Permanence

10

W AKING CAME SLOWLY. For a while Rue drifted, wondering why the sounds around her were so like her habitat on the Envy and yet different— pumps whirred, voices muttered through the plastic walls, but not the pumps she was used to; and these voices were different. She blinked at the ceiling for a few seconds, realized she was on the Banshee, then groaned, rolled over, and tried to bury herself under the pillow.

Her alarm chimed again. In the past she'd been able to ignore such things; even if Jentry yelled at her for being late, nothing was really riding on her shoulders. Now, she had her people to think about. And Creepy Crisler and his band of merry men and those oh-so-serious scientists who were sharpening their knives even now for the dissection of her cycler.

Which they were going to do today, she realized. They had been at the Envy for two weeks now, four full days out of cold sleep. Everything was set to start exploring.

The thought of them going out without her supervision galvanized Rue. She threw off the covers and hurried to the bathroom. Tomorrow, she thought as she sat staring at the fake wood paneling. Tomorrow I will sleep in. She knew if she repeated this mantra once every day, after a few hundred repetitions it might come true.

The habitat balloons of the Banshee were palatial compared to her shuttle. Together the two balloons totalled twelve decks of large rooms and ample private space. There were labs, garrisons and weapons lockers, a complete medical facility and a gym. The lights were kept at Earth-normal most of the time, so she wore her sunglasses everywhere; luckily she had finally adapted to higher temperatures, so the twenty degrees Celsius air no longer made her wilt.

Her crew were awake now, though not entirely up to speed; despite their loginess, today would be their first EVA.

Rue's stateroom had a window, another contrast to her first time out. She turned the lights off to watch the stars wheel by. They looked no different than they had from Allemagne; she even recognized some constellations. In Rights Economy terms, she was still next door to Erythrion— and only two dozen light-years from Earth.

She turned away from the window with reluctance. There had been a couple of times when she'd had panic attacks standing here; looking out at the stars had been the only thing that had calmed her. Now, looking out had become a ritual.

After taking a couple of deep breaths, she fixed a confident smile on her face and stepped out into the curving hall of B Dormitory. A few of Crisler's people nodded to her in passing; the soldiers had a habit of checking her out, pushing the envelope of propriety, but they were always faultlessly polite when she spoke to them. Everybody radiated confidence; they were at the Envy and ready to start investigating its secrets.

They weren't like her— they were graduates of the finest universities, disciplined military minds. She was just a woman from the middle of nowhere, yet they treated her like an equal. It made her want to scream.

She entered the galley and immediately Corinna waved at her from an otherwise empty table. Blair had a tray and was headed that way too and she saw Max talking to the chef. Good. She nodded at Corinna, but before heading over there she took a detour.

Crisler sat with Dr. Herat, the lead scientist, at a table in the back of the room. Rue clenched her fists, loosened them and walked up to the two men. "How are you gentlemen this morning?"

They both nodded and greeted her courteously. Max had a term for guys like these: alpha males. Both men were instinctively dominant. They reminded her a lot of Jentry and having that frame of reference helped her. Alphas couldn't be coerced, but they could always be tricked; before Max had revealed that she owned Jentry's Envy, she had let him serve as foil with Crisler while she nosed around on her own. Now that he knew about her, Crisler was wary. She had been trying to appear young and naive around him, but lately was regretting that strategy. You become what you pretend.

Dr. Herat was a lot harder to figure out than Crisler. He seemed utterly relaxed, as usual. Being at the cycler seemed to have no effect on him, except maybe to increase his already considerable enthusiasm.

She remembered how she had been before her first EVA to Lake Flaccid. She'd thrown up. It wasn't the environment that had wrought her nerves that time— from the outside, Lake Flaccid bore a remarkable resemblance to Allemagne. It was no colder here than where she had grown up. No, it was a fear that hied her back to old stories about robbing graves. The cycler was cold and silent, after all: It was likely that it was in fact a tomb. She still felt uneasy whenever she thought about all the places here that they had yet to visit.

Still, she needed to be present on this first sortie. Herat was on the EVA team, at his own insistence. So were Corinna and Evan. Three other scientists and two soldiers rounded out the team.

"We're all set," Herat said sunnily. "The fellows on the EVA team are pacing like caged tigers."

"Remember, anything you find that might be a way of controlling the Envy's course, you hand over to us. I invited your people on this trip to help me uphold my salvage claim."

"Yes, I know. But may I point out, Ms. Cassels, that we may not be able to identify the controls when we see them. How can you tell an alien inscape crown from a toilet? It could take us months. Then to understand how it works—"

She had learned to just interrupt him if she needed to get a point in. "I expect you to approve anything— but I also expect to understand everything you investigate. Look at it as a challenge; the fun part will be explaining it all to me in layman's terms."

He laughed. "I usually get paid to do that."

"You don't think having free rein on the Envy to be payment enough? When all your colleagues are sitting on their hands back at the Institute?" She smiled sweetly at him.

He stammered something.

"I'll see you gentlemen in the control room at ten o'clock," she said, then hurried on while she still had the momentum.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Michael Bequith had nearly run her down. He had a tray with two tiny bacon strips and a piece of toast on it.

"How do you survive on that?" she asked.

He blushed. He did that a lot, she'd found; she couldn't decide whether it was endearing or annoying. He was good looking, though, tall and lean, with dusky skin like Corinna and eyes so dark you usually couldn't see the pupils. He generally dressed severely and today was no exception: He was in a black jumpsuit with an equally black utility vest on it. A small, but not virtual, book lay on the tray next to his meager breakfast.

"I never eat much before a space walk," he said. "It's a sensible precaution."

"Oh, so you're on the team?" She already knew this, but wanted to keep the conversation going. Rue had a connection with him; they had both been there at the discovery of Linda Ophir's body, after all. She wasn't sure yet whether she liked Bequith, but she wanted to find out, and he seemed hard to get close to.

He grimaced at her question. "I'll be in charge of enforcing the quarantine precautions," he said. "Dr. Herat gets the fun work; I do the digging, he picks up the treasure." He grinned almost imperceptibly.

Interesting; she hadn't known he had a sense of humor at all.

"So space walks make you nervous?" she asked.

"Space Walks into alien spaceships do." He shrugged. "Shouldn't they?"

"No, no, you're quite right. It's funny… nobody else is admitting to being nervous."

He registered a faint smile. "That's because most of them haven't got the faintest idea where we are."

"Oh? And you do?"

He peered off into the middle distance for a moment. "One thing I've learned in this job is, we never get used to the alien. Looking at something that's of alien manufacture is like catching a glimpse of God— no, don't laugh. What I mean is— well, ask yourself this question: What's the difference between holding an object, say a cup, made by alien hands and a cup created out of nothing by the universe— by the ineffable?"

Rue might indeed have laughed at this strange analogy, were it not that she remembered quite vividly how her scalp had prickled when she first looked through the telescope, saw one of the Envy's habitats, and knew it was not man-made.

"An alien speaks, or a stone speaks— what's the difference?" said Mike. "The experience is similar."

"Rocks speak to you?" she said in a mock-indulgent tone.

"Not as such. Ask me about NeoShintoism sometime," he said.

"Uh… okay." Bequith was religious! She should have realized it before; he was very much the priest type, now that she thought about it.

"Don't worry," he said. "I don't bite."

"So you're from, what, the Vatican?" she asked.

"No, actually, I'm from Kimpurusha. It's not far from here—"

Rue's stomach did a flip. "Oh. If you'll excuse me, my crew's expecting me."

Even as she walked away, Rue was thinking, Go back— keep talking to him! She'd wanted to have some polite chitchat with the man and here she was running away instead. But if he really was from Kimpurusha, he was from one of the lit worlds that had betrayed the halo. In the years before she was born, there had been hundreds of embassies and trade centers around Erythrion, each representing one or another cycler ring. The jewels in the vast Cycler Compact were the lit worlds, places like Kimpurusha that had nearly Earthlike planets basking in the glow of G-, K-, or even M-class stars.

When the Rights Economy burst into the galaxy, visitations from the lit worlds had dwindled. It took as much to maintain one cycler as it did to maintain ten thousand FTL ships. Kimpurusha, once the spiritual capital of the halo, had turned its back on Erythrion and the rest of the unlit worlds. Rue had seen the former Permanence monastery at Treya; it was now a sports facility.

She was surprised that she felt so strongly about a decline that had begun before she was born. But then, this whole trip had been a series of revelations about just how much of a halo-worlder she really was.

"Good morning!" Blair waved her to sit. Max was already tucking into his food; he acknowledged her indifferently. Corinna sat herself next to Blair, just as Rebecca entered the room and looked around. Rue waved vigorously; Rebecca grinned and headed over. She seldom ate breakfast.

Max had focused his attention back on his meal and would probably not participate in the upcoming discussion; he was Bad Max again, after briefly being Good Max while they were on Chandaka. At times like these, Rue leaned heavily on Rebecca for support.

Evan was the last to arrive, which was typical. It was hard for him to drag himself out of bed; she had come to realize that he had horrible self-esteem. Rue wasn't surprised that he'd signed on again after loudly protesting that he couldn't. The crew of the Envy gave him the only meaning in his life right now.

"Sorry I'm late," he said, in exactly the tone he always used.

"Let's get down to business," said Rue. "The EVA's in an hour. First things first. Did you guys find the cache?"

Evan nodded. "It's right where we left it. Seems intact, from what I could see in the telescope."

"Good. Blair?"

"They don't know it's there. I checked the logs and talked to some of the techs. Like we predicted, the plow sail hasn't gone into ramjet mode since we left, so there's been no significant radiation on it. Parking it right next to the sail was a stroke of genius."

"We'll leave it where it is for now. What Crisler's people don't know can't hurt us. Are they still doing the radar survey of the habitats?"

Blair nodded. "It's supposed to wrap up tomorrow, though. Then they'll just do an occasional ping to make sure things don't move unexpectedly."

"Crisler will lose it completely when he finds out we're holding out on him," said Rebecca.

"Crisler is in charge of the Banshee, not the Envy," Rue said, with as much confidence as she could muster. "Leave him to me."

They nodded. Everyone was looking alert, with an undercurrent of excitement— except for Bad Max, who was indifferently stuffing his face. Rue had to smile.

"We're back!" she said. Everybody laughed; even Max grinned.

"We're back and we're going to find out how to control the Envy," she continued. "We'll handle this bunch of space marines and mad scientists and send Envy on her way back 'round to Erythrion. Then we go home and we're going to be heroes. Is everybody up to that?"

They all raised their glasses and cheered; the rest of the people in the galley turned to look. Rue laughed again.

She was thinking, though, that she had told a little story to them: Capture the flag and return as heroes. It worked, it was a goal to shoot for.

She couldn't help remembering that they'd had no script to follow the first time they explored this place. Staring at the tiny dark crescent of an alien habitat through the scope, she had felt cold terror at facing a complete unknown. They had all felt it.

In talking to Crisler's people about their first trip out here, Rue had not revealed that they had huddled inside their shuttle for a week, debating and staring at that little crescent, before they'd summoned the courage to explore the lake.

It was so different this time around. But was it different only because, in bringing the Banshee, they had brought a comforting new set of stories to use in relating to this place?

The idea was too abstract to hold her attention; she turned back to her grinning crew and set about discussing plans.

MICHAEL HAD TRIED five times to compose a letter to his scattered brothers; he had deleted each one before sending it and now that they were at the Envy he couldn't hope to send an encrypted message out. Nonetheless, this morning he had felt compelled to write, so after breakfast, but before suiting up for his first trip to Lake Flaccid, he sat down in his tiny wedge-shaped room to compose.

He was more restless and unhappy than ever. Herat had forbidden him from performing any of the domestic duties he had always given himself. Those duties had been a kind of devotion for Michael— a palpable form of Service. Herat, the old bastard, knew that Michael needed to confront his demons, so had taken Michael out of his safe routines. Michael spent long hours in the gym and when he wasn't doing that he was getting to know the Banshee's crew and Crisler's staff. He was now on a first-name basis with everyone except the enigmatic halo-worlders, who mostly kept to themselves. Michael could joke with the highest and the lowest and everybody thought he was a nice guy.

When he sat by himself in his cabin, he felt a black depression he'd not felt since the insurrection on Kimpurusha. It was as if the past five years had not happened.

He moved a private inscape window to easy view and subvocalized words: a greeting, a short summary of his expedition to Kadesh. He would not speak of Jentry's Envy here; it wasn't yet time and the risk was too great even if this message was encrypted.

"I have told you that something happened to me on Dis, but have not answered your inquiries as to what it was. I won't describe the actual events here, because they wouldn't convey to you the magnitude of the experience. Our goal has always been to become one with our environment— to absorb its particular character, which we call the kami or spirit of a place. That experience is always an experience of union, of joining with the world that we're otherwise alienated from. I've experienced it on a hundred worlds, in places humans can only timidly tread. On Dis, though… On Dis I experienced not union but annihilation: my consciousness expanded and at first it was ecstatic, but the kami of the place were too alien and too strong. I could see myself, infinitely small and vulnerable, a stranger to this place and then even that was gone; I was swept away, becoming one with Dis and lost to my Self.

"I tried frantically to find my way back, but I was lost in the vision. Dr. Herat found me and shook me awake, but the kami were still there, like a ringing in my ears, denying me my own reality.

"We have always believed that our religion was a real union of the transient individual soul with the eternal Absolute of the universe. But the kami of Dis are dying, slowly, in a paroxysm that will take a trillion years. Their light is fading; all light will fade, they tell me, and no one can hold back the darkness of individual and species extinction for long.

"What I am saying to you is that on Dis, I became one with the world and remained in that vision and am there still. And the vision is not what we thought it was; I am lost in it. I am truly lost."

He closed the window and rubbed his eyes. Beyond his little cabin, he could hear people moving up the stairs nearby; the Banshee's balloon habitat was so small that the whole place bounced whenever anyone took a step. Michael knew he should be getting ready for the upcoming EVA, but he was so weary; all he wanted to do was sleep.

He popped the window open and reviewed what he had written. His brothers might understand his imagery, but to anyone else it would sound crazy— wacko, his friends back home would call it. Bitterly, he snapped the window closed. Enough self-indulgence. There was work to do. He stood and stretched and began to inventory his tools for the EVA.

11

"N O, THERE'S NO chance this thing could be two billion years old," said Dr. Katz to one of the marines. "It would have eroded in this environment long ago."

They were all crammed into an inflatable airlock at the axis of the spinning habitats. The lock was transparent. Michael had trouble focusing on his suit checklist, because his gaze kept drifting to the infinite expanse of stars surrounding them. It was nothing he hadn't seen before— but to say that was to completely miss the point. There were few sights more awesome than space itself, devoid of worlds.

He tried to concentrate on the nasal twang of Katz's voice. "Any dust and debris we encounter comes at us as high-energy cosmic radiation. A few thousand years of that and even the best structure will deteriorate. No, this ship can't be more than a century or two old, if that."

"Yeah, what about this radiation thing," said another marine. "We're going so fast now, if we hit anything bigger'n a pin, we're vapor, right?"

"Maybe so," said Katz, "but you and I can't begin to comprehend just how empty it is out here. Every second each one of us is passing through about a million and a half times our own body's volume worth of space. In all that volume, we're only hitting a few stray particles— the rest have been cleared out of the way by the plow sail and there weren't that many to begin with."

The marine didn't look reassured. Michael couldn't say he blamed him.

"The stars don't look any different," said the first marine, who now had his suit check completed and his helmet dogged. Michael was still struggling with his gloves. "Isn't there supposed to be some kind of 'starbow' thing happening?"

"Popular misconception," said Katz. "Nope; you'd need a spectrograph to figure out our velocity. We might as well be standing still as far as I can tell."

Michael glanced behind him. Rue Cassels was already in her suit and was chatting with one of her crew. There were three of the halo-worlders on this jaunt, plus two marines and four scientists, Michael included. His scientific qualifications were pretty thin compared to some of the others, but he did have the benefit of five years spent with Dr. Herat.

The professor was suited up too. "Snap to it, Bequith. Here, let me help you." Dr. Herat settled the helmet on his head. "Nervous?"

"Of course. What kind of a fool do you take me for?"

Herat laughed. "There! You're all set. Not a second too soon, too— they're evacuating the airlock."

Michael looked around, expecting to see the transparent balloon crumpling in around them. It took him a few moments to figure out that since there was no air pressure outside it, it wouldn't collapse even when all the air inside was removed.

"Load up! Four to a cart!" shouted the lead marine. Space suited figures began jumping up to the waiting EVA carts; these were little more than I-beams with clips, spare oxygen, and supply nacelles and a motor at the back. Michael clipped his safety line to one and found himself face-to-face— or more properly, faceplate-to-faceplate— with Rue Cassels.

"Mr. Bequith," she said brightly. "I'm sorry for my behavior in the cantina this morning. It was rude."

"No offense taken," he said, a little stiffly to his own hearing.

"It just threw me when you said you were from Kimpurusha," she said. The cart lurched into motion and Michael grabbed for a handhold. Without missing a beat, Rue continued, "I didn't realize I felt so strongly about it."

Michael tried not to look beyond her to where the translucent habitats were rapidly receding. They seemed the only objects in all of space.

"I feel pretty strongly about it, too," he said. He quickly checked to ensure that she had opened a private channel between them; then he said, "I was involved in a rebellion against the R.E. when I was seventeen."

He couldn't see her face now; she was a silhouette against the diamond-hard stars. She didn't say anything for a moment and he thought he must have revealed too much. Then she said, "I feel like an idiot."

"What do you mean?"

"Here I go knowing just how different all us halo-worlders are from each other and it never occurred to me that people from High Space might be diverse, too. I just assumed you were all one big happy family."

"I remember before the Reconquista," he said. "It was only twenty years ago."

"I guess so," she said. "We only heard about Kimpurusha four years ago. I grew up thinking that of all the worlds, it, at least, would never give over to the R.E."

Now that he thought about it, it was plain that news about Kimpurusha's fall would not even now have reached the farthest outposts of the Cycler Compact. Dispatches from his brothers at the monastery, sermons, and theological abstracts were still winging their way at light-speed to the struggling colonies around isolated Jovian planets and methane dwarfs hanging in the silent darkness between the lit worlds. For them, the events of his childhood had not yet occurred.

"Turnover in five seconds," said the marine flying the cart.

"Hang on," said Rue. "No, like this." She drew his hand to a ring he hadn't known was there. "And watch the stars— it'll keep you from throwing up."

There was a stomach-lurching moment as the cart flipped over; watching the stars turn seemed to work, though, since that way Michael knew the feeling was real and not the phantom-falling sensation that he always had when weightless. "Deceleration in five," said the marine.

"There it is," said Rue. Her silhouetted arm pointed almost straight down. "Lake Flaccid."

Somebody had a floodlight and was roving it over the structure; there was no way to tell where the light was coming from, of course, since there was no air here to show a beam. Michael could see a disembodied oval of illuminated metal, which zipped to and fro dizzyingly, sometimes sliding off the giant sphere and disappearing completely. The first time that happened, he thought the light had been switched off, the effect was so total. It didn't help that the habitat rotated, so the vision of metal sliding through the spotlight made it seem as though the beam itself was moving, even when it wasn't.

"First time we came here," said Rue, "I was so scared. The place looks like my home, you know— like Allemagne. But it wasn't. It could hold anything— monsters, maybe, ghosts. I swear I have never been so frightened in my entire life as I was when we went to open the airlocks of the lake."

He laughed shakily. "I can believe that."

Whoever held the spotlight switched it to broader illumination and the whole habitat appeared, a ghostly white metal sphere covered with zigzag seams. A little vapor hazed off it; the marine, his voice flat, said, "See a bit of hydrogen evaporating from the heat of the lamps." They were probably still half a kilometer away and the light was not very strong. Michael decided he would not ask what the local temperature was.

The other cart blinked into existence below them; simultaneously its shadow appeared, hugely distorted, near the limb of the sphere.

"Knock knock," said someone; it sounded like Katz. "Anybody home?"

"There's two hotspots," said Corinna Chandra. She was on the other cart. "Opposite one another. Last time we found a hatch by one. Maybe there's one by the other."

"Did you mark the hatch you used?" asked Dr. Herat.

"We clipped a line to a ring there. You can see it at four o'clock."

It took a while for Michael to see it, because Corinna's four o'clock was his ten o'clock. A thin thread of white hovered just over the habitat's horizon; that must be it.

"We'll explore the second entrance later," said Dr. Herat. "Today we're going to follow your original route in. This time out we're interested in the lake, not the external structure."

Michael stared at the sphere, which was fast becoming a giant wall below them. "Decel burn," said the marine. Michael held on as weight reappeared for a second. Then they were drifting ever so gently in the direction of that dangling cable.

People from the other cart were grabbing for the line; Michael hardly noticed. He couldn't take his eyes off the sphere. He did not need the NeoShinto AI to help him feel awe of this place.

He imagined diminutive Rue Cassels floating here with her companions. Just them— alone, unknown to the rest of humanity and about to open an inhuman door. His admiration for her kept growing.

"Go, Corinna," said Rue. One of the anonymous space suits began to pull itself hand over hand up the line. Corinna stopped at a broad disk of ribbed and spikey, slightly purple material and began digging at an indentation near its edge.

"The airlock's a magnetic liquid; right now it's frozen so the magnets aren't on," said Corinna. "This switch turns on the heat and magnets at the same time. Watch." She withdrew her hand and the purple surface suddenly roiled and shimmered like an oil slick. Corinna reached over and her arm disappeared up to the shoulder in the material. "See?"

"Wait for us," said the lead marine. Both carts were at the cable now and Michael watched as they reeled themselves in.

"What's fun," said Rue, "is that the air pressure inside wants to pop you out like a grape seed. It's easier to get out than in, which doesn't strike me as too safe."

"On the other hand," said Dr. Herat, "there's no moving parts."

They were clustered around the disk now. "There's a bar just inside the edge here," said Corinna. "Just grab and do a flip— like so." She reached into the disk, somersaulted, and disappeared into it. The marines followed.

The material of the disk was denser than Michael expected— almost a meter thick and lens-shaped. It resisted his passage like a strong wind. When he completed his roll, though, he found himself floating inside a cylinder about four meters long and three across. It was brightly lit by the marines' floodlights and lined with ordinary-looking rectangular locker doors.

"You inspected these?" Herat pointed at them.

"Yeah," said Rue. "Nothing in them. Spotlessly clean, too. Like they'd never been used." She was undogging her helmet. "It's just nitrogen in here, so monitor your mesobots to make sure you don't come down with nitrogen narcosis. And keep your nosepiece in." She demonstrated the oxy clips, which promptly made her sound congested. Michael pulled up an inscape readout to watch the nitrogen scrubbers in his own bloodstream. He situated it down and to the right in his peripheral vision, so it wouldn't get in the way.

"Next is the strap palace," said Rue. She was obviously enjoying playing tour guide. "Come along, don't dawdle."

The far end of the cylinder had a two meter-wide opening in it. This turned out to be the entrance to a long round corridor. As Rue's name for it implied, the corridor was strung with hundreds of rubbery straps, each as wide as Michael's waist. They crisscrossed the space at various angles, making it impossible to see down the length of the cylinder.

"This is bizarre," said Katz unnecessarily. "What the hell are these things?"

Herat said, "I'd say the logical equivalent of handholds or steps, for something that uses its whole body for locomotion. Bequith?"

His scalp crawled looking at the things. "Maybe." Rue was hauling herself from strap to strap, closely followed by the two marines. The lights cast weird tongues of shadow across everything.

"This is like nothing I've ever seen," said Katz.

"But we can infer a lot from it," said Herat. "They were less than two meters in diameter, probably not more than three long; look, if you were a fish or an eel, you'd be able to bounce your way along this corridor pretty quickly. If it were completely open, you'd be whacking the walls or adrift— there'd be nothing for your body to undulate against."

"You think they're fish?"

"Why not? After all, everything below here seems to be full of some kind of liquid."

The corridor ended in a large long space Michael recognized from photographs as the shore of Lake Flaccid. It was spookier in real life: a long cylinder, like a cave or tunnel, lit only by darting flashlight beams, with darkness at its far end. Rue had overshot her landing and now hung in the very center of the space. She was fiddling with her wrist rockets, trying to jet back. In freefall, up and down were arbitrary choices; Michael could choose to think he was looking down a wide deep well, but it was more comforting to choose one side of that well and decide that it was «down» and that the side opposite it was "up." Indeed, in unspoken agreement everyone drifted over to one wall and oriented their feet down to it. Michael did the same and now he could imagine the cylinder was lying on its side and he and the others were standing inside it.

"Strange. What are these?" Katz's voice made no echoes here. He was shining his lamp at some translucent circles set in the floor. "Lights?"

"That's what we thought," said Corinna. She took a tiptoe step and sailed over to one. "But they're gelatinous and have things embedded in them. Like a jelly salad."

Katz joined her. "It's dark stuff, different shapes and sizes. Looks like… peas… and something cylindrical… and a square block. Can't be a light."

Herat dismissed the circles with a wave of his hand. "Signs. Actually," he said, looking around, "this place is festooned with writing. It's just that it's for beings who see with sonar."

Everybody turned to stare at Herat. Michael hid a smile; the professor was showing off, but he had to admit it was impressive. Herat's ability to look at an alien artifact and determine its purpose was legendary. These scientists were seeing that ability in action for the first time.

"Let's see what this lake is made of, shall we?" Dr. Herat folded himself cross-legged and gradually drifted down to rest on the lip above the gray substance Rue had called a lake. Michael wouldn't have known that the gray stuff wasn't solid if he hadn't been briefed. It simply looked like the ends of the cylinder were metal and the slightly wider middle part was this gray material. It was hard for the planet-born to imagine a cylindrical pool, after all; the lake was below him, but it also curved up to each side and was overhead. Reason told him that because the habitat rotated, the liquid would move outward because of centrifugal force. It was much easier just to ignore the liquid above him and see only what was below.

One of the scientists, Dr. Salas, was a materials specialist. He hunkered down with Dr. Herat and they dipped things in the lake for a while, talking in low murmurs, sometimes laughing. One of the marines had unpacked some fish-shaped mesobots and now held one over the lake; its sonar was able to penetrate the strange surface with ease. Michael opened an inscape view of the sonar signal and got his first view of the bottom of the lake.

Evan Laurel saw the inscape window and drifted over. "Stuff conducts sound really well." He pointed out a feature in their shared window. "Hey, that looks like an armchair…. Except it's a good four meters across."

"There are openings in the walls," said the marine.

"Yeah. We figured we'd make some of those our first target. Gravity gets pretty steep as you go down. At the bottom it's twice Earth-standard."

The other marine had drifted out across the lake and was inspecting the far end.

Dr. Herat began to laugh. "Of course! It's a perfect solution!"

They all clustered around him. He grinned, holding up a jar full of grayish stuff. "It's not a liquid at all! It's actually made of fine little beads, a bit bigger than sand grains. It's a granulated aerogel!"

The marines exchanged an uncomprehending glance. "Aerogels are ninety-nine percent air," said Herat. "We use them as insulation. They weigh almost nothing, but they're pretty strong. Our hosts, here," he waved around at the tunnel, "found they could make a kind of substitute for water, at a thousandth the weight. The grains don't crush easily, but they'll deform and move past each other. They behave mechanically almost exactly like a liquid."

Katz nodded vigorously. "Cheaper to accelerate," he said.

"I kind of thought that was what it was," said Evan. "But I didn't want to say so in case I was wrong."

"So now what?" asked Rue. "Can we go in it?"

"Oh, sure! It's not going to have any effect on our suits. And the sonar penetrates it. Perfect."

"In that case, we'd better set up camp. Corinna?"

She and Evan began unpacking and pasting down a pressure tent. "Just like old times, huh?" said Evan with a grin.

Herat shot a significant glance at Michael; that was his cue to butt in and make sure the halo-worlders followed proper quarantine procedure. He went over and politely asked to help. Meanwhile Herat, Rue, and the others crouched at the edge of the lake and ran their hands through it, discussing how best to proceed.

They erected two pressure tents and stuck them to the floor using a degradable glue. After several more hours spent surveying the axis, they retreated to the tents. Michael was in the larger tent, with Herat, Salas, Katz— and Rue Cassels. They stripped out of their suits, but left the black skintight underlayer on, as per regulations. In the event of a depressurization, the underlayer would protect them for several minutes.

There was almost no gravity here, so they pitched their sleeping bags standing up. That left plenty of floor space, where Salas and Herat hunkered down to play with samples of the aerogel. Katz fussed with the air mix for a while, then put on blinkers and earplugs and climbed into his sleeping bag. "See you in the morning, if that concept still has value around here," he said.

Michael sat down next to Herat. His employer had an uncharacteristically dreamy expression on his face. "Look at this place," said Herat, peering out of the tent's small window.

Michael called over his shoulder. "We've seen alien technology before."

"Yes… but this is different."

Michael nodded.

"How?"

They both turned their heads. Rue Cassels stood behind them. "How is this different?" she asked.

Herat scratched his ear. "Hmm… pretty fundamental question." Herat and Michael turned, offering a place in their circle. Rue drifted down to sit with them.

"Well," said Herat, "you know the R.E.'s been expanding through what used to be the cycler civilization for sixty years now. We actually had the FTL drive twenty years before that, but Earth hushed it up and started slowly, with exploratory vehicles that deliberately avoided the suns colonized by the cyclers. Even then the plan was to arrive at the cycler worlds with overwhelming force and complete knowledge about the stellar neighborhood.

"We sent exploration ships out to search for Earthlike worlds. The program concentrated almost exclusively on single, G-class stars like the sun. We did find life, everywhere, in fact. The universe is overflowing with it, it appears in unthinkable environments. It thrives brainless and without senses on nearly every world that could sustain liquid water. But intelligent life? That's another story. We didn't find any during that period— not currently existing intelligence, that is. But everywhere we went, we found the ruins of great ancient civilizations… cities and shattered fleets; burnt-off continents still radioactive after a million years… and everywhere, we found Earthlike planets that had been bombarded by meteors all at the same time, sixty-five million years ago.

"I spent a summer on the Yucatan peninsula, in Mexico, studying the Chicxulub crater. It's sixty-five million years old; the meteor that made it caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm partly responsible for naming the particular aliens who made that crater and thousands like it throughout the galaxy. The Chicxulub, you see, were the last pangalactic civilization. They wiped out every other sentient species in the galaxy by sending out self-reproducing planet killers— von Neumann machines— that bombarded every world that had animal life bigger than a fly. Then they died out in turn.

"The Chicxulub left the galaxy empty of technological species. Our studies showed that it took at least thirty million years for new toolmaking species to develop from the Chicxulub extinction event.

"The Chicxulub partly explain why the galaxy is so empty of intelligent life— but not completely. In the early years of the exploration the Panspermia Institute was formed and I was one of the first graduates. They filled our heads with idiotic notions; I was starry-eyed and intent on uncovering a galactic pyramid of consciousness, with microbes at the bottom, ancient wise species at the top, and us somewhere in the middle— A vision inherited from the mystical writings of Teilhard de Chardin, though I had never even heard his name at that point. But the stupid ideas we got from him resulted in the fiasco the Institute's in now.

"Our goal was to find our counterparts— conscious, toolmaking aliens whose civilizations might help us understand our own. We would find or help establish a galactic government, integrate our culture with those alien ones and follow the path to species-maturity. It was a fine vision and heavily funded by the R.E. We even built a giant orbital station, called Olympus, which was to be the home for our ambassadorial counterparts."

Rue nodded. "And you sponged our wealth off relentlessly to pay for it, until places like Chandaka can no longer survive on their own."

"Yes, but we thought it was for a good cause! We genuinely believed that the outcome would be a galactic civilization with a future history of millions, maybe billions of years, with humanity as the founders and chief patrons. Think of it! What greater dream could there be?"

Rue shook her head. "But the halo worlds could never be a part of it. We can't travel at faster than light. We could never visit Olympus."

"Well." Herat looked uncomfortable. "Nobody on Earth ever really believed anyone would live in the halo by choice. How could people live their whole lives without seeing the light of a sun? No— anybody born on a lit world would wither and die in the halos and we thought— they thought— that over time, the halo worlds would be abandoned. That's still the prevailing opinion in the R.E.

"So the Rights Economy went from being a completely local, Earthbound incestuous loop into a kind of panhuman taxation empire. It expanded like a swarm of locusts, devouring the inhabited lit worlds of the cycler civilization, bypassing the halo worlds and leaving them stranded and alone." Herat sighed. "I know it's a tragedy. I saw it happen. But at the time… it made so much sense. The R.E. was the only way to maintain control over the far-flung colonies, to prevent them from developing into political rivals, or from going transhuman on us.

"Anyway, thousands of ships were fanning out across the galaxy, searching for intelligent species. There was life everywhere, after all— why not life like ourselves?"

"Hang on," said Rue. "It sounds like you're saying you never found aliens. But I've heard about them— they do exist."

"Ah, well." Herat smiled sadly. "For political reasons, we have found it necessary to label certain species and… things… as aliens. Don't get me wrong— there are starfaring species out there, like the hinge foxes, or the autotrophs. We have found intelligent entities. Just… not what we expected. Not what we were looking for.

"Take the autotrophs. Because their planet had a more active carbon cycle than Earth, oxygen from photosynthesis took a billion years longer to concentrate in their atmosphere. Animals never developed, because autotrophic life— life that produces its own nutrients from ambient energy and minerals— had a billion extra years to evolve.

"The autotrophs developed in a kind of Eden, where predation didn't exist. They developed technology more as an outgrowth of their own bodies than as a cultural phenomenon. Imagine their shock when they began to visit other worlds and discovered that creatures who actually ate one another were dominant nearly everywhere.

"We've met the autotrophs. But they won't speak to us. To them, we are the worst possible moral abomination, right down to the cellular level.

"Then there's the solitaires. They're individual creatures, we know that. Each one has built a starship around itself and they travel all over the galaxy. But they don't have the concept of language at all; they're solopsists. Since we haven't even met one, we can only theorize about how they developed technology; I think they reproduce by budding and the new bud takes away the knowledge of its elder. But who knows?

"And there's the sylphs, who are incredibly dangerous. We set up colonies on six sylph worlds before we even knew they existed. A biologist on one of the colonies made the discovery that every form of life on her planet had identical DNA— from the giant fern forests to sea slugs at the bottom of the ocean, it was one species, just expressing different genes to become different life-forms. And even the plants had nervous systems. What's more, the colonists had all reported various levels of radio and electronic interference on these worlds. It turns out the sylphs communicate constantly— it's a global network that passes experiential information back and forth. By the time we realized this, a good ten percent of the colonists themselves were sylphs— changelings, replaced in the womb by mimics.

"After an initial panic we realized the sylphs weren't attacking, they were just doing what they do— adapting to a new feature of the environment, in this case us. The changelings didn't even know they were sylphs— their human consciousness was completely separate from the underlying sylph mind.

"Discovering this, we made the fatal mistake: We tried to communicate with them.

"The result," said Herat sadly, "was the extermination of a colony of twenty-five thousand people and the subsequent cauterization of the continent they'd lived on by our navy. It turns out that to the sylphs, the highest ideal is adaptation. To them, the notion of adapting your environment to suit you is horrifying.

"They happily cohabited with us as long as they saw us as just another feature of the local environment. When they realized we were conscious beings like themselves, they were so outraged that they moved to destroy us. We had to wipe out one entire sylph culture in order to prevent the information spreading to the others. The sylphs have FTL and they're incredibly powerful. We're now in the midst of pulling our colonies off their worlds— slowly and carefully."

Rue took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. "That's awful."

"Well, the R.E. became a lot more cautious after that. About eight years ago, I was assigned to explore the various ruins we'd found and try to come up with a general pattern for the rise and fall of galactic civilizations."

"Really?" She seemed fascinated by that idea. "Is that when you hired Mike?" She turned her dark eyes in his direction.

"Shortly after," said Herat. "We visited hundreds of worlds and we did find a pattern. But we resisted accepting it, until we visited a place called Dis and were hit over the head with it." He smiled ironically.

"Go on," said Salas. "I've heard of Dis— what's it like?"

"Dis is a rectangular piece of woven fullerene, ten meters thick, four hundred kilometers wide, and five hundred long. Three billion years ago, it was part of a ring-shaped orbital structure almost two thousand kilometers in diameter. It had two-hundred kilometer high walls on the edges of the ring to keep atmosphere in and it rotated to provide gravity. At some time after its abandonment it must have been hit by an asteroid, which tore it apart. The part we found is in a highly elliptical orbit around a white dwarf star that was once a G-class sun. This sun long ago swelled up, swallowed its planets, and shrank again. Dis is the only legacy of a magnificent species three billion years old.

"Most of the soil and structures that were on the inside surface of the Dis ring were knocked off it in the catastrophe, but we found one nearly intact city and thousands of kilometers of subsurface tunnels. They left records and we were able to piece together a little of their history.

"They wanted their civilization to last forever— that's the one thing we do know about them. They built for the ages in everything they did. The evidence is that they did last a very long time— maybe eighty million years. But early on, they discovered a disquieting truth we are only just learning ourselves. It is this: Sentience and toolmaking abilities are powerful ways for a species to move into a new ecological niche. But in the long run, sentient, toolmaking beings are never the fittest species for a given niche. What I mean is, if you need tools to survive, you're not well fitted to your environment. And if you no longer need to use tools, you'll eventually lose the capacity to create them. It doesn't matter how smart you are, or how well you plan: Over the longest of the long term, millions of years, species that have evolved to be comfortable in a particular environment will always win out. And by definition, a species that's well fitted to a given environment is one that doesn't need tools to survive in it.

"Look at crocodiles. Humans might move into their environment— underwater in swamps. We might devise all kinds of sophisticated devices to help us live there, or artificially keep the swamp drained. But do you really think that, over thousands or millions of years, there won't be political uprisings? System failures? Religious wars? Mad bombers? The instant something perturbs the social system that's needed to support the technology, the crocodiles will take over again, because all they have to do to survive is swim and eat.

"It's the same with consciousness. We know now that it evolves to enable a species to deal with unforeseen situations. By definition, anything we've mastered becomes instinctive. Walking is not something we have to consciously think about, right? Well, what about physics, chemistry, social engineering? If we have to think about them, we haven't mastered them— they are still troublesome to us. A species that succeeds in really mastering something like physics has no more need to be conscious of it. Quantum mechanics becomes an instinct, the way ballistics already is for us. Originally, we must have had to put a lot of thought into throwing things like rocks or spears. We eventually evolved to be able to throw without thinking— and that is a sign of things to come. Some day, we'll become like the people of Dis, able to maintain a technological infrastructure without needing to think about it. Without needing to think, at all…

"The builders of Dis faced a dilemma: The best way to survive in the long run on any world they colonized was to adapt yourself to the environment. The best survivors would be those who no longer needed technology to get by. They tried to outlaw such alterations, but how do you do such a thing for the long term without suppressing the scientific knowledge that makes it possible? Over tens or thousands of millennia, you can only do this by suppressing all technological development, because technologies intertwine. This tactic results in the same spiral into nontechnological life. So inevitably, subspecies appeared that were better survivors in a given locale, because they didn't need technology in that locale. This happened every time, on all their worlds.

"The inhabitants of Dis had studied previous starfaring species. The records are hard to decipher, but I found evidence that all previous galactic civilizations had succumbed to the same internal contradictions. The Dis-builders tried to avoid their fate, but over the ages they were replaced on all their worlds by fitter offspring. These descendents had no need for tools, for culture, for historical records. They and their environment were one. The conscious, spacefaring species could always come back and take over easily from them. But given enough time… and time always passes… the same end result would occur. They would be replaced again. And so they saw that their very strength, the highest attainments they as a species had achieved, contained the seeds of their downfall.

"This discovery finally explained to us why toolmaking species are rare to begin with. It takes an unusual combination of factors to create a species that is fit enough to survive, but at the same time is so unfit in its native environment that it must turn to its weakest organ, its brain, for help. Reliance on tools is a tremendous handicap for any species; only a few manage to turn it into an asset.

"The builders of Dis knew they were doomed. We all are: technological civilization represents a species' desperate attempt to build a bubble to keep hostile environments at bay. Sentient species also never cooperate with one another over the long term, because the environments they need in order to live are incompatible. Some, like the Chicxulub, accept this easily and try to exterminate everyone else. Even they can't stop their own evolution and so eventually they cease to be starfaring species. Destruction or devolution are the only choices.

"It's hard to see how we can cohabit with the autotrophs and the sylphs, if humanity is bent on expansion and so are they. Something catastrophic is bound to happen; and if not, well, we'll just evolve away from what we are, sooner or later."

"That's about as bleak a story as you can get," said Rue. She scowled off into space for a while. "But you still haven't answered my question: how is Jentry's Envy different?"

Herat nodded. "Two things. One is something we found on Dis, something that scares me even to think about. But I'll start with the other, obvious one: Jentry's Envy appears to have been built for more than one kind of species to use— not just more than one species, more than one kind. It implies the one thing we've never seen: multispecies cooperation. If it's not a fluke, a one-time happening in the history of the galaxy, then it suggests there may be a way to break the cycle of competition and destruction that's ruled since the first stars were born.

"But the other thing, the thing that scares me right now, is that while we were on Dis we found evidence that a number of other races had visited Dis in the past— searchers, like ourselves. In two places, we even found Lasa graffiti."

"Graffiti?"

"Well… artifacts and writings, like the ones on the habitat here. We haven't fully translated it, but the point is that one of those pieces of writing dates to the Lasa period, two billion years ago. We know it's Lasa because it illuminates the meaning of other samples we have— it's either Lasa or somebody who could think in the language. But the other…

"The other thing was a piece of Lasa technology that also appears genuine, because its integrated data storage has the unforgeable mathematical signature of the Lasa," said Herat. "But when we dated it, we found it to be only twenty thousand years old."

Salas whistled and sat back. "Two billion years…"

Herat shook his head. "It's impossible. But every time I see the pictures of that habitat out there, with the Lasa writing on it, I wonder… Were the poor inhabitants of Dis right— is a permanent civilization possible? If so, how? What's frightening is the thought of how you might have to live— how you'd have to understand the world— in order to maintain a civilization for two billion years."

12

"Y OU'RE SET TO go, people," said Rue Cassels. She waved down at Michael. "All signs looking good."

They were not wasting time. Michael had only just had breakfast and now he found himself clutching the lip of Lake Flaccid's shore, preparing to dive into who knew what. It was probably better to do it this way. Otherwise he might have to think about where he was about to go and that would be bad.

Michael heard Herat sigh. "Okay, let's do it." Michael let go of the shore of Lake Flaccid and let himself sink.

Real vision was impossible here. As the surface of the lake closed over the top of his helmet, Michael had a startling moment of déjà vu: He remembered as a child standing on the edge of a cliff in wintertime. He was all bundled up in a parka with the hood up and had been gazing out at some mountain sheep on a far slope, when a snow squall came up. In seconds everything went blank and he couldn't see more than a meter beyond his feet. Terrified, he had stood there for half an hour, englobed in white, until the storm abated and he could once again see the sheer drop at his feet. He had never gone to stand on that particular spot again.

The evac suit felt much like a parka and as soon as he entered the lake he was embedded in milky whiteness. For a while he just stared at it, able to see swirls and layers in it as he descended. He waved his arms experimentally. It certainly felt like he was underwater.

Then Dr. Herat's voice broke him out of the reverie: "Look at it! It's magnificent!"

Michael switched to the inscape view provided by the mesobot "fish." The sonar mappings of all three fish were combined into one 3-D model and Michael's POV was adjusted to match his actual position in that model. He could look around and it was almost as if it were his own eyes that saw, in false color, the interior of the alien habitat.

The first thing he noticed was that the wall he was following down did not extend all the way to the bottom of the habitat. There were windows just below him, then under that great arches opened up. The material of the walls swept down to become pillars that grounded in a blurry maze at the bottom; of course, since the habitat was a rotating sphere, the arches looked more like the arms of a star radiating out from the cylinder at the axis.

There were numerous round «signs» like those they'd found above, set in vertical rows in the wall. When the sonar hit them just right, they turned into complex three-dimensional swirls that seemed to move. Beautiful.

"It's all open down here." Herat was enjoying this altogether too much. In some ways, the man had no imagination, Michael had decided; he couldn't picture the nightmares that most people glimpsed in shadows. To him, this was just another place. True, Herat knew the utility of imagination; that was why he had hired Michael.

Their lines could snap (though they were fullerene, strong enough to suspend a whole building) and they might fall into jagged wreckage or even traps down in that blurred substrate. Or the weird aerogel beads could penetrate the suit somehow.

Or there might just be live things in here after all…

"How are you guys doing?" asked Rue. The marine answered, "Great, thanks," with more than a tinge of relief in his voice. "I'm good, Rue," said Michael.

Experimentally, he switched off the inscape view. It was dark down here now— an unremitting slate gray, not at all like water. He held up his hand and couldn't see it until he plastered his palm against the faceplate.

"Tell me again what you're looking for?" asked the marine.

"Evidence of habitation," said Herat. "That means organic materials, ad-hoc structures— bodies would be ideal. We want to know whether this cycler was launched with a crew who later abandoned it or died here. Why is it empty? That's what I want to know right now."

"Yes, sir. My instructions are not to allow you to enter any small spaces, sir."

Michael flipped back to inscape. Dr. Herat's fuzzy outline was floating near one of the «window» openings. It wasn't dark in there— sonar shadows in this view were like solid extensions of the objects casting the shadow. Every now and then the triangulation of the three mesobots failed and one of the space-suited figures would grow a long spike-shaped tail for a few seconds.

"Bring one of the bots down here," commanded Herat. Something small and sleek slid up through the water to him, and the archway below Michael's feet vanished. He saw his own feet grow long pillars that grew down into indeterminacy.

This was the perfect place to try to capture a kami— but not right now. Michael's mouth was dry and his heart was thudding painfully in his chest.

As the mesobot approached the window, the opening took on more definition, despite being farther away from Michael than his own indistinct, overlapping hands. Since vision in his neighborhood was deteriorating, he swam in that direction.

"It opens up just past the entrance," said Herat. "I see… looks like a swimming pool."

"Maybe you should go topside, sir," said the marine.

"I'm not hallucinating, man— I'm looking at a wide, long chamber with a low roof— maybe a meter high. The sonar hits a kind of boundary layer at the bottom and under that it's like another chamber. I'm going in."

"No! Sir—" Herat disappeared into the opening. The marine followed.

There was some scuffling and a sharp exchange of words. Then Herat and the marine emerged.

"It's water!" Herat had forgotten his anger immediately in the light of a new discovery. "There's long tanks of water in there. We're at about the one gee level here; you could swim in there and just sort of glide into the water. Maybe that's where they slept— the equivalent of living quarters. We have to do a thorough investigation—"

"Not before we've secured the approach, sir." The marine waved at the vaults below them. "I suggest we see what's down there before we proceed. And then, only with Admiral Crisler's permission."

"We don't need Crisler's permission," scoffed Herat. "Only Ms. Cassels's."

"He's right," said Rue. "It's my ship."

"You are correct," said the marine. "The ship is your responsibility. However, your safety aboard said ship is our responsibility. We are not threatening your ownership, merely doing our duty to protect you."

"We'll see about that," said Rue.

"Meanwhile," said Dr. Herat, "let's take this young man's suggestion and explore under the arches. Shall we?"

They backed the fish out of the opening and began to lower it and the others. Michael let out his line and drifted down after, with Herat behind him and the marine above.

The pools of water had sparked his imagination. This environment was alien, but something Herat had said last night came back to him: "What we will share most fundamentally with aliens will not be mathematics, or reason, or language, but basic bodily functions. If we're going to commune with them, it will be on that basis first and the others later or not at all."

Indeed, the slope of these arches told him nothing— they were geometrically minimal structures and any cellular automata program could have evolved their design. No, what made this place make sense was the image of someone coming home after a hard day's work in an uncomfortable medium and slipping gratefully into real water for a rest.

He knew he was half-consciously building the empathic basis for a NeoShinto revelation. A few months ago that would have pleased him; now he saw it as making himself vulnerable to a frightening truth he didn't want to see; he angrily shrugged off the feeling.

They dropped past the top of one of the arches and for the first time the rest of the spherical habitat became visible.

"It's a town!" Herat laughed. "An underwater town!"

"Beware the metaphor, Professor," muttered Michael.

It did look kind of like a mountain village back home, though. Farthest away was a smoothly curved latticelike structure suggesting boxes or buildings that rose up from the valley at the equator of the sphere toward its rotational pole. The boxes had openings on all sides, even the roofs. Inside, the sonar presented various complex shapes as multicolored blurs.

The middle distance was cluttered by a number of closed spherical structures atop tall pillars. Some of these had closed tubes or ducts that angled up and away to merge into the distant walls.

Michael looked up. The arches made a vaulted ceiling just above his head. Above that, he knew, were the tanks of water Herat had spotted, then the axis where Rue and the others waited. If those tanks were the living quarters, then what they were now seeing was where the creators of this habitat spent their days.

Something about the tanks seemed out of place. After a moment, he had it: "Professor, if the bottom of this place is at two gees of gravity, why did they put the water tanks at one gee if two was their natural gravity level?"

"Hell, I don't know. Comfort? Low-gee for sleeping? Hmm— urmm."

"By rights then we should find some more water at the very bottom, for a normal homeworld environment." He looked down; the sonar didn't show the sort of boundary layer there that Herat had described— only a jumbled blur.

"Why don't you swim down and take a look?"

"Yeah. Give me one of the fish." A shimmering, shape-shifting form drifted in his direction: the metal mesobot fish, viewed with sonar.

He switched from the inscape view for a moment: It was completely dark here now. The sensation of being flipped over slowly— an artifact of the habitat's rotation— was all he could feel. Best not to think about that; he returned to the inscape view.

Michael dropped a few meters and began to notice a change in the feel of the aerogel liquid. It was thicker, more viscous. Probably the little spheres were more tightly packed down here— something that didn't happen with water, which was essentially incompressible. He was just wondering whether it might harden into a solid mass at a certain level, when something caught his eye. He felt a flood of adrenaline hit him even as he realized what he was seeing.

"Shit! There's a fan down here. It's a big-bladed thing, on its back. It's turning at a few RPM; I don't know if it's pulling or blowing."

He had his answer a second later, as the mesobot fish passed him on the left and began arcing slowly down in the direction of the fan.

"Professor! The combination of the fan and higher gravity's pulling us down! Grab my line."

The fish turned around and began undulating, trying to escape the pull of the fan. For a few seconds it stayed suspended above the blades, which in sonar-light looked more like pyramids or blocks, their undersides shadowed solid.

"Bequith, your line's played out and fallen down behind you. We're getting them to reel it in from above."

He looked around. The line, visible as a kind of wing behind him, was indeed draped down into the blur below. He could see the vague other end of it lifting up past the arches, but too slowly. He was directly over the fan now.

He looked down and saw a Dalíesque fan blade swinging out to touch his line, just as the mesobot fish lost its fight to climb and fell among the blades.

Instantly everything blurred; he heard a loud clang through the aerogel. Then something had hold of his line and was pulling him down.

Yelling, he clawed at the safety clip on his belt. Precious seconds were lost as he fumbled at it; all he could see were vague looming shapes surging by under his feet.

He found the quick-release and pushed it. The line jerked away and then Michael was sucked down by turbulence. Something struck him hard in the stomach. He fell, landed hard and rolled, hammering his head against the inside of the helmet.

MICHAEL KNEW EXACTLY where he was and what had just happened, but he wasn't sure whether he had been lying here on his back for a few seconds or an hour. It was completely dark and silent. The darkness made sense; the silence didn't.

"Dr. Herat?" There was no answer. He called up inscape; a flood of diagnostic windows opened like flowers all around him. Since they were artifacts painted on his sensorium by nerve implants, their light didn't make him wince, nor did it illuminate the darkness beyond his helmet visor.

The diagnostics were clear, though: He had been here about ten minutes and still had almost a day's worth of air left in the suit's recycler. The suit's comm unit was damaged, however.

He tried to sit up; his head spun and it felt like a great hand was trying to push him down again. He stood, slowly, and though movement was like pushing through a strong wind, he had no difficulty staying up. The worst part was the continuous spinning sensation, which he knew was real: It came from the habitat's rotational gravity.

From somewhere nearby a steady chop-chop sounded. That would be the fan. He could feel its effect, in regular pushes that almost made him stagger.

He was supposed to weigh twice his normal weight down here, but it didn't feel like it. Except for the thickness of the medium, it felt more like a standard gee. He could walk, or at least stagger under the strong coriolis effect and his feet touched down as fast as if he were standing in air on board the Banshee.

Of course. He bet that the creatures that built this place were more buoyant than a space-suited human. They probably couldn't sink in this aerogel and there would be a lower limit below which they couldn't swim— they'd just pop up again. What to him was a floor, would to them be as inaccessible as a distant ceiling.

By that logic, he would be standing in their machine attic. He might stumble into another fan in this blackness, or something worse.

But he couldn't just stand here. Or could he? They should be lowering the other mesobots more carefully even now and casting sonar illumination all through this area.

Wait a second— ten minutes? That was plenty of time for them to have illuminated the whole area and even brought down another diver and some safety line. Where was everybody?

Maybe he wasn't visible lying down. He tried waving his arms, after cautiously reaching out to make sure he wouldn't hit something. That should do the trick.

Michael stood there for a few minutes, waiting, while his head throbbed and he imagined all sorts of threats converging on him in the blackness. He waved his arms again and shouted, which was absurd since he just hurt his own ears.

Nobody answered. Nobody came.

After a while he decided he must have fallen in the sonar shadow of something big. He would have to walk. Arms out like a blind man, he shuffled forward. Almost immediately his fingers touched a solid wall.

He groped his way along it. It turned out to be a big metal box, just taller than he was. There was open space beyond it, but he only went a few meters before he encountered a low box with a grill; aerogel was surging up out of this, though not strongly enough to lift him. He skirted it and tripped over some cables. The weird combination of rotational gravity and viscous aerogel made him land on his face again.

Where were they? Michael ran through his entire repertoire of curses. His voice in his own ears sounded weak, boyish. He didn't want to die down here. Once he had believed death was merely a remerging with the universe. Now he saw that universe as vastly indifferent and himself as trivially small within it. To die was not to merge; it was simply to cease.

He forced himself to crawl, waving one hand ahead of him. And after a while, he began to see light ahead— at least, a change from total black to graphite gray.

They must be searching in the wrong place and they'd brought in floodlights to help…? No, that didn't make sense, this stuff wasn't transparent at any wavelength.

The light brightened and it became evident that it wasn't coming from above but from something on the deck ahead of him. Michael stood up cautiously and walked forward. His faceplate became gray, then white, then bright and milky. He put up his hand and saw it as a shadow. Following the shadow brought him to another collection of shadows, a sort of crosshatch pattern. Some bars with a bright light behind them? He reached out.

His hand fell on a pipe of some kind. Running his fingers along it, he discovered it ended in a vertical junction about half a meter to the right— and another, on the left. And above….

It was a ladder. They'd let down a ladder for him.

Michael laughed in huge relief and began to climb. This would be a story and a half, that was for sure. It was strange, though, how had they gotten a ladder in here in ten or fifteen minutes? He kept climbing, idly wondering at this, as the light fell away below him. No light emerged above.

He slowed his climb, then stopped. The ladder was a bit too steady under him to be something that had just been lowered from above. His people hadn't put this ladder here. It was part of the ship.

For a while he clung there in indecision, feeling his inner ear flip over and over from the habitat's rotation. He had to be visible on this thing. Nobody came, nothing happened, so he resumed his climb.

After a while he bumped his head and reaching up felt a smooth surface above him. A dead end? He felt about and his hand fell on an indentation, which had several knob-shaped things in it. He twisted one at random, then another, then reached up again.

His hand felt the surface again, but this time it was soft. He put his hand through it— this was an airlock like the one on the outside of the habitat. Eagerly, he pushed up through it— and into light.

"Gods and kami." He'd thought he must be back at the axis, but this was not the case. Instead, Michael found himself in a small round room with virulently green walls. Most of the floor space was taken up by the bulging round magnetic lock. The place was illuminated by, of all things, a sort of mirror-ball that hung in the center of the space. Four small spotlights spaced about the edges of the ceiling were aimed at it.

The room was a little more than a meter and a half tall. He had to crouch to stand.

A corridor led off from one side of the room. He hulked his way over to this; he seemed to weigh more than usual here, but not unduly much. The corridor sloped up steeply. It too was lit by little spots and mirrored pyramids set into the ceiling.

Michael checked his suit's readings. External air pressure: five bars, very high by human standards. Temperature: twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Humidity: forty percent. Atmospheric composition: ninety percent nitrogen, eight percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide. This might be breathable if you used CO2 scrubbers; he didn't know enough about partial pressures to be able to say for sure.

Well, there was only one way to go. Michael started climbing.

The corridor ran a long way. Somewhere around halfway up he realized that the round room must have been in one of those spheres they'd seen balanced halfway up the cathedral space of the habitat. This corridor would be in one of the ducts that had angled up from them to join with the habitat's outer skin.

The habitat was designed for two entirely different species to use together. Herat, were he here, would doubtless be chattering on about all that. For once, Michael was glad his boss wasn't around; it felt much better to be panicking by himself and not having to do it for two. Herat wouldn't even know he was in danger in a place like this.

Michael's weight fell rapidly as he climbed. Finally the low corridor ended at a T-intersection. He estimated he was at about the level of those tanks Herat had seen. He would have to get higher than this; if two species inhabited this place, there should be another entrance at the rotational axis. There wasn't one on the shore of Lake Flaccid, but hadn't Corinna said something about there being airlocks at both ends of the sphere? Maybe there was one for each species.

The corridor he was in now curved off in both directions. It might well circumnavigate the sphere. There were square doorways at regular intervals. He picked a direction at random and walked, glancing with some apprehension through the first several doorways before passing them.

The doorways led to rooms of various sizes. These were filled with… sheets. Each room held dozens of vertical rods, always in pairs, and between these were tautly strung thick sheets of some clothlike substance. They were usually about three meters wide and six to eight long and were fairly tightly packed in the vertical; he counted up to fifteen stacked above one another. They filled the rooms right up to the door; the only way to get in would be by burrowing through these layers and maybe that was the idea: He pictured some sort of social animal, molelike, used to burrowing and being surrounded by friends and family. Among the taut sheets he glimpsed folded frames of some kind, as well as stacks of complex metal items and what looked like plain old ordinary boxes.

Tempting as it was to try to reach those, he had already had one close brush with disaster and who knew what traps awaited him in these strange chambers? Over and above that, he just shouldn't touch anything. This location was pristine and should be studied with care.

Before he was a quarter of a turn around the circle, he found another ramp going up— as well as one going down that he had no desire to investigate. He ran up the ascending way; it curved, indicating that it was following the outer skin of the habitat and not diving into the interior. By the time he reached the top he was weightless.

This was no longer a room, but something like the space between the walls of two cylinders, laid on their sides. He had no doubt that the inner surface was the floor that verged on the lake. He bounced around the space until he found a gray oval with an indentation next to it, set into the inner wall. He couldn't recall seeing anything like this from the lakeside, but if the aquatic residents of the habitat were blind then they wouldn't have signified the door with color anyway. He pushed the indentation and when the door had deliquesced, he borrowed Corinna's maneuver and flipped himself through it.

The light here was different— yellow and multishadowed. It came from floodlights that poised in the microgravity like cobras on their cables. He was inside the axis cylinder… and there were his people.

Rue Cassels perched on one hand on the edge of the lake. Beside her Evan Laurel was playing out line. Their eyes were intent on the surface below them, as if they could drill through it by eyesight alone.

The temptation was too great. Michael eased off his helmet and drifted over as silently as he could, careful not to cast a shadow over the two watchers. When he was right behind them, he said in his most innocent voice, "What's up?"

"Listen, we're going after him no matter what you say," said Rue without looking up. Evan did look, did a double take and shouted, "Hey!"

Rue looked up too. Then, "He's back, he's back," "We've got him, come back!" they were shouting. Both grabbed the lines that led into the aerogel and began hauling on them.

Michael watched them pull for a few seconds; then he said, "Aren't you going to ask me how I got here?"

"Sorry," gasped Rue. "We gotta get out of here."

"What…?" A gloved hand gripped the side of the lake and a second later Dr. Herat was flying through the air, scattering sparkling aerogel beads. He was mouthing something inside his suit— grinning, of course.

"There's been an explosion on the Banshee," said Evan. "We've got to get back there with the sleds right away."

"The bastard wanted us to leave you," said Rue. She pulled and Corinna Chandra's faceplate broke the surface. "We told him to get stuffed."

Herat had his helmet off now. "Bequith, good to see you! Nothing broken, not too shaken, I hope?"

"A bit shaken," he admitted with a grin of his own. "But nothing serious. Professor, I've found it! Proof of the multispecies theory."

Herat gave a whoop and threw his helmet. It flew up past the axis and splashed into the aerogel. "Oh, I guess I need that. Excuse me." He dove after it.

The marines emerged from the gray soup and immediately started gesturing in the direction of the strap palace.

Michael watched Dr. Herat retrieve his helmet. "What about this explosion?"

Rue sighed heavily. "I don't know. Crisler said it was in the main life-support stacks. Dr. Katz flew back right away to help save them. Crisler wanted us all to come back and the marines pulled everybody out of the lake. We told them to go yank themselves and went back in."

So that was why nobody had come to his aid. He didn't feel any better about having been abandoned, but still the news was chilling. Had the explosion been deliberate? If so, was somebody willing to risk suicide in order to stop the expedition? Because destroying their life support this far from home was just that: suicide.

"Was anybody hurt?" he said after an awkward pause.

She shook her head. "But if the stacks are blown… we won't be able to stay. We'll have to go back into cold sleep and try to make it back to Chandaka." He could hear the deep disappointment in her voice, though her face showed nothing.

He frowned. "Maybe not. I don't know about food, but we might be able to get our air from here." He told her about the passages he had gone through. Rue listened in silence, then pushed her hair back with a gloved hand and puffed out her cheeks.

"Okay," she said. "That's the first good news I've heard in a long time. Thanks, Mike."

"Move out!" commanded the lead marine. They secured their helmets, grabbed their instruments and data packs and one by one flew up to the strap palace.

They had no idea what awaited them back on the ship, but Michael found himself absurdly happy anyway. He had made a discovery, survived an adventure, and he had brought news that had made Rue Cassels happy. Maybe he had been right to come after all.

13

HALFWAY BACK TO the Banshee, Rue's radio crackled into life.

"Rue, they're locking us up! We haven't done anything, but the bastards are blaming us for the explosion!" It was Max's voice; he sounded outraged. "Hey, give me that, you—" The radio went dead.

Rue felt fury wash over her. "Crisler," she said. She'd been right not to trust him— he was a control freak just like Jentry.

The two sleds seemed motionless, while in the distance the two-lobed white shape of the Banshee approached. She could see a black smear on one of the lobes now: a torn section of hull, right where the life-support stacks had been. So Crisler wasn't lying about that, anyway.

"What do we do, Rue?" asked Evan. He was on the other sled.

"Just wait a sec," she said. Rue had to keep reminding herself that Jentry was not the model for all men. She was probably overreacting. She put a call directly through to Crisler.

He appeared in a little inscape window down near where her hands gripped the sled. "Ms. Cassels, I'm sorry for this inconvenience," he said immediately. "But we've got a situation here."

"When I spoke to you ten minutes ago you said you had everything under control," she said.

"Yes, well… the important thing right now is to ensure that no further damage is done. Since I don't know who caused this explosion, everyone's a suspect. I'm confining everyone to quarters and that includes your people. It's just until we can investigate properly and make sure the Banshee's safe."

"And what about me?"

He hesitated, for just a second. "Naturally, you'll be free to move about as you wish."

She didn't believe him. That little hesitation said it all.

"All right then. Cassels out." She closed the window and leaned back. Her marine was at the front of the sled, his helmet turned toward the Banshee. Behind him was Salas, then Corinna. Rue had boarded the sled last.

They were still several minutes from the decel burn. She eased her feet out of the straps that connected her to the sled. Her heart was pounding. "I'm going to count on you guys to cooperate," she said on a public channel. "Do what you're told and answer any questions they might have. We'll get through this quicker that way. I mean, none of us did it, so we've nothing to worry about."

She spread her arms wide and cocked her hands down. Lifting her legs from the sled slowly, she gently fired her wrist jets. For a second it felt like she was hanging onto something with both hands. Then she cut the jets and watched the sled glide away.

"But what about Max?" blurted Evan.

"Max throws a fit over anything that keeps him from his hammock," she said. Her mouth felt dry as she watched the two sleds converge on the habitats of the Banshee. It wasn't that she was afraid of being out here in space— this was her home. She was frightened of facing Crisler's anger.

Well, hell, he was pushing her buttons and besides, she didn't have to justify herself to him. Really.

Now she was getting mad at herself. Cursing, Rue flipped over and oriented herself to face Lake Flaccid. With a couple more squirts of the jets, she was headed straight for it.

"Cassels, what are you doing?" She wasn't sure whose voice that was, but whoever it was, they were pissed.

"I'm looking to my ship," she said. "How do we know they won't bomb that, too?" Then she switched off the radio.

This ought to start 'em guessing.

It was with a feeling of déjà vu that she found herself grabbing the cable outside the lake's airlock and hauling herself in. Last time it had been her brother chasing her. This time it would be marines— they'd be sure to have turned the sleds around, or launched more by now.

Wryly, she thought, who's it going to be next time? The Lasa?

Rue flipped her way through the airlock and dove for the strap gallery. They'd shut off the lights here, so she used her helmet spot to navigate. This was dangerously fun, actually— nothing better than thumbing your nose at authority. The only thing that made her feel guilty was the fact that she had a crew to look after. They'd be feeling pretty bewildered right about now.

But, as Jentry often said, "always negotiate from a position of strength." If she was locked up aboard the Banshee, she'd have no way to influence the outcome of Crisler's investigation. Especially if he, say, rigged the explosion himself as a pretext for taking control of the whole cycler.

Not that she believed this, she thought as she launched herself across the length of the axis cylinder. She was just a paranoid yokel from the Stations. Well, maybe. But she would still negotiate from strength.

They'd catch up to her pretty fast. Even now they might be at the airlock. Rue reached the far shore of Lake Flaccid and found the corresponding strap palace there. As they'd discovered, the axis of the lake was indeed symmetrical, with two shores, two strap palaces, and two airlocks.

A minute later, she was outside again, perched on the hull of the lake and out of sight of the Banshee.

There was no handhold here and no light except from the stars. That was plenty of light for Rue, who spotted what she was looking for almost immediately. She sailed over to the cluster of rings and little robot arms that held onto one end of a thin white cord. This cord rose slackly into the night, spiralling away to infinity.

Rue had seen the radar maps of the cycler habitats. They were all still connected to the plow sail by cables and not much slack had entered the system since the last turn.

She clipped herself to the cord and kicked off from the Lake. As she rose she gave herself a few tugs on the line to speed herself up, then used a third of her remaining jet pressure to accelerate some more.

The jets had accelerated her to about 150 kilometers per hour. She concentrated on trying to keep the cord from touching the ring of the clip; it rattled when it did so and would reduce her speed. Too much of that would be bad: She had a thousand kilometers more to go today. So she unclipped it, played out a little of her own grappling cable, made a much bigger loop and put that around the cord. As long as she wasn't going to drift away, she'd be all right.

It would take at least six hours for her to get to the plow sail. She had almost a day's worth of air and power in the suit, so that wasn't a worry. But she fretted, wondering what was going on back at the Banshee, while the gray line of the tether stretching out ahead of her wavered and swung as it passed through her loop.

RUE FELL ASLEEP despite her best efforts. She had an inscape window open next to the wavering cord and had reviewed her suit's recording of the trip to the lake. Then she put on some music she'd downloaded into the suit months ago and sang along with it. She ran through all that too and ended up staring at the long line as it zipped by her, until she was hypnotized and finally, dozing.

She came to with the impression that something was wrong and had no idea where she was for a few seconds. She saw only stars, heard herself breathing in the suit and reached out reflexively.

Her glove found the cord and clutched it before she realized what she was doing. She let go immediately, but not before she realized what was wrong: She had stopped moving.

Rue looked behind herself. The cord seemed to coil up back there; she must have hit a really slack part or a long curve, which had pulled on the loop of belt line until it braked her to a stop.

Great. She checked the time: She'd been asleep for three hours. Rue knew she had passed the halfway point before falling asleep, but beyond that, who knew? There was no way to tell where she was; the plow sail might be two hundred kilometers away or only five.

For a few seconds she just hung there, discouraged and cursing herself for a fool. What was she doing out here, anyway?

She would have to boost up to speed again. That meant losing more propellant. She'd be dangerously low when she finally got to the sail. But it was too late to turn around and go home.

The alternative was to pull herself along, which would be slower, but wouldn't waste any fuel.

Rue compromised, by hauling herself along the cord until she was going as fast as she could, then giving herself a little boost with the jets. Once she was going again, she checked her instruments.

Hmm. The magnetometer was going crazy and the Geiger counter readings were rising fast…

Something black had blocked out the stars ahead of her. It expanded quickly until it filled her vision.

"Crap!" She grabbed the cord with both hands; it scraped her gloves, yanking her to a stop just meters from the terminus of the cord. Rue found herself perched on the end of a long, insectile arm that curved away toward a gigantic black object. She hung on for a few minutes while she stopped cursing and her heart rate slowed. When her faceplate had unfogged, she took a careful look around.

The plow sail was like a huge black spider, cylindrical of body, with at least a dozen long legs fanning out from its open end. Each arm ended in a spinnerette that held a delicate thread. The threads trailed away to infinity behind or below, depending on how she wanted to look at it.

Everything was perfectly still against the stars. The monstrous shape made Rue decidedly uneasy— it looked like it was frozen in midconvulsion and might at any second thrash those giant legs and draw her into its mouth.

The eeriness of it made her remember Dr. Herat's story about Dis. For a moment she could vividly picture the place— the dead roads and buildings black under the stars, a weightless cityscape where bodies frozen for three billion years still drifted through the rooms like ghosts, or embodiments of despair.

She tore her gaze away from the plow sail and opened an inscape window. In it, she issued the call to awaken the cache.

When they came to Jentry's Envy the first time, they had not done so in just one shuttle. Max had insisted that they fit two for the journey, the second being redundant and packed with extra supplies. It was horrendously expensive and nothing had gone wrong to warrant using it, but every day that they spent out here Rue had been thankful for its presence. When they rode the beam in to Chandaka they had left it behind, to further guarantee their safety upon their return. And Rue had instructed that no one should mention its existence on Chandaka.

She found it after a minute's searching; it had lit up as per her instructions and now appeared like a dim pearl in the night. Rue unclipped herself from the cord that connected her to the plow sail and Lake Flaccid and jetted out to meet it.

Ten minutes later she floated before a console in the cache, orienting an inscape camera so that it showed the wealth of netted food bags and equipment behind her. The picture was lined up perfectly, but she still hesitated a long moment before pinging Crisler. Her head hurt and she had to talk to herself for a few minutes to get her voice to stop shaking.

When she called he responded instantly. "So," he said. "Where are you?"

"I know how it looks," she said, "and that can't be helped. But I'm not your bomber. In fact, I think I can help."

He arched an eyebrow disdainfully. "My life support blows out, you disappear and the next morning there you are in what looks like…" he peered past her, "a treasure trove. What should I think about it?"

"This is our local cache of supplies."

"Supplies? You never told us about any cache," he said.

"Why should I have?" she said, her face hot. "The Envy is my ship; it's under the jurisdiction of the halo worlds. You are visitors."

"And now that you no longer need us, you're sending us packing back to the R.E." He said with an angry nod. "I see."

"No, you don't," she said. "Why would we blow up your life support? We need it, too."

"Do you? Not according to what I see behind you. Plus which, how many other caches have you got stashed around the Envy?"

"Oh yeah," she said with a laugh. "We could have lifted thousands of tonnes of stuff out of Erythrion, right? Infinite amounts. Get real, admiral. We came out here the first time with two balloons full of stuff and we flew into Chandaka with one of them. Do the calculations yourself— it was the best we could do with the energy budget we had. Would you have brought all your material back down from near-c if you were me? And would you have told people that you'd left stuff there? Think about it."

"I've been thinking about it," he said darkly.

"Then you know it doesn't add up," she said. "Why would we blow up the Banshee's life support while most of us were aboard it, if we wanted to scuttle you and send you home? If that were the plan, all my crew would be aboard the cache with me."

"Bad timing?" he said.

"We'd have to be idiots to be even getting ready to do something like that right now— we just got here! If we were going to do it, we would have waited a week or two until we were thoroughly camped out somewhere, say in those rooms Mike found in the lake. And you know perfectly well that all I'm after here is proof that the Envy is going to return to Erythrion at the end of her cycle. We don't have that proof and I don't know how to get it— so we still need you and your scientific team."

"So why did you cut and run, then?"

"You were going to lock me up, weren't you?"

He met her eyes. "No, Rue. I gave you my word and I would have kept it. Do you distrust me that much?"

"I… I had to imagine the worst," she said. "If the saboteur's smart, he'd make it look like we did it. And while we were cooling our heels in your brig, you guys might have found the cache on your own and that would just clinch it then, wouldn't it?"

"So? You're still out there with it. But I have your crew."

Rue made a face and waved a hand at Crisler. "Oh, stop it. Like I said, you wouldn't have my crew if it really had been us who did this. Look, Admiral, nobody wants this mission to succeed more than me. My future depends on it. For that reason, I'm bringing the cache back. We can try to rebuild the life-support stacks with my supplies."

Crisler scowled. "In exchange for…?"

"Nothing! Don't you get it yet? This isn't a negotiation, Crisler. I'm giving you the cache. As a gesture of good faith and to prove that I'm not your bomber."

The admiral's scowl gradually subsided into a frown. "Okay," he said finally. "We might be able to get back on-line with the material you've got there. Then what? I still have a saboteur to deal with."

"It's somebody who doesn't want the expedition to succeed," she said. "Or somebody who desperately wants to get back to Chandaka with news about what we've found here. Which is more likely."

He nodded. "I'd been thinking along those lines myself. Your disappearance threw me— because you're right, it doesn't make sense that it was you. But…"

"What?"

He was scowling again. "We're still in danger. Look, Rue, I'll let your people out and meet you in the boardroom when you arrive. We've got to work out a strategy to deal with this— either find the saboteur or neutralize his effectiveness."

"I'd rather talk about everything in the open— everybody present, no secrets," she said.

He shrugged. "If you want."

"Okay. The cache is pretty unwieldy. I'll be a day or two in getting there."

"We'll send some sleds on ahead to get the critical gear," he said. "Otherwise, we're going to run out of air before you get here."

"All right. Are we done?"

"Yes. And Rue… I'm sorry for my presumption of guilt on your part. Thanks."

"You're welcome." She cut the connection, and felt herself slump in relief. She hadn't been crazy to act this way; that was something to remember.

So was the fact that Crisler could be dealt with. Humming, Rue turned to the task of reviving the rest of the cache's systems.

MICHAEL HAD WATCHED as Crisler talked to someone through inscape, but he couldn't hear the dialogue or see the other person. That damnable military inscape was clouding his senses again. Finally Crisler's lips finished moving, he turned, and Michael found he could hear again.

"I suppose you know why you are here?" said Crisler. He had an expression of distaste on his face, as though Michael's mere presence offended him.

"Yes, I've written up a full report about my discovery in Lake Flaccid—"

"That's not what I mean." Crisler smiled grimly, and Michael felt his confidence evaporate. He had just spent the last few hours locked up with Rue's crew— with no explanations or apologies from the marines who guarded them. He had assumed some kind of overall quarantine was in effect.

There were other reasons why Crisler might take an interest in him, though.

The admiral was waiting. Michael cleared his throat. "Are you presuming some… involvement on my part in this explosion?"

"Bombing," said Crisler. "It was a bombing. We found traces of a chemical explosive."

"But why assume one of our people? I hate to say it, but the halo-worlders have the best reason for wanting us gone—"

Crisler shook his head. "The explosive was tagged."

"Tagged? What do you mean?"

"Everything's tagged," said Crisler. "From tables to starships. The tags are molecular-scale. It's impossible to get them out of a manufactured object without destroying that object. This bomb had tags, ergo it came from the R.E. and not the halo."

"The rebels."

"A rebel." Crisler leaned over his desk. "Maybe this rebel."

Michael's past was far behind him, but he still shifted uncomfortably under Crisler's gaze. "I had a brief flirtation with the rebels when I was a kid," he said. "So did a lot of people."

"Maybe. But you have also maintained illegal religious activities ever since." Michael must have reacted, because Crisler laughed. "Yes, we knew about your NeoShinto activities all along. Tolerated them, because you were useful. But you must admit it looks bad for you: a known connection with the rebels; current membership in a secret order that seeks to undermine the R.E. through religious proselytizing."

Michael's defensiveness gave way to anger. "I'm just continuing an old tradition, a tradition of my homeworld. A tradition your people destroyed."

"My people? Interesting turn of phrase." Crisler sat back, steepling his hands. "Of course, I don't have any proof it was you. Just supposition. But one slip-up this far into deep space, and we're all dead. So I can't afford to take any chances."

"What are you going to do? Put me into cold sleep for the remainder of the trip?"

"I actually thought of doing that. But Professor Herat has told me that he'll go on strike if you're put down. Anyway, I don't need to lock you up. Not if you wear this." Crisler tossed something small across the table. Michael picked it up.

It was a little earclip, with a beadlike lens on it. "Wear that at all times," said Crisler. "We'll be monitoring you through it. Take it off, and we'll find you and shoot you. That is all."

Michael's face burned with fury and shame. He fumbled to clip the damnable monitor to his ear, then stood.

He had just put his hand on the door switch when Crisler said, "Oh, I nearly forgot!" Michael turned.

The admiral waved a hand and an inscape window appeared above the desk. "Have you ever seen this man before?"

Michael glanced at the picture, then looked again. He put his hands behind him to hide a sudden tremble. With difficulty, he kept his voice steady as he said, "No."

"Hmm. Too bad. And quite surprising, given that this man Jason Errend was the rebel leader who headed the failed insurrection on Kimpurusha. We thought he'd changed his allegiance, and we trusted him for a while. Now he's disappeared again. Think about it, Bequith. If some memory comes to you of this man, please don't hesitate to come see me. My door's always open." Crisler smiled pleasantly, as though they'd been making lunch plans.

Michael lurched out the door, thoughts and emotions whirling in confusion. He couldn't help but feel the weight of the little traitor on his earlobe; it made him want to avoid meeting the gazes of the people he passed.

It was all too much to take in— particularly the shock of seeing Errend's face again, after all these years. Michael had always believed Errend had betrayed the resistance— had turned in his fellows on Kimpurusha. Michael included. Yet Crisler said he was still an active rebel leader.

Michael had trusted Errend, and the trauma of betrayal had driven him into the arms of the NeoShinto brothers.

Had he been wrong?

He went directly to his stateroom, but when he entered he saw that someone had been here. His Mark 820 datapack, in which he had stored illicit kami during his travels with Herat, lay on the bed. It was an open invitation for him to pick it up and access it. He knew that if he did, someone would be watching through the clip on his ear. They would see if he discovered the pack had been wiped clean of its illegal contents. They would see the kami if he accessed the pack to see if the files were still there.

He sat and stared at the black case— unable to pick it up, unable to ignore it.

He did not leave his stateroom for the remainder of the day.

RUE ARRIVED BACK at the Banshee the next morning, and Crisler immediately called a general assembly in the ship's round gymnasium. The science team was there, and Rue brought her people— all except for Max, who couldn't be bothered to move today, damn him. The small space barely held everyone; Rue ended up perched atop a piece of exercise equipment.

"The news is pretty grim," the admiral said as soon as the last stragglers arrived. "We have enough oxygen and food to maybe keep everybody going for a few days. If Dr. Bequith's discovery pans out, we may have resources we can use on the Envy." Rue smiled at Bequith, but he stood with his head down, eyes fixed resolutely on the floor. Odd.

Dr. Katz nodded vigorously. "We could put excess personnel in cold sleep after we find out how well we're supplied."

"Then what?" asked Crisler. "We can't complete the surveys here if we're understaffed."

Rue stood up on her bench. "But we're in the halo now. If we can get enough food stacks going to keep at least a skeleton crew alive for a few months, we can drop a rendezvous ship on the Colossus beam. We buy some new stacks from Colossus and we're back in business."

Crisler scratched his chin. "Can we do that? We'll be passing Colossus at near light-speed. If we stopped there, the Envy would be… maybe years away before we got back to it."

"There are ways," she said. "It takes a dangerously high-g arrival and departure. You only get a few days of stopover before you have to leave. Then you have to accelerate to a higher velocity than the cycler just to catch up, then slam on a braking magsail and match speeds. It's punishing and expensive, but my people have being doing it for centuries."

"It might just work. The alternative is to return to Chandaka for supplies and that'll cost us a good year— though if your skeleton crew turns out to be too small, R— Captain Cassels, then we don't gain anything, do we? If we can't explore the rest of the Envy in the meantime…"

"Well, let's work out our minimums," she said. She knew they were surrounded by uncertainties, but it wasn't the first time for her. They had to stay focused on the critical issues or let the whole expedition collapse.

"This scheme of visiting Colossus seems highly risky," said Katz. "What have we got to buy new stacks with at Colossus? These things don't come cheap."

Rue had thought of that. "We can sell our preliminary findings, or passage on the Envy to its next stop, if the passengers bring their own stacks."

"Unacceptable," said Crisler. "I don't want information about the Envy getting out."

"Oh, come on! Colossus is two light-years from the nearest lit world. Even if your precious rebels heard about what we've got, it would take them years to find out about it!"

"Nevertheless," said Crisler. "And two years isn't that long."

"All right," she said. Her hand strayed to her throat. "I do have a… negotiable item independent of the Envy that I can sell. I'm sure we can get the stacks and more with it." She carefully ignored the looks of surprise that passed over her crew's faces at this revelation.

"So are we going to fly the Banshee into the Colossus system?" asked Katz.

Rue shook her head. "No, that would take too much energy and time. We send a small group, and they ride the beam in— just like we did at Chandaka."

"That sounds suicidal," sputtered Katz. "Admiral, are we really going to rely on this— sorry, Rue— primitive cycler technology?" She glared at him.

"Rue's right," said Professor Herat. "Why interrupt our investigation of the Envy by shipping out in the Banshee? For that matter, if Rue's negotiable item is information, we could sell it and order the stacks without having to leave the Envy at all. Isn't that right, Rue?"

She nodded. "Dr. Katz, the Cycler Compact has functioned for centuries. It's far from primitive. They would have to honor an agreement like that. Unfortunately, my item can't be radioed on ahead. I'll have to sell it in person."

"All right," said Crisler, "so we have the beginnings of a plan. Now, assuming we use the supplies that Captain Cassels has graciously donated, we can survive until we reach Colossus if we put… how many people?"

"Forty," said Katz, rather quietly.

"…Forty people into cold sleep."

This news did not go over well. Rue watched the scientists eye one another, and tighten into small groups, muttering. "I know," said Crisler, one hand raised, "forty of sixty-eight people is a huge hit. We have our unknown saboteur to thank for the situation and we'll just have to make the best of it. If Rue is right that we can pick up supplies at Colossus according to time-honored cycler tradition, then we revive everyone afterward. This means that we are committed to the full year-and-a-half exploratory mission, but considering what we've discovered in just scratching the surface here, I don't think that'll be a problem. We'll disembark at Maenad and return to the R.E. with our results. Comments, anyone?"

"Well, yeah," said a young chemist named Hutcheons. "Who's going into the tanks?"

"We want to maximize the science presence, obviously, but we can't completely eliminate the support team," said the admiral. "We can't ask Captain Cassels to spare any of her people, so a reasonable cut would be twenty of my people, mostly on the military side, except for a squad that will guard the tanks and other essential equipment from further sabotage. Twelve of the support staff leaves eight to be cut from the science team. Dr. Herat will have to decide on who he needs the most."

Hutcheons shook his head vigorously. "That's not fair. We all know Herat will keep the priest awake no matter what. Somebody's going to get put down in his place."

There was more muttering. The priest? Rue looked around at the crowd. Then she noticed Michael Bequith standing to one side, eyes still fixed on the ground. Other members of the science team were looking at him too.

"Oh, stop whining," Herat said. "You're only going to miss the initial exploratory phase— something Bequith has years of experience with. The real work comes later anyway, you know that."

Herat walked to the front and turned to fix his team with a determined look. "You all know I seriously object to tampering with alien archaeological treasures, but as Admiral Crisler keeps pointing out, this is a survival issue. We're going to have to search the Envy for usable supplies. One thing we can say is that oxygen is oxygen and we're not going to learn anything from the gas stored in the tanks we've seen attached to some of the Envy's habitats. We can harvest that gas if it's not being used by the habitats themselves. Now, we will learn from the tanks, damn it, so I don't want them busted, drilled, reamed out or painted! We need isotopic and engineering studies of them.

"Doubtless we could find a lot more supplies if we ransacked the place, but if we do that then we make a joke of the scientific expedition. So we will proceed slowly and systematically. Is everyone clear on that?"

There was no more grumbling. After a moment, Herat nodded sharply and said, "It's important to know what progress we've made in the little time we've been here. Dr. Katz, could you present our findings from the habitat Rue's people so colorfully call 'Lake Flaccid'?"

Katz was taken a bit by surprise. To cover himself, he began summoning inscape windows, until they surrounded his head like a cloud of playing cards. He glanced at these and cleared his throat.

"Well, the main finding is, of course, that Jentry's Envy really is a multispecies starship. This has profound implications; it could revive the project at Olympus and the political impact is going to be huge.

"Even so, this raises more questions than it answers. If there really are at least two species involved in creating Jentry's Envy, where are they? All the stars within twenty light-years are either inhabited by humans, or empty of useful planets.

"Secondly, we've completed isotopic analysis of Lake Flaccid and, by laser, on two other structures. The isotopic distribution matches several stars in the local stellar group. Most important, the hull of Lake Flaccid contains a record of its age: There's a steady rain of cosmic rays on the Envy and from the number of tracks in the hull metal you can directly calculate how long the ship's been travelling at this velocity.

"The answer is exactly forty-seven years." Katz waited while the now excited buzz of conversation died down. "If there is no FTL drive on this ship, then it's impossible for the Envy to have come from more than about forty light-years away. If it's a true cycler it's travelling in a rough circle and will eventually return to its starting point. We think that starting point is less than twelve light-years from here.

"If that truly is the case, then we have a paradox, since this whole volume of space is well known. At this point… I'd welcome any ideas," he ended weakly.

The scientists proceeded to get into a roaring debate. Crisler stood back, arms folded, and watched with satisfaction. Rue took the opportunity to edge in the direction of Mike Bequith, who was standing aloof; apparently no one would talk to him. Some kind of revelation had occurred concerning him, and Rue had to know what it was.

After letting the argument go on for a while, Katz raised a hand and said, "People, please! We can talk till we exhaust the stacks, but it won't get us anywhere. The evidence is there to be collected, if we just go look. I suggest that our next stop be the habitat that has the Lasa writing on it."

This touched off even more debate, but Rue had reached Mike now. "I wanted to thank you again for your discovery yesterday," she said. "I thought we'd lost you, and I apologize for getting you into that situation to begin with."

Mike appeared surprised. "It's… my job," he said, his voice a bit husky. "But thanks."

"I wanted you to know that you've served my ship and crew well," she said. "Now tell me, what was all that about?" She nodded in the direction of the arguing scientists.

Mike squinted at the wall for a few seconds. "I'm a suspect in the bombing," he said. "The only suspect, it seems."

"What? Why?" Then she remembered her first impression of Mike: He had been eavesdropping on her conversation with Evan in the gardens at Chandaka. She'd thought that impolite at the time, but not sinister. Now, though…

He grimaced. "I was briefly involved with the resistance, years ago. It was the kind of foolish thing you do when you're young. But it seems there's no outliving your mistakes."

"Hmm." She decided not to judge that, now— it might pay to be more cautious around Michael Bequith in the future; on the other hand, he had been nothing but charming and helpful during the expedition, so far. "Why are they calling you 'the priest'?"

"Because Crisler's told everyone that I practice a banned religion," he said.

Well, that at least was not a total surprise. "NeoShinto. You told me about it, so I looked it up. It's banned in the Rights Economy, but not in the halo. If you can't practice your religion in peace and quiet on the Banshee, all you need do is visit the Envy. Remember that."

He stammered his thanks. The meeting was breaking up, so Rue took her leave of Mike.

He might be the threat Crisler was searching for, or he might be innocent. Either way, by offering him a haven Rue had hopefully made him less of a threat to her own people.

Besides, he was kind of cute.

14

"STERLING ACCOMMODATIONS," SAID Dr. Katz. "But I'm sure we'll get used to them."

"Thanks for the support, Henry," said Laurent Herat. They were watching some of Crisler's marines unload boxes into one of the more capacious chambers of the Lake Flaccid warren. They had figured out how to unclip the sheets that were wadded into the rooms and here had packed them into a corner, leaving uprights standing like too-thin pillars everywhere. Two members of the scientific team sat in the corner, suits off, reading about partial pressures and trying to program their scrubber implants to handle the local air. There were public inscape windows everywhere, full of equations, photos, and journal articles and one or two hovering models of life-support equipment that the techs were using as schematics. You walked through them like clouds.

Michael Bequith was depressed. He had been struggling against admitting it to himself, but the strain of Crisler's accusations and the revelations about his past that had followed the explosion had mired him down. It didn't help, today, that Katz was in such a good mood.

"It'll be fun," said the habitat specialist. "We've gotten way too soft, let our machines do all the work for us. You know, when I was young I used to design habitats from scratch with big constraints on them— not enough air, or no free water supply. The more these halo-worlders tell me about their lives, the more I think I should have been born out here."

Herat laughed. "You're one of a kind, Henry."

It continually astonished Michael how men like Katz and Herat could completely fail to notice their environment. They crouched now in a long, rectangular chamber, a meter and a half high, its perimeter stacked with boxes. Fine: But every time Michael really looked at his surroundings, his breath caught. This was what Rue Cassels called "the creeps" and over years spent with Dr. Herat, Michael had learned what caused it. It was the sensation you got when the wind took an inanimate object, say, a shirt and for a moment made it flap its arms and reach for you. It was the sensation he'd had on their one visit to Earth, when he had stood at Stonehenge and found that the stones looked simultaneously natural and artificial; his mind couldn't reconcile the two.

This place was deliberately designed and yet no human person had ever stood here. Human instinct reacted just as though these walls had fitted themselves and the lights assembled from nothing and lit on their own. In a sense they had; an independent inhuman part of the universe had created Jentry's Envy and perceiving this, the part of the human mind that once saw spirits in stones awoke.

"No, don't put that there, we're going to partition that corner for the toilet," Katz shouted. "These jarheads," he muttered. "We're well rid of them. Told one to put up some numbers on the doorways and he just slapped numbers and letters up randomly. Just not thinking."

Two marines shuffled the boxes over to where Michael was standing. "Excuse me, Father," said one; they both laughed and one or two of the scientists hid smiles.

Everybody knew about Michael's NeoShinto activities. Apparently, he was a joke now.

"Ah," said Katz. "Here, look at this. Team B is inside the Hive."

He waved to a large inscape window; several members of the science team were clustered around it, including Dr. Herat, who would obviously have preferred to have been at the Hive than here. The image showed a gray oval blob; Michael couldn't make head or tail of it until a space-suited figure crawled into view, providing scale. The image shook and moved and the blob took on dimension: It was a sort of oblong chamber. The chamber was a little more than a meter high and twice that long, more like the inside of a large cocoon than a room.

"Captain Cassels told us that they'd visited only one other habitat before reaching Chandaka," Katz said. "That was the Hive. They didn't take any photos because, as she so eloquently put it, they 'freaked. I can see why."

The camera moved through a narrow slit in the papery end of the cocoon and emerged into another identical space.

"That's the fifteenth of these in a row," somebody said. Michael could hear a faint chatter of voices coming from the window, including Rue Cassels's.

"No, left, left!" said Herat. "Ach, idiot, wait, I'm coming over."

"We're not waiting for you," said Rue. "You have to give us some autonomy, Professor."

She and Herat proceeded to descend into an argument over procedure. Rather than get drawn into that, Michael left the room through its wide door (labeled with a big sticky "I") and looked for the steep ramp he had first come up when he'd found these chambers. Maybe the feelings this place awoke in him had always been illusions, creations of his own that he used to fill a void in his life. Maybe this really was just a thing, magnesium alloy and aerogel filling, no more or less significant than any rock. It had been created by blind evolutionary fate, as had he; he wasn't going anywhere but where his genes led him; nor was the human race going anywhere. Herat had proven that— they were at the top of the evolutionary arc, with nowhere to go now but down. So all this investigation was futile. You could already see the seeds of decay in the inequities of the R.E. itself.

He found the ramp (labeled N) and headed down. He found he had to crab walk because of the steepness of the descent. Michael wasn't sure why he was coming this way, but maybe it was because the chambers above were no longer his— Katz and his troupe were taking the heart-pounding excitement of Michael's discovery and transforming it into a hotel.

Not that Herat wasn't excited. Proof that somewhere, some when, alien life had banded together in the same spirit of oneness that humanity took as its own essence… well, that had always been Herat's dream. And now it had come true.

Michael reached the bottom of the ramp. Here was the little round room he had climbed to— exactly as it had been, save for the letter taped by the entrance: P.

Whoever put down these letters must have been more than half asleep, Michael thought idly as he walked around the magnetic airlock. The randomness of the lettering seemed apt somehow— it was like this whole place, a purposeless jumble.

He sat down by the airlock and rested his gloved hand on it. Soon enough they would get the air balance right and then he could take this suit off and feel these walls himself. He wasn't completely here yet, insulated as he was by the suit.

After an empty moment Michael snatched his hand back. He knew what he was feeling: The kami of the place were calling to him— or, at least, that was how he'd been trained to describe the feeling. As a child he'd thought this feeling to be simple loneliness and maybe he had been more right then than now. But if he was going to escape the feeling, whatever its name, he no longer felt that the kami were the way.

Which left him back where he'd started.

The monks of Kimpurusha had their psychology; Dr. Herat had his. If Herat ever felt down he would just do something— anything, from reorganizing his files to taking a walk. Dr. Herat was rarely unhappy for long and maybe there was a lesson in that.

Thinking of the professor reminded Michael of the explosion and before that, the murder of Dr. Ophir. And there, of course, was something he could do.

He glanced around the chamber. If he sat down here and started to meditate, would Crisler see and send someone after him? Probably not; although the sensor clip was still on Michael's ear, there was no evidence that anyone was actually watching what he did through it. Maybe no one was; maybe the clip was inactive, just a cruel joke by Crisler— like the fact that Michael's offline datapack had not been tampered with.

Crisler could probably monitor anything Michael did in the public inscape network through that clip. But there was no way he could monitor the private loop-back network made possible by Michael's NeoShinto implants.

He sat down in full lotus, facing the corridor and called up his private inscape foyer.

Instantly he was surrounded by dozens of iconic objects, slowly rotating photos and control surfaces. These would not normally be visible to anyone else, but his suspicion of inscape ran all the way back to his childhood and Michael had spent a long time adding various semilegal privacy devices to the foyer. They were stored, with the rest of his private data, in the data chip in his skull. He had novels in there, hundreds of hours of music, movies, and all the reference material he might ever need in his work. All that storage was too cramped to accommodate even a single NeoShinto kami, of course.

With luck, Crisler's sensors would not be able to tell his connection to this data from ordinary meditation. If they could… well, he would find out when they came to arrest him.

He sat for a while, wondering where to start. If Linda Ophir's murder had not been a crime of opportunity committed by someone still on Chandaka, then it was safe to assume that the perpetrator was also Banshee's saboteur. In that case, there were two likely motives for her murder: She'd found him out, or she knew something else that he couldn't allow anyone to learn. Michael had wondered all along what she had been about to tell him, when she asked to see him that day.

Before the sabotage incident, Michael had uploaded all the research data and preprints done so far on the expedition. He also had a crew roster and some background on everyone.

He would start with learning a little more about who Linda Ophir had been and go from there.

RUE WAS RELIEVED to see stars again. She faced away from the long oval habitat she'd dubbed 'the Hive, listening with half an ear as the others exited its rotating airlock. The scientists were all agog at what they had found, which puzzled her since what they had found was absolutely nothing: chamber after paper-wrapped chamber full of nothing. The Hive was just that: a giant, empty wasp's nest awaiting its wasps.

"If the others pan out, then we'll have proven the Hypothesis," gushed Hutcheons. The Hypothesis, Rue knew, had something to do with whether Jentry's Envy had been abandoned or whether it had never been used at all. That didn't really interest her— she knew the answers would present themselves eventually. No, she had entered the Hive again to try to find more supplies of raw materials, like water and oxygen. They had discovered none— just a cloying methane atmosphere, dry as a bone.

She had an inscape spreadsheet open above and to the right in her sensorium at all times; on this spreadsheet, she juggled numbers trying to guarantee their survival until they should reach Colossus. It was a familiar exercise, one she had engaged in over a year ago, the first time they reached the Envy. Max called it obsessive— but then, Max didn't take responsibility for the crew of the Envy or anything else for that matter.

A ghostly circle blotted out some stars in the opposite direction. Evan was repositioning the cache by the lake, now that most of its cargo had been off-loaded at the Banshee. She had begun using it as her crew's primary living quarters, while the scientists had largely moved into the warrens Mike had discovered. Its carrying capacity was written in glaring reds and greens across her spreadsheet— good, but not enough. Whoever had blown up the life-support stacks had better be found by Crisler's boys, because if she got to him first, he would be out the airlock.

"All right, gentlemen, where next?" she asked cheerily as she swung around. The science team were clambering aboard their sled; five helmets swung to face her simultaneously.

"What do you mean?" asked one. "We've been out here for eight hours. We're going home, aren't we?"

"The suits are good for another twelve to fifteen hours and as long as we're out here in them we're not putting a direct drain on the Banshee or the Envy," she said. "We need as much information as we can get as quick as possible. There's a whole bunch of places we could visit before we go back."

There were groans from the team and she sympathized; they must have found it as nerve-wracking as she to spend all day crawling through those chambers, picturing huge dry insect bodies scraping through them, possibly waiting beyond the next door-slit. She no longer believed they would find living aliens on board the Envy, but that didn't prevent the imagination from putting them around every corner.

"How about the Lasa sphere?" Hutcheons suggested hopefully.

"Nope. You remember what Herat said: It's potentially the most fragile find here, so we leave it for him to open. That is, unless we don't find any more water, in which case we'll have to break in tomorrow and clean it out if it's got any.

"Okay, here." She called up an exaggerated inscape view of the other habitats, which seemed to hang like moons at random across the sky. "Somebody pick a direction and let's go! We're wasting air."

"Oh, all right… that one." Hutcheons reached out and in their public inscape, one of the habitats flashed. This one was a big rusty cube, fifty kilometers away.

"Right. Hang on, everybody… away we go."

INSCAPE NORMALLY SHUT down when you closed your eyes. That had puzzled Michael when he was young; his father refused to discuss the subject, so he had asked a teacher at the seminary school. "If I closed my eyes I'd be able to see all the colors and shapes so much clearer! But every time I shut my eyes it goes away."

"They did that because of bad things that happened to people back in the beginning," his teacher told him. "Men and women tried to use inscape to hide from the real world. They spun themselves fantasy worlds and then shut themselves away in little airless rooms, slowly starving to death while they built a false paradise for themselves in the Net.

"After some people died they made it so that you could only take your senses away from reality in special circumstances. Rather than build something that appeared to be a separate reality— but isn't— they decided that everything should appear to be here, in this reality, with us. So the public and private inscapes were developed. Private inscape is made up of those things that only you can see, public ones are the windows and shows that you share with other people. They all reach you by the same means, through the implants in your sensory nerves.

"Now, we believe that this trend has gone too far in the opposite direction; the Rights Economy has layered its version of reality on top of what everyone sees and hears— strictly in the name of economics, they claim, and the alternatives could be far worse. True— they could completely control the appearance of reality if they chose. But as it is, though they think they are being moral, they are godless people, because they have made it appear that the essence of things is money— that a thing only really exists if it can be bought or sold. When you look at a rose, you no longer see the immanence of the thing itself; all you see is a price."

Michael contemplatively turned over the offline datapack he used to store kami. Crisler had neither taken it from him nor wiped the kami already stored in it. He was sure that was deliberate: Crisler was saying more clearly than words could express that he could take the pack away any time he chose.

The kami of Kadesh and the terrifying kami of Dis were still in there. He knew he should erase the kami of Dis, but even with those huge files in the system there was plenty of extra storage space left. Enough for him to try something he had not done since his final days at the seminary.

One of the reasons Dr. Herat encouraged Michael's religious activities was that the kami often revealed insights into alien places and things that Herat himself missed. The professor had a brilliant mind, but not everything could be seen with the rational faculty. On more than one occasion he had called upon Michael to scry an object using the NeoShinto AI— calling up a history half imagined, half inferred. Herat knew that the deepest engines of human thought are unconscious and he respected Michael's ability to tap those powers directly. Michael himself always found the experience disquieting.

He had gotten nowhere with his search of the databases he'd archived from the Banshee. Terabytes of data were arrayed about him in diffuse clouds and he was certain that the right kind of analysis would show a clue as to why Linda Ophir had been killed. If there was no such clue, that was also proof of something— namely that her murder had been one of opportunity.

His analytic powers and even those of the semilegal search tools he'd brought from Kimpurusha, weren't up to the task of finding that clue, or its absence. So he was faced with a choice.

Years ago, when he was testing the limits of his ability to touch the kami, Michael had tried to find the kami of inscape. He had no doubt that they were there; everything that came to human consciousness as a presence held kami. So one night he had sat down in the middle of a marble floor under the wan light of Kimpurusha's faint ring and summoned the kami of Data.

He activated the data storage unit now and held it up to eye level. He could feel a connection being made between the AI in his skull and the unit; he lowered it, closed his eyes and overrode the safety defaults of the inscape interface.

With a wrenching twist, all his sense of place and position vanished. He seemed to be hanging in a vast ethereal space, high above the misty galaxy of data he had been exploring. The illusion was total— vision crisp, murmurs of musical pattern thrumming all around him. This place was seductive, as always, in its perfection. And already he could sense the kami here.

When he was younger, the kami of Data had almost killed him. They were infinitely powerful and mercurial. They defied identity while greedily sucking it from everything in their domain. They embodied the spaces in between the blocks of information that were known to people using the Net. So they had come at Michael as answers to questions he'd never thought to ask; they had promised unifications of senses, like the texture of green or the sound of height. As soon as he entered their influence they fell upon him and he was trapped in their realm until his brothers found him in the morning and pulled him free.

The Michael of today was far more disciplined and his attention more focused than that younger man. As he felt the kami beginning to swirl around him like the precincts of a hurricane, he pulled them deliberately, one at a time. He examined the towering half-minds each in its turn and discarded it. The kami of this data resembled those who had stored information here; after months or years of being constantly half-connected to inscape, everyone left tracks. The papers written by the science team were here, each hyperlinked a thousand ways to notes, observations, citations, and personal logs of the authors. Many links trailed off into private inscapes whose data were not replicated in Michael's archive; but most were public. They made a collective music that came to him as ghosts of the authors' personalities.

He was looking for one ghost in particular and it didn't take long for him to find it. Linda Ophir lived on in her writings and in the thousands of small personal touches she had left in her public inscape galleries. The NeoShinto AI took hints of connection and spun them into personality. In seconds Michael found himself standing in front of Linda— or a composite of her whose age was indeterminate, sometimes childlike, sometimes wise and of dizzying depth. It stared back at him quizzically and opened its mouth to speak. He heard a thousand recordings of her voice— notes, voice messages, recorded lectures— blur together into a single yearning for meaning and in that yearning he understood completely why she had chosen science as her religion.

The ghost's eyes were mesmerizing; Michael was falling into them, disoriented, overwhelmed by her voice and the force of her character. He clutched for something else to hold onto and found, strangely, the hollow emptiness of Dis. Remembering it, he was able to look away from Linda's eyes.

"What are you hiding?" he asked her. He sensed turmoil and looked back.

Unlike most of the scientists in the expedition, Linda had kept almost nothing private. Her whole life was open in her writings and recordings. So the single, tiny block of files that were conspicuously missing from the continuum of her work were as instantly visible to Michael as a crack in a pane of glass.

He reached down, grabbed the absence that should have been several hours of Linda's work and pulled. As he did he shut down the NeoShinto AI. The ghosts fled and he was left holding a set of files.

He blinked, returning to the strange little airlock and now finding it homey. For a minute he just sat there, breathing, trying to forget the ghosts and the electric power of the kami of Data. Eventually he looked up from the floor between his knees. Several files were rotating in the air in front of him— photographs, by their icons. They had been stored in a public photo archive called "Waste Disposal Systems: Schematics."

Hidden in the open.

This guile was suggestive— was Ophir trying to hide her data from her own people?

When he felt ready, Michael opened the first, then, in puzzlement, another and finally all of them. This was not what he had expected— not that he knew what it was he'd expected, really.

The images were all of the Lasa habitat, the final one being a holo globe mapped with the pictures to create a miniature model. The black sphere with its red cuneiform lettering was instantly recognizable. These images were all tagged B. G., which hyperlinked to Blair Genereaux— but they had been annotated and the annotation layer was initialed L. O.: Linda Ophir.

He opened all the annotations. He rotated the globe; it looked like the one in the public archive all the scientists were using. Nothing odd there.

But in the annotated version, several of the photos had some of the background stars and certain Lasa words circled. With those highlighted, it was easy to see that four of the photos were in fact duplicates. He looked closer: The coordinates on the photos were different, suggesting that they had been taken at different points in an orbit around the habitat. But no, the photos were the same.

He looked at the globe again. The lettering formed discrete units— paragraphs— that were separated from one another by large areas of black hull. There were twelve of these paragraphs and it had already been noted by the science team that not all of them were written in Lasa. But they were all unique— except for one duplication.

He sat back, startled. One of the Lasa paragraphs was repeated, on opposite sides of the sphere. No other text was duplicated. And that duplicated text was the text from the duplicate photos.

So somebody had removed one or more of Rue Cassels's original photos of the habitat and reordered them to hide the fact. There were precious few reference points from which to tell what you were looking at: Every picture was identical to the others except for different letters splashed across the dark circle of the habitat. But if you looked closely enough, you could see the deception— and Linda Ophir had obviously looked close enough.

He should be getting back; his keepers would be wondering what he was up to. He felt a surge of anger at the thought of the spy camera on his ear, and decided to defy it. He turned his attention back to the photos.

For a while at least, Michael's attention was not on the dark ancient whisperings of the kami of Dis, but on the faint traces of another kind of more tangible spirit; those of a deadly human who hid somewhere aboard the Banshee.

"DON'T YOU HAVE anything to say to me?"

Max had tried gamely to lose her in the Banshee's corridors, so Rue had simply stood in the doorway to the cold sleep chamber until he arrived. She had waited, biting her lip and fuming, and now here he was, skulking up guiltily, but trying to look casual. He planted his feet a few meters away, dropped his satchel and squinted at her.

"What?" he said.

"Come on, Max. Weren't you even going to say good-bye?"

"Good-bye?" He scratched his head, eyes looking everywhere but at her. "I'm just taking a nap."

Rebecca had called Rue an hour ago; all she'd said was, "You'd better get over to the Banshee right away."

"Why? What's happened?"

Rebecca had sighed heavily. "It's Max."

She hadn't had to say more. Rue had never thought Max would duck out on her like this— but it was obvious in that moment, and she had simply said, "Yes," to Rebecca, and flown over.

"Six months is not a nap, Max," she said now. "Why are you doing this to me? I need you!"

He finally looked at her. "No, Rue, you don't. You never did. If I hadn't fronted this expedition, you'd be happily surveying a mountain on Treya somewhere. You'd be living modestly, but you'd have a stable relationship and a social set. And now?" He shrugged. "You're more of a natural leader than you know. You don't need me as a crutch, that's for sure."

It drove her to distraction when he talked like this. "But why?"

He rubbed his hands on his pants, shrugging again. "There's nothing for me to do here. You're perfectly happy living in a can like this. I grew up under sunlight, such as it was. Anyway, I'm no scientist and I'm certainly not starship crew." He sighed heavily. "What do you want from me?"

"A straight answer."

"If you don't want me to go, say the word. You're the captain, after all." She heard the resentment in his voice and that just made her feel worse.

"Max, you know I love you. I'd never hold you back from doing what you want to do. But this isn't healthy. You're running away from something. What?"

He laughed. "You only just noticed? Oh, couz, sometimes you're so naive."

Max picked up his satchel and moved to pass her. She stood her ground.

"Look," he said, "some of us find life easy. I have no idea how. You're one, I knew it the instant I saw you. You've got courage, Rue. But me… all my life, I felt like I've been running on water. The instant I pause, down I go." He gently put a hand on her shoulder and moved her aside. "I'm okay if I've got something to fight against. Something to do. But if I have to sit down and face myself… the pit opens. You don't understand and I'm sorry that you want to. Not all of us can be heroes, Rue. Not all of us can even face the day. There's no why to it. It just is that way."

He walked into the cold sleep chamber without looking back.

Rue watched him go. She was astonished, not at what he'd said about himself, but at what he thought of her. Courage? Courage? She had never had that. What others took for courage in her was just another kind of fear: fear of not measuring up, of failing her people.

She wanted to call him back, force him to understand that she needed his support now more than ever. But she couldn't bring herself to step across the threshold. She couldn't ruin his dignity that much.

It wouldn't do for any of her people to see her cry. Rue went to one of the Banshee's washrooms, locked herself in a stall and put her face in her hands.

15

THAT EVENING, RUE undertook yet another pointless inventory of the remaining supplies. She was in the «attic» of the cache, feeling bad about herself, missing Max. Funny how she'd turned into the sort of person who worked compulsively; she remembered how she'd had contempt for that sort of laborer at Allemagne. Well, maybe they'd known things about life that she hadn't, at that point. Once upon a time, her only task had been keeping out of Jentry's way.

Max had picked a rotten time to bail on her. He'd said that for him, life was like running on water. She understood that, more than he seemed to know. Rue had been running too, she felt, ever since Allemagne. Not running to keep herself up, maybe, but running away from Jentry, and everything that she had been raised to be, there in that little station in the middle of the void.

What Max didn't get— the idiot! — was that without him she'd have faltered and fallen long ago. Rue kept going forward, true, but she understood how less and less. Responsibility, doubt and insecurities beaten into her in her childhood all pulled at her, all the time. Max had been a rock to cling to. He seemed so certain of what to do, there at the beginning. Now he'd taken that certainty away.

Now she was arguing with him in her own mind, the sort of satisfying internal dialogue that one always wins. She had just scored a major point when she heard the airlock cycling; expecting it to be Corinna returning from the Banshee, she returned to her checklist. Across the attic space from her, Evan was running simulations on their approach to Colossus. Good for him.

Rebecca's voice floated up from downstairs. "Dr. Bequith! How nice to see you!"

Damn that woman. Rue and Rebecca had discussed the possible romantic prospects among the Banshee's crew the previous day. Rebecca had shied away from mentioning any men she found attractive, but had suggested a few prospects for Rue. It had been frivolous banter— but Rue had mentioned that she found Mike attractive. Had Rebecca invited him over?

"Please, call me Michael." It was Mike's low, soft voice. "Is your captain here?"

"Rue! Visitor!"

Rue paused, looked at her checklist, bit her thumbnail.

"Would you like a drink?" continued Rebecca. "Apparently Max hid some whisky nanospores here and Blair's been growing them in an aeration tube. We were just about to sample his first batch." Rue heard them moving into the kitchen area.

"Hardly a batch," said Blair. Rue moved to the open hatchway and peeked down at the kitchen area. Blair was holding out a small closed jar. A single large drop of amber liquid floated in its center. "I think there's enough for four people to get a taste."

Mike waved it away politely. "Please, go ahead. I was never a fan of whiskey."

Blair held out the jar to Rebecca, who also shook her head. "Your loss," he said with a shrug. He uncapped the jar and tossed the little ball into his mouth.

For a moment he floated there with an odd look on his face. Then, carefully but very quickly, he bounded in the direction of the cache's small bathroom.

Rebecca hung in midair with her hands on her hips, watching. "I guess it's not mature yet," she said.

Rue stifled a laugh and flipped herself down through the hatch. "Hi." She realized she should say something more and added, "Have you had dinner?"

"I ate before I came," he said. "I'm not good at eating in freefall, I'm afraid. Despite having done it a thousand times."

"Coffee?"

"Sure."

Rebecca shot Rue one of her annoyingly smug looks and went to make it, leaving her alone with Mike at the cache's standup table.

"What can we do for you, Mike?"

He grimaced. "I'm not sure I should be here at all. Admiral Crisler suspects me of being the saboteur, so he's made me wear this…" He pointed to his ear. Rue had noticed the little adornment there earlier, and had thought it odd that the austerely dressed Michael Bequith should wear jewelry.

"You're bugged?" She let go of the table in astonishment, then caught herself before drifting away.

"Yes, I thought you should know if I was to come aboard your ship." He looked Rue straight in the eye, and his expression held eloquent pleading.

"Give me that!" Rue reached out quickly and rolled the little bead off Mike's ear. She held it up to eye level. "Admiral, I should have been informed of this. Since I wasn't, I'll take it you were willing to let Dr. Bequith be your spy in my terrain. But the Envy is my ship, and I will not permit such devices to remain aboard. Rebecca!" She tossed the bead to her doctor. "Put that out the lock, will you?"

They watched as Rebecca cycled the lock. When that was done, Mike turned back to Rue, grinning apologetically. "Thanks. I—"

"I do not like being manipulated, Dr. Bequith," she said as icily as she could. "You came here to get me to do that, didn't you?"

He frowned, apparently tamping down on some anger of his own. "I can't go back to the Banshee now," he sat at last. "They'll arrest me. I came here to ask you for asylum."

"Oh, I like this less and less," she said. "You'd better have a good explanation for this. Otherwise I see no reason why I shouldn't let them arrest you. How do I know you aren't the saboteur, after all?"

He looked her in the eye again, quite confidently now. "I discovered something," he said. He didn't elaborate, just let the words hang there.

Rue hesitated. Behind Mike, Rebecca started to open her mouth; Rue waved her silent. "Tell me," she said.

Mike brought out a large black datapack and clipped it to the edge of the table. "It's about Blair's photos of the Lasa habitat," he said.

Blair had been watching from the door to the bathroom. Now he jumped over. "What's wrong?" he said, a bit indignantly. "I did a complete photomosaic last time we were here. I was very thorough." He hooked his feet into the floor loops under the table.

"Yes, I know. But I have reason to think your photos have been tampered with."

Rue was surprised, but not as much as she might have expected. As Mike's words sank in, she realized she had been waiting ever since the sabotage for something to happen— for some sign that the uneasiness about this expedition she felt was well-founded. Well, here it was.

"Ah, do you have a holo card?" asked Mike. "I can show you."

"Just a sec." Blair raced away to get one. When he returned, Mike put his hand on the card and downloaded something through its galvanic interface.

Some pictures appeared in ghostly transparency above the table. Blair squinted at them. "Yeah, those are mine."

"Do you have original copies of this data?"

Blair made a sour face. "I didn't have enough storage units to leave backups here when we went to Chandaka. The originals of all our data ended up in Crisler's hands— as partial payment for our rescue."

Mike brought up an annotation layer and pointed at the circled stars. "What does this mean?"

Blair examined the photos for a few seconds, then blinked in surprise. "Holy tholin, you're right. Somebody's screwed with my data."

Mike showed the extent of the changes and showed that they were connected somehow to Linda Ophir. Blair, the reporter, was visibly impressed by his detective work. Rue was pretty impressed herself.

It didn't add up, though. "But why…" she began.

"Because there's something written on the missing part that we're not supposed to know."

"We can just look at it through the telescope," said Evan, who had come up behind them silently.

"I thought of that," said Mike. "The problem is that the Lasa habitat's north pole is pointing at us. The missing stuff is on the south pole. But, we're going out to explore the habitat tomorrow. I came here to ask you to bring some cameras that aren't connected into the expedition's inscape system. We should insist on doing a new photomosaic then."

Rue nodded. "But what are we looking for?"

"Not sure. More Lasa writing, maybe."

"But we can't read Lasa, can we? And anyway, if this stuff has been deliberately hidden, won't we give away that we know about it? That could be dangerous, depending on who did the hiding…" She didn't mention Crisler's name, but then, she didn't have to. "Remember, Dr. Bequith, the Envy may be my ship, but it could be taken away from me at any time."

"Maybe we can find a more subtle way of taking the pictures," aid Blair. "We could throw a little mirror past the habitat, and aim the camera at that."

"Anyway," said Mike, "You're right that we can't read Lasa writing— not with the resources we have here, anyway. So until we get back to civilization, whatever's written on the hidden part of the habitat will remain obscure. Whoever hid it in the first place will know that."

"Why can't we read it?" asked Rebecca.

"Our AIs aren't smart enough," he said. "We could figure out the writing in denotative terms, but that wouldn't get us anywhere."

Rue raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, denotative?"

"Surface meaning— dictionary meaning. The problem is, most meaning is carried through context and implication; it's connotative. In the case of the Lasa, the context is so alien that even when we translate the words and know what they mean, we, well, don't know what they mean." That was a pretty thick description and it must have shown on her face, because he immediately said, "Imagine an alien trying to figure out what a Haiku poem means.

"If we had a context-switching AI we might be able to do it, but the nearest one's on Mars as far as I know. So, no, we don't really know what the writing means. Even so, somebody's gone to great lengths to hide a piece of it. Since you did such a good job with your photomosaic," he said to Blair, "nobody planned to do another. There didn't seem to be a need."

Rue leaned back, examining the ceiling. She was relieved that her worries had finally taken on a tangible form. "You suspect Crisler, don't you?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Not necessarily. However much I detest the man…"

"It's more than that," she said. "I don't know why he's here. Do you?"

Mike looked puzzled. "Surely, if there's a multispecies civilization nearby…"

"Isn't the fastest way to find it through FTL?" She watched him intently through the diaphanous panes of holo light. "Don't you think he'd have a dozen ships scouring the nearby lit stars? What if one of them found the alien homeworld while he was stuck out here? It doesn't make sense. I'll bet he'd already completed a search of those stars before he even hired you guys."

"Meaning…"

"Meaning he already knows where the Envy came from, or he knows that it's not from any nearby sun; either way there's no threat of the rebels finding the homeworld first, is there?"

"That's right," said Evan. "Unless Linda Ophir told the rebels about the Envy."

"And they planted a spy on board," finished Rebecca.

Rue shrugged. "I bet she did and I bet there is one," she said. "But how does that connect with the faked photos? And it still doesn't explain to me why Crisler is here and not waiting in High Space for us to send him information about the homeworld by message laser."

Rebecca passed some bulbs of coffee around. "Thanks," said Mike. "I… Rue, you think the missing writing tells where the Envy came from?"

She nodded. "It might. In which case, Crisler already knows… but then why not go straight there?"

"Unless it was Linda who faked the photos? Or the rebel?"

"This is getting us nowhere," laughed Rebecca. "No, I don't think the missing writing is about the homeworld. But you guys are going to bust a blood vessel trying to figure what it is. Why not wait until tomorrow?"

"So true," Rue agreed with a laugh. "We're just getting ourselves worked up."

They drank their coffee and the discussion drifted from topic to topic, though it always returned to Crisler and the sabotage. Rue liked having someone outside her tiny crew to talk to— Michael Bequith wasn't so stuck up as the rest of the scientific team. She supposed he wasn't on the career treadmill like so many of his colleagues on the Banshee. At least, not on the same one.

That reminded her of something. "Oh!"

They looked at her.

"You told me to ask you about NeoShintoism sometime," she said to him. "So… I'm asking."

Mike didn't look happy at the question for some reason. Maybe he'd been getting a lot of the same inquiries lately. "NeoShinto is simply a system for summoning and contemplating kami," he said.

Well, that sure explained it. "Kami?" she pressed. "Who're they?"

"Spirits of a place," said Evan. "Right?"

Mike nodded.

"Oh." It sounded a bit cultish.

"There's nothing metaphysical about it," Mike said quickly. He described a truly frightening set of neural implants he'd gotten when younger; having some bizarre AI altering your consciousness went way beyond any of the control mods Jentry had tried. Rebecca listened with particular (doubtless clinical) interest.

"…So I can record the stimulation pattern for this vision and literally e-mail it into the galactic inscape network. You see, it's a technology, not a mythology. NeoShinto is a branch of Permanence, which is a nonmetaphysical religion, like Buddhism would be if it stayed purely methodological and didn't keep holding onto ideas like karma and reincarnation. Permanence is a scientifically developed meditation program that is tailored to the individual; if you follow it properly you're very likely to reach a state of mind that used to be called 'enlightenment. We try not to label that state because everyone has different interpretations of it until they experience it and after they experience it they generally laugh at the idea of describing it in words." Mike sounded positively stuffy when he talked about this; the thought made her smile.

"NeoShinto is all about creating and capturing an artificially generated mystical experience, similar to our target state, so that people can 'visit' the state and decide whether they want to pursue the program."

"Hm." She understood, but played dumb because now that he was rolling, he obviously did enjoy talking about it. "It's like a oneness with the universe sort of thing?"

He nodded. "My particular task was to collect the kami of alien places. I undertook this task because we recognized that humans are spreading into some pretty inhuman environments and living in these makes it harder to commune with the Absolute. My kami give people a starting point, at least."

Rue sat back, thinking about the idea. She'd never heard of this sect, or these kami things. The idea of merging your identity with your surroundings was very seductive, though. It made her realize just how separate from the world she usually felt.

After all, she had been raised to disbelieve cults and religions. There was no transcendence to be found; this had been drilled into Rue from an early age, as if she needed any more proof than the limits of Allemagne and her own puny body.

The kami sounded wonderful; but they couldn't be real. "My mother always told us," said Rue, " 'believe what you want, but always put it to the test. »

"What test is that?" asked Blair.

"She called it 'the Supreme Meme, " said Rue. Now that she'd started talking about this, she was a bit embarrassed. Jentry's crowd scoffed at any metaphysical talk.

She pressed on. "It's what you call a thought experiment, a way to test whether something you believe is good for you or not. You know what memes are?"

"Memes are the genes of culture," said Evan promptly. "They are ideas and behaviors that use humans and our culture to propagate themselves. Religions are usually full of memes— ideas that don't mean anything, or serve any useful purpose, but are just so compelling that they get passed on generation after generation."

"Right. Well, the Supreme Meme is like a way of exploding all other memes— other ideas about life, you know? It has the power to destroy beliefs that are bad for you."

"And what is it?"

"Simple," she said. "We know the multiverse is infinitely old and spawns new universes in infinite amounts all the time. That means that infinitely far in the past and infinitely far in the future, there's a universe just like this one, where everything happened just the same way, with the same people; and you and I and this place and this conversation, all happened before and will happen again, not once, but an infinite number of times." Now she was sounding stuffy; she had recited this description from memory.

"Yeah, I've heard that idea," said Evan dismissively.

"Oh, that's not the idea," she said with a grin. "The idea is this: Say you had just died and the angels or kami or whatever asked you where you would like to go now— anywhere in the multiverse, any kind of rebirth or heaven you want. Here's the Supreme Meme: How would you have to feel about the life you've led and your universe, to say to that angel, 'let me come back to where I started and live this life over, exactly as it was, no detail spared. »

"Well, that's, just—" sputtered Evan.

"How would you have to feel? And could this or that religion or ideology that I believe give me that feeling— even in theory? That's the question and you apply it to the religions people try to sell you on. Because if a religion can't, well… sanctify… everything, even the crappy parts of your life, then it doesn't measure up."

Evan looked horrified.

Mike sat back, a bemused look on his face. After a moment he half-smiled. "And has anything ever measured up for you?" he asked.

"No," she said. There was an awkward silence. "Anyway, that's what my mother taught us," Rue said.

"I'll have to think about that," Mike said with apparent sincerity. "But for now… you never did answer my original question."

"What question?"

"Can I call upon you for asylum?"

"Oh! Of course."

"We've got a spare bunk if you'd like," said Rebecca, with a sidelong glance at Rue.

"Ah, well, I… Isn't Lake Flaccid part of your territory? That's where the science team is setting up, anyway."

"Of course," Rue said firmly. "I'll tell Crisler to keep his hands off you as long as you're anywhere in the Envy. I'll tell him I'm keeping an eye on you myself." Of course, Rue knew she had no power to enforce her orders. She had to assume that Crisler wouldn't feel too threatened by this. If he did… well, she had to try.

They left the table and Mike shook hands with each of them at the airlock.

After he was gone Rue scowled at Rebecca. "You're shameless. Haven't you got anything better to do than try to set people up?"

"Hey, matchmaking's an old and respectable tradition," she replied with a grin.

"Not on my ship it isn't." But they were all laughing at her and after a moment she joined in.

RUE COULDN'T SLEEP, so she drifted out into the common area. Rebecca was sitting up, talking through a holo window to one of the women from Crisler's security team. She noticed Rue and said, "Call you later," then closed the connection. Then she frowned at Rue. "Back whence ye came."

"I can't." Rue settled down at the table next to Rebecca. She clasped her hands in front of her and stared through the holos. "I'm glad Mike came over tonight," she said. It wasn't what she wanted to say, but she didn't know how to approach that.

Rebecca arched an eyebrow. "You like him, don't you?"

"Yes, but… It's just… I was starting to go seriously crazy worrying, when he showed up. He proved I was right about not trusting Crisler. But he also took my mind off things."

"What things?"

She shrugged angrily. "You know what's at stake tomorrow."

Rebecca sighed. "I know what you think is at stake."

"Rebecca, we haven't found anything like a control system anywhere else in the Envy. If it's not in the Lasa habitat, then maybe there isn't one. Not one we'd understand, anyway." All during their search for supplies to repair the stacks, Rue had kept an eye out for anything that might be a control surface. They hadn't opened all the habitats yet, but they'd certainly visited the biggest ones. For days a sense of helplessness had been growing in her and she'd confided in no one, until tonight she felt like bursting. "We've got to think about what happens if we can't control the Envy," she said.

Rebecca put a hand on hers, "Yes, Rue, we do need to do that. But we don't need to do it tonight. There's months to go before we reach our rendezvous with Colossus. Anything could happen in that time.

"Hmm." Rebecca looked at her appraisingly. "I remember when you showed up at Treya, all jittery and determined. You didn't seem to know what you were determined about, but you were determined." They both laughed. "But that's just it, Rue; have you asked yourself what you're going to do if we do find out how to control the Envy?"

Rue stared at her. The question was infuriating somehow, though she couldn't have said why. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Ah, I think you do." When she saw that Rue wasn't going to answer, Rebecca continued. "You know, Rue, you're one of the most driven people I know. But you don't think of yourself that way."

"I'm just trying to survive."

"By doing this?" Rebecca waved around at the habitat. "This is more than just survival. We could have settled down on Chandaka; I could have finished my education there, you'd have found something—"

"We'd have been poor! Worse than poor— indentured. Same as I was at Treya."

"Rue, you were perfectly happy working in the mountains and living hand-to-mouth. I remember it very well."

Rue shrugged angrily. "But I wasn't responsible for all you guys then."

"We can look after ourselves, you know." The words stung. "I'm not saying you're not a wonderful captain— you are— it's just that you've got to learn that your responsibility ends where our ability to think for ourselves begins. You're upset about Max putting himself in cold storage, aren't you?"

"Of course I am! I should have taken better care of him."

Rebecca shook her head. "You did all you could for him. After a certain point, how he takes the help you give him is up to him. Max's problems run too deep for you or I to help him. We can be supportive; and ultimately you were, when you allowed him to put himself on ice."

Rue sat back, absorbing the words. They were silent for a long time; then Rue said, almost against her will, "Then I don't know what it means to be captain. Rebecca, I don't get it."

"You will. Just… not tonight." Rebecca pointed imperiously in the direction of the staterooms. "Now go to sleep. I want to see you fresh in the morning."

"Yes, doctor," said Rue unhappily. "Beck, I… I'm glad you're here."

Rebecca hugged her and Rue sailed back to her room, feeling a little lighter, though no less confused.

Rebecca was right, though; Rue had no picture in her mind of what her life would be like after this expedition. No picture at all. Success or failure seemed the same to her— a blank.

She resented Rebecca's insight, so when she strapped herself into bed, Rue fought down all thought— since to think would be to think about the question Rebecca had raised— and soon fell fast asleep.

16

THEY APPROACHED THE Lasa habitat in three sleds. This was the largest party to visit any of the Envy's strange, self-entombed vessels; even Crisler was along this time. That was unfortunate, because the admiral had made it plain that he considered Michael a renegade now, and the marines were watching every move he made. That would make it difficult for him to execute his little plan. He remained stubbornly determined, however. Crisler had made him angry.

The slowly spinning habitat glowed beautifully in the floodlights— a finely iridescent black, like velvet, with crimson lettering set in it in discrete islands. By Michael's reckoning, they were approaching from the side opposite to the side whose photos had been faked. On the face of it, this made sense: They were simply approaching the pole of the spinning ball that faced the Banshee.

When they were a hundred meters away, Michael said, "Let's take a quick orbit of the place. That way we can get a higher quality photomosaic."

"I don't think that'll be necessary, Bequith." Interesting— that was Crisler's voice.

"The more detail we have the better analysis we can make," he retorted. A couple of the scientists murmured in agreement.

"All right, then," said Crisler. That was a bit surprising.

He reached down into a thigh pouch and drew out the camera Rue had lent him. The mirror he left in the pouch. If for some reason they were not allowed to make this orbit, he had been planning to toss the mirror and try to photograph the far side of the habitat in its reflection. He was almost disappointed at not getting the chance to be so devious.

Maybe it was someone on Chandaka who had faked the Lasa photos, in which case all his caution was unnecessary. Maybe it was the saboteur… He should know in a few seconds.

The far side of the habitat rotated into view and the floodlights played over it. Michael had an inscape window open with the existing photomosaic in it and he looked at this, then at the habitat, then back at the mosaic.

"Gods and kami," he murmured. The full paragraph came into view and it was exactly the same as the one in the photos.

Was this somebody's idea of a joke? — take a photomosaic and doctor it to look like something had been faked when nothing had? Or had Blair just copied four pictures to complete an incomplete photomosaic? That was so sloppy as to be ridiculous— and Blair himself had insisted his photo documentary was complete. He had not missed this side of the sphere.

Michael looked over at sled two, which was briefly silhouetted against the red script. The third figure back was Rue Cassels. She was turned his way, a human shaped erasure of the lettering. He made an exaggerated shrug. She turned away.

It didn't make any sense. Frustrated, he aimed the camera and took a few shots of the paragraph anyway.

They returned to the «north» pole of the habitat— the one facing the Banshee. There was an airlock here, but not at the «south» pole, which only had a ring tying down the cord to the plow sail.

This airlock was of the same design as the one at Lake Flaccid. The iridescent black material of the hull gave way to a burnished metal ring— beryllium, Salas had declared— with the familiar black disk inside it like the pupil of a giant eye.

"Hold up here," said Crisler. The three sleds braked to a stop a meter from the lock. Michael took a flashlight and shone it on the black surface of the sphere. He was astonished to see that the surface was not smooth. "It's fur," he said. "The thing is covered in fur."

He reached out to touch it, even as Katz was saying something about fur being a better insulator in vacuum than air. The fine black pelt didn't seem to give at all under his touch. He pushed harder and felt a sudden sting in his fingertips.

"Damn!" He pulled his hand back. A red diagnostic window popped open, telling him he'd suffered a minor breach of suit integrity.

"What happened?" asked Crisler.

"It's hard as diamond— it poked me right through the glove."

"Well, nobody touch it, then."

The red writing was apparently bald hull. Very weird. While the others focused on finding the latch for the airlock, he swept his light along a long swath of hull. Now he could see texture to the fur, as if it had been mussed by the hand of a passing giant. It was like the back of some enormous, sleeping creature.

"Here it is," said one of the marines.

"Good work, Barendts." Crisler and Herat drifted over to the man. Without hesitation Herat reached out and put his hand in the switch hollow. The black disk roiled in a now-familiar manner.

Crisler put his arm out to block Herat's way. "We should send in a mesobot first."

"I suppose you're right." Herat gestured to Michael, who fetched a fist-sized explorer from the sled. Herat pushed it into the liquid material of the lock, letting go only when he was up to his elbow. "That's got it."

Michael made a public inscape window of the mesobot's camera readout and put it next to the lock. Everyone gathered around to watch. For the first few moments there was nothing to see but blackness.

"Registering magnetic field— very strong," said Herat. "And the walls are vibrating. Temperature rising rapidly… this place is alive, whatever it is." The little mesobot's lights came on, illuminating a metal wall several centimeters away; it swiveled around at Michael's command.

There was a collective intake of breath among the watchers. In the window, a large curving space appeared, cluttered with drifting debris. "Look at that crap," said the marine Barendts. "Something must have blew up."

"No." Michael skewed the camera around again. Now it was clear what the curving space was. The outer hull of the Lasa habitat was separated by a space of at least five meters from an inner sphere which was made of white metal. This inner sphere had no writing on it; instead, it was covered with hundreds of outward-dimpling airlock doors, one every four meters across the whole visible surface.

The space between the hulls contained various freely drifting objects. They were mostly spherical, but some were torus or bolo-shaped. Michael stared at one for a few seconds, trying to puzzle out what it was.

"Models!" shouted Dr. Herat. "Those are models of habitats!"

Crisler cursed under his breath; it was an exclamation of wonder. Michael shook his head. Once again, Herat had beaten him to an essential realization. He was indeed looking at a model habitat. In fact, the little sphere, which must be about a meter in diameter, was a dead ringer for Lake Flaccid.

"What are we waiting for?" said Rue. She sounded tense. "Let's get in there already."

Just then the inscape window flashed so quickly that Michael almost missed it. "What was that?"

"Not sure. Wait— there's some kind of light source coming on in there."

"It knows we're here?"

A slow pulse of light welled up from several small points on the inner hull. It started out deep red, then rainbowed all the way to blue before fading away completely. The mesobot reported that it had started out in the deep infrared and went up to ultraviolet before fading. It happened again and began repeating at nine second intervals.

"What's it mean?" asked Crisler.

"Damned if I know," said Herat. "It doesn't seem dangerous, anyway. We'll wait and see if there's any change. If it's still doing this in five minutes, I'm going in."

As they waited, Rue drifted over to Michael's side. "Hey." She made a sign for him to go on private channel. "Did you get your photos?" she asked when he had.

"Yeah— but none of it makes any sense." He was beginning to feel like he was being had, somehow.

"Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so," she said. "What about this place? Models? What does that mean?"

"I can't even begin to speculate. And Dr. Herat's stymied too, for once." He said it with some relish.

"The pattern's not changing," said Herat. "I'm going in, unless one of you burly gentlemen has some objection?"

Crisler waved a gloved hand indifferently. Herat reached into the edge of the airlock disk and pulled himself through.

"No resistance," he said as his feet vanished into the black surface. "There's no atmosphere at all in here."

"Any ice?" asked Rue. "We need to find more oxygen."

Michael groped inside the lock and found the familiar bar, then flipped himself through. Pride demanded that he be second inside after Dr. Herat and he was, but only by seconds as the rest of the team followed, leaving three marines with rescue training outside. They snaked some umbilicals through the airlock; these stood up out of the disk like surreal reeds in the light of Michael's helmet lamp.

He called the mesobot and it obediently returned to him. Just then, a sweep of prisming light swept over it, causing Michael to miss his first grab for the bot.

"This is wild," said Rue. "Beautiful— but weird."

For someone raised on planets like Michael, it was a hard environment to get used to. It was natural to choose an up and a down to orient yourself, but here the choice was arbitrary and none of the options was comfortable. If he decided that down was in the direction of the airlock on the outer hull, that meant he was floating at the bottom of a giant bowl, with a huge metal sphere hanging over his head. If he put down in some direction tangent to the airlock, then he was in midair beside a sphere, with a long drop beneath him that curved out of sight. And if he pictured himself at the very top, then he had nothing to hold onto and could imagine sliding down that inner sphere and falling into the space between them.

"The light's brightening," said Crisler.

Michael turned his head and at that moment the small circles that were flashing went out. In their place, a series of red expanding rings appeared on the outer hull. One of these swept over Michael before he had time to even look away. His eye was momentarily dazzled by crimson laser-light. The marines started shouting.

"It's all right!" said Dr. Herat. "We're being scanned, is all. We can't see the beams because we're in vacuum— only the reflections off the outer hull. I think whatever it is that's in here is trying to decide what we are."

"We should leave," said Crisler.

"That might be prudent." They swarmed the airlock disk. Michael let go of the mesobot and popped out into familiar starlight last. The others were all talking at once; he counted to make sure they were all there, then connected to the mesobot again.

The little lamps had come on again, this time steadily. They illuminated the space between the hulls with a bright, steady, yellow-white light. "Look!"

There was another change happening too. The mesobot reported the presence of a faint gas pressure, rapidly rising. The gas was warm— in fact it was a mix of nitrogen and oxygen at the same temperature as the inside of Michael's suit.

It was Michael's turn to swear, very quietly.

"I think we've just been invited in," he said.

RUE WATCHED THE others slide through the black circle of the airlock. It was frightening to think that something inside the Lasa habitat knew they were here and was opening the way for them. On the other hand, Rue had always known she was just the finder of the Envy, not its real owner. The scattered habitats that made up the cycler had kept their secrets for almost two years now; without knowing where it came from or why it was here, she was forced to be humble. So her anxiety was mixed with relief at the thought that if the Envy's true masters appeared now, they could at least take the burden of doubt away from her.

Her turn came and she flipped through the airlock with ease. She nearly ran into somebody's back and climbed over them to get a better view.

The place was transformed. "Humidity, temp, pressure, oxy mix, they're all identical to our suit standard," Mike was saying. The interhull was lit up now too, in brilliant white light like the false sunlight the R.E. people favored. Rue dimmed her faceplate so she wouldn't have to squint.

"Eerie," somebody said. Rue nodded; this cavity between the spheres was strangely like a place on Allemagne known as the Gallery. The Gallery was the last insulating space between the outer shells of the colony and the inner part, where the centrifuge and power plant resided. It was much bigger than this space, but perspective was tricky here due to the smooth reflective metal everywhere. If she just glanced around casually, though, the place had a weird familiarity to it. Almost like home.

"I suggest we designate the airlock as bottom," said Herat. "We can string some lines up the sides so we can orient ourselves." The other men grunted agreement and soon were unreeling lines and jetting off around the sphere in pairs.

Slowly, like a shy animal, one of the little habitat models was drifting in Rue's direction. She held onto the lip of the airlock and studied it. It was an elongated doughnut shape about sixty centimeters wide and a hundred long, made of some burnished white metal. It didn't match any of the Envy's habitats, so it was hard to get a sense of how big the object it modeled would be. But there was an obvious airlock etched in one end and a whole slew of tiny machines, intricately shaped, stuffed into the tubular doughnut hole. It glimmered like some fantastical toy; for a moment she fantasized about some day being able to hang this bauble over her son or daughter's crib. Of course, it might be solid and weigh five hundred kilos.

For some almost superstitious reason, nobody had touched one of these models yet. Rue wasn't about to be the first. As it reached her she drew back, letting it parade slowly past.

"The readings are pretty clear," said Michael. "No organics of any kind, just the perfect breathing mix for us."

That got her attention. "Can we export it? Tank it and take it back to the Banshee?"

"Please!" Uh oh, she'd set Herat off again. His suited figure jetted over to her. "If this is a first contact situation I hardly think we'd make a good impression by stealing their air."

Chagrined, Rue fell back to the airlock. But Herat didn't know how dire their life-support situation was. Rue's inventory last night had revealed some cracked stack tubes, which was going to reduce the carrying capacity of the Banshee even further. She'd told Crisler about it, but so far the news hadn't percolated down. There was a good chance, though, that this would be their last EVA for a while.

It was pointless to argue with Herat. If this air became crucial to their survival, she would requisition it; he would have no say in the matter. Better just to avoid the confrontation, since it would do no good.

"If the air is breathable, we should at least conserve our suit supplies," she said. It was a small defiance, but saying it made her feel better.

"Good point," said the professor. "Bequith? Can we take off these damnable head-clamps?"

"Yes. We could even renew our suit supplies here; I doubt the Lasa would object to that."

She threw Mike a grateful look, which he probably didn't see as he was in the process of taking off his helmet. She quickly did the same. Her first sniff of this alien air revealed a metallic tang and the faint sharpness she associated with cold and ice. But the air was warm.

"Where's the heat coming from?"

Mike clipped his helmet to a shoulder loop. "In there." He jerked a thumb at the inner sphere.

Crisler and one of the marines had flown over to one of the black circles on the inner sphere. "What do you make of those?" asked Crisler. "Looks like airlocks covering the whole surface. Makes no sense."

"Not human sense, maybe," said Herat. "I'm more interested in why the air is perfect for us. I know how; The lasers must have taken a spectroscopic reading through our faceplates. But why?"

"Like Bequith said," said Crisler. "We were invited in."

Herat was scowling. "That makes a lot less sense than you might think. And what sense it makes isn't good. You might think they want to talk— but Bequith and I have found ample evidence that symbolic communication is only really useful within a species; different intelligent species are usually so different that communication between them is useless at any level above threat/reward signals. We never have anything in common above basic bodily functions, so what's to talk about?"

"What are you saying?"

"Well, Admiral, ask yourself this: Under what circumstances does one organism invite a member of another species into a place?"

Crisler looked alarmed. "When it's trapping the other for a meal."

Herat nodded. "This place has already extracted quite a bit of information about us without asking."

What Herat was saying was unsettling— but Mike shook his head.

"They are asking," he said. "These open doors are an invitation more clear than a symbolic communication. So was the air. They're gestures of friendliness."

"So is the scent on a Venus's flytrap," said Herat.

One of the marines shouted. Rue looked over in time to see him leaping away from the inner sphere. The airlock disk next to him had irised open.

"I just reached out to touch the thing and it opened!" he said. He had his sidearm out and ready.

Silently, all across the surface of the inner sphere, other airlocks opened.

No one moved. All conversation had ceased and they waited to see what would emerge.

Rue was in a position to look directly into the first airlock that had opened. Unlike the outer lock, this and the others had collapsed from disks into rings around the lip of a round opening. The magnetic liquid spiked up in cones and fantastical arcs that must follow the reshaped magnetic field. They were perfectly still, though the surface of the liquid roiled like oil.

The airlock opened into a can-shaped chamber about four meters long and half that wide. At its far end was another, closed, airlock disk. Floating in the center of the space was a large, perfect ball of water.

"The trap opens," muttered the marine.

"Quiet, Barendts," said Crisler.

"Only some of them opened," said Mike quietly. He and Herat had drifted together. Rue jetted over to them; she felt safer next to these experienced alien-hunters.

"I wonder why that is," said Herat, also quietly. "We need to get around the other side and see what's happening there." Rue felt a thrill of fear when he said that; something might be emerging opposite them while they hung here gaping.

Crisler had heard and motioned two marines to move. They reluctantly jetted off around the small horizon of the sphere, appearing a minute later from the other direction. The one Crisler had called Barendts shook his blond head. "Some open doors; funny things inside, but nothing moving."

"What kind of things?" asked Herat.

"Balls of water with various amounts of mud in it. Dirt in a couple. Sand. That kind of thing."

"This is insane," said Crisler.

Mike and Herat were grinning at one another. "Actually, it makes perfect sense," said Herat. "This is an attempt to communicate, though there's no way to know whether the ultimate aim is hostile or not. In any other situation I'd say it was a trap— but we have evidence of multispecies cooperation outside. Maybe…"

"This? Communication?" Crisler shook his head.

"Not symbolic communication," said Herat. "Physical communication— the kind most species use between one another. It's more universal and reliable than language. Of course the Lasa would use it for first contact! The only reason we never have is because we're…"

"Stupid?" said Mike with a small grin.

"I was going to say, 'infected with a number of academic prejudices, " said Herat. "But 'stupid' will do."

They were acting like such boys now. It was infuriating, considering everything that was at stake. "Speaking of stupid," said Rue, "are we going to investigate or float here gabbing? Let's check these things out."

"Not so fast," said Herat in his most condescending tone. "We don't know which questions to ask yet."

"What questions? Just send the bot into one of these doorways!"

Herat looked indignant, but Mike had that subtle little smile going again. "I can do that," he said. He concentrated for a moment and the glittering little mesobot scooted over to the nearest open door.

Rue accessed the inscape feed from the bot. It roved around the surface of the meter-sized ball of pure water that was the only contents of the chamber. There was no piece of scrip with a message written on it, no readout screens, no arrows pointing anywhere— but there was a latch next to the inner door, similar to the one on the outside airlock.

They retrieved the bot and sent it into several more open doors. Rue watched the proceedings with growing impatience. Michael and Herat had turned into plodding researchers like the rest of the science team— taking no chances, noting down pointless details, like small differences in lighting and temperature in the various cells. Each cylindrical chamber held a different sample of material: salt water in one, epsom-salted water in another, a cloud of dry silicate sand in a third. None of it even hinted at a way to control the vast cycler scattered through thousands of kilometers of space around her. It was all beside the point, but the scientists didn't seem to care.

Finally, after Rue had descended to nagging, Herat shrugged and said, "Let's try one of the inner doors. The question is, which one?"

"What do we need most?" she shot back. "That should be our prime consideration."

"That's shortsighted, Rue. We need to know what kind of question this place is asking us before we can answer."

"It's asking us what we like. Salt water or pure water, or no water," she said. "Isn't that right?"

"Well… probably…"

"So what do we like? Pure water, right?"

"Well…"

"As captain of the Envy I am ordering you to pick a chamber for us to investigate further."

The professor glowered, but after a minute said, "The pure-water one, then. We really don't know enough to—"

She held up a hand, conscious of Crisler's eyes on her. "We are not going to know the right answer, Professor, because we've been given a choice. This isn't about what the Lasa want us to do— it's about what we want. Let's try the water room."

"All right. Let's trip the switch."

Crisler held up a hand. "Not you, Professor. We don't know whether it's safe."

"I'll do it," said Barendts. Crisler nodded and the marine entered the small cylindrical room. He contorted his way around the water sphere and, without preamble, tripped the switch next to the inside airlock.

A splashing sound echoed through the interhull, like many glasses of water being tipped on the floor simultaneously. Rue had been watching Barendts, so she'd missed it: All the other other open doors had collapsed closed.

"Getting power readings from inside," said Michael.

"It's not opening," said Barendts.

"Weird," said another of the marines. "This is just weird."

"Hey! There's more doors opening!"

Rue looked away from the chamber containing Barendts. All across the sphere, other round airlocks had opened. These were different ones from those that had been open a moment ago. She smelled metallic odors, ozone, and sulphur. All the new doors contained floating balls of mud.

"Question. Response," muttered Herat. "New question."

"But what was the question?" asked Crisler. "And what was our response?"

Herat shook his head. "I… have no idea."

"WE ARE ONE step ahead of the souvenir-collectors," the professor said some hours later, as they were settling in to the little camp of balloon-tents they'd tethered next to the airlock. Nothing new had happened since Barendts opened the inner door; the Lasa machinery seemed quiescent, so Michael had gone with two of the marines and brought back the rest of the science team and some supplies. Between this place and Lake Flaccid, he mused, they could have years of investigation ahead of them.

Except, of course, that they would only be here a few more months.

"Look at this place," Herat went on, gesturing through the mesh of the tent foyer at the smooth metal walls. "Are you really going to make this into a habitat of your cycler, Rue?"

She sighed. "You've got me all wrong. What would be the point of reworking this place? It would take more equipment to scour out and refit these habitats than it would to ship up new quarters."

Herat grunted. "It's just a shame that this place is so inaccessible."

Rue stretched and yawned. "Inaccessible? Only to your people, Dr. Herat."

"Uh oh, there they go," Michael said to Barendts as Herat worked up a response. The marine grinned; of all Crisler's men, he was the only one who hadn't become frosty in his relations with Michael since the sabotage.

Michael climbed out of the tent and did a hand-walk up one of the ropes next to the inner sphere. He felt they were safe here, at least as long as they didn't flip any switches. This place seemed purely reactive; their act of entering through the airlock had stimulated a response, as had other actions they'd taken. As long as they touched nothing, nothing would happen.

It wasn't a frightening environment, anyway. Not like Dis had been. Dis was a place of death, so old that objects that had come together in the ancient past had become fused. He remembered finding the mummified corpse of some kind of animal, cemented to a floor in the tunnels.

It had been stupid of him to call the kami of that place. Of course it would scar him.

Having reached the horizon of the inner sphere, Michael let himself drift out into the center of the interhull space. One of the little models floated nearby; they'd spent an hour photographing those from every angle, but still no one had touched one. To do so, he suspected, would be to awaken some new Lasa response.

He felt an old itch at the base of his brain. The NeoShinto AI was awake, preparing to skew his neural pathways in the direction of a mystical experience. All he had to do was give it a subject to focus on.

Michael hesitated. This was what he had come here to do. Ever since Dis, Michael had felt uncomfortable in his own skin; he was adrift, because the kami of Dis dominated his consciousness. He had wracked his brains, but could think of no other way to get that feeling back than to find and contact stronger kami.

He looked back at the camp. Herat was looking at him; the professor nodded slightly. Herat knew what he was going to try. Michael felt a surge of affection for the older man and grinned. It would annoy the hell out of Crisler if he realized what Michael was doing— but they were on the Envy now, and Michael was under Rue's protection. Remembering this decided him.

Jetting over the horizon so that the camp was out of sight, he found a spot where the cables the marines had strung weren't visible. All he saw was the curving Lasa space itself. One of the marines followed him, looking suspicious, but Michael turned his back on the man. He opened his eyes wide, let go of verbal thought and tried to become pure awareness.

The AI took over smoothly; Michael felt his consciousness expand to fill the cool geometric perfection of the habitat. He thought he heard a sighing laughter echoing off the chamber's walls— the sound of something ancient shrugging awake for a moment.

For a few seconds he felt a swelling sense of wonder; that wasn't hard, considering where he was. He waited for it to translate into something more, but it didn't happen. All he got was a sense of something watching— a mind vast and cool and ultimately indifferent.

Michael blinked, staring at the metal walls. No. He couldn't leave things as they were. He had to find the kami again. He shut his eyes and consciously awoke the implants. Show me!

Nothing happened.

Michael squeezed his hands into fists. He felt trapped. But it was not the implants that were at fault, he knew. How could he find the kami anymore, now that he no longer believed in the doctrines of Permanence?

For a long time he hung there, bent over, hearing faint sounds of conversation echoing over the horizon, but uncaring to listen. Then, gradually, shame overtook him. Here he was in one of the most incredible alien artifacts of all time and he wasn't even looking at it. He was hardly here at all, in fact, so preoccupied was he with his own problems. No wonder he couldn't sense any kami; he hadn't formed any connection with this place.

Maybe. But if I did, would the kami help me?

He stared upward for several minutes, deliberately taking note of the fine details of the metal walls, the drifting models. Then he shook his head, shrugged at the marine who had watched this performance, and jetted back to the campsite.

"Did you get it?" asked the professor.

"No," he said. He tried to say more, but the words wouldn't come. Finally he just shook his head. "No, I failed."

"Failed at what?" asked Rue.

"It doesn't matter." He drifted down slightly apart from the others. Rue cast him a puzzled look, but didn't say anything more.

Herat also looked over. "Let's turn in," he suggested. "Tomorrow will probably be a long day."

They retreated to the interior of the tent; Barendts hung by the door, obviously not intending to sleep. Michael curled up and tried to dispel the sensation of falling. He could hear Rue breathing a few centimeters away.

For some reason, he thought about Rue's tale of the Supreme Meme. What would happen if he applied that little test to his beliefs? Would they come up short? Probably. Probably.

How would you have to feel? The words seemed to bounce around inside his skull, like a catchy advertising jingle. How would you have to feel, to want it all again?

17

THEY ENTERED ONE of the newly opened chambers after breakfast and then to Rue's intense frustration, Herat called a halt to proceedings.

The scientists had analyzed the composition of the «mudballs» that had appeared in the second set of chambers. Most were toxic in one way or another: saturated with cadmium, sulphur or PAHs. Rue had wanted them to flip the door switch in the chamber full of PAH and tholin mud; it was the nearest thing to the material that made up Allemagne's trapped comet. Herat had refused and so they had gone into a cylinder whose mudball was full of complex hydrocarbons, hydro-cyanides and other nasty volatile chemicals that Herat thought most closely resembled the constituents of the early Earth environment.

"It's asking about us, starting with the most elementary questions, literally," he said. "This is what we're made of. We say yes here."

Once again the stoic marine Barendts had gone into the chamber and tripped the switch inside. Again the other open doors had closed and a new configuration gaped seconds later.

The problem was, what was behind these doors was so unnerving that even the normally adventurous Herat was stopped dead by it.

"Looks like… meat," observed Crisler as they clustered around one of the doorways. A large red quivering sphere hung several meters below them. It was joined to the walls of its chamber by veinlike threads. Worst, Rue could smell it, a reek like an open wound.

"We need specimens," muttered Herat. "Is this their kind of life or…"

"Or what?" asked Rue. "What else would it be?"

He just shook his head. The other open chambers contained even more bizarre things; one of them looked like a kind of leafless bush that seemed to hum with electricity. Another was an immense solid sphere, apparently of cuticle.

"You know what really annoys me?" Herat asked no one in particular. "It's that." He pointed at the innermost wall of one of the new chambers. Where there had been a single switch next to the inner airlock of the previous chambers, in this and the other new chambers, there were two switches.

"Before we just had 'yes, " he said. "Now what do we have? Yes or no?"

"Let's find out," she said.

He shook his head. "Not until we know more."

"How are we going to know more if we don't try something?"

The professor looked down his nose at her. "We analyze the data we've collected so far, of course."

"Data?" She laughed. "What data?"

He ignored her. She appealed to Mike, who was wrinkling his nose at the smell of the chamber. "We have to continue. We have to know how this place works!"

"In time," he said.

"We don't have time!" Finally she had their attention. "Crisler, tell them about the cracked stacks."

The admiral winced. "Our life-support situation's a bit more dire than we thought," he admitted. "Nothing to panic about. But we're going to go critical in just a few days unless we cut down the awake personnel again."

"Cut down?" Mike cable-walked his way over to the admiral. "To what?"

"Well, a full complement of ten seems likely," said Crisler. The marines received this news with no reaction, but the scientists were visibly dismayed.

"We can't work under these—" and "Why didn't you tell us?" were two of the themes she extracted from the babble of scholarly voices. Crisler crossed his arms and waited; she realized with an uneasy start that she was doing the same thing.

"This could be our only chance," Rue said when the talk had died down a bit. "If we don't figure this place out in the next day or two, we're all going to have to go back in storage and it'll be too late."

Herat glowered into the middle distance. "A bad break," he admitted. "The problem remains that this… interface… with the Lasa system only seems to work in one direction. If we go down the wrong alley, we can't turn around and start over. Like it or not, this place expects us to know what we're doing. And we don't."

"So we do nothing?"

"No," he said with exaggerated patience. "We analyze our data. Like I said."

"Damn it!" She jumped off the inner sphere and bounced herself off the outer hull, then over the horizon— just like she used to do in the Gallery back home.

She heard them all talking again, somebody laughed, doubtless at her antics. Rue didn't care. She found a doorway on the opposite side of the interhull and perched on its lip, looking inward. Slowly rotating inside was something like a big ball of bark. It wasn't at all attractive, but certainly wasn't threatening.

Eventually they were going to have to choose a switch next to one of these live things. It might take Herat days to analyze this stuff; the problem was nobody could tell how many more close/open sequences like this there might be before the habitat got to where ever it was going. Or had answers to whatever questions it was asking.

It didn't help that she couldn't decide which one was best either. The most tantalizing was a green thing like a giant cabbage; it smelled lovely. But were the Lasa asking if this was what she liked to eat, or were they asking if this was what she was made of? There seemed no way to know.

After a time, solitude and reflection calmed her down. She still had nothing to say to anyone, though, so she hung out by the chambers on this side of the sphere, speculating. About an hour after she'd left the main party the little mesobot scooted around the horizon and began nosing around the open airlocks.

She watched as it glided up to her and stopped, a meter away. "Hi. How are you?" it asked in Mike Bequith's voice.

She laughed. "I'm fine. Sorry about the display back there. Your boss just knows how to push my buttons, that's all."

"It's not just that, is it?" asked Mike. Somehow he made the mesobot tilt itself in a quizzical gesture. "The success of your own mission is riding on what we find here."

"Well, there is that." She crossed her arms. "The professor doesn't see that."

"He sees more than you might think."

"Whatever. Have you found out anything more about these things?" She gestured at the open hatch next to her.

"Yeah. They really are alive— and the DNA is derived from human DNA. Somehow we got sampled after arriving here and this place," the mesobot tilted toward the inner sphere, "has been making variations on the theme of human biology ever since. All these life-forms share the basic organic composition of humans, but put together in different ways. The one you're sitting next to is probably the one we'd consider most edible; a couple of the others are really off-putting, like that bone thing four hatches over from you."

"So what next?"

"Herat thinks these things are a gold mine. He wants to study them all."

"Damn him! Can't you make him see reason?"

"He thinks if we select one of these chambers, the others will close and he'll lose his chance to examine them."

"Yeah? So?"

"Rue, you have to face the possibility that this whole process isn't going to lead us to the information you need."

Rue reached out and grabbed the mesobot. It let out a surprised beep. She whirled her arm and flung it away in the general direction of the horizon.

"Hey…" Mike's voice faded away as the bot receded. She watched it stop itself just short of the outer sphere's skin, then jet away indignantly.

Rue caught herself on the edge of the hatch and settled again. Mike might well be right that exploring these hatches wouldn't get her anywhere; but that was no excuse for not trying.

IT WAS OBVIOUSLY prudent to leave Rue alone when she was in this kind of mood. Michael returned the mesobot to its inspection duty, opening more and more inscape windows around himself until he was almost boxed in by them. The other scientists crowded around, starting their own analyses and soon the whole space near the main airlock was full of windows.

It was good to lose himself in work. Michael had awoken from their rest period feeling the accustomed lightness of freefall and another lightness he hadn't felt in years. He knew a part of his life was over, had ended yesterday when he failed to summon the kami of the Lasa. For months, he had agonized over this coming loss, which he could foresee but not divert. Now that it had happened, he felt… nothing. At least, no despair. Just a kind of expectancy. As he worked now, he turned that feeling over in the back of his mind, trying to figure out what it meant.

The kami had been his anchor to a meaning in life. He'd thought he would be lost without them— and he was; it was just that being lost didn't seem to mean so much all of a sudden.

There was more to it… but understanding eluded him, for now.

Crisler drifted into the constellation, eyeing the microscopic views and spectral analyses with some irony. "In your element, I see, Dr. Bequith."

"Yes, Admiral." Michael kept his tone neutral.

"I've been watching you," said Crisler. "I'm aware that you've been doing a good job with this investigation. I just wanted you to know that this information is going into my report. If it should turn out that you are not the saboteur, you'll be receiving the highest commendation for your work here."

Michael appraised the admiral; for once Crisler wasn't showing his usual hail-fellow-well-met face. He looked serious and sincere. Michael had to restrain himself from punching the man in the face.

"Thank you, Admiral," said Michael as cooly as he could. "I hope you realize that I took asylum on Rue Cassels's ship so that I would be able to continue my work unhampered by… politics."

"I reserve my judgment on that. Carry on." Crisler glided through some windows and vanished behind them.

Well, I wonder what that was all about? Michael returned to work, but his halfhearted concentration was quite broken now.

What an unbelievably clumsy attempt to be chummy! Crisler's little pep-talk had doubtless been meant to be reassuring, but to Michael it just seemed forced. How could he think that Michael would ever trust him? Which reminded him of how Rue mistrusted Crisler; that, in turn, brought his mind back to Rue and her present dilemma. Would she end up at this man's mercy, if she was unable to find a way to control the Envy?

He needed a bathroom break. Michael left the open windows where they were and headed for the cylindrical, man-sized portapot they'd set up last night. He hated performing bodily functions in freefall, so tended to wait until the last minute. As usual his need was fairly urgent by the time he got to the can.

As he was buckling up his jumpsuit again, something tumbled out of one of the pockets. It was the little camera he'd borrowed from Blair and used to photograph the outside of this habitat. The pictures were still in the camera— presumably useless since they appeared to show nothing new.

The camera had its own little preview screen. On a whim, he turned it on and brought up the first photo.

There was the black of the Lasa sphere and the writing…

The writing was different.

Michael gaped at the image in astonishment. His mind was a complete blank. He was jerked rudely out of that state when somebody knocked on the door to the can. "Hey, what are you, dying in there?" It was one of the marines.

"Hold on." He hid the camera again, finished zipping up and left the portapot.

A few meters away, the science team was poring over the results from the mesobot. They were all quite absorbed in their work, especially Herat. Even the marines were interested, since some of the inscape pictures showed the squishier parts of the life-forms under analysis.

Michael drifted off to the horizon and settled down with his back to the camp. Then he brought out the camera again and looked at the pictures.

Somehow, the camera had seen something completely different from what he— and the others— had seen as they approached the habitat. Where Michael had seen spidery Lasa writing, the camera had recorded something different, right at the spot where Linda Ophir's annotations suggested a deception in Blair's originals.

There was writing there, all right, but only one of the large paragraphs was Lasa. The other paragraph, Michael recognized as the dense, multilayered and multicolored lines of Chicxulub script.

And now he remembered how, on board the Spirit of Luna, he had been literally unable to see any part of the ship that he was not authorized to visit. Doors had been invisible; stairs had looked like walls, all due to an override on his inscape. What if… Michael called up an inscape search interface and tried to connect to the camera through it. He got no reply. Like most simple mechanisms manufactured in the halo worlds, this camera was not connected to the inscape network.

The only way that he and the others could have had the complete sensory experience of seeing Lasa writing instead of what was really there was if inscape had overridden their senses whenever they looked at the outside of the habitat.

The thought was disturbing. How could he know what was real about this place and what fake? No— everything couldn't be faked, that would place too great a burden on the inscape system. Even on the Spirit of Luna, only key items had been disguised. Nothing so magnificent as this space he was now in could be completely constructed for everyone's senses without some signs that it was unreal. But strategic information could be hidden, essentially in the open, if everything else was left alone.

Nobody could mess with inscape without massive computing power and direct control of the inscape system. Only Crisler had that control. So Crisler knew about the Chicxulub writing. Crisler— and how many of his people?

Michael quickly replaced the camera in his pocket and turned toward the camp.

As he did there was a great splashing sound and the steady light that had been ever-present in the habitat since yesterday, went out.

People started shouting. He could see the luminous inscape windows where the scientists had been working, but of course they cast no real light since they existed only in his visual cortex. After a few seconds the marines had their spotlights operating and began shining them around, casting columns of light that were multiply reflected back from the metal walls.

"Bequith!" Herat flew up just as Michael made it back to the constellation of windows. "The doors. They've all closed!"

He turned. It was true: The dozens of open portals had reverted to being solid black disks.

Something about those disks looked strange, but it must be a trick of the wobbling lights. Michael blinked and looked again.

"Professor…"

"What triggered it? Where's that damned mesobot."

Michael grabbed Herat's arm. "I think you'd better look at this, sir."

Herat looked where he pointed. "What, I… oh. Oh!"

The black airlock disks on the inner sphere were growing. Where before each had been separated from its neighbors by a good four meters, now the distance had shrunk to three. And the disks were continuing to grow, in liquid tendrils like a stain spreading through fabric— or the arms of an amoeba absorbing a meal.

"The magnetic liquid's overflowing— or being redirected," said Herat. "It's going to cover the whole surface…"

As they watched, the white metal of the inner sphere slowly vanished under an advancing tide of black. After several minutes they were left in a space with the same dimensions as before, but the beams from their lights were now absorbed by what had come to look like a vast drop of black oil. The outer hull of the habitat was still there, still mirror-bright, but what it mirrored was as dark as a starless sky.

"Is it growing? I think it's growing," somebody said.

"Everyone fall back to the main lock," ordered Crisler. "Now!"

With a sinking feeling, Michael realized what must have happened. He counted heads, then checked the view from the mesobot just to be sure.

Then he said, with some hesitation, "has anybody seen Rue?"

THE BIG QUESTION had been, was she acting from impulsive anger like she had when she ran away to the plow sail— or was Rue right when she thought that they should open the next chamber now? She perched outside the entrance to the green ball for a long time, tugging back and forth at the issue.

She was still a bit ashamed of how she'd acted after the sabotage. Rue couldn't decide whether she'd been right about Crisler; logic and, well, everybody else said she had overreacted. He hadn't been about to lock her up with her crew, that was just a paranoid fantasy.

But it wasn't paranoia now that made her think they were at the limit of what they could do. The Banshee's life support was continuing to degrade and in a day or so it would all be over. Rue would have to go into that terrible half-sleep stupor along with Max and the others and when she awoke they would be decelerating into the empty Maenad system, from there to return to Chandaka. And Rue would be poor again and there would never be another chance to return to Jentry's Envy, or in all likelihood the halo either.

So Herat's caution be damned. I'm right, she thought as she swung herself into the narrow cylindrical chamber that held the chlorophyll-green cabbage thing.

Edging around the tangle of leaves/vanes, which looked ready to pounce, she found herself at the black disk of the chamber's inner airlock.

There were two switches here. In the earlier chambers there had only been one; logic suggested that they should open the inner airlock door, but when tripped they had made the other outside chambers open and close. Here were two switches— but one of them was right next to the door itself, the other several hand-spans distant. This time, she was sure, she could open the inner door if she wanted.

But why would she want to? Rue looked back at the giant cabbage, wondering what question she was supposed to be answering by tripping the switches here. These living things were obviously not attempts to re-create humans from their DNA; unless the Lasa mind behind this place was an idiot, it could see that its productions didn't resemble people. Its previous questions seemed to have been about human preferences in environment— what kind of water they liked and what kind of soil. By that logic, this time the question was 'what kind of food do you like'?

Tentatively, she broke a small piece of leaf off the cabbage and nibbled it. Herat would kill her if he saw her doing this— but the mesobot had investigated this thing and said it wasn't poisonous.

It had no real taste, which was reassuring, actually. She chewed and swallowed.

"Okay." Of all the weird life-forms in these chambers, this one seemed most benign. That made her answer clear, at least on a gut level. It was increasingly clear to her that it was the gut-level answer that the Lasa were looking for.

She reached out, hesitated, and pressed the switch next to the inner airlock door.

With a splash the door irised open, really before she could register the fact that she had made an irreversible and maybe critical, decision. Rue found herself staring into a new chamber, one level further into the inner sphere of the habitat.

"Well, well, what have we here?" She pulled herself in.

This chamber was spherical, about four meters across. It had eight airlock doors in its walls. Floating in front of each airlock was a model, like the ones in the interhull. These models, however, were made of something transparent and each one held a tiny ball of leaves and earth, lit by tiny pinprick lamps inside it.

"Oh boy." This was major. She glanced back up the cylinders, wondering whether she should get the others in here now. Like as not Herat would want her locked up for what she'd just done— but damn it, this was her ship…

The outermost airlock door was closed.

"Hey!" Rue flew back to the door and pressed her hand against it. Her fist deformed the liquid slightly, then slid about friction-lessly on it. She couldn't push through it and there was no switch on this side.

"Oh, Meadow-Rue, you've done it this time." She almost laughed, it was so pathetic. She was on her own now.

Rue returned to the round chamber. Her heart was pounding, but she was more excited than scared now. The Lasa had locked her in, but she didn't think arms were going to come out of the wall to dissect her. If that had been the Lasa's intention, they would have done it a year ago, when she first arrived here.

No, this room was another question and she needed to answer it. Summoning her determination, she hand-walked over to the nearest model and examined it gingerly. This was a half-meter wide sphere, a little crystal ball, really, with a miniature version of the cabbage growing from a wet ball of earth in its center. There were little openings in the crystal; she put her nose to one and sniffed. It smelled like a terrarium, of wet soil.

The little plant was lit by eight tiny lights that were mounted in the outer crystal. It was beautiful, but what was most intriguing was the tiny black disks near the lights.

If Rue was right, then she knew exactly what the Lasa were asking her this time. Excitement mounting, she went to another model— this one a less beautiful can-shaped thing.

She could only see through the transparent end caps of this model. Its soil and water were distributed around the inside walls, with tiny grasslike plants innermost, basking under the light of a string of lamps strung down the can's center.

She checked the other models quickly. There was a cube, a doughnut shape, a flattened sphere. She came back to the can, though it was really the ugliest of the lot.

"This is perfect," she said aloud and pressed the switch for the door next to the can.

THEY WERE ALL outside now. The black airlock liquid had expanded in arcs and curving spikes, until it filled the entire interhull; the last marine was literally squeezed out through the lock. Michael now hung in space with the others, their jittery spotlights flitting across the placid face of the habitat as they talked excitedly about this development.

He felt sick. Rue was in there, devoured by the black liquid. There was no doubt in Michael's mind that she had tripped a switch and been caught like a mouse in a trap. He shouldn't have left her to brood.

Crisler's voice came loudly through his earphones. "Okay, people, we're falling back to one kilometer. The Banshee's weapons are on-line and trained on this place. If it looks like it's going to open fire on us, we'll have to hit it first with everything we've got."

"That's insane," said Herat. "We haven't found any evidence of hostile intent in this place."

"Except that your precious Lasa have just eaten Rue Cassels."

"Beware of using loaded terms, Admiral. We don't know what just happened. We certainly don't know it was a hostile act."

"You were the one urging caution before."

"I was saying we shouldn't act without certain knowledge and I still am."

"Sirs," said one of the marines. "The airlock's overflowing."

"Everybody back! Now!"

Reluctantly, Michael turned on his maneuvering thrusters and jetted back with the rest. When he was in place at Crisler's one-kilometer line, he turned and looked back at the habitat.

It was hard to see unless you knew what to look for, but the smooth black of the habitat's hull was being replaced by the oily shimmer of the magnetic liquid. It was being pumped out through the airlock and was slicking rapidly over the furred hull. Frightening as it was to look at, Michael had to admire the genius behind it: Using ferrofluids, the Lasa could make their airlock grow big enough to bring the entire habitat inside it. Its spiky outthrusts showed that this liquid had to follow the lines of the magnetic fields— it couldn't be filling all the space under its surface. He pictured a large and growing chamber inside; anything could be happening there.

"It's swallowing itself," he said. Herat grunted in response.

"Explain, Bequith."

"This looks more defensive than aggressive, Admiral. Of course, we can't see what's going on underneath, but we were in that situation before."

He watched as the oily blackness ate away the letters of the Lasa writing. Soon the entire paragraph was gone and the black marched on to meet itself on the opposite side of the sphere.

A new voice cut in— one of Crisler's staff, calling from the Banshee. "Sir, the surface you see is actually moving five centimeters above the actual hull. It's a very thin layer of ferrofluid, supported from below by some pretty impressive magnetic gymnastics. But a picosecond blast from the main laser will open a three-meter hole in that stuff. We can do it at any time."

"Ready to go in, sir," said Barendts.

"Hang on there," snapped Herat. "If it's all that thin, it's obviously no threat."

"Maybe," said Crisler. "At the same time, it has one of our people. I for one am not inclined to leave her in there."

Michael looked at the habitat. It was completely covered in the black oil now; there were no telltale words to signify that it was a physical object that could be written on— there was only a complete absence of stars in a starburst shape to show that anything was there at all.

The staffer's voice cut in. "Sir! Registering a change. Heat levels are rising in a number of spots. No change on the surface, but the ferrofluid's radiating, probably from sources underneath. We might be able to image the sources."

"If anything breaks through the surface, shoot it off," said Crisler. "Marines, prepare to enter the thing."

"Sir, wait," said the staffer.

"What the hell is it?"

"Sir… it's changing shape."

SIX CHAMBERS IN, Rue found the control panel.

The previous rooms had been more and more specific; when it came, this one wasn't a surprise.

Rue moved in a daze, a kind of ecstasy. She knew exactly what was happening and it was the fulfillment of every possibility that Jentry's Envy had ever hinted at. The outside world, the past, her worries, even hunger and thirst, had all dissolved in the wonder of the present.

This chamber glittered with light and hummed with sound. It had eight doors, as had the others. The auroral glows and sparkling-edged images projected all around her were beautiful and alien, but she knew their purpose. They were the question that followed her last answer.

She moved slowly into the chamber and entered a region of focused sound. The tones were ordered, a kind of wonderful chorus, and when she moved they shifted and modulated. It was like the air itself held little clouds of sound and she could poke her head into one or another and hear its particular song.

Sadly, it was not practical. Herat would have spent a whole career in this little space, writing dissertations on the use of holographic sound to convey metric information. Mike would have heard endless kami in it. She was with Mike on this one.

Hulking near the next door was a large metal frame, surrounded with interpenetrating rings like one of those medieval globes of the heavens. At its center the whole contraption held a set of straps and manacles in places where they could be clamped around arms, legs, neck, torso. It looked very disturbing, like a high-tech torture device, but when she figured out what it was, Rue was actually tempted to try it. Herat would be even more fascinated by this thing: a display and input device that used physical pressure, orientation and position to convey and read information. A full-body joystick.

There were two places whose models she couldn't figure out at all; two which were strictly visual and beautiful, but whose input component eluded her. At the seventh door, she found the one she needed.

From outside, this area of the chamber had a kind of polarized sheen to it. When she glided into the space it defined, though, she found herself surrounded by stars. The holography was beautiful and precise; she could faintly see the rest of the chamber through it.

Also in this space were several little pens, more like chopsticks. She didn't know whether they were real or projected until she picked one up. It was cool metal, smooth and comfortable to hold. She took another, held them like chopsticks and reached out to pluck a star from the air.

To her amazement, the whole display zoomed in the blink of an eye. Before her was a blazing star, its tiny retinue of planets twinkling next to it. Dozens of tiny crosshairs floated in the display; they could represent asteroids, ships, or colonies. She felt that she was seeing a processed telescopic view and not something completely made up.

She waved the chopsticks and the star retreated to its original position.

Hmm… Rue looked around until she found another set of tiny crosshairs. It was down by her feet, very faint. She reached down and plucked it.

Jentry's Envy soared into view around her. She recognized Lake Flaccid, the red cube and there was the Banshee, balloon-sides glowing with internal light.

Rue wiped her eyes and looked about for the Lasa sphere.

There it was, superimposed over something cylindrical and familiar from the previous chambers she'd navigated. Yes. She was right about what was happening. She selected the sphere and it expanded around her.

Instead of an inner sphere made of metal and with airlock doors in it, though, she found herself floating above a giant sphere of light, with meridianal lines dividing it into many sections. Within each translucent section, small models glowed.

It's a menu. Laughing, she selected an element and it zoomed out around her— leaving a new sphere, its elements composed of variations on the item she had chosen.

She zoomed out, took one chopstick and waved it. It left a glowing line in space. She signed her name in thin air and laughed again.

Then she navigated down the menus until she found a little image of herself and she picked it up and deposited it outside the whole sphere.

The airlock below her blew outward in a big bubble, which opened, swallowed her and her display and closed again. From outside it she suddenly heard a tremendous crunching sound, like a giant's molars consuming a building. And she was moving.

That was okay; she knew where she was going. Rue was in charge of her ship at last.

"IT'S LENGTHENING OUT," said the staffer. "Becoming more cylindrical." Michael could see that with his own eyes now. The black surface was bulking up in places, then the bulges subsided again. It looked for all the world like a man dressing in a too-small survival bag.

"Sir?" asked Barendts.

"Hang on," said Crisler. "I need to know what it's doing."

"The heat signatures are intense," said the staffer. "We're getting radar showing all kinds of turmoil in there, sir. Very large masses in rapid motion."

"What kind? I need more information, damn it."

"Um… I think it would be unwise to send anyone in there at this time, sir. They'd be minced."

A space-suited figure jetted over to Michael. "What do you think?" asked Herat over a private channel.

"She triggered some kind of transformation, that's for sure," said Michael. "But it doesn't make any sense, based on where we were on the sequence. The Lasa were asking us something about how our life is organized, but why would the answer lead to this?"

"Maybe they're like the autotrophs," said Herat. "If we replied that we ate life like them, they might go ballistic. After all, wouldn't that be a major part of their assessment? Seeing what kind of risk we are?"

"I prefer not to believe that they're paranoid, sir."

"You prefer to think she's still alive," said Herat quietly. "So do I, Michael."

"We need to do something!"

"I know. But I don't know what."

The habitat had finished reshaping itself. It was much bigger now and shaped like a shaggy can. Now something started to bud away from one end. A large sphere, black as everything else, but…

Michael spotted a little dot of red on that sphere. The dot grew to become a letter of Lasa writing. Then a whole word emerged.

"The habitat's reappearing!" he shouted.

"I'll be damned," whispered Herat. "It's squirting itself out."

Over the next several minutes, the original Lasa habitat emerged from the end of the black cylinder. The black liquid was draining off it in an orderly way. The habitat seemed unchanged by the strange transformation that had taken place.

"It's given birth," said Herat. He began to laugh. "And what a bunch of nervous fathers we were!"

"Keep the lasers ready," said Crisler. "Marines, check out the Lasa sphere."

"Sir." The squad jetted away, the mesobot following them. Michael watched them approach the red-lettered sphere from its perspective. His head was spinning. Just what had happened here?

The marines found the airlock, now reverted back to its original condition. They stuck some periscopes through it, then one pushed the mesobot in. Michael's view suddenly went black, then came back as the little bot entered the interhull.

Except it was an interhull no longer. The interior of the black Lasa sphere was almost empty— just a smooth collection of arcing reflections from the metal walls. There were only two objects in here now.

One was a large black sphere of roiling ferrofluid, maybe eight meters across. It drifted near the far end of the sphere.

The other object was harder to figure out. It glowed with faery light, even seeming to have wings, or fans of auroral light around it. It too was a sphere, only this sphere was made of crystal or glass.

Inside it Rue Cassels moved in a slow but purposeful dance. Her space suit's helmet was off and he could clearly see the huge grin on her face.

"She's alive," he said.

"Sir, look! The black, it's peeling off the cylinder now!"

Michael brought his view back from the mesobot. Spotlights had the new cylinder outlined and in their glow he could clearly see the black liquid draining away from a bright metal hull. As it crept away from the end caps of the cylinder it revealed glass and the spotlights refracted into some kind of open interior.

"It's a habitat," murmured Herat. "It's built us a habitat."

"Yes, Professor."

It was Rue. Her voice sounded dreamy, jubilant. "It built us a new home, according to my specs. And it's showed me the origin of Jentry's Envy and its course. This habitat is for humans, Professor. It's ours, as part of the Lasa's crew. Jentry's Envy was a gift all along, you see. All we had to do was unwrap it."

Michael turned on his jets and headed for the Lasa habitat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Herat jetting toward the new one— curiosity getting the better of him, as always. Crisler was shouting for them to remain where they were, but Michael just wanted to make sure Rue was all right and tell her how happy he was that she had succeeded at finding her dream and desperate necessity.

"Decant Max," shouted Rue. "Bring 'em all out! We're going to have a damned big party! And then Jentry's Envy is open for business!"

Behind Michael, Crisler and his men didn't move. For once, the admiral gave no orders.