Earth

PLANET KILLER

Space was the fabric of its existence.

A skein of superdense yarn — knitted and purled in ten dimensions — it was unravelable. A deep well — sunk into a microscopic point — it was unfathomable. Blacker than blackness, it emitted nothing, yet the tortured space around it blazed hotter than the cores of suns.

It had been born within a machine, one that had traveled far to reach this modest basin, pressed into the rippling universe-sheet by a lesser star. On arrival, the apparatus set to work crafting the assassin’s tight weave out of pure nothingness. Then, in its final death throes, the factory slowed its progeny onto a gentle circular path, skating among the star’s retinue of tiny planets.

For two revolutions, the assassin lost mass. There were atoms in space to feed its small but hungry maw, but nowhere near enough to make up for its losses… loops of superdense brightness that kept popping out to self-destruct in brilliant bursts of gamma rays. If this went on, it would evaporate entirely before doing its job.

But then it entered a shallow dip of gravity — a brief touch of acceleration — and it collided with something solid! The assassin celebrated with a blast of radiation. Thereafter, its orbit kept dipping, again and again, into high-density realms.

Atoms fell athwart its narrow mouth — little wider than an atom itself. There were still very few real collisions, but where at first it dined on picograms, soon it gobbled micrograms, then milligrams. No meal satisfied it.

Grams became kilograms…

It had not been programed to know the passage of years, nor that the feast would have to end someday, when the planet was consumed in one last, voracious gobble. Then it would sit alone again in space, and for a time the solar system would have two suns… while the essence that had once been Earth blew away in coruscating photons.

Of all this it neither knew nor cared. For the present, atoms kept pouring in. If a complex, fulgent knot in space can be called happy, then that was its condition.

After all, what else was there in the universe, but matter to eat, light to excrete, and vacuum? And what were they? Just subtly different kinds of folded space.

Space was the fabric of its existence.

Without fuss or intent, it grew.

• CRUST

Fast approaching the scene of carnage, a detachment of the Swiss navy arrived in the nick of time. Sweeping over the ocean’s morning horizon, the proud flotilla un-furled bright battle ensigns, fired warning shots, and sent the raiders into rout at flank speed. Rescued! The crews of rusty fishing barges cheered as their saviors hove into sight, the bright sun at their backs. Only moments before, all had seemed lost. Now disaster had turned to victory!

Nevertheless, Crat barely took notice. Amid the throng of filthy, sweat-grimed deck hands, climbing the rigging and waving their bandannas, he was too busy vomiting over the side to spend much effort cheering. Fortunately, there wasn’t much left in his stomach to void into waters already ripe with bloody offal. His fit tapered into a diminishing rhythm of gagging heaves.

“Here, fils,” someone said nearby. “Take this rag. Clean yourself.”

The voice was thickly accented. But then, nearly everyone aboard this corroded excuse for a barge spoke Standard English gooky, if at all. Grabbing at a blur, Crat was dimly surprised to find the cloth relatively clean. Cleaner than anything he’d seen since coming aboard the Congo, some weeks ago. He wiped his chin and then tried to lift his head, wondering miserably who had bothered taking an interest in him.

“No. Do not thank me. Here. Let me giff you something for the nausea.”

The speaker was white haired and wrinkled from the sun. And despite his age, it was clear that his wiry, sun-browned arms were stronger than Crat’s own soft, city-bred pair. The good Samaritan grabbed the back of Crat’s head adamantly and lifted a vapor-spritzer. “Are you ready? Goot! Breathe in, now.”

Crat inhaled. Tailored molecules soaked through his mucous membranes, rushing to receptors in his brain. The overwhelming dizziness evaporated like fog under the subtropical sun.

He wiped his eyes and then handed back the kerchief without a word.

“You’re a silent one, neh? Or is it because you’re choked up over our triumph?” The old man pointed where the green raiders’ rear guard could still be seen, fleeing west-ward in their ultrafast boats. Of course nothing owned by Sea State could hope to catch them.

“Triumph,” Crat said, repeating the word blankly.

“Yes, of course. Driven off by the one force they fear most. Helvetia Rediviva. The fiercest warriors in all the world.”

Crat shaded his eyes against the still-early sun, wondering vaguely where his hat had gone to. By the captain’s orders, everybody aboard Congo had to wear one to protect against the sleeting ultraviolet… as if the average life span on a Sea State fishing boat encouraged much worry about latent skin cancers.

The first thing Crat saw as he turned around was the listing hull of Dacca… the fleet’s cannery barge and the green raiders’ main target. Deck hands dashed to and fro, washing down gear that had been sprayed with caustic enzymes. Others cast lines to smaller vessels nearby, as pumps fought to empty water from Dacca’s flooding bilges.

The greeners hadn’t had any intention of sinking her, just rendering her useless. Still, raiders often overestimated the seaworthiness of ships flying the albatross flag. Crat was too inexperienced to guess if Dacca’s crew could save the ship. And damned if he’d ask.

Near the factory ship, a UNEPA observer craft loitered, blue and shiny like something from an alien world — which in a sense it was. The dumpit U.N. hadn’t done a gor-sucking thing to stop the greeners. But should Dacca drown — or spill more than a few quarts of engine oil saving herself — UNEPA would be all over Sea State with eco-fines.

“There,” the oldster said helpfully, nudging Crat’s shoulder and pointing. “Now you can get a good look at our rescuers. Over toward Japan.”

Is that what those islands are? The mountainous forms were low to the northeast, like clouds. Crat wondered how anyone could tell the difference.

He saw a squadron of low-slung vessels approaching swiftly from that direction, so clean and trim, he naturally at first assumed they had nothing to do with Sea State.

Smaller craft spread out, prowling for greener submarines, while in the center a sleek, impressive ship of war drew near. The nozzles of its powerful cannon gleamed like polished silver. Bulging high-pressure tanks held its ammunition — various chemical agents that it began spraying over poor Dacca to neutralize the greeners’ enzymes. Although neither dousing was supposed to affect flesh, the new bath caused Dacca s crew to laugh and caper, luxuriating as if it were a Fragonard perfume.

“Ah!” the old man said. “Just as I thought. It is Pike-man. A proud vessel! They say she never needs to fight, so fearsome is her name.”

Crat glanced sideways, suddenly suspicious. This fellow’s eyes glittered with more than mere gratitude at being saved from greener sabotage. There was unmistakable pride in his bearing. From that, and the thick but educated accent, Crat guessed he was no mere refugee from poverty, nor a foolish would-be adventurer like himself. No, he must have joined the nation of the dispossessed because his birthplace was still officially under occupation by all the world’s powers — a country whose very name had been confiscated.

Crat remembered seeing that look in the eyes of another veteran, back in Bloomington — one of the victors in the Helvetian campaign. How strange, then, to spot it next in one who had lost everything.

Shit. That must’ve been some dumpit war.

The old man confirmed Crat’s suspicions. “See how even at this low estate they must treat us with respect?” he asked, then added in a low voice. “By damn, they had better!”

The rescuing flotilla efficiently dispatched units to repair Dacca, while Pikeman turned into the wind to launch a tethered guard zeppelin. On closer inspection, Crat saw that the vessel wasn’t new at all. Its flanks were patched, like every other ship in Sea State’s worldwide armada. And yet the refurbishments blended in, somehow looking like intentional improvements on the original design.

Watching the cruiser’s flag flapping in the wind, Crat blinked suddenly in surprise. For a brief instant the great bird at the banner’s center, instead of flying amid stylized ocean waves, had seemed to soar out of a blocky cloud, set in a bloody field. He squinted. Had it been an illusion, brought on by his constant hunger?

No! There! The colors glittered again! The Sea State emblem must have been modified, he realized. Stitched in amid the blue water and green sky were holographic threads, flashing to the eye only long enough to catch a brief but indelible image.

Once again, for just a second, the albatross flapped sublimely through a square white cross, centered on a background of deep crimson.

Naturally, during the melee the dolphins had escaped. Even before the Helvetian detachment arrived to drive them off, the green raiders had managed to tear the giant fishing web surrounding the school. Crat groaned when he saw the damage. His hands were already cracked from trying to please a slave-driving apprentice net maker, tying simple knots over and over, then retying half of them when his lord and master found some fault undetectable to any human eye.

The calamity went beyond damaged nets, of course. It could mean they’d go hungry again tonight, if the raiders’ enzymes had reached the catch already in Dacca’s hold. And yet, in a lingering corner, Crat felt strangely glad the little creatures had got away.

Oh, sure. Back in Indiana he’d been a carni-man, a real meat eater. Often he’d save up to devour a rare hamburger in public, just to disgust any NorA dumpit ChuGas who happened to pass by. Anyway, today’s prey wasn’t one of the brainy or rare dolphin types on the protected lists, or else UNEPA would have interfered faster and a lot more lethally than any green raiders.

Still, even dumb little spinner porpoises looked too much like Tuesday Tursiops, the bottle-nosed hero of Sat-vid kiddie shows. They cried so plaintively when they were hauled aboard, thrashing, flailing their tails… Crat’s gorge was already rising by the time cawing birds arrived to bicker and feed on factory ship offal.

Then, suddenly, had come the greeners — among them probably former countrymen of Crat’s. He recalled seeing well-fed pale faces, jaws set in grim determination as they harassed Sea State’s harvesters to the very limits of international law and then some. To Crat, the lurching fear and confusion of the brief battle had only been the final straw.

“Are you feeling better now, fils?

Crat looked up from his makeshift seat, one of the coiled foredeck anchor chains. Squinting, he saw it was the geep again — the old Helvetian — come around to check up on him for whatever reason. Crat answered with a silent shrug.

“My name is Schultheiss. Peter Schultheiss,” the fellow said as he sat on a jute hawser. “Here you go. I brought you some portable shade.”

Crat turned the gift, a straw hat, over in his hands. Weeks ago he would have spurned it as something from a kindergarten class. Now he recognized a good piece of utilitarian craftsmanship. “Mm,” he answered with a slight nod and put it on. The shade was welcome.

“No gratitude required,” Schultheiss assured. “Sea State cannot afford eye surgery for all its young men. Nor can we count on U.N. dumpit charity.”

For the first time, Crat smiled slightly. The one thing he liked about this disappointing adventure was the way both old and young cursed and suffered alike. Only here at sea, a young man’s strength counted for as much as any grandpa’s store of experience.

Just wait n see, he thought. When I get used to all this, I’ll be tougher ’n anybody.

That wouldn’t be anytime soon, though. First week out, he’d foolishly accepted a dare to wrestle a very small Bantu sailor wearing a speckled bandanna. The speed of his humiliation brought home how useless years of judo lessons were in the real world. There were no rubber mats here, no coaches to blow time out. The jeers and pain that followed him to his hammock proved this dream was going to take some time coming true.

Crat remembered Quayle High and that lousy tribal studies class he and Remi and Roland had to take. Hardly anything spoken by the teacher stuck in memory, except one bit — what old fathead Jameson had said one day about chiefs.

“These were clansmen who won high status, respect, the best food, wives. Nearly every natural human society has had such a special place for its high achievers… even modern tribes like your teen gangs. The major difference between cultures has not been whether, but how chiefs were chosen, and by what criteria.

“Today, neither physical power nor even maleness is a principal criterion in Western society. But wit and quickness still make points…”

Crat remembered how Remi and Roland had grinned at each other, and for an instant he had hated his friends with a searing passion. Then, surprisingly, the prof also let drop a few words that seemed just for him.

“Of course even today there are some societies in which the old macho virtues hold. Where strength and utter boldness still appear to matter…”

Each of them had taken to the Settler style for different reasons. Remi, for romance and the promise of a new order. Roland, for the honor of comradeship and shared danger in a cause. For Crat, though, the motive had been simpler. He just wanted to be a chief.

And so, a month ago, he had bought a one-way ticket and begun what he was sure would be his great adventure.

Some fuckin’ adventure.

“I think maybe the admiral will give up these fishing grounds now,” Schultheiss commented as he looked up toward the bridge. Congo’s officers could be glimpsed, pacing, arguing with the other captains by the flicker of a holo display.

Soon they heard the bosuns shouting — all hands to the nets in five minutes, for hauling and stowing. Crat sighed for his throbbing muscles. “D’you think we’ll be goin’ to town?” he asked.

It was his longest speech yet. Schultheiss seemed impressed. “That is likely. I hear one of our floating cities is heading this way, north from Formosa.”

“Soon as we dock,” Crat said suddenly, “I’m gonna transfer.”

Schultheiss raised an eyebrow. “All Sea State fleets are the same, my friend… except the Helvetian units, of course. And I doubt you’d—”

Crat interrupted. “I’m through fishin’. I’m thinkin’ of goin’ to the dredges.”

The old man grunted. “Dangerous work, fils. Diving into drowned cities, tying ropes to furniture and jagged bits of rusty metal, dismantling sunken office buildings in Miami—”

“No.” Crat shook his head. “Deep dredging. You know. The kind that pays! Diving after… noodles.”

He knew he hadn’t pronounced it right. Schultheiss looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded vigorously. “Ah! Do you mean nodules’¹. Manganese nodules? My young friend, you are even braver than I thought!”

From that brief look of respect Crat derived some satisfaction. But then the old man smiled indulgently. He patted Crat’s shoulder. “And Sea State needs such heroes to take wealth from the deep, so we can take our place among the nations. If you would be such a man, I’m proud to know you.”

He doesn’t believe me, Crat realized. Once, that would have sent him into a sputtering rage. But he had changed… if only because nowadays he was generally too tired for anger. Crat shrugged instead. Maybe I don’t believe it myself.

The main winch was out again, of course. That meant Congo’s section of the great seine net would have to be hauled aboard by hand.

Now Crat remembered where he’d seen the old Helvetian before. Peter Schultheiss was a member of the engineering team that kept the old tub and her sister vessels, Jutland and Hindustan, sailing despite age and decrepitude. Right now Schultheiss was immersed headfirst in a tangle of black gears, reaching out for tools provided by quick, attentive assistants.

Nearby, the forward wing-sail towered like a tapered chimney. No longer angled into the wind to provide trim, it had been feathered and would remain so unless old Peter succeeded. Apparently it wasn’t just the winch this time, but the entire foredeck power chain that depended on the fellow’s miracle work.

Now that’s a skill, Crat admitted, watching Schultheiss during a brief pause in the hauling. You don’t learn that kind of stuff on the gor-sucking Data Net.

“Again!” the portside bosun shouted. The barrel-chested Afrikaaner had long ago tanned as dark as any man on his watch. “Ready on the count, ver-dumpit! One-and, two-and, three-and… heave!”

Crat groaned as he pulled with the others, marching slowly amidships, dragging the sopping line and its string of float buoys over the side. Scampering net makers busied themselves caring for the damaged seine as fast as it came aboard. It was a well-practiced cadence, one with a long tradition on the high seas.

When next they paused to walk forward again — Crat massaging his throbbing left arm — he sniffed left and right, perplexed by a sour, sooty odor. The sharp sweat tang of unbathed men, which had nearly overwhelmed him weeks ago, now was mere background to other smells, drifting in on the breeze.

At last he found the source over on the horizon, a twisted funnel far beyond the Sea State picket boats, rising to stain the shredded, striated clouds. Crat nudged one of his neighbors, an unsmiling refugee from flooded Libya.

“What’s that?” he asked.

The wiry fellow readjusted his bandanna as he peered. “Incinerator ship, I think. No allowed go upwind anybody… UNEPA rule, y’know? But we not anybody. So upwind us jus’ fine okay.” He spat on the deck for effect, then again onto his hands as the bosun ordered them to take up the hawser for another round.

Glancing at the smokey plume, Crat knew what Remi would have said. “Hey, you got priorities, I got priorities. All the world’s got priorities.” Getting rid of land-stored toxic wastes rated higher to most than worrying about one more carbon source. Protecting onshore water supplies outweighed a few trace molecules escaping the incinerators’ searing flames, especially when those molecules wouldn’t waft over populated areas.

Hey, Crat thought as he heaved in time with the others. Ain’t I population? Soon, however, he hadn’t a thought to spare except on doing his job… on keeping jibes about clumsy dumb-ass Yankees to a minimum, and keeping the others from trampling him.

Because Crat was concentrating so hard, he never noticed the captain come out on deck to test the brush of the wind, his brow furrowed in concern. Poor as it was, Sea State owed its very existence to computers and to other nations’ weather satellites. Regular forecasts meant life or death, enabling rusty fleets and floating towns to seek safety well in advance of approaching storms.

Still, weather models could not predict the smaller vagaries… mists and pinprick squalls, microbursts and sudden shifts in the wind. While Crat strained on the line, wearily aware they were still only half done, the captain’s eyes narrowed, noticing subtle cues. He turned to call his comm officer.

While his back was turned a pocket cyclone of clear air turbulence descended on the little fleet. The micropressure zone gave few warnings. Two hundred meters to the east, it flattened the sea to a brief, glassy perfection. Men’s ears popped aboard the Dacca, and blond seamen on the Pikeman’s starboard quarter briefly had to turn away, blinking from a needle spray of salt foam.

The zone’s tangent happened to brush against Congo then, sending the wind gauge whining. Gusts struck the feathered wing-sail, catching the vertical airfoil and slewing it sharply. The brakeman, who had been picking his teeth, leapt for his lever too late as the sail swung hard into the gang of straining laborers, knocking several down and cutting the taut cable like a slanting knife.

Tension released in a snapping jolt, hurling sailors over the railing amid a tangle of fibrous webbing. One moment Crat was leaning back, struggling to do his job despite his aching blisters. The next instant, he was flying through the air! His quivering muscles spasmed at the sudden recoil, and yet for a moment it seemed almost pleasant to soar bemusedly above the water like a gull. His forebrain, always the last to know, took some time to fathom why all the other men were screaming. Then he hit the sea.

Abruptly, all the shrill tones were deadened. Low-pitched sounds seemed to resonate from all directions… the thrashing of struggling creatures, the glub of air from panicked, convulsing lungs, the pings and moans of Congo’s joints as she slowly aged toward oblivion. A destination that loomed much more rapidly for Crat himself, apparently. His legs and arms were caught in the writhing net, and while the float buoys were gradually asserting themselves, that wouldn’t help men who were snared like him, only a meter below.

Strange, he pondered. He’d always had dreams about water… one reason why, when all other emigration states had spurned his applications, he finally decided to go to sea. Still, until now the possibility of drowning had never occurred to him. Wasn’t it supposed to be a good way to go, anyway? So long as you didn’t let panic ruin it? judging from the sounds the others were making, they were going to have the experience thoroughly spoilt for them.

Something about the quality of the sound felt terribly familiar. Maybe he was remembering the womb…

Sluggishly, with a glacial slowness, he started working on escape. Not that he had any illusions. It was just something to do. Guess I’ll be seein’ you guys soon, after all, he told Remi and Roland silently.

His left arm was free by the time one of the thrashing forms nearby went limp and still. He didn’t spare the time or energy to look then. Nor even when a gray figure flicked by, beyond the other side of the net. But as he worked calmly, methodically, on the complex task of freeing his other arm, a face suddenly appeared, right in front of him. A large eye blinked.

No… winked at him. The eye was set above a long, narrow grin featuring white, pointy teeth. The bottle jaw and high, curved forehead turned to aim at him, and Crat abruptly felt his inner ears go crazy in a crackling of penetrating static. With a start, he realized the thing was scanning him… inspecting him with its own sophisticated sonar. Checking out this curiosity of a man caught in a net designed to snare creatures of the sea.

This dolphin was much larger than the little spinners the fleet had been killing only hours ago. It must be one of the big, brainy breeds. Certainly it looked amused by this satiric turnabout.

Damn, Crat cursed inwardly as his right arm came free at last. No dumpit privacy anywhere. Not even when I’m dying.

Accompanying that resentment came a dissolving of the peaceful, time-stretched resignation. With a crash, his will to live suddenly returned. Panic threatened as his diaphragm clenched, causing a few bubbles to escape. He must have been underwater only a minute or two, but abruptly his lungs were in agony.

Ironically, it was the dolphin — the fact of having an audience — that made Crat hold on. Damn if he’d give it the same show as the others! Now that his mind was working again — such as it was — Crat began recalling important things.

Like the fact that he had a knife! Sheathed at his ankle, it was one of the few items ship rules wouldn’t let you hock. Bending, grabbing, unfolding, Crat came up with the gleaming blade and started sawing at the strands clasping his legs.

Funny thing about the way water carried sound — it seemed to amplify his heartbeat, returning multiple echoes from all sides. Counterpoint seemed to come from the spectator, his dolphin voyeur… though Crat avoided looking at the creature as he worked.

One leg free! Crat dodged a loop of netting sent his way by the rolling currents — and in the process almost lost the knife. Clutching it convulsively, he also squeezed out more stale, precious air.

His fingers were numb sausages as he resumed sawing. The sea began filling with speckles as each second passed. Infinite schools of blobby purple fishes encroached across his failing vision, heralding unconsciousness. They began to blur and the feeling spread throughout his limbs as his body began quaking. Any second now it would overcome his will with a spasmodic drive to inhale.

The last coil parted! Crat tried to launch himself toward the surface, but all his remaining strength had to go into not breathing.

An assist from a surprising quarter saved him… a push from below that sent him soaring upward, breaching the surface with a shuddering gasp. Somehow, he floundered over a cluster of float buoys, keeping his mouth barely above water as he sucked sweet air. I’m alive, he realized in amazement. I’m alive.

The roaring in his ears masked the clamor of men watching from the Congo, only now beginning to rush to the rescue. Dimly, Crat knew that even those now bravely diving into the water would never be able to cross the jumbled net in time to reach some still-thrashing forms nearby.

As soon as his arms and legs would move again, Crat blearily turned to the nearest struggling survivor, a stricken sailor only a couple of meters away, churning the water feebly, desperately. The fellow was thoroughly trapped, his head bobbing intermittently just at the surface. As Crat neared, he spewed and coughed and managed to catch a thin whistle of breath before being dragged under again.

Belatedly, Crat realized his knife was gone for good, probably even now tumbling down to Davy Jones’s lost and found. So he did the only thing he could. Gathering a cluster of float buoys under one arm, he stretched across the intervening tangle to grab the dying man’s hair, hauling him up for a sobbing gasp of air. Each following breath came as a shrill whistle then… until the poor sod’s eyes cleared enough of threatening coma to fill instead with hysteria. Good thing the victim’s arms were still caught then, or in panic he’d have clawed Crat into the trap as well.

Crat’s own breathing came in shuddering sobs as he kicked in reserves he never knew he had before. Just keeping his own head above the lapping water was hard enough. He also had to tune out the fading splashes of other dying men nearby. I can’t help ’em. Really can’t… Got my hands full.

Nearby, Crat felt another form approach to look at him. That dolphin again. I wish someone’d shoot the damned…

Then he recalled that shove to the seat of his pants. The push that had saved his life.

His mind was too slow, too blurry to think of anything much beyond that. Certainly he formed no clear idea to thank the one responsible. But that eye seemed to sense something — his realization perhaps. Again it winked at him. Then the dolphin lifted its head, chattered quickly, and vanished.

Crat was still blinking at strange, unexpected thoughts when rescuers arrived at last to relieve him of his burden and haul his exhausted carcass out of the blood-warm sea.

• MESOSPHERE

The most pleasant thing about the new routine was that it finally gave Stan Goldman a chance to take some time off and go argue with old friends. The next several Gazer runs would be ordinary.

The program was on schedule, slowly nudging Beta, beat by beat, into its higher orbit. At last Stan felt he could leave his assistant in charge of the resonator and take an hour or so off to relax.

In fact, it was really part of his job — helping maintain their cover. After all, wouldn’t their hosts get suspicious if he didn’t stay in character? The paleontologists at the Hammer site would find it odd if old Stan Goldman didn’t come by on occasion to talk and kibitz. So it was with a relatively clear conscience that he made for the nearby encampment to partake of some beer and friendly conversation.

All in the line of duty of course.

“We ought to have an answer in a few years,” said Wyn Nielsen, the tall, blond director of the dig and an old friend of many years. “We’ll know when the Han finally launch that big interferometer of theirs. Until then talk is pointless.”

They had been disputing whether any nearby stellar systems might have Earthlike planets, and the elderly but still athletic Dane kept to his pragmatic, hard-nosed reputation. “If you have the means to experiment, do it! If not, then wait till experiments are possible. Theory by itself is only masturbation.”

The small club erupted in laughter. Still, Wyn was no spoilsport. And as everyone else seemed to want to speculate, he merely grumbled good-naturedly and went along.

“We’ll see about that Han interferometer,” said a woman geologist named Gorshkov, whom Stan had met off and on at conferences for decades. “The Chinese have been talking about it forever. Why can’t we answer the question with facilities in orbit right now?”

Stan shrugged. “The Euro-Russian and American telescopes are quite old by now, Elena. Yes, they’ve detected planets around nearby stars, but only giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Little rocky worlds like Earth are harder to find… like picking out the reflected glint of a needle next to a burning haystack, I should think.”

“But don’t most astrophysical models predict that sun-like stars will have planets?”

This time it was a younger Dane, Teresa’s husky friend Lars. The fellow might look like an overbuilt mechanic or an American football hero, but he obviously read a lot.

“Yes and no,” Stan replied. “G-type stars like our sun must shed angular momentum in their infancy, and since ours gave nearly all its spin momentum to her retinue of planets, most astronomers think other stars that rotate like the sun must have planets too.

“Furthermore, astronomers think early protostars give off fierce particle winds, which drive away volatile elements. That’s why there’s so much hydrogen in the outer solar system, while Mercury and Venus, sitting close in, have been stripped of theirs.”

“But Earth came out just right,” Wyn nodded. “In the middle of a zone where water can stay liquid, right?”

“The Goldilocks effect.” Stan nodded. “Life could never have started, or kept going for long, without lots of water.

“But as for Earth being ‘in the middle’ of the solar system’s life zone, well, astronomers have argued over that for more than a century. Some used to think that if our world was only five percent closer to the sun we would have fallen into the Venus trap… heat death by runaway greenhouse warming. And if we’d been just five percent farther, Earth’s seas would have frozen forever.”

“So? What’s the modern estimate?”

“Currently? The best models show our sun’s life zone is probably very broad indeed, stretching from just under one astronomical unit all the way out past three or more.”

Someone whistled. Elena Gorshkov closed her eyes momentarily. “Wait a minute. That extends past Mars! So why isn’t Mars a living world?”

“Good question. There’s evidence Mars once did have liquid water, carving great canyons we have yet to visit, alas.” To that there was a general murmur of agreement. Several raised their glasses to opportunities lost. “Perhaps there were even seas there for a while, where early life-forms made a brave start before all the water froze into the sands. The problem with old man Mars wasn’t that he spun too far from the sun. The real difficulty was that the Romans named their war god after a pygmy. A midget world, too small to hold onto the necessary greenhouse gases. Too small to keep those famous shield volcanoes smoking. Too small, by half, for life.”

“Hmm,” Lars commented. “Too bad for Mars. But if G stars have broad life zones, there ought to be many other worlds out there where conditions were right… with oceans where lightning could begin the first steps. Evolution would have worked in those places, too. So where — ?”

“So where the dickens is everybody!” Wyn Nielsen interjected, slapping the table.

So we return to the age-old question, Stan thought. Enrico Fermi had also asked it a hundred years ago. Where is everybody, indeed?

In a galaxy of half a trillion stars, there ought to be many, many worlds like Earth. Surely some must have developed life, even civilization, long ago.

On paper at least, star travel seems possible. So why, during all the time Earth was “prime real estate,” with no indigenous owners higher than bacteria or fish, was it never colonized by some earlier spacefaring race?

The amount of verbiage that had been spent on the subject — even excluding flying-saucer drivel — only expanded after the establishment of the World Data Net. And still there was no satisfactory answer.

“There are lots of theories why Earth was never settled by outsiders,” he replied. “Some have to do with natural calamities, like you lot are investigating here. After all, if giant meteorites wiped out the dinosaurs, similar catastrophes may have trounced other would-be space travelers. We ourselves may be wrecked by some stray encounter before we reach a level sufficient to—”

Stan’s voice caught suddenly. It was as if he’d been struck between the eyes, twice.

For a blessed time he had managed to banish all thought of the taniwha. So the sudden contextual reminder came like a blow. But the thing that really had him stopped in his tracks was a new thought, one that had swarmed into consciousness following the words — We ourselves may be wrecked by some encounter…

He coughed to cover his discomfiture, and someone slapped him on the back. While he took a drink of warm beer, waving concerned helpers away, he thought, Could our monster have come from outside? Could it not be man-made?

He didn’t need to make a mental note to look into the idea later. This was one that would stick with him. If only I’d been able to break free and go to the meeting in Waitomo! Somehow, he must find a way to transmit this thought to Alex!

But now was not the time to lose his train of thought. There were appearances to maintain. Where was I… ? Oh yes.

Clearing his throat, he resumed.

“My… own favorite explanation for the absence of extraterrestrials — or their apparent absence anyway — has to do with the very thing we were talking about before, the life zones around G stars like our sun. Astronomers now envision a very broad zone outward from our position, where a Gaia-type homeostasis could be set up by life. The farther ^out you go the less sunlight you have, of course. But then, according to the Wolling model, more carbon would remain in the atmosphere to keep a heat balance. Voila.

“But note, there’s very little habitable zone left inward from our orbit. Earth revolves very close to the sun for a water planet. In our case, life had to purge nearly every bit of carbon from the atmosphere to let enough heat escape as the sun’s temperature rose. And in a couple of hundred million years even that won’t suffice. As old Sol gets hotter, the inner boundary will cross our orbit and we’ll be cooked, slowly, but quite literally.

“In other words, we only have a hundred million years or so to come up with a plan.”

They laughed, a little nervously.

“So what’s your theory?” Nielsen asked.

Stan was wondering how to get the center of attention away from himself, so he could find an excuse to sneak away. But he’d have to do it smoothly, naturally. He spread his hands. “It’s really simple. You see, I think Earth must be relatively hot and dry, as water worlds go. Oh, it may not seem that way, with seventy percent of the surface covered by ocean. But that just means that normal life-zone planets must be even wetter!

“One consequence would be less continental land area to weather under rain.”

“Ah, I see,” a Turkish geochemist said. “Less weathering means less fertilizer to feed life in those seas. Which in turn means slower evolution?”

One of the paleontologists spoke from the fringes of the group. “And the life-forms would have less oxygen to drive fast metabolisms like ours.”

Stan nodded. “And of course, with less land area, there’d be less chance of evolving these.” He held up ten wriggling fingers.

“Huh!” Elena Gorshkov commented, shaking her head. Several arguments erupted at the periphery as the scientists disputed amiably. Nielsen was tapping away at the miniplaque on his lap, probably looking for refutations.

Good, Stan thought. These were bright people, and he liked watching them toss ideas about like volleyballs. Too bad he had to keep his most pressing scientific quandaries secret from them. To know such things as he did, and withhold them from his peers… it felt shameful to Stan. ›,

“Aha,” Nielsen said. “I just found an interesting paper on continental weathering that supports what Stan says. Here. I’ll pipe it to the rest of you.”

People drew plaques and readers from their pockets and unfolded them to receive the document, drawn from some corner of the net by Nielsen’s quick-and-dirty ferret program. Distracted from his recent desire to leave, Stan too began reaching for his wallet display.

At that moment, though, his watch gave a tiny, throbbing jolt to his left wrist, just sharp enough to get his attention — the rhythm urgent.

While the chatter of excited discussion swelled again, Stan excused himself as if heading for the men’s room. Along the way he popped a micro-pickup from the watch and put it in his ear.

“Speak,” he said to the luminous dial.

“Stan.” It was the tinny voice of Mohotunga Bailie, his assistant, and it carried overtones of fear. “Get back. Right quick.” That was all. The carrier tone cut off abruptly.

Stan felt a chill, mixed thoroughly with sudden pangs of guilt. The taniwha — has it gone out of control? Oh Lord, I shouldn’t have left them alone!

But even as he thought it, he knew in his heart that Beta couldn’t have gotten away so suddenly. The physics just weren’t there for such a happenstance… not from the stable configurations of just an hour ago!

Then it must be one of the beams. This time we must have hit a city. How many died? Oh God, can you forgive us? Can anyone?

With pale, shaking hands he plunged outside where the pearly arctic twilight stretched around two thirds of the horizon. The aurora borealis made flickering, ionized curtains above the Greenland ice sheet. Stan half stumbled, half ran to his little four-wheeled scooter and kicked the starter, sending its balloon tires whining across the glittering moraine, spewing gravel behind it.

All the way back to the Tangoparu shelter, his mind was filled with dire imaginings of what could have put those dread tones in his stolid assistant’s voice. Then he crossed a hillock and the dome itself came into view, along with the big, olive-drab helicopter, parked just beyond. Stan’s heart did another flip-flop.

It wasn’t a problem with Beta after all, he realized suddenly. At least not directly. This was quite another type of calamity.

NATO, he realized, recognizing the uniforms of the armed men patrolling the shelter’s perimeter. Lord love a duck… I never thought I’d see those colors again. I’d forgotten they were still in business.

He knew only one reason the big armed aircraft would have come all this way at such a time of night, bringing soldiers to the door of his laboratory. And it surely wasn’t a social call.

They’ve found us, he realized, knowing he had only seconds to decide what to do.

• MANTLE

There was only one entrance to the deep cave complex. When armed men in blue helmets rained from the sky on jet-assisted parafoils, they had to hunt and thrash through the jungle for a time before they found that hidden opening. Then, silently, they began repelling down the shadowy chimney.

Sepak Takraw awakened to the sound of blaring alarms and at first thought it was only another Gazer run… whatever those were. The Kiwis working for George Hutton had remained closemouthed about the essential purpose of the gravity scans, though clearly they had to do with the Earth’s deepest interior. Whatever the Tangoparu techs were doing here in New Guinea, they sure took their work godawfully seriously — as if the world would end if they made one bleeding mistake!

Sepak had finally moved his sleeping roll up to a cleft in a narrow, extinct watercourse, because of the noise they made each time their big resonator thing fired up, sending bells and whoops echoing through the deep galleries. This time, however, when he stumbled toward the lighted chamber rubbing his eyes, he suddenly stopped and stared down at a scene of utter chaos. Had the New Zealanders finally done it this time, with all their noise? Invoked Tu, the Maori god of war?

They were dashing about like addled bowerbirds, and the bright cylindrical resonator swung wildly within its gimbaled cage as armed men swarmed into the hall. Sepak slipped into the shadows and kept very still. George bloody Hutton. What’ve you got me into! The government can’t be this upset over us keeping a few caves secret for a while!

Anyway, these weren’t regular police. Half the soldiers clearly weren’t even native Papuans! Sepak mouthed a silent whistle as commandos rushed past the dazed technicians to secure the area. No, these weren’t locals, nor even U.N. peacekeepers. By damn, they were real troops… ASEAN Marines!

Anyone who did the necessary ferreting knew Earth still bristled with sovereign military might. Perhaps even several percent of what used to exist in the bad old days. And even more weaponry lay “in reserve,” in treaty-sealed warehouses. Alliances still trained, still maintained a balance of power that was very real, for all its generations of stability. Only, on a planet aswarm with real-time cameras and volatile public opinion, those states and blocs generally took pains to use their martial forces gingerly.

So Sepak knew this wasn’t just a raid over some infraction of the secrecy laws. As the marines briskly rounded up the kiwi engineers, he searched in vain for emblems of the U.N. or other international agencies. He peered for the de rigueur Net-zine reporters.

Nothing. No reporters. No U.N. observers.

It really is national, then, he realized. Which meant more was involved here than just the government of Papua-New Guinea. A whole lot more.

And these guys don’t want leaks any more than George Hutton did.

Sepak melted even farther back into the darkness.

By all the holy cargo of John Broom… George, what have you got me into?

• EXOSPHERE

Teresa began her journey home as she had arrived, in the company of Pedro Manella. For probably the last time, she stepped into a little boat to be conveyed through the Cave of Glowing Worms — their living constellations still shimmering in a subterranean mimicry of night. Then she and Pedro took advantage of the darkness to slip behind a flock of whispering tourists, treading well-worn guide paths past phosphorescent signs lettered in a dozen languages. Finally, they emerged on the flanks of a forested mountain, in New Zealand.

It’s like we only first entered for the first time an hour ago, Teresa thought, coaxing an illusion. Nothing in the intervening weeks has been real. I made it all up — Beta, the trip to Greenland, the gravity laser…

As Pedro stepped ahead of her down the tree-lined path, his shadow moved aside at one point to let glaring afternoon brightness fall upon her face. Teresa fumbled for her sunglasses.

Just a fantasy, that’s all it’s been, she continued wishing, including all that stuff about interstellar enemies sending monsters to devour our world.

It was a good effort, but Teresa had to sigh. She lacked enough talent at self-deception to make it work.

While you’re at it, might as well go whole hog and pretend you’re nineteen again, with all life’s adventures still ahead of you — first flight, first love, that illusion of immortality.

Southern autumn was ebbing fast, chilling toward winter. A breeze riffled her hair — now again her own shade of brown, but longer than at any time since she’d been a teenager. It felt at once sensuous, feminine, and startling each time it brushed against her neck.

Distracted, she suddenly collided with Manella’s massive back. “Hey!” Teresa complained, rubbing her nose.

Pedro turned, glancing at his watch, an agitated expression on his face. “You go on to the car,” he said. “I forgot something. See you in a nano.”

“Sure. Just remember I have a plane to catch at fourteen hundred. We—” Her voice trailed off as he hurried uphill, disappearing round a right-hand fork in the path. Strange, she thought. Didn’t we come down the left branch?

Maybe Pedro had to visit the gents’ before the long drive. Teresa resumed walking downhill again, one hand lightly on the guide rail overlooking steep forest slopes. Rain-damp ferns brushed in the wind. The tourist group had gone ahead and were probably spilling into the parking lot to seek their buses or rented runabouts. Perhaps the traffic jam would have cleared by the time Pedro caught up.

Teresa’s bags were already in the car. In them lay a packet of doctored photos, depicting her at an Australian hermitage-resort for the past month. They should get by any cursory inspection. And she’d gone over her cover story umpteen times. Soon, at the Auckland airport transit lounge, she would change places with the woman who’d been taking that holiday in her name. After the switch, at last, she’d be Teresa Tikhana once again. No reason for NASA ever to think she hadn’t done what they’d asked — taken that long-delayed recuperative holiday.

A new swarm of tourists loomed ahead, a big, intimidating group of determined sightseers climbing rapidly, staring about with their total-record goggles, holding tightly onto their shoulder bags. The tour guide shouted, describing the wonders of these mountains — their hidden rivers and secret byways. Teresa stepped aside to let the throng by. Several of the men looked her up and down as they passed, the sort of cursory, appreciative regard she was used to. Still, though the odds of being recognized were infinitesimal, Teresa turned away. Why take chances?

I wonder what’s keeping Pedro? She chewed on a fingernail as she looked across the rain forest. Why do I feel something’s wrong?

If she were in a cockpit right now, there’d be instruments to check, a wealth of information. Here, she had only her senses. Even her data plaque had been packed in the luggage below.

Glancing behind her, she realized something was distinctly odd about the tour group passing by. They’re sure in a hurry to see the caves. Is their bus behind schedule, or what?

Every one of them carried pastel shoulder bags to match their bright tourist gear. Four out of five were men, and there were no children at all. Are they with some sort of convention, maybe?

She almost stopped one to ask, but held back. Something seemed all too familiar about these characters, as she watched them recede upslope. Their movements were too purposeful for people on holiday. Under their goggles, their jaws had been set in a way that made Teresa think of—

She gasped. “Peepers! Oh… burf it!”

Helplessly she realized what her inattentiveness might cost. Without her plaque, she had only her slim wallet to use in an attempt to warn those below ground. Teresa took it from her hip pocket and flipped it open — only to find it wouldn’t transmit! The tiny transceiver was jammed.

There was a telephone though, in the gift shop by the park entrance. Teresa backed downhill till the last “tourist” vanished round a bend, then she turned to run—

— and crashed into several more men taking up the rear. One of them seized her wrist in a ninety-kilo grip.

“Well. Captain Tikhana. Hello! But I heard you were in Queensland. My goodness. What brings you to New Zealand so unexpectedly?”

The man holding her arm actually sounded anything but surprised to meet her here. Despite Glenn Spivey’s scarred complexion, his smile seemed almost genuine, empty of any malice. Next to Spivey, making useless any thought of struggle, stood a big black man and an Asian. Despite the ethnic diversity, they all seemed cast from the same mold, with the piercing eyes of trained spies.

A fourth man, standing behind the others, seemed out of place in this tableau. His features, too, were vaguely oriental. But his stance shouted civilian. And not a very happy one, either.

“You!” Teresa told the peeper colonel, cleverly.

“I hope you weren’t planning on leaving so soon, Captain?” Spivey replied, apparently bent on using one old movie clichi after another. “I wish you’d stay. Things are just about to get interesting.”

“… warn you, George! The place is swarming with soldiers! They’ve already taken the thumper and my crew. You and Alex and the others better clear out…”

A hand reached past George Hutton to turn off the sound. The holo unit went on visually depicting an elderly man in a heavy parka, obviously worried but now speaking only mime into a portable transmitter. Behind Stan Goldman loomed a titanic, icy palisade.

“I’m afraid the warning wouldn’t have done much good, even if it had come earlier,” Colonel Spivey told Hut-ton and the assembled conspirators. “We snooped all your files, of course, before running this kind of operation. Can’t afford to be sloppy, you know.”

Teresa sat in her old chair, across from Alex Lustig and two seats from the exit, now guarded by Spivey’s ANZAC commandoes. This time, the underground meeting room was packed with everyone, even the cook. Everyone except Pedro Manella, that is.

How did he know? She wondered. How does Pedro always seem to know?

She was feeling numb of course. Another few hours and she’d have been on her way to Houston, back to her comfortable apartment and her loyal NASA publicity flack.

Now though?

Now I’m cooked. Teresa’s thoughts were scattered like leaves. It was only natural, of course, when you contemplated a future in federal prison.

She glanced across the table at Alex and felt ashamed. Certainly he wasn’t worried foremost about saving his own neck. This event would have effects on more than just one life. All right, then. We’re all cooked. There was little solace in the reminder.

“How long ago?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Hutton?” Spivey asked.

George levered his heavy body to sit up at the head of the table. “How long ago did you snoop our records, Colonel?”

Teresa noticed he didn’t ask how Spivey’s team had broken the Tangoparu security screen. Obviously the great power alliances possessed better infotech than even the best Net hackers. With the deep pockets of governments, and many of the old loyalties to call upon, they could stay two, three, even four years ahead of individual users. So Spivey’s next admission took her a bit by surprise.

“You know, it’s funny about that,” the colonel answered openly. “We looked for you guys a long time. Too long. You had someone running awfully good interference for you, Hutton. We pierced your caches just three days ago, and then only thanks to some anonymous tips and help from civilian consultants like Mr. Eng here.”

Spivey nodded toward the vaguely oriental-looking man Teresa had seen on the trail, who blinked nervously when his name was mentioned. Obviously he was no peeper.

One of the Tangoparu technicians stood up to loudly protest the illegality of this invasion. Pulling a cube from his jacket, Spivey interrupted. “I have a document here, signed by the chiefs of NATO, ASEAN, and ANZAC, as well as the New Zealand national security authority, declaring this an ultimate emergency under the security sections of all three pacts and the Rio Treaty. What you people have been up to justifies that label, wouldn’t you say? If anything in human history does, a black hole eating up the Earth surely qualifies as an ‘emergency.’

“And yet you kept it to yourselves! Hiding it from the press, from the net, and from sovereign, elected governments. So please spare me your righteous indignation.”

In the holo tank, Stan Goldman’s silent image turned away as he saw someone approaching. Sighing in silent resignation, he reached for a switch and the image cut off abruptly. In its place the familiar cutaway globe rotated again — the Earth, depicted as a multilayered ball of Neapolitan ice cream.

Ah, if only it were true. An ice cream planet. What a wonderful world it would be.

Forcing aside giddiness, Teresa mentally added — Good luck, Stan. God bless you.

“Until only a little while ago we thought you people were the ones who made the damned monster!” June Morgan shouted at Spivey. “You and your secret cavitron laboratories in orbit and your cozy great power agreements. We felt we had to keep our work hidden or you’d interfere to save your own asses!”

“An interesting, perhaps even plausible, defense,” Spivey acknowledged. “But now you know it wasn’t we nasty government brutes who manufactured the…” He paused.

“The Beta singularity,” Alex Lustig prompted, his first comment of the afternoon.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Alex nodded enigmatically.

“Yes, well. A few days ago you folks seem to have decided the monster was sent this way instead by angry aliens.” He shrugged. “I’m not yet convinced by that colorful scenario. But be that as it may, once you believed that, and knew we weren’t Beta’s makers, wasn’t it your duty then to tell us? After all, aren’t we supposed to be the experts at dealing with external aggressors? We’re the ones with the resources and organizational skills to take your shoestring operation and—”

“We were arguing about just that when you and your men burst in,” George said abruptly. “In hindsight, maybe I was wrong to hold out for continued secrecy.”

“Because now it will remain secret.” Spivey nodded. “You’re right in your implication, Mr. Hutton. The alliances I represent see great danger in this situation — danger going far beyond the immediate matter of getting rid of Beta. The last century’s proven how dangerous new technologies can be when they’re misused. But once it’s widely known that something’s possible, there’s never a second chance to stuff the genie back into its bottle. Do you doubt it’ll be different when people hear about gravity lasers*”

He looked around the room. “Be honest now, would any of you like to see Imperial Han or the East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, learn how to make these knot singularity things? Or Sea State, for heavens’ sake?”

“There are science tribunals,” June Morgan suggested. “And on-site inspection teams…”

“Yes.” Spivey nodded. “A combination that’ll work fine, so long as manufacturing such things requires large industrial facilities. But hadn’t we better make sure of that, first? That these things can be controlled by the peacekeeping agencies? After all, Dr. Lustig’s already shown you can use very small cavitrons to make impressive singularities.”

“Not that impressive,” Alex cut in, showing his first sign of irritation as he gestured toward a whirling representation of Beta.

“No?” Spivey turned to face him. “With all due respect for your admitted brilliance, Professor, you’re also notorious for truly major screwups. Can you be so sure you’re right about that? Can you absolutely guarantee that Joe Private Citizen won’t be able to make planet killers someday, in his basement, any time he’s angry at the world?”

Alex frowned, keeping his mouth shut. Suddenly Teresa thought of her conversations with Stan Goldman, about the mystery of a universe apparently all but empty of intelligent life. Putting aside Lustig’s theory about alien berserkers, there was yet another chilling possibility.

Maybe it is trivial to make world-wrecking black holes. Maybe it’s inevitable, and the reason we’ve never seen extraterrestrial civilizations is simple… because every one reaches this stage, creates unstoppable singularities, and gets sucked down the throat of its own, self-made demon.

But no. She knew from the look in Alex Lustig’s eyes. He’s not wrong about this. Beta’s beyond our ability to duplicate, now and for a long time to come. Bizarre as it sounds, the thing was sent here.

“Hmph.” George Hutton grunted. The Maori geophysicist clearly saw little point in arguing over things already beyond his control. “Mind if I consult my database, Colonel?”

Spivey waved nonchalantly. “By all means.”

George picked up a hush-mike and spoke into it, watching streams of data flow across his desk screen. After a minute he looked up. “You have our stations in Greenland and New Guinea. But the other sites—” He paused.

Spivey looked to his left. “Tell them please, Logan.”

The civilian consultant shrugged. He spoke with a soft but startlingly incongruous Cajun accent. “My computer model of recent Earth, um… tremors, indicates the third site has to be on Easter Island. The last one’s inside a fifty-kilometer circle in the northern part of the Federation of Southern Africa.”

George shrugged. “Just checking. Anyway, I see here all is normal at those two. No troops. No cops. You haven’t got them, Colonel.”

“Nor are we likely to.” Spivey folded his arms, looking quite relaxed. “None of the alliances I represent have any jurisdiction in those territories.

“Oh, we could sabotage your sites I suppose. But if you people are right — if you’re not all deluded or crazy — then Earth needs those resonators. So I imagine zapping them would be a little self-defeating, wouldn’t it?”

That actually won a weak chuckle from a few of those gathered at the table. He continued with an ingratiating smile. “Anyway, our objective isn’t to slam you all into jail. Indeed, formal gravamens have been prepared against only one person in this room, and even in that case we might find some room to maneuver.”

Teresa felt all eyes turn briefly toward her. Everyone knew who Spivey meant. The list of likely counts against her was depressing to contemplate — misappropriation of government property, perjurious nondisclosure, dereliction of duty… treason. She looked down at her hands.

“No,” Colonel Spivey continued with a smile. “We’re not here to be your enemies, but to negotiate with you. To see if we can agree on a common program. And first on the agenda, by all means, is how to continue the work you’ve begun, putting every resource into saving the world.”

Everything the man said seemed so-o-o reasonable. Teresa found it infuriating, frustrating… all the way down to realizing her own role in Spivey’s game. While others dove right into the subsequent freewheeling discussion, she just sat there, resigned to a pawn’s mute, helpless role.

Clearly, with the New Zealand authorities committed to their alliance, extradition proceedings would be straightforward. Spivey could lock her up and throw away the key. Worse, she’d never fly again. No leak to the Net, no public outcry, not even legal gambits by the best live or software lawyers would ever get her back into space again.

The others were in jeopardy too, even though their cases weren’t quite as clear-cut. Teresa watched George Hut-ton’s mental wheels spin. With canny shrewdness, the Kiwi entrepreneur poked away at Spivey’s cage, testing its walls.

Prosecutions would mean disclosure, wouldn’t they? No one knew how deeply Spivey’s aversion to publicity really went. Did he seek to keep the secret for months? Years even? Or just long enough to give his side a head start?

The Tangoparu cabal had cards to play, as well. Such as their expertise, which no one else could duplicate in time. George emphasized the point, though it was a weak bluff and everyone knew it. Could they go on strike, refusing to use those skills, when the entire world was at stake?

Spivey countered by taking a lofty tone, making a strong case for teamwork. He dropped hints the criminal cases might be dropped. And within hours of an agreement, the times of short supplies and sleepless nights would end. Fresh manpower would arrive, fresh teams of experts to work round the clock, relieving the tired technicians, helping them guide Beta’s orbit slowly outward while making sure the worst tectonic shocks missed populated areas.

Teresa realized Hutton and Lustig were trapped. The benefits were too great, the alternatives too hard. All that remained were the details.

Of course, no one was asking her what she thought. But in fairness, she probably looked as if she couldn’t care less right now.

“We’re particularly interested in this coherent gravity amplification effect of yours, Dr. Lustig.” The speaker was one of Spivey’s aides, a black man dressed for tourism, but with the bearing of a professional soldier and the vocabulary of a physicist. “Surely the implications of the gazer haven’t escaped you?” he said.

“Its implications as a weapon? Oh, they occurred to me.” Alex nodded suspiciously. “How could they not? Want to destroy your enemies with earthquakes? Blast their cities into marmite… ?”

The officer looked pained. “That isn’t what I meant, sir. Other means of triggering quakes have been studied before. You’d be surprised how many there are. All were discarded as worthless bludgeons, lacking precision or predictability — useless in the present geopolitical arena.”

“And please note,” Colonel Spivey interjected. “It’s the very fact that we kept those techniques under wraps, completely secret, that let us discard those awful weapons and at the same time keep them out of the wrong hands. Secrecy isn’t always obscene.”

The black officer nodded and went on. “No, Professor Lustig, I’m not talking about liquefying the ground under the Forbidden City or anything like that. I was thinking instead about the gazer beam itself, propagating outward through space.

“Consider your claim that Beta must have been built by alien beings… aliens who apparently mean us harm… have you given no thought to how the gazer might be aimed? At targets coming into the solar system?” He leaned forward. “I can’t help but wonder if our extraterrestrial foes haven’t badly underestimated us, by inadvertently giving us the very means we need to defend ourselves.”

Alex blinked. A faint smile spread as he sat up straighter. “A defensive weapon… using the beam against Beta’s builders. Yes.” He nodded. “I see your point.”

“By damn, you’re right!” George Hutton slammed the table. Dawning enthusiasm glinted in his eyes. “Wouldn’t that be justice? To turn their own taniwha against them?”

“Um. Wouldn’t that mean leaving the, uh, Beta singularity down there… inside the Earth?” Logan Eng pointed out hesitantly. “… to continue serving as a mirror for the gravity laser?” He motioned with two hands. “Otherwise, no coherent beam.”

“Oh. Right.” George looked crestfallen. “Can’t have that.”

“Are you certain?” the military physicist asked. “You say Beta’s orbit even now carries it briefly up to regions where the rock density’s so low it loses mass. All right, then, what if it were set on just the right trajectory remaining inside the Earth, but balanced to neither grow nor shrink?”

George looked at Alex. “Is that possible?”

While Alex pondered the question, consulting mental resources Teresa could not imagine, June Morgan commented, “It would save us all that worry about how to deal with a million-degree flaming ball when it’s finally ejected from the Earth. What do you think, Teresa?” the blonde woman turned and asked her, for some reason.

Teresa pushed her chair back. “I’m feeling very tired,” she told Glenn Spivey as she stood up. “I think I’ll go lie down for a while.” The colonel looked at her for a moment and then nodded for a guard to accompany her. Teresa glanced back from the doorway to see Alex Lustig tracing mathematics in a holo tank, surrounded by excited scientists from both camps. She sighed and turned away.

The guard was an ANZAC commando from Perth, a gung-ho Aussie patriot who was nonetheless solicitous and rather sweet. When she asked if it was possible to have some food sent down, he said he would try.

Her bags were in her old room… retrieved from the car and no doubt inspected for good measure. She collapsed onto the same cot she’d awakened in that morning and mumbled a command to put the lights out. Curled up in a ball, clutching a blanket to her breast, Teresa did not feel “home” in any way at all.

In fitful slumber she dreamt the death of stars.

Her old friends. Her guideposts. One by one they flickered out, each with a cry of anguish and despair. Every sigh she echoed in her pillow with a moan.

Something was killing them. Killing the stars.

Poor Jason, she thought in the strange, mixed illogic of sleep. By the time he reaches Spica it’ll be gone. Nothing but black, empty holes. And he so enjoys the light.

Dreams move on. Now she looked out through the bars of a dungeon, across a dark, glassy-smooth sea, barren of reflections. As she watched, the water acquired a faint luminance… a pearly glow that suffused not from above but within. The radiance grew as steam rose; then roiling bubbles burst from a mounting bulge.

The sun rose out of the ocean.

Not the horizon — but the ocean itself. Too brilliant to see, it cast fierce light through her outstretched hand, tracing the contours of her bones. The blazing orb speared upward on a column of superheated vapor. In its wake, mammoth waves rolled across the once-placid sea.

Those water mountains were higher than her prison and heading her way. Yet she didn’t care. Even half blinded, she could trace the fireball’s trajectory and knew with dreadful certainty, It isn’t going away after all. It’s coming back. Coming back to stay.

Perhaps it was that dreaded thought that stirred her from the nightmare. Or maybe the creepy feeling that someone was treading softly toward her, across the floor of her tiny quarters. Teresa’s eyes snapped open, though she was still snared by sleep catalepsy and by her mother’s reassuring words.

“Shhh… you only imagined it. There are no monsters. There’s never anybody there.”

A foot collided with the dinner tray, left by the kindly commando. Teresa heard a sharp intake of breath. Momma, Teresa thought, as her heart raced and her right hand formed a fist, you had no idea what you were talking about.

“Shhh,” somebody said, not a meter away. “Don’t speak.”

She stared at two white blobs… a pair of eyes, presumably. Teresa swallowed and tried not to let adrenaline rule her. “Wh… who is it?”

A hand settled gently, briefly over her mouth, hushing her without force. “It’s Alex Lustig… Do you want to get out of here?”

Why is it, she wondered, that your eyes never completely dark-adapt while you sleep? Only now, staring into the dimness, did she begin making out the man’s features.

“But… how?”

He smiled. A Cheshire Cat smile. “George slipped me a map. He’s staying with the others. Going to try cooperating with Spivey. You and I, though… we’ve got to leave.”

“Why you?” She asked hoarsely. “You were in pig heaven, last I looked.”

He shrugged. “I’ll explain later, if we make it. Right now there’s a coffee break going on, and we’ve maybe fifteen minutes till I’m missed. You coming?”

Teresa answered with action, flinging off the covers and reaching for her shoes.

The Australian was no longer on watch by her door. Instead, a tall, powerful Maori, with permanent-looking cheek tattoos and battle ribbons on his uniform, stood with his back against the opposite wall, his mouth half open in a pleasant leer. At first Teresa wondered if the Kiwi soldier had been won over to their side. Then she saw his glassy look, like a dazer, high on a self-induced enkephalin rush. Only, a dazer wouldn’t be a commando. Somehow, Lustig must have drugged him.

“Choline inhibitors. He won’t remember a thing,” Alex explained. He led her down silent, rock-walled corridors. Each time they approached a door, he referred to a small box before giving the okay to proceed. At last they arrived at the secret quay, where two small boats bobbed in the still, cool waters of Waitomo’s underground lake.

“Won’t the exits be watched?” she asked. It wouldn’t require human guards — just tiny drones, about the size of a housefly.

“This area was swept a few minutes ago. Anyway, nobody but George knows the route we’ll be taking.”

Teresa wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. But there wasn’t much choice. She climbed into the lead boat and cast off as Alex began hauling at the network of ropes lacing the ceiling overhead. As they neared the big doors, the dock lights shut off, plunging them into darkness. The gates rolled aside with a low rumble. Alex grunted, feeling his way from one guide cable to the next. She heard him softly counting, perhaps reciting a mnemonic.

“Are you sure you know what you’re—”

He cut her off. “If you want to go back, you know the way.”

Teresa shut up. Anyway, soon they were under the false constellations again — those parodies of starlight used by phosphorescent worms to lure their hapless prey. Each vista pretended to show unexplored clusters, galaxies… a promise of infinity.

Perhaps all our modern astronomy is wrong, she pondered, gazing across the ersatz starfields. Maybe the “real” constellations are just like those green dots. No more than lures to bait the unwary.

She shook her head as the ceiling slid slowly past, carrying with it whole implied universes. That was the problem with nightmares, they clung to you, affecting your mood for hours afterwards. Teresa couldn’t afford that now. Nor even settling into “passenger” mode. Action was the proper antidote. She whispered. “Can I help?”

The boat glided smoothly through the water. “Not yet…” Alex panted as he groped for something up ahead, almost tipping them over in the process. Teresa gripped the rocking sides. “Ah. Here it is. George’s special rope. From here we leave the main cave.”

Their craft made a sharp turn, scraping by towers of inky blackness and then embarking under new, unfamiliar skyscapes. A little while later Alex spoke again, now short of breath. “All right. If you take my hand, I’ll help you stand… carefully! Let me guide you to the cable… Got it? Now that there aren’t other ropes about to confuse you, I could use some assistance. Put an elbow on my shoulder to feel my rhythm. Keep to an easy pace at first. Let me know the instant you feel any motion sickness.”

Teresa forbore telling him her entire life had been a battle with vertigo. “Lay on, Macduff,” she whispered with an effort at cheerfulness.

“And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ” he finished the quotation. “We’re off.”

Trying to stand in a swaying boat while dragging on a cable overhead in total darkness — it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing Teresa had ever attempted. She almost fell over the first few times. But leaning against him made it easier. They could brace each other on four legs. Soon they were breathing in the same cadence, gliding across the smooth pond with hardly a sound and only the green sprinkle overhead to give the cave walls outlines.

Soon those walls were closing in again, she could tell. The darkness and silence seemed to accentuate her other senses, and she was acutely aware of every faint drip of condensation, every aroma rising from her clothes and his.

The boat bumped once, twice, and then went aground on a rocky bank. “Okay,” he said. “Carefully, crouch down and help me feel for the bag of supplies.”

Letting go of the rope, they came closer than ever to tipping over. Teresa gasped, clutching him. Together they fell in a heap of arms and legs, gasping — and also laughing with released tension. As they tried to untangle, he grunted. “Ow! Your knee is on my… ah, thank you.” His voice shifted to falsetto. “Thank you very much.” They laughed again, in tearful relief.

“Is this what you were looking for?” she asked, as one hand came upon a nylon bag. She pushed it toward him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Now where’s the zipper? Don’t answer that! Here it is.”

There was something bizarre and really rather funny about all this fumbling in the dark. It made your hands feel thick and uncoordinated, as if smothered in mittens. Still, altogether, this beat languishing in a tiny room, feeling sorry for yourself.

“Here, take these,” he said, apparently trying to hand her something. But in reaching out she wound up jabbing him in the throat. He made exaggerated choking sounds and she giggled nervously. “Oh, stop. Here, let’s do it this way,” she suggested, and ran her ringers from his neck down to his right shoulder. She felt his left hand move to cover hers. Together they followed his sleeve down to his other hand.

Funny, she thought along the way. I had this image of him as being soft, mushy. But he’s solid. Are all Cambridge dons built like this?

With both hands he pressed into hers an object — a pair of goggles. But he didn’t let go quite yet.

“We had to get you out,” he told her in a more serious tone. “We couldn’t let Spivey take you off to jail.”

Teresa felt a lump, knowing she had underestimated her friends.

“He’d have used your jeopardy as one more threat, to coerce George and the others,” Alex finished. “And we decided we just couldn’t allow that.”

Teresa pulled her hand away. Of course. That’s completely right. Have to stay practical about this.

“So you’re dropping me off now and going back?” she asked as she adjusted the elastic headband.

“Of course not. First off, we haven’t got you out yet. And anyway, I’m not staying to be Colonel Spivey’s tool!”

“But… but without you the gazer…”

“Oh, they’ll manage without me, I suppose. If all they want to do is keep the damn thing down there—” He paused and caught his breath. “But I’m not bowing out completely. There’s method to this madness, Captain Tikhana.”

“Teresa… please.”

There was another pause. “All right. Teresa. Um, got yours adjusted yet?”

“Just a sec.” She pulled the strap and toggled the switch by one lens. Suddenly it was as if someone had turned the lights on.

Unlike mere passive infrared goggles, which would have detected very little down here, these monitored whichever way her eyes turned and sent a tiny illuminating beam in just that direction, for just as long as she was looking that way. The only exception was where they detected another set of goggles. To prevent blinding another user, the optics were programmed never to shine directly at each other, so when Teresa looked around for the first time, she made out limestone walls, the inky waterline, the boat — but Alex Lustig’s face remained hidden inside an oval of darkness.

“Couldn’t have used them before because Spivey had spy sensors—”

Teresa waved aside his explanation. It made sense. “Now where?” she asked.

He pointed downward, and she understood why even the peeper colonel’s little robot watchers wouldn’t be able to follow them. “Okay,” she said. And together they sorted equipment from the nylon bag.

Claustrophobia was the least of her worries as they kicked along a deep, twisting tube, carried by the current of an underground stream. Nor did the bitter cold bother her much — though Teresa kept an eye on the tiny clock readout, calculating the time before hypothermia would become a problem.

Alex’s flippers churned the water in front of her, creating sparkling flecks in her goggles’ beam. Spectrum conversion always made things look eerie, but here the effect was otherworldly, other-dimensional. The taper of his legs seemed to stretch endless meters, kilometers ahead of her, like this surging hypogean torrent.

The river held their lives now and they were helpless to turn back if George Hutton’s map proved wrong or if they took some fatal wrong turn. She imagined they might, as in some old movie, be swept downward ever deeper into the Earth’s twisting bowels, to some Land That Time Forgot. In fact, though, washing ashore on a misty underground dinosaur refuge was less unsettling to contemplate than some likelier possibilities… like meeting their end pinned to a porous wall, the freshet plunging past them through crevices too small for human flesh to pass.

Was Alex planning to lead her all the way to the river’s outlet, somewhere on the Tasman Sea? If so, the timing would be tight. Their air capsules weren’t rated for more than a couple of hours.

Perhaps it was the coolness, but Teresa’s thoughts soon calmed. She found herself wondering at the sculpted shapes of the sweeping, curving tube… at the way different hardnesses of stone overlapped in smooth relief and how patient eddies had carved cavities into the ancient mountain, laying bare fine patterns, delicate to the eye.

Those eddies were dangerous. Even with gloves and knee pads it was hard to ward off every sudden invisible surge, every buffet and blow. Teresa felt certain there were daredevils among the world’s bored, well-fed majority who would pay George Hutton handsomely for this experience, without ever understanding where they were or what they were seeing.

At one point the river opened into a large chamber with an air pocket. They met at the surface, spitting out their mouthpieces as they treaded water.

“Amazing!” she gasped. And the black oval covering his face seemed to nod in agreement. “Yes, it’s unbelievable.”

“Where to from here?”

“I… think we take the way to the left,” he answered after a pause.

Teresa churned her legs, rotating. Yes, the river split here, dividing into two unequal paths. Alex was referring to the narrower, swifter-running branch. “You’re sure?”

In answer, he held out the miniplaque that hung from a cord around his neck. “Did you see any other large chambers on the way here? Did I miss one?” She peered at the sketch. A computer graphics device could reproduce only what it was given, and George Hutton’s drawing had apparently been scrawled in a hurry. “I… I’d have to say you’re right. Left it is.”

They reset their goggles and mouthpieces and kicked off toward the left-hand opening, and an ominous roaring. Teresa was intensely aware of the annotation Hutton had inscribed at this point on the map, in red letters.

Be careful here! the inscription had said.

Only a few meters into the new stretch, Teresa realized just how friendly the last one had been. No time or energy could be spared for sightseeing or philosophizing now. Curves loomed suddenly out of the froth ahead, confusing her smart goggles. Confusing her. Even with the help of slip-streaming — the natural tendency to ride the current’s center — it took every ounce of effort just to keep the writhing stone intestine from crushing her!

It can’t be much farther, she figured, remembering her brief glimpse at the sketch, unsure whether she was calculating or simply praying. The last pool has to be just ahead.

No sooner did she think that though, than suddenly she was caught in a tangle with Alex Lustig’s legs. With the river plowing into them from behind, the collision was a series of buffets that made her head ring, knocking dazzling spots before her eyes. The goggles only made things worse by dimming suddenly in response to her pupils’ shocked dilation.

A sharp scrape on one leg made Teresa aware of jagged stones, too fresh and rugged to have lain in the smoothing flow for long. A rockfall must have partly blocked the stretch of river. She writhed to one side barely in time to avoid being impaled on one jutting monolith, then had to grab Alex’s leg as the current swept her toward another jagged jumble just ahead!

Clutching his ankle, Teresa hadn’t time to wonder how he had stopped so suddenly. She held on tightly with both arms. Her flippered feet bumped the barricade and instinctively she kicked at it.

Miraculously, it gave way! Glancing quickly downstream, Teresa saw the current sweep away what remained of the precarious barrier. All it had taken was one extra nudge and the impediment was gone. What luck!

She almost let go to continue the journey. But then she paused. How is he holding on? a voice insisted. And why doesn’t he let go now that the way is clear?

Something else had to be wrong. Involuntary shivers were coursing down the man’s legs. He’s in trouble, she realized.

Fighting the current, worming her arms forward one at a time, Teresa climbed up his legs inch by awful inch, seizing at last a solid grip on his belt. She lifted her head to see what Alex was doing.

My God! Bubbles escaped Teresa’s mouth as she tried not to cry out. The goggles prevented her from looking within the circle of darkness framing the man’s face. But she didn’t need any look in his eye to know panic and despair. With growing feebleness, Alex clawed at a thong that gouged deeply into his neck, releasing thin trails of blood every time the current let up a bit. That same current almost dragged Teresa’s goggles off as she shifted to try to see around the black circle, to whatever had him trapped.

It was the map plaque. Somehow it had jammed into a crevice left by the cave slide! It was what had stopped them both from crashing among the razor-sharp rocks just seconds ago. Now wedged in place by Alex’s struggles, it also anchored the noose that was strangling the life out of him.

There was no time for thought. Teresa’s knife was at her ankle, while Lustig’s was convenient at his thigh. It would have to be his then. But to take it meant she’d have to let go with one arm! And Teresa knew she couldn’t hold on… unless.

She took three deep breaths, spat out her mouthpiece and bit down hard on his belt, fastening her teeth as hard as she could. Gripping tight with her left arm, she released the right and fought to bring it to the knife. The river buffeted them like flags. But in spite of the pain, her jaw and shoulder remained in their sockets as her right hand fumbled with the sheath snap and at last brought out the gleaming blade.

Teresa squeezed both arms around him again and wriggled the pungent belt out of her mouth. Now came the hard part — holding her breath while worming her way up Alex’s body, centimeter by centimeter. His shirt was in tatters of course, and blood streamers stained the chill water as she noted with one dim corner of her mind that the man’s chest was even hairier than Jason’s… And that, of all things, he had an erection!

Now? Males are so bizarre.

Then she recalled the old wives’ tale — that men sometimes grow tumescent when they are close to death. Teresa hurried.

Her arms were close to giving out and her lungs were burning by the time she wrapped her legs around his thighs, held tight with one arm, and reached upstream with the knife. She tried not to stab him in the face or throat as the fickle, trickster river tore and twisted at her grip with sudden surges, forcing her hand this way and that.

He had to be alive and conscious still. Or was it just a reflex that caused Alex to run a hand along her outstretched arm, nudging her aim? All at once, through the metal blade, she felt the taut, bowstring tension of the thong, thrumming a bass tone of death.

Now! Bear down, bitch. Do it!

With a force of will Teresa drove strength into her arm. The thong resisted… then parted with a sharp twang that reverberated off the narrow walls.

Suddenly they were tumbling downstream, bouncing against the floor and ceiling. Teresa had to choose between protecting her goggles from the tearing slipstream and cramming the breather tube back into her mouth. She chose breath over sight and grabbed the aerator, quenching her agonized lungs even as the high-tech optics were torn off her head, turning everything black.

The wild ride ended just a few chaotic moments later. Abruptly, the bottom seemed to drop out as she flew into what felt like open air! The former low, thrumming growl now crested to a clear, crashing roar. Gravity took her, and the plummet lasted a measureless time… ending at last in a splash at the foot of a noisy waterfall.

The pool was deep and cold and utterly black. Teresa struggled toward what she devoutly hoped would be the surface. When her head finally broached again, she treaded water, spat out her mouthpiece, and drank in the sweetness of unbottled air. Up was up again, and down was down. For a moment it didn’t matter that nothing — not even the green glimmer of worms — illuminated her existence. Other people, after all, had gone blind and lived. But no one had ever managed very long without air.

“Alex!” she shouted suddenly, before even thinking of him consciously. He might be knocked out somewhere in this inky lake, drifting away silently, unconscious…’ and she without sight to look for him!

She swam away from the falls until the clatter and spume faded enough to let her hear herself think. “Alex!” she called again. Oh God, if she was alone down here. If he died because she passed within inches, just missing him without even knowing it… ?

Was that a sound? She whirled. Had someone coughed? It sounded like coughing. She kicked a turn, seeking the source.

“Uh… over…” More coughing interrupted the faint, croaking voice. “Over… here!”

She thrashed the water in frustration. “I lost my goggles, dammit.”

The current seemed to be drawing them closer, at least. Next time his voice was clearer. “Ah… that must be…” He coughed one last time. “… must be why I can see your face now. You look terrible, by the way.”

He sounded nearby. Alex kept talking to guide her. “Go left a bit… um… and thank you… for saving my life. Yes, that’s it. Gets shallow about there… left a bit more.”

Teresa felt sandy bottom beneath her feet and sighed as she dragged her heavy, shivering body out of the clinging black wetness. “Here, this way,” she heard him say, and a hand grabbed her arm. She clutched it tightly and sobbed suddenly with emotion she hadn’t been aware of till that moment. Now that all the furious action had stopped, a sudden wave of lygophobia washed over her and she shivered at the intimidating darkness.

“It’s all right. We’re safe for the time being.” He guided her to sit down beside him and put his arms around her to share warmth. “You’re an impressive individual, Captain… um, Teresa.”

“My friends…” she said, catching her breath as she clutched him tightly. “Sometimes, my friends call me… Rip.”

She knew he was smiling, though she couldn’t even see the hand that brushed her stringy, sopping hair out of her eyes. “Well,” he said from very close. “Thanks again, Rip.” And he held her till the shivering stopped.

Some time later, Teresa borrowed his goggles to look around. The Hadean lake stretched farther to the left and right than the tiny beam could reach, and the ceiling might as well have been limitless. Only echoes confirmed they were underground — and her fey sense, which told her countless meters of ancient rock lay between them and any exit from this place.

She gasped when she saw the extent of poor Alex’s scrapes and bruises. “Whoosh,” she sighed, touching the noose mark around his throat. It was certain to be permanent.

“A Scotsman, one of my ancestors, died this way,” he commented, tracing the bloody runnel with his fingertips. “Poor sod was caught in bed with the mistress of a Stuart prince. Not wise, but it makes for good telling centuries later. My famous grandmother says she always expected to wind up on the gallows, too. Finds the idea romantic. Maybe it runs in the family.”

“I know a thing or two about ropes and nooses also,” she told him as she dressed his worst cuts. “But I’ve got a feeling that when you go it’ll be a lot flashier than any hanging.”

He agreed with a sigh. “Oh, I imagine you’re right on about that.”

Their supplies were meager, since their hip pouches had been packed in a hurry and hers was torn in the struggle. Besides the first-aid kit and one capsule containing a compressed coverall, there were two protein bars, a compass, and a couple of black data cubes. Carefully scanning the pool, Teresa failed to find her lost goggles or anything else of value.

“How well do you remember George’s map?” she asked when they were both a bit recovered. Alex shrugged in what was, to him, utter darkness. “Not too well,” he answered frankly. “Had I it to do over again, I’d have made a copy for you. Or we ought to have taken the time to memorize it.”

“Mmm.” Teresa understood after-the-fact regrets. Her entire career had been about avoiding rushed planning — parsing out every conceivable contingency well in advance. And yet she trained for the unexpected, too. She was always ready to improvise.

“You had no time,” she replied. “And Glenn Spivey’s no fool.”

Alex shook his head. “Back in the conference room he spun out a scenario so reasonable, it almost had me convinced.”

“You seemed to be going along when I left. What changed your mind?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t so much change my mind as decide I didn’t want it made for me. We’d all worked so hard. It was starting to look as if we might be able to deal with Beta ourselves. Though how to expel it safely at the very end — that I still hadn’t figured out, yet.”

Teresa recalled her dream about the fireball, erupting into the sky from a boiling ocean… rising, but certain to return.

“So maybe Spivey’s plan’s a good one… keeping it inside the Earth, but up so high it’ll lose mass slowly?”

“Maybe… if it loses mass fast enough while in the mantle to make up for its gains lower down, if there aren’t instabilities we never calculated, if constant pumping on the gazer doesn’t crumble too many farms or cities or change the Earth’s innards somehow—”

“Could it do that?”

His face took on a perplexed look. “I don’t know. Last time I looked over my big model on Rapa Nui…” He shook his head. “Anyway, that’s where we’ve got to go now. From there we can answer Spivey’s proposition with one of our own.”

What an optimist, Teresa realized, and wondered why she ever thought him dour or lethargic. “How are we supposed to get there?”

“Oh, George says that will be surprisingly easy. Auntie Kapur can get us aboard a Hine-marama zep to Fiji, which isn’t a part of ANZAC and has an international jetport. From there, we travel under our own names, quite openly. Spivey won’t dare try to stop us… not without revealing everything, since, naturally, we’ll leave complete diary caches with Auntie before we go.”

“Naturally,” she nodded. “Knowing Spivey, he’ll just wait to talk with us when we get there. He still holds a full hand. And we can’t deal with anyone else.”

Of course Teresa knew what she and Alex were doing. They were talking as if their fates were actually still in their control. As if they would ever meet that clandestine zeppelin to begin a journey across the Pacific to the land of haunting statues. By putting off their predicament, even for a few minutes, they gave themselves time to calm down, to equilibrate. Time to engage in denial that they really were doomed, after all.

Alex recalled George saying something about exiting the Waterfall Cave via a dry channel, cut halfway up a jumble slope about a quarter of the way forward from the falls themselves. Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall whether that was a quarter of the way clockwise or counterclockwise. They tried the former first — taking turns peering through the goggles for any sign of an exit — before moving on to the latter. Fortunately, they found the opening at last, not too badly hidden behind a jutting limestone wall.

Unfortunately, one of them would always be effectively blind at any given moment. Because Alex was still a bit shaky from his misadventure in the river, Teresa insisted he lead, wearing the goggles. She assured him she could follow so long as he provided some spoken guidance, plus a hand wherever it got complicated.

The experience of climbing over glassy-smooth boulders in pitch blackness was a unique one for Teresa. At times she had the illusion this wasn’t a cave at all, but the surface of some ice moon. The sky was occulted not by stone but by a sooty nebula, hundreds of parsecs in breadth. But at any moment, the moon’s rotation might reveal bright stars, shining through a gap in the vast space-cloud… or perhaps even some alien planet or sun.

Those were moments of fantasy, of course. And always they were cut short, refuted by her other senses… by the bouncing echoes of the receding waterfall and the strange feeling of pressure from the rock overhead… reminding her she was actually deep inside a world. A dynamic world, with a habit of changing, shifting, shrugging in its fitful slumber.

New Zealand, especially, was a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. And though all that activity went on slowly in comparison to human lives, Teresa felt a sense of danger beyond the prospect of getting lost and starving to death.

At any moment the mountain might simply decide to squash them.

Somehow, strangely, that patina added to all their other jeopardies seemed to compensate a bit. It felt thrilling, somehow. In that respect we’re alike… Alex Lustig and I. Neither of us was meant to die in a boring way.

She thought about all this while, with other parts of her mind, she paid close attention to each stone and every tricky footing. Alex helped her squeeze finally through a narrow slot, into a passageway that coursed with a stiff breeze. Her fingertips brushed the wall to her left, tracing dripping moisture. Alex stopped her then and slipped the goggles into her hand.

The interactive optics read her pupils’ dilation and damped power accordingly. Nevertheless, the return of sight left her momentarily dazzled. Pyrites and other deceptively gaudy crystalline forms glittered back at her from all sides, their shine accentuated by the gleety dampness, giving the impression of some hermit’s deeply buried shrine. It was lovely. For a moment she was reminded of holos she’d viewed of the Lasceaux and Altamira caves, where her Cro-Magnon ancestors had crept by torchlight to paint the walls with haunting images of beasts and spirits, blowing ocher dust around their hands to leave poignant prints upon the cool stone — markers denoting the one thing she and they intimately shared… mortality.

Teresa consulted her compass — though such things were notoriously unreliable underground. Then she took Alex’s hand to lead him in what seemed the only direction possible, away from the growling river into the heart of the mountain.

So they alternated, stopping frequently to rest, each taking turns being the leader, then the blind, helpless one. She became quite knowledgeable about the contours of his hands, and their footsteps slowly joined in almost the same subconscious rhythm.

Along the way, to pass the time, Alex asked her to talk about herself. So she spoke of her school years and then her life and Jason. Somehow that seemed easier now. She could speak her husband’s name in past tense with sadness but no shame. Teresa also learned a few things about Alex Lustig when his turn came. Perhaps one or two that only slipped between the lines as he told her about his life as a bachelor scientist. In fact, Teresa marveled at how much better a storyteller he was. He made his own labors, in front of chalk boards or holo screens, seem so much more romantic than her own profession as a spacebus driver.

Of course their conversation went in fits and starts. Every third phrase was an interruption. “… Lift your left foot…” or “… duck your head half a meter…” or “… twist sideways now, and feel for a cut to the right…” Each of them took turns verbally guiding and often physically controlling the other one. It was a heavy responsibility, demanding mutual trust. That came hard at first. But there was simply no alternative.

It was during one of her turns to be led that Teresa suddenly felt a passing breeze as they crept along a narrow passage. She turned her head. And even though the fleeting zephyr was gone, she sniffed and began to frown.

“… so that was when Stan told me I’d better shape up my…”

She stopped him by planting her feet and tightening her grip on his hand.

“What is it, Teresa?” She heard and felt him turn around. “Are you tired? We can—”

She held up her free hand to ask for quiet, and he shut up.

Had she really sensed something? Was it because she was blind and paying attention to other senses? Would she have walked right on by if she had been sighted and in the lead? “Alex,” she began. “On which side of the corridor was the next branching on George’s map?”

“Um… as I said, I’m not too certain. I think it was on the left, perhaps four klicks past the lake. But surely we haven’t gone that far yet… Or have we?” He paused. “Do you think maybe we’ve gone past?”

Teresa shook her head. It was a gamble, but the breeze had come from the left…

There were always breezes though, little gusts that blew down the cavern from who knew where, bound for places impossible to guess. Still, something in her internal guidance system had seemed to cry out that last time.

“Did George write a note next to the turn?”

She heard him inhale deeply and imagined him closing his eyes as he concentrated. “Yes… I believe I see some writing… do you think it was something like ‘watch out for the skull and bones’?”

She punched fairly accurately and struck his shoulder. “Ow!” he grunted, satisfyingly.

“No,” Teresa said. “But the turn must have been unobvious. After all, they don’t have to be clear forks in the road. Usually they won’t be.”

“I guess not. Maybe that’s what he wrote down… how to look for it. Did you—”

She dragged his wrist. “Come on!”

“Wait. Shouldn’t I give you the gog—”

He stumbled just to keep up as she led him back through the utter blackness purely by memory, waving one arm in front of her, trying to find that elusive whisper again.

“Alex!” She stopped so suddenly he collided with her. “Look up! Up and to the right. What do you see?”

“I see… Yes. There’s an opening all right. But how do you figure… ?”

She waved aside his objections. It felt right. Her internal compass, her ever-nervous, never-satisfied sense of direction… called her that way. She suppressed a voice of doubt, one that said she was grasping at straws. “Let’s give it a try, okay? Shall I give you a boost up? Or want I should go first?”

Alex sighed, as if to say, What have we got to lose?

“Maybe I’d better go, Teresa. That way, if it looks like a true passage, I can reach down and lift you.”

She nodded in agreement and bent over, lacing her fingers to form a step. Gently, he took her waist and turned her around. “There, that’s better. Are you ready then?” He planted one foot in her hands.

“Ready? You kidding?” she asked as she braced to take his weight. “I’m ready for anything.”

Even after they had traveled quite some distance along the steep, twisty new path, half crawling, half slithering up slanted chimneys and narrow crevices, Teresa kept refusing his offer to share the goggles. He was doing fine as leader, and she used the excuse that they couldn’t risk a transfer in all this chaos. To drop them would be a catastrophe; they might slide or tumble out of sight and never be found again.

But in truth, Teresa felt a queer craving for sightlessness right now. It was strange — difficult to explain even to herself. Why should anyone prefer to stumble along, hands waving, groping in the dark, utterly dependent on another for warning about what low overhang might lay only centimeters from her forehead? What precipice yawned beneath her feet?

And yet, twice she stopped Alex from taking a route that must have seemed reasonable by sight — the wider or flatter or easier path — urging him instead to take a lesser route. They were climbing most of the time, and though Teresa knew that was no guarantee against some dead end just around the next corner, at least upward meant they had only a mountain to contend with, not an entire planet, twelve thousand kilometers across.

This can’t be George Hutton’s route anymore, she knew after a while. There couldn’t have been this many diversions, this many narrow, twisty crawlways indicated on the map they’d lost. Alex certainly realized it as well, but said nothing. Both of them knew they’d never remember how to retrace their steps. The easy banter of an hour ago (or was it four hours? six? fourteen?) gave way to clipped, hoarse whispers as they saved their strength and tried not to think about their growing thirst.

They were blazing their own path now… going places no caver must have ever seen before. Teresa didn’t see them even now of course, but that didn’t matter. The textures were new with every turn. Under her fingertips she became familiar with many different types of rock, without associated names or images to spoil the perfect reality. Substance unsullied by metaphor.

Alex made the tactical decisions, step by step, meter by meter, small-scale choices of how to move each foot, each knee and hand. “Watch your head,” he told her. “Bend a bit more. Turn left now. Reach up and to the left. Higher. That’s it.”

Not once was there any implied rebuke in his voice, for her having led them this way… a blind woman pointing vaguely heavenward one moment, the other way the next, quite possibly taking them in circles. I’m supposed to be scientific. A trained engineer. What am I doing then, trusting both our lives to hunches?

Teresa quashed the misgivings. True enough, logic and reason were paramount. They were wiser ways by far than the old witchcraft and impulsiveness that used to guide human affairs. But reason and logic also had their limits, such as when they had no data at all to work on. Or when the data were the sort no engineer could grapple with.

We have many skills, she thought during one rest period, as Alex shared the last crumbs of protein bar and then let her lick the wrapper with her dry tongue. Some are skills we hardly ever use.

If only water-finding were one of hers. Occasionally they heard what could only be the plinking drip of liquid, somewhere beyond the beam of Alex’s goggles — often resonating tantalizingly beyond some rocky wall. Pressing your ear against a smooth surface, you could sometimes even pick up the distant roar and gurgle of the river, or perhaps another one that coursed and threaded these hidden countries below ground.

Sometime during their next stretch, she heard Alex gasp, backing up from what he described as a “bottomless pit.” Teresa remained calm as he guided her round an unseen trap that would have been their ossuary if he hadn’t spotted it in time.

They rested again on the other side. Hunger and thirst had long since become acute, and then begun fading to dull, familiar aches. But these didn’t worry Teresa as much as her growing weakness. Perhaps, a few rest stops from now, they would simply not get up again. Would their bodies then dessicate and mummify? Or was the dryness seasonal? Perhaps in a few months a slow seepage, rich in minerals, would return to these passages and gradually glue their bodies to the rocks where they sat, to seal their crypt and lapidify their bones. Or some wayward, springtime torrent might come crashing through this way, crushing and dissolving their remains, then carrying the bits all the way to distant seas.

Perhaps none of those things would have time to happen. It was still quite possible for Spivey and Hutton to lose control over the Beta singularity, in which case, even the mountain-tomb surrounding her now would prove no more solid than a house made of tissue. The distance between Teresa and her friends in the outer world seemed infinite right now, but would become academic once the taniwha reached its ravenous, final maturity, when all their atoms would rendezvous in a sudden, intimate, topological union.

Teresa wondered what that might feel like. It almost sounded attractive in a way, as she contemplated the immediate prospect of starvation. Did other lost explorers get this philosophical when they neared the end?

She wondered if Wegener in Greenland or Amundsen in the Arctic pondered the vagaries of human destiny as they, too, plodded on and on beyond all realistic hope. Perhaps that, more than cleverness, has been our secret power, Teresa thought as she and Alex got moving again, choosing yet another branching path. Even when you run out of answers, there are still possibilities to consider.

After a while though, even that consoling line of thought petered out. Tiredness settled over her like a numbing weight, thankfully dulling the ache of countless bumps and cuts and scratches. Her knee pads might have been lost some while back, or not, for she could hardly feel anything from those quarters anymore as she crawled or crouched or sidled edgewise through cramped or slanted defiles. All that remained to focus her attention was the rhythm. And an obstinacy that would not let her stop.

She had no premonition when Alex stopped suddenly. Through the hand on his arm, she felt a tremor run through his body. “Come here, Rip,” he urged in a hoarse whisper, pulling her alongside him and then over to an inclined shelf. When she was seated on the cool stone, she felt him take her head between his hands and turn it to the left, then downward a bit. “I can’t tell,” he said in a dry voice. “Is there something over there?”

Teresa blinked. By now she had gotten used to the speckles and entopic flashes the retina seems to “see” even in total darkness — the lies your eyes tell in order to pretend they still have something to do. So it took her a moment to recognize that one of those glimmers was maintaining the same vague, half-imagined, blurry outline, keeping position whichever way she tilted. Teresa gingerly bit her cracked upper lip so the pain would rouse her a bit. In a voice parched and scratchy from thirst, she asked, “Um… want to go check it out?”

“No, of course not,” he answered with wry, affectionate sarcasm, and squeezed her hand before beginning to guide her down the new channel, this one layered deep with some sort of dust that gave off a strong, musty aroma.

Teresa inhaled and finally realized what was so attractive about the smell. It was a rich pungency, and she could only hope her suspicions were true, that the fragrance wafting her way rose from the thickly lain droppings left by endless generations of flying mammals… animals who sheltered below ground, but made their living flying and hunting outside, under an open sky.

Round more bends and turns they followed the faint glimmer, until Teresa began making out the dim outlines of walls and rough columns, contrasting at first only in faint shadings of black, but then with hints of gray and sepia creeping in to lend a detail here and there. Soon she found herself no longer needing as much help from Alex, guiding her own footsteps, detecting obstacles miraculously at long range, while they were still meters away.

Sight… an amazing sensation.

It took more steep descending after that, taking care not to make some fatal error in their haste, but at last they came to a place where the floor leveled off and was littered with a carpet of small bones which crunched under their feet. Now, overhead, they could make out thousands of brown, folded forms, hanging from every crack and crevice. The denizens of the cave gave them little notice, wrapped within the cocoons of their wings, sleeping through the day.

Day. Teresa blinked at the concept, and had to hold up a hand to cut the glare reflecting directly off one last cave wall — one facing a source of light brighter than anything she had ever imagined. I’m sorry I doubted you, she told the sun, remembering how in her dream she’d presumed it could ever have a rival.

Alex removed the grimy goggles and they looked at each other, breaking out in silent grins over how filthy, horrible, battered and positively wonderful each of them looked to be alive.

They were still holding hands, purely out of habit, when they finished scrambling through the brush covering the cave entrance and stepped into a morning filled with clouds and trees and a myriad of other fine things too beautiful ever to be taken for granted again.

• BIOSPHERE

“So tell me. What do you think of Elspeth?” Dr. Wolling asked as she poured and then passed him a cup of tea.

Nelson stirred in a spoonful of sugar, concentrating on the swirling patterns rather than meeting her eyes. “It’s… an interesting program,” he said, choosing words carefully.

She sat across from him, clattering her own cup and spoon cheerfully. Still, Nelson figured this wasn’t going to be an easy session — as if any with this teacher ever were.

“I take it you haven’t a lot of experience with auto-psych programs?”

He shook his head. “Oh, they had ’em, back home. The school counselors kept offerin’ different ones to us. But y’know the Yukon is, well…”

“A land of immigrants, yes. Tough-minded, self-reliant.” She slipped with apparent ease into a North Canuck accent. “De sort who know what dey know, and damn if any wise-guy program’s gonna tell dem what dey tinkin’, eh?”

Nelson couldn’t help but laugh. Their eyes met and she smiled, sipping her tea and looking like anybody’s grandmother. “Do you know how far back autopsych programs go, Nelson? The first was introduced back when I was just a little girl, oh, before 1970. Eliza consisted of maybe a hundred lines of code. That’s all.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. All it would do is ask questions. If you typed ‘I feel depressed,’ it would answer either, ‘So you feel depressed?’ or ‘Why do you think you feel depressed?’ Good leading questions, actually, that would get you started picking apart your own feelings, even though the program didn’t understand the word ‘depressed’ at all. If you’d typed, ‘I feel… orange,’ it would have answered, ‘Why do you think you feel orange?’

“Funny thing about it, though, Eliza was positively addictive! People used to sit for hours in front of those old-fashioned screens, pouring their hearts out to a fictitious listener, one programmed simply to say the rough equivalent of ‘Hmm? I see! Oh, do tell!’

“It was the perfect confidant, of course. It couldn’t get bored or irritated, or walk away, or gossip about you after-ward. Nobody would cast judgment on your deep dark secrets because nobody was exactly who you were talking to. At the same time, though, the rhythm of a true conversation was maintained. Eliza seemed to draw you out, insist you keep trying to probe your feelings till you found out what hurt. Some people reported major breakthroughs. Claimed Eliza changed their lives.”

Nelson shook his head. “I guess it’s the same with Elspeth. But…” He shook his head and fell silent.

“But Elspeth seemed real enough, didn’t she?”

“Nosy bitch,” he muttered into his teacup.

“Who do you mean, Nelson?” Jen asked mildly. “The program? Or me?”

He put the cup down quickly. “Uh, the program! I mean she… it… kept after me and after me, picking apart my words. Then there was that, um, free-association part…”

He recalled the smiling face in the holo tank. It had seemed so innocuous, asking him to say the first word or phrase to come to mind. Then the next, and the next. It went on for many minutes till Nelson felt caught by the flow, and words spilled forth quicker than he was aware of them. Then, when the session was over, Elspeth showed him those charts — tracing the irrefutable patterns of his subsurface thoughts, depicting a muddle of conflicting emotions and obsessions that nevertheless only began to tell his story.

“It’s the second-oldest technique in modern psychology, after hypnosis,” Jen told him. “Some say free association was Freud’s greatest discovery, almost making up for some of his worst blunders. The technique lets all the little selves within us speak out, see? No matter how thoroughly a bit or corner is outvoted by the rest, free association lets it slip in that occasional word or clue.

“Actually, we free associate in everyday life, as well. Our little subselves speak out in slips of the tongue or pen, or in those sudden, apparently irrelevant fantasies or memories that just seem to pop into mind, as if out of nowhere. Or snatches of songs you haven’t heard in years.”

Nelson nodded. He was starting to see what Jen was driving at, and felt intensely relieved. So all of this has something to do with my studies, after all. I was afraid she wanted me to face that program ’cause she thought I was crazy.

Not that he felt all that sure of his own mental balance anymore. That one session had exposed so many raw nerves, so many places where it hurt — memories from a childhood he’d thought normal enough, but which still had left him with his own share of wounds.

He shook his head to knock back those gloomy thoughts. Everybody has shit like that to deal with. She wouldn’t be wasting time on me if she thought I was nuts.

“You’re tellin’ me this has to do with cooperation and competition,” he said, concentrating on the abstract.

“That’s right. All the current multimind theories of consciousness agree on one thing, that each of us is both many and one, all at the same time. In that sense, we humans are most catholic beings.”

Obviously, she had just made a witticism, which had gone completely over his head. Fortunately, the session was being recorded by his note plaque and he could hunt down her obscure reference later. Nelson chose not to get sidetracked. “So inside of me I’ve got… what? A barbarian and a criminal and a sex maniac…”

“And a scholar and a gentleman and a hero,” she agreed. “And a future husband and father and leader, maybe. Though few psychologists anymore say metaphors like that are really accurate. The mind’s internal landscape doesn’t map directly onto the formal roles of the outer world. At least, not as directly as we used to think.

“Nor are the boundaries between our subpersonae usually so crisp or clear. Only in special cases, like divided personality disorder, do they become what you or I would call distinct characters or personalities.

Nelson pondered that — the cacophony within his head. Until coming to Kuwenezi, he had hardly been aware of it. He’d always believed there was just one Nelson Grayson. That core Nelson still existed. In fact, it felt stronger than ever. Still, at the same time, he had grown better at listening to the ferment just below the surface. He leaned forward. “We talked before about how — how the cells in my body compete and cooperate to make a whole person. And I been reading some of those theories ’bout how individual people could be looked at the same way… like, y’know, organs or cells cooperating and competing to make up societies? And how the same… metaphor—”

“How the same metaphor’s been applied to the role species play in Earth’s ecosphere, yes. Those are useful comparisons, so long as we remember that’s all they are. Just comparisons, similes, models of a much more complicated reality.”

He nodded. “But now you’re sayin’ even our minds are like that?”

“And why not?” Dr. Wolling laughed. “The same processes formed complexity in nature, in our bodies, and in cultures. Why shouldn’t they work in our minds as well?”

Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. “But then, why do we think we’re individuals? Why do we hide from ourselves the fact we’re so many inside? What’s the me that’s thinkin’ this, right now?”

Jen smiled, and sat back. “My boy. My dear boy. Has anyone ever told you that you have a rare and precious gift?”

At first Nelson thought she was referring to his unexpected talent with animals and in managing the ecology of ark four. But she corrected that impression. “You have a knack for asking the right questions, Nelson. Would it surprise you to learn the one you just posed is probably the deepest, most perplexing in psychology? Perhaps in all philosophy?”

Nelson shrugged. The way he felt whenever Jen praised him was proof enough that he had many selves. While one part of him felt embarrassment each time she did this, another basked in the one thing he wanted most, her approval.

“Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness for centuries,” she went on. “Julian Jaynes called it the ‘analog I.’ The power to name some central locus ‘me’ seems to give intensity and focus to each individual human drama. Is this something totally unique to humanity? Or just a commodity? Something we only have a bit more of than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees?

“Is consciousness imbued in what some call the ‘soul’? Is it a sort of monarch of the mind? A higher-order creature, set there to rule over all the ‘lower’ elements?

“Or is it, as some suggest, no more than another illusion? Like a wave at the surface of the ocean, which seems

’real’ enough but is never made of the same bits of water from one minute to the next?”

Nelson knew an assignment when he heard one. Sure enough, Jen next reached into her pouch and took out a pair of small objects, which she slid across the table toward him. “Here are some things to study. One contains articles by scholars as far back as Ornstein and Minsky and Bukhorin. I think you’ll find them useful as you write up your own speculations for next time.”

He reached for the items, perplexed. One was a standard gigabyte infocell. But the other wasn’t even a chip. He recognized the disk as an old-style metal coin and read the words united states of America imprinted around its rim.

“Take a look at the motto,” she suggested.

He didn’t know what that meant, so he searched for the most incomprehensible thing on it. “E… pluribus… unum?” he pronounced carefully.

“Mmm,” she confirmed, and said nothing more. Nelson sighed. Naturally, he was going to have to look it up for himself.

By all the numbers, it should have happened long ago.

Jen thought about consciousness, a topic once dear to her, but which she’d given little attention to for some time. Until all these new adventures overturned her pleasant, iconoclastic existence and threw her back to contemplating the basics again. Now she couldn’t help dwelling on the subject during her walk back to the Tangoparu digs.

It’s close to a century since they’ve been talking about giving machines “intelligence.” And still they run up against this barrier of self-awareness. Still they say, “It’s sure to come sometime in the next twenty years or so! “As if they really know.

Stars glittered over the dusty path as she made her way from Kuwenezi’s compact, squat, storm-proof ark four, past fields of newly sprouted winter wheat, toward the gaping entrance of the old gold mine. The quandary stayed with her as she rode the elevator deep into the Earth.

Simulation programs keep getting better. Now they mimic faces, hold conversations, pass Turing tests. Some may fool you up to an hour if you aren’t careful.

And yet you can always tell, if you pay attention. Simulations, that’s all they are.

Funny thing. According to theoreticians, big computers should have been able to perform human-level thought at least two decades ago. Something was missing, and as her conversations with Nelson brought her back to basics, Jen thought she knew what it was.

No single entity, all by itself, can ever be whole.

That was the paradox. It was delicious in a way, like the ancient teaser, “This sentence is a lie.” And yet, hadn’t Kurt Godel shown, mathematically, that no closed system of logic can ever “prove” all its own implied theorems? Hadn’t Donne said, “No man is an island”?

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That’s how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

Or a mind.

Jen entered the well-lit chamber where the Tangoparu team had their resonator. She stopped by the main display to see where Beta was at present. A purple ellipse marked its current orbit — now rising at its highest point all the way past the outer core to the lower mantle, where quicksilver flashes seemed to spark and flare with every lingering apogee. Now Beta was losing mass at each apex — a true milestone — though it would be a while yet before its balance sheet went into debit full time and they could all draw a sigh of relief.

Jen watched the mantle’s flickerings of superconducting electricity, those pent-up energy stores Kenda’s people tapped to drive the gazer effect. One brief, titanic burst had taken place while she was visiting Nelson — triggered in tandem by the Greenland and New Guinea resonators. The next run, scheduled in ten minutes, would unite this African device with New Guinea in an effort to shift Beta’s orbital line of apsides slightly.

At first she and the others had been fearful of the news from headquarters — that the NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN alliances had seized two of the four resonators. Kenda worried that all their work would be in vain. Then came word from George Hutton. Everything was to go on as before. The only difference, apparently, was that new supplies and technicians would flood in to help the effort. Jen had been cynical, it sounded too good to be true.

Sure enough, George went on to add that there would be limits to cooperation with Colonel Spivey. Easter Island and South Africa were to remain independent. He was adamant about that. No newcomers would be allowed at those two sites. Kenda’s team reacted with a mixture of resigned fatigue and relief. They would have loved the help, but understood Hutton’s reasons.

“George isn’t so sure about this association, yet,” Kenda told them all at a meeting several days ago. “And that’s enough for me.”

Jen wondered why there was no word from Alex. Now that they were communicating over secure military bands, completely independent of the World Data Net, shouldn’t the boy feel free to talk openly? Something was wrong, she sensed. More was going on than anyone said.

With a sigh she went to her own station to plug in the subvocal. By now it was almost as easy to calibrate as her home unit, though she still had to do most of it “by hand.”

Only this time, after that conversation with Nelson, she paid a little more attention to the extraneous blips and images that popped in and out of the peripheral screens.

At the upper left, several bars of musical score wrote themselves — an advertising jingle she hadn’t heard in years. Below that, poking from a corner, came the shy face of a young boy… Alex, as she remembered him at age eight or so. No mystery why that image crept in. She was worried about him, and so must have subvocalized unspoken words that the computer picked up. It, in turn, had gone into her personal archive and pulled out some old photo, feeding it then to an off-the-shelf enhancement program to be animated.

To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the computer had read her thoughts. In fact, it was only highlighting the surface bits, those which almost became words. It was like rummaging through your purse and coming up with an envelope of neglected pictures. Only now her “purse” consisted of terabyte sheets of optical memory, extrapolated by a tool kit of powerful subroutines. And you didn’t even have to intend in order to rummage. The mind “below” was doing it all the time.

Jen adjusted the sensitivity level, giving her associations more space to each side… it was a sort of visually amplified form of free association, she realized. Yet another type of feedback. And feedback was the way life-forms learned and avoided error. Gaia used feedback to maintain her delicate balance. Another word for feedback was “criticism.”

A pair of cartoon figures drifted toward each other from opposite screens. The first was her familiar tiger totem… a mascot that had been omnipresent, for some reason, ever since this adventure had begun. The other symbol looked like an envelope… the old-fashioned kind you used to send letters in. The two figures circled round each other, the tiger mewling lowly, the envelope snapping its flap at the cat.

Now why had these manifested when she thought the word “criticism”? As she reflected on the question, written words formed in the tank. The envelope said to the tiger, “YOUR ORANGE STRIPES ARE TOO BRIGHT TO CAMOUFLAGE YOU ON THIS SCREEN! I CAN SEE YOU TOO EASILY!”

“THANK YOU,” the tiger acknowledged, and switched at once to gray tones Jen found blurry and indistinct, “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the tiger asked the envelope in turn, “IT REALLY IS WRONG FOR ONE PART TO KEEP SECRETS FROM THE WHOLE.”

And a slashing paw ripped open a corner, laying bare a bit of something that sparkled underneath, “what do you contain?” the great cat insisted.

Though amusing in its own way, Jen decided this was accomplishing nothing. “I’ll tell you what it contains,” she muttered, making the words official by saying them aloud. She wiped the screen with a simple tap of one tooth against another. “Just more bleeding metaphors.”

Gathering herself together, Jen concentrated on the matter at hand. Getting ready for the next run of the gravity laser. She’d, gotten to quite enjoy each firing, pretending it was she herself who sent beams of exploration deep into the living world.

Meanwhile, though, a ghostlike striped pattern, like a faint smile, lingered faintly in one corner of the screen, purring softly to itself, watching.

• LITHOSPHERE

The face in the telephone screen seemed to be changing daily. Logan felt a pang, seeing how grown-up Claire was becoming.

“She doesn’t even think it worth hiding from me!” his daughter complained. Behind her, Logan saw the familiar cane fields and cypresses of Atchafalaya country, with its monumental dikes shading fish farms and lazy bayous. Claire looked frustrated and angry. “I’m no great programmer, but she must think I’m a total baby not to be able to snoop through those pathetic screens between my unit and hers!” Logan shook his head. “Honey, Daisy could hide data from God himself.” He smiled. “Heck, she could even fool Santa Claus if she put her mind to it.”

“I know that!” Claire answered with a furled brow, dismissing his attempt at levity. “Between the house and the outside world, she’s got watchdogs and griffins and the scariest cockatrice programs anyone’s ever seen. Which shows just how much contempt she must have for me, leaving it so easy for me to probe her puzzle palace from my little desk comp down the hall!”

Logan realized this was complicated. Part of Claire’s agitation had little to do with Daisy’s actual sins. “Your mother loves you,” he said.

But Claire only shrugged irritably, as if to say his statement was obvious, tendentious, and irrelevant. “I have a psycher program, Dad, thanks. I didn’t come all the way out here, beyond range of her local pickups, just to whine that my momma doesn’t understand me.”

That was sure what it had sounded like. But Logan held up both hands in surrender. “All right. Pipe me what you found. I’ll look it over.”

“Promise?”

“Hey,” he said, pausing to cross his heart. “Didn’t I pay off on the meteorite?”

That, at last, got a smile out of her. Claire brushed aside a lock of dark hair that had fallen over her eyes in her agitation. “Okay. Here it comes. I encrypted it inside a routine weather forecast, in case one of her ferrets happens across it on the way.”

If one of Daisy McClennon’s ferrets finds the blip, simple encryption won’t matter. But Logan kept the thought to himself. Almost as soon as she pressed a button, a thousand miles away, his own borrowed data plaque lit up.

INCOMING MAIL.

Logan thought he heard the sound of a copter’s engines. He looked up to scan the forest from this slight rise, but there was no sign yet of the pickup vehicle. There was still time to finish the conversation.

“I want to know if you thought about what I said last time,” he asked his daughter.

Claire frowned. “You mean about dragging Daisy with me on some sort of ‘vacation’? Daddy, have you any idea what my counselor in Oregon is like? I already missed one threshold exam this month because of the storm. Two more and I might have to go back to school. You know, high school!”

Logan was almost tempted to ask, What’s so bad about high school? I had some great times in high school.

But then, the mind has ways of locking out memories of pain and ennui, and recalling only the peaks. Prison for the crime of puberty — that was how secondary school had seemed, when he really thought back on it.

So how do 1 tell her I’m worried? Worried about things far worse than the off chance she might have to finish her diploma in some public warren? What’s six months of bored purgatory against saving her life?

One of Daisy’s surrogates might or might not at this moment be snooping the plaque he was using. But Logan knew for certain another force, even more powerful than his ex-wife, was listening to his every word. Glenn Spivey’s organization was fanatical about security, and its watch pro-grams would parse all but the vaguest warnings he might offer Claire. Still, Logan had to take a chance.

“I… do you remember what Daisy snooped, last time? My paper?” He furrowed his forehead until his eyebrows nearly touched.

“You mean the one about — ?” Then, miraculously, she seemed to read his expression. Her mouth went round, briefly. “Urn, yeah. I remember what it was about.”

“Well, just so you do.” Logan pretended to lose interest in the topic. “Say, have you been up to Missouri, lately. I hear they’re having a pretty good state fair up around New Madrid, these days. You might pick up some nice specimens for your collection there.”

Claire’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Um, Tony has to handle the fish harvest all alone since his uncle got laid up. So… I’m helping even on weekends. I probably won’t get to any fairs this year.”

He could see the wheels turning behind those blue eyes. Not even seventeen, and yet she knows how to read between the lines. Are the new schools doing this? Are teenagers really getting smarter? Or am I just lucky?

Obviously the reference to New Madrid was setting off alarm bells in Claire’s head. Now he had to pray Spivey’s spy software wouldn’t catch the same contextual cues. “Mm. Tony’s a good kid. Just remember, though, how we talked about boys, even the nice ones. Be sure you call the shots, kiddo. Don’t let anybody turn the ground to jello under you.”

With a show of irritation he could tell was calculated, Claire sniffed. “I can take care of my own footing, Dad.”

He grunted with fatherly curmudgeonliness. For the moment, that was all he could do. Let Claire evaluate his veiled warning, as he’d consider hers. What a team we’d make. That is, if we survive the next year.

From a distance, across the forested slopes, Logan now heard the real growl of the ’copter carrying the rest of his inspection team. He turned back to his daughter’s image. “Time to go, honey. I just… hope you know how very much I love you.”

He hadn’t intended getting so uncharacteristically mushy all of a sudden. But it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. Claire’s eyes widened momentarily, and he saw her swallow, realizing perhaps for the first time just how seriously he took all this.

“Take care of yourself, Daddy. Please.” She leaned forward and whispered. “I love you too.” Then her image vanished from the small display.

Fallen pine needles blew across his ankles. Logan looked up as the hybrid flying machine — half helicopter, half turboprop — rotated its engines to descend vertically toward a clearing a hundred meters away. Leaning out the side door was Joe Redpath, Logan’s sardonic Amerind assistant, whose bored, sullen expression was just his version of a friendly greeting. No doubt Redpath brought news of the colonel’s next assignment now that their survey here was finished.

Between Logan and the clearing lay the emergence site — an area about equal to a city block. As usual, the gravity beam’s coupling with surface matter had been, well, peculiar. This time roughly a quarter of the pines within the exit zone had been vaporized, along with their roots. Those remaining — which had all been either taller or shorter than the missing trees — stood apparently unscathed amid the gaping holes.

Fortunately, no people had been in this remote mountain locale, so it hardly seemed a calamity. Logan would reserve judgment though, till the soil and underlying rocks were scanned by follow-up teams.

But of course, Colonel Spivey was less interested in mineralogical consistency than readouts from his instrument packages, which had been scattered across this mountainside just before the gazer beam was scheduled to pass through. Returning minutes after the event, Logan had dropped in to gather the mud-spattered canisters nearest the center while Redpath and the ’copter crew collected others farther out. Of those at ground zero, two were missing, along with the vanished trees.

The predictions made by Hutton’s teams grew sharper with each event. Soon, we won’t have to retreat so far for safety. Soon I’ll get to witness one happening up close.

The prospect was both chilling and exciting.

This improved predictability was helping keep collateral damage to a minimum, at least in alliance territories. Where the beam couldn’t be diverted to completely uninhabited areas, people could generally be evacuated on some pretext. It was different, of course, when the exit point lay in “unfriendly territory,” where a warning might arouse suspicion. In those cases, the resonator crews could only do their best with aiming alone.

Sometimes, that wasn’t enough. In China, an entire village had sunk out of sight last week, when the ground beneath it turned to slurry. And had the vibrations in an Azerbaijani earthquake been just a few hertz closer to the normal modes of certain large apartment buildings, the damage would not have been “minor,” but horrendous. Logan shuddered to think about that near catastrophe.

Maybe Spivey’s arranging for these close shaves, he pondered as he picked his way past the yawning gaps in the forest loam. After all, when you’re testing a weapon, an intentional “near miss” is just as good as a bull’s-eye.

Only, what if some “near miss” happens to trigger something else? Something unexpected?

New Madrid, he had said to Claire. Not many people knew that Missouri town was distinguished as the site of a particularly stiff seismic jolt back in the early nineteenth century — the most powerful quake to hit the territory of the United States in recorded history, which shook the Mississippi out of its banks and rattled the continent as far away as the Eastern Seaboard. Only a few had died on that occasion, because the population was so sparse. But if something like it struck today, it would make two “big ones” in late TwenCen California look like mere amusement park rides.

Spivey and the others think they can “manage” the monster. But Alex Lustig seemed dubious, and he was the only one with any real understanding.

It troubled Logan that they still hadn’t found the British physicist. Perhaps Lustig and that woman astronaut had been victims of foul play. But if so, who could have profited?

Redpath caught the recovered instrument packages Logan slung into the aircraft. “So where to now?” Logan asked as he clambered aboard. The federal officer with the beaded headband barely shrugged. “Somewhere in Canada. They’re tryin’ to pin it down now. Meanwhile, we ride.”

Logan nodded. This was the thrilling part, heading off to yet another site, somewhere in North America, flitting from one place to the next to see what new, weird manifestations the gazer would wreak. Most of the time it came down to interviewing some eyewitness who saw “a cloud disappear” or reported “a thousand crazy colors.” But then, when the beam coupling coefficients were close, there might be bizarre, twisty columns of fused earth where none had been before, or gaping holes, or disappearances.

We’re saving the Earth, Logan reminded himself dozens of times each day. The gazer is our only hope.

True enough. But Glenn Spivey was right about something else, too. While “saving” the world, they were also going to change things.

The flyer took off, gained altitude, then rotated its jets and swung to the northeast. Logan settled in as comfortably as he could and began reading his mail.

So, he thought, when he perused what Claire had sent him. It was a document of agreement — between his ex^-wife and the United States Department of Defense.

I always knew Daisy suffered from selective morality. But it seems she’ll deal with the Devil himself, if it advances one of her causes.

In this case, the rewards were substantial. Military funds would be used to buy up one thousand hectares of wetlands and donate them to the World Nature Conservancy, protecting them forever from encroaching development. Logan had never heard of a whistle blower getting so much for a single tip. But then, Daisy McClennan was a shrewd negotiator. I wonder what she sold them.

Logan frowned as he pieced together that part of the deal. It was me. She sold me I

Daisy had been the one who told Spivey about his Spanish paper… that he was on the trail of the cause of the anomalies. Reading the date, he whistled. His ex-wife had realized the importance of his discovery back when he thought it nothing but another amusing “just-so” story.

Logan read on, in growing astonishment.

Hell, it wasn’t Spivey’s peepers who finally cracked the Tangoparus’ security. It was Daisy! She’s the one who tracked them to New Zealand and gave Spivey the time he needed to get his three-alliance deal worked out.

Logan whistled, in awe and not a little admiration. Of course I always knew where Claire got her brains. Still, Daisy—

He rescaled what he had believed about his former wife and lover who, it appeared, felt at liberty to dictate terms to governments and spies. Of course it was conceited and foolish of her to think she could manipulate such forces indefinitely. But Daisy had grown up a McClennon — and therefore almost as cut off from reality as ancient Habsburg princes. That couldn’t have been healthy for a youngster’s coalescing sense of proportion, or learning to know one’s limitations. Even after rebelling against all that, Daisy must have retained a residual feeling that rules are for the masses, and really only optional for special people. That reflex would only get reinforced in the simulated worlds of the Net, where wishing really made some things so.

Logan recalled the girl she’d been at Tulane. She had seemed perfectly aware of those handicaps, so eager to overcome them.

Ah, well. Some wounds get better, some just fester. So now she had sold him to Glenn Spivey. What next?

Logan erased the screen and put away the plaque. He settled to watch as the aircraft passed beyond moist forests into drier territory and finally dropped out of the Cascade Range. Soon it was reeling its fleeting shadow behind it across a high desert, still visibly contoured and rippled from massive eruptions and floods that took place in ages gone by. To Logan’s eyes, the stories of past cataclysms were as easy to read as a newspaper, and just as relevant. The planet breathed and stretched. And yet it had never occurred to him until recently that humankind might also wreak changes on such a scale.

Funny thing is, in all honesty, I can’t tell whether Daisy was right or wrong to do what she did.

One thing, though. I’ll bet she didn’t worry much about choosing between George Hutton and Glenn Spivey. Two devils, she’d call them, and say they deserved each other. She got her thousand hectares — saved some ivory-billed woodpeckers or whatever. All in a good day’s work.

Logan had to laugh, finding it deliciously ludicrous and stupid. That irony compensated, somehow, for the inevitable pang he felt, knowing why, ultimately, she had cast him out years ago — not because of any particular sin or failing on his part, but simply because she preferred by far her own obsessions over the distracting nuisance of his love.

• HYDROSPHERE

Daisy McClennon felt good.

For one thing, business was going well. She’d just finished a lucrative 3-D reprocessing of the entire nine-hundred-episode Star Trek saga, and all three Rambo movies. Pretty good for a business that had started out as piecework enterprise, a part-time occupation for a housewife!

Daisy admitted she worked as much for pride as cash. It meant independence from the family trust fund, so she could afford to snub her damned cousins more often than not.

You’ll come crawling back, they had told her long ago. But nowadays it was they who came to her asking favors, seeking answers their hired flunkies couldn’t give them.

They thought I’d never make it on my own. But now I’m a mover and a changer.

She was spending less time with movies these days, anyway, and more of it brokering “special” information. That recent bit of private espionage for the peepers, for instance. In desperation, the feds had finally agreed to her price. The coup caused quite a stir in certain parts of the Green underground, adding to her burgeoning reputation.

Of course, some purists said you shouldn’t ever deal with nature-killing pigs. But Daisy had grown up around wheeler-dealers. The trick is to take advantage of their short-term mentality, she answered her critics. Their greed can be turned against them if you have what they need.

In this case, the peepers wanted data on a rogue techno-conspiracy of some sort. Something having to do with those missing drilling rigs and water spouts Logan Eng had been so uptight about. Her customers didn’t want to discuss specifics, and that was fine by her. The details weren’t important anyway. Let them play their adolescent-male, military-penis games. The deal she’d struck had saved more land than you could walk across in a day of hard marching. All in exchange for a simple map to the conspirators’ front door!

What’s more, she was already getting feelers from other clients who wanted information on the same subject. There were ways of getting around her oath of confidentiality to the feds. This affair might be milked a lot farther, for more acres set aside, more watersheds put off limits to rapacious man.

All told, it had been a very profitable month. In fact, it seemed such a pleasant spring day, Daisy put on her hat and sunglasses and gloves and left her den to go for a walk.

Of course once she crossed the bridge, leaving behind her wind generators and mulch turbines and acres of restored native foliage, she had to face all the garbage left by four centuries of desecrators… including, still visible above the cypress groves, the decaying spires of derelict riverside refineries. Some of them still seeped awful gunk, many decades after their abandonment and so-called cleanup. Only fools drank unfiltered groundwater from Louisiana wells.

That wasn’t all. Ancient power cables and sagging telephone poles laced the parish like atherosclerotic veins, as did concrete and asphalt roads, many no longer used but still stretching like taut lines of scar tissue across the fields and meadows. Even near at hand, in her quiet green neighborhood, there were those Kudzu-covered mounds in the nearby yards, which looked like vine-coated hillocks till you peered close and recognized the blurred outlines of long-abandoned, rusted automobiles.

It all reminded Daisy of why, as the years passed, she left her carefully resurrected patch of nature less and less often. It’s a wonder I had the stomach to spend so much time in this countryside when I was young, instead of getting sick whenever I went outdoors.

Actually, the family estates were a ways north of here. Still, this general part of Louisiana was where her roots had sunk deeply, for better or for worse. Back when her brothers and sisters and cousins had been dashing madly about, taking juku lessons, struggling to live up to their parents’ expectations and be better horseriders, better at sports, better world cosmopolitans, always better than the children of normal folk — Daisy had fiercely and adamantly opted out. Her passion had been exploring the territory in all directions, the living textures of the land.

And exploring the Net too, of course. Even back then, the data web already stretched round the globe, a domain fully as vast as the humid counties she roamed in the “real” world. Only, in the Net you could make things happen like in stories about magic, by incantation, by persuasion, by invoking sprites and spirits and just the right software familiars to do your bidding for you. Why, you could even buy those loyal little demons in brightly colored boxes at a store, like a pair of shoes or a new bridle for your horse! No fairy tale wizard ever had it so easy.

And if you made a mistake on the Net… you just erased it! Unlike outside, where an error or faux pas left you embarrassed and isolated, or where a single careless act could despoil a habitat forever.

And it was an egalitarian place, where skill counted more than who your parents were. You could be pen pals with a farm girl near Karachi. Or join an animal rights club in Budapest. Or beat everybody at Simulation Rangers and have all the top gamesters on the planet arguing for months whether the infamous hacker called “Captain Loveland” was actually a boy or a girl.

Best of all, when you met someone on the Net, people’s eyes didn’t widen as they asked, “Oh? Are you one of those McClennons?”

It was a touchy subject, brought to mind by a recent message she’d received. Family interests were among those inquiring about the peeper matter. And much as she hated to admit it, Daisy was still snared in a web of favors and obligations to the clan. How else, these days, could she afford to turn so much prime agricultural acreage back to native bayou?

Damn them, she cursed silently, kicking a stone into one of the turbid man-made canals carrying drainage from a cluster of giant fish farms.

Maybe I can use this, though… find a way to turn things around on them. If they want the data bad enough, this could win me free of them forever.

For the first time she wondered, really wondered, about the conspiracy Logan and the peepers had been so upset over — that everyone in the world seemed to want to know about. I assumed it was just more physics and spy stuff.

Corporations and institutes and governments were always getting in a froth over this or that technological “breakthrough,” from fusion power and superconductors to nanotech and whatever. Every time it was “the discovery that will turn the tide, make the difference, harken a new era.” Always it seemed imperative to be the first to capitalize. But then, inevitably, the bubble burst.

Oh, sometimes the gadgets worked. Some even made life better for the billions, helping forestall the “great die-back” that had been due decades ago. But to what end? What good was putting off the inevitable a little while longer, which was all Logan and his ilk ever managed, after all? Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it.

Now, though, she wondered. If this thing’s got everybody so excited, maybe I ought to look into it myself.

She turned back well before reaching the little town of White Castle. Daisy didn’t want the humming power cables from the nuclear plant to ruin what was left of her mood.

Anyway, she’d begun thinking about ways to take advantage of the situation.

If the clan wants a favor, they’ll have to give one in return. I want access to Light Bearer. It’s the last ingredient I need to make my dragon.

On her way back past the cane fields and fish farms, Daisy contemplated the outlines of her superprogram — one that would make her surrogate “hounds” and “ferrets” look as primitive as those ancient “viruses” that had first shown how closely software could mimic life. She pondered the beautiful new structure mentally. Yes, I do think it would work.

Turning a bend, Daisy was roused from her thoughts by the sight of two teenagers up ahead, laughing and holding hands as they strolled atop a levee. The boy took the girl’s shoulders and she squirmed playfully, giggling as she avoided his attempts to kiss her, until suddenly she leaned up against him with an assertion all her own.

Daisy’s smile renewed. There was always something sweet about young lovers, though she hoped they were being careful about…

She took off her sunglasses and squinted. The girl — was her daughter! As she watched, Claire pushed at her boyfriend’s chest and whirled to stride away, forcing him to hurry after her.

Make a note to call Logan, Daisy filed for future reference. Have him talk to the girl about sexual responsibility. She won’t listen to me anymore.

The one time they had had a mother-daughter chat on the subject, it had been a disaster. Claire acted horrified when Daisy did no more than suggest the simplest, most effective form of birth control.

“I will not. And that’s final!”

“But every other method is chancy. Even abstinence. I mean, who knows? You could get raped. Or miscalculate your own mood and act on impulse. Girls your age do that sometimes, you know.

“This way you can be free and easy the rest of your life. You can look on sex the way a man does, as something to seek aggressively, without any chance of, well, complications.”

Claire’s expression had been defiant. Even contemptuous.

“I’m a result of ‘complications,’ as you call them. Do you regret the fact that your old-fashioned birth control methods failed, seventeen years ago?”

Daisy saw Claire was taking it all too personally.

“I just want you to be happy—”

“Liar! You want to cut down the human population just a bit more, by having your own daughter’s tubes tied. Well get this, Mother. I intend on experiencing those ‘complications’ you speak of. At least once. Maybe twice. And if my kids look like they’re going to be real problem-solvers, and if their father and I can afford it and are worthy, we may even go for a third!”

Only after Daisy had gasped in shock did she realize that was exactly the reaction Claire had wanted. Since that episode, neither of them ever mentioned the subject again.

Still, Daisy wondered. Might it be worthwhile to send out a ferret to look for, well, chemical means? Something nonintrusive, undetectable…

But no. Claire already did all the cooking. And she probably had her gynecologist watching for any signs of tampering. Daisy made a rule of avoiding meddling wherever it might lead to retaliation. And so she decided to let the matter lay.

The girl will be leaving soon, Daisy pondered as she neared home again. Automatically, a list of chores Claire currently took care of scrolled through her mind. I’ll have to hire one of those oath-refugees, I suppose. Some poor sod who’ll work a lot harder than my own lazy kid, no matter how I tried not to spoil her. Or maybe I’ll get one of those new domestic robots. Have to reprogram it myself, of course.

On her way to the back door she nearly tripped over two unfamiliar mounds on the slope overlooking the creek. Fresh earth had been tamped over oblong excavations and then lined with stones.

What the hell are these? They look like graves!

Then she remembered. Claire had mentioned something about the gloats. Their two weed eaters had died last week of some damn stupid plague set loose by a bunch of amateur Greeners over in Africa.

That blasted kid. She knows the proper way to mulch bodies. Why did she bury them here?

Daisy made another mental note, to cast through the Net for other means of keeping the stream clear. It was a dumb compromise anyway, using gene-altered creatures to compensate for man’s ecological mistakes. Just the sort of “solution” touted by that Jennifer Wolling witch. Rot her.

What is Wolling up to, anyway? I wonder.

Soon Daisy was sitting before her big screen again. On impulse, she pursued her most recent mental thread.

Wolling.

Daisy ran a quick check of her watchdog programs. Hmm. She hasn’t published a thing since leaving her London flat. Is she sick? Maybe dead?

No. Too tough to get rid of that easily. Besides, her mailbox shows a simple transmuting to Southern Africa. Now why is that familiar?

Of course it would be trivial to create an associator search program to find out, but Daisy thought of something more ambitious.

Let’s use this as a test for my new program!

Last week one of her search routines had brought home a research article by an obscure theorist in Finland. It was a brilliant concept — a hypothetical way of folding computer files so that several caches could occupy the same physical space at the same time. The “experts” had ignored the paper on its first release. Apparently it would take the usual weeks, or even months, for its ideas to percolate upward through the Net. Meanwhile, Daisy saw a window of opportunity. Especially if she could also get her hands on Light Bearer!

If this works, I’ll be able to track and record anybody, anywhere. Find whoever’s hiding. Pry open whatever they’re concealing.

And who better to experiment on than Jen Wolling?

Daisy began filling out the details, drawing bits of this and that from her huge cache of tricks. It was happy labor and she hummed as the skeleton of something impressive and rather beautiful took shape.

Once, the door opened and closed. Daisy sensed Claire leave a tray by her elbow and recalled vaguely saying something to her daughter. She went through the motions of eating and drinking as she worked. Sometime later, the tray disappeared the same way.

Yes! Wolling’s the perfect subject, Even if she finds out, she won’t complain to the law. She’s not the type.

Then, after I’ve tried it out on her, there’s all sorts of others. Corporations, government agencies… bastards

so big they could hire software guns smart enough to keep me out. Until now!

Of course, the program was structured around a hole where the keystone — Light Bearer — would go. If she could coerce it from her cousins in exchange for information.

There! Daisy stretched back and looked over the entity she’d created. It was something new in autonomous software. I must name it, she thought, having already considered the possibilities.

Yes. You are definitely a dragon.

She leaned forward to dial in a shape from her vast store of fantasy images. What popped into place, however, amazed even her.

Emerald eyes glinted from a long, scaled face. Lips curled above gleaming white teeth. At the tip of the curled, jeweled tail lay a socket where Light Bearer would go. But even uncompleted, the visage was impressive.

Its tail whipped as the creature met her gaze and then slowly, obediently, bowed.

You will be my most potent surrogate, Daisy thought, savoring the moment. Together, you and I will save the world.

• CORE

“ so for the third time they untied Cowboy Bob from the stake and let him speak to Thunder, his wonder horse.”

June Morgan’s eyes seemed to flash as she leaned toward Alex and Teresa.

“This time, though, Bob didn’t whisper in Thunder’s left ear. He didn’t whisper in the right. This time he held the horse’s face, looked him straight in the eye, and said — ‘Read my lips, dummy. I told you to go get a Posse! ”

As June sat back with an expectant smile, Alex had to bite his lower lip to contain himself. He watched Teresa sitting across the room, as her initial confusion gave way to sudden understanding. “Oh! Oh, that’s awful!” She laughed while waving at the air, as if to fan away a bad odor.

June grinned and picked up her glass. “Don’t you get it, Alex? See, the first two times, the horse brought back women…”

He held up both hands. “I got it, all right. Please, Teresa’s right. It’s bloody offensive.”

June nodded smugly. So far, she was having by far the best of it. No joke he or Teresa told was delivered half as well or elicited such approving groans of feigned nausea. Probably, her skill came from being Texan. The only nationality Alex knew who were better at this odd ritual were Australians.

As bearer of good tidings, June could hardly be begrudged. This party in Alex’s tiny bungalow was to celebrate an end to weeks of tension.

At least one hopes it’s over. I still feel twinges of paranoia, looking over my shoulder for men in snap-brim hats and trench coats.

June had arrived on Rapa Nui this morning with word of Colonel Spivey’s complete agreement to their terms. In exchange for their cooperation — and especially Alex’s expertise — all charges would be dropped against Teresa and Easter Island would be left alone.

Naturally, Spivey will smuggle in a spy or two. But at least Teresa and I are no longer on the run.

It was still an open question whether there was any place to run to. The struggles against Beta weren’t over yet. Still, even the most fatalistic of Alex’s technicians were starting to act as if they thought there might be a planet under them by this time next year.

Now if only they can convince me.

Things had changed since theirs was a tiny, tight-knit cabal, wrestling subterranean monsters all alone. Now they were part of a large official enterprise, albeit one still veiled under a “temporary” cloak of security. June was here to cement the partnership, conveying the determination of both Glenn Spivey and George Hutton to make it work, for now. In that role as emissary, she would leave again tomorrow with Alex’s chief token of cooperation — a box of cubes with fresh data for the other teams. Her courier route ought to bring her back every week or so from now on.

Teresa, for her part, had gone to great pains to make things clear to June — that her new, close friendship with Alex wasn’t sexual.

Not that the two of them hadn’t thought about it. At least he had. But on reflection he had come to realize that anything intimate between them would demand more intense attention than either could spare right now. For the time being, it was enough that they had a silent understanding — a link that had never been severed since they emerged hand in hand from that odyssey underground, like twins who had gestated together and shared the same act of being reborn.

For her part, June Morgan’s outwardly relaxed posture and easy humor surely overlayed anxiety. Alex’s relationship with her had been a wartime affair, mutual, uncomplicated. He had no idea where it stood now and didn’t mean to push it.

At least the two women appeared to have buried whatever tension once lay between them. Or most of it, at least. Alex was glad. For one thing, it meant he could stand up now and leave them alone together for a little while.

“If you ladies will excuse me,” he said, stepping to the door of the little bungalow. “I have to go see someone about an emu.”

June nodded briefly at him, but Teresa was already leaning forward in her chair, almost touching the other woman’s arm. “All right then,” she said. “Here’s one for you, while he’s out playing fire drill with the bushes.”

Moving quickly, Alex made it outside before she started telling the joke. A long one might have snared him and set off a crisis in his kidneys.

It was a balmy night, though winter had lingered a long time, turning this desolate island even more windblown and sere. Apparently spring would be late and blustery. Even the trees at the experimental reforestation zone up at Vaiteia seemed to shiver and cower whenever the gales picked up.

He didn’t bother walking downslope to the shower-commode, shared by five of the prefabricated cottages. Instead, he climbed the hill a ways to where the view was better. As he watered the scrub grass, Alex looked westward toward the lights of Hanga Roa town, just north of Rano Kao’s towering cliffs. The solitary jet runway glittered palely next to five compact tourist hotels and a moored cargo zeppelin. Nearer at hand lay the Atlantis monument, bottom-lit so that at night the ancient, crippled space shuttle .actually seemed caught nobly in the act of taking off.

Since their close escape from New Zealand, wincing and limping from their bruises, he and Teresa had perforce taken up different activities. For her part, she spent most of her days with the old model-one shuttle. Presumably she knew a way inside, past the vandalism alarms. Or perhaps she was just scraping off the graffiti and gull droppings that made the broken spacecraft look so pathetic by daylight.

Possibly, she was just sitting in Atlantis’s pilot seat, brooding over the slim likelihood she’d ever see space again — even given a pardon from Spivey’s masters.

Anyway, he was busy enough for both of them. Rapa Nui station was again the fulcrum for up to several dozen gazer beams a day, pulsating through the Earth’s interior in a dizzying variety of modes and leading to countless surface manifestations. Now, at least, Alex had secure consultation links with Stan Goldman in Greenland, and data streamed in from the NATO ground teams, as well, helping him refine his models with each passing day.

(He’d even had a chance to get in touch with his grand-mother, over in Africa. Good old Jen. After berating him several minutes for neglecting her, she had immediately dropped the subject and launched into a long, excited explanation of her new research, which Alex vaguely gathered had something to do with schizophrenia.)

Alex spent a good part of each day watching the singularity on the big display, where Beta could be seen spending more of its time in the “sparse” zones of the lower mantle. Already the monster was on an enforced diet, and soon they’d reach break-even — that milestone when the deadly knot began losing mass-energy as fast as it absorbed it. That would be time for real celebration… a true miracle, given their odds just a few months ago.

But then what?

Behind him, he heard the women laugh out loud, Teresa’s alto blending harmoniously with June’s contralto. It was a sound that cheered him. Finished with his business, Alex found himself suddenly shivering in the chill breeze. He zipped up and walked a little further along the slope, crunching the dry grass underfoot.

Apparently, a surprising number of Colonel Spivey’s superiors believed Alex’s theory, that Beta was a smart bomb sent by alien foes to destroy humanity. If so, then Spivey had a point. The gazer could become the pivot of Earth’s only credible defense. In fact, to hear Spivey put it, the world might someday erect statues to Alex Lustig.

Savior of the planet, forger of our shield.

The image would appeal to any man’s vanity. And Alex wasn’t sure he had the will to resist. What if it’s true? he thought, tasting the honey sweetness of Spivey’s fable.

The colonel’s plan had one more advantage. It meant they might soon reduce the number of pulses to just a nudge now and then.

He scuffed the ground. Inhaled the scented air. Shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. All right. Keeping it down there makes sense. Maybe. And yet Alex felt edgy.

Everywhere Beta passes, the minerals seem to change … at least momentarily.

It was hard to tell how, exactly, even with their wonderfully improved sensitivity. Beta was still a tiny, if ferocious object, with an actual physical zone of influence only millimeters across. The affected track of altered perovskites was consequently extremely thin. Still, with each orbit more slender tubes of transformed mineral glittered in the singularity’s wake, flickering oddly.

How can we leave the thing down there when we have no idea what the long-term effects will be?

Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t told Hutton or Spivey about his new resonator, the one with the spherical, compact design. Better to wait and be certain what the colonel’s actual scheme was… what he was going to do when word inevitably leaked out.

For they weren’t going to be able to keep the lid on forever, that was clear to everyone. Spivey’s bosses had to be preparing for a political powwow soon.

Maybe all they want is to present the world with a fait accompli, Alex thought hopefully. “Look, see what we in the West have done? We saved the world! Now, of course, we’ll let the tribunals have the keys to the gazer. It’s far too dangerous for any one group to control.”

Alex smiled. Yes. Quite possibly that was exactly what they had in mind.

Right. Surely.

On his way back to the bungalow, Alex passed before a row of seaside moai sculptures, this strange island’s contribution to world imagery. Gloomy and almost identical, they nonetheless struck him differently each time he saw them. On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they just looked like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid… as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.

We didn’t make Beta though, Alex reminded himself. So we’re foolish, fearful, sometimes crazy, but maybe not damned.

Not yet, at least.

Back at the bungalow, Alex wiped his feet before entering.

“…know it’s logical, and maybe justified,” Teresa said, nodding seriously. “But after Jason… well. I can’t share again. I don’t think I could handle it.”

“But that was different—” June stopped and looked up quickly as Alex entered.

“Share what?” he asked. “What’s so different?”

Teresa looked away, but June stood up, smiling. She took him by the lapels and drew him into the room. “Nothing important. Just girl talk. Anyway, we decided to call it a night. I have a busy day tomorrow, so—”

“So I’ve got to go,” Teresa said, putting her glass aside. For some reason she wouldn’t meet Alex’s eyes now, which disturbed him. What’s going on? he wondered.

Teresa picked up the satchel June had brought along especially for her. Alex had assumed it contained tokens from Spivey, to signal all was forgiven. But Teresa acted as if it were something strictly between herself and the other woman, a peace offering of a different sort entirely. “Thanks for the stuff, June,” she said, lifting the case.

“No big deal. Just hardware store goods. What’re you going to do with all those catalysts and things?”

Teresa smiled enigmatically. “Oh, just a little tidying up, that’s all.”

“Mm,” June commented.

“Yeah. Mm. So.” Teresa shifted her feet. “Well. G’night you two.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the women kissed each other on the cheek. Teresa squeezed Alex’s shoulder, still without meeting his eyes, and went out into the night. He stood in the open doorway, watching her go.

From behind him, June’s arms slid under his and wrapped across his chest. She squeezed hard and let out a sigh. “Alex. Oh, Alex. What are we going to do with you?”

Puzzled, he turned around, letting the door close behind him. “What do you mean?”

“Oh…” She seemed about to say more, but finally shook her head. Taking his hand she said, “Come on, then. To bed. We both have busy days ahead.”