Anathem

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?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.