we look after the welfare of all students in the Mouseion.”

She closed her mouth, waited for a moment, and then said, “I bring a private message from my grandmother.”

“She’s deceased,” the bibliophylax observed, deadpan.

“Through my father. A message the sophē felt the queen would be interested in.” She paused, her lips set in a grim line. She could feel opposition radiating from the bibliophylax, even a professional kind of hatred. “A private message.”

“Of course.” His face soured slightly, and he flipped through more papers. “I have reviewed your course requests, and they are all in order. You are seeking a fifth in mathematics, and a third in physics, as well as a second in science of city leadership. Can you handle such an academic load without strain?”

“It’s similar to my load at the Akademeia.”

“Ah, but Mouseion professors will not be awed by your ancestry. They might treat you less leniently.”

“I was not treated leniently on Rhodos,” Rhita said, keeping her irritation in check. She wanted to laugh at the man, kick her slippers off and show him the bottom of her foot—but she stayed outwardly composed, though her stomach twisted.

“No, I am sure you weren’t,” the bibliophylax said. His small black eyes dared her to say something more.

“I do have one problem,” she said, facing his stare.

“Oh?”

“My manservant. He is with me for protection, at the direct request of my father, yet we have been separated—”

“No servants or guards are allowed in the Mouseion. Not even for royalty.”

As it happened, there were no royal youths studying in the Mouseion; the queen was childless, and most of the rest of the royal family had long since retired to Kypros for safety.

“Please feel free to consult this office at any time,” the bibliophylax concluded abruptly, closing her file and slipping it into a small square withy basket on the left hand corner of his desk. He smiled and passed his hand over his head, dismissing her.

When she returned to her quarters, she sat in the cool of the room for an hour, trying to regain her composure. The Objects had not been disturbed, but could she count on complete privacy and security for much longer? She did not trust the bibliophylax; the only hope she had was that the queen had already taken up her case, and was protecting her. Whatever, she hoped her audience would be soon.

She suspected, once she told the queen what she knew—and demonstrated its truth to her—that she would not long remain a student in the Mouseion. She would no longer be allowed the luxury of scholarship and studies.

Discouraged, she left her room to attend the meeting of the women’s council. The least she hoped to accomplish there was to get the lock back.

Is everybody here my enemy? she wondered.

13

Thistledown

The Thistledown’s axis bore hole opened tiny and black in the middle of the vast depression marking the asteroid’s south pole. The opposite pole—“north” for a sense of direction only, since the asteroid had no natural magnetic field—was now a gaping, rough-edged crater with the seventh chamber opened wide to space. Using ships equipped with traction fields, the Hexamon had long since swept the debris of the Sundering away from the seventh chamber, making it serviceable as a spaceport. Someday, the orbiting precincts would need extensive repair; the seventh chamber dock would be ideal.

For small ships like the shuttle on which the Russian and Lanier rode, the south pole entrance was more practical.

Lanier hardly noticed the darkness swallowing the craft. His mind was still elsewhere. He felt a stronger queasiness, and a flash of anger at his eternal unease. He closed his eyes tight, then opened them suddenly as the shuttle latched onto the rotating interior dock.

“We are here,” the Russian said.

The first chamber had changed little. Even the de-rotation and re-rotation of the Thistledown had left it relatively unmarred. Of course, there had been little but sandy desert on the first chamber’s floor in the first place. As they departed the elevator, a steady, cool breeze fell on them from the face of the chamber’s southern cap, a great, demeaning gray wall behind them. Around the axis shimmered the hazy white light of the plasma tube, twenty kilometers above them where they now stood on the “valley” floor.

To each side, the chamber stretched as flat and normal as could be imagined for a dozen kilometers, then with a slow, lazy vault began to creep upward, finally rising in an impossible vertical curve to meet overhead, behind the plasma tube, like some bridge for gods. After a good many years—how long had it been since his last visit, ten, twelve?—the dimensions of the Thistledown’s inner chambers struck Lanier all over again. He remembered the feeling of those awful months before the Death, when he had been swamped by administrative duties, by intrigues on Earth and within the Stone, by mystery and foreknowledge. He had called it being Stoned.

The rush of memories did not cheer him. He found it difficult to believe men had ever dwarfed themselves by such a creation. That was how he felt; small, overpowered. Stoned again.

They were greeted by a tall man, skeletally slender and very bald, an assistant to Korzenowski. “My name is Svard. Ser Korzenowski sends his regrets that he does not meet you personally.” He gave the Russian a quick appraising stare, then he led them toward a tractor. “The Engineer has a research compound in the middle of the valley, and he invites you to join him there.”

They boarded the tractor. The eight-passenger vehicle rode over the sand on a traction field, not treads or tires; it had been manufactured aboard Thistledown and was sleek and beautiful, with a pearly white exterior and a soft, adaptable gray interior that shaped itself to spoken or picted commands.

Svard wore a pictor hidden within his low collar. Lanier had never quite learned the art of picting. “I trust you’ve had an interesting journey, Mr. Lanier, Mr. Mirsky,” Svard said. Lanier nodded abstractedly. The tractor floated smoothly and swiftly over low scrub and brown and white patches of sand and soil.

“What keeps Ser Korzenowski busy now?” Lanier asked. “We haven’t spoken for some time.”

“He has been doing research,” Svard said.

“For the Hexamon?” Lanier asked.

“In part. Mostly to satisfy his own curiosity.”

“Who pays the bills?”

Svard smiled over his shoulder. “Really, Mr. Lanier. You should know that Ser Korzenowski has—what is the old phrase?—carte blanche to spend any reasonable amount, either in resources or money. He was given that privilege before his death, and the circumstances did not change with his resurrection.”

“I see,” Lanier said.

Directly ahead lay a complex of low, flat buildings, their walls gently curved to merge with the sand. The air above the complex shimmered like a mirage; was it because of rising heat, Lanier wondered, or something else? He squinted through the tractor’s transparent nose, trying to define the shimmer.

The tractor stopped a few dozen meters from the southernmost building and eased to the sand with a low sigh. The door flowed open and Mirsky stepped out first, Lanier following, watching the man’s reaction closely. The Russian looked around the valley floor, glancing up at the plasma tube. He knows the Stone, Lanier thought. He’s been here before. It doesn’t hold pleasant memories for him.

Svard bent low to exit the tractor and rose gracefully to his full height, large eyes blinking. “This way. Ser Korzenowski is in his private quarters.”

Lanier savored the extra spring in his step. The Stone’s spin imparted a pull of six-tenths of Earth’s gravity on the floor of each chamber, one of the few qualities of the Thistledown that had always been pleasant to him. He remembered, decades ago—before the Death—exercising in the first chamber, swinging vigorously on parallel bars…That reminded him of his once excellent physical conditioning. He had been a gymnast in college.

A hundred meters to the east of the main complex, a smaller anonymous blister of white rose a few meters out of the sand. Svard escorted them along a gravel path and picted a greeting to the dome’s receptor as they approached. A green icon of an outspread hand floated before each of them. “He wants us to come right in,” Svard said. A square door in the wall curled aside, and Konrad Korzenowski emerged, dressed in a simple dark blue caftan.

Lanier had not seen him in person in over thirty years. He had changed little in that time; a simple, spare frame, round face topped by a short crop of pepper-gray hair, a sharp, long nose and penetrating dark eyes. The eyes were more haunted—and haunting—than when they had first met. Having absorbed part of Patricia Vasquez’s mystery, that part of the human personality which could not be synthesized, Korzenowski had seemed to carry an ineffable aspect of the mathematician. His look had been enough to spook Lanier. Patricia was still discernible in the Engineer’s makeup, if anything, more pronounced. What does he feel, with part of her making up his core?

On Earth before the Death, heart-transplants had been commonplace before the perfection of prostheses. How does one feel about carrying a transplanted part of someone’s soul?

“Good to see you again, Ser Lanier,” Korzenowski said, shaking his hand. He hardly glanced at Mirsky, treating him less as a guest and more perhaps as an unresolved curiosity. He beckoned them enter and take seats. The free-form white interior of Korzenowski’s quarters was cluttered with white and gray cylinders of all sizes, draped with lumps of what looked like white bread dough. He pulled a few of these aside—as he lifted them, they elongated in his hands, hissing faintly—and ordered the floor to form chairs, which shaped themselves rapidly. The Russian sat and folded his arms, appearing at ease. The trace of apprehension he had exhibited outdoors was gone.

Svard made his farewells, picted something rapidly to the Engineer, and departed. Korzenowski folded his arms decisively, echoing Mirsky’s gesture, and stood before Lanier and the Russian. The Engineer’s expression had become stern, irritated.

“We have a genuine puzzle here, Ser Lanier,” he said, regarding the Russian. “Is this truly Pavel Mirsky, or a clever imitation?” He looked sharply at Lanier. “Do you know?”

“No,” Lanier said.

“What’s your intuition?”

Lanier didn’t answer for a moment, a little startled. “I can’t really say. If I have any intuition, it’s fogged by all the impossibilities.”

“I know for a fact that Pavel Mirsky went down the Way in one half of the Axis City, and that the Way closed up behind him, and all who accompanied him. I know there has been no gate opened to this Earth since. If this is Pavel Mirsky, he’s returned to us by some avenue we can’t begin to guess at.”

The Russian shifted a little in his seat, folded his hands in his lap, and nodded agreement, content to be spoken of as if he were not there.

“He seems self-satisfied,” Korzenowski said, rubbing his chin speculatively. “Cat with a canary feather. I hope he pardons a candid examination. Our instruments tell us that he is solid and human, down to his atomic structure. He is not a ghost in the old or new sense, and he is not a projection of any kind familiar to us.” Korzenowski uttered these observations as if going through a string of obvious truths simply to get them out of the way. “His genetic structure is that of Pavel Mirsky, as recorded in the medical records of the third chamber city. Are you Lieutenant General Pavel Mirsky?”

The Russian glanced between them. “The simplest answer is yes. I think it is close to the truth.”

“Do you come here of your own free will?”

“With the same qualifications, yes.”

“How did you come here?”

“That’s more complicated,” the Russian said.

“Do we have time to listen, Ser Lanier?”

“I do,” Lanier said.

“I would like Ser Olmy to be here,” Mirsky said.

“Unfortunately, Ser Olmy does not answer his messages. I suspect he is on Thistledown, but I don’t know where. I’ve sent a partial to locate him and tell him the circumstances. He may or may not join us. I’d like to hear your story as soon as possible.” Korzenowski sat and pulled one of the white lumps into his lap, kneading it between his hands.

Mirsky stared at the spotless floor for a moment, then sighed. “I will begin. Telling it all with words would be painfully slow and clumsy. May I borrow one of your projectors?” “Certainly.” Korzenowski ordered a traction beam to lower the nearest projector. “Do you require an interface?”

“I don’t think so,” Mirsky said. “I’m somewhat more than I appear.” He touched the teardrop-shaped device with a single finger. “Pardon me if I don’t completely reveal myself to your apparatus.”

“Quite all right,” Korzenowski said, with absurd cordiality. Lanier’s body hair tingled again. “Do begin.”

The quarters interior vanished, replaced by something difficult for Lanier to comprehend at first—a condensed representation of the Way, the Axis City, Mirsky’s first few days in the forested Wald of the Central City, the journey down the Way, accelerating along the flaw…

The projected information spun and dazzled. All sense of present time ended. Mirsky told his story in his own way. Korzenowski and Lanier lived it.

Call it escape or the grandest defection of all time. Running from the horrid past, my own death, the death of my nation, the near-death of my planet. If you can refer to as “running” the flight of half a city, filled with many tens of millions of souls and perhaps a dozen million corporeal human beings, down an infinite tunnel in space-time, fleeing through the fury of a star’s heart on the rail of an elongated “knot,” an umbilicus of impossibilities…

The tunnel itself an immense tapeworm curling through the guts of the real universe, pores opening onto other universes equally real but not our own, other times real and equally real…Those pores cauterized by our passage, the tunnel itself changing or having changed because of our flight, warping and expanding from the moment it was made with the prior knowledge of our escape; how do you explain this to an unaugmented human being?

You cannot.

I had to change to know all this, and change I did, many times across decades and centuries of flight. I became many people, and sometimes one of me would hardly know another until they could mesh with each other, exchange personal gossip. I was no longer the Russian Mirsky—had not been perhaps since my assassination in the Thistledown library—but an inhabitant of the Geshel neighborhoods of Axis Nader and Central City. A citizen of a new world, adapting to it’s unlikely environment. We were no longer masters of all we surveyed, as the Axis City had once nearly been…

I watched the humans who had come with me from Earth evolve, as I did, or eventually fade away—die in the last way left to immortals, to forget one’s self and be forgotten by others. The rest of us lived, and merged.

The journey lasted, from our point of view, centuries. You know that time is a variable thing, far less important than our youth and weakness once made us think; flexible, but ever-present, warped and twisted into some barely recognizable form or another.

I lived many different times: the time of the city traveling down the Way at relativistic velocities, my time on the highspeed level of city memory, the time spent communicating directly with my fellow travelers, as I do now with you. Time bunched and coiled like a spring. If all my time were stretched out in a straight line, I might have lived ten thousand years, by your scale…

We had long since passed beyond the point in the Way where the last moments of this universe might have been accessed. Had we opened a gate there, something not possible to us, we might have witnessed the death of all we had ever known, all that was—however remotely—connected with us…And still we fled. I had defected from my own universe.

Strangely, that moment was not particularly momentous. We had already closed in upon ourselves in an extraordinary way, like a pupating insect. We had isolated ourselves from our surroundings, even as we continued to study them.

The Way opened into an immense, twisted tunnel. Our passage down this tunnel no longer followed any rational geodesic. There was no longer a flaw, a singularity, in the middle; the city could not draw its power from the flaw generators, so it sucked power from the very thin atmosphere of particles and stray atoms within the Way. And because of this, we slowed…rapidly. Within ten years of our own basic time, the city traveled at less than relativistic velocities.

The Way grew broader around us. We studied this increase, and foresaw what awaited us…A vast blister of space-time, capping but not ending the Way, finite but unbounded…

We had entered the egg of a new universe. We could not survive as material beings within this egg. We would have been dissolved by the nascent plasma of potential mass and energy as salt vanishes in water. But we learned how to cope with such an eventuality.

The entire city, all of its citizens, worked to transform itself. We expected at any moment to simply die, cease to exist, for we were children facing a raging furnace. But there was another possibility, very remote…

The possibility that we could adapt to the furnace-egg, live in it, and finally shape it to expand into a mature universe. It would sever its connection with the Way, drift free in superspace, and within the furnace-egg, our transformed selves would expand butterly wings, reborn.

Is it immodest to say we planned to become gods? We had no choice. We had reached the end of the Way, such as it had any end, and we could not go back…We had no choice but to make our own universe.

To do so, we had to shed all of our material connections. We had to impose ourselves on the foundation of all space and time, beyond and below energy and matter, beyond the touch of the plasma amnion.

I watched my companions wall themselves up in light, great rose windows of personality spreading and blurring at the edges, painted across the walls of the city, using the city’s mass as a temporary restraint against simply dissolving away. The light of each of us touched the light of all. We were drunk with oneness. It was an orgy of incredible proportions. All the remnants of our humanity distilled into a vast merging sexuality. We almost lost sight of our goal. We might have become stunned by our own self-immersion in recognition, love and pleasure, and plunged like a lovesick moth into the furnace…But we regained control, and managed to take the next step.

All that we were, now united, was a frail and very delicate tissue of thought wrapped in and around the remains of the city. We spread those tissues out to the particle winds within the Way, much hotter now with the furnace-egg so near. We toughened, condensed, and finally pushed ourselves through to a level beneath even that of light and energy.

We flowered into the furnace, imposed our will, gave it the impetus to expand by converting the remaining mass of the city into energy, tipping the balance. The unbounded egg began to swell and cool, its plasma amnion condensing and taking shape…

We became shapers of worlds. For a moment, we considered simply reproducing our own birth universe, making galaxies and stars and starting things anew. But we learned quickly that we could not do this. This universe was far more constrained than ours had been. Its roots were humbler, coming not out of the ground of superspace itself, but from the tortured extending of the Way. It would be smaller, less complex, far less ambitious. Still, we could shape it into a fascinating place, a universe that would absorb all our creative abilities…if we were careful.

It is far more difficult to be a god than we could possibly have imagined. We had assumed, from the beginning I suppose, that one conscious will, or a combined conscious will, could shape and control a universe. We focused our pinpoint of will and shaped and made, guided and tuned, in ways that of course I cannot begin to describe, because in this body I cannot remember them, or fit them into my thoughts even if I could remember.

For a time, it seemed all would go well. We rejoiced in our mastery. We were like a child in a vast playground. The universe became beautiful. We began to shape the equivalents of living and thinking beings, to be our companions, perhaps to hold our own personalities in time. We still yearned for material form. We were still influenced by our origins.

And then it began to fail. The universe ruptured, decayed, rotted. Its boundaries shriveled inward, eating and transforming what order we had established into sour, hot chaos. We had miscalculated. A single will could not create a stable universe. There had to be contrast and conflict.

We desperately tried to separate ourselves into opposing forces to repair the damage. But it was much too late.

The god we had become, failed.

We would have all ceased to exist, dissolved in the falling shreds of our failure. But we heard another voice. It was a less exalted, less ecstatic voice than ours, and it seemed far away. But it was much more practical and experienced, much more diverse. We thought for a time we had heard the voice of another god, or gods, but that was simply our ignorance. However advanced we had become, we were incredibly ignorant and naive.

What we heard was the voice of our descendants, reaching us from the end of our own universe. All the intelligent beings who had grown up and grown old with the cosmos we had been born into, had detected our failure, and felt us trapped within. They were no more material, no more distinguishable as individuals than we were, but theirs was a hardier, more practical intelligence. They had become the Final Mind, at once united and coherent, and yet made up of many individual communities of minds.

They rescued us. Pulled us back along the still-open cord of the Way, never quite severed from our furnace-egg.

Their rescue was not magnanimous. They had a use for us.

Is it appropriate to describe the emotions of a failed god? We were chagrined, deeply embarrassed. We measured ourselves against this other matrix of thought, and saw we were less than infantile: we were puerile. We were young wine aspiring to vintage. We had begotten vinegar.

But we were forgiven, and treated, brought back to the equivalent of health. We were welcomed into the community of thinkers, one and separate at once, who occupied the end of the old universe. They revealed many things to us.

I was reconstituted from the whole of my matrix, isolated—an experience worse than death, I can assure you, worse than loss of family or city or nation or planet. I mourned and went crazy, and they reconstituted me again, with refinements. Finally, after many attempts, they made me stable, and sent me back here.

I carry a message, and a request—if it can be called a request. They have their limitations, these descendants of all intelligent beings now alive. And they have their duties. They must bring the universe to an honorable and complete end, an aesthetic conclusion. But they do not have infinite resources.

I am more than I seem, but I am far less than those who sent me here, and I must persuade you of one thing.

I have described the Way as a great tapeworm, winding through the guts of the universe. It extends beyond our universe, as you know. The universe cannot die with such an artificial, such a young construct winding through its body; rather, it cannot die well. It can only die badly, and our descendants cannot accomplish all they hope to.

Lanier swam out of the projection and re-focused his eyes on Mirsky. One particular image lingered in his mind. It terrified him. He tried to remember it clearly, but all he could retrieve was a vague impression of certain galaxies being chosen, throughout time, for sacrifice…

Galaxies dying to provide the energy for whatever the Final Mind was trying to do.

His head throbbed and he felt mildly nauseated, as if he had eaten too much. Moaning, he leaned forward between his knees.

Korzenowski put a hand on his shoulder.

“I share your distress,” the Engineer said quietly. Lanier glanced up at Mirsky, who had released the projector.

“What in hell are you?” he asked weakly.

Mirsky didn’t answer that question. “You must re-open the Way, and you must destroy it from this end. If you do not, then we have betrayed our children at the end of time. The Way, to them, is a kind of magnificent hairball, an obstruction. We are responsible for it.”

14

Gaia

On the evening of her fourth day in Alexandreia, after seven frustrating hours trying to find her way around the maze of buildings, walking from classroom, to distant classroom, as Rhita sat alone in her room, digesting another unfamiliar and faintly nauseating meal eaten in the tiny dining hall reserved for women, she allowed herself a moment of supreme homesickness and misery. There was nothing she could do but cry. After a few minutes of that, and no more, she sat up on the hard cot and grimly considered her situation.

There had been no word yet from Kleopatra.

She had not yet met with the mekhanikos Demetrios, her appointed didaskalos. On a rare occasion of providing useful information, Yallos told Rhita that she should meet with the didaskalos within a week or so, otherwise her standing in the academic competition might slip. She felt lost; she had had an appointment with the man since the week before sailing from Rhodos. Inquiring at his office, in a dark, ancient and ill-tended building in the western quarter of the Mouseion grounds, she had been told by a waspish male assistant, “He has been called to Krētē for a conference. He will be back inside a month.”

What was worse than the indignity was her sense of loss and alienation. Nobody here knew her; it seemed scarcely anybody cared about her. The women—with the unfortunate exception of Yallos, whom Rhita had taken a strong disliking to—ignored her or slighted her. Yallos, with an air of coming to the aid of a simpleton, had appointed herself Rhita’s informal advisor.

To the women in the dilapidated two story building, she was “an island girl,” unsophisticated and boorish. Worse, she was also from a well-known family, and yet had not been graced by the Mouseion with any apparent privileges. Her social status was a puzzle, then; she was fair game for their disdain. Within earshot, they gossiped about her, speculating wildly. She had heard whispered rumors that the Kelt was her “island lover.”

That, she thought, was probably envy.

She was not free to leave the Mouseion and wander the streets of Alexandreia; she knew very well what might happen to an innocent “island girl” there. And walking with the burly, taciturn Kelt at her side was not the sort of stroll she fancied just now, though in time she might resort to his company, just to get away from the Mouseion.

She hadn’t seen the ocean since leaving the quays in the Great Harbor.

Rhita longed for Rhodos, for the prancing sea-laughter of the waves when a storm sat offshore, the dusty green smell of olive groves and the play of dazzling clouds against lapis blue sky. What she missed most of all was the company of Rhodians, simple and sun-wise, as the island saying went; especially the beach children.

Perhaps she was just an “island girl.”

At almost any hour of the day, sometimes even at dusk or after the twilight had faded, on the rocky and sandy beaches of Rhodos could be found a few scampering adolescents, brown and naked but for shifts or lioncloths. Usually they were Avar Altais from the south of the island or the old refugee slums in Lindos, swarthy, oriental-eyed, round-headed, mouths full of curses, sun-gold limbs flashing as they spear-fished in the tidepools or carried makeshift metal detectors in search of lost coins or buried wrecks. She had stolen away as an adolescent from her studies to run with them, laughing and learning their language, their curses and sunny expressions of enthusiasm, musical and harsh at once, so alien on her Hellenized tongue. Her mother had called them “barbarians,” an old word seldom used now. Most of the citizens of the Oikoumenē were barbarians by her mother’s definition.

When Rhita’s breasts had developed, and the shoulders on the beach boys had grown broader, something new had come into their play—a tender roughness. She had almost appreciated the curses thrown at her, half in jest, half as if growled by carnivores wanting her flesh. Had she been less protected, a bit more worldly and less enshrouded by the Hypateion gymnasion’s code of behavior, one of those boys might have been her first lover. The Great Mother knows she had had enough caresses and kisses stolen from her.

She still remembered their jokes, born out of centuries of struggle and desperation, not at all tempered by the tolerance and clime of Rhodos. There were cruel, wild jokes about ill-timed death spoiling great plans, raucous fables about separated families and lost relatives, about herd animals never seen on Rhodos.

Once, she had sat talking with a boy perhaps a year younger than she. He had told her his family’s story, unnumbered centuries tangled up with the lives of other families, other tribes, perhaps even other nations; and she had tried to fit that in to what she knew about the old Rhus-Oikoumenē-Parsa alliances and the extinguishing of the Steppes tribes. In return, he had listened to her formal history with unusual politeness and attention, and then had told her, “That’s what you winners say.” Leaping up, he had brayed at her like an ass, and run across the beach, his bare feet unerringly picking a path on flat sun-heated stones.

With a sigh, Rhita opened her eyes, losing that hot pale noon sky and distant running boy. She picked up the electronic teukhos that had belonged to her grandmother, switched it on, selected a memory block and began to search through the volumes listed. Then, realizing she might be taking a risk, she turned the machine’s lighted screen off. Examining the frail door, she decided the least she could do was block it with the room’s single cane chair. She hadn’t dared listen to any of the music cubes since her arrival; discovery would be at best embarrassing, and at worst, disastrous. The Mouseion might confiscate the Objects. They might accuse her of all sorts of ridiculous crimes; how could she know?

Rhita hated this strange, difficult, clannish Mouseion, with its ancient, mazy gounds…

She felt out of place among the city-wise students, drawn from all around Gaia. To her surprise, she had seen young men dressed in the peculiar fringed leather clothes sported by Nea Karkhēdonians, in imitation of the indigenous peoples they had subjugated a century ago. These were the children of the sworn enemies of the Oikoumenē. What perversion of diplomacy allowed them into Alexandreia? She had even seen students dressed in the shifts and leather skirts of Latin tribes. Not that she disliked any of them personally; Rhodos seemed so remote from all that, though having studied her history, she knew nobody was truly isolated from such conflicts.

Rhita drew the gap in the curtains tighter, old nut-shell curtain rings rattling against the cane rod, and returned to her bed, feeling without reason a little more secure. Switching the screen back on, she surveyed the list. She had read or looked through virtually all of the two hundred and seven books listed.

This time, however, her eyes alighted on a title she had not read. She could have sworn it was newly added. It said simply, “READ ME NOW.” She called it up on the screen.

The index card preceding the display of the first page told her the volume was three hundred pages in length—about a hundred thousand words—and it was in Hellenic, not English, as all the other books in the cubes were. She halted the display of the index as she saw a flashing cursor next to a description she had not seen before. “Contents and catalog display suppressed until 4/25/49.”

That had been two days before.

Rhita pressed the keypad to read the first page.

Dear Granddaughter,

You have the name of my mother. Is it all my fancy someday you will meet her? When you were younger you must have thought I was a crazy old woman though I think you loved me. Now you have this, and I can talk to you though I have never gone home, not really. Some say even here that dying is going home.

Imagine that world I have told you about, and you have read these books, if you are my granddaughter, and I know you are. You have read these books and they must tell you I made nothing up. All is true. There was a place called Earth. I did not come out of a whirlwind.

I clung to this slate and the few blocks brought with me—all by accident, by chance!—for years when it seemed even to me I must be crazy. Now you are burdened by my quest. But all things are connected, even such far-away things as my world Earth and yours Gaia. My fancy could be important to you and all on Gaia. If there is a gate. And there will be again. They have come and gone on the clavicle like dust-devils. Who would taunt an old woman so?

On certain days, I will leave you something here to read, like the unrolling of a scroll, to be revealed only that day and after.

She could not get the machine to display any more of the large file’s contents. The machine had apparently been set to portion it out to her a bit at a time. Rhita turned off the slate and screwed her knuckles into her eyes. She could not get away from Patrikia. She had no life of her own.

But if there was such a thing as a gate—

And there was! Who could deny machines that spoke to her mind, or hundreds of books her grandmother could not possibly have imagined, much less written?

If the gate was real, then there was more of a burden on her shoulders now than just responsibility to her grandmother. All the people on Gaia weighed her down.

Rhita was beginning to imagine what such a thing as a gate would mean to this world. Not all that she imagined was pleasant. It would bring change, perhaps immense change…

15

Thistledown City

The tracer transferred itself to Olmy’s library terminal and signaled with the black and white pict of a grinning terrier that it had completed its search. Olmy switched on blowers to collect the remnants of a meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit, pushed himself off the couch and stood before the teardrop terminal, concentrating on the tracer’s picted condensation of its findings.

No relevant file sources in Axis Euclid or Thoreau or copies of library records of Nader and Central City. All file sources classified in Thistledown libraries; classification limit has expired, but no records of access to files since the Sundering. Last access-52 years remote from Axis City, no identification, but likely from noncorporeal in city memory. Thirty-two files containing references to Fifth Chamber Repository.

By law, all security classifications in libraries and city memory storage were voided after one hundred years without application and approval for renewal. Olmy inquired of the tracer how many applications for extension had been made on the files. The tracer replied Four.

The files were all older than four hundred years.

“Records of file authors,” he requested.

All author records deleted.

That was highly unusual. Only a president or presiding minister could approve of deletion of authors or originators from file records in libraries or city memory storage; and even then, only for the most pressing reasons. Anonymity was not an approved concept in Hexamon history; too many of the Death’s perpetrators had hidden themselves away from responsibility before and after the holocaust.

“Description of files.”

All are brief reports, in words only.

The time had come. Olmy was surprised to realize his reluctance. The truth might be worse than what he had imagined.

“Show me the files in chronological order,” he said.

It was worse.

When he had finished and stored all the files in implant memory to mull over at leisure, he gave the tracer its reward—the free run of a simulated grassy field on Earth—and released the meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit into the room again.

His decision was made infinitely more difficult by what the tracer had retrieved.

Reading between the lines—the whole story was by no means contained in the files, which were adjunct files only, bare scraps left over after some hasty and none-too-thorough purge—Olmy put together his half-educated surmise.

A living Jart had been captured some five centuries before, under what circumstances there was no knowing. It had died before being returned to Thistledown and its body had been preserved after its mentality was crudely downloaded. Not knowing Jart psychology or physiology, the downloading had been only partly successful. How integrated the Jart mentality was, how true to its original, not even its captors had known. They had even suspected the body; several researchers felt that Jarts, like humans, could adapt their biological forms and even their genetic makeup to fit the circumstances. Hence, the Jart’s physiology had been studied, but the studies were inconclusive; they had not been passed on to military commanders or other researchers.

At first, the investigations into the downloaded mentality had been conducted in secure but relatively open situations, with perhaps ten or fifteen individual researchers. Nine had died in the process, two irretrievably—their implants hopelessly scrambled. Direct or indirect mental links with the downloaded personality had been forbidden at that point. Research, so encumbered, came almost to a halt.

Even then, Olmy knew, indirect examination of mentalities had been a highly developed art. He found it difficult to believe that a Jart, fragmented or whole, could injure investigators in such circumstances. And yet, Beni had been killed and Mar Kellen damaged…

Olmy controlled another hormonal surge. Were he not so altered and augmented, the surge would indicate a condition called fear.

For centuries, there had been a law in cybernetic research: “For any program, there is a system such that the program cannot not know its system.” That is, a program, however complicated, even a human mentality, could not always be aware of the system it was running on, if no clues were provided by that system; it could only know the extent to which the system allowed it to run.

But less than a century ago, Hexamon investigators headed by a brilliant team-leader, homorph Doria Fer Taylor, had found mathematical algorithms which allowed programs to completely determine the nature of their systems. Thus, a downloaded mentality could tell whether or not it had been downloaded; Olmy could, in theory, know under any circumstances whether his focus of personality was running in implants or in his organic mind.

In theory, such algorithms, fully developed, could allow a mentality or program to change the nature of its system, to the extent that a system could be changed. Because of the existence of rogues in city memory, such information could have had disastrous consequences. The rogues—even one rogue—could have destroyed city memory and all that was in it. Human mentalities were not disciplined enough to be given such power. The researches had been classified. Olmy had learned of them through his police work, when he had been ordered by the presiding minister to investigate whether any mentalities in remote gate memories—human or otherwise—had independently discovered such power. None had.

Olmy searched his deepest levels of implant memory for the Taylor algorithms. He had often tucked away such items, trusting himself to keep them secure, unable to resist the chance to incorporate them into his personal data file. They were still available. He would have to purge them before—if—he ever downloaded into the current city memory.

Not likely, he thought.

Judging from what had happened to Beni and Mar Kellen, as well as the early researchers, the Jart mentality was aware of and fully capable of using the Taylor algorithms. But at the time of its capture, humans had not even known of their existence.

The Jart mentality, still an unknown quantity, had been removed to complete isolation in the fifth chamber, to be studied now and then across some number of decades, apparently less than a century, and then to be forgotten, but for an occasional inquiry as to status. Too valuable to be destroyed, too dangerous to be investigated…

The investigators had apparently all passed into city memory in their allotted times. Most had been Geshels. Equally apparent, all of them had chosen to go down the Way during the Sundering. That could explain why there had been no further inquiries in the last forty years; it did not explain twelve years of silence before that.

He called up the complete list of data and looked at the file access dates. Why check on static files if not to see whether somebody else has accessed them?

The access dates were all between five and thirty years apart over the last century and a half. The name of the accessor had been erased after the fact in each case; a clever trick, but perhaps not clever enough. Olmy requested the string length of the erased void in each access record. In every case, the name had filled fifteen spaces. It seemed probable that only one person had accessed the files for at least one hundred and fifty years, checking to see if the footprints were still hidden, if the dangerous skeleton in the closet was still secure.

Someone, of course, could have accidentally stumbled on the security door in the fifth chamber, or found out about it as Mar Kellen had. But Mar Kellen had used code cracking techniques developed comparatively recently to open the door.

In all likelihood, nobody in the Terrestrial Hexamon but Mar Kellen and now Olmy knew anything about the captured Jart.

Mar Kellen was finding his way to an honorable obscurity.

That left Olmy.

16

Gaia

The Boulē conference on the Libyan attack on the Brukheion had been discouraging. Jewish militia stationed all around the Nilos delta had already shown their displeasure in demonstrations that bordered on mutiny; the Boulē was now reacting. Kleopatra, attended by her usual midge-cloud of counselors and advisors, had emerged from the session into the glare of lights wielded by an official Boulē recording crew. She had enough vanity to hate bright lights and cameras, and enough sense of duty to smile.

Her position as queen was shaky indeed. She had long since come to regret the power she had regained for the Ptolemaic Dynasty in the past thirty years; power enough to take blame, yet not enough to assume control. She did not have the power to defy the Boulē completely and take charge of the military; yet she was held responsible by many groups if the Boulē military policy was a failure. Rumors of plots were thick in the air; she almost wished they would come true.

The day did not improve when her Mouseion spy reported on how Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza was being treated.

Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs had long since learned to take every possible advantage of a situation. She had suspected for over a decade that the Mouseion’s interests were drawing apart from her own, but not so far apart that they would be openly defiant. The Akademeia Hypateia on Rhodos was a thorn in the bibliophylax’s side; Kleopatra had thought she could provoke an interesting response, then, by allowing Patrikia’s granddaughter to come to the Mouseion. And if this young woman brought better news than Patrikia had…So be it.

Either way, she was useful.

But what the spy told his queen was infuriating.

She listened to the spy’s testimony while seated on a campstool in her private study. Her scar whitened as her jaw muscles tightened. She had not believed that the bibliophylax Kallimakhos would be so willing to flout her authority.

Kallimakhos had sent Rhita’s chosen didaskalos, a young physics and engineering professor named Demetrios, away on extended sabbatical, against his own expressed wishes. (Demetrios, the spy said, was a fine mathematician as well as a promising inventor, and had looked forward to working with the daughter of the sophē Patrikia.) Kallimakhos had then rudely treated Rhita, ignoring her privileged visitor’s status, forcing her to live separately from the Kelt bodyguard who might very well be necessary for her safety…

Rhita Vaskayza, the spy said with some professional admiration, was bearing up well under these disgraces. “Is she a royal favorite?” the spy asked.

“Do you need to know?” Kleopatra asked coldly.

“No, my Queen. If she is a favorite, however, you have chosen an interesting woman to favor.”

Kleopatra ignored the familiarity. “It’s time to play the chosen piece,” she said. With a deftly pointed finger, she ordered the spy from the room. A secretary appeared in the doorway. “Bring Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza to me, tomorrow morning. Treat her exceptionally well.” She hummed and stared at the ceiling, thinking what else she could do. Something for her simple satisfaction, without derailing any larger plans. “Send the tax auditors to the Mouseion. I want every administrator and didaskalos on the premises—understand that, only those who are immediately present—audited for tithe performance and royal taxes. With the sole exception of Kallimakhos. Tell him I wish to meet with him within the week. And see to it that any royalties and benefits transferred from palace funds to the Mouseion are delayed for three weeks.”

“Yes, my Queen.” The secretary touched clasped hands to chin and angled back through the door.

Kleopatra closed her eyes and stilled her dull anger with a slow breathy moan. She found herself wishing more and more for something apocalyptic, to cut cleanly through the political morass that was her life now. Neither supremely powerful, nor weak enough to be ignored, she had to ply her power like a sailor with a ragged boat on Lake Mareotis.

“Bring me something distracting and wonderful, Rhita Vaskayza,” she murmured. “Something worthy of your grandmother.”

The residence hall echoed with women’s voices speaking Hellenic, Aramaic, Aithiopian, and Hebrew. Today was the beginning of classes, yet Rhita had no didaskalos, no assignments, and hence, no classes beyond the basics accorded to all Mouseion students: orientation, language—of which she had no need—and Mouseion history. By the second hour of morning—beginning after sunrise—the hall was nearly empty, and she sat in a dark mood in her cramped room, wondering about the wisdom of coming to Alexandreia at all.

She heard two pairs of heavy footsteps outside her door and felt a moment of anxiety. There was a rap on the doorframe, and a male voice inquired, “Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza?”

“Yes,” she said, standing to face whoever might come in.

“I’m here with your bodyguard,” the man said in polished common Hellenic. “Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs requests your presence by the sixth hour of this day.”

Rhita opened the door and saw Lugotorix standing behind a tall, bulky Aigyptian in royal livery. The Kelt nodded at Rhita and she blinked. “Now?”

“Now,” the Aigyptian confirmed.

Lugotorix helped her gather the cases containing Patrikia’s Objects. She felt faintly ridiculous, having tried the Mouseion at all; but that had been her father’s strategy, at her mother’s suggestion, years back. Best not to approach her Imperial Hypsēlotēs directly, her mother had advised. Especially after the fiasco of the disappearing gates.

A much larger motorized wagon waited for her on the cobble road curving past the main archway of the residence hall. Three other Aigyptians, also in royal livery, carefully loaded her cases into the back. The Kelt took a seat beside the driver, and the guards stood on running boards. With a wind-horn roaring, she was driven from the grounds of the Mouseion, west to the palace.

Leaving the main gate, she looked back and realized, with an intuitive shudder, that her brief sojourn in the Mouseion was at an end.

17

Thistledown

Once, before the age of thirty, life had been bordered by walls of reasonable proportions; Garry Lanier had not had to face a constant barrage of explosive re-evaluations of reality and where he fit in. Since the arrival of the Stone, he had had to come to grips with mind-stretching truths so often, he had once thought nothing would amaze him any more.

He lay in the bunk prepared for him by Svard, Korzenowski’s assistant. In the dark, on his back, half-covered by a sheet, he sighed and knew that he was not so jaded after all. The Russian’s story had flabbergasted him.

Mirsky had returned, after traveling beyond the end of time and becoming at least a minor deity.

He was an avatar, a reincarnated symbol of forces outside even Korzenowski’s comprehension.

“Jesus,” Lanier said almost automatically. The name had lost considerable power in the past few decades. After all, the miracles at the foundation of Christianity were almost all duplicated weekly in the Terrestrial Hexamon. Technology had superseded religion.

But what was Mirsky, that his reappearance should supersede even the abilities of the Hexamon? Had wonders gone full circle, back to the realm of religion again?

What Mirsky had shown them…The combination of simplified visuals and words and incomprehensible sounds projected into their minds…His innards still curled at the memory of the experience.

What would Karen have thought, from her less Western perspective? Born in China of parents defected from England, her capacity for wonders might be increased by a different attitude toward reality. At least, she had never seemed quite as culture-shocked, future-shocked, as Lanier had felt. She had accepted the inevitable and undeniable with calmness and pragmatism.

Lanier knuckled his closed eyes and turned over, trying to find elusive sleep. Now that he could not possibly see her, he realized he missed Karen. Even with the hidden bitterness of their last few years together, they shared something with her when they were together: a common link with the past.

Was it that he was simply too old to accept these new realities? Would pseudo-Talsit help, or a cleansing of his mental channels through a new youthfulness?

He swore under his breath and started to get out of the bunk, but there was no place he could safely go in the compound, no place where he was unobserved. And he needed isolation now, needed darkness and freedom from stimulus. He felt like a transported animal clinging to the security of an enclosed cage. Opening the door, he might be assaulted by another barrage of impossibilities.

While Lanier tried to sleep, Korzenowski was arranging a meeting with the president and several key corpreps. There was a good possibility that Judith Hoffman, Lanier’s boss and mentor four decades ago, would be present.

Lanier had not kept up with her activities for years. He was not surprised to learn she had undergone pseudo-Talsit and transplant rejuvenation, but it came as something of a shock when Korzenowski informed him she was leading the Thistledown faction that supported re-opening the Way.

The trains between Thistledown’s chambers were as efficient as ever, sleek silver millipedes gliding at several hundred kilometers an hour through their narrow tunnels. Lanier sat beside Mirsky, and Korzenowski sat opposite, all lost in silence.

Theirs was a cosmic shyness with little room for small talk—not after what Mirsky had showed them. Mirsky took the silent treatment stoically, peering through the windows at the surrounding tunnel darkness and the sudden explosion of cityscape as the train emerged into tubelight.

The third chamber metropolis, Thistledown City, had been designed and built after the asteroid’s launch, taking advantage of lessons learned in the construction of Alexandria in the second chamber. Its enormous towers rose from slender bases to wide tops five kilometers above the valley floor. Soaring suspended structures reached across the curve of the chamber like skyscrapers strung along a curtain. The glittering mega-plexes, each as capacious as a good-sized town on prewar Earth, seemed poised for imminent disaster. Much of Thistledown City was an architectural nightmare to unaccustomed eyes, always teetering, threatening to collapse in a stray wind.

Yet these buildings had survived the stopping and re-rotation of the asteroid during the Sundering, with comparatively little damage.

“It’s truly beautiful,” Mirsky said, breaking the silence. He leaned forward and shook his head enthusiastically, grinning like a boy.

“Quite a compliment from a man who’s seen the end of time,” Korzenowski observed.

He doesn’t act like an avatar, Lanier thought.

After the Sundering, Thistledown City had been reoccupied by citizens from the precincts. An abortive attempt to bring Old Natives to the asteroid and settle them had been called off after the new immigrants expressed great unhappiness; most had been returned to Earth, where they would not be overawed by unnatural splendor. Lanier sympathized.

Now, the city was about one-fifth full, citizens clustering together in certain areas, others in less populated regions often living one or two families to a building. If ever large numbers of Earth’s inhabitants could be persuaded to make Thistledown their home, space aplenty waited for them.

All of the city’s parks had been restored, unlike in Alexandria, where restoration was still in progress. Some had been replanted with flora brought up from Earth. Conservators were encouraging endangered animals from Earth to breed in various spectacular zoos completed within the past two decades. The second and third chamber libraries contained the genetic records of every Earth species known at the time of Thistledown’s launch, but a large number of species had vanished in the years after the Death; now was their chance to prevent those extinctions.

The Terrestrial Hexamon Nexus met in the middle of a thousand-acre rain forest. A wide, low translucent dome the color of a clear twilight sky vaulted over much of the forest and the Nexus meeting chambers; under the dome, the tubelight was transformed into glorious sunlight and clouds.

The Nexus was not in session this day. The meeting chambers, a circular arena and central stage, were almost empty.

Judith Hoffman sat in an aisle seat near the central stage. Lanier, Mirsky and Korzenowski walked down the aisle abreast, and she turned in her seat, cocking an eyebrow. With a quick glance, she summed up Mirsky and Korzenowski, and then she smiled at Lanier. He stepped aside and met her welcoming hug while Mirsky and Korzenowski waited.

“It’s wonderful to see you again, Garry,” she said.

“It’s been too long.” He smiled broadly, feeling more energetic and reassured just in her presence. She had allowed herself to age a little, Lanier noted, though she still appeared twenty years younger than he; her hair was steely gray and her face carried a look of tired, careworn dignity.

She had deliberately ignored the more advanced fashions of Thistledown City, where apparel might consist of illusion as much as cloth. Instead, she had chosen a stolid gray pants suit with just a hint of feminine cut to her lapels. She wore a pictor necklace and carried a small slate at least four decades old, the equivalent here of a quill pen.

“How’s Karen? Have you been keeping up with Lenore and Larry?”

“Karen’s fine. She might be here now. She’s working with Suli Ram Kikura on a social project.” He swallowed. “Lenore is in Oregon now, I believe. Larry died a few months ago.”

Hoffman’s mouth made a surprised O. “I hadn’t heard…Damn. That’s a Christian for you.” She clasped his hand and sighed. “I’ll miss him. I’ve been out of touch up here—too much so. I’ve missed you all, but there’s been a lot of work.” The other three representatives approached from another aisle: David Par Jordan, Assistant and Advocate to the President, a small, delicate Thistledown-born man with white-blond hair; Sixth Chamber Supervisor Deorda Ti Negranes, a tall, lithe female homorph dressed in black; and Eula Mason, a squat, powerful woman with hawklike features, corprep for Axis Thoreau, an orthodox but not extreme Naderite with substantial power as a swing vote in the lower Nexus.

Mirsky watched them all with his mild, distanced expression, like an actor waiting to be called on stage. Hoffman shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with Korzenowski, then turned to Mirsky. She folded her hands in front of her chest. “Garry,” she said, “is this man who he says he is?”

Lanier knew his judgment would be relied upon implicitly. “I wasn’t sure to start with, but now, I think he is, yes.”

“Ser Mirsky, my pleasure to meet you again,” Hoffman said. “Under circumstances more peaceful, and certainly more mysterious.” She unfolded her hands and extended one with some hesitation. Mirsky grasped it by the fingertips and bowed.

Chivalry from the end of time, Lanier thought. What next?

“Indeed, Ser Hoffman,” he said. “Much has changed.”

As they adjourned to a meeting room in the complex beneath the arena, introductions were made all around, with a social awkwardness that Lanier found amusing, considering the circumstances. Human convention could trivialize even the most momentous occasions, and perhaps that was its purpose—to bring enormous events down to a human scale.

Korzenowski pointedly did not go into detail about Mirsky.

“We have some complicated and important evidence to bring before the Nexus and the president,” Korzenowski said as they took seats around a small round table.

“I have one question, and I can’t wait to ask it,” Eula Mason said, features stern. “I know very little about Ser Mirsky. He’s an Old Native—pardon me, a Terrestrial—and he has Russian ancestry, but your introduction doesn’t explain his importance, Ser Korzenowski. Where does he come from?”

“From a great distance in space and in time,” the Engineer said. “He’s presented us with some disturbing news, and he’s ready to testify before this select group. I warn you—you’ve never experienced anything like such testimony, even in city memory.”

“I make it a habit to avoid city memory,” Mason said. “I respect you, Ser Korzenowski, but I dislike mystery and I certainly dislike having my time wasted.”

For ostensible allies united against the re-opening, Lanier thought Mason was being remarkably uncongenial to Korzenowski.

Korzenowski was unfazed. “I’ve asked the four of you here because this is so unusual a circumstance, and I’d like a kind of rehearsal before we go on to the full Nexus.”

“Will we need aspirin?” Hoffman asked Lanier, leaning in his direction.

“Probably,” Lanier said.

Negranes’s design as a homorph was a little too extreme for Lanier’s tastes; her facial features were too small on her head, and her body was proportioned in ways that exceeded the natural—emphasis on length of legs and thickness of thighs, extremely long fingers, an almost masculine chest. Yet her bearing was regal and it was obvious she knew her place in this room, and on Thistledown. “Is this evidence designed to discourage re-opening, Ser Engineer?”

“I think it may allow us to reach a compromise,” Korzenowski said.

That’s a bit optimistic, Lanier thought.

Mason squinted with unconcealed suspicion. Obviously, Korzenowski was not completely trusted in his own camp. That was hardly surprising; he had designed the Way in the first place.

“Then let’s have it,” Par Jordan said.

“This time, I will not use a projector,” Mirsky said. “I will spare Sers Korzenowski and Lanier…They have suffered my story once already.”

When the presentation was over, Hoffman laid her head on the table and sighed. Lanier rubbed her neck and shoulder gently with one hand. “God,” she exclaimed, her voice muffled. Par Jordan and Negranes seemed stunned.

Mason stood, hands trembling. “This is a farce,” she said, turning on Korzenowski. “I’m amazed you believed this willful deception. You are certainly not the man my father put his confidence in—”

“Eula,” Korzenowski said, facing her coldly, “sit down. This is not deception. You know that as well as I.”

“What is it, then?” she asked, voice shrill. “I don’t understand any of it!”

“Yes, you do. It’s quite clear, however amazing.”

“What does he want us to do?” she continued. Korzenowski raised his hand and nodded his head, asking for patience. Mason found just enough patience to fold her arms and sit rigidly back in her chair.

“Do you have any questions?” he asked Negranes and Par Jordan.

Par Jordan seemed the least disturbed of them all. “You think the president should see this? I mean, experience it?” he asked.

“It must be the entire Nexus, please, for a decision,” Mirsky said. “As soon as possible.” They looked at him as if he were an unexpected ghost—or perhaps a very large insect. They were noticeably reluctant to speak to him directly.

“Ser Korzenowski, that’s going to be difficult. I sympathize with Ser Mason’s reaction…”

She slapped her open hand on the table, vindicated.

Negranes lifted her head. “I’ve never felt anything like it,” she said. “It makes me feel immeasurably small. Is everything so futile, that we simply vanish and are forgotten in time?”

“Not forgotten,” Mirsky said. “Please. You are not forgotten. I am here.”

“Why you?” Negranes asked. “Why not some better-known figure from the Hexamon?”

“I volunteered, in a way. I offered myself,” Mirsky said.

Hoffman fixed Korzenowski with her clear brown eyes. “We’ve been opposed on this question for a long time. I’m sure Garry is surprised to hear I’ve been supporting re-opening. How do you feel, experiencing this? Have you changed your mind?”

Korzenowski didn’t answer for a moment. Then, using a tone of voice that made Lanier jump—a familiar tone, that of Patricia Vasquez—he said, “I’ve always known it was inevitable. I’ve never enjoyed inevitability. I don’t enjoy this, now. I designed the Way, and was punished for doing so by assassination. I was brought back, and I saw what progress we had made, and how much we had gained as human beings—not lost. We were trapped by our own glories.

“I was certain that returning to Earth would balance out our problems, but the Way is like a drug. We have been using this drug for so long, we cannot break free of it, so long as the possibility for re-opening remains.”

“You sound ambivalent,” Mason said.

“I think the Way must be re-opened. And then it must be destroyed. I see no alternative to the method presented by Ser Mirsky.”

“Re-opening,” Mason said, shaking her head. “Finally giving in.”

“Our responsibility is a heavy burden,” the Engineer continued. “The Way must be dismantled. It blocks the designs of those whose goals are far larger than anything we can easily imagine.”

“Count on this,” Mason said. “If we favor any kind of reopening, they will not let us dismantle.” She nodded at Negranes and Hoffman.

Hoffman looked at Lanier, her face only now regaining some of its color. “By all means. The Nexus must see this. I believe this man is Mirsky, and that’s remarkable enough to convince me.”

Par Jordan stood. “I’ll make my recommendation to the president.”

“What is your recommendation?” Mirsky asked.

“I doubt we can block testimony before the Nexus. I don’t know whether we’d want to. I just…don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “The disruption is going to be unbelievable.”

Lanier suddenly longed for a chance to relive that moment on the mountain, when he had first seen the hiker descending the path.

Given another chance, he might run away as fast as cramped legs allowed.

18

Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

Kleopatra the Twenty-first greeted the young woman warmly in the sitting room of her private quarters. The queen’s hair was shot with gray and her eyes lackluster. The scar across her cheek, a badge of honor well-known throughout the Oikoumenē, appeared red and puffy. She looked exhausted.

The Kelt was not allowed into the private quarters. Rhita felt vaguely sorry for the man, always cooling his heels someplace away from his primary duty—protecting her.

“You were not treated well at the Mouseion,” Kleopatra said, sitting across a transparent rose-veined quartz table from the young woman. “I ask your forgiveness and understanding.”

Rhita nodded, not knowing what to say, thinking it best to let the queen speak. Kleopatra seemed agitated, ill at ease.

“Your request for an audience was expected, and welcome,” she continued. “I’m afraid your grandmother thought I lost faith in her.” The queen smiled faintly. “Perhaps I did. It is easy to lose faith in a world of disappointments. But I never doubted her word. I needed to believe in what she said. Is that easy to understand?”

Rhita realized her silence might be interpreted as shock at being in the presence of royalty. Strangely, she was not nervous. “Yes. I understand.”

“From what I’ve been told, you were not close to your grandmother, not all your life.”

“No, my Queen.”

Kleopatra waved away the formality, fixing her tired eyes on Rhita. “She chose you for something?”

“Yes.”

“What?” The queen’s hand gestured for her to be more forthcoming, as if urging her closer.

“She put me in charge of the Objects,” Rhita said.

“The clavicle?”

“Yes, my Queen.”

“Is it busy disappointing us again?”

“It shows a new gate, your Imperial Hypsēlotēs. This one has stayed in place for three years.”

“Where?”

“In the steppes of Nordic Rhus, west of the Kaspian Sea.”

The queen thought that over for a moment, brows drawn together. Her scar lightened in color. “Not easy to get to. Does anybody else know it’s there?”

“Not that I know of, my Queen.”

“Do you know where it leads?”

Rhita shook her head.

“There’s nothing…more convincing about this particular gate?”

“In what way, my Queen?”

Try as she might, Rhita could not change her method of address. It seemed almost sacrilegious to speak to the woman baldly, without some kind of obeisance.

“I suppose I’m asking for security. If I outfit an expedition, brave the diplomatic difficulties of sending it to Nordic Rhus—should we be caught, I mean, since there’s no question of asking permission—and it’s all for nothing, a hole to nowhere…”

“I can’t guarantee anything, my Queen.”

Kleopatra shook her head sadly, then smiled again. “Neither could your grandmother.” She took a deep breath. “She was, and you are, both very lucky to have me as queen. Someone more intelligent, more pragmatic, would not listen to either of you.”

Rhita nodded solemnly, braced for rejection.

“Do you have any idea what lies on the other side of this gate? Any notion at all?”

“It may take us back to the Way.”

“Patrikia’s big water-pipe world.”

“Yes, my Queen.”

Kleopatra stood, holding her finger to her temple on the upper end of her scar, clenching and relaxing her jaw. “What would your expedition need? More than what Patrikia once requested?”

“I don’t believe so, Hypsēlotēs.”

“Not a great expenditure. The Objects are all working properly? The Rhodian mekhanikoi have kept them in good shape?”

“They have required no maintenance, my Queen. Other than changing batteries…They are working properly.”

“You could guide this expedition?”

“I think that is what my grandmother wished.”

“You’re very young.”

Rhita did not deny it.

“Could you?”

“I believe so.”

“You lack your grandmother’s passion. She would not have hesitated to say yes, even if she doubted herself.”

Rhita did not deny this, either.

Kleopatra shook her head slowly, walking around the table. She stopped with her hands resting on the back of Rhita’s chair. “It’s political folly. Risking a confrontation with the Rhus, and a storm in the Boulē should secrecy be broken…My position is not enviable now, young woman. There’s a part of me irritated—no, not just irritated, angry!—at your simply being here, making your tacit request. And another part…the part your grandmother took advantage of…”

Rhita swallowed, locking her neck muscles to keep from constantly bobbing her head in agreement.

“I’ve already spread some minor punishments for your ill-treatment in the Mouseion. In a way, I’ve already supported your cause. But it is not easy for me to simply give in to my desires. And I do desire that you find something…wonderful, maybe even dangerous, wonderfully newly dangerous. Something far above this incredible tangle of low-level threats and high-level hatred and intrigue.” She bent beside Rhita, bringing her face close to the young woman’s, eyes shifting over her features. “What collateral do you offer?”

“Collateral, my Queen?”

“Personal guarantees.”

“None,” Rhita replied, her heart faltering.

“None at all?”

Very softly, hating herself, fearing herself and her own uncertainties, Rhita said, “Only my life, Hypsēlotēs.”

Kleopatra laughed. Straightening, she took Rhita’s hands in her own and raised her from the chair, as if they might dance. “There’s some of the old girl in you after all,” she said. “Can you show me?”

Rhita unlocked her neck muscles long enough to nod once.

“Then bring your clavicle here and show me, as your grandmother did. I enjoyed that experience.”

19

Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

After thirty-one days of investigation, Olmy had reached a decision. The Jart mentality, in its present location, could not be studied safely. He knew too little about the system it was stored in, whereas the Jart apparently knew everything.

He stood in the second room, jaw muscles working. The mentality’s displayed image had not changed noticeably in all the time he had studied it. Placid, undisturbed, timeless; soon to be reborn, and perhaps to attempt its higher purpose yet again…

Olmy had never put himself into a situation where his inner being could be violated. He had even shied away from mixing personalities with lovers and friends, not uncommon back in the heady days of the Jart Wars. Whenever he had joined entertainments in city memory, he had always carefully wrapped a tight shell around his self.

He regarded this foible with as much amusement as anyone; but he had violated the rule only once, when he had downloaded Korzenowski’s reassembled partials into his implant memories. Korzenowski’s scattered mentality had been close enough to share only his outer layer of thoughts, and nothing deeper, however.

In a way, he detested deep intimacy. He valued his singularness. He had never subscribed to the old poet’s maxim that to be alone was to be in bad company. Olmy clearly understood why he rejected deep intimacy; he did not want to know himself completely, or to have anybody else know him. He did not relish the thought of exploring his own mentality, as others did.

But to know the Jart, the best way would be to download it into an isolated implant within himself. He could not trust any device to resist the Jart’s explorations; inside, he could constantly monitor the downloaded mentality, and even shift it from an implant using one system to another with a different system. He had three large memory implants, one of them only five decades old, the extra two installed in anticipation of carrying the Engineer’s partials, all of Talsit construction. Each could be modified at will, isolated, examined from outside with little or no chance of unwanted output from whatever was kept in memory…

The plan had been inevitable all along.

Olmy had simply avoided the obvious.

How much was he willing to sacrifice for the Terrestrial Hexamon? His mentality, his soul? If the Jart somehow managed to corrode its way through all internal barriers, to outwit and outmaneuver him, then more than that would be lost.

The Jart had allowed itself to be captured.

It was a Trojan Horse.

Of this much he was sure.

And he was about to take the horse within the walls of his own precious citadel, his mind.

If his safeguards failed, the Jart might do what it had probably planned to do all along. It could become a spy, a saboteur in human form, within the Hexamon. It could control all of his memories, even, in the worse case imaginable, convince his enslaved personality that he was acting of his own volition.

Hormonal implants kept his body chemistry in relative balance, but the sharp bite of fear was still apparent. Olmy had never been so unsure of the outcome of his plans.

He returned to the first room, where Beni had died, and opened a small box of equipment. Onto the panel’s output device he locked a data valve. Drawing several leads from the valve’s smooth round surface, he fastened them to the curved band that would slide tightly around the base of his skull.

The downloading could take hours; the equipment here was ancient. The valve would not allow any unregulated surge of information.

You’re about to become a bomb, he told himself. A very dangerous rogue indeed.

The room was silent but for the faint hum of the valve. He thought of the fifth chamber landscape, six kilometers above, and of the mass of the Thistledown all around them; even more ancient than this equipment. A weight of history and responsibility that he had carried for most of his life.

If he were to die right now, killed by this rash process or by some unexpected irregularity in his body—rare, but not unknown—he knew he would have performed his duty to the Hexamon many times over. He would not regret simply ceasing to be. And perhaps Korzenowski or someone else would pull the Hexamon through these dangerous times.

He reexamined the wires. All fittings were correct. First, however, he had to take a few precautions. He rigged a strong traction field near the door, laying two small nodes on each side. The nodes would draw from the room’s hidden power supply. If he simply tapped a remote button, or sent a sharp whistle, or blinked his eyes in a rapid code, the field would activate…And there was no way to turn it off or harm the nodes, since they would lie within their own field.

He would not be able to escape. Nothing inside him would be able to escape. This would be a tomb for both of them.

If necessary, Olmy would stay in the room for several weeks, waiting to see if the process was successful. He had rigged other traps for himself in Alexandria, in the fifth chamber near the train station, in the third chamber. All he had to do, should something go wrong away from this small sanctuary, would be to make his way to one of those traps, activate traction fields, and wait to die—or wait to be discovered.

Nobody knew of these traps. Nobody knew of his plans.

And then, there were the traps within his own mind…Mental trip-wires controlled by the same internally-downloaded partial that would oversee the Jart’s mentality.

If he felt himself losing all control, and could not make it to a trap, a blunder across these trip-wires would release a small explosive charge in his chest.

Satisfied that everything was in order, he reconnected the leads and sat on the floor, legs in a lotus, before the panel. He removed a small vial of nutrient fluid from his equipment case, lifted it to the silent air in toast, and said, “Beni. Mar Kellen. Nameless researchers. Star, Fate and Pneuma be kind to you all.” He drank it down and laid the vial aside.

Then he reached up and touched the valve.

The transfer began.

20

Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

The evening after their meeting, Rhita dined with the queen on sturgeon, lentils and fruit in the hall of Ptolemaios the Guardian. They took their seats at a marble table, a servant standing behind each, and looked out over the parapet at the sun setting on the ancient capital.

Kleopatra explained the unusual menu as each dish was served. “This is a royal fish, flown in fresh from Parsa, a fish beyond price, garnished with its own roe. The lentils are a common dish, coarse and healthy, served with unleavened bread made of bleached maize from the Southern Continent. The fruit is Gaia’s gift to rich and poor, common to us all. Would that all commoners could eat as well as their rulers.” As they ate, they did not discuss the gate or anything else of immediate consequence. “We’ve made enough interesting decisions today,” Kleopatra averred.

After the dinner, Rhita was shown by a wizened white-haired chamberlain to a windowless room deep in the ancient, cool lower floors of the royal quarters, in the palace’s north wing.

“Do you trust him?” the chamberlain asked her just outside her door, jabbing his finger at Lugotorix.

“Yes,” Rhita said.

The chamberlain looked him over with a squint. “If you say so.” He raised his hand and a servant at the end of the hall advanced. A few mumbled words of Aigyptian—which Rhita did not understand—made the servant run to the end of the hallway. A moment later, while all three stood waiting in awkward silence, a dour, stocky old man in a leather apron and arm-chaps brought forward a Ioudaian machine gun and a bullet-proof vest.

“This is the palace armorer,” the chamberlain explained. He took the weapon from the armorer and handed it to the Kelt, who accepted it with obvious admiration. Then the chamberlain ordered the armorer to instruct the Kelt in its usage, which he did, using Hellenic and a touch of Parisiani.

“You wear an armored vest, and she doesn’t,” the armorer explained, “because you should always be between her and a hasisin. Understood?” The Kelt nodded grimly.

At another gesture from the chamberlain, two massive Aithiopians stalked toward them from the end of the hall. The Kelt raised his new weapon instinctively, but the chamberlain tapped the gun’s black barrel with a disdainful finger and shook his head. “Ceremony,” the chamberlain explained. “You’re to join the Palace Guard.”

The Kelt was initiated on the spot in a brief blood-sharing ceremony with the Aithiopians. Judging by his astonished expression, he was quite impressed. Rhita was less enthusiastic; she was tired, and vaguely wondered why she had to witness all this.

A cot was brought into the corridor and placed near the door of her sleeping chamber. Then the chamberlain gestured to the armorer and the Aithiopians and they left.

“You’re going to be comfortable here?” Rhita asked him, standing in the doorway. He patted the cot with the splayed fingers of one huge hand and shrugged.

“It’s too soft, mistress, but it won’t hurt me.”

“What do you think of all this?” she asked, her voice lower.

The Kelt pondered for a moment, thick dark-blond eyebrows knitted. “Will I go with you, or stay here?”

“You’ll come with me. I hope.”

“That’s okay, then.” He was obviously unwilling to comment further. Rhita closed her door and walked around the room, trying not to feel closed in. The fanciful murals painted above a wainscot did little to add to the room’s size. They depicted crocodile and hippopotamus hunters on Lake Mareotis, and were doubtless very old—perhaps two thousand years. Their sense of perspective was primitive. Rhita suspected she could do better herself, and she had never been a quick study at drawing.

After examining the exquisite furniture—ebony and ivory and highly polished silver and brass—she lay on the feather mattress and stared at the purple silk canopy hanging from the ceiling.

What in hell am I doing?

Teeth clacking together with exhaustion and anxiety, Rhita remembered she had not yet looked at the slate to see if there was a message for her today. She removed the slate from her case and turned on the display.

My dear granddaughter,

If you have met the queen, you know she is a very smart woman, tough and quite capable of holding her own in a troubled Oikoumenē. But she is also a woman who will die shortly—politically, perhaps, before her body dies. The Oikoumenē will soon be run by aristocratic administrators, men for whom politics is a precise and clear-cut science. They already resent her for her intuitions and unpredictable decisions. That is why the gates must be found and examined before she dies or is deposed. She is our last chance. No reasonable politician would allow an expedition such as this. For one thing, no reasonable man would believe in the existence of something like a gate. Kleopatra believes because it gives her a much-needed thrill, a sense of bigger things in a life focused on day-to-day crises. I have disappointed her once, but I think the need is still in her. All the same, do not be arrogant with our queen. Exercise your inborn caution. And beware the lure of the palace. It is a dangerous place. Kleopatra lives there as a scorpion among snakes.

Rhita thought about the chamberlain, the armorer, the Aithiopian guards, and the ceremony she had been made to witness. Somehow, it all made a little more sense. She turned off the slate, grateful to the sophē for her foresight—and insight. But her teeth still chattered, and sleep was not easy to find.

Planning for the expedition to the site in Nordic Rhus began the next morning, in secret. The pace of the next two days was dizzying; the queen and her advisors seemed to be racing against time to get their preparations made, and Rhita was soon made privy to the reason for speed and discretion.

Kleopatra had once, decades before, controlled most matters involving exploration and research in the Oikoumenē. She had assumed this royal prerogative in her youth, even before the influence of the Boulē had waned and Kleopatra had gathered more and more power to the Ptolemaic Dynasty and away from the Alexandreian and Kanopic aristocracies.

“Your grandmother cost me dearly when her gates wandered and vanished,” Kleopatra said, lips twisted in a wry smile. She shuddered and dismissed the past with her hand. “But the aristoi have been getting into a fair amount of trouble lately. Farmer and kleroukhos revolts, conscription failure in the Kypros crisis…They’ve been in hiding for the past few months, letting me take the fall, and that gives me some room to breathe. If I breathe secretly. Secrets don’t last long in Alexandreia. I have to have this expedition outfitted, and on its way, within five or six days, or chances are it’ll be stopped by the Boulē Royal Counselor.”

Kleopatra introduced her to a trusted advisor, Oresias, an explorer and expert on the Nordic Rhus who had a fierce loyalty to Kleopatra. Oresias was tall and lean, of late middle age, strong and aquiline and white-haired; centuries past, he might have been one of Alexandros’s generals. With his help, Rhita hastily prepared a list of supplies and people necessary to the expedition. On something more than whim, she included the name of Demetrios, though they still had not met; she thought she might enjoy the company of a fellow mathematician.

Oresias consulted with another trusted advisor, Jamal Atta, a short, black-haired man, retired general of the Oikoumenē Overland Security Forces. Jamal Atta was of Berber ancestry, but affected the style of an old Persian soldier. Together, they plotted the difficulties and dangers of entering unfriendly territory.

Rhita thought about the long journey to Nordic Rhus with no small amount of trepidation. As Oresias spread the plans before her on a cards-and-jackals table in the royal game room, his strong, badly-scarred index finger tracing the likeliest routes, she wondered what the queen’s motivations really were. Had Patrikia read Kleopatra’s intentions truly?

The expedition would be politically risky; they would have to avoid detection by the Nordic Rhus high-frequency towers placed along their southern borders, from Baktra to Magyar Pontos. The independent Rhus-allied republics of the Hunnoi and Uighurs also lay in the path, and both were renowned for fierce and heartless warriors. Intrusions might be regarded as justifying counter-intrusions, or even lead to small border wars. Jamal Atta mentioned these possibilities in passing, as simple comments on Oresias’s plans.

The expedition’s vehicles would be Ioudaian beecraft, large hovering vehicles powered by Syrian jet turbines. Atta fanned out a handful of pictures of these beecraft with their top-mounted long broad spinning blades and forward canopies like bug’s eyes.

“I cannot say how reliable they are,” Atta said in his deep, froggy voice, with his face even longer and darker than usual. “We can get two of them from the palace secret police. They have a range of five hundred parasangs. A parasang is about three hundred Oikoumenē schoene—rope-lengths.” Rhita said she knew military and Persian measures. Jamal Atta lifted an eyebrow, pursed his lips and continued. “Weapons we can get plenty of—black markets flourish in the delta, if we can’t transfer them from the palace armory or the weapon factories at Memphis. The question I need answered is, why are we going? What do we plan to do if we find what we’re looking for?” Both Atta and Oresias had been told some details, but not all, about the unlikely thing for which they would search.

Rhita stared at the plans spread on the game table. “We’ll try to enter the gate,” she said.

“Where will this door take us?”

“Into a place called the Way.” She described it for him, but Atta’s eyes glazed after a few minutes and he raised his hand.

“If we can live there, then others can live there, too. Will they resist us?”

“I don’t know,” Rhita said. “They might welcome us.”

“Who will they be?”

“The people who made the Way. Perhaps.”

Atta shook his head dubiously. “Whatever someone has, they protect from intruders. This all sounds dangerous and badly thought out. I would feel safer with an army in front of me.”

Oresias, sitting to one side, said, “Obviously, an army is out of the question. If this young woman is prepared to go, can an old strategos be less willing?”

Atta held up his spread hands. “You’re damned right I can. But her Imperial Hypsēlotēs commands.” He fixed his weary eyes on Rhita again. “What kind of weapons might they have?”

“Nothing we could defend ourselves against,” Rhita said.

“What does that mean?”

“From what my grandmother told me, they have weapons we might dream of making in a hundred or a thousand years.”

“What are they, gods?” Atta asked with a gloomy edge in his voice.

“An old kleroukhos on his plot might think they were gods, yes,” Rhita said. She blushed slightly, realizing she had used a queenly tactic against the strategos.

“What about an old soldier hoping to live on his pension?” Atta asked. “An old man who’s seen all the things this world has to offer, from the forests of Nea Karkhēdōn to Africa’s bottom?”

“You’ve seen nothing like the Way,” Rhita said, staring at him without blinking. Atta refused to engage in this kind of contest. He casually turned to Oresias.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs wishes us to end our days of service eaten by monsters or burned to ashes by gods.”

“Or being met by friends,” Rhita said, angry now at the strategos’s cynicism. “Friends who could bring the Oikoumenē back to its days of glory.”

“Treasure beyond the monster’s jaws,” Oresias said.

“Try to be more specific about their strengths and weaknesses…if they have any weaknesses,” Atta urged her gently. “We only have a few more hours before we start putting everything together. Help an old ass carry a heavier load.”

“I’ve never seen these things. I’ve only been told about them,” Rhita said, suddenly afraid again.

“Try to remember,” Atta said with a sigh. “Any scrap can only help.”

21

Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

The Jart bided quietly within Olmy, apparently unaware of any change in status. Olmy lay in the second room, eyes closed, probing delicately at his new companion, like a surgeon seeking the best point of entry to a sleeping but dangerous beast.

He could feel the depths of the asteroid all around him, unchanged across billions of years, implacable as time, primordial rock and carbonaceous materials and water that had fed and housed his people for centuries.

He looked at the empty plate which had once revealed the Jart’s placid patterns. Now the memory stores were empty; all that there was of the Jart had been successfully uploaded into Olmy’s implants.

His first discovery, in the first few seconds of investigating the Jart, was that a kind of translating shell, or interface, had been developed, either by the Jart itself in reaction to the probes of early researchers or, less likely, by the researchers themselves. Without the shell, Olmy would not have picked up sensible communications when Mar Kellen first hooked him to the system. The shell was incomplete but useful for a beginning.

Having confirmed that translated communication was possible, Olmy now double-checked his precautions. He had set both the Jart mentality—which occupied one implant—and a downloaded partial of himself apart from his primary self, and erected a number of barricades, not the least of which was a timer that regulated access to all of his implants. The partial conducted the early investigation and reported to him periodically.

In the super-fast world of implant functions, all of this took place within ten minutes of the uploading. Olmy’s partial determined that the Jart mentality was almost intact—that is, its major routines and subroutines appeared to follow the accepted rules for intelligence ordering. They were not fragmented. The Jart’s lesser routines did not appear to function properly, but he would reserve judgment on that until later.

One never assumed that any part of a ticking bomb was inert until one completely understood the bomb.

Within the first hour, Olmy’s partial had located some pieces of Jart experience-memory. The first attempts to transfer these disturbed the Jart. Parts of its mentality seemed to wake briefly from its timeless slumber, and once again Olmy received a cacophony of anxiety messages:

>Duty unclear. Presence of Duty arbiter(?)< >Unable to locate (self?)< >(Abominations)<

And then a lapse back into the quiet pool of seeming repose.

The memories he retrieved were far from clear or easy to translate. Jart sensoria were very different from human equivalents; “eyes” were sensitive to both light and sound, combining such signals in a way unique in the Hexamon’s experience. This did not cause Olmy’s major difficulty with the memories, however; algorithms had been known for centuries which could interpret nearly all sensory messages. What puzzled him (or rather, at this stage, his partial) most of all was the de-emphasis on individual perception to the advantage of larger cultural conditioning. A Jart individual’s personal perspective seemed almost irrelevant; and there was substantial evidence that this Jart at least acted more as a remote sensor than a self-willed individual.

Yet other indications contradicted this. The Jart had a strong, independent motivation routine—what in human terms might be analogous to an ego. There were enormously difficult associated complexes of social and hierarchical responses which meshed with this motivation routine, however. The Jart was strong-willed, yet in certain situations—when enmeshed in its social environment—it would be completely docile and obedient, lacking almost any will at all. And it would find no contradiction between these states.

For a Jart, obedience was indistinguishable from self-will, yet Olmy was certain Jarts did not comprise a group mind—at least, not this Jart. Perhaps the Jart carried a model or artificially imposed simulation of the Jart hierarchy, a kind of monitor or conscience.

For a time, as Olmy received data through the one-way link with his partial, he wondered if in fact two or more mentalities had been downloaded. It was difficult to accept such primary contradictions in the routines of an individual.

The partial was finally able to assemble a series of sensory memories that could be translated into human terms.

Not surprisingly, since the Jart had been highly stressed, the most prominent images were of its capture. Olmy saw what had to be the Way—quite flat and colorless—and brilliant objects in the foreground, picked out with amazing detail. The details changed frequently, making him wonder whether his partial was translating properly. The partial, anticipating the reactions to its primary, assured Olmy its interpretations were correct.

The Jart was perceiving objects from multiple and almost independent viewpoints, not in a Picasso-like Cubist fashion, but by processing the visual input through many different routines.

It then came to Olmy—and his partial independently concurred—that the Jart was using sensory interpreters adapted from other species. The Jart contained many visual “brains,” almost certainly patterned after those of non-Jart species.

During its capture, the Jart had apparently shuffled through these alternatives, trying to duplicate a human viewpoint by using routines from beings thought to be similar to humans.

Did this explain some of the confusion as to ego and motivation routines? Did Jarts literally engulf the mentalities of other species, carrying them around like tools in a kit?

How many intelligent species, how many cultures and societies had the Jarts conquered? What had happened to them?

Olmy worked for an additional hour, trying to make sense of the visual memories. Finally he was able to piece together a reasonably clear picture of the capture.

First level sense interpretation (perhaps the Jart’s natural routine):

The surround is pitchy black and cold, absent of sound. The foreground is occupied by hot and noisy objects moving very rapidly. The objects are machines, but the Jarts do not build machines like these (an image of seeding and virus-like development).

Second level sense interpretation (foreign?):

The background is filled with detail, sharp to the point of distraction; the foreground objects seem irrelevant, ignored. This routine simply cannot interpret machines or perhaps close objects at all.

(Is this an adapted sense routine, Olmy wondered, designed to augment or supplement the others? It seemed to have a minor place in the totality.) Olmy had no difficulty recognizing the Way. Tractor fields stretch across the vast expanse, brilliantly colored—purple and red.

Some fields recede in sparkling tatters from penetration beams. The beams pierce through and intersect—but again, this routine cannot interpret machines.

(An odd lack, Olmy thought; seeing was akin to thinking, however, and it was possible the species this routine had been “borrowed” from had no knowledge of technology.)

Third level (adapted Jart? Similar to the first):

The actions of the foreground objects are clearly understood, in the abstract. Each machine is sharply delineated.

Olmy recognized human armored physical penetrators (unmanned except by partials) and automated seek-and-destroy units, great and small—all nasty and black and seething with field energies. He shuddered. He had always disliked such weapons. They were simple and direct and unstoppable. They destroyed whatever they captured within their fields, reducing it to component atoms, pulses of heat and gamma rays.

The Jart had witnessed such weapons—yet had survived to be captured. And this Jart had been in the front lines of whatever skirmish in the Way these images represented. Humans sent only partials into such action.

Was this Jart a natural organism in any way, or an artificial creation entirely? The original human captors had not trusted the physical form to be typical of Jarts. Why trust the mentality?

Olmy concentrated on the sequence of events in the Jart’s capture. As more sense-memories arrived, he pieced together a humanly linear story.

The Jart occupies a small vehicle, weaving through tractor field boundaries like a dragonfly through walls of reeds. Above, throughout this section of the Way—

Very likely in the million kilometers or so of disputed territory at 1.9 ex 9—

Jart and human weapons engage in fierce combat. There is stalemate; this situation has continued for a considerable time.

(The Jart measures of time are not clear to Olmy)

The Jart’s vehicle encounters and destroys numerous small human machines scouring the Way’s barren surface. It encounters seek-and-destroy units and somehow evades them. It is now in territory behind the region of impasse, in human territory, where it will attempt to inflict a devastating blow to some command center—a large flawship or armored fortress. But its next encounter is with a cloud of penetrators

—and vehicles Olmy himself does not recognize

and before it can maneuver it is caught in thick layers of traction, the shell of its vehicle stressed and mangled. A research and reconnaissance machine quickly seals off the crash site in a traction bubble. The Jart lies within its environment cradle, pulses of light crawling over the surface of this transparent shield as its generator begins to fail. Remotes shaped like giant black beetles push through the bubble and neutralize the weakening environment cradle, pulling the Jart from its controls. The Jart body is already severely damaged. Another vehicle, almost as large as a flawship, moves over the surface of the way

—and the sense images blurred and came to an end.

Olmy opened his eyes. The Jart’s mission had been hopeless; he had never heard of organic forms occupying the Jart equivalent of penetrators. The entire action was more than suspicious—it was uncharacteristic, ludicrous.

Yet the humans had taken the bait, hoping—perhaps believing—that they had at last captured a Jart.

Perhaps they had. Perhaps the Jarts had been willing to give up the advantage of an enemy’s ignorance in order to slip their Trojan Horse past the walls. But then, why kill researchers immediately? Why open the belly of the horse before night has fallen and the Trojans are asleep?

Olmy closed his eyes and recalled the last few scattered visuals sent by his partial. They were too fragmentary to reassemble—

But connected to the last was a scouring, biting node of corrosion. Olmy withdrew from this acid sting and shoved the entire sequence into his third implant, isolating it immediately.

He then purged the third implant of all data contents.

The Jart was not slumbering.

Olmy waited for the downloaded partial in the second implant to deliver a self-analysis. When the data came through, the initiation string was badly flawed. The partial had been compromised.

The Jart was active. His precautions had almost failed.

Olmy raised more barricades around the isolated implants and prepared another partial. Sending partials into that alien hell was like sending himself—the partials were duplicated pieces of himself. His hormonal levels surged again and he fought back a sick, claustrophobic terror that almost overwhelmed his peripheral controls.

Less than two hours had passed since the uploading.

Studying the Jart was obviously going to involve a battle of wits. After wiping the second implant and putting another partial in to replace the one that had been compromised, Olmy waited for results from a new series of probes. The Jart mentality did not attempt to tag the data with corrosives, nor did it corrupt the partial.

They were taking each other’s measure.

Despite its attack on the first partial—a circumstance Olmy had been prepared for—the Jart had not yet succeeded in altering the basic system of the implants in which it was stored. Olmy believed the Jart did not understand the system it now occupied, but it probably knew that its status had changed.

His safeguards were effective. Having accomplished this much, he decided to leave the buried memory storage rooms and continue his interior researches in the fourth chamber.

The cramped quarters and the sensation of being surrounded by kilometers of rock had become oppressive. However, he was not yet ready to return to human society. There were a great many more probes to make and tests to run before he took that risk.

If the Jart was reawakening, the time had come to expose it to some of the greater reality of human existence.

22

Gaia, Alexandreia

Within the cavernous palace garage, Rhita stood at the center of the circle of members of the queen’s expedition. Clavicle in both hands, she closed her eyes and focused on the spinning globe. Continents raced beneath her disembodied eyes, their features etched in bright relief. There were many things about the display she did not understand. Certain features flashed as if they might be of interest; others were crosshatched or dotted. Some land masses or ocean areas were outlined in red or yellow. Yet the clavicle did not reveal the meaning of these functions; it simply rotated the globe to the Kanopic mouth of the Nilos, then twisted and rolled the globe again to the position of the gate, marked by a cross. Her point of view “fell” to the surface of the globe, and she crossed bright, feverishly colored landscapes to a grassland that burned with green fire. There was the gate, marked only by an unlikely cross with wide-splayed armtips.

She opened her eyes.

“It’s still there,” she said. Oresias stood beside her. She hesitantly took his hand and placed it on hers where it gripped the clavicle bar. “Close your eyes,” she said. He did, and she felt the projection move through her, into him. He stiffened as he had the first time they had shared the images, then forced himself to relax. After a few seconds, he opened his eyes.

“I confirm that,” he said. “We know our goal.”

Kleopatra sat in a portable throne on a stone platform above the circle. All turned toward the queen. She stood and held her hand out over them. “The blood of the keepers of Alexandros the Uniter, the Conqueror, flows in my veins.” Her lips twisted in that peculiar smile Rhita had seen several times. “However diluted by Persians and Nordic folk. To some, this seems like a royal whim, the shadowy wish of a weak queen. But can you feel this day’s importance? What you find, what you learn and bring back with you, could mean rebirth for the Oikoumenē, and a century of order and prosperity, rather than decline and strife. We might look for a talisman, for the penis of Aser or the lost magic of Neit; we might be fools. What we seek instead is real, and I only regret I cannot share your danger.” Her tone was convincing; none, Rhita saw, doubted the words of their Imperial Hypsēlotēs.

“Go with the gods and the spirits of your loved dead. Apollo shines upon you all. I love you as my children. I envy you.”

Sour, long-faced Jamal Atta’s eyes filled with tears. Oresias saluted the queen with a hand held high, fingers splayed—Alexandros’s sign of friendship and cooperation. “We will return, my Queen,” he called out.

“We will return,” the members called out in unison.

Kleopatra nodded and kneeled before them.

Rhita felt Oresias’s hand on her arm. He led her to the cab of a covered steam freight wagon. Seven such wagons waited to carry them and their equipment from the staging area in the garage to the aerodromos in the western desert, beyond the old nekropolis. “This had better be worthwhile,” he murmured in her ear, not in accusation, but in camaraderie.

Jamal Atta accompanied a tall, black-haired man with ruddy skin. Both climbed into Rhita’s wagon and found their assigned seats. When they were settled, and the wagons began to roll from the garage, the military advisor introduced the stranger. “This is your long-missing didaskalos, if I recall correctly,” Atta said. “He has just returned from Kallimakhos’s exile. Demetrios, this is your patient and disruptive student, Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza. She asked that you accompany us.”

Demetrios turned his genial features on Rhita and smiled with a mix of confidence and shyness that Rhita found disconcerting. “I am honored,” he said.

“As am I. I hope you weren’t…troubled by your journey. I seem to have been the reason for it.”

“Irritation, no more,” Demetrios said. “I’m still not sure what I’m doing here…. We seem to be going on a long journey, and the queen personally told me I was needed. I can’t imagine why.”

“Because you’re the mekhanikos with the most advanced ideas,” Oresias said. “Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs expects we’ll be seeing some real marvels, and hopes you can explain them to us, if our mistress Vaskayza cannot.”

“She did discuss wonders. I confess I couldn’t understand all she said…. Are we looking for the door that opened for the sophē to enter this world?”

“Maybe,” Rhita said.

“That would be a marvel, indeed.” He shook his head in wonder, and then looked at the box holding the clavicle. “Is that one of the Objects?”

Rhita nodded. Demetrios had the features of an aborigine from Nea Karkhēdōn, but with lighter, more olive-toned skin. There was perhaps some Latine blood in him, or Aigyptian.

“You will pardon my reverent curiosity,” he said. “Mechanikoi in my studio have been taught about the sophē’s Objects from childhood. To actually see one…” He seemed about to ask if he could touch it, but Oresias shook his head discreetly.

“I am pleased to meet you,” Demetrios concluded, smiling again. Rhita glanced at the other men in the wagon. She was the only female in this wagonload. There were only two other women in the entire expedition. She had hoped there might be more, but even under Kleopatra’s influence, the attitudes of Alexandreia were very different from those of Rhodos.

The steam wagons wound through the Brukheion and Neapolis in the early dawn, passing a few market owners and fishermen walking or riding donkeys to their stalls. The air was crisp, cleaner than it had been the past few days, which seemed auspicious. Alexandreia had once been renowned for the purity of its air; the factories of the delta had changed that.

Once through the Neapolis and Aigyptian district—where the roadway rose above the hovels on disdainful concrete pillars—the nekropolis spread out before them on the city’s western border, a jumble of limestone, red and gray granite and marble tombs. They were not stopped at the city’s gates; the queen’s influence among the police was still strong.

The sun was well up as they passed through the city of the dead. The poor had invaded the nekropolis centuries before, moving into the tombs of forgotten families and setting up a unique, violent social structure that had become a way of life unto itself. The most the police could do was keep the nekropolis from moving into the Neapolis; the Aigyptian quarter acted as a buffer. Still, the caravan was not bothered on the rutted, potholed highway through the tombs.

The queen had her contacts and supporters here, as well.

Beyond the last dismal scatter of old graves, a military highway rose out of the scrub grass and sand like an inky mirage. The caravan followed this route to the aerodromos, an additional ten schoene to the west. Upon their arrival, the morning was well under way. Rhita could smell kerosene and oil on the wind, and heard a continuous low roar as jets and other gullcraft took off to patrol the Libyan borders. She could see little through the plastic windows in the canvas covering the wagon; they faced away from the aerodromos.

“We’re here,” Oresias said, standing and flexing his knees. Demetrios stood beside him, still unsure of his place.

The caravan had stopped on an apron of asphalt near a broad concrete quadrangle. As she stepped down, glancing left, Rhita saw long rows of gleaming silver gullcraft, sleek fighters that were all wing and larger needle-shaped bombers with markings of the provinces of Ioudaia and Syrian Antiokheia. Beyond them lay the western desert, a narrow ribbon of cream above the white concrete and black asphalt. A fighter screamed down the closest runway, passing within barely a hundred arms of the line of wagons. Rhita shifted the box with the clavicle to one arm and covered her left ear, wincing at the din.

As they walked around their wagon, she saw the two beecraft squatting on the apron, sullen and nondescript brown with patches of yellow and white. They seemed ugly and ungainly compared to the fighters, like flying houses. Their wide horizontal blades drooped, man-sized nacelles on the tips coming within three arms of the ground on each side. A few men in red and white flight outfits stood beside the beecraft, engaged in conversation, watching the wagons’ passengers disembark.

Climbing down from the back of the next wagon in line was the Kelt and a small contingent of the palace guard; all to protect her, she realized.

She stifled a sudden urge to drop the clavicle and run into the desert.

A whistling breeze riffled little lines of sand on the asphalt, scattering grains about her feet. She looked up at the sun, shading her eyes against the brilliance.

It was a perfect day for flying. She had hoped it might be otherwise. She thought of the sanctuary of Athene Lindia, with its stone steps hot in the sun and the lapis-blue water beyond.

“Time to board,” Oresias said. “Didaskolos, assist your student, if you please.”

Demetrios offered his hand but Rhita declined, moving ahead of them with quick, small steps to show her determination.

“Ours is the machine on the right,” Jamal Atta instructed.

Oresias shaded his eyes and looked across the field to the low buildings nestled among sand hills to the south. “Are we expecting a reception?” he asked. Rhita followed his pointing finger and saw a line of distant vehicles about half a parasang from the asphalt apron.

“No,” Atta said, tensing. “We have this part of the field to ourselves.”

“Then we’d better hurry.”

Demetrios moved up behind Rhita as if to protect her. The palace guards and the Kelt joined their group at the beecraft hatchway, falling in line at Atta’s command. The military advisor cursed repeatedly under his breath, eyes flicking between the people and piles of supplies yet to be loaded and the approaching wagons.

Oresias rapped on the plastic canopy and the kybernetes opened a small window. “Get this thing off the ground first if you have to. Get her out of here if they reach us before we’re ready.”

“I’ve got a query on the radio,” the kybernetes said.

“There weren’t supposed to be any queries,” Oresias told him sharply.

“Then I don’t suppose they expect an answer,” the kybernetes replied casually. “Everybody has to be loaded two minutes before we can leave the ground. I need time to get my blades up to speed.” He snicked the window shut.

Rhita found her seat within the narrow fuselage, a thinly padded canvas square stretched across two parallel iron bars. Demetrios handed her the case containing the slate and helped her secure the clavicle in its box behind a net in an overhead rack. The whine of the jet motors directly overhead was hideously loud, disorienting. A crewman handed them ear-covers and motioned for all to be seated and strap themselves in.

Outside, the last of the supplies was being hastily piled into the second beecraft. The wagon drivers retreated to their vehicles and spun them away from the apron toward the military road. Rhita wondered what would happen if they were caught; why had things gone wrong? Had they gone wrong?

She clapped her hands over the ear-covers and closed her eyes. She had never flown before.

Oresias tapped her shoulder and she opened her eyes.

We’re going, he mouthed to her. She glanced out the square window between the explorer’s seat and her own and saw the ponderous jet nacelles blurring as the blades picked up speed. The roar seemed to turn her entire body to liquid. She hadn’t urinated in hours. The need was intense. She clenched her teeth.

The two beecraft left solid ground and drifted off the apron, accelerating north. She couldn’t see what the soldiers in the vehicles behind them were doing. She hoped they weren’t shooting.

Demetrios, sitting beside the Kelt across the aisle, grinned despite his gray face and strained expression. Rhita closed her eyes again.

She knew she would never again see Rhodes or Rhamōn or the sanctuary of Athene Lindia. The feeling came to her as an absolute certainty, beyond question.

For the first time, she actually understood the parallels between her grandmother’s journey and her own. Her grandmother had been young, too; only a couple of years older than Rhita was now. She had not just flown from her home, but had been lifted by rockets into space, away from Gaia—from Earth.

So who was responsible? What could she have done to avoid this misery? Rhita prayed, remembering the comfort and peace of sitting quietly in the shadow of Athene’s sanctuary, and for the merest instant she was back there, with Athene towering above her in the dark wooden shed.

Then the beecraft lurched sharply and she saw dazzling iron-pewter sandpaper through the window—ocean directly below them, hundreds, perhaps thousands of arms away.

“We’re turning east,” Oresias shouted in her ear. “I think we’ve gotten off without any damage. At least we’re not being followed.”

“What will we come back to?” Atta shouted. Even at high volume, his voice expressed dismal unhappiness. He flung his hands out and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “What went wrong?”

The question remained unanswered. As planned, they kept radio silence, staying five or six parasangs off the coast.

The pressure in her bladder was becoming too much. She leaned forward, gestured for Oresias to lift an ear-cover, and said something in a low voice. He still could not hear her.

“I have to urinate,” she shouted. The explorer raised an eyebrow and pointed to the back, where a crewman was pissing into a metal canister. “There’s a curtain.”

Rhita nodded. Not too embarrassing for a former gynandros—what Patrikia called a tomboy. When she was done, as a small sign on the canister instructed, she poured the contents into a funnel in the floor. Presumably, it fell from the beecraft and dribbled across the sea, her own personal rain.

She finally became used to the noise, and ate from a packet of dried fruits and nuts, drinking wine thoroughly diluted with water. One of the three crewmen handed out plastic packets of olive oil, telling everyone, “For your health. Suck it down.”

Rhita glanced at the overhead rack and saw the clavicle secure behind its netting. She tried to persuade herself that the expedition was under way and there was no sense feeling regret, but regret dominated her thoughts anyway.

In an hour, her attitude began to change. She was almost used to the bobbing and the rising and falling in her stomach. Looking out the window and seeing the clear, cloudless air of the coast—and then, far to the southwest, the smoggy haze above the delta—gave her a new perspective that was actually exciting. She listened to Oresias and Jamal Atta plotting their course with the kybernetes, who had left the beecraft in charge of his assistant. Behind and to their right flew the second craft, matching course precisely.

The Kelt and the palace guards took the situation quietly and stoically. Rhita thought there was a kind of contest between them—the first to show any sign of unease, lost.

Demetrios no longer looked so gray, but he was obviously unhappy. Rhita leaned across the aisle and then unbuckled her harness to get closer to him. She tapped his ear-covers and he lifted one side away.

“Let’s have a contest,” she said, giddy.

“What kind of contest?” he shouted.

“The first one to look scared or sick or upset, loses.” She nodded at the guards and the Kelt and grinned. “Game?”

“Game,” Demetrios said, returning her grin. “I’ve lost already, though,” he said ruefully.

“Starting now. Let’s sober up.”

Atta looked at them with patent disapproval.

“Where are we?” Rhita asked him, lurching near the group of three and grabbing hold of an overhead rack. Her bravery seemed unlimited now.

“West of Gaza,” Oresias said. “Making good time. We’re following Alexandros’s route! Sort of. We have a stop in Damaske for refueling, then Bagdade, then on to Raki below the Kaspian Sea, where we’re followed by an aerial tanker. We refuel in mid-air over the Hunnos Republic, and within two hours we’re at your site in the prairie steppes. I hope our allied provinces are good on their pledges to the queen.”

The sound of the beecraft’s engines equated with security for Rhita now. She napped for an hour, dreaming of sandy wastes, and found they had crossed Ioudaia and were nearing Damaske. Like an enormous pastry fresh from the oven, the sand and rock and crusted mountains passed below. She thought of caravans and days of travel, of dying of thirst and digging for water in ancient wells…That was romance.

Crossing it all like god’s bird was simply unreal.

Out of the baked pastry desert came a distant patch of green, spread across the sands like a spill of paint. Rhita smelled Damaske before she actually saw it; a smell of life and water and greenery that made her lift her head and twitch her nose, hoping for more. Demetrios and Oresias were deep in expedition plans; the mekhanikos was catching up on what he had missed. She wondered how she would feel if she had been conscripted, as Demetrios had. But I was conscripted, she reminded herself. My grandmother chose me. She crawled from her harness and looked through a window.

Damaske claimed to be the oldest city in the world. Excavations at Jericho in the last century had challenged that claim, but Jericho was a much smaller community, hardly more than a village; Damaske had truly been a city for millennia. It was the major trading center of Syria, surrounded by orchards and fields, squat glass and steel and stone ziggurats rising from the Jewish quarter and the Horian quarter, the massive stone Persian fortress dominating the south of the city, and south of that, the international civilian aerodromos of El Zarra.

Atta returned from the kybernetes’ cabin and told her they would be landing on the outskirts of El Zarra for refueling. “I hope to get some news there, if anybody’s talking.” He shook his long head gloomily.

The beecraft dropped low and approached the aerodromos just above tree-top level. Rhita smelled dates and cook-stove camel-dung smoke and smiled despite the tension. She had never been to any of these places; if she lived, she would be a very well-traveled young woman.

The beecraft set down on a flat concrete pad near a few ragged old fuel wagons. Tired, dusty men approached the two craft, dragging long, flat sand-colored hoses behind them. They waited for the props to stop spinning, then tugged the hoses to within a few steps of the side doors. Oresias swung their door open and jumped down, followed by Atta, the bodyguards and Demetrios. The Kelt took a deep breath and shook his head as if to clear it.

Atta conferred with the closest field attendant, who seemed reluctant to say anything, concentrating on hooking up the hose and starting the fuel pumping. Atta then walked over to speak to a wagon driver, and seemed to have better luck. When he returned, he appeared, if such a thing was possible, even more desolate.

Rhita stood beside the mekhanikos as Atta told them what he had heard. “There’s no communication out of Alexandreia. We’re getting our fuel, but we were supposed to get aerial charts of the steppes from the Syrian Map Center, and they haven’t shown up.”

“What do they mean, no communication?” Oresias asked.

“Just that. No radio, no telephone, nothing, as far as the driver knows. He’s an officer, too; he talks with pilots coming in to the aerodromos. All flights are being held in Alexandreia. Ours are the only craft to land today.”

Oresias circled his fingers around his wrist and twisted them. “Something’s gone wrong.”

Demetrios squinted quizzically. “What—”

“We’re being slighted,” Atta said. “We get our fuel, but the powers in Damaske are being spare with other amenities. That tells me the queen’s influence may now be less important to them…”

Oresias chafed his wrist until the skin seemed about to rupture. “A blow against the palace?”

Atta shook his head, unwilling to speculate. “We still have our mission. But something’s wrong. It must have begun just before we left. We can’t radio back…it would take an hour or more to go into the city, or to the aerodromos administration and place a cable…” He shrugged. “We have no choice but to go on.”

Rhita stared at the distant towers and squat ziggurats of Damaske, realizing she was not scared, but should be. The flight’s mixed exhilaration and boredom still had a grip on her, like a drug.

“Check with your clavicle, please,” Oresias told her softly as they re-boarded the beecraft. “I want to know whether our goal is still there.”

She pulled the box from its rack and opened it, touching the handlebars with one finger. The brilliantly colored world spun before her again, and the cross reappeared in the same position, unchanged.

“Still there,” she affirmed. Oresias strapped himself into his seat, leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

In a few minutes, the beecraft were refueled and ready for the flight again. Atta came aboard at the last and angrily slammed the sliding hatch shut. “What about our aerial tanker?” he muttered. “What about the return leg?”

23

Thistledown

Olmy arrived in the fourth chamber an hour after hiking to the abandoned station in the fifth chamber. The train crossed over a broad expanse of shimmering, silvery water and dropped him off at a rest station on Northspin Island, in the first quarter, near the northern cap. Avoiding the few other hikers, he rented a tractor, drove ten kilometers to a distant trail head, and walked into the dense coniferous forests.

Within his implant memories, isolated from his primary personality, the freshly created partial conducted its more cautious investigation of the Jart mentality.

Three hours later, he stood beneath a thousand-year-old redwood, a light mist drifting from spinward, his feet sinking into ancient loam.

Whatever isolation and abstraction he had felt before, after his months of research on nonhuman psychology, was nothing compared to his sense of self-exile now. He kept thinking of Tapi, perhaps even now working through his incarnation exams. He did not think he would see his son for some time, if ever; or Suli Ram Kikura. It seemed unlikely their paths would cross.

He felt the redwood’s thick, tough bark and wondered if he should feel a kinship with this old tree. In truth, he felt a kinship with nothing, not even his fellows, and that disturbed him. It was barely possible his implant regulators were not working properly, and that he was experiencing an unhealthy mental state. Just to be sure, he ran a test string through his primary mind and through the regulatory implants.

No inappropriate states, the results told him.

Merely extreme stress and danger.

All of these trees had survived the re-rotation after the Sundering. They had lasted through temporary weightlessness, floods, chaotic weather, and years of neglect, and now they seemed to thrive. Why couldn’t he feel simple encouragement from their example?

Why can’t I feel anything at all?

A scheduled status report emerged from behind the barriers. His partial sent a string of information indicating successful penetration of the Jart’s cultural and personal memory stores. In addition, the partial had exchanged cautious “greetings.”

Olmy sat back against a tree and took a deep breath. A kind of dialogue was happening a lot sooner than he had expected. The Jart, for the moment, was finding some advantage or other in cooperation. He might soon be able to tell how much of the Jart’s ostensible memories were real and how much manufactured; it seemed unlikely the Jart would willingly give up actual information about its kind. But then, everything about this situation was unlikely…and Olmy still had no idea what a Jart’s psychology was like, what it was capable or not capable of doing.

When the partial transferred its findings to Olmy, for a time, as he sat with eyes open, he saw both the forest and

Great prism-shaped Jart flawships, moving with majestic slowness over a colonized segment of the Way

(again in several visual layers, but these more ordered, less frantic)

and dancing clouds of midge-like attendant machines and vehicles moving from the flawship to broad curving ramps on the floor of the Way.

With a start, replaying the memory, Olmy realized that beneath the nearest ramp was an inverted image of the exterior of a planet. He tried to reinterpret but could not; it seemed that at least in this case, Jart gates were not circular holes, but slashes in the Way several kilometers wide. There was always the possibility that all the information he had received this far was deception, that the Jart itself was a ruse; one way to find out would be to ask Korzenowski about the possibility of elongated gates in the Way. Even if they were possible, other details might be distorted…

Another memory:

mingling with other beings

(Jarts? Clients of the Jarts?)

in a thick green liquid, much smaller silver worms passing between them, occasionally wrapping around one individual or another and cinching tight enough to crease flesh. Some of the beings resembled the Jart body in the fifth chamber memory store’s second room; others were flat white specked black carpets with undulating fringes, flying through the liquid, or trilaterally symmetric “starfish” with flexible mandibles or fingers on the end of each arm, or thick shapeless extrusions from colorless tubes…

All seemed to have some remote and nightmarish sea floor as a common origin, and none of them did anything Olmy could even begin to understand.

There were other images, too many to experience for the moment. Storing these findings without examination, he moved on to the exchanged “greeting.”

Partial: (Replay of capture memories and a string signifying awareness of the Jart’s existence and status.) Jart: >I am beyond reach of duty? Where is duty expediter label?< Partial: You are >beyond reach of< all your kind. Jart: >What is brother/father status? Is this communication from command oversight?< Partial: >Brother/father status< not known. Not command oversight. You are captured and under examination. Jart: >Acknowledge personal status as captured.<

The partial then sent a long list of questions. Those were being processed now. At least, for the time being, he had an illusion of progress.

The partial passed along another string:

Jart: >Cooperation and transfer of status information? Replacement of command oversight and command?<

This seemed to be a kind of surrender. Olmy marked the phrases “duty expediter,” “command oversight” and the isolated “command,” wondering if they were levels in Jart society. The partial had agreed to the condition offered by the Jart, subject to further explanation. The limits and methods were being worked out now, with the barriers still up and not likely to be lowered except for the transfer of more findings and status checks.

Olmy dug his hand into the loam and stared up at the tree branches overhead. All of his defenses were on alert. It was possible the Jart was simply preparing for another assault.

Somehow, he didn’t think it was that simple. Having failed to immediately kill or subdue Olmy, the Jart was apparently taking a different tack. Where it would lead, Olmy had no idea.

But a detailed exchange was beginning.

24

Gaia

Elamite Bagdade was a ruin slowly being rebuilt by the Mesopotamian Nekhemites, who had moved west in armored, mechanized hordes and sacked the city twenty years before, while the Oikoumenē concerned itself with one of the endless Libyan incursions on its own borders. The Nekhemites had proved themselves barely able to control the effete but efficient people they had so piously slaughtered in the name of their faceless, demanding god; they had then turned to Kleopatra, one of the few queens left on Gaia, and requested that she be a “bride to Nekhem.” The request was so ludicrous and so opportune that it could not be denied; henceforward, her Imperial Hypsēlotēs was worshiped in effigy in Bagdade, and Oikoumenē money and technical assistance flowed into the ancient city. In return, the Nekhemites guarded the frontiers of the Hunnos Republic and Nordic Rhus.

Jamal Atta thought it very unlikely they would face any trouble in Bagdade, and indeed, after three hours of flight from Damaske, the turbaned and red-robed attendants at the new aerodromos gave them all the fuel they needed, and maps of the Kazakh, Kirghiz and Uzbeki territories of Nordic Rhus. As they departed sad Bagdade, the Kelt bent over to investigate the floor and held up something, grinning foolishly. Tiny plastic statues of Kleopatra mating with Nekhem had been tossed through the beecraft doors along with their supplies.

The Kelt gave her his find. Rhita fingered it thoughtfully, fascinated by its crude vigor. Inelegant, ignorant, vicious and cruel beyond her experience, yet honest and full of life, the Nekhemites might someday own all the middle lands of the old world. She hoped they had deposed Nekhem by that time. He was an ugly god.

From Bagdade, they crossed the land of the Nekhem and picked up a tailwind, which brought them in two hours to Raki, Raghae of old, once again on Oikoumenē territory. Raki was an isolated city on an island of peace heavily fortified on all its borders. There, Oresias learned from a military field inspector that no news had been heard from Alexandreia, and that their air transport escorts—an aerial tanker and an old cargo plane that would be abandoned—were ready to accompany them from that point.

They now began their incursion into truly dangerous territory. Fifteen hundred years before, the Persians and the Oikoumenē in Europe had been swept to the west and then driven to the seas—the Priddeneian Sea and the Middle Sea—by the Alanoi and Hunnoi, working their nomadic peoples and subject Teutonic tribes into a vast mobile nation of warriors. An empire had been set up from the shores of Galleia and Kimbria to the great walls of Chin, the greatest the world had ever known—and the most fragile. In fifty years, that empire had vanished like a dream of blood and smoke, and the Skythians and Nordic Rhus had moved into the void. The Alanoi and Avars had finally held their ground east of the Kaspian, and the Hunnoi north and east of them. For a thousand years, these territories had been in flux, but had kept their basic shapes, until the arrival of the Aigaian Turkmenoi, pirates and ravagers of Hellas.

The Turkmenoi had carved their own niche, transferring their piratic tendencies to the Kaspian, and it was over that slender mountainous territory between the Altaic republics that the beecraft now flew. The Turkmenoi recognized no one as their betters or their masters. They isolated themselves and tried to hold back the incursions of the outside world. There would be no mercy for gullcraft should they be forced down; but it was unlikely the Turkmenoi could muster such weapons.

Rhita looked at the hundreds of miles of broad naked mountains passing below, and felt lonelier than ever before. She realized the variability of human thought and human history, the contradictions of cultures, as unmappable as these rocky passes and pinnacles, and it seemed that humans would never share a single truth. That meant either there was no single truth, or humans would kill themselves trying to find it…. Either way, thinking about it depressed her.

Her exhilaration of a few hours before had faded into dark unease. She was tired; sleep on the beecraft was not refreshing, accompanied as it was by the unending roar of the jets. Her stomach was touchy again; she did not feel it was safe to eat any more, yet she was hungry. She complained about nothing, but the flight was dragging on and on…

They refueled in the air near the northeastern border of Turkmenia. That process was interesting, what little she could see of it. The tanker veered away from their group and flew back to Raghae, leaving them with the cargo plane as escort. So far, despite her unease, she had to admit the expedition was going well.

Against her will, her thoughts wandered to home. She had never had opinions one way or the other about the Oikoumenē it had always been there; it seemed to be immortal. Within her lifetime, there had never been disaster broad enough to affect her world. Still, Rhodos had been peaceful for only eighty years. As a youngster, she had swum in huge rain-filled pockmarks in the hills, shell-holes from bombardments older than almost anyone alive. But if the queen herself was in peril…

The entire Oikoumenē could change its character. There might not be a home she could safely return to. Rhita squirmed on her seat, thinking of war, rebellion, death.

The mountains below gave way to ochre flatlands, with raw, rounded naked-looking hills and rocky promontories. The ochre became patchy green, and long ribbons of green bordered shallow streambeds. “We’ve passed over the southern extremes of the Hunnos and Alanos republics,” Oresias said, returning from the front cabin.

They swooped close to ground level for twenty minutes. Atta seemed especially forlorn, shaking his head and pounding his hands despairingly on his knees, waiting for the Nordic Rhus Uzbek and Kazakh watchtowers to sense them. But defenses never appeared; they apparently had passed through, either unseen or a blip too small to be credible.

“One hour,” Oresias said. The jets droned and wind rushed by, whistling through cracks in the beecraft hull. She tried to sleep again, but could only close her eyes, not bring on oblivion. She ached all over from tension and trying to hide how uncomfortable she was. The men sat still as statues, stoic, faces dull, rocking back and forth in unison as the beecraft maneuvered or hit a pocket of air.

How could she be so uneasy, and yet so bored? She might die, and not be excited when death caught her…. Would death—she imagined a large black serpent with skulls for teeth—recoil from such a cool, calm victim? Was it against death’s principles to eat the uncaring?

Looking out the window. Squinting in the sunlight. Using the can in the back again and voiding it, watering the steppes. Sitting, strapping herself in.

“How close?” Oresias asked, bending over her. She had managed to fall asleep somehow, dreaming of turtles flying. She rubbed her eyes and gripped the clavicle. The globe seemed much larger now, and the sweep across the surface much shorter, with more and more strange symbols and abstract shapes flashing by, unexplained. Then she was in the swale, and the cross was still there, vibrant red.

“Let me sit up front,” she said. They made way for her to the kybernetes’ cabin, and the assistant gave her his seat. She clutched the clavicle, feeling its responses, and looked out over the endless grasslands. “Down, please,” she said.

“How far?” the kybernetes asked.

“Slow down, and descend to…a hundred arms? Less?”

She looked back at Oresias. Demetrios had crowded in the hatch behind him, eyes wide, face still pale.

“Fifty arms,” Oresias said. “Will we see it?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. It might not be large…but I’ll know when we’re there.”

The two beecraft slowed and descended, while the cargo plane and tanker began to make wide turns over the landscape, flying above them every few minutes as they searched. Rhita concentrated on the prairie, trying to match the terrain with what she felt in the clavicle…an exercise not really necessary, as it turned out.

“Here,” she said. “Stop here.” The clavicle had simply told her, in no way she could specify, that they were over the site. The beecraft overshot and she guided them back, until both craft were within a hundred and fifty arms of each other, and the site lay beneath them, recognizable now: a grassy fertile swale around a small muddy streambed. She could not see the gate with her eyes, but the clavicle told her its precise position.

“Let’s land,” Oresias instructed the kybernetes. The kybernetes spoke with his counterparts on the other beecraft, and they descended the last fifty arms, touching down with a gentle bump on the grass, their blades causing rippling waves to spread and clash between them.

“Stop your engines,” Atta instructed from behind Oresias. “We want silence. We’ve come here like a horde of drunken demons. No sense overdoing it.”

“Is there a place for the gullcraft?” Oresias asked Rhita. She was confused for a moment—how could she know?—when she remembered that the clavicle could tell her. In the clavicle’s display, she flew over the simplified landscape and searched for a flat, undimpled area several stadia in length for the plane to land. “Northeast a few hundred arms,” she said. “It looks smooth, though there’s probably a few holes…might be rough.”

“From which direction?” Oresias asked.

“They should fly in from the south. They’ll see it—it’s quite broad.”

“Wish them luck,” Oresias instructed the kybernetes as he relayed her message. “Is it safe to go out?”

“I don’t see why not,” Rhita said, though she trembled. Not seeing the gate with her eyes disturbed her. She could not tell anything about it except its position.

Perhaps it’s nothing at all.

The doors were pushed open and a sweet, clean cool breeze blew into the stuffy interior. Grass-smell like a horse barn. Tang of something else, wet soil perhaps.

From horizon to horizon, the prairie steppe rolled with dominant confidence, ignoring them, ignoring all humans, concerned only with its dreaming fecundity. Its surface provided some of the richest land on Gaia, where water was available. To the west, a clean orange-yellow sun was within half an hour of falling below the horizon. The sky was cloudless and pure, the blue of Athene’s hemline spread over her domain, with a few bright stars or perhaps planets twinkling in the expanse, drops of glitter from Aphrodite’s makeup box.

The cargo plane made its descent to ground a couple of stadia distant, followed by the tanker, their motors obscenely loud in this calm, this aloofness.

They stood, all the expedition, beneath the still blades of the beecraft, looking down the gentle slope into the swale. They had arrived at their destination without real difficulty. Nobody, judging from their expressions, expected the absence of trouble to continue. Atta kept glancing at the horizon all around, one heavy eyebrow lifted doubtfully.

The Kelt stood beside Rhita with his weapon ready. The other palace guards followed a few moments after, expressionless, alert. Birds returned to the grass, tiny feather bullets shy and curious.

Rhita lifted her clavicle. “It’s there,” she said. She swallowed. “I’ll go down and look at it. Nobody comes with me…except him.” She indicated the Kelt. It would deeply insult her bodyguard to keep him away when she walked into danger.

Demetrios stepped forward, still pale from his ordeal on the beecraft. “I’d like to go with you,” he said. “I’m here to make an opinion about what we’re seeing…I’m useless if I just stand here.”

Rhita was too tired and nervous to object. “Just Lugotorix and you, then,” she said, hoping there wouldn’t be any more brave men volunteering. There weren’t. Oresias and Atta stood at the edge of the swale, arms folded, surrounded by the beecraft crew and kybernetes and the other expedition members, while Rhita, the Kelt and Demetrios walked down the gentle slope to the muddy streambed.

Not of her own volition, Rhita lifted the clavicle into a better position and carried it before her. She saw the gate in the display as a red circle now, barely five arms ahead of them. “Is it close?” Demetrios asked.

Rhita pointed. “Right there.” She could finally make it out with her eye, an almost invisible lens floating about eight arms above the ground, slightly darker than the sky around it. It seemed quiescent, but still it terrified her.

The clavicle told her things she barely understood, and she had to ask it silently for a repeat. Not using words, it informed her again that this was an incomplete gate, requiring very little energy to maintain; a test gate, through which probes might be dropped and samples taken. It was not large enough for anything wider than a hand to pass through, and it was not at this moment open for passage anyway.

She relayed this to Demetrois. They walked around it, heads inclined, while the Kelt stood a few arms away, weapon ready. Can I open the gate myself? she asked.

The clavicle responded that there was a possibility the gate could be expanded from this side, but that such an action would undoubtedly alert anybody or anything monitoring the gate, whatever they might be.

Do you know who opened this gate?

No, the clavicle said. Gates at this stage of their creation are pretty much all alike.

She turned to Oresias and Atta and said, “It’s too small to pass through. If I try to open it wider, people on the other side will know we’re here.”

Oresias considered this for a moment, then he and Atta conferred in low voices. “We’ll think about this overnight,” Oresias said. “Come back to the beecraft. We’ll set up camp.”

The sun was already below the horizon and the sky over the grassland darkled quickly. Rhita squinted at the lens again, seeing a watery star distorted through it, and nodded at Demetrios. “Let’s go,” she said.

Camouflage nets were thrown over the beecraft, making them look like grassy hillocks—not a very good disguise, she thought, considering how flat everything was around them, but better than nothing. Oresias and Atta met with the kybernetes of the cargo plane while four large tents were erected. Rhita listened to their plans for the next day from her cot on a pad of grass flattened by a canvas sheet. Flies and moths buzzed around her light in the corner of the tent. She was exhausted; hardly able to keep her eyes open, and yet she could not seem to drift off. Demetrios brought a can of soup from the makeshift galley and she sipped it, asking herself silently, again and again, Why here? Why open a gate here? Who could have followed Patrikia to this Gaia, and who would want to?

There had been no messages on the teukhos for the past two days. This evening, however, she flipped the switch and saw her grandmother’s words again. She had been no witch, after all; she was still advising Rhita about politics in Alexandria, a world to all intents and purposes lost to her granddaughter now. Rhita read the long message and closed her eyes, somewhat relieved; for a time, she had thought perhaps Patrikia was staring over her shoulder, holding her accountable. Now it was apparent that the sophē had been mortal, after all.

Exhausted, Rhita turned off the slate, packed it into its goatleather case, and turned down the kerosene lantern. In other parts of the tent, all was quiet. Outside, the day’s gentle wind had settled, and the prairie was wrapped in expansive silence, with thousands of stadia of emptiness all around.

25

Thistledown City

Lanier, feeling a need for simple amusement, rearranged the decor of his guest quarters below the Nexus dome. He walked from room to room in the palatial suite, giving voice instructions. “Polynesian,” he said in the dining hall, currently austere, sharp-edged and classical. The decor projectors searched their period memories and produced a fire-and torch-lit ceremonial chamber, matted with brown and white tapas, set with wooden bowls. The walls were constructed of palm logs and faced with more matting woven of grass and palm leaves.

“Very good,” he approved. By making fun of such marvels, he felt he could soothe his wizened little ego, or at least put himself in a better mood.

Once, powerful governors—senators, presiding ministers and even presidents—had lodged in these quarters. The rooms had been empty for centuries after the exodus down the Way, and were now used only for ceremonial occasions.

Korzenowski had gone off to make arrangements for the full Nexus conference; Mirsky was in his own quarters, similar to these; Lanier had nothing to occupy him but his thoughts. He felt like a fifth wheel. He was old, if that mattered; his understanding had never been adequate to a problem like this. Yet he had not expressed his reservations to anyone yet, and that worried him still more. It meant the administrative dog within him was starting at last to grip the bone being forced between its teeth. He did not want that; he wanted repose, not mind-bending excitement and challenge. He wanted—

Not to put too fine a point on it, Garry Lanier realized he wanted to be dead.

His eyes opened a little wider and he sat on the step of the staircase leading into the dining hall (carved from volcanic rock, the projectors perceived). He felt as if his heart had skipped a beat. Always willing to hide his feelings from himself, he had never directly confronted this particular personal truth.

An end to life and experience. Acquiescence to rest of the final sort. Reassurance that whatever the advances in medicine and technology, for him at least all life could end in darkness and quiet.

Lanier had lived through more unusual things than he could clearly recall; much of his memory was clouded by simple incomprehension. He might spend a century researching what he had seen, and be only a little wiser; so he would chuck it all and lie back.

Still, the admission shocked him. He rubbed his hollowing cheeks with his long, thin, still-strong fingers and repeated this interior revelation several times, savoring its bitterness. Whatever he had been, he had never been a quitter, and yet this was nothing if not wanting to quit.

Heineman had not wanted to quit. He had accepted mortality, but had enjoyed life to the end, and he had survived as much trauma as Lanier; perhaps more. Lenore Carrolson’s spirit was intact; she still had vitality and purpose. And Karen relished life so much she refused to think of dying, postponing that day with Hexamon technology.

No wonder he and Karen had parted ways. Like Lenore, she had not been blunted by all she had seen, and she had seen as much as he. She had grieved for their daughter as deeply as he—grief made all the more difficult because it was mixed with an impossible hope…that they might someday recover Andia’s implant. Where was his failure, then? The room’s voice announced a visitor at the main entrance. Lanier groaned, hoping for time to chew this over before having to confront his fellows, but that was not to be. He could not deny visitors now. “All right,” he said. He walked to the suite’s main entrance, a five-meter-long, two-meter-wide steel bridge suspended in a hollow sphere of meteoric crystal. A slice of the crystal moved aside from the opposite end of the bridge. Pavel Mirsky stood there, smiling his usual chagrined smile.

“Am I interrupting?”

“No,” Lanier said, spooked more by the man’s normality and solidity than by anything else. Why couldn’t he come dressed as a god, at least? A thunderbolt or two flickering in his hair…

“I do not sleep normally, and I am bored just searching for information…I need company. I hope that is fine with you?”

Lanier nodded weak assent. Of course he would be bored. Even the Stone’s incredible libraries would seem childish to him…wouldn’t they?

“I haven’t apologized for imposing on you, have I?”

“I believe you have,” Lanier said. Surely, his memory can’t be faulty?

“Perhaps I have.” He smiled again and crossed the bridge, passing Lanier. “These are spacious living areas, yet not, I think, much more luxurious than where common folks lived? Technology finally made equals of leaders and led.”

“It’s too rich for my tastes.”

“I agree,” Mirsky said as they crossed the reception rotunda, passing beneath a dome depicting the heavens as viewed from the Thistledown’s northern pole. At the moment, the Moon was visible and full, and its light cast shadows under their feet. “This is a nice effect, though, no?”

He seemed more like a child now. More spontaneous, playful, yet in control.

Lanier followed Mirsky into the suite’s small informal sitting room. The Russian tried out a stylish and neutral chair—neutral in that it did not possess traction cushions or any other field effect. He bounced on the centuries-old cushions, still pliant, and shook his head with mock sadness. “I was such a mess when I left this place, this starship,” he said. “I had lost much of my personality, or so I thought…very confused. I remember one thing clearly, however.”

Lanier cleared his throat. Mirsky’s long stare was unnerving.

“My admiration for you. I found you an incredible force. You faced all from the beginning, and did not…crack?”

Lanier shook his head slowly, not quite denying that he had kept his sanity. “Those were hard times.”

“The worst. I can hardly believe what I am now came out of those times, those circumstances. But this evening, I feel this urge to talk, and I want to talk more with you. You and I are not much alike, most would say, but I see similarities.”

“Even now?”

Mirsky’s face became bland. “You are not enthusiastic. I fear you have come to the end of your rope.”

Lanier barked a laugh. “Yes,” he said. “How true.” Softly.

“You know, a man reaches the end of his rope, he falls off.”

“Hangs himself, actually,” Lanier said. “That’s the clichè.”

“But a dog, he reaches the end, bites the rope…he’s free.”

“Old Russian wisdom?”

“Hardly,” Mirsky said, still bland. He did not quite look at Lanier, not quite away from him. He seemed a kind of pudding into which one could comfortably fall, to live a life of vanilla and sleep. The itch to confess flared.

Lanier sat opposite him, trying to revivify that fluid body motion of his youth, just to compete with this avatar. Competition not being practical, but—

“All right,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ve lived too long. You’ve lived out a universe and you’re not bored or tired.”

“Yes, but I have been bored and tired in ways I cannot see clearly now. Exhausted by failure. We who went down the Way failed miserably, and it cost us in ways…well, it cost dearly. We were scarred. We suffered what I can only call an ego-loss, and that alone was almost enough to bring us to self-extinction. When you exist in a nullity, ego-loss is like loss of blood. We nearly sapped ourselves away.” Mirsky rested his hands on his thighs and splayed his fingers, examining them as if looking for dirt or hangnails. Almost shyly, he asked, “Are you curious about me, what I am now?”

“We’re all curious,” Lanier said, again softly, gently, as if not to disturb Mirsky’s enchanting blandness.

“I am back to my old self, mostly. Sometimes I do not control my capabilities, and that is when what I must do exceeds the comprehension of my old self.”

Lanier raised his brows, not understanding. Mirsky continued without elaboration.

“But I come to talk about you, and why I came back to you. I owed you a debt. I could not discharge that debt across all of time. In some of my forms, this debt did not bother me, since all my past was tucked away like an old book, unread. But when I knew I would return as my old self, the debt surfaced.”

“I don’t know of any debt.” Lanier felt the impulse grow, not just confession but a bursting, an exploding. He wanted to hold his head and keep himself together.

“A simple debt. I need to thank you.”

Tears came to Lanier’s eyes, unbidden, unwanted.

“You were decent. You did your work and did not ask for thanks. You are the reason I survived to make our long journey, and come back now. In every situation, there can be a seed crystal of goodness and decency, of sensibility. You were that crystal on the Stone.”

Lanier leaned his head back on the chair, tears streaming down his cheeks. Had it been in his character, he would have sobbed. He held those spasms in, but felt a release none the less.

“A simple thanks,” Mirsky reiterated.

How incredible that in all the time he had worked on the restoration, he remembered no one thanking him. Not even Karen, too close to see the need. He had sacrificed life and time for the people he had administered, yet because of his manner—a confident self-sufficiency—he had never been thanked, or because of some personal flaw could not remember the thanks. Perhaps he had never put himself in a position to be thanked. The release now was like the unwinding of an ancient spring that had pinched his vitals.

He lifted his head and stared at the Russian’s blurred face, embarrassed and grateful at once. “I was your enemy,” he managed to croak. He touched his face and was surprised to find old skin, soft and yielding.

Mirsky clucked his tongue, a startling mannerism in an avatar. “To have a decent enemy is a blessing beyond measure,” he said, rising. “I have disturbed your rest. I will go.”

“No,” Lanier said, lifting his arm. “No. Please. I do need to talk with you.” The fear and envy this man aroused had turned in a moment into a kind of love, a homecoming of feelings he would never have acknowledged four decades ago. With these feelings came a sudden wary, almost painful concern for Karen. What was she doing now? He needed to speak to her, too. His skin…so old!

“Shall we reminisce? There appears to be time enough now, and may not be later.”

Mirsky nodded and sat again, leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. The blandness had gone from him.

“Maybe we both need memories refreshed,” Lanier said. “I wanted to tell you how tired I was, but I don’t feel very tired now.”

Mirsky waved his hand nonchalantly. “Old warriors always chew the bull long after.”

“Chew the fat,” Lanier said, smiling. It seemed very unlikely Mirsky made an unconscious error. “I’d like that.”

“Tell me what happened after I defected.”

“First, I’d like to ask a question…A thousand questions.”

“I cannot answer a thousand questions,” Mirsky said.

“Then one or two.”

Mirsky nodded skeptically.

“Your presentation…there was so much power there. You tell us they’ll take—they are taking—whole galaxies and converting them, destroying them…. Lifeless galaxies?”

Mirsky grinned. “Wise question. Yes. Stillborn, you might say…Huge, full of too much energy, burning themselves out anyway, or quickly falling into frozen stars at their center…You call them black holes. No life, no order in those galaxies will survive. The Final Mind accelerates and controls their death.”

Lanier nodded stupidly, caught himself, and licked his dry lips. “With so much power, why not just force us? Send a kind of army of people like yourself, or…something stronger.”

“Not subtle. Not the right way.”

“What if you fail?”

Mirsky shrugged. “Even so.”

“What will happen…between now and the end of time?” There it was, bald; he had had his interest in the future renewed, and with that came curiosity.

“I remember only what I need to remember. If I remembered more, I would not be allowed to tell you…not everything.”

“How long will it be—until the end?”

“Time means less and less in that region of history,” Mirsky said. “But an estimate—a ballpark figure—is not too misleading. About seventy-five billion years.”

Lanier blinked, trying to absorb such a span.

Mirsky shook his head sadly. “Sorry. I am not trying to be evasive, but there can only be so much revelation now. Perhaps later…much later, when humans join the communities…”

Lanier shivered and nodded. “All right,” he said. “But I’m still curious. Others are probably more curious than I am…The very people you have to convince.”

Mirsky agreed with a wry expression. “Now, Garry, I have my own questions. Can we talk about what happened after the Geshel precincts left?”

“Starting from when?”

“From the return to Earth.”

Lanier thought, found a starting point, and began his confession, after the need for it had finally passed.

26

Gaia

Birds sang and something else was in the air—something electric. Rhita pulled down her covers and listened to the men moving around in the rest of the tent, grumbling. She rubbed sleep from her eyes; she had been exhausted, strained to the breaking point, she realized now. For a moment she simply hung on to the comfort of her bed, refusing to listen to her instincts. Then something exploded not far from the tent and she was on her knees, and on her feet, dressed only in loose-fitting underwear. The air crackled and wind beat the outside of the tent. A few men screamed questions and orders at each other. Demetrios lifted the edge of the tent flap, stared at her, embarrassed, and said almost sternly, “Thunderstorm. It’s going to pour rivers on us any minute.”

“Just what we needed!” She stepped into her pants, not at all embarrassed to be seen by him. In fact, she found the moment slightly arousing—the appraising look in his eye before his politeness made him look down…

“It adds to the excitement,” he admitted, back turned. She looped her shirt closed and zipped up her jacket, then bent down to put on her shoes, buckling quickly. In seconds, she was fully dressed. She brushed past Demetrios and skipped by a kybernetes and a soldier, down the covered gap between two sections of the tent, into the outside.

Oresias and Jamal Atta stood at the edge of the ravine, Oresias with hands on hips, Atta speaking into the mouthpiece of a mobile radio mounted on the back of a soldier. What happened to radio silence? she asked herself. Demetrois came through the tent door behind her, just as big drops of rain splashed on her face and hands and darkened the fabric of her jacket. Atta lifted his hands and shook his head; the last straw, more than any human could bear.

The two beecraft seemed hunched under the onslaught, blades drooping almost to the level of the grass. Soldiers stood in the hatchways, smoke rising from several long pipes as they casually watched the downpour grow more intense. Oresias handed the soldier the mouthpiece and drew his jacket up over his head, running toward them. Lightning flashed to the south, lighting up the canopy of clouds and the steppe around them with cold, pale brilliance.

“There’s disaster in Alexandreia,” Oresias shouted over another crack of thunder. He pushed Rhita and Demetrios back through the door into the tent and threw aside his jacket, running his hand like a comb through his wet hair, rubbing water out of his eyes with his knuckles. Atta remained standing in the middle of the storm, raising his arms now and then, shouting or whispering, they couldn’t tell over the noise.

“He wants lightning to hit him. Might be better for all of us,” Oresias said. “There’s been a revolt. Elements in the Mouseion, I gather…and the Jews. The Lokhias is under siege and the palace has been locked up. Soldiers loyal to the queen have dropped bombs on the Mouseion—”

“No!” Rhita felt the word leap out of her, a futile, outraged countermanding order.

Oresias grimaced in shared pain. “We should have known from the attitude in Bagdade and Damaske. We have no protection on the way back. For all we know, the Hunnos and Rhus border stations are being alerted now. I don’t think they have a radio fix on us yet, but they will if we have to send any more messages.”

Lugotorix stood tall and protecting over Rhita, his eyes dark under a heavy frown.

“What do we do here?” Demetrios asked, apprehensive but not fearful.

“Our mission,” Oresias said. “We have two hours before I order a pull-out and we try to get back. We’ll unload what we need from the cargo plane.” He ordered several soldiers to organize the transfer of supplies. Outside, the tanker’s engines roared over the storm. The fuel had been transferred, and now it was taking off. “A long, leisurely expedition is no longer possible, but we can investigate this gate, learn as much as we can, and save our skins before the Kirghiz or Kazakh Tatars or their Rhus masters are upon us.”

Atta had given up imprecations against the thunder and joined them under the tent. “Lightning hit the gate,” he said breathlessly. “It glowed like a lantern.” Simultaneously, he and Oresias looked at Rhita.

“My turn, isn’t it?” she said.

“I will bring the Objects,” Lugotorix said. She looked at the Kelt’s retreating back with some surprise. Everybody pushes me to this. I don’t like the feeling I have; my instincts say no….

Or was she simply afraid?

“Will lightning strike the clavicle, too?” Oresias asked.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

“What?”

“I don’t know!” she shouted. Demetrios nodded phlegmatically and she turned away from him with a flash of disgust contradicting her earlier attraction. He can’t help. Nobody can help. I’m trapped.

Lugotorix returned with the large case. She unlocked it with her keys and removed the clavicle, holding it low before her, feeling its power in her hands and thoughts. It tries to reassure me. The Kelt adjusted his machine pistol and shifted from one foot to the other behind her. Oresias smiled and pulled aside the tent door.

Without hesitation, refusing to show any weakness to anybody, disgusted with herself and everything else—especially with her weak-minded notions of adventure the day before—she stalked out into the driving rain.

She stopped and turned, eyes blinking against the pounding drops. “That way,” Demetrois said, pointing her in the direction of the swale.

“It’ll flood soon,” she called over her shoulder. The men followed her, all but the Kelt hunched over. Lugotorix strode through the storm like a walking tree, hair plastered across his face, eyes mere slits, teeth bared in a grimace.

The bottom of the swale was already ankle-deep in rushing water. She slipped and stepped gingerly down the bank, somehow staying upright with both hands gripping the clavicle, until she splashed across the bottom and stood beside the shivering lens of the gate, seeing it with her eyes and also in her mind, undisturbed by the storm or the lightning strike.

The clavicle showed her how wide the storm was, and odd symbols flashed through the display, bunching up at one point in the clouds and blinking green—

Just as lightning brightened the grassland yet again.

The clavicle kept her informed about all conditions around the gate. A pity Grandmother didn’t tell me about all this, she thought. She might not have known.

“It’s still here, and it hasn’t changed,” she called to the men. Only Lugotorix followed her into the swale. Demetrios stopped halfway down the bank, not, she surmised, out of fear, but in deference to her position, her control of the situation.

“Do you need help?” he asked, holding out his hands.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”

What do I do to widen the gate? she asked the device. She assumed that was what they were all after, with no time to be extra cautious. She could hardly conceive of who or what might be waiting for them on the other side: ogres or gods.

She was still a child of Rhodos, however sophisticated she might pretend to be. She did not have her grandmother’s upbringing.

The clavicle instructed her below a level she could follow with her conscious mind. Her hands tingled; the effect was almost painful. Her muscles jerked minutely, growing used to new directives, new channels of command being blazed through her nervous system in just a few seconds. For a moment, Rhita was both tired and nauseated, but that passed and she straightened.

Surprised, she blinked away a few drops of water. The rain had stopped and she hadn’t noticed. Had she fainted or blacked out? She turned and saw Lugotorix behind her, eyes focused over her head. Demetrios halfway down the bank, and Atta and Oresias and the soldiers along the edge, all stared at the gateway.

Rhita looked up.

The lens had risen and expanded, flattening. It gleamed oddly in the fresh rays of a morning sun shining at a low angle between parting clouds. She consulted the clavicle.

The gateway’s changed. What’s happening?

We have made it expand, the clavicle told her. You ordered it so.

Can I go through it?

Not advisable, the clavicle said.

Why?

We cannot know what is on the other side.

Rhita thought that made a great deal of sense, but their time was limited. There’s no way we can find out?

None.

But it is open?

Yes.

Can someone come through from the other side?

Yes.

The enormity of what she had done began to sink in. She stood below and to one side of the gate, admiring its uncanny beauty, like a suspended raindrop, or the lens from the eye of some huge fish.

Water had risen above her ankles in the swale. It tumbled in glassy sheets over the bent grass, muddy foam catching against the bank. Rhita glanced down at it, annoyed, and decided it would be wise to climb up the bank, away from any possible flood. She stood beside Demetrios, holding the clavicle level with her knees, breathing heavily. “It’s open,” she told him quietly. He glanced at Atta and Oresias, then back at her.

“Don’t you want to tell them?”

“Of course,” she said, “It’s open,” she called back over her shoulder. “I opened it. The clavicle opened it.”

Atta nodded, lips drawn down, eyes squinted in speculation. Oresias gave her a short smile. “We can pass through?”

“It says we can, but that we shouldn’t. It doesn’t know what’s on the other side.”

Oresias walked down the bank. “We came here to investigate,” he reminded them. “Whatever’s happened in Alexandreia, that’s our mission. You’re too valuable to send through,” he told Rhita, “and we need Atta to command the pilots and soldiers in an emergency. Which this situation is, probably. Demetrios—”

“I’d love to go,” the mekhanikos said, eyes sparkling.

“No.” Oresias lifted his hands and shook his head. “You didn’t sign on to take risks. I did.”

Lugotorix watched them all closely, his eyes following the circle of conversation.

“Bring down the second Object,” Oresias ordered one of the soldiers. The man ran off to comply.

“I don’t know how to use it,” Rhita said. “Grandmother didn’t tell me.”

“Careless of her,” Oresias said, face glowing with the challenge. “We’ll see if it still works, and whether or not we can work it. If it works, I go through. If not—”

“I’m responsible for all of the Objects,” Rhita said.

“And I’m responsible for you,” Oresias said. “If it doesn’t work, we can at least poke one of our caged animals through first, and then I’ll follow—if the animal comes back alive.” He touched Rhita’s arm lightly. “I’m not a complete fool, and I don’t want to die. We’ll be cautious.”

The case containing the second object was brought down into the swale by the soldier. Rhita opened the lid while he held it, and brought out the control box and recirculation box, both attached to a thick black belt. “It’s very old,” she said.

Oresias held up his arms and she wrapped the belt around his waist. “How would you make it work?”

Rhita thought for a moment, then touched the control box with her hand. The device did not communicate with her mind; apparently it was less sophisticated than the clavicle. What would Grandmother do? she asked herself.

She’d talk to it.

“Please turn on,” she said in Hellenic. “Please protect this man.” Nothing happened. She thought about that for a while, and then decided to use her grandmother’s English, a difficult language she was not at all fluent in. “Please turn on,” she said. “Protect this man.”

Again, no response.

Rhita felt a flush of anger at her own ignorance. Why didn’t Grandmother teach me how to use all the Objects? Perhaps, toward the end of her life, Patrikia’s brilliance had faded. “I can’t think of anything else to try…” she said. “Unless…it might work if I’m wearing it.”

Oresias shook his head firmly. “If her Imperial Hypsēlotēs still sits on her throne, she’d have my head if I put you in any danger. We’ll try the animal first.” He ordered that a cony be brought forward.

“I’ll go,” Lugotorix told Rhita in confidence, speaking softly in her ear. She shook her head; everything was confused. They were amateurs; none of the others—probably not even her—had any idea of how momentous this occasion was, how dangerous and not just for them.

The cony arrived, a small bundle of fur in a wicker cage, twitching a pink nose, its cage suspended by a metal hook on a long wooden pole. The water had not risen appreciably, so he took the far end of the pole and stepped into the stream, walking awkwardly with the cage dangling before him. “Where should I put it?” he asked.

Despite herself, Rhita grinned. “In the center.”

Lugotorix seemed to find this amusing, too; the Kelt seldom found anything worth smiling about.

Oresias lifted the long pole and maneuvered the cage up to the center of the glimmering lens. “Like this?” he asked. The cage and cony disappeared, as if by some magician’s sleight of hand.

“Yes,” Rhita said softly, awed. She tried to visualize Patrikia falling through such a lens, landing in an irrigation channel…

“I’ll leave it there for a few seconds,” Oresias said, the pole trembling in his grip.

Rhita heard a deep pounding sound to the north. Jamal Atta looked up from the swale and flinched. “Tatars—Kirghiz!” he shouted. “Hundreds of them!”

Oresias’s face blanched, but he continued to hold the pole in position. “Where?”

Lugotorix leaped to the rim of the swale. Rhita was torn between staying near the gate and Oresias and following the Kelt to find out what was happening. Soldiers shouted around the beecraft. The pounding grew louder.

“Horsemen and infantry!” Lugotorix called down to her. “They’re close—a couple of stadia.”

“What banner?” Oresias asked, his entire upper body trembling with the weight of the cage and pole. The lens hung steady and undisturbed, absorbing the cage just as an invisible doorway swallows the top of a magician’s rope.

“No banners,” Jamal Atta said. “They’re Kirghiz! We must leave!”

Oresias pulled the cage from the gate convulsively. Rhita saw a limp blur of red and gray in the cage as Oresias swung the pole out over the stream to the bank. They both peered down at the cony. It was dead; it hardly resembled an animal at all.

“What happened to it?” Rhita asked.

“Looks like it exploded, or something tore it apart,” Oresias said. He fingered the wooden bars; they were intact, their contents dripping a thin fluid of blood onto the grass and dirt. He unhooked the cage and stuffed it hastily into a rubberized sack. Lugotorix came down the decline to grab her arm. “We go now,” he said firmly, machine pistol in hand. She did not resist.

They stood on the edge of the swale for a moment to get their bearings. Soldiers ran through the grass to the beecraft with boxes of supplies. One stumbled and fell, screaming; Rhita thought he had been shot, but he regained his footing and picked up his load. She looked to the north, beyond the beecraft, and saw a line of dark riders moving rapidly toward them, horses up to their withers in grass. Clods of mud flew up behind them, and their voices joined in a heavy, ululating song above the pounding of hooves. Some waved swords and long rifles in the air. Hidden by a low hill until just this moment, a flimsy multiple-winged gullcraft suddenly vaulted into view behind the riders, buzzing like a summer dragonfly. The gullcraft flew over the line, gained more altitude, and passed above them at about fifty arms, wings dipped almost vertical as the kybernetes and one observer in a rear seat tried to see the invaders. She clearly made out a long black telescope in the observer’s hands, and then Lugotorix lifted her by her arms, pinned to her sides by his huge hands, and ran with her to the nearest beecraft. Oresias tried to keep up with them. She turned and saw Jamal Atta scrambling with arms outflung, cape billowing, in the direction of a clump of soldiers bearing yet more boxes of supplies from the cargo gullcraft.

“Drop them! Get to your craft!” he ordered. But it was too late. The horsemen were already riding through the camp, some plunging into the swale, barely missing striking the gate, and up the other side, horses chuffing and flinging ribbons of foam, their nostrils flaring.

The riders wore black leggings and dark gray pants, with loose magenta tunics belted and tied around the wrists with rope. Their hats were made of skins, ear coverings flapping loose as they bounded around the tent, pointing their rifles and laughing and screaming. Soldiers cowered in the grass, on their knees, or stood their ground with wide eyes, cringing this way and that, not daring to bring up their own weapons.

They were clearly outnumbered. To add to the confusion, it began to rain again.

Lugotorix lifted her into the beecraft and leaped up after her, pushing her behind a bulkhead with one boot while he took a position with pistol behind his back near the open hatch. Other soldiers hid in the craft, and some crawled beneath it, seeking refuge from the pounding hooves. There were at least three hundred riders.

The second beecraft started its jets. Rhita crawled to a low window on the opposite side and saw the props rotate ponderously, jet pods low, almost in the grass. Horsemen rode around it, rifles pointing at the forward compartment, shouting and swinging their free hands down. Oresias crawled up beside her. Demetrios coughed behind him. “They won’t let any of us leave,” he said. Jamal Atta strode with some dignity between four riders on plunging and rearing horses, glancing this way and that with a fierce grin. He’s showing them he has no fear, Rhita thought. Atta turned and approached the area of the rotating blades. The pods were picking up speed now, the props rising slowly and the grass bending outward. The horsemen rode clear, rifles still at ready. Atta shouted at the beecraft, but from inside their own vehicle, they could not hear what he said.

“He wants them to stop the engines,” Oresias guessed.

Demetrios found his own position near a second window. “What happened to the cony?” he asked.

“It’s dead,” Oresias answered bitterly. “Our luck has been steady throughout this expedition.”

“Dead how?” Demetrios persisted.

“Like something ate it and spit it out!” Oresias replied, eyes wild. “We may all be dead in a few minutes anyway.”

Encircled by riders, Jamal Atta spoke with a brawny fellow in a thick black wool coat, shiny with rain, that made him seem twice his already formidable size. The Kirghiz swung a long curved sword idly near Atta’s ribs. Atta seemed to pay little attention to this, maintaining an admirable calm despite being soaked to the skin, his hair hanging in long strings. Other riders herded scattered soldiers before them. The second beecraft’s engines moaned sadly, turbines dropping in pitch, and the props swung to halt, pods undulating.

“He’s surrendering,” Oresias said. “Not much choice.”

Rhita still held the clavicle. She had ignored the device for several minutes, yet she clutched it firmly in both hands. Lowering her head from the window, shaking her aching hands out one by one, she returned her full attention to what the device was telling her. Her thoughts filled with the display again. She saw the gate—still represented by a red cross—and she saw what must have been a haze of rain drops around the swale. The riders did not seem significant to the clavicle—she could detect no symbols indicating their presence. But something was happening to the red cross. It was surrounded by one red circle, and then by another, and a third. The circles broke into three equal segments and spun about the cross.

What’s happening?

The gateway is still expanding, the clavicle told her.

How?

Controlled from the opposite side.

Rhita’s heart fell. She had not been truly frightened—exhilarated, shocked, surprised, but not afraid—until now. “What have we done?” she murmured. Once again she prayed to Athene Lindia and closed her eyes, wishing Patrikia were here to advise her.

A trio of riders seemed to rise up out of the ground before the beecraft hatchway, screaming and waving their rifles and swords. Oresias stood and faced them, hands outstretched to show he was unarmed. The lead rider, bareheaded, bald and with a long, thin mustache, leaned forward in his minimal saddle and motioned for Oresias to approach.

“You speak Hellenic?” the rider asked.

“Yes,” Oresias said.

“Our strategos, he wishes a word with you—you are Oresias?”

“Yes.”

“You command with this arabios Jamal Atta?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you here?” The bald-headed rider leaned forward with an expression of intense, solicitous interest. Then he leaned back, shaking his sword vigorously. “No. You tell the strategos, with the arabios, all together!”

Oresias climbed down from the hatch and followed the trio across the grass, around the beecraft, to where Atta conversed with the man in the wool coat.

Rhita still had half her attention on the clavicle display. The circles spinning around the cross had become a blur; that, the clavicle told her, was an indication of the strength of the gate. A great deal of energy was being expended. She could not see the swale or the gate directly.

“Something’s happening,” she told Demetrios. He knelt beside her, hair dripping rain. They all resembled drowned cats. He held out his hand, and she released the clavicle to clasp it, then pull it down to touch a handle. His eyes grew large.

“God!” he said. “It’s a nightmare.”

“I guess the Tatars don’t see anything unusual,” Rhita surmised. “But it’s getting wider, stronger.”

“Why?”

“Something’s going to come through,” she said.

“Maybe more people like your grandmother,” Lugotorix said. He laid the machine pistol behind the winch housing, out of sight but quick to hand; not, however, immediately in hand, in case they were searched.

Rhita shook her head, feeling hot, almost feverish.

They are not human, the clavicle told her. They do not use human methods on the gate.

Demetrios stared at her, having heard the message as well, but not knowing what to make of it.

How soon? she asked.

The gate is open. When they will pass through cannot be known.

27

Thistledown, Fourth Chamber

There was no time to worry about the Jart’s almost total cooperation with his partial; Olmy could hardly keep up with the flow of information they were exchanging. Some risk was involved; a particularly subtle corrosive or worm could be embedded in the Jart’s flood of information, and might even make it past Olmy’s filters and other defenses, but that was a risk Olmy was willing to take.

The exchange was not one-way. Olmy’s partial was providing the Jart with selected information about humans.

Physically, Olmy sat on a rock by a narrow streamlet, tubelight filtering through a haze of pollen that dusted the quiet pool near his feet. Mentally, he explored the labyrinth of Jart social strata, convinced by now that the Jart’s information was accurate and not made-up. It was too convincing, too true to what little humans had learned about their long-time adversaries in the Way.

This Jart was a modified expediter. Expediters carried out orders passed through duty expediters, slightly different in mentality and form. An expediter might be thought of as a laborer, although their tasks were often non-physical; expediters might just as often be assigned thought processing as physical work. Duty expediters designed practical ways of carrying out policy. They decided who should be called up from a pool of expediters, who were stored, Olmy learned, in a kind of city memory, but kept inactive. If physical forms were required for their labor, they were assigned to bodies which might be either mechanical, biological, or a mix of the two.

Another description of another kind of body existed which Olmy was not sure he understood: the translation came across as mathematical form, but was not complete by any means.

The Jart was not above holding back key information. Neither was Olmy.

Above duty expediters was command. Command made policy and foresaw the results through intense simulation and modeling. Command was always made up of Jarts in their original natural bodies, without augmentation of any kind. They were mortal and allowed to die of old age. They were never downloaded. Olmy puzzled at this bottleneck in an otherwise extremely advanced and amorphous group of beings; why not give what was obviously an important level in the strata more flexibility, and more capabilities than they naturally had? He made a note to have his partial ask the Jart about this.

Above command and all other ranks of Jarts was command oversight. At first, Olmy could not understand what role command oversight played. Individuals in this rank were immobile, lacked any bodies, and resided permanently in a kind of memory storage different from that where inactive expediters were kept. Command oversight Jarts—if they could be called Jarts at all—were stripped of all but pure reasoning faculties and rigorously modified for their tasks. Apparently they gathered information from all levels of the strata, examined it, made judgments of goals achieved and efficacy of actions, and presented “recommendations” to command.

In all of Jart cybernetic technology, as far as Olmy was being informed, there were no artificial programs; all processing was accomplished by Jart mentalities which had, at one time or another, occupied natural and original Jart bodies. However far from their natural origins, however duplicated, modified and customized, these mentalities always had a connection with their original memories. It was possible, then, that there were Jarts still active who remembered a time before their occupation of the Way, who perhaps remembered the Jart home world.

If there had been a single home world…

The Jarts might not be a single species, but a combination of many species—a kind of volvox of beings and cultures.

The only level within the strata allowed to breed naturally was command. No impression of what command looked like came through in the information; Olmy was beginning to realize that understanding Jart physiology was much less important than humans had once thought.

Jarts, far more even than humans, had superseded their physical origins; most had been consumed by their cybernetic structures.

But in all honesty, Olmy could see that had the Infinite Hexamon continued its development, humans might have ended up in a society not qualitatively different from that of the Jarts. They might yet; neo-Geshels were pushing the Terrestrial Hexamon to return to the old ways.

Did freedom or individuality mean anything at all in such a culture? Another note, another question.

In all the information, Olmy found nothing that could be considered directly strategic: nothing about the Jart activities in the Way, about their trading partners (if any) or their ultimate goals (again, if any). He decided it would be best not to press for this information until he saw fit to provide the Jart with similar insight.

It was a kind of dance, this exchange of information. The moves had started out awkwardly, rapidly become fast and furious, and might soon slow to a measured back-and-forth rhythm.

For the time being, there was almost total cooperation. Olmy doubted that would last; the Jart had its mission, after all, and probably suspected that a greal deal of time had passed.

Vigilance was the order of the hour.

28

Earth

There was no physical sensation when the shuttle lifted off from the landing field at Christchurch. Karen Farley Lanier closed her eyes briefly and listened to the exclamations of the delegates, many of whom had never flown until the last few weeks, much less traveled in space. They would spend seven hours in transit before docking with the Stone—Thistledown, she corrected herself. Only the Old Natives referred to the orbiting asteroid as the Stone.

Still slender, her blond hair graying into sunlit ash, Karen seemed mature, but nowhere in age near her sixty-eight years. She might have been a well-preserved forty. Pride in her appearance and fitness had been part of her bulwark against the Death; if she could maintain her strength and youth, she felt more subconsciously than otherwise, then the Earth could regain her vitality. Sometimes she accused herself of self-serving vanity, but what did she have to be vain about, or for that matter, who could she be vain for? Her husband hadn’t complimented her on her looks in at least five years; they hadn’t made love for three years; she had neither time nor inclination for affairs.

Life had made her almost completely self-contained, a kind of emotional analog to the homorph Olmy.

The atmosphere in the shuttle was electric with excitement. The delegates sat glued to the ports, eyes wide. After an hour and a half, the novelty passed sufficiently for some of the delegates to turn away from the view of stars and Earth. Karen looked around the broad, dimly-lighted white interior of the cabin. As with almost all Hexamon shuttles, the furnishings resembled ingeniously molded soft white bread dough: couches arranged almost casually for maximum efficiency, all capable of customizing themselves to fit their occupants’ bodies; opacity where no windows were needed, transparent ports where passengers wished to see out; pools of light where a delegate read a small stack of papers (archaic in this setting!), and shadow where another slept.

This Hexamon shuttle was much larger than most, easily capable of carrying several hundred passengers. There were forty-five aboard now, forty-one men and women from around the Earth, as well as herself. It was going to be a grand experiment—a by-your-bootstraps knitting of these individuals into a single family, teaching them to see that their problems were not separate but intimately linked, and to see their companions not as competition, but as helpers.

The introduction at Christchurch had gone smoothly enough; Karen had blended in, despite her rank as Chief Earth Coordinator, and had been accepted by most of the group as a peer.

A number of delegates had attached themselves to her in an attempt to form a proto-ruling-class. One such was a middle-aged Mainland Chinese woman whose community, near Karen’s home province of Hunan, had not known the touch of the Terrestrial Hexamon until just five years ago. Another was a badly scarred, very proud Ukrainian, representing a group of Independents who had held off the would-be-salvagers of their villages and towns for nearly twenty years after the Death. Yet a third was a North American from Mexico City. Mexico City had survived the bombs only to succumb to lethal radiation, and had been repopulated by Latinos from Central America and refugees from the border cities…

Karen appreciated their confidence in her but she subtly discouraged the hierarchy they were unconsciously forming. She did not desire eminence or power, only success. Theirs was a unique opportunity. The circumstances had to be handled carefully.

Their faces bore the mark of Earth’s agony, even though some had been born after the Death. Few of these people had received pseudo-Talsit mental therapy, having kept their sanity and abilities even in the worst of times; they were incredibly tough and resilient. They had been hand-selected by Hexamon sociologists who had spent months searching the Recovery census—completed only in the past four years—for just their kind. “We call them high primes,” Suli Ram Kikura, the project coordinator, had told Karen. “Strong naturals with little or no previous tampering.”

Most of them were natural leaders, having come to power without Hexamon help. They seemed at ease together, though few had dealt with each other as leaders before. Their communities were far enough apart that the borders did not touch, and there had been little commerce between them; but with the completion of the Hexamon social structure over the next ten years, their peoples would certainly interact, and the experience they received aboard the Stone would make them all—it was hoped—a kind of seed, broadcast over the Recovered Earth.

Ser Ram Kikura’s prejudice against the Hexamon’s extensive psychological meddling still showed; it made her the perfect coordinator for this project, an attempt to let Earth stand on its own feet.

Some citizens of the Terrestrial Hexamon seemed to feel the Hexamon would not remain stable for the indefinite future. The shortage of materials necessary for the maintenance of society aboard the Stone, the shifts in deeply held attitudes, the repercussions of dealing with their own origins on the post-Death Earth—all were taking their toll on Hexamon stability.

If Earth had to survive a crisis among its saviors, it would have to be weaned…

Karen spoke Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, having brushed up on her Russian with Hexamon devices, and having learned Spanish the same way. That was enough to communicate directly with most of the delegates. Those few whose language she didn’t speak—including three whose dialects had arisen since the Death—could usually communicate with others in the group through a shared second language. No outside human or machine translators diluted this early stage of their interaction; they were being taught to rely on each other. Before the week was out, they would all speak each other’s languages—having acquired them within the third chamber’s city memory—and many more, besides.

For the first time in years, Karen felt on the edge of fulfillment. She had suffered as much as Garry during the last four decades, traveling around the ravaged Earth, seeing more death, destruction and seemingly unending agony than she thought she could stand. Losing their daughter. Her breath still took a hitch at that memory. But she had dealt with her grief in a very different manner, not internalizing it as world-guilt, but finally rejecting it, setting her personality aside as a separate thing, and dealing with her work as a nurse might. She did not succeed entirely—she had her own hidden scars—but she had not declined into a permanent funk.

She forced the thoughts back again, a little surprised they had gotten loose. Karen had long ago learned when and how to block off the area of her mind having to do with her husband; she usually managed not to think much about Garry when they were separated, concentrating on the delicate tasks at hand. But their last meeting…Garry, nervous, perhaps even frightened, though doing his best not to show it, escorting a man who could not possibly be on Earth…

She glanced out the shuttle window at stars, temporarily ignoring the steady, polite conversation of three delegates sitting beside her. Was Garry aboard the Stone, with the impossible Russian? She had, in her own stubborn way, come close to resolving the mystery by deciding that someone had played a trick on her husband; that Mirsky had never gone down the Way. But the more she thought about it—and she could not help thinking about it now, with little else to do—the more she realized how unlikely this was.

She felt a flush of anger. Something was going to happen. Something momentous. She resented the mystery of Mirsky’s return, feared it might drive Garry deeper into his funk by making him face cosmic imponderables even farther outside his control than Earth’s pain.

She frowned and turned away from the stars. Unlike Lanier, Karen felt little dismay at the changes in her life. She accepted change easily enough; spaceflight, the Stone, the opportunities offered by the Hexamon. But Mirsky’s return slipped from her understanding like a fish through her fingers.

“Ser Lanier,” the Chinese delegate called, smiling broadly and inclining her head as she sat beside Karen on the free-form couch. Her face was wreathed in fine sun-wrinkles; she was small and round, matronly, probably ten years younger than Karen. “You seem pensive. Are you worried about this conference?”

“No,” Karen said, smiling reassurance. “Personal difficulties.”

“Your mind should be at rest,” the delegate said. “All will go well. We are friends already, even those whom I worried about.”

“I know,” Karen said. “It’s nothing, really. Don’t trouble yourself.” He’s doing it to me again, she thought. I cannot get away from him. She closed her eyes and forced herself to sleep.

29

Thistledown

Korzenowski’s partial located Olmy in the fourth chamber forests of Northspin Island two days after Lanier’s arrival. Downloaded into a cross-shaped tracking probe, the partial searched the fourth chamber with infrared sensors and located seven hundred and fifty humans. Most were in groups of three or more; only seventy were solitary, and only two, across half a day of activity, showed signs of deliberately avoiding company. The partial analyzed the heat signatures of both of these possibilities and settled on the one most likely to be a self-contained homorph.

Under any other circumstance, this kind of search would have been unthinkable, a gross invasion of privacy. But Korzenowski knew the importance of having Olmy speak with Mirsky. And he needed Olmy for the upcoming Nexus debate on the reopening of the Way. The Engineer could no longer completely oppose that project; Mirsky’s arguments were too persuasive, however bizarre. How could one deny the requests of gods, even if they existed only at the end of time?

It was not the partial personality’s duty to analyze these problems. It flew above the valley floor to hover near Olmy’s campsite, and then projected an image of Korzenowski with the appropriate picts revealing its status as an assigned ghost.

From Olmy’s point of view, Korzenowski seemed to walk out of the forest, his face wreathed in a smile, his eyes catlike, piercing. “Good day, Ser Olmy,” the ghost said.

Olmy pulled himself away from the flow of Jart information and hid his all-too-human irritation at being found. “You’ve gone to considerable trouble,” he picted.

“Something extraordinary has happened,” the ghost informed him. “Your presence in the third chamber is required.”

Olmy stood by the tent, unsure of his emotional state for the moment, neither moving nor picting nor speaking.

“A decision is to be made regarding the Way. Your presence is requested by my original.”

“Is this a Nexus summons?”

“Not formally. Do you remember Pavel Mirsky?”

“We never met,” Olmy said. “I know who he was.”

“He has returned,” the ghost said, rapidly picting the few salient details.

Olmy’s face seemed to contort with pain. He shuddered, then his shoulders sagged and the tension left him. He pushed aside the Jart information, refocusing on his humanity and on his relationship with Korzenowski, once his mentor, the man who had shaped much of his life—or rather, lives. The fact of Mirsky’s reappearance then assumed its proper color—deeply bizarre, more than puzzling: entrancing. He did not doubt the ghost’s message. Even had someone besides Korzenowski summoned him, this news alone would suffice to bring him out of the forest and away from his meditations.

Events were moving more rapidly than he had imagined.

“Is there time for me to hike out?” Olmy asked, smiling. The mild social humor was as sweet as sugar in his mind, and he realized how starved he had become for human company. The ghost returned the smile. “Quicker transportation will arrive soon,” it said.

“The prodigal son,” Korzenowski said, hugging Olmy firmly in the Nexus antechamber. “I apologize for sending a partial to hunt you down. I assume you didn’t want to be found.”

Olmy felt a kind of shame, standing before his mentor, unwilling to speak of what he had been doing. He still had to keep his balance within his own head, watching the implants he had given over to the Jart. “Where is Mirsky?” he asked, hoping to sidestep questions.

“With Garry Lanier. The Nexus is meeting in two hours. Mirsky is testifying before the full chamber. He wants to speak with you first.”

“Is he real?”

“As real as I am,” Korzenowski said.

“That worries me.” Olmy forced a grin.

“He has an amazing story to tell.” Korzenowski, unwilling to find humor in anything now, looked away from Olmy at a wall of natural asteroid iron, his reflection milky and distant in the polished metal surface. “We’ve caused a lot of trouble.”

“Where?”

“At the end of time,” Korzenowski said. “I remember thinking about this possibility centuries ago, when I was designing the Way…. It seemed a vain fantasy then, that anything I could be involved in would have such repercussions…. But the idea has haunted me. I half expected someone to return from the precincts, like a ghost.”

“And here he is.”

Korzenowski nodded. “He hasn’t pointed any accusing fingers. He seems happy to be back. Almost childlike. Still, he frightens me. We have such responsibilities, now.” Korzenowski turned his square, discerning eyes on Olmy. “Would you resent a request for help?”

Olmy shook his head automatically. He owed more to the Engineer than he could ever repay—more than even bringing him back to life could tally against. Korzenowski had shaped Olmy’s life, opened vistas to him he would have missed otherwise. Still, he was not sure how his plan—already fixed and irrevocable—might match Korzenowski’s. “I am always at your service, Ser.”

“Sometime in the next few months, perhaps even today if the time is right—if Mirsky puts his story across as clearly to the Nexus as he did to us—I am going to recommend that the Way be opened,” Korzenowski said.

Olmy’s smile was faint, ironic.

“Yes, I know,” Korzenowski said gently. “We’ve been opposing forces on this.”

It seemed no one understood his position, not even his mentor. Olmy did not think it worth the time to correct him. Still, he could not help but gently chide the Engineer, if only to make sure he was keeping everything in perspective.

“I hope I don’t presume when I say that you are not completely unhappy with this turn?”

“There is excitement and challenge,” Korzenowski said, “and then there is wisdom. I’ve been clinging desperately to wisdom. Which of us is more eager to have this monster back?”

“Which of us really wants to face the consequences?” Olmy asked.

Lanier and Mirsky left the elevator and approached them. Mirsky walked ahead of Lanier, smiling expectantly, and extended his hand to Olmy. “We have not met,” he said. Olmy shook the hand firmly. Warm and human.

“You are the expediter of our duty,” Mirsky said. Olmy could not completely contain his reaction to that choice of words. Mirsky paused, examining his face. Who is he looking at? Olmy wondered. “You understand the problems, no?”

Olmy hesitated, then said. “Perhaps some of them.”

“You’ve been preparing?”

There was no question now of not understanding. “Yes.”

Mirsky nodded. “I would expect nothing less from you. I’m anxious to testify,” he said. “Anxious to get things moving.” He walked away with an abruptness that puzzled all of them.

Olmy turned to Lanier while the Russian paced near the door to the Nexus chamber. “How have you been?” he asked. “And your wife?”

“She’s fine, I suppose, working on a project…”

“She’s just arrived on Thistledown,” Korzenowski said. “She’s working with Ser Ram Kikura.”

“Will the Nexus listen to me?” Mirsky asked, walking back toward them. “I am nervous! Can you believe that?”

“No,” Korzenowski said in an undertone.

Mirsky suddenly turned and faced Olmy. “You believe the Jarts will oppose us,” he said. “And you suspect they won’t be the only ones. You know the Talsit were Jart allies before—you think they probably are again. You have been working on this, haven’t you? It’s what I expected from you!” he said again, staring earnestly at Olmy. Olmy nodded.

“Is he the same Mirsky?” Olmy asked Lanier when Mirsky returned to the opposite side of the room.

“Yes and no,” Lanier said. “He’s not human.”

Korzenowski glared at Lanier. “Knowledge, or supposition?”

Lanier pursed his lips. “He can’t be human. Not after what he’s gone through. And he’s not telling us everything yet. I don’t know why.”

“Does he know whether he will succeed?” Olmy asked.

“No. I don’t think he does.” A dreaming expression came to Lanier’s face. “I’ve never met anybody like him. I envy him.”

“Perhaps we should all be cautious in our evaluations,” Korzenowski suggested dryly. “Having an angel in our midst.”

Mirsky paced back yet again. “Nervous! I haven’t felt nervous in…a very long time! It is exhilarating.”

Korzenowski’s irritation grew. “Are you beyond caring?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Mirsky stopped pacing, facing the Engineer with an intensely puzzled expression.

“We are—I am being forced to make a decision I have tried to avoid for forty years! If we do have to fight the Jarts, the results might be disastrous—we might lose everything.” He grimaced. “Including the Earth.”

“I am more concerned than you know,” Mirsky said. “There is more at stake than just the Earth.”

Korzenowski was not mollified. “If you are indeed an angel, Ser Mirsky, you might not be as concerned as we are about our own skins.”

“Angel? Are you angry with me?” Mirsky asked, his face bland again.

“I am angry with this situation!” Korzenowski said, drawing his head closer to his shoulders. “Pardon my outburst.” He looked to Olmy, who had stood with arms folded throughout the exchange. “We are both torn by our emotions. Ser Olmy would love to get back to his paper work, keeping our Hexamon intact in the Way, and I am fascinated by the prospect of re-opening. The part of me that remembers Patricia Vasquez…”

Lanier almost flinched as Korzenowski glanced in his direction.

“That part is eager. But what our less responsible selves want, and what is safe for our Hexamon, could be very different things, Ser Mirsky. Your reasons are compelling…I am just irritated by your carefree attitude.” Korzenowski looked down at the floor and took a deep breath.

Mirsky said nothing.

“In truth,” Olmy interceded, “the pressures on the Hexamon to re-open would be strong even without you.”

“Thank you for your guidance,” Mirsky said quietly. “I lack perspective. I must approach the Nexus carefully.” He spread his arms and looked down at his body, still clad in hiking clothes. “To have limitations, to think in channels. It’s exhilarating to be back in flesh again! A wild, half-drunken blindness…a fleshy peace.”

The Earth circled by a strand of DNA, the symbol of the Terrestrial Hexamon Nexus in session, appeared by the doors to the chamber. A partial of Presiding Minister Dris Sandys materialized beside the symbol.

“Full chamber,” the partial said. “Please enter now and be sworn in.”

Mirsky squared his shoulders and smiled, walking through the doors first. Lanier held back, entering the chamber behind Korzenowski and Olmy. Guided to his assigned seat in the lower circle, he was reminded of the time when he had testified before the Infinite Hexamon Nexus on the Axis City. Now, that time didn’t seem so long ago. Earth’s wounds had been raw and fresh then, nearly fatal.

Mirsky stood patiently in the armillary sphere of testimony before the presiding minister’s dais. President Farren Siliom occupied the dais beside the P.M. Lanier faced the pictor near his seat, aware that the experience would drain him again, but eager to see what Mirsky would say this time, whether he would elaborate.

An orthodox Naderite corprep seated beside him smiled politely, picting polite curiosity about Lanier’s age.

“I’m from Earth,” he answered.

“I see,” the corprep said. “Do you know anything about this testimony?”

“No fair telling ahead of time,” Lanier said conspiratorially. “Get set for the ride of your life.

30

Gaia

The Kirghiz in the black wool coat held court in the expedition’s tent, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a circle consisting of five of his troops, Oresias, Jamal Atta, Demetrios and Lugotorix. Rhita stood with the others outside the circle, hands bound with strong thin rope. Women were anomalies on a military expedition, apparently; they did not believe she was among the leaders, and no one made them any the wiser.

A translator entered the circle, short and wiry, wearing a drab uniform cut in a modern Rhus manner, with scalloped collar and tight-wrapped linen leggings above short, supple boot-slippers. The bull-like, black-coated Kirghiz leader spoke, and the translator converted his words into common Hellenic.

“I am Batur Chinghiz. I control this square of the grass for my esteemed masters, the Rhus of Azovian Miskna. You are trespassers. I need to know your reasons, to report by radio to my masters. Can you enlighten me?”

“We are here on a scientific expedition,” Oresias said.

The translator smiled before converting those words into Kirghiz. Batur smiled also, showing even yellow teeth.

“I am not stupid. Surely you would ask our scholars to do this thing for you, not risk your own lives.”

“It is an urgent matter,” Oresias said.

“What about the dark one, the arabios. What does he say?”

Jamal Atta nodded in Batur’s direction. “I concur.”

“With whom, me or the light-skinned leader?”

“We are on a scientific expedition.”

“Ah, so it is. I will report you are lying, and they will tell me to kill you, or perhaps cage you and send you to Miskna. Are you part of the revolt in Askandergul? He means,” the translator added, “Alexandreia, of course.”

“I don’t understand,” Oresias said.

“Are you fleeing from the palace, perhaps, cowards in search of sanctuary in our wide territories?”

“We know little about a revolt.”

“We have only received news in the past few hours ourselves.” The Kirghiz lifted his broad shoulders and raised his chin, staring at them across his flat brown cheeks. “We are not speakers of nonsense here. He means Barbarians,” the translator added again. “We have radios, and we are in touch with our fortresses. We even bathe when the rivers are full or we are garrisoned.”

“We have all due respect for the illustrious Kirghiz soldiers of the Rhus of Azovian Miskna,” Atta said, glancing at Oresias. “We are intruders, and we humbly beg your mercy, which under the sky of God and the grass of the Riding Devils, we feel sure the great horsemen Batur Chinghiz will grant us.” Oresias narrowed his eyes, but did not object to Atta’s attempt at formulaic diplomacy.

“I am pleased by your kind and understanding words. But mercy is not mine to give. I am, as you say, soldier and not master. Enough of this. Can you enlighten me further before I request orders for your disposition?”

Rhita shivered. The clavicle had been taken from her when they had been dragged out of the beecraft; she had no idea what was happening with the gate, but darkness was coming. More than anything, she wanted to be away from this place, relieved of responsibility to her grandmother, to the Akademeia and her Imperial Hypsēlotēs—whatever had happened to her now…

She was terrified. The past few hours had given her time to absorb a few facts she had until now managed to ignore. She was mortal; these people would gladly kill her and all her companions. Lugotorix could not protect her, although when the time came—if it came—he would attempt to die first trying.

This situation was her doing. She could not easily pass the blame on to her father or Patrikia. She had agreed to come; the outcome of bringing the news to Kleopatra could not have been foreseen, but…

She shivered.

The Kirghiz troops prodded and shoved them out of the tent and into a hastily made enclosure of tent poles and canvas gleaned from the emergency supplies in the cargo gullcraft. The enclosure had no roof; it lay open to the cool wind and the deepening twilight. “I think we’re dead,” Atta murmured as the final section of canvas was erected and tied by a Kirghiz infantryman, who regarded them with narrow, curious eyes.

Their prison was flimsy at best, but they didn’t dare even touch the canvas; they had been given, by gestures of rifles and hands striking the fabric, the distinct impression that bullets were ready for anyone who made a ripple in the barricade.

Rhita squatted on the dirt, arms across her knees, and rubbed her face wearily. Her entire body ached; hours of fear had done this to her. She needed desperately to urinate, but no one had yet made provisions within the barricade for a latrine, and she was too angry and confused to take the lead. Soon, however, she might be forced to.

She turned slitted eyes up at the stars, as miserable as she had ever been in her life, and felt their coldness sink into her face. They don’t know, they don’t care.

All absolutes meant nothing; how far could a goddess such as Athene extend? She seemed wholly inadequate beyond Gaia. The comfort of prayer meant little if she was going to die soon, and die in discomfort and ignominy, far from Rhodos.

“Damn it, I have to piss,” she said aloud. Jamal Atta stared down at her, his dark brows knitting.

“So do I,” he said. “We’ll—”

Rhita ignored him, fascinated by something above his head—a luminous green straight line, singular, unembellished, silent.

“—make an area over here—” Atta continued.

The line passed smoothly over their enclosure; she could not tell whether it was near or very far. Another green line crossed it and both lines moved their juncture rapidly to the edge of the enclosure. That made them seem close.

The gate. Something was happening at the gate.

The lines passed out of view. There was no unusual sound outside the enclosure—men conversed in soft gutturals; boots scuffed dirt, grass rustled in the cool evening wind. Darkness was almost complete. She smelled raw dirt and scared men and the green of the steppes.

Like an automaton, she followed Atta to the designated latrine, marked by boot-scuffed lines of sod. She pulled down her pants and relieved herself. A few men glanced in her direction, never too frightened to catch a glimpse of a woman’s naked flesh. Pulling back her pants, she stepped out of the scuffed lines and looked closely at her companions within the enclosure. They stood in dejected postures, heads hanging, faces coldly outlined by a faint crescent moon and the starlight.

This was what it had come down to. In truth, she now hoped something would come through the gate. It might be their only chance at reprieve.

Had the green light been real, or were her eyes playing tricks?

She stood still for several minutes with arms crammed beneath her jacket, the cold sapping her strength and numbing her face. The fabric of the barricades tensed and bellied in a freshet of wind; expecting a bullet, she flinched as a teardrop of rain splatted on her eyelid. A black wall of cloud slid smoothly over the moon. She could barely see around herself.

More raindrops fell. She listened for sounds outside the barricade, suddenly alert, her arm-hairs pricking. No voices. Not even the hoof-clomps or neighing of horses complaining of the wet. Darkness, scattered rain and wind whipping the canvas.

The moon gleamed through a rift. Lugotorix stood beside her, huge and bedraggled. Saying nothing, but touching her arm, he pointed above the barricade to their left. Something tall and sword-shaped, as wide as a man’s spread arms, towered over their flimsy prison. Its edges rippled like water. Smoothly, quickly, it curved to one side and dropped out of sight. Death, she thought. It looks like death.

“Kirghiz?” the Kelt asked quietly. Nobody else seemed to have noticed.

“No,” she said.

“I didn’t think so,” Lugotorix muttered. Rhita tried to locate Oresias or Jamal Atta in the temporary illumination; they were hidden among the men. Before she could find them, the moon vanished again.

A hideous ripping noise on all sides startled her. She gave a small scream and reached for Lugotorix, but he was not there. The canvas barricade was being torn to shreds. Wind rushed by, the wake of the passage of something huge. Nails drove into her back, knocking the breath out of her; one pause two pause three and four and five. She could not fall over. Lugotorix whimpered nearby like a struck dog, a sound she had never heard from him before. Head slung back, jaw open, scalp and neck resting on something icy cold, she saw once again the straight green lines cross above them.

Something lifted her. She had an impression that the grass had grown huge and metallic; the camp was covered with swaying, supple steel blades, edges rippling like water, topped with smooth green shields or hoods. Her spine stiffened until she wished she could scream, but all her muscles had frozen. She could still see, but gradually she realized she was losing the ability to think.

For what seemed a very long time, she saw everything, and nothing; she might as well have been dead.

31

Gaia

The clavicle came into her hands and comforted her. It knew her; for the moment, that was enough. The clavicle was withdrawn and she missed it deeply.

No time at all later, but later nonetheless, she realized the clavicle had told her the gate was fully established, a “commercial width.” There were other gates. This did not comfort her.

Lugotorix, standing naked between two huge snake-swords, touched on arm and thigh by dots of luminous green.

You are connected with this man?

Yes.

Do you need him?

Yes.

And the others?

She thought of Demetrios and Oresias.

They saved them.

She wondered what would happen to the others.

It did not comfort her that she was a center of attention. For a time, there were many of her, and some of her selves were subjected to unpleasant experiences. That was all she remembered. Her body was not injured.

She had no privacy.

They asked her if Athene had opened gates to Gaia; or Isis, or Astarte. Rhita said no. She did not believe these beings, gods, actually existed. That interested them. Are the gods imaginary companions to console you for the possibility of dying?

She didn’t know how to answer that.

You did not make the clavicle.

No answer required. That much must have been obvious.

How did you find it?

She told them.

They believed her.

They became very interested in the sophē.

She’s dead, Rhita informed them.

You are from her.

Again, no answer was required.

Some time of intense discomfort, worse than pain.

It was almost worth the experience to feel time passing.

Without memory, she stood in a place of blue sky and crumbling marble overlooking the sea.

That went away, and came back, and she was years younger, standing in the sanctuary of Athene Lindia. She remembered everything, including her life after this moment. A young man stood near her, vaguely handsome; his face was not clearly defined. He wore a white byssos shirt and dark pants with legs split and tied; like a fisherman, but not. She wondered if this was a lover but he was not; nor was he a friend.

“Is this pleasant for you?” he asked, walking around her. “Please be truthful.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“I hope you’ll pardon our intrusion. We’ve had few opportunities to work directly with your kind. You’ve been treated rudely.”

She forgave nothing. Her confusion was too great for such niceties.

“Would you prefer I have a name?”

“I won’t know you, anyway.”

“Would you prefer we stay here?”

It seemed wise to say yes. She nodded, appreciating the sun on her face and the cool reassurance of the abandoned temple in the rock. She did not believe she was actually there.

I am Rhita, she told herself. I am alive. Maybe I’ve been taken through the gate.

Maybe Grandmother came from Hades.

32

Thistledown City

For reasons clear only to himself and his advocate, the president had decided not to lodge in the formal Nexus quarters beneath the dome. Instead, he chose temporary quarters in a small, plainly decorated apartment in a Journey Century Five building adjacent to the arboretum, a kilometer from the dome. Four hours after Mirsky’s testimony, Farren Siliom held audience there with Korzenowski, Mirsky, Olmy and Lanier. His manner was sharply formal. He seemed to be controlling anger.

“Pardon my forthrightness,” he picted to Korzenowski. “I have never, in my existence in the Way and now near Earth—never seen such a treacherous about-face by a celebrated Hexamon citizen.”

Korzenowski bowed slightly, face stiffening “I make these requests reluctantly, and under pressure,” he said. “That should be obvious.”

“I’m sure the entire Nexus needs a Talsit session,” Farren Siliom said, pressing on the bridge of his nose. The president glanced at Lanier, seemed to dismiss him with a leisurely blink, then focused his attention on Mirsky. “The Hexamon considers itself an advanced society, whatever our self-ordained limitations…but I find it very hard to believe our work could have such far-ranging consequences.”

“You are at a crux,” Mirsky said.

“So you claim. We are not complete innocents, however. I well remember Olmy’s deceit before the Geshels some years back, when he brought the Engineer back to us. He did all true Naderites a service. But is this another kind of deceit, another manipulation?”

“The truth of my story should be obvious,” Mirsky said.

“Not so obvious to someone who has spent the last ten years fighting a tide of sympathy for re-opening. Fought with the Engineer by my side, although that seems difficult to believe now.”

Lanier swallowed. “May I sit?” he asked.

“By all means,” Farren Siliom said. “My irritation obscures my manners.” The president ordered a chair to be formed for Lanier, and as an afterthought, ordered chairs for them all. “We’re going to talk for some time,” he told Korzenowski.

“I’m a reasonably practical man,” Farren Siliom continued, “as practical as a politician can be in charge of a nation of dreamers and idealists. That’s what the Hexamon believes it is; has been for centuries. But we’ve also been hard-headed, strong and willful. We met the challenge of the Way once. But we nearly lost to the Jarts, and they have had decades since to refine their tactics. We all believe they’ve occupied the entire Way—don’t we?”

Lanier was the only one to abstain from agreeing. He felt like a dwarf among giants here; again old, a fifth wheel.

“Do you understand my confusion?” Farren Siliom asked Korzenowski.

“Yes, I do, Ser President.”

“Then clear it up for me. You’ve been convinced, but do you swear to me by the Good Man, by the Stars and Fate and Pneuma, that you are not involved in a plot to re-open your creation, and you have not somehow fabricated this entire episode?”

Korzenowski regarded the president for several seconds in offended silence. “I so swear.”

“I regret calling your integrity into question, Ser Korzenowski. But I must be absolutely certain. You had no prior knowledge of Ser Mirsky’s return?”

“I half-expected something of this sort; I cannot say I believed it would happen. No, I did not have prior knowledge.”

“You are convinced the Way has done this damage?”

“Not damage, Ser Minister,” Mirsky said. “Obstruction.”

“Whatever. You are convinced?” He stared sharply at Korzenowski.

“Yes.”

“You understand that most of the corpreps and senators have the highest regard for you, but that your motives in this case must be suspect. You spent much of your life creating the sixth chamber machinery and the Way. You must have felt some justifiable pride at changing the course of Thistledown’s history. It would be understandable if you felt your status had decreased since your reincarnation and since the Sundering. Personally, I’m well aware you’ve had nothing to do with encouraging our neo-Geshels.” Calmer now, the president rubbed his hands together and sat among them. “If we open the Way, will we be at war with the Jarts, Ser Olmy?”

“I believe we will.”

That’s it, Lanier thought.

“If we do not open the Way, Ser Mirsky, and make preparations to close it from our end, will we block the distant, noble efforts of our descendants?”

“Of the descendants of all intelligent creatures in our universe, Ser President. Yes.”

Farren Siliom leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I can replay parts of your testimony. I’m sure most of the corpreps and senators are doing so now.” He grimaced. “The procedure for voting on this is going to be difficult. We’ve never called for a complete Hexamon plebiscite. Do you understand the problems?”

Mirsky shook his head.

“Let me enumerate them. Voting procedures on Thistledown and in the orbiting precincts are very different from those on Earth. Most citizens on Earth must vote physically. It would take months to make arrangements for such a vote; we simply haven’t prepared.

“Each citizen in space must download a special partial into a mens publica in city memory. The partials are assembled into a unified whole, using methods strictly outlined in the Hexamon constitution, and can vote within two to three seconds on any subject, though by law they are given much more time to make a decision. Citizens can update their partials once a day if they wish, to reflect changing personal attitudes; the partials cannot evolve opinions on their own.

“Those are the technical considerations. Considered as a problem of public policy, if we re-open the Way only to destroy it, we aggravate those who wish the Way to remain closed, and to avoid conflict with the Jarts. We certainly do not satisfy those who wish to reoccupy the Way. And the Jarts will no doubt resist our efforts fiercely. They may have more at stake in the Way now than we ever did; they seemed much more singular in their pursuits. Am I correct, Ser Olmy?”

“Yes.”

Farren Siliom folded his hands. “I do not know how our Terrestrial citizens will view this problem. Or even whether they’re capable of judging now. For most Old Natives, the Way is a very foggy concept, at best. Earthbound citizens do not have direct access to extensive city memories or libraries yet. I suspect, however, that the neo-Geshels will invoke the Recovery laws and cut Earth out of the voting entirely…. That would be exceptionally distasteful.”

“Earth’s senators would fight it every step of the way,” Lanier said.

“The Recovery laws haven’t been used for a while, but they’re still in place.” Farren Siliom raised his hands, face drawn. “The way I read the Hexamon’s temper now, those who want to re-open are about evenly divided with those who don’t. Social condensations and coalescences are not at all unlikely in such a split; rapid formation of power groups…perhaps even a neo-Geshel domination in the Nexus. The neo-Geshels could force me to act as they decree, or resign and let them form a new government. These problems are not specifically your problems, my companions. But you bring them to me, and I can’t say I’m grateful to you. Nor can I say how the vote will go. We face a number of problems, a number of decisions, and now that the genie has finally crawled—or exploded—out of its bottle again…”

Farren Siliom stood and picted a query at the quarters’ monitor. “If you could stay here for another few minutes, gentlemen, I’ve arranged for another Old Native to join us. Ser Mirsky should remember him. You were companions, fellow soldiers, during the invasion of Thistledown by forces of the Soviet Union, before the Sundering…before the Death. He returned to Earth after the Sundering, and has lived in what we now call Anatolia.”

Mirsky nodded, face composed. Lanier tried to remember the surviving Russians who had worked with and around Mirsky, and found only a few faces weakly linked with names in his memory. The sharp, acerbic zampolit Belozersky…assured, calm, doomed Vielgorsky, senior engineer Pritikin.

The monitor flashed and Farren Siliom ordered the door to open. “Gentlemen, this is Ser Viktor Garabedian,” he said with a look of triumphant expectation. He believes he’ll expose Mirsky, Lanier thought.

Garabedian entered the room, white-haired, thin, slightly stooped. His hands were hideously scarred. His eyes were half-lidded, rheumy. Lanier could read his condition almost immediately. Talsit-cleansed radiation damage…he must have tried to return to the Soviet Union, decades ago.

Garabedian looked around the room, obviously not prepared for this meeting. His eyes lit on Mirsky and an ironic smile crossed his face. Mirsky seemed stunned.

“Comrade General,” Garabedian said.

Mirsky rose and approached the old man. They stood apart for a moment, and then Mirsky spread his arms and hugged him. “What happened to you, Viktor?” he asked in Russian, holding the old man at arm’s length.

“A long story. I expected another old man. They didn’t tell me you’d look the same. Ser Lanier, I recognize him, but he looks dignified, not like a youngster.”

Farren Siliom folded his arms. “It took us several hours to locate Ser Garabedian.”

“I live as near Armenia as I can,” Garabedian told Mirsky. “The homeland will be cleansed in a few years, and I can return. I’ve worked as a policeman with the Soviet Recovery Forces…I fought in the Armenian Liberation against the Hexamon…Not much of a war, like children fighting their doctors and teachers with sticks. When that was put down, I became a farmer. Where have you been, Comrade General?”

Mirsky glanced around the room, tears in his eyes. “Friends, Viktor and I must talk.”

“They want me to ask you some questions,” Garabedian said.

“Yes, but alone. All but for you, Garry. Will you come with us? We need a room.” He glanced at the president.

“You can use one of my work rooms,” Farren Siliom said. “We will record your meeting, of course…”

Lanier observed the change in Mirsky’s expression. He seemed sharper, more hawk-like, less serene; much more like the Pavel Mirsky he had first met in the Stone, four decades ago.

“I’d like to speak with Ser Lanier for a moment, then he’ll join you,” Korzenowski said.

The two men left the room, guided by the president to another section of his temporary quarters.

“Ser Lanier?” Korzenowski asked.

“He’s Mirsky,” Lanier said.

“Did you doubt?”

“No,” he said.

“But this is additional proof?”

“For the president,” Lanier said. “It has to be the clincher.”

“The president’s reservoirs of doubt are vast,” Olmy said quietly. “Matched only by political expediency.”

The president passed Lanier in the wide cylindrical hallway, nodding at him. Uncomfortable, Lanier followed Mirsky and Garabedian into the work room and stood beside them. A small round table rose out of the floor, surrounded by several free-form chairs. The room smelled vaguely of clean snow and pines; a residue, Lanier suspected, of some previous environment.

Garabedian, cap clutched in gnarled pink and white hands, examined his old comrade with the childlike eyes of the old and weary, eyes empty of any emotion but a kind of stunned wonder.

“Garry, Viktor was with me when the Space Shock Troops invaded the Potato—Thistledown,” Mirsky said. “He was with me when we surrendered, and he advised me during the bad times after…I last saw him before I volunteered to go with the Geshel precincts. You’ve lived through hard times, Viktor.”

Garabedian continued to stare, his mouth slack. Then he turned to Lanier. “Sir,” he said in halting English, “You have not stayed youthful. Some have. But Comrade General Mirsky…”

“No longer a general,” Mirsky said quietly.

“He has not changed at all, except…” Garabedian squinted at Mirsky again, and said in Russian, “When you were shot, sir, you changed. You became more resolved.”

“I’ve been on a very long journey since.”

“The people who brought me here…we seldom see them in Armenia. They come to break up our little wars, to stop our plagues, to repair our equipment. We were like children. We hated them so much. We wished to be let alone.”

“I understand,” Mirsky said.

“This time, they did not ask me…Pavel.” Using Mirsky’s first name seemed to strain the old man. “They came and said I was needed. They said I was a witness. They were like police in the old times.” His voice rose. “How can they treat us so like children? We have suffered! So many died.”

“How have you suffered, Viktor? Tell me.”

Lanier saw Mirsky’s face become bland and accepting again, and a chill made him clench his jaw muscles. Mirsky put his arms on Garabedian’s shoulders. “Tell me.”

“Nothing is like it was,” Garabedian said. “Nothing will ever be. There is good and bad in that. It seems all my life I have been confused, having seen this, and then gone back to the villages where my forefathers lived. Having fought against the Hexamon, having lost…”

“Yes?”

Garabedian held up his hands. “We went into poisoned lands. The soil had become a serpent. It bit us. We were taken out by Hexamon angels. They apologized for not giving us new bodies. I could not go home. There was nothing there. I moved into Armenia…they call it North Anatolia now. No nations, they say. No factions. Only citizens. I farmed and raised a family. They were killed in an earthquake.”

Lanier felt the familiar sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Couldn’t save them all.

“I raised horses. I joined an Armenian cooperative for protection against the Turks. Then the Turks made peace, and together we fought against immigrant Iranian farmers raising opium. The Hexamon came in there, too, and pulled us out…Then they gave people something that made the opium useless.”

Mirsky looked at Lanier.

“Some sort of immune response, blockers…” Lanier said. He knew very little about this aspect of the Recovery. Mirsky nodded.

“Go on.”

“It has been a long life, Pavel. I have suffered and seen many die, but until now I have forgotten much of the pain. I see you, so young. It is indeed you?”

“No,” Mirsky said. “Not the same one for you know. I’ve lived a much longer time than you, Viktor. I’ve seen much myself, triumph and failure.”

Garabedian smiled weakly, shaking his head. “I remember Sosnitsky. He was a good man. I think often that we could have used him in Armenia…Me! An Armenian, thinking that about a White Russian! Everything has been turned upside down, Pavel, and it is still upside down. I hated the Turks, now I am married to a Turkish woman. She is small and brown and has long gray hair. She is not a city girl, not like my first wife, but she’s given me a beautiful daughter. I’m a farmer now, growing special plants for the Hexamon.”

Lanier thought of the Frant farmers on Timbl, the Frant homeworld, walking through their fields, growing biologically altered crops for export to the Way.

“Is it what you wanted?” Mirsky asked.

Garabedian shrugged, then smiled ironically. “It’s a living,” he said. He grasped Mirsky’s left hand in his and prodded him with a scarred finger. “You! You must tell me.”

Mirsky looked at Lanier with a sheepish expression. “This time I’ll tell it in words,” he said. “Garry, you must go back to the others now. Viktor, tell Ser Lanier. Am I Pavel Mirsky?”

“You say you are not exactly him,” Garabedian said. “But I think you are. Yes, Ser Lanier. This is Pavel.”

“Tell the president.”

“I will,” Garry said.

Mirsky smiled broadly. “Now sit, Viktor, because I doubt that you will believe what has happened to this Ukrainian city boy…”

33

Thistledown City

Little of the Nexus debate took place in real time. Korzenowski and Mirsky answered questions and discussed the problem in detail within an isolated Nexus branch of Thistledown city memory; Lanier “listened in” to the debate. Hours of argument and information exchange whisked by in seconds.

The debate was not nearly as exhausting as it would have been in open session. Geshels, neo-Geshels and all but the most orthodox Naderites participated; off and on, it lasted three days. It seemed to last several months. Not an aspect of the re-opening was neglected, not a nuance left unexplored.

There were proposals of such scale that Lanier’s mind reeled; some firebrands—if you could call any Nexus member a firebrand—wanted the Way opened, scoured of Jarts, and then human hegemony pushed even farther, opening new wells every few dozen kilometers, establishing broad lengths of territory before Jarts or other forces could push them out again. Others scoffed at the grandiose schemes; still others, presenting depositions from colleagues of Korzenowski who had been in precinct city memory for decades and even centuries, theorized that the Way could be destroyed from the outside, without re-opening.

This suggested two possibilities: that those who wished to unravel the Way could do so without the risk of confronting the Jarts; and if the Way were re-opened and the Jarts defeated, they might exact revenge by destroying it from outside. Mirsky, unveiling yet more of his character and capabilities, demonstrated through complex mathematics—equations that made even Korzenowski furrow his brow—that this was unlikely.

The Russian seemed in his element during the debate. The level of discussion was usually far beyond Lanier’s comprehension, even when his mind was augmented by loaned talents—a service he had never used before.

But Lanier could sense one thing perhaps not so obvious to the corpreps and senators. Reverence for the Way was deeply branded into even those who were terrified of re-opening. The Way had been their world; most of them had grown up in it, and until the Sundering, most of them had known no other existence. The debate, however fiery, was one-sided; the question rapidly became not whether to re-open, but what to do after the Way was linked again to Thistledown.

They gathered now in physical session to hear what the Nexus would recommend to the Hexamon. In addition, a vote would be taken on whether to pass the matter on with Nexus recommendations to the Hexamon as a whole, or to restrict voting to the Thistledown mens publica, or to launch an educational campaign on Earth and postpone the voting until that effort was complete, which could take years.

Lanier entered the Nexus Chamber alone; Mirsky, Korzenowski and Olmy had preceded him for some pre-session discussion with the president. The chamber was empty but for two corpreps across the circle picting at each other. He stood in an aisle, oddly at peace. He was still out of his depth, but since his confession to Mirsky, he no longer felt the inner turmoil, the dark, confused exhaustion.

He had toured the third chamber city for a few hours earlier in the day, riding a spinward train to the main library where he had once spent hours learning Russian, and where Mirsky had been shot and resurrected. The library had been reactivated thirty-five years ago; it was now a busy facility, its wide floor of pictors and seats often serving hundreds of corporeal scholars at once. The library had been built about the same time as the Nexus dome. What had once seemed monumental, alien and frightening—containing as it did the news of Earth’s death before it had happened—was still monumental, but familiar now, acceptable to him.

His attitude toward the starship had certainly changed. He thought he wouldn’t mind living on Thistledown for a few years. The lighter pull of the asteroid’s spin agreed with him; he was tempted to try some gymnastics. Parallel bars had helped keep him sane when he had administered the exploration of the Stone. Glancing at his clawlike hands, he winced, thinking of what he had allowed to slip away….

He still resisted the idea of rejuvenation. He wanted to discuss things with Karen, to see if their bonds hadn’t been cut completely.

But he would not interrupt her conference. That was important to her. Besides, while the debate was still relatively closed, he did not think it was politic to talk with those not directly involved.

The members entered the chamber and took their seats with little talk or picting. The air in the chamber was charged with something ineffable; history, Lanier thought. Decisions had been made here that had altered the fate of worlds. Now, the fate of more than worlds was at hand.

Mirsky and Korzenowski entered behind him and walked down the aisle. Mirsky smiled at Lanier and took a seat beside him. Korzenowski nodded at them both and walked farther down to sit beside the panel of six men and women currently in charge of the sixth chamber machinery.

The president and presiding minister Dris Sandys came in last and took their seats behind the armillary sphere of testimony.

The presiding minister announced, “The Nexus mens has cast its vote on the proposal of Sers Mirsky, Korzenowski, Olmy and Lanier.”

Lanier was surprised to find himself designated as one of the proposers. A flush of excitement and nervous pride went through him.

“Now it is time to confirm this vote by a physical plebiscite.”

Lanier glanced around at the corpreps and senators, hands clenched in his lap. He did not know how the vote would be taken; would they all pict their decisions, the whole chamber lighting up like a Christmas tree?

“The final recommendation of this Nexus having been determined first in the Nexus mens, must now be confirmed by a voice vote. Each voice will be recognized and tallied by the chamber secretary; the votes will be cast at once. Members, is it your decision to proceed with the basic proposal of re-opening the Way? Signify by aye or nay.”

The chamber was a chaos of ayes and nays. Lanier thought he detected a preponderance of nays, but that apparently was nerves on his part. The presiding minister glanced at the secretary, seated beside the sphere of testimony, and the secretary raised his right hand.

“Aye it is to the proposal. Is it to be the recommendation of this Nexus to open the Way with the intent of ultimately destroying it, as Ser Mirsky has requested?”

The Nexus members voted again, their voices a warm murmur in the dome.

“Nay it is to this decision. The Way is to be kept open. Is it the decision of this Nexus to create an armed force with the express purpose of securing the Way for the benefit of the Infinite Hexamon and its pledged allies?”

The voices seemed to rise in volume. Lanier could not tell whether ayes or nays led now; the vote was very close, and some corpreps and senators had dropped out, bowing their heads or leaning back, faces strained.

“The decision is aye. Is it the decision of this Nexus to put the issue with our recommendations before a full vote of the Terrestrial Hexamon, including the mens publica and the corporeal voters of Earth?”

Again the voices spoke out in unison.

“Nay it is to this plan. Is it the decision of this Nexus to take a vote solely from the mens publica of the seven chambers of Thistledown and the two orbiting precincts?”

And again.

Lanier closed his eyes. It was happening. He might actually stare down the throat of the Corridor, the Way, again…. There might even be a chance, someday, of learning what had happened to Patricia Luisa Vasquez.

“Aye it is. The vote shall be taken solely before the mens publica of the three orbiting bodies. Ser Secretary, do these votes tally with the Nexus mens?”

“They do, Ser Presiding Minister.”

“Then the recommendations are set and the voting process will begin. A Nexus advisory will be issued to all citizens of the three orbiting bodies tomorrow at this time. There will be a week-long period of individual research and contemplation, with all information and testimony presented to the Nexus available to the voters. Within twenty-four hours of the end of that week, all citizens will inform their partials within the mens publica, and another period of twenty-four hours will pass before a vote is taken there. The decision of the citizens of the Hexamon will be ratified by the Nexus within one week, and the implementation of the new policy will be made binding upon the Nexus and the president and presiding minister. It is the law that the president may delay this entire process by as long as one month of twenty-eight days. The president has informed me that he does not wish to delay the process. This meeting is hereby adjourned. Thank you all.”

Uncharacteristic pandemonium broke out in the chamber. Lanier watched the corpreps and senators flashing bright picts at each other, some meeting to embrace, others standing in stunned silence. A contingent of conservatively dressed Orthodox Naderites came forward to meet with the president and presiding minister beneath the podium.

Mirsky pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is not good,” he said quietly. “I have opened the bag and the winds are escaping.”

“What will you do?” Lanier asked.

“Much thinking. How could I not have convinced them?”

“During your journey, you might have forgotten one thing about humans,” Lanier suggested.

“Obviously. What thing?”

“We’re a perverse group of sons of bitches. You’ve come to us like an avatar. Maybe they resent being dictated to by a demigod, just as much as people on Earth resent being saved. Maybe they simply don’t believe you.”

Mirsky frowned deeply. “My physical powers are not great,” he said. “I come as catalyst, not as an explosive. If I fail, however, there will be grave times ahead.”

Lanier felt his old instincts coming to the surface. “Then use judo on them,” he said. “Think of the power to be directed when the Way is opened.”

“Power?” Mirsky turned his placid gaze full on Lanier.

“The social disruption.” He might not be a fifth wheel after all; he saw a crazy plan coming together in his head.

“Yes?”

“I think perhaps we should go with Olmy to Suli Ram Kikura.”

“You are thinking something interesting, then,” Mirsky said.

“Perhaps. I need to talk with my wife, too. Earth has been cut out of the decision. There’s a lot of resentment already; this could be explosive, even if you aren’t.” He had taken the bone in his teeth and was clamping down hard. His neck ached with tension. He rubbed it slowly with one hand.

“Lead on, my friend,” Mirsky said. “This avatar bows to your judgment.”

34

Thistledown City Memory

The valley of Shangri-La lay below the walls of the palace in shadowy emerald splendor, mountain crests touched with gold in the last light of the sun. Karen gripped the cold stone rail of the balustrade with fingers clenched white.

The conference had begun to unravel on the first day.

The fighting among the delegates had begun in the third chamber city when they had been taken to their apartments, located on the lower floors of a huge gray and white Journey Century Nine building shaped like a golf tee. A woman from North Dakota had protested that their quarters were entirely too luxurious. “My friends back home are living in wooden and sod shacks. I can’t live like a queen.”

Suli Ram Kikura had suggested, somewhat innocently, that the quarters could be made to seem as spare as they wished. The North Dakatan had scoffed. “Fake hovels in a palace won’t disguise the palace,” she had answered contemptuously.

A shack had been built for her in a nearby park. The expense of wiring an extension pictor and building the shack had cost more than her simply living in temporary luxury; but there had been no criticism of her choice. This was to be an exercise in understanding and unanimity, after all.

Then had come the disputes over which fantasy environments the delegates would interact in. “We can’t expect lasting results if we lose all touch with reality,” a male delegate from India had declared. He had then demanded a setting similar to an early-nineteenth-century mogul’s palace. When none of the other delegates had agreed with this, he had threatened to leave the conference.

He was back on Earth now.

What had seemed straightforward and promising to begin with had rapidly turned sour.

The remaining delegates had finally settled on a suitable environment for interaction—a duplicate of James Hilton’s Shangri-La, created for downloaded Thistledown vacationers centuries ago. Within a few hours, more disputes had broken out. Two delegates had become enamored of each other and complained when the environment would not allow them to have sexual relations.

“That’s not what we’re here for,” Karen had tried to explain. They had not been mollified. Suli Ram Kikura had put her foot down, explaining that the environment had been modified to forbid sexual interactions. In this project, the delicately balanced psychological atmosphere would be damaged by allowing them. The two delegates had grudgingly given in, but even now complained about other petty issues.

Karen realized now that she and Ram Kikura had approached this project with entirely too much idealism. This shamed her; she knew humans too well to have been so naive. But Ram Kikura’s attitude had affected her deeply; she had approved of the advocate’s upbeat approach, and had unconsciously hoped against her better judgment that it would all turn out well, that people would after all be reasonable…

But even those with the very best attitudes and records were only human. Taken from the surroundings in which they had proven themselves, they had become little better than children.

City memory’s ideal environments were too seductive for Old Natives, and for that reason unsuited for what Karen and Ram Kikura hoped to accomplish.

Besides, there was a tension in the air…even in Shangri-La—something she could not define, but which seemed to put large obstacles in the way of their project’s success.

Suli Ram Kikura appeared on the balcony behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I think it’s time you took a rest.”

Karen laughed. “This place was made to be restful.”

“Yes, but for you, it’s not right.”

“So what are we? Wild flowers that wilt in the greenhouse?”

Ram Kikura’s brow wrinkled. Physically, she had changed little since Karen first met her, four decades before; she was still striking, with strong, pleasingly irregular features and golden-brown hair. “I’ve never thought of Thistledown as a greenhouse.”

“It’s Shangri-La to these people, even without going into city memory. I should have known.”

“You’re tired.”

“I’m mad, goddammit.”

“I was wrong. It is not your fault.”

“No, but I was hoping so much you’d be right, and we could bring them all together here…forge a bond. It was such a wonderful plan, Suli. How could it have gone so wrong, so quickly? We explained it to them…. They’re acting like children!”

Ram Kikura smiled grimly. “They know what they need better than we, perhaps. I wanted to force things. Like a parent watching a child play with toys…trying to teach them how to grow up more quickly.”

“That’s not fair…” Karen cut herself off, surprised that hearing the delegates compared to children made her angry. She felt close bonds with these Old Natives…was one herself, of course. “They’ve lived through hell, most of them.”

“Maybe they thought of this as a vacation,” Ram Kikura suggested. “And we were tour guides. We disappointed them by being so bossy.”

Despite herself, Karen laughed. She’s a master, really, however naive she is…we’ve been. “So what do we do now?”

“I have just enough stamina to give it one more try. But you, dear Karen, are at the end of your rope.”

“I must be. I want to kick them.”

“So you must take a break. We’ve been in this environment for an objective ten-hour period. Return to your apartment—”

“Back to my body. Out of the dream.”

“Precisely. Out of the nightmare. And get some genuine rest, in your own head, natural rest without city memory’s overtones.”

“How could this be anything but restful?” Karen asked wistfully. The stars were coming out above them, as sharp and real as any she had seen on Earth. The night winds smelled of jasmine and honeysuckle.

“Do you agree?” Ram Kikura asked.

Karen nodded.

“Then go now. I’ll report to you if anything improves. Otherwise, I’ll close this whole charade down and send them all back to their bodies. We’ll escort them back to Earth and start planning all over again.” She lifted her eyebrows and inclined her head, staring levelly at Karen. “All right?”

“Yes. I…how do I get back?”

“Ruby slippers, my dear. Remember the code.”

Karen looked down at her feet. Instead of soft doeskin boots, she now wore ruby slippers. She tapped them together. “There’s no place like home,” she said. Ram Kikura vanished.

An objective hour later, in her temporary apartment, Karen put on a silk kimono, given to her by a group of survivors in Japan thirty years before, and lay back on a couch with a cool glass of Thistledown Chardonnay, a Haydn quartet playing softly in the background sans pictor accompaniment. The apartment environment had been adapted to resemble an open-air porch looking across a tropical island beach. Across the broad, dazzling blue ocean, a nub of volcano smoked casually, its plume mingling with stacked white anvil-head clouds. Warm, salty breezes played over her wicker chair.

She might have never left city memory, the illusion was so complete, but there was a certain sensation, a knowing, that her body was being deluded and stimulated, and not just her mind. It was a moot distinction. So many distinctions were moot on Thistledown.

We are all such children! she thought, sipping her glass and considering the distant volcano. Maybe Garry’s right to chuck it all and let old age claim him. Maybe we are all burned out after forty years, and he’s only being honest.

The room control chimed melodiously. She leaned back in the chair and said languorously, “Yes?”

“Two men wish to speak with you, Ser Lanier. One is your husband and the other is Pavel Mirsky.”

Involuntarily, she shivered. Speak of two devils. “Drop the islands and give me the standard setting.” The porch, beach, volcano and ocean vanished and were replaced by a small room decorated in classical Hexamon spareness. “All right.”

Garry appeared in the middle of the room. “Hello, Karen.”

“How are you?” She fingered the cool bowl of her wine-glass, both glad to see him—she had not blanked out her worry—and curiously irritated. But their quiet discord had gone on for so long, she did not want to let him know her emotions. That was her armor.

“I’m fine. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“I wondered if you were up here,” she said defensively, struggling to keep her voice mellow.

“I wanted to talk to you before now, but I didn’t want to interrupt your conference.”

“Please do,” she said. An image came to her mind of whom she wanted to be like now: the American actress of the early twentieth century, Bette Davis, cool and contentious, armored but desirable. The apartment pictors could not do that for her, however.

“We need to speak with Suli Ram Kikura.”

“She’s still in city memory, keeping the chickens from pecking at each other.”

“Problems?”

“It’s not going well, Garry.” She looked away from the image, noticed her finger actually in the wine, removed it, and set the glass down. “I’m resting. What about Mirsky? What’s happening?” There; the curiosity had escaped.

“Have you been following the Nexus proceedings?”

She shook her head.

“There’s very big trouble coming.” He explained the situation.

The time had come to shift gears; this was not strictly a personal call. Still, the shift did not come easily. “That doesn’t sound like the Nexus at all. Without consulting Earth?”

“Mirsky’s told us some amazing things,” Lanier said, “and frankly, I don’t like the Nexus denying his request. I think reopening the Way, and leaving it open, is a very bad idea.”

“Suli hasn’t heard his story?”

“No.”

She thought quickly, her conflicts temporarily suspended. They were almost a team again, working together on a problem. Something had changed about her husband. What had Mirsky done to him—to all of them? “All right. I’ll contact her in city memory and tell her it’s urgent. Then I’ll set up a meeting. Where are you?”

“Nexus dome quarters.”

“Mirsky…he is Mirsky?”

“Yes.”

That answer, unequivocal, brooked no argument; she knew Lanier better than to think he had come to such a judgment lightly. Somewhat to her surprise, she found she still trusted her husband’s judgment on these matters…perhaps on many other matters as well. Why was that surprising? She did not dislike Garry; she disliked the thought of losing him forever. Their discord and separation were certainly not based on distrust or aversion.

“This is very big, then.” A note of wonder and speculation crept into her voice.

“It is indeed,” Lanier said. “And Karen…I don’t want our problems to get lost in it.”

Her face flushed. “What do you mean?”

“I need to talk about other things, too.”

“Oh?”

“When there’s time.”

“Fine,” she said tightly.

“I love you,” Lanier said, and his image faded.

Completely against her will, and to her surprise, her breath caught in her chest and she had to struggle to hold back tears. It had been years since he told her that.

“Damn him,” she said.

35

Rhita

Before the memory of her capture was lost to her completely, bleached away by the false Rhodian sun, she asked the youth, “Where are my friends?”

“Preserved,” the youth replied. She tried to ask more about them but could not. Her thoughts were restricted into certain channels. With a wrenching awareness of the falseness of this place, she forced herself to think, I am not free. She felt a shiver of horror. She could not be among her grandmother’s people. The sophē would have told her about such horrors…

Who had her, then?

She did not understand how such things could be; how could she be someplace and yet not be there? This was not a dream, however devious; it did not feel like a dream. Whatever it was, they took it from her, but it was not hers; she did not control it.

She walked through the stone house where Patrikia had lived, bare feet stroking cool tile with each step, peering into this room, then the next, aware somehow that they wished to know more about the sophē but unwilling to tell them. Or show them. She was blocking her grandmother from her mind. How long could she do this? They seemed very strong.

She decided she would ignore the youth. He did not answer her questions fully. There was no way of knowing whether the little he did tell her was the truth.

A flash of anger and scattered confused thinking made her vision darken and Patrikia’s library room fade. When her vision cleared, the Objects lay on the floor around her, clavicle revealed in its wooden case.

“This is a device for passing from the Way to other worlds. You attracted our attention by using it on the gate.”

Rhita glanced over her shoulder to see the youth behind her. His face was still indistinct.

“Where did you get it?” he asked.

“You know that already.”

“Where did your grandmother get it?”

She closed her eyes and still saw the clavicle before her and felt the unanswered question.

“We are not going to torture you,” the youth said. “We need your information to take you where you want to go.”

“I want to go home,” she said softly. “My real home.”

“You did not make this device. Your grandmother did not make it. Your world has no use for such things. We are curious how it came to be here. Did you once commune with the Way, far back in history, perhaps?”

“My grandmother. I told you.” What had she told them? And how often?

“Yes. We believe you.”

“Then don’t ask me again and again!” She turned on the youth, anger again dimming her vision. Each time she got angry, it seemed they knew more; yet she was not actually trying to hide anything from them. She surmised she could not hide facts if they were capable of making her think she was on Rhodos when she wasn’t. I should be nearly dead with fear.

“There’s no reason for you to be afraid. You are not dead, you are not injured.”

The youth’s face suddenly became distinct, as if a shadow not of darkness but of ignorance had passed. He had regular features, black eyes, black hair and a slight growth of beard. He might have been a Rhodian beach boy. “I take this shape because you are not familiar with us.”

“You’re not human?”

“No. We come in many different forms, unlike your people. We are all unified, but…” He grinned. “Different. So please accept me in this more pleasant shape for the time being.”

They seemed to have changed tactics, or perhaps learned how to make their deception even more convincing. Rhita turned away from him and from the vision of the Objects. “Please leave me alone. Let me go home.”

“I will not conceal truth from you. Your home is undergoing changes now, to make it more efficient.”

Rhita looked at her hands. She wanted to shiver, but she couldn’t; she could, however, feel more anger. She restrained herself. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“We’ve laid claim to your Earth. I suppose it’s time we drop this pretense and acquaint ourselves more fully. Are you prepared for that?”

“I—”

“Let me explain. This is a kind of waking dream, made up by our investigators to introduce you gently to your new life. I am a superior officer among the investigators. I have just arrived to speak with you. Until now, you’ve been speaking with an inferior officer. I am more acquainted with your people than he was. Is that clear?”

“I think so,” Rhita said.

“You’ve been in this state for several years of your time. Since there’s nothing you can do to hurt us, and since we have enough information from you for the time being, there’s no need for pretense, so I’ve decided we will let you awaken. When you are ready, you will be able to use your real body, and the environment you see around you will be real. Understood?”

“I don’t want any of this,” she said. Years? That took a moment to sink in; the despair she felt spreading through her thoughts was a dark, freezing thing. She realized she might as well have been dead from the moment she boarded the beecraft; perhaps from the moment she had left Rhodos. She—and Patrikia—had opened a true Pandora’s box; she still had no idea a what had emerged. Years.

I am too young. How could I have known? Patrikia did not know. Is the world dead, too?

The cold sensation passed and she felt a series of small aches. The illusion of Rhodos and Patrikia’s home faded. She opened her eyes and found herself lying on a hard, warm surface beneath a square of light the color of embers. The light slowly dimmed. Her skin felt sore, as if it had been sanded; indeed, looking at her arms, they seemed flushed, sunburned.

A man-shaped shadow stood just beyond the reach of the light. An olive-colored darkness surrounded them, the hue of a dream before it begins, or after it ends. She did not feel well.

“I’m sick,” she murmured.

“That will pass,” the shadow assured her.

“Are you a Jart?” she asked, trying to sit up. She had not voiced that question until now because she had hoped never to have to know the answer. Now, hopeless, she faced the shadow.

“I’ve tried to decide what that word means. It’s possible we are; but you’ve never encountered Jarts, nor did your grandmother, who told you about them. The word does not connect with us; the humans your grandmother seems to have known could not have spoken our true name…They might have known a name used by others, not human. The answer, at any rate, may be yes.”

“She told me you fought humans.”

The figure in shadow did not directly respond to this. “We are many and varied, and we can change our shapes if we wish, change our functions.”

Rhita felt better, physically if not mentally. The despair faded with an odd sensation of hot chill that diminished with the overhead glow, now cinnamon. Other lights came on, vague and soothing, in the olive gloom.

“Am I on Earth?”

“You are within what you call the Way.”

Her breath shuddered and she suppressed a moan. That meant nothing and everything to her. Could she believe them? “Are my friends alive?”

“They are here with you.”

That, she decided, was evasive.

“Are they alive?” she asked again.

The shadow stepped forward, its face falling within a nimbus of light. She shrank back, sensing very strongly this was not a dream or an illusion, but a physical being. The face was masculine but without much character, smooth-skinned, narrow-eyed. Not a face she would look at twice in a crowd. It was neither godlike, nor some monstrous horror. It wore a jacket and pair of pants similar to that worn by the soldiers she had traveled with…years ago, if that wasn’t a lie.

“Would you like to speak with them?”

“Yes,” she said, breathing more rapidly. She held her hand up to her face; it felt the same. She had not been changed; why should she expect such a thing? Because her captor looked human?

“All of them?” the Jart asked.

She looked down for a moment, lips moving. “Demetrios and Oresias,” she said.

“Allow us some time, please. We discard nothing.”

36

Thistledown

“I hadn’t expected to see you again,” Suli Ram Kikura picted at Olmy, her symbols cool blues and greens. Olmy smiled enigmatically and followed Korzenowski and Mirsky into the corporeal meeting area reserved for Ram Kikura’s fellowship project. Befitting the Terrestrials’ home surroundings, the room had been decorated in mid-twentieth-century industrial boardroom—spare metal and wood chairs, a long wooden table, bare bone-white walls, with a display board on one end. “Excuse the primitive conditions,” Ram Kikura apologized in speech.

“Brings back memories,” Lanier said, catching the chill between the advocate and Olmy. Olmy seemed to take it in stride; but then, Lanier had never seen him nonplussed. “I spent many a long hour in rooms that looked like this.”

“Our Earth guests are still in city memory. We’re trying to repair a complete fiasco,” Ram Kikura said. “Karen will join us in a few minutes. From what she tells me, some unholy alliances have been forged the past couple of days. The Nexus has decided to re-open the Way?” She pointedly avoided Olmy’s eyes.

Korzenowski stood by one of the chairs, fingering it with a puzzled expression. “Yes,” he said, coming out of his brief reverie with a quick blink. “A Nexus advisory subject to Hexamon voting. Precints and Thistledown only.”

“I presume they’re invoking the Recovery laws. We should have wiped those from the statute books years ago.” Ram Kikura seemed more radical and bitter to Lanier than when they had first met. Age and the Recovery had worn on her, as well, yet she did not appear any older than when he had first met her. She had kept her style and looks largely unchanged the past four decades.

Olmy completed a slow walk around the table, his gait smooth and leonine. “You’ve absorbed Ser Mirsky’s story?”

Ram Kikura nodded. “As much as I care to. It’s hideous.”

Mirsky’s eyes widened in surprise. “Hideous?” he asked.

“The ultimate pollution. The ultimate sacrilege. I was born and raised in the Way, and yet now…” She looked as if she might spit. “To open the Way again, and keep it open, is more than folly. It’s evil.”

“Let’s not get extreme,” Korzenowski said mildly.

“I beg the Engineer’s pardon,” Ram Kikura said.

“You’re being shrill,” Olmy picted privately to her. She turned on him with a stone-heavy glare. “These men are here to ask your help. So am I. There’s no sense being self-righteous before you know what we need. Or what we believe.”

This message passed in an eye’s blink. Lanier only knew that Olmy had picted with her; he was not in the line of picting, of course, and did not consider himself adept at translating picts anyway. Ram Kikura’s shoulders slumped and she stared at the carpet, eyes closed, taking a deep breath.

“My apologies. Ser Olmy reminds me of my manners. I happen to be passionate about these things. Seeing the aftermath of the Death gave me a strong impression of what our hubris can do.”

“Please remember, until now I have opposed the reopening of the Way,” Korzenowski said. “But the pressures on the Hexamon are enormous. And Ser Mirsky’s return—”

“Excuse me, Ser Korzenowski,” Mirsky interrupted. “I am curious why she calls my story hideous.”

“You tell us the Way clogs up our universe like a snake,” Ram Kikura said.

“Not precisely. It makes a project carried out by our very distant descendants more difficult, perhaps impossible. But the Way itself is not thought of by these being as ‘hideous.’ They regard it with wonder. That such a tiny community, traveling between worlds, still locked into the realm of matter, should accomplish so much in so short a time…this is unprecedented. Constructs similar to the Way exist in other universes, but none of them were created by beings so early in their development. To our descendants, the Way stands out as the Egyptian pyramids did in our history, or Stonehenge. If they had their preference, it would be preserved as a monument to early brilliance. But that is not possible. It must be dismantled in a particular fashion…and that can only begin here.”

Ram Kikura’s anger faded. She regarded him with deep interest. “You aren’t concerned with our petty politics, are you?” she asked.

Mirsky rapped his fingers on the table, an impatient gesture Lanier found intriguing. “Politics…never petty to those caught up in it. I am concerned only insofar as politics might prevent dismantling the Way.”

Karen entered the conference area and stepped forward to kiss her husband. The kiss was short but apparently sincere; there was no need, she seemed to tell him, for personal problems to come to the fore now. Nevertheless, he took her hand and squeezed it.

“The timetable is short,” he said, forcibly interlacing his fingers through hers. Her jaw tightened and she glanced around at the others, wondering what they were making of this, quickly seeing that social nuances and speculations were the last things on anybody’s mind.

Lanier did not loosen his grip. “Ser Korzenowski?”

“The Way could be opened in less than six months. I’m afraid Ser Mirsky’s story drove a wedge into the Nexus, and the neo-Geshels used that wedge to open a wide split. The Nexus will advise a permanent re-opening. Nobody doubts what will happen then—if the Jarts aren’t waiting for us, I mean. There’ll be a rush of entrepreneur legislation—permits to open ‘test’ gates, some of which of course will lead us to Talsit concessions…And if we establish commerce with the Talsit again, we’ll never shut the gate down. The Talsit are damnably seductive salesmen, and besides, many Hexamon citizens need their goods too much right now. There’s an air of desperation…. Ser Olmy?”

“Even Naderites enjoy their longevity,” Olmy said. “Within the decade, millions will have to give up their bodies and download into city memory…or die. Naderites dislike the idea of living permanently in city memory. They accept artificial life enhancements, but city memory is a kind of Gehenna, a limbo to the orthodox.”

“That sounds a lot like hypocrisy to me,” Lanier said dryly.

“It is, of course,” Korzenowski said. “Committees of partials are being formed in city memory to study the possibility—that’s all the neo-Geshels will call it—of Jarts reoccupying the Way. If they agree with Ser Olmy, they might delay the reopening until an adequate defense is in place—perhaps even a workable offense.”

“My God,” Karen said. “They’d fight the Jart Wars all over again?”

“They are being very optimistic,” Korzenowski observed darkly.

“What if the Jarts are right there, waiting for us?” Lanier asked.

Korzenowski grimaced. “Such a nightmare has occurred to me often the past few days. I have partials in city memory listening to all planning sessions. And I must participate in the defense of the Hexamon, if I am so ordered…”

“How can we defend ourselves?” Karen asked.

“It used to be a secret, very closely held,” Korzenowski said. “But even the deepest secrets can be declassified when the ruling powers think it expedient. We have immensely powerful offensive weapons stored in Thistledown. They were too ungainly for pure defense; useless in the Way fortresses. No military planner gives up weapons that might someday have a use…. So they were kept in the asteroid walls. Ancient, but still effective and deadly.

Ram Kikura covered her nose and mouth with prayerful hands and shook her head. “Star, Fate and Pneuma,” she murmured. “I didn’t know. The people were told—”

“All politicians will lie,” Mirsky observed, “when it is politically expedient. The people demand it of them.”

Lanier’s face had gone pale. “Weapons?”

“Surplus from the last Jart War, stockpiled in Thistledown’s secret chambers,” Olmy elucidated.

“They’ve been there all along? When we first boarded?” Lanier asked.

Olmy and Korzenowski nodded. Ram Kikura watched his reaction with grim irony.

“What if we had found them…?” He did not finish his speculation.

“The Death happened anyway,” Korzenowski said, waving a hand, irritated at being sidetracked. “Even if the Jarts are in the Way, we can at the very least establish a ‘beachhead,’ I believe the strategic term is.”

“Unless they’ve progressed beyond our old technologies,” Ram Kikura said dourly.

“Indeed. At any rate, I have been given a Nexus command to render technical assistance. That I cannot refuse. I’ve had my special research privileges for too long to play the upstart now. Our problem is, how to change the Hexamon’s collective mind…”

“Go around the Nexus,” Ram Kikura said. “Go directly to all citizens, including terrestrials.”

“Without the Earth, a bare majority would agree with the re-opening,” Lanier said. “We’ve done opinion modeling. Or rather, Ser Olmy did.”

“They cut the Earth out because it’s too ignorant?” Karen asked.

“Too provincial and too self-absorbed,” Korzenowski said. “Which, of course, it is…but the procedure is very irregular. The threat of encountering Jarts could be made more evident…. Even the existence of the weapons might be used to convince the mens publica to vote against the advisory. Ser Ram Kikura’s suspicion that the Jarts have advanced beyond us—that could make a useful counter-argument. And before the advisory is made, I think we can attack it through the judiciary on the grounds that no segment of the Hexamon should be disenfranchised.”

Mirsky had taken a seat in one of the conference room chairs. He clasped both hands in front of him, then lifted his arms over his head. “Delicate job,” he said. “No doubt Garry understands how delicate?”

Karen looked at her husband.

Lanier decided to emulate the Russian’s familiarity. “Pavel says the Way must be dismantled.”

“And if it isn’t?” Ram Kikura asked.

“It will be,” Mirsky said. “One way or another. I did not count on such difficulties. Even with a better mind than I now have. If I fail, the consequences will be spectacular….”

“Is that a threat?” Ram Kikura asked.

“No. It is a certainty.”

“How spectacular?”

“I do not know. I did not make the contingency plans. I probably would not understand them in my present form, anyway.”

“Too many questions,” Korzenowski said unhappily. “Ser Mirsky, when your story is made public…how many of our citizens will believe you, and how many will think your appearance here is an Orthodox Naderite trick to keep us locked to Mother Earth?”

“I can be no more convincing than I am now,” the Russian said, releasing his hands and stretching. “Do you not believe me?” He looked around the group, thick eyebrows raised in query.

Karen, who had yet to see his presentation, ventured no opinion. Korzenowski, Olmy and Lanier did not hesitate to express their belief. Ram Kikura reluctantly said she concurred.

“We have to set our strategy,” Lanier said. “Between us, we can devise something worth presenting to the opposing corpreps and senators. They can make their case—Ram Kikura can carry the case to the judiciary. A two-pronged assault.”

“I think I’d better start on Earth,” Ram Kikura said. “There’s a meeting of the Earth Hexamon Council in a few days. We were going to report our conference results there anyway—nobody in the Nexus will be any the wiser if Karen and I leave and attend that meeting. How much of this is officially confidential?”

“All of it,” Korzenowski said. “Until the advisory is made, none of us is supposed to talk.”

“That’s not strictly legal either,” Ram Kikura mused. “The Nexus neo-Geshels have become an eager group, haven’t they? I’m surprised Farren Siliom would go along with them…”

“He’d rather keep his government together than turn everything over to his opponents,” Lanier said.

Ram Kikura picted a complex symbol he could not read. “I’ll steer clear of mentioning the weapons. That could involve me in defense law—and I’m no expert there.”

“Somehow, when I was not in this body, and my mind was immense, I thought all rational people would agree,” Mirsky said, shaking his head. “What a surprise to be human again!”

Lanier smiled thinly. “Back to being thick as a brick, hm?”

“Not thickness,” the Russian said. “Perversity, twisting.”

“Amen,” Karen said, glancing at Ram Kikura. “People are the same all over.”

37

The Way

The ghost of Demetrios hung translucent and unhappy before Rhita. Her face was white with horror; she had expected nothing like this. Now she understood she was beyond the reach of any god or gods; or in the hands of the wrong gods.

The escort told her, “His mind patterns have been stored. His body is also in storage. He is not using his body at this moment; nor are his thoughts moving through his brain. They move through a different medium, where you also were once stored.” He stood beside Rhita, examining her face, gauging her reactions. “Are you in distress?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you want the display ended?”

“Yes! Yes!” She backed away, hiding behind her clenched fists, and began to cry hysterically. Demetrios reached out with ghostly arms, beseeching, but could not speak before he vanished.

In the indefinite chamber that was her prison, she squatted on the soft floor and buried her face in her hands. All of her remaining scant supply of courage had fled her. She realized, beneath her horror and hysteria, that at this moment she was completely vulnerable to her captors. They could put her back in a fantasy, in a dream, and she would live there happily without protest, answering their questions, just to be in some place like home, away from this nightmare.

“There is no reason for your fear,” the escort said, stooping beside her. “You would be speaking to your friend, not to an image we have made. He is still thinking. He occupies a pleasant illusion, as you did before you insisted on returning to your body.”

The escort waited patiently, saying nothing more as the paroxysm faded and she regained control of herself. She had no idea how long this took. Time was not her strong point now. “Oresias and the others…are they dead, too?” she asked between her last few sobs and gulps.

“Death has a different meaning for us,” the escort said. “Some are active in illusions; others are inactive, as if in deep sleep. None are dead.”

“Can I speak to any of them, if I want to?” she asked.

“Yes. All are available. Some might take more time to be brought here than others.”

She decided it would be best to try again, although she was not at all sure she could control herself. “Can you make Demetrios seem more real? He frightens me…. He looks like he’s dead. He looks like a ghost.”

The escort seemed to savor the word “ghost,” repeating it several times and smiling. “He can be made to seem as solid as you and I, but that will still be an illusion. Do you want such an illusion?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Demetrios reappeared, more substantial but no less miserable. Rhita got to her feet and approached him, leaning forward, arms stiff by her side, hands clenched into fists. “Who are you?” she asked between gritted teeth. Still, her body shivered.

“Demetrios, mekhanikos and didaskalos of the Mouseion of Alexandreia,” the figure replied. “You are Rhita Vaskayza? Are we dead?” He spoke as a shade might speak, voice slow and quavering. Rhita could not stop her teeth from chattering.

“I d-don’t think so,” she said. “We’ve been captured by demons. No.” She shut her eyes tightly, trying to think how Patrikia would have approached this situation. “I think we’ve—we’ve been captured by people who are not human, but with very advanced…machines.”

Demetrios tried to take a step forward, but seemed to be walking on ice. “I can’t reach you,” he said. “I should be frightened, but I’m not…. Am I the one who’s dead?”

Rhita shook her head. “I don’t know. He says you’re still alive. You’re dreaming.”

“He says? What is he?” Pointing to the escort.

“One of our captors.”

“He looks human.”

“He’s not.”

The escort didn’t seem to think it was necessary to pay attention to the image. He focused on Rhita. This frightened her even more.

“Are the others dead?”

“He says they’re alive.”

“What can we do?”

The escort, eyes still on Rhita, said casually, “Nothing. Escape is not possible. You’re all being treated with respect, and no harm will come to you.”

“Did you hear him?” Rhita asked, jerking her thumb vehemently at the escort. She really wanted to strike him, but knew that would accomplish nothing.

“Yes,” Demetrios said in a thin voice. “We opened the wrong doorway, didn’t we?”

“He says years have passed on Gaia.”

Demetrios looked this way and that, squinting as if through smoke. “It seems only a few hours ago…. Can he take us back to the real Gaia?”

“Can you?” Rhita asked.

“It’s possible,” the escort answered diffidently. “Why would you wish to return? It’s not the same world you once knew.”

Demetrios did not react. Rhita felt sick to her stomach; she had enough of her grandmother’s knowledge and instincts to half-visualize what that meant. These were Jarts; Jarts were rapacious. So Patrikia had been told by the people in the Way.

I may be responsible for the destruction of my home. Her hands rose automatically, like symmetrical claws, to just under her chin. “Demetrios, I am so frightened. These…people don’t seem to care. They just want information.”

“On the contrary,” the escort said. “We’re really quite passionate. We’re very interested in your welfare. Very few people have died since we claimed your planet. A great many of them are in storage now. We waste nothing. We cherish all thoughts. We have scholars, and we save as much as we can.”

“What are you talking about?” Demetrios demanded. His voice was so calm, calm and deep and thin; Rhita remembered what that felt like, to be in the illusion and not feel true fear.

“Do you wish me to address your companion?” the escort asked Rhita.

Dumbfounded, aware there was some protocol here of which she was ignorant, she gave her permission with a nod.

“It is our duty and destiny to study and preserve the universes, to spread our own kind, the best and most efficient of all intelligences, to serve the ends of knowledge. We are not cruel. Cruelty is a word and concept I learn only from your language. It is wasteful to cause pain and to destroy. It is also wasteful to let other intelligences advance to a point where they will slow our growth by resistance. Wherever we go, we gather and store, we preserve, we study; but we do not allow resistance.”

Demetrios absorbed this soberly, with a puzzled expression. He knew next to nothing of Patrikia’s stories; only what she had told him on the grasslands, before the arrival of the Kirghiz horsemen.

“I would like to see my home,” Rhita said resolutely. “I would like Demetrios and Oresias…and Jamal Atta, as well, to accompany me.”

“Only part of your request can be granted. Jamal Atta killed himself before we could capture him. Not enough of his personality has been preserved, I fear, to present a complete image, or to control a rebuilt body.”

“I must go,” Rhita said, sticking to this one demand, unwilling to be distracted by her own mounting horror. If she wept, if she let her hands reach her face, she might lose all control, and she would not shame herself before these monsters. Or before pale Demetrios.

“We will take you there. Do you wish to observe the process, or would you like your journey to be instantaneous?”

Demetrios looked at her pointedly; she wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say, but it was obvious to both of them that she was the important one to their captors. “I want to see everything,” she said.

“It might be confusing. Do you wish for me to accompany you, and explain, or would you like a supplement added to your own psyche, to your memory, to guide you?”

She bowed her head, face almost touching her hands. She did not understand the first alternative, or perhaps she refused to understand it. Can they make me more than what I am? Perhaps she had already been changed. That thought was almost unbearable. “Please,” she said, her voice little more than a harsh whisper. “Come with us. Just take us.”

She had one hope left; that the Jarts were liars.

If they were not, then she might as well be dead, and she would work very hard to die. Somehow, she did not think the Jarts would let her. To their way of thinking, it might be a waste.

38

Thistledown City

Ram Kikura wondered what it would be like, some day, to fall into city memory, never to return; trapped away from life, in a world indistinguishable from life but for all its mutability, its extraordinary privileges. That would make city memory either heaven or hell, albeit a comfortable enough hell…

She had been born in city memory, incarnated much as her son would soon be, and feeling uncertain about city memory now was both premature and foolish. She had at least one more incarnation to go, her life was not hazardous; she might live for millennia before the problem became practical…

But she mulled it over as a natural youth on Earth might mull over death. The youth on Earth, however, would not be allowed to sample the afterlife; she could do so whenever she wished, for as long as she wished, and visiting her “unborn” son was the usual reason.

Her visits seldom lasted more than five minutes, external time; those five minutes in city memory could extend for months. The last time she had visited, she had accompanied Tapi on a tour of an imaginary and highly embellished Amazon, something he had created as a personal project. The simulation was selected for a permanent place in city memory recreations, something of an honor.

Their time would be more limited on this visit. She was entering Axis Euclid’s city memory remotely, from Thistledown. That reduced both the time and complexity of her experience.

When she accessed Tapi’s personal space, he was involved in “limiting” himself, cutting away unnecessary mental adjuncts to prepare his mentality for birth. By law, no newborn could enter its body requiring implant memory; every incarnate had to design and choose a core mentality that could fit within the limits of a normal human brain.

“It’s painful,” he said ruefully. “So much freedom here. Makes the real world seem harsh and confined!”

“Sometimes it is.”

“Makes me wonder if incarnation is such a privilege…”

She moved through his personal space, looking over what he had already cut away. “Wise choices,” she said. Extraneous subroutines, modified personalities adapted to abstract environments he was unlikely to encounter when he became incarnate, sexual image experimentations probably prompted by fellow unborns…all stored away, to be accessed at some future date should he wish, or permanently discarded.

“There’s a lot of me disappearing,” he complained. Around Olmy, Tapi did not complain; he enthusiastically demonstrated and explicated, but never revealed his doubts. That was reserved for his mother, and she took some pride in seeing this other side.

“Doesn’t look like anything essential,” she commented dryly.

“Fewer voices in the chorus,” he said. “But I’m seeing what I’ll be more clearly. I think Olmy will approve, don’t you?’

“Has he been to see you?”

Tapi nodded. “Some time back. He gave his approval.”

She withheld some half-sarcastic comment. “He knows quality when he sees it,” she said instead.

“Father’s facing some very large problems.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Perhaps larger than you think.”

She examined her son’s present image—very close to the appearance of his chosen body-form—and asked, “Has he told you anything…surprising?”

“No,” Tapi said. But he was holding something back. He knew the present status of his parents’ relationship; he would not carry tales.

“I’m concerned about him.”

“So am I.”

“Should I be more concerned?”

“I don’t know,” Tapi said, honestly. “He tells me very little.”

Ram Kikura set her mind on the task at hand, finished examining the deleted adjuncts, and embraced her son. “All right,” she said. “I think you’re ready.”

“Your approval?” he asked, an eagerness in his voice that belied his previous complaining.

“Registered already,” she said. She did not go through the age-old formula, as Olmy had; she resisted that kind of traditionalism.

“Have you decided where you’re going to be born?”

“Yes,” he said. “On Thistledown.”

Olmy had been born within the asteroid; she had been born on Axis City. Still, she knew Tapi was not slighting her.

Tapi arranged his personal space to hide the discarded adjuncts. “Do you approve of my plans once I’m born?”

“It’s not my place to approve or disapprove. You’ll be independent.”

“Yes, but I appreciate your opinion.”

“My opinion is,” she said, “like father, like son. Olmy’s part in you is very strong. Mine seems subdued at the moment. But I have no doubt you’ll make us both proud.”

Tapi literally beamed, filling the space with light. He embraced her again. “You’re as much a soldier as Father,” he said. “You just fight different battles.”

Olmy felt more in control among his fellows, and less strained by the circumstances than he had thought. Still, it was good to be alone, if only for a few hours. He missed the isolation of the fourth chamber forest.

He did not return to the Thistledown City apartment; instead, he had accepted temporary quarters beneath the Nexus dome. Whoever so desired could spy on him all they wished; he was certain they could not discover what he carried in his implants.

There was a strong temptation to simply lie still and study what his partial was sending to him; he resisted that temptation and went through the intricate steps of the Frants’ relsoso dance, taught to him over a century ago on Timbl, the Frant homeworld. He stretched out his arms and lifted his legs, twisting smoothly from corner to corner of the small quarters. Frant anatomy was inherently more subtle and flexible than human; Olmy had to refashion some of the basic movements. Still, the relsoso did its job. He felt more relaxed and stronger afterward.

“Now I’ll sit and vegetate,” he announced out loud, squatting in the middle of the blank, unfashioned parlor and its white furniture-forms.

The exchange with the Jart mentality was proceeding smoothly, according to his partial; in a few more hours, more information would be passed through the barriers.

What he already had to digest was considerable. There was little room left in his implants to process the material more rapidly; between the Jart, his partial, the various barriers and safeguards, and the cleared and uploaded information, the implants were filled almost to capacity. His study consequently was slow, limited to a natural human rhythm. There were some advantages to this; implant processing of information was rapid but sometimes lacked the cross connections of more natural thinking.

Olmy closed his eyes and was bathed in Jart philosophy. Translating the concepts into human language or even thought was difficult at times; other times, the ideas seemed directly analogous. He mused on the possibility that the Jart was releasing this part of itself in order to persuade its captor; propaganda certainly was not out of the question.

He instructed his partial to match the cultural and philosophical exchange with an equal emphasis on persuasion.

Jarts were voracious conquerors, much more so than humans. While humans desired commerce, Jarts seemed to relish domination and complete subjugation. They were unwilling to share hegemony with non-Jart species, making exceptions only when they had no choice. The Talsit, for example, had traded with Jarts before humans had retaken the first few billion kilometers of the Way. The Jarts must have known that conquering the elusive Talsit was virtually impossible. Talsit were after all representatives of a much older race, even more mysterious—and certainly far more advanced—than Jarts.

The question was, why such voracity? What lay behind the push to control everything?

Command has duty established by >ancient command< Gather and preserve that >descendant command< may complete the last duty. Then there is repose for expediters and all others, and in repose we will become ourselves again, relieved of duty, relaxing the >image of strained materials< that is our thought and being. Why is this not what humans do?

Olmy tried to riddle this apparently key passage. It had such a formal air that he surmised it might contain quotes from some ethical or semi-religious work of literature or indoctrination.

The notion of descendant command was particularly intriguing, with its overtones of Jart evolution, transformation and transcendence. Oddly, in this idea there was also the only hint that Jarts and other beings could equitably cooperate and share responsibility. There was an implication of vast enterprise behind descendant command, of work that surpassed the capabilities of any individual group of beings.

Gather and preserve. That string/image was particularly striking. Olmy searched the background behind it, opening up layer after layer of complex instruction. The Jarts were collectors, and more than that; they transformed what they collected, hoping to prevent self-destruction of the collected objects, beings, cultures, and planets. Nature was, for them, a process of decay and loss; best to take control of all things, stop the decay and loss, and ultimately present this neatly beribboned package to…descendant command.

Olmy felt a mixture of attraction and horror. Theirs was not a selfish greed; it was a compulsion of incredible depth and uniformity for such a diverse and advanced culture, and it had little to do with their own welfare and progress. Jarts were simply the means to a transcendent end. They believed they could rest only when the task was done, when the neat package of preserved galaxies (such maniacal ambition!) would be given up to this nebulous entity; their reward would consist of being gathered and preserved themselves. And what would descendant command do with the package?

It wasn’t a Jart’s duty to speculate. Certainly not an expediter, however modified.

Olmy found a list of supremely forbidden actions and inactions. While it might be necessary to destroy in the struggle to completely preserve—as the Jarts had to destroy human forces to try to keep control of the Way—to destroy unnecessarily was hideous sin. There was not a hint of cruelty in any portion of the Jart philosophies; no enjoyment of victory, no petty satisfaction for the success of a moment’s work, no savoring of an opponent’s defeat. Ideally, Jart actions were to be motivated only by desire for the transcendent goal. Satisfaction would come when the package was presented.

Olmy doubted that this kind of purity was possible in any living being, but that at least was the ideal; and in its rigor and selflessness it put to shame a good many exalted human philosophies. There was a neatness and finality about it that denied change of mission without denying progress; progress in speeding achievement of the goal was highly desirable, and any level of Jart from expediter to command could make improvements subject to command approval.

Human history had seldom managed that neat trick; fixed goals almost inevitably fixed change, causing a strain in human history that usually led to denial or reshaping of the goals.

Even in the Hexamon there was the dichotomy of accepted philosophy—Star, Fate and Pneuma and the rule of the Good Man Nader—and the contradiction of actions necessary to preserve institutions and advantages for individuals, groups and the Hexamon as a whole.

Jarts could fit war and destruction neatly into their philosophy, encompassing contradiction of goals in a tight wrap of necessity while controlling excess and bloodlust. Humans had never been so neat about their paradoxes, nor so capable of reining in excess.

Olmy realized there was an element of propaganda here, very effective propaganda. He was not seeing Jart history; there seemed very little of that. He was simply being fed the ideals with no information as to how closely they were followed.

He withdrew from the philosophy and sped through an overview of the Way’s role in the Jart scheme.

When the Jarts had first entered the Way through a fortuitous test gate, they had quickly understood the principles behind this marvel. They had thought themselves either the creators of this infinite tube-shaped universe, through a rationale Olmy found difficult to follow, or they had postulated that descendant command had sent it to them to help them reach their goals. And the Way could not have been more neatly designed for them; by understanding its principles, as they quickly did, Jarts could open gates to any point in the universe, and even find means to enter other universes. They could travel to the end of time. In this Jart’s memory, they had not done so, apparently, never having mounted an expedition like that of the Geshel precincts after the Sundering…. Perhaps they felt it was best to leave such things to descendant command, or at least to wait until their task was finished.

As a tool, the Way fit into their plans perfectly. Through the Way, Jarts could wrap up and even present the package in record time.

Olmy barely touched the image connected with this idea: a static, perfectly controlled universe, all energies harnessed, all mysteries removed, unchanging, ready for consumption by descendant command.

It was a logical conclusion.

Still, it made him feel justified for all the resistance he had offered to the Jarts. Theirs was the purity of a kind of death. Jarts did not savor or enjoy or suffer or exult; they merely performed their roles, like viruses or machines…

He knew the simplification was unfair, but a feeling of deep abhorrence was upon him. Here was an enemy he could understand and hate at the same moment.

His partial signaled that more information was ready for transfer and consideration.

Olmy opened his eyes. It was hard to reorient after such strange journeys. Having barely skimmed the data already available, he packed it away and cleared the path for more.

39

The Way

Her captor’s scrupulous attention to leading her step by step to Gaia began to wear on Rhita early in the journey. Nothing, not even the scale of what she was seeing, was familiar or comprehensible.

First, she was taken from her chamber—actually quite a small room, nowhere near the cavern she had imagined—and placed inside a protective oval bubble, where they stood on a flat, railed platform four or five arms wide and as black as lamp soot. The escort accompanied her in the bubble, which seemed to be made of exquisitely thin glass.

Or perhaps soap. She was not willing to place any limits on what her captors could do.

“Where are my companions?” she asked. The image of Demetrios had been left behind; they were alone in the bubble.

“They are taking a much quicker route. What I am doing with you is, if I may borrow a word, expensive; it consumes energy. I am given only so much energy for my tasks.”

The bubble hung suspended in blackness. Ahead of them, at the far end of the blackness, a brilliant triangle of white light grew as large as her outstretched hand, and then stopped. For a moment there was no further action; the escort stood in silence, staring at the light ahead.

Rhita shivered. Something animal in her looked for a way out, hoping that some magic had suspended all this reality and provided her with a chance to escape. But she did not try. Left idle with her thoughts, she turned and saw an opaque wall behind them, covered with the sheen of an oil slick on black water, gold and silver and all the colors of the rainbow besides.

The wall stretched off above them in shadowy darkness. It was hauntingly, massively beautiful; it gave her no clues whatsoever as to where she was, or what would happen next. The silence terrified her; she had to speak to keep from screaming.

“I don’t know your name,” she said quietly. The escort turned to her, smooth face all attention, and she was oddly ashamed for even wanting to know such things about her enemy. The shame came in part from realizing that she could not hate this figure standing beside her; she wasn’t even sure what it was. To learn more, she would have to ask questions that might make her seem weak.

“Do you want me to have a name?” the escort asked pleasantly.

“You don’t have a name of your own?”

“My companions address me in a wide variety of ways. In this form, however, since I am to be viewed and accessed only by you, I have no name.”

His seeming obtuseness renewed her irritation. “Please choose a name,” she said, turning away from him.

“Then I will be Kimōn. Is this a suitable name?”

She had had a third school paidagōgos named Kimōn. He had been a round, pleasant man, gentle and persistent but not quick. She had felt deep affection for Kimōn as a young girl. Perhaps the escort hoped to play on that. And perhaps he doesn’t need to use any such obvious subterfuge. “No,” she said. “That isn’t your name.”

“Then what should my name be?”

“I will call you Typhōn,” she said. From Hēsiodos: the horrible being who fought with Zeus, son of Gaia (hence the escort’s human appearance) and Tartaros; a deeply buried monster of limitless evil…. That name might keep her on her guard.

The escort nodded. “Typhōn it is.”

Without warning, the bubble sped away from the rear wall. There was no way she could judge their speed; she felt no motion. All around, the darkness seemed filled with subliminal rainbows. Glancing up, she saw a myriad faint beams of light traveling in parallel from the triangular whiteness ahead, over and behind them, into the wall, where they vanished. The triangle grew larger and brighter; they were obviously approaching something, but what she could not be sure.

Hypnotized, Rhita stared until the whiteness filled her vision, a brilliant, almost dazzling luminosity with a pearly quality that both awed and soothed her. This was the light in which a god might come clothed. Those gods I don’t really believe in, she thought. They’re still inside me, though. Athene and Astarte and Isis and Aser and Aserapis and Zeus…and now Typhōn.

Suddenly the light surrounded her, and the blackness became a yawning wall or hole behind. With a sudden reorientation, she realized that she had emerged from a huge triangular prism into a surrounding bath of pearly light. She turned and saw the dark equilateral mouth receding. It was framed by a thin line of sullen red of a richness and elegance hard to describe—a color that seemed to carry within it the qualities of serene dignity, vibrant life and horrendous violence all at once.

“Where am I?” she asked, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Behind us is a vessel. We are in a vacuum, within a tube of glowing gases. We will descend through this tube momentarily.”

She still had no clear idea where they were. Her stomach had knotted; so much strangeness, she decided, was not good for her. How had the sophē reacted, seeing so many strange things? There was a time when Gaia herself must have seemed strange and perhaps awful to Rhita’s grandmother.

She held her fists to her eyes and rubbed them. They hurt. Her neck hurt from so much tense craning. Her head hurt; she felt miserable again, and yet there was a beauty to the light…. She was ashamed to be in pain.

I’m not reacting well, am I? Perhaps I should be grateful to still be sane.

The glow intensified and she felt a momentary tingle. They passed through the boundary of the tube of pearly light. Below lay something incomprehensible, intricate like an enormous map, pale green in color, covered with white and brown lines, dotted at rhythmic intervals with processions of cone-shaped towers made up of stacked disks with rounded edges.

Again she felt a reorientation, and saw with understanding instead of just coordinated sensation.

They were within a closed, elongated surface round like a cylinder or a pipe, but enormous. The surface of the cylinder spread out like a Krētan textile design, all pale greens and browns and whites, or like…she quickly ran out of comparisons.

Rhita knew where she was now. Patrikia had described many of these things—though not these patterns or colors. Above their bubble stretched the wide band of the plasma tube, much fainter now, and the impossible region called the flaw, the singularity. Perhaps the prism rode the flaw, like the Hexamon’s flawships.

She was seeing the Way.

40

The Hawaiian Islands

The Terrestrial Senate was in recess, its members scattered around the Pacific Rim. One influential Terrestrial senator had remained in Honolulu, however, and Garry Lanier arranged for a meeting with him.

Suli Ram Kikura and Karen accompanied Lanier to Earth; their object was sabotage.

Lanier knew Robert Kanazawa, senior senator from the Pacific Nations, from fifty years before; they had met as young officers in the Navy. Kanazawa had gone on to become a submariner, Lanier a pilot; their ways had parted until the Recovery, when they had met again in a Nexus plenary session on Thistledown. They had managed to cross paths every few years until Lanier’s retirement. He deeply respected Kanazawa; the man had survived the Death in a U.S. Navy submarine, had worked in California to reestablish civilian authority, and had become senior senator twenty years before.

During the Death, around the world, Allied and Warsaw Pact military facilities had been targeted repeatedly. Yet due to some vagary in Soviet planning, or wholesale missile failures, Pearl Harbor had been hit by only two warheads. Other bases on the islands had been struck by one warhead, some by none at all. Honolulu had suffered widespread damage from the Pearl Harbor attack; still, as a city, it had not been obliterated.

After the Sundering, as Hexamon investigators—Lanier among them—chose sites from which to begin the Recovery, the islands had offered themselves as a prime location for mid-Pacific support services. The weapons used there had been relatively clean; the radiation, after five years, was not especially dangerous, and could certainly be countered by Hexamon medicines and treatments.

In ten years, the lush growth of Oahu’s jungles and grasslands returned. Cities rose again, feeding both on the Hexamon activity and on trans-Pacific trade between New Zealand, North Australia, and Japan and Indochina.

Because Hexamon communications did not make geographic position crucial to centers of Recovery Government, the Terrestrial Senate had established its capitol on Oahu, at the site of old Honolulu. There had been a hint of power and privilege in this decision, but the Nexus overseers did not attempt to change it; they knew that few terrestrials would participate in such an unpleasant task as leading the Recovery without substantial perquisites.

Kanazawa lived in a long wood-frame and stone house a mile from the fused glass shore of Waikiki. With a moist, warm southerly breeze rustling palm fronds overhead, Karen, Garry and Ram Kikura walked up the pumice path to be greeted by a Nexus security device, a long polished white tube about a meter long and fifteen centimeters wide, floating beside the porch.

“We’re pleased to see you again, Ser Lanier,” the device said in a higher-pitched version of Kanazawa’s voice. “You are all expected. Please enter and excuse the mess. The senator is doing research for a trade bill to be considered next session.”

They walked up the stone steps and entered the porch breezeway. Wicker furniture rested on polished dark wood floors. Papers and folders lay in haphazard piles around the living room; advanced electronic storage media were still something of a luxury on Earth. Ostentation was not Kanazawa’s style; he relied on paper.

“I like this,” Ram Kikura said, fondling Polynesian print fabrics on sofa and chair. “The real thing.”

Kanazawa stepped from his rear office wearing a blue and white Japanese cotton print robe and tabi slippers. “Garry, Karen! I’m delighted to see you again.” He smiled at Ram Kikura. “If I’m not mistaken, this is Earth’s advocate and a former colleague, Ser Suli Ram Kikura?” He offered his hand; Ram Kikura shook it and bowed slightly. “To see all of you here at once worries me, pleased as I am by the visit. Something important is happening in the Nexus, I take it?”

He led them to a back porch and ordered drinks from a mechanical servant. Since his second wife had died ten years before, Kanazawa had not remarried; instead, he had plunged more deeply into his work, establishing a reputation as exceptionally polite, exceptionally capable, but also exceptionally stubborn, even obsessive.

“There’s an advisory about to be issued by the Nexus on Thistledown,” Lanier said.

“I’ve heard nothing about it,” Kanazawa said, tilting his head to one side with curiosity. His broad, rugged face carried a vivid white scar across one cheek where he had received a flash burn while standing on the sail of the U.S.S. Burleigh, his submarine. A similar scar marked the back of his right hand, ending at the shadow of the long jacket sleeve he had worn. The submarine had been sailing north along the coast of California, three days after the inception of the Death; the flash had come from a Spasm re-nuking of San Francisco.

“Chances are, the Old Natives will not be allowed to vote on this issue,” Lanier said.

Kanazawa’s expression did not change, but his voice took on an edge. “Why not?”

“They’ll be excluded by Recovery regulation,” Lanier said. “Unfit for the making of decisions involving the parent Hexamon.” By a peculiar twist of legal language, in the early years of Recovery legislation, the Thistledown and Precinct ruling bodies had become the parental legislatures.

Kanazawa nodded. “Not invoked for eleven years, but still in force. Should it concern me?”

“It concerns all of us, I think,” Lanier said. “It’s a rather long story.”

“I know it is worth my time, coming from you. Tell me.” Lanier told.

41

Thistledown

Korzenowski walked across the sixth chamber terminal to join Mirsky under a transparent skylight. The avatar—Korzenowski found it easiest to think of him that way—stared up across the chamber at the carpet of machinery on the opposite side of the chamber. Clouds moved swiftly over the view, both on their side and the far side; the colors, gray and green and mottled, traversed by the glow of the plasma tube, soothed Korzenowski in a way he found puzzling. He had cut himself loose from all this, yet it continued to fascinate him.

Like Olmy, he now believed that the Hexamon would reopen the Way no matter what obstacles they faced; would he be sorry?

“It’s magnificent,” Mirsky said. “A magnificent achievement.” He smiled at the Engineer. “When I first saw this, it was beyond anything I could imagine. I was dwarfed. I had not been introduced gradually, had not had the time Lanier spent in the Potato—that’s what we called Thistledown. We had not entered peacefully. It felt impossibly alien and disturbing, and fascinating, too. Yet Ser Ram Kikura called it ‘hideous.’”

“Her passions do not lie in machinery; she’s spent her life with huge machines. She takes them for granted. It’s not unusual for Naderites to be blind to their actual environment, in quest of some perfection. We’re a mystical group, all in all; Star, Fate and Pneuma lie deep in us.”

“How long will it take you to complete this diagnostic?” Mirsky asked.

“Three days. There are partials and remotes all over the chamber now. Everything crucial seems in working order.”

“And the weapons?”

Korzenowski stared intently at the view through the skylight. Rain began to fall in gentle patters, mottling the glass; the same water that had cooled and cleansed the machinery in the sixth chamber for centuries. “I did not build them. I know very little about them. I suspect they’re in working order, also. The Hexamon spent much of its history relying on machinery to stay alive; we respect our creations, and by instinct, we build them to last.”

“How long until the re-opening, then?” Mirsky asked.

“The timetable hasn’t changed. Unless Lanier and Ram Kikura succeed in blocking the advisory and the vote, perhaps two weeks; no more than a month.”

“You’ll do it, if they order you to? Open the Way again?”

“I’ll do it,” Korzenowski answered. “It seems to be Fate acting, doesn’t it?”

Mirsky laughed. For the first time, Korzenowski heard a timbre in the avatar’s voice that did not seem entirely human, and it chilled him. “Fate indeed,” Mirsky said. “I have been with beings like gods, and fate puzzles them, too.”

42

Hawaii

“I would be honored to have you stay here,” Kanazawa said. “My hospitality is not what it was when my wife was alive—only mechanical help donated by my constituents, but the kitchen treats my guests and me well.”

“We’d be delighted,” Lanier said. “We leave in the morning to visit Oregon, then fly on to Melbourne and back home, New Zealand…Christchurch. We haven’t much time.”

From the front porch, they saw the sun decline in splendor beyond the palms and beach, setting the slopes of Barber’s Point aflame with a gentler fire than that area and its Naval Air Station had known during the Death. A Japanese graveyard lay just west of the senator’s property, behind fresh-painted white picket fencing; Suli Ram Kikura stood there now, Karen beside her, examining the carved lava pagoda-shaped headstones and crosses.

“There’s something the old Axis City lacked,” Lanier said.

“What’s that?”

“Graveyards.”

“Far too many here,” Kanazawa said quickly. “Many things must be different up there—we have such close ties, and yet, I sometimes think, so little understanding of each other. I wish I were not so afraid of space travel. My only trip was the last time we met. My weeks in the Burleigh cured me of cramped quarters, I suppose. I left the ship when we beached her at Waimanalo, and I swore I would never sit in an iron tube again. I flew up there sedated.”

Lanier smiled sympathetically.

“You’ve worked with them—hell, Garry, you were one of the first to meet them. Surely you understand what motivates them.”

“I can guess.”

“Why suddenly consider us weak partners, when this could affect all of humanity?”

“We are weak partners, Senator.”

“Not as weak or naive as they must think. We can encompass many strange things before breakfast.”

“I think the quote is more like, ‘believe six impossible things before breakfast.’”

“Impossible things! That we have a man returned from the dead, or very nearly…”

“We’ve had lots of those,” Lanier said. “I’ve even helped resurrect people. Mirsky is something much stranger than that.”

Kanazawa turned his back on the twilight. The flames past Barber’s Point had died to purple dream-tones. Sunsets were not as spectacular now as they had been for years after the Death, but in Hawaii, they were still memorable. “All right. Perhaps we are naive. Does she accept such a thing?”

“Karen, or Ram Kikura?”

“Ram Kikura.”

“I think she accepts it one way, and finds it difficult to accept another way…. She accepts that we have to act on what Mirsky says. But she deeply regrets his return. She believes he catalyzed this whole mess, which of course he did; it would have happened anyway, however.”

“Spreading word across the Earth can only increase resentment, however many believe you,” Kanazawa said. “We resent our saviors. We resent having our childhood stolen from us.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Senator. Surely the Death did that.”

“No. The builders of Thistledown—they survived the Death, grew out of it, developed a new civilization. They invented their own marvels, struggled to supremacy, launched their asteroid starships. We cannot do that. They’ve come to us with hands full of marvels, like parents raising children, giving us miracles here and wonders there, sometimes forcing them upon us. They did not let us make our own mistakes—”

“Thank God,” Lanier said dryly. “We’d screwed up badly enough already.”

“Yes, but do you see what I mean?” Kanazawa asked plaintively. “My constituents feel lost when confronted by these saviors; they think of them as angels. A visitor from the precincts or the asteroid is still rare; they are respected and feared. We are left on Earth like backwater bumpkins.”

“If the shoe fits,” Lanier said.

“You’ve grown cynical, Garry.”

“Not without reason, Senator,” Lanier said, smiling wryly. “But I understand what you’re saying. Still, we have to make more of an effort. Earth can’t live in resentment and bitterness and envy like some twisted postbellum South. Maybe a larger issue like this is what we need to spark enthusiasm down here.”

“They will not understand, Garry,” Kanazawa said. “It is beyond their experience. A fairy tale. It’s the stuff myths are made of. Myths don’t play well in politics. You have to disguise them, make them seem down-to-Earth.”

Ram Kikura and Karen came back from the fence, both looking somber. “Mortality is not the only thing that separates some of us,” Kanazawa said in an undertone.

Dinner was served by robots. The four of them sat around the table, Lanier and Karen and Kanazawa feeling slightly giddy with big tumblers of rum after the day’s solemnity and worry. Lanier hadn’t been even mildly drunk in decades; he found more knots loosening, and regarded Karen with eyes of a distant, more youthful self. She was truly a lovely woman; however young she seemed, she had much of the wisdom of age, and that made her even more beautiful. Lanier did not despise youth; he was simply unwilling to let its attractions dominate him.

Working together might be a remedy, he thought; but she was still not as warm to him as he felt toward her, and they behaved as an old married couple might, talking more with others at the table than between themselves.

Ram Kikura was reluctant to try rum. “I’ve heard about alcohol,” she said with a voice of temperance caution. “A narcotic poison.”

“Was Thistledown dry during its voyage?” Kanazawa asked, astonishment creeping into his voice.

“No, not at first,” she answered. “Though alcohol played second fiddle, if that’s still a current idiom. Or third or fourth. Early voyagers were more interested in direct mental stimulations, a problem we carried with us from Earth. The stimulations became more sophisticated, and safer, and we found ways to treat personalities devoted to excess, chemical or neurological…. Alcohol was never a major worry, or a major recreation. Wines, if I remember, were cultivated…”

She seemed to enjoy a chance to talk history, especially when it delayed her decision on the rum. “But when the Way was built, and we had pushed back the Jarts, trade began through the wells. Talsit and other substances became known to us…complex intoxicants, enhancers, augmenters, not to mention the nuances of complete downloading. Alcohol and other chemical intoxicants were like kazoos.” (she emphasized the word, enjoying its alienness) “compared to a symphony orchestra.”

“Primitive treats still have their charm, though,” Kanazawa said.

“I’d hate to make a fool of myself,” Ram Kikura said softly, dipping her finger into the small glass, lifting it to her nose. “Esters and ketones. Very strong.”

“Destroys the brain,” Karen said, on the edge of being tipsy. “Might need to rent another.”

“Alcohol,” Ram Kikura began, pausing, realizing she was about to be sententious, “is still a problem on Earth. Am I right?”

“You are absolutely right,” Kanazawa said. “And a balm for our manifold wounds.”

“I dislike not being in control of myself.”

Karen leaned forward. “Drink it,” she said. “It actually tastes good. You don’t have to drink it all.”

“I know what it tastes like. I’ve had biochrones in city memory.”

“Biochrones?” Kanazawa asked.

“Not as popular now as they once were,” Lanier said. “Simulated full-life experiences. Edited, usually; the more extreme remove your awareness that they’re simulated. You live another life.”

“Jesus,” Kanazawa said, making an astonished, strongly disapproving face. “That’s almost like being…I know. Unfaithful to yourself.”

As they discussed the ethical dilemma of whether or not sex in a biochrone was tantamount, by older Earth standards, to cheating on one’s wedding vows, Ram Kikura brought the rum glass closer. Lanier could see she was attracted to it; she had always felt a connection with the past. When they had first met, she had picted an American flag over her shoulder, proud of her ancient ancestry; here was a bit of the past she knew little about, directly. Biochrone memories, he had heard, were not nearly as vivid as real ones; they couldn’t possibly be, without extraordinary implants, larger than practical in homorphs.

“All right,” she said, steeling herself and picking up the glass. “To being human!” She drank a much larger swallow than Lanier would have recommended. Her eyes widened and she spluttered, choking. Karen pounded her back unhelpfully.

“Ah, Pneuma!” Ram Kikura croaked when she was halfway in control again. “My body hates it!”

“Go slow,” Kanazawa recommended. “If that’s too strong, I have some wine…”

Ram Kikura waved away their attentions, embarrassed by her ineptitude. She wiped away tears and lifted the glass again. “What were the toasts?” she asked, still slightly hoarse.

“Down the hatch,” Lanier suggested.

Ram Kikura sipped more moderately. “Makes my throat close up.”

“I don’t understand,” Kanazawa said. “It’s very good rum, Oahu’s best.”

“At least three hours old,” Lanier said. Kanazawa gave him a twinkling look of senatorial disapproval.

“From my district,” he said.

“This half of the world is your district. Surely you don’t drink everything bottled by your constituents!” Karen said.

Ram Kikura sat quiet for a moment, contemplating the effect. “I don’t think I’ll become drunk,” she said. “My implant metabolizers are converting the alcohol to sugars faster than I can drink.”

“What a pity,” Kanazawa said.

“I could fine-tune them…if I will fit into the occasion less sober…”

Kanazawa glanced meaningfully at Lanier. Karen sighed. “You are not a natural party girl, my dear,” she said.

The night sky of Hawaii was a cold blaze, reminding Lanier of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Kanazawa brought a low-powered red laser pointer onto the back lawn. They sat on the grass, eating Brazilian chocolates and sipping aperitifs.

“This is my private planetarium,” the senator said, crouching carefully, kicking out one foot, almost falling over, then settling back on his butt and crossing his legs. “Nothing comparable to actually being up in space, I suppose…. But I’m happy with it.”

He switched on the laser and lifted it. In the moist sea air, the beam cut a straight glowing path hundreds of feet up to the stars, seeming to touch them individually. “I know all the constellations,” he said, “the Japanese and Chinese and the Western. Even some of the Babylonian.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ram Kikura said. She had allowed more than a little of the alcohol to have an effect on her; her eyes were half-lidded and she seemed relaxed, almost sleepy. “The sky is more…human down here. More friendly.”

“Yes, I see that,” Karen said. She and Lanier sat back to back on the grass, heads touching. “But when I was a girl, it still seemed immense. Frightening.”

“Yes, I see that,” Ram Kikura said, imitating Karen’s tone and smiling broadly. “I really do.”

“My own planetarium,” Kanazawa repeated. “I can just point the laser and move the beam and watch and nobody knows or cares. Their problems—” He flicked the beam across the entire sky, from cloud-darkened horizon to clear open sea, “—are not my problems.” He sighed overdramatically. “It is good to see you again, Garry, Karen. And it is good to meet someone from the precincts on less than formal terms. We have such distance between us, for being parents and children…”

“Who are the parents,” Karen asked, “and who the children?”

“You are the parents,” Ram Kikura said.

“And the children, too.” Karen bumped her head gently against Lanier’s, and then harder, as if to attract his attention.

“Ow,” he said. “What?”

“Just bumping, you old son of a bitch.” She giggled. “Sorry. Rum talk.”

“Keep bumping,” he said.

Ram Kikura held her hands up. “I would love to see crowds of Earth children now. Healthy children, happy children. I love to watch Hexamon children through my apartment window, in Axis Euclid. You’ve never had more children, Karen…Why?”

“Much too busy,” Karen said. She bit her lower lip.

“How can anyone be too busy to have children?”

“Naturally, or the Hexamon way?” Karen asked. The pain had been blunted by time but she still shied from the center.

“The Hexamon way, I think,” Ram Kikura said. “My son Tapi is an old-fashioned child.” She smiled and shook her head. “He will pass his incarnation exams. He will follow in his father’s footsteps…Olmy’s,” she added.

“I never knew you had a son,” Lanier said.

“Oh, yes. I’m very proud of him. But I did not give birth to him in the very old sense. To have children is important, though, however you have them…whether or not they are raised first in city memory. Allowed to grow like flowers, to make mistakes.”

“And to die,” Lanier mused, his eyes closed. Karen stiffened and leaned forward, breaking their back-to-back contact, and he instantly regretted his words.

“There are graveyards on Thistledown,” he said defensively, avoiding Ram Kikura’s steady gaze. “I’ve seen them. Columbaria, even pretentious tombs. Your people once knew what death was like.”

“Death is failure,” Ram Kikura said, her tone angry.

“Death is completion,” Lanier said.

“Death is a waste and a loss.”

“I’ll go along with that,” Karen said, bumping him again pointedly. “More life.”

“Robert!” Lanier pointed a finger at him. In exchange, Kanazawa pointed the laser beam’s arrow on his chest.

“Garry! What?”

“You decide. You’re a natural man. No implants, nothing but radiation therapy—you’ve even kept your scar—”

“White badge of courage,” Kanazawa said. “Helps me stay in office.”

“Is death completion or waste?”

“We’re far from the subject of the evening, aren’t we?” Kanazawa asked.

“You have Japanese ancestry. They look upon death in a different way. Honorable death. Death at the right time.”

“Do you have Amerindian blood?” Kanazawa asked him.

“No.”

“Well, you look as if you might. When people have to die, they look upon death differently. They dress it up and dance with it and put it in black robes and fear it. I have many disagreements with the Hexamon, but I do not regret their giving us the choice. Those graves—most are from the years just after the Death. Most of my constituents have chosen to live longer. Some hope to live forever. Perhaps they will. Death is not failure, it may even be completion, but only so long as it is not master.”

“Right,” Karen said.

“Have you chosen to live forever?” Lanier asked.

“No,” Kanazawa said.

“Why?”

“That is personal.”

“Sorry,” Karen said. “This is not a pleasant subject…”

“No. It is important,” Kanazawa said. “Not too personal to talk about. Rum talk, even. I cannot forget certain things. Unpleasant memories. I cannot use Talsit or pseudo-Talsit, even if we could get them, wonderful as those treatments are; these memories are a fixed part of me, and have made me what I am now. I fight with them always. In the morning I wake to them. Sometimes they hang over my whole day. You know what I’m talking talk about, don’t you, Garry?”

“Amen,” Lanier said.

“When I die, those memories will be gone. I will be gone, and perhaps someone better will come in my place. He may have knowledge of the history I’ve lived through, but he will be able to lift above them. There will be no waste. What I cannot assimilate, he or she will.”

“Amen,” Lanier repeated in a whisper.

“We will agree to disagree,” Ram Kikura said. “You are a wonderful man, Senator. Your death would be a loss.”

Kanazawa tilted his head to acknowledge her compliment.

“We cannot cry, you know,” Ram Kikura said. “We feel many of the same emotions, but we have…not risen above them. Transcended them. We assimilate and remain ourselves, but…” She shook her head vigorously. “I can’t think straight! Rum thought, rum talk.”

“We are too close to a lot of death to look at individual death objectively,” Kanazawa said. “Karen, do you approve of your husband’s age?”

“No,” she said after a long pause.

“I can’t keep up with her,” Lanier said, trying for a pleasantry.

She looked down from the stars at the dark grass. “It’s not that. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to sacrifice myself to stay in step with you, either.”

“Lance that boil, doctor,” Lanier said.

“Shut up.” She pushed away from him again and stood up. “We’re talking stupid talk now.”

“Rum talk,” Kanazawa said, swinging the beam across the sky again. “In vino, veritas.”

“This is noble,” Ram Kikura said. “This is human.”

Karen ran for the house. Lanier stood, brushed grass from his pants, and said, “I think I’m going to follow her and then we’ll go to sleep.”

Kanazawa nodded sagely.

Lanier walked back to the house, found the bedroom, and stood in the doorway, watching Karen undress. “I remember the first time you made love to me,” he said. “In the jumpjet. On the tuberider.”

She made a little noise, unhitching her bra.

“It took me many years to really appreciate you. Not until after we were married. After we had worked together.”

“Please shut up,” Karen said, but not angrily.

“You became like one of my arms, one of my legs,” he pursued. “I took you for granted. I thought everything I’d do, you’d do. I loved you so much I forgot you weren’t me.”

“There was work to do.”

“No excuse, even so,” he said. “I think you lost sight of me, too.”

“You’re not the only one with bad memories,” Karen said sharply. “I went back to Hunan. Remember? I saw my town, the farmlands. I smelled death, Garry, waste. Skeletons of infants by the roadside, you couldn’t tell whether they had been there for months or years, from the Death or after, when their parents dropped them there because they couldn’t feed them. We couldn’t get to everybody in time. You are not the only one with memories!”

“I know,” Lanier said, still leaning on the door frame.

“I can handle them. I can love you for a lot longer. I don’t want you to go away from me. I hate that thought.”

“I know.”

“Then come back to me,” she said. “You can still become young. There are centuries left to us. Centuries of work yet to do.”

“That’s not my way,” he said. “I wish you could accept that.”

“I wish you could accept my…fears,” she said.

“I’ll try. We’re working together now, Karen.”

She half-shivered, half-shrugged and sat on the bed. He remained standing by the door, still dressed. “What about Mirsky?” she asked. There was a look of patent wonder on her face, forehead smooth, eyes wide, lips drawn down as if in a pout. “Is he going to bring the gods down on us? Is that what he’s really saying? He’s a horrible thing, Garry.”

“I don’t think so.”

She shook her head. “A nightmare.”

“A vision,” Lanier countered. “Let’s wait and see.”

“I am afraid,” she said simply. “Will you allow me that?”

If he came forward now, he knew, and tried to hug her, she would not accept; she would push him away. But he could see that the time might come, and for now, still mildly buzzing with rum, that was enough. “Of course,” he said.

“I’m going to sleep.” She lay back on the guest bed and pulled the covers up.

He watched her for a moment, then shut out the light, turned, and stood alone in the dark and quiet hallway. Out on the grass, he heard Kanazawa and Ram Kikura talking.

“I would be honored if you would share my bed with me this evening,” Kanazawa said.

“I’m not even mildly drunk now, Ser Kanazawa,” Ram Kikura said.

“Nor am I.”

Ram Kikura said nothing for a moment. Then, “I’d like that.”

Lanier contemplated his wife in bed, the quaint comfort of the guest room, and shook his head. Still too many walls between them. He walked to the front porch and lay down on the padded wicker sofa there, plumping an old tattered silk pillow under his head.

In the morning, Lanier walked along the beach before Karen awoke. A kilometer away, he spotted Ram Kikura, walking around a tongue of exhausted surf, tall and slender, surrounded by wheeling gulls. Without gesture, they walked toward each other, and Ram Kikura smiled at him as they closed.

“Am I a brazen hussy?” she asked, turning to match his pace and direction.

Lanier returned her smile. “As brazen as they come,” he said.

“In all my years as Earth’s advocate, I’ve never made love to an Old Native,” she said.

“Was it quaint?” Lanier asked. She scowled at him.

“Some things stay remarkably the same, in basics,” she said. They walked on in silence for a while, watching gulls prance on the wet sand ahead of them, avoiding the slick rising curves of water. “Ser Kanazawa is furious,” she finally said. “He’s angrier than I’ve seen any man in a very long time. He didn’t show it to all of us…He’s going to call a meeting of all of Earth’s senators and corpreps. Through me, they’ll challenge the mens publica vote. I can make a strong argument that the Recovery laws cannot apply in this case.”

“Will you win?” Lanier asked.

She bent down to pick up a glass Japanese float. “I wonder low long this has been here?” she asked. “Do they make these now?”

“I don’t know,” Lanier said. “I suppose they do. Will you win?”

“Probably not,” she said. “The Hexamon isn’t what it used to be.” She held the float up close, examining its tiny starlike bubbles floating in green glass. She returned the float to the sand.

“The president seems to be swinging with the tide,” Lanier said. “He claimed he violently opposes re-opening.”

“He does. But there’s not much he can do if the Nexus supports it. And I fear that like the captain of a troubled ship, he won’t hesitate to cut the Earth loose, if it’s necessary to save what’s left of the Hexamon.”

“But the Jarts—”

“We beat them back once, and we weren’t prepared for them,” Ram Kikura said.

“You sound proud, almost supportive,” Lanier said.

She frowned again, shaking her head. “An advocate needs to understand how the opposition feels. I’m as furious as Kanazawa, myself.” She swung her arms and bent to pick up a crumbling piece of plastic bottle. “How old is this, do you think?”

Lanier didn’t answer. He was thinking of Mirsky, surprised by the refusal of the Nexus to go along with his request. “What chance is there for a negative vote?” he asked.

“None,” she said. “Without a persuaded and informed Earth, and that seems to be an impossibility in the near term.”

“Then why are we here? I thought this was a good idea…I thought we might have an effect.”

Ram Kikura nodded. “We will,” she said. “We’ll hang on their damned heels and slow them down. The tide is coming in, don’t you think?”

The tide was going out, as far as Lanier could tell, but he understood her meaning.

“What will we say in Oregon?” he asked.

“The same thing we’ve said here.”

They turned around to walk back toward the house. When they arrived, the others were up and about, and the robots were serving breakfast. Kanazawa and Ram Kikura were friendly, cordial and no more.

Lanier was thoughtful. He had had a burst of youthful enthusiasm shot down. There was chagrin, but there was also the realization he could still be young and foolish. He could still fight for hopeless causes. Somehow, that made him feel even more alive, even more resolved.

Besides, he suspected Mirsky—or the beings at the end of time—were far more resourceful than even the Hexamon.

They packed their few pieces of luggage. Ram Kikura and Karen spoke with Kanazawa as Lanier carried the small bags to the shuttle. As he entered the shuttle doorway, the automated pilot flashed a red pict before his eyes.

“Speak in English, please,” Lanier said, vaguely irritated.

“Our flight has been held,” the pilot said. “We are to stay here until precinct police arrive.”

Lanier set the bags down, stunned. “Precinct police? Not terrestrial police?”

The pilot did not respond. The interior lighting dimmed. The white interior relaxed and turned an inactive blue.

“Are you still functioning?” Lanier asked. There were no further answers. He looked around the darkened interior, opening and closing his fists. He stepped down from the doorway, face red with anger, and confronted Karen.

“I think we’re being intercepted,” he said. Ram Kikura and Kanazawa came from the house.

“Problems?” the senator asked.

“Precinct police are coming,” Lanier said.

Kanazawa’s face hardened. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“You probably don’t,” Ram Kikura said. Kanazawa stared at her as if she had struck him. “This is very serious, Garry. How did you—”

Karen looked out to sea. Beyond Barber’s Point, three aircraft flew toward them, sharp white against the billowing gray mid-morning clouds. They banked and approached the house, slowing and hovering, their flight fields knocking bits of gravel and dirt from the senator’s driveway and yard.

“Ser Lanier,” a voice from the craft boomed above them. “Please respond.”

“I’m Garry Lanier.” He stood away from the others.

“Ser Lanier, you and your wife are to return to New Zealand immediately. All Old Natives are being returned to their homelands.”

Ram Kikura stepped out beside him. “Under whose orders, and by what law?” She lowered her voice. “There are no such laws,” she muttered.

“By Revised Recovery Act. Direct presidential authority. Please board your shuttle. Its flight plans have been changed.”

“Don’t go,” Kanazawa said. He lifted his eyes to the three craft and raised a fist. “I am a senator! I demand a meeting with the president and the presiding minister!”

The hovering craft did not reply.

“You won’t board the shuttle,” Ram Kikura said. “We’ll all stay here. They won’t dare use physical force.”

“Garry, they said all Old Natives were being returned—even those with permanent residency on the orbiting bodies?” Karen’s face resembled a child’s, horribly disappointed, disbelieving.

“I don’t know,” Lanier said. “Senator, we can do more in our own territory…unless we’re under house arrest, in which case it doesn’t matter where we are.” He turned to Ram Kikura. “I assume you’ll go back to Thistledown.”

“Assume nothing,” she said tightly. “All rules are off. I certainly didn’t expect this.”

“They do this,” Karen said, her face red, “and they’ll really have a fight on their hands.”

I doubt that, Lanier thought. The fight is probably over right here and now. They feel the need to play dirty.

The three craft held their position, implacable. A light sun shower began to fall. Ram Kikura wiped wet hair from her face. “We shouldn’t just stand here like disobedient children,” Lanier said. “Senator, thank you for listening to us. If we can talk again, I’ll—”

“Please board your shuttle now,” the voice boomed.

Lanier took his wife’s hand. “Good-by,” he said to Kanazawa and Ram Kikura. “Good luck. Let Korzenowski and Olmy know what happened here.”

Ram Kikura nodded.

They boarded the shuttle and the door flowed shut behind them.

43

The Way, Efficient Gaia

A maze of brilliant green lines sketched themselves in parallel around them, breaking pattern to draw a harness or cage about the bubble faster than Rhita could move her eyes to follow. After a brief pause, another array of lines rose from the surface of the Way, far below, originating at a single dazzling vertex near one of the stacked disk towers. The lines connected and the oval bubble descended with alarming rapidity, though again with no sensation.

Rhita felt faint. There was too much stimulation, too much to absorb. “I’m going to be sick,” she told Typhōn. The escort took hold of her left arm—the first time he had touched her. His touch was warm but unconvincing; through her constricting circle of thought and vision, she was faintly repelled. Then she was on her knees and past caring.

She half-expected Typhōn to do something to her, to fix her and banish the spell of dizziness. But he simply stood behind her, keeping her from falling on her back. For a moment, she restrained an impulse to heave, and then shut her eyes tightly, deciding darkness would be better for her health.

After a time, the dizziness faded and she felt better. “If you are thirsty,” Typhōn said, “drink this.” She opened her eyes and saw a glass cup of clear liquid in his hand. She took it and sipped cautiously. Water; nothing more, as far as she could tell. This disappointed her. She had expected some elixir. Of course, where the escort had found a cup of water in the bubble was a puzzle…. She imagined him opening a hole in his body and drawing it out, or perhaps spitting into the glass. She shut her eyes again, fighting another rising plume of nausea.

Rhita used the railing to regain her feet, waving off his hand, and hastily returned the half-full cup. Partly to distract herself from the panorama outside, partly to subdue her queasiness, she directed her full attention to what he did with the glass.

He held it. Nothing more. Shivering, she turned back to the view. They had dropped much closer to the surface now, and flew—guided by the green lines—toward a white tower. Trying to judge scale, she decided the tower was at least as tall as the Pharos at Alexandreia, and much more massive. But the scale of the Way dwarfed all structures.

Rhita forced herself to lean her head back and look up. Her neck protested. Her lips parted and she sighed, despite herself. Far behind and above them, the triangular prism hung huge and blunt and graceless in the center of the pearly ribbon of light, like a long black crystal suspended in milky water.

Something much farther down the throat of the Way, a blinking beacon, caught her attention. She shielded her eyes, although the tubelight was not excessively bright, and squinted to focus on a moving speck. It, too, was within the ribbon of light, but many stadia away, moving rapidly in their direction. She jerked her neck back as it reached a point just above them, saw that it was another huge rainbow prism, and realized it would collide with the first prism. Twisting about, she gasped as the prisms struck like trains on a rail. For a moment, they were one long green mass, and then the second prism passed through the first without damage to either, continuing its travel unimpaired in the opposite direction.

Patrikia had never described anything like that.

“I feel numb,” she said, glancing resentfully at Typhōn.

“It was your choice to see it all,” the escort said mildly. “None of me take this route often, themselves.”

She pondered that syntax for a moment, decided the view was less disturbing than what she suspected Typhōn meant, and faced forward again.

There were no obvious entrances to the tower. Nevertheless, the bubble passed straight through the rounded wall of a stacked disk, crossing an enclosed arc-shaped space filled with floating polyhedrons, and then through another wall. The bubble discarded its panoply of green lines, and descended along a leaf-green shaft toward what might have been a perfectly clear lens of glass. Distorted by the lens were sea-blues and sky-blues and light browns and cloud-grays; all the normal colors of her home. She held her breath for a moment, hoping against hope that the nightmare would end.

“This is the gate to Gaia,” her escort said. “A prior gate was opened here. Our gates are not usually so constricted in shape, but the prior geometry takes precedence.”

“Oh,” Rhita said. Free with information that meant next to nothing to her…

As they fell toward the surface of the lens, the color of the shaft reddened, then abruptly shifted to white.

The bubble struck the lens and they fell through. Below lay a coastline, gray ocean under cloud shadows, blue ocean in patches of brilliant sunlight.

Rhita could hardly breathe. “Where are we?”

“This is your world,” Typhōn said.

She knew that; and it was no dream, either. “Where on Gaia?”

“Not far from your home, I understand—I’ve never visited here in any self or capacity.”

“I want to go to…” She looked up and saw blue sky and an indistinct shimmer over their heads: the gate they had just passed through. “Can we go to Rhodos?”

Typhōn considered her request for a moment. “It would not consume much more energy. This project nears its limits, however. There will have to be results soon.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“This line of investigation. You must provide results soon.”

“You know everything I know,” Rhita said, near tears, utterly exhausted. “What can I do for you?”

“Lead us to those who built your clavicle. Give us clues. But—” He held up his hand as she was about to protest, “I realize you do not know these things. Still, there is some hope you can reveal more by your actions, or by your presence—the clavicle may be sought by others than ourselves. Only you can operate it. You still have some value in your active form.”

“What about my…companions?”

“They will be brought here if it makes you more comfortable.”

“It would,” she said. “Please.”

Typhōn smiled. “Your forms of social appeasement are wonderful. Such simplicity masking such aggression. The request is made; they should meet us at Rhodos, if we do not exceed the energy budget.”

“I’m not sure I can stand here much longer. I’m very tired.”

Typhōn encouraged her to squat on the platform. “You will not be clumsy in my eyes,” he said.

With a grimace, she not only squatted; she lay down on her stomach, peering over the edge. “Are we going to Rhodos?” she asked.

“Yes.”

A green line appeared from nearby clouds and spread out before the bubble into a radiance of grasping curves. In a cage again, the bubble transported them high above the ocean. She could not tell in which direction of the compass they were heading.

“Am I the first human you’ve ever studied?” she asked.

“No,” Typhōn answered. “My selves studied dozens of humans from this world before investigating your preserved record.”

“Do you know everything about us?” Anger was her dominant emotion now; she bit off her words, hoping the sour edge was not lost to the escort.

“No. You still have many subtleties, many things to study. But I may not be allowed to study you to completion. There are higher tasks, and my number of selves is fully occupied.”

“You keep saying that,” Rhita said wearily. “My ‘selves.’ I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I am not an individual. I am actively stored—”

“Like grain in a barrel?” Rhita asked sarcastically.

“Like a memory in your own head,” Typhōn said. “I am actively stored in the flaw. We can induce resonances in the flaw and store huge amounts of information—literally worlds of information. Is that clear to you?”

“No,” she admitted. “How can there be more than one of you?”

“Because my patterns, my self, can be duplicated endlessly. I can be merged with other selves of differing designs and abilities. Various effectuators can be built for us—machines or ships or more rarely, bodies. I do work when any of my selves are required.”

“You’re trained to take care of strangers?”

“In a sense. I made a study of beings similar to you when we fought with them in the Way. I was an individual then, biologically based, in a shape similar to my original birth-form.”

Her grandmother had told her what little she knew about the Jart Wars. To a young girl, they had not meant much—meaningless wonders in a weave of fantastic stories. She wished she had listened more closely.

“What was your original birth-form?”

“Not human, not this shape at all.”

“But you did have your own shape once.”

“No. Part of me did. I have since been combined with others, stirred together.” He twirled an extended finger slowly. Rhita frowned at him over her shoulder. All my questions keep me from the truth I’ll have to face.

“I’m confused again,” she said. “You tell me one thing, then another.”

Typhōn knelt beside her, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. A very human gesture. Was his face gaining more character?

“Your language doesn’t have the right word-groups. All sound-carried language is inadequate.”

“You don’t talk to each other,” she said.

“Not in words, or using sounds. Not usually, at any rate.”

“Would you kill me if you were ordered to?”

“I will not be ordered to kill you or anybody, if by that you mean destroy your patterns. That is what you would call a crime, a sin.”

Enough for the moment. She rolled back on her stomach. Below them, the ocean stretched blue-green, shallow, with pillars of rock sticking up like stumps of trees. She did not know this place.

Yet they were supposed to be near Rhodos. “Near” might mean different things to a Jart; they could speed down the Way and exit through gates in soap bubbles, after all.

More pillars appeared. Each was covered by a cap of gold that took the shape of the rocks, as if painted on. No vegetation, no boats in the water, just this cloud-shadowed and pillar-specked barrenness.

“Could I smell the air?” she asked.

“No,” Typhōn said bluntly.

“Why not?”

“It is no longer healthy for you. There are organisms and biological machines on your world now that travel by air, too small to see. They are raising Gaia to a higher level of efficiency.”

“Nobody can live out there?”

Typhōn seemed to commiserate. “Not of your kind,” he said.

She felt weak again. They had spread disease around Gaia—was that what the escort meant? Death and defilement. Nobody could live—

“Anywhere? Can people live anywhere?”

“There are no humans on Gaia. They have been stored for further study.”

Now the hatred came. It jerked her head back, squeezing her vitals like a giant hand, pushing a scream out. She turned on Typhōn with fists raised. He made no effort to defend himself. She hit him as hard as she could, again and again, not weak feminine blows; she had never been raised to fear defending herself. Her fists deformed his face and her knees kicked dimples in his clothing. She seemed to be striking bread dough, warm and yielding. She continued to scream, pitching higher with each blow, grunting, saliva falling from her lips, eyes half-closed. Again and again. Striking, kicking, grabbing him by the neck and sticking her fingers into what might be flesh.

Typhōn collapsed on the platform, face misshapen, eyes beaten shut, not bruised but simply warped, and she kicked him several more times until she felt a sparkling dark emptiness in her head. Staring up at the clouds outside the bubble, tears slick on her cheeks, her chin damp with spit, the rage gone but the legs and arms still trembling, Rhita began to creep back into control.

She glanced down at the clothed mass that no longer seemed very human, her expression that of a panicked horse, pupils like pinpricks and nostrils wide, then grabbed the railing, feeling again as if she might vomit. Across the barren sea, she saw a low dark green outline above the horizon and the last hopeful part of her exulted. That was Rhodos; she would know it anywhere. The bubble was still speeding her toward home.

Typhōn spoke behind her, voice undistorted by the injuries she had inflicted. “I may be exceeding my budget now,” he said.

44

Thistledown City

President Farren Siliom entered the full Nexus chamber and proceeded to the podium. Olmy sat beside Korzenowski and Mirsky. They listened to his speech intently. Korzenowski’s expression was enigmatic; he knew the importance of this occasion as well as anybody in the chamber, but he expressed neither approval nor disapproval.

Mirsky’s face was also bland, but in its blandness, Olmy thought, there might lie more threat to the Hexamon than ever posed by the Jarts. Olmy had come to accept Mirsky’s story completely, and now even judged the man—if he was a man—incapable of lying. The president doubtless agreed; Garabedian’s confirmation had weighed heavily in that judgment. Yet now the Nexus—and Farren Siliom, for irresistible political reasons—were committing themselves to a course of re-opening. They were committing political acts that could only serve to slice a gap between Earth and the orbiting bodies that might never heal.

All native Terrestrials were being returned to the Earth, whatever their status on the orbiting bodies. The Hexamon was entering a period of Emergency. Under Emergency Laws forgotten since the Jart Wars, the president was assuming extraordinary powers. He now had one year in which to carry out his plans; after that time, because of his use of the Emergency Laws, he would be forbidden from ever holding political office again.

He was guaranteeing the purity of the vote of the mens publica with a vengeance. If the vote was negative, he would resign. If it was positive, Thistledown’s sixth chamber could be refurbished, the Hexamon defense reestablished and the Way reopened within four months.

Korzenowski had been formally ordered to see to the execution of the will of the mens publica. He could not refuse. To Olmy, he seemed resigned; perhaps more than resigned. Having been forced this far, Korzenowski might be shedding the last vestiges of the mask he had worn for four decades, a mask of interest only in the Recovered Earth and the Terrestrial Hexamon, the denial of all his genius and accomplishment for the greater good of his fellows…

Shedding, or having the mask ripped from him, it might not matter which in the long run.

Olmy had few doubts Korzenowski would carry out the Hexamon’s orders efficiently. The Way might be opened sooner even than the president expected.

What Mirsky would do, he could not tell. Best not to worry about imponderables.

Meanwhile, within Olmy himself, the Jart was revealing layer upon layer of everyday Jart life. The flow of information had turned into a true flood, perhaps a rupture.

Thus far, he was managing to keep up with the tide. Already he was planning his briefing for the reorganized defense forces.

Soon, following an agreement worked out between the Jart mentality and his partial, he would allow the Jart access to his eyes and ears. They could communicate more effectively if they understood each other better.

There were some dangers in that, of course, but none worse than what he had already survived.

It was more than a time of changes.

The pace had now taken the proportions of revolution. The Sundering was about to be reversed.

The president finished his presentation, and the dominant coalition of neo-Geshels applauded and picted complete approval. The president’s Naderite colleagues kept silent. Korzenowski turned to Mirsky. “My friend, I must do this work, whatever my beliefs.”

Mirsky shrugged and nodded, as if either forgiving or dismissing the Engineer. “Things will work out,” he said with bland nonchalance. He glanced at Olmy and winked.

45

Thistledown, the Orbiting Precincts, and Earth

Korzenowski lifted a lump of white dough and listened to its soft hiss in his hands. The lumps were remains of a failed attempt six years before to create a gate without the Way; the failure had been quiet, but decisive. Instead of creating a gate, he had created a new form of matter, quite inert, possessing no useful properties that he had found, so far. And he had spent the past six years searching…

He laid the lump back in its pallet of black stone and straightened, surveying his laboratory, saying farewell. He would not be back for months, perhaps not ever.

The results of the Hexamon mens publica vote had been tabulated and broadcast. By a two-thirds majority—more than he had expected—permanent re-opening had been mandated.

Farren Siliom had no choice at all now.

Korzenowski activated the robot sentries and gave final instructions to a partial. Should he not return, and should anyone come visiting, the partial would be there to greet them.

He was not reluctant to return to the sixth chamber and begin the refurbishing; in fact, he was eager. There was a small and persistent voice in him that either echoed or perhaps, in some way not clear, created that eagerness: the unquiet voice of that which integrated his reassembled self, the mystery of Patricia Luisa Vasquez.

Korzenowski gathered up his small tools and journals, all that was necessary to begin work on the Way, and ordered the laboratory sealed. “Be good, now,” he instructed a cross-shaped sentry as he walked away from the domes. He paused at the boundary of the compound, frowning. It was certainly not in his character to address a remote; he treated them for what they were, useful machines.

Surrounded by kilometer after kilometer of scrub and sand, the Engineer boarded the tractor that would take him to the train station in the second chamber city.

Suli Ram Kikura’s partial argued persuasively that its original should be released from house arrest in Axis Euclid. The partial’s appeal was rejected by the City Memory auxiliary courts on the grounds that under Emergency Laws, all appeals had to be presented by corporeals. This was so ridiculous it did not even anger her; she was beyond anger, moving into sadness.

In her apartment, Ram Kikura had known the partial would fail. This new Hexamon was not above making up the rules as it went along. To openly object to the re-opening was not so much dangerous now as it was extremely awkward, impolite in its extended sense of impolitic. For decades, Hexamon law and politics had been based upon awareness of boundaries beyond which lay chaos and disaster; the president and presiding minister, having accurately gauged the true spirit of the orbiting bodies, were now doing everything within their power to stay within the boundaries of their duty, yet also carry out the vote of the mens publica and the advisory of the Nexus. They also seemed grimly determined to demonstrate the extremes of this mandate, as if they wished to punish the Hexamon—even their ideological partners—for this onerous duty.

She was not allowed access to any city memory; that meant she could not speak with Tapi, who would be born any hour now. She had not been allowed to speak with either Korzenowski or Olmy. They were on their best behavior, she had been told, and were cooperating fully with the Emergency Effort.

She had refused any form of cooperation. Ram Kikura had her own boundaries, and she was damned if she would step over them.

In New Zealand, spring brought lovely weather and the amusement of lambs. Lanier tended their small flock of black-faced sheep; Karen helped when she wasn’t lost in her own funk. Unable to work, confined to their home and valley, she was not doing well.

They worked together, yet kept their distance. Lanier had lost whatever enthusiasm Mirsky had kindled. He did not know what would happen next. He didn’t much care.

In his way, he had once adored the Hexamon, and all it had stood for. Over the past few years, he had seen from a distance the changing character of the orbiting precincts, the shifting sands of Hexamon politics. Now, lost in its own needs and regrets, the same Hexamon that had worked to save the Earth had finally betrayed him, and betrayed Karen…had betrayed Earth.

Earth’s Recovery was not yet finished.

Perhaps now, it would never be done, whatever the assurances broadcast around the world nightly from the orbiting bodies. He found these particularly galling; smooth, pleasant, informative, day by day educating the Earth about progress in the re-opening.

Now and then, Lanier heard of Recovery efforts continuing in a desultory fashion.

He felt old again, looked older.

Sitting on their porch at night, he listened to cool night breezes wafting through the bushes, thinking thoughts convoluted and fuzzy as balls of yarn.

I am only a single human being, he told himself. It is right that I should wither like a leaf on a tree. I am out of place now. I am finished. I hate this time, and I do not envy those being born.

Perhaps the worst part of it all was that for a brief moment, he had felt the old spark again. With Mirsky, he had thought of fighting the good fight; he had hoped perhaps here was an agency more powerful and wise than all of them.

But Mirsky was gone.

Nobody had seen him in months.

Lanier tried to get up out of his seat, to go to bed and sleep and for a short time lose all these painful thoughts. His hands pushed on the wood, and his back moved forward, but he could not lift himself; his pants seemed stuck to something. Puzzled, he leaned over one side of his chair. Silently, something exploded. A ball of darkness edged in from one side of his eyes and his head became enormous.

The ball of darkness centered and became a great tunnel. He grabbed the ends of his chair arms but could not straighten.

“Oh, God,” he said. His lips were numb as rubber. Ink spread in the back of his head. Doors closed with rhythmic slammings on all his memories. Karen not with him; not where she was. This was the way his father had gone, younger even than he was now No pain just the sudden withdrawl of He had not thought himself so “Oh, God.”

The tunnel yawned wide, full of rainbow night.

46

Thistledown

Buried sixty meters within the outer perimeter of the seventh chamber’s southern cap were seven generators, connected by seven field-lined shafts of pure vacuum to the sixth chamber machinery. The generators had no moving parts and nothing to do with electrons or magnetic fields; they worked on far more subtle principles, principles developed by Korzenowski based on mathematical reasoning that had primarily begun with Patricia Luisa Vasquez in the late twentieth century.

These seven generators had created the stresses on space-time that had resulted in the Way. They had not been used for four decades but were still sound; the vacuum shafts were still operating and completely free of matter or time-linked energy, that enigmatic byproduct of interaction between universes.

In the hole leading to the seventh chamber, an observation blister had been erected and the bore hole pressurized with air. The blister was now filled with monitoring equipment, giant red spheres studded with silver and gray cubes the size of a man’s head, tracting back and forth within the blister’s shell, silently avoiding their human masters whenever encountered along their complex paths.

Korzenowski floated where the Way’s singularity had once been, his body precessing like a slow top, gray hair standing out from his hand in the blister’s gentle cooling breezes. With catlike eyes, he observed the construction on the southern cap of the seventh chamber, radiating for kilometers outward from the bore hole, huge black concentric rings of virtual particle stimulators and their reservoirs of graviton-stabilized tritium metal. These would not be brought into play until after the opening of the Way; the stimulators could be used as weapons, and were capable of stripping the Way clear of matter for a distance of several hundred kilometers, giving the Hexamon its first “beachhead,” should it need one. Soon, the traction beam radiation shields would be in place to focus the backwash of disrupted matter that the stimulators might create along the same path as the stimulator beams.

Fearsome weapon, fearsome defenses…

Fearsome opponents.

At rest, Korzenowski’s thoughts wandered. He used his two hours of daily inactivity to put the events of the past few months in perspective. The blister was deserted but for him and the machines.

In two more weeks, the Way generators would be ready for tests. Virtual universes of fractional dimensions—continua with little more than abstract reality—would be created in deliberately unstable configurations. The night sky over Earth would sparkle with their deaths, as particles and radiations unknown in this continuum—or any stable continuum—left their tracks in the protesting void.

In three weeks, if the first tests went well, Korzenowski would order the creation of a torus, an independent and stable universe turned in upon itself. He would then dismantle the torus and observe how it faded; the manner of its demise could give clues as to the state and superspatial location of the Way’s sealed terminus.

Over the next few months, they would “fish” for that terminus. A temporary virtual universe the size and shape of the Way, but of finite length, would be generated, would be encouraged to merge with the terminus, and would create an attractive bridge between the generators and their now-independent progeny.

Ramon Rita Tiempos de Los Angeles

Korzenowski shut his eyes and frowned deeply. He could not help but know the source of these increasingly frequent interruptions and what they signified. When Patricia Vasquez’s mystery had been transferred to his assembled partials, to bind them and give them a core, somehow memory and drive had been transferred as well. In theory, that was unlikely. But Vasquez had been in a highly disturbed state, and Korzenowski, unusually shattered, had not been a textbook model for the transfer process.

He did not fight the impulses. For the moment, they did not work opposite to his wishes, and they did not disturb him unduly. But the reckoning would have to come soon. He would need to submit to major personality restructuring.

That was risky and he could not take risks now, central as he was to the Hexamon’s effort.

There, he told himself after a few minutes had passed. Quiet. Peace. Integration.

“Konrad,” came a voice from the blister’s bore hole entrance. Korzenowski grimaced and turned to face the voice. It was Olmy; they hadn’t talked in weeks. He spread his arms and slowed his precessing, then tracted outward from the center.

They picted intimate greetings and embraced each other in the near-weightlessness. “My friend,” Korzenowski said.

“I’ve disturbed your free time,” Olmy said, picting polite concern.

“Yes, but no matter. I’m glad to see you.”

“Have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Garry Lanier suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage.”

“He wasn’t protected—” Korzenowski’s face paled. “He’s dead?”

“Very nearly. Karen discovered him a few seconds after it happened and immediately called Christchurch.”

“His damned Old Native pride!” Korzenowski exclaimed. The anger was not just his own.

“They reached him within ten minutes. He’s alive, but he needs reconstruction—the brain is extensively damaged.”

Korzenowski closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. He did not approve of forced medication, but under the circumstances, he doubted the Hexamon would give Lanier much choice in his treatments. “They did this to him,” he said bitterly. “We’ve all had a hand in it…”

“There’s guilt enough to go around,” Olmy said. “If Karen consents to reconstruction, most of the damage can be reversed…But he’ll need medical aid that he’s always been on record as refusing.”

“Have you told Ram Kikura?”

Olmy shook his head. “She’s being kept under house arrest, held in a communications null. Besides, my own leash is short.”

“So is mine,” Korzenowski said, “but I can swing wide enough to hit some influential people.”

“I appreciate that,” Olmy said. “I’m afraid my political status is uncertain at the moment.”

“Why?”

“I’ve refused to take command of the Emergency Defense Effort.”

“You’d be the best choice,” Korzenowski said. “Why refuse?”

Olmy smiled and shook his head.

Korzenowski, staring into his eyes, felt a small tingle of sympathy. He’s not alone, either. But he couldn’t decide what made him feel that way, or what the feeling implied.

“I’ll explain later. It’s not the time now. I think I’ll be hard to reach for a while, however.” The last message he picted in tight-beam so that only Korzenowski could receive it. “If you need to tell me anything, please…”

Korzenowski examined Olmy for a moment, then picted, “I’ll feel very alone without you to speak to, should I need you…or Garry, or Ram Kikura.”

Olmy nodded understanding. “Perhaps we’ll all meet again. Star, Fate and Pneuma willing.” He tracted swiftly back to the bore hole.

Korzenowski floated alone once again in the blister, surrounded by wheeling machines, red spheres and gray cubes. No use trying to rest now, he told himself, and returned to work.

47

Earth

Lanier struggled on the lip of a well. Every time he relaxed his hands and waited to fall, somebody held on to him. He could not die. He began to resent being saved. So long as he was alive, he was condemned to suffer the sour old-party taste in his mouth, and feel the constant disruption in his stomach and bowels. In a moment of lucidity, he tried to remember who he was and could not.

Light exploded around him. He seemed bathed in supernal glory. At the same moment, his mind itched. And he heard the first clear words in what seemed a very long time: “We’ve done all we can without reconstruction.”

He pondered those words, so familiar and yet alien.

“He wouldn’t want that.”

Karen.

“Then there’s nothing more we can do.”

“Will he become conscious again?”

“He’s conscious now, in a way. He’s probably listening to us.”

“Can he speak?”

“I don’t know. Try him.”

“Garry? Can you hear me?”

Yes why not just let me die Karen No there’s “work to do.”

“Garry? What work?”

is the Recovery over

“…recovery over…”

“Garry, you’ve been very ill. Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t just let you die. I called the Hexamon medical center in Christchurch. They’ve done all they can for now…”

He still couldn’t see, couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed; the glory had faded to brown darkness.

“…don’t let them.”

“What?”

“Don’t let them.”

“Garry, you tell me what to do.”

She was speaking Chinese. She sounded very unhappy. He was making her unhappy.

“What’s reconstruction?”

Another voice interposed, speaking English. “Ser Lanier, you can’t recover fully without reconstruction. We send tiny mobile medical devices into your brain and they help repair nerve tissue.”

“No new body.”

“Your body is fine, such as it is. It’s your brain that’s damaged.”

“No privilege.”

“What’s he mean?” the voice asked somebody else. Karen responded.

“He doesn’t want any privileged medical attention.”

“Ser Lanier, this is standard procedure. You mean—” voice fading, addressing somebody else, perhaps Karen again, “—he refuses implant preservation?”

“He always has.”

“None of that involved here, Ser. Straight medicine. You haven’t refused medical help before.”

No, I haven’t. Long life.

“Although I must say, if you’d come in to Christchurch, we could have told you this was coming on. We could have prevented it.”

“Are you from orbiting bodies?” Lanier asked slowly. He opened his eyes, could feel the eyelids open, but still saw nothing.

“I was trained there, Ser. But I’m from Melbourne, born and bred. Can’t you hear the Strine?”

In fact, he could now; the thick Australian accent.

“All right,” he said. Did he have any choice? Was he too afraid of dying, after all? He could hardly think, much less think straight. He simply did not want to be responsible for Karen’s pain.

Karen wept somewhere far away. The sounds faded and the brownness darkened to black. Before losing all consciousness, he heard another voice, this one with a Russian accent.

“Garry. More help coming. Get well, my friend.”

Mirsky.

48

Thistledown

Olmy had decided to disappear when it had become apparent they were going to offer him the command position. There was more risk than he was willing to take in harboring the Jart and standing at the center of the Hexamon’s most sensitive activities.

After speaking with Korzenowski, he returned to his apartment below the Nexus chambers, then to his old apartment in Alexandria, and cleaned both of all traces. He then prepared to deactivate his library link. He hesitated. Before severing all ties, he had one last duty to perform. He called up his favorite tracer and inquired as to the whereabouts of his son.

Thistledown, the tracer quickly replied.

“Incarnate?”

“Successfully born and now receiving body indoctrination.”

Neither he nor Ram Kikura had been there…Guilt and remorse were not emotions implants were made to control. “Can I speak to him outside of open channels?”

The tracer did not respond for several seconds. “Not directly. But he has set up a clandestine data account that can only be accessed by you.”

Olmy smiled. “Access it.”

The account contained only a single message. “Accepted for defense service. First duty in a few days. Success to us all, Father.”

Olmy read the message several times, and viewed the accompanying pict signifying love, respect and admiration. Without thinking, he reached out to touch the pict. His fingers passed through it.

“I have a message for my son,” he said. “And a request.”

When the message was in Tapi’s account, Olmy withdrew the tracer and shut down the terminal.

The time had come to hide himself where he was certain he could not be located. Stockpiling the few resources he needed, he moved them into a maintenance worker’s temporary quarters in a service tunnel near the north cap, third quarter.

He was not yet ready to present his information to the Hexamon; there was much more work to do. As yet, he had nothing that might be strategically useful; he had learned a great deal about Jart society, but nothing significant about Jart science and technology. There was little chance this Jart carried detailed information about such things; that would have been foolish in the extreme, given its mission. But Olmy still felt the need for a few more weeks of investigation…

In truth, he was losing himself in the study. He saw the trap—his own trap, not the Jart’s—and carefully avoided it; he could bury himself in his own head and simply process the information his partial passed on, for months at a time, returning to the outside world only to take his nutrient supplements and perhaps check on progress with the reopening.

He had never been given the opportunity to study an enemy so closely, so intimately; and studying one’s enemy was like examining a skewed mirror of one’s self. In time, playing against the strengths and weaknesses of an opponent, one could become a kind of negative impression, like a superimposed mold. And vice versa.

Olmy no longer despised the Jart. He sometimes thought himself close to understanding it.

They had worked out a kind of psychological pidgin that allowed each to think in the other’s manner, within a common bond of language. They had begun exchanging personal information—no doubt carefully selecting and pruning, but still offering each other personal insights. Olmy told the Jart of his background, his natural birth and conservative upbringing, the Exiling of the orthodox Naderites from the second chamber city; he did not tell of Korzenowski’s stored partials and his centuries-long conspiracy.

And through the Jart, Olmy learned:

A civilized planet is a black planet. No waste and no chance of detection. We hide here and prepare ourselves for service in the Way. There are many planets like this, where expediters in and out of service wait for their assignments. {I} was brought into service on such a world, lovely dark against the stars; {I} do not know what a natural birth is. {We} have been brought into service by duty expediters for as long as {my} memory is informed; at creation, {we} are supplied with knowledge necessary to {our} immediate duties. Reassignments bring further knowledge; {we} do not forget our past assignments, but place them in reserve, that they may inform {us} in emergency later.

Olmy told the Jart about human childhood: education, entertainment, choosing and receiving one’s first implants, the libraries; he did not tell the Jart about the Thistledown or what it was, and he carefully monitored his visual information so that the Jart could not see the starship’s gently curving chambers. He tried to provide the illusion that he, too, had been born and raised on a planet.

In time, he hoped to be able to penetrate the Jart’s analogous lies. After all, he was the captor; he had the upper hand. Perhaps later, when he had become completely sure of his mastery, he would tell the Jart nothing but truth, and all of the truth.

For the moment, however, they circled around complete disclosure…

Outside, the Hexamon worked steadily toward its goals. Olmy sometimes accessed a public library terminal away from his hideout, using his tracer to penetrate Hexamon propaganda, which had become oppressively thick. The Hexamon seemed to be hiding from itself, guilty for its actions. It needed to convince itself again and again.

Olmy was not encouraged by such subterfuge. It led to blunders and bad judgment. All of his worst suspicions and fears about the current Hexamon leadership were being realized.

After the mens publica mandate, the re-opening was on schedule. The defenses were nearly complete. The Way could be reconnected within a month, perhaps less; citizens on the orbiting bodies were enthusiastic but nervous.

On Earth, the Terrestrial Senate had been placed in emergency recess. The senators and corpreps were sequestered, as were a number of territorial governors.

Ram Kikura was still kept under house arrest and in a communications null in Axis Euclid.

Olmy received this information with grim resignation. There had always been the potential; now the potential was actual. The re-opening had become an obsession, and nothing would stand in its way—not even the honor and tradition of a thousand years.

In time, he might come to respect the Jarts, with their single-minded purity, more than his own people, mired in hypocrisy and confusion.

He returned to his study.

49

Earth

“Was Pavel Mirsky here?” Lanier asked as Karen turned him over and checked the flotation fields beneath him. She straightened and gave him an odd look, puzzled and irritated at once.

“No,” she said. “You’ve been dreaming.”

He swallowed and nodded: probably so. “How long have I been asleep?”

“It wasn’t sleep,” she said. “You’ve been reintegrating. They added the last repair microbes to your blood two days ago. You almost died…” She rolled him back onto the fields. “About two months ago.”

“Oh.”

She stood above him, face stern. “You almost did it.”

He smiled weakly. “I don’t remember much about it. Was I trying to find you, when it happened?”

“You were sitting on your chair on the porch. It was cold outside. You…I found you tipped over in the chair.” She shook her head slowly. “Sometimes I hated you. Sometimes…”

“I didn’t know it was coming,” he said.

“Garry, your father.”

“I’m not him.”

“You acted as if you wanted to die.”

“Maybe I did,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t want to lose you.”

“You wanted me to go with you, perhaps?” She sat on the side of the bed, on the edge of the soft purple sleep fields. “I’m not ready for that.”

“No.”

“You look old enough to be my father.”

“Thanks.”

She took his jaw in one hand and gently twisted his head to one side, touching a bump at the base of his neck. “They put a temporary implant in you. You can remove it later if you want. But right now, you’re a ward of the Hexamon.”

“Why? They lied to me…” He lifted his head and reached up, feeling the tiny bump himself. So there it is. I’m angry…very angry. And I’m relieved, too.

“The Hexamon wants you alive. Senator Ras Mishiney has been made the temporary administrator of New Zealand and North Australia…he ordered you be kept alive, and that an implant be installed whatever your feelings, so his job won’t be made any harder. You’re a hero, Garry. If you die, who knows what Old Natives will imagine?”

“You let them do it?”

“They didn’t tell me until after. They didn’t give me any choice.” Her voice softened, and her lip began to tremble. “I told them what you wanted. They did what they said they’d do at first, and then Ras Mishiney came…a sympathy visit, he said.” She wiped her palm across a damp cheek. “He ordered them to put in the implant. He said it must stay until the crisis is over.”

Lanier lay back on the fields and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I thought you were dead.” She stood, then sat down again and covered both her cheeks with her hands, eyes squeezed tight shut. “I thought we could never resolve…what…”

He reached up to her arm but she shrugged his hand away.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, reaching for her arm again. She did not refuse his touch this time. “I’ve been selfish.”

“You’ve been a man of principle,” she said. “I respected you and I was afraid for myself.”

“A man of principle can be a selfish man,” Lanier said.

She shook her head and took his hand in hers. “You made me feel guilty. After all we’ve done for the Earth, not to share…its handicaps.”

He looked at the bedroom window. It was night. “What’s been happening?” he asked.

“They’re not telling us everything. I think they’re close to reopening.”

He tried to get out of bed, but the long convalescence had weakened him, and he gave up the effort. “I’d like to talk to the administrator,” he said. “If I’m important enough to keep alive, maybe I’m important enough to talk to.”

“He won’t talk to any of us. Not really talk. He’s full of platitudes. I’ve come to hate them so, Garry.”

What a shock it must have been, Lanier thought, sitting on the porch, wrapped in blankets even though the air was warming. Summer. The Earth was going through its cycles, raw and uncontrolled and beautiful and ugly. What a shock to come from the perfect, controlled, rational environment of the Way and descend like angels into the squalor of the past.

He lifted his notepad and scrolled the display through what he had written. Scowling, dissatisfied, he deleted a few paragraphs of obfuscation and tried to remember the words he had just pieced together in his head.

They don’t need us, he wrote. Everything they need is in the Stone—the Thistledown—and when they re-open the Way, once again they’ll have more than they need.

“If not more than they can handle,” he murmured, fingers trembling slightly above the notepad keys.

Lanier had decided the time had come to write down all he had lived through. If he was to be kept isolated from the play of history, then he could record what he had already experienced. His memory seemed sharper after the reconstruction, a sensation he luxuriated in while at the same time experiencing more than a twinge of guilt. This was something he could do, under arrest or not; in time, perhaps what he recorded would influence people. If there was any profundity left in him.

What a shock, he began again, to find the past full of people who knew nothing of psychological medicine, people with minds as bent and warped and distorted (he deleted bent and warped) as nature and circumstance could (he stopped, having written himself into a corner. Started over.)…minds as distorted as the bodies of people in ancient times, gnomish, shriveled, withered, ugly, clinging to their ragged personalities, cherishing their warps and diseases, fearful of some mandated, standard mental health that might make them all alike. People too ignorant to see that there are as many varieties of healthy thinking as there are diseased; perhaps more. Freedom lay in control and correction, the newly formed Terrestrial Hexamon knew, yet what a task lay before them! Tricks and subterfuge, outright lies, were necessary in a constant struggle against the ravages of the Death as well as the causes of that disaster. And just as I was broken on the wheel of ministering to this misery, so the Hexamon in time wished for…

He paused. What? A return to the good old days? To the world they were in fact more familiar with, more comfortable with, despite their philosophies and stated goals? The Sundering had been the decision of a moment, in Hexamon time, just as now the re-opening was. Spikes in the smooth graph of Hexamon history. Points of cataclysmic fracture in a glassy matrix.

All very human, despite the centuries of Talsit and psychological medicine. Even a healthy, sane culture, with healthy, sane individuals, could not rise above strife and discord; it was simply more polite, less senselessly destructive and horrifying.

Karen had said she hated them now; Lanier could not bring himself to share that emotion. Whatever his anger, his disappointment, he still admired them. They had finally admitted to a fact that had been obvious all along. Humans of the past—Old Natives—could never comfortably mesh with humans of the future. Certainly not in a matter of decades, and not with the reduced resources available.

With a suspicious eye, he tracked a white speck flying above the green hills to the south, watching it pass behind trees and out of his line of sight. He glanced at his watch. “Karen,” he called. “They’re coming.”

She pushed through the screen door, carrying a tray of repotted plants. “Supplies?”

“I’d guess,” he answered.

“How kind.” She didn’t sound bitter now; they were resigned to being pushed out of the way. “Maybe we can coax some straight news out of whomever it is.”

The small shuttle came to a frozen hover above the small square of garden and grassy yard in front of the cabin. A traction field touched the ground, extending from the craft’s nose hatch, and a young neo-Geshel homorph in black descended. They had never seen him before. Lanier gathered up his blankets and threw them over the chair arm, standing with notepad in hand.

“Hello,” the young man said. He seemed oddly familiar in manner if not in looks. “My name is Tapi Ram Olmy. Ser Lanier?”

“Hello,” Lanier said. “My wife, Karen.”

The young man smiled. “I’ve brought supplies, as scheduled.” He glanced around, still smiling but apparently ill at ease. “Pardon my awkwardness. I’m a newborn. I passed my incarnation exams three months ago. The real world is…well, it’s vivid.”

“Would you like to come in?” Karen invited.

“Yes. Thank you.” As he climbed up the steps to the porch, he removed a palm-length silver wand from a pocket in his black suit and ran his finger along a glowing green line on one side. “Your house isn’t monitored,” he said. “There are only monitors on the perimeter.”

“They don’t care what we say or do,” Karen said, no edge in her voice, only weary acquiescence.

“Well, that’s an advantage. I bring a package from my father.”

“You’re Suli Ram Kikura’s and Olmy’s son?” Lanier asked.

“That I am. Mother nobody can reach—they’re very afraid of her. But she’ll be free soon. My father is hiding, not because they’re after him…I don’t know why he’s hiding, truly. But he thought you might like a clear, clean report of what’s happening on Thistledown.” The young man looked solemn. “I could get in a fair amount of trouble. But my father took chances in his career, too.”

“They designed well,” Lanier said, translating a Hexamon picted compliment into English.

“Thank you.” Ram Olmy handed the old-fashioned memory cubes to Lanier. “You can probably spend a few weeks reading what’s in there. No picts, just text. Father had it translated from picts where necessary. I can give a summary…”

“Please,” Lanier said. “Have a seat.” He indicated a winged-back chair near the hearth. Ram Olmy sat, clasping his hands in front of him.

“The Engineer is going to create a number of virtual universes tonight. To fish out the end of the Way. I think you’ll be able to see the side effects. It’s going to be spectacular.”

Lanier nodded, not sure he was up to spectacular wonders just now.

“The defenses are in place. They haven’t been tested, but soon. I’m assigned to one of the test crews.”

“Good luck.”

“I appreciate your irony, Ser Lanier,” Ram Olmy said. “If all goes well, the Way will be reconnected in a week, and the first test opening will be within two weeks. I hope to be there when it’s opened.”

“Should be quite a moment.”

Lanier hadn’t taken a seat. Karen stood behind him. Ram Olmy looked up at them, eyes calm but body still not at ease. He moved his hands to the chair arms and then clasped them again. Like a young colt, Lanier thought.

“I have a message from Konrad Korzenowski, too,” Ram Olmy said. “Ser Mirsky hasn’t been seen anywhere. The Engineer told me to tell you, ‘The avatar has fled.’”

Lanier nodded. Then he turned and said to Karen, “We’re making the boy uncomfortable, Let’s sit.” They pulled up chairs. Karen offered refreshments, but Ram Olmy demurred.

“I’m built on slightly different lines than my father. Not as efficient, but I don’t need Talsit devices.” He held out his hands, obviously proud of his new material form.

Lanier smiled. Tapi reminded him of Olmy, and that memory was pleasant. Karen seemed less taken by this breath of Hexamon wind.

“Why is your father in hiding?”

“I think he’s expressing some kind of disapproval, but I truly don’t know. We’re all embarrassed by your isolation here. I don’t know of anybody in the defense and protection league who approves of the way Earth’s being treated…”

“But you see it as a necessity,” Karen said.

Ram Olmy regarded her with steady, clear eyes. “No, Ser Lanier. I don’t. The Emergency Laws put responsibility for decisions on the president and Special Nexus Council. They give us the orders. Disobeying the orders, under these same rules, means loss of incarnation privileges and direct downloading to city memory. That would put me back where I started.”

“How did you pull this duty?” Lanier asked.

“Excuse me…pull?”

“Get this duty.”

“I requested it. Nobody saw anything to object to. I said you were friends of my father, and of the Engineer, and that I could carry a message from the Engineer to you.”

“They aren’t secluded?”

“No. My father’s hiding, but he hasn’t broken any laws. They can’t make you take command positions. That would be ridiculous.”

“Korzenowski volunteered?” Karen asked, her interest growing.

“I’m not sure what his motives are. Sometimes he seems quite strange, but he’s getting his work done. So I hear. The Special Nexus Committee can’t control all communication links; there’s considerable gossip on Thistledown. I see him very seldom, and his partial gave me this message.”

“We appreciate your bringing it to us,” Lanier said.

“My pleasure. My mother and father mentioned you often. They said you were among the best Old Natives. I also wanted to say…” He stood abruptly. “I have to be getting back now. The supplies are unloaded. When this is over, when the Way is re-opened, the Hexamon feels it can finally have the resources to finish our work on Earth. I look forward to that, and I’d like to volunteer now, to work with you on any project you might lead. Both of you. It would be my honor, and both my mother and father would be very proud.”

Lanier shook his head slowly. “This will never be over,” he said. “Not in the way the Hexamon imagines.”

“Mirsky’s warning?” Ram Olmy asked.

“Perhaps. And abuse of trust,” Lanier replied. “The Hexamon will have a lot of patching to do.”

Ram Olmy sighed. “We’ve all listened to the testimony. Nobody knows what to make of it. The Special Nexus Committee says it’s a forgery.”

Lanier’s face flushed. “You must have your mother’s and father’s brains, if they mixed you together out of their own personalities. What do you think?”

“He’s caught up in the adventure, Garry,” Karen said. Her attitude had softened. “Don’t be harsh on him.”

“Mirsky was no sham,” Lanier continued. “He was here, and he convinced the Engineer, and your father, I’m fairly sure, and your mother. His warning was serious.”

“Where is he, then, Ser?”

“I don’t know,” Lanier said.

“I’d be interested in meeting him, if he returns.”

“If he returns. What if someone or something more powerful than Mirsky takes notice of the Hexamon’s intransigence?” Lanier stood slowly, more agitated than he wished to appear. “Thank you for visiting us. Tell whomever is interested that we are well. I am recovering. Our attitudes have not changed. If anything, they have hardened. Tell your superiors this for us.”

“Yes, Ser. If the occasion arises.” He thanked Karen for her hospitality, locked eyes with Lanier, and nodded. “Good-by.”

“Star, Fate and Pneuma be with us all,” Lanier said.

They escorted the young man to the front yard, where remotes had finished the unloading and were now tracting back into their holds in the craft’s underside. Ram Olmy boarded and the craft rose quickly, spinning about to head west against the fading skyglow.

Karen put her arm around him and kissed his cheek. “Well said.”

“He seems to be a good fellow,” Lanier said. “Still, he’s one of them. Heart and soul.”

“His father’s son, more than his mother’s.”

Lanier kissed the top of her head. Twilight was blending into night. He looked up expectantly and shivered. “What magic is the old wizard going to work this evening?” “I’ll bring out the blankets,” Karen said. “And the heater.”

For a moment, standing alone in the yard with the stars coming out above him, Lanier did not know whether it was good or horrible to be alive. He could not stop the gooseflesh from rising on his arms. This is real, he reminded himself. I’m awake.

Soon, Korzenowski—and perhaps a part of Patricia Vasquez—would be playing with the ghosts of universes. Karen returned and they prepared a place on the grass.

“I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” she said softly. “They’re bastards, but they’re brilliant bastards.”

Lanier nodded, clutching her hand.

“I love you,” he said, tears coming to his eyes.

She lay her head against his shoulder.

Early the next morning, on his notepad, Lanier wrote: We saw the point of Thistledown low to the northwest, soft and ill-defined. The night was warm and my old bones did not ache; my mind is more clear than it’s been in recent memory, shockingly clear. I had my Karen lying next to me. We were among the few on Earth who knew what to expect this evening—or did we?

We owe them so much, these determined angels, our distant children. A lump came to my throat, simply watching the Thistledown—the Stone—ascend a few degrees. I feared for them. What if they made a mistake and destroyed themselves? What if Mirsky’s gods at the end of time decide to intervene? Where are we then?

Straight beams of clear white light fanned out from the Stone and crossed three quarters of the sky, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space, pointing away from Earth. I do not know what they were; not light alone, surely, for lasers or some similar phenomenon could only be reflected by dust, and there is not so much dust in space. We sat almost as ignorant as savages. The lines of light faded abruptly, and for a moment there was nothing but the stars and the Stone, brighter now, higher in the northwest. I thought perhaps Korzenowski had thrown a rough sketch across the heavens, and this was all we would see.

But from the point of the Stone, across the entire night sky, there unfurled a gorgeous curtain of violet and blue, taking seconds to reach from horizon to horizon. Within the curtain glowed indistinct patches of red; it took us several seconds to see, within the unfocused patches, images of the crescent moon, somehow lensed to two or three dozen locations.

The curtain then shredded, like rotten fabric washed apart by a river current. Where it had been, there now curled lazy arms of green, the tentacles of a monstrous jellyfish spiraling and vibrating. There was an organic ugliness in this that made me want to turn away; I was witnessing some unnatural birth, with the attendant gore and mystery; space being distorted or used in ways it is not accustomed to.

Then all dimmed and the stars returned, clear and sharp, undisturbed. Whatever happened now, could not be seen by us.

50

Thistledown

Korzenowski looked down on the sixth chamber through the blister covering the northern cap bore hole, fingers working restlessly on a small die of nickel-iron. Beside him, the president floated with arms folded, in ceremonial robe and cap resembling a Mandarin lord. He had come from a special Nexus session to observe the second and third series of tests; now they waited to see how the sixth chamber machinery would react.

A small plume of smoke rose from the third quarter; already, aircraft hovered around the damage site.

“You know what that is?” Farren Siliom inquired.

“Fire in an inertial control radiation duct,” Korzenowski said, paying the president little attention. His eyes were on the key points in the sixth chamber, points where any kind of pseudo-spatial backscatter could blow out huge sections of the valley floor. “It’s a minor problem.”

“The tests are still successful?”

“Successful,” Korzenowski acknowledged.

“How much longer before we make the connection?”

“Nine days,” Korzenowski said, giving himself some leeway. “The machinery needs time to reach equilibrium. We need to let the looped virtual universe dissolve. Then the path will be clear and we can reconnect.”

The president picted a symbol of unenthusiastic acceptance. “Neither I nor the presiding minister are comfortable with this,” he tight-beamed at Korzenowski. “We’re all forced to do things we’d rather not do, eh?”

Korzenowski glanced at the president with cat-square eyes. You’ve made the whole process Draconian as a kind of revenge, he thought. “At least we’ll be going home,” he said flatly. “Back to a life we may have been ill-advised to leave in the first place.”

Farren Siliom did not respond to this unconcealed self-criticism. Korzenowski had been the inspiration for just that action.

The web had become too tangled to ever separate single strands.

51

Thistledown

What is Pavel Mirsky?

Olmy stopped his exercises on the barren quarters floor and immediately swung up a second level of barriers; the question had come unbidden, and not through his partial or the established feed; it was not a stray thought or a wandering echo.

For several minutes, he stood rigid in the middle of the floor, face blank, trying desperately to locate the source of the query. It was not repeated; but as he checked each connection between his implants and natural mind, he realized repetition would not have been necessary. Information had been drawn smoothly and with very few traces of entry from his original, natural memory.

The barriers had been breached, yet seemed intact.

The room was bleak enough to serve as a tomb. For an instant, he contemplated blowing up his heart and the implants, but realized he could not. The voluntary connections had been severed. Now, only if hidden detectors in the implants were disturbed would he die. Where was the partial? Had everything been absorbed—including the secrets of his safeguards?

Is Pavel Mirsky a human like yourself, or is he command from another concern?

Olmy locked down his thoughts, hoping against hope that not all had been lost. He did not have the slightest idea what had happened, or how extensive the breach was.

I am finding much hidden information that provides missing color and form, the voice continued. It felt very similar to his own internal voice. That told Olmy that his natural sub-personalities, what the Hexamon psychologists called “functionary agents,” had been suborned.

Olmy felt like the captain of a ship whose crew has been suddenly and inexplicably possessed by demons. The “bridge” had been peaceful until just now; but peering below decks told a quite different story.

You are not command nor are you duty expediter. Are you command oversight in temporary physical form? No. We see you are a simple expediter given extraordinary privileges. No. Even more astonishing. You have taken these privileges upon yourself.

Olmy was fully aware he had made a horrible mistake. All of his safeguards had been sidestepped, so far; he had severely underestimated the Jart.

This Pavel Mirsky. There is nothing like him in your available memory. Nor in associated memory, nor in memory we have been given permission to access. Pavel Mirsky is unique and surprising. What is his message?

For a moment, Olmy thought that to allow the Jart access to this seeming irrelevancy could give him a chance to recover control and kill himself. Olmy prepared and released a summary of Mirsky’s story.

The Jart’s control could not be shaken. As Olmy’s sense of helplessness and horror grew, its cool, speculative fascination with Mirsky increased.

Mirsky is no longer of your rank and order. He is not human, yet once was; he returns with a message but you do not know how he returns. Mirsky has been awaited by us, yet appears to you; perhaps it has appeared to our kind also, but unknown to you.

Mirsky is messenger/expediter from descendant command.

Olmy tried to control his panic and relax. The situation had happened so quickly, with no warning, that some time passed before he fully realized their situations had reversed. He was the prisoner now, his personality fragmented and completely under the Jart’s power. What little of his mind was left to him—he quickly scanned his available natural memories and found most of them blocked by Jart inhibitors—could hardly understand the Jart’s last clear statement.

The Jart found Mirsky’s presence very significant.

Your struggle is illuminating. I spread faster with each status search you make.

“I acknowledge your control,” Olmy said.

Good. You fear what I will do to your kind. Harm to your kind was my original instruction, but it is superseded now. News of the appearance of a messenger from descendant command is far more important than our conflicts.

“How did you break through the barriers?”

Inappropriate curiosity. Are you not fascinated by messenger Mirsky?

Olmy buried a fragment of himself that wanted to scream. “Yes, fascinated and puzzled. But how did you break through my barriers?”

Your understanding of certain algorithms is incomplete. A flaw of your kind’s development, perhaps. I have been in control an indefinite but significant number of periods now.

“You’ve been playing with me…”

Does a failed >amateur< deserve greater consideration? You do not fit in a rank that we acknowledge respect for. Nevertheless, I will accord you the respect you have accorded me.

Had he been integrated, Olmy knew this would have been the lowest point of his long life. As it was, he felt a distant, free-floating misery, like a soul disembodied in some hideous afterlife, powerless to change or move.

It will soon be possible to give this important information to command oversight, the Jart said. If you help, integration of your personality parts will be allowed, and you may witness this important event with full faculties.

“I will not cooperate if you seek to harm my people.”

No harm to hosts of messenger. You have been recognized and by our law must be spared from storage and packaging. You are now expediters of descendant command.

Olmy tried to think that through. The risk was too great to even begin to think the Jart meant the Hexamon no harm…It had admitted that its primary mission had been harm. “What do you want to do?”

We must return to the Way. Command oversight must be informed.

Olmy knew he had no real choice. He had been hopelessly outmatched; he could not help but wonder whether, in time, the Jarts would have outmatched them all. Or was that a self-serving underestimation of his own, uniquely personal failure?

52

Efficient Gaia

Rhita felt like a caged animal. She did not want to know the truth; Rhodos was approaching rapidly, and it would reveal the truth. She was trapped in the bubble with a bent and distorted monstrosity, some unlikely battered doll of a human being. She heard it standing up behind her and dared not turn to look at it. Knuckles white on the railing, she closed her eyes, then opened them again, telling herself, This is what you wanted. To see it all.

But her reservoirs of strength had long since been tapped out. She opened her mouth to speak, and closed it to mute a shriek. Shaking her head, she bent over the railing and flung herself back, straining her arms and hands, wild with the grief she did not yet completely feel, but soon would, as surely as this was Gaia, the real world, her home.

Rhodos’s commercial harbor was visible, and the long bridge of land to the fortress of Kambyses across from Patrikia’s house that overlooked the old military harbor. The city of Rhodos itself was gone, bare brown dirt spread flat in its place. “Where is it?” she breathed.

The island was studded with gold-topped pillars of stone. From inland mountains to coastline, the pillars rose like a Kroisos’s dream of mushroom growths. “Why?” she cried out. “What are they?”

Typhōn’s speech was muffled now. He said something but she could not understand and refused to turn around to look at him. It.

The sun set behind them as the bubble slowed and approached the headland where Patrikia’s house had been—or still was, Rhita saw, surrounded by a fence of the same fringed metal snakes they had met with in the camp, it seemed much less than years before.

“Your temple is near here, too,” Typhōn said. She heard it standing up behind her and felt an awful crawling along her spine; there were things worse than death, among them being in the service of these monsters. She wiped her face quickly with the palm of one hand, turned and faced the battered escort. “Why are these places still here?”

“Because they mean something to you,” Typhōn said. It reached up and pushed the top of its head back into place. She swallowed hard to restrain another urge to throw up. She had one thing she must hold on to, and that was the bare remaining shred of her dignity.

“This whole world is significant to me,” she said. “Put it back the way it was.”

Typhōn made a sound like a small dog choking, and its speech became much clearer. “Not possible. Already close to exceeding budget. Your world will have its uses. It will become its own repository; whoever wishes to study Gaia in later cycles will come here and do so. Meanwhile, it serves as a place to raise and train young. What you would call a holy place.”

“None of my people are alive?”

“Very few have died,” Typhōn said, adjusting a shoulder.

She remembered the unexpected yielding of its substance and turned away again, fist thrust into her mouth.

“In truth, more of your kind would have died had we not come here. By far the great majority are in storage. It is not unpleasant; my selves have been there many times. Unlike death, storage is not final.”

She shook her head, numb to the horror but unwilling to listen to more useless talk. “Where are my companions? You said you’d bring them here.”

“They are here.” The bubble moved through Patrikia’s gray and withered garden; the orange trees were dusty skeletons. They approached the house, and from behind the house other bubbles emerged, one containing Demetrios, another Lugotorix, a third Oresias. Each was accompanied by an escort: Oresias by what seemed to be an older woman, Lugotorix by a red-headed old man, Demetrios by a slender young male in student’s garb.

Lugotorix stood with arms crossed and eyes tightly closed. What he can’t see can’t make him more miserable.

Typhōn kept silent behind her. The bubbles orbited slowly about each other in Patrikia’s yard. Lugotorix seemed to sense her presence and opened his eyes, looking on her with an expression of fierce joy; he had not failed completely. Demetrios merely nodded, unwilling to meet her stare. Oresias seemed unable to raise his head.

Defeat. Final and total. No going back.

What would Patrikia do? If she were here, having lost two homes, two worlds…. Rhita did not doubt the old sophē would simply have laid herself down and died. The enormity was truly outside the range of a human mind.

There was no hope. “The whole world is dead,” she said.

“No,” Typhōn corrected her.

“Shut up,” she said sharply. “It’s dead.”

The escort did not contradict her again.

She tried to speak with the others, but no sound passed between them. Suddenly, she turned and faced Typhōn. On his distorted face there was a triumphant expression, brief but unmistakable. He had absorbed enough humanity to mimic exultation.

She had been brought here, she now believed, in part at least so that the victors could measure their triumph. Prisoners on parade.

She did not turn away. There had been no satisfaction in knocking the escort about; clearly, abuse did not bother Typhōn. And there was scant satisfaction in defiance. She was too small and limited to even begin to search for weaknesses. Still, Rhita needed to do something, to pick up some thread, or indeed she would just lie down and die.

But they would not let her die. She would be stored. And someday, surely the people who had built the Way would fight the Jarts again, perhaps destroy them, perhaps find her and her companions, as records or in boxes or however they might be stored, and bring them back. Could that much be hoped? She could barely even conceive of such things.

But Patrikia would have grabbed at any thread.

Rhita seized this one and observed Typhōn calmly now, having lost everything and knowing it if not accepting. “Take us back,” she said.

“This means nothing to you?”

She shook her head.

“You do not wish to visit the temple?”

“No.”

“Do you wish to die?” Typhōn inquired curiously, politely.

“Are you offering?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Just take me back.”

“Yes.”

The interior of the bubble seemed to fill with gelatinous smoke. She felt all weight lift from her feet.

Store me, she thought. Pack me away.

My time must come again.

Oblivion would have been welcome, if she could have known she would not be disturbed.

53

Earth, Thistledown

Lanier had resumed walking the trails again, climbing the side of the mountain, looking down over the autumn-brown grasslands and the increased flocks of sheep. Despite all that had happened, he thought himself a contented man. He could not save all of humanity from its follies; could not stop the flow of history.

Losing his sense of responsibility was a necessary liberation; he had spent much of his life helping others. Now was the time to calm himself and prepare for his own next step.

Despite the forced implant, and his relief at being saved from death, he knew he would not choose immortality. When the time came—whether it be ten years, or fifty years—he would be prepared.

He did not think his personality was so valuable that it should impose itself on others for more than a century. This was not humility, nor was it exhaustion; it was the way he had been raised.

He accepted that Karen did not agree. Even so, they were much closer than they had been in years. That was sufficient.

Two months after his recovery, on a particularly crystalline night, they walked under the stars. Thistledown was not visible. “I’m not sure I care what’s happening up there, down there.” She pointed through the Earth at where Thistledown might be.

Lanier nodded. They walked on, lantern illuminating the trail in a blue circle for several meters ahead. “That’s where we met,” he said, and it sounded silly once he said it; silly and awkward, the words of an uncertain youth, not an old man. Karen smiled at him.

“We have had many good years, Garry,” she said. Then, with her usual directness, she said, “What’s more important to us now, our past together, or our future?”

He could not answer. In a way, he was being forced to stay alive. That implied that he wanted his future to be brief…. Yet he did not wish to die. He simply wanted equality and justice, and under the present circumstances, immortality did not seem just. He was willing to die for these convictions. “Just us, now,” he said.

She held his hand more firmly. “All right,” she said. “Just now.”

Lanier knew that Karen would not stay at his side forever. Once the isolation was lifted—almost certain within the next few months—she would become active again, and perhaps separation would drive them apart again. He didn’t want that, but they were no longer well matched. He could accept being old; she could not.

Still, there were many people he would like to see again.

Questions he would like to have answered.

Whatever happened to Patricia?

Was she home, or alive in some other alternate universe, or had she died trying?

Thistledown orbited Earth every five hours and fifty minutes, as it had since the Sundering. In some regions of the Earth, the asteroid’s bright star was worshipped even after decades of education and social engineering; humanity’s psychological yolk sacs could not be eliminated so easily.

The news that the Earth’s saviors might soon leave—so the stories had been simplified—caused panic in some areas, relief in others. Those who worshipped the Thistledown and its occupants believed they were leaving out of disgust for Earth’s sins. They were correct in a sense; but if the Earth could not abandon its past, neither could the Hexamon.

With the re-opening on schedule, and Korzenowski’s wonders performing flawlessly, the Nexus Special Committee set about healing some of the worst wounds in their relations with Earth.

There was not much time; nor did they expend an enormous amount of effort. The Hexamon was enthused; hysteria was not possible, or at least highly unlikely, in the population of the orbiting bodies, but an almost drugged sense of splendor reigned. They were proud of their power and cleverness; they were happy to be working to solve otherwise insoluble problems. And they felt that Earth would benefit in the long run, that the Way would bring prosperity to them all.

Mirsky’s warnings were virtually forgotten. Hadn’t the so-called avatar vanished without trace? If his strength had been so enormous, why hadn’t he put a stop to the vote and forced the Hexamon to do things his way? Even Korzenowski gave Mirsky little consideration. There was too much to do, too many compulsions exterior and interior; and the interior compulsions grew stronger with each day.

The Engineer tracted from one end of the bore hole to the other, wrapped in his closed-end, baggy red robe like an overgrown infant.

The long, slender shapes of three flawships—transported from Axis Thoreau two days before, threaded through the Thistledown bore holes—hung suspended in softly glowing traction cradles, huge dark spindles along his accustomed path.

These were fully armed vessels, brought in as precaution. They could also be used to explore the Way.

Korzenowski looked down on the wide, cylindrical valley of the sixth chamber and felt a yearning he could neither analyze nor repress. The foundation on which all of his assembled partials had been integrated now colored him through and through. He did not protest; something was wrong within him, but it did not stop his work; if anything, it made him more brilliant.

For Olmy, dreaming had never been the same with implants, and it had changed even more radically since the Jart had taken over.

Sleep was not necessary for an implant-aided homorph. The processing of experiences and memories—and the relaxation and play of an overworked subconscious mind—took place during Olmy’s waking hours; these activities were assigned to surrogate mentalities within the implants. Essentially, Olmy’s concentrated conscious effort could continue at all hours while a parallel mentality “slept” and dreamed. The mentality could then refine and filter Olmy’s subconscious mental contents.

The process had been perfected across centuries.

Olmy’s dreams were intense, as real as waking experiences, like living in another universe with different (and changing) rules; but he did not access them unless he wanted to. They had accomplished their purpose without his necessarily being aware. Eventually, after five or six years, dream contents were purged or compressed in his personal implant, and either downloaded to external personal memory or deleted. Olmy tended to delete such contents. He was not fond of experiencing his own dreams, and seldom did so unless he felt they might hold the resolution to a pressing personal difficulty.

Now, however, the Jart mentality occupied all of Olmy’s available implant space, including his personal implant. Olmy, even when he had been in control, had had to reassign subconscious processing to its natural center—his primary mentality.

He had had the choice of either sleeping and dreaming naturally, or filtering out waking dream experiences. Before the Jart’s conquest, he had chosen the latter. Dreaming while awake posed few problems; he was mentally disciplined enough to not be distracted.

Now, however, the Jart was controlling and manipulating not only the implants, but his primary conscious and subconscious routines—those activities which took place within his organic brain. Olmy’s conscious primary self was often shunted into the dream-world abruptly and without warning.

It was a realm filled with monsters. The subconscious, all those agents and routines which handled automatic responses, was in a terrible state. Olmy could be consciously calm, but his fundamental self was terrified, helpless, and in a panic.

Often, when the Jart did not need his immediate attention, he was forced to wander the dream landscape like a character in a bad biochrone.

Forced to confront his dreams directly, Olmy found signs of character flaws that further undermined his already low morale. (Why hadn’t he dealt with these flaws through Talsit or other therapy decades or centuries ago? He might not have made the disastrous decision to ingest the Jart if he had been fully rational…) In his dreams, he repeatedly found suicidal urges and had to fight them off—small, insect-like creatures that threatened to eat away his limbs or bite off his head.

Sometimes it took all his courage and will just to survive until the Jart allowed his consciousness access to the external world.

In time, he wondered whether the Jart knowingly put him to this torture as a kind of revenge; drowning him in his own mind, just as the Jart had been forced to drown in its thoughts until it had slumped into timeless stasis…

But he had no proof, no evidence the Jart could be cruel or vengeful. It simply needed his entire mind to sweep for information, or practice its masquerade as a human being.

When his personality was foremost and in apparent control of his body, he could not act on any impulse or plan unless approved by the Jart.

So far, the Jart had not tripped any of those algorithmic snares that would kill them both. Not even Olmy knew where they were; the partial had managed to erase itself just before Olmy’s surrender—the Jart’s single lapse thus far—and only the partial had known the locations and character of the snares.

The Jart, having satisfied itself that its position was now secure, began to give Olmy more and more control, and to act more and more as a firm rider on a horse, rather than a puppet master. For the first time, it expressed its wishes as a demand, rather than simply forcing him to act.

We must speak with Korzenowski. Make us available for the reopening.

“They’ll open a test connection first,” Olmy explained. “It would be better to wait for the final re-opening. Even better not to be seen in public at all…”

The Jart considered this. We are both on >borrowed time<, no, fellow expediter? We must act quickly. The risk of early exposure does not outweigh the risk of finding your pitfalls. Once his test opening is made, Korzenowski may have great difficulty closing it.

The sixth chamber machinery had been examined and certified, and repaired or replaced where necessary; ten thousand corporeal humans, some seventy thousand partials and innumerable robots and remotes had done their finest work the past few weeks, at Korzenowski’s direction. The next major test was at hand.

In the final hours before the first connection, the Engineer rested in his spherical quarters, attached to the wall of the bore hole like a cocoon. He was mentally and physically near complete exhaustion. Even dividing himself into a dozen partials could not lighten the burden he carried. He had felt this burden before, and in one way it exhilarated him, but it had a sour edge.

Once, gate-openers in the Way had relied on psychological self-mastery. The cloak of ceremony wrapped around a gate-opener’s duties served as a reminder that a fogged or unfocused mind could not properly use a clavicle…

Yet Korzenowski, his mind in turmoil, was about to use the entire sixth chamber—in effect, the Thistledown itself—as a clavicle, opening something analogous to a huge gate.

He curled tighter in his red robes, resting within a tube of sleepfield lines. Eyes closed, he released a small cloud of Talsit, the last genuine Talsit in the Terrestrial Hexamon, as far as he knew. The session would not last long enough to clear his thoughts completely, but it would help. The fog filled the sleepfield and he inhaled deeply, evenly, letting the tiny particles enter through lungs, skin, wherever they could, cleansing, correcting, soothing.

“Ser Korzenowski.”

He opened his eyes. Through the thinning Talsit fog, he saw a man floating nearby. The sphere was locked; no one could enter without the monitor notifying him. He uncurled, brushing away the last wisps.

Again, it was Olmy. His friend’s appearance startled Korzenowski; he looked unkempt, his eyes did not seem to focus properly, and he smelled like an ill-tended homorph; he also smelled afraid. Korzenowski’s nose wrinkled.

“I would have invited you in,” Korzenowski said. “No need to enter like a thief.”

“Nobody knows I’m here.”

“Why hide?”

Olmy shrugged. Korzenowski noted that he wore no pictor.

“We’ve been close friends, more than that even, for a long time.”

Korzenowski stretched out and braced himself against a weak traction field. This sudden awkwardness was peculiar; they had always been at ease around each other.

“You’ve always relied upon my judgment…trusted me. And I’ve always trusted you.”

The Engineer liked this conversation less and less. Olmy seemed scattered, almost twitchy. “Yes.”

“I’d like to make an unusual request. Something the Hexamon might disapprove of. I can’t explain all my reasons now…But I think you’ll have major problems opening a test link with the Way.”

“My old friend, I’m expecting problems.”

“Not like this. I’ve been researching, collecting everything that we know about Jarts. I think I’ve found a way to prevent even greater problems when we complete the reopening. It may even help with the test. I’m asking you to send a message down the Way through the test link.”

“A message to the Jarts?”

Olmy nodded.

“What sort of message?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Korzenowski grimaced. “Trust has its limits, Olmy.”

“It’s necessary; it might save us all from a hideous battle.”

“What did you learn that could save us all?”

Olmy shook his head.

“I can’t do something so unusual with so little explanation.”

“Have I ever asked anything of you before?”

“No.”

“This may be primitive, and uncalled for, Konrad…but you owe me a favor.”

“Very primitive,” Korzenowski agreed. For a moment, he had a strong urge to call security. The urge passed, but it added to his sense of unease.

“You must trust me that this is very important, and that I cannot explain now.”

Korzenowski regarded the man who had saved his life and arranged for his resurrection. “You have unique privileges in this community,” he said. “But as you said, you’ve never taken advantage of them before…or taken advantage of me. What sort of message is it?”

Olmy gave him a memory block. “It’s recorded here, in a code the Jarts might understand.”

“A message directly to the Jarts?” Korzenowski could not conceive of a way in which Olmy might turn traitor; still, the idea shocked him. “A warning?”

“Think of it as an overture for peace.”

“You’re playing at diplomacy with the worst enemies we’ve ever faced? Does the president or the head of Thistledown Defense know about this?”

Olmy shook his head, obviously unwilling to say more.

“I ask you just one thing. Will this jeopardize the reopening?”

“Solemn oaths are old-fashioned, too. I give you my solemn oath that this will not jeopardize the re-opening. It may ensure its success.”

Korzenowski accepted the memory block, wondering if there were some quick way he could come to understand its contents. Knowing Olmy, probably not. “I’ll transmit it through the link on one condition…That you explain to me, very soon, what you are up to. What has really happened to you.”

Olmy nodded.

“Where can I contact you?” Korzenowski said.

“I’ll be at the opening of the test link,” Olmy said. “Farren Siliom has invited me.”

“The neo-Geshel observers want to keep watch on all of us. I’d just as soon not have an audience.”

“Difficult times for all of us,” Olmy said.

Korzenowski slipped the block into his robe’s pocket. Olmy stretched out his hand and the Engineer clasped it. Then he left the small quarters.

Will he transmit the message? the Jart asked as they exited the bore hole.

“Yes,” Olmy answered. “Damn you to whatever Jarts call hell.”

The Jart’s internal voice seemed tinged with sorrow. We are like brothers, yet we do not trust each other.

“Not at all,” Olmy said.

I cannot convince you of the urgency of my mission now.

“You haven’t yet.”

When your people open the Way again, I do not know what they will find…but it will not likely be pleasant.

“They’re prepared.”

Your passion is curious. I can do your kind no harm. You carry the message of descendant command. That is the message your friend will transmit—that you are not enemies, must not be enemies.

54

Earth

On his last day on Earth, Lanier cut wood for their stove—more a decorative item than a necessity—and enjoyed the physical labor. The positioning of the iron wedge and the solid slam of the sledge. The stacking of the logs. Solid, muscle-straining, authoritative, ancient rituals.

He watched Karen baking bread, and tasted a slice from a fresh loaf early in the afternoon.

“Today, I am free of my little helpers,” he said, pointing to a red mark on a wall calendar. The last of his internal medical remotes would have dissolved by now.

“You should call Christchurch for another check-up,” Karen said, following him with her green-gold eyes.

“They won’t remove the implant,” Lanier said. “Until they agree to do that, I’m boycotting Ras Mishiney’s little medical tyranny.”

She smiled, obviously not agreeing, but not willing to argue any more.

“Fine bread,” he said, putting on his boots, grimacing at the new muscles he had found chopping wood. “Makes the whole world cheerful again, just by its smell.”

“Old English recipe, with some Hunan embellishments,” Karen said, removing a second loaf from the oven. “My mother used to call it Four Unities Bread.” She slipped the loaf onto a rack on the tile counter. “Going walking?”

He nodded. “Need to stretch and cool down after all that labor. Want to go along?”

“Four more loaves,” she said, taking his arm and kissing him on the cheek. She stroked his gray stubble with one hand, solicitous, gentle. “You go on. I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”

He took the short trail behind the house, into an old coniferous forest that had managed to survive clear-cutting throughout the twentieth century. The thick arching ferns and spreading canopy of branches cast everything into a sun-spotted green gloom. Birds cut devious flutters through the undergrowth and high overhead.

He had hiked about two kilometers from the house when a weakness along his right side became apparent. Walking a few more meters, he felt a numbness accompanied by a dull tickle. His armpits became wet with sweat and he leaned on his walking stick, legs shivering like a sick dog’s. Finally, he couldn’t stand up any longer, and he half-sat, half-fell onto an old mossy stump.

Right side. Left brain. A new hemorrhage had occurred in the left side of his brain.

“I’ve had the little helpers,” he said, his voice high and childlike with pain. “They must have fixed me. This shouldn’t happen.”

A shadow crossed his face. Half bent over, unable to get up, he twisted his head to one side and saw Pavel Mirsky standing no more than two meters away.

“Garry. Can you come with me now?”

“I’m not supposed to be sick. The helpers…”

“They were not working right, perhaps?”

Fading fast. “I don’t know.”

“Inferior. Not Talsit. Pseudo-Talsit.”

“The medicals should have fixed it.”

“Nothing human is perfect.” Mirsky sounded very calm, yet he was doing nothing to help Lanier, not even calling for aid. Lanier had left his communicator in the cabin.

There was not much pain now, just the black tunnel, the doors slamming on memory. “It’s now, isn’t it? You’re here because it’s now.”

“You’ll be downloaded into your implant soon. You don’t want that.”

“No. But it shouldn’t be now.”

Mirsky bent on one knee and stared at him intently. “It is now. You are dying. You can either die their way—they will give you a new body this time—or you can die your own way. In which case, I would like you to come with me.”

“I…don’t understand.” His speech was slurred. He couldn’t control his tongue. This is awful. It was awful before, it’s awful now. “Karen.”

Mirsky shook his head sadly. “Come with me, Garry. There’s adventure. And some startling truths. You must decide soon. Very soon.”

Not fair. “Call for help. Please.”

“I can’t. I’m not really here, not physical this time.”

“Please.”

“Decide.”

Lanier closed his eyes to avoid the tunnel, but he could not. He hardly knew who he was now. “All right,” he said in a voice so weak it was not even a whisper.

Something warm pressed behind his eyes, and he felt a sharpness—not painful, just sharp—throughout his head. The sharpness pared his thoughts away layer by layer, and for a brief moment, there was no self at all. Still the paring went on, unwinding, unraveling. Then the process seemed to reverse, and he felt things fall back into place, but with a different texture underlying—as if he were a layer of paint on a canvas, being peeled from the old surface and pressed onto a new…. Yet there was no surface, no ground, nothing solid to hang himself on, only the pattern and some ineffable connection to Mirsky, who no longer looked like Mirsky, or any human. What he saw now was not light, and what he heard from Mirsky was not words.

I’ve been wondering what you really are, he commented without lips to move. You’re not a man at all.

No longer, Mirsky affirmed. I will put something here for Karen, that she will not have lost everything.

Lanier’s body fell to one side, crushing a fern and knocking bark from the rotten side of the stump. The eyes flickered half-open. The right hand twitched and curled sharply, then relaxed. The lungs fluttered and urine trickled into the pants. The heart continued to beat for several more minutes, but then the breathing stopped and the chest was still.

His implant was not empty, but Garry Lanier was dead.

55

Thistledown

The seventh chamber was in shadow, turned away from sun and Earth and moon, pointing to the stars. Its smooth-cut edges, its vast round cavity swept clean of debris, were a lesser and emptier black. Only four sets of lights shone on its perimeter, and fitful glows from survey parties making final alignments.

The blister capping the bore hole now contained a contingent of VIPs and guests; the official Hexamon historians, a group Korzenowski was not unfamiliar with; scientists and technicians who would assume the maintenance functions once the Way was reconnected and re-opened; the president and presiding minister; the director of Thistledown; Judith Hoffman.

Olmy, looking considerably improved.

They all hung in the dim lines of traction fields like spider’s prey, quiet, expectant.

As much ceremony as if this were the actual re-opening, Korzenowski thought, moving to the center of the dome with his extended clavicle. He had done this before, centuries ago; opening the Way for the first time after its creation, setting the Hexamon on a course far more difficult and final than any had then suspected.

He had still not made his final decision on whether to transmit Olmy’s signal. Friendship, even personal debt, was not something that could be weighed against an event as important as this…. The considerations of individuals were dwarfed by his larger responsibilities.

And yet, Olmy had never in his life done anything that was not for the good of the Hexamon. A more heroic and dedicated figure did not exist.

Korzenowski locked himself into the traction field at the center of the blister and slowly swung the control clavicle into place. The nodes surrounding the seventh chamber’s cap were slaved to this device. He had all the capabilities and the entire power of the sixth chamber machinery at his disposal. He had months of preparation and tests behind him. His hands on the clavicle were sure; his mind was more clear and more sharply focused than it had been in years.

The time had come. Around him, the visitors fell quiet and stopped picting.

Korzenowski closed his eyes and let the clavicle speak to him. The Thistledown’s superspace probes—little more than mathematical abstractions given temporary reality by the sixth chamber machinery—spread outward and inward and in directions that could not be followed by unaided human brains.

Across the smear of closely related half-realities that surrounded this universe, across the multiform fifth dimension that separated the great universes and their different world-lines, the probes went in search of something artificial, something unlike the precisely organized chaos of nature. They passed their results back to the clavicle and to Korzenowski. He saw a weave of great universes twisting around and even through each other, coinciding and separating, almost always spreading away from each other, their fifth dimensional distances increasing.

He knew a kind of ecstasy. The part of him that was Patricia Vasquez was like the quiet surface of a deep ocean accepting rain; not responding, merely receiving, leaving him alone to work his extraordinary technology.

For a timeless moment, Korzenowski’s senses merge with the clavicle, and he understood with a clarity at once transient and transcendent all the secrets of this limited fifth-dimensional cross-section. Korzenowski was in the state he had experienced only a few times in his past; theoretical quibbles about the nature of superspace meant less than nothing. He knew.

In that place beyond words and experience, he found an anomaly. Infinitely long, curiously coiled

it is very like a worm

at a number of points, those points being places of deep confusion known as the geometry stacks; curiously super-coiled within the boundaries of one universe, his own; extending like a linear flame to an unoccupied and indefinite darkness—the shadow of the terminal universe that would be made and would fail—

The Way.

Within those ponderous, fluid yet immutable coils—intestines, snakes, protein molecules, DNA—he searched for a cauterized end. The search might have taken centuries; he did not know or care. If the Thistledown itself had become a cold, sterile hulk in the time it took, he would not have been bothered. His goal was clear and overwhelming.

Korzenowski examined his creation more carefully this time, with a more practiced and mature eye. There were certain features of the Way he thought might merit future investigation: the structure of the very twisted and interwoven geometry stacks, the wonderful complex curves of the Way as it interacted with its parent universe’s own enormous space-time anomalies, avoiding disruption and inevitable destruction. His creation had become like a living thing, seeking to continue its existence undisturbed…

In all the weave of great universes, nowhere could the sensors find any overall pattern or sense. No intelligence had made all this, nothing had willed this totality into being. If a god or gods existed, they had no place here; this much he understood beyond any shadow of a doubt, knew in a way he could never consciously understand or recover.

There was no god of allness and everythingness. No god would have desired such a role; for what Korzenowski saw could not have been created, and would never be destroyed. It was superspace’s own Mystery, ineffable; the sink beyond all mathematics and physics that absorbed all Gödelian contradictions.

What Korzenowski saw was a fantastic panoply of canvases on which those things which concern intelligences could be painted, a playground for ever-evolving and ever-greater intelligences, up to and beyond gods. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds without end or beginning.

There would never be true boredom here, or true and permanent loneliness. This was All, and it was infinitely more than enough.

Almost as an anticlimax, the Engineer found what he sought, the cauterized end of the Way.

He readied the clavicle and powered the stimulators and projectors surrounding the open seventh chamber. Reflections and distortions of Earth and Moon and Sun formed slowly spinning halos around the perimeter. The distant stars shimmered.

He moved nothing, exerted no force, yet brought the cauterized end of the Way across vast distances to meet with the broadly distended field of the projectors. He gave little thought to anything but the reaches of superspace; he was in the ecstasy of stretching his abilities to their greatest range. Consequences were irrelevant now. The act itself was sufficient.

56

Earth

The night sky above Earth filled again with diffuse sheets of light and the stars danced. Karen shouted through the punctuated blackness; Lanier had been gone for seven hours, and she could not call for a search party. Power to the cabin was out. More than power was out—no communications were possible.

She navigated back and forth along the trail, moving through the forest by the light of an electric lantern, flinching at the pyrotechnics visible through the canopy overhead. “Garry!” She had an awful knowledge, the awareness of a missing connection; she knew she would not find him alive. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and blinked to clear away a sting of terror.

Again Karen shined the lantern beam on the trail. Always, his footsteps ended here. As if he had been carried away. She had gone farther three times now, finding no more footsteps, no trace; tear-streaks on her face reflected red from the sky as she stared up, grimacing with frustration. “Garry!”

His footsteps became confused here, as if he had stumbled around. Beside the trail, ferns and deep moss hid any spoor. A stump rose from the foliage. She had passed the stump half a dozen times, pacing, shining the lantern at it.

For the first time, she noticed that a long layer of bark had been freshly peeled away. She pushed through the ferns and saw a declivity beyond. Ferns had been crushed on the lip.

Breathing deeply, erratically, she stumbled and slipped down the shallow angle and stood in the gully, pausing, not wanting to complete the act. Lips set tight, she bent over and fingered a broken fern. Then she used both hands to pull aside the thick fern boughs.

Above the forest canopy, cold sea-green luminosity smeared across the sky, brighter than her lantern, creeping under every shadow and flattening all depth. The outline beyond the ferns was brought into dreamy relief.

“Garry,” she said softly, her face contorted. After a moment in which she felt as if she were falling down a long, deep well, she touched his neck for pulse, found none, then shined her light into half-open, unresponsive eyes. Her skin crawled at the coldness of the body’s skin, her husband’s skin, and her breath came in painful hitches, unconscious, sharp, birdlike cries lost in the forest. She could not call Christchurch. All communications were disturbed by the activity at Thistledown.

She was on her own.

Instinctively—she had done this only once before, but the training had been thorough—she opened her pocket tool and pulled down the rumpled jacket collar, rolling the corpse over to expose the neck.

57

Halfway

Lanier could not feel his body, or for that matter anything else, but he could see in a fashion; seeing without eyes, wrapping himself around light and finding images.

He experienced the presence of his teacher, and knew it to be the being that had masqueraded as or played or returned to the role of Pavel Mirsky. He mingled with this being, observed its nature and qualities, and began to model himself after it, gaining more control.

Without speech or words, he asked certain pressing questions left over from his physical mind, and received the beginnings of answers.

Where are we?

Between the Earth and Thistledown.

It doesn’t look like the Earth. Those fingers of light…

We’re not seeing with eyes now. You left those behind.

Yes, yes…The taint of his own impatience sent a ripple through him that was its own punishment. He would soon learn to control these vestigial emotions; without a body, they were more than useless, they were disturbing. The pain is gone. But so is my body.

No need.

Lanier absorbed and processed images of the Earth below. It did not look at all the same now; it seemed covered with glowing, shifting strands that reached out to darkness, twisted, and vanished…What are they? I can hardly see the planet, there are so many of them.

All those being gathered, large creatures and small. Watch where the light goes.

It ties into a kind of knot…I can’t follow it.

Harvesting the lives. Gathering all the memories and patterns, all the sensations and recollections.

Souls?

Not as such. There are no ectoplasmic bodies or souls. We are all frail and temporary, like wilting flowers. When we are gone, we are truly gone—and the universe is empty, desolate, shapeless. Unless at some time those with the power decide to arrange a kind of resurrection.

Who’s doing this?

The Final Mind.

Our descendants save us?

With reason. The observations of living things are a distillation of the universe, a conversion of information to knowledge. All sensation, all thought, all experience, is gathered, not just at death, but throughout one’s life. That knowledge is precious; it can be distilled even further and passed through the tiniest fissures of connection between this universe, as it dies, and the new universe that is born out of it. The distillation imposes itself on the new creation, like the passage of seed, guides it away from chaos, impressing a pattern. The new creation can then develop its own intelligences, who will in some way or another repeat the process when their universe grows old.

Nothing dies?

Everything dies. But that which is special in all of us is saved…if the Final Mind succeeds. You see the urgency of my mission?

Lanier’s memories of all the years of pain and death came to him as if spread out in an album of three-dimensional pictures. Everything dies…But the Final Mind was burning galaxies at the beginning of time, to power this effort to recover all that was finest in all the things that had ever lived. Not just human beings, but all living things; all things, at any rate, that converted information to knowledge, that learned and observed and came to know their environment that they might change it. From the scale of microbes to the living Earth itself, all levels harvested and encoded, selected and

Saved.

He savored that thought, tasting it, delighting in it, sobering at what it really meant; not the resurrection of the body, not the salvation of any individual, but the merging and transcendence of the whole. That which is best in all of us.

He thought of his father, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in a parked car in Florida. Of his mother, dying of cancer in a hospital in Kansas. Of his friends and relatives and colleagues and acquaintances instantly immolated in the furnace of the Death, that scorching, ashing breath that lingered so briefly on the Earth. Their achievements, their courage, their foolishness and mistakes, their dreams and thoughts, harvested as if a combine swept over them, threshing their kernels of grain away from the husks and chaff of death. All the simple people, and the brilliant, the swift contentious birds of the air and the sheep of the green cloud-shadowed fields, fish and strange beasts of the sea, insects, people, people, people, swept up and saved. Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a form that the Final Mind could remember all that you were?

And not Earth alone, but all the worlds of this galaxy, and all the worlds of those galaxies filled with life, immense fields of hundreds of billions of worlds, some strange beyond imagining. Immense was not the word for such an undertaking. On any such scale, the fate of the Earth was less than insignificant, yet the Final Mind was diverse enough, powerful enough to reach down to Earth and shape history with such delicacy, focusing the eviternal on the infinitesimal.

Even in his present form, he found this hard to accept, impossible to understand.

Am I being harvested, too? Is that what you’re doing now—carrying me away?

We have a different path and a different role.

What are we—spirit, energy?

We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which particles of matter and energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they are—pathways hidden to humans in our time, but available to the Final Mind.

Where are we going?

First, to Thistledown.

58

Thistledown

The witnesses had gathered in the bore hole, behind Korzenowski’s control center: the president, presiding minister, the director of Thistledown, official Hexamon historians, Judith Hoffman, selected senators and corpreps.

Directly ahead, through the blister, a circle of night expanded slowly until it touched the smooth-cut edges of the open seventh chamber, banishing the stars. Within the darkness swam afterimages of Sun and Moon and Earth, growing smaller and dimmer.

Korzenowski opened the test link. A pinpoint of milky light glowed in the center of the dimensionless blackness. Concentrating on the clavicle, refusing to be distracted by any display but the abstraction provided by the machine, he “felt” through the link and explored what lay beyond.

Vacuum. The nearly empty void surrounding the flaw; the brightness of a plasma tube.

The frequency of light matched that of the Way’s own variety of plasma tube.

A few meters behind Korzenowski, President Farren Siliom heard the Engineer whisper, “It’s here.”

Now Korzenowski broke out of his trance long enough to pict an instruction to the console hovering beside him. Olmy’s mysterious signal passed through the open link and down the Way.

“Is everything—” the president began.

The point of light in the darkness ahead of them flashed. Korzenowski felt a tremor in the clavicle. That tremor seemed to growl throughout the Thistledown; warning picts appeared in front of him, telling of disturbances in the sixth chamber.

Korzenowski made sure the link had been correctly established. It had.

Something was trying to pass through the link from the other side.

Korzenowski focused all his attention once again on the clavicle. A force had inserted itself into the link, intent on keeping it open; a force stronger and more sophisticated than Korzenowski had imagined possible.

“Trouble,” he picted quickly at Farren Siliom.

He tried to sever the link. The point of light remained, even grew in size. He could not reduce the link; all he could do was expand it, and he did not think that was wise. Whatever was on the opposite side apparently desired a complete re-opening, a reconnection with Thistledown.

Returning to the clavicle’s simulation of the weave between universes, Korzenowski examined the link from a wide variety of “angles,” searching for a weakness, something that in theory had to exist. He could exploit that weakness to destabilize the link, clamp it down on whatever was trying to pass through.

Before he found that weakness, a hideous flare of energy shot from the point and pierced the traction field blister over the end of the bore hole. The blister sparkled and vanished and everything spun in an instant wind, other traction fields flickering desperately as air rushed out of the bore hole.

Farren Siliom grabbed Korzenowski’s robe. The flare of energy whipped this way and that, searing the walls of asteroid rock and metal, arcing over the witnesses to touch the lead flawship and blast its nose into shards. The flawship swung out of its traction dock and smashed against Korzenowski’s spherical personal quarters, squashing it against the smoking wall.

Korzenowski could not breathe, but that didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and in the expanded instants of implant-augmented time, searched for the defect he knew must be there.

Farren Siliom lost his grip and shot past Korzenowski. An emergency traction field net expanded across the gap, lines glowing fiercely as it tried to stop the outrush of air and debris and people. The president struck this net and spread out against it, arms and legs held fast.

Olmy had fetched up against a pylon and now clung desperately, watching people fly past. Judith Hoffman, wrapped in a flickering emergency environment field, rolled by, and he reached out to grab at her. His hand was burned by the malfunctioning field, but he caught her and held, and the field extended around both of them.

Korzenowski, body spinning like a pennant cut loose in a storm, held in place only by the traction field connecting the clavicle and the console, felt his natural consciousness fade. He immediately switched all thought to his implant processors…And saw a glimmer of inequity, a hint of instability, from a certain “angle” on the link. The implant was wildly interpreting the flow of data from the clavicle; the defect “smelled” like something burnt, and left a sharp resinous taste in his mind.

The rush of wind slowed, the bore hole pressure having dropped almost to the level of the outer vacuum, but the blaze of energy pouring through the tiny link with the Way was narrowing, seeming to grow more specific in its targets. It had not yet, as far as Olmy had been able to see, hit any people, concentrating instead on large chunks of machinery, but now in its curls and convolutions it was coming dangerously close to the Engineer.

Korzenowski felt the heat but with eyes tightly closed, did not see the edge of his robe glow and disintegrate. More traction fields fought to regain the bore hole’s integrity, and emergency fields quickly formed spheres around the remaining people, but they were still being disrupted by the energy pouring out of the link.

The bore hole filled with spinning debris, stunned and unconscious people, agonized whorls and streamers of smoke; the loose flawship rolled and bounced slowly against the wall, threatening to crush the confused remotes that had gathered at the sides, awaiting instructions and an end to the chaos.

Korzenowski directed all the energies of the sixth chamber through the clavicle, at the defect in the link, seeking to open a gate there, a premature and disruptive gate that would force the link to close or create a violent crimp in the Way itself.

He wondered for a dark instant if they were facing the power of the Final Mind, as Mirsky had threatened; his intuition said otherwise.

The link blossomed into redness, like an expanding rose, and the petals lashed and abraded the cap of the open seventh chamber. He saw all of this briefly through the clavicle, and then felt an implant overload. If he did not disconnect, the implant—and part of his natural mind, as well—would probably be erased.

He removed his hands from the clavicle, but the work was already done.

The rose shrank against the blackness and stars. The blaze of energy vanished. The point of light, dimming rapidly, winked out.

Air stopped its painful rush past the Engineer. The traction fields held, and somewhere in the bore hole far behind, huge pumps began to replace the air lost in the past few…

How long had it been? Korzenowski queried his implant.

Twenty seconds. Only twenty seconds.

Olmy made sure the unconscious Hoffman was not seriously injured, then picted instructions for the environment field to separate. He tracted alone toward the console and Korzenowski. The Engineer steadied himself against his own emergency field, sucking in the thin air with painful gasps.

“What happened?” Olmy asked.

The Jart within him supplied the answer: Automatic defenses.

“I was about to ask you that,” Korzenowski said. “Your signal…” He stopped and looked around. “How many people lost? Where’s the president?”

Olmy looked through the transparent field now sealing the northern end of the bore hole. He could see a few twinkling bright objects flying outward on trajectories away from the seventh chamber and Thistledown. The traction field holding Farren Siliom had failed. Remotes were already speeding out to capture them.

“He’s out there,” Olmy said.

Korzenowski curled up in exhaustion and misery, collapsing like a pricked balloon.

“I think,” Olmy said, “that most of the dead are neo-Geshels…they all have implants.”

“Disaster,” Korzenowski said, shaking his head forlornly. “Was it what Mirsky warned us about?”

“I don’t think so,” Olmy said.

“Jarts, then.”

Olmy took hold of Korzenowski’s arm and gently urged him away from the clavicle. “Most likely,” he said softly. “Come with me.” The Jart did not attempt to control his actions; Korzenowski was as important to it as to Olmy.

The Engineer was almost babbling. “They tried to force the link to open completely. They want to get at us. They want to destroy us.”

Olmy asked the Jart if that was what they wanted.

Unless and until they receive the signal, that is almost certainly their goal.

The screams and groans within the bore hole subsided as medical remotes began to issue from the staging areas in the walls. Olmy guided his mentor toward a hatch. “We’re going to have to talk,” he said. “I have some things to explain.”

He did not know whether he had spoken the words voluntarily, or at the Jart’s command. Did it matter?

The message had been sent. Something had happened that could have destroyed the seventh chamber, perhaps the asteroid. The connection was not irrefutable, but it was strong…

Olmy’s failure was bearing its first fruit.

59

Thistledown City

In the Nexus chambers, the Engineer stood before the armillary sphere of testimony. Presiding Minister Dris Sandys occupied his Nexus seat, to one side of the president’s empty seat. The P.M. had escaped any serious injury.

Judith Hoffman, bruised and exhausted from the ordeal in the bore hole, sat in a special witness seat, along with the others who had escaped major harm. The rest of the Nexus chamber was empty; this was a matter for the presiding minister alone, as acting president, under the Emergency rules.

Olmy sat beside Judith Hoffman. The Jart was quiet within him; alert, but not interfering.

The P.M. requested that status reports on the dead and injured be projected before the chamber.

“The president,” he said dryly, “is being reincarnated now. There are a total of seven dead and nine seriously injured, including the two official historians, two corpreps, one senator, and the director of Thistledown. We haven’t suffered such losses since the Sundering. Fortunately, all are equipped with implants, and are expected to survive. Can you tell us what happened, Ser Korzenowski?”

The Engineer glanced at Olmy. There had been no time for the conversation Olmy had promised; both had been taken away by medical remotes for examination upon slipping into the staging area. They had not been alone since.

“I opened a test link with the Way. Something tried to pass through the link, and interfered with my attempt to close it.”

“Do you have any idea what the something was?”

“A Jart weapon, I presume,” Korzenowski said.

The presiding minister stared at him. “Is this merely a guess?”

“Vigilant Jarts, waiting for just such an opportunity,” Korzenowski said. “I don’t know what else it could be.”

The presiding minister asked if the representatives of the Thistledown Defense Forces agreed. They did; there was certainly no evidence to the contrary.

“Will it be possible to open another test link and learn for certain?”

“Yes,” Korzenowski said. “I can open an off-center link, in effect open a gate one hundred kilometers or so beyond the closed end of the Way. With proper shields and safeguards, we can make a reconnaissance and close the gate with little chance of detection.”

“How little?” the presiding minister asked.

“Little enough,” Korzenowski said. “But I recommend Thistledown be evacuated, all but for essential personnel and defense forces.”

The presiding minister stared grimly at him. “That would be a horrendous task.”

“It is essential,” the head of the defense forces said. “If we are going to reclaim the Way territories and establish a beachhead, there must be a buffer between the battle and our civilians.”

“What sort of buffer do you contemplate?”

“All civilians must be sent to the orbiting precincts or Earth.”

“Do you advocate removing just corporeals?”

“No, sir,” the head replied. “We advocate removing all corporeals, all residents in city memory, and all important cultural materials and data stores. Thistledown must serve as a buffer. In the unlikely event of our defeat, we must be willing to shut down the Way by destroying Thistledown.”

Hoffman glanced at Olmy. The expression on her bruised face was grim. “This is becoming an extravagant indulgence, isn’t it, Ser Olmy?” she murmured. “Nothing worth doing ever comes easy.”

Olmy didn’t reply. Second thoughts were more than ridiculous now.

“Is there substantial damage to the sixth chamber?” Dris Sandys asked.

“No, Ser,” Korzenowski said. “We can proceed.”

“We can’t say this is unexpected,” the presiding minister said. The following pause was long and accusing; nobody in the chamber missed the unspoken criticism. The president and presiding minister had been given little choice, and now, those who had put them in such a position had to face the consequences. “As acting president, and under the authority of the Emergency Laws, I order that Thistledown be evacuated, and that Ser Korzenowski and the defense forces make joint plans for further reconnaissance into the Way.”

60

Earth, Christchurch

Karen sat in the waiting room of the Christchurch clinic, face pale and drawn from lack of sleep. It had been thirty hours since she discovered her husband’s body, and still there was no word from technicians about the implant.

Her chair was opposite a window. Outside, the streets of Christchurch were filled with people, many in Hexamon uniforms, many Terrestrial citizens, thronging around the hospital. News of the evacuation had arrived less than half an hour ago; she worried now that her husband’s condition would be of no importance whatsoever in the middle of this enormously greater crisis, that they would both be forgotten.

She glanced at her hands. Despite scrubbing in the hospital lavatory, she saw there was still an overlooked speck of dried blood under her index fingernail. She focused on that speck—her husband’s blood—and closed her-eyes. The memories would not go away: opening up his neck, digging for the implant, slipping it into a pocket and zipping the pocket shut, driving along the dark roads in a balky ATV with the body and the implant into Twizel, all taking hours. After the sky had cleared, a shuttle had flown her into Christchurch.

The body, useless, had stayed in Twizel.

The issues were far from clear to her.

They had spent so many years together, and so few years, in comparison, growing apart…Their time coming together again had been so brief.

Humans are made for sorrow. We are not made for answers or certainties.

A technician—not the same one she had given the implant to—came through the door of the waiting room, glanced around until he saw her, and set his jaw grimly, a professional expression that indicated trouble. She raised her eyebrows, lips forming an expectant O.

“Mrs. Lanier?”

She gave the slightest nod.

“Are you sure the implant came from your husband?”

Karen stared at him. “I’m sure. I…took it from him myself.”

The technician spread his hands and glanced at the window.

“He’s dead?” she asked suddenly.

“The implant doesn’t contain your husband, Mrs. Lanier. There’s a personality, but it’s female, not male. We have no record of this personality in our files…. We don’t know who she is. She’s complete, however—”

“What are you talking about?” Karen asked.

“If the implant is from your husband, I don’t see—”

She stood and almost screamed, “Tell me what has happened!”

The technician shook his head quickly, intensely embarrassed and uncomfortable. “There’s a young woman in the implant, about twenty-one years old. She seems to have been out of action—stored—for some time, maybe twenty years; she doesn’t have any memory of contemporary events. She certainly wasn’t downline loaded recently. Her coding—”

“That’s impossible,” Karen said. “Where’s my husband?”

“I don’t know. Are you acquainted with anyone named Andia?”

“What?”

“Andia. This woman’s ID lists that name.”

“She was our daughter,” Karen said, the blood draining from her face. She half-sat, and supported herself with one hand on the back of the chair. “What happened to my husband?”

“We haven’t done more than an initial query. The only personality in the implant claims that her name is Andia. I have no idea what happened to your husband.”

Karen sat heavily, shaking her head. “How? She’s been dead—missing—twenty years…”

The technician shrugged his shoulders slightly, helpless.

“Garry…they made him wear the implant.” She straightened in the chair. This was not reality; this was beyond anything she had ever dreamed, hope or nightmare: to regain her daughter at the expense of her husband, through some miracle or perverse trick. “He beat them at their own game.” But he couldn’t have done it alone. She looked up at the technician, determined not to shake herself apart. Her arms and lower legs felt as if they carried a mild electric current. She had to stand and move around or she would faint. She stood carefully, slowly, letting the blood flow back to where it was needed, willing herself to be calm and not get sick. Something had to be said; she had to react in some rational way.

“May I speak to her?”

“I’m sorry. Not until we’re able to expand her storage. She won’t be lucid until then. Your daughter is a Terrestrial citizen?”

Karen followed the technician into the hospital records area and answered his questions. With some searching, the old inactive legal records were recovered. Personality maps taken during the installation of Andia’s implant were compared.

They matched perfectly.

“The only word I can think of is miracle,” the technician said. Obviously, he did not believe her story; he had not removed the implant himself. “I’ll have to arrange for a legal inquiry.”

She nodded, numb now from head to toe despite her determination to stay calm. She felt cast adrift, isolated between horror and sorrow and wonder and hope. I’ve lost Garry and found our daughter. There was only one way that could be explained.

She had never been raised to believe in forces higher than humankind. Her upbringing had been strictly Marxist; the solace of religion was not available to her. Yet now she could think only of Mirsky, and what he might represent.

If you have him, please take care of him, she thought, addressing her message to the Russian, and to the forces beyond the avatar. And thank you for my daughter.

She waited alone in a small side room for an hour while the doctors and technicians tried to make their way through the maze of procedure and law. For a few minutes, she dozed off into a blank void. When the technician returned and awoke her, she felt much stronger; her numbness had passed.

“We’ll arrange for a reincarnation—she’s entitled,” the technician said. “That may take time, though. We’re going to be extremely busy here for the next few weeks, maybe months. We’ve been told to prepare our clinic for an emergency. Every available shuttle is going to be tied up for the foreseeable future, and all vehicles, too. I think I can arrange to have a medical shuttle take you home, however, if you leave in the next hour or so…”

She waved her hand, dismissing his offer. She had nothing to do at home. “I’d rather stay here. If I can be of any help.”

“I suppose you can,” the technician said, still dubious. “We’ve gone through your records—sorry, but there was an element of uncertainty here…. None of us can figure out what happened…” He shook his head. “Your daughter was lost at sea. There’s no way you could have her implant, and not your husband’s.”

She smiled a dismayed, sad smile and nodded.

“Are you going to be all right?”

She thought about that for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “I’d like to speak with my daughter, as soon as possible…”

“Of course,” the technician said. “I suggest you sleep in the infirmary for a while. We’ll call you.”

“Thank you,” she said. She looked around the room and prepared to lie down on an examination table.

Andia.

61

Thistledown City

Korzenowski walked across the park that bore his name, a relic come back to view his own monument; a brilliant anachronism.

He had come to meet with Olmy and talk, arriving an hour early to survey this old work, visited only once since his reincarnation. For the time being, there was little for him to do in the sixth chamber and bore hole; whenever the defense forces had finished their work, and the evacuation of Thistledown was accomplished, he was ready to open another, more discreet test link with the Way.

Korzenowski Park covered one hundred acres in Thistledown City. Green and quiet, covered by immaculate fields of mowed and rolled grass, dotted with flower gardens and forests of oaks and elms and other, more exotic trees, it had been one of the few parks to maintain itself perfectly over the centuries of the Exiling.

Korzenowski, before his assassination—before the completion of the Way—had designed this place on practical yet utopian principles, using plant and animal, insect and microorganism, as harmonious pieces in an isolated perfection. He had given himself one constraint: that all living things within the park would be unaltered and natural. The utopian artifice had come from keeping certain species separate, and limiting the park’s ecology to a few well-chosen and complementary combinations.

The result had been peace.

One could walk through the park at any time of the year—the weather mimicked Earth’s seasons from the point of view of England in the late eighteenth century—and see nothing but growth. Remote gardeners groomed the park regularly, trimming away dead growth and mulching it on the spot. Insects and microorganisms did not prey on plants so much as work with them.

Here was topiary on a grand scale, arranged across Hilbert rather than Euclidean space; its shape was not that of animal or geometry, but of perfect biology, a kind of living heaven. Eden, as it might have been seen by an English gardener; certainly as Konrad Korzenowski saw it.

He had done this. He hardly knew who or what he was now; was he the Engineer, living history, animated legend, accorded formal respect and informal suspicion by both neo-Geshels and Naderites? Was he Konrad Korzenowski, natural-born human being, brilliant son of orthodox Naderite parents, mathematician and designer? Was he a container for the unhappy spirit of Patricia Luisa Vasquez?

It didn’t matter much; he was a mote of dust in a high wind, and what he had been or done in the past seemed more than remote. It seemed irrelevant.

Soon, the Hexamon would try to push back into the Way. There was a good possibility the current claimants to the Way would force them to destroy Thistledown; if that happened, very likely he would be annihilated in the firestorm.

Powers, forces, dominations.

He could barely remember the time he had spent working on the park. Those memories had been poorly represented in the partials that had been gathered and archived after his assassination.

He had been murdered by orthodox Naderites.

Shunned by his own parents for forcing the Exiling.

Troublemaker.

That just about summed it up.

He entered a circular hedge maze at the geometric center of the park. The waist-high outer hedges wandered in uneven tessellations, following no particular radiant or arc of the circle; some angles were in fact projections of three-dimensional figures, which made the outer maze particularly troublesome. Humans with implants had little difficulty riddling the maze, since they could easily visualize and manipulate it in their heads; without implants, it was a substantial brain-bender.

He remembered building it with the hope that those with implants would not use them…But most did. That had taught him something about human nature, that challenge and difficulty mattered less to the great majority than accomplishment and gain, even in the Hexamon.

Korzenowski glanced up toward the center of the maze and saw a man standing there, a hundred meters distant. The man began to work his way outward; Korzenowski, as if challenged, began to work inward. The sport was diverting, relaxing; he did not look at the man directly, choosing instead to remember his own design, and riddle what he had forgotten or lost.

They were still some meters apart, on separate concentrics of the easier central maze, when Korzenowski looked up and stared the man full in the face. For a moment, it seemed as if no time at all had passed since the Sundering, forty years gone and the early hours of his reincarnation fresh in memory…

The man was Ry Oyu, chief gate-opener for the Infinite Hexamon. His presence was as impossible as Mirsky’s; both had gone with the Geshel precincts down the Way.

“Hello,” the gate-opener greeted him, lifting a hand. He nodded at a point behind Korzenowski, alerting him that they were not alone. Korzenowski reluctantly turned away from Ry Oyu and saw Olmy on the maze’s periphery.

Abruptly, the Engineer laughed. “Is this a conspiracy?” he asked the gate-opener. “Are you in league with Olmy?”

“No conspiracy. He isn’t expecting me. This seemed like an opportune moment to talk to you both. Shall we meet Ser Olmy on the outside?” the man asked. “This is a wonderful maze, but no place for comfortable conversation. Too many distractions and problems to solve.”

“All right,” Korzenowski said, his tone deliberate and measured.

“You don’t seem surprised,” Ry Oyu said.

“Nothing surprises me now.” Korzenowski waited for the gate-opener to join him. As they moved together through the maze, following the pathway, he asked, “Are you also an avatar, prophesying doom?”

“No prophecy. I’m afraid I’m here to be a hard taskmaster,” Ry Oyu said. “Would you like to question me, to confirm my reality?”

“No.” Korzenowski waved his hands, brushing the suggestion away. “You’re the Ghost of Christmas Past. Clearly, the gods themselves take a great interest in all our affairs.” He laughed again, this time a small, exhausted laugh.

“You’re convinced I am what I appear to be?”

“No, not that,” Korzenowski demurred. “But I’ll accept that you are whatever Ry Oyu has become.”

The former gate-opener picted approval of that judgment. Korzenowski noted that Ser Oyu did not appear to wear a torc or any other kind of projector; the picts emanated out of nothing, a talent interesting in itself.

“I have a difficult request to make of both you and Olmy,” the gate-opener said.

“More a command, I suspect,” Korzenowski said.

“I’d like the opportunity to convince both of you of a certain necessity.”

“I agreed with Mirsky,” Korzenowski said, feeling vaguely guilty. At least part of me did. “I supported his efforts.”

Ry Oyu smiled knowingly. “You’ve worked exceptionally hard to re-open the Way.” His tone was not accusatory, but in the Engineer’s present mental state, under the present Dickensian circumstances, the gate-opener did not need to directly accuse.

Korzenowski waved one hand again, as if to shoo the gate-opener away. “I perform my duty before the Hexamon.”

“You have no other motives?”

Korzenowski did not answer. He had no other motives; whatever stained his personality like a dye, he could not answer for.

“You contain a duplicate of the Mystery of a very singular woman. I myself arranged for the transfer. You’re working for her now, aren’t you?”

“If you put it that way…”

“I do.”

“I suppose I’m working on her behalf, yes. But what she wants doesn’t contradict my duty.”

“A mystery is not a complete personality. When something goes wrong during a transfer—if motivations or basic obsessions are copied as well—then the mentality resulting is not a responsible, integrated individual.”

Korzenowski felt a hollow, dismal despair.

“I am haunted,” he admitted. “I have been…pushed, compelled…” He couldn’t finish.

“Don’t be distressed. It can all work out for the best.”

Korzenowski wanted to shrink away, to consider whether he should in fact resign from his duties, appoint someone who was accountable, responsible.

“You can use her brilliance, what you have of it,” Ry Oyu suggested as they exited the maze. The gate-opener picted greetings to Olmy, who accepted his presence without comment.

“Nobody’s surprised to see me,” the gate-opener observed wryly.

“It’s the season of miracles,” Olmy said, his voice oddly inflected, strained. Outwardly calm, inwardly tormented—Korzenowski wondered what compelled him now.

“Have you two confided in each other yet?” Ry Oyu asked.

“I’ve confided nothing,” Olmy said. “But I suppose we have no secrets from the Final Mind.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s obvious the time is right for a long talk.”

Korzenowski thought Olmy looked at least as haunted as he did. “This is as safe a place as any,” he suggested. “No monitors, no remotes. We can pict in tight-beams.”

“Speech will be difficult,” Ry Oyu said. “It’s time to bring the nonsense to an end. Ser Mirsky’s approach was not firm enough, I gather…or devious enough. I have a proposition for both of you, something that could resolve all of our difficulties—though not the Hexamon’s. Earth and the Hexamon are going to have to learn to live with each other. Are both of you willing to listen?”

“I am obedient,” Olmy said, his tone even more strained. “You are from descendant command.”

“What does that mean?” the Engineer asked.

They sat down in a circle of stone benches surrounded by tree roses. “You’re not the only one who’s haunted,” Ry Oyu said. “Time for Ser Olmy’s explanation, and then my proposition…”

62

Thistledown

There had been nothing like it since the Sundering. The four million inhabitants of Thistledown were being removed from the asteroid’s five populated chambers with every vehicle available in the Earth-Moon vicinity. Even with ten thousand shuttles of all sizes and utility, the evacuation went slowly; there was a great deal of resistance. Some infighting had broken out between the various factions that had made new homes on Thistledown.

In the last four decades, Thistledown had become the bulwark and nerve center of the Hexamon, taking over many functions from the orbiting precincts, which were considered much more vulnerable. Transferring these functions was an enormous task, simplified only slightly by the Hexamon’s ability to move mountains of data in very small packages.

Olmy stood in the first chamber bore hole, wrapped in an environment field, watching shuttles pass back and forth in ordered array. Four shuttles had been taken out of service and as gaps occurred in the steady stream, were being guided below the rotating docks into the staging areas for repair. Four out of ten thousand…Hexamon technology was still wonderfully efficient in some areas.

Olmy’s master witnessed these actions without comment, leaving Olmy, for the time being, to follow a previously agreed-upon routine of working with the evacuation effort and preparing, in secret, for the theft of a flawship.

He had made his confession; the expression on Korzenowski’s face had been particularly painful. But the distinctions between failure and defeat, and compliance with an authority higher than any of them, were dim indeed now…

Olmy had put down some of his burdens. Now he assumed a greater burden: the realization that even were he not Jart-ridden, he would be doing the same things, making the same plans, opposing the will of the Hexamon’s leaders and the mens publica.

Some would undoubtedly believe that that made him a true traitor, not just a defeated and foolish soldier.

Korzenowski made his preparations just nine hours before the next link, this time neglecting his ceremonial red sack-robe and wearing black overalls, more utilitarian, more suited to the adventure—or misadventure—on which they would soon embark. As he absorbed the reports of automated remotes and partials, all saying that the sixth chamber machinery and projectors were functioning properly, his natural mind gave in to a bit of wandering.

He clearly remembered the early years, after the first opening, when unexpected instabilities had four times threatened complete collapse. Those had been very difficult times, when the Hexamon had faced not only his awesome, temperamental creation, but the threat of the Jarts.

At first, there had been stand-off. Neither Jarts nor humans had known what to make of each other. Attempts at communication with the Jarts had been rebuffed. The first attacks by the Jarts—more like sorties with intent to inflict damage—had come just after his first instability crisis. The seventh chamber had sustained minor damage. In those early times, Korzenowski had worried that damage to a buried projector node could cause disastrous pinches in the Way…

His worries then had been unfounded. But through other means, such a pinch or crimp could be the very technique he would use in a short time—perhaps within twenty-four hours—to begin the Way’s dismantling. The crimp, if properly formed, could be accelerated along the Way’s “length” in superspace, causing it to coil, knot, form fistulas, and eventually disintegrate.

“Coil” and “knot” meant something quite different when applied to such higher dimensions. Korzenowski had worked out what that ripple of destruction would look like from within the Way, and from without.

While the Way intersected an infinite number of points in space and time—and a smaller infinity of points in other universes—each intersection was not in itself eviternal, of infinite duration.

Each gate opened would have a finite existence, no greater than the total duration of the Way’s existence as measured internally; no single gate would be in existence longer than the Way itself. The total number of gates that could be opened in the Way was huge, but not infinite; the Way could not give access to all possible points of intersection.

It would take years, perhaps centuries, for the ripple of destruction within the Way to complete its work. Much of the Way’s length would be accordioned as the crimp passed by, and a number of spontaneous fistulas—interconnections between different segments—would close off long sections, in effect creating closed loops. The fistulas could redouble and make connections between themselves, cutting the looped segments and letting them drift free.

When the crimp had completed its journey along the Way, there would be only a small tail remaining, connected to the “balloon” of the aborted universe mentioned by Mirsky.

All of this, in a way difficult even for him to understand, was reflected in the character of the far-distant segments of the Way as they had been viewed by Ry Oyu before the Sundering. Had Ry Oyu—or Patricia—even suspected such an unlikelihood, they would have seen the effects immediately.

Korzenowski finished receiving the reports and retired to sit in his restored spherical quarters within the bore hole. He closed his eyes, losing himself in contemplation and a deep melancholy that was not entirely unpleasant.

He had nobody, and everybody, to leave behind. No offspring but the Hexamon itself. Having died once already, he certainly did not fear extinction. What he feared was overstepping limits.

He had already intruded upon beings vastly superior to humanity with the creation of the Way. That they bore him no ill will was remarkable, and perhaps a hallmark of their superiority. Or it was possible that any emotion, or description, of the predicament—even the projections of Mirsky—were gross simplifications suited for limited minds.

Now, he was betraying his duty to the Hexamon to make amends for that overstepping of bounds. Would the Hexamon find sufficient flexibility and ingenuity to do without the Way forever?

Would they try to make another? What, if anything, would stop them?

In all his explorations through the clavicle, in all the explorations of all the gate-openers throughout the Way’s history, they had found no other construct like it…in this universe. Mirsky had hinted that other artificial constructs similar to the Way had been made in other universes, but no new Way would be made here.

Korzenowski was fully aware of his capabilities, but did not doubt that others could match them. He had failed to find a method of opening gates without an intermediary construct like the Way; perhaps others had succeeded, and that explained the lack.

Another possible explanation for the Way’s uniqueness was interference, prevention by the forces of which Mirsky and Ry Oyu were but the tiniest representatives. But why would those forces allow even one Way, if its effects were so obstructive?

If they followed Ry Oyu’s plan, and succeeded—there seemed enormous risk involved—perhaps in due time the Final Mind, what the Jart within Olmy called descendant command, could explain it all to them directly.

Within him, the Mystery of Patricia Vasquez was quiet. Ry Oyu’s plan did not forget her needs.

63

Earth

Before receiving her duty assignment in Christchurch, Karen made sure that the mentality of her daughter was being given the best of care. The equipment required to fully expand Andia’s mentality was not available in New Zealand, as it turned out; because of the evacuation, and confusion all around the Earth, it would not be available for weeks. That would delay Andia’s reincarnation; it also meant that Karen could not speak with her. For the time being, she could only work and be patient.

The confusion worked for her, in one way; nobody could think of charges to bring against her, not even Ras Mishiney, who received the news of Lanier’s death with barely controlled rage. The easiest course seemed to be to ignore her, let her blend into the evacuation effort. There could even be some political capital made by publicizing her devotion to duty in the face of tragedy.

When the orbiting precincts were full to capacity, camps were set up near the most technologically sophisticated urban centers on Earth. The ideal centers for relocation could provide city memory facilities and the advanced technology Hexamon citizens often needed for daily maintenance; like hothouse flowers, Karen thought, or specialized insects in a hive…Very much like all human beings, only more so.

She was assigned to the camps being constructed around Melbourne, acting as liaison between the Old Native administrators and the evacuation officials from the orbiting precincts. Day in and day out, as the week progressed, she smoothed over difficulties, improved understanding, and made sure that the resentments of the Old Natives did not hamper progress. At night, exhausted, she slept in a small, private bubble habitat, dreaming of Garry and of Andia as a child…and of Paval Mirsky.

When she did not sleep, in those short rest periods, she wept, or lay quiet as a stone on an emergency cot, face set, trying to puzzle through her reactions. Despite their separation, emotionally and sexually, she had never stopped relying on Garry’s presence, or at least the knowledge that he was available.

She was grateful for the chaos and the work. She suspected her grief was stronger and harder to come to grips with than if she and Lanier had been close all along; she could not put aside the thought that given a few more months, they might have come together as strongly as before.

The world was changing again. Karen actually relished the challenge of change; but with Garry at her side, what work they could have done! What problems they could have solved, and with such style!

The wounds of grief were already beginning to heal through her glorification of the good memories, and cloaking of the bad. She resisted these mild dishonesties at first, and then gave in, if only to shed her pain.

The camps neared completion by the end of the week. Shuttles already were arriving, disembarking evacuees.

Just after noon on the last day of the week, Karen climbed the side of a low, scrub-covered hill, carrying a small wrapped sandwich and a bottle of beer. She looked over what had once been a broad parkland. Hundreds of Hexamon machines—no larger than trucks—had planned, designed, and extruded emergency shelters, creating what would in a few days become fully functional, largely self-contained communities.

To the east, dumps of raw materials awaited the attentions of intermediate processors, which separated out the raw materials necessary for the construction machines. Purified minerals and cellulose and added foodstuffs—necessary for the machines’ quasi-organic components—were stacked in hills of meter-wide cubes.

The community on the flat land below the hill was more than half-finished, and already it bore some resemblance to the cities on Thistledown. For the moment, all the structures—row upon row of domes and tiered prisms, broad expanses of farm belt, large community centers like inverted cups—were translucent or white, but soon organic paints and textural modifiers would be layered over them, coloring and sculpting; interiors would then be added. Very few would be equipped with decorating projectors. The Hexamon’s evacuees would have to get used to more austere environments.

No doubt they would feel deprived, Karen thought. But this community would still be more advanced by several centuries than any other city on Earth.

By being forced to live on Earth, perhaps the Hexamon citizens would finally carry out the necessary but long-delayed steps in the Recovery. Terrestrial and Orbiting Hexamons would finally be compelled to come to terms with past and future.

Unless, of course, nothing happened to Thistledown…. Then the evacuees would return and things would continue as before.

But that seemed highly unlikely. Whatever the outward explanations, Karen saw the hand of Mirsky behind the evacuation.

Again, she found herself beseeching the Russian to take care of her husband. It had become a daily ritual. She found a surprising amount of comfort in it.

If forces beyond her comprehension were still at work, it was possible Garry had not simply passed into oblivion. Even if she never saw or spoke with him again…he would exist, somewhere.

The wind blowing over the camp and toward the hill brought a scent of fresh greenery—the scent of a city growing, coming alive. Karen glanced up at the sky and cruelly, irrationally, wished for Thistledown to be destroyed.

Not until late that evening, waking from a troubled sleep, did she realize why; and in the morning, preparing for conferences between the Melbourne city fathers and newly elected corpreps for the camp town, she had almost forgotten again.

The wish remained.

You have to know where you are. You cannot live in two worlds.

64

The Way

In the odd moments—whatever those moments were, time or delusion—when Rhita was not being examined, tested, questioned, whatever it was the Jarts did to her—when she could think a thought that she was reasonably sure was her own, she tried to understand what her grandmother had told her. That she worked through a wall Patrikia herself had not penetrated was obvious to her now; a wall of ignorance regarding the Jarts. What are they doing to me? They seemed to be keeping her thoughts and self in a separate enclosure. She did not feel her real body; or at least, she did not believe her real body was still connected to her. Some of the illusions presented to her were very convincing, but she had learned to distrust all apparent realities.

Where am I? She was back in the Way again, that much seemed probable; she had been given the impression that whatever had been done to Gaia, the task was not yet finished. By deduction, she would not be kept there; it would perhaps be more convenient to those testing her to have her body nearby.

Her mind might be anywhere.

Is Typhon testing me? She did not know; perhaps it did not matter. Jarts seemed interchangeable.

The tests they put her through were occasionally enlightening, to the extent that she remembered them, and that she could work with those memories in the scattered moments she had left to herself.

She was placed in different social situations with phantoms of people she had known. At first, these phantoms did not include those she had met in Alexandreia. She played the scenes with some hope they were real; part of her played them in earnest, quite deluded; she gave what she thought were honest performances. But part of her, however suspended, was always skeptical.

Many times she met Patrikia. Many times certain scenes were reenacted. In this way, her own memory was brought to the forefront, and Rhita was given an opportunity to review it, at the same time the Jarts did so.

All this changed after an immeasurable time. Her life became rooted; she became a student in Alexandreia. The delusion was not interrupted by her captors.

She stayed in the women’s dormitory, fought her way through social and political ostracisms, and attended classes on mathematics and engineering. She hoped soon to begin her studies in theoretical physics.

Demetrios became her didaskalos. The small part of her still suspended in skepticism wondered if this was the real psyche of Demetrios; there seemed something more convincing about him.

All of her surroundings were real enough that she began to relax. Her skeptical suspended self faded until she regarded such memories as passing delusions themselves. The last perception of this fading, skeptical Rhita was: They have finally gotten through my guard.

Then Alexandreia became real, if somewhat skewed at times.

She remembered nothing of the journey to the steppes.

Rhita won most of her academic battles. Demetrios seemed to take an interest in her beyond the normal relationship between didaskalos and student. They had something in common neither could define.

The days passed, Aigyptian winter coming, dry as usual but cooler; they went boating on Mareotis. He confessed that he had taught her almost as much as he knew, outside of political wisdom; “You seem slow to acquire that,” he told her. She did not deny it; she expressed her belief that honesty seemed a better policy than merely fitting in.

“Not in Alexandreia, it isn’t,” he said. “Not even for the granddaughter of Patrikia. Especially not for her.”

White ibises stalked through reedy shallows near the sandstone and granite retaining walls that had maintained Mareotis’s ancient boundaries for a thousand years. Rhita sat in the boat, trying desperately to remember something, her head hurting; perhaps she felt the pressure of her didaskalos’s attentions. They weren’t unwelcome, but there had been something else far more urgent…meeting with the queen? When would she do that?

“I’m still waiting for my appointment with Kleopatra,” she said, apropos of nothing.

Demetrios smiled. “Your father’s doing?”

“I think so,” she said, her head hurting more.

“He wants to beat out the bibliophylax.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason…. It must take a long time for anybody to see the queen.”

“Reasonably enough. She’s very busy.”

Rhita pressed her hands to her cheeks. They felt like…nothing made solid.

“I need to go back to shore,” she said quietly. “I feel ill.” Perhaps it was then that the long, continuous delusion began to unravel, and not because of her captors. Something within Rhita’s psyche was going wrong. All she had seen and felt erupted within her hidden thoughts, seeking release.

Days seemed to pass. She studied, tried to sleep quietly at night, but sleep was an odd thing, a void within a void.

She dreamed in these troubled sleeps of a young girl pounding on her grandmother’s door, wanting in. Who was this young girl, who wished to see Patrikia when she was very busy and could not attend to just anybody? The young girl wept and grew thinner, starving. In one night’s dreams she was nothing more than a husk, wrapped in a tight linen shroud and smelling of herbs, slumped against the door like a roll of stiff cloth, jaw slack. The next night, she was not there, but the knocking continued anyway, empty and desperate.

Patrikia never gave an audience to the girl.

Rhita, however, did finally get an appointment with the queen. She walked through the private quarters, noticing Oresias sitting in one corner, reading from a very thick, very long scroll, like an ancient scholar; she saw a funeral portrait of Jamal Atta on the wall.

And then a red-headed Kelt led her into the queen’s innermost chamber, the bedroom, deep in the palace, surrounded by arms and arms of quiet stone, cool, dark. The room smelled of incense and illness. Rhita examined the Kelt, who regarded her with outwardly solemn, inwardly terrified eyes. She said, “I should know your name, too.”

“Go in,” the Kelt told her. “Never mind my name. Go in to the queen.”

The queen was ill, that much was obvious. Rhita saw her on her long, wide leather bed, draped in the skins of exotic animals from the Southern Continent; gold oil lamps hung around her, and dim electric lamps as well. The queen was very old, thin, white-haired, wearing a black robe. Objects in wooden cases lay scattered around the bed. Rhita stopped by the bed’s right corner; the queen’s eyes followed her.

“You’re not Kleopatra,” Rhita said.

The queen did not speak at all, merely watched her.

“I need to speak to Kleopatra.”

Rhita turned and saw Lugotorix—that was his name—standing by the entrance to the bedroom. “I’m not in the right place,” she said.

“None of us is, mistress,” the Kelt said. “Remember. I am trying to be strong, to remember, but it is difficult. Remember!”

Rhita trembled, but did not feel her fear deeply.

Typhōn came out of the shadows, undistorted, as convincing now as Lugotorix, his face textured with experience, eyes wise, knowing, more human. “You are permitted to remember now,” the escort said.

65

Thistledown City

Tapi Ram Olmy walked down the corridor of the centuries-old apartment complex, searching for the floor designator of the Olmy-Secor Triad Family’s unit, as his father had instructed. He found it easily enough. The door was open, showing an interior decorated with the style and taste of the original occupants. He had often studied that period in his father’s life; the triad family had spent only three years in this unit, after being forced out of Alexandria, the second chamber city, in the last stages of the Exiling. And yet his father had always returned to this place, as if it represented home more than any other living space he had had.

Tapi, still fresh to the much more stable world beyond city memory and the crèche, found such devotion curious, but accepted it; whatever his father did, Tapi was sure, was fit and proper.

Olmy stood near the apartment’s single broad window, in a wide room to the right of the entrance. Tapi entered without speaking, waiting to be noticed.

Olmy turned. Tapi, for all of his youth, was discomfited by his father’s appearance. He seemed to have abandoned juvenation, or neglected his periodic supplements. He was thinner, haggard. His eyes seemed to fix on Tapi without seeing him.

“I’m pleased you could come.”

Tapi had pulled every string he could think of to be here, when every available member of the defense forces was on constant duty. He was not about to explain this to his father, however.

“I’m pleased you asked me.”

Olmy approached him, his eyes coming into focus again, looking him over with a loving gaze that pretended to be objective. “Very fine,” he said, observing those little details and embellishments apparant only to one who has lived in a self-designed body. “You’ve done well indeed.”

“Thank you.”

“You carried my message to Garry Lanier, I understand…before he died.”

Tapi nodded. “I regret not serving under him.”

“He was a remarkable man. This…is more awkward than it should be, between two men used to serving the Hexamon…”

Tapi listened intently, head cocked to one side.

“I would like for you to convey my love to your mother. I cannot see her.”

“She’s still isolated,” Tapi said. “I can’t talk to her now, either.”

“But you’ll be seeing her before I will.”

Tapi’s lips tightened on one side, the only acknowledgment of worry.

“I’ll never see either of you again. I can’t explain much more than that…”

“You’ve told me this once before, Father,” Tapi said.

“This time there’s no doubt, no second chances.”

“Pavel Mirsky came back to us,” Tapi said, hoping to make an extreme comparison as a joke. Olmy smiled in a way that chilled him.

“Probably no chance of that, even,” Olmy said.

“Can I ask questions, Father?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”

Tapi nodded.

“I couldn’t answer if you did.”

“Can I help in any way?”

Olmy smiled again, this time warmly and with a slight nod. “Yes,” he said. “You’ve been reassigned to Way defense in the seventh chamber.”

“Yes.”

“You can tell me one thing. My research hasn’t borne any fruit here. Do your weapons still attack only Jart or nonhuman objects?”

“They’re not set for human objects. They won’t fire on them.”

“Under any circumstances?”

“We can target them to fire on any object, manually…But there’s little time expected to do any manual targeting.”

“Don’t,” Olmy said.

“Ser?”

“Just that. Don’t manually target a human object. I will not compromise you any more than that.”

Tapi swallowed and glanced down at the floor. “I must ask one question, Father. You are not working under Hexamon instructions. That much is obvious.” He looked up and reached out to touch his father’s arm. “Whatever you’re doing is for the good of the Hexamon?”

“Yes,” Olmy said. “In the long run, I think it is.”

Tapi backed away. “I can’t hear any more, then. I will do my best to…do this, not do this. Whatever. But if I see any sign, even the…” His anger and confusion were apparent.

Olmy shut his eyes and gripped his son’s hand.

“If you have the least suspicion I’m lying, or working to harm the Hexamon, you target manually.”

Tapi’s face was grim. “Anything else, Ser?”

“You have my blessings,” Olmy said.

“Will I ever know?”

“If there is any way, within my power, to let you know what happened, and why, I will.”

“Are you going to die, Father?”

Olmy shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What do you wish to tell Mother?”

Olmy handed him a block. “Give this to her.”

Tapi tucked the block into a pocket and moved toward his father, hesitated, and finally put his arms around him, hugging him tightly. “I don’t want you to go, not forever,” Tapi said. “I couldn’t say that to you the last time.” He pulled back and Olmy saw tears on his cheeks.

“My God,” he said softly. “You can cry.”

“It seemed a good thing…”

Olmy touched his son’s tears with a finger, in wonder, and said, “It is. I’ve always regretted losing that.”

They left the apartment together, and Olmy closed the door. They parted in the corridor, saying nothing more, walking quickly in opposite directions.

Your son is very much like you, the Jart commented.

“Too much,” Olmy said.

66

The Seventh Chamber

The bore hole was almost deserted this time: it contained only Korzenowski and two defense force observers in corporeal form. Shields were in place beyond the traction blister, ready to move into position between the bore hole and the link at the first sign of problems. Emergency overrides had been placed on certain projectors, to allow Korzenowski to destabilize the link and withdraw power from the connection, a more efficient and rapid way to cut all communication between the Way and Thistledown.

Even with all the safeguards, Korzenowski was apprehensive. What would the Jarts do next? Something even more violent, something that could override all precautions?

It was remarkably like playing chess with a masterful opponent, one’s life hanging in the balance.

If the message of Olmy’s Jart had gotten through, there might be an entirely different reception. But he counted on nothing; the blaze of energy had come through the small link almost as soon as it was opened, and there was no way of telling whether any signal could have passed through, or if there had been anybody or anything ready to receive such a signal.

He maneuvered himself before the console and placed his hands on the clavicle. He concentrated on this moment, and sank into the trance of superspace, experiencing all over again the glory and chaos and majesty of a search for the Way.

He found it, much more easily than before. In the clavicle’s sensory simulation of environments that were not entirely real, much less comprehensible to human senses, he orbited around a segment of the Way, although there was no “outside” to the pipe-shaped universe, any more than there was an outside to any other universe.

He quickly located a likely coordinate for a gate-like link.

The clavicle and the sixth chamber made their necessary adjustments.

Thistledown seemed insubstantial around Korzenowski, less than smoke, a dream from a past life.

A spot of light appeared beyond the blister, like a new star, not very bright. Korzenowski instructed remotes to push a probe through and investigate the environment beyond.

No energies slashed out; the gate-like link was stable and unimpeded. The remotes gave him a visual picture from within the Way, just centimeters above the link.

The Way was empty in this vicinity, and for hundreds of kilometers north and south. Radar signals probed rapidly south, and returned just as rapidly, telling him his gate had been opened a distance of one thousand kilometers from the cauterized end of the Way.

The Way was empty in that direction, and to the north, as well, for at least five hundred thousand kilometers.

Korzenowski broadcast the Jart’s signal once again through the link, paused for several seconds and then repeated it continuously. There was no response.

But the emptiness might be response enough…might, in Jart manners, be an exceedingly cordial invitation.

“We have a beachhead,” Korzenowski picted to the defense force observers. “The Way is empty to at least five ex five.”

He removed the remotes and severed the gate-like link. It had been previously agreed that under this circumstance, he was to go ahead and attempt a full link, to connect the Way to the seventh chamber.

Defense forces were already marshaling there, ready to secure the Hexamon’s advantage.

Korzenowski rested for several minutes, steeled himself, and began the re-opening of the Way.

The dot of light formed again, extended its petals outward, filled the void beyond the open seventh chamber with a garden of intricate, elegant flowers, the tortured world-lines of a haze of half-real universes surrounding status geometry. The flowers dimmed and were pushed aside.

At the edges of the seventh chamber, the color of bronze became apparent. Faster than his unaided eye could follow, the Way filled in the void with its complete presence.

The Engineer kept his place at the center of the blister, linked to the clavicle, waiting for the final evidence of his success: the lengthening of the Way’s central singularity, the flaw, to compensate for the Way’s new condition as an adjunct of status space-time.

He knew precisely where the flaw would stop its advance. It would end up just over nineteen centimeters from the locus of his clavicle, pushing through the blister field.

He felt the flaw advancing: to his eyes, it resembled a strange, curved mirror growing larger in front of him. In the clavicle’s abstraction, it registered as an enormous dynamically restrained force, all the tension of the Way’s existence and self-contradictions tied up in a calm, yet raging knot. The singularity was in some respects more real than the Way itself; but few humans could comprehend that kind of reality.

The flaw pushed aside the blister’s field, which formed a thin, bright-blue ring around it. Inexorable, awesome even to the Engineer, the blunt end of the flaw reflected some nightmarish version of their world, images thankfully indistinct, and came to its greatest extension—as he had predicted—barely a hand-span from the clavicle.

Korzenowski removed his hands from the clavicle’s bars. He could not see Ry Oyu, although he had been aware of the gate-opener’s presence throughout the linking. Defense forces in the seventh chamber swept their invisible beams of sensor radiation down the re-opened Way, searching for any sign of Jart occupation.

“The connection is stable,” he said. “The Way is open.”

67

The Way

The Stone orbited the Earth, as it had since the Sundering, with only one difference—it now pointed its north pole away from the Earth. The seventh chamber was now a featureless, abyssal darkness. Traction fields kept all matter away from the north pole. Nothing would be allowed to enter the area of linkage.

News passed quickly.

There were few celebrations. The reality was more a matter of sober reflection than festivity. The Hexamon’s obsession had been fulfilled.

But they had been away from their vast domain for decades—and who knew how much time had passed within the Way?

The president’s new body was still being made. Korzenowski stood in the middle of the president’s third chamber apartment, located on the peak of the highest building in a chamber-spanning curtain structure on which skyscrapers hung like crystals from a spider web. The space was empty and echoing, luminous with the unfinished whiteness of an undecorated environment. The president’s image was a projection from an isolated section of Thistledown’s city memory.

“Good day, Ser Engineer,” Farren Siliom said. Korzenowski stood with arms folded before the image.

“The work is done, Ser President.”

“So I’ve seen…and been told. A superb job, according to your colleagues.”

“Thank you.”

“Can you explain why the Way is now empty for such a distance?”

Korzenowski shook his head. “I cannot, Ser President.” It comes down to lies.

“Could it be because the Jarts are waiting for us, in ambush?”

“I don’t know what the Jarts are thinking, Ser President.”

“I think you might have a clue…as much as I do. I’ve had visitors in city memory, three of them.”

Korzenowski raised his eyebrows, but looked away, close to total exhaustion, wanting to sit. A chair rose out of the floor behind him and he sat. “Excuse me. I haven’t slept or used any Talsit. It’s been very strenuous.”

“Of course. It isn’t possible to truly dream in city memory, and fantasy or delusion is always clearly marked. What I saw was no delusion.”

Korzenowski folded his hands, unwilling to make guesses.

“Mirsky was there,” the president said. “And oddly enough, Garry Lanier, who has died…. Ras Mishiney tells me that he forced Lanier to have an implant. I don’t approve of that, but there’s little I can do to Mishiney…except guarantee he never rises above Terrestrial senator. At any rate, the implant did not retain Lanier’s personality. Somebody else was found in it: somebody missing and accounted as dead for twenty years. Lanier’s daughter. Who brought her back?”

Korzenowski gave the slightest shake of his head.

“Ry Oyu was there, also. He spoke with me. Lanier and Mirsky said very little. The gate-opener frightened me. He reminded me of higher duties, duties we once accepted as part of our responsibility in the Way…To utilize the Way in a manner that would ultimately benefit all of our clients. And he told me that you are going to start a crimp in the Way soon, which will eventually destroy it.”

“Yes,” Korzenowski said.

“These avatars can apparently go wherever they wish. Lanier and Mirsky are gone now. We won’t see them again. The gate-opener is still with us. He says his work is not finished…Though nearly so, if you’re still convinced.”

“I am,” Korzenowski said.

“This goes beyond immediate politics, no? We are both in key positions. I have the power to interfere in the plan. Or I can stand aside and let it proceed, even make it easier for you.”

“Yes, Ser President.”

“The Jarts are no longer our enemies?”

“Perhaps not, Ser President.”

“They will not attack Thistledown? They’re willing to give up the Way, and all it means to them?”

“I don’t know. Olmy’s Jart—” Korzenowski stopped, hoping he hadn’t told Farren Siliom something he didn’t know.

“I’m aware of Olmy’s Jart, though I think the Jart now has Olmy, not the other way around.”

“It’s probably responsible for the Jarts pulling back from the end of the Way. A signal was sent, informing its kind that humans had definitely communicated with what they call descendant command. Mirsky’s Final Mind.”

“So Ry Oyu told me.”

“They probably won’t attack us unless this is disproven, or remains unconfirmed.”

“I can’t imagine the Jarts giving up anything, certainly not the existence they’ve fought for, the privileges they value so highly. Could humans be so magnanimous?”

“We’ve both lived a contradictory existence the past year, Ser President, working for the Hexamon rather than ourselves.”

“That’s our sworn duty.”

“Yes, Ser. But there are higher duties. As you’ve said.”

“Do we know what would happen to the Hexamon if we were to persist and keep the Way open?”

“No.”

“Is it possible descendant command or the Final Mind would find a way to persuade the Jarts that the Way must be closed, and the Hexamon must be destroyed in order to do that?”

“I don’t know. It’s certainly possible.”

“I think it’s likely.” The president’s image appeared to come closer to Korzenowski. “I know what my higher duty is. We must preserve the Hexamon, whatever the mens publica thinks. However polite these avatars have been, however many miracles they’ve worked, I doubt we can stand alone against that kind of force.”

Korzenowski looked down at his hands. “No, Ser.”

“I have no other choice, then. I order you to destroy the Way. Can Thistledown be saved?”

“To completely destroy the Way, and prevent another Way being made, the sixth chamber must be destroyed as well. If we tried to…” He picted images of the sixth chamber being sabotaged, Hexamon forces arrayed against other Hexamon forces, civil war, destruction and division the likes of which the Hexamon had never experienced, even during the Sundering. “There’s no choice, if we wish to destroy the Way and preserve the Hexamon. Thistledown is already prepared for its own death…”

The president’s image darkened. “Why,” he asked quietly, “would anyone ever wish to be a leader of humans? We could be judged the most treacherous villains in Hexamon history…. But so be it. I’ll make sure the last phase of the evacuation is thorough. You will warn the defense forces…I don’t think they need to know what’s happening and why, but they should not be killed for their valor.”

“I’ll warn them.”

“I’m being installed in my new body tomorrow. When will the destruction begin?”

“Not for another sixty hours, Ser President. To give all citizens and defense forces time to evacuate.”

“I leave it in your hands. You know, Ser Korzenowski, I’ll be glad not to have to deal with these issues much longer.” The president’s image went black and disappeared, leaving a formal pict of dismissal and the Hexamon’s gratitude for services rendered.

68

Between

They had finished their work on Thistledown. Now they moved through their hidden conduits to points between worlds. Lanier’s sense of time had flown; not inappropriately, since he was supposed to be dead. But he still thought, still remembered, his mind somehow operating in a new matrix established and maintained by Pavel Mirsky.

Am I dead now? he asked Mirsky.

Yes. Of course.

There’s no oblivion.

Would you rather have oblivion? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

No…

Our time here is done. We have choices to make…Choices on how to go home.

Lanier felt like laughing. He conveyed this to Mirsky.

Marvelous, no? Such freedom. We can return as Ry Oyu will return, or take another route…much longer, more arduous.

And he outlined for Lanier where that route would take them, and how long.

Floating in the soothing, undemanding between, Lanier absorbed the information, already feeling separated from the reality that had been his life. Either route seemed acceptable…But the second way was extraordinary. Only rarely had he even imagined such a thing. Complete freedom, a journey beyond all journeys…and, as Mirsky pointed out, a journey with a definite purpose.

The Final Mind needs many observers along the way, many progress reports. We can provide one continuous report, from the beginning, to the end.

We won’t start here? Lanier asked.

No. We go back to the beginning. We are only observers, after all, and not actors, now that our labor is done. The information we gather can have no effect on the times we’ll gather it from.

Lanier’s thoughts became crystalline again, and he felt another sharp wave of an emotion mixing sense of duty, love and nostalgia. I haven’t cut my roots to the present yet.

Mirsky admitted that he had not, either; not completely.

Shall we say our farewells? Briefly, unobtrusively. To those we love.

For the last time? Lanier asked.

For a very long time to come…but not necessarily for the last.

Now you’re being obscure.

That’s our privilege, with such freedom! Where will you go to say farewells?

I have to find Karen.

And I will find Garabedian. Shall we meet again in, say, a few seconds, and begin?

Lanier found he could still laugh, and the feeling of lightness in him was held down only by that same weight of duty and nostalgia.

All right. A few seconds. However long it takes.

They sped along the conduits reserved for the subtle messages of subatomic particles, space-time’s hidden circuitry.

Karen walked with three terrestrial senators through the freshly painted streets of the Melbourne camp. “They call these camps. I call them palaces,” the senator from South Australia said. “Our people will still be envious…”

That debate had been going on all morning, and she was tiring of it rapidly. The day was going to be unbearably long; more meetings, more pointless bickering, more awareness that never, in all of human history, would they be free of their monkey heritage.

Karen stopped and felt her knees tremble. Something welled up within her, a tide of love and anguish and joy; joy at having spent so many years with her husband, working together, doing as much as two humans could.

Absolution. We are not perfect; it is enough that we did what we could.

“Garry,” she said. She could feel his presence, almost inhale him. Her eyes filled with tears. Part of her said, Not now. Don’t lose it now in front of these people. But the sensation continued and she held up her arms as if to a distant sun.

The South Australia senator turned and regarded her quizzically.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I feel him. It’s really him, it’s not just me.” She closed her eyes tightly, brought her arms down and held them rigid at her sides. “I feel him.”

“She lost her husband recently,” the senator from the south island of New Zealand explained to the others. “She’s been under tremendous strain.”

Karen didn’t hear them. She listened instead to a familiar voice.

We are always a team.

“I love you,” she whispered. Don’t go away. Where are you? Is it really you? She raised her arms again, grasping at the air, eyes still closed, and felt for the merest moment the touch of his fingers on her own.

There are many more surprises, she heard him say, and then the touch was gone, and he seemed to recede across a vast distance.

She opened her eyes and stared at the puzzled faces around her. “My husband,” she said, trembling uncontrollably. “Garry.”

They led her to a small greenspace between buildings. “I’m all right,” she said. “Just let me sit.” For a moment, surrounded by young trees and well-manicured lawn, Hexamon architecture a few dozen yards away, she thought she might be on Thistledown again, in the second chamber city, before meeting and working with Garry; that it was all just beginning…

She shuddered and took a deep breath. Her head was clearing now. The contact had been strong and undeniably external; she was not hallucinating, though she doubted she would ever be able to convince others. “I’ll be fine. Truly. I’m all right now.”

69

The Beginning of the Way

Korzenowski was making a sentimental journey. He wished to touch the surface of the Way before beginning its destruction. It was more than his only child; it was so large a part of himself that ending its existence was a kind of suicide.

Taking the elevator to the surface of the seventh chamber, he prepared his environment field and waited for the massive door to slide open and show that enchanting perspective, like something from an endless dream.

Considering the time he had spent as a cluster of inactive partials, only for the first century and the last forty years had he truly lived. By Hexamon standards, he was a youngster; he was certainly younger than his own creation, whatever time measurements could be applied to the Way.

Pumps sucked the air from the elevator cab. The door opened, and he stared down the throat of the beast that had once swallowed him, the Hexamon, the Jarts, and dozens of other races, opening up commerce between separate worlds, separate times, even separate universes.

The scoured bare rock and metal floor of the seventh chamber stretched for almost ten kilometers, gray and cold and dead. Beyond lay the surface of the Way itself, bronze in color, and not at all lifeless. Korzenowski knew that if he drew his eye close to that surface, he would see shots of black and red, a kind of ineffable bubbling activity: the life of space-time itself, vacuum teased and twisted and seduced into throwing up a perverse surface.

The bronze pipe, fifty kilometers wide, elongated itself to infinity before him. A mimicry of the tube light within the enclosed Thistledown chambers ran in a pale glowing ribbon down its center. He felt dizzy for a moment, as if he had actually become part of the tortured geodetics describing the Way’s unlikely existence.

A small personal shuttle awaited him. He boarded, and it flew at a level of several meters over the flatness, crossing the seventh chamber’s boundary, stopping and hovering some thirty kilometers from the southern cap.

Korzenowski stepped down from the shuttle hatch and stood a few centimeters above the naked surface of the Way. He removed the environment field segment beneath his feet. Now he was on the surface itself. Removing his slipper, he let his naked foot touch what was neither warm nor cold, what possessed only one quality at this moment and that was solidity. The surface of the Way was uninterested in the laws of thermodynamics.

Korzenowski bent down and rubbed the palm of his hand on that surface.

He stood up, feeling his foundation—the Mystery of Patricia Vasquez—very strongly now, as if someone were watching over his shoulder. Her creation, too, in a way, he thought. Our offspring, a wonderful monstrosity.

“Nothing is ever pure, except for you,” he said to The Way. “You were made by precocious children. We didn’t know what you would mean to us. You allowed us to dream fine dreams. Now I’ve got to kill you.”

He stood in silence for several minutes on the unresponsive, unreal surface, then returned to the shuttle and the seventh chamber bore hole.

70

The Way

“We’re prisoners,” Rhita told Demetrios on the lake, in the long wooden rowboat. “All of us. The queen is dead, and so is Jamal Atta. They aren’t here.”

“All right,” Demetrios said. “I agree something isn’t right. But what do you mean by prisoners?”

“This is a test, an experiment. The Jarts.”

“I’m not familiar with that word.”

Rhita touched his face with her hands. “Do you feel it, though? That we’re prisoners?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do you remember a Kelt named Lugotorix?”

An ibis flew from the shore and landed on the prow of the boat. It opened its long beak and said, “You can remember now.”

Rhita shuffled back through her past, hiding. Why remember? There was nothing she could do; no way to escape when the legs with which she would run weren’t real. She visited with her mother for a time, sitting in the stone and plaster house near Lindos, talking about inconsequentials. Relaxing in the sun, which was not as warm as it should have been, nor as bright. On the road to the temple to spend a day alone, her shadow preceded her, walking long in the morning sun on the dirt and gravel. She watched it with mild interest, then stopped. It raised its arms; her arms were down. It gestured wildly. It lengthened, crossing the road, up over dry hedges and stone walls, across a dead orchard. The tree branches swayed wherever it touched.

A young man with black hair approached along the road. He stood beside her for a time, watching the shadow lengthen to the island horizon, and then spread across sky and rushing clouds. She glanced at him, not at all curious. He told her, “We are losing you, Rhita Vaskayza. You must not hide. If we cannot hold you, your self will dissolve in its own memories, and we would not wish that. We will have to inactivate you. Wouldn’t you rather continue thinking?”

“No,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

She ran from the youth, but in thought or memory or wherever she was now, she made a very wrong turn.

Rhita stumbled into the warehouse of all her nightmares.

Before she could be inactivated, she saw the ghosts of all she had killed, flying over the sea’s bloody waters, questions on their lips, knives in their hands: Why did you open the gate?

She had killed Gaia.

But she could not herself die.

Her psyche, her butterfly, lay pinned in a box, examined and prodded by monstrous collectors. She saw hall upon hall, brightly lit, stretching for millions of miles, lined with steel cases, in every case row upon row of humans—infants, old men, crones, girls, young men, mothers-to-be, soldiers, all passing under her inspection with infinite detail, more real than anything in her true life had ever been, squirming on the pins that ran through their hearts. I am with you, she said. I can’t run from you.

But she was running. With no physical body to run with, she chased her self through her own memories, over all the roads of her mind, frantic with grief and fear and guilt. She ran faster and faster, until she seemed to melt and flow like water, the water frantically surging into a cold spray, diffuse and selfless…No center, almost no awareness.

A brief warmth before null.

71

Thistledown

Thistledown, launched thirteen centuries before by its own timeline, had been beyond doubt the greatest single achievement of the human race, made even greater by the creation of the Way. Containing the two finest and largest cities of all humanity, yet never fully populated; containing the greatest weapons ever devised, birthplace of the most accomplished and wide-ranging civilization, center of philosophies encompassing all the human religions, many synthesized into the myth of the Good Man, who exemplified the imperfect but glorious expression of that universal urge to Just Progress, Star, Fate and Pneuma: the universe, history and human spirit; Thistledown, transient and even humble name for such an endeavor.

Farren Siliom contemplated all these things from his apartment. He would not have time to get used to this new body; in a way, he regretted the waste of resources, but preferred to end his life in a physical form.

If Thistledown were to die, he would die with it, rather than explain to its citizens what he had done, and why.

Despite an odd melancholy—something akin to what he had seen in Korzenowski’s face—he did not feel much like a traitor. No doubt, in the scales of cosmic justice, he was a hero; but he didn’t feel that sense of justification, either. He had become nothing more than a small transducer in the circuit of history, a fate experienced most acutely by politicians who believe or hope they are in control.

He knew his place in the Thistledown’s history, though he was far from sure it would be an honored place. With no authorization, only the power of being in a certain office at a certain time, he had ordered—or at least supported—the asteroid starship’s destruction. He had done so for reasons that were inescapable and correct, yet that were still not clear to him. I have been persuaded by Gods. Historians are seldom kind to leaders.

His family was on Earth by now, in a camp in Southeast Asia. His two children, both conceived and born in the natural manner—in accord with his Naderite beliefs, but of course, with a few Hexamon embellishments, since he was not orthodox—those children would grow up more influenced by Earth than the orbiting precincts, he could prophesy; the precincts would more than likely close themselves off as a society, rendering aid and assistance, but turning inward. As such, within a century or two they could cease to be viable, their societies beginning the long process of decay, like a—he borrowed now from Terrestrial experiences, such as Garry Lanier might have had—lamb’s tail bound with cord, cut off from the parent body. Who could have foreseen such a possibility during the enthusiasm of the Sundering?

Earth would grow on its own, having been given a mighty boost; who could say where it would go, after the Recovery and such strong Hexamon influence?

He had placed remotes and partials in several places around Thistledown, all connected to his sensoria, to allow him to fully experience the moment when—and if—it came. He still reserved a small and probably foolish skepticism. Thistledown had always been. In his life, at least…

He felt a wave of sentiment for the old times in the Way, and it shamed him. But those times had been so much easier to comprehend, even if no less complicated. He had never thought he would be homesick for the awesome reaches of Korzenowski’s creation.

Since the Sundering, it seemed that the Hexamon had never truly known where it was. It had never found home.

72

The Beginning of the Way

Olmy reached out to touch the blunt, mad-mirror terminus of the flaw and felt it draw his fingers along where he applied pressure, and push them back when he applied pressure from the opposite angle. Frictionless, enormously powerful, the flaw had once supplied all the Hexamon’s energy through these transforms of space and time. Korzenowski watched from the blister.

“You can enter the flawships?”

“I can enter at least one of them,” Olmy said. “My imprint is still on this one.” He pointed to the first ship in the row, closest to the flaw, mounted behind the blister that covered the bore hole. The wreckage of the flawship damaged by the Jart intrusion had been removed, replaced by the second ship in line, and a third added. “It took us down the Way and through the closing end, during the Sundering…with Patricia Vasquez and Garry Lanier. We dropped off representatives from Timbl and other worlds…we dropped off Patricia to open her gate in the geometry stacks.” They tracted along the bore hole to float beside the flawship.

“I didn’t remember this was the ship,” Korzenowski said. “They look so much alike.”

Olmy pressed his hand into a circle scribed in the side of the flawship and a hatchway irised open noiselessly. The smell of the interior was clean and metallic, redolent with the blunt odors of unbreathed air and formfit decor. Light spilled from the hatch, gleaming against the dark metal and stone of the bore hole wall opposite. They entered.

Olmy tracted along faint purple field-lines within the ship to the controls. Korzenowski moved to the transparent bow. Behind them, the flawship interior was shadowy and silent, a long cylinder interrupted here and there with rounded shapes of unformed furnishings.

Are there restrictions to your use? the Jart asked.

I don’t think so, Olmy replied. He had once had nearly as high a clearance as a full-rank Hexamon senator, with the added advantages of connections in the defense forces; as far as he knew, his status had not been changed. He did not doubt that the ship would respond to any instruction he gave it. The defense forces would not expect a rogue in their midst, even though Olmy had played that part before. Certainly not a rogue that would steal a flawship and run it down the Way…

With the president’s influence—and a little help from vigilant Tapi, still somewhere aboard Thistledown—they would make it.

Olmy inserted his hands into control dimples and created a large docking field around the flawship. In the dark bore hole, green and purple diffusions played across the raw rock and metal walls. Slowly, the flawship advanced toward the blister.

Korzenowski, in the bow, used his pictor to instruct the blister to accept intrusion. They would pierce the blister and string themselves on the flaw. The flaw would pass through the center of the ship, down a flaw passage that gave the ship its U-shape cross-section. When the ship was strung, the open end of the U would close and the ship’s flaw grips would seize the elongated singularity. At Olmy’s instruction, the grips would bear down at a certain angle, and the flaw would translate the ship forward.

“My partial is sounding the final evacuation alert,” Korzenowski said. “The crimp in the Way will be started in six hours. We should be well down the Way by then.”

Olmy nodded. Tapi might leave a partial of himself to oversee operations, as would others in the defense forces; but there would be no one living left aboard Thistledown.

“Are you tired of life, Ser Engineer?” Olmy asked, apropros of nothing.

“I don’t know,” Korzenowski said. “Tired of not knowing who I am.”

Olmy agreed. “To knowing who we are,” he said, raising an imaginary cup in toast. He pushed the flawship slowly forward, through the blister and onto the long mad-mirror ribbon of the singularity.

73

Thistledown

The last Hexamon archivists and archaeologists withdrew their hundreds of thousands of hastily created partials from the second and third chambers, where they had conducted a final survey of the Thistledown’s cities. For lack of time, the other chambers had been neglected.

The contents of Thistledown’s city memory and the various library centers had been gleaned; all that remained untouched were the hidden information stores, private caches put away over the centuries by individuals who distrusted direct links with the libraries. Who could say how much history would be lost if these private caches were destroyed, never to be discovered or analyzed?

The archivists’ frustration was that the Hexamon, before the Sundering, had had centuries to explore the deserted cities, and had forbidden most such exploration because of the remote possibility of tampering in the sixth chamber. After the Sundering, the archivists had thought they had all the time they needed, never imagining a day such as this…

The defense forces withdrew with the last of the archivists. Only a few suicidal or thrill-seeking individuals remained now—and Farren Siliom, prepared to atone for his decision, however correct it had been.

He sat in the high, undecorated suite overlooking the third chamber city, picting artistic designs around himself, waiting patiently. So far, nobody knew he was here—or where he was. That saved the embarrassment of last-minute rescues, if anyone would be so rude as to interrupt a citizen’s chosen path to extinction.

There were no signs of the coming destruction. Thistledown was stable, the tubelight steady and bright.

74

The Way

“I’m setting acceleration at one G for the first few minutes,” Olmy said. He asked the Jart, Do you know where your people will be?

Singularity stations are spaced at intervals of about five million kilometers in Jart territory. We’ll encounter flaw defenses and barriers first.

Then we shouldn’t be traveling very fast, should we?

No more than one-fiftieth c. That is maximum velocity for all of our vessels on the flaw; anything traveling faster is automatically destroyed.

I presume you’ll have some way of alerting your superiors that we’re not belligerent?

When that time comes, I will perform through you.

Olmy, having at least the illusion he was in control now, did not look forward to losing it again. He explained the situation to Korzenowski.

“We should be a million kilometers down the Way when the kink is initiated,” the Engineer said. He picted his calculations to Olmy, who understood at least the factors of acceleration of Way destruction, their required velocity to outrace the destruction, and how long they might have at their unknown destination to do whatever the Jart thought necessary.

Was this what he had been preparing for these past years?

He had thought he was preparing for war; not for a fool’s run down the Way on a quasi-religious errand for a Trojan Horse Jart. But he knew he had to count his blessings; at least his error would not destroy the Hexamon. His own sacrifice, measured against avoiding even the bare possibility of such a disaster, was inconsequential.

He called up a display of the seventh chamber’s southern cap, now receding slowly behind them. The display showed no activated defenses beyond the deep-Way sensors and sweeping automatic target acquisition fields.

With no sensation of motion—the flawship contained its own inertial damping system—they began to accelerate at one G.

“Here we go,” he said.

Korzenowski could not help modeling again and again the sequence of events happening now in the sixth chamber machinery. Certain control centers would undergo planned failures within minutes. Other mechanisms would try to compensate for the failures. For a short time, they would succeed, but they would be exposed to strains and contradictions in design that would bring about their own, irrevocable failures. The projection nodes would try to shut off long enough to allow robot workers and remotes to correct the imbalance; when no such repairs were made, and the nodes had to switch on again to avoid their own destruction under the Way’s growing instability, the entire carpet of sixth chamber machinery would fail.

The kink in the Way would begin.

Where the kink originated, the Way would quickly become unlivable. Fundamental physical constants would change rapidly; what matter was left in the Way would cease to exist, converting to varieties of radiation not encountered in normal space and time. These radiations would quickly decay to extremely high-energy, photon-like particles, which would leak through the kink and appear in the regions near the Thistledown—and in randomly selected regions for a hundred thousand light years around the sun. Entering normal space, they would assume the character of actual photons, appearing as brilliant displays of Tcherenkov-blue.

Korzenowski shook his head, close to weeping. Unlike Olmy, he had never had himself altered to eliminate such emotional displays. What he felt was a deep sadness that extended into that part of him which was Patricia Vasquez. The Mystery they shared, however tainted by her obsessions, knew what was going to be destroyed, and how important it had been to the Engineer, how integral a part of his existence.

“It’s beginning now,” he told Olmy.

Ry Oyu came forward from the shadowy rear of the flawship, startling Korzenowski. “Your bravery is deeply appreciated,” he said.

Korzenowski shook his head slowly.

75

Axis Euclid

Suli Ram Kikura was no longer a ward of the Hexamon. Released from confinement to her apartment, she was a free woman again, free to contemplate the confusion and contradiction of the past few weeks.

She could not help thinking that Olmy was playing some substantial part in all this; perhaps he even knew what was really happening. Nobody else did.

All her anger and frustration was overridden by her sense of duty. First, she had to be sure that the destruction of Thistledown—if it happened—would not jeopardize the orbiting bodies or Earth. She did not have the technical expertise in these matters, even using the full capabilities of her implants, to come to any useful conclusions by herself.

For a moment, she simply reveled in having her lines of communication open and unmonitored. She decided to contact Judith Hoffman.

When she called Hoffman’s terrestrial residence in South Africa, a message awaited her, conveyed by a delegated partial with instructions to speak only to selected people, herself among them. The partial explained that Hoffman had been on Thistledown until the very last moment, and was now on a shuttle returning to Axis Euclid. The partial was willing to arrange a meeting; it was possible, if channels were not closed by the Hexamon, to speak with its primary now. Did she wish to do so?

Ram Kikura, usually reluctant to impose, did not hesitate now. “If you can open a channel, I’ll be very grateful.”

Hoffman’s partial made the necessary arrangements, found that channels were still available, and Hoffman herself appeared in Ram Kikura’s living room, seated in a white shuttle formfit, exhausted and unhappy.

“Suli!” she said, trying to muster a semblance of polite gladness. “It’s a disaster out here. We couldn’t access a third of what we wanted to…. If it all goes, we’ll lose so much…”

“Do you now what’s happening?”

“It isn’t even classified!” Hoffman said, waving her fingers in dismay. “The presiding minister lifted all security measures—”

“I know. I’m free.”

“The re-opening is a disaster. They say there was instability in the Way—but I can’t believe Korzenowski couldn’t take care of that.”

“Mirsky?” Ram Kikura suggested.

Hoffman rubbed her neck with her hands. “We were warned.”

The coloring on her image changed. With raised eyebrows, she peered to her left—where a transparency in the hull might be—and a look of wonder crossed her face. “What is it?” she asked others around her. Ram Kikura caught muffled sounds of other voices.

She glanced through her own window at the arc of darkness visible beyond the edge of what had once been the flaw passage. That region was no longer dark; now it glowed a ghostly blue.

“Something’s happening,” Hoffman said. “Transmission—”

She faded with a silent sizzle of white lines. Ram Kikura called for an image of the precinct’s exterior, and then added, “Where’s Thistledown? Show me that octant.”

A circle of radiant blue appeared in the middle of her living room, enchanting and deeply disturbing. It did not block out the haze of stars visible beyond Earth. “Thistledown,” she ordered. “Show me where Thistledown is.” A projected red line curled snake-like around the bean-sized white object and blinked. The glow was not coming from Thistledown, nor was it limited to the starship’s vicinity; it seemed to come from all space, all directions.

The bean-sized object grew brighter as she watched. “Magnify,” she demanded. Throughout Axis Euclid, she knew citizens by the tens of thousands were asking for the same picture; her own private projector’s image flickered occasionally as the precinct’s signal amplifiers and splitters cut in.

Thistledown appeared enlarged and in sharp detail, surrounded by a faint corona of even brighter blue. The north pole pointed away from the Earth and all precincts. But the south pole itself glowed now. Concentric and expanding rings of luminous pinspecks formed beyond the south pole, followed by even brighter rings and then continuous halos.

The Beckmann drive engines were cutting in; she was sure of it. Thistledown had not used those drives since the Sundering; now the asteroid starship was pushing itself away from Earth and the precincts.

What had been only an intellectual speculation before was now reality; Thistledown was preparing for its death.

Somehow, she knew Olmy was still aboard, or very near the Thistledown—perhaps in the Way itself.

Ram Kikura, like Olmy, did not have the means to cry. She sat in tense silence, watching as Axis Euclid’s sensors tracked the Thistledown. How long?

The glare from the Beckmann drives increased until the display had to adjust for brightness. The plume of destroyed matter reflected from the south polar crater, forming a long violet brushstroke against the unnatural blue. The colors and the circumstances went against all reason; she felt as if she were watching an artificial entertainment, depicting something remote and beautiful but hardly plausible.

It hurts, she thought, her implants working steadily to handle the emotional overload. I know he’s there. And that’s my home, where I was born and grew and worked—within the Way.

She could hardly bear to watch, yet she did not move.

She owed her past this much, to sit and watch it die.

76

Earth

The ethereal night sky brought people out by the hundreds of thousands. In Melbourne there was religious frenzy and rioting; Karen heard the sounds, like a distant grumbling wave, from the balcony of her hotel room. She had been ordered to take a week’s vacation after her episode in the evacuee camp, a gift she did not appreciate, since it left her with little to do but think.

She looked upon the show calmly. Marvels had multiplied in her lifetime; after the events of the past two weeks, she almost expected them now. She had some vague notion this glow was associated with Thistledown, but the asteroid starship was not visible.

At midnight, however, she did see the violet plume of the Beckmann drives, rising from the northeastern horizon like a spotlight beam. It faded three hand’s-breadths above the horizon, which meant it was huge—tens of thousands of kilometers in length. She did not know what it signified; she thought it might be Thistledown’s death glow, but that was yet to come.

Sitting in a deck-chair on the balcony, wrapped in a sweater against the night chill, she looked across Melbourne’s brightly lit skyline, clutching a ceramic mug, shivering slightly not just with the cold, but with having drunk too much coffee.

She knew she was a wreck; she allowed she might someday be able to rebuild herself, conduct her own Recovery, perhaps become a whole human being; but for the moment the curtain was down and the stage props were being rearranged. What came before the spotlights next might be a new Karen Farley Lanier, or merely a rewrite of the old; at any rate, she hoped it would be a more successful one. Andia could help her; but until she actually saw her daughter, she would be as unreal and fantastic as the night sky.

The plume seemed to grow longer as the minutes passed. Then she realized the Earth was turning, perhaps bringing Thistledown into view, if it still existed.

She had had no more contact with Garry. She began to wonder if in fact she had been overstrained; but an inner voice reassured her, the experience had been real; it had been Garry.

That alone could give her strength. If the powers behind Mirsky had saved her husband, or given him some alternate existence beyond death, then perhaps all things would turn out right after all; perhaps her life, however trivial in the march of millennia and on a scale of light-centuries, would have some use, be worth continuing.

Though not forever.

Garry, whatever his final doubts, had left her this: that age and death and change were natural, even necessary, if not for citizens of the Hexamon, then for those humans who had not seen the slow evolution of life-extension across the centuries.

Someday, she would allow herself to age and die. She smiled, thinking what Ram Kikura might say.

Something rose in the northeast, at the beginning of the violet plume; a bright, twinkling thing that looked less like Thistledown than some distant, continuous fireworks display.

Suddenly, it became as brilliant as a sun, and cast Melbourne into the light of full summer noon. Cup still hooked to her finger, she flung up her forearm to shield her eyes and gave herself a painful whack on one ear. The cup fell to the concrete porch and shattered.

Cursing in English and Chinese, she lurched out of the chair, through the open sliding glass door and into the bathroom. There, she blinked at herself in the mirror, her face hidden behind a negative blind spot turning green and red at the edges.

The flash had been silent. The hotel was quiet; even the sound of distant riots had died. When her vision recovered, she peered around the bathroom door. The sky outside was dark. Cautiously, she walked to the balcony, holding her hand up near her eyes just in case, and squinted at where the Thistledown had been. The plume still glowed faintly in the blackness; a few degress past the plume’s tip, all that remained of Thistledown was a turbulent, dim red ball the size of her thumbnail.

77

Thistledown City

Farren Siliom felt the grinding sound before he heard it. It came through the anchors and suspension cables into the hanging buildings, vibrating the floor under his feet, making his bones ache.

A remote in the sixth chamber relayed its impressions:

The northern bore hole leading to the seventh chamber was spewing a fountain of intense white and green. The fountain grew along the axis of the chamber, spreading as it traversed the thirty kilometer length. The remote’s eyes tracked the fountain to the opposite southern cap, where it sprayed out in brilliant rings of violet and greenish blue.

The sixth chamber machinery was no longer operating. The remote turned its attention to the chamber itself. The valley floor seemed to be buckling, but that couldn’t be—the sound and vibration would have been much more violent. Areas of machinery tens of kilometers wide formed globules and rose toward the axis like soap bubbles. That, too, made no sense.

Then the sound increased. The northern cap split from the center outward like a plate of glass hit by a bullet. Radial slivers of asteroid rock and metal lifted away from the cap and twisted weirdly with the stress of their uneven inward and outward centrifugal spin. With dream-like slowness, they plummeted toward the valley floor, striking and crumpling. Where they had left gaps in the cap, glowing red molten rock spewed into the chamber, arcing outward in beautiful, uneven pinwheel spirals.

The remote had a momentary glimpse of this before the entire cap blew inward, the shock wave racing along the valley floor, obscuring everything with dust and smoke and ending its transmission.

It’s grinding the end off Thistledown, Farren Siliom thought, working its way toward me…

The remote in the fifth chamber watched mountains and rusty rivers distort as if in a rippled mirror. The northern cap shattered, but there was no outpouring of molten rock; the air in the chamber abruptly clouded over. This remote also ceased transmitting.

In the fourth chamber, the president’s extended eyes and ears heard the rumbling grow to potentially deafening levels, the trees of the forests shaking their limbs away, rivers and lakes seeming to boil.

The sixth chamber was almost certainly gone, and that meant no more inertial damping within Thistledown. If the asteroid was subjected to any abrupt motion, the cities in the second and third chambers would crumple like toy castles made of stacked blocks.

Farren Siliom could see his own death, then, minutes before it came. He would not witness the conclusion of this final episode in Thistledown’s history.

78

The Way

Korzenowski knew the kink had formed, ablating the first few chambers from the Thistledown. The force of this would twist the asteroid around like a piece of wood on a lathe. The twist would probably reverse at some point as the kink began its motion along the Way, and that would destroy everything within Thistledown.

He could see this with a feverish clarity; time and again, his implants created realistic scenarios for the asteroid starship’s demise with a painful persistence he could hardly stop. Something akin to guilt compelled him to pay attention, to imagine the destruction as accurately as he could…

For he was directly responsible. He had built the Way; he had pushed a sliver into God’s finger.

They had been traveling for just under five hours. Ry Oyu floated near the bow, face calm.

The flawship shivered faintly. Olmy called up a select display of the next few thousand kilometers. He saw odd square patches floating a kilometer or so above the flaw itself.

We approach a flaw station, the Jart warned him. Begin deceleration.

He applied the clamps in reverse, making the flaw fluoresce a vivid green. By the time they came to a dead stop, they would have traveled some five million kilometers; the flaw station was probably just where the Jart had foreseen.

“We’ll reach a flaw station in about four hours,” he told the Engineer.

The Jart took him over and began to send signals through the flawship radio frequency transmitters.

79

Axis Euclid

Ram Kikura’s display showed the Thistledown spinning this way and that, like some giant’s spindle gathering thread and throwing it off. The northern first third of the asteroid had been melted and blasted away and formed a fan of glowing red haze around the remaining mass.

Hoffman’s shuttle had not been damaged, she had learned a few moments before; all communications had been cut off to allow full channels for official Hexamon signals. Thistledown’s demise would not affect the Earth or the orbiting precincts, beyond a few Old Natives temporarily blinded by the first flare.

She stood up and walked around the apartment, unable to turn away from the display. What next? How long until—

A funnel like the bell of an enormous trumpet congealed out of darkness ahead of Thistledown. Undulating like a jellyfish, the funnel had none of the qualities of the Way; something far more ominous had just come into being, a restrained, shaped black hole, like nothing this universe had ever seen before. The starship began to visibly move toward the yawning dark bell. That implied tremendous acceleration.

The uneven acceleration toward the funnel split the starship along its thinner walls with surgical precision. Tidal forces twisted the asteroid apart in latitudinal segments, as if it were being cut by a giant cake knife, each section corresponding roughly to an internal chamber.

Air and water and rock—and molten rock toward the northern end—spread outward from Thistledown like paint smeared by an enormous thumb, accompanied by a dusty debris that could only be the fragments of interior mountains, forests, cities.

Thistledown’s ruins vanished into the gaping funnel, emerging nowhere, going nowhere, creating a deficit of trillions of tons in this universe which had to be made up in some fashion.

From the complex domain of superspace, to the far-spread reaches of this universe, spontaneous and compensatory leaks of pure energy would occur, amounting precisely to the mass of Thistledown; thus the books would be balanced. Chances were the leaks would be so widespread that not a single one of them—and they would probably number in the billions—would occur near a star, much less a planet. Still, for thousands, perhaps millions of years, tiny bursts of gamma rays would mystify human and non-human astronomers. And who would guess their origin?

Perhaps no one.

Ram Kikura watched the display for minutes after Thistledown had disappeared. The funnel showed now only as a ring of inward-spiraling dust and debris and a greater darkness against the stars.

Then the bell closed like a flower withdrawing for a long night.

The Way had begun its long, violent suicide.

80

The Way

The Jart flaw station, from their perspective, was simply a huge black triangle strung on the flaw, its edges flashing dark rainbows as they approached. Korzenowski and Ry Oyu watched Olmy work intently at the flawship console, aware that the Jart was conducting the orchestra, attempting to make the right music to placate vigilant defenses.

“There’s been an enormous amount of activity here,” Olmy said. Korzenowski looked at the picted information from the flawship sensors; gates had been opened dozens of times about two hundred kilometers ahead. They appeared to have been opened in one latitude surrounding the Jart flaw station. Glancing at Ry Oyu, the Engineer brought forward his clavicle. “This is a geometry stack region,” he said. “We’re very close to where Patricia Vasquez opened her own gate.”

“It must have been fused shut by the stellar plasma,” Olmy said.

“It would have left a trace…something the Jarts could have detected,” Korzenowski said. “Did they?”

Olmy consulted the Jart. “They have that capability.”

“They might have found the trace of a gate in the geometry stacks too unusual to ignore.” Korzenowski shook his head. “Patricia may not have had much time, whether she made it home or not.”

Entry to a world populated by humans would be most useful to command oversight, the Jart said within Olmy. He turned to Ry Oyu. “They might have found her. Did they?”

“I don’t know,” Ry Oyu said. “I don’t know the answers to a good many questions, regrettably. Our jobs would be a lot easier if I did.”

Korzenowski scanned the latitude ahead in more detail as they came closer. Four gates remained open, though there was little activity around them now.

The triangle filled their forward view. The Engineer was aware of some abrupt change around them; passage through a kind of traction field, perhaps, or suspension of the flawship’s inertial damping.

The flawship entered the station’s dark triangle like a spear sliding slowly into a black pool. Beyond was more darkness, as if the pool were black paint, absorbing all light, all information; telling nothing.

Olmy’s Jart had no idea what awaited them. Things had changed greatly since its capture; little was familiar, including the design of the flaw station.

Ry Oyu floated toward Korzenowski and curled up beside him. “This is the area where I should find Patricia’s world,” he said. “If I have an opportunity to fulfill my obligations to her, I’ll need to copy her Mystery…”

They hadn’t brought along the necessary equipment. “How?” Korzenowski asked.

“This much I have the power to do,” Ry Oyu said. “Close your eyes, please.”

The gate-opener did not even touch him. A few seconds of warmth scattering through his head and body, the opposite of tingling, and it was over. Korzenowski opened his eyes. He did not feel any different.

“Just a copy,” Ry Oyu said quietly.

The darkness at the flawship’s nose suddenly parted and they stared at a segment of the Way perhaps three hundred kilometers long. Blocking the segment was a black radiance, deeply scalloped around its circumference, fully fifty kilometers in diameter. The walls of the Way leading up to this formation were brazen, undisturbed.

We will not be allowed to pass, the Jart told Olmy. That is a barrier to protect command individuals.

Olmy slowed the flawship to a few hundred kilometers per hour. A reception? he asked the Jart.

Very unusual for command individuals to come this far >south<.

He slowed the flawship to a crawl now, as the black shape filled their northern view. Green lines spun outward from the center of the shape and made graceful arcs to the circumference of the Way.

“I think we’ve been noticed,” Olmy said.

The arcs rose and neatly encased them. Dozens of transparent bubbles, perhaps a meter and a half in diameter, each containing a tiny black smudge like ink in water, flowed toward the flawship along the green lines.

“Traction fields, or something equivalent,” Korzenowski said. “Do they know how to communicate with us?”

“They don’t know any of our languages…” Olmy said.

A voice issued from the console. “We welcome the representatives of descendant command. Please accept the passage of our transport vehicles.”

“That was English,” Korzenowski commented dryly. The message was repeated in Spanish, then in a language very similar to Greek, and another language similar to Chinese. Other languages were less identifiable. At the conclusion of the translations, the bubbles took formation in concentric rings around the flawship.

Olmy felt the Jart take control of his movements again. The Jart sent another signal to the barrier through the flawship radio transmitters. It then moved Olmy to the transparent bow and waited there.

One of the green arcs flared suddenly and illuminated the flawship’s bow. Olmy was surrounded by something like St. Elmo’s fire; his body convulsed. Korzenowski had tracted halfway toward his friend when the display stopped. Olmy rotated to face them with a wan smile. “Inspection,” he said. “They still don’t trust us completely.”

“Did you pass?” Korzenowski asked.

“So far, so good.”

“Very advanced,” Ry Oyu said. Korzenowski thought he detected a hint of irony.

“Remove the ship from the flaw,” came a return signal in English. Olmy went to the console and instructed the flawship to unstring itself.

“Ride within the bubble nearest your ship’s door.”

They put on environment packs and stood by the hatchway. When it opened, a bubble expanded to about four meters in diameter and fastened itself around the hatch with a sucking, sizzling sound. The black nebulosity within congealed to make a railed platform.

“Our phaeton,” Korzenowski said, following Olmy onto the platform. A quiet hissing surrounded them; cool air smelling faintly musty, sweet, like young beer, blew against their faces. The bubble withdrew, sealing itself, and carried them along the green arcs toward a point just outside the center of the barrier. The flaw in this region was an uncharacteristic sour-orange color, carrying the additional burden of Jart information; it cast a feeble glow against the barrier’s gray-black surface.

Four green arcs cradled the flawship and guided it toward the walls of the Way. Olmy looked at the descending ship with a twinge of regret: their last contact with the Hexamon. Arms folded, still not entirely resigned, Korzenowski faced the featureless barrier surface toward which they were being ferried. His eyes carried little of Patricia’s impression now; she seemed to have sunk back deep into his psyche, biding her time.

Ry Oyu put his hand on the Engineer’s shoulder. “In our youth,” he said, “we would have called this an adventure.”

“In my youth, I always preferred thinking to adventuring,” Korzenowski replied.

The barrier absorbed the bubble, and again they were in darkness. Olmy would have been more comfortable if the Jart communicated with him, but it was silent; nothing had passed between them since the inspection. He could still feel it within him, as an oyster must feel a grain of sand…

When they finished their passage through the barrier, all that was human lay behind them. The bubble hovered above a broad forest-green floor. Perhaps a hundred meters away, the floor met a wall of lighter green. There did not seem to be a ceiling; merely a pale, featureless void.

“You will meet with command individuals,” said a bodiless voice in the bubble.

“Fine,” Korzenowski said, lips straight and tight. “Let’s get on with it.”

The green wall parted like a curtain and the bubble passed through. Only now did Olmy feel the Jart react within him; it seemed to change its shape, rearrange its points of contact with his mentality, stiffen.

“Big day for my conquering companion,” he said. “Time for debriefing.”

They passed along a proscenium, flanked on both sides by processions of identical sculptures resembling abstract chrome-plated scorpions. Their long tail-like abdomens stuck into the green floor, stiffly supporting gleaming bodies; their abstracted legs and claws raised and spread in formal salute.

Around and between these shapes floated fist-sized orange and green balls of light.

“What are they?” Korzenowski asked Olmy, pointing at the sculptures.

“I don’t know,” Olmy said. “My guide is silent.”

Korzenowski made a face and nodded, as if that was the least they could expect. “Even their architecture is menacing,” he said. “Damn us all for going this far.”

Olmy could only agree. Whatever happened to those far-off days of duty and research and nothing but inner turmoil? Those times seemed positively peaceful and desirable. What he feared now was not so much death as something nameless, perhaps coming across the exact opposite of life and humanity, the antithesis of all he believed in, and finding it was also true and indisputable; losing all reference and simply fading like an outmoded idea.

They had already faced the strangeness of Mirsky and Ry Oyu, but these avatars had been tailored to humanity. What would Ry Oyu become to convince the Jarts?

The proscenium opened onto a broad circle surrounded by pale, translucent sea-green cylindrical tanks, each twice as high as it was broad. Within the tanks black membranes waved with a calm, resilient rhythm, like misty banners.

Directly ahead, there were no tanks, only a flat stage about a meter above the floor. Above this stage floated three obviously organic shapes, sleek and long and somewhat more massive than elephants, torsos wrapped in more misty dark banners that first obscured them, then revealed…

Command individuals among the Jarts were incarnate organisms closest in form to the forebear originals. Whatever world had bred these figures must have been a place of poisons and death and bad dreams. They appeared, first of all, vital; there was no denying that these creatures were survivors, with their long black spike-legs and efficient armor casings wrapped around long, tapering thoraxes. They split in two near the front, each bifurcated section rearing up from the platform, displaying deep gashes along the underside. These were fringed with wrinkled appendages tipped with wickedly pointed black claws. No eyes or other sensors were visible.

They did bear some resemblance to the body in the hidden chamber, Olmy thought. They were much more efficient-looking, however, perhaps more evolved. The dead form in the transparent box might have been a precursor, like a chimpanzee compared to a human.

How much time had passed in the Way—decades, or millions of years?

Do you recognize these individuals? Olmy asked the Jart within. For a long moment, it did not answer, and then it said, These are not command as known to this expediter.

Perhaps they are not Jarts at all?

They are my kind. There is glory in them. They have accomplished much improvement.

Will they know you?

They already recognize this modified expediter. Humble submission to their presence. Something else passed between them that did not fit the pidgin mental language Olmy shared with the Jart, something ominous and dark and exalted at once; a kind of murderous pride he could not classify in human emotions.

“You’re looking bemused,” Korzenowski said to Olmy.

“No muse at all,” Olmy said. “Those are definitely Jarts.”

“Ah,” said Korzenowski dryly. “Our hosts.”

The bubble came to rest at the fourth corner of a square, the command individuals occupying the other three. The misty black drapes wrapped around their bodies evaporated, and the Jarts lifted their anterior bifurcations, claws on appendages meeting delicately tip-to-tip, like sutures over twin gashes, in a manner that would have made Olmy’s skin crawl, and did make Korzenowski draw back instinctively.

“They are quite thoroughly horrible,” he said. Olmy did not disagree; he could not remember encountering intelligent beings who looked more threatening.

Ry Oyu stood at one edge of the bubble platform, still relaxed and undisturbed.

Surely they’re not the most vicious-looking intelligences in the universe, Korzenowski thought. The Final Mind doubtless will encompass far worse. He glanced at Ry Oyu, who smiled and nodded as if listening and agreeing.

The three command individuals spread their uplifted bifurcations into wider Vs.

“We meet,” said the voice in the bubble, seeming to each of them to come from over his right shoulder. “This event is not expected. Are you one or many?”

“We are each individual,” Ry Oyu said.

“Which represents descendant command?”

“I do.”

“Is there confirming evidence?”

“They want loaves and fishes,” Ry Oyu said in an undertone. “So be it.”

He did not appear to do anything, but the three command individuals shivered slightly, as if struck by a cold breeze. Their upper sections closed almost to the point of joining.

The voice said, “The testimony is adequate confirmation. What is your plan for completion?”

Korzenowski frowned, puzzled. Ry Oyu said, “Tell them what we’ve done, and what we wish to do. Tell them who you are.”

“My name is Konrad Korzenowski,” he said. “I designed the Way.”

The command individuals did not react.

“We have already begun destruction of the Way…”

“Command individuals are aware of this,” the voice said.

“We’ve come to finish the last of our work, to…bring one of your own back to you, and…” He stumbled over the words in his head, trying to express himself clearly and in a way non-humans might understand. “I carry part of the mentality of another human, who once did work that helped me design the Way. We wish to return this mentality to an appropriate world, in the geometry stacks…behind where we are now.” He gestured awkwardly over his shoulder, unsure even of direction. “We hope to journey on and help the Final Mind. With you, or alone.” How naive and childlike, to even think of being able to help something so vast as the Final Mind…

“Command individuals have accessed and stored a human-occupied world in the regions you refer to,” the voice said. Then it did not speak for several long minutes. Finally, “Command is aware. Command did not create the Way. Do you have knowledge regarding human designator individual Patrikia Vaskayza or Patricia Luisa Vasquez, human duty expediter or of similar rank?”

Korzenowski closed his eyes, then licked his lips, as if savoring some inner taste, and said. “Yes. I carry part of that individual. Do you have her, did you find her…?”

The voice’s tone altered radically; it now sounded female.

“This is command oversight. We have the sexually generated twice-removed progeny of designator individual Patricia Luisa Vasquez.”

“I think they mean they have Patricia’s granddaughter,” Ry Oyu said. Olmy agreed.

“Where did they find her?” Korzenowski asked. Eyes square and bright, he faced the command individuals. “Where did you find this woman?”

The female-toned voice answered. “We have accessed and stored the world where human designator individual Patricia Luisa Vasquez traveled from the Way. Sexual progeny twice-removed is stored also.”

“But not Patricia Vasquez herself?”

“Individual Patricia Luisa Vasquez is dead.”

“Can we speak to her granddaughter?” Ry Oyu asked.

“This individual has been damaged by our investigations.”

Korzenowski felt a sudden tremor of horror and despair. He struggled to control his anger—and a deeper anger, from the ghost of a grandmother who had never met this granddaughter, never even known of her existence.

“We’d like to speak with her, damaged or not,” Ry Oyu said. “If that’s possible.”

The command individuals wrapped themselves in shifting black cloaks again. Korzenowski turned away, sickened by this strangeness, this incomprehensibility; this casual cruelty. What had happened to the world Patricia found? What sort of world had it been before the Jarts “stored” it? In what condition was it now? Ry Oyu touched his shoulder again, and Olmy moved closer, lending support through solidarity.

“This damaged individual is highly valued,” the female voice said. “Damage was unintentional.”

“Let us speak with her,” Korzenowski said, his voice cracking.

The three command individuals receded on the platform, as if through the turning of some distorting lens. A scene appeared in front of the bubble, the interior of a house of human construction, though not any home Patricia might have found in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century…

Rhita came out of a moiling eternity, where time was not so much lacking as non-linear and randomly arranged; true memories dancing with simulations, unorganized animal thoughts—disembodied hunger, pointless yearning, sexual desire—vying with brief moments of crystal clarity, in which she remembered her situation…and rejected it, returning to the turbulent eternity.

In one moment of clarity, she saw herself as a hero, consciously making herself useless to her enemies by eluding them within their own incomprehensible sanctuary. In another, she realized she might never recover from this jumble, that her enemies might keep her in this state forever, and a better definition of Hades she could not think of.

She was worse off than any shade thirsting for blood and wine; what she thirsted for was the sweet liquor of reversed history, second chances, doors to a past not so much dead as pickled and preserved, waiting for some inhuman feast of knowledge.

She no longer touched on the presences of Demetrios or Oresias.

Then, at no particular moment, the tempest of chaotic escape calmed. Her thoughts were still jumbled, but what she experienced and felt was crystal clear: she stood in her grandmother’s house on Rhodos. Typhōn was with her, still human in appearance.

She tried to escape again, back into her chaotic freedom, but suddenly noticed three human forms that did not seem to be Jarts. She did not know them. There was conversation of a sort; again, the voiceless talk of Jarts in a dream, disembodied, hideous.

Still, now and then, in her self-imposed confusion, she managed to listen and not reject what was being said.

There was talk of her grandmother.

Could the two actually be humans? People from Gaia…or…again the storm grabbed her thoughts and whirled them.

Grandmother’s Mystery.

A memory: sharp and demanding. The sophē explaining how she had loaned a part of her psyche to a man…Magic and mystery in the Way.

Suddenly, she stood not in a simulation of the sophē’s house, but on the stones of the temple of Athene Lindia—not in simulation, but in memory. The memory was so vivid she could feel the wind in her hair and hear the song of birds darting between the massive cream-colored columns.

This was the memory she always returned to, a memory of peace and solitude, where she withdrew from the welter to think her own thoughts, discover her own self. She had once imagined herself as Athene in her various forms: wise woman, bringer of victory, Athene of the storms, Athene of python and owls; Athene helmeted adorner of old coins, goddess of the great and tortured city of the Hellenes. An adolescent girl could be all of those things in the space of an hour, and yet face no danger for her hubris, for Athene understood such dreams.

Athene understood and forgave failure, even should it cost a world.

Rhita closed her eyes and opened them again. There was talk of Patrisha which was, she remembered, the way her grandmother had sometimes pronounced her own name.

“She’s been stored in a memory matrix, much like city memory,” Ry Oyu said. “She’s retreated into herself, following personal pathways…. They can’t unravel her. She’s defying them in the only way left to her.”

They watched the uncertain, wavering image of Patricia’s granddaughter, placed in the context of the house-memory like a mannequin within some museum exhibit, or a zoo animal on display. “Ser Olmy, how does your Jart justify this?” Korzenowski asked.

“It’s distressed that a valued bit of information should be damaged,” Olmy said.

“I mean the…‘packaging’ of an entire world.”

“In their own way, they try to serve the Final Mind,” Ry Oyu said. “They want to send all they’ve stored on to the Final Mind. And that is what they’ll do. But we should be able to stop this woman’s suffering…. The time has come for decisions. The Jarts know the Way will soon cease to exist. They accept me as a representative of descendant command. They’re anxious to present the fruits of their labor to the Final Mind. They’ll do anything I say…. As far as they’re concerned, this is the time they’ve been waiting for, the time that justifies their entire history.

“I can take Patricia’s Mystery, and her granddaughter’s stored mentality, back to the geometry stacks and try to give them some peace.”

“Why?” Korzenowski asked, his eyes square and cat-like now, as if he were suddenly all Patricia Vasquez. “Why just them? Why not restore all the worlds the Jarts have destroyed and packaged?”

Ry Oyu shook his head. “Not within my means. I do what I can do now largely to fulfill promises. Long ago, when I was merely a gate-opener,” he tapped his own chest emphatically, “I failed to teach Patricia Vasquez properly. I make up for that by giving her another chance, and her granddaughter, as well. Besides, there’s the aesthetic satisfaction.”

“Garry Lanier refused special privileges,” Korzenowski said, his face contorted, a mask of contradictory personality and emotion. “Why should you give us…give Patricia Vasquez special consideration?”

Ry Oyu considered this for a moment. “For my past self,” he said. “We can’t correct all of our failures. But the Engineer has redeemed himself for the creation of the Way…Olmy has suffered for his ambition and feelings of self-importance…Mirsky has paid some of his own debts. Please allow me to correct one of my own failures.”

The Engineer’s face relaxed. “All right,” he said softly. “Take them home.”

“And what do you choose? Ser Olmy, freed from the Jart…where would you go? Ser Korzenowski, still carrying part of Patricia Vasquez, where would you go?”

“I am incomplete without her,” Korzenowski said. “I think she will stay with me, and be content, as long as she knows some part of her is going home. I…we’d like to journey down the Way and become part of the Final Mind.”

Olmy considered. “That would be fascinating,” he said, “but I’m not sure I’m ready. If all the stories we’ve heard are true, we follow that route wherever we are, however we go.”

“They are true,” Ry Oyu said.

“I think of how few beings have actually known this,” Olmy said. “How privileged we are. I know where I’d like to go, still alive, still incarnate.”

“Where is that?”

“Timbl,” he said. “The Frant homeworld. I have many friends there.”

“There should be enough time to re-open the gates to Timbl,” Ry Oyu said.

“Don’t you feel a bit like Santa Claus?” Korzenowski asked, or perhaps it was Patricia; the Engineer knew very little about the old terrestrial legends.

Ry Oyu smiled and turned toward the image of the room, and the jumbled figure of the woman within. “I’ll convey all this to our hosts. I’m sure they’d be proud to have the creator of the Way go with them to meet descendant command.”

Rhita focused on the wise-looking, smiling gray-haired man, feeling more secure in his presence. He did not have the fierce aspect of a Zeus, but more the calm air of Aserapis with his stalks of corn and Plutonian dogs, his ceremonial bulls and festivals of resurrection.

This calm man spoke of going home.

“I’m going back to Gaia?” she asked, her voice strong in this place without true sound or true voices.

“Now,” Ry Oyu said, “we perform the most sacred of weddings once again. Patricia, carried within me, will you have the patterns of your own granddaughter as a shell in which to live, until we can search for the home you have lost?”

Olmy saw the image of Rhita shimmer, become solid, fade in color; become solid yet again. Always, the young woman’s eyes watched Korzenowski, and Korzenowski watched her.

“Rhita, will you lend part of your self to this shadow of your grandmother, that she may have the strength to go home?”

“Yes,” Rhita said.

She felt a mingling of their waters, like the mingling of seas so clearly visible along the outermost pillars of Hercules, entering into the broad ocean of Atlantis.

She saw a dense weave of realities, Gaias in profusion, and knew that none of them were exactly like her world. But the gray-haired, smiling man who might have been Zeus or Aserapis told her to choose one in which the Jarts never did open a gate, never did invade…in which the expedition never happened…he suggested no more.

She closed her eyes.

“Time for saying au revoir,” the second avatar said. “I entrust Ser Korzenowski to these command individuals.”

Korzenowski transferred his clavicle to the gate-opener and backed away. The Engineer became separated from Olmy and Ry Oyu as the bubble split in two. Olmy watched him move off and vanish behind another black barrier.

Ry Oyu lifted the clavicle, as if to become used to its weight and capabilities again. “Ser Olmy, these are servants of the Final Mind—however misguided. They tell me they are eager to convey you to your chosen gate. They are preparing to find the gate and open it now. I believe we can trust them. But no one knows how much time has passed there…”

“Always an element of risk,” Olmy said.

“Uncertainty keeps us interested,” Ry Oyu commented.

“Thank you.”

“You are quite welcome. They will accept their modified expediter any time you choose to give him up.”

Olmy was not at all reluctant to part with this reminder of his greater failure. Again, he was surrounded by a pale fire. The Jart within him vanished.

For a moment, he savored the wonderful aloneness. To be restored, alive and sane, and to return to Timbl…

He thought of Tapi and Ram Kikura, of other failures less spectacular and ultimately perhaps more haunting.

“Be content, Ser Olmy,” Ry Oyu said, and clasped his hand, then released it.

Their bubble split in two again.

Ry Oyu turned to the command individuals. “I would like to travel back to the geometry stacks. I will need to open gates to two worlds in universes very slightly different from our own.”

His bubble moved back through the barriers, into the flaw station, and down to the Way.

He carried Korzenowski’s clavicle lightly. The bubble spread open at the bottom and gave him access to the living bronze surface.

The gate-opener closed his eyes and murmured the ritual incantations that prepared his mind, however unnecessary they might be in his present form.

“I lift this clavicle to worlds without number, and bring a new light to the Way, guiding this gate that all may prosper, those who guide and are guided, who create and are created, who light the Way and bask in the light so given…”

The surface of the Way grew dark with the approach of the accelerating kink. That would make opening gates even more difficult. There was little time left, perhaps only hours, and he had much work to do, much searching even after the gate was open.

He finished with, “Behold…I open a new world.”

He had never before, in all his career as gate-opener, made a double gate. Yet this gate would open onto two precisely chosen worlds.

A circular depression began to form beneath his feet, its edges sparkling. The first world spun beneath him, as seen through the clavicle; here was an alternate to Rhita’s Gaia, a spreading branch from the Gaia where Patricia had arrived and made her changes, yet where no Jarts had ever invaded.

The gate-opener could not stretch this gate far back in time. He made a brief attempt, then pulled back and concentrated on locating Rhita Vaskayza. A Rhita who had never known the Jarts, who had never traveled to find the Jart gate…

The Way shimmered violently, and he wondered if there would be time.

81

Home

Rhita walked through the grove where Berenikē had told her she would find her father. She saw Rhamōn sitting discouraged among the olive trees, back against a gnarled trunk, head in hands, face twisted with troubles. Having fought some petty battle against the Akademeia’s increasingly rebellious board of masters. Needing encouragement.

“Father,” she said, and then stepped back as if slapped. Something fell on her, into her; something at once familiar and very alien. She saw herself, strange and exhausted, tumbling from nowhere, as if into a cup…Memories of invasion, destruction and something like death filled her. She closed her eyes and held her hands to her head, wanting to scream. She gasped like a fish with the shock of assimilating so much, feeling for an instant that she must have lost her mind…

Stumbled on a root and almost lost her balance.

When she recovered, the memories were cached in deep background, safely isolated for the moment.

“Rhita?” Rhamōn looked up from his reverie. “Are you all right?”

She made up an excuse to cover her confusion. “Some illness, I think…from Alexandreia.”

She was home for a vacation. Truly home, not in a dream or a nightmare. She grasped her upper arms with both hands. Real flesh, real trees, her real father. All the other memories, visions, hallucinations…faces. Nightmares.

“I felt faint. I’m all right now,” she said. “Perhaps it was Grandmother touching me.”

“We could use her touch,” Rhamōn said, shaking his head.

“Tell me what’s happened,” Rhita said. And sat before her father, digging her hand into the dry, caky soil, clenching the dirt between her fingers.

I will sort this out, in time. I promise myself that I will. Visions and dreams and nightmares enough for a dozen lifetimes.

The legacy of the sophē. Who was, even now…Where? Doing what?

The Way was coming apart. The flaw station had moved out of sight, retreating in the face of the Engineer’s accelerating destruction. Ry Oyu gave up his human form then, hovering as a twist of light and pattern over the double gate, searching across a different Earth, an Earth without the Death, reaching through the geometry stack some decades back in time, finding a specific moment.

Even in his immaterial form, the stresses on the Way began to dissolve him. He shifted character again, hid himself within the geometry of the gate, found the gate itself dissolving, struggled to keep integral long enough to complete this last but not least important of his duties—

Patricia Luisa Vasquez stepped from the car of her fiancé, Paul, clutching a bag of groceries. The air was chill with California’s mild brand of winter, and the last light of day spread gray and yellow fingers along the scattered clouds high overhead. She started up the flagstone path to her parents’ house—

And dropped the bag onto the lawn, arms thrown wide, neck jerked back, eyes seeming to vibrate in their sockets.

“Patricia!” Paul shouted from the car.

She rolled onto the ground, then straightened again, bucking against the grass, grunting and whining incoherently.

Then she lay back limp, spent.

“Jesus, Jesus,” Paul said, bending over her, hand on her forehead, other hand waving, not knowing what to do.

“Don’t let Mother hear you say that,” Patricia whispered, her throat raw.

“I didn’t know you were epileptic.”

“I’m not. Help me up.” She tried to gather up the spilled groceries. “Oh, what a mess…”

“What happened?”

She smiled fiercely, sweetly, triumphantly, and then the smile faded and was replaced by puzzlement. “Don’t ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you no lies.”

If I know where I am, she thought, I know who I am. Nothing was very clear; she had only vague, scattered recollections of a group of people trying valiantly to help her, and succeeding. But she was home, on the walkway just outside the little bungalow in Long Beach, and that meant she was Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the worried young man kneeling on the grass beside her was Paul, whom she had mourned for some reason, just as she had mourned…

Looking around at the streets, the houses, unburnt, solid, skies clear of smoke and flame. No Apocalypse.

“Mother will be so pleased,” she said in a hoarse croak. “I think I’ve just had an epiphany.” She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him so hard he grimaced.

Around his head, she peered up with sharp, cat-like eyes at the stars just beginning to shine overhead.

No Stone in the heavens, she told herself. Whatever that means.

82

In the Flaw

With grave misgivings still, Korzenowski submitted to being “stored.”

The Engineer experienced a time of cold nothingness, and then a wonderful and nightmarish jumbling in the maelstrom of information gathered by the Jarts—the remnants of thousands of worlds, trillions of beings, gathered haphazardly through time, now transmitted along the flaw, to pass into the Final Mind.

The Way gathered in great coils and supercoils, eating itself like some ineffable burning fuse, and died.

The time of avatars on Earth came to an end.

83

Timbl

Olmy felt rather than saw the gate closing above him. Static crackled in the dry air and a low moan spread out from where his feet lightly touched red sand. Then, nothing but the whisper of a thin breeze.

For a moment, he feared that all he would see would be another Jart conquest, a world fanatically packaged and preserved for descendant command. But Timbl had not been invaded by the Jarts. They apparently had not bothered to reopen this particular gate until now, and they would never return.

He stood in the raw, blinding glare of Timbl’s sun, smiling broadly. His altered skin could withstand this much ultraviolet; it even felt good to him, familiar. It seemed to make little difference how much time had passed here; Timbl at any time would be home to Olmy.

He was at the top of a hill. Below the hill, to the north, lay a flat paved field, still kept polished white, despite the absence of Hexamon vehicles. This was where the main gate to Timbl had once opened. It had been closed just before the Sundering, when the Hexamon had begun its withdrawal from the Way.

Olmy looked to the west and saw the brilliant blue ocean. A tiny torch-like arc crossed overhead and was intercepted by a purple beam of light. Cometary fragments still fell here, and were still intercepted by Hexamon defenses…Not so much time had lapsed, after all.

There were undoubtedly a good many Hexamon citizens on Timbl, refugees after the closing of the gate. He would not lack for human company. But that wasn’t what he sought out first. Any visitor to Timbl had to be personally welcomed by a Frant to have official status.

Early in their history, when Timbl had been besieged by devastating comet falls, Frants had evolved to pass along the memories and experiences of every individual to its fellows. The great mass of Frants carried the memories of all individuals, if not in detail, then at least as a kind of inbred history. Any individual Frant, returning home, was quickly absorbed, integrated, debriefed.

By now, every mature Frant on Timbl would know something about Olmy. They would have assimilated the experiences of the Frants he had worked with, decades past; sharing the memories, diffusing the personalities. Every adult Frant would be his friend.

He did not deserve so much, but here it was.

Olmy walked down the hill to the east, toward the ripe, wind-swaying fields of yellow and blue food plants, into the closest village with its characteristic central stupa. He passed young Frants, who stared impassively after him; the young would not yet recognize him. Olmy met his first mature individual just outside a marketplace closed for the midday rest period.

The Frant, tall and gangly, face narrow, eyes protruding to each side, its shoulders cloaked with ceremonial foil, sat on a broad stone bench. It regarded him silently for a moment.

“Greetings, Ser Olmy,” it said. “What a surprise to see you here.”

“My pleasure,” Olmy said.

EPILOGUE

First, Mirsky told his companion, we start at the beginning.

And then? Lanier asked.

We search for points of interest, until we come to the end.

And then?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Karen Anderson has once again provided invaluable help with my odd languages and history. Her work on the last chapter of Eon laid many stones for the foundations of the Oikoumenē in this sequel. Adrienne Martine-Barnes lent much useful research material; I’ve ignored her direct observations on the architecture of Rhodes, at my peril, to demonstrate deep historical changes on Rhodos. Brian Thomsen, illustrious editor, believed and trusted and took risks, and also worked valiantly to keep my prose from stumbling. Blame these fine folks for nothing; all error in this book is mine, or perhaps my computer’s.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright Legacy © 1995, Eon © 1985 and Eternity © 1988 by Greg Bear

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

ISBN: 978-1-5040-4545-2

This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

THE EON SERIES

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Prologue - Journey Year 753

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34