"Anathem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

Part 11
ADVENT

Red light woke me, or kept me from sleeping in the first place. It was not the clear, cold blood-red of warnings and emergencies, but pink/orange, warm, diffuse. It was coming in through the windows of the aerocraft, which were few and tiny. I unbuckled myself, staggered over to one—for I’d lain wrong, and my limbs were tingling and floppy—and squinted out at a spectacular dawn above the same ice-scape I’d recently traversed on a sledge.

For a confused minute I fancied we might, for some reason, be headed back to Ecba. But I had no success matching the mountain ranges and glaciers below against those I recollected. Out of habit I looked for Sammann, hoping he could conjure up a map. But he was huddled with Jules Verne Durand. Both were wearing headsets. Sammann just listened. Jules alternated between listening and speaking, but he did a lot more of the latter. Sometimes he’d sketch on Sammann’s jeejah, and Sammann would transmit the image.

I found myself irked. The Laterran’s presence in Cell 317 had seemed like a medal pinned on our chests. Through him we would know things, be capable of deeds, beyond all other cells. But I hadn’t bargained on the wireless link to the Reticulum that would make him fair game for any Panjandrum who was feeling curious about something. They were pumping him dry before he was rendered useless by inanition. I couldn’t hear a word because of the noise of the plane, but I could tell he’d been at it for a while, and that he was tired, groping for words, doubling back midsentence to repair conjugations. Orth was a murderously difficult language and I thought it a kind of miracle that Jules spoke it as well as he did, having practiced it for only a couple of years (which, we’d calculated, was about how long the Geometers had been in a position to receive signals from Arbre). Either Laterrans were smarter than we, or he was prodigiously gifted.

Arsibalt was up, pacing the aisles. He joined me at the window and we began shouting at each other. From our recollected geography we convinced ourselves that we were descending from the pole along a more easterly meridian than the one that passed through Ecba. This was confirmed as we left the ice and the tundra behind and entered into more temperate places: there was a lot of forest down there, but few cities.

No wonder people were slow to get up; we’d jumped forward through more than half a dozen time zones. I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d had a full night’s sleep. In fact, I might not have slept at all.

Lio had been sitting alone in the front row, trying to make friends with a military-style jeejah. I noticed he had set it aside, so I went up and sat next to him. “Jammed,” he announced.

I turned and looked back at Sammann and Jules. They were peeling the phones off their heads. Sammann caught my eye and threw up his hands disgustedly. Jules, on the other hand, seemed relieved to have been cut free of the Ret; he sank back heavily in his seat, closed his eyes, and began to rub his face, then to massage his scalp.

I turned back to Lio. “Such a move must have been anticipated,” I said. But he had got into one of those Lio-trances where he did not respond to words. I grabbed the jeejah, whacked him on the shoulder with it, threw up my hands, tossed it aside. He watched me curiously, then grinned. “The Ita can still make the Reticulum run on land lines and other things,” he said. “When we stop moving, we can get patched in once more.”

“What are your orders?” I asked.

“Go to ground—which we’re doing now. All the other cells are doing it too.”

“Then what?”

“At the place where we’re going, there’ll be equipment prepositioned. We’re supposed to train on it.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Don’t know, but here’s a hint: Jesry is in charge of training.”

I looked over at Jesry, who had commandeered a row of seats and constructed a sort of amphitheatre of documents all around himself. He was scanning these with an intensity that I had learned, long ago, never to interrupt.

“We’re going into space,” I concluded.

“Well,” Lio said, “that is where the problem is.”

I decided to take advantage of the noise, and of the fact that our wireless link was down. “What news of the Everything Killers?” I asked.

He looked as though in the earliest stages of airsickness. “I think I can tell you how they worked.”

“Okay.”

He pantomimed a punch to my face, pulled it so his knuckles met my cheek and nudged my head. “Violence is mostly about energy delivery. Fists, clubs, swords, bullets, death rays—their purpose is to dump energy into a person’s body.”

“What about poison?”

“I said mostly. Don’t go Kefedokhles. Anyway, what’s the most concentrated source of energy they knew about around the time of the Terrible Events?”

“Nuclear fission.”

He nodded. “And the stupidest way of using it was to split a whole lot of nuclei in the air above a city, just burn everything. It works, but it’s dirty and it destroys a lot of stuff that doesn’t need destroying. Better to nuke the people only.”

“How do you manage that?”

“The amount of fissile material you need to kill a person is microscopic. That’s the easy part. The problem is delivering it to the right people.”

“So, is this a dirty bomb type of scenario?”

“Much more elegant. They designed a reactor the size of a pinhead. It’s a little mechanism, with moving parts, and a few different kinds of nuclear material in it. When it’s turned off, it’s almost totally inert. You could eat these reactors by the spoonful and it would be no worse than eating one of Suur Efemula’s bran muffins. When the reactor goes to the ‘on’ configuration it sprays neutrons in every direction and kills—well—everything that is alive within a radius of—depending on exposure time—up to half a mile.”

“Hence the name,” I said. “What’s the delivery mechanism?”

“Whatever you can dream up,” he said.

“What causes them to turn on?”

He shrugged. “Body heat. Respiration. The sound of human voices. A timer. Certain genetic sequences. A radio transmission. The absence of a radio transmission. Shall I go on?”

“No. But what kinds of delivery mechanisms and triggers is the S#230;cular Power looking at now?”

He got a distant look. “Remember, launching mass into space is expensive. With the amount of energy it takes to launch a single human, you could get thousands of Everything Killers into orbit. They’d be too small to show up on most radar. If you could get even a few of them into the vicinity of the Daban Urnud…”

“Yeah, I can see the strategy clearly. Which leads to the profoundly sickening thought—”

“Are we going to be asked to deliver these things?” Lio said. “I think the answer is no. If anything, we are going to be a diversion.”

“We’ll distract them,” I translated, “while some other technique is used to deliver the Everything Killers.”

Lio nodded.

“That’s inspiring,” I said.

He shrugged. “I could be wrong,” he pointed out.

I felt like going outside and getting some fresh air. In lieu of which I walked up and down the aisles for a bit. Jules Verne Durand was asleep. Next to him, Sammann was bent over his jeejah. But I thought it was jammed? Looking over his shoulder, I saw he was making some sort of calculation.

Looking over Jesry’s, I saw that he was, indeed, reading the manual for a space suit. This demanded a double-take. But it was as simple as that. Suur Vay was in an adjoining row, poring over many of the same documents, swapping them with Jesry from time to time. The other Valers were asleep. Fraa Jad was awake and chanting, though my ears were hard put to disentangle his drone from that of the engines. I went back to staring out the window.

We angled across a range of old, worn-down mountains and struck out over an expanse of brown that ran to the eastern horizon: the grass of the steppe, browned by the summer sun. The craft was descending. A river flashed beneath us. Then the industrial skirt of a modestly sized city. We landed at a military airbase that seemed to stretch on forever, since land here was as plentiful as it was flat, and there was no incentive to make things compact.

A canvas-backed military drummon came out to collect us. We had no windows, and could not see out the front, but through the aperture in the back we watched the streets of an ancient, none too prosperous city ramifying in our dust. There were more animals on highways than we were used to, more people carrying things that in other places might have been entrusted to wheels. Of a sudden, things got dense and old, all yellow brick adorned with polychrome tiles. A heavy shadow passed over our heads, as if we were being strafed. But no, we had only passed through an arch in a thick wall. Three successive gates were closed and bolted behind us. The vehicle stopped on a tiled plaza. We clambered out to find ourselves in a courtyard, embraced by an ancient building four stories high: stone, brick, and wrought iron, softened by cascades of flowering vines on trunks as thick as my waist. A fountain in the center supplied water for these and for gnarled fruit trees growing in pots and casting pools of shade on what would otherwise have been an unpleasant place to stand.

“Welcome to the Caravansery of Elkhazg,” said a voice in cultured Orth. We turned to see an old man in the shade of a tree: a man who did not seem to belong here, in the sense that he was of an ethnic group one would expect to find in another part of Arbre. “I am the Heritor. My name is Magnath Foral, and I shall be pleased to serve as your host.”

After introductions, Magnath Foral gave us a quick explanation of the history of Elkhazg. I made no effort to follow most of this, since I only needed a few cues and hints to reconstruct what I had been taught of the place as a fid. It was one of the oldest Cartasian maths, founded by fraas and suurs who had personally witnessed the Fall of Baz, and known Ma Cartas. They had trekked across forests and mountains to build this thing more or less out in the middle of nowhere, on an oxbow lake a few miles from the main course of a river. A trade route from the east crossed the river not far away—close enough to give them access to commerce when they needed it, not so close as to be a distraction or a menace. Centuries later, a rough winter followed by a stormy spring caused some trouble involving ice dams that altered the course of the river and turned the oxbow lake back into an active channel. The trade route adapted, choosing Elkhazg as the best place to make a crossing—since one of the side-effects of the math had been the development of a relatively stable and prosperous S#230;cular community around its walls.

A certain kind of mathic personality would then have abandoned the place for something more remote, perhaps up in the mountains. The wardens of Elkhazg, though, weren’t that way, and had come to notice that the goods being carried on the backs of the beasts passing over the river included not just fabrics, furs, and spices but books and scrolls. In a compromise that would have made Ma Cartas kick her way out of her chalcedony sarcophagus and come after them with a broken bottle, they had spun off a thriving side business in the form of a caravansery adjacent to the math, and a ferry across the river. The one tariff that they charged was that the fraas and suurs of Elkhazg be allowed to make a copy of every book and scroll that passed through. Books were copied whose meanings they did not even know. But they interpreted their mandate somewhat broadly and began, as well, to make copies of the geometrical designs that they saw on fabrics, pottery, and other goods. For these fraas and suurs had a particular interest in plane geometry and in tiling problems. So, to make a long story somewhat shorter, Elkhazg had become synonymous in the minds of theors all over the world with tiling problems. Important tile shapes and theorems about their properties were named after fraas and suurs who had lived here, or specific walls and floors in this complex.

It was no longer a math. At the time of the Rebirth its library had been dispersed and copied all over the world, and the building had fallen into private hands. It had not been made over into a new math at the time of the Reconstitution. Instead—as Magnath Foral did not come out and say, but as was easy enough to figure out—it had been taken over by a long-lived complex of financial interests similar to—quite likely the same as—the one that ran Ecba.

Fraa Jad skipped the intro and wandered off into some other courtyard. Elkhazg had been big and rich and its courtyards went on and on. Now it must appear as a large, rambling black hole in the population density map of the city, since the only people who dwelled here were Magnath Foral and another man who was his liaison-partner; some visiting avout (though these had all been sent packing yesterday); and a staff of janitors-cum-curators who looked after the place. For one of the problems with this kind of art—i.e., tiles cemented to stone walls—was that you couldn’t cart it off to a museum.

My brain ought to have been shutting down, since I’d had essentially no rest since the shovel experiment at Tredegarh the day before, and the time since then had been freakishly eventful. But the visual environment of Elkhazg was overwhelmingly rich—would have been so even had I not known that every pattern of tiles was not merely a mesmerizing, intricate work of art, but a profound theorical statement as well, shouting at me in a language I was too tired or stupid to understand. This acted like a shot of jumpweed extract, or something, that kept me awake for another hour at the cost of some sanity. When I closed my eyes to get some respite from the relentless grandeur, questions crept out of the darkness. That our host had the same family name as Madame Secretary was, of course, interesting. Was it a coincidence that Cell 317 had ended up here? Of course not. What did it mean? Impossible to say. Should I even be trying to puzzle it out now? No—no more than I should be trying to grasp the significance of the tiling patterns that spread over every surface around me, and seemed to be trying to crawl beneath my closed eyelids and invade my brain.

One of the courtyards was a Decagon—of course. Fraa Jad found it. The Teglon had already been solved on it, perhaps by some master geometer of yore, perhaps by a syndev. None of us had ever seen a full solution in person before, so we spent a while gawking. Stationed around the edges were baskets of extra Teglon tiles in a different color, which Fraa Jad was nudging around with his toe. It occurred to me I’d never seen him sleep. Maybe Thousanders did something else. We left him to the Teglon. Magnath Foral took the rest of us to the Old Cloister, which had not been remodeled in five thousand years. That is to say it lacked electricity or even plumbing. Each of us got a cell. Mine had a bed, and a lot of tiles. I closed some preposterously ancient and rickety shutters so that I’d not have to see, and consequently think about, the tiles, then sank to my knees and located the bed by groping.

“It occurred to me,” said Arsibalt, the next time both of us were awake, “I don’t think we have anything like this.”

“We meaning—?”

“The modern, post-Reconstitution mathic world.”

“And this meaning—?”

He held up his hands and gazed about in an are you blind? sort of gesture.

We were standing next to a table in an alcove on the ground floor, open to the cloister on one side. The floor of the cloister itself was covered with thousands of identical, horn-shaped, nine-sided tiles that had been joined together with machine-tool precision into a nonrepeating double-spiral pattern that was giving me motion sickness just looking at it. I turned my back on this and looked at a loaf of bread that was resting on the table. This was so fresh that steam was gushing out of the end—Arsibalt, an infamous heel-filcher, had already got to it. The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a non-trivial pattern that, I feared, had deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgian Saunt. “I just don’t think we have anything this ancient, this—well, fantastic,” Arsibalt continued through a crunchy mouthful of bread-heel.

“There’s more than one way to be Inviolate, I guess,” I said, tearing off a hunk of bread, and sitting down at the table—which, inevitably, was ancient and covered with precision-cut tiles of diverse exotic woods. “You can simply stop being a math.”

“And thereby become exempt from Sacks.”

“Exactly.”

“But what kind of entity owns something for four thousand years?”

“That’s what I kept asking myself on Ecba.”

“Ah, so you have a head start on me, Fraa Erasmas.”

“I guess you could think of it that way.”

“What conclusion have you reached?”

I stalled for a while by chewing the bread—which was possibly the best I’d ever had. “That I don’t care,” I finally said. “I don’t need to know the bylaws, the org chart, the financial statements, the tedious history of the Lineage.”

Arsibalt was horrified. “But how can you not be fascinated by—”

“I am fascinated,” I insisted. “That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.”

“Here’s a candidate,” announced Sammann, who had crossed into the cloister from an adjoining court where, I inferred, Reticulum access was to be had. He sat down next to me and laid his jeejah on the table. The screen was covered with the calculations I’d noticed him doing on the plane. “Chronology,” he said. “According to Jules, the amount of time that has passed since the Daban Urnud embarked on its first inter-cosmic journey is 885 and a half years.”

“Whose years?” Jesry asked, skittering down the stairs from his cell, homing in on the smell of the bread. He closed with it like a wrestler and ripped off a hunk.

“That, of course, is the whole question,” Sammann said with a grin.

Arsibalt noticed a pitcher of water on a sideboard and began pouring it out into earthenware tumblers incised with geometric patterns.

“If Urnud years are anything like ours, that is a long time,” I said. “Thank you, Fraa Arsibalt.”

“The Urnudans, and later the Troans, wandered for a long time between Advents. Jules thinks it explains why they are a little tetchy.”

“Can we get a conversion factor—” Jesry said, in a tone that said I’ll be damned if I let this conversation wander.

“That’s what I’ve been working on,” said Sammann, nodding thanks to Arsibalt. He took a draught of water. Elkhazg was in a climate that sucked the moisture out of you. “Problem is, Jules is a linguist. Hasn’t paid a lot of attention to this. Knows the timeline in Urnud years—which is their standard unit up there—but not the conversion factor to Arbre years. Anyway, I was able to back it out from some clues—”

“What clues?” Jesry demanded.

“While the rest of us were evacuating Tredegarh, a unit of Valers assaulted the quarters of the so-called Matarrhites, and captured a lot of documents and syndevs before the Urnud/Tro guys could destroy them. My brethren are still virtualizing the syndevs—never mind—but some of the documents have timestamps in Urnud units, which can be matched against recent events on our calendar.”

“Wait a moment, please, how can we even read a document in Urnudan?” Arsibalt asked, sitting down and helping himself to the other heel.

“We can’t. But a cryptanalyst can easily see that many of the documents have the same format, which includes a string of characters readily decipherable as a timestamp. And they have a special, phonetic alphabet for transliterating proper names; they haul it out and dust it off whenever they encounter a new planet. This too is elementary to decipher. So if we see a document that has the phonetic transcription of Jesry and of his loctor at the Plenary—”

“We can infer it must be a report of the Plenary I participated in after I came back from space,” Jesry said, “and we know the Arbre date of that event. Very well. I agree that such givens would enable you to begin estimating a conversion factor relating Arbran to Urnudan years.”

“Yes,” said Sammann. “And there is still some error margin, but I believe that, in Arbran years, the Urnudans began their inter-cosmic journey 910 years ago, plus or minus 20.”

“Somewhere between 890 and 930 years ago,” I translated, but that was the limit of my arithmetical powers so early in the morning. Sammann was glaring fiercely into my eyes, willing me to wake up a little faster, to go the next step, but mere calculation was not my strong suit, especially when I had an audience.

“Between 2760 and 2800 A.R.?” said a new voice: Lio, coming across the cloister with Jules Verne Durand. These two did not look as if they’d only just gotten up; I guessed Lio had been pumping the Laterran for information.

“Yes!” Sammann said. “The time of the Third Sack.”

One of Magnath Foral’s staff came out with a huge bowl of peeled and cut-up fruit and began ladling it into bowls, which we passed around.

Jules tore off a piece of bread and began to eat it. This surprised me at first, since he could not derive any nutritional value from it; but I reasoned it would fill his stomach and make him feel less hungry.

“Wait a second,” Jesry said, “are you trying to develop a theory that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship at work? That the Urnudans began their journey because of events that took place here on Arbre?”

“I’m just saying it is a coincidence that needs looking at,” Sammann said.

We ate and thought. I had a head start on the eating, so I briefed Jesry and Lio—as well as others who drifted in, such as three of the Valers—on the conversations we’d had in the Plurality of Worlds Messal about the Wick and the idea that Arbre might be the HTW of other worlds, such as Urnud. The newcomers then had to be brought up to speed on the first part of this morning’s conversation, so the conversation forked and devolved into a general hubbub for a couple of minutes.

“So information could flow from Arbre to Urnud, in that scenario,” Jesry concluded, loudly enough to shut everyone up and retake the floor. “But why would the Third Sack trigger such behavior on the part of an Urnudan star captain?”

“Fraa Jesry, remember the margin of error that Sammann was careful to specify,” Arsibalt said. “The trigger could have been anything that happened in this cosmos in the four decades beginning around 2760. And I’ll remind you that this would include—”

“Events leading up to the Third Sack,” I blurted.

Silence. Discomfort. Averted gazes. Except for Jules Verne Durand, who was staring right at me and nodding. I recalled his willingness to broach excruciating topics at Messal, and decided to draw strength from that. “I’m done tiptoeing around this topic,” I said. “It all fits together. Fraa Clathrand of Edhar was the tip of an iceberg. Others back then—who knows how many thousands?—worked on a praxis of some kind. Procians and Halikaarnians alike. It’s hard to know the truth of what this praxis was capable of. The parking ramp dinosaur hints at what it could do when they made mistakes. We know what the S#230;culars thought of it, how they reacted. The records were destroyed, the practitioners massacred—except in the Three Inviolates. There’s no telling what people like Fraa Jad have been up to since then. I’ll bet they’ve just been nursing it along—”

“Keeping the pilot light burning,” Lio called.

“Yeah,” I said. “But something about what they did, circa 2760, when the praxis reached its zenith, sent out a signal that propagated down the Wick, and was noticed, somehow, by the theors of Urnud.”

“It drew them here, you’re saying,” said Lio, “like a dinner bell.”

“Like the fragrance of this bread,” I said.

“Perhaps it’s not just the smell of the bread that has drawn others to this room, Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt suggested. “Perhaps it is the sound of the conversation. Half-overheard words, not understandable at a distance, but enough to pique the interest of any sentient person in range of the voices.”

“You’re saying that’s what it might have been like to the Urnudan theors on that ship,” I said, “when they received—I don’t know—emanations, hints, signals, percolating down the Wick from Arbre.”

“Precisely,” said Arsibalt.

We all turned to Jules. He had removed some Laterran food from a bag and—having sated his appetite with stuff he could not digest—was now eating a few bites of what his body could use. He noticed the attention, shrugged, and swallowed. “Do not hold your breath waiting for an explanation from the Pedestal. Those of 900 years ago were rational theors, to be sure. But during the long, dark years of their wandering, it became something better recognizable as a priesthood. And the closer these priests get to their god, the more they fear it.”

“I wonder if we might calm them down just a little by getting them to see they’re not actually that close,” Jesry said.

“What do you mean?” Yul asked.

“Fraa Jad’s an interesting guy and all,” Jesry said, “but he doesn’t seem like a god, or even a prophet, to me. Whatever it is that he’s doing when he chants, or plays Teglon all night, I don’t think it is godlike. I think he’s just picking up signals coming to Arbre from farther up the Wick.”

By now everyone had showed up and eaten except for Fraa Jad. We found him sitting in the middle of the Decagon, eating some food that had been brought out to him by the staff. The Decagon looked altogether different. When we had passed across it yesterday, it had been paved in hand-sized clay tiles, dark brown, and grooved: just like the ones I’d played with at Orithena, except proportionally smaller. The groove seemed to run unbroken from one vertex to the opposite—I had not taken the time to verify this, but I assumed it was a correct solution. For those who wanted to try their hands at it, baskets of white porcelain tiles, marked with black glazed lines instead of grooves, had been stacked all around the edges. This morning, though, the baskets were empty, and Fraa Jad was enjoying his breakfast on a seamless white courtyard decorated with a wandering black line. During the night he had tiled the whole thing. When we understood this, we burst into applause. Arsibalt and Jesry were shouting as if at a ball game. The Valers approached Fraa Jad and bowed very low.

Out of curiosity, I backtracked to the outskirts of the Decagon and stepped off its edge—for the surface was several inches higher than the adjoining pavement. I squatted down and lifted up one of Jad’s white tiles to expose a small patch of brown tiling underneath. Jad’s was, as I’d expected, a wholly different solution of the Teglon—the positions of the older brown tiles didn’t match up with those of the new ones, proving that Fraa Jad had not merely copied the older solution.

“It is the fourth,” said a gentle voice. I looked up to find Magnath Foral watching me. He nodded at the tile in my hand. Looking more closely at the edge of the Decagon, I perceived, now, that underneath the brown tiles was a layer of green ones, and below that, one of terra-cotta.

“Well,” I said, “I guess you need to bake up a new set of tiles.”

Foral nodded, and said, deadpan: “I don’t think there is any great hurry.”

I set the white tile back into its place, stood up, and took a step up to the Decagon. It was open to the sky. I craned my neck and looked straight up. “Think they noticed?” I asked. Magnath Foral got a bemused look and said nothing.

Cell 317 moved on to convene in a courtyard we’d not visited yesterday. This one was circular, and roofed by a living bower. They had somehow trained half a dozen enormous flowering vines to arch across the top of the space and grapple with one another to form a stable dome of interlocked branches, fifty feet above the ground. Dappled light shone through it to illuminate the cool space below, but seen from above it would look like a hemisphere of solid green, freckled with color. Pallets of mysterious but expensive-looking stuff had been stationed around the edge of the yard. We devoted the remainder of the morning to breaking these open, getting rid of packaging materials, and drawing up an inventory: mindless labor that everyone badly needed.

That we’d be going into space was obvious from the nature of this stuff. By weight, it was ninety-nine percent containers. We were opening beautiful twenty-pound lockers to find pieces of equipment that weighed as much as dried flowers. We shed our bolts and chords in favor of nearly weightless charcoal-grey coveralls. “It’s all for the best,” Jesry said, eyeing me. “In zero gravity, the bolt doesn’t hang, if you get my meaning. Things would get ugly fast.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Anything else I need to know?”

“If you get sick—which you will—it’ll last for three days. After that, you get better or you get used to it. I’m not sure which.”

“Do you think we’ll even have three days?”

“If they were only sending us up as a diversion—”

“Just to get killed, you mean?”

“Yeah—then they could just send Procians.”

Our conversation had begun to draw in others, such as the Valers, who did not understand Jesry’s sense of humor. He cleared his throat and called out, “What is happening, my fraa?” to Lio.

Lio sprang to the top of a tarp-covered pallet, and everyone went silent.

“We’re not allowed to know yet what the mission is,” he began, “or why we’re doing it. We just have to get there.”

“Get where?” Yul demanded.

“That Daban Urnud,” Lio said.

Not that we hadn’t been paying attention, but: we were really paying attention now. Everyone seemed brighter. Especially Jules. “Food, here I come.”

“How are we going to get aboard a heavily armed—” Arsibalt began to ask.

“We haven’t been told that yet,” Lio said. “Which is just fine, because simply getting off the ground is difficult enough. We can’t use the normal launch sites. I would presume that the Pedestal have threatened to rod them if they notice launch preparations. That means we can’t use the usual rockets, because those are tailor-made to be launched only from those sites. And that, in turn, means we can’t use the usual space vehicles—such as the one you rode on, Jesry—because those can only be launched by said rockets. But there is an alternative. During the last big war, a family of ballistic missiles was developed. They use storable propellants and they launch from the backs of vehicles that ramble around the countryside on treads.”

“That can’t work,” Jesry protested. “A ballistic missile doesn’t get its payload to orbit. It merely throws a warhead at the other side of the world.”

“But suppose you take off that warhead and replace it with something like this,” Lio said. He jumped down, got a grip on the tarp, collected himself, and snapped it away with a forceful movement of the hips and the arms. Revealed was a piece of equipment not a great deal larger than a major household appliance. “A gazebo on top of a welding rig” was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here. The “gazebo” was a very small one—though, as Lio demonstrated, it was large enough to house one person in a fetal position. Its roof was a lens of pressed sheet metal with some sort of hard coating. It was supported by four legs: spindly-looking, triangulated struts, like miniature radio towers.

So the gazebo had a roof and pillars, but it lacked a floor. In lieu of that were only three lugs projecting inward from a structural ring. At the moment, these were spanned by a sheet of plywood, which supported Lio’s back as he curled up on top of it. Once he rolled out, though, he took the plywood away to reveal nothing below except for structural members and plumbing. There were two big tanks—a torus encircling a sphere—and several smaller ones, all spherical, and none larger than what you’d see on the shelves of a sporting goods store. These were profoundly ensnared in plumbing and cable-harnesses. Sticking out the bottom, like an insect’s stinger, was a rocket nozzle, dismayingly small. “The real one will have a nozzle skirt bolted onto it,” Lio informed us, “as big again as this whole stage.”

“Stage!?” Sammann exclaimed. “You mean, as in—”

“Yes!” said Lio. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. This is the upper stage of a rocket. There’s one for each of us.” Then, so that we could get a better view of the nozzle, he grabbed a strut with one hand and hauled up. The entire stage rocked back, exposing the underside.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” I exclaimed, and put my hand next to his and shouldered him out of the way. He let it drop into my hand. The entire stage weighed considerably less than I did. Then everyone else had to try it.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Jesry asked.

There was an awkward silence.

“This is the whole thing,” proclaimed Jules Verne Durand, understanding it perfectly, even though he was seeing it for the first time. “The conception is monyafeek!”

“Well, since you appear to be an expert on monyafeeks,” Jesry said, “maybe you could tell us how four legs and a roof are going to contain a pressurized atmosphere!”

“It’s not called a monyafeek,” Lio protested mildly. “It’s a—oh, never mind.”

“We will have only space suits, am I right?” Jules asked, looking to Lio.

Lio nodded. “Jules gets it. Since we need space suits anyway, complete with life support and sanitation and all the rest, it’d be redundant to send up a pressurized capsule comprising extra copies of the same systems.”

I was expecting Jesry to lodge further protests but he underwent a sudden conversion, and held up both hands to silence murmurs. “I have been there,” he reminded us, “and I can tell you there is no part of the shared space capsule experience I’m eager to relive. You don’t know the meaning of nasty until you’ve been blindsided by a drifting blob of someone else’s vomit. Don’t even get me started on what passes for toilets. How hard it is to see out those tiny windows. I think this is a great idea: each of us sealed up in our own personal spaceship, keeping our farts to ourselves, enjoying the panoramic view out the facemask.”

“How long is it possible to live in a space suit?” I asked.

“You’re going to love this,” Jesry proclaimed, taking the floor with a nod from Lio. Jesry strode over to where he, with help from Fraa Gratho, had, for the last hour or so, been assembling space suits. He approached one that seemed to be complete, and slapped a green metal canister socketed into the suit’s backpack. “Liquid oxygen! A whole four hours’ supply, right here.”

“Provided you show discipline in its use,” put in Suur Vay.

“Liquid!? As in cryogenic?” Sammann asked.

“Of course.”

“How long will it stay cold?”

“In space? It’s not such an issue. It’ll stay cold as long as the fuel cell has fuel to run the chiller.” Slapping a red canister, he went on, “Liquid hydrogen. Easy on, easy off.” He twisted it off, showed us some kind of complicated latching/gasket hardware, then twisted it back on.

“So we’re competing against a fuel cell for the available oxygen?” Arsibalt asked.

“Think of it as co#246;peration.”

“What about waste products?” someone asked, but Jesry was ready. “Carbon dioxide is scrubbed here.” He twisted off a white can and waved it around. “When it’s used up, slap on a new one. Then—you’ll like this—take the old one over to the tender.” He paced over to a separate piece of equipment that looked as if it belonged to the same genus, but a different species, from the space suits. It had color-coded sockets all over it for tanks and canisters. He jacked the scrubber onto one of these. “It bakes the CO₂ out of the scrubber. When this bar has changed color”—he pointed to an indicator on the side of the can—“it’s ready to use again.”

“This device is also a reservoir of air and fuel?” asked Suur Vay, eyeing the sockets for oxygen and hydrogen canisters.

“If it’s available, this is where you’ll get it,” Jesry said. “It’s meant to be connected to a water bladder and an energy supply—usually solar panels, but in our case, a little nuke. It breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, liquefies them, and fills any tank you slap onto it. And it uses heat to recycle the scrubbers, as I was saying. Likewise, when your waste bags fill up—we’ll discuss those later—you attach them here—” pointing fastidiously to an array of yellow fittings.

“Do you mean to say we’ll be defecating inside the suits?” Arsibalt asked.

“Thank you for volunteering to demonstrate this amazing feature of the praxis!” Jesry proclaimed. “Lio and Raz, would you be so kind as to give your fraa some privacy?”

Lio and I collected Arsibalt’s bolt from where he had left it, and held it up, stretched between us, to make a screen as Arsibalt shed his coverall. Meanwhile, Jesry fetched a double extra large space suit and trundled it over. It was suspended from a rolling contraption that he called the Donning Rig. The suit consisted of a big rigid construct, the Head and Torso Unit or, inevitably, HTU, whose upper back hinged open like a refrigerator door. Each arm and each leg was built up out of several short, stiff, bulbous pods, stacked like beads on a string. This gave it a different appearance from the space suits I remembered seeing in speelies, and on the Warden of Heaven: this one was bigger, more rounded, reassuringly solid. Another big difference, at least cosmetically, was that this suit—like all of the others that Jesry had been working on—was matte black.

Arsibalt stepped toward the Donning Rig, raising his hands to grasp a strategically located chin-up bar, and pulling/climbing to a step poised at the threshold of the suit’s back door. He was surprisingly game. Perhaps he was remembering spec-fic speelies he used to watch before he was Collected, or perhaps he just didn’t like being naked. With some help from Jesry he introduced one pointed toe, then the other, into the leg-holes at the base of the HTU, and lowered himself into them. As his feet descended, the hard segments rotated in different ways. Each bulb, it seemed, was joined to its neighbors by an airtight bearing. All of them could rotate independently, so that elbows and knees could bend normally without the need for a complex joint mechanism. Arsibalt looked even more roly-poly than usual now. He flexed one leg, than the other, giving us a look at how the segments allowed movement by rotating against each other.

“I want to you take notice of the bags ringing your thighs and waist,” Jesry said, indicating some rubberish-looking stuff hanging limp from the inner walls of the HTU. “In a few minutes, those are going to rock your world.”

“It is so noted,” Arsibalt said, thrusting one hand, then the other, into the arm-constructs, which seemed to end in blunt hemispherical domes—handless stumps. All we could see now was his back and his arse. Jesry did us all the favor of slamming the door on that.

Now that our fraa was decent, Lio and I let the bolt drop, then migrated round to Arsibalt’s front side. We could barely hear his muffled voice. Jesry jacked a wire into a socket on the chest and turned on an amplifier. We heard Arsibalt on a speaker: “There’s much for my hands to learn about down here—I wish I could see what I was doing.”

“We’ll go over it,” Jesry promised. He spoke distractedly, since he was busy examining an array of readouts on the front of the suit—making sure his fraa wasn’t going to asphyxiate in there. I noticed others staring at Arsibalt’s front and looking amused, so I came around to that side of him and discovered that a small flat-panel speely screen was planted in the middle of his chest. It was showing a live feed of Arsibalt’s face, taken by a speelycaptor inside the helmet. It was quite distorted because shot through a fisheye lens at close range, but gave us something to look at other than the opaque smoked-glass face mask. “Pray tell, what are all these nozzles in front of my mouth?” Arsibalt asked, eyes downcast and scanning.

“Left, water. Right, food and, as warranted, pharmaceuticals. The big one in the middle is the scupper.”

“The what?”

“You throw up into it. Don’t miss.”

“Ah.” Arsibalt’s eyes rose to look out the face-mask at where his hands ought to have been. He raised one arm until its stump was up where he could see it. A hatch popped open. We all jumped back as something like a giant metal spider sprang out of it, flailing its limbs. On a second look, this proved to be a skeletal hand: bones, joints, and tendons mimicking those of a natural hand, but all made of machined, black-anodized metal, and skinless, unless you counted the black rubber pads on the tips of the fingers. It all grew out of a wrist joint that was fixed to the end of the stump. At first, it twitched and flopped spasmodically. One by one, the joints seemed to come under Arsibalt’s control, and it began to move like a real hand. His other arm came up, the hatch popped open, and another hand emerged from it. This one, though, was less human-looking; it was studded with small tools.

“Explain what you are doing with your hands,” I requested.

“The ends of the arms are roomy,” Arsibalt said. “There is a sort of glove, into which I can insert my hand. It is mechanically connected to the skeletal hand that you can all see.”

“Pure mechanism?” Sammann asked. “No servos?”

“Strictly mechanical,” said Jesry. “See for yourself.” And we gathered round for a closer look. The skelehand was animated by a number of metallic ribbons and pushrods that all disappeared into the arm-stump where, we gathered, they were connected directly to the internal glove that Arsibalt was wearing.

“Simple, in a way,” was Fraa Osa’s verdict, “yet very complex.”

“Yes. Except for the airtight seals, the whole thing could have been made by a medieval artisan with a lot of time on his hands,” Jesry said. “Fortunately, the mathic world has a large number of medieval artisans. And, believe it or not, it’s easier to build something like this than it is to make a pressurized space suit glove that’s actually good for anything.”

“There are other controls as well, in the end of the stump,” Arsibalt volunteered. “If I withdraw my hand from the glove—” The skelehand wiggled, then went limp. It snapped back into its storage compartment in the end of the stump, and the hatch closed over it. “Now,” Arsibalt said, “I’m groping around on the inner surface of the stump, which is replete with all manner of buttons and switches.”

“Be careful with those,” Jesry suggested. “Most of the suit’s functions are controlled by voice commands, but there are manual overrides that you don’t want to mess with.”

“How are we to tell all of these buttons and whatnot apart, since we can’t see them?” Arsibalt asked, and on the speely screen we could see his eyes wandering around uselessly as he felt his way around the inside of the stump.

“Most of them are a keyboard for entering alphanumeric data with the fingertips. Sammann will be able to use it immediately. The rest of us will have to hunt and peck.”

“So,” I asked, “overall, what do you think? How does it feel?”

“Surprisingly comfortable.”

“As you’ve noticed, the suit touches you in relatively few places,” Jesry said. “That is for comfort, and so that your core temp can be regulated by a simple air-conditioning system—obviates the tube garment that the Warden of Heaven had to wear. But where it touches you, it really grabs you—say the words sanitary elimination cycle commence.”

“Sanitary elimination cycle commence,” Arsibalt repeated, with trepidation rising as he climbed to the end of this ungainly phrase. The words SANITARY ELIMINATION CYCLE appeared on a status panel below the speely of his face. His eyes got wide. “Oh, my god!” he exclaimed.

Everyone laughed. “Care to explain what’s going on?” Jesry said.

“Those air bags you pointed out to me earlier—they inflated. Around my waist and upper thighs.”

“Your pelvic region is now completely isolated from the rest of the suit,” Jesry said.

“I’ll say!”

“You can do whatever needs doing.”

“I believe we can skip that part of the demonstration, Fraa Jesry.”

“Have it your way. Say ‘sanitary elimination cycle conclude.’”

Arsibalt said it, and we got to have another laugh as we saw and heard his reaction. “I’m being sprayed with warm water. Fore and aft.”

“Yes. Boys and girls get the same treatment, like it or not,” Jesry said. Jesry now hauled down a thick hose that was part of the donning rig, and jacked it into a not very dignified part of the suit’s anatomy. “We don’t have the infinite vacuum of space to draw on, so we fake it.” He hit a switch and a vacuum cleaner howled for several seconds. More comedy on the speely screen. Arsibalt informed us that he was now being vigorously air-dried. Then: “It’s over. The bags deflated.”

“We know,” Sammann said, reading the status panel.

“You spend some air every time you do this—so use it sparingly,” Jesry cautioned us. “But the point is—”

“As long as the tender is up and running we can live in these things for a long time,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“This suit is altogether different from that worn by the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Osa pointed out. “More sophisticated.”

“Beautifully machined,” I said, wishing Cord could be here to admire the huge ring bearing that encircled Arsibalt’s waist, just below the threshold of the back door, making it possible for him to swivel his hips and shoulders independently.

“It is literally unbelievable,” was Arsibalt’s verdict. “As highly as I rate our fraas and suurs of the Convox, I can’t believe they could have designed something of such complexity on such short notice.”

“They didn’t,” Jesry said, “this suit was designed, down to the last detail, twenty-six centuries ago.”

“For the Big Nugget?” Sammann asked.

“Exactly. And that Convox had several years to devote to it. The plans were archived at Saunt Rab’s, and preserved during the Third Sack by fraas and suurs who carried the books around on their backs their whole lives. Last year, when the Geometers dropped into orbit around Arbre, there was a whole round of Vocos that we at Edhar never heard about, just to dump talent into restarting the program. Money was spent on an inconceivable scale to build these”—he slapped Arsibalt’s shoulder—“and those.” He waved at the monyafeek. “Note the attachment points.” He swiveled Arsibalt around so that the rest of us could see his back, and pointed out a triangular array of sockets, in the same configuration as the structural lugs on the monyafeek. “One plugs into the other—they become an integrated unit. So we don’t need furniture—no acceleration couches. Air bags in the suit will inflate to cushion our bodies during launch.”

“Impressive,” Sammann said. “The only thing we won’t be able to do in these things is sneak around.”

Everyone looked at him blankly. He grinned, and waved at Arsibalt’s chest, all lit up with speely feeds, alphanumeric displays, and status lights. “Pretty much rules out a covert operation.”

Gratho stepped forward, grabbed a barely noticeable ridge projecting from the HTU at collarbone level, and pulled down. A retractable black screen deployed, slid down, and latched in place just above the waist bearing. All of the lights and displays were now concealed. Arsibalt was matte black from head to toe, as if he’d been sculpted out of damp carbon.

“It is remarkable,” Osa pointed out, “when one considers that these were not even available when you, Fraa Jesry, went up with the Warden of Heaven.”

Jesry nodded. “There are now sixteen of them.”

“But there are eleven of us!” Arsibalt exclaimed, over his speaker. We’d forgotten he was there. His skelehand groped at his waist, found the latch for the screen, and yanked it back up to expose the speely. His familiar look of bulging-eyed surprise was comically magnified.

“That’s right,” said Jesry.

“The significance of that should be obvious,” Lio said, “but I will spell it out: we can’t screw this up. It is a similar story with the missile launchers. These were a military secret. There’s no reason why the Pedestal—who have obtained almost all of their knowledge of Arbre from the leakage of popular culture into space—would know of their existence. They were specifically made to be hard to see from above. But as soon as one of them is launched, its thermal signature will be picked up on the Geometers’ surveillance, and they’ll know all about them. So they must be launched all at once, or not at all. There are a couple of hundred. They are all going to be sent up within the same ten-minute launch window, which happens to be three days from now. Eleven of them will be tipped with ‘monyafeeks’ carrying the members of this cell. Quite a few others will carry the equipment and consumables we’ll be needing.”

“And the remainder?” Sammann asked.

Lio said nothing, though he did throw a glance at me. Both of us were thinking of the Everything Killers. “Decoys and chaff,” he said finally.

“What is it we’re expected to do once we get up there?” Arsibalt asked.

“Consolidate a number of other payloads into a thrust platform—I won’t dignify it as a ‘vehicle’—that will inject us into a new orbit,” Lio said, “an orbit that will bring us to a rendezvous with the Daban Urnud.”

“We could have guessed that much,” Jesry said. “What Fraa Arsibalt is really asking, is—”

Fraa Osa stepped forward, giving Lio an if I may? look. We hadn’t heard much out of the Vale leader, so everyone got where they could see him. “The greatest difficulty for ones such as you shall be, not completion of the given tasks, but instead the humiliation and uncertainty that arise from not being able to know the entire plan. These emotions can hamper you. You must simply decide, now, either to proceed with the awareness that the entire plan might never be revealed to you—and, were it revealed, might have obvious defects—or to turn away and allow some other person to occupy the space suit that has been allotted to you.” And then he stepped back. There was a minute of silence as all of us made our decisions. If that was the right word for what was going on in our heads. I didn’t feel any of the emotions connected with real decision-making. To step away from this group at the moment was simply unthinkable. There was no decision to be made. Fraa Osa, who had devoted his entire life to preparing for such situations, no doubt knew this perfectly well. He wasn’t really asking us to make a decision. He was telling us, in a reasonably diplomatic way, to shut up and concentrate on the matter at hand.

And so that is what we did eighteen hours a day until the truck came to pick us up and take us to the airfield. Though a casual observer might have thought we were working only half the time, and playing video games otherwise. Three of the cells that adjoined the courtyard had been equipped with syndevs hooked to big wraparound speely screens. In the center of each was a chair with disembodied spacesuit arms rigged to it. We’d take turns sitting in that chair with our hands stuck into the arms, groping at the controls. Projected on the screens around us was a simulation of what we might see out of our face-masks when we were floating around in low orbit, complete with all manner of readouts and indicators that, we were promised, would be superimposed on the view by the suit’s built-in syndevs. The controls beneath our fingertips could be patched through to the thrusters on the monyafeeks so that, once we reached orbit, we’d be able to scoot around and accomplish certain tasks. Beneath the left hand was a little sphere that spun freely in a cradle; beneath the right, a mushroom-shaped stick that could be moved in four directions as well as pushed down or pulled up. The former controlled the suit’s rotation, which was pretty easy to manage. The latter controlled translation—moving across space, as opposed to spinning in place. That would be tricky. Things in orbit didn’t behave like what we were used to. Just to name one example: if I were pursuing another object in the same orbit, my natural instinct would be to fire a thruster that would kick me forward. But that would move me into a higher orbit, so the thing I was chasing would soon drop below me. Everything we knew down here was going to be wrong up there. Even for those of us who’d learned orbital mechanics at Orolo’s feet, the only way for us to really grasp it was by playing this game.

“It is deceptive,” was Jules’s observation. He and I were in one of those cells together. I’d become good, early, at playing the game, since I knew the underlying theorics, so helping others learn it had become my role. “The left hand seems to make a great effect.” He spun the little sphere. I closed my eyes and swallowed as the image on the screens—consisting of Arbre, and some other stuff in “orbit” around us—snapped around wildly. “However, in truth the six elements have not been changed in the slightest.” He was referring to the row of six numbers lined up across the bottom of the simulated display: the same six numbers I’d once taught Barb about in the Refectory kitchen.

“That’s right,” I said, “you can spin around all you want and it won’t change your orbital elements—which is all that really matters.” A six-way indicator in the lower right began to flicker, which told me that Jules was using his other hand—the dexter, as he called it—to play with the mushroom, which he called a joycetick. The six orbital elements began to fluctuate. One of them changed from green to yellow. “Aha,” I said, “you just screwed up your inclination. You’re out of plane now.”

“Very significant in the long run,” he said, “and yet deceptively I observe no great difference now.”

“Exactly. Let me run it forward, though, to show you what happens.” I had an instructor’s control panel, which I used to fast-forward the simulation, compressing the next half hour into about ten seconds. The other satellites drifted so far away from us that they were lost to sight. “Once you get so far away that you can’t see your friends—or can’t tell them apart from all of the decoys—”

“I am pairdoo,” he said flatly. “Can you make it run backward?”

“Of course.” I ran the simulation back to just after he had messed up his inclination.

“How can I fix it—like so, perhaps?” he muttered, and tried something with the joycetick. The inclination got a little worse, and the eccentricity jumped through yellow to red. “Maird,” he said, “I am fouled up now on two of the six.”

“Try the reverse of what you just did,” I suggested. He fired the opposite thruster, and the eccentricity improved, but semimajor axis got worse. “Quite a fine puzzle,” he said. “Why did I study linguistics instead of celestial mechanics? Linguistics got me into this excellent mess—only physics can get me out.”

“What’s it like up there?” I asked him. He was getting frustrated and I thought he might benefit from a break.

“Oh, you have seen the model, I am sure. It is quite accurate, in the externals which can be viewed by your telescopes. Of course, most of the Forty Thousand never see any of that. Only the internals of the Orbstack where they live their whole lives.” He was speaking of the living heart of the Daban Urnud: sixteen hollow spheres, each a bit less than a mile in diameter, clustered about a central axis that rotated to produce pseudogravity.

“That’s what I’m asking about,” I said. “What’s that community of ten thousand Laterrans like?”

“Split, now, between the Fulcrum and the Pedestal.” The Fulcrum was the opposition movement, led by Fthosians.

“But in normal times—”

“Until we came here, and the positions of Pedestal and Fulcrum became so hard, it was like a nice provincial town with perhaps a university or research lab. Each orb is half full of water. The water is covered with houseboats. On the roofs of them, we grow our own food—ah, I remember food!”

“Each race has four of the orbs, I assume?”

“Officially, yes, but there is of course some mixing of the communities. When the ship is not under acceleration, we can open certain doors to join neighboring orbs, and one moves freely between them. In one of the orbs of Laterre, we have a school.”

“So there are children?”

“Of course we have children and raise them very, very well—education is everything to us.”

“I wish we did a better job of that on Arbre,” I said. “Extramuros, that is.”

Jules thought about it, and shrugged. “Understand, I do not describe a utopia! We do not educate the young ones purely out of respect for noble ideals. We need them to stay alive, and to allow the voyaging of the Daban Urnud to continue. And there is competition between the children of Urnud, Tro, Laterre, and Fthos for the positions of power within the Command.”

“Does that even extend to fields such as linguistics?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I am a strategic asset! To make its way to new cosmi and to carry out new Advents is the Rayzon Det of the Command. And almost nothing is more useful to them, in an Advent, than a linguist.”

“Of course,” I said. “So, your nice town of ten thousand is big enough for people to marry, or whatever you do—”

“We marry,” he confirmed. “Or at least, sufficient of us do, and have children, to maintain ten thousand.”

“How about you?” I asked. “Are you married?”

“I was,” he said.

So they had divorces too. “Any kids?”

“No. Not yet. Never, now.”

“We’ll get you back home,” I told him. “Maybe you’ll meet someone new up there.”

“Not like her,” he said. Then he got a wry look and shrugged. “When Lise and I were together, I always would have said such things. Sweet nothings. ‘Oh, there is no one like you, my love.’” He sniffled, and looked away. “Not insincerely, of course.”

“Of course not.”

“But the manner of her passing made so clear, so bright, the truth of it—that there truly was no one like her. And in a community of only ten thousand, cut off forever from its roots in the home cosmos—well—I know them all, Raz. All the women of my age. And I can tell you as a matter of fact that in the cosmos where you and I are standing, there is no one like my Lise.” Tears were running freely down his face now.

“I am terribly sorry,” I said. “I feel such a fool. I didn’t understand your wife was dead.”

“She is dead,” he confirmed. “I have, you know, seen the pictures of her body—her face—all over the Convox.”

“My god,” I exclaimed. I wasn’t in the habit of using religious oaths, but could think of nothing else strong enough. “The woman in the probe at Orithena—”

“She was my Lise,” said Jules Verne Durand. “My wife. I have already told Sammann.” And then he broke down altogether.

Jules and I were sitting together in the darkened cell, nothing to see by except simulated sunlight, reflecting from a simulated Arbre and a simulated moon. Simulated persons in spacesuits drifted silently around us. He was hunched over sobbing.

I remembered our Messal conversations about how we could interact in simple physical ways with the Geometers even if biological interaction was not possible. I went over and wrapped my arms around the Laterran until he stopped crying.

“He told me,” I said to Sammann later.

He knew immediately who and what I was speaking of. He broke eye contact and shook his head. “How’s he doing?”

“Better…he said something good.”

“What’s that?”

“I touched Orolo. Orolo touched Lise—gave himself up for her. When I touched Jules, it was like—”

“Closing a cycle.”

“Yeah. I told him how we had prepared her body. The respect we showed it. He seemed to like hearing that.”

“He told me on the plane,” Sammann said. “Asked me not to tell the others.”

“You have anyone like that, Sammann?” For in all the time we’d spent together, we’d never broached such topics.

He chuckled and shook his head. “Like that? No. Not like that. A few girlfriends sometimes. Otherwise, just family. Ita are—well—more family oriented.” He stopped awkwardly. The contrast with avout was too obvious.

“Well, in that vein,” I finally said, “could you help me close another cycle?”

He shrugged. “Be happy to try. What do you need?”

“You got a message off to Ala the other day. Just before the plane took off. I was sort of—shy.”

“Because of the lack of privacy,” he said. “Yeah, I could see that.”

“Can you send her another?”

“Sure. But it won’t be any more private than the last.”

I sort of chuckled. “Yeah. Well, considering everything, that’ll be acceptable.”

“Okay. What do you want me to tell Ala?”

“That if I get to have a fourth life, I want to spend it with her.”

“Whew!” he exclaimed, and his eyes glistened as if I’d slapped him. “Let me type that in before you change your mind.”

“All we do now is go forward,” I said, “there’ll be no changing of minds.”

I spent the entire journey to orbit convinced that the rocket had failed and that this was what dying was. The designers hadn’t had time or budget to put in fripperies like windows, or even speely feeds: just a fairing, a thin outer shell whose functions were to shield the monyafeek from wind-blast; to block out all light, ensuring we’d make the trip in absolute darkness and ignorance; and to vibrate. The latter two functions combined to maximize the terror. Think of what you’d feel going down white water in a barrel. Keeping that in mind, think of being nailed into a rickety crate and then thrown from an overpass onto an eight-lane freeway at peak traffic. Now think of putting on a padded suit and being used for stick-fighting practice in the Ringing Vale. Finally, imagine having giant speakers glued to your skull and pure noise pumped into them at double the threshold for permanent hearing loss. Now pile all of those sensations on top of each other and imagine them going on for ten minutes.

The only favorable thing I could say about it was that it was much better than how I’d spent the preceding hour: lying on my back in the dark, wedged and strapped in a fetal position, and expecting to die. Compared to that, actually dying was turning out to be a piece of cake. Most unpleasant—and, in retrospect, most embarrassing—had been the philosophical musings with which I’d whiled away the time: that Orolo’s death, and Lise’s, had prepared me to accept my own. That it was good I’d sent that message to Ala. That even if I died in this cosmos I might go on living in another.

A stowaway hit me in the spine with a pipe. No, wait a second, that was the engine exploding. No, actually it had been the explosive charges blowing off the fairing. A system of cracks split the darkness into quadrants, then expanded to crowd it out. The four petals of the fairing fell aft and I found myself looking down at Arbre. Some of the buffeting’s overtones (aero turbulence) lessened, others (combustion chamber instability) got worse. The acceleration, so far, had not been a big deal compared to the buffeting, but about then it became quite intense for half a minute or so as the missile’s engine concluded its burn. Made it hard to appreciate the view. Another spine-crack told me that the booster had fallen off. Good riddance. It was just me and the monyafeek now. A few moments’ drift and weightlessness came to a decisive end as the steering thrusters got a grip and snapped the stage into the correct orientation with a crispness that was reassuring even if it did make some of my internal organs swap places. Then a sense of steadily building weight as the monyafeek’s engine came on for its long burn. To all appearances—the sky was black—I was out of the atmosphere, and the roof of the gazebo was doing nothing more than blocking my view ahead. But as the monyafeek’s engine pushed me ahead toward orbital velocity, blades of plasma grew out from the roof’s edges and twitched around my shoulders and feet, just close enough to make it interesting. This was the upper atmosphere being smashed out of the way with such violence that electrons were being torn loose from atoms.

At the launch site, just after I’d swallowed the Big Pill (an internal temperature transponder) and donned the suit, the avout who’d been pressed into service as launch crew had mummified me in kitchen wrap, stuffed me into the gazebo, bracing their shoulders against the soles of my feet, and strapped me together with packing tape. They had taken measurements with yardsticks: freebies from the local megastore. More tape work had ensued, until they’d compressed me into an envelope that matched the diagrams on their hastily printed, extensively hand-annotated documents. Then they had converged on me with cans of expanding foam insulation and foamed me into position, being sure to get the stuff between my knees and my chest, my heels and my butt, my wrists and my face. Once the foam had become rigid, someone had reached in and peeled the plastic back from my face shield so that I could see, patted me on the helmet, and stuck a box cutter into my skelehand. The importance of the measurements became obvious during the early minutes of the second stage burn, as I saw those jets of white-hot atmosphere playing within inches of my feet. But they faded as we climbed out of the atmosphere altogether. The entire gazebo sprang off (literally—it was spring-loaded) and drifted away, leaving me as hood ornament. Then I was powerfully tempted to get free of the packing material. But I knew the velocity-versus-time curve of this trajectory by heart, and knew I was still far from reaching orbital velocity. Most of the velocity gain was going to happen in the final part of the burn, when the monyafeek had left in its wake three-quarters or more of its mass in the form of expended propellants. The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as “near-fatal.” “But it’s okay,” he’d said, “you’ll black out before anything really bad happens to you.”

I tried to look around. During the last three days, I’d fantasized that the view would be fantastic. Inspiring. I’d be able to see the other rockets going up: two hundred of them, all arcing up and east on roughly parallel courses. But the suit had more air bags inside of it than Jesry had let on, and all of them had been pumped up to maximal inflation (meaning: I was lying on a bed of rocks), locking my head and torso into the attitude deemed least likely to end in death, paralysis, or organ failure. My spleen could rest easy; my eyes could see nothing but a starfield, and a bit of Arbre’s glowing blue atmosphere down in the lower right. Those grew blurry as my eyes began to water, and the eyeballs themselves were mashed out of shape by their own weight, like Arsibalt sitting on a water balloon…

I was falling. I was hung over. I was not dead. My suit was talking to me. Had been for a bit. “Issue the ‘Restraint Depressurize’ command to deflate the restraint system and to commence the next stage of the operation,” suggested a voice in Orth, over and over: some suur with good enunciation who’d been drafted to read canned messages into a recording device. I wanted to meet her.

“Ruzzin duzzle,” I said, thinking that this would impress her.

The suit drew breath, then said, “Issue the ‘Restraint Depressurize’ command to—”

“Rustin Deplo!” I insisted. She was beginning to get on my nerves. Maybe I didn’t want to meet her after all.

“Issue the ‘Restraint—’”

“Restirraynt. Dee. Press. Your. Eyes.”

The bags deflated. “Welcome to Low Arbre Orbit!” said the voice, in an altogether different tone.

My head and torso were now free to move about the HTU, but my arms and legs were still taped and foamed. I got busy with that box cutter. It was slow going at first, but soon hunks of foam and snarls of tape were flying out of the monyafeek, drifting away, keeping station in my general vicinity. Eventually, because of their low mass and high drag, they’d re-enter and burn up. Until then, they’d make a lot of visual clutter to confuse the Geometers.

Speaking of clutter, I was beginning to see brilliant specks of light around me. There were two kinds: millions of tiny sparkles (strips of chaff sent up on other missiles) and dozens of large, steady beacons. Some of the latter were near enough that my eyeballs—gradually resuming their former shape—could resolve them as disks, or moons. Depending on where they, I, and the sun were situated, some looked like full moons, some like new ones, others somewhere in between.

There was a half moon off to my right, steadily getting larger as my orbit and it converged. It was a metallized poly balloon five hundred feet across, sent up in the same missile-barrage as I. By measuring its apparent size against the reticle on my face mask, I was able to estimate its distance: about two miles. This must be the one I was supposed to make for.

Feeling around inside the arm-stumps, I got my left hand on the trackball and my right on the stick. They were dead until I uttered another voice command, and confirmed it by flicking a switch. This brought the monyafeek’s thrusters under my control. Up to now, the built-in guidance system had been managing them. And, assuming that the nearby balloon was the one that I was supposed to be aiming for, it seemed to have done a respectable job. But it had no eyes, no brain by which it could home in on the balloon. And as long as the Geometers kept jamming our nav satellites, it could only get me so close. From here on, my eyes would have to be the sensors and my brain the guidance system. I gave the trackball the tiniest rotation, just to verify that the system was working, and the thrusters spat blue light and spun me around to a new attitude. I got my bearings, squared Arbre’s horizon below me, figured out which way was southeast (the direction of my orbital travel), made a mental calculation, thought about it one more time for good measure, and gave the joycetick a shot in two directions. The monyafeek hit me with a one-two punch. Other than that, nothing terrible happened, and I liked what the balloon was now doing in my visual field, so I was tempted to repeat. But I thought better of it. That was how we’d frequently got into trouble in the video game: by doing too much of the right thing.

I had a long-distance wireless transceiver, for use only in emergencies. I left it switched off. When the balloon was close enough for the short-range system to work, I said “Reticule scan,” and a few moments later the suit came back with “Network joined,” drowned out by Sammann’s voice: “How was that for a ride?”

“I want my money back,” I said, and suppressed a feeling of wild joy that came over me on hearing his—anyone’s—voice. Glancing down at a display below my face mask (actually, projected into my eyeballs so that it looked that way), I saw ikons for myself, Sammann, and Fraa Gratho. But as I was looking, Esma’s face and then Jules’s were tacked on. I looked around to see two other monyafeeks converging on us. They were flying in improbably close formation. Actually, one of them—Esma—was towing the other. “I grappled Jules. He was drifting,” Esma said. Fortunately, I had grown accustomed to the Valers’ habit of modest understatement. I’d only just managed to get here alone. In the same time, Esma had tracked someone else, maneuvered to snag him, and brought him home.

“Jules? What’s up? You okay? Is this what passes for a joke on Laterre?” Sammann asked.

“I locked him out of the reticule,” Esma said. “He was speaking incoherently of cheese.”

“Twenty minutes to line of sight,” said an automated voice—referring to the time when the Daban Urnud would be able to see us. The balloon now was huge in my vision, and I could see Sammann hovering to one side of it in his monyafeek, Gratho in his about fifty feet away. Both looked strangely colorful and fuzzy, like toddlers’ toys. The monyafeeks, and the other, non-human payloads that had been sent up at the same time, were surrounded by unruly clouds of fibrous netting that had been crammed into sealed capsules for the ride up, but that had popped open once we’d hit orbit, and expanded to ten times their former volume. We looked like drifting red pompoms.

“You guys performed the star check?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Gratho, “but I invite you to verify our results.”

I used the trackball to nudge myself around until I could see the vaguely circular constellation that outlined the Hoplite’s shield, and compared its position to those of Arbre and of the balloon. This was a simple way of assuring that when our orbit took us around to where telescopes on the Daban Urnud might be able to see us, the balloon would be between us and them.

By now, the Geometers must know that something big was afoot. We had timed it, though, in such a way that Arbre had blocked their view of the two-hundred-missile launch. That was soon to change. Our orbit was almost perfectly circular—its eccentricity, a measure of how unround it was, was only 0.001—and it skimmed just above the atmosphere, at an altitude of a hundred miles. It took us around Arbre once every hour and a half. The Daban Urnud’s orbit was more elliptical, and its altitude ranged between fourteen and twenty-five thousand miles. It took ten times as long—about fifteen hours—to make one revolution. Imagine two runners circling a pond, one staying so close to the shore that his feet got wet, the other maintaining a distance of half a mile. The one on the inside would lap the one on the outside ten times for every circuit made by the other. Whenever we were lapping the Daban Urnud, they could look down and see us against the backdrop of Arbre. Soon, though, we would scoot around behind the planet and be lost to their view for anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour. We had launched during one of those intervals of privacy; now it was halfway over.

Why hadn’t we simply launched to a higher orbit? Because our patched-together launch system wasn’t capable of dumping that much energy into a payload.

In a few minutes, when the Daban Urnud got line of sight to the cloud of stuff that had just been flung into orbit by those two hundred missiles, they’d see a few dozen balloons salted through a nebula of radar-jamming chaff-strips of metallized poly—hundreds of miles across, and rapidly getting bigger as orbits diverged. The chaff would make long-wavelength surveillance (radar) useless. They’d have to look at us in shorter wavelengths (light) which would necessarily mean sorting through a very large number of phototypes, looking for anything that wasn’t a balloon or a strip of chaff. If we did this right, then even if they did manage to collect all of those pictures and inspect them in a reasonable span of time, they’d still see nothing—because we and all of our stuff would be hiding behind one of the balloons.

But this implied that a lot would have to happen in the next twenty minutes. I became so preoccupied that I almost forgot Jesry’s first piece of advice: don’t miss the scupper. The first spasms in my throat seized my attention, though, and I was able to lunge forward and bite down on the rubber orifice just in time. My breakfast was vacuumed away and freeze-dried into a waste bag somewhere. I returned to the task at hand. Fortunately—and a bit surprisingly—the Big Pill didn’t come up. It must still be down in my gut somewhere, sending temperature and other biomedical data to the suit’s processors.

After that, anyway, I felt better, and didn’t throw up again for almost ten seconds.

By getting there first, Sammann had appointed himself Glommer, which meant that his job was to keep station under the balloon and secure the incoming payloads into a single, haphazardly connected mass. Payload number one was Jules Verne Durand. Esma towed him in and hit the brakes. Her monyafeek stopped, but Jules kept going, like a trailer jackknifing on an icy road. She had to back-thrust once more as the Laterran’s rig tried to jerk her forward. As Gratho hovered watchfully, wondering whether this was an emergence, Sammann maneuvered closer, then spun in place. A long slender probe snapped out from his monyafeek, stretched across twenty feet of space in an eye-blink, and buried itself in the mass of red fuzz surrounding Jules’s rig. “Nailed it!” Jules was now stretched between him and Esma. “Feel free to detach.”

“De-grappling,” Esma reported. “I’ll try to find additional payloads.” Her jets flared and the probe connecting her to Jules’s fuzz-ball slid free.

Thus did Sammann begin his work as Glommer. The rest of us were Getters, meaning we’d move around using the maneuvering thrusters, latch on to payloads that drifted near, and bring them to the Glommer. I spun my rig around to look for any incoming payloads. Humans—of whom there ought to have been eleven—were color-coded red. The tender and its little nuke plant were also red, since we’d soon die without them. In addition, there were fifty monyafeeks carrying cargo. Their fuzzballs were blue. Their contents were interchangeable—each contained some water, some food, some fuel, and some other stuff we’d need. That’s because we didn’t expect to recover all of them. When I looked around, I saw what seemed like an impossibly huge number of red and blue fuzzballs, all drifting in the general vicinity. My brain told me, flat-out, that rounding them all up was impossible. It was a disaster. But the very least I could do was head for the nearest red one and make sure that whoever it was had survived the launch and was conscious. I began to line up for a rendezvous, but I’d barely begun to move before I saw maneuvering jets flash. Jesry’s ikon came up on my display. “I’m good,” he announced impatiently, “go look for something that can’t take care of itself.”

Beyond him, a blue payload was coming in. It was in the correct plane but its orbit was a little too eccentric, so it was losing altitude—probably doomed to re-enter and burn up in a few minutes. I got myself spun around facing “forward,” i.e., in the direction that I, and all of this other stuff, were moving in our orbits around Arbre, and then made myself “vertical,” so that the soles of my feet were pointed at Arbre and its horizon was parallel to a certain line projected across my face mask. The payload was slowly “falling” through my visual field. I used the stick to thrust backwards, slowing myself down. The payload stopped “falling,” which meant I was now in the same doomed orbit that it was. A little more maneuvering took me to within twenty feet of the thing.

I was distracted for a moment by more visual clutter: a red payload, tumbling across my visual field from left to right, sideswiped a blue one. My eye was drawn to it. The red and the blue had stuck together. I reckoned it was one of the other cell members doing what I was doing. But if so, they weren’t using a grapnel—just holding on to the net with a skelehand, or something. The red and the blue payload had merged into a slowly rotating binary star. I saw no sign of thrusters being fired—no evidence that the person was even conscious. “I think we might have someone in trouble here—an inadvertent collision,” I reported.

“I see what you see and am coming to investigate,” said Arsibalt.

“I’m a little closer,” I offered, turning my head around and seeing Arsibalt on his way in. “I could—”

“No,” he said, “go ahead and take the payload you’ve got.”

So, to grips. But before I went to the next step, I couldn’t help looking over toward the balloon. My pursuit of this payload had taken me well away from it, but I was heartened to see a number of blues and reds converging there. Suur Vay and Fraa Osa had linked half a dozen payloads into a big lazily spinning molecule of fuzz-balls and were hauling it in, getting ready to link it to a growing complex in the shelter of the balloon.

Arsibalt reported: “I’m closing on Fraa Jad. He has become entangled with a blue payload and he seems to be unconscious.”

“What kind of orbital elements are you seeing?” Lio asked.

“His e is dangerously high,” Arsibalt said, referring to the eccentricity of Jad’s orbit. “He’ll be in the soup in a few minutes.”

“Be careful you don’t get entangled, then!” Lio warned him.

“Rear grapnel camera on,” I said, and the view out my face-mask was obscured by a virtual display in jewel-like laser colors: a green grid with red crosshairs in the middle. This was a feed from a speelycaptor aimed out the back of my monyafeek. I checked my pitch angle and then rotated the trackball until it had incremented by a hundred and eighty degrees. The payload swung into view. It was now directly behind me. “Grapnel One fire,” I said, and felt a little kick in the tail as a small cylinder of compressed gas ruptured. The grapnel system was a long skinny tube of fabric, all telescoped in on itself like a stocking. When the gas exploded into it, the tube shot out straight and became a long rigid balloon. At its end was a warhead, rounded smooth on its tip so that it would plunge through the cloud of netting surrounding a payload, but spring-loaded with spines that sprang out when the tube reached the end of its travel, or when it smacked into something.

Based on my imperfect view through the rear camera, I was pretty certain it had all worked. But there was only one way to be sure. “Rear grapnel camera off,” I said, and thrust forward. For a couple of seconds I don’t think my heart beat at all. Then a jerk backwards told me my grapnel had engaged the netting. I allowed myself a shout of joy, then checked the balloon again.

Arsibalt reported, “Jad is welded to the payload. I’ll never get them apart.”

Lio: “What do you mean, welded?”

Arsibalt: “When he drifted into it, the blue plastic netting contacted the hot nozzle skirt on his monyafeek and melted—stuck fast. I’m attempting to grapple the two payloads as a unit.”

Lio: “Do you have sufficient propellant to make the necessary burn?”

Arsibalt: “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

Lio: “I’m on my way. Don’t expend all your propellant. We don’t even know if Jad is still alive.”

“Seventeen minutes to line of sight.”

Plenty of time. I got myself oriented as before, with the payload trailing behind me, and thrust forward, undoing the damage I’d inflicted on my orbit a few moments earlier. It took more fuel—a longer burn—because I was moving double the mass now. Some nervousness here, because a long burn meant a large mistake, if I was doing it wrong. I kept an eye on the eccentricity readout at the bottom of my display. This was already about.005, but I had to make it less than.001 to stay in any kind of reasonable synch with everyone else.

In my earphones I could hear others making a similar calculation. Arsibalt, I gathered, had succeeded in grappling Jad and the payload Jad was stuck to, and was trying to do what I was doing, calling out numbers to Lio, who was maneuvering into position to rescue Arsibalt if that became necessary. Meanwhile Jesry was monitoring the traffic, calculating how much propellant was going to be needed, calling out suggestions that, as the adventure went on, hardened into commands. The distraction was severe, so I reluctantly shut off my wireless link and focused on my own situation.

Only once I’d burned my e down under.001 did I lift my hands from the controls and look around for the balloon. After a few moments’ wild anxiety when I didn’t think it was anywhere near me, I found it “above” and to my right, a thousand feet away, and slowly getting closer. A cluster of blue netting was forming up “below” it as other Cell 317ers brought in payloads. As long as I was so close, I took a look around to see if there were any others handy.

“Fifteen minutes to line of sight.”

I’d lost contact with Arsibalt and Lio, but several other ikons came up on my display as I drifted in range of the reticule. I turned the sound back on, not without intense trepidation, since I did not know what news I was about to hear.

Screaming filled my ears—overloaded the electronics. I tried to remember how to turn down the volume. The tone was not that of a horror show; more like a sporting event where someone wins a close game with an improbable score just as time expires. Lio’s ikon popped up. “Calm down! Calm down!” he insisted, appalled by the lapse of discipline. Arsibalt’s ikon came up. “Sammann, prepare to grab Fraa Jad, please. He’s unresponsive.” His voice was weighed down with a kind of unnatural calm, but I sensed that if I checked his bio readouts they would reflect near-fatal excitement.

The balloon was rapidly getting bigger. I was too high, though—too far from Arbre—so I juked northwest, killing a bit of my orbital velocity, dropping to a lower altitude. I say “juked northwest” as if it were that simple, but now that I was towing a payload on the end of a twenty-foot grapnel, such moves were much more complicated; first I had to swing around to get on the payload’s other side, then apply thrust. This slowed my convergence on the balloon.

Sammann said, “Got him. He’s alive. Bio readouts are screwy though.”

Everyone had been paying attention to Fraa Jad being towed in by Arsibalt. But suddenly all I heard was shouting. “Look out look out!” “Damn it!” “That was close!” and “Bad news—it’s a red!”

Twisting my head around, I saw what they had been reacting to: a red payload had passed within a few yards of the balloon, moving at a high relative speed—fast enough to have done damage if it had been just a little bit “higher.” It had come upon them so rapidly that no one had reacted in time to head it off, grapple it, and rein it in. It passed between me and the balloon, and I got a good look at it. “It’s the nuke,” I announced. Then I said to my suit, “Grapnel disengage.”

“Disengaged,” it returned.

I fired a little burst to pull myself free of the blue payload. “I’m on it,” I announced, “someone grab this payload.” The nuke was moving so fast that I reverted to instincts cultivated playing the video game in Elkhazg. I fired a lateral burst that—while it didn’t solve the problem—slowed the rate at which the gap between me and the nuke was widening. Ikons were falling off my display as I shot out of range, and the sound was coming through as sporadic, disjointed packets. I was pretty sure I heard Arsibalt saying “wrong plane,” which tallied with what I was thinking: this nuke’s orbit was in a plane that differed from ours by a small angle, just because of some small error that had crept in during the chaos of launch.

One voice, anyway, came through clearly: “Thirteen minutes to line of sight.”

I tried another maneuver, screwed it up desperately, and, with feelings that were close to panic, watched the nuke zoom across my field of vision. A moment later, Arbre whipped beneath me, and I realized I was spinning around. My hand must have brushed the trackball and set it spinning. I devoted a few moments to getting my attitude stabilized, then spun about carefully so that I wouldn’t lose my fix on the nuke. Once I had that in hand, I glanced back toward the balloon. It was shockingly distant.

When I looked back toward the nuke, I couldn’t see it. I’d lost it in sun-glare off the Equatorial Sea. Back-thrusting to lose altitude, I was able to find the red fuzzball again as it rose above the horizon.

No one else was anywhere near. They’d heard me saying I had the nuke, and assumed I could handle it.

“Calm down,” I said to myself. Doing this slowly and getting it right on the next try would get me back to my friends quicker than making three hasty, failed attempts. I got myself stabilized so that the nuke was low in my field of vision and dead ahead, and forced myself to spend thirty seconds doing nothing except tracking it, observing how its motion differed from mine.

Definitely an error in the slant of its orbital plane. I had to fire the thrusters to match that error. Which I did—but in the process I messed up my semimajor axis and a couple of other elements in a way that would have killed me ten minutes later. Another sixty seconds’ fussing got those squared away.

Plane change maneuvers are expensive.

I’d been forcing myself not to look for the balloon any more. Partly because I was afraid of what I’d see—my shelter, my friends, impossibly far away. But also because it simply didn’t matter. Without the nuke, whose power would split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we would all asphyxiate within a couple of hours. If I lost my nerve and retreated to the balloon without it, my empty-handed arrival would be a death sentence for the whole cell.

I came near, but got slewed sideways at the last minute. Did a little spin move. Stopped myself, where “stopped” meant that the nuke and I were stationary with respect to each other. “Three minutes to line of sight,” said the voice. I gave the controls the tiniest nudge, saw to my satisfaction that the nuke and I were converging. Just let it happen. Tried not to breathe so fast.

Rather than grappling the nuke, I spent a few moments maneuvering close enough that I could simply reach out with my skelehand and grab the netting. Then I turned, making my best guess as to where the balloon might be, and saw—nothing. Or rather, too much. Our decoy strategy had backfired. At this distance, I had no way to distinguish true from false. There were three balloons about the same distance from me—none closer than ten miles. Even if I were to guess right, I wouldn’t be able to reach it in three minutes. And if I guessed wrong, I’d use up so much thruster propellant in getting to it that I’d be marooned there.

On the other hand. The orbit that I, and the nuke, were in was a stable one. I double-checked the numbers, since all our lives depended on my judgment of this. The orbit’s shape and size were such that it would not enter the atmosphere and burn up, at least not for a day or two.

What if I simply stayed with it? My oxygen supply was down to about two hours, but I could stretch it by calming down a little. I knew for a fact that the problem, here, was in the inclination of the orbit—the angle that the nuke and I were now making with respect to the equator. Ours was a little steeper than my comrades’. Consequently, my trajectory would only coincide with Cell 317’s in two places—two points of intersection, occurring once every forty-five minutes, on opposite sides of the planet. Sort of like the proverbial stopped clock that’s right twice daily. The last time it had been right had been about fifteen minutes ago, when the nuke had almost hit my friends, and I had gone after it. Since then, we’d been getting farther apart. But starting in another few minutes, we’d begin getting closer together again. And in half an hour, we should enjoy another near collision.

“One minute to line of sight.”

The key to it all: what were my friends thinking? What were they saying right now over that wireless ret? I’d heard Arsibalt’s voice saying that the nuke was in the wrong plane. They’d probably watched me drifting away, with mounting anxiety, and debated whether to send out a rescue team.

But they hadn’t. Lio had given no such order. Not only that, they had fought off the temptation to switch on the long-range wireless.

If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to read their minds, nor they mine. But my fraas had been raised, trained, by Orolo. They had figured out—probably sooner than I had—that in forty-five minutes the nuke would reappear on the other side of Arbre. Just as important, they were relying on me—entrusting me with their lives—to figure out the same thing and to act accordingly.

And what did “act accordingly” mean? It meant stay calm and don’t mess with the orbit that I was in. If I took no action, they’d be able to anticipate my position. If I did something, though, they’d have no way of predicting my whereabouts.

I didn’t have much in the way of emergency supplies: just a blanket of metallized poly—like the emergency blanket they’d issued to Orolo after his Anathem—taped to the chest of my suit. It was to be used to block the light of the sun, where necessary, from striking our matte black suits with full force and overheating them, which would force the chiller to work harder and use more oxygen. I peeled mine loose and unfolded it—not easy with skelehands—and used it to cover as much of the nuke as I could, then snuggled beneath it.

“Line of sight established.”

Supposing they were looking, the telescopes on the Daban Urnud could now see me, albeit as just another hunk of crud thrown up in the two-hundred-missile launch. Chaff.

Let’s put this in perspective: the Daban Urnud was something like fourteen thousand miles away. At their closest approach to Arbre, the whole planet looked as big to them as a pie held at arm’s length. At their farthest, the size of a saucer. For them to see my spread-out blanket, at this distance, was like trying to spot a gum wrapper from a hundred miles away. Worse—or, for me, better—it was like looking at a whole field covered with litter, trying to pick out a single gum wrapper from all the rest.

On the other hand, Lio—who had brought Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems with him to the Convox—had cautioned us not to get cocky, and Jules had added weight to this by telling us how the Urnudans, past masters of space warfare, had coupled syndevs to excellent telescopes, enabling them to sift through vast numbers of images to find things that didn’t look right. Decoys, for example, were easy to detect because they were usually nothing more than balloons, whose huge size and light weight made them feel the drag of the evanescent atmosphere much more than real payloads.

So decoy orbits behaved a little differently from non-decoy ones. Moreover, once the Urnudans had created a census of all the stuff that the two-hundred-missile-launch had flung into orbit, they would be in a position to notice if anything went missing, or changed to a new orbit. This could only happen if it had thrusters and guidance on board.

So in that sense we had already screwed up the mission. We had to fall back on safety in numbers: the hope that my blanket’s sudden disappearance from the junk-cloud would not be noticed soon enough for the Pedestal to do anything about it.

But I was getting ahead of myself. In order for this blanket to suddenly disappear, I was going to have to rendezvous with the others.

That would be easier with oxygen. I closed my eyes, tried to relax, tried to stop thinking about the Pedestal and their admirable telescopes and their syndevs. Here was that rare circumstance where worrying too much actually could kill me.

Once my pulse had dropped to a more reasonable range, I found the keyboards in my arm-stumps and typed messages to Cord and to Ala, in case I died and the suit was recovered later with its memory intact.

The suit’s syndev included an orbital theorics calculator, which one almost never had time to use in the heat of the moment, but I fired it up and used it to verify some of my hunches as to what I’d need to do when I drew within range of the others. It was infuriatingly difficult to concentrate, though. My brain had become like an old sponge that has sopped up more water than it can hold.

In zero gravity, there was almost no contact between the suit and the person wearing it. Air, at just the right temperature, circulated all around my naked body—it was like taking a bath in air. Behind my back was a small chemical plant going full tilt, but I was only aware of it as a source of gentle white noise. Other than that, I heard nothing except the beating of my own heart. Normally, I could get a jolt of excitement simply by opening my eyes and looking out the face-mask: I’m in space! But now all I could see was the back side of a crinkly blanket, as if I were poultry in a roasting pan. So it was not difficult to feel drowsy. My body and my mind had never had so many reasons to want rest; between jet lag and training, we’d slept very little at Elkhazg, and not at all in the last twenty-four hours. The last half hour had been absurdly stressful—just the kind of experience after which any sane person would want to crawl under the covers of a warm bed and cry himself to sleep.

The only thing that kept me from passing out instantly was fear of my own sleepiness. After the training we’d been through, I now knew the symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning better than the alphabet. Nausea, check. Dizziness, check. Vomiting, check. Headache, check. But who wouldn’t have all of those symptoms after being kicked up a hundred-mile-high staircase by a monyafeek? What came next? Oh, yeah—almost forgot—drowsiness and confusion.

I checked the readouts in my screen. Checked them again. Closed my eyes, waited for my vision to clear, checked them a third time. They were fine. Oxygen tank level was yellow—which was to be expected, after all the heavy breathing—but the oxygen content of the air I was breathing was fine and the CO₂ level was zero—the scrubber was taking all of it out.

But if I were drowsy and confused, might I be reading the numbers wrong?

I drifted off, but started awake every few minutes. Enough time had passed that I’d begun to second-guess what had happened just after the launch. I’d been so focused on what I’d been doing that when I’d noticed Jad bumping into the blue payload and getting stuck to it, I’d decided not to go check it out. That had been a mistake. I should have gone for it. Instead, Arsibalt had gone after Jad—and to judge from the way Jesry had been screaming when Arsibalt had made it back, he had just barely escaped with his life, and Jad’s.

This was a bad plan. Who had come up with the idea of doing it this way?

I understood the logic. Arbre had two hundred missiles. No more. Each just barely capable of getting a tiny payload to a dangerously low and short-lived orbit. There was only so much we could do, working from that. We’d all studied the plan at Elkhazg, come to grips with it, nodded our heads, accepted it.

But that was one thing. To be up here with payloads zooming around chaotically, bumping into each other, getting melted together—hiding under space blankets—there were so many ways this could have gone wrong.

Could still go wrong. Could be going wrong now.

What if I’d been a little hastier when I had reached the nuke, and made a bid to drag it back? We’d all have died.

I was worrying again. Actually, it was worse than that—even more pointless. Rather than worrying about the future—which could be changed—I was worrying about things that might have gone wrong in the past, and couldn’t be changed in any case.

Leave that to the Incanters and the Rhetors, respectively.

Where were all of the Thousanders now? Gathered in a stadium, chanting?

“Raz!”

I opened my eyes. Had one of those moments when I simply couldn’t figure out where I was—could not convince myself that the launch hadn’t been a dream.

“Raz!”

One ikon was visible on the display: Fraa Jesry.

“Here,” I said.

“It’s great to hear your voice!” he exclaimed, sounding enormously relieved.

“Well, I’m touched to hear you say so, Jesry—”

“Shut up. I’m incoming. Get the blanket out of the way so you can get a clue what’s going on.”

“Are you sure? Aren’t we in line of sight?”

“No.”

“I think that we are in line of sight, Jesry.”

“We were, last time. Now we’re not.”

“Last time?”

“We missed you the first time around. Crossed your path, but the altitude difference was too great. Couldn’t raise you on the wireless.”

“This is our second try?” I checked the time. He was right. Ninety minutes—not forty-five—had passed. My oxygen indicator had gone red. I’d slept through the first rendezvous!

I swiped the blanket out of the way. Saw a balloon, a mile away and rapidly getting closer. Tucked up under it was an ungainly structure of inflated grapnel-tubes with dozens of red and blue fuzzballs caught up in it. A few space-suited figures on monyafeeks kept station nearby, all turned to look my direction. The row of ikons flashed up as I rejoined the reticule. But no one spoke except Jesry. He had come out alone.

“If I fail, remain calm and wait,” he said. “There are two layers of backup plans.”

“But they sent the best first, eh?” I kicked away from the nuke, very gently, and fired a grapnel into its net-cloud.

“Thanks, but for doing what you did, you get bragging rights, Raz.” Jesry had floated in range. He spun about, collected himself, and fired a grapnel of his own.

“Maybe we can brag when we’re old,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Orient positive radial,” he said. This meant that instead of facing in the direction of our orbital movement as before, we had to swing around ninety degrees so that our backs were to Arbre. I did it, and bumped lightly against Jesry as we came around side by side.

“Rotate down forty-five degrees and fire a fifteen-second burst,” Jesry said.

Fifteen seconds was huge, and, if the calculations had been wrong, would send us far off course with no propellant to get back. But I did it. Didn’t even think of not taking the suggestion. This was Jesry. He’d been watching me, coolly, as I’d gone out to fetch the nuke. Had done the theorics in his head, and triple-checked it with the syndev. I swiveled and fired. Lost my visual in so doing.

“You are headed for us as if we were reeling you in on a line,” Sammann proclaimed. But his tone of voice was all I really needed to hear.

“Take no action,” Lio warned us. “You’re passing under us—we are coming to grapple you—” And a moment later, two sudden yanks, and a cheer from the others, told me we’d been captured. I took my fingers off the thruster controls just to prevent my trembling hands’ inadvertently firing the thrusters, and let Lio and Osa tow us in.

“Raz, you’re secure,” Lio said. “Sammann, final star check please?”

“We are still shielded by the balloon,” Sammann said.

“Good,” Lio said. “I’m sure everyone wishes to congratulate Fraa Erasmas, but don’t. Save oxygen. Do it later. Arsibalt, you know what’s next—let us know if you need to borrow oxygen from someone else.”

The others had pulled on white overgarments of tough fabric to stop micrometeoroids and to reflect the heat of the sun. These made them look more like proper spacemen. One was given to me, and I put it on. Then, like the others, I snap-linked myself to this huge tangle of nets and payloads and grapnels and tried to sleep while Arsibalt and Lio got the tender online. This meant maneuvering it and the nuke close together and then connecting them. Already connected to the tender was a flexible water bladder. Other cell members had been busy during my absence scavenging water from the reservoirs on the blue payloads and transferring it into this bag, which had plumped out until it was bathtub-sized.

Arsibalt snap-linked himself to the control panel of the nuke and spent a lot of time motionless, which probably meant he was reading the instructions on the virtual screen inside his face-mask and going through checklists. After a while he got to work deploying some long poles that ended up sticking out from one side of the nuke like spines. Petals blossomed from near their ends, blocking our view of whatever was on the tips of those poles. Arsibalt returned to the control panel and worked for a few moments, then informed us, “I have powered up the reactor. Avoid the ends of the poles. They are hot.”

“Hot, as in radioactive?” Jesry asked.

“No. Hot as in ouch. They are where the system radiates its waste heat into space.” Then, after a pause: “But they’re also radioactive.”

No one said anything, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who checked his oxygen supply. The water was now being split into hydrogen and oxygen. In a few hours we’d be able to replace our depleted air and fuel supplies, and swap used for fresh scrubbers, at the tender. Until then, we had to take it easy, and share what we had with others who needed it more. Esma, for example, had been responsible for scavenging water from payloads, and had used up a lot of her oxygen.

Lio said, “Everyone except Sammann and Gratho drink, eat, and sleep. If you absolutely can’t sleep, review coming tasks. Sammann and Gratho, connect us.”

Sammann and Gratho clambered free of their monyafeeks and took to shinnying around the payload-tangle. They found some kind of magic box, broke it free from the mess, and got it lashed into a position where it enjoyed a clear line of sight down to Arbre. A few minutes later Sammann announced that we were on the Reticulum. But I already suspected that based on new lights and jeejah-displays that had begun to flourish in my peripheral vision.

“Hello, Fraa Erasmas, this is Cell 87,” said a voice in my ears. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Tulia, I can hear you fine. Good morning, or whatever it is where you are.”

“Evening,” she said. “We’re in the equipment shed of a farm about a thousand miles southwest of Tredegarh. What took you guys so long?”

“We were enjoying the view and having a party,” I said. “How have you been spending the time? What is it that Cell 87 does in that equipment shed?”

“Whatever makes things easier for you.”

“Tulia, I’ve hardly ever known you to be so helpful, so compliant…”

“Looks like you need to urinate. What’s the holdup?”

“I’ll get right on it.”

“Any particular reason your pulse is so rapid?”

“Gosh, I don’t know, let me think…”

“Spare me,” she said. “Here’s a picture of the mess you’re in—check it out while you’re peeing.” And just like that, my screen was filled with a three-dimensional rendering of a big silver sphere with a mess of struts, fuzzballs, and color-coded payloads tucked up against one side of it. “Here’s where you are.” My name flashed in yellow. “Here’s where you need to be.” A payload began flashing on the other side of the mess. “We worked out the most efficient route.” A line snaked through, linking my name to the destination.

“That doesn’t look so efficient,” I began.

She cut me off. “There’s stuff you don’t know. Each of the others in your cell has to follow a different route to a different payload. This one is optimized to minimize interference.”

“I stand corrected.”

A flashing red box appeared about halfway along my route. “What’s the red thing?” I asked.

She conferred with someone in the equipment shed, then answered, “One of the payloads has a sharp corner you’ll want to avoid. No worries, we’ll talk you through it.”

“Gosh, thanks.”

Rustling papers, she announced, “I’m going to talk you through the process of unstrapping yourself from the S2-35B.”

“Up here, we call it a monyafeek.”

“Whatever. Move your right hand up to the buckle above your left collarbone…”

I’ll describe what we did next as if we’d just done it. In the act, though, it was—as the old joke goes—a whole hour’s work packed into just one twenty-four-hour day.

It would have been twenty-four days, though, if not for our support cells on the ground, keeping track of what we were doing and coming up with ways to make it easier. During rest breaks—ruthlessly enforced by our private physicians—I learned that Arsibalt’s support cell was in a drained swimming pool in a Kelx parochial suvin, and Lio’s was on an unmarked drummon parked at a maintenance depot. And as slowly became plain, each of these cells was in turn being supported by networks of other cells out there in the Antiswarm.

Work began with disentangling and sorting the goods we’d hauled in during that first, feverish twenty minutes. Suur Vay tended to Jules Verne Durand and to Fraa Jad. Both ended up being fine. The Laterran was weak from lack of nutrition, and had suffered more from the ride up to orbit. It simply took him longer to become himself again. It wasn’t really clear what had happened to Fraa Jad. He was unresponsive for a while, though his vital signs were in acceptable ranges and his eyes were open. Eventually, he requested that Suur Vay leave off pestering him. Then he dropped off the reticule and did nothing for an hour. Finally he began to move, and to take part in the unpacking. I wondered who was in his support cell.

The fuzz-balls we stripped off, wadded up, and got out of the way. The payloads we strapped together with poly ties, just so they wouldn’t drift out from the shelter of the balloon and give away our position. We rigged the payload-cluster to a monyafeek, and used its thrusters for station-keeping. The balloon’s low mass and high drag made it inevitable that we’d drift out from under its shelter unless we tapped the thrusters every so often to slow ourselves down. If we did this for more than a couple of days, we’d re-enter the atmosphere along with the balloon, and there would be a sort of race to see whether incineration or crushing deceleration would kill us first. But we had no intention of hanging around that long.

Arsibalt, Osa, and I assembled the decoy while the rest of Cell 317 assembled the Cold Black Mirror.

The decoy was erected on a base consisting of seven monyafeeks lashed together in a hexagonal array. We scavenged propellants from the blue payloads just as Suur Esma had earlier done with water, and loaded it into the decoy’s tanks.

That took care of propulsion. On top of this platform we attached what looked like a big unruly wad of fabric—it was an inflatable structure—that had come up as a separate payload. There was a zipper in its side. We opened it, and stuffed in everything we didn’t need: nets, leftover packing material, parts of other monyafeeks. Also there were four manikins dressed in coveralls. We closed the zipper to prevent all of that junk from drifting out, and opened it from time to time as members of the other team came to us with stuff they wanted to get rid of. But we didn’t inflate it yet, because space on this side of the balloon was tight, and getting tighter as the Cold Black Mirror took shape.

My description of the Cold Black Mirror might make it sound heavy, but like everything else up here, it weighed practically nothing because it was slapped together of inflatable struts, memory wire, membranes, and aerogels. It was square, fifty feet on a side. Its upper surface was perfectly flat (it was a membrane stretched like a drumhead between knife edges) and perfectly reflective. It was made of stuff that would reflect not only visible light, but microwaves—the frequencies that the Geometers used for radar. When we ventured out from behind the balloon, we would keep it between us and the Daban Urnud, but angled, like a shed roof, so that their radar beams, as they swept across our vicinity, would be bounced off in some other direction. We’d still make a big echo, but it would never come anywhere near the Daban Urnud, and never show up on their screens.

As long as we were careful about which way the mirror was pointing, we would not be visible against the backdrop of space, because the mirror would be reflecting some other part of space, and all space looked more or less the same: black. If they just happened to zoom in on us with a really good telescope they might happen to notice a star or two in the wrong place, but this was unlikely.

When we passed between the Daban Urnud and the luminous surface of Arbre it would be a different matter, but we were hoping that a fifty-by-fifty-foot snatch of absolute blackness might go unnoticed on a backdrop eight thousand miles across. It would be like a single bacterium on a dinner plate.

If the mirror were permitted to get warm, it would emit infrared light that the Geometers might notice, and so most of the ingenuity that had been spent on its design had been devoted to keeping it cold. It was laced with solid-state chillers that were powered by the nuke. The nuke, as Jesry had mentioned, produced a lot of waste heat. This would show up like a casino on infrared, if we were dumb enough to shine it at the Daban Urnud, but as long as we kept the radiators hidden beneath the Cold Black Mirror and pointed in the direction of Arbre, the Geometers would not have a line of sight that would make it possible for them to see it.

Propulsion was, to get us started, three scavenged monyafeeks, and (for later) a reel of string. Our spacesuits would serve as living quarters, beds, toilets, Refectories, drugstores, and entertainment centers.

But not as cloisters. Space travel had any number of interesting features, but quiet contemplation was not among them. During Apert, and later when we had been Evoked, the worst part of the culture shock had been the jeejahs. There was no estimating how many times I’d said to myself Thank Cartas I’m not chained to one of those awful things! But this was like living inside of a jeejah: a super-ultra-mega jeejah whose screen wrapped all the way around my field of vision, whose speakers were jacked into my ears, whose microphone transmitted every word, breath, and sigh to attentive listeners on the other end of the line. Part of it was even inside of me: that huge temperature transponder.

We were only allowed to work for two hours before a mandatory rest break kicked in. And, as I began to suspect, round about the second or third such break, it wasn’t so much to give our bodies a rest as it was to rest our souls from the bewildering, overwhelming, irritating barrage of information being pumped into our ears and eyes.

Strangely, when I got a moment’s peace, I only wanted to talk to someone. In a normal way. “Tulia? You there?”

“I am shocked you haven’t fallen asleep!” she joked. “You’re behind schedule—get cracking and relax!”

I laughed not.

“Sorry,” she said, “what’s up?”

“Nothing. Just thinking, is all.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Are we the right people, out of all Arbre, to be up here doing this?”

“Uh, that decision has been made, and the answer is yes.”

“But how did it get made? Wait a minute, I know: Ala rammed it through some committee.”

“Maybe it wasn’t so much a ramming kind of thing,” Tulia said, and I had to smile at the distaste in her voice. “But you’re right that Ala had a lot to do with it.”

“Fine. No ramming. But I’ll bet it wasn’t all sweet persuasion either. Not all rational Dialog. Not with those people.”

“You’d be surprised how far rational Dialog goes with wartime military.”

“But the military must have been saying ‘look, this is obviously a job for our guys. Commandos. Not a bunch of avout, a renegade Ita, and a starving alien.’”

“There was—is—a backup team,” Tulia allowed. “I think it’s all military. Same training as you guys.”

“Then how did the decision get made to give us the suits, the monyafeeks—”

“Partly a language issue. Jules Verne Durand is a priceless asset. He speaks Orth. Not Fluccish. So the team would have to be at least part Orth-speaking. To make it bilingual would pose all sorts of problems.”

“Hmm, so we were probably the backup option until Jules fell into our laps.”

“He didn’t fall into your lap,” Tulia reminded me. “You went out and—”

“Be that as it may, I still find it amazing that the Panjandrums would even entertain the idea, given that they have commandos and astronauts who know this kind of thing cold.”

“But Raz, you are educable, you can learn ‘this kind of thing,’ if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You’ve spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable.”

“Well, maybe you have a point there,” I said, remembering the hitherto inconceivable sight of Fraa Arsibalt powering up a nuclear reactor.

“But the clincher—and here I’m just imagining how Ala would have framed the argument—is that the whole mission, the journey you and the others are going on, isn’t going to be just this. When you get where you’re going, who knows what you’ll be called upon to do? And then you’ll have to draw on everything you know—every aptitude you’ve ever acquired since you became a fid.”

“Since I became a fid…now that seems like a long time ago!”

“Yeah,” she said, “I was thinking about it the other day. Finding my way through that labyrinth. Coming out into the sun. Grandsuur Tamura taking me by the hand, making me a bowl of soup. And I remember when you were Collected.”

“You showed me around the place,” I recalled, “as if you’d lived there for a hundred years. I thought you were a Thousander.”

I heard a sniffle on the other end of the link, and closed my eyes for a minute. The suit was built to handle just about every excretory function except for crying.

How could I ever have been so stupid as to think I could be in a liaison with Tulia? Now, that would have been a mess.

“You ever talk to Ala? Are you in touch with her?” I asked.

“I probably could if I had to,” she said, “but I haven’t tried.”

“You’ve been busy,” I said.

“Yeah. When your cell got shot into space, it made her really important. Really busy.”

“Well…I hope she’s busy figuring out what we’re going to do when we get there.”

“I’m sure she is,” Tulia said. “You can’t imagine how seriously Ala takes her responsibility for what she’s—for what happened.”

“In fact, I have a reasonably good idea,” I said, “and I know she’s worried we’re all going to get killed. But if she could see how well the cell is working together, she’d take heart.”

We dropped behind Arbre yet again. I’d lost track of how many times we had swung in and out of the Daban Urnud’s line of sight. The others were strapping themselves down to the thrust structures under the Cold Black Mirror. I was up underneath the decoy, running through the final seventeen items on a checklist that was two hundred lines long.

“Pulling the inflation lanyard,” I proclaimed, and did. “It’s done.” I couldn’t hear the hiss of escaping gas in space, but I could feel it in the hand that was gripping the frame of the decoy.

“Check,” Lio said.

“Monitoring inflation process,” I said, numbly reading the next line of technobulshytt. The listless wad of painted fabric, which we’d been using as a garbage receptacle for the last day, stirred, and began to show some backbone as internal struts filled with gas and began to stiffen. For a while I was afraid it was failing—not enough gas, or something—but finally, over the course of a few seconds, it snapped open.

“Status?” Lio demanded. Down under the mirror, he could see nothing.

“The status is, it’s so beautiful I wish I could climb into it and go for a ride.”

“Check.”

“Commencing visual inspection,” I said. I spent a minute clambering over the thing, admiring its origami “attitude thrusters,” its paper-light, memory-wire-and-polyfilm “antennas,” its hand-painted “scorch marks,” and other marvels of stagecraft that Laboratoria at the Convox must have toiled over for weeks. I found a “thruster” that had failed to unfold, and popped it loose with my skele-fingers. Whacked on a creased strut until it inflated itself properly. Flicked off a clinging stripe of kitchen wrap. “It’s good,” I announced.

“Check.”

The remaining items on the list were mostly valve openings and pressure checks down among the engines. I was conscious that a plumbing failure here would kill me, but had to get on with it.

“Ten minutes to line of sight.”

The final step was to set a timer for five minutes, and to start the countdown. Lio’s final “Check” was still in my ears when I felt a mighty yank on my safety line: Osa hauling me in. A few seconds later I was down beneath the Mirror and the others were strapping me down as if I were a homicidal maniac at the end of a day-long chase. All communications had devolved to a series of checklist items and clipped announcements.

“Eight minutes to line of sight.” My suit’s airbags inflated. Light flared as the Mirror’s engines came on, and I felt the thrust against my back. As usual our faces were aimed in the wrong direction, so we could not see that anything was happening. But this time around, we had a speely feed to watch, so we were able to see the balloon and the decoy dwindling into the distance. By the time that the five-minute timer expired, the decoy was so far away that we could see nothing of it except for a single blue-white pixel as its engines fired.

A few minutes into its burn, the Geometers could see it too. Because by then the Daban Urnud’s orbit had taken it back into line of sight.

Our engines had performed their mission of kicking us into a new trajectory that would get us up to the same altitude as the Geometers. We’d never use them again. So we were back in free fall. The in-suit airbags deflated.

I loosened a couple of straps and twisted around so that I could see the decoy. Its engines continued to burn for another minute or so, as if it were making a spirited attempt to climb up out of low orbit and get on an intercept course with the Daban Urnud.

Then it blew up.

It was supposed to. Rather than wait for the Pedestal to do something about it—something we couldn’t predict, something that might have unwanted side-effects on us—the designers of the mission had deliberately programmed the engines to open the wrong valve at the wrong moment. So it flew apart. There wasn’t much in the way of fire, and obviously we couldn’t hear the boom. The thing just turned into a rapidly expanding mess of smithereens, and ceased to exist. Only a few minutes later, we began to see streaks of fire drawn across the atmosphere below us as chunks of it began to re-enter. The Pedestal, we hoped, would think that our pathetic gambit had failed because of a malfunctioning rocket engine—which was all too plausible—and would put all of their sensors to work snapping pictures of the debris, greedily vacuuming up all the intelligence they could get before it was engulfed and burned by the atmosphere. The Cold Black Mirror they would not see.

The next phase of the journey lasted for several days. It couldn’t have been more different from those first twenty-four hours. We no longer had that high-bandwidth link to the ground. Between that, and the fact that we didn’t have much to do, things got quiet.

The burn that had taken us out from the shelter of the balloon had put us in a predicament, vis-a-vis the Daban Urnud, a little like that of a bird that is on a collision course with an aerocraft. We would definitely reach the Daban Urnud now, but if we didn’t want to end up as a spray of freeze-dried flesh on its rubbly surface, we would need to slow down before we smacked into it.

Any other space mission would have done it with a brief rocket engine burn at the last minute, followed by some nice work with maneuvering thrusters. But since we were trying to sneak up, that wouldn’t work. We needed a way of generating thrust that didn’t involve a sudden brilliant ejaculation of white-hot gases.

The Convox had found the answer in the form of an electrodynamic tether, which was nothing more than a string with a weight on the end, with electricity running through it in one direction. The string was about five miles long. It was slender, but strong—similar to our chords. In order to keep it taut, we had to dangle a weight from the end. The weight turned out to be our spent and now useless monyafeeks, concealed under a smaller and simpler version of the Cold Black Mirror. So our first task, once we’d broken out from the shelter of the balloon, was to lash the monyafeeks together into a compact mass, to deploy another mirror above them, and to attach them to the end of the tether. We waited until Arbre was between us and the Daban Urnud before commencing the most ticklish—verging on insane—part of the operation, which was to throw ourselves into a spin and then use the resulting centrifugal force to pay out the five miles of line. This was sickening and terrifying for a few minutes, until we and the counterweight got a little farther apart. This slowed the rate at which we and the counterweight spun around our common center of gravity, so that Arbre was no longer whipping past us quite so frequently. By the time the counterweight was at the end of the string, the rotation had slowed to the point where we barely noticed it. From now on, we would spin exactly once during each orbit, which simply meant that the counterweight was always five miles “below” us, the string was oriented vertically, and the Cold Black Mirror was always “above” us—where we wanted it. This slow rotation yielded pseudogravity at a level of about a hundredth of what we felt on the surface of Arbre, so we and all of our stuff slowly “fell” upward—away from the planet—unless something stopped us. The something was the frame of inflated tube-struts that helped keep the Cold Black Mirror stretched out flat. We drifted up against it and remained caught there like litter pressed against a fence by an imperceptible breeze.

Shortly after completing this maneuver, we passed onto the night side of Arbre. This afforded us an excellent view when the Pedestal rodded all of the big orbital launch facilities around Arbre’s equator. The planet was mostly black, with skeins and clots of light sprawling across the temperate parts of the landmasses where people tended to live. The incoming rods drew brilliant streaks across this backdrop, as if chthonic gods, trapped beneath Arbre’s crust, were slicing their way to freedom with cutting torches. When a rod hit the ground its light was snuffed out for a moment, then reborn as a hemispherical bloom of warmer, redder light: comparable to a nuclear explosion, but without the radioactivity. We orbited over the very launch pad from which Jesry had begun his first journey into space, and got a perfect view of an orange fist reaching up toward us. Jesry was fussing over the tender at the time, but he paused in his labors for a few minutes to watch as we flew over.

I heard a little mechanical pop, and looked over to see that Arsibalt had just jacked a hard wire into the front of my suit. This was how we’d be talking to each other from now on. Even the short-range wireless was considered too much of a risk. Instead we physically connected ourselves, suit to suit, with wires. Likewise, we no longer had the 24/7 high-bandwidth link to the ground. Instead, Sammann was bringing up some kind of link that squirted information—slowly and sporadically—along a narrow line-of-sight beam that the Geometers would not be able to detect. So if Cell 87 had anything to say to me after this, they’d say it in the form of text messages that would flash up on the virtual screen inside my face-mask—but not immediately. We’d been told to expect delays on the order of two hours. And if we didn’t hard-wire ourselves into the reticule, we’d not be able to send or receive anything.

“It is a high wire act,” Arsibalt remarked. Out of habit I looked at his face-mask, but saw nothing except for the distorted reflection of a mushroom cloud. So I looked down at the screen mounted to his chest and saw his face, staring down at Arbre, then glancing up to make eye contact of a sort.

I collected myself for a moment. This was the first real—that is, private—conversation I’d had in days. Since I’d choked down the Big Pill and climbed into the suit, every sound I’d made, every beat of my heart, every swallow of water I’d taken had been recorded and transmitted somewhere in real time. I’d gotten into the habit of assuming that every word I spoke was being monitored by Panjandrums, discussed in committees, and archived for eternity. Hardly a way to have an honest or an interesting conversation. But I’d very quickly adjusted to not having Cell 87’s voice in my ears. And now Arsibalt and I had the opportunity to talk. No one else was hard-wired to us. We were alone together, as if strolling through the page trees at Edhar.

High wire was a play on words: a literal description of the tether that we had just unreeled. But of course Arsibalt meant something else too. “Yes,” I said, “as we have torn open one payload after another I have been keeping an eye out for anything that would serve as a—” And I checked myself on the verge of lapsing into astro-jargon. I’d been about to say “atmospheric re-entry and deceleration system” but it sounded as wrong here as it would have back among the page trees.

Arsibalt finished the sentence for me: “A way down.”

“Yeah. And now that we’ve unpacked everything, and thrown away most of it—stripped down to the absolute basics—it’s clear that there is nothing here that can get us back to Arbre. Never was.” I thought about it as I watched another mushroom cloud skidding along below us, rapidly diluting itself and paling like dawn in the cold upper atmosphere.

Arsibalt picked up the thread I’d dropped: “So you told yourself that they would send up a re-entry vehicle for us later—launching it from, say, there, or there.” He pointed at the mushroom cloud we’d just passed over, then at another, new one, burgeoning a few thousand miles to the east of it. “Or wherever that’s going.” He was obviously referring to another rod that was just now streaking across the atmosphere below us. I don’t know what it hit. Maybe a rocket factory.

Of course, Arsibalt was making the point that we were all dead now—beyond rescue, unless we could make it to the Daban Urnud. I was irked, just a little, that he’d put this picture together a bit quicker than I had. And I was also thinking, Here we go again, bracing myself to spend the next ten hours hard-linked to Arsibalt, trying to talk him down from a condition of near-hysteria, persuading him to gulp sedatives from the supply that, I presumed, was stored somewhere in the suit.

But he wasn’t being that way at all. He was grasping the truth of our situation as clearly as anyone could—more so than I’d done. But he wasn’t upset. More bemused.

“When we were Evoked,” I reminded him, “you said there was a rumor we’d just get taken off to a gas chamber.”

“Indeed,” he said, “but I was envisioning something much simpler—quicker—less expensive.”

It was the kind of joke that would only be ruined by my laughing out loud. I somewhat wished that Jesry and Lio could be in on it. But indeed, before too much longer, our conversation flagged. Arsibalt disconnected from me and began making the rounds, as if table-hopping in the Refectory.

He was connected to Jesry when Jesry applied power to the tether. This was a simple matter of pumping electrical current down the wire to its far end. Of course, in order to make an electrical circuit, there had to be some way for those electrons to get back up to the nuke. Normally that would have been provided by a second wire, parallel to the first—as in a lamp cord. Here, though, that would have defeated our purposes. Fortunately we were in the ionosphere—the extreme upper atmosphere, permanently ionized by the radiation of the sun, so that it conducted electricity. We got the return path for free. Current only flowed in one direction along that wire. Consequently, it interacted with Arbre’s magnetic field in such a way as to generate thrust. Not a lot of it—not like a rocket engine—but, unlike a rocket engine, we could run it continuously for days, and gradually spiral in to the desired orbit: still, all this time later, the orbit that Ala and I had watched the Daban Urnud settle into by following a trail of sparks across a page in the Pr#230;sidium.

As long as Arsibalt was hard-wired to Jesry, he acted as communicator to the rest of us, getting our attention with sweeping arms and pantomiming a suggestion that we all grab on to something. Then he counted down with his finger. At “five,” one of his skelehands became redundant and he used it to grasp a bracket on the control panel of the nuke. At “one” he grabbed the bracket with his other hand as Jesry flipped a switch. The result was not dramatic, but it was perfectly obvious: we saw the tether adopt a slight bow, just like a taut string being acted on by wind. As it did, the Cold Black Mirror yawed around slightly and settled into a new angle, no longer looking straight down at the surface of Arbre but now canted almost imperceptibly sideways. And that was the whole event. We were under thrust now, as surely as if Jesry had fired a rocket engine. It was, though, a thrust too subtle for our bodies to feel it, and it would have to act on us for days to have any effect.

Once that had been done, I had a few moments to think about what Arsibalt had been saying. Even taking into account Jules’s and Jad’s medical troubles and my nuke escapade, it had to be said that the launch and the assembly of the Cold Black Mirror, the firing of the decoy and the deployment of the tether had all gone better than we’d had any right to expect. No one had turned up dead, or mysteriously failed to turn up at all. There’d been no accidents—no one drifting helplessly away—we’d recovered as many of the payloads as we needed. Since that had seemed like the most obviously fatal part of the journey, it had put me in too sunny a mood. But ten seconds’ reflection sufficed to make it obvious that this was a suicide mission.

Social conventions evolved. I’d thought some might take it the wrong way if two or three of us jacked together for a private conversation. But I didn’t feel thus when I noticed Lio talking to Osa or Sammann to Jules Verne Durand, and soon it became clear that everyone in the cell was happy to afford others privacy. Sammann strung a network of wires through the frame that everyone could connect to when it was necessary to have an all-hands meeting, and we agreed that we’d do so every eight hours. The intervals between those meetings were free time. Each of us tried to devote one out of three to sleeping, but this wasn’t going so well. I thought I was the only one having trouble with it until Arsibalt drifted over during a rest period and connected himself to me.

“You sleeping, Raz?”

“Not any more.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No. Not really. How about you?”

Up to this point it had been the same, word for word, as the conversations we used to have in the middle of the night back when we had been newly Collected fids, lying in unfamiliar cells, trying to sleep. Now, though, it took a new turn. “Hard to say,” Arsibalt said. “I don’t feel as if I am going through normal sleeping and waking cycles up here. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between dreaming and waking any more.”

“Well, what are you dreaming about?”

“About all that could have gone wrong—”

“But didn’t?”

“Exactly, Raz.”

“I haven’t heard the whole story yet of how you rescued Jad.”

“I’m not even certain that I could relate it coherently,” he sighed. “It exists in my mind as a jumble of moments when I thought or did things—and every one of those moments, Raz, could have gone another way. And all of the other outcomes would have been bad ones. I’m certain of that. I replay it in my head over and over. And in every case, I happened to do the right thing.”

“Well, it’s kind of like the anthropic principle at work, isn’t it?” I pointed out. “If anything had been a little different, you’d be dead—and so you wouldn’t have a brain to remember it with.”

Arsibalt said nothing for a while, then sighed. “That is as unsatisfactory as anthropic arguments usually are. I’d prefer the alternate explanation.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m not only brilliant, but cool under pressure.”

I decided to let this go. “I’ve had dreams,” I admitted, “dreams in which everything is the same, except that you and Jad aren’t here because you croaked.”

“Yes, and I have had dreams in which I let Jad go because I couldn’t drag him back, and watched him burn up in the atmosphere below me. And other dreams in which you didn’t make it, Raz. We recovered the nuke, but you had simply vanished.”

“But then you wake up—” I began.

“I wake up and see you and Jad. But the boundary between waking and dreaming is so indistinct here that sometimes I can’t make out whether I’ve gone from dreaming to waking, or the other way round.”

“I think I see where this is going,” I said. “I might be dead. You might be dead. Jad might be dead—”

“We’ve become like Fraa Orolo’s wandering 10,000-year math,” Arsibalt proclaimed. “A causal domain cut off from the rest of the cosmos.”

“Whew!”

“But there is a side effect that Orolo never warned us of,” he continued, “which is that we’ve gone adrift. We don’t exist in one state or another. Anything’s possible, any history might have happened, until the gates swing open and we go into Apert.”

“Either that,” I said, “or we’re just sleepy and worried.”

“That is just another possibility that might be real,” Arsibalt said.

When we weren’t (according to most of us) dozing or (according to Arsibalt) drifting between distinct, but equally real, worldtracks, we were studying the Daban Urnud. A few paragraphs’ worth of description from Jules Verne Durand, disseminated over the Reticulum, had given the Antiswarm enough information to build a three-dimensional model of the alien ship that, according to the Laterran, was eerily faithful.

Blow a balloon out of steel, almost a mile wide, and fill it half full of water. Repeat three more times. Place these four orbs at the corners of a square, close to one another, but not quite touching.

Repeat with four more orbs. Stack the new set atop the old. But give it a forty-five-degree twist, so that the upper orbs nestle into the clefts between the ones below, like fruits stacked at a green-grocer’s.

Pile on two more such orb-squares, repeating the twist each time. Now you have sixteen orbs in a stack a little more than two miles high and a little less than two miles across. Running up the center of the stack is an empty space, a chimney about half a mile in diameter. Pack that chimney with all of the good stuff: all of the complicated, expensive, exquisitely designed praxis that we have long associated with space travel. Much of it is nothing but structure: steel trusswork to grip those orbs and hold them securely in their places while the entire thing is spinning around at one revolution per minute to create pseudogravity, maneuvering to dodge incoming bogeys, managing the resultant slosh, accelerating under atomic power, or all of the above.

Once you’re satisfied it’s never going to fall apart structurally, weave in all of the other stuff: a storage magazine capable of holding tens of thousands of nuclear propulsion charges. Reactors to supply power when the ship is far from any sun. Inconceivably complex plumbing and wiring. Pressurized corridors along which Urnudans, Troans, Laterrans, and Fthosians can move from one orb to another. Trunk lines of optical fibers to pipe captured sunlight from the exterior of the icosahedron to the orbs, to shine on their rooftop farms.

The orbs themselves are comparatively simple. Inside of them, the water’s free to find its own level. When the whole construct is spinning, the water flees to the outside and settles into a curve on which “gravity” is always equal to what it was on the home planet. When the ship is under power, the water settles into the aft part of the sphere and levels out. People live on the surface of the water in houseboats linked by a web of stretchy lines and held apart by tough air-bladders; when the shape of the water changes, there’s always a bit of jostling. Like any proper boat, though, these are rigged for that; the cabinets have latches so that they don’t fly open, the furniture is attached to the floor so it doesn’t slide around. People live as their ancestors did on the home planet, and may go for days, weeks, without thinking very much about the fact that they’re sealed in a metal balloon being spanked through space by A-bombs—as their families back on Urnud, Tro, Laterre, or Fthos might never think about the fact that they live on wet balls of rock hurtling through a vacuum.

This construct—the Orbstack—is a nice piece of work, but vulnerable to cosmic rays, wandering rocks, sunlight, and alien weaponry. So, frame walls of gravel around it, and while you’re at it, hang the walls on a network of giant shock pistons. The Orbstack is suspended in its middle, webbed to it. Anything that relates to the rest of the universe—radar, telescopes, weapons systems, scout vehicles—lives on the outside, attached to the thirty shock pistons, or the twelve vertices where the shocks join together. Three of the vertices—the ones down around the pusher plate—are naked mechanisms, but the other nine are all complex space vehicles in themselves. Some are pressurized spheres where members of the Command float around weightless. Others have wide tunnels bored through them so that small vehicles, and space-suited persons, can pass between the interior of the icosahedron and the remainder of whatever cosmos the ship happens to be in. And one is an optical observatory, better than any on Arbre because it enjoys the vacuum of space.

All of this had been modeled, in more or less detail, by the minds of the Antiswarm during the days that my cell-mates and I had been assembling space suits and playing video games in Elkhazg. The model lived in our suits now. We could fly through it using the same controls—the trackball and the stick—that we had earlier used to steer the monyafeeks. From a distance it seemed impressively complete, with a kind of organic complexity about it; as I flew in closer, though, to explore the core of the Orbstack, I found hovering, semitransparent notes that had been posted by diffident avout, writing in perfect Orth, informing me, with regret, that everything beyond this point was pure conjecture.

Fraa Jad finally got his wish: a sextant. We had been supplied with a device consisting of a wide-angle lens, like Clesthyra’s Eye, that was smart enough to recognize certain constellations. So it could know our attitude with respect to the so-called fixed stars. That in combination with the positions of the sun, the moon, and Arbre, and an accurate internal clock and ephemeris, gave this thing enough information to calculate our orbital elements. Fraa Jad seized this tool as soon as its presence was made known, and devoted hours to mastering its functions.

Now that our adventure had turned into an obvious do-or-die proposition, Jules had given up on trying to conserve what remained of his food, and was eating freely. So his energy level sprang back and his mood improved. Whenever he was awake, several others were jacked into his suit, asking him questions about internal details of the ship that had not made it into the model: for example, what the doors looked like, how to operate the latching mechanisms, how to tell a Fthosian from a Troan. I learned that the Geometers had a particular dread of fire in the zero-gravity parts of the ship, and that one could not go more than a hundred feet without encountering a locker stocked with respirators, fireproof suits, and extinguishers.

That still left a lot of free time. Two days in, I made a private connection with Jesry and told him what I knew of the Everything Killers. Jesry listened attentively, as in a chalk hall, and didn’t say much. By watching his face on the speely screen I could tell that he was thinking about it hard—talking himself into why it made sense. It had been obvious to him that there was something we weren’t being told. Otherwise, the mission made no sense on the face of it. I had given him something to think about. Until he’d thought about it—until he’d had a thought that wasn’t obvious—he’d have nothing to say.

Text messages trickled in from Cell 87 and appeared on my screen. The first few were routine. Then they started getting weird.

Tulia: Settle an argument down here…what is your head count up there?

I pecked a message back: Pardon me, but are you asking me how many of us are alive? Then I fired the message off. Only after brooding over the exchange for a few minutes did I realize that I hadn’t answered her question. By that time, though, we’d lost contact with the ground.

I called a meeting. We all jacked in.

“My support cell doesn’t know how many of us are alive,” I announced.

“Nor does mine,” Jesry said immediately. “They claim I sent them a message a few hours ago implying that two of us were dead.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“My support cell sent me no messages at all for quite a long time,” said Suur Esma, “because they were convinced I had perished in the launch.”

“It makes me wonder if something has gone wrong with the Antiswarm,” I said. “All of these cells should be talking to each other on the Reticulum, right? Comparing notes?”

We looked at Sammann. New body language was required. Since faces could not be seen directly, we had gotten in the habit of shifting our bodies toward the interlocutor to let them know we were paying attention. So, nine space suits aimed themselves at Sammann. Fraa Jad, though, didn’t seem interested. He had already jacked out of the meeting and was clambering to a different part of the space frame. But he had scarcely uttered a word since we had reached space, and so we paid him no mind. I was even starting to wonder if he had suffered brain damage.

“Something has gone wrong,” Sammann affirmed.

“Did the Geometers find a way to jam the Reticulum?” Osa asked.

“No, the Ret—its physical layer, anyway—is working fine. But there’s a low-level bug in the dynamics of the reputon space.”

“In Ita talk,” I said, “when you call something ‘low-level,’ you mean it’s really important, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you say any more about what this means for us?” Lio requested.

“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

“Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”

“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

“What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.”

“The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.

“Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.”

“So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that—?”

“Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”

“And this is all because a few bits got flipped in a syndev somewhere,” Jesry said.

“It’s slightly more complicated than you make it sound,” Sammann retorted.

“But what Jesry’s driving at,” I said, “is that this ambiguity is ultimately caused by some number of logic gates or memory cells, somewhere, being in a state that is wrong, or at least ambiguous.”

“I guess you could put it that way,” Sammann said, and I could tell he was shrugging even if I couldn’t see it. “But it’ll all get sorted soon, and then we’ll stop receiving goofy messages.”

“No we won’t,” said Fraa Gratho.

“Why do you say that?” asked Lio.

“Behold,” said Fraa Gratho, and extended his arm. Following the gesture, we found Fraa Jad at work on the wireless box that was our only link to the ground. He was stabbing it with a screwdriver again and again. From time to time a piece of shrapnel would float away from it, and he would fastidiously pluck it out of space with a skelehand so that it would not wander out from beneath the Cold Dark Mirror and return a radar echo.

When he was good and finished, he drifted back to the meeting and jacked himself in. Lio remained calm, and waited for him to speak.

Jad said, “The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters.”

Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorceror. That clarified things a little. We were silent for a while. We knew there was no point in requesting clarification. Fraa Jad had put it as clearly as he knew how. I saw Jesry looking my way in his speely display. This is how the Incanters do it; he’s doing it now.

Sammann finally broke the silence. “It is most odd,” he said, sounding strangely moved, “but I have been working up my nerve to do the same thing.”

“What? Destroy the transmitter?” Lio asked.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I dreamed a few hours ago I had done it. I felt good about it. When I woke up, I was surprised to find it intact.”

“Why would you wish to destroy it?” Arsibalt asked.

“I’ve been observing its habits. Once every orbit, it comes into line of sight with a facility on the ground and establishes a link. Then it empties its buffer—clears its queue.” He went on to translate these Ita terms into Orth. The queue was like a stack of leaves with messages written on them, which were transmitted down to Arbre whenever possible. They were sent down in the same order as they stood in the queue, like customers waiting in line at a store.

“So these things in the queue are, for example, the text messages I’ve been writing back to my support cell on the ground?” I asked.

“How many have you written?” he asked me.

“Maybe five.”

“Lio?”

“More like ten.”

“Osa?” Sammann polled everyone. None had written more than a few messages. “The number of items in the queue at this time,” he announced, “is over fourteen hundred.”

“What are they?” Arsibalt asked. “Can you read them?”

“No. They are all encrypted, and no one saw fit to give me the key. Most are quite small. Probably text messages, biomedical data, and associated bogons. But some of them are thousands of times larger. Since I am the only one here with knowledge of such things, I’ll tell you what would be obvious to an Ita, which is that the large items are most likely recorded sound and video files.”

I could think of any number of explanations for this but Arsibalt jumped directly to the most dramatic and, I had to admit, probably correct one: “Surveillance!”

Sammann made no objection. “I have been watching the behavior of the queue during my idle moments, of which I have many. The big files behave in certain remarkable ways. For one thing, they get priority over the little ones. The system advances them to the foremost position in the queue as soon as they are created. For another, the creation of these files seems to coincide with beginnings and ends of conversations. As an example, I saw Erasmas having a private conversation with Jesry a while ago, between about 1015 and 1030 hours. The next time Jesry connected himself to the reticule, which was only about fifteen minutes ago, a large file sprang into existence in the queue, and was promptly moved to the top. Time of creation, 1017. Last modified, 1030.”

“Is this occurring with all of our conversations?” Lio asked. And the tone of his voice told me—as if I ever could have doubted it—that all of this was as new to him as it was to me.

“No. Only some.”

“I propose an experiment,” Jesry said. “Sammann, does it still work?”

“Oh yes. Fraa Jad destroyed only the transmitter. The syndev still functions as if nothing had changed.”

“Are you monitoring the queue now?”

“Of course.”

Jesry disconnected, and motioned for me to do the same. We formed a private connection. Jesry launched into a very old, well-worn dialog that we’d had to memorize as fids: a verbal proof that the square root of two was an irrational number. I did my best to hold up my end of it. When we were finished, we reconnected to the reticule and waited a few seconds. “Nothing,” Sammann said.

Again we disconnected and formed a two-person link.

“Do you remember back at Edhar,” I began, “when we and the other Incanters would sit around after dinner making Everything Killers out of cornstalks and shoelaces?”

“Of course,” Jesry said, “those were really good Everything Killers because they could assassinate filthy Panjandrums like no one’s business.”

“That’ll come in handy when we betray Arbre to the Pedestal,” I pointed out.

And so on in that vein for a couple of minutes. Then we reconnected to the reticule. “There’s a new file,” Sammann announced, “at the head of the queue.”

“Okay,” I announced, “so the Panjandrums seem to be really keen on knowing if we talk about certain things like the Everything Killers.”

“Ha!” Sammann exclaimed. “A new file has just been opened, and it is growing larger the longer…I…keep…talking.”

The topic of the Everything Killers had not yet been broached to the group at large, and so some people had a lot of questions, which Lio fielded. Meanwhile, Jesry and I continued the experiment we had begun, breaking and re-establishing contact with the reticule a couple of dozen times over the course of the following half-hour. Every time we broke away, we’d try a few more words, just to see which topics triggered the automatic recording system. This was a haphazard business, but we were able to discover several more trigger words, including attack, neutron, mass murder, insane, dishonor, unconscionable, refuse, and mutiny.

Every time we reconnected, we heard more ideas for possible trigger words, since the conversation was quite naturally evolving in such a way that all the words listed above, and many more, were frequently put to use. Things were becoming extremely emotional, and it was good in a way that Jesry and I were able to jack in and out of it and treat its contents as an object of theorical study. But after a while it reached a point where we reckoned we had better join and stay joined.

Arsibalt had just asked a rather probing question of the Valers: where did their ultimate allegiance lie?

Fraa Osa was answering: “To my fraas and suurs of the Ringing Vale I have a loyalty that can never be dissolved precisely because it is no rational thing but a bond like that of family. And I will not waste oxygen by discussing all of the nesting and overlapping loyalty groups to which I belong: this cell, the Mathic world, the Convox, the people of Arbre, and the community, extending even beyond the limits of this cosmos, that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

“Say zhoost,” answered the Laterran, which we’d figured out was his way of expressing approval.

“To untangle all acting loyalties and obligations is not possible in the thick of an Emergence, and so one falls back on simple responses that arise from one’s training.”

Jules had not yet been exposed to this concept and so Osa gave him a brief tutorial on Emergence-ology, using as an example the decision tree that a swordfighter must traverse in order to make the correct move during a duel. It was obvious that such a thing was far too complex to be evaluated in a rational way during a rapid exchange of cuts and thrusts, and so it must be the case that sword-fighters who survived more than one or two such encounters must be doing Something Different. The avout of the Ringing Vale had made the study and cultivation of that Something Different their sole occupation. Jules Verne Durand took the point readily. “The analogy works as well with complex board games. We have some on Laterre, similar to yours here in that the tree of possible moves and counter-moves rapidly becomes far too vast for the brain to sort through all possibilities. Ordinators—what you’d call syntactic devices—can play the game in this style, but successful human players appear to use some fundamentally different approach that relies on seeing the whole board and detecting certain patterns and applying certain rules of thumb.”

“The Teglon,” put in Fraa Jad. And he did not need to elaborate on this. We’d all seen the feat he had accomplished at Elkhazg, and it was obvious to all of us that it could not have been done by trial and error. Nor by building outwards from a single starting place. He’d had to grasp the whole pattern at once.

“This is dangerous,” Jesry said flatly. “It leads to saying that we may abandon the Rake and behave like a bunch of Enthusiasts, and everything will work out just fine because we have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosm.”

“What you say is indeed a problem,” said Jules, “but no one here would dare argue that it is possible to win a swordfight or solve the Teglon by behaving so self-indulgently.”

“Jesry is making a straw man argument,” Arsibalt said. “He’s raising a possible future issue. If we agree to proceed along these lines, and reach a point, somewhere down the line, where a difficult decision needs to be made, what grounds will we have for evaluating possible decisions, if we’ve already thrown rational analysis to the wind?”

“The ability to decide correctly at such moments must be cultivated over many years of disciplined practice and contemplation,” said Fraa Osa. “No one would argue that a novice could solve the Teglon simply by trusting his feelings. Fraa Jad developed the ability to do it over many decades.”

“Centuries,” I corrected him, since I saw no benefit, now, in being coy about this. I heard a couple of surprised exclamations over the reticule, but no one said anything for or against the proposition.

Not even Fraa Jad. He did say this: “Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

“Fine,” Jesry said, “but where does it get us? What are we going to do?”

“I think it has already gotten us somewhere,” I said. “When you and I re-joined this dialog a few minutes ago, passions were inflamed and people were still trying to frame the decision in terms of allegiances and loyalties. Fraa Osa has shown that any such approach will fail because we all belong to multiple groups with conflicting loyalties. This made the conversation less emotional. We’ve also developed an argument that it’s not possible to work out all the moves in advance. But as you yourself pointed out, going on naive emotion is bound to fail.”

“So we must develop the same kind of decision-making ability that Fraa Jad employs when he solves the Teglon,” said Jesry, “but that requires time and knowledge. We don’t have time and we don’t have much knowledge.”

“We have two more days,” said Lio.

“And there is much knowledge that we can infer,” said Arsibalt.

“Such as?” Jesry asked in a skeptical tone.

“That Everything Killers might be planted in this equipment. That our purpose might be to deliver them to the Daban Urnud,” Arsibalt said.

“Most of this equipment isn’t going to make it to the Daban Urnud,” Lio pointed out. He added, perfectly deadpan, “Those of you who’ve reviewed the Terminal Rendezvous Maneuver Plan will know as much.”

“Just us, and our suits,” Jesry said. “That’s all that will make it to the ship—if we’re lucky. And they—the ones who planned this—can’t predict the fate of our suits. What if we get captured by the Pedestal? They might ditch our suits in space, or dismantle them.”

“Your point is becoming clear,” said Fraa Osa, “but it is important that you make it.”

“Fine. We are the weapons. The Everything Killers have been planted inside our bodies. We all know how it was done.”

“The giant pills,” said Jules.

“Exactly: the core temperature transponders that we swallowed before takeoff,” Jesry said. “Anyone pass theirs yet?”

“Come to think of it, no,” said Arsibalt. “It seems to have taken up residence in my gut.”

“There you have it,” said Jesry. “Until those things are surgically removed, we are all living, breathing nuclear weapons.”

“All,” said Suur Vay, “except for Fraa Jad, and Jules Verne Durand.”

This left all of us nonplussed, so she explained, “I believe you will find their core temperature transponders rattling around loose, somewhere inside their space suits.”

“I threw mine up,” explained Jules.

“I declined to swallow mine,” said Jad.

“And as the cell physician, you knew this, Suur Vay, because their core temp readings have been obviously wrong?” asked Lio.

“Yes. And the incorrect readings caused their suits to respond in inappropriate ways, which is why both of them required medical attention following the launch.”

“Why didn’t you swallow your pill, Fraa Jad?” asked Arsibalt. “Did you know what it was?”

“I judged it wiser not to,” was all that Fraa Jad was willing to supply in the way of an answer.

“This idea—that we’ve all been turned into nuclear weapons—is an amazing theory,” I said, “but I simply don’t believe that Ala would ever do such a thing.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t know,” Lio said. “This must have been added onto the plan without her knowledge.”

Fraa Osa said, “If I were the strategist in charge, I would go to Ala and say ‘please assemble the team you deem most capable of getting aboard the Daban Urnud.’ And her answer would come back: ‘I will do it by making friends with those among the Geometers who are opposed to the Pedestal; they’ll take our people in and offer them assistance.’”

“That is monstrous,” I said.

“Monstrous: probably another trigger word,” Jesry mused. I wanted to slug him. But he was making an excellent point.

Two days later we stripped off our white coveralls, then drew down the retractable shields to conceal the lights and displays on our suit-fronts. We were all matte black now. Like mountaineers, we roped ourselves together with a braided line that doubled as safety rope and communications wire. Jad, Jesry, and I had spent much of the last shift working with the sextant and making calculations. These culminated with Fraa Jad hanging off the underside of the nuke with a knife in one hand, sighting down the length of the tether as if it were a gun barrel, watching the constellations wheel behind it. At the instant when a particular star came into alignment with the tether, he slashed through it with a knife. The tether and the counterweight at its end flew off into space—and so did we, picking up a final momentum adjustment that would, we hoped, synch our orbit with that of the Daban Urnud.

Half an hour later, we all braced our feet against the underside of the Mirror and, at a signal from Lio, pushed it away—or jumped off, depending on your frame of reference. The Mirror glided out of the way to give us our first direct look at the Daban Urnud. It was so close to us, now, that we could hardly see anything: just a single triangular facet of the icosahedron, filling most of our visual field.

Essentially all of the Geometers’ surveillance and remote sensing systems had been designed to look at things that were thousands of miles away. As Jesry and the others had learned when they had brought the Warden of Heaven here, the Daban Urnud did have short-range radars for illuminating things that were nearby, but there was no reason to keep them switched on unless visitors were expected. And we had not emerged from behind the Cold Black Mirror until we had approached too close even for those radars to work very well. This was partly luck. If our trajectory had been a little less precise, we’d have been forced to ditch the Mirror farther out, and thereby exposed ourselves to the scrutiny of those systems. But Fraa Jad had wielded his knife at just the right instant. If he did nothing else for the rest of the mission he would still have earned his place.

In order to see us, they’d have to literally see us. Someone would have to look out a window, or (more likely) at a speelycaptor feed, and just happen to notice eleven matte-black humanoids gliding in against the background of space.

Its surface was like a shingle beach: flat, assembled from countless pieces of asteroids that had been scavenged from four different cosmi. Light glinted among the stones: the wire mesh that held them together. It seemed as though we were going to collide with a shock piston, which cut straight across our path like a horizon. But we cleared it by a few yards and found ourselves gliding along “above” a new face of the icosahedron, currently in shadow. Each of us was armed with a spring-loaded gun, and so at a signal from Lio, eleven grappling hooks shot out toward the rubble shield, trailing lines behind them. I’d estimate that half of them snagged in the mesh holding the rocks together. One by one the grapnel-lines went taut and began to pull back on those who’d fired them. This caused the ropes that joined us to go tight in a complex and unpredictable train of events, and so there were a few moments of bashing into one another and gratuitous entanglement as the whole cell came to the end of this improvised web of tethers. Our momentum caused us to swing forward and down toward the rubble, a scary development that was somewhat mitigated by the four Valers, who’d been issued cold gas thrusters that they held out before them like pistols and fired in the direction we didn’t want to go. This led to further collisions and entanglements that bordered on the ridiculous, but did have the net effect of slowing us down some. As we got closer, we tried to get legs and/or arms out in front of ourselves to serve as shock absorbers. I was able to plant my right foot on a boulder. The impact torqued me around. I spun and punched another 4.5-billion-year-old rock with the stumpy end of my suit-arm just in time to avoid planting my face on it. Then various ropes jerked on me from multiple vectors and dragged me along for a short ways. But soon everyone stopped bouncing and dragging and managed to grip the wire mesh with their fingers, giving Cell 317 a secure purchase on the Daban Urnud.

The darkness was nearly perfect. Arbre was on the other side of the ship, and shed no light here. A new moon, though, was swinging up through the cluttered horizon of the nearest shock piston, strewing faint light by which we cut ourselves apart and sorted ourselves out. Our magnetic boot-soles stuck faintly to the icosahedron, a rubble of nickel and iron. Moving like a man with gum on the soles of his shoes, Sammann made the rounds and checked our connections to the rope/wire.

“This facet will remain in darkness for another twenty minutes,” Jesry informed us, “after which we have to move to that one.” I supposed he was pointing at one of the three shock pistons that made up our local horizon, but I couldn’t see him. As the Daban Urnud revolved around Arbre, the terminator—the dividing line between the sunlit and shaded halves of the icosahedron—crept around it. On any given facet, sunrise or sunset would be explosively sudden. We’d better not get caught in the open when it happened, because the citadel-like complexes that loomed over the twelve vertices had clear views over the surrounding facets.

“According to my equipment,” announced Fraa Gratho, “we did not get illuminated by any short-range radar.”

“They simply don’t have it turned on,” said Lio. “But sooner or later, they’ll probably notice the monyafeeks that Fraa Jad cut loose, or the Cold Black Mirror, and then they’ll go to a higher state of alert. So, which way to the World Burner?”

“Follow me,” said Fraa Osa, and started walking. If walking was the right word for such a clumsy style of locomotion. I’d like to say we moved as drunks, but it would be an insult to every sloshed fraa who had staggered back to his cell in the dark. Much of our twenty minutes of darkness was burned moving the first couple of hundred feet. After that, though, we learned, if not what to do, then at least what not to do, and reached the nearest horizon with a few minutes’ darkness to spare.

The shock piston was like a pipeline half-buried in the rubble, but reinforced with fin-like trusses to prevent it from buckling like a straw when it was under load. At its ends, about a mile away in either direction, it swelled like the end of a bone and developed into a heavy steel knuckle. Five such knuckles, coming together from different directions, formed the base of each vertex. Each vertex was different, but in general they had been cobbled together from a mess of domes, cylinders, gridwork, and antennae. Extravagant bouquets of silver parabolic horns flourished from their “tops,” waiting for their turn to gaze into our sun and steal some of our light.

The triangular rubble-field across which we’d been walking didn’t butt up hard against the shock piston, because there had to be some give in the system; a shock absorber that had been in effect welded to a stiff triangular plate all along its length would not be able to function. Instead the facet stopped ten feet short of the truss-work that enshrouded the shock, and was sewn to it by a system of cables that zigzagged over pulleys. At a glance, it looked awfully complicated, and made me think of sailboats, not starships. But since the Urnudans had been building such things for a thousand years I guessed they had come up with a way to make it work.

Light shone up from the chasm below. As we neared it we slowed, bent forward, and gazed into the interior of the icosahedron, a volume of some twenty-three cubic miles, softly illuminated by sunlight slitting in through other such gaps and scattering from the icosahedron’s inner walls and the sixteen orbs. It was all as we’d seen it rendered on the model, but of course to see it in person was altogether different. The view was dominated by the nearest of the orbs, swinging by as fast as the second hand on a clock, helpfully painted with a huge numeral in the Urnudan writing system. I’d learned enough of this to translate it as number 5. Orb 5 housed high-ranking Troans.

All of my instincts told me to fear the jump across the gap, because if I “fell in” I would drop for some vast distance before getting splattered on a rotating orb. But of course there was no gravity here, no down, nothing to fall into.

Osa went first, launching himself across the gap and getting himself established on the struts that lent strength to the shock piston. Vay was last on the line. Once we’d all made it over, we hand-over-handed our way across the shock out of concern that the snapping of our magnetic boots against its steel would create an obvious acoustical signature. There was a dizzy moment when our settled conception of up and down was challenged by the next facet swinging into view, defining a new level and a new horizon. Then we got used to it and floated across another gap using the same procedure as before. This was perhaps an overly cautious way to travel ten feet through space. But if we all did it at once, and jumped too hard, we might drift away.

Sun was striking the struts we had just passed over as we planted our feet on the next facet of the icosahedron, where we could be assured of a few hours’ darkness. This was more time than we needed. Or, to speak truthfully, it was more than we had, since we only had an hour’s oxygen remaining, and the tender was gone.

Two miles away—directly across the facet—was a hydrogen bomb the size of a six-story office building. It was essentially egg-shaped. But like a beetle caught in spider’s webbing, its form was blurred by a fantastic tangle of strut-work and plumbing connecting it to the vertex-citadel. Indeed, that whole vertex appeared to have no practical use other than to serve as a support base for the World Burner. Even if it hadn’t been so enormous, it would have been a difficult thing to miss, because it was all lit up.

Lit up for the benefit of a hundred people in space suits clambering around on it.

“Do you think they’re getting ready to launch it?” Arsibalt asked.

“I don’t think they’re giving it a new paint job,” Jesry said.

“Very well,” Lio said. I didn’t know who he was speaking to, or what he was giving his assent to. A click on the line suggested that someone had just jacked out.

Our view of the World Burner complex was interrupted, now, by four black-space-suited figures who had broken away from the rest of us. In the dark, with the suits in stealth mode, we could not tell one another apart, but something in the way that these four moved convinced me that they were the Ringing Vale contingent. They walked abreast, with one—presumably Fraa Osa—slightly ahead of the others. They were spreading a little farther apart with each step.

“Lio? What is happening?” I asked.

“An Emergence,” he reasoned.

When the four Valers were spaced about twenty feet apart, Fraa Osa deployed his skelehands and, like a steppe rider in a shootout, drew a pair of pistol-like objects—the cold gas thrusters—from holsters bracketed to the hips of his suit. The other three did likewise. Then, to all appearances, Fraa Osa fell on his face. He planted his feet next to each other and let his momentum carry his body forward, peeling his magnetic soles loose from the rubble. As soon as he lost that connection to the icosahedron, his feet swung up and his whole body pivoted in space until he was prone. And in the same moment he began to glide headfirst toward the World Burner. He was holding both arms down to his sides, pointing the cold gas guns toward his feet, using them to thrust himself across the rubble plane, like a low-flying superhero. Vay, Esma, and Gratho were all doing likewise. In their wake we could see a roiling in the light, like heat waves, as the plumes of clear gas dissolved into space. At first their movement was achingly gradual, but they rapidly picked up speed, sometimes porpoising up, then correcting it with a calm inflection of the wrist, spreading out as they vectored themselves toward different parts of the World Burner complex, sliding with a kind of wicked, silent beauty over the glossy purple-blue rubble plane. We were able to see them only in silhouette against the lights of the sprawling complex—and that only for the first few moments of their flight. Then they were as invisible to us as they were to the space-suited Geometers swarming over the bomb.

Lio announced, “We have perhaps only a few minutes to get inside and find something to breathe before every door in the Daban Urnud is locked against us.”

“What about the Valers?” Arsibalt said.

“I think it would be wisest to assume that they and everyone working on the World Burner are as good as dead,” Lio said, after a moment’s thought.

“They are attacking now?” I asked.

“They are boarding it now,” Lio said.

Or—technically speaking—reminded me. For we had discussed this eventuality. “What if, when we come in sight of the World Burner, we see evidence that the Geometers are just about to launch it?”

“Ah, well, of course that would change everything, we’d have to fork to a completely different branch of the plan, not a moment to spare!” I knew we’d gone over it. But I had filed it, in my head, under the category of “things very unlikely to happen, hence safely forgotten.” Lio, however, had not forgotten. “If the Valers can manage to get aboard the World Burner covertly, they’ll hide, and take no further action until just before their air supply runs out. That’s to give the rest of us time to find a way in. But if the World Burner launches—or if someone sees them, and raises the alarm—well—”

“Bad things will happen,” Jesry snapped.

“So we might or might not have a little time,” I said.

“Which means, we should act as if we have none at all,” Lio returned. “Jules?” For the Laterran had been silent for a long time. “You still with us?”

“Pardon me,” Jules returned. “I am amazed, thinking of the havoc that our friends of the Ringing Vale are about to unleash. It is an inconceivable nightmare for the Pedestal, the worst embarrassment they will have suffered in one thousand years. My loyalties are torn several ways, you know.”

“No matter how much conflict is in your soul,” I said, “you can’t possibly object to the destruction of the World Burner, can you?”

“No,” said Jules softly, but distinctly. “In that my feelings are unalloyed. What a shame, if some of those working on it are slain! But to work on such a horrible device—” He did not finish the sentence, but I knew that, inside his space suit, he was shrugging.

“So mainly you just don’t want to introduce Everything Killers to the Daban Urnud,” I said.

“That is certainly correct.”

Lio broke in: “I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but: take us to your leader,”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Point us to the Urnudans. Then your work is done. You can go home and get a decent meal.”

“Which is more than we can say for ourselves,” Arsibalt pointed out. “Yes,” Jules said, “the irony. No food for you. Not here!”

“So then,” Lio said, “what is your decision?” All of us shared his impatience, if for no other reason than that we were running out of air. I’d like to report that I was still thinking coolly, applying the Rake to everything that was clattering through my mind. But in truth I was stunned and bewildered and—if this made sense—hurt by the sudden departure of Osa, Vay, Esma, and Gratho. I’d known, of course, that there were various contingency plans. Had never fooled myself that I could know all of them. But I’d been telling myself all along that the Valers would always be with us. When I’d first seen them on the coach at Tredegarh I’d been horrified by the idea that I was about to be sent off on the kind of mission where such persons might be needed. But over the days since, I had grown used to—and proud of—being on just such a mission. Now, here we were, at its most critical moment, and the Valers were suddenly gone, without explanation, without even a “goodbye and good luck!” The logic of the decision they’d made was unassailable—what could be more important than disabling the World Burner? But where did it leave the rest of us?

“Is it possible,” I heard myself saying, “that we are a spent delivery mechanism? Like those boosters that threw us into space—to be dumped into the sea?”

“That’s totally plausible,” Jesry said without hesitation. “We did our lessons well and played some clever tricks to get the four Valers here. That job is done. Now, here we are. No food, no oxygen, no communications, and no way home.”

“You overestimate the importance of the World Burner,” Jad announced. “It is a bluff. Its existence forces our military to act in ways it would not otherwise. Its destruction would give Arbre back a measure of freedom. But what use the S#230;cular Power would make of that freedom is yet to be known, and our actions may yet be of some importance. We go on.”

“Jules?” Lio said. “How about it?”

“It is tempting to drop through this opening before us, no?” Jules said. For we had instinctively turned our backs on the World Burner, as if this would protect us from whatever was about to erupt there. Once more we were gazing down into the gap, watching Orbs 6 and 7 rotate past, glimpsing the Core in the cleft between them. “But then we are in the light, where we may be seen. And the Orbstack rotates with too much velocity for us ever to catch it. No. We must go in via the Core. But to enter the Core, we must first go in at a vertex.” He toddled around until he was gazing at the vertex that, as we faced the shock piston, was to our left. “That is the observatory. You’ve studied the pictures.” He toddled right. “That one is a military command post.”

“Does the observatory have airlocks?” Arsibalt asked. For all of us were now looking leftward—no one felt up to invading a military command post, not after we’d lost our Valers.

“Oh yes, you are looking at one,” said Jules, and began walking toward it. We fell in step.

“Er—I am?”

“The dome that houses the telescope is, itself, a great airlock,” Jules explained.

“Makes sense,” Jesry said. “To work on the telescope, they’d want to flood the dome with air. Then, when they were ready to make observations, they’d evacuate it and expose it to space.” Which is where I normally would have become irritated with Jesry for lecturing the rest of us. But it went by me. I was fascinated, dumbfounded, by an idea I had not dared to think of for a week: taking my suit off. Being able to touch my face.

Arsibalt was on the same track: “The way I smell will probably seem funny when I reminisce about it years hence.”

“Yes,” Lio said, “if odors can travel between cosmi, everything down-Wick of us is about to die.”

“Thanks for the preview,” Jesry said.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I suggested.

Sammann asked, “Is anyone going to be on duty in this observatory?”

“Perhaps not physically there,” Jules said. “The telescopes are controlled remotely on our version of the Reticulum. But the big one will be in use, certainly—making a survey of your lovely cosmos, which is all new to us.”

The vertex was looming mountainously as we carried on this conversation. Old instincts warned me that we had an exhausting climb ahead of us. But, of course, it was no climb at all, because we were weightless. Without having to discuss it we made for the “highest” and largest of the domes, which, as Jules had promised, was open. It was a spherical shell, split into two hemispheres, which had spread apart on tracks to expose a multi-segmented mirror with a diameter of some thirty feet. We all clambered through the gap between the hemispheres, which was wide enough to throw a three-bedroom house through, and hand-over-handed ourselves “down” to the level of the trusses and gimbals that supported the mirror—all following, I think, a sort of instinct to get indoors, under cover, away from the terrible exposure we had been living with for so long. Jules pointed out a hatch by which we could gain entry to the pressurized regions of the vertex once the dome had been closed and filled with air. There was even a nice big red panic button that we could slam to emergency-pressurize the dome. But he advised us not to use it, because this would trigger alarms all over the Daban Urnud. Instead he pulled himself up on the struts that held the telescope’s objective suspended at the mirror’s focal point. He peeled the reflective blanket off his chest and stuffed it in there, then clambered “down” to rejoin us. Meanwhile, the rest of us tried to stay calm and control our breathing. Arsibalt, who used more oxygen than anyone else, was down to ten minutes. Sammann had twenty-five; the two of them swapped oxygen tanks. I had eighteen. Lio suggested we all try to eat as much as possible; if we were separated from our suits, we’d have no food left except for a few energy bars that we could carry with us. So I sucked more gruel from the nozzle and made a prolonged and labored effort not to throw it right back up into the scupper.

“Hello!” called Jules, more as an exclamation than a greeting. It took us a moment to understand that he was responding to a face that had appeared in the porthole of the hatch: some cosmographer come to see why the big scope had gone dark. Based on Jules’s lessons, I guessed, from the hue of her eyes and the shape of her nostrils, that she was Fthosian. And, though it would take some time to learn Fthosian facial expressions, I reckoned I had now seen two of them: befuddlement followed by shock as a matte black space suit of unfamiliar design loomed in her window. Jules grabbed handles flanking the hatch and pressed his face plate against the glass. Then we all had to turn down the volume in our phones as he began to holler in what I assumed was Fthosian. The woman inside got the idea and pressed her ear against the window. Sound would not travel through the vacuum of space, but, by shouting loud enough, Jules could excite vibrations in his face-mask that would be transmitted by direct contact into the glass of the porthole and thence into the cosmographer’s ear.

He repeated himself. He somehow managed to sound more cheerful than desperate. His tone seemed to say it was all in good sport. The woman’s lips moved as she shouted back.

The dome illuminated. I reckoned she’d hit the light switch, to get a better look at what was going on. But on second thought this light was pouring in through the gap between the hemispheres. The sun must have risen? We’d been warned of explosive sunrises. But this seemed explosive in more ways than one; the light flared, faded, and flared brighter. It burbled and boiled. A silent concussion passed through the frame of the icosahedron. Lio sprang up so smartly that he almost committed the fatal mistake of flying straight up out of the dome and off into space. But he caught himself short by gripping the comm wire that linked him to the rest of us, and swung around above the telescope mirror until he finally contrived to stop himself short on the edge of a dome-half. The light, which was slowly dying, reflected in his face mask. “The World Burner,” he said, “I think they must have blown the propellant tanks.” Then, with a sudden exclamation, he pushed off and glided back “down” to what I was thinking of as the floor of the dome. For the giant hemispheres had gone into movement, and the slit between them was narrowing decisively. The lights really did come on now.

The slit disappeared with a clunk, felt not heard. For better or worse, we were trapped here now. I kept eyeing the big red emergency button. I had eight minutes.

A readout on my display began to change: outside air pressure, which had been a red zero ever since I’d been launched into the vacuum of space, was climbing up toward the yellow zone. Jules had noticed the same thing; he went over to a grated vent near the hatch and reached for it. His arm was batted aside by inrushing air.

“Thank Cartas,” Arsibalt said, “I don’t care what cosmos this air came from. I just want to breathe it.”

“While we are waiting, re-acquaint yourselves with the doffing procedure,” Lio told us. “And show yourselves.” He pulled up the screen that had been hiding his readouts. The rest of us did likewise. For the first time in a couple of hours we were able to see one another’s faces on the speely screens and to check one another’s readouts. I could not see everyone in the group, because we were distributed around a cluttered and complex space “beneath” the mirror supports. But I could see Jesry, who had two minutes. I had five. I swapped canisters with him; it was taking a long time to pressurize the dome.

A few minutes later the external pressure readout finally changed from yellow to green: good enough to breathe. Just as my oxygen supply indicator was going from red (extreme danger) to black (you are dead). With my last lungful of Arbre air I spoke the command that opened my suit to the surrounding atmosphere. My ears popped. My nose stung, and registered a funny smell: that of something, anything, other than my own body. Lio, who’d been keeping a sharp eye on my readouts (I had less oxygen than anyone else that I could see), stepped behind me and hauled the back of my suit open. I withdrew my arms, got a grip on the rim of the HTU, and pulled myself, stark naked, out of the accursed thing. I breathed alien air. My comrades watched me with no small interest. The only other Arbran to have breathed this stuff had been the Warden of Heaven, who apparently hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes. My hands flew to my face. I kneaded it, scratched my nose, rubbed a week’s sleep from my eyes, ran my fingers up into my hair. Could have thought of more edifying things to do, but it was a biological imperative.

Lio groped on his front, found a switch, flicked it. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, I can hear you.” The others took to groping for their switches.

“Not that it makes a difference—since we all have to get out—but what is it like, my fraa?”

“My heart is pounding like crazy,” I said, and paused, since to say that much had worn me out. “I thought I was just excited, but—maybe this air doesn’t work for us.” I was speaking in bursts between gasps for air; my body was telling me to breathe faster. “I can see why the Warden of Heaven blew an aneurysm.”

“Raz?”

Breathe, breathe. “Yeah?” Breathe breathe breathe…

“Get me out of this thing!” Lio insisted.

Jesry grabbed Lio, spun him around, yanked his door open. Lio got out of his suit as if it were on fire. He floated over with a mad look on his face. All my habits from home told me to get out of Lio’s way when he approached in that mood, but I simply didn’t have the strength. His arms, which had subjected me to so much rough treatment over the years, came around me in a bear hug. He pressed his ear against my chest. His scalp was like thistles. I felt his rib cage begin heaving. Jesry and Arsibalt and Jules were swimming free of their suits. Jules went straight to the hatch, threw a lever, and shoved it open. Everything faded—not to darkness but to a washed-out yellow-gray, as if too much light were shining through it.

Fraa Jad and I were floating in a white corridor. I was naked. He was dressed in one of the grey coveralls we’d brought up in our kit. Evidence suggested he had been rummaging in a steel locker set into the wall. Two clumps of silvery fabric were floating near him. He teased one open. It turned out to have arms and legs. From time to time he glanced my way. When he noticed me looking at him, he tossed me a grey packet in a poly bag: another folded-up coverall. “Put this on,” he said. “Then, over it, the silver garment.”

“Are we going to put out a fire?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

The effort of tearing open the poly wrapper set my heart pounding. Pulling on the coverall plunged me deep into oxygen debt. Once I had recovered enough to get a few words out, I asked, “Where are the others?”

“There is a Narrative, not terribly dissimilar to the one you and I are perceiving, in which they went to explore the ship. Their plan is to surrender peacefully whenever someone notices them.”

“Is there any particular reason they left us behind?”

“Emergence from the suit after so long. Finding oneself in a confined space after having grown accustomed to the unobstructed vastness. Breathing an atmosphere from a different cosmos. Effects of long-term weightlessness. General stress and excitement. All of these induce a syndrome that lasts for a few minutes, a kind of going into shock, that can produce confusion or even loss of consciousness. Soon it passes, if one is healthy. I infer that it was too much for the Warden of Heaven.”

“So,” I tried, “after we doffed the suits, we were all confused or unconscious for a few minutes. Meaning—in your system of thought—we lost our grip on the Narrative. Stopped tracking it. Whatever faculty of consciousness enables it continuously to do the fly-bat-worm trick—it shut down for a while, there.”

“Yes. And the others regained consciousness in a worldtrack in which you and I are dead.”

“Dead.”

“That is what I told you.”

“So that’s why they left us behind,” I said. “They didn’t leave us behind, because, in their worldtrack, we never even made it here.”

“Yes. Put this on.” He handed me a full-face respirator.

“What of the Fthosian astronomer? Won’t she summon the authorities, or something?”

“She went with Jules. He is talking to her. He has a gift for that kind of thing.”

“So Lio, Arsibalt, Jesry, and Sammann are just wandering around the ship openly, looking for someone to surrender to?”

“Such a worldtrack exists.”

“It’s pretty bizarre.”

“Not at all. Such occurrences are common in the confusion of war.”

“How about this worldtrack? What are the four of them doing in the Narrative that you and I are in?”

“I’m in several,” Fraa Jad said, “a state of affairs that is not easy to sustain. Your questions hardly make it easier. So here is a simple answer. The others are all dead.”

“I don’t wish to abide in a worldtrack where my friends are all dead,” I said. “Take me back to the other one.”

“There is no taking, and there is no back,” Jad said. “Only going, and forward.”

“I don’t want to be in a Narrative where my friends are dead,” I insisted.

“Then you have two choices: put yourself out the airlock, or follow me.” And Fraa Jad pulled the respirator over his face, terminating our conversation. He handed me a fire extinguisher, and took one for himself. Then he shoved off down the corridor.

Now my mind did something absurd, namely, attended to the nuts and bolts of the ship instead of things that were truly important. It was as though some Barb-like part of me had stepped to the fore, elbowed my soul out of the way, and directed all of my energies and faculties toward those things that Barb would find interesting, such as door-latching mechanisms. Subsystems responsible for irrelevancies such as grieving for my friends, fearing death, being confused about the worldtracks, and wanting to strangle Fraa Jad, were starved of resources.

There were many doors, all closed but not locked. This was, according to Jules, the usual state of affairs here. These outer reaches of the ship were divided into separate, independently pressurized compartments so that a meteor strike in one wouldn’t beggar its neighbors. Consequently, one spent an inordinate amount of time opening and closing doors. These were domed round hatches about three feet in diameter, with heavy bank-vault-like latching mechanisms. One opened them by grabbing two symmetrical handles and pulling them opposite ways, which was handy in zero gravity where planting one’s feet and using one’s body weight were not supported by theorical law. The effort always left me panting for breath in Fraa Jad’s wake. One of the questions I had meant to annoy him with had been, Why me? Can’t you do whatever it is you are doing alone, so that I can be in a Narrative where my friends are alive? And maybe this was the answer. I’d been picked out for the same reason that the hierarchs at Edhar had made me part of the bell-ringing team: I was a lummox. I could open heavy doors. It seemed preferable to doing nothing, so I floated ahead of Fraa Jad and applied myself to it. Every time I hauled one open I expected to find myself staring down the muzzle of an Urnudan space marine’s weapon, but there simply weren’t that many people here in the observatory, and when we did finally encounter someone in a corridor, she gasped and got out of our way. The firefighter disguise was so simple, so obvious, I’d assumed it could never work. But it had worked perfectly on the first person we’d met, which probably meant it would work as well on the next hundred.

That corridor led to a spherical chamber that apparently served as the foyer for the whole vertex. We had to pass through it, anyway, to get out of this vertex and reach other parts of the Daban Urnud. As we discovered by trial and error, one of its exits communicated with a very long tubular shaft. “The Tendon,” I announced, when I discovered it. Fraa Jad nodded and launched himself down it.

The stupendous icosahedron and its imposing vertex-citadels had accounted for almost all of my impressions of the ship until now. Their size and their strangeness made it easy to forget that essentially all of the Daban Urnud’s complexity and population lay elsewhere: in the spinning Orbstack. Until now, Fraa Jad and I had been like a couple of barbarians kicking down doors in an abandoned guardhouse on the frontier of an empire. Here, though, we had set out on the road that would take us to the capital. There were a dozen Tendons. Six radiated from each of the mighty bearings at the ends of the Orbstack. The Orbstack was like a monkey using its arms and legs to brace itself in the middle of a packing crate. Sometimes an arm had to push, sometimes it had to pull. It flexed to absorb shocks. It was alive: a bundle of bones that gave strength, muscles that reacted, vessels that transported materials, nerves that communicated, and skin that protected all of the rest. The Tendons had to perform all of the same functions, and so shared much of that complexity. All that Fraa Jad and I could see of this Tendon was the inner surface of a ten-foot-diameter shaft, but we knew from talking to Jules that the Tendon as a whole was more than a hundred feet wide, and crammed with structure and detail hidden from our view—but richly hinted at by a bewilderingly various series of hatches, valve-wheels, wiring panels, display screens, control panels, and signs that shimmered by us as we flew along. Since it was impossible for novices such as we to get aimed perfectly down the center, we strayed from side to side as we went along. Whenever we came in slapping range of a likely-looking handhold we’d give it a bit of abuse and earn some speed, then take a lot of deep breaths while coasting to the next. About halfway along, we encountered a group of four Geometers who, when they saw us coming, grabbed handholds and crouched against the wall to make way. As we flew by, they shouted what I assumed were questions, which we had little choice but to ignore.

The hatch at the end opened onto a domed chamber about a hundred feet across: by far the largest open volume we had yet seen. I knew it had to be the forward bearing chamber. This was confirmed by the fact that it had a navel in its floor, perhaps twenty feet across, and everything that we could see on the other side of it was rotating. We had reached the forward end of the Core. Surrounding but invisible to us was the immense bearing that connected the spinning Orbstack to the non-spinning complex of icosahedron and Tendons that guarded it.

It was a mess. Half a dozen Tendon-shafts were plumbed into this thing via huge portals shot into its domed “ceiling.” Fraa Jad and I had just emerged from one of them. The adjacent one was the focus of a huge amount of activity and attention—it looked like one of those pits in great cities where stocks are traded. This, of course, was the Tendon that led to the World Burner complex, or what was left of it now that the Valers had got to it. People were flying in to, or issuing from, it at a rate of about two per second—it was like watching the entrance of a hornet’s nest in high summer. Most of those going into it were carrying weapons or tools. Some of those coming out were injured. The ingoing and outcoming streams collided in the bearing chamber, and others tried to sort things out, to tell people where to go, what to do, without much result that I could discern, save that they ended up arguing with each other. I was just as happy I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The chaos made it almost too easy for me and Fraa Jad to move around without attracting notice. In fact, my only problem was distinguishing the Thousander from other men in firefighting gear. But after a brief moment of anxiety when I feared I’d lost him, I spied a likely-looking firefighter gazing in my direction and pointing toward what I had begun to think of as the floor of the chamber: the flat surface with the big hole in the middle of it.

The hole was getting smaller.

As Jules had explained, wherever the Daban Urnud’s architects had needed to forge a connection between major parts of the Core, they had used a ball valve, which was just a sphere with a fat hole drilled through the middle, held captive in a spherical cavity bridging the two spaces in question. The sphere couldn’t go anywhere, but it was free to rotate. Depending on how the hole in its middle was aligned, it could allow free passage or form an impregnable barrier. Such a valve was set into the “floor” of this chamber. It was so huge that, at first, I hadn’t seen it for what it was. But now that it had gone into motion, its nature and its function were perfectly obvious. It moved ponderously, but by the time Fraa Jad managed to draw my attention to it, the thing was already about half closed, like an eyeball slowly drifting into sleep.

Fraa Jad planted his feet against a soldier’s backside and shoved off, driving the soldier toward the ceiling and Jad down toward the ball valve. I was already near a sort of ladder or catwalk, which I pushed off against to propel myself after him. When we got to the ball valve, the aperture had narrowed to perhaps three feet at its widest—plenty of room to squeeze through. But we had used up all of our momentum just getting there, and our aim had been miserable. After some feverish banging around we drifted through the aperture and found ourselves hovering in the bore of the sphere, watching the eye at its other end get smaller. There were no handholds that we could use to move ourselves along. If we didn’t reach the other end by the time it closed, we’d be imprisoned until the next time they opened the valve.

I was too out of breath to do much anyway. I aimed my fire extinguisher back the way we’d come and pulled the trigger. The recoil forced it back against me; I took the force with my arms and felt myself tumbling backwards. But I was moving. I slammed into the socket-wall at the end, scrabbled for a handhold on the rim of the hole, and pulled myself through. A second later Fraa Jad squirted through on a snowy plume of fire retardant. I grabbed his ankle, which slowed him down quite a bit. We found ourselves adrift and slowly tumbling at the forward extremity of the two-mile-long, hundred-foot-diameter shaft that ran the length of the Orbstack. We had made it to the Core. And if any of those we’d left behind in the bearing chamber had found our behavior suspicious, they had not been adroit enough to follow us through the ball valve. Smaller hatches—airlocks, made for one person at a time—were planted around it so that people could pass between Core and bearing chamber even when the ball valve was closed. I kept a nervous eye on those, half expecting a space cop to fly out and accost us, but then reasoned that it simply wasn’t going to happen. Jules’s words of a few minutes ago came back to me. What the Valers had done—what we had done—had been the worst military embarrassment these people had suffered in a thousand years. The bomb was still on fire, the disaster only getting started. The Valers might still be alive and fighting. So they weren’t going to make a big deal about a couple of firefighters acting weird.

Our panicky flight through the valve had imbued us with momentum that carried us outward toward the wall of the Core, which was rotating about as fast as the second hand on a clock. This meant that when we drifted into the wall, it was moving past us at a brisk walking pace. This part of the Core wall was covered with a grid with convenient hand-sized holes between the bars, so we did what came naturally and grabbed it. The effect was gentle but inexorable acceleration that made our feet spin out to find purchase on the grid. We were now rotating along with everything else. Here our body weight was less than that of a newborn infant. But it was the most “gravity” we had known for a long time, and took a little getting used to.

We clung to it for a couple of minutes, gasping for air, trying not to black out. Then Fraa Jad, never one to discuss his plans and intentions with his traveling companions, pushed off and glided along the Core wall, headed for the first of the four great Nexi that were spaced evenly along its length. Travel was easier in micro- than in zero gravity, because we slowly “fell” to the Core wall where we could always push off and get another dose of momentum. Available was a sort of rapid transit system, consisting of a moving conveyor-belt-cum-ladder that glided up one side of the Core and down the other. Most of the people we could see—perhaps a hundred, heavily skewed toward soldiers and firefighters—were using it. The rungs were elastic, so that when you grabbed one it didn’t simply jerk your arm from its socket. Tired as I was, I was tempted to have a go, but didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself. Fraa Jad showed no interest. We moved more slowly than those who were using it, which worked to our advantage: some of them shouted questions at us as they glided by, but none was inquisitive enough to jump off and pursue the conversation.

In a few minutes we came to the station in the Core where the forward-most Orbs—One, Five, Nine, and Thirteen—were connected. Each of these stood at the head of a stack of four. So, Orbs One through Four were for the Urnudans. Five through Eight were Troan, Nine through Twelve were Laterran, and the rest Fthosian. By convention, the lowest-number Orb in each stack—the ones that connected here, at the heads of the stacks—were for the highest-ranking members of their respective races. So this Nexus was the most convenient place for the Geometers’ VIPs to meet. From where we were, it didn’t look like much: just four cavernous holes in the wall, the termini of perpendicular shafts leading out to the Orbs. According to Jules, though, if we were to look at it from the outside, we would see that this part of the Core was wrapped in a doughnut of offices, meeting-chambers, and ring-corridors where the Command had its offices. Several hatches in the Core wall hinted at this. But conflict between Pedestal and Fulcrum had led to a division of the Command torus into parts of unequal size. Hatches had been locked, partitions welded into place, guards posted, cables severed.

None of which concerned us very much, since the space we were in served only as a service corridor or elevator shaft, rarely visited or thought about by the Command. Of much greater interest to us were the four huge orifices in the Core wall. As we drifted into the Nexus we were able to gaze into these and see tubular shafts, each about twenty feet in diameter, each leading “down” about a quarter of a mile. At the “bottom” of each was another huge ball valve, currently closed. Beyond each such valve was an inhabited Orb a mile wide.

It wasn’t difficult to identify the shaft leading to Orb One. A large numeral was painted on the Core wall next to it. The numeral was Urnudan, but any sentient being from any cosmos could recognize it as the glyph that represented unity, 1, a single copy of something. I, however, did not have time to linger and contemplate its profound meaning, as Fraa Jad had already located a ladder bracketed to the wall of the shaft, and begun to descend it.

I followed him. Gravity slowly came on as we went. It’s hard to describe how terrible this made me feel. The only thing that kept me from passing out was fear I’d let go of the rungs and fall down on top of Fraa Jad. During the worst spell, a voice drilled into my awareness and made my skull buzz. Fraa Jad had begun to sing some Thousander chant like the one that had kept me awake at the Bazian monastery on the night we had been Evoked. It gave my consciousness something to hold on to, like the steel ladder-rung that I was gripping with my hand: my only hard tangible link to the giant complex spinning around me. And in the same way that the rung kept me from falling, the sound of Jad’s voice in my skull kept my mind from floating away to wherever it had gone when I’d passed out in the observatory and awoken on the wrong worldtrack.

I kept descending.

I was crouching atop a giant steel navel with my head between my knees, trying not to pass out.

Fraa Jad was punching numbers into a keypad mounted to the wall.

The sphere began to rotate beneath me.

“How did you know the code?” I asked.

“I selected a number at random,” he said.

I’d heard only four beeps from the keypad. Only a four-digit number. Only ten thousand possible combinations. So if there were ten thousand Jads in ten thousand branches of the worldtrack…and if I were lucky enough to be with the right one…

Sunlight was shining through the bore of the valve. I flattened myself on it and gazed down on open water, vegetation, and buildings from an altitude of half a mile.

This time, the bore of the valve had ladder-rungs on it. We climbed down them even as the valve was snapping to its final position, and exited onto a ring-shaped catwalk hung from the ceiling of the orb, surrounding the aperture—the oculus at the top of a vast spherical dome, a little sky above a little world. A stairway led up to it. Men with weapons were running up the stairway, intent on saying hello to us. Fraa Jad, seeing this, pulled off his respirator. No point in maintaining the disguise now. I did likewise.

Two soldiers, peering down shotgun barrels, reached the catwalk. One of them moved aggressively toward Fraa Jad. I stepped forward, instinctively, holding up my hands. My attention was drawn to a small silver object in Fraa Jad’s hand—like a jeejah, of all things! The other soldier pivoted toward me and swung the butt of his weapon around, catching me in the jaw. I toppled backward over the rail and felt my old friend, zero gravity, taking me back into its embrace as I went into free fall down the middle of the orb. Something went extremely wrong in my guts. A moment later I heard the boom of a shotgun. Had I been shot? Not likely, given my situation. My vision whited out again, and my viscera caught on fire and melted.

They had shot Fraa Jad. The Everything Killers had been turned on. I had become a nuclear weapon, a dark sun spraying fatal radiance onto the dwellings and cultivated terraces of the Urnudan community below.

We had accomplished our mission.

“We have come,” said the man in the robes. “We have answered your call.” He was speaking Orth. Not as well as Jules Verne Durand, but well enough to make me think he had been studying it for almost as long. As long as we didn’t snow him with arcane tenses and intricate sentence structures, he would be able to keep up.

I say “we,” but I didn’t expect to do much talking. “Why am I here?” I’d asked Fraa Jad, as we had approached the gate of the building that floated in the center of Orb One.

“To serve as amanuensis,” he had replied.

“These people can build self-sufficient intercosmic starships, but they don’t have recording devices?”

“An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon’s Dowment.”

“You’re a consciousness-bearing system. And you seem to be much better at playing this polycosmic chess game than I am. So doesn’t that make me exiguous?”

“Much pruning has taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.”

“You mean, you’re dead and I’m alive.”

“Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won’t quibble.”

“Fraa Jad?”

“Yes, Fraa Erasmas?”

“What happens to us after we die?”

“You already know as much of it as I do.”

About then the conversation had been interrupted as we had been ushered into the room featuring the man in the robes. Knowing nothing of Urnudan culture put me at a disadvantage in trying to puzzle out who this man was. The room offered no clues. It was a sphere with a flat floor, like a smallish planetarium. I guessed that it was situated near the geometric center of the Orb. The inner surface was matte, and glowed softly with piped-in sunlight. The circular floor had a chair in the middle, surrounded by a ring-shaped bench. A few receptacles, charged with steaming fluids, were arranged on the bench. Otherwise the room was featureless and undecorated. I felt at home here.

“We have answered your call.”

What was Fraa Jad going to say to that? A few possible responses strayed into my head: Well, what took you so long? or What the hell are you talking about? But Fraa Jad answered in a shrewdly noncommittal way by saying, “Then I have come to bid you welcome.”

The man turned sideways and extended an arm toward the circular bench. The robes unfurled and hung from his arm like a banner. They were mostly white, but elaborately decorated. I wanted to say that they were brocade or embroidery, but life among bolt-wearing ascetics had left me with a deeply impoverished vocabulary where the decorative arts were concerned, so I’ll just say that they were fancy. “Please,” the man said, “we have tea. A purely symbolic offering, since your bodies can do nothing with it, but…”

“We shall be pleased to drink your tea,” Fraa Jad said.

So we repaired to the circular bench and took seats. I let Fraa Jad and our host sit relatively close, facing each other, and arranged myself somewhat farther away. Our host picked up his teacup and made what I guessed was some kind of polite ceremonial gesture with it, which Fraa Jad and I tried to copy. Then we all sipped. It was no worse and no better than what “Zh’vaern” used to eat at Messal. I didn’t think I’d be taking any home with me.

The man drew some notes from a pocket in his robe and consulted them from time to time as he delivered the following. “I am called Gan Odru. In the history of the Daban Urnud, I am the forty-third person to bear the title of Gan; Odru is my given name. The closest translation of Gan into Orth is ‘Admiral.’ This only approximates its meaning. In our military system, one class of officers were responsible for the trees, another for the forest.”

“Tactics and strategy respectively,” Fraa Jad said.

“Exactly. ‘Gan’ was the highest-ranking strategic officer, responsible for direction of a whole fleet, and reporting to civilian authorities, when there were any. Command of specific vessels was delegated by the Gan to tactical officers with the rank of Prag, or what you would call a captain. I apologize for perhaps boring you with this, but it is a way to explain the manner in which the Daban Urnud has behaved toward Arbre.”

“It is in no way boring,” said Fraa Jad, and glanced over my way to verify that I was doing my job: which as far as I could tell was merely to remain conscious.

“The first Gan of the Daban Urnud was entrusted with the responsibility to establish a colony on another star system,” Gan Odru continued. “As links to Urnud became more tenuous with distance, his responsibilities grew, and he became the supreme authority, answerable to no one. But he was a strange kind of Gan in that his fleet consisted of but one ship and so his staff consisted of but one Prag, and inasmuch as the Prag had no real tactical decisions to make—as the war had been left far behind—the relationship between Gan and Prag became unstable, and evolved. A simple way to express it is that the Gan became somewhat like your avout, and the Prag like your S#230;cular Power. This state of affairs came about over the course of but a single generation, but proved extraordinarily stable, and has not changed since. The clothing that I wear is but little changed from the formal dress uniforms worn by the Gans of Urnud’s ocean-going fleets thousands of years ago. Though, of course, they did not wear them aboard ship, since it is difficult to swim in robes.”

Humor was the last thing I was looking for here and so astonishment got the better of mirth and I chuckled too little and too late.

“The second Gan was weakened by illness and served for only six years. The third was a young protege of the first; he had a long career, and through the force of his personality and his uncommon intelligence, gained back some of the power that his office had ceded to that of the Prags. Late in his career, he became aware of your summons, and made the decision to alter the trajectory of the Daban Urnud so that it would—as he conceived it—fly into the past. For the signals that he and the others heard, they conceived as ancestral voices calling them home to make the Urnud that should have been but that, through its leaders’ follies, it had failed to become.

“I suppose you have already some notion of the wanderings that followed, the Advents at Tro, Earth, and Fthos and their consequences. My purpose is not to rehearse all of that history but to give an account of our actions here.”

“It will be useful,” Fraa Jad said, “to know what occurred with the Warden of Heaven.”

“For a long time,” said Gan Odru, shifting into a lower gear, as he was now making it up as he went along instead of reading from notes, “the relationship between the Gans and the Prags has been poisoned. The Prags have said that the third Gan was simply wrong. That all the wanderings of the Daban Urnud have been without meaning—simply the endless consequence of an ancient mistake. Believing that, they saw their only purpose as self-preservation. Those who think this way want only to settle down somewhere and go on living. And, with each Advent, some do. We have left Urnudans behind on Tro, Troans behind on Earth, and so on. They find ways to live even though those cosmi are not their own. So, of the cynical ones, the ones who believe it is all a meaningless error, a large fraction are bled off at each Advent. At the same time we are joined by ones from the new cosmos who believe in the quest. So the ship is rebuilt and departs for the next cosmos. At first the Gans have power and the Prags do their bidding. But the journey is long, the quest is forgotten as generations go by, the Prags gain, the Gans lose, power. The Pedestal and the Fulcrum have long been our names for these two tendencies. And so here you see me, virtually alone in this place of ceremony, doing what my predecessors did, but with little respect and no power.

“Thus came we to Arbre. Prag Eshwar, my counterpart, and her followers saw your planet as just another civilization to be raided for its resources, so that the ship could be rebuilt and the journey extended. Yet Eshwar is an intelligent woman who has read our histories and well knows that, in an Advent, the Pedestal and the Prag tend to lose power to the Fulcrum and the Gan. Already she was choosing tactics to forestall this.

“When the Warden of Heaven came to us, it was obvious that he was a fool, a charlatan. We already knew as much, of course, from our surveillance of Arbre’s popular culture. And the Prag had already devised a plan, to draw comparisons between me and this Warden of Heaven. To make his foolishness, his falseness, rub off on me.

“So the Warden of Heaven was brought here in his spacesuit. He kept wanting to take it off. We advised against it. When he came in to this room, he saw it as a kind of holy place, and insisted that the risk of removing his suit was acceptable. That his god would watch over him and keep him safe. So, off came the suit. He became short of breath. Our physicians tried to reassemble the suit around him but this did not help matters, for he had already suffered the bursting of a major blood vessel. The physicians next tried to put him in a cold hyperbaric chamber, a therapy in which they are well practiced. He was stripped naked and readied for the procedure, but it was too late—he died. A debate followed as to what should be done with the body. While some of us debated, overzealous researchers took samples of his blood and tissues, and commenced an autopsy. So the body had already been desecrated, if you will. Prag Eshwar made the decision that any effort to apologize would be taken as a sign of weakness and that any sharing of information would only benefit Arbre. And too, for internal political reasons, she was inclined to show contempt, or at least disregard, for the body—because she had made it into a symbol for me. Hence the style in which the Warden of Heaven was returned.”

“But it backfired,” I said, “didn’t it?”

“Yes. Those of the Fulcrum were embarrassed and ashamed, and conceived a plan to make an exchange of blood for blood. As we had taken samples of blood from the Warden of Heaven’s body, they would convey samples of our blood to the surface of Arbre. We had detected signals from the planet, which, as we later learned, had been sent by Fraa Orolo. These took the form of an analemma. Jules Verne Durand had become the foremost authority on Orth and on the avout. He was covertly sympathetic to the Fulcrum. He interpreted Orolo’s signal as pointing to Ecba, and suggested that it would have profound symbolic value to deliver the samples there. He even volunteered to go down on the probe. But at about the same time he was ordered to go on the raid to the concent of the Matarrhites, and so was no longer available. Lise went in his stead—without his knowledge, of course. For she had learned much of the avout, and even a few words of Orth, from Jules. It went wrong and she was shot while boarding the probe, as you know.”

We let a few moments pass untroubled by words.

“Since then things have moved fast. I would say that Prag Eshwar has done what Prags do, which is—”

“React tactically, with no thought of strategy,” Jad said.

“Yes. It led us to this pass. Thirty-one have been slain by your fraas and suurs—from the Ringing Vale, I presume?”

Fraa Jad made no response, but Gan Odru looked my way, and I nodded. He continued, “Eighty-seven more are held hostage—your colleagues herded them into a chamber and welded the doors shut.”

“A misinterpretation,” Fraa Jad said. “Such people do not take hostages, so the eighty-seven were put in that room to keep them safely out of the way.”

“Prag Eshwar interprets it, rightly or wrongly, as hostage-taking, and prepares a response with one hand. With her other hand she has reached out to me and asked me to discuss matters with you. She is shaken. I don’t really know why. The large bomb that was destroyed has always been a weapon of last resort; no one would seriously consider using it.”

“Pardon me, Gan Odru, but the Pedestal was getting ready to launch it,” I blurted.

“As a threat, yes—to hang above your planet and exert pressure. But that is its only real use. I don’t understand why its loss has shaken Prag Eshwar so deeply.”

“It didn’t,” Fraa Jad said. “Prag Eshwar sensed terrible danger.”

“How would you know this?” Gan Odru asked politely.

Fraa Jad ignored the question. “She might explain it by claiming that she had a nightmare, or that sudden inspiration struck her in the bath, or that she has a gut feeling that tells her she ought to steer a safer course.”

“And is this something that you brought about!?” Gan Odru said, more as exclamation than as question. He was getting very little satisfaction from Fraa Jad, and so turned to look at me. I can’t guess what he saw on my face. Some mix of bemusement and shock. For I had just seen a glimpse of an alternate Narrative in which we had visited appalling destruction upon one of the Orbs.

“That we might send a signal to Prag Eshwar—is that such a difficult thing to believe for you, Gan Odru, the Heritor of a tradition, a thousand years old, founded on the belief that my predecessors summoned you hither?”

“I suppose not. But it is so easy, after all this time, to harbor doubts. To think of it as a religion whose god has died.”

“It is good to doubt it,” Fraa Jad said. “After all, the Warden of Heaven’s mistake was failure to doubt. But one must choose the target of one’s doubt with care. Your third Gan detected a flow of information from another cosmos, and saw it as cryptic messages from his ancestors. Your Prags, ever since, have doubted both halves of the story. You disbelieve only one half: that the signal came from your ancestors. But you may still believe that the signal exists while discarding the third Gan’s incorrect notions as to its source. Believe, then, that information—the Hylaean Flow—passes between cosmi.”

“But if I may ask—have you learned the power to modulate that signal, to send messages thus?”

I was all ears. But Fraa Jad said nothing. Gan Odru waited for a few moments, then said, “I suppose we’ve already established that, haven’t we? You apparently got inside Prag Eshwar’s head somehow.”

“What signal did the third Gan receive nine centuries ago?” I asked.

“A prophecy of terrible devastation. Robed priests massacred, churches torn down, books burning.”

“What gave him the idea it was from the past?”

“The churches were enormous. The books, written in unfamiliar script. On some of their burning leaves were geometrical proofs unknown to us—but later verified by our theors. On Urnud we had legends of a lost, mythic Golden Age. He assumed that he was being given a window into it.”

“But what he was really seeing was the Third Sack,” I said.

“Yes, so it seems,” said Gan Odru. “And my question is: did you send us the visions, or did it just happen?”

We have come…we have answered your call. Was he the last priest of a false religion? Was he no different from the Warden of Heaven?

“The answer is not known to me,” said Fraa Jad. He turned to look at me. “You shall have to search for it yourself.”

“What about you?” I asked him.

“I am finished here,” Fraa Jad said.