In the Ocean of Night

One

He awoke, basking in the orange glow of sun on his eyelids. A yellow shaft of light streamed through the acacias outside the window and warmed his shoulder and face. Nigel stretched, warm and lazy and catlike. Though it was early, already the heavy, scented heat of the Pasadena spring filled the bedroom. He rolled over and looked appreciatively at Alexandria, who was seriously studying herself in the mirror.

“Vanity,” he said, voice blurred from sleep. “Insurance.”

“Why can’t you simply be a scruff, like me?” “Business,” she said distantly, smearing something under her eyes. “I’m going to be far too busy today to pay attention to my appearance.”

“And you must be spiffy to face the public.” “Ummm. I think I’ll pin up my hair. It’s a mess, but I don’t have time to…”

“Why not? It’s early yet.”

“I want to get into the office and thrash through some paperwork before those representatives from Brazil arrive. And I have to leave work early—have an appointment with Dr. Hufman.”

“Again?”

“He’s got those tests back.”

“What’s the upshot?”

“That’s what I’m to find out.”

Nigel squinted at her groggily, trying to read her mood.

“I don’t think it’s really important,” she volunteered. The bed sloshed as he rolled out and teetered on one foot, an arm extended upward in a theatrical gesture.

“Jack be nimble,” Alexandria said, smiling and brushing her hair about experimentally.

“You didn’t say that last night.”

“When you fell out of bed?”

“When we fell out of bed.”

“The party on top is in charge of navigation. Code of the sea.”

“My mind must have been elsewhere. Silly of me.” “Um. Where’s breakfast?”

Naked, he padded across the planking. The yielding, creaking feel of oiled and varnished wood was one of the charms of this old trisected house, and worth the cost of leasing. He went into the bathroom, lifted the ivory toilet seat and peed for a long moment; first pleasure of the day. Finished, he lowered the seat and its magenta cover but did not push the handle. At thirty-five cents a flush, he and Alexandria had decided to let things go until absolutely necessary. As an economy measure the savings weren’t necessary for them, but the waste of not doing so seemed inelegant.

He slipped on his sandals where he’d stepped out of them the night before and walked through the archway of thick oak beams, into the kitchen. The tiled room held the night chill long after the remainder of the house had surrendered to day. The slapping of his sandals echoed back at him; he flipped on the audio channels and dialed first music, then—finding nothing he liked, this early—the news spots.

He grated out some sharp cheddar cheese while a calm, undisturbed voice told him that another large strike was brewing, threatening to cut off shipping again. He rapped open six eggs, thought a moment and then added two more, and rummaged through the refrigerator for the creamy, small curd cottage cheese he’d bought the day before. The President, he heard, had made a “tough, hard-hitting” speech against secret corporate gestation-underglass programs; the newscaster made no mention of similar government projects. Two of the recent hermaphrodites had married, proclaiming the first human relationship free of stereotypes. Nigel sighed and dumped the lot into the blender. He added some watery brown sauce he’d made up in batches for just this purpose and sprinkled in marjoram, salt and pepper. The blender purred it all into a smooth soup. He fetched tomato sauce while the audio went on about a new industrial coalition which had linked up with an equally massive crowd of labor unions, to back a bill granting extraordinary protectionist import taxes on goods from Brazil, Australia and China. For variety and in the name of pure blind experiment he added coriander to the mix, poured it into a souffle dish and started it baking. The oven popped with industrious heat.

Alexandria was showering as he dressed. He put the bedroom in order; last night, tumbling toward the bed, they’d scattered oddments of underclothing like debris from some domestic collision. He rolled up his flared shirt cuffs in anticipation of the day’s warmth and Alexandria emerged from the vapor shower, her expressive bottom jiggling beneath a sheen of moisture.

She slipped the shower cap from around her knotted hair and said, “Read me my horoscope, will you? It’s on the end table, there.”

Nigel grimaced. “I prefer entrails, myself. Shall I nip out for a small goat, put him to the knife and give you a prognosis for the day?”

“Read.”

“Much more satisfying, I should think. Gutsy—” “Read.”

“Gemini, April twentieth to May twentieth.” He paused. “Let’s see, ‘You are quick, intelligent and well organized. Try to use these to advantage today. Unfortunately, people will probably tend to think you are overly aggressive. Try not to flaunt your power, and resist the impulse to hurt small animals—this is a bad character trait. Avoid orange juice pits and dwarfs today.’ Sound advice, I’d say.”

“Nigel…”

“Well, what good’s advice if it’s not specific? A lot of vapid generalities won’t tell you much about what stock to buy for those Brazilian fellows—if there were stocks any more, that is.”

“They want to buy us, that’s the point.”

“The whole airline?”

“Yep. Lock, stock and et cetera.”

“And your job—?”

“Oh, they just want to own us, not run the company.” “Ah. Well—” He glanced at his watch. “Nearly time for the Catnapper’s Souffle.”

He went into the kitchen, dealt out forks, plates and napkins and took them into the dining nook. The nook had been a spacious closet in the old house, in those days a single-family dwelling, and now featured a mitred window giving on the back yard. A jacaranda tree, showing signs of an interest in blossoming into a velvety blue-and-white, bracketed one side of the green swath of lawn.

Nigel checked his watch again, which mutely informed him that this was the thirty-first of April. Was that right, under the new calendar? He ran the old rhyme through—thirty days hath November, and, and—? He never could summon up those fiendish little aids to memory when they’d be handy. But he knew April well enough, certainly: next week would mark fifteen years since Icarus.

Fifteen. And for all the conferences and international symposia and doctoral theses, scant reward had come of the Icarus adventure. He and Len had managed to lash a fair quantity of interesting artifacts into various crannies of the Dragon module, and even more outside, in the superstructure. But in dealing with the totally strange, how could they possibly make the right judgments? What seemed a complex web of electronics turned out to be a series of idiot circuits; the greenish fog that permeated the vast caverns within Icarus was an organic chain molecule, probably a high-vacuum lubricant.

Interesting, yes; but not keys to a fundamental discovery. Some odd technical tricks came out of it all—an advanced substrate for microelectronics, resistant alloys, some sophisticated chemicals—but somehow the alienness of the thing had slipped through their fingers. None of their haul bore silent witness to Icarus’s origin. Everything in it could have been made from Earth materials, far in the past—and a fraction of the scientists who worked on the trove thought it had been. No one had come up with convincing evidence of an earlier civilization on Earth, but the sheer ordinariness of Icarus seemed to argue for it.

For Nigel and Len it had been a slowly dawning defeat, particularly following the storm of controversy that waited for them when the shuttle brought them down from Earth orbit. NASA had shielded them at first, but too many people were horrified at Nigel’s risk-taking. The Indians broke off relations, even after he and Len fired the Egg and pulverized Icarus into harmless gravel. Congressmen demanded prison sentences for the two of them. The New York Times ran three editorials within one month, each calling for progressively stronger measures against NASA, and Len, and especially Nigel.

He spoke a few times before largely hostile audiences, defendings his ideas and emotions, and gave up. Words weren’t actions, and never would be. Luckily, he was a civilian. His offense against the moral equilibrium fell awkwardly between statutes. A Federal prosecutor introduced a charge, based on deprivation of the civil rights of everyone in the United States, but it was thrown out; after all, it was the Indians who’d been threatened. And in the public scuffle NASA kept very quiet, stepping gingerly around the fact that Dave had been lying behind that media-measured Cheshire-cat grin of his. The whole story about Icarus skipping on the upper atmosphere, like a child’s accurately skimmed rock, was a hastily improvised song and dance.

And so it had passed.

After a year and a final receding volley from the Times (“Remembering the Abyss”), other worries furrowed the world’s brows. Once out of the limelight, NASA began gently easing Len and Nigel out. Oddly enough, in obscurity lay more threat. Exposure of Dave’s lie in full view would have cost NASA support on all sides. But if the facts wobbled into view before an obscure committee, years later, it would do little harm; timing was everything. The trump cards he and Len held slowly devalued, like an inflated currency. Thus the worst time came when he could finally walk into a supermarket without being harangued, insulted, treated to a garlic-breathed debate.

That, too, he had survived.

“Ready yet?” Alexandria said, bringing the jug of orange juice into the dining nook. It rattled with ice cubes.

“Right.” Nigel shook off his mood and fetched the souffle. As he served it up with a broad wooden spoon, the crust cracked and exhaled a cloud smelling of omelette. They ate quickly, both hungry. It was their policy to eat virtually no supper and a thorough breakfast; Alexandria felt the body would use the breakfast through the day, and simply turn a supper into fat.

“Shirley’s coming over after supper tonight,” Alexandria said.

“Good. You finish that novel she gave you?” Alexandria sniffed elegantly. “Nope. It was mostly the usual wallowing in postmodernist angst, with technicolor side shows.”

Nigel popped a Swebitter grape into his mouth; his lips puckered at its tartness.

Alexandria reached for a grape and winced. “Damn.” “Wrists still hurting?”

“I thought they were getting better.” She held her right wrist in the other hand and wriggled it experimentally. Her face pinched for an instant and she stopped. “Nope, it’s still there, whatever it is.”

“Perhaps you sprained it.”

“Both wrists simultaneously? Without noticing it?” “Seems unlikely.”

“Damn,” Alexandria said abruptly. “You know, I don’t believe I want those Brazilians to get our company after all.”

“Uh? I thought—”

“Yes, yes, I started it all. Made the first moves. But damn it, it’s ours. We could use the capital, sure …” She twisted her mouth sidewise in a familiar gesture of irritation. “… but I didn’t realize…!”

“That was part of the soft sell, though. They’d get something thoroughly American—American Airlines.”

“Compared to us, the way we do things, those preening dandies can’t tie their shoelaces without an instruction manual. They don’t know.”

“Ah.” He enjoyed watching the flush of eagerness and zest stealing the cool and proper manner from her features. Watching her this way, chattering on about indices and margins and accountable funds, suspended halfway between the soft and easy Alexandria of the night, emerging into the precise, efficient executive of the day, he knew again why he loved her.

He left for the Lab a few minutes after Alexandria, as soon as he could finish the dishes, and barely caught his bus. It meandered along Fair Oaks, three-quarters filled even this late in the morning. Nigel pulled his personal earjacks out of his pocket and plugged into the six-channel audio track. He tuned out a jingle suitable for morons, a sportscast ditto, paused at the news—psychologists were worrying about a sudden surge in infanticide—and flicked over the “classical” channel. A short trumpet voluntary ended and a soupy Brahms symphony began, heavy with strings. He switched off, pocketed his earjacks and studied the view as the bus labored up the Pasadena hills. A ruddy-brown tinge smothered the land. He slipped his nose mask on and breathed in the sweet, cloying smell. Some things never improved. He was aware that the political situation was worsening, people were jittery about imports/exports, but it seemed to him that air smelling fresh-scrubbed, as though from the night’s rain, and a bit of Beethoven on the way to work were, all in all, more important issues.

Nigel smiled to himself. In these sentiments he recognized an echo of his mother and father. They had moved back to Suffolk shortly after the Icarus business, and he had seen them regularly. Their compass had shrunk into the comfortable English countryside: clear air and string quartets. The more he rubbed against the world, the more he saw them in himself. Stubborn he was, yes, just like his father, who had refused to ever believe Nigel should have gone to Icarus or, indeed, should have stayed on in America after that. It was precisely that same stubbornness that made him remain, though. Now, when he spoke amid these flat American voices, he heard his father’s smooth vowels. Angina and emphysema had stolen those two blended figures from him, finally, but here in this sometimes alien land he felt them closer than before.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was a jumble of rectangular blocks perched on a still-green hillside. As the bus wheezed to a stop he heard chanting and saw three New Sons handing out literature and buttonholing at the main gate. He took one of their handouts and crumpled it up after a glance. It seemed to him their promotional field work was getting worse; overtly mystical appeals wouldn’t work with JPL’s staff.

He passed through three sets of guards, grudgingly showed his badge—the Lab was a prime target for the bombers, but it was a nuisance nonetheless—and made his way down chilly, neon-bleached corridors. When he reached his office he found Kevin Lubkin, Mission Coordinator, already waiting for him. Nigel moved some issues of Icarus, the scholarly journal, out of a chair for Lubkin, pushed them into the heap of papers on his desk and raised the blinds of his window to let one pale blade of light lance across the opposite wall. He worked in a wing without air conditioning and it was a good idea to get some cross-ventilation going as soon as possible; the afternoon was unforgiving. Then, too, he adjusted the blinds each morning as a ritual beginning of work, and so uttered nothing more than a greeting to Lubkin until it was done.

“Something wrong?” he asked then, summoning up an artificial alertness.

Kevin Lubkin, distracted, closed a folder he had been reading. “Jupiter Monitor,” he said tersely. He was a burly, red-faced man with a smooth voice and a belly that had recently begun to bulge downward, concealing his belt buckle.

“Malfunction?”

“No. It’s being jammed.”

He flicked a blank look at Nigel, waiting.

Nigel raised an eyebrow. An odd tension had suddenly come into the room. He might still be relaxed from breakfast, but he wasn’t so slow that he could be taken in by an office sendup. He said nothing.

“Yeah, I know,” Lubkin said, sighing. “Sounds impossible. But it happened. I called you about it but—”

“What’s the trouble?”

“At two this morning we got a diagnostic report from the Jovian Monitor. The graveyard shift couldn’t figure it out, so they called me. Seemed like the onboard computer thought the main radio dish was having problems.” He took off his creamshell glasses to cradle them in his lap. “That wasn’t it, I decided. The dish is okay. But every time it tries to transmit to us, something echoes the signal back after two minutes.”

“Echoes?” Nigel tilted his chair, staring at titles on his bookshelves while he ran the circuit layout of the J-Monitor’s radio gear through his mind. “Two minutes is far too long for any feedback problem—you’re right. Unless the whole program has gone sour and the transmissions are being retaped by Monitor itself. It could get confused and think it was reading an incoming signal.”

Lubkin waved a hand impatiently. “We thought of that.”

“And?”

“The self-diagnostics say no—everything checks.”

“I give up,” Nigel said. “I can tell you’ve got a theory, though.” He spread his hands expansively. “What is it, then?”

“I think J-Monitor is getting an honest incoming signal. It’s telling us the truth.”

Nigel snorted. “How did you muddle through to that idea?”

“Well, I know—”

“Radio takes nearly an hour to reach us from Jupiter at this phase of the orbit. How is anyone going to send Monitor’s own messages back to it in two minutes?”

“By putting a transmitter in Jupiter orbit—just like Monitor.”

Nigel blinked. “The Sovs? But they agreed—”

“No Soviets. We checked on the fastwire. They say no, they haven’t shot anything out that way at all in a coon’s age. Our intelligence people are sure they’re leveling.”

“Chinese?”

“They aren’t playing in our league yet.”

“Who, then?”

Lubkin shrugged. The sallow sagging lines in his face told more than his words. “I was kind of thinking you might help me find out.”

There was a faint ring of defeat in the way the man said it—Nigel noted the tone because he had never heard it before. Usually Lubkin had an aspect of brittle hardness, a cool superior air. Now his face was not set in its habitual aloof expression; it seemed open, even vulnerable. Nigel guessed why the man had come in himself at 2

A.M., rather than delegating the job—to show his people, without having to tell them in so many words, that he could do the work himself, that he hadn’t lost the sure touch, that he understood the twists and subtleties of the machines they guided. But now Lubkin hadn’t unraveled the knot. The graveyard shift had departed into a gray dawn, so now he could safely ask for help without being obvious.

Nigel smiled wryly at himself. Always calculating, weighing the scales.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll help.”

Two

The solar system is vast. Light requires eleven hours to cross it. Scattered debris—rock, dust, icy conglomerates, planets—circles the ordinary white star, each fragment turning one face to the incandescent center, receiving warmth, while the other faces the interstellar abyss.

The craft approaching the system in 2031 did not know even these simple facts. Swimming in black vastness, it understood only that it was once again nearing a commonplace type of star and that the familiar ritual must begin again.

Though it was carrying out a long and labored exploration of this spiral arm, it had not chosen this particular star at random. Long before, cruising at a sizable fraction of light speed somewhat below the plane of the galaxy, it had filtered through the whispering radio noise a brief signal. The message was blurred and garbled. There were three common referents the craft could piece together, however, and these resembled an ancient code it had been taught to honor. The machine began to turn in a great arc which arrowed toward a grouping of stars; the jittery message had not lasted long enough to get a precise fix.

Much later, during the approach, a stronger radio burst peaked through the sea of hydrogen emission. A distress call. Life system failure. A breach in the hull, violation of the vital integrity indices—

There it ended. The signal’s direction was clearer. But did it come from this system ahead, or from some much more distant source lying behind it? In such circumstances the craft fell back on its habitual patterns.

Its first duty was simple. It had already decelerated until interstellar dust would no longer plow into it with blistering, destructive velocity. The craft could now safely cut off the magnetic fields encasing it and begin to extend sensors. A port opened to the utter cold and peered ahead. A blinder drew across the image of the nearing star, so that tiny flecks of light nearby could register.

The telescope employed was 150 centimeters in diameter and did not differ markedly from those used on Earth; some facets of design, bounded by natural law, are universal. The craft crept along at far below light speed. Isotopes met with a low mumble in the throat of its exhaust. Fingers of magnetic fields, extended forward, plucked the proper atoms from the interstellar gas and funneled them in. Only this carving of a cylinder in the dust disturbed the silent reaches.

The craft watched patiently. Any planets orbiting the star ahead were still far away, and picking out their movements against the speckled background of stationary stars was difficult. At four-tenths of a light-year away, the activated circuits and their consultation backup agreed: a yellow-brown patch near the white star was a planet. Higher functions of the computers felt the prickly stirrings of activity and heard of the discovery. A background library of planetary theory was consulted. The blurred, dim disk ahead shimmered as the ship swept through a whisper-thin cloud of dust, while the machine bracketed and measured its objective in methodical detail.

The planet was large. It might have enough mass to ignite thermonuclear fires in its core, but experience argued that its light was too weak. The computers pondered whether to classify the system as a binary star and eventually decided against it. Still, the waxing point of light ahead held promise.

The morning passed in puzzled argument.

Nigel wasn’t totally willing to abandon the hypothesis that Jupiter Monitor had malfunctioned. The flight engineers—a flinty crew, skeptical of nonspecialists, fond of jargon—thought otherwise. They gave ground grudgingly, pitting sweet cool reason against Nigel’s vague doubts. A complete run-through of J-Monitor’s error-detection modes, a new diagnostic analysis, a hand-check of transmissions—all showed nothing wrong. There was no mechanical flaw.

The quirky echo had faded away a little after 3 A.M.

The Monitor was no longer in its original ellipse around Jupiter; a month earlier its engines had stirred awake and fired, to nudge it into orbit around Callisto, fifth moon of Jupiter. Now it spun an elaborate orange-slice orbit, lacing over the icy glare of Callisto’s poles every eight hours.

Nigel snapped a cracker in half, swallowing it with some lukewarm tea, hardly noticing the mingling of sweet and tart. He closed his eyes to the ting and clatter of telemetry. The flight engineers had finally gone back to their burrows and he and Lubkin sat in the main control bay, at one of the semicircular tables; digital arrays ringed them.

“That puts paid to the simple ideas, then,” Nigel said. “I suppose we’d best have a glance at the Callisto orbit.”

“Don’t follow,” Lubkin said.

“If the signal came from a source outside J-Monitor, something cut it off. The echo must’ve faded because Callisto came between the source and J-Monitor.”

Lubkin nodded. “Reasonable. The same thing had occurred to me, but—” he looked at his watch. “It’s almost noon. Why didn’t the echo return around seven or so this morning, when J-Monitor came out from behind Callisto?”

Nigel had the uncomfortable feeling that he was playing the role of dull-witted graduate student to Lubkin’s learned professor. But then, he realized, that was precisely the impression a skillful administrator would try to create.

“Well … maybe the other source is occluded by Jupiter itself. Now it’s blotted out.”

Lubkin pursed his lips. “Maybe, maybe.”

“Can’t we rough out some sort of orbit for the source, given a triangulation with Callisto?”

Lubkin nodded.

Around every star stretches a spherical shell of space, and somewhere within the thickness of that shell, temperatures are mild. For an Earthlike world, given the right primordial nudge, water will be liquid on the planet’s surface.

One-third of a light-year from the burning nugget of the star, the craft surveyed this livable zone and found it good. There was no sign of a large planet like the yellow-brown gas giant circling further out. This was a crucial test, for a massive world, close in, would have made another stable orbit impossible within the life-giving volume. Had the ship found such a planet, it was under standing orders—encrusted, ingrained, so old they functioned as instincts—to accelerate through the system, gathering all possible data for the astrophysical index, and chart a course for the next in a lengthy record of candidate suns.

Instead, the ship quickened the rumble of deceleration. It uncapped its telescope more frequently and peered ahead for longer intervals. A blue-white splotch revolved into another gas giant planet, smaller than the first and further out. Its image resisted precise definition. The craft noted a blurred circlet of bluish light—the body was ringed, a not uncommon occurrence among heavy planets.

Another massive planet was found, thinly ringed, and then another, each further away from the star. The machines began lowering their estimates of the possibility of life in this system. Still, past experience held out a glimmer of hope. Small, dim worlds might lie further in, even if the weight of theory and observation made it seem unlikely. By a fluke, the ship could be approaching from the night side of a world and miss it entirely. The craft waited.

At one-sixth of a light-year out the computers found an ambiguous smear of blue and brown and white: a planet near the star. Reward circuits triggered. The machines felt a spasm of relief and joy, a seething electric surge within. They were sophisticated devices, webs of impulses programmed to want to succeed, yet buffered against severe disappointment if success eluded them.

For the moment they were content. The ship flew on.

Spherical trigonometry, the vectoring line of J-Monitor’s main dish, calculus, orbital parameters, estimates, angles. Check and recheck.

Slowly, the most probable answer emerged—3:30 P.M., an hour away. By then the source should arc into view of J-Monitor’s main dish. Nigel imagined it as a dot of light slowly separating from the churning brown bands of Jupiter, rising above the horizon. As it traced its own ellipse, J-Monitor would be surveying the snow fields of Callisto below with its own mechanical intensity; craters, wrinkled hill lines, fissures, glinting blue ice mountains.

“One hour,” Lubkin said.

“Can we realign the main dish that quickly, without disturbing the surveying routine?” Nigel asked.

“We’ll have to,” Lubkin replied firmly. He picked up the telephone and dialed Operations Control.

“Tell them to rotate the camera platform, too,” Nigel said quickly.

“You think there’ll be anything to see at that range?” Nigel shrugged. “Possibly.”

“The narrow-angle camera? We can’t move both in—” “Right. We should work out a set of shots. Use the filters, stepping down from ultraviolet to IR. They can sequence automatically.”

Lubkin began speaking rapidly and precisely into the telephone, smiling confidently now that there were orders to be given, men to be told.

The ship was still cruising in deep silence, far from the star’s warmth, when it began to discern radio waves. More of the higher functions of the craft came alive. The weak signals were weighed and sifted. Filtering away the usual sputtering star noise, they found a faint trace of emission localized to the planets.

The most powerful source was the innermost gas giant. This was an optimistic sign, for the world did orbit fairly near its star. If it had merely a transparent atmosphere it would be too cold, but analysis showed it to be cloaked in thick, deep clouds. Such planets could warm themselves, the ship knew, by gravitational contraction and by heat-trapping—the greenhouse effect. Life could well evolve in their skies and seas.

Still, such clotted blankets of gas and liquid meant awesome pressures. Life in similar worlds rarely developed skeletons and thus could not manipulate tools; the ship’s log carried many instances of this. Trapped in their deep bowl of ammonia and methane, free of technology’s snarls, such creatures could not communicate—and the ship could assuredly not fly into such pressures in search of them.

A smaller source of radio waves lay further inward. It was the third planet, blue and white. The signals wove complex overlapping patterns, faint tremors that could be atmospheric phenomena: thunderstorms, lightning flashes, perhaps radiation from a magnetosphere. Still, the world was wrapped in a clear gas, a hopeful sign. The craft flew sunward.

By 6 P.M. they became discouraged. The Monitor’s main dish was reprogrammed to carry out a methodical search pattern around the spot where the unknown radio source should appear.

It was functioning. The data were coming in. All operations were proceeding smoothly.

And there were absolutely no results.

The flight engineering staff was milling about, writing day summary reports, ready to go home. To them, the echo problem was a temporary aberration that cleared up of itself. Until it reappeared, no cause for alarm.

The target should have emerged from Jupiter’s rim at 3:37 P.M., according to revised estimates. Given the time lag in signals from Jupiter, Operations Control began receiving data slightly before 4:30 P.M. The main dish’s search was completed within an hour. They couldn’t use the narrow-angle camera—not enough technicians were free from the Mars Burrower and the planetary satellites. In any case, nothing indicated that there was anything worth seeing.

“Looks like balls-up on that,” Nigel said.

“Either the whole idea is a pipe dream—” Lubkin began.

“Or we haven’t got the orbit right,” Nigel finished. An engineer in portable headphones came down the curved aisle, asked Lubkin to sign a clipboard, and went away.

Lubkin leaned back in his roller chair. “Yeah, there’s always that.”

“We can have another go tomorrow.”

“Sure.” Lubkin did not sound particularly enthusiastic. He got up from the console and paced back and forth in the aisle. There wasn’t much room; he nearly bumped into a technician down the way who was checking readouts at the Antenna Systems console. Nigel ignored the background murmur of the Control Bay and tried to think. Lubkin paced some more and finally sat down. The pair studied their green television screens, which were tilted backward for ease of viewing, where sequencing and programming data were continually displayed and erased. Occasionally the computer index would exceed its allowed parameter range and the screen would jump from yellow-on-green to green-on-yellow. Nigel had never gotten used to this; he remained disconcertingly on edge until someone found the error and the screen reverted.

The console telephone rang, jarring his concentration still further. “There’s an external call for you,” an impersonal woman’s voice said.

“Put them off a bit, will you?”

“I believe it’s your wife.”

“Ah. Put her on hold.”

He turned to Lubkin. “I’d like to get the camera free tomorrow.”

“What’s the use?”

“Call it idle speculation,” he said shortly. He was rather tired and wasn’t looking for an argument.

“Okay, try it,” Lubkin said, threw down his pencil and labored to his feet. His white shirt was creased and wrinkled. In defeat he seemed more likable to Nigel, less an edgy executive measuring his moves before he made them. “See you tomorrow,” Lubkin said and turned away, shoulders slumped.

Nigel punched a button on the telephone.

“Sorry I took so long, I—”

“Nigel, I’m at Dr. Hufman’s.”

“What’s—”

“I, I need you here. Please.” Her voice was thin and oddly distant.

“What’s going?”

“He wants to talk to both of us.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, really. Not totally.”

“What’s the address?”

She gave him a number on Thalia. “I’m going down for some lab tests. A half hour or so.”

Nigel thought. “I don’t know which bus serves that—” “Can’t you…”

“Certainly. Certainly. I’ll sign off for a Lab car, tell them it’s for business tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Nigel. I, I just…”

He pursed his lips. She seemed dazed, distracted, her executive briskness melted away. Usually the efficient manner did not seep from her until evening.

“Right,” he said. “I’m leaving now.” He replaced the telephone in its cradle.

Three

A gray haze layer cut off all buildings at the fourth story, giving Thalia Avenue an oddly truncated look. The cramped car labored along with an occasionally irregular pocketa-pocketa as Nigel leaned out the window, searching for building numbers. He had never become accustomed to the curious American reticence about disclosing addresses. Immense, imposing steel and concrete masses stood anonymously, challenging the mere pedestrian to discover what lay inside. After some searching, 2636 Thalia proved to be a low building of elegant striated stonework, the most recent addition to the block, clearly assembled well after the twentieth-century splurge of construction materials.

Dr. Hufman’s waiting room had the hushed antechamber feel to it that marked a private practice. A public medical center would have been all tile and tan partitions and anonymous furniture. As he walked in, Nigel’s attention returned to Alexandria’s unspoken tension and he looked around the waiting room, expecting to see her.

“Mr. Walmsley?” a nurse said from a glass-encased box that formed one wall of the room. He advanced.

“Where is she?” He saw no point in wasting time.

“In the laboratory, next door. I wanted to explain that I didn’t, we didn’t know Miss Ascencio was, ah…”

“Where’s the lab?”

“You see, she filled out her form as Single and gave her sister as person to be notified. So we didn’t know—”

“She was living with me. Right. Where’s—”

“And Dr. Hufman likes to have both parties present when…”

“When what?”

“Well, I, ah, only wanted to apologize. We, I would have asked Miss Ascencio to come with you if we had—”

“Mr. Walmsley. Come in.”

Dr. Hufman was an unremarkable man in an ill-fitting brown jacket, no tie, large cushioned shoes. His black hair thinned at the temples, showing a marble-white scalp. He turned and walked back into his office without waiting to see if Nigel would follow.

The office differed in detail but not general theme from every other doctor’s office Nigel had ever seen. There were old-fashioned books with real bindings, some of them leather or a convincing synthetic. Long lines of medical journals, mostly out of date, marched across the shelves on one wall, punctuated by a model ship here and there. On the desk and a side table were collections of stubby African dolls. Nigel wondered if physicians were given a course in med school in interior decorating, with special emphasis on patient-soothing bric-a-brac, restful paintings and humanizing oddments.

He began to sit down in the chair Hufman offered when a door opened to his left and Alexandria stepped in. She hesitated when she saw Nigel and then closed the door softly. Her hands seemed bony and white. There was in her manner something Nigel had never seen before.

“Thank you, dear, for coming so quickly.”

Nigel nodded. She sat in another chair and both turned toward Hufman, who was sitting behind a vast mahogany desk, peering into a file folder. He looked up and seemed to compose himself.

“I’ve asked that you come over, Mr. Walmsley, because I have some rather bad news for Miss Ascencio.” He spoke almost matter-of-factly, but Nigel sensed a balanced weight behind the words.

“Briefly, she has systemic lupus erythematosus.” “Which is?” Nigel said.

“Sorry, I thought you might have heard of it.”

“I have,” Alexandria said quietly. “It’s the second most common cause of death now, isn’t it?”

Nigel looked at her questioningly. It seemed an unlikely sort of thing for Alexandria to know, unless—unless she’d guessed.

“Yes, cancer of all sorts is still first. Lupus has increased rapidly in the last two decades.”

“Because it comes from pollution,” she said. Hufman leaned back in his chair and regarded her. “That is a common opinion. It is very difficult to verify, of course, because of the difficulty in isolating influences.”

“I think I’ve heard of it,” Nigel murmured. “But…” “Oh. A disease of the connective tissue, Mr. Walmsley. It strikes primarily the skin, joints, kidneys, heart, the fibrous tissue that provides internal support for the organs.”

“Her sprained wrists—”

“Exactly, yes. We can expect further inflammation, though not so much as to create a deformity. That is only one symptom, not the total disease, however.”

“What else is there?”

“We don’t know. It’s an insidious process. It could reside in the joints or it could spread to the organs. We have very little diagnostic capability. We simply treat it—”

“How?”

“Aspirin,” Alexandria said mildly with a wan smile. “That’s absurd!” Nigel said. “Fixing up a disease with—”

“No, Miss Ascencio is correct, as far as she goes. That is the recommended course for the mild stages. I’m afraid she is beyond that now, though.”

“What’ll you give her?”

“Corticosteroid hormones. Perhaps chloroquine. I want to stress that these are not cures. They offer only symptomatic relief.”

“What does cure it?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, hell! There’s got to be—”

“No, Nigel,” she said. “There doesn’t have to be anything.”

“Mr. Walmsley, we are dealing with a potentially fatal disease here. Some specialists attribute the rise of lupus to specific pollutants such as lead or sulfur or nitrogen compounds in auto exhausts, but we truly do not know its cause. Or cure.”

Nigel noticed that he was clenching the chair arms. He sat back and put his hands in his lap. “Very well.”

“Miss Ascencio’s condition is not acute. I must warn you, however, that the subacute or chronic stage of this disease has been getting shorter and shorter as its frequency among the population increases. There are cases in which the disease persists but is not ultimately fatal.”

“And—?” she said.

“Other cases sometimes go to completion within a year. But that is not an average. The course of the illness is totally unpredictable.” He leaned forward earnestly to emphasize the point.

“Simply take the drugs and wait, is that what you advise?” Alexandria said.

“We will keep close track of your progress,” Hufman said, glancing at Nigel. “I assure you of that. Any flareup we can probably control with more powerful agents.”

“What is it that kills people, then?” she said. “Spread to the organs. Or worse, interception of the connective tissue in the nervous system.”

“If that happens—” Nigel began.

“We often don’t know right away. Occasionally there are early convulsions. Sometimes a psychosis develops, but that is rare. The clinical spectrum of this disease is broad.”

Nigel sat and listened with pressed lips as the man went on, Alexandria with her hands folded neatly, the man’s voice droning in the soft air with facts and theories, his broad forefinger occasionally tapping Alexandria’s file to reinforce a point, his sentences paraded out to display a new facet of systemic lupus bloody erythematosus, more lockjawed Latinisms, words converging like a pack of erudite wolves to devour some new snippet of causation, diagnosis, remission, exacerbation. Nigel took it all, numbly, sensing a dim tremor within his chest that went unnamed.

During the drive home he concentrated. Traffic was always thin since the demise of the private automobile, and the broad avenues of Pasadena seemed an infinite plane over which they skated with Newtonian skill. He played the game of his youth, when everyone drove but fuel was excruciatingly short. He watched the lights flick yellow red green and timed his approach, seeking the path of minimum energy. It was best to glide the last third of a block, letting road friction and the gentle brushing wind slow them until the red popped over to green. If his timing was off he would down-shift to third, then second, storing the kinetic life that he envisioned as a precious fluid moving within the car, poured into temporary bottles somewhere between engine and axle. Making a turn, he would wait until the last moment before shifting, hoping to stretch the green time, then slapping the stick forward as his leg pumped the clutch, bringing the turgid car to a humming peak, tires howling slightly with expended energy. They arced into a new linear path, vectoring on the Pasadena grid toward the hills. Thus he played again the game of his youth, lines creasing his face.

“You can’t accept it, can you, Nigel?” she said in the long silence.

“What?”

She reached over and caressed his forearm, fluffing up the blond hair. Her own gesture; no other woman had ever touched him that way. “Ease into it,” she said.

He let the silence between them grow as several blocks of neon consumer gumbo passed, the sandwich parlors pooled in wan yellow.

“I’ll try. But sometimes, I… I’ll try.”

Something blazed ahead. As they approached they could make out a large bonfire in a ruined field, flames licking at the cup of darkening sky. Figures moved against the lemon flickering.

“New Sons,” he said.

“Slow,” she said. He lifted his foot and she studied the fire.

“Why is it round?” she murmured.

“It’s an annular flame. One of their symbols.”

“The secret center. Godhood in every person.”

“I suppose.”

Several figures turned from the playing flames and waved their arms toward the car, beckoning.

“They pile their scrap wood in a circle, leaving the center clear. One pair is left there when they light it. For the duration of the fire they are free. Nothing can reach them. They can dance or—”

“How do you know all this?” he said.

“Someone told me.”

A tall woman detached herself from the weaving line of figures and moved toward the street, toward their car. She was the focus of multiple, shifting shadows.

Nigel shifted into first and they surged away into the dim and desiccated night.

“Freedom at the center,” he murmured. “License for public rutting, I’ll wager.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said mildly.

When they let themselves into the apartment, Shirley was lying on the couch, reading. “You’re late,” she said sleepily.

Nigel explained about the car, about Dr. Hufman, and then it all came out in a rush, Alexandria and Nigel alternating in the telling. Lupus. Sore wrists. Connective tissue. Chloroquine. Swelling joints.

Shirley got up wordlessly and embraced each of them. Nigel chattered on for a bit, filling the room with busy, comfortable sound. Into the darting talk Alexandria inserted a mention of supper and their attention deflected to the practicalities of the meal. Nigel offered to do up some simple chopped vegetables in the wok. Rummaging through the refrigerator revealed a total absence of meat. Alexandria volunteered to walk down the two blocks to a grocery store and, without debating the issue, slipped out. Nigel was busy with an array of celery and onions on the chopping block as the door closed behind her and Shirley was washing spinach, snapping off the stems as she went.

At once a silence descended between them.

“It’s serious, isn’t it?” she said. He looked up. Shirley’s dark eyebrows were compressed downward, forming long ridges beneath her towering stack of black hair.

“I gather so.” He went back to chopping. Then, suddenly: “Shit! I wish I knew, really knew.”

“Hufman doesn’t sound very sympathetic.”

“He isn’t. I don’t think he intended to be. He simply told us the bloody facts in that flat voice of his.”

“It takes a while,” she said softly, “to come to terms with facts.”

He rapped the block with the cleaver, scattering onion cuttings. “Right.”

“What do you think we ought to do?”

“Do?” He stopped, puzzled. “Wait. Go on, I suppose.” Shirley nodded. She rolled up the sleeves of her shimmering blue dress, bunching it above the elbows. She handed him the spinach in aligned stacks, ready for cutting. “I think you ought to travel,” she said.

“Eh? What for?”

“To take her mind off it. And yours.”

“Don’t you think her usual, settled routine is more the thing?”

“That’s just the point.” Shirley said abruptly, an edge to her voice. “You two are stuck here because you don’t want to leave your work at JPL—”

“And she doesn’t either,” he said evenly. “She has a career.”

“Damn it!” She threw down a wad of spinach. “She could be dead in a year! Don’t you think she realizes that? Even if you don’t?”

“I realize it,” he said stiffly.

“Then act like it!”

“How?”

Shirley’s mood changed abruptly. “If you become more flexible, Nigel, she will, too. You’re so absorbed in that damned laboratory, those rockets, you can’t see it.” Her lips parted slightly, puckering outward infinitesimally. “I love you both, but you’re so fucking blind.”

Nigel put his chopping knife aside. He was breathing in quick little gasps, he noted, and wondered why. “I… I simply can’t throw it all over—”

Shirley’s eyes moistened and her face seemed to draw downward. “Nigel… you think all this space research is so important, I know that. I’ve never said anything until now. But now your obsession can hurt Alexandria, damage her terribly in ways you may never even see.”

He shook his head dumbly, blinking.

“If the work was so vastly important, I wouldn’t say anything. But it isn’t. The real problems are here on Earth—”

“Buggering nonsense.”

“They are. You slave away at this business, after all they’ve done to you, and act as though it’s somehow crucial.”

“Better that, than a job handing out the daily dole.” “Is that what you think I do?” she said, voice teetering between acid and genuine curiosity.

“Well…”

“No backing and filling. Is it?”

“Not quite. I do know it’s not my sort of thing.” “With your intelligence, Nigel, you could make real contributions to—”

“Human problems, as you call them, are seldom accessible to intelligence alone. It takes patience. A warm touch, all that. You’ve got it. I don’t.”

“I think you’re very warm. Below that surface, I mean.”

“Uh,” he said wryly.

“No. You are. I, I know you are in some ways, or else you and I and Alexandria wouldn’t be possible, it couldn’t work.”

“Does it work?”

“I think so,” she said in almost a whisper.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Just lashing out.”

“We need people in the project at Alta Dena, in Farensca. It’s not easy, creating a sense of community after all that’s happened. Those sociometricians—”

“Haven’t a clue about making it work, I know. Good for diagnostics and precious little else.”

“Yes.” Her fine-boned face took on a bleak, introspective look.

“I think you should stay over tonight.”

“Yes, of course.”

The front door clicked open then, Alexandria returning with lean cuts of flank steak. The mere presence of so much meat implied that the occasion was festive, and Nigel resumed chopping, silent, pondering the details of whether to open a bottle of red wine before the cooking began. Without having time to absorb the meaning of what Shirley had said, he slipped into the routine and ritual of evening.

Each time with Shirley he found some new depth, some unexplored flavoring, a sea change. The revelation always came at that place where all parts of her converged; his head cradled between her thighs, the salt musk aswarm in his nostrils. Alexandria’s presence was a warm O sliding on him. He was an arched segment of their ring. His hands stretched toward where Shirley and Alexandria intersected, Shirley’s black hair mingling with Alexandria’s pubic brown. His arms made an unsuccessful chord to the circle, too short; he turned his hands and felt the puckering of Shirley’s nipple. His tongue worked. Shirley was moist and cool under his massaging hand. The equilibrium between the three shifted and resolved: Alexandria’s tongue fluttered him to new heat; Shirley drew down Alexandria’s breasts, cupping them and rolling the perked nipples between her long fingernails, like marbles. Here they were at their best, he knew. Here the machinery of their bodies spoke what words could not or would not. He felt Shirley’s edgy tension in her hip which trembled with concealed energy. He sank into Alexandria’s encased calm, her mouth fluid and impossibly deep. He felt his own knotted confusion focus in a thrusting jerk, battering against her slick throat. Yes, here was their center. Loving, they hauled each other’s bodies as though they were sacks of sand, stacking them against the waters that surrounded Alexandria, and thus now enveloped all three of them. Shirley moved. Her legs released him and her hand caressed the back of his neck where two rigid bands of muscle formed a valley between. She smiled in the dusky light. Their bodies moved to a new geometry.

Four

Since having an auto available was an unusual treat, Nigel took Alexandria to work the next morning. Shirley had waved away the invitation to drop her in Alta Dena; it would be wasteful, and anyway she had her motorbike with her. She coasted down the street for a block, started the engine with a preliminary rattle, rounded a corner and was gone.

Alexandria was intent on the Brazilians, getting ready for the second day of negotiations. The employees’ committee was divided on the terms American Airlines should ask, afraid that control would slip out of the country and into hands they didn’t understand. Alexandria’s job was to soothe their fears without endangering the course of the bargaining. She still didn’t know whether she agreed with the deal or not.

Nigel took his time driving up the gentle sloping hills. He took a route shaded by long stands of eucalyptus, and rolled down the window to breathe the fresh, minty smell. To his surprise he found that the subject of Alexandria and lupus did not float unbidden to the surface of his mind, again and again. Somehow the night had washed him free of it, for the moment.

This area was unfamiliar; he passed by several blocks of gutted ruins. Only the blackened corners of buildings remained, jagged spires thrusting from a sea of lush weeds. He slowed to study them, to determine whether they were remnants of the earthquake, or the result of one of the “incidents” that had raged over the last two decades. The quake, he guessed; there were no obvious, yawning craters, and the flaking walls were unpocked by heavy-caliber fire.

By the time the craft entered the system it knew the planetary population. Of the nine planets, four held promise. All but the farthest inward could be resolved into a disk now. There was a completely clouded world near the star. Next outward came the smaller radio-emitter; it showed sharp oxygen lines and an occasional blue glint hinted at oceans. A smaller world came next, dry and cold, with odd markings.

But for now the craft’s attention focused on the fourth possibility, the huge banded giant. Its radio emissions were broad, covering much of the spectrum, as though the source were natural. But they seemed keyed to an amplitude pattern that repeated nearly identically, at a constant period.

The pinkish-brown world seemed an unlikely site for a technological society. Other considerations entered here, however: time and energy. The craft’s engines worked inefficiently at these low speeds. Yet it needed to alter momentum and flatten its trajectory into the plane of the ecliptic. A flyby of the large planet could save engine strain and time. Looping through its gravitational field, picking up momentum from the vectoring forces, would allow a detailed study while the ship was launched sun-ward along a more desirable course.

Its higher functions debated.

With a mild rumble it altered the timbre of its engines. Gas giant or no, the radio pattern could not be ignored. It swung smoothly toward the waiting world.

“The aft camera nailed it,” Nigel said.

“What? You found the trouble?” Lubkin got up with surprising agility and walked around his desk.

“No malfunction. Those echoes were real, the engineers pegged it right. We’ve got a Snark.”

Nigel tossed a shelf of fax sheets on the desk. They were shiny even in the muted office light, yellow squiggles on green stripping.

“Snark?”

“Mythical English creature.”

“Something’s really out there?”

“These are optical and spectroscopic analyses. Telemetry errors already corrected and numerically smoothed.” He pulled one sheet from the pile and pointed at several lines.

“What is it?”

“Our Snark gives off all the lines of a fusion torch burning pretty bright. Nearly a billion degrees.”

“Come on.” Lubkin gave him a skeptical look, eyes screwed up behind his pale glasses.

“I checked it with Knapp.”

“Damn,” Lubkin said. He shook his head. “Funny.” “J-Monitor got one clear look at it before Callisto came into the way again. Couldn’t avoid that, even with the new orbit we put it into.”

He slid a glossy optical photograph out of the stack. “Not much to see,” Lubkin said.

Near one corner was a tiny orange splotch against a dead black background. Lubkin shook his head again. “And this was through the small-angle telescope? Must be pretty far away.”

“It was. Almost all the way diagonally across the Callisto orbit. I don’t think we’ll be able to spot it again on the next pass.”

“Any radio contact?”

“None. No time. I tried when I first came in this morning, registered something—didn’t know what, right away—couldn’t get a good enough fix on it, with that photo. The narrow radio beam that Monitor’s main dish puts out needs a better fix.”

“Try again.”

“I did. Callisto got in the way, then Jupiter itself.” “Shit.”

Both men stood, hands on hips, staring down at the fax sheets. Their eyes traced through the matted patterns, noting details, neither of them moving.

“This is going to be pretty big news, Nigel.”

“I expect.”

“I think we ought to sit on it for a while. Until I get a chance to speak to the Director.”

“Ummm. Suppose so.”

Lubkin looked at him steadily.

“There’s not much question about what this thing is.” “Not one of ours,” Nigel said. “Dead on about that.” “Funny, you discovering it. You and McCauley are the only men who’ve ever seen anything alien.”

Nigel glanced up at Lubkin, surprised. “That’s why I stayed in the program. I thought you knew. I wanted to be where things were happening.”

“You guessed something would?” Lubkin seemed genuinely startled.

“No. I was gambling.”

“Some people are still pretty hot about Icarus, you know.”

“I’ve heard.”

“They might not like your being—”

“Up theirs.” Nigel’s face hardened. He had answered Lubkin’s questions about Icarus years before and saw no reason to reopen the past now.

“Well, I was only… I’ll be seeing the Director—”

“I found it. I want in on it. Remember that,” he finished savagely.

“The military is going to remember last time.” Lubkin spread his palms open in a conciliatory gesture.

“And?”

“Icarus was dangerous. Maybe this thing is, too.” Nigel scowled. Politics. Committees. Jesus.

“Bugger all,” he said. “Hadn’t we best figure where it’s going? Before fretting about what to do if it gets here?”

The gas giant had been a disappointment. The nonrandom radio emissions were natural in origin, keyed to the orbital period of its reddish inner moon. Methodically, the craft analyzed the larger moons and found only ice fields and gray rock.

As it whipped by the giant planet on an artful parabola, it decided to focus on the water world. The signals from there were clearly artificial. But as it did so, a brief radio burst caught its attention. The signal showed high correlations, but not enough to rule out a natural origin; there were many well-ordered phenomena in nature. Incredibly, the source was nearby.

Following standing orders, the ship retransmitted the same electromagnetic signal back at the source. This happened several times, quite quickly, but with no sign from the source that the ship’s transmission had been received. Then, abruptly, the signal stopped. Nothing spiked up from the wash of static.

The ship pondered. The signal might well have had a natural cause, particularly in the intense magnetic fields surrounding the gas giant planet. Without further investigation there was no way to decide.

The source seemed to be the fifth moon, a cold and barren world. The ship was aware that this moon was tidelocked to the gas giant, keeping the same side eternally facing inward. Its revolution with respect to the ship was therefore rather slow. It seemed unlikely, then, that the source of the radiation would have slipped below the visible edge so quickly.

As well, the signal strength was low, but not so weak that the ship could not have detected it before. Perhaps it was another radiation pattern from the belts of trapped electrons around the planet, triggered by the fifth moon rather than the first.

The ship thought and decided. The hypothesis of natural origin seemed far more likely. It would cost fuel and time to check further, and the region near the gas giant was dangerous. Far wiser, then, to continue accelerating.

It moved sunward, toward the warming glow.

Nigel worked late on a search-and-survey program to pick up the Snark’s trail. He hadn’t much hope of it working because Jupiter Monitor wasn’t designed for the task, and the Snark’s departing velocity would carry it out of range soon. But there was a lift to his steps as he left and he hummed an old song in the darkened corridors. As a boy he’d watched the old film cassettes and had an ambition to be John Lennon, to strut and clown and warble and become immortal, launch himself into history with his vocal cords. It had been years since he’d remembered that obsession. The period lasted for a year or so: gathering memorabilia, hiring a guitar by the week, rummaging through a song or two, posing in profile for the mirror (backlighting himself in blue, sporting a cap, fluffing out his hair), learning the surprisingly undated slang. The dream faded when he learned he couldn’t sing.

Near the entrance he did a little two-step, whistling, lifting, lilting, and then pushed out into the dimming spring sunlight.

The exit guard stopped him. She looked at his badge photograph and then back at his face.

“Can’t match up this ruined visage with that cherubic photograph?”

“Oh, sorry. I knew you worked here, sir, and I’m new, I hadn’t seen you. I saw you on Three-D when I was a girl.” She smiled prettily at him and he felt suddenly considerably older.

He trotted for the bus, snagged it and waved to the guard as he swung aboard.

Fame. Lubkin envied him for it, he knew, and that fact alone was enough to make him wince and laugh at the same time. Hell, if he’d wanted the limelight he’d have stayed in the most visible part of the program, the cylinder cities being built at the Lagrange points. Create a world, fresh and clean. (Cylcits, the 3D called them, a perfectly American perversion of the admittedly whorish language—almost as bad as skyscraper, from the last century.)

No. He’d been lucky, is all, fearsomely lucky, to get even this post.

When they pried him and Len out of the shoe-box accommodations of the Dragon, and then tiptoed away from the legal scuffle, Nigel had learned a lot. The attacks from The New York Times were mosquitoes compared to what awaited them at NASA. Still, the public experience prepared him for private infighting. Parsons, who was head of NASA at the time, had sent Nigel off as a boy, really, quick and serious, able to lower his breathing rate and slow his metabolism at will with self-hypnosis. The Icarus furor made him a man, gave him time to water the bile that built up inside him, so that some humor remained.

Admittedly, he was less than a second Lindbergh. But he slicked down his hair and when the Night of the Long Knives loomed up within NASA, he went public with the facts. He snared a retrospective interview on 3D, made some well-timed speeches, flashed his teeth. When asked about Cheshire-cat-David’s role in the mission, he invented a limerick about him that NBC cut from their early evening show, but CBS left in.

Business picked up. He appeared on a mildly intellectual talk show and revealed a better than passing acquaintance with the works of Louis Armstrong and the Jefferson Airplane, both of whom were coming back into vogue. He was interviewed during a long hike through the Sierras’ Desolation Wilderness, wearing a sweat suit and talking about meditation and respect for closed lifesystems (such as Earth). Not great material, no. But 3D execs proved to be an odd breed; anything that tickled their noses they thought was champagne.

He was inordinately lucky. Something would boil up from his subconscious and he would put it into a sentence or two, and suddenly Parsons or Cheshire Dave would be in trouble. He hit them about duplicity in the Icarus incident, about cutting the cylinder cities program (truly stupid, that; the first city was already giving birth to whole new zero-g and low-temperature industries that could save the American economy).

And in the sweet rushing fullness of time, Parsons was no longer director of NASA.

Cheshire Dave was execing somewhere in Nevada, his grin slowly coming unstuck.

A news commentator said Nigel had a talent for telling the right truth at the right time—right for Nigel—and it was doubly surprising when the faculty left him, utterly, after Parsons resigned. Some NASA execs urged him to keep it up, kick over a few more clay-footed troglodytes. But they did it in secluded corners at cocktail parties, muttering into their branch-water-and-bourbons about his maneuvering skill. He shrugged them off, and knew their feral admiration was misplaced. He had done in Parsons and Dave out of sheer personal dislike, no principle at all involved, and his subconscious knew it.

As soon as the irritants vanished, the sly Medici within him slid into slumber, the venom drained from him and Nigel returned to being a working astronaut.

Such as it was.

NASA sensed his potential power (once stung, twice paranoid) and—lo—retained him and Len on active status. Len opted for orbital maintenance work. Nigel wangled for the moon.

The older men were thoroughly married and nearing forty, reeking of oatmeal virtues. NASA was having to pay its way in economic payoffs, so they wanted the moon explored quickly, for possible industrial uses. The cylcits needed raw materials, Earth needed pollution-free manufacturing sites, and it all had to come at low rates. So into an age leached of glory came the return of gallant men, bleached hair cropped close to the skull. Into their ranks he wormed his way, for an eighteen-month sojourn at Hipparchus Base on the moon.

His rotation schedule back on Earth turned into a permanent post. The economy was reviving, men could be trained who were younger, quicker of eye, leaner and harder. He and Len still kept up their minimum capability requirements in the flight sim at Moffatt Field, and every three months flew to Houston for the full two-day primer.

Someday he might get back into zero-g work, but he doubted it. His waist thickened, the loyal sloshing of his heart now ran at a higher blood pressure and he was forty-one.

Time, everyone hinted, to move on.

To what? Administration? The synthetic experience of directing other people’s work? No; he had never learned to smile without meaning it. Or to calibrate the impact of his words. He said things spontaneously; his entire life was done in first draft.

He stared out at the carved Pasadena hills. Some other career, then? He had written a longish piece on Icarus, some years back, for Worldview. It had been well received and for a while he’d contemplated becoming immersed in litbiz. It would give him a vent for his odd, cartwheeling verbal tricks, his quirky puns. Perhaps it would drain the occasional souring bile that rose up in him.

No, thumbs down to that. He wanted more than the act of excreting himself onto pieces of paper.

He snorted wryly to himself. There was an old Dylan lyric that applied here: the only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keepin’ on.

Like it or not.

Five

“It started in on my ankles this afternoon.”

He stopped, his hand halfway raised to beckon a waiter. “What?”

“My ankles ache. Worse than my wrists.”

“You’re taking the chloroquine?”

“Of course, I’m not stupid,” Alexandria said irritably. “Perhaps it takes a few days to settle in. To have an effect,” he said with false lightness.

“Maybe.”

“You may feel better after you’ve had a bite. What about the birani?”

“Not in the mood for that.”

“Ah. Their curries are always sound. Why don’t we share one, medium hot?”

“Okay.” She sat back in her chair and rolled her head lazily from side to side. “I need to unwind. Order me a beer, would you? Lacanta.”

In the layered air, heavy with incense, she seemed to hover at a dreamy distance. Two days had passed since he’d spotted the Snark and he hadn’t told her yet. He decided this was the right moment; it would distract her from the ache in her joints.

He caught a waiter’s eye and placed their order. They were cloistered near the back of the restaurant, sheltered by a clicking curtain of glass beads, unlikely to be overheard. He spoke softly, scarcely above the buzz of casual conversation provided by the other diners.

She was excited by the news and peppered him with questions. The past two days had revealed nothing new, but he described in detail the work he’d done in organizing the systematic search for further traces of the Snark. He was partway through an involved explanation when he noticed that her interest had waned. She toyed with her food, sipped some amber beer. She glanced at diners as they entered and left.

He paused and dug away at the mountain of curry before him, added condiments, experimented with two chutneys. After a polite silence she changed the subject. “I, I’ve been thinking about something Shirley said, Nigel.”

“What’s that?”

“Dr. Hufman recommended rest as well as these pills. Shirley thinks the best rest is absence from the day-today.” She gazed at him pensively.

“A vacation, you mean?”

“Yes, and short trips here and there. Outings.”

“This Snark thing is going to snarl up my time pretty—”

“I know that. I wanted to get in my bid first.”

He smiled affecionately. “Of course. No reason we can’t nip down to Baja, take in a few things.”

“I have a lot of travel credit built up. We can fly anywhere in the world on American.”

“I’m surprised you want to give up a great deal of time, with these negotiations going on.”

“They can spare me now and again.”

As she said it the expression altered around her brown eyes, her mouth turned subtly downward and he saw suddenly into her, into a bleak and anxious center.

It was late when they left the restaurant. Some of the more stylish stores were still open. Two police in riot jackets checked their faxcodes and then passed down the street. The two women stopped most of the people they met, taking them into the orange pools beneath the well-spaced street lamps and demanding identification. One woman stood at a safe distance with stun-club drawn while the other dialed through to Central, checking the ferrite verimatrix in the faxcodes. Nigel was not looking when, a short distance away, a woman suddenly bolted away from the police and dashed into a department store. The man with her tried to run, too, but a policewoman forced him to the ground. The other policewoman drew a pistol and ran into the store. The man yelled something, protesting. The woman rapped him with her stunclub and his face whitened. He slumped forward. Muffled shots came from inside the department store.

Their bus arrived. Nigel climbed on.

Alexandria stood still, hand raised halfway to her face. The man was trying to get to his knees. He rasped out a few words. Her lips curled back in distaste and she started to say something. Nigel called her name. She hesitated. “Alexandria!”

He reached down toward her. She climbed the steps numbly, legs stiff. She sat down next to him as the bus doors wheezed shut. She breathed deeply.

“Forget it,” Nigel said. “That’s the way it is.”

The bus hummed into motion. They glided past the man on the sidewalk. The policewoman’s knee was in his back and he stared glassily at the broken paving. All the details were quite clear in the faintly orange light.

Before Lubkin could finish his drawling sentence Nigel was out of his chair, pacing.

“You’re damned right I object to it,” Nigel said. “It’s the most stupid bloody—”

“Look, Nigel, I sympathize with you completely. You and I are scientists, after all.”

Nigel thought sourly that he could quite easily marshal a good argument against that statement alone, at least in Lubkin’s case. But he let it ride.

“We don’t like this secrecy business,” Lubkin went on. He chose his words carefully. “However. At the same time. I can understand the need for tight security in this matter.”

“For how long?” Nigel said sharply.

“Long?” Lubkin hesitated. Nigel guessed that the rhythm of his prepared speech was broken. “I really don’t know,” the other man said lamely. “Perhaps for the indefinite future, although”—he speeded up, to cut off Nigel’s reaction—“we may be speaking of a mere matter of days. You understand.”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“Who has the say in this?”

“Well, the Director, of course, he was the first. He thought we should go through military channels as well as civilian.”

Nigel ceased pacing and sat down. Lubkin’s office was illuminated only around his desk, the corners gloomy. To Nigel’s mind’s eye the effect of the pooled light was to frame him and Lubkin as though in a prizefighter’s ring, two antagonists pitted across Lubkin’s oaken desk. Nigel hunched forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the other man’s puffy face.

“Why in hell is the goddamned Air Force—”

“They would find out about it anyway, through channels.”

“Why?”

“We may need their deep space sensor network to track the, ah, Snark.”

“Ridiculous. That’s a near-Earth net.”

“Maybe that’s where the Snark is heading.” “A remote possibility.”

“But a nonzero one. You have to admit that. This could be of importance in world security, too, you know.”

Nigel thought a moment. “You mean if the Snark approaches Earth, and the nuclear monitoring system picks up its fusion flame—”

“Yes.”

“—and thinks it’s a missile, or warhead going off—” “You must admit, that is a possibility.”

Nigel balled his fists and said nothing.

“We keep this under our hats by telling no one extra,” Lubkin said smoothly. “The technicians never got the whole story. If we say nothing more they’ll forget it. You, I, the Director, perhaps a dozen or two in Washington and the UN.”

“How in hell do we work? I can’t oversee every flamin’ planetary monitor. We need shifts—”

“You’ll have them. But we can break the work down into piecemeal studies. So no one technician or staff engineer knows the purpose.”

“That’s inefficient as hell. We’ve got a whole solar system to search.”

Lubkin’s voice became hard and flat. “That’s the way it’s going to be, Nigel. And if you want to work on this program …” He did not finish the sentence.

She shook him gently in the night, and then more roughly and finally he awoke, eyes gummy and mind still drifting in fog.

“Nigel, I’m afraid.”

“What? I…”

“I don’t know, I just woke up and I was terrified.”

He sat up and cradled her in his arms. She burrowed her face into his chest and shivered as though she were cold. “Was there a dream?”

“No. No, I just…my heart was pounding so loud I thought you must have heard it and my legs were so cramped… They still hurt.”

“You had a dream. You simply don’t remember it.” “You think so?”

“Certainly.”

“I wonder what it was about?”

“Some beastly bit from the subconscious, that’s always what it is. Settling the accounts.”

She said in a weak, high voice, “Well, I wish I could get rid of this one.”

“No, the subconscious is like the commercial bits on Three-D. Without them sandwiched in, you’d get none of the good programming.”

“What’s that sound?”

“Rain. Sounds like it’s pissing down quite heavily.” “Oh. Good. Good, we need it.”

“We always need it.”

“Yes.”

He sat that way the remainder of the night, finally falling asleep long after she did.

At the Los Angeles County Museum:

Alexandria leaned over to study the descriptive card beneath the black and gray sculpture. “Devadasi performing a gymnastic sexual act with a pair of soldiers who engage in sword-play at the same time. This scene records a motif for a spectacle. South India. Seventeenth Century.” She arched her back in imitation of the Devadasi, getting about halfway over.

“Looks difficult,” he said.

“Impossible. And the angle for the fellow in front is basically wrong.”

“They were gymnasts.”

Reflectively: “I liked the big one back there better. The one who carried men off in the night for ‘sexual purposes’—remember?”

“Yes. Delicate phrasing.”

“Why did she have a touch-hole in her vulva?” “Religious significance.”

“Ha!”

“Maintenance purposes, then. It probably short-circuited the occasional desire to carve one’s initials in her.”

“Unlikely,” she said. “Ummm. ‘The eternal dance of the Yogini and the lingam,’ it says, on this next one. Eternal.” She gazed at it for a long moment, and then turned quickly away. Her mouth sagged. She wobbled uncertainly on the glossy tiles. Nigel took her arm and held her as she limped toward a row of chairs. He noticed that the gallery was oddly hushed. She sat down heavily, air wheezing out in a rush. She swayed and stared straight ahead. Her forehead beaded with sudden perspiration. Nigel glanced up. Everyone in the gallery had stopped moving and stood, watching Alexandria.

“She ought to quit that damned job now,” Shirley said adamantly.

“She likes it.”

Nigel sipped at his coffee. It was oily and thick, but still probably better than what he could get at work. He told himself that he should get up and clear away the breakfast dishes, now that Alexandria had left for her meeting, but Shirley’s cold, deliberate anger pinned him to the dining nook.

“She’s holding on, just barely holding on. Can’t you see that?” Her eyes flashed at him, their glitter punctuated by the high, arching black eyebrows.

“She wants to have a hand in this Brazilian thing.” “God damn it! She’s frightened. I was gone—how long? five minutes?—and when I came back she was still sitting there in that gallery, white as a sheet and you patting her arm. That’s not healthy, that’s not the Alexandria we know.”

Nigel nodded. “But I talked to her. She—”

“—is afraid to bring it up, to show how worried she is. She feels guilty about it, Nigel. That’s a common reaction. The people I work with, they’re guilty over being poor, or old, or sick. It’s up to you and me to force them out of that. Make them see themselves as…”

Her voice trickled away. “I’m not reaching you, am I?”

“No, no, you are.”

“I think you ought to at least persuade her to stay home and rest.”

“I will.”

“When she’s feeling better we’ll take a trip,” Shirley said quickly, consolidating her gains.

“Right. A trip.” He stood up and began stacking plates, their ceramic edges scraping, the silverware clattering. “I’m afraid I haven’t noticed. My work—”

“Yes, yes,” Shirley said fiercely, “I know about your damned work.”

He awoke in a swamp of wrinkled, sticky sheets. July’s heat was trapped in the upper rooms of this old house, lying in wait for the night, clinging in the airless corners. He rolled slowly out of bed, so that Alexandria rocked peacefully in the slow swells of the water’s motion. She made a foggy murmur deep in her throat and fell silent again.

The cold snap of night air startled him. The room was not close and stifling after all. The sweat that tingled, drying, had come from some inner fire, a vaguely remembered dream. He sucked in the cool, dry air and shivered.

Then he remembered.

He padded into the high-arched living room and switched on a lamp where the light would not cast into the bedroom. He fumbled among the volumes of the Encylopaedia Britannica and found the entry he wanted. Reading, he groped for the couch and sat down.Lupus erythematosus. May affect any organ or the overall structure of the body. Preference for membranes which exude moisture, such as those of the joints or those lining the abdomen. Produces modified antibodies, altered proteins. For long intervals symptoms may subside. Spreading through the body is usually undetectable until major symptoms arise. Communication to the central nervous system has become a consistent feature of the disease in recent years. Studies relating disease incidence and pollution levels show a clear connection, though the precise mechanism is not understood. Treatment—

Until this moment it had not seemed truly real.

He read through the article once, then again, and finally stopped when he found that he was crying. His eyes were stinging and watery.

He put the volume back and noticed a new book on the shelf. A Bible bound in ridged acrylic. Curious, he opened it. Some pages were well thumbed. Shirley? No, Alexandria. Had she been reading it, even before their conference with Hufman? Had she suspected in advance? He sat down and began reading.

Six

“The President does not know how long, Nigel,” Lubkin said sternly. “He wants us all to hold on and try to find it.”

“Does he think anybody can suppress news about something this big forever? It’s been five months now. I don’t think the Washington or UN people will keep quiet much longer.”

Once more they were framed in the pool of light around Lubkin’s desk. The one window in the far wall let in some sunlight, giving Lubkin’s sallow skin a deeper cast of yellow. Nigel sat stiffly alert, lips pressed thin.

Lubkin casually leaned back in his chair and rocked for a moment. “You aren’t hinting that you might…?”

“No, rubbish. I won’t spill it.” He paused for a second, remembering that Alexandria knew. She could be trusted, he was sure. In fact, she didn’t seem to quite grasp the importance of the Snark, and never spontaneously spoke of it. “But the whole idea is stupid. Childish.”

“You wouldn’t feel that way if you had been with me at the White House, Nigel,” Lubkin said solemnly.

“I wasn’t invited.”

“I know. I understand the President and NASA wanted to keep the number of attendees down. To avoid attracting notice from the press. And for security reasons.”

The trip had been the high point of Lubkin’s career, clearly, and Nigel suspected he burned to tell someone about it. But at JPL only Nigel and the Director were privy to the information, and the Director had been present at the White House, anyway. Nigel smiled to himself.

“The way the President put it was really convincing, Nigel. The emotional impact of such an event, coupled with the religious fervor afoot in the country, in fact in the world … those New Sons of God have a senator to speak for them now, you know. They would kick up quite a bit of dust.”

“Which wing of the New Sons?”

“Wing? I don’t know…”

“They come in all colors and sizes, these days. The fever-eyed, sweaty-palmed ones can’t count to twelve without taking off their shoes. If they have any. The intellectual New Sons, though, have a doctrine cobbled together about life existing everywhere and being part of the Immanent Host and that sort of thing. So Alexandria says. They—” Nigel stopped, aware that he’d begun to rattle on about a side issue. Lubkin had a definite talent for deflecting from the point.

“Well,” Lubkin said, “there are also the military people. They’re pretty nervous about this thing.” Lubkin nodded unconsciously to himself, as though this last statement needed added weight.

“That’s bloody simple-minded. No species from another star is going to come all this way to drop a bomb on us.”

“You know that. I know that. But some of the generals are worried.”

“Whatever the hell for?”

“The danger of triggering the Nuclear Warning Net, though that is reduced now that more participants know of the, ah, Snark. There is also the possibility of biological contamination if this thing should enter the atmosphere…”

Lubkin’s voice trailed off and both men stared mood-ily for a long moment at a eucalyptus tree that dripped steadily from the light gray fog outside the window. The continuing alteration in the world weather cycle made these fall fogs more intense each year; the process was understood but beyond control.

Lubkin tapped his pen on his desk’s polished sheen and the ticking rhythm echoed hollowly in the still room. Nigel studied the man and tried to estimate how Lubkin was dealing with the politics of this situation. He probably saw it as a matter of containment, of separate spheres of activity. Lubkin would do what he could to keep Nigel toeing the line, keeping mum, and rummaging around the solar system after the Snark. Meanwhile, Lubkin could play the steely-eyed, competent, can-do type back at the UN. To harried diplomats someone like Lubkin, with hard, sure answers, must seem like a good bet, a bright candidate for better things.

Nigel twisted his lips and wondered if he was becoming cynical. It was hard to tell.

“I still believe we have an obligation to tell the human race about this. The Snark isn’t merely another strategic element,” Nigel said.

“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, Nigel.”

There was no reply. Outside drops pattered silently in a moist, gray world, beading the pane.

“You do acknowledge the need for secrecy in this, don’t you? I mean, despite your personal feelings, you will maintain security? I would—”

“Yes, yes, I’ll go along,” Nigel said testily.

“Good, very good. If you hadn’t, I’m afraid I would have had to remove you from the group. The President was very firm about it. We, nothing personal, of—”

“Right. Your only concern is the Snark.”

“Uh, yes. About that. There was a little concern about attaching such an odd, mythical name to it. Might excite interest, you know, if anybody overheard. The UN Chancellor’s office suggested we give it a number, J-27. With twenty-six discovered Jovian moons, this is the next, you see—”

“Um.” Nigel shrugged.

“—but of course, the main interest expressed by the Chancellor lay in finding out where we can expect it next.”

Nigel saw he could wait no longer. The card in his hand couldn’t be turned into a trump, so he might as well play it. “I think I may already know,” he said evenly.

“Oh?” Lubkin brightened and leaned forward gingerly.

“I guessed the Snark would follow a reasonably energy-saving orbit. No point in squandering essentials. Given that, and the crude Doppler shift measurement we got of its fusion flame, I figured it for a long, sloping orbit in toward Mars.”

“It’s near Mars?” Lubkin stood up excitedly, his distant manner forgotten.

“Not any more.”

“I don’t—”

“I’ve been putting in a lot of hours on the Mars Monitors. Used that blanket budget charge and had the camera and telescope rigs doing a piecemeal scan of the available sky around Mars. The program ran round the clock and I’d check the results each day. I got behind. Yesterday I found something.”

“You should’ve told me.”

“I am telling you.”

“I’ll have to call Washington and the UN at once. If the object is in orbit around Mars now—”

“It isn’t.” Nigel folded his arms, a faint sour taste in his mouth.

“I thought you—”

“The Snark was outward bound, away from Mars. I got two shots, spaced hours apart. The data was from seven days ago. I looked again today, when I finally read that week-old readout, but it’s gone, out of resolving range.”

Lubkin seemed dazed. “Already left,” he said slowly. “Even with only two points, the flight path is pretty clear. I think it must’ve done a gravitational rebound, looping in for a quick look and picking up momentum from the encounter.”

Nigel was standing now, and he walked leisurely over to Lubkin’s blackboard. He leaned against it, hands behind his back and resting on the chalk tray, elbows cocked out. He stood in the dim light, where Lubkin could not quite make out the expression of wry superiority on his face. He brushed away drifting swirls of yellow chalk dust and studied the other man. He was glad for once to have Lubkin on the defensive, in a way. Perhaps the Snark riddle could deflect the man from his fascination with generals and presidents.

Lubkin looked puzzled. “Where is it going next?” “I think…Venus,” Nigel said.

The ship knew, even before leaving the banded giant planet, that the next world inward was barren, a place where reddish dust stirred under the touch of cold, thin winds. Absence of a natural life system did not rule out inhabitants, however. The craft recalled several other such worlds, encountered in the distant past, which supported advanced cultures.

It elected to fly past the planet without orbiting. This would subtract more angular momentum during the gravitational “collision,” readying the ship for the venture further inward.

This loomed all-important now, for the blue and white world demanded most of the craft’s attention. Many overlapping radio signals chorused out from it, a babble of voices.

A debate ensued within the ship.

Matters of judgment were decided by vote between three equally able computers, until intelligent signals could be deciphered. Only a short while remained until a preliminary breakdown of the incoming transmissions was complete. Then, still higher elements of the craft would be warmed into life.

One of the computers held out for an immediate change of orbit, to skip the dry pink world and drive on, burning more fuel, toward the blue world.

Another felt that the bewildering torrent of radio voices, weak but all different, bespoke chaos on the third planet. Best to allow ample time for deciphering these confusing signals. The minimal energy course involved yet another flyby, looping by the second planet, the world which was shrouded in thick, creamy clouds. This path would trade time for fuel, a clever bargain.

The third computer wavered for a moment and then cast its lot with the second.

They hurried; the parched disk ahead swelled quickly. The craft swept by this world of drifting dust and icy poles, storing the collected data on tiny magnetic grains deep within itself; one more entry in a vast array of astronomical lore.

The craft damped the rumble of its fusion torch and began the long glide toward the wreathed second planet. Intricate steps began in the final revival of its full mental capacity. Meanwhile, electromagnetic ears cupped toward the blue world, catching whispers of many tongues. Understanding a single language without knowing any common referents would require immense labor. Indeed, the attempt might fail. The craft had failed before, in other systems, and been forced to leave in the face of hostility and misunderstanding. But perhaps here…

The machines set to work eagerly.

He and Shirley sat on the hard-packed sand and watched Alexandria gingerly wade into the foaming white waves. She held her forearms up with each successive wash of cold water in a curious gesture, as though the lifting motion would pull her, loft her up and away from the chilling prick of the ocean. Her breasts swayed and jounced.

“It’s good to see her getting in,” Nigel said conversationally. He and Shirley had spent a good ten minutes coaxing Alexandria into activity.

“It is cold,” Shirley said. “You suppose there’s some runoff from…?” She waved a lazy finger at the blue-white mountain that peaked above the rippling surface of blue. The iceberg floated a few kilometers offshore, slightly south of Malibu.

“No, they ring it pretty tight. Float most of the fresh water in on top of the ocean water.” A slight cooling wind stirred the sand around them. “That breeze might be coming over the berg, though,” he added.

Alexandria was now bouncing in the scalloping waves. A spray of surf burst over her. She emerged, hair stringy and now a darker brown, shook her head, blinked and resolutely dove into the deepening trough of the next wave. She breast-stroked out with sudden energy.

“This was a good idea, Shirley,” he said. “She’s responding to it.”

“I knew she would. Getting her away, out of that deal with the Brazilians, is the only thing that’ll work.”

“Is that what you learned during these nightly jaunts of yours?”

“Ah ha,” she said with a slowly drawn smile. “You’re wondering where we go.”

“Well, I did…”

Nearby, an old man, barrel chest supported by wiry tanned legs, pointed offshore. “Hey. Ya,” he said.

Nigel followed the man’s trembling index finger. Alexandria was floundering in the undertow. An arm appeared, grasping. She rolled in the soapy white. Her head jerked up, jaws agape to suck in more air. She paddled aimlessly, arms loose.

Nigel felt his heels digging into the gritty sand. From the dunes to the hissing water’s edge was downhill and he covered it in a few strides. He leaped high and ran through the first few breaking waves. He tumbled over the next wave, regained his feet and blinked back stinging salt.

He could not see Alexandria. A curving wall of water rose up, sucking at his feet. He dove into it.

As he surfaced something brushed his leg, soft and warm. He reached down into the frothing white suds and pulled up. Alexandria’s leg poked out of the surf.

He set his feet solidly and heaved upward. She came up slowly, as though an immense weight pinned her. He stumbled in the riptide, blue currents rushing around his legs.

He got her face clear. Awkwardly he manhandled her body until she was facing down. He swatted her on the back and a jet of water spurted from her throat.

She gasped. Choked. Breathed.

He and Shirley stood just inside the ring of strangers. Their blunt stares fixed on the young man who was talking to Alexandria calmly, filling out spaces in his clipboarded form. Afternoon sunlight bleached the scene and Nigel turned away, his muscles jumping nervously from residual adrenalin.

Shirley glanced at him with a mingled look of fear and relief. “She, she said there was a feeling of weakness that came over her,” Shirley said. “She couldn’t swim any more. A wave picked her up and slammed her into the bottom.”

Nigel put an arm around her, nodding. His body felt jittery, urging him to action. He looked at the clotted gathering of beachgoers, abuzz with speculations, eyeing the two of them with unasked inquiry. A ring of naked primates. Far down the rectilinear beach a huge restaurant sign promised ERNIE’S SUDDEN SERVICE. Shirley huddled closer to him. Her hand clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed. Absurdly, he noticed that this gesture occurred scarcely centimeters from his penis. At the thought it swelled, thickened, swayed, throwing him into a confusion of emotions.

He hired a cab to drive them from Malibu to Pasadena. It was immensely expensive but Alexandria’s wan and drained expression told him the bus would be intolerable.

On the long drive Alexandria told the story over and over again. The wave. Choking on the salt water. Struggling at the bottom. The pressing, churning weight of water.

In the midst of the fifth telling she fell asleep, head sagging to the side. When they reached home she woke in a fumbling daze and allowed herself to be led upstairs. He and Shirley stripped and bathed her and then tucked her into bed.

They made a meal and ate silently.

“After this, I …” Shirley began. She put down her fork. “Nigel, you should know that she and I have been going to the New Sons in the evenings.”

He looked at her, stunned. “Your… jaunts?”

“She needs it. I’m beginning to think I need it.”

“I think you need …” But he let it fade away, the sharp edge left his voice. He reached across the table and touched the sheen of her cheek, where a tear was slowly rolling down.

“God knows what we need. God knows,” he said hollowly.

Dr. Hufman looked at him blankly. “Of course I can put her into the hospital for a longer time, but there is no need, I assure you, Mr. Walmsley.”

He reached out for one of the stubby African dolls grouped at the corner of his desk. Nigel said nothing for a moment and the other man turned the doll over in his hands, studying it as though he had never seen it before. He wore a black suit that wrinkled under the arms.

“More time wouldn’t help? A few more tests in hospital—”

“The complete battery is finished. True, we shall have to monitor these symptoms more frequently now, but there’s nothing to be gained—”

“Damn it!” Nigel leaned over and swept the collection of dolls off the mahogany desk. “She doesn’t eat. Barely makes it to and from work. She’s, she’s got no zest. And you tell me there’s nothing for it—”

“Until the disease equilibrates, that is so.”

“Suppose it doesn’t?”

“We’re giving her everything we can now. Hospitalization would only—”

Nigel waved him silent with a hand. Abruptly he heard the distant swishing of traffic on Thalia outside, as though suddenly the volume control had been turned up somewhere.

He stared at Hufman. The man was a technician, doing his job, not responsible for the reddening and swelling attacking Alexandria. Nigel saw that, had never doubted that, but now in the compressed airless space of this office the facts smothered him and he sought a way out. There had to be a release from the arrowing of events.

Hufman was gazing steadily at him. In the man’s constricted face he read the truth: that Hufman had seen this reaction before, knew it as a stage in the process, something to be passed through as surely as the aches and spasms and clenching tremors. Knew that this, too, was one of the converging lines. Knew that there was no release.

Seven

Lubkin did not react well when Nigel requested an extended leave.

He appealed to Nigel’s duty to the project, loyalty to the President (forgetting his British origins), to JPL. Nigel shook his head wearily. He needed time to be with Alexandria, he said. She wanted to travel. And—casually, not quite looking into Lubkin’s eyes—he was behind in his flight simulations. To maintain his astronaut status he needed a solid week at NASA Ames, splicing it up so that he was never gone from Alexandria more than a few hours.

Lubkin agreed. Nigel promised to call in at least every two days. They were bringing in new men, Ichino and Williams, to supplement the survey program. If Nigel wanted to interview them now—

Nigel didn’t.

The three of them went to the beach again, partly to exorcise the experience, partly because it was October and the crowds were gone. They lounged, they waded. The women were doing their meditations regularly now. They would face each other, draw the annular circle in the sand between them, link hands and go off into their own mesmerized world. Nigel closed his eyes, back pressed to the sand, and dreamed. Of Alexandria, of the past. Of the years after Icarus.

What put off The New York Times attracted women. They would drift his way at a party, lips pursed, seemingly inspecting Cezanne prints, and abruptly come upon him, round doe eyes widening in polite surprise at his mumbled identity (yes, he was the one), hand unconsciously going to the throat to caress a necklace or scarf, an oddly sensual gesture to be read if he cared.

Often, he did. They were electric women, he thought, yet they sensed in the Icarus even something basic and feral, some mysterious male rite performed beyond the horn-rimmed gaze of pundits and, most importantly, away from women.

They were of many kinds, many types. (How mascu-

line, one of them said, patting blue hair into place, to think of women as types. Embarrassed—this was in New York, where differences were unfashionable that year— he laughed and threw some chablis at the back of his throat and left her soon thereafter, reasoning that, after all, he did not quite like her type.) He sampled them: the Junoesque; the wiry and intense; the darkly almond sensual; the Rubens maiden; the others. How not to call them types? The urge to classify washed over him, to analyze and inspect. At last he came to look upon himself as from a distance, pacing his responses, never moving wholly with the moment. There, he quit. The NASA flack who hovered ever-present at his elbow tried to keep him “alive” on the 3D, circling through the talk shows, to retain his “saturated image,” but Nigel dropped out. And after a while, found Alexandria.

He went for long runs on the beach between La Jolla and Del Mar, keeping in training, churning doggedly by forests of firm young thighs, sun shimmering through a thin haze of sweat that ran into his eyes from bushy eyebrows. Cantilevered breasts—or, more stylishly, bare ones, brown painted nipples pouting in the stinging sun— swung to follow his progress. He loped along the ocean’s foaming margin, feet slapping in water, arms and legs growing leaden, his throat awash in dry pinpricks. He diverted himself by studying the faces that wheeled by, moving stride by stride into his past. Small families, leathery men, dogs and children: he picked roles for them all, ran small plays in his head. He glimpsed them frozen in laughter, boredom, lazy sleep.

One of them had stared straight at him, seen in an instant what his mind’s eye was up to and given him a crooked insane grin, eyes crossed. He slowed, stopped. Tried to read the deliciously red lips. Came closer. And met Alexandria.

The past was really not a scroll or an ornament for the mind to do with as it liked; no. It was a fog, a white cloud made of pale dead brain cells that once stored memory, their loss a sloughing off of detail and everyday incident, until only a few moments, warm random yellow lights, shine through the fog. Whether he had met Shirley first, or Alexandria, was not clear to him any longer. He had been reeling away from the whole oppressive NASA thing, without realizing it, and when Alexandria appeared he washed up on the shore of her. He remembered talking to her, very earnestly, over clear glasses of Vouvray, chilled so that it almost numbed the lips to drink it. Remembered hikes on the southern slopes of Palomar Mountain, past the ruins of the great telescope, lizards scuttling in the sunlight. And dry nights, dim and strange after the setting sun, with that cool stagnancy that pervades the California coastal towns.

Early on, when things were still cementing, Shirley and Alexandria still saw each other separately, in elaborately arranged schedules, but soon they saw the comedy of it and became more natural. Their circle of friends constricted until he and Alexandria became a circle of two, complete together, though not obsessive, not clutching at each other. They each lived in the world, moving and doing, she at American Airlines and he at NASA, but each in an orbit that defined the locus of the center: the place where they both met. About this center Shirley orbited, a moon bound to their planetary influence. Always changing, always shifting, the spaces around the three had still a Pythagorean simplicity, a unity centered on the two—

“Nigel. Wake up, Nigel!”

Shirley loomed over him, blotting out the sun. “We’ve got to go. She’s feeling nauseous again.”

He sat up. Alexandria smiled wanly a few meters away, eyes hollowed and dark, a shadow of the woman he had conjured up a moment before. He wrenched his eyes away.

They took the express coach to the Orange County Fall Fair, coasting high on the Santa Ana freeway above the punctured, burnished ruins of La Mirada and Disneyland, now asprawl with groves of oranges again.

Alexandria potted earnestly at moving dummy targets, felling three with wadded paper bullets and winning a wooden doll that grinned with manic love. They rode the looper, relishing the seconds of delicious free fall. They inspected the implausibly fattened cattle, stared into the blank brown eyes of lambs, stroked the matted heads of baby goats.

A ring of singing New Sons accosted them. Nigel brushed them off and Alexandria lingered behind to speak to them, beyond his earshot.

They sat under cloth umbrellas and ate fair food: tacos, pasta salad, crisp sansejens. Nigel slurped at a tankard.

And Alexandria said with sudden finality, “We should have had children.”

“Alexandria, no, we thought it through. Our jobs—” “But then there would have been something…”

She blinked rapidly, swallowed and bit into her simbani and noodles.

Uncomfortably, Nigel glanced at the next table. A mother was urging her son to finish his taco so that the family could go see the cattle show. “Ummm, mmmm, mommy.” The boy artlessly fumbled the taco into his left hand and dropped it theatrically on the ground. The maneuver was well timed; his mother looked back to see the taco tumble, but not early enough to see his preparations. “Oh,” he said unconvincingly.

“All through,” Alexandria said.

Nigel turned and found she was smiling again.

“Right, I see that. What I can’t make out is why I must have a telltale installed.” Nigel leaned forward, shoulders hunched, elbows on Hufman’s desk. Alexandria sat silent, hands folded. Hufman grimaced and started over:

“Because I can’t rely on Alexandria carrying her pickup monitor everywhere. Her telltale is much more complex than yours—it taps directly into the nervous system—but its radio transmitter hasn’t got enough range. If she got beyond her pickup, she could have a brain stem hemorrhage, go into a coma, and you’d think she was just dozing. But with a pickup telltale inset behind your ear, you’d know something was wrong even if she’d left her monitor behind.”

“And fetch you.”

“An emergency team, not me.” Hufman sighed, looking frayed and tired. “If you two are going to travel or even go on long walks, the telltales are necessary.”

“It won’t screw up my inner ear or my balance, anything like that? NASA has to approve any—”

“I know, Mr. Walmsley. They’ll okay it; I checked.” “Nigel, yours is only an—” Alexandria glanced at Hufman.

“Acoustic transducer,” Hufman supplied.

“Yes. Mine is a complete diagnostic communicator. We’ll both be tagged with the same transmission code, but yours will be, well, just a warning light for mine. You—”

“I know, right,” Nigel said, jerking to his feet. He paced nervously. “You say mine can come right back out, just pop the cork and I’m good as new?”

“Painless.” Hufman regarded him steadily. “We’ll be able to interrogate Alexandria’s diagnostics, or check yours to see if it’s receiving properly, without touching either of you.”

Nigel blinked rapidly, jittery. He hated operations of any kind, could barely tolerate the NASA physicals. But what upset him here was the calm, assured way Hufman and Alexandria talked about the possibility of massive damage to her nervous system. Of a wasting disease, a slow seeping away of function. Then the hemorrhage. Then—

“Of course. Of course I’ll do it. Now that I understand. Of course.”

He flew to Houston for his routine tests and workout. Nigel arrived with two other astronauts, all doing ground work but remaining on standby for deep space operations. They flew in on commercial transport; the days of private planes for astronauts had vanished long before. The other two men were of the usual mold: robust, good-humored, competitive. Nigel weathered the physical tests, including the long-standing worst—cold water, poured in an ear, causing the eyeballs to whirl as the confused brain struggles with input from two semicircular canals, one warm and the other cold; the world tilted madly. Then a day in a practice module, immersed in a universe of switches, manifolds, pipes, tanks, sensors, valves, connectors, hardware without end. They centrifuged him in it, timed his reflexes. He relearned the tricks of breathing under high gs: balloon the lungs and then suck in air in rapid little pants, breathing off the top. Finally, on the fifth day, he arced into a low orbit on a milk-run shuttle craft. In zero g his blood pooled in different parts of his body, fooling the body into thinking that his blood volume had increased. His urine output rose, hormones accumulated, all within the acceptable parameter range. He passed, renewed his credentials, and sped earthward. The shuttle landed in Nevada. He arrived back at their apartment to find that Alexandria had entered the hospital for an overnight biopsy, all standard, and that Shirley was alone there, reading.

He puttered about, unpacking. As they went to bed Nigel realized this was the first time they had spent the night together since the days when he’d first met Shirley, through Alexandria. Even then their intimacy had a forced quality to it, a seeming inevitability without its own intrinsic momentum. Touching her, he worked awkwardly for the right rhythm. They fumbled with each other’s bodies, unfamiliar packages they could not open. At last they gave it up with mumbled apologies, a half-muttered theory about fatigue and the lateness of the hour, and sank into a relieved sleep, back to back, the sheets making a loose tent over the space between them.

In the long afternoons as Alexandria rested, he pored over decades of scientific research and speculations. There was a cycle, he saw: as the twentieth century wore on, the assertion that life was common in the universe rose from the status of an improbability to a common assumption, until the radio listening programs began. Then, after several decades of null results, a certain zest went out of the search. Expensive radio telescopes cupped an ear to the fizzle of interstellar hydrogen, and then, as budgets ran short, the programs died. There was no dramatic change in the scientific underpinning—the evolution of matter seemed to almost require that life arise in many sites—but faith lagged. If the galaxy swarmed with life, why were there no prominent radio beacons left to guide us? Why no galactic library? Perhaps man was simply too impatient; he should listen for a century, calmly, without counting the cost. Nigel wondered how the debate over use of the radio telescopes would shift when word of the Snark became widespread. Did one example of a visitor change the odds that much? Emotionally, perhaps so. The key was the Snark itself.

They still attended parties in the homes of friends, or visited Shirley’s cramped apartment in Alta Dena, but Alexandria found her tolerance for alcohol weakened. She tired early and asked to be taken home.

Her work schedule slipped from three days a week, to two, then one. The Brazilian deal went on, gathering legal complexity, like a ball of wool picking up lint. She fell behind and was given more and more circumscribed tasks to complete.

Nigel resisted Shirley’s persuasions to attend New Sons… meetings? rallies? services? He could not tell whether Shirley went because of Alexandria, or the other way around. Alexandria, knowing him, scarcely mentioned it.

He rose in the early morning and read the New Son books, the New Revelations, the intellectual super structure. It seemed a Tinkertoy religion to him, assembled from the detachable sprockets and gears of earlier faiths. Through the center of it ran the turbine he’d suspected: a parody of the Old Testament God, obsessed with the power of His own name, capable of minute bookkeeping in the lives of the devout, to decide their salvation. This God carried the whole suitcase full of wars, disease, floods, earthquakes and agonizing death to visit upon the unconvinced. And, apparently, believed in preposterous connections between Buddha, Christ, Joseph Smith and Albert Einstein; indeed, had caused them all, with a tweak of the holy hand.

Nigel slammed the New Revelations shut on this mean-minded God, rose and padded quietly into the bedroom. Alexandria lay sleeping, head tilted back and mouth open.

He had never seen her sleep this way before. The thrust of her body seemed to belie the fact of rest. Tense yet vulnerable. He had a sudden perception of death: a small thing moving in from the distance, winging slowly in the night air as she slept. Searching out the house. Through a window. Into the shadowed bedroom. Silent, slow. Fluttering. Fluttering into her sagging mouth.

Eight

Lubkin called frequently. Nigel listened but volunteered little; nothing more had been learned about the Snark, so there seemed no purpose in speculating. Lubkin was all atremble over the President’s appointment of an Executive Committee, headed by a man named Evers, to monitor the situation. ExComm, Lubkin called it. The Committee was meeting at JPL in a week; would Nigel come?

He did, begrudgingly. Evers proved to be a deeply tanned, athletic-looking sort, well groomed and noncommittal. He carried the air of one who had been in charge of things for so long that his leadership was assumed, a fact hardly worth remarking upon. Evers took Nigel aside before the formal meeting and pumped him for an estimate of what the Snark was up to, where it would go. Nigel had his own ideas, but he told Evers that he hadn’t a clue.

The meeting itself proved to be a lot of talk with precious little new data. The Venus rendezvous seemed quite probable now, after detailed analysis of the Mars encounter. Why the Snark should be doing this was another matter. Since the communications satellite nets were completed in the 2010s, Earth was no longer a strong radio or TV emitter. A magnetic implosion-induced rainbow artfully produced in Saudi Arabia was transmitted to Japan by direct beaming through a satellite; no signals leaked out of the atmosphere anymore. It was conceivable that the Snark hadn’t picked up intelligible electromagnetic signals from Earth until it was near Mars. But still, why Venus? Why go there?

Nigel felt a certain wry amusement at Evers and his scientific advisors. When pressed on a point they would hedge and slip into their neutral jargon; a simple “I think” became “it is suggested that”; opinions were given in the passive voice, devoid of direct authorship.

It came to him as the meeting broke up that, compared to this slippery committee and the unreadable Evers, he probably preferred the riddle now riding toward Venus, a thing known only by its blossoming orange fusion flame.

Lubkin called. The Snark did not respond to a beamed radio signal, or to a laser pulse.

Of course not, Nigel thought. The thing isn’t naive anymore. It’s had a squint or two at daytime 3D and grown cautious. It wants time to study us before putting a toe in the water.

More news: Evers was upping the budget. New specialists were being called in, though none was given the whole picture, none knew what all this was really about. The Ichino fellow was working out well. Tracking went on. No sign of the Snark.

Nigel nodded, murmured something and went back to Alexandria.

And Alexandria was right, he saw: the two of them had been on a plateau for years. He recalled the boy at the Orange County Fall Fair. People with children had a natural benchmark. They grew, developed; you could see your effort giving into a living human being, a new element in the world’s compound. Alexandria had climbed up through a corporate anthill. Her progress was merely vertical, without human dimension. The Brazilians would buy the damned airline, that much was clear by now, and how, precisely, could that enter the sum of her life?

Nigel usually left the ExComm meetings as soon as they formally broke up. Without a firm fix on the Snark’s trajectory, there seemed little to discuss. At one of them Lubkin followed him out of the conference room and into an elevator. Nigel nodded a greeting, distracted. He absently scratched his cheek, which was shadowed by a day’s growth of beard, and the rasp sounded loudly in the elevator.

“You know,” Lubkin said abruptly, “the thing I kind of like about a thing like this, a group effort like this with not many people in on the thing, is the way it makes people fall back on each other.”

“So does gin.”

Lubkin laughed in short, sharp barks. “Man, I’m glad Evers didn’t hear you say that. He’d be angry as a toad with the warts filed off.”

“Oh? Why?”

“He, well, he wants to be sure we got a solid group.” “Then he must be having doubts about me.”

“Naw, I wouldn’t say that. We all sort of feel different about you.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know.” Lubkin looked at him earnestly, as though trying to read something in Nigel’s face. “You were there. At Icarus. You’ve seen some things that, well, nobody else in the human race ever will.”

Nigel paused. He chewed his lip.

“You’ve seen the photos I took. They—”

“It’s not the same. Hell, Nigel—what you did—going into Icarus—may have brought the Snark.”

“That radio burst, you mean?”

“Yeah. Why would a derelict send out an intense signal like that?”

Nigel shrugged, lifting his eyebrows in a faintly comical way that he hoped would break Lubkin’s mood. “Beyond me, I’m afraid.”

The elevator door slid aside. “If it’s beyond you, I’m pretty sure it’s beyond all of us, Nigel.” He shuffled his feet, as though vaguely embarrassed. “Look, I’ve got to run. Give my best to Alexandria, will you? And don’t forget the party, eh?”

“Certainly.”

As Nigel left the building he felt good to be getting away from Lubkin, a man he basically found difficult to like, but who had somehow touched him for a moment in that brief conversation. The look on Lubkin’s face reminded him of other people at NASA who had spoken to him in the past, sometimes buttonholing him in lunch-rooms or corridors, total strangers, really, some of them. They wanted to know an odd point or two about Icarus, or ask a technical question that hadn’t been adequately covered in the reports; or so they said. Some were dry and businesslike, others would leave phrases hanging for long moments as if, acutely conscious of Nigel (who was balancing a tray of food, or waiting to go into a meeting, and still did not want to seem rude), they nonetheless could not let him go. Some would mumble for a moment and then beat a retreat, while others, after a moody phrase or two about a detail, would suddenly boom out jovial phrases, wring his hand and be gone before he could reply. And from those encounters would come the same phrases: you were there … you’ve seen some things that… the pictures, not the same… not what it was really like… you were there …

Lubkin and the rest truly did respect him and hold him apart, he saw. Nigel could deduce that people felt some aura around him. He ignored it pretty successfully. Now and then the thought would crop up that this must have happened to the early astronauts. He’d gone and read the books from that era; they didn’t teach him much. He retained a vision of Buzz Aldrin withdrawing into depressive-alcoholic binges, divorcing his wife, living alone, securing the doors and windows of his apartment, unplugging the telephone, and drinking, for days at a time, simply drinking and thinking and drinking. Had his own personality picked up a tinge of whatever demon stalked Aldrin? From the subtle weight of expectations people had? … you’ve been there … touched it … Well, so he had. And perhaps been changed by it. And changed by what people thought of it.

Some days later Nigel’s home console sigmaed a reminding nudge for him, from its memorex. CATEGORY: ASTRONOMY, Ib (Planetary); periodic events, as requested. A partial eclipse of the sun by the moon would be visible from the southern California coast, 2:46 P.M. Pacific Coast Zone Time, two days in the future. So they delayed lunch and made an elaborate picnic on the back lawn. A casserole of beans, onions, chunky beef and spices; cheese, pale yellow; tomatoes, sliced cucumbers; gazpacho; artichoke frittatas with lime sauce; a sound Pinot Noir; finally, macadamia-nut ice cream. Alexandria ate with gusto. She forked the frittatas between her teeth in precise, squarely cut wafers, leaning back on one stiffened arm, an extended hand buried to the wrist in fresh grass. Her red skirt slid off her raised knees and down, exposing thighs of parallel whiteness to the sun’s sting, a sun already bitten at its edge. This lazy motion, laying bare the ashy white inside of her thighs as though they were a new and secret place, caught at something in his throat. Above them, the moon devoured the sun. She lay back on the grass with a sigh and motioned to him to put on the filmed glasses they’d bought. Nigel rested his head against the firm and rounding earth, feeling it curve away beneath him and roll off toward the horizon. He realized for a moment that he was, indeed, pinned by Mr. Newton to what was in fact a ball, a sphere, and not the misleading flatland men thought themselves to inhabit (and reminded himself that a savage, according to Dr. Johnson, was a person who saw ghosts, but not the law of gravity). Some of the earliest observations of eclipses, he recalled from the memorex, were made from the intellectual fulcrum of ancient Alexandria. There, in Ptolemaic times and after, the great library blending Greece and Rome had stood—until, in some minor scramble of a war, it had burned. He blinked. Darkness gnawed at the sun. Alexandria beside him asked questions and he answered, his words slurred by the Pinot Noir and the muzzy haze of afternoon sunlight. But the warmth ebbed. A chill came across the lawn. The eating above continued, an abiding darkness chewing the center from the sun. It was a partial eclipse. Slowly a curtain drew across the dead but furious matter above, carving the star into a crescent, Nigel saw suddenly, an incomplete circle with horns that yawned open and unconnected, its tips burning bright with mad energy. Something in him turned, I am dying, Egypt, dying, it squeezed his throat, and he blinked, blinked to see the chewing everlasting pit that hung above them.

Nine

Alexandria insisted that they go the Lubkins’. The idea somehow caught her interest and brought a glinting life to her eyes. She had always gotten into the spirit of holidays with more zest than he, and now the early weeks of December lifted her mood. Nigel mentioned it to Hufman. The doctor, relying on lab reports, thought she might have reached a stable plateau. Perhaps the drugs were working. The disease might go no further.

As if on cue, Alexandria improved more. She bought a dress that artfully exposed her left breast and found a shirt for Nigel with ruffled black-and-tan sleeves. Nigel felt conspicuous in it when they arrived at the Lubkins’ party, but within half an hour he had knocked back the better part of a bottle of a Chilean red he’d found at the bar. Alexandria was her old self; she took up a corner position in the living room and the guests, mostly JPL-related, gradually accumulated around her. Nigel talked to a few people he knew but somehow the flow of words between mind and tongue never got going. He prowled Lubkin’s home, staring out at the evening fog that seeped uphill toward them through a stand of jacaranda trees. The house was in the new style, worked stone and thin planking, with huge oval windows overlooking the hazy view of Pasadena.

“Say, Nigel, I thought you’d like to know Mr. Ichino.” Nigel turned woodenly. Lubkin’s introduction had come unexpectedly and Nigel was not prepared for the short, intense man who held out a hand. He normally thought that Japanese faces were impassive and unreadable, but this man seemed to radiate a quiet intensity before he’d even said anything.

“Ah, yes”—they shook hands—“I gather you’re to look into the telemetry and computer hookups to Houston.”

“Yes, I shall,” Ichino said. “I have been overseeing the general aspects of the problem so far. I must say your programming for the Snark search pattern was admirable.”

At this last sentence Lubkin stiffened.

“I am sorry,” Ichino said quickly. “I shall not mention such terms again in public.”

Lubkin’s face, drawn and strained, relaxed slightly. He nodded, looked at the two men indecisively for a moment and then murmured something about looking after the drinks and was gone. Ichino compressed his lips to hide a smile. A glance passed between him and Nigel. For an instant there was total communication.

Nigel snickered. “Art has been defined”—he sipped at his wine—“as adroitly working within limitations.”

“Then we are artists,” Mr. Ichino said.

“Only not by choice.”

“Correct.” Mr. Ichino beamed.

“Have you picked up the, ah, object yet?”

“Picked up…?” Mr. Ichino’s walnut-brown forehead wrinkled into a frown. “How could we?”

“Radar. Use Arecibo and the big Goldstone net together.”

“This will work?”

“I calculate that it will.”

“But everyone knows we cannot follow deep space probes with radar.”

“Because they’re too small. Admittedly we’ve never seen the, the thing, so we don’t know its size. But I used the apparent luminosity of its fusion flame and estimated what mass that exhaust was pushing around.”

“It is large?”

“Very. Couldn’t be smaller than a klick or two on a side.”

“Two kilometers? Using Arecibo we could easily—”

“Precisely.”

“You have told Dr. Lubkin of this?”

“No. I rather thought somebody would’ve looked into it by now.”

From the look on Mr. Ichino’s face, Nigel could see quite clearly that the usual Lubkin style was still in force; Lubkin was doing what he was told. Innovation be damned and full speed ahead.

A tray of edibles passed by. Nigel took some violet seascape paste and smeared it on a cracker. He felt suddenly hungry and scooped up a handful of wheatmeats. He asked the waiter after more of the Chilean red. Ichino was partway through a delicately phrased recital of what was happening in the Snark search—apparently, damned little—when the red arrived. Nigel allowed an ample quantity to slosh into his glass and gestured expansively: “Let’s move round a bit, shall we?”

Ichino followed quietly, ice tinkling in his watery drink. Nigel ducked down a hallway, nudged open a door that was ajar. The family rec room. He peered around at the usual furniture netting, console desk and sim-sensors.

“Big screen, isn’t it?” He crossed over to the pearly blank 3D. He thumbed it on.

—A man in an orange and black uniform, holding a long, bloody sword, was disemboweling a young girl—

—The thing in silvered dorsal fins made an explicit gesture, grinning, eyes fixed. Male? Female? Ambig? It murmured warmly, twisting—

“Bit juicy, looks like,” Nigel said, switching away. “Perhaps we should not be witnessing his private channel selections …” Mr. Ichino said.

“True enough,” Nigel said. He flipped over to full public circuits. “Haven’t seen one this big in quite a while.”

A gaudy picture swam into being. The two men watched it for a few moments. “Ah, he’s a hibernation criminal, you see,” Nigel said, “and he is set on destroying this underwater complex, so’s the woman there, the one in red—” He stopped. “Dreadful stuff, isn’t it?” He spun the dial.

—The oiled bodies snaked in long lines. They formed the sacred annular circles under the glare of spots, off-camera, which did not wash out the log fire that blazed angrily at the center, sparks showering upward. Feet pounded the worn earth. A hollow gong carried the beat. Spin. Whirl. Stamp. Sing.

“Even worse than before,” Mr. Ichino said mildly. He reached out to the dial. Nigel stopped him. “No,” he said.

—Chanting, spinning in a dizzy rhythm, the bodies glistened with sweat. Their ragged chorus swelled into new strength.Running living leaping soaringBrimming loving flying dyingOnly once and all togetherJoyful singing love forever

Annular circles orbited about the central fire. Spin. Whirl. Stamp. Sing.

“Overall,” Nigel drawled, “I think I would prefer opium as the religion of the masses.”

“But you err there, sir,” a voice said from the doorway. A roly-poly man stood there with Alexandria. His eyes glimmered out from folds of flesh and he laughed deeply.

“Bread and circuses we need. We cannot provide infinite bread. So—” He spread his hands expansively. “Infinite circuses.”

Introductions: he was Jacques Fresnel, French, completing two years of study in the United States. (“Or what’s left of it,” Nigel added. Fresnel nodded uncertainly.) His subject was the New Sons in all their branches and tributaries. So Alexandria had struck up a conversation with him and, sensing an interesting confrontation, led him to Nigel. (And Nigel, despite the fact that the New Sons were not a favorite topic, felt a surge of happiness at this sign of her new liveliness. She was mixing and enjoying things again, and socializing better than he was at this party.)

“They are, you see, sir, the social cement,” Fresnel said. He held his glass between two massive hands as though he would crush it, and gazed at Nigel intently. “They are necessary.”

“To glue together the foundations,” Nigel said blandly. “Correct, correct. They have only this week unified with numerous Protestant faiths.”

“Those weren’t faiths. They were administrative structures with no parishioners left to keep them afloat.”

“Socially, unification is paramount. A new binding. A restructuring of group relationships.”

“Nigel,” Alexandria said, “he thinks they are a hopeful sign.”

“Of what?”

“The death of our Late Sensate culture,” Fresnel said earnestly.

“Passing into—what?—fanaticism?”

“No no.” He waved the idea away. “Our declining Sensate art is already being swept aside. No more emptiness and excesses. We shall turn to Harmonious-Ascendant-Ascetic.”

“No more Nazis gutting blonds for a thrill on the Three-D?”

Alexandria frowned and glanced at Lubkin’s pearly 3D, now blank.

“Certainly not. We shall have mythic themes, intuitive art, work of sublime underlying intent. I do not need to stress that these are the feelings we all sorely lack, both in Europe and here and in Asia.”

Alexandria said, “Why does that come next, after Sensate?”

“Well, these are modified views, taken from the strictly schematic outline of Sorokin. We could pass into a Heroic-Promethean, of course”—he paused, beaming around at them—“but does any of us expect that? No one feels Promethean these days, even in your country.”

“We are building the second cylinder city,” Mr. Ichino said. “Surely construction of another world—”

“A fluctuation,” Fresnel said jovially. He touched a fingertip to his vest. “I am always in favor of such adventures. But how many can go to the—the cylcits?”

“If we build them fast enough with raw materials from the moon—” Alexandria began.

“Not enough, not enough,” Fresnel said. “There will always be such things, and they are good, but the main drift is clear. The last few decades, the horrors of it— what have we learned? There will always be dissenters, schismatics, deviants, holdovers, dropouts, undergrounds, heretics even, and of course the reluctant or nominal conformers.”

“They are the majority,” Mr. Ichino said.

“Yes! The majority! So, to do anything useful with them, to channel and funnel that stupendous energy, we, we must place—how is it said?—all these under one roof.” Fresnel made a steeple of his hands, his stone rings like gargoyles.

“The New Sons,” Nigel said.

“A true cultural innovation,” Fresnel said. “Very American. Like your Mormons, they add whatever elements are missing from traditional religions.”

“Stir, season to taste and serve,” Nigel said.

“You’re not truly giving it a chance, Nigel,” Alexandria said with sudden earnestness.

“Bloody right. Anyone for drinks?” He took Alexandria’s glass and made off toward the bar.

The carpet seemed made of spongy stuff that lifted him slightly into the air after each step. He navigated through knots of JPL people, flashing an occasional automatic smile and brushing away from contact with others. At the bar he scooped up a basket of pumpkin seeds, roasted and salty and crisp. The Chilean red was gone; he switched to an anonymous Bordeaux. Mr. Ichino materialized at his elbow. “You remain an active astronaut, Mr. Walmsley, I understand?”

“So far.” He downed the Bordeaux and held out his glass to the bartender for a refill.

“Should you be watching your weight?”

“A good eye you have. Quite good.” Nigel prodded a finger into his stomach. “Gaining a bit.”

“Alcohol has a remarkable number of—”

“Right. Apart from stuff like cement, which I presume you aren’t taking in by the handfuls, strong drink—love that phrase—is the worst thing possible for cramming on the kilos. But wine—the dryer, the better—isn’t. Scarcely more in a glass than a few grams of macadamia nuts. If you could get macadamias any more, I mean.”

He stopped, aware that he was probably talking too much. Mr. Ichino nodded solemnly at Nigel’s advice and asked the barman for beer. Nigel watched owlishly as the icing of suds rose. “Back to the sociometrician?” he said, and the two of them returned to the rec room.

A small knot of people had formed around Fresnel. Most of them had fashionably midnight-black hair, trimmed exactly to the shoulders. They were discussing Humanistic-Secular. The prime point in question seemed to be the use of electronically enhanced gloves by the Pope, and whether this meant he would throw in with the New Sons. Media said the two were jockeying over the issue; a computer-human linkup had predicted absorption of the Catholics within three years, based on assignable sociometric parameters.

Nigel beckoned to Alexandria and they drifted away. Shirley appeared, arriving late. She kissed Alexandria and asked Nigel to fetch her a drink. When he returned, Alexandria was talking to some Soviets, and Shirley drew him aside.

“Are you going with us?”

“Where?”

“The Immanence. We do so want you to go with us to see him, Nigel.”

He studied her eyes, set deep above the high cheekbones, to read how serious she was. “Alexandria has mentioned it.”

“I know. She said she’s making no progress. You just clam up about it.”

“Don’t see much point in talking nonsense.”

“You apparently don’t like talking to us at all,” she said with sudden fire.

“What’s that mean?” he asked, bristling.

“Ohh.” She slammed her fist against the wall in dramatic emphasis. She rolled her eyes and Nigel couldn’t stop himself smiling at the gesture. She should have been an actress, he thought.

“Nigel, damn it, you are not flexing with this.” “Don’t follow the slang, sorry.”

“Ohh.” Again the rolling eyes. “You and your language fetishes. Okay, in one syllable. Alexandria and I don’t know where you are any more.”

“Hell, I’m home with her most of the day.”

“Yes, but—Lord!—emotionally, I mean. You keep working on this thing, whatever it is, at JPL. Reading your damned astronomy books. Alexandria needs more of you now—”

“She’s getting plenty,” Nigel said a bit stiffly. “You’re closed off in there, Nigel. I mean, some gets through, but …” Shirley knitted her eyebrows together in concentration. “It never struck me before, but I think that might be why you fit into a triad. Most men can’t, but you…”

“I’d imagine a triad requires more communication, not less.”

“Of a kind, I suppose, yes. But Alexandria is the center. We orbit around her. We don’t have a true threeway.”

She leaned against the padded hallway wall, shoulders slumped forward, studying the carpet. Her left breast, exposed, teardropped in the soft shadows, its tip a brown splotch. Nigel suddenly saw her as more open, more vulnerable than she had seemed in months. Her pastel dress bunched at hips and breasts and somehow made her appear nude, as though the material protected without concealing. The oval on her left breast hung as an eye into a deeper layer of her.

He sighed. He was aware of the breath leaving him as a thick alcoholic vapor, a liter of stuff so substantial he half expected to see the cloud hang in the hallway, un-mixed with the customary air. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “I will go and see this fellow if you wish. It must be before we leave though—a week from now.”

Shirley nodded silently. He kissed her with an odd gravity.

Three people, chattering, came out of a nearby room and the mood between them was broken.

Mr. Ichino left early. Damned early, Nigel thought muzzily, for he had liked the man on sight. It was a good party, too, quite good. Lubkin’s affairs in the past had been straightaway the most boring of a sad lot of parties that sprouted up around the moribund jollity of the Xmas season. Keep the X in Xmas, he thought, making another round to the bar. The Bordeaux was finished off but a passable California claret went down nicely. Lubkin wasn’t being mean-minded about his wine, much to his credit. No poisonous California rotgut reds, no mysterious mixtures. Nigel realized dimly that he was pretty well into a substantial piss-up. Better yet, all done at Lubkin’s expense. He had half a mind to search out Lubkin and thank him profusely, meantime sloshing down a gratifyingly large quantity directly in his presence.

He set out on this mission and found himself negotiating a surprisingly difficult corner getting out of the rumpus room. (Did Lubkin allow an occasional rumpus in the rumpus room? Just a sweet beheading or two, in full color, Chinese cleavers and all? No, no; the disorderly nature of the cleaning-up would offend the man.) The angle of the corner was obtuse, opaque. He had noticed the floor plan was pentagonal, with occasional jutting intrusions, but how was he to get his bearings?

He sat down to clear his head. People drifted by as if under glass.

He pondered the opaque angle. Oddities of the language: angle, with two letters interchanged, spelled angel. Easy, so easy. One transposition rendered the comfortably Euclidean into—pop—the orthodoxly religious. Two letters alone could leap that vast, abiding chasm. Absurdly easy.

Up again, and off. In the living room he sighted land, in the persons of Shirley and Alexandria. They were foci for the usual knot of JPL engineers, men with close-cropped hair and cheap ballpoint pens still clipped in their shirt pockets. They smiled wanly as he approached, looking as though they had just been shaken awake.

Nigel skimmed past these constellations on a flyby, then ricocheted from conversation to conversation in the hollow living room:

—So Cal lost its appeal to the regional EIB?

—Sure. I expected it.

—So our water quote’s cut again?

—Sure. Factors into an eighteen-thousand-person popdrop, mandatory. We’ll make it up from fractional decline. Slowed immigration laws will come through. And the Federal Regional Support Allotments will be shaved. We—

Onward:

—Suppose we’ve got the terrorists stopped on plutonium 240? So what? Since the New Delhi incident we know the damned Asians can’t be trusted to—

Onward:

—and I loved that scene with the semen all over the stage, just frozen CO₂ really but what an effect, jizzing into the audience—

Here and there Nigel began talking, feeling the sentences form whole inside before he’d begun them. He unzipped the floppy covers from words, made them pop out quick and shiny. People peered at him as though down a pit, from a height. Words merged together.

Nigel: You pronounce “clothes” as though it were “close.”

Woman: Well, aren’t they the same?

Nigel: How about “morning” and “mourning”?

And then away, to the bar, where some decent hock burbled out into his uplifted glimmering glass. He sipped. A riesling? Too sweet. Gewürztraminer? Possibly.

The room was unsuitably warm. He moved through the heavy, cloying air. Crescents of sweat had blossomed under his armpits. He made for the rec room.

Vacant. The 3D. He thumbed it on. The screen flickered wetly at him and melted into an overview of the two annular circles. Bodies laced together. A voice boomed out over the crowd. Bread and wine. Come to fullness.

No communion rail and wafer, not here. No baptismal dunking, no empty Jewish phrases muttering about a Pharaoh in a tongue they can’t understand. No ritual. The real religion straight from the wellsprings. Only once and all together. Joyful singing love forever. Sic transit, Gloria.

Nigel reeled away to the opposite wall, yellowed by a spotlight. He punched at a button, stabbed another. Family Music Center, it said.

Good, right. Try for a bit of Eine Kleine Krockedmusik.

He dialed. Wellsby’s choral improvisations swelled out of the speaker. He stabbed again. Jazz: King Oliver. Brassy trumpet, drums. But where was the Bach? The sixties, one of his favorite Beatles? Or did he have to settle for some modern cacophonist?

He turned back to the 3D. Stabbed once more.

The writhing New Sons, again. Make a joyful noise unto the horde.

He punched at the buttons.

The black swastika vibrated against the orange uniform. The gleaming tip of the sword bit into the girl’s stomach. She begged, crying. The man shoved upward and the sword sank deep. Blood spattered from her. She lunged against the cords binding her hands but this only made the sword slice crosswise. She screamed. The crimson laced down her legs.

Nigel wrenched it off. He was sweating; it ran into his eyes. He wiped his brow and wheeled away.

He paused in the hallway to steady himself. Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man. Welcome to the 21st century. Sic transit, Gloria. Or was it Alexandria?

He made his way to the patio. Cool air washed over him. The fog below had layered above the jacaranda trees, haloing the lights of Pasadena. Nigel stood, breathing deeply, watching the gathering mist.

“Mr. Walmsley? I wanted to continue our discussion.” Fresnel advanced from the opened slideway, framed by the murmuring party beyond.

The frog comes in on little flat feet, Nigel thought. He tossed his wine glass away and turned to meet the man.

“Surely you understand, don’t you, that we have all, all of us, come at last to terms with ourselves? With our finiteness? Our little amusing perversions? Mr. Lubkin’s Three-D was demonstrative. It illustrates how far we have come. Progressed. Econometrics—”

Nigel watched his fist blossom in midair and home with elliptical accuracy on Fresnel’s forehead. There was a fleshy smack. Fresnel staggered. Lurched. Did not fall. Nigel set himself and estimated the geometry of the situation with a precise eye. Fresnel was wobbling, a difficult, challenging target. The man’s face beaded with perspiration in the silvery light. Nigel launched his left fist along an ascending parabola. Angle into angel. There was a jolting impact. Flesh colliding, wetly. His hand went numb. Lick the lips: salty. Fresnel melted away. His nostrils sucked in a rasping new breath. Nigel tottered. Relaxed. He studied the fog layer. It was tilting. Tilting in the smooth air. It seemed to take a long time.

Ten

His Immanence resided in a recently purchased Baptist church. The building squatted on a scruffy, midwestern-looking street corner among the flatlands of lower Los Angeles. Nigel squinted at it skeptically and slowed his walk, but Alexandria and Shirley, on either side of him, tugged him on.

They’d never have gotten him here but for a moment of contrition over Fresnel. Scarcely anyone at the party’d noticed except Alexandria, who glimpsed Nigel tipping over. Fresnel had been insulted but surprisingly, dismay-ingly unhurt; the women had been shocked; Nigel had rather enjoyed the whole bash, and still relished the memory of Fresnel going down, ass over entrails.

He braced himself for the ordeal to come. They entered through a side door and passed through a large auditorium packed with saffron-robed figures being lectured. Shaved heads, bright garlands of flowers. The salty tang of Japanese food. Through a clicking beaded curtain, out the back door, around the temple. They entered a small garden through a bamboo gate, nosily slipping the latch.

A small, browned man sat in lotus position on a broad swath of green. A breeze bestirred the trees overhead. The man regarded him with quick, assessing yellow eyes. He gestured for the three of them to sit and Alexandria produced three round yellow pads for them. Nigel sat in the center.

They exchanged pleasantries. This was a wing of the New Sons, those who felt in tune with the eastern roots of man’s religious heritage. This seated man with his face of sagging flesh was an Immanence, for there was no one sole Immanence, just as a universal God had an infinite store of representations.

Nigel explained, with long uncomfortable pauses, his own rational skepticism about religion in any form. Most men sought some undefinable something, and Nigel admitted he did too, but the grotesque distortions of the New Sons—

The Immanence plucked a leaf from a bush and held it to Nigel’s eyes. He blinked and then stared at it steadily.

“You are a scientist. Why would anyone spend his life studying this leaf? Where was the gain?”

“Any form of knowledge has a chance of resonating with other kinds,” Nigel replied.

“So?”

“Suppose the universe is a parable,” Nigel said uncertainly. “By studying part of it we can read the whole.”

“The universe within a grain of sand.”

“Something like that. I feel the laws of science and the way the world is put together can’t be accidents.”

The Immanence pondered a moment.

“No, they are not accidents. But except for their practical use, they were always unimportant. The physical laws are but the bars of a cage.”

“Not if you understand them.”

“The central point is not to study the bars. It is to get out of the cage.”

“I think the act of reaching out is everything.”

“If you would come to fullness you must stop reaching and manifest a more basic spirit.”

“By dancing in two circles?”

“Another facet of the Many Ways. Not ours, but a Way.”

“I have my own way.”

“This world can best be understood as an insane asylum. Not an asylum for the mind, no. For the soul. Only the flawed remain here. Are still here.”

“I have my reaching out to do here. Out between the bloody bars, if that’s the way—”

“That is nothing. You must try to escape and transcend the cage.”

Nigel began to speak rapidly and the old man waved away his points.

“No,” he said. “That is nothing. Nothing.”

Rubbish, Nigel thought. Utter rubbish, what that dried prune of a man had said.

So thinking, he dipped a wing.

The airfoil caught and he felt a tug, pressure. Up he went, the momentary image of that dreadful Immanence bloke fading as quickly as it had come (odd, to think of it here, now) and the wind sang through the struts.

“How is it, Nigel?” Alexandria’s voice came in his ears.

“Incredible,” he said into his throat mike. He peered down at the spinning earth—which the instructor had warned him against, but what in hell was the point, really, if you couldn’t do that?—and saw her, an orange speck.

“Can you hold the spiral?” she called.

“Bit tough on the arms,” he grunted.

“The instructor says to relax into the harness.” “Right. I’m trying. Oops—” He lurched. The glider bit into a surge of wind and climbed sharply. The invisible funnel of air, warm as it swept in from the Pacific, lofted him further up his lazy spiral. The wind rose like a transparent fountain here on the coast, where breezes moving landward struck first the steep hills and then the westward wall of Arcosoleri, the kilometer-high city of cubes and apses. Nigel glanced at the glittering windows of the Arc as he swooped nearer it, judging the distance. He still had a safe margin of distance from the pinkish concrete face. The circling tunnel of air held him in check.

Below, the turning world.

Purple-ripe clouds mottled the arc of the sea’s horizon, showers of rain like skirts beneath them. And here, Nigel, banking and rising, felt a sensation like a swoosh of breath leaving him as his spirit lifted free of this spiraling body and joined the air. He shook himself. It was as though he had stopped struggling, stopped trying to swim through mud. The scooping wind moaned at the slit in his face mask and he tilted his wings to rise higher, Icarus re-born as he left behind everything below him. It was all in the past now, he hoped—Alexandria was recovering, the Snark was on its way. A pure blind joy possessed him. The unacknowledged fear that had gripped him at the beginning of the flight now fell away like a weight and he felt smooth and sleek, birdlike, darting in these high winds. Corkscrewing up, up from the enveloping earth. Soundless happiness. Mortality seeped out of him, froze in the chill high air and fell to shatter with a crystal tinkling on the California below. He turned in a slow circle, carving Earth’s skin of air, glinting ocean waves below waving at him randomly. A wing foil flapped, then straightened. Icarus. Wax wings. Do not go softly into this good sky. Soaring. The spinning Earth a basket below. The twin dots of Shirley and Alexandria like pins on a mapcoins in his lapYes.He lofted free.

They stayed overnight in a luxury suite of the Arc, rather than catch a bus southward to Los Angeles. Shirley dialed a holo and Nigel lay back in their room’s center pit, letting the delicious ache that came from exercise seep through him.

“Do you really think NASA will approve of your taking a chance like that?” Shirley said.

“Ummm? Flying a one-man glider, you mean?” Nigel shrugged. “Whacking lot they can do now.”

“I thought you were supposed to check with them on anything dangerous.”

“Piss on ’em and leave ’em for dead.” Nigel sighed noisily and watched quick splashes of color flick, jewel-like, across the inside of his eyelids.

“You don’t feel boxed in by what they’ll think?” “Hardly.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind signing an endorsement of a People’s Referendum?”

Nigel opened his eyes lazily. The holo abstract was a seething vision two meters above the pit, like an oozing ruby in oil. “What for?”

“To prohibit sale of LHS foods.”

“LHS?” Nigel frowned. A signer of a People’s Referendum Call guaranteed that he would help pay for the cost of having a nationwide vote on the issue in question, if it was turned down by the voters.

“Left-Handed Sugars. You know. We digest only sugars with a right-handed spiral molecule in them.”

“That’s what natural sugars are—right-handed.”

“Yes. Only now they’re making left-handed ones to use in food, so the body doesn’t turn them into fat. It’s a kind of diet food.”

“So what?”

“Well, it’s an insult to other countries to have that happening. When people are starving, I mean, almost everywhere. Will you sign, Nigel?”

He tilted his head back and studied the seamed concrete vault above them. Someone had once asked him to sign a Referendum Call against this Arc, even while it was becoming obvious that the first one, Arcosanti, was already an enormous success. It was still growing faster than Phoenix, which lay sixty klicks to the south of it, and yet wasted no space or energy on transportation systems. Everyone who lived inside it was within a fifteen-minute walk of work, play, entertainment, shopping. It had the urban complexity without the Losangelization, the separation from nature. But somebody had opposed it, for reasons now forgotten.

He sighed. “Think not.”

Her “Oh?” was carefully put.

He opened his eyes again and studied her. She wore the simplest of black dresses. Long panels of gossamer cloth hung down from a deep neckline. They were artfully arranged to hint at the tanned flesh beneath. She had a well-scrubbed sheen on her nose but her face was clouded by an odd, compressed tension.

“Shirley, old girl, you know I’m no revolutionary.” “Do you feel the same way about what those Brazilians want to do?” she said sharply. “They’ve got great little ideas about how to make the airline cost-effective again.”

“How?” Nigel said guardedly.

“During peak periods, when the computers don’t have enough solid-state electronics banks left to do the job, they’re planning to use human neural inventories.”

Nigel blinked, surprised. “Alexandria didn’t tell me.” “She probably doesn’t want to bother you while you’re busy planning your trip.”

“Probably… But look, why not use animals to tap into, for computer memory?”

“They don’t have—what’s it called?—anyway, they lose detail too easily.”

“Holographic data-storing capability, you mean.” He paused. “I’d heard about the experiments, but…With the cost of manufacturing computers these days, and the power drain, I suppose it’s smart economics…”

“Is that what you say? Economics? To hook poor people into machines, rent out their frontal lobes?”

“Granted, it’s unappealing. A zombie life, I suppose.” “It’s beneath human dignity.”

“How dignified is it to starve to death?”

Shirley leaned forward and said fiercely, “Do you really believe such a simple-minded—? You do, don’t you? Nigel, you’re greedy. You don’t know a thing about social problems and you want your life undisturbed.”

“Greedy?”

“Of course! Look at this room. It’s packed with every rich man’s amusements—”

“I didn’t notice you hanging back at the threshold.” “Okay, I enjoy a holiday too. But—”

“Why aren’t you down in Brazil? That’s what those types are going to do, isn’t it?—use grunt labor from Brazil to beef up—you’ll excuse the phrase?—American computers? Why not go down there and work with the poor people on the spot, in some little dimple of a burg?”

“This is my home,” Shirley said stiffly. “The people I love are here.”

“So they are. And you have wondrous thighs, Shirley, but they can’t encompass all the world’s teeming troubles.”

“Sarcasm won’t—”

“Listen.” Nigel cocked his head. “Alexandria’s coming in from her walk. I don’t want a chuffup over this, Shirley. I want no bother before we go off. Right?”

She nodded, her mouth twisted slightly as though under pressure.

Nigel saw that the mood in the room would be detectable when Alexandria came in, so he leaned back, yawned elaborately and began in a heavy Welsh accent,

Eleven

He and Alexandria lifted three days later. They had booked well in advance to get a flight over the poles; they reentered the atmosphere as a flaring pink line scratched across the sky of the north Atlantic.

Matters were a bit better in England than during their last visit several years before. There were only a few shambling beggars at the baggage checkout, and they seemed to have valid licenses. Most of the terminal was lighted, though not heated. Their helicopter to the southlands lifted free with a clatter into the chilling winds. Coal smoke blotted out the London sprawl.

They reached their destination easily: a well-preserved English inn about three hundred and fifty years old, well run and securely guarded. They spent Christmas there, snug in the battering winds. The next day they hired a guard and a limousine and visited Stonehenge.

Nigel found the experience oddly moving. In spirit he was scarcely an Englishman anymore after the welfare state had turned into the farewell state. These massive thrusting columns, though, spoke to him of a different England. The heel stone was so marvelously aligned, the celestial computer so accurate, he felt a kinship with the men who had made it. They had thrust these gray measuring fingers at a clockwork sky, to understand it. The New Sons had long since played up the pantheistic side of the Druids, popularly thought to be the builders of this stone heap, never mentioning the rest—that these were not men who followed others’ ideas senselessly.

Nigel looked out at the road where a gang of altered chimps was repairing wash damage. They cradled their special shovels and flicked mud thirty meters in one toss. Alexandria stood beside him, biting absently at a fingernail: evolutionary remnant of animal claws. He shivered and took her back to the inn.

Paris was depressing. The second day of freezing in a darkened hotel ended with a shutdown of water pressure throughout the city for the rest of the week.

The pleasure domes of the Saudis were thronged. Cloud sculptors flitted over the desert, carving erotic white giants that coiled ponderously into vast orgasms.

Over South Africa the display was more modest. At evening the swollen elders appeared, wrinkled financial barons, and enjoyed an orchestrated weatherscape as they dined. Nigel and Alexandria watched a vibrating rainbow that framed purple thunderheads, clouds moving with the stately grace of Victorian royalty.

In Brazil, in a restaurant, Alexandria pointed: “Look. That’s one of the men we’re negotiating with for the airline.”

“Which one?”

“The stocky man. Tiltlens glasses. A sway shirt. The briefcut jacket with highlighted trim. Khaki—”

“Right, I see.”

She looked back at Nigel. “Why are you smiling?” “I’ve missed that eye for clothes you have. I never see those things, really.” He reached out to take her hand. “I’ve got you back again.”

A lot of the planet they couldn’t see. In the large areas without resources or industry a white man was an automatic enemy, a child-starver, a thief; the politics of the past thirty years had seen to that. In Sri Lanka they went a block from the hotel to eat. Partway through their curry the muttering in the restaurant and a gathering tension drove them into the sinking street. A passing cab took them back, and then to the airport, and then to Australia.

They were baking on Polynesian sands when his pager buzzed. It was Lubkin. Ichino had relayed the radar search idea to him. They had a blip. It was bigger than two klicks, and spinning. It would rendezvous with Venus inside eleven days if it didn’t accelerate. Lubkin asked if Nigel would return early to run the Main Bay team. Nigel told him he would think about it.

Outside Kyoto, walking a country lane, Alexandria suddenly threw up into a ditch. A two-day biopsy showed no change in her condition from three months before. Her organic systems seemed stable.

Her pocket telltale hadn’t made a sound. Nigel checked his skull set. It was active. It beeped on command. Alexandria simply hadn’t been ill enough to trigger it.

The next day she felt better. The day after that she was eating well. They went on a hike. As she slept, afterward, Nigel called ahead and cancelled the rest of their reservations. He fluxed through to Hufman; the man’s face showed on the screen as a wobbling mask. Hufman thought Alexandria needed a rest near home.

They took the next jet to California, arcing high over the pale Pacific.

Twelve

The Main Bay: a crescent of consoles, each sprinkled with input boards like a prickly frosting. Men sitting in roller chairs were stationed at each console, watching the green/yellow screens flicker with a blur of information. The Bay was sealed; only staff members directly involved in the J-27 project were present.

“Arecibo has acquisition,” Nigel said.

The knot of men around his chair buzzed with exclamations. Nigel listened to his headphones. “They say the Doppler confirms a flyby orbit.”

“You check with Arecibo?” Evers said at Nigel’s elbow.

Nigel shook his head. “Our satellite, Venus Monitor, can’t get a radar fix. This is all we have.” He tapped in programming instructions on his keyboard.

“Spectrographic reading,” Lubkin explained. A telemetered photo was being drawn on the screen line by line. At the top edge of the screen was a tiny point of light, scarcely more than a few bright dots on the picture tube.

“Spectral intensity shows it’s hot. Must be a pretty fiendish fusion torch.” Nigel looked up at the men from NASA, Defense and the UN. Most of them clearly couldn’t make sense of the wavelength plot being displayed; they scowled in the fluorescent glow of the Main Bay, looking out of place in their stylish green suits.

“If it is on a flyby course it will almost certainly come here next,” Evers said to the other men.

“Possibly,” Nigel said.

“It may attempt to land, bringing unknown diseases with it,” Evers went on smoothly. “The military will have to be able to stop such an eventuality.”

“How?” Nigel said, ignoring a raised finger from Lubkin that plainly told him to remain silent.

“Well, ah, perhaps a warning shot.” Evers’s expression pinched slightly. “Yes,” he said more brusquely, looking at Nigel. “I’m afraid we will have to determine that for ourselves.”

The group broke into conversation.

Lubkin tapped Evers’s arm. “I think we should try to signal again.”

Evers nodded. “Yes, there is that. The ExComm will work out the message. We have some hours left to discuss it, don’t we?” He turned to Nigel.

“Three or four at least,” Nigel said. “The men need a break. We’ve been at it over ten hours.”

“Good. Gentlemen,” he said in a booming voice, “this area is not secure for further discussions. I suggest we retire upstairs.”

The group began moving off under Evers’s direction. Lubkin beckoned Nigel to follow.

“I’ll stay here for a bit. Set up the watch schedule. And I want to go home to rest. I’m not going to be needed in your deliberations.”

“Well, Nigel, we could use your knowledge of…” Lubkin hesitated. “Ah, maybe you’re right. See you later.” He hurried to catch up to the group.

Nigel smiled. Lubkin clearly didn’t relish the prospect of a cantankerous Nigel in the ExComm meeting. Feisty subordinates do not reflect well on their superiors.

He took a JPL scooter home. The tires howled on the corners as he banked and shifted down the hillside avenues, slicing through the dry evening air. Stars glimmered dimly behind a layer of industrial haze. He piloted without goggles or helmet, wanting to feel the rush of wind. He knew handling the Snark-Venus encounter would be tricky, particularly if Evers and Lubkin and their faceless committee designed some transmission. Nigel would then have to sandwich his own in somehow before the Committee caught on. He had been working for months on the code; he’d read all the old literature on radio contact with extra-terrestrial civilizations and adapted some of their ideas. The transmission had to be simple but clearly a deliberate signal to the Snark. Otherwise the Snark would probably assume it had picked up another conventional Earthside station, and ignore it.

Or would it? Why did Snark remain mute? Couldn’t it easily pick up Earth’s local stations?

Nigel gunned the scooter, swooping down the hills. He felt a rising zest. He’d check on Alexandria, who would be home from work soon, then wait for Shirley to arrive and keep Alexandria company while he was gone. Then back to JPL and Venus and the Snark—

He coasted into the driveway, kicked back the stand and bounded to the front door. The lock snapped over and he ran up the winding staircase. At the landing he stopped to fit his key into the apartment lock and was surprised to find his ears ringing. Too much excitement. Maybe he really would need to rest; the Venus encounter would last through until morning at least.

He let himself in. The living room lights glowed a soft white.

Now only one of his ears was ringing. He was more tired than he thought.

He walked through the living room and into the arched intersection of kitchen and dining nook. His steps rang on the brown Mexican tiles, the beamed arch echoing them. The ringing in his head pitched higher. He cupped his hand to an ear.

A woman’s shoe lay on the tiles.

One shoe. It was directly under the bedroom arch. Nigel stepped forward. The ringing pierced his skull. He walked unsteadily into the bedroom. Looked to the left.

Alexandria lay still. Face down. Hands reaching out, clenched, wrists a swollen red.

The ambulance wove through darkened streets, shrieking into the night mists. Nigel sat dumbly beside Alexandria and watched the attendant check her life functions, give injections, speak in a rapid clipped voice into his headset transmitter. Lights rippled by. After some minutes Nigel remembered his telltale. It was still keening at him. Alexandria’s unit was running down, the attendant said, using most of its power to transmit diagnostics into the ambulance cassette. He showed Nigel the spot behind Nigel’s right ear where a rhythmic pressure would shut it off. Nigel thumped at it and the wailing went away. A thin beeping remained; his telltale continued to monitor Alexandria’s diagnostic telemetry. He listened, numb, to this squeaky voice from the very center of her. Her face was slack with a gray pallor. Here, now, linked by bits of microelectronics, he and she spoke to each other. The indecipherable chatter was a slim chain but he clung to it. It would not stop even if she died; still, it was her only voice now.

They swerved, rocked down a ramp, jolted to a stop under red neons. The bubble surrounding him and Alexandria burst—the ambulance tail door popped open, she was wheeled out under a white blanket, people babbled. Nigel got out awkwardly, ignored by the attendants, and followed the trotting interns through a slideway.

A nurse stopped him. Questions. Forms. He gave Hufman’s name but they already knew that. She said bland, comforting things. She led him to a carpeted waiting room, indicated some magazine faxes, a 3D, smiled, was gone.

He sat for a long time.

They brought him coffee. He listened to a distant hum of traffic.

Very carefully he thought about nothing.

When he next looked up Hufman was standing nearby, peeling away transparent gloves.

“I’m sorry to say, Mr. Walmsley, it’s as I feared.” Nigel said nothing. His face felt caked with dense wax, stiff, as though nothing could crack through.

“An incipient brain stem hemorrhage. The lupus did equilibrate in her organs, as I thought. She would have been all right. But it then spread into the central nervous system. There has been a breakdown in the stem.”

“And?” Nigel said woodenly.

“We’re using coagulants now. That might possibly arrest the hemorrhage.”

“What then?” a female voice said.

Hufman turned. Shirley was standing in the doorway. “I said, what then?”

“If it stabilizes… she might live. There is probably no significant brain damage yet. A spasm, though, induced by the lupus or our treatment—”

“Would kill her,” Shirley said sharply.

“Yes,” Hufman said, tilting his head back to regard her. He plainly wondered who this woman was.

Nigel made a halting introduction. Shirley nodded at Hufman, arms folded under her breasts, standing hipshot with tense energy.

“Couldn’t you have seen the lupus was getting worse?” she said.

“This form is very subtle. The nervous system—” “So you had to wait until she collapsed.”

“Her next biopsy—”

“There might not be a next—”

“Shirley!” Nigel said sharply.

“I must go,” Hufman said stiffly. He walked out with rigid movements.

“Now you’ve fair well muddled it,” Nigel said. “Shaken up the man whose judgment determines whether Alexandria lives.”

“Fuck that. I wanted to know—”

“Then ask.”

“—because I just got here, I didn’t talk to anybody and—”

“How did you know Alexandria collapsed?”

Nigel had thought he could gradually deflect the conversation and calm her down. He was surprised when Shirley glared at him and fell silent, nervously stretching her arms to the side. Her face was ashen. Her chin trembled slightly until she noticed the fact and tightened her jaw muscles. In the distance he could hear the staccato laboring of some machine.

“Shirley …” he began, to break the pressing silence between them.

“I saw the ambulance leaving when I came back from my walk.”

“Walk?”

“I got to the apartment early. Alexandria and I had a talk. An argument, really. Over you, your working late. I, I got mad and Alexandria shouted at me. We were fighting, really fighting in a way we never had before. So before it got any worse I left.”

“Leaving her there. Wrought up. Alone. When Hufman had already said she couldn’t take stress in her condition.”

“You don’t have to…”

“Rub it in? I’m not. But I’d like to know why you harp away on my taking time for JPL. You work.”

“But you’re her, well, she leans on you more than me, and when I got to the apartment and she was so weak and pale and waiting for you and you were late I—”

“She could lean on you. That’s what we three are all about. Extended sharing, isn’t that the proper jargon?”

“Nigel—”

“You know what I think? You don’t want to face the fact that you’ll lose Alexandria and you’re blaming me in some buggered-up way.”

“You’re so damned independent. You don’t share, Nigel, you—”

“Can that shit.” He took a convulsive, mechanical step toward her and caught himself. “That’s, that’s your own illusion.”

“A pretty convincing one.”

“I’ve tried—”

“When you do let go it’s something seamy. Like getting drunk that night.”

Nigel held his breath for a moment and let it out in a constricted, wheezing sigh. “Maybe. It all stacked up on me there. Alexandria, I mean. And this New Sons, I couldn’t—” He stared directly at Shirley. In the bleached light her skin seemed translucent, stretched thin over the bones of her face. “We’ve never supported each other, have we? Never.”

She studied him. “No. I’m not sure I’d want to, now.” Silence. A clink of glassware from down the corridor. “Me either,” he said across the pressing space that had formed between them.

“It shouldn’t be that way.”

“No.”

“We weren’t, weren’t growing together. Ever.”

“No.”

“Then…no matter what happens to Alexandria, I think…”

“It’s finished. You and me.”

“Yes.”

With each exchange he had felt a pane of glass slide snugly into place between them. There was no going back from this.

“There’s some, some knot in you, Nigel. I couldn’t reach it. Alexandria could.”

She closed her trembling eyelids, tears swelling from under them. She began to cry without a sound.

Nigel reached out toward her and then a soft, padding shuffle caught his attention. Several people were coming down the corridor.

“Oh,” Shirley said, the word coming from her like a thick bubble. “Oh.” She turned, arms straightening to her sides, and went to the door.

Two robed men entered. Each held an arm of His Immanence. The small browned man between them moved with arthritic slowness but his yellowed eyes moved quickly from Shirley to Nigel, judging the situation.

“Alexandria may want to see him again,” Shirley said to Nigel. “I called from the apartment and asked him to come.”

“You can tell him to clear off,” Nigel said tightly. “No,” Shirley said. “She needs him more, more than she needs you—”

“Bugger that. Th—” and something clutched at his throat, stemming the words. His mind spun. He dimly sensed Alexandria lying nearby somewhere, near death, and Shirley here, these men, the awful sagging flesh of the old one. Pressing at him. Pressing. He turned, a hand out to steady himself. Sit down. Rest.

But he knew they would wear him down if he sat there meekly and listened to their droning talk. The room suddenly was a clotted, airless place, thick with the sweet incense of the New Sons coiling into everything. He swayed on his feet and gulped for air. Something tugged at his memory. The Snark. Venus. The shallow curve he’d plotted, now coming to its apex. Time ticking, the Snark—

“No.” He raised his hands, palms outward. He pushed the cloak of air away from him. Pushed at Shirley and the men, who now receded in the watery light. Swerved away and lurched out the door. A destination formed in his mind. The shiny plastiform walls of the corridor slid past. The dense antiseptic air of the hospital parted before him and closed behind, his passage a spreading ripple.

Thirteen

He hunched over in the back of the cab and planned. He rubbed his hands together, each palm momentarily clenching the other in the chilling air. His teeth chattered slightly until he clamped his jaw shut. The past fell away from him and left only a clear, geometrically precise problem. He could not allow Evers and the ExComm to blunder when they tried to communicate with the Snark. Granted they’d had the sense to adopt Nigel’s scheme, a set of primes denoted in binary code. When arrayed in a rectangle the long string of numbers formed pictures: a plot of Snark’s path through the solar system, with circles for the planetary orbits; a breakdown of simple terrestrial chemistry; a recognition code for fast transmission, once the Snark understood that someone was trying to communicate.

But when the Snark responded, how would ExComm answer? Then it would be out of Nigel’s hands. Well, he had a partial answer for that, too. He had made up another message cube, identical to his earlier, ExComm-approved cube, except that it allowed the Snark’s return signal to be routed through the JPL communications board to whatever receiver the board operator selected. And that receiver would be Nigel, through the only private channel he had—his telltale. Simultaneously, the message would be stored and then, when it was finished, replayed for the JPL crew in the Main Bay.

Nigel grimaced. Granted, Evers had accepted Nigel’s message. Granted, getting early reception was a small betrayal, of sorts. But it would give Nigel a few moments to understand before ExComm got into the act—a precious margin of minutes so he could hear the Snark through the telltale, try and guess what the proper response must be. And then, if he could follow what the Snark said, he would have to head off the ExComm reply; those men would almost certainly jump the gun. Any error could be disastrous. The Snark had probably been silent all this time because it was cautious. If the ExComm reply was unclear or seemed unfriendly, the Snark might simply pass through the solar system and away. Gone. Forever.

The yellow sprinkling of lighted windows at JPL made a beacon amid the shadowed hills. Nigel paid the cab, checked through the guards and, instead of going directly to the Main Bay, walked quickly to his office. He unlocked his desk and reached far back in the left drawer. He fished out the second ferrite message cube, identical in appearance to the one ExComm now had. He pocketed it and stopped at the men’s room to check his appearance in the mirror. His eyes were red and his face seemed all angles, stark and sharp. He combed his hair with jittery strokes and practiced looking relaxed. Must be smooth. Calm. Yes.

He froze, breathing shallow gasps as he looked at himself. Back there lay Alexandria, beyond his help but not beyond his caring. And here he stood, dealing an ace from under the deck to the men he’d worked with, not trusting them, a fine film of perspiration cooling the skin below his eyes. If he could step outside his mind he was sure it would all appear stupid, blind. What was the Snark to him, anyway? Round the bend, he was. He curled a fist and pressed it against his thigh. Alexandria was now in their province, the world gnawing away at her. Let it come. Relax, he told himself. Be reasonable, Nigel. Ping. It’s gone way past tea, now. Things are well past the realm of pure bloody fucking sweet reason. Oh yes, oh yes.

Outside the Main Bay door he pressed the spot behind his ear. His telltale beeped on. He opened the door.

The Committee was there, and Evers, and Lubkin. Nigel moved among them, consulted, advised. He checked recent developments with the technicians. Lubkin showed him some ExComm work on a second signal to Snark—awkward, ambiguous, too complicated. Nigel nodded, murmured something. Lubkin gave him the ferrite cube with their signal in it and Nigel made a show of logging it into the communications board.

The casual air of the bay had evaporated. The Snark was still on the plotted course. Minutes ticked by. A half hour. The Committee buzzed with speculations and worries. Nigel fielded their questions and watched the Snark approach. Venus Monitor still showed only an unresolved dot of light.

Nigel spoke into his head microphone, ordering Venus Monitor out of the tandem control scheme JPL usually used; now the satellite would respond only to Nigel’s board. He ordered the Monitor’s main radio dish to rotate and fed in aiming coordinates.

Casually he fished his own ferrite cube from his pocket and logged it into the board. He punched in orders and the ExComm cube was retired into storage, while his own came to the fore, ready to transmit.

“What are you doing?” Lubkin said. The men around Nigel’s roller chair fell silent.

“Transmitting,” Nigel said.

He tapped in the crucial part: recognition code. He had memorized his telltale code months before, in Hufman’s office, and now he instructed his board to relay the Snark’s reply to him. The board would transmit directly to the telltale, so that Nigel could hear the reply before it was replayed in the Main Bay for the Committee.

“Here it goes,” Nigel said. He pressed a button and the board transmitted a recognition signal; his telltale beeped in sympathy in his ear.

He ordered Venus Monitor to begin signaling the Snark.

The ship was coasting smoothly when the strong signal found it.

It was a clever code, beginning with a plot of the ship’s own trajectory through this planetary system. So the beings of the third planet had followed all along, waiting. To reveal this now was a clear sign of nonhostile intentions; they could have kept their capabilities secret.

The craft quickly located the source of the pulse, circling this shrouded planet. Was this world occupied, too? It recalled an ancient amphibian race that evolved on a world not too dissimilar, whose inability to see the stars through the blanket of clouds had retarded them forever. And it thought of other worlds, encased in baking layers of gases, where the veined rock itself attained intelligence, laced together by conducting metals and white-hot crystals.

The machines studied the radio pulse for a fraction of a second. There was much here to understand. Elaborate chains of deduction and inference led to a single conclusion: the third planet was the key. Caution was no longer justified.

The computers would have to revive the slumbering intelligence which could deal with these problems. They would become submerged in that vast mind. There was a bittersweet quality to the success of their mission; their identity would cease. The overmind would seek whatever channel it needed to understand this new species, and these more simple computers would be swept up in its currents.

The revival began.

The craft readied itself to answer.

The ferrite cube emptied itself. Nigel heard a blur of stuttered tenor squeals.

“Hey! What’re you—”

Lubkin had noticed the switch in cubes. Some indexing error? Lubkin reached over Nigel’s shoulder toward the board controls.

Nigel lunged upward. He caught Lubkin’s arm and twisted it away from the board.

Someone shouted. Nigel swung out of his chair and pulled on Lubkin’s arm, slamming him into another man. Lubkin’s coat sleeve ripped open.

His telltale beeped. The Snark was answering. Nigel froze. The pattern was clear, even though speeded up: the Snark was sending back Nigel’s original message.

Nigel wobbled. In the enameled light the faces of Evers and Lubkin swam toward him. He concentrated on the burbling in his head. There; the Snark had finished retransmitting Nigel’s signal. Nigel felt a surge of joy. He had broken through. They could reply with—

Someone seized his arm, butted into his ribs. He opened his mouth to say something, to calm them. Voices were babbling.

His telltale squealed. Shrieked.

Sound exploded in his mind. The world writhed and spun.

He felt something dark and massive move through him. There was a bulging surge, filling— The torrent swallowed his identity.

Nigel gasped. Clawed the air. Fell, unconscious.

Fourteen

Lubkin was talking to him. Meanwhile fireflies of blue-white banked and swooped and stung his eyes. They were distracting. Nigel watched the cloud of singing fireflies flitting between him and the matted ceiling. Lubkin’s voice droned. He breathed deeply and the fireflies evaporated, then returned. Lubkin’s words became more sharp. A weight settled in his gut.

They understood Nigel’s state of mind, Lubkin said. About his wife and all. That explained a lot. Evers wasn’t even very angry about Nigel’s maneuver with J-27. It was a better idea, the committee admitted, once they’d had a chance to study it. What the hell, they could understand…

Nigel grinned dizzily, ironically.

The fireflies sang. Danced.

Evers was pretty pissed at Nigel’s suckering them, Lubkin said, forehead wrinkling. But now J-27 had responded. That made things better. Evers was willing to ignore Nigel’s deception. Considering, that is, Alexandria.

“What?” Nigel sat upright in the hospital bed.

“Well, I—”

“What did you say about Alexandria?”

Nigel saw that he was stripped to the waist. Lubkin licked his lips in an uncertain, edgy way. His eyes slid away from Nigel’s.

“Dr. Hufman wants to see you as soon as I’m through. We brought you here from JPL, after we got that call, asking where you were. I mean, we understood then.”

“Understood what?”

Lubkin shrugged uneasily, eyes averted. “Well, I didn’t want to be the one …”

“What in hell are you saying?”

“I didn’t know she was that close, Nigel. None of us did.”

“Cl… close?”

“That’s what the call was about. She died.”

A nurse found him a stiff blue robe. Dr. Hufman met him in the corridor where he was saying goodbye to Lubkin and shook hands solemnly, silent. Nigel looked at Hufman but he could not read any expression.

Hufman beckoned to him. They moved down the hallway. Somewhere a summoning bell chimed. The sleek walls reflected back to Nigel the face of a haggard man, a day’s growth of beard sprouting, upper face fixed in a rigid scowl. The two men walked.

“She… she died right after I left?” Nigel asked in a croaking whisper.

“Yes.”

“I—I’m sorry I left. You tried to call me…”

“Yes.”

Nigel looked at the other man. Hufman’s face was compressed, eyes unnaturally large, his features pinched as if under pressure.

“You… you’re taking me to view her?”

“Yes.” Hufman reached a gray metal door and opened it.

His eyes fixed on Nigel. “She died, Mr. Walmsley. Uncontrollable hemorrhage. The operating room was busy. There were other patients. We put her aside for the orderlies to carry away. A half hour passed.”

Nigel nodded dumbly.

“Then she began to move, Mr. Walmsley. She rose from the dead.”

Alexandria sat alone. She was in an elaborate diagnostic wheelchair; it bristled with electronics. Her white hospital smock was bunched above her knees and probes touched her at ankles, calves, forearms, neck, temples. She smiled wanly.

“I knew. You would return. Nigel.”

“I…I was…”

“I know,” she said mildly. “You. Spoke. To Shirley. You became. Frightened. By what was. Happening.” She spoke slowly, the words individually formed and separated by a perceptible pause. She had to work for each syllable.

“The New Sons …” Nigel began and then did not know how to continue.

“You need not. Have. Become. Excited. Nigel. He had told. Me. That you sensed it. Too. Briefly.”

“He? Who…”

“Him. What you felt. Before you. Rejected the Immanence.”

Nigel was aware of Hufman closing the door behind them, standing where he could hear but not interrupt. Alexandria seemed delicately balanced, fragile, suspended by some inner certainty. Encased.

“You felt Him. Nigel. My love. Perhaps. You did not. Recognize. Him. To you. For a long while. He was the Snark.”

Nigel was silent for a long, stunned moment. “The telltale,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, toward Hufman.

“Yes. Yes,” Alexandria said in a flat voice. “That is. How He entered me. But I. Recognized Him. For His true nature.”

She closed her eyes and her chest rose in shallow, rapid breaths. Nigel glanced at Hufman. His legs were numb and he felt pinned to this spot, unable to advance toward Alexandria or retreat. Her wheelchair readouts blinked and shifted.

“Can someone—something—do that?” he said in a quick whisper. “Transmit over that telltale circuit?”

Hufman’s voice was a resonant bass in the small room. “Yes, certainly. Hers has both acoustic and electric contact with her nervous system. It functions passively most of the time, but we can use it to send echo signals through the central nerves.”

“Is that what’s happening?”

Hufman moved to Nigel’s side and, to Nigel’s surprise, put an arm over his shoulders. “I believe so. I’ve told no one about this because, well, at first I thought I had made some awful mistake.”

“Something is going into her. Through that telltale.” “Apparently. You collapsed, didn’t you? At JPL? Probably an overload. Or whoever is transmitting shorted out your input and concentrated on her.”

“But she was dead.”

“Yes. All functions ceased. I estimate she suffered oxygen deprivation only five or ten minutes, at most. Somehow a stimulus through the telltale jolted her breathing. Restored it to function. Her renal overload has subsided, too.”

“I don’t see how…”

“Neither do I. There is work going on in the use of neurological startups, yes, but they are highly dangerous. And unreliable.”

“It’s bringing her back to life,” Nigel said distantly. “What is? Who’s doing this?”

“I can’t say.”

Hufman looked at him piercingly. “You won’t, you mean. You and that other woman have some—”

“What other woman?”

“The one I met. You introduced us earlier. Alexandria asked for her. I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I let her in, and—”

“Nigel?” Alexandria’s eyelids fluttered, mothlike, and she moved her right hand weakly in a beckoning motion. Nigel went to her.

“He is. Seeing. Through me. Nigel. He wants. You. To know that.”

Nigel looked back at Hufman helplessly.

“No, do not be. Afraid. He wants to see. To feel. To walk. In this world.”

“Who is he, Alexandria?” Nigel’s voice broke as he said her name.

“He is the Immanence,” she said, as though to a child. “I know. What He has done. You and the Doctor. Do not need. To whisper. I know.”

“He—it—brought you back.”

“I know. From the dead. To see.”

“Why?”

She looked at him serenely. Her eyes crinkled with some inner mirth. “In the sense. You mean. Darling. I do not. Know. But I do not. Question Him. Or question. Moving. With this moment.”

In the antiseptic light her bloodless face shone both strange and familiar, each pore sharp and clean.

Hufman’s voice intruded: “As nearly as I can determine, she is kept alive by the telltale stimulus. Somehow the synaptic breakdown is being offset. Perhaps the tell-tale is providing control functions for her heart and lungs, taking the place of the damaged tissue. I don’t believe that can last long, however.”

Alexandria gazed at him steadily. Her smile was thin and pale. “He is here. With me. Doctor. That is all. That matters.”

Nigel took her hand, squatting beside the heavy wheelchair, and studied her, frowning. Conflicting emotions played on his face.

There was a knock on the gray metal door.

Hufman glanced at Nigel uncertainly. Nigel was lost in his own thoughts. Hufman hesitated and then opened the door.

Shirley stood firmly in the doorway. Behind her were a half a dozen New Sons clad in dhotis and jackets. A man in a business suit shouldered his way to the front of them.

“We’ve come for her, Doctor,” Shirley said. Her voice carried a hard, brittle edge. “We know her wishes. She wants out, she told me. And we have a lawyer to deal with your hospital.”

Fifteen

Imagine thin sheets of metal standing vertically, separated by millimeters. In the stark light they become lines of metallic white. In slow motion a projectile, spinning, the color of smoke, strikes the first sheet. The thin metal crumples. The sheet is rammed back into the second layer, silently, as the film goes on. Though it moves with ponderous slowness you can do nothing. The second sheet folds. At the point of impact the bullet is splattering, turning to liquid. But it goes on. The third silvery line is compressed into the fourth, the lines form a family of parabolas, shock waves focused at the head of the tumbling, melting bullet. And you cannot stop it. Each sheet presses on the next. Each act—

Nigel saw this dream, lived through it each night, yet could do nothing. Events compressed. Each moment of those days impinged on the next, carrying him forward in a stream of instants.

—At the hospital. Hufman objecting between clenched teeth. The lawyer smooth, voice resonant with certainty. Nigel had no legal rights over Alexandria; he was not her husband. And Alexandria said she wished to leave. The law, thin sheets compressing, was clear. She wished to live—or die—among the New Sons. They understood. They wished her to walk with Him.

—The wheelchair. Winking its update metric lights, purring, ignored. The New Sons in dhotis wheeling her from the ambulance toward the Baptist church. The old man, the Immanence. His face a leadened silver, lit by arc lamps ringing the church. He cupped his hands and nodded to Shirley. Alexandria was between them, the focus of a swelling crowd. Shirley spoke reverently to the stooped, gnarled Immanence. In the moving shadows Nigel thought he caught a glance from those yellow eyes. A look of weighing, judging, assessing. The old man gestured. There was a subtle shifting in the crowd. The tide of bodies that opened before Alexandria’s wheelchair now lapped around behind her. Sealing her off. Shirley on the edge, the Immanence, sagging face aglow, at the center. Toward the church. An excited babble, a murmur. And the liquid crowd swirled between Nigel and the others. Cut him off. Slowly him. Shirley, he cried out. Alexandria! Shirley had mounted the steps into the church. She turned, looking back over the tossing sea of faces. She called out something, something about love, and then was gone. Into the shadows. Following the winking wheelchair.

—On 3D.

She was the same—calm, compact, radiating an inner sureness. The snowballing of interest around her had not touched that core. The eyes were set back, away from the questions put to her by her interrogators; viewing, studying. Nigel watched her in their darkened apartment, lit only by the glowing 3D. He saw Shirley in the background crowd. Her face was rapt, like those around her. Three individual Immanences of the New Sons escorted Alexandria down a ceremonial ramp. They were each tall and stately men, sunken cheeks, palms turned outward in ritual gesture; ascetic; lean. They were very careful of her, their first confirmed miracle. The program paused to run a fax of Hufman, angry, jaw muscles clenching. He admitted under direct questioning that Alexandria had died. Was certified. Abandoned. And then rose.

“Did she have an explanation?” the interviewer asked. Hufman’s weary face faded from the screen, to be replaced by Alexandria’s.

She smiled, shook her head, no. And something shifted far back in her eyes.

—At the church they would not let him in. To Nigel all doors were barred.

When his story reached the 3D people they interviewed him, paid attention, promised results. But when the interview was broadcast Nigel came through as a bitter, hostile man. Had he really said these things? he wondered, watching himself. Or were they adroitly rearranging his words? He could not remember. The metallic lines compressed, converged.

—At JPL, alone with Evers and Lubkin. Outside sunlight glinted on trucks as they hauled in new equipment. The facility was being beefed up.

Lubkin: We heard about Alexandria’s recovering, Nigel. That’s great news. We were kind of wondering if, well…

Evers: J-27 transmits on two channels, Walmsley. Using a circuit you logged into the board. We’ve got Ichino working on the main signal, but we’re afraid to tamper with this other one. Whatever’s receiving it—

Nigel: It’s my telltale. You know that, don’t you? Evers: Yes. We just wanted to give you the chance to admit it.

Lubkin: You’re receiving J-27? Directly?

Nigel: No. It’s found some way to sidestep me. Evers: We’ll cut it off then.

So he had to tell them about Alexandria. And beg them to allow the transmissions through JPL. Otherwise she would die.

Stony-jawed, Evers nodded. He would let the beeping thread of life go on. They would even monitor it, eavesdrop, try to decipher what they could. The code was a dense thicket of complexity.

After Nigel had left Evers’s office he could remember little of whatever else was said. Events had become so constricted, so compressed, that he confused people and moments. But he could recall Evers’s calculating bland expression, the pursed lips, the hint of forces finding a new balance.

Sixteen

He sat on the dusty hillside and watched the people streaming into the V of the canyon. Most of them had made the two-hour ride from Mexico City, carrying box lunches. There were bunches from Asia, though, carefully shepherded by guides. And Europeans, identifiable by their brown standard-issue trousers and wooly shirts, severely cut. Separate rivulets which emptied into the canyon.

A flight of birds entered the canyon from the south, fluttering higher as they came. Probably disturbed by the hum of the vast crowd, Nigel thought. He licked his lips. The morning air already shimmered, far warmer than it had been in Kansas two days before. Or had that been Toronto? He had difficulty keeping the days straight. Each of Alexandria’s appearances drew a larger crowd; these, he’d been told, had encamped days in advance.

A hundred meters away men labored to frame up more bleachers. It was pointless; people were sitting on the jutting rock ledges already in immense numbers, far more than last-minute measures could accommodate.

The hills swarmed with life, the ripplings of the throng like cilia on an immense cell. On the narrow floor of the valley the impassioned performed: tumblers, self-flagellators, psi acrobats, chanters with their hollow booming sound, dancers. The annular rings turned. Brimming loving flying dying. Fling. Shout. Moan. Stamp.

At last, the excited babble came. At the head of the canyon a white dot blossomed. Alexandria in her wheel-chair, wrapped in glittering robes. She occupied a platform among the banked rock shelves. Four Immanences flanked her.

“To fullness!” chanted the crowd. “Oneness!” In the sky a winged dot burned orange at one end. Against the pale desert blue a cloud formed. A white sculpture for the occasion: an immense alabaster woman. Wings. Hand raised in greeting, blessing, forgiveness. Alexandria.

Words from an Immanence. Music. Trumpets blared and echoed from the stones. Stamp. Sing. Running living leaping soaring. Salvation in the shimmering, enchanting heat.

He knew the litany well. It washed over him without effect. He was numb from following her. He knew he should leave but he could not give up when he could still stay close, still see her in the distance. A white dot. The walking, talking dead. Come and see. Have your hopes raised. Regain your faith. Joyful singing love forever.

And yet, and yet…he envied her. And loved her.

He grimaced.

Her voice suddenly rolled down the canyon, booming, silencing the mob. She spoke of Him, the One, and how He saw through each of us. Of a vision—

She crumpled. Something banged the microphone. A man shouted hoarsely. Nigel squinted and could make out a knot of robed, milling figures clustered where Alexandria had stood the moment before. Shrill voices called out orders.

She was going at last. Woodenly he stood, brushed away dust from his pants, staring fixedly ahead. Going. Going.

In his room in Mexico City he let the 3D play while he showered and packed. A short balding man, pink skin, fleshy cheeks, said that Alexandria had suffered a relapse but had not yet joined the Essential One, as she herself had predicted she soon would.

His telephone rang.

“Walmsley? That you?” Evers’s voice was high and ragged. Nigel grunted a reply.

“Listen, we just heard the news. Sorry, and all that, but it looks like she’s dying. We know you’ve been following her. Security’s tracked you. Have you been able to find out what she’s told the New Sons? I mean, about J-27?”

“Nothing. As far as I can tell.”

“Ah. Good. I’ve gotten word from higher up to be pretty damned sure nothing gets out. Particularly not to those… well, it looks okay, then. We’ll—”

“Evers.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t cut the second channel. She isn’t dead yet. If you do, I’ll tell the Three-Ds about… J-27.”

“You’re …” Evers’s voice cut off as though a hand had cupped over the speaker. In a moment Evers said, “Okay.”

“Keep it on indefinitely. Even if you hear she’s dead.” “Okay, Walmsley, but—”

“Goodbye.”

For a long time he stood at the hotel window and watched pedicabs lace through the lanes of the Paseo de la Reforma, mostly the late crowd streaming out of Chapultepec Park. The hivelike comings and goings of man.

So he had made one last gesture, threatened Evers. Perhaps kept her alive a few more hours or days. For what? He knew he would never see her again. Only the New Sons would relish those last moments of her.

So… back to JPL? Begin over? The Snark still waited.

Eventually, yes. He needed to know. Always the clean and sure, the definite; that’s what he sought. To know. Something that Shirley, and perhaps even Alexandria, had never quite understood.

Or…

He fluxed the window and a seam parted in the middle. At least two hundred meters down. Into a pool of racing yellow headlights. Compressing lines, snuffing him out like a candle burned too low.

He looked down for long moments.

Then turned. Picked up his bags and took the shuttle down to the lobby. He checked out, smiling stiffly, tipped a porter, left his bags and went out onto the sidewalk. Soft air greeted him. He shoved his hands into his pockets and decided to take a walk around the block, to clear his head.

From his pocket he took a wedge of plastic. It contained microminiature electronics, a power source and transducer. He clipped it into a holder beneath his collar and made sure it did not show. It rubbed as he walked.

He wanted to be in the open when he tried this. A building might shield the signal at these distances, or blur it. He could take no chances. When Alexandria died, the Snark could still use the channel…

He reached behind his ear and pressed. The telltale hummed into life. The bit of plastic and electronics he’d had made at such expense rubbed his neck. He pressed a thumb against it and heard a faint ceramic click.

He walked. Stepped. Felt a massive, bulging surge— Stepped—

Love and envy.

Stepped—

Seventeen

A day later: he steps—

—steps

—onto the sheets of folded rock. Stone decks of an earthen ship, adrift in this high desert. A craft of baking rock. The ages have layered and compressed this wrinkled deck; life skitters over it. Chittering. Leaping.

He mounts the flaking rock. A scorpion scuttles aside. Boots bite into crunching gravel.

—plants licking, foamlike, at the coarse crust—

The looming presence

peers out

sucks inunderstands

—and is quiet.

In this brittle Mexican desert he marches on. The air is crystalline; puddles from a recent rain splinter the descending light.

Poppies, mallows, zinnias, cacti, sand mats and yellow splashes of lichen—

—soil awash in life—

—sun spinning over the warped earth—

Nigel smiles. The being rides back, behind the eyes.

His legs make easy strides. A bootheel rubs. Leather creaks. Arms rocking, calves bunching. Heart pumping lungs whooshing skin warm boot turning on a stone sky flat shirt tugging in the damp armpits waxy cactus in the path canteen rattling as he turns—

From this awareness Nigel selects. The being does not. He eats it all.

A rabbit bounds to the side. A claret-cup cactus beckons. Nigel stops. Unscrews canteen. Drinks.

—feels the rushing silvery quilted reddening flavor on his tongue—

—And senses some dim trace of what the other being must feel. It honored the sanctity of living creatures; it would not have bid Alexandria to rise again, but she was already gone, already dead to her own world. So to see this fresh planet, the being used a body that men had already cast aside.

In those first moments of contact with Nigel, on the street in Mexico City, the being had very nearly withdrawn. But when it saw the ruined canvas inside this man, it had stayed. Using the subtle knowledge, learned from thousands of such contacts with chemical life forms, it undertook some brush of contact. And remained. To taste this sweet world. To shore up this man.

—blue custard sky vibrant with flapping life, drifting splotches, writhing clouds—

This place is alien.

Pausing, the sharp jagged horizon dividing this world into halves, he reflects. And sees the rippling weave of Evers and Lubkin and Shirley and Hufman and Alexandria and Nigel. A play. A net. Gravid workings. Each a small universe in itself.

But each together. Exalted. Each a firmament. A clockwork.

So familiar.

So alien.

Deep, buried in the currents of the torrent, Nigel swims.

Swimming, he heals.

The looming presence sat astride the flood of perception and took it all. Before Nigel could apply the filters of his eyes, ears, skin, touch, smell—before all that, the being sponged up this new and strange world, and in the act of taking altered it for Nigel as well.

And someday the being would go. Pass through. Nigel would split his cocoon then. Emerge. Into the splintering day. On doddering feet.

He would pass through that lens. All would pass. But for the moment:

The Snark feels the booming pulse unfolds the rocks before him carves the dry air smacks boots into yielding earth—

seeing

tasting

opening.

Eases him into the warming world.

Pins him loving to the day

—E v e r s L u b k i n S h i r l e y H u f m a n—

AlexandriaAlexandria—

Thinking of them, knowing he will return to that world someday, a weight slips from him and he rolls and basks and floats in these familiar waters of the desert. Evers-Hufman-Shirley—

Alien, they are, his brothers.

So alien.