Seveneves

Part Three

THE HABITAT RING CIRCA A+5000

FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER

KATH TWO WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY PATCHES OF ORANGE-PINK light cavorting across the taut fabric above her. A very old instinct, born on the savannahs of Old Earth, read it as danger: the flitting shadows, perhaps, of predators circling her tent. During the five thousand years of the Hard Rain, that instinct had lain dormant and useless. Here on the surface of New Earth, just beginning to support animals big and smart enough to be dangerous, it was once again troubling her sleep. Her shoulder twitched, in the way that it did sometimes when you were half awake, and not sure whether you were really moving or dreaming of it. She had thought of reaching under her pillow for the weapon. But coming fully to, she found that her arm had not really moved, other than the twitch. Through the thin padding beneath her head she could still feel the hard shape of the katapult.

By then it had become obvious that the moving light on the tent had nothing to do with large predators. It was too dappled and volatile. Not even birds could move so. Its twinkling and swirling were mysterious, but its hue told her it was the first light of the day. This meant that she had slept a little too long and was in danger of missing the dawn breezes that she had hoped would bear her into the sky.

She stumbled out of her little tent, feeling yesterday’s hike in the muscles of her legs. That was surprising. She thought she had trained well. But even in the largest space habitat, you couldn’t go downhill for all that long. On an actual planet, you could go on losing altitude for days. And, as it turned out, those long downhill runs were what really killed your legs. Yesterday she had shed almost two thousand meters, descending from a range of hills toward a blue, water-filled crater thirty kilometers across. She had stopped a few clicks short of its rim, where the ground dropped away toward a swath of grassland between her and the shore. The break in the slope had been subtle, but Kath Two’s throbbing knees had made it obvious enough. She had taken a dozen or so strides down it, gauging its angle in her blistered soles, sensing the air’s currents with her lips, her hair, and the palms of her hands. Then she had turned around and trudged back up to an inflection point that would have been invisible had the low evening sun not been grazing it, casting a sharp terminator on the ground.

Where wind streamed over bent ground, it stretched. The stretching had been faint in the dying wind of yestereve, but she had known that it would become more pronounced in the morning, as the sun rose and the air fled from its warmth. So she had dropped her pack and made her camp.

The source of the dappled light, as she now saw, was sunlight sparkling from waves on the lake below, shooting rays through the branches of trees, perhaps a hundred meters down the slope from her, that were beginning to stir in the morning breeze, making soft noises, as when a sleeping lover exhales.

She bent down, pulled the katapult out from under the sack of laundry she’d been using as a pillow, felt it thrum as it recognized her fingerprint. After a short walk and a careful look around — for she did not actually wish to use the katapult — she squatted and urinated in the largest open space that was handy. Only in the last few decades had the ecosystem here matured to the point where TerReForm — her employer — could seed it with predators. And that was always somewhat hit-or-miss. On the mature ecosystems of Old Earth, predators and prey had, according to the histories, evolved to some kind of equilibrium. On the remade ones of New Earth, you never knew. You couldn’t assume that all the predators around here were getting enough to eat; and even if they were, they might view Kath Two as a bit of tempting variety to add to their diet.

Kath Two was Survey. Whether or not this made her military was a topic of almost theological complexity. But regardless of whether you considered Survey to be a purely scientific corps with ad hoc liaisons to the military — merely for logistical convenience and situational awareness — or viewed it as an elite scout unit working hand-in-glove with Snake Eaters, its stated mission was to observe and report on the growth of New Earth’s ecosystem. Not to kill the animals that the human races had gone to so much trouble to invent and import. During her two-week stint on the surface, she had grown used to the katapult and stopped seeing it as remarkable that she was carrying a weapon. But the awareness that she was going home today made her see all of this through the eyes of the sophisticated urbanites she might be mingling with tomorrow: habitat ring dwellers who would never believe that only a short time earlier Kath Two had been in a place where one did not pee without carefully looking around first, did not venture into the open without a weapon in hand.

During the minutes since she had awakened, the sparkling light had warmed to brassy gold. Everything in the scene was a combination of exceptionally complex and unpredictable phenomena: the wavelets on the lake, the shapes into which the branches of the trees had grown during the century or so since this ground had been seeded by pods hurtling down out of space, tumbling like dice on jumbled ejecta from the myriad bolide strikes of the Hard Rain, finding purchase in crevices prepped by rock-munching microbes. The branches and the leaves responded to the currents of the wind, which were themselves random and turbulent in a way that surpassed human calculation. She thought about the fact that the brains of humans — or of any large animals, really — had evolved to live in environments like this, and to be nourished by such complex stimuli. For five thousand years the people of the human races had been living without that kind of nourishment. They had tried to simulate it with computers. They had built habitats large enough to support lakes and forests. But nature simulated was not nature. She wondered if humans’ brains had changed during that time, and if they were now ready for what they had set in motion on New Earth.

And then, because she was a Moiran, she wondered if all that had to do with the fact that she had overslept. Her previous Survey missions had been quick insertions lasting a few days. And they had typically sent her to less developed biomes: the fringes of the TerReForm process, where the seeding of the ground had occurred more recently, and less complexity struck the eye, nose, and ear. This mission, however, had lasted long enough that she could feel it changing her.

Eve Moira had been a child of London, fascinated by the natural world, but drawn to the city. So, Kath Two looked to the bright lights of the big city. Here that meant gazing up into the sky.

Yesterday had been overcast, with little movement in the air. She might have been hard-pressed to find and organize the energy she would need to get home. But matters had changed during the night. The air was moving. Not strongly enough, yet, that she could feel it on her face, but enough to stir the leaves at the tops of the trees and to wobble the heavy heads of the tall grass. Above, it must be moving more strongly, for yesterday’s sheet of clouds had been shredded to tufts and tissues, purplish-gray on the bottom and pink-orange on their eastern faces. The sky between them, however, was perfectly clear, and still dark enough that she could see a few bright stars and planets. And, to the south — for she was in the northern hemisphere — an orderly ring of brilliant points erupting from the eastern horizon and arching across the vault of the sky until it plunged into the shadow of the world, off to the west. From here she could see nearly half of the ten thousand or so habitats in the ring. Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.

It was time to go there.

She had pitched her little shelter on a flat lozenge of soft grass some distance back from the brow of the hill where the wind would soon be bending. She struck her camp, shouldered her pack one last time, and carried it a short distance to the break in the slope she had noticed yesterday. She popped the clasp on the hip belt and let it drop to the ground.

Unrolling the deflated wings and the tail structure was as easy as giving each a swift kick. Smaller bundles had been stuffed between them: a foot-operated pump and a hard sphere, somewhat larger than Kath Two’s head.

She devoted a few minutes to stomping the pump. The wrinkles began to disappear from the splayed runs of fabric, and it began to look like a glider.

The sun had cleared the opposite rim of the crater. The tops of the wings began gathering its energy and feeding it to built-in air pumps that would pressurize the wing and tail tubes beyond what could be achieved with muscle power.

She got dressed. Which began with getting naked, and cold. She was glad she had worked up a sweat operating the pump.

The hard sphere was a glass bubble with an opening at the bottom large enough to admit Kath Two’s head. At the moment, though, it was stuffed with a roll of gray fabric. She withdrew this and kicked it out on the ground. It was as long as she was tall. Rolled up in it had been a semirigid funnel with straps dangling from its edge. Stuffed into the funnel were two packets. One of the packets was tiny, just a pill that would stop up her bowels for a day. She swallowed it. The other was a heavy and distressingly cold sac of gel. Kath Two bit off one corner and then smeared the gel all over herself, wincing at its chilly touch. It was an emollient, rumored to be very complicated, and it had an official name. But everyone called it Space Grease. The stuff would never be sold as a cosmetic; it lay heavy on her skin, and she could practically feel her pores clogging.

The funnel-and-strap contraption was for collecting urine. She stepped into it, pulled it up over her pubic mound, and cinched the straps high over her pelvic crest. A short tube dangled from it, tickling her inner thigh.

She then picked up the gray fabric thing. This was a one-piece bodysuit whose only opening was at the neck. It was a mesh of nearly microscopic nats — simple three-legged robots that knew how to do very little other than hold hands with their neighbors. It would have been impossible to put on were it not for the fact that the nats, talking to each other in a simple language, could stretch and shrink those connections according to a shared program. She got both of her hands into the neck hole and pulled opposite ways. Recognizing the gesture, the nats relaxed, and the opening widened to the point where she could insert one foot, then the other. This required good balance, which Kath Two was fortunate enough to have. She was standing on a towel that she had spread out on the ground. The classic error was to lose one’s balance and plant a foot in the dirt, or even fall down, and get covered with dirt and rocks and twigs that would stick to the Space Grease. But Kath Two got her feet into the suit without incident. Finding the leg holes, and then the individual toe holes, was, as usual, slapstick comedy. Once she got the suit pulled up over her buttocks she was able to sit down and manage this one digit at a time. Then she reached down inside the still-baggy thighs and connected the urine tube to a fitting on the inside of her right thigh. Recognizing as much, the fabric drew tight, nearly trapping her hands inside. The tightness moved up in a wave from toes to knees to thighs to buttocks, pausing once it had noticed her waist. She shrugged the suit’s upper half on over her shoulders and got her fingers sorted into the gloves that terminated its arms. The suit, sensing what she was up to, grew tighter as she went, save at the neck.

From the helmet’s orifice she detached a rigid collar with a hinge on one side and a latch on the other. She snapped it into place around her neck, then pulled the loose fabric of the suit up over it and held it in place as it shrank, forming a tight connection to the collar.

From the hard collar down to her toes, she was now clad in gray material that fit her so closely she could see tendons in the backs of her hands, nipples reacting to the early morning chill, and the little valleys where her nails erupted from their beds.

She hesitated to lower the helmet over her face. This would be her last opportunity for a while to breathe the fresh air of New Earth. The scientist in her was at odds with a deeper layer, common to all human races, that wanted to see beauty and purpose in the “natural” world. She knew perfectly well what Doc — or just about any other Ivyn — would say to her, if he could read her mind. The water in that lake below you is there because we crashed comet cores into the dead Earth until it stayed wet. The air you’re breathing was manufactured by organisms we genetically engineered and sprayed all over the wet planet, then killed once they had accomplished their task. And the sharp scent you like so much comes from vegetation that, for many years, existed only as a string of binary digits stored on a thumb drive on a string around the neck of your Eve.

None of which changed the fact that she liked it. But the breeze was building, making the craft jostle and fidget. It was trimmed for minimum lift and unlikely to go anywhere, but a sudden gust might still carry it away.

Unnerved by a sudden movement, Kath Two reached out and slapped the upper surface of the right wing, about an arm’s length in from the tip.

Kath Two felt her own touch. A patch of skin on the back of her right forearm, a finger’s length in from the wrist, thrilled as the suit’s fabric contracted over it: a configuration of puckers no larger than a fingerprint. But shaped, unmistakably, like a miniature hand — Moira’s hand. Her skin and that of the glider had become joined in a common sensorium, mediated by the smart fabric of the suit.

It never got old. She slid her hand out toward the tip of the wing and watched with a little grin as the hand-shaped disturbance in her suit moved out toward her wrist. She lifted her hand from the wing and the pucker vanished.

She dropped the helmet over her head and got it seated in the collar. Other than a padded brow band to support the weight of her head, and a sparse geodesic array of miniature speakers, the helmet was just a transparent bubble, mercifully free of heads-up displays and other clutter.

In the fuselage that joined the wings was a nest barely large enough to accommodate her. She straddled the nose, lifted one knee, and nestled it into a padded and insulated gutter that would support it and her shin. Then she followed suit with the other leg. She was kneeling in the cockpit now. Resting loose on the belly pad in front of her was a parachute folded up into a slim backpack. She picked this up, slung it over her back, and tightened the straps around her waist and thighs. She leaned forward and took her weight on her arms, then did a reverse push-up, settling onto her belly.

Then she made connections: the pee tube to a system that would drain it. Drinking water at her collar. She didn’t yet need the tubes for incoming and outgoing atmosphere, but she connected them anyway, as well as a power cable.

Then she reached back behind her, all the way down to her ankles, and found the handle for the zipper. She had no idea why it was called that. It was a linear closure, consisting of more dumb, specialized nats, that sealed her body inside the fuselage, snug under many layers of crinkly insulation. As she pulled it up she felt the glider’s flexible top clamp around her buttocks and cleave together up the length of her spine until it had closed around the collar of her suit. Only her head-bubble was now exposed. It had become the glider’s nose cone.

She extended her arms then to the sides like a bird spreading its wings, sliding them into insulated tunnels where they rested comfortably on inflated supports. For a moment she thought that some little stones had somehow made their way onboard and gotten trapped under her arms. Then one of them shifted a little, and she realized that this was the suit again, sensing the pressure of a rock on the underside of the wing and mirroring it.

The insulation also helped to deaden sound, and so she could now hear almost nothing from outside.

Which didn’t mean she couldn’t hear anything. She could hear the wind. A phrase that didn’t really do justice to the soundscape now being rendered by the array of miniature speakers. “The canid smelled the forest” was a completely different sentence from “The man smelled the forest,” not because the words had different meanings, but because the canid’s olfactory apparatus was infinitely superior to that of the man. In a loosely analogous way, the real-time, three-dimensional sonic portrait of the wind generated by the glider’s onboard systems and rendered by the helmet’s speakers was as far beyond what she could sense with unaided ears as the canid’s scenting of the forest was beyond the man’s. For the vehicle had lidars pointed in all directions, looking out into the air to a range of several hundred meters and seeing its myriad currents, shears, and vortices. To convey all of that information in sound was impossible, but what came through was more than enough to tell Kath Two where she wanted to go: namely, where the energy was. And right now the symphony of tones, whooshes, crackles, and rustlings told her that her intuition yestereve had been more or less correct. The wind climbed the slope from the lake in a fairly continuous sheet, but as it molded itself over the brow of the hill, the wind higher up, on the outside track, had to go faster in order to keep up with the ground layer. There was a gradient in speed between the wind aloft and that at the ground. She could use it.

Her eyes were busy too, tracking a pair of birds flying parallel to the slope, dipping in and out of the shear in the wind, sipping power. Far above them, the clouds were telling her a story about the conditions she’d be facing in a few minutes’ time, but this was no concern of hers now.

The wind gusted. The feeling of pressure beneath her arms increased and at the same time she felt the entire craft rising. She moved her feet and her hands in a way that the suit recognized and transmitted to the glider’s control surfaces. Just that quickly, it was configured for lift. Biting suddenly into the wind coming up the hill, the craft sprang into the air; she could feel the knots of pressure vanish as the ground lost contact with the wings. Then the only sensations on the skin of her arms were caused by the wings reading the currents of air flowing over them. She let herself rise high enough to buy some margin of error, then dropped the nose and glided down the hill, trading altitude for velocity. The game she’d be playing for the rest of the day was to build up a fund of energy by stealing it from the atmosphere. At the end she would trade it all for altitude, and spiral up to a place where the atmosphere failed.

Closer to the shore of the lake, the meadow gave way to trees. This was one of the more mature forests on New Earth. It had been seeded only a few years after the First Treaty, about a hundred years ago. She pulled the nose up, skimmed over the highest branches, then dropped again until she was gliding over the blue water of the lake: the melted core of a comet, still coming alive with seeded algae and fish. With a voice command she caused the glider to drop a tube, no thicker than her finger, into the water skimming by a few meters below. On her first pass across the lake’s diameter she collected twenty kilograms of water, which slowed the glider down somewhat. She found a thermal on the other side and rode it up a few hundred meters before rolling over and diving down for another, faster pass over the lake, and another long drink of water. This part of the journey was the most ticklish, so it was good that it came first, when she was still fresh. A glider that was light enough to carry around on her back was, by the same token, too light to store very much kinetic energy. Its lack of momentum placed limits on the maneuvers Kath Two could perform in the higher atmosphere; small twitches in the flow of air would bat it around like a feather. It needed to get a lot heavier. The way to do that was to scoop water out of a lake, as she was doing now. But it all happened at low altitude and low speed, where the margin for error was slender. The first few passes, when the glider weighed practically nothing, were the most delicate. So she took her time at each side of the lake to find good thermals and harvest their force. After an hour of that, however, she was dive-bombing her way across the crater with terrific authority, carrying hundreds of kilograms of ballast in the belly and the wings. By then she had learned where to hunt for thermals that, as the morning wore on, bloomed with increasing vigor from the open meadows in the shoulders of the great crater.

It was on her last pass, just as she was getting ready to pull up and skim over the tops of the trees that grew from the onrushing shore, that she saw the human.

The human was not exposed on the shore, but standing back among the first line of trees, apparently watching her. He or she — the distance was too great to read gender — was dressed in clothing that blended in with the surroundings. Not the bright coveralls of Survey. But neither did it look military. Perhaps sensing that he or she had been spotted, the human immediately stepped back into the young forest. At the same moment, Kath Two was obliged to pull her nose up, lest she collide with the trees. So great had been her surprise that she almost did it too late, and felt a few thin branches whipping against the belly of the fuselage as she put the lake behind her for good.

Directly ahead was a broad meadow, angled toward the sun, that she knew to be an excellent source of power. As she drew close enough for the lidars to read the air, and for her eyes to pick out the movements of the birds, she banked into the thermal. Her first approach was a crude guess based on what she was hearing, but as soon as she got into it and felt the fine-grained currents of the air in her arms and her fingertips, she was able to use it as birds did.

Half an hour’s climbing left the lake a blue disk far below and put her in sight of open country to the southeast, dotted with mushroom-cap clouds that were a dead giveaway. Trading altitude for distance, she glided in a nearly straight line until she could pick up those thermals and recharge her store of energy. She had her eye on a range of mountains several hundred kilometers distant, rising up above the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. Above them, clouds were arranged in long folds, running parallel to the crest of the range.

The photocells in the wings had stored up enough power now that she was able to send a burst of data up into space. Packets coming back a few seconds later told her when and where she could expect hangers along her projected route. It was too early to lock in on a specific plan, but useful to get a general picture. And it was good practice to let people know where she was and when to expect her.

It looked like about twenty other surveyors were operating in the same general zone. She considered the number astonishingly high, and double-checked it. While she was waiting for confirmation to come back, she scanned the skies around her and spotted two of them.

After some thought, she sent a voice message to Doc. “I want to talk to you when I get back. Not urgent. But important.”

Then she put such distractions out of her mind and attended to the problem at hand, which was stringing together enough thermals to get her into the mountain wave that awaited her downrange. Once she had stored enough energy in her glider — mostly in the form of altitude — the thermal-riding part of it became nearly automatic and she was able to doze off for stretches of twenty minutes at a time.

In truth, there was no aspect of this flight that could not have been managed by a robot. Robot gliders were at this moment operating all over New Earth. But she was leery of letting her own powers dwindle by delegating them to machines, and so she liked to fly the glider at least part of the time. The algorithms worked, but they wouldn’t get better unless humans gardened them; and to do that, you had to fly.

A surge of acceleration awakened her from an early afternoon nap and she looked down to see the snow-covered peaks of the mountains a thousand meters below her. She had found the mountain wave, a source of sustained atmospheric power that dwarfed anything that could be obtained from thermals. It was a ridge of rising air running from north to south. If she turned north from here, she could probably ride it all the way to the polar vortex, and take that up to where the atmosphere failed. But she had farther to go than wings could take her, so she banked south and trimmed the glider to slip sideways along the wave, skimming enough power from it to gain altitude even while screaming southward at three hundred kilometers an hour. She was a fly hitching a ride on a hurricane.

Knots in the tapestry of sound told her of other solid objects above and below, left and right. She was able to pick them out visually as the setting sun lit up their fuselages and wingtips against the deep purple of the sky.

Higher yet — unfathomably far above, and yet only in “low” Earth orbit — were larger structures, moving more slowly, like the minute hands of great clocks. Linear constellations with fatter, brighter lights on their ends. One of them was sweeping across the sky directly south of her, and she knew she was already too late to catch it. But looking off to the west she saw another approaching, like a giant leg striding across the sky, its foot swinging downward, not yet planted. She didn’t even need to check the params to know that this was the hanger for her. But she ran the calculation anyway, partly to confirm her guess and partly as a courtesy to other aircraft in this crowded space that might be aiming for the same one.

Darkness fell before she reached it. The hanger — it was a pun on “hangar,” a term from Old Earth aviation — was a big hollow pod hanging on the end of a tether that, just now, extended far up into space. At its opposite end, thousands of kilometers above, was another hanger just like it, serving as a counterweight. The two hangers formed a bolo, rotating around each other to keep the tether stretched tight between them. The bolo orbited the Earth just like any other satellite, the difference being that the height of that orbit, and the length of the tether, had been tuned so that on every rotation — or, as it appeared from Kath Two’s point of view, each long stride across the heavens — the hanger on the low end would swing down into the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere and seem to hover, almost still, for a minute. Somewhat analogous to the way that a runner’s foot will remain planted on the ground, unmoving, for an instant during each stride, even though the runner is traveling swiftly. In any case it came low enough and went slowly enough that a glider, pumped to great velocity and brought high into the atmosphere by the power of the mountain wave, could catch it and match it.

Kath Two’s eyes and ears told her of other vehicles converging on the same target. A few minutes prior to rendezvous, it became obligatory to hand control of the craft over to a version of the ancient program Parambulator, which managed the final approach. Kath Two could have stuck the landing without assistance, had she been alone. But coordinating her approach with the other vehicles was the sort of task best left up to a five-thousand-year-old algorithm.

At the time she ceded control, the hanger still seemed impossibly far away, but over the next few minutes it loomed out of the sky like a slow-motion meteorite, studded with red running lights. It was shaped like a rugby ball, streamlined fore and aft, with stubby winglets that were finding traction in the thin air, adjusting their angles of attack to stabilize its flight. Kath Two and the other aircraft were converging on it from behind, overtaking it rapidly as it slowed almost to a stop.

Most of the hanger’s aft end was a broad aperture that now irised open to reveal a spacious deck, brightly illuminated, like a magic doorway hanging in the sky. In front of her she could see the lights of other vehicles sidling into the queue ahead of her.

The hanger’s bright orifice grew huge, like a chilly sun falling out of the sky. One by one the vehicles slipped into its lee and bounced and skidded to a stop on its deck. From a distance this appeared level. In fact it was angled slightly upward, so that the aircraft climbed a gentle ramp as they rolled into it. This helped them kill their excess velocity. Her glider bounced twice before the ramp took its weight. Then gravity — real and simulated — came down like a fat hand on her back, and she felt a rush of blood to the head as the glider slowed sharply.

Visually, she was at rest now. In truth, she was contained in a revolving object: one extremity of a bolo four thousand kilometers long. Even though its revolution, seen from a distance, had looked ponderous, the bolo as a whole was wheeling fast enough to produce two gees of simulated gravity. That plus the one gee of real gravity she was feeling from New Earth added up to a massive amount of down force pressing her into the water-filled ballast sacs that made up the glider’s belly.

A human-sized grabb, untroubled by the weight, dragged her glider off to the side, making way for other aircraft coming in for a landing behind. All told, the hanger collected eight aircraft during this pass. Besides Kath Two’s, two others were piloted by humans. Each was of a different design; both were powered. The other five were robot gliders, looking similar to Kath Two’s, but solid rather than inflatable. As soon as the last of these was stowed, the hanger’s tailgate constricted and closed behind them. Its stride complete, the hanger was already swinging back, gaining altitude “heel” first, rising back up toward space.

It was much too large a volume to be pressurized. What little air it had scooped up during its dip into the atmosphere rapidly leaked out. So Kath Two was effectively in outer space now. Knowing this, the fabric of the suit had contracted against her skin to supply the back pressure that was no longer provided by the atmosphere. It was porous, and so the only thing really between her skin and the void was Space Grease. The combined effects of that and the nat mesh fooled her skin and muscles into believing that they were under a nice thick blanket of air — the way humans were meant to live. The only part of the outfit that was pressurized like an old-fashioned space suit was the helmet.

Dangling above the middle of the hanger’s landing deck were four flivvers of various sizes and designs — the latest iterations of a vehicle type that had been in existence since before the onset of the Hard Rain. During the series of landings just completed, these had been kept up and out of the way. As soon as the door of the hanger closed, one of them — a medium-sized, four-passenger model — was lowered to the ramp by winches. It came to rest about ten meters away. Incongruously for a space vehicle, it seemed to have wheels. It was, in fact, resting on a low, wheeled sled that was designed to roll up and down the ramp.

Green lights beside the flivver’s airlock door told her that all was well on the other side. Kath Two had about ten minutes to reach it. That would be plenty of time if she didn’t pass out. She issued a command that allowed the glider’s body to deflate. She felt rather than heard the air escaping and the water draining. The soft top of the fuselage parted over her shoulders, back, butt, and thighs. Meanwhile she was wriggling her arms in from the insulated sleeves where they had been spread like a pair of wings. This was good exercise, given that they weighed three times as much as normal.

By the time that was all done, the glider was just a wrinkled cross of fabric, flat on the deck. Kath Two disconnected herself from its air scrubber and its urine collection system, then unplugged the power and data from her collar. She gathered her arms under her and began to belly-crawl toward the flivver, sliding one knee, then the other forward along the deck plates, like a lizard. A big siwi corkscrewed out and kept pace with her, tracking her vital signs, ready to supply extra air or other forms of assistance if needed. But Kath Two made adequate progress. She probably could have crawled on hands and knees, as one of the other human pilots was doing, but she saw no need.

Something strange caught her eye, and she went to the effort of rotating her head slightly just to verify it was real: the third pilot was actually walking upright. He was trudging along with short deliberate strides, carefully judging his balance and the loads he was placing on his joints, while somehow managing to keep enough blood in his brain to remain conscious.

Kath Two could never have stood up, let alone walked, under three gees. The same was true of most of her race. This man, however, was a Teklan. That was obvious from his size, as well as his coloration and the shape of his head, which were visible through his helmet. It was hinted at by his musculature and by the style of the suit he was wearing — heavier, partly armored, slung about with load-bearing straps made to support various burdens. His scabbards, holsters, and bandoliers were vacant. Even without any of those clues, however, she could have guessed his race from the fact that he had chosen to perform the feat of walking when he could have more safely and more easily crawled.

Had it not been for the racial bond that joined Moirans and Teklans, Kath Two might have rolled her eyes and muttered a joke about it. Teklans didn’t need blood in their brains to keep dutifully trudging forward. Something along those lines. But that kind of stereotyping could just as well have been turned back on her. The Teklan had piloted his vehicle into the hanger under power. The thing had engines. Why not use engines if you belonged to a civilization that knew how to make them? Kath Two, on the other hand, had reached the same destination in an unpowered glider, using skill and wit to draw energy from the atmosphere. She could have turned pilot’s duties over to an algorithm anytime she wanted. Instead, she had chosen to do most of it herself. In its own way, this was no less an act of pointless bravado than what the Teklan pilot was doing right now. She had been testing and sharpening a set of skills that was important to her. Mutatis mutandis, this Teklan was doing the same.

Kath Two got to the airlock with time to spare. Its floor was padded as a courtesy to people who, like her, were experiencing it through all the body’s boniest parts. She rolled heavily onto her back, slightly bumping the pilot who had reached it on hands and knees, and connected her air tube to a socket on the airlock wall. New air flooded her helmet. The Teklan entered and allowed himself to collapse onto a bench. The outer hatch closed and locked. The air pressure rose and the nat mesh reduced its fierce clutch on her body. It became no tighter than an athletic jersey as the pressure approached one standard habitat atmosphere — a thinnish concoction of gases similar to what humans of Old Earth had breathed in places like Aspen, Colorado.

The inner hatch opened. Crawling now on hands and knees, Kath Two followed the others into the main cabin, where four acceleration couches were waiting. They climbed into three of them, strapped in, and made themselves comfortable. They were now lying on their backs, legs elevated. At some point their suits’ systems had found their way onto the flivver’s voice network — she knew as much from the fact that she could hear the other two breathing as heavily as she was. But no one said anything. Talking would become a lot easier in a few minutes. True to form, the Teklan, with a controlled exhalation, heaved his meaty arms up off the rests, grabbed his helmet, and pulled it off. He let its weight rest on his stomach and allowed his arms to thud back onto the couch. Kath Two got a vague peripheral glimpse of platinum hair and cheekbones, as expected, but didn’t feel like turning her head. Instead she looked at a display screen mounted above her face, focusing as well as she could with her eyeballs flattened into their sockets by gees.

They had entered the hanger in level flight, traveling at a hundred kilometers per hour. In the minutes since then, the centripetal force that had obliged her to crawl on the floor like a lizard had been accelerating them upward and forward, steadily pumping kinetic energy into them and everything around them, whirling them up to the immense velocities more typical of space travel. Compared to the baroque, fire-breathing systems that their ancestors had used to the same purpose, there was nothing to it. The bolo was mechanically identical to the sling used by David to slay Goliath. The flivver was the stone nestled in its pocket.

The bolo had made about a quarter of a revolution, so they were now traveling directly away from the surface of the Earth — aimed toward the distant ring of habitats that they and the three billion other members of the human races called home.

Seen on a video window in the display above, the hanger’s tailgate dilated, showing a disk of black sky. A tattoo of metallic clunks let them know that the brakes on the sled had been released. Driven down the ramp by centripetal force, it built speed all the way to the lip of the hanger deck and then stopped short with a sneeze from its shock absorbers. The flivver jerked free of the sled. From its occupants’ point of view, it seemed to fall off the edge of the deck and into space. En route it picked up a bit of a tumble, which was killed by quick firings of its thrusters.

They became weightless. Kath Two took her helmet off but kept her head nestled in the couch’s rest for a minute while her inner ear adjusted. Meanwhile she was groping in a compartment in her armrest for a varp, which was what people normally used in place of flat-panel display screens when they wanted to interact with some kind of app. It was an old enough word that most people had forgotten it was an acronym for something like Vision Augmentation Retro-Projector. Styles varied, but the baseline model looked like a heavy-framed pair of glasses. Mounted in that frame were cameras that could see the way her hands were moving, a microphone that could hear her speech, and other cameras that could track her gaze. A number of glowing figments appeared in her peripheral vision as she slipped them on, and she was able to reach out and activate one of them to launch Parambulator. This gave her a schema of the flivver’s situation in the universe: in the center, a blue disk representing New Earth, under a gray film of atmosphere. Well outside of that, the orbital track of the bolo’s center, the twin trajectories of its two hangers snaking around it. This was what they had just left behind. A blinking green dot showed their current location on their new orbit, a fat ellipse whose apogee coincided with the circle of habitats that hung above the planet at geosynchronous altitude. Over the next twelve hours they would coast up to that height, then strap back into the couches and use other means to effect a delta vee that would sync them up with whichever habitat they decided upon.

The world in which essentially all three billion humans lived, as depicted from “above” (high over the North Pole, looking “down” on the whole system) was a hair-thin ring some eighty-four thousand kilometers across — roughly seven times the diameter of the blue-and-white planet in its center. The objects that made up the ring, though they seemed big to the humans who lived in them, were evanescent particles compared to the ring’s overall scale. Imagine the thinnest possible jewelry chain, a nearly invisible trace of platinum around a woman’s neck. Make a perfect circle of that same chain ten meters in diameter, and that gives a picture of the ring’s thinness in comparison to its overall size. It was more easily viewed in artificial renderings like the one on Kath Two’s varp, where the points that made up the ring — the individual habitats — were drawn as unrealistically large, color-coded pips.

Seen that way, the circle was chopped into eight arcs of roughly equal size, each subtending about forty-five degrees. At long zoom, these were glinting and luminously iridescent, with much shorter gray arcs — the boneyards, they were called — sticking them together.

At a closer zoom, the pointillistic nature of the image became obvious, and the system began helpfully to superimpose labels and numbered meridians. There were more than nine thousand active habitats distributed among those eight segments. The boneyards contained another several hundred — mostly obsolete ones being cut up for scrap — as well as unused fragments of the moon and the odd captured asteroid, there to serve as raw material for new construction.

Any object that was not inhabited — because it wasn’t finished yet, because it was abandoned, or because it was just a rock — was rendered as a gray dot. This accounted for the dull appearance of the eight boneyards.

Sparkling with pure colors were the eight much longer arcs between them. Seen from a distance, each arc had a predominant color. Encoded in those colors was the history of their building, and in turn that of the human races during the last thousand years — the Fifth Millennium, the Millennium of the Ring. Prior to that — during the first four thousand years of the Hard Rain — space had been so dirty that the human races had been obliged to hunker down in the shelter of massive nickel-iron bodies such as Cleft, whose orbits were, of course, similar to that of the moon whose core had once comprised them — nine times farther away from Earth than the habitat ring was now. As Dubois Harris had foreseen, the orbit of the former moon had been a fine place — the only place, really — to restart a civilization, as long as hellfire was raining down on Earth. But to the extent that the human race, as a whole, was capable of having a plan, it was to return to Earth eventually. The Hard Rain diminished, gradually at first, and then, during the Fourth Millennium, more steeply as fleets of robots, issuing from their nickel-iron fastnesses like bats from caverns, began to sweep the skies clean, policing the rubble cloud, herding specks and pebbles together, and spiraling them down into disciplined orbits at geosynchronous altitude. Most of the work was accomplished using the pressure of sunlight, a weak form of propulsion that took hundreds of years to have its effect.

At the dawn of the Fifth Millennium, about a thousand years ago, the first new habitat in geosynchronous orbit had been constructed. It was called Greenwich because it was positioned above Old Earth’s prime meridian. In the way of neighbors, it at first had nothing but rubble and worn-out robots. As soon as Greenwich was complete, however, construction of more habitats had spread outward from it. The human races and their robots had begun burning their way through the ring of raw material in both directions, consuming it like fire on a fuse.

Greenwich had been a joint project of all seven human races. The same was true of its first neighbors: Volta, then Banu Qasim to the east, Atlas and Roland to the west, later more in both directions. All of these were, therefore, colored white in the display that Kath Two was seeing in her varp.

Greenwich was one of eight equidistant points plotted around the ring. The other seven, proceeding west, acquired the names Rio, Memphis, Pitcairn, Tokomaru, Kyoto, Dhaka, and Baghdad. In due course, each of them was seeded with a new habitat as well as the production capabilities needed to manufacture more yet. As the centuries went by, their inhabitants likewise burned their way through the raw materials lying to their western and eastern sides, building new habitats at a pace to match the growth of their populations.

It was self-evident that if that process went on long enough, the arc of habitats reaching west from, say, Greenwich would make contact with that growing east from Rio. The increasingly narrow bands of unused material and recyclable junk between segments became the boneyards, and might have disappeared altogether had they not been so useful — in the early going, as materials depots, later as political buffers and as liminal zones, akin to frontiers, to which people could escape when they had learned that the close-packed life of space habitats was not for them. The one halfway between Greenwich and Rio was called Cape Verde. Other boneyards, proceeding westward from Cape Verde, were Titicaca, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Kamchatka, Guangzhou, and Indus. Completing the circle, the one between Baghdad and Greenwich was called Balkans. Some were bigger than others. Guangzhou, which formerly had separated the Aïdan and Camite segments, had been used up entirely as the populations to either side had grown.

When pronouncing her Curse, Eve Aïda had said much that was true. It had become clear within the first few generations after the Council of the Seven Eves that the seven races were going to be around forever. They were as permanent in the human picture as toenails and spleens. Though no official policy had ever been proclaimed to that effect, they had tended to vote with their feet. Rio had become predominantly Ivyn. Moirans had flocked to Memphis, and Teklans to the next one around the arc in that direction, which was Pitcairn.

Baghdad, flanking Greenwich on the other side, had been settled by Dinans. Proceeding east from Baghdad, Dhaka had filled up with Camites. Aïdans and Julians had found a way of expressing their perpetual sense of alienation from the other races by opting for the Antipodean habitats of Kyoto and Tokomaru respectively; closing the ring, this brought the Julians, on their eastern end, up against the Teklans’ western extremity, separated only by the Hawaii boneyard, which was relatively large, if only because the Julian race was not numerous enough to make much headway in using its resources.

The levels of racial purity varied. Greenwich had been founded by all of them together, and so it would forever be the most diverse part of the ring. Baghdad and Rio, flanking it, also tended to have a lot of residents who were not, respectively, Dinans or Ivyns. That three-segment arc was, therefore, fairly cosmopolitan. The other races, in general, tended to be more inward looking, so their segments were not as thoroughly mixed. Anomalous outposts speckled the ring: a habitat containing fifty thousand Julians located spang in the middle of the Dinan segment, for example.

Eve Moira had employed a color-coding scheme to keep track of the lab samples from which all the races had spawned. It was purely the result of what she’d had lying around in the way of office supplies: an assortment of colored test-tube stickers and felt-tipped pens. Nevertheless, it had become a universal convention.

Blue: Dinah

Yellow: Camila

Red: Aïda

Orange: Julia

Cyan: Tekla

Purple: Moira herself

Green: Ivy

White: no particular race

The same code was used to render the dots that made up the ring. So, a predominantly Dinan habitat would be colored blue, and so on. Because they were so tiny and so numerous, the dots all merged into an iridescent, sparkling arc on the screen. But general trends could be seen. Whether or not it had been a deliberate choice on Eve Moira’s part, colors in the cool part of the palette — blue, green, purple, cyan — were linked to the four Eves she was personally closest to, while warm colors — red, yellow, orange — were saved for the others.

When the entire ring was plotted according to this scheme, and the plot was viewed as a whole, with Greenwich at twelve o’clock and Tokomaru at six, one therefore saw a great arc of cool colors starting at about ten o’clock (the western end of the Indus boneyard) and sweeping around to about five o’clock (the eastern end of the Hawaii boneyard). A shorter arc of warm colors ran from a little before six o’clock to a little after nine. The ring’s “top”-most segment, centered on Greenwich, was frosty white, like a polar icecap flanked by purple mountains, green hills, and blue water. But on its bottom left side, the ring looked as if it were being heated by a blowtorch, glowing in the warm tones that spoke of predominantly Camite, Aïdan, and Julian populations.

That segment was marked off, on the plot, by two red lines drawn athwart the ring. One was located at the longitude of 166 degrees, 30 minutes west, above the former Pacific island of Kiribati. This placed it near the eastern end of the Julian segment. The other was at precisely 90 degrees east, running through the habitat called Dhaka, in the exact center of the Camites’ arc. The lines were borders: not just imaginary frontiers but literal barriers that had been constructed, like turnpikes, across the ring. The warm-colored arc of habitats stretching between them, incorporating most of the Julian segment, all of the Aïdan segment, and exactly half of the Camite segment, was, to Kath Two and the others aboard this flivver, another country. The relationship between it and the larger, cool-colored segment where they lived could be described in many possible ways, of which the most succinct was war.

THE TEKLAN, SEEING THAT KATH TWO HAD LIFTED HER HEAD FROM the rest and thereby joined the temporary society of the flivver, turned toward her. He stuck his right elbow out to the side, made a blade of his hand, palm down, and snapped it in until his thumbnail was touching the point of his chin, then, after a moment’s pause, elevated it to the level of his forehead. “Beled Tomov,” he said. But Kath Two had already known this, since it was stenciled on the outside of his suit.

Kath Two made a similar gesture, though in the style of her race she used her left hand and kept the palm toward her, fingers curled into a loose fist. “Kath Amalthova, Two.”

Both of them looked toward the Dinan. During the previous moments he had kept his gaze averted in a way that, as everyone understood, meant that he had been taking a leak into his suit’s urine collection system and wanted privacy. But now he looked up and performed the gesture, also left-armed, with a slight variation in the attitude of the hand, beginning with his palm toward him but flipping it over to face outward as he brought it to his forehead. “Rhys Alaskov.”

This style of greeting was a throwback to the early days of the Cloud Ark and the first generations spawned on Cleft by the Seven Eves. People then had spent a lot of time in space suits equipped with outer visors that could be flipped up or down to compensate for sunlight. When the visor was pulled down, it concealed the wearer’s face behind a reflective metallized screen. When it was pushed up, the face could be seen. In the crowded environments of those days, the upward movement of the hand had become a signal meaning “Hello, I am available for social interaction,” and its reverse had come to mean “Goodbye” or “I wish for privacy now.” These gestures’ practical necessity had withered away as the human races had spread out into habitats where they could get privacy whenever they desired it. They lived on, however, as salutes. Beled Tomov had opted for a military style, using the right hand, the subtext being “I am not going to kill you with a concealed weapon.” In gravity, the next move might then have been to reach out for a handshake. In zero gee this usually wasn’t practical and so was rarely done. The left-handed version suggested a nonmilitary vocation, implying that the saluter’s right hand was busy doing something useful. The variations in hand position were racial and their origins were the subject of folkloric research. All agreed, however, that they were useful for signaling one’s race when far away, or when obscured in a space suit. The cues in size, shape, posture, and bearing that distinguished the races could be subtle, particularly when it was not possible to see facial features and hair color. Rhys Alaskov had the honey hair and freckled skin typical of a Dinan. Teklans too were fair. But where Rhys had an open, appealing face and an engaging manner, Beled was all cheek- and jawbones, sleek and bony at the same time, eyes so blue they were nearly white, hair like fiber-optic glass, cropped close to his skull. His affect matched his look. Kath Two was dark brown, with green eyes and woolly black hair. Close, in other words, to the way Eve Moira had looked. Among the three in this flivver, the largest contrast was therefore between her and Beled. And yet five thousand years of acculturation shaped the way they would interact. If some crisis were to arise, Kath Two and Beled would likely find themselves back to back, each instinctively seeking qualities wanted in the other. And in the absence of a crisis, they might find themselves front to front. A similar complementary relationship obtained between Dinans and Ivyns, but as it happened Rhys Alaskov was without an opposite number at the moment — that empty fourth couch.

All of which, and more, was just subtext, passed over in a fraction of a second. Rhys pushed off gently and floated toward the nest of displays that served as the flivver’s control panel. The same functions, of course, might have been served within his varp, but it was considered desirable to make the ship’s status clearly visible to everyone in the cabin, and so that kind of information tended to be splashed up on large screens.

Rhys was going to establish contact with whatever habitat was at their apogee, chat up whoever was “answering the phone” on the other end, and smooth the way in general. While he was floating slowly across the cabin, he said, “I trust you both had good surveys?”

“Nominal,” Beled announced.

Kath Two was about to make a remark in the same vein when she remembered the Indigen, or whoever it was, watching her glider from the shelter of the trees by the lake. The impression had been so fleeting. Had she imagined it? She was certain she hadn’t. But memory could play funny tricks.

“Mine was fascinating,” Rhys said, when Kath Two failed to take the bait for a while.

“Any irregularities?” asked Beled, just as Kath Two was saying, “What was so interesting?”

Sensing Beled’s gaze on her, Kath Two turned his way and understood that his question had been aimed as much at her as at Rhys.

It was in Rhys’s nature as a Dinan, however, to assume that the question was all for him. His eyes flicked between Kath Two and Beled. Knowing he was the odd man out here, he responded with a grin that was, of course, charming. “I think I can answer both questions at once.” He had reached the chair centered in the cockpit. “The canids are going epi in a huge way. They’ve become nearly unrecognizable.” He brought the controls to life with a few sweeps of his fingers, and the screens lit up all around him.

A canid was a thing like a dog, wolf, or coyote. Rather than trying to bring back individual species, Doc — Dr. Hu Noah — had drawn inspiration from research that had emerged in Old Earth scientific journals shortly before Zero, suggesting that the boundaries among those commonly recognized species were so muddy as to be meaningless. They all could and did mate with each other and produce hybrid offspring. For various reasons these tended to group by size and shape in a way that human observers saw as being distinct species. But when humans weren’t looking, or when the environment shifted, all manner of coy-dogs and coy-wolves and wolf-dogs appeared. Coyotes began hunting in packs like wolves, or wolves went solo like coyotes. Creatures that had avoided, or eaten, humans struck up partnerships with them; family pets went feral.

Hu Noah was 120 years old. As a young man he had been one of many scientists who had rebelled against a tradition of TerReForm thought that had passed as gospel for hundreds of years previously. Thanks in part to the young Turks’ propagandizing, this older approach had become hidebound and stereotyped as the TOT, or Take Our Time, school. The premise of TOT was that ecosystems — which on Old Earth had evolved over hundreds of millions of years — would have to be rebuilt slowly, through a sort of handcrafting process. Which was fine, since living in habitats was safer and more comfortable anyway than the unpredictable surface of a planet. The human races could enjoy thousands of years of safe, secure habitat life while slowly re-creating ecosystems down below that would resemble those of Old Earth. The planet would become a sort of ecological preserve. Africa, whose outlines were still vaguely recognizable, though heavily reshaped by the Hard Rain, would have giraffes and lions sequenced from the ones and zeroes dating all the way back to the thumb drive around Eve Moira’s neck. Likewise with the other battered and reforged continents.

Doc was the last surviving member of the young Turk faction that had named, then rubbished, “the TOT lot.” They were called the GID, or Get It Done, school. Their leader had been Leuk Markov, who himself had been over a hundred years old when he had become Doc’s teacher. Obviously from his name (which was taken from the surname of Eve Dinah’s boyfriend Markus), Leuk had been a Dinan, but Doc and most of his followers were Ivyns, which gave them an air of seriousness and credibility that had proved useful in pressing their agenda. They had formed a partnership with mostly Moiran philosophers who had begun questioning the TOT lot’s premises, pointing out that re-creating simulacra of Old Earth biomes, in addition to taking an unreasonably long time, reflected a basically sentimental way of thinking about nature. It was an expression of a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that the human races had carried on their backs ever since the Hard Rain. It was time to discard that. The old ecosystems would never return. Even if it were possible to bring them back, it would take so long as to not be worth it. In any event — and this was the nail in the coffin, supplied personally by Doc — it would fail anyway because the forces of natural selection were unpredictable and uncontrollable.

The most powerful weapon in the GID school’s arsenal, however, was not philosophy. It was impatience, a failing shared to a greater or lesser degree by all the races. Second only to that was competitiveness, a quality absent in Camites but present in the other six. Anyone so motivated would of course want to Get It Done, to make the TerReForm happen in centuries rather than millennia.

Their rise to power had, however, produced political consequences they had never imagined by giving the races something to compete for — namely, territory on the surface of New Earth.

In the early 4820s, Leuk Markov had published papers speculating that the surface of New Earth could be made ready for permanent human habitations as early as 5050. While that was startlingly soon by the standards of the Take Our Time school, it had seemed far in the future to the average person, and so the council of scientists responsible for planning the TerReForm had seen no problem with enshrining it in the schedule, and later even moving it up to 5005—the anniversary of the landing on Cleft. But the shift in thinking had unleashed long-pent-up political forces that had led to the formation of what amounted to two different countries in the year 4830. The Aïdans, who dominated one of them, bringing many Camites and Julians under their sway, had built the turnpikes at Kiribati and Dhaka in 4855, cleaving the ring. They eventually came up with a formal name for their country, obliging the rest of the ring to come up with a name for theirs, but everyone simply called them Red and Blue.

TerReForm had continued anyway, through ad hoc cooperation between scientists and labs straddling the Red/Blue borders. Twenty-three years later, however — practically as soon as New Earth’s atmosphere had become breathable without artificial aids — had begun the War on the Rocks, a struggle carried out partly in space but mostly on the still-nude surface of New Earth. This had been terminated in 4895 by what was now called First Treaty, which stipulated among other things how subsequent TerReForm activity was going to proceed. It had thus paved the way for the Great Seeding, which was responsible for the trees that Kath Two had been flying over this morning. In subsequent decades, larger and larger animals had been set loose on the surface as part of a planned program to jump-start whole ecosystems.

Some of those — the ones Kath Two had been worried about this morning — were canids. When Rhys said that they were “going epi,” he meant that they were passing through some kind of epigenetic shift.

If the Agent had blown up the moon a couple of decades earlier, Eve Moira wouldn’t have known about epigenetics. It was still a new science at the time she was sent up to the Cloud Ark. During her first years in space, when she and her equipment had been coddled in the most protected zones of Izzy and Endurance, she’d had plenty of time to bone up on the topic. Like most children of her era, she’d been taught to believe that the genome — the sequence of base pairs expressed in the chromosomes in every nucleus of the body — said everything there was to say about the genetic destiny of an organism. A small minority of those DNA sequences had clearly defined functions. The remainder seemed to do nothing, and so were dismissed as “junk DNA.” But that picture had changed during the first part of the twenty-first century, as more sophisticated analysis had revealed that much of that so-called junk actually performed important roles in the functioning of cells by regulating the expression of genes. Even simple organisms, it turned out, possessed many genes that were suppressed, or silenced altogether, by such mechanisms. The central promise of genomics — that by knowing an organism’s genome, scientists could know the organism — had fallen far short as it had become obvious that the phenotype (the actual creature that met the biologist’s eye, with all of its observable traits and behaviors) was a function not only of its genotype (its DNA sequences) but also of countless nanodecisions being made from moment to moment within the organism’s cells by the regulatory mechanisms that determined which genes to express and which to silence. Those regulatory mechanisms were of several types, and many were unfathomably complex.

Had it not been for the sudden intervention of the Agent, the biologists of Old Earth would have devoted at least the remaining decades of the century to cataloging these mechanisms and understanding their effects — a then-new science called epigenetics. Instead of which, on Cleft, in the hands of Eve Moira and the generations of biologists she reared, it became a tool. They had needed all the tools they could get, and they had wielded them pragmatically, bordering on ruthlessly, to ensure the survival of the human races. When creating the children of the other six Eves, Moira had avoided using epigenetic techniques. She had felt at liberty, however, to perform some experiments on her own genome. It had gone poorly at first, and her first eight pregnancies had been failures. But her last, the only daughter of Moira to survive, had flourished. Cantabrigia, as Moira had named her after the university of Cambridge, had founded the race of which Kath Two was a member.

By the time the Great Seeding was in the works, thousands of years later, epigenetics was sufficiently well understood to be programmed into the DNA of some of the newly created species that would be let loose on the surface of New Earth. And one of the planks in the Get It Done platform was to use epigenetics for all it was worth. So rather than trying to sequence and breed a new subspecies of coyote that was optimized for, and that would breed true in, a particular environment, as the TOT school would have had it, the GID approach was to produce a race of canines that would, over the course of only a few generations, become coyotes or wolves or dogs — or something that didn’t fit into any of those categories — depending on what happened to work best. They would all start with a similar genetic code, but different parts of it would end up being expressed or suppressed depending on circumstances.

And no particular effort would be made by humans to choose and plan those outcomes. They would seed New Earth and see what happened. If an ecosystem failed to “take” in a particular area, they would just try something else.

In the decades since such species had been seeded onto New Earth, this had been going on all the time. Epigenetic transformation had been rampant — and, since Survey was thin on the ground, largely unobserved by humans. Still, when it led to results that humans saw, and happened to find surprising, it was known as “going epi.” Use of the phrase was discouraged for being unscientific, but Rhys Alaskov knew how to get away with it.

Rhys brought up a rendering of the habitat ring and zoomed in on the whitish segment at its top. Their projected route was superimposed as a crisp green arc that curled through apogee near a succession of relatively small habitats just to the east of Greenwich. For the first habitats constructed in each segment — close to the seeds of Greenwich, Rio, et al. — had naturally tended to be smaller than the ones that came along later, when the construction process had hit its stride. The closer to a boneyard you got, the larger the habitats generally became. As Rhys panned and zoomed around, habitat names came and went on the screen: Hannibal, Brussels, Oyo, Auvergne, Vercingetorix, Steve Lake. The latter aroused a flicker of interest. Kath One had had an old friend living there. But the friendship wouldn’t likely have survived the transition to Kath Two.

She brought the same thing up on her varp and zoomed out to remind herself of the current location of the Eye.

If the habitat ring as a whole was like the dial of a clock, then the Eye, with its inner and outer tethers — one depending toward Earth, the other reaching out beyond the habitat ring — was a hand.

Any description of the Eye had to begin by mentioning that it was the largest object ever made. Most of its material had come from Cleft. It was, in a sense, the thing Cleft had ultimately shape-shifted into. Its innermost piece was a spinning, ring-shaped city of sufficient diameter — some fifty kilometers — that even the largest space habitats could pass through its center with plenty of room to spare. This made the Eye capable of sweeping all the way around the ring, encompassing in turn each of the ten thousand separate habitats.

Or at least that had been the original plan. In practice, its sweep was limited to the Blue part of the ring that began at Dhaka and ran westward about two-thirds of the way around the ring to the fringe of the Julian segment. At both of those locations, barriers — literal turnpikes, consisting of long splinters of nickel-iron laid directly across the ring — had been constructed by Red to physically block movement of the Eye into “their” segment. So instead of sweeping around like the hand of a clock, it bounced back and forth between the turnpikes, confining itself to Blue habitats. During the ensuing century and a half, Red had been at work on something huge that appeared to be an anti-Eye in the making, and that would presumably sweep back and forth, in like manner, over their segment. But it had never budged from its geostationary orbit above the Makassar Strait, and no one in Blue really knew how soon it might become operational.

The Great Chain, as the rotating city was called, lined a circular opening, like an iris, in the middle of the Eye. To either side of it, the Eye tapered to a point. One of those points was always aimed toward the center of Earth and the other was always aimed away from it. A cable, or rather a redundant, self-healing network of them, emerged from each of those two points. The inner one hung almost all the way down to the Earth’s surface, where a thing called Cradle dangled from it. The outer cable stretched for some distance beyond the habitat ring and terminated in the Big Rock, which served as a counterweight. By adjusting the length of the latter cable it was possible to move the whole construct’s center of gravity closer to or farther away from Earth, causing it to speed up or slow down in its orbit relative to the habitats in the ring. Thus it could sweep around like the hand of a clock, passing around each habitat along the way, or pausing for a time as needed. And when it was encircling a particular habitat it could easily exchange people and goods with it, via flivvers, or cargo shuttles, or swarms of nats, or mechanical contraptions that could snake out like tentacles.

To be in a habitat — even a quite large and cosmopolitan one — when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenly roll over the horizon, surround you, have a hundred kinds of intercourse with you, and then move on. Among its many other functions, it was a passenger ferry: the most straightforward way of moving among habitats. This was why Kath Two needed to remind herself of where it was at the moment and which direction it was moving.

The answer was that it was about twenty degrees west of their projected apogee, encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri, and heading generally in the direction of the Cape Verde boneyard that separated the Greenwich segment from the Rio segment. Which meant that it would soon be in the predominantly Ivyn part of the ring.

“Whip over high and catch the Eye?” she asked.

This amounted to a proposal that they should avail themselves of a kind of huge aluminum bullwhip — a very common device on the ring — to project their flivver into a higher orbit. As they curved slowly through apogee out beyond the ring, everything below them — the entire contents of the habitat ring, including the Eye — would speed past them on the inside track, so that by the time they looped back to it, the Eye would have caught up with them. They could dock their flivver to any of its hundreds of available ports, pass through Quarantine in relative comfort, and go their separate ways, using the Eye as a ferry to take them wherever they wanted to go, or as a transit hub where they could change to passenger flivvers or liners that might transport them more directly to other places in the system. Or they could ride the elevator down to Cradle. Or they could just remain on the Eye, a habitat in its own right where many people lived their entire lives. When possible, “catching the Eye” was almost always preferable to ending up on some random habitat whence it might take days or even weeks to get transit onward, and so proposals like this one were rarely controversial.

“Works for me,” Rhys said immediately.

Kath Two glanced toward Beled and saw him looking back at her. She understood that the Teklan had, in a manner unchanged through thousands of years of racial subspeciation and acculturation to the social and cultural environment of space, been checking her out.

She raised an eyebrow at him, just slightly.

“Of course,” said Beled.

“Unanimous. I’ll punch it in,” Rhys announced, and went to work at the interface panel.

Kath Two had felt a mildly embarrassing faint tingle between her legs, a sort of blush, accompanied by a bit of warmth in the face. She expected that Beled was reciprocating at some level. But Teklans were trained not to show their feelings, out of a belief, supposedly traceable all the way back to the ancient Spartans, that emotions such as fear resulted from their visible expression, rather than the other way around.

Perhaps sensing what was going on between Kath Two and Beled, Rhys focused on his task somewhat more intently than was really needed. The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called “air space” around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called “space space.” Kath Two, keeping half an eye on the brief and businesslike conversation between Rhys and Parambulator (which, to her eyes, had nothing whatsoever in common with whatever was meant by “punching it in”—but this was just how Dinans liked to express themselves), saw that they would pass through the twenty-kilometer-wide gap between habitats named Saint-Exupéry and Knutholmen. Midway between them was a whip station. Almost every habitat of significance was bracketed between two of these installations. The whip stations were small habitats, crewed by half a dozen or so humans who got rotated out every few months so they would not go crazy from boredom. Their job was to look after thousands of flynks: the latest generation of a lineage of robots that went all the way back to Rhys Aitken’s work aboard Izzy. He had been working with fingernail-sized nats. The ones on whip stations performed the same functions, but they were much bigger. The chains that they formed had the mass and momentum of pre-Zero freight trains, capable of undulating and cracking like a whip, or reaching out at distant targets like the fly on the end of a fishing line. Some wear and tear was involved. Flynks could have been inspected and repaired by other robots, but Blue’s overall cultural bias in favor of having humans in the loop had led to much of the work being done by flesh-and-blood crew members. In any case, supposing those people had been doing their job, keeping their fleet of flynks ready for use, and assuming that no other space travelers had already reserved that time slot on that whip station, the flivver carrying Kath Two, Rhys, and Beled would, in something like twelve hours’ time, rendezvous with the tip of an aluminum bullwhip that would then snap it into a circular orbit with a slightly higher radius than that of the ring. A few hours later, they would dock at Port 65 in the Quarantine Section of the outer limb of the Eye.

The Eye observed whatever time was local on the part of Earth lying directly below it. Currently, it was about eight in the morning there. She could look forward to some serious jet lag — another term from the pre-Zero era that had become embedded in the language despite the obsolescence of its literal meaning. According to one convention, they should switch over to Eye time now, so that they could begin adjusting. But they had all finished long days on New Earth and were too exhausted at this moment to maintain the pretense that it was first thing in the morning for them. They would have plenty of time to adjust in Quarantine. Kath Two reserved a Moiran-friendly bed and meal plan at Port 65, then plummeted into sleep.

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter.

An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever.

The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants.

Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries — it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain — the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan — was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.

As in Manhattan, the discretization of the space imposed form on how it had developed, with each link of the chain — each city block — acquiring its own skyline and identity. Groups of consecutive blocks had long since coalesced into neighborhoods. Each block was, in effect, a fully independent space vehicle with its own system for keeping the air from leaking out. But each was connected to its two neighbors by a bundle of passageways routed through its foundation slab, which made it possible to move easily from one to the next in the same way that the Londoners of Old Earth had used underground passages—“subways” in the London sense of that word — to cut beneath crowded intersections. Some of the subways were sized for human pedestrians. Four of them carried trains: locals and express service running both directions around the full circuit of the Great Chain. Still others were reserved for robotic vehicles programmed to carry cargo. Beyond that was a wide range of smaller conduits carrying air, water, power, and information. All of them went by the name of subways — this was a conflation of the old London and New York senses of the word. At each end of each block was a system of airlocks; these would seal themselves off in the event that a block were to depressurize. People ran marathons through them — four consecutive marathons made up about one circuit around the entire Chain.

Every fifth link in the Chain was public property. These tended to be parks, though some served as cultural facilities. So you were never more than two links away from green, or at least open, space. The other 576 links were privately owned, and constituted a commercial and residential real estate market that would have been easily recognizable to any pre-Zero property magnate. The Great Chain had been likened more than once to the ancient board game of Monopoly. Some stretches of the loop were more high-rent, others less so. The pattern was interrupted in several places by special links, or short series of links, placed there to serve industrial and civic requirements, such as making the transit system work.

One of those was the Ramp Link, whose purpose was to make connections, every five minutes, with the On Ramp and the Off Ramp. Since the Great Chain was moving at about five hundred meters per second with respect to the nonrotating frame of the Eye, persons wishing to get from the latter to the former needed to be accelerated to a fairly spectacular velocity — almost Mach 1.5—before they could set foot on the Ramp, or any other, Link. And those wishing to dechain, as the expression had it, needed to be decelerated by the same amount. The acceleration and the deceleration were handled by machines built into a place on the rim of the “iris” of the Eye. Though some efforts had been made to camouflage their essential nature, they were really just guns for shooting humans, albeit humans strapped into comfortable, pressurized bullets.

Outside of the Great Chain, the rest of the Eye was lightly infested with human beings, heavily so with robots. Most of it existed in microgravity, since the entire contraption — Great Chain, tethers, and all — was in geosynchronous orbit, hence free fall, around Earth. As you moved away from its center, toward the two extremities of the Eye where the tethers emerged, you might begin to notice tidal forces, which would show up as very mild gravity-like tugs. These shifted whenever the Eye adjusted its orbit to move around the habitat ring, and people who spent a lot of time there could always feel in their bones when a move was under way, like Old Earthers predicting the weather in their knees.

The skeleton of the Eye was a simple space frame built in the Amalthean style, which was to say that it had been carved and shaped from existing material (Cleft) as opposed to fabricated from scratch. Aesthetically, it meant that the big structural elements had a rough-hewn, space-battered look about them, a bit like a log cabin with all the knots and bark still visible. Vacancies between the big structural elements had been filled in with giant machines, most notably several immense rotating masses whose purpose was to stabilize the whole Eye gyroscopically. The nooks and crannies between the machines had been caulked with pressurized spaces where humans could move about. Some of those rotated to produce simulated gravity; they were like miniature, torus-shaped space colonies pinned to a much bigger structure. Docking ports tended to cluster near those.

As Kath Two’s eyes closed into sleep, she was gazing at the usual ring-shaped formation of iridescent sparkles, so densely packed that they blended into each other on the varp. The Eye was a slightly larger white dot between twelve and one o’clock; it would have been difficult to see were it not for the long white line representing its tether system, which ran from just above Earth’s surface all the way through the big white dot and beyond to the Big Rock.

Their flivver’s trajectory, a sharp green ellipse, projected from where they were now (near Earth) all the way out to slightly beyond the ring before curving back in to intersect the Eye.

Through her eyelids she could see indistinct patterns, reminding her a little of the first thing she’d seen this morning: the flickering lights on the walls of her tent. But then the varp figured out that her eyes were closed and shut off the display.

When she opened her eyes, the varp noticed it and came back to life, rendering the display again. Generally it looked the same, but the Eye had moved a little bit, and the dot representing the flivver had covered most of the distance to the habitat ring. Zooming in, she could see the two habitats between which they were going to pass, and the much smaller rendering of the whip station between them, exercising its long hair-thin flagellum in preparation for their arrival. She must have slept for something like ten hours. Moirans were notorious for it. Remembering the looks she had exchanged earlier with Beled, she felt, then stifled, mild embarrassment over the fact that she had spent most of the journey snoring away.

She unstrapped and floated over to the zero-gee toilet at the end of the flivver’s cabin. When she emerged a few minutes later, she saw that Rhys was asleep, loosely strapped in before the control panel. Beled was still in his acceleration couch. He too had slipped on a varp, and she guessed from the way he was moving his hands and wiggling his fingers that he was working, as opposed to playing. He was probably filling out his Survey report. Which was what Kath Two ought to be doing.

They represented a civilization that had, during the Fourth Millennium, executed a plan to undo the damage caused by the Agent by identifying, cataloging, reaching, corralling, and revectoring millions of rocks in orbit around Earth, while also reaching as far as the Kuiper Belt to acquire chunks of frozen water and methane and ammonia and bring them home and smash them into the ruined planet. Essentially all of this work had been accomplished by robots. So much metal had gone into their construction that millions of humans now lived in space habitats whose steel hulls consisted entirely of melted down and reforged robot carcasses. It would have been easy for them to blanket the surface of New Earth with robots and, without ever sending down a single human being, perform a kind of survey: one that was heavy on data and light on judgment. In that version of the world, Kath Two and the others would have spent their lives in habitats, working at varps and mining data. All sorts of interesting philosophical arguments could have been framed as to whether that approach was better or worse than what they were in fact doing. But philosophy didn’t really enter into it. The decision to do it this way was driven partly by politics and partly by social mores.

On the political front it boiled down to the terms of Second Treaty, which, eighteen years ago, had terminated the second Red-Blue war, sometimes called the War in the Woods to distinguish it from the earlier War on the Rocks. The treaty imposed strict limitations on the number of robots that either side could send down to the surface. For that matter, it also limited the number of humans; but the upshot was that, given those limits, human surveyors could gather more useful information about conditions on New Earth than could robots beaming data up to the ring.

On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices.

To the extent that Blue had a definable culture, it tended to view technological aids with some ambivalence, a state of mind boiled down into the aphorism “Each enhancement is an amputation.” This was not so much a definable idea or philosophy as it was a prejudice, operant at a nearly subliminal level. It was traceable to certain parts of the Epic. In many of these, Tavistock Prowse played a role; he was seen as its literal embodiment in the sense that he had actually undergone a series of amputations, and been consumed as food, after throwing in his lot with the Swarm. Blue saw itself — according to cultural critics, defined itself — as the inheritors of the traditions of Endurance. By process of elimination, then, Red was the culture of the Swarm. A century and a half ago, Red had sealed itself off behind barriers both physical and cryptographic, so not much was known of its culture, but plenty of circumstantial evidence suggested that it had different Amistics from Blue. Specifically, the Reds were enthusiastic about personal technological enhancement.

The upshot, here in the cabin of this flivver, was that the missions just concluded by Kath Two, Beled, and Rhys had no value — in effect, they had never happened — until reports had been filed. And the reports could not simply consist of data dumps and pictures. Surveyors had to write actual prose. And the more judgment and insight were condensed into that prose, the more highly it was thought of by people like Doc and, increasingly, his senior students.

Knowing that, Kath Two had been writing her report since before her glider had touched down on a broad swath of grass a fortnight ago. What remained was some editing and a summary. This ought to have come easily. But half an hour after she pulled the document up on her varp, she found herself gazing at it, unable to focus.

“Beled,” she finally said. Distinctly enough for him to hear it, not loud enough to wake up Rhys.

“Working on your report?” he asked.

He could see her, and the rest of the cabin, through the translucent light field of his varp. He might have seen the movements of her hands, indicative of text entry. In any case the question had a bit of an edge to it. Hours earlier, Beled had noted some uncertainty in Kath Two’s face. There was no telling, now, how long he’d been observing her through eyes screened by the varp.

“Did you see any Indigens?” she asked him.

He reached up and slid the varp onto the top of his head: a polite gesture.

“I planned my route to avoid a certain RIZ,” he said. Registered Indigen Zone, a place listed by name in the Treaty as a district where Sooners — people who had illegally gone to the surface ahead of schedule — were grandfathered in under the politely evasive term “Indigens” and allowed to live subject to certain restrictions. “I saw it from a distance. They did not see me.”

“Of course not,” Kath Two said, suppressing a smile.

“Does that answer your question?” Beled asked, knowing that it didn’t.

“I think I saw one not in a RIZ,” Kath Two said.

This piqued Beled’s attention. “Establishing a settlement or—”

“No,” Kath Two said firmly. “I’d have mentioned that. I think he, or she, was in scope.” Meaning, conducting activities, such as hunting and gathering, within the scope of Second Treaty. “Most likely fishing. But at least two hundred kilometers from the nearest RIZ.”

“A long way to carry a dead fish,” Beled remarked.

“Yeah,” Kath Two said, and felt her face warm slightly. Obvious as it seemed now that Beled had pointed it out, she’d missed that detail.

“Did you investigate further?” Beled asked.

“Unable,” Kath Two said. “I saw this person from my glider, on my way out.”

“It is not mandatory to explain every last thing in your report,” Beled pointed out. “To leave a loose end, under those circumstances, is acceptable. It will give some other surveyor a challenging and welcome task to shoulder.”

An idea came to Kath Two. “What if we were shouldering it?”

“Explain.”

“Does it seem to you as though there was an unusual concentration of Survey activity in that one zone?”

“Unusual,” Beled allowed, after thinking about it for a few moments. “Not without precedent.”

“Makes me wonder,” Kath Two said, “if some previous surveyor saw what I saw, and triggered a wave of missions in the same area.”

“In that case,” Beled pointed out, “Survey would have informed us of what it was they were sending us to look for.”

That was so sensible, and Beled said it with such simple conviction, that Kath Two nodded and declined to press it any further. But she was thinking, Unless it is something they don’t want us to know.

The conversation with Beled had been useful in that it had given her a way to proceed, which was simply to type up the Indigen sighting as a loose end, and thus drop it into the lap of whoever read the report. She went to work on that general plan, trying to clarify the fleeting memory in her mind’s eye, to sort out objective observations, made in the moment, from judgments and suppositions she’d added later. Which was tricky, since the latter were supposed to be part of her job.

A while later Rhys was awakened by an alarm he’d set on his wrist. He made a sleepy flight to the toilet and back, looking at her in the classic style of the extrovert who wants you to drop whatever you’re doing so that you can have a conversation with him. After exchanging a few words with Beled, he settled in to work on his own report, and the cabin was quiet for a while. Later the two men broke out some rations and had a snack, talking of this and that.

Kath Two was snapped out of her work reverie by a mild shift in their tone of voice. Now they were talking about something important. Not in an urgent or concerned way. A glance at the display told her what it was: they were nearing the ring, which meant that they were about to lance through the twenty-kilometer-wide gap between two space habitats. There was no reason that this should be a problem, but it was the sort of feat that focused one’s attention and brought a discernible edge to one’s voice.

She reached up and found the lever on her varp that activated an opaque screen over the lenses: essentially, a blindfold. Her view of the cabin was now blocked. The only things she could see were those being projected into her eyes by the varp. At the same time she activated an application that gave her the ability to see the flivver’s surroundings as if she were floating adrift in space. The same service could have been provided by a bubble of glass on the flivver’s hull, but it wouldn’t have been as good. It would have exposed the user’s head to cosmic radiation, and the contrasty light would have made it difficult to see certain things. The varp, on the other hand, played games with the light’s dynamic range so that bright things were less so while dim things were bright enough to see; it gave everything a luminous warm quality that did not exist in reality. It was so far superior to looking at the world directly that many space suits eschewed transparencies altogether and just encased the wearer’s head in a radiation-shielded dome with a varp on the inside.

She was now “looking” at an enhanced view of the universe from their current location, which was just inside, but rapidly approaching, the habitat ring.

The ring was spinning past them. It was a little like being on the inside of a carousel watching the horses wheel by, except that instead of horses, these were space habitats as much as thirty kilometers across, and they were moving at three thousand meters per second.

The task was to shoot between two of them without getting hit. By the standards of orbital mechanics it was no great feat, but it looked shockingly dangerous, and as such it was great fun to watch. As Kath Two looked straight ahead, the habitats seemed to be whizzing across their path like the teeth of a buzz saw. But through an apparent miracle the flivver found a gap between two of them.

“Whip dock in three,” announced a synthesized voice, and Kath Two’s hands moved around to check the straps holding her into her seat.

An immense bullwhip was burgeoning toward them. Its general dimensions were about those of an exceptionally long Old Earth freight train, but instead of boxcars it was made up of many flynks coupled nose-to-tail into a chain.

If Rhys’s earlier preparations had gone according to plan — and Kath Two would have heard about it, were that not the case — then, several hours ago, the hundreds of flynks that lived in this whip station had begun to assemble themselves into a chain. When it had reached the desired length — which was a function of the specific mission to be performed — the chain had joined itself nose-to-tail into an endless loop and gone into motion, driven by a simple linear motor in the whip station. It had formed an elongated oval known as an Aitken loop and then devoted some time to tweaking its shape and dialing in its exact velocity. Flynks were simple beasts, consisting mostly of structure: solid aluminum cast into certain shapes. Each flynk had a knuckle amidships, enabling it to bend freely in both directions — in mechanical engineering terms, it was just a heavy-duty universal joint. Fore and aft it had couplers that enabled it to form a strong, rigid connection with other flynks. Somewhere in all of that structure were a few grams of silicon that made it smart, and lines for carrying power and information down the length of the chain.

A few moments ago, word had gone out to one of the flynks that it should decouple from the one behind it. This had happened just as it was emerging from the whip station. At the instant the coupler had disconnected, the system had stopped being an Aitken loop and started being a giant bullwhip. The niksht — a very old mispronunciation of Knickstelle, referring to the U-shaped bend at the apex of the loop — had begun to propagate away from the whip station, towing the free end of the whip behind it, accelerating as it went, and rapidly building to thousands of meters per second of velocity. This was the thing Kath Two saw in the VR: the elbow in the whip, coming right at them. The free end was concealed behind it, but she knew that in a few moments it would come whipping around in a huge final burst of acceleration.

All the energy was directed “backward” from the point of view of the bored crew members who were presumably monitoring all of this in the station at the “handle” end of the whip. They were moving a lot faster than the flivver. In order to make physical contact with the approaching craft, they had to reach “back.” And “reach” wasn’t really the right term; they had to punch backward with explosive suddenness to match the flivver’s much lower velocity. This was the kind of task that bullwhips were made for.

Still, she couldn’t help but flinch as the final few flynks snapped around toward them. The perspective on the VR was almost sickening. The eye was confused by the fact that the whip as a whole was moving away from them so rapidly, and yet its uncoiling tip was coming right at them. Any failure in the calculations and it would have either hurtled away from them, leaving them alone and adrift, or else smashed into them at hypersonic closing velocity and destroyed them as surely as a bolide strike during the Epic.

Instead of which the two velocities matched perfectly and the last flynk in the chain was, just for a moment, right there in front of them, much like the hanger she had docked with earlier.

“Coupling,” said the voice, unnecessarily since she could hear the mechanical connection being made and then feel the acceleration as the flivver was slapped sideways and then jerked forward by the momentum of the whip. “Brace for stabilization.” A polite way of saying that the situation in the whip was a little chaotic in the aftermath of the snap-around. In general they were now being pulled forward with tremendous force, being brought up to a speed to match that of the whip station and all the other objects in the habitat ring. But the physics of the whip led to some side-to-side oscillation, some surges and lapses in the acceleration that could be dampened but not removed by the tiny adjustments of the flynks. “Hebel has toggled,” the voice confirmed. “Hebel,” like Knickstelle, was a term from the German; it was a lever at the base of the whip, anchored to the whip station and capable of flipping freely from one side to the other. It was, in effect, the arm that held the handle and cracked the whip, and shortly after the completion of the first crack — the one that had culminated in successful docking — it had snapped around to the other side of the station and initiated a second crack in the opposite direction. A new niksht had been formed, just at the place where the whip was attached to the hebel, and was beginning to accelerate “forward,” accelerating the flivver to the velocity it would need to accomplish the rest of the mission.

The process lasted for about three minutes. The visual cues in her headset gave her mind the context: the buzz saw whirling past them seemed to slow down. Of course it was still moving at the same speed; in truth the flivver was speeding up to match its pace. But, from her point of view, the habitat ring stopped looking like a whirling dervish and began to resolve itself into a series of discrete objects, still rushing past them, but more and more slowly until the whole ring seemed to grind to a halt. And at that moment, something especially huge drifted into view: the Eye, dead in their path.

“Decoupling,” the voice announced, and not a moment too soon, since the acceleration had become difficult to tolerate. Had they not broken their connection to the tip of the whip, the gee forces would have rendered them unconscious, then killed them, and finally ripped the flivver to shreds. Flynks were built to survive forces that humans and ordinary spacecraft could not. But the geometry and the timing of the niksht had been programmed so that it would bring them to their desired velocity and release them into their new trajectory just before the crisis that, in an Old Earth bullwhip, would have been signaled by the sharp bang of a sonic boom. Weightlessness returned, unless you counted a bit of corrective jostling from the flivver’s thrusters. Kath Two’s vision cleared and she swallowed a few times, trying to settle her stomach.

The funny thing was that the entire procedure, from Kath Two’s landing her glider in the hanger, to the bolo release, to the just-concluded interaction with the whip, would have looked graceful, even gentle, when viewed from a distance. In order to understand the sheer intensity of the acceleration and the jostling, you had to live through it.

Trying to think about something other than her stomach, she took a good look at the Eye.

Right now it was encircling Akureyri, a big (population 1.1 million), newish (eighty-four years old) habitat constructed in the style known informally as the double barrel, historically known as the O’Neill Island Three type. It was two large cylinders, parallel to each other, rotating in opposite directions. Each was enshrouded in complexes of mirrors and other infrastructure. The mirrors were aimed at the sun, whose light was bounced through windowed strips on the cylinder walls to illuminate the landscapes within. But it was about six in the evening local time, and so those mirrors were gradually being feathered to simulate twilight. By using the varp to zoom in, Kath Two could have peered through the windows to see the farms, forests, waterways, and habitations inside Akureyri, but she knew generally what it would look like, so she remained zoomed-out for now.

Which she had to, if she was going to take in the Eye. Akureyri, big as it was, was dwarfed by the construct surrounding it. Of this, the most eye-catching part was the Manhattan-on-a-roller-coaster spectacle of the Great Chain, whipping around at terrific speed, completing a full circuit every five minutes.

But that wasn’t where they were going. As the Eye became larger and larger in her view, its whirling iris drifted to one side, and it became clear that the flivver’s tiny corrective burns had aimed them toward one of those inhabited bits contained within its massive, pitted iron frame: a ring of four score docking ports encircled by a large, glowing yellow letter Q that was universally recognizable as the logo and the badge of Quarantine.

At a glance, two-thirds of the ports in the Q were already occupied by other ships, mostly flivvers of various types plus a couple of liners. The ports were individually numbered with glowing digits, and annotated, in the mixture of Latin and Cyrillic used throughout the ring, as to their purposes:

TRANZIT

IMMIGRAШON

MILITARY

CURVEY

CPEЦ

A ring of green lights surrounding a vacant port — number 65—began to flash. The systems that were controlling the flivver already knew where to go, so this was solely for the benefit of human beings, as well as serving as a backup plan in the rare event that a vehicle needed to be piloted by hand.

Kath Two had seen enough dockings in her time, so she peeled off the varp and held it in her lap through the ensuing series of nudges and jerks, which terminated with the opening of the airlock door.

A yellow-striped tube stretched away into the part of Quarantine set aside for people who, like them, were returning from the surface of Earth. A few meters in, they were confronted by a one-way door, constructed so that only one person at a time could pass through it. Hanging on a rack nearby were a number of hard bracelets, color-coded to indicate that they were intended for Survey personnel, also striped with machine-readable glyphs. Kath Two selected one and ratcheted it around her wrist. After a moment, a red diode began to blink on its back and digits began to count time. She waved it at the door, which unlocked itself and allowed her to pass into the tube beyond.

This part of the Q consisted essentially of plumbing: a snarl of human-sized pipes that drained people away from incoming ships and let them pool in separate reservoirs until they had passed muster. Kath Two, Rhys, and Beled would be inspected visually for invasive species and pathogens, their clothes and equipment sterilized. There would be mandatory showers and scrubbings. Stool and blood samples would be taken and tested. Because they were Survey, however, little interest would be shown in their backgrounds, their politics, their emotional stability, their motivations. Survey personnel had already been vetted for that sort of thing. Depending on how busy the lab facilities were, it could take anywhere from six to twenty-four hours.

THE SUSPICION, FOLLOWED BY THE CERTAINTY, THAT KATH TWO WAS being detained crept up on her. After a few hours, she was given clearance to move freely about the common areas of the Q’s no-man’s-land: eateries, shops, lounges, and recreational facilities strung around a torus with about half a gee of simulated gravity. This meant that she had passed all the biological tests. But the bracelet continued to blink red. The digits counted up to a day, then a day and a half. She shifted her sleep schedule to Eye time and began to experience jet lag.

The Q was pretty crowded — perhaps that figured into the delay. The Eye had, in the last couple of weeks, swept westward across the oldest, most densely populated regions of the Greenwich segment, headed for the Cape Verde boneyard and the Rio segment beyond. At such a location, close to a boneyard where the habitats were big and new, the Q would expect to see a large volume of “in transit” passengers: emigrants from older and more crowded places bound for big new habitats like Akureyri. It took decades to fully populate one of those things; their population was ramped up gradually as new housing was constructed and the life-supporting ecosystem was cultivated and tuned. In a short while the Eye would reach the Cape Verde boneyard and the census in this place would drop to near zero: just a few workers going to jobs on new habitats, and some patient long-range travelers. But for now the facilities in the no-man’s-land were operating at capacity and there were queues for food and drink, especially at places that catered to families. For people often emigrated when they had small children who they thought would benefit from being planted in a clean new place where they could run around.

So Kath Two told herself, for a while, that the delay was purely bureaucratic in nature, a result of too many emigrants and not enough Q staff on hand. But on the second day she noticed Beled in the recreation center, operating a resistance training device at some insane power level only usable by young male Teklans. Later, after he had showered, she caught up with him in a bar and he mentioned that he had seen Rhys headed for the exit with his bracelet flashing green.

“When was this?” she asked.

“Yesterday,” Beled said. “Eight hours and twenty minutes after we docked.”

A few hours later, Kath Two and Beled vacated their single rooms and moved into a slightly larger double. They began sleeping together without having sex, which was a fairly common behavior pattern for Moiran/Teklan couples who scarcely knew each other. When Beled got an erection, which was fairly often, he would go into the tiny en suite bathroom and masturbate. This way of dealing with it was sufficiently common that for him to have behaved in any other way would have been noteworthy. She knew that she could rely on him to show impeccable discipline, and he knew that this was her expectation, and so it could go on indefinitely until one of them signaled a change.

Unable to sleep, not as proficient as Beled at masturbation, she heaved his massive arm off her chest, a project akin to dragging an unconscious ten-year-old boy to the other side of the bed, and slipped out, looking for a place to kill time until she felt drowsy.

At the cafeteria, waiting in line for chocolate, she found herself standing next to a small, lithe Julian woman in her sixties. The woman had been reading a book, or pretending to. As the wait stretched on she seemed to lose interest. She closed the book, stifled a yawn, and fixed her gaze on Kath Two. “Back from the surface?”

This was obvious from the color of Kath Two’s wristband. But Kath Two understood that the woman was just trying to strike up a conversation. “Yes.”

“Home for you?” the woman asked, referring to the Eye.

“I’m sort of between homes at the moment. Survey duty makes it hard to settle down.”

“Ah, taking a little R & R on the Great Chain. Good for you.”

Kath Two understood perfectly well that this woman was a Quarantine agent.

This was how the Q operated: not by interrogating you in a windowless room but by striking up a casual conversation. The purpose of these common areas was to supply a range of venues and opportunities.

It was important not to be seen as dissimulating, so Kath Two said: “I expect some R & R might happen, but really I’m bound for Stromness.”

“Ah, visiting a friend at university?”

Was it telling the truth to call Doc a friend? “More of a mentor. A teacher,” she said.

“Well, I’ve heard Stromness is lovely. Never been.”

Many, perhaps most, who were probed in this way never even realized that they were talking to a Quarantine agent. That was because most people passed through the Q rarely, if at all; and when they did, they tended to be jumbled together with large groups of travelers in settings where this sort of conversation might easily be mistaken for idle chitchat.

Kath Two was a sufficiently experienced traveler to know exactly what was going on. And the other woman knew that she knew. They would carry on with the charade anyway. Kath Two resisted the temptation to make trouble by asking the Julian where she had come from and where she was going. The woman would no doubt have some plausible story cued up. Obliging her to rattle it off would only waste time.

As the queue crept forward, they came in view of a display panel above the counter, showing a scene from the Epic. The time code in the corner was A+3.139, placing it about a year and a half into the Big Ride. The footage was from an arklet — not Endurance—so this was most likely from the Swarm. There was simulated gravity, so the arklet had to be part of a bolo. Kath Two didn’t recognize any of the people at first. They were, of course, all rootstock humans, clearly recognizable as not belonging to any of the seven current human races, but close enough that she could still feel what they were feeling. They spoke, like everyone else in the Epic, in the archaic accents of five thousand years ago.

No Eves were currently in the frame. The only Eves in the Swarm, of course, had been Julia and Aïda. So this was probably what they called sidestory, which was to say, video from the Epic that, while it didn’t capture the words or the deeds of any of the Eves, was still deemed important enough to have been incorporated into the canon and to show up on playlists in locations like this café. Kath Two had a vague sense that she had seen it before, many years ago, perhaps in school. She had lost track of days and time zones, but she was fairly sure that today was Julsday, and so any Epic scenes being broadcast in a place like this were most likely commemorative of something that Eve Julia had said or done. “Happy Eve Day,” she said, as a polite reflex, to the Julian standing next to her.

“Good day to you,” the woman returned, which confirmed that today was in fact Julsday.

Kath Two watched the scene long enough to get the gist of it. She was growingly certain that she remembered these people and their situation. The Seven Fat and Seven Thin was a bolo that had consisted of two heptads. One of them had experienced a breakdown in food production because of a contagious blight that had started in one of its arklets and eventually spread to the other six. The result was seven arklets full of starving people, connected by a long cable to seven arklets in which there was plenty to eat. They had worked out a system of sending spacewalkers up their respective cables to the center point where the two paws were latched together. There, care packages from the Seven Fat would be handed over to spacewalkers from the Seven Thin, who would descend back to the afflicted heptad and distribute the food. But seven arklets could not produce food for fourteen. All went hungry, and people in the Seven Thin began to die. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that this bolo had become separated from the main Swarm.

The particular scene now being broadcast was a video conference between the starvelings of the Seven Thin and the only slightly better-fed occupants of the Seven Fat, made more wrenching by the fact that family members and old friends had found themselves separated by that cable. Kath Two was sure she remembered it now. In a few minutes, they would establish radio contact with the White Arklet and bring Eve Julia into the conversation to ask for her advice. She would make a little speech about what they must do. The story would end with the Seven Thin cutting themselves loose from the bolo. They timed it in such a way that the Seven Fat would be flung back in the direction of the main swarm, ensuring their at least temporary survival, while the Seven Thin went hurtling away in the opposite direction. In effect, the doomed ones used themselves as propellant to save the others. The tale was made more complicated, and more poignant, by other details that Kath Two would be subjected to if she stood here watching it long enough. The Seven Thin heptad was one of the few that contained part of the Human Genetic Archive, and so its sacrifice had been part of the seemingly inexorable series of mishaps that had led to the Council of the Seven Eves and the creation of the new human races. And their decision to sacrifice themselves had not been unanimous; it had been preceded by a mutiny, and hand-to-hand fighting from one arklet to the next as a minority of the starvelings had attempted to save themselves by donning space suits and ascending the cable. The man who had fought his way to the control panel and mashed the button that had severed the bolo was named Julius Mwangi. There was a habitat named after him at thirty-eight degrees, zero minutes east, hovering over his birthplace in Kenya. The “zero minutes” part being significant, since habitats lying on meridians were traditionally named after heroes of the Epic.

All of that came back to Kath Two’s mind during the time it took the café workers to make her coffee. For, since it had become obvious that she was being interrogated, she thought it best to change her order from chocolate to something with a little more caffeine. “This is on me,” she said to the Quarantine agent, since it was traditional to do small favors for strangers on their Eve Day. Had this been Moirsday, someone else might have paid for her coffee.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” the woman said. Which was probably true on a literal level; she could not accept a favor from someone she was interrogating. “But if you would allow me to sit with you. .”

“Of course,” Kath Two said, and waited while the woman’s coffee was made. The screen above the counter had cut to a different part of the Epic, consisting of a conversation that had taken place aboard Endurance shortly before the Final Burn, in which Dinah and Ivy had talked each other into believing that Julia wasn’t as bad as all that. Kath Two had always found it a little cloying. People quoted lines from it all the time. It had served as the basis for political movements and parties that had sought to build stronger alliances between the Julians and other races. As such, its timing was fortuitous. Had Kath Two been of a Julian turn of mind, she’d have wondered whether the whole thing had been staged, the playlist’s timing rigged by someone behind the scenes at Quarantine so that she would see it just before sitting down to coffee with this woman. Because that was how Julians were. It was the choice that Eve Julia had made during the Council of the Seven Eves. Her strain, living in relative isolation in their segment of the ring, had intensified it through the selective breeding process known as Caricaturization. Julians had developed huge eyes, sleek ears, and small mouths as part of that; it was the single easiest way to identify one from across the room.

The woman saluted before sitting down. Julians saluted with their left hands, kept off to the side of the face so that the hand never passed through the eyeline. “Ariane,” she said. A common Julian name, derived from the rockets launched from Kourou, which Eve Julia had defended by nuking the Venezuelans. “Ariane Casablancova.” Meaning that she was the daughter of a woman named Casablanca, after the White House.

Kath Two saluted back. “Kath Amalthova Two.” For Kath Two’s mother had been named after the asteroid that had sheltered Moira and her lab through the Big Ride.

Ariane sat down across from her, huge eyes fixed impassively on Kath Two’s face.

“Look,” Kath Two said, “I’m no good at this. I don’t belong to any kupol and I don’t want to join. Just ask me what is on your mind.”

“Just wondering if you saw anything interesting on the surface.”

“My whole point in going there is to see interesting things. I hardly see anything that is not interesting.”

Ariane just sat expectantly.

“I filed a report,” Kath Two said.

“And discussed its contents with Beled Tomov?”

“Yes.”

“But not with Rhys Alaskov.”

“Rhys was asleep when Beled and I were talking.”

“You slept quite a bit as well,” Ariane remarked. “Ten hours on the flivver.”

“I had been flying a glider all day.”

“With frequent naps.”

“Every time a Moiran sleeps in a little bit,” Kath Two said, “it doesn’t mean that we are going epi. Sometimes we are just tired, is all.”

“Time will tell. Now you are journeying to have a face-to-face conversation with your mentor,” Ariane said. “Or so you think.”

“What does that mean?”

“Dr. Hu is not on Stromness. You would know as much if you had coordinated with him. But you didn’t. Instead you made an impulsive plan, spur of the moment, to visit a place with which you have good associations. Something’s troubling you. You are aware that you might be starting to go epi. You won’t discuss it with ‘Doc’ until you are face-to-face with him, in a place where you feel safe. It must be something you observed on the surface. Something unexpected.”

Telling Ariane Casablancova to read Kath Two’s report wouldn’t help. Probably she had already perused it several times. She wanted to hear the story fresh.

“I might have seen a human,” Kath Two said.

“Might?”

“It was a glimpse. From a distance.”

“Not another surveyor — or else you wouldn’t see anything remarkable in it.”

“Surveyors wear bright clothes, for visibility.”

“Beled didn’t.”

“When he was passing near the RIZ, no, of course not. I’m speaking in general.”

“Go on.”

“This person was wearing the opposite. Sort of like—”

“Like what?”

“You ever see pre-Zero videos with hunters? They used to wear clothes that would make them less visible.”

“Camouflage,” Ariane said.

“Yeah. I think this person was in camouflage.”

“Not a surveyor, then.”

“So — military, perhaps?” Kath Two asked. “But the only purpose of military is to fight other military. And I’m pretty sure there’s no other military down there. Unless there’s been some kind of infraction. But if there’d been an infraction, I’d have been warned of it before I was dropped. Hell, they’d have sent a Thor after me.”

“Did it occur to you that it might be a fresh infraction? Which you were the first to notice?”

The question kind of hung there. Ariane’s implication was clear. If Kath Two had witnessed anything of the sort, she ought to have reported it immediately instead of sleeping for ten hours and then making a harebrained effort to find Doc in a place where he wasn’t.

“No,” she said. “That’s not what this was.”

“How do you know?”

“I was making passes over the lake for a long time. I was clearly visible. Anyone who was there for no good reason would have simply hidden in the trees until I was gone. That’s not what this person did. They were down near the shore in a place where they could get a clear view of what I was doing. Like—”

“Like what?” Ariane asked.

“Like they were gawking.”

After a long silence, Ariane repeated the word, “Gawking.”

“Yeah.” Until this point, Kath Two had felt uncomfortable under Ariane’s gaze, but now she looked directly into the great penetrating eyes for a while.

“When this person moved,” Ariane said, “did you get any sense as to posture and gait?”

“I don’t think it was a Neoander,” Kath Two said, shaking her head. “That I would have reported.”

Ariane blinked and said, “The simplest explanation is, of course. .”

“An Indigen. Which is the possibility I discussed with Beled.” She was feeling a little on the defensive now. “But what would one be doing there? So far from the nearest RIZ.”

“It is a mystery.”

“Yes.”

“That explains why you broke profile,” Ariane said, nodding.

“I don’t even know what ‘broke profile’ means to you people.”

“Did you ever get the sense that you were being watched? Followed?”

Ariane Casablancova had the damnable habit of asking good questions.

“You have to assume, when you’re down there, that—”

“That you are not going unnoticed by local megafauna. Of course.”

“Over time, hiking solo, trying to be aware of that, it can make you sort of, I don’t know—” She didn’t want to use the word “paranoid” around a Julian, since it was a racially charged word. Ariane seemed to sense this, and found it ever so slightly amusing. She leaned forward slightly, trying to help Kath Two over the sticky place.

“You develop a heightened awareness. Perhaps, to be safe, you interpret the sounds of the wilderness—”

“In the most conservative possible way, yeah. Like, the morning of my departure I was awakened by patches of light moving around on my tent. I thought for a minute that it might be caused by the movement of a large animal, passing between me and the sun. Then I emerged from the tent and saw that it had just been my imagination, that the light was shining between tree branches that were moving in the wind.”

“Interesting! That heightened awareness of things, over a long enough span of time, does seem just like the sort of stimulus that could trigger an epigenetic shift in a Moiran,” Ariane said.

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“You didn’t mention it in your report.”

This was the first time Ariane had come out and admitted that she’d read the report, and so it pulled Kath Two up short.

She was distracted by a large Teklan entering the café with a green bracelet on his wrist. But it wasn’t Beled. Just another surveyor, recently arrived, perhaps part of the same dragnet.

Obviously Beled had filed a very complete report, including his conversation with Kath Two on the flivver. From another type of person she might have found this an irritating indiscretion, but for a Teklan it was to be expected.

“I didn’t mention it in my report,” Kath Two said, “because in my judgment it was only my imagination, not a genuine, reportable Survey event.”

“If you don’t object to my going all juju—” This was a self-deprecating term for Julian-style cognition.

“Go ahead.”

“Perhaps your initial impression was correct, and it was, in fact, caused by a large animal — a human — passing between you and the sun. A mistake committed by someone who was watching you furtively. And when he — I’ll call him a he — noticed his shadow on your tent, he realized he’d blundered, and withdrew down the slope into the woods, and watched you from there.”

“It is entirely possible,” Kath Two said. Out of politeness she refrained from adding that it was the kind of thing that could only have been spun from a Julian mind.

“How has your sleep been since then?”

“Very sporadic and jet laggy, which is why I’m here. I think it is possible that I might have started to go epi on the last day, but now that I’m back in civilization my system is confused, and the shift is being aborted.” Here, Kath Two might have reached up to feel her own face had she been sitting across the table from a Moiran friend. Do I look different? But Ariane would have no way of knowing the answer.

Kath Two added, “I’ve been sleeping with Beled. I think that is helping pull me back.”

“Very well. I hope your adjustment — whether or not it includes becoming Kath Amalthova Three — is a smooth one.”

“Am I free to leave?”

“It’s not my decision. Your status remains indefinite.”

“Afraid I’ll blab about it?”

“It’s not for me to be afraid about such things. My personal advice? Don’t blab about it. But you know your rights. You can’t be detained just because you think you might have seen a camouflaged gawker in the middle of nowhere.” Ariane seemed to consider her next move before adding, “Otherwise you’d see a lot more Survey people bottled up in this café.”

ARIANE WAS RIGHT ABOUT DOC. HE HAD LEFT HIS HOME IN THE misty campus of Stromness — a habitat in the predominantly Ivyn part of the ring, consisting entirely of university — and was en route to Cradle. Along the way he was spending a bit of time on the Great Chain. So when Kath Two finally took the obvious step of getting in touch with him directly, he responded within a few minutes and told her where he could be found.

At about the same time, the diode on Kath Two’s wristband turned green, informing her that she was free to leave. She went to the room she’d been sharing with Beled to find that he had already departed. She gathered up her sterilized possessions and went to the exit, where the robot that was the door inspected her wristband. Apparently it liked what it saw, because it unlocked itself and allowed her to pass through. At the same moment the wristband sprang free and went dark. On her way out she tossed it into a bin.

Half an hour’s floating along Eye passageways took her to the On Ramp, where she piled onto a capsule along with two dozen other visitors, strapped herself in, and was fired like a bullet down a gun barrel whose muzzle, at just the right moment, synched up with an arrival platform on the Great Chain. One gee of simulated gravity took effect as they were swept up into the rotation of the circular city. Attendants, stationed near the capsule’s exit door, helped the new arrivals onto the platform and looked each one in the eye to make sure they were all right. People who weren’t accustomed to sudden shifts in gravity were apt to suffer from dizzy spells or worse. Most of the attendants were Camites. This was a considered choice, ratified by many centuries of practice. Even the most hot-blooded Dinan would be willing to admit to one of these unassuming people that he was feeling woozy. The elaborate Dinan code of chivalry obliged them to show special politeness to Camites, whom they identified as weak and childlike.

Kath Two walked with only minor unsteadiness toward the top of a moving stairway that would take her down to the mass transit level. The ceiling above was high and arched, like a grand Old Earth train station, and its nickel-iron fretworks were atwitter with birds, a whole society of them going about its internecine trends and controversies while keeping an eye on the human traffic below. Specialized siwis, wrapped around the struts and girders like pythons around tree branches, moved along at a rate too gradual for the birds to notice, cleaning off their shit. The birds were all the same species, called the grizzled crow: a small corvid, half of whose feathers were devoid of pigment, giving it a salt-and-pepper appearance. This feature had been added by its designers simply as a visual flag so that they could be easily distinguished from rootstock crows. They moved in wheeling gray cyclones through the vaulted space overhead, but they were also comfortable shooting up and down the angled shafts that connected it to the transit level below. As Kath Two walked along the platform, a single one of those birds peeled away from a spiraling and squawking murder and dove toward her. As it hied in closer she became more and more certain that it was homing in on her face. It pulled up just short of colliding with her and, lacking a place to perch, hovered before her in ungainly style, treading air and slipping backward to match her pace. “The grove in the temperate rain forest,” it said, or as near as a crow could come to pronouncing those words, and then beat air and took off, rising toward the rafters but then banking hard down the slanted tube that would take it back into the transit. Nor was it the only grizzled crow that was completing such an errand; similar encounters were happening all around her. Perhaps a score of the birds were perched on the safety railing that surrounded the entrance to the moving stair, muttering things that they had heard from humans. One of them, who perhaps had listened to a couple making love, was producing a crow’s approximation of an orgasmic moan. Three of them were singing a popular song in unison. One was barking like a dog. A few were trying to cadge food from people who were carrying snacks. One of them just kept repeating “meet me at the train station at dot sixteen,” another “I’ll be wearing a red scarf.”

At the bottom of the moving stair the crows were flying in and out of snug little rookeries that had been built for them at the ends of the tube cars, so that they wouldn’t foul the seats. Ten minutes on one of those cars took Kath Two to Aldebrandi Gardens. This was a series of six consecutive blocks that had been constructed as botanical preserves. Each consisted of a rectangular slab of ecosystem covered by a lofty arched glass roof under which simulated Earth landforms had been built. The temperature and humidity of each had been tuned to simulate a different part of Old Earth. Plants and other organisms, sequenced from digital records, had been cultivated here, and supplemented later with birds, insects, and small animals. Creatures fostered and studied here had later been disseminated to factories in other parts of the ring where they’d been propagated in vast numbers and used to seed New Earth.

Starting at the hot end, Kath Two walked through a Southeast Asian jungle so humid that moisture condensed on her face before she could even begin to perspire. No sky was visible beneath its triple canopy, but when she stepped through the next airlock into Chihuahuan desert, she was treated to a direct view up through its ceiling into space, and blasted with sunlight bounced in by a robotic mirror mounted outside. Hanging up there in the center of the Great Chain was a little habitat called Surtsey. For during Kath Two’s stay in Quarantine, the Eye had moved on from Akureyri, passed the even larger habitat of Sean Probst at twenty degrees west, and was now entering a sort of boundary zone on the edge of the Cape Verde boneyard. She knew nothing of Surtsey, but it looked like a placeholder habitat, a sort of construction shed that would be used as the basis for something planned a minute or two west of here. Her skin and hair dried out instantly under the sun, and by the time she reached the end of the block, she almost wished she’d stayed below in the tunnels, where she needn’t have worried about cactus spines and rattlesnakes.

The next ecosystem was Fynbos, the characteristic environment of the Cape of Good Hope, cooler but no less sunny, a riot of scrappy flowering plants, a favorite of picnickers and birdwatchers from elsewhere in the Great Chain. It was a little too crowded for her taste, and so she marched straight down its length, trying not to be distracted by its many small charms, and entered the next block. This was almost more aquarium than terrarium, being a simulation of Old Earth Louisiana bayou. A plank walkway snaked among its moss-covered trees, carrying her over teeming reptile-infested waters to the airlock at its far end, where she stopped to pull a jacket out of her knapsack and don a pair of gloves.

Eight-hundred-year-old Douglas firs filled the next block from end to end. This one had been engineered to simulate the temperate rain forest of pre-Zero British Columbia, so its roof had been equipped with filters that damped the sun down to a steady silver glow that seemed to come from all directions. The lack of shadows made it seem brighter, in its way, than the unobstructed sunlight in the Chihuahuan biome. Ferns, moss, and epiphytes grew on fallen logs so thickly that they seemed to have been sprayed from a hose. A skein of faint paths ran through it. Kath Two followed one of them to the Kupol Grove: a relatively open space near the center, ringed by particularly enormous trees, where she found Doc, four of his students, his aide, and his robot sitting on moss-covered rocks and logs.

Dr. Hu Noah and most of his students were Ivyn. In Doc’s case it was difficult to tell, since extreme old age tended to obscure racial differences. He’d lost his hair long ago, and his skin was blotchy from years spent down on the surface doing research in unfiltered sunlight. Limp skin dangled from his sharp cheekbones like wet laundry from the edge of a rock, and eventually joined into a system of wattles mostly concealed by a scarf wrapped around his neck. That, and other touches meant to keep him comfortable, had been seen to by his nurse, a stocky Camite wearing a knapsack full of medical supplies. Curled at Doc’s feet like a sleeping dog was a grabb with a display panel in its back showing live readouts of his vital signs, which it was monitoring through a bundle of wireless connections. A pole projected vertically from its back to about the level of Doc’s waist, where it forked to a pair of handlebars. It was a smart cane. When he grabbed the handlebars it would help him stand up. It would then steady his locomotion even on the roughest terrain, adding its six legs to his two.

Doc’s students ranged in age from twenty to seventy. Kath Two had never met any of them before. There was nothing unusual in that; the TerReForm was the largest project ever undertaken by the human race, and 99 percent of it still lay in the future. She recognized the oldest one’s face from pictures in scientific journals.

She felt awkward. Walking into the clearing and making herself known to these people had required a kind of courage. There was a class system within TerReForm. Doc was at its apex. Survey personnel were not so much at its bottom as on its wild fringes. Not so much looked down upon as looked at askance, seen as not entirely serious.

But they were polite. All except Doc greeted her with the Ivyn variant of the salute, an understated gesture that incorporated a suggestion of a bow. Doc held both of his hands out so that she could take them carefully in hers. He squeezed with surprising strength and she squeezed back.

Then suddenly they were alone. Whether by prearrangement or because the other Ivyns had sensed something, they all withdrew. Even the nurse stepped away and contented herself with a stroll around the clearing, holding her hand up from time to time to check Doc’s readouts on a palm-sized device.

“You’re coming to Cradle with me,” he announced. “There is need of a team.”

“A new research project?” she asked.

Doc’s eyes closed for a moment in disagreement, then sprang open, gazing at her directly. “A Seven,” he corrected himself.

“Hmm. And I’m to be—”

“One of us, yes.”

Doc said this as if it were obvious. But it wasn’t, not to Kath Two. A Seven — a group consisting of one person from each race — was usually assembled for some ceremonial purpose, like dedicating a new habitat or signing a treaty. Not Kath Two’s thing at all. And even if it had been, she was confused by the suggestion that she was to be in the same Seven as Doc. Because usually, when a Seven was being assembled, some effort was made to have all the members be of like status. And this was decidedly not the case between her and Doc. The gap in age, fame, and eminence was almost too wide to measure.

What could possibly make Kath Two special enough to deserve such an honor?

Her confusion lasted for only a few moments before she saw it, so obvious: it was something to do with what she had seen on the surface.

She saw faint amusement around Doc’s eyes as he watched her figuring it all out. This turned to a mildly apprehensive look as he perceived that Kath Two was getting ready to blurt something. And that alone caused her to stifle it. She said nothing. They would talk of it only when Doc felt it was time.

“You’ve never been to Cradle before,” he said.

“That’s correct.”

“Well, it should be a new kind of adventure for you then.”

“I’ll try not to look like a tourist.”

“Look like whatever you please,” he said. “We’ll be too busy to worry much about such things.”

“When do we—”

“Twelve hours, give or take,” he said, and looked over to the Camite. “Is that about right, Memmie?”

Memmie nodded. “Cabins have been booked on the elevator departing at twenty-two thirty.”

Kath Two hadn’t met Memmie before, but had heard about this person of indeterminate gender who kept Doc alive and looked after many of his affairs. “Memmie” was short for Remembrance, a common Camite name. At the moment Memmie seemed to be presenting as female, with a saronglike wrap around the waist of a coverall that was otherwise utilitarian in the extreme, appearing to consist entirely of cargo pockets. Some neck jewelry and a turbanlike head covering completed the ensemble. Her use of the passive voice—“Cabins have been booked”—was racially typical. Memmie, of course, had done the booking, made the other arrangements, and looked after the significant fund transfers needed to book a number of elevator cabins on short notice. But getting her to say that this had been her doing would have been like extracting teeth from her jaw. Some saw it as a becoming habit of humility; others saw it as irritatingly passive-aggressive. Kath Two had no opinion. She had a few free hours on the Great Chain and needed to make the most of them.

“See you there,” she said.

“I shall look forward to it,” Doc answered.

KATH TWO DESCENDED TO THE TRANSIT LEVEL AT THE END OF THE block and took the tube around the ring to a district of midrise blocks full of stores, markets, kupols, restaurants, and theaters, and spent the day drifting around, looking at things, buying little except for small items of clothing and toiletries she imagined she might need on the next leg of her journey. Square meter for square meter, this was the finest shopping district in the human universe, drawing its stock from every habitat visited by the Eye, attracting the sophisticated and well-heeled natives of the Great Chain as well as tourists from whichever habitats were currently in reach.

She was feeling a kind of vague ambient pressure — enhanced, no doubt, by the advertising that walled her in on all sides — to buy clothes, or try on jewelry, or get a hairstyle that would make her fit in better on Cradle. That was a place for people more important than Kath Two: brisk, poised paragons in uniforms or smart outfits, speed-walking down corridors in murmuring clusters, exchanging glances across lobbies. Kath One had been much more susceptible to those kinds of social influences and would have been emptying her bank account at this moment, trying to silence the little voice in her head telling her she wasn’t pretty or stylish enough. But Kath One had died at the age of thirteen and been replaced by Kath Two, whose brain had a rather different set of emotional responses. It wasn’t that she was unafraid. Everyone was afraid of something. Kath Two was afraid that she would make the wrong choices, and make a fool and a spectacle of herself, if she tried to dress up to Cradle’s standards. Better to lurk, observe, and merge, as she did when flying in a glider.

On her way back down to the tube, she happened to pass by a bookstall, where she picked up a paper copy of one of her favorite history books and downloaded a whole series of novels set on Old Earth. The paper copy was an extravagance, something she would add to her little library the next time she made it to one of her caches. For like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn’t even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family. All of which was fine for the people of the other races. But until a Moiran “took a set,” such permanent arrangements were unwise, placing husband, children, coworkers, and friends at risk of waking up one day to find that their wife, mother, colleague, or pal had effectively died and been replaced by someone else. So rather than renting apartments, young Moirans opted for storage caches in places they were wont to visit. Sometimes it was a shelf in a friend’s closet, sometimes a locker in a Survey or military base, sometimes a commercial niche in a big city with a robot doorkeeper that would ID you. Abandoned caches were legion, their contents forever being sold at auction.

Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

Elsewhere on the Great Chain was a block-long historical museum, stacked by era, with one floor for each millennium, beginning with the pre-Zero world on the ground floor and proceeding upward. Of course, very few physical artifacts remained from pre-Zero, so that floor consisted mostly of pictures and reconstructed environments. But the Arkies had been allowed to bring a few possessions into space with them, and some of those had survived the Epic and the ensuing five thousand years. So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people’s intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world — the habitat ring, the Eye, and all the rest — were so vastly greater than what the people of Old Earth had ever accomplished.

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched — and that only in densely populated, affluent places like the Great Chain.

There was no telling, of course, what was going on in the Red zone between the turnpikes. Signals intelligence shining out into space from their part of the habitat ring suggested that the Aïdans were at least as advanced, in their use of mobile communications, as people here. Because they were also quite good at encryption, there was no way of telling what they were saying to one another. But Blue, for its part, had made a conscious decision not to repeat what was known as Tav’s Mistake.

It was unfair, of course, for billions of people to focus blame on one representative of his culture who had died in a bad way five thousand years ago. The Epic, however, tended to have this effect on people’s thinking. In the same way that certain people of Old Earth, raised on the Bible, would have referred to masturbation as the Sin of Onan, those of the modern world tended to classify personal virtues and failings in terms of well-known historical figures from the era of the Cloud Ark, the Big Ride, and the first generations on Cleft. Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties. The actions that he had taken at the beginning of the White Sky, when he had fired off a scathing blog post about the loss of the Human Genetic Archive, and his highly critical and alarmist coverage of the Ymir expedition, had been analyzed to death by subsequent historians. Tav had not realized, or perhaps hadn’t considered the implications of the fact, that while writing those blog posts he was being watched and recorded from three different camera angles. This had later made it possible for historians to graph his blink rate, track the wanderings of his eyes around the screen of his laptop, look over his shoulder at the windows that had been open on his screen while he was blogging, and draw up pie charts showing how he had divided his time between playing games, texting friends, browsing Spacebook, watching pornography, eating, drinking, and actually writing his blog. The statistics tended not to paint a very flattering picture. The fact that the blog posts in question had (according to further such analyses) played a seminal role in the Break, and the departure of the Swarm, only focused more obloquy upon the poor man.

Anyone who bothered to learn the history of the developed world in the years just before Zero understood perfectly well that Tavistock Prowse had been squarely in the middle of the normal range, as far as his social media habits and attention span had been concerned. But nevertheless, Blues called it Tav’s Mistake. They didn’t want to make it again. Any efforts made by modern consumer-goods manufacturers to produce the kinds of devices and apps that had disordered the brain of Tav were met with the same instinctive pushback as Victorian clergy might have directed against the inventor of a masturbation machine. To the extent that Blue’s engineers could build electronics of comparable sophistication to those that Tav had used, they tended to put them into devices such as robots. Cleft’s initial population had been eight humans and hundreds of robots (thousands, if nats were counted as individuals). Both numbers had expanded since then. Only in the last century had the human population pulled even with that of non-nat robots.

The end result, for a young woman in a bookstall above a tube station on the Great Chain, was that she was dwelling in habitats, and being moved around by machines, far beyond the capabilities of Old Earth. She was being served and looked after by robots that were smarter and more robust than their ancestors — the Grabbs and so on that Eve Dinah had programmed on Izzy. And yet the information storage capacity of her tablet, and its ability to connect, were still limited enough that it made sense for her to download books over a cable while that was easy, and to make room for them in the tablet’s storage chips by deleting things she had already read.

That sorted, she rode transit to the Off Ramp, where she climbed into a capsule, facing backward, and felt deceleration push her back into her couch as it was flung off the Great Chain into a tube lined with electromagnetic decelerators.

Back now in the zero gee environment of the Eye’s nonrotating frame, she began to navigate its internal companionways, pushing herself along lighted tubes marked with the icon of Cradle: a pair of mountains enclosed within a semicircular dome. This led her, within a few minutes, to a transit station where she and two random strangers climbed into a four-person bubble that presently went into motion and began to whoosh at greater and greater speed down a long and perfectly straight tube. They were traveling from the rim of the great Eye’s iris out to its inner vertex, the one closest to Earth, a distance of some eighty kilometers, and so hand-over-handing their way down a shaft wasn’t an option. Kath Two, who had been awake now for something like sixteen hours, felt herself dozing off.

She jerked awake near the end of the trip, convinced that she had heard her name being spoken.

The pod had a video screen on its front bulkhead, and one of the other passengers, to pass the time, had begun playing back a segment of the Epic that must have taken place around twenty years after Zero. This could be guessed from the visible signs of aging on the faces of the surviving Eves, and from the fact that the first generation of their offspring were adolescents. This segment of the Epic told the story of how a personal rift between Eve Dinah and Eve Tekla had been mediated and settled by some of the youngsters, led by Catherine Dinova. It was frequently pointed to as one of the first moments when the children of the Eves had begun to think and take action for themselves. Lines of dialogue from it were quoted frequently in modern-day discussions.

Kath Two wondered, as she always did, whether the people of the Epic would have said and done some of what they had, had they known that, five thousand years later, billions of people would be watching them on video screens, citing them as examples, and quoting them from memory. Over the first few decades on Cleft, the cameras had died one by one. Depending on how you felt about ubiquitous surveillance, the result had either been a new Dark Age and an incalculable loss to history, or a liberation from digital tyranny. Either way, it signaled the end of the Epic: the painstakingly recorded account of everything that the people of the Cloud Ark had done from Zero onward. After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single chip had been used for critical functions such as robots and life support.

A tone sounded, warning the passengers of deceleration, and the pod eased to a stop in the terminal. Even after it had come to rest, however, they experienced a mild sense of gravity. It was too faint to be perceived other than as an annoying tendency for objects not otherwise constrained to drift “downward,” where “down” in this part of the Eye meant “toward the Earth.” To prevent that drift from getting out of hand, some floors of lightweight decking had been constructed. But the gravity was still so faint that you could fly around by pushing off against anything solid. Kath Two collected her bag, strapped it to her back, and glided out into the terminal. The other travelers from her pod seemed to know where they were going and so she followed them “down” through staggered gaps in those decks. This part of the Eye was bare bones in an almost literal sense; it was where the massive structural limbs that held the whole thing together converged to a sharp point, aimed forever at Earth. The metal was honeycombed with tunnels and cavities engineered for various purposes. The carbon cables that held Cradle suspended above Earth’s atmosphere some thirty-six thousand kilometers below diverged here and ran taut through long sheltered passageways all the way to the other end of the Eye, where they came together again and emerged to connect with the Big Rock beyond. The passageways and chambers used by humans were tiny by comparison.

Set into the very point of the Eye was a glass dome, half a dozen meters in diameter. From it you could look straight down the bore of the tether — which was actually a tubular array of sixteen smaller tendons — and see the Earth. From this distance, the planet looked about as big as a person’s face seen from across a small table. An Old Earther, seeing it from here, might think at first that nothing had ever changed. It still had the same general look: blue oceans, white icecaps, green-and-brown continents partly obscured by swirling white vortices of weather. Those continents stood in roughly the same places as the old ones, for not even the Hard Rain could make much of a dent in a tectonic plate. But the landforms had been radically resculpted, with many inland seas, and deep indentations in coastlines, created by large impacts. New island chains, frequently arc shaped, had been created by ejecta and by volcanic activity.

The Eye was always above the equator; currently it hovered over a spot about halfway between Africa and South America, whose coasts echoed each other’s shape in a way that made their tectonic history obvious even to nonscientists. The low-lying terrain along both coastlines had huge bites taken out of it, frequently with rocky islands jutting out in the centers of the bites: central peaks of big impact craters. Archipelagoes reached out into the Atlantic but trailed off well short of joining the two continents.

The geography of New Earth, though beautiful to look at, made little impression on Kath Two, since she had been studying it her whole life and had spent years tromping around on it. For now, her attention was captured by the giant machines in which the view was framed. Surrounding her, and just visible in her peripheral vision, was another of those ubiquitous tori, spinning around to provide simulated gravity for the staff who lived here with their families, looking after the tether and the elevator terminal. Inward of that were the sixteen orifices where the tether’s primary cables were routed into the frame of the Eye. Each of those cables, though it looked solid from a distance, was actually made of sixteen more cables, and so on and so forth down to a few fractal iterations. All of these ran parallel between the Eye and Cradle. Webbing them together was a network of smaller diagonal tendons, arranged so that if one cable broke, neighboring ones would take the force until a robot could be sent out to repair it. Cables broke all the time, because they’d been hit by bolides or simply because they had “aged out,” and so if you squinted your eyes and looked closely enough at the tether, you could see that it was alive with robots. Some of these were the size of buildings, and clambered up and down the largest cables simply to act as mother ships for swarms of smaller robots that would actually effect the repairs. This had been going on, to a greater or lesser extent, for many centuries. This end of the cable had beanstalked downward from the Eye while the other had grown in the opposite direction, reaching out away from the habitat ring and from Earth, acting as a counterbalance.

Cradle was much too small to be picked out at this distance. Even if it had been large enough to see, her view of it would have been blocked by the elevator, which was on its final approach, and expected to reach the terminal in about half an hour. It had a general resemblance to an Old Earth wagon wheel, with sixteen spokes reaching inward from its rim to a hotel-sized spherical hub where the people were. Watching it approach produced the mildly alarming illusion that it was going to come crashing through the dome. In that case, two domes would have been destroyed in the collision, since the hub was capped by a dome similar to this one where passengers could relax on couches and gaze up at the view of the approaching Eye and the habitat ring spreading out to either side of it. But of course it slowed down and stopped short of contact. Through the glass, now just a stone’s throw away, she could see the new arrivals unbuckling their seat belts, gathering their things, and floating toward the exits. Most of them were wearing military uniforms, or else the dark, well-designed clothing that she associated with comersants and politicos. Not really her crowd. But Doc had invited her, which was all the credentials anyone really needed.

Through the flimsy internal partitions she could hear several dozen arrivals making their way to Quarantine. These were eventually bound either for the Great Chain or the much smaller torus that encircled this end of the tether. Through the dome she could see housekeeping robots, and a few human staff, making their sweep through the hub’s lounge. After a few minutes, a green light came on above a door, and she joined a flow of a few dozen departing passengers.

Within minutes she was ensconced in a small private cabin in the elevator’s hub, where she would spend the four-day journey to the tether’s opposite terminus. A chime warned her when the elevator began to accelerate downward, but it moved at a speed that was extremely modest by the normal standards of space travel, so she felt no need to strap in. She climbed into her bed and slept.

THE ELEVATOR WAS A HOLLOW CYLINDER TEN STORIES HIGH, WITH A glass dome at each end, one aimed up at the Eye and the other aimed down at Earth. The floors beneath those domes were made of glass, so that the light shone through from end to end. The outer walls were windowless and heavily shielded against cosmic radiation, but on the inside, the cabins and lounges had windows onto the atrium. Or at least the more expensive cabins did; Kath Two’s was at the periphery, hard up against the outer wall, with no windows other than a tiny porthole onto a ring-shaped corridor. Which was fine with her. At the beginning of the journey they were in near weightlessness, but as the days went on, gravity would increase, reaching one normal gee at Cradle. She could tell when she woke up that she had not slept for long, since gravity was still quite faint, perhaps comparable to what had once existed on the moon.

She wandered up and down the atrium looking for a place where she could sit and read her book. Several bars and restaurants fronted on it, but these were not places for Kath Two, as she could tell just from the look of the people and the prices quoted on the menus. Comfy-looking chairs and couches were distributed around the glass floor of the atrium, and a coffee bar stood along one edge, so she ended up there.

After an hour or so, Beled Tomov turned up and sat in her general vicinity but made no move to interrupt her reading. When she came to a good stopping place, she looked up and happened to notice Ariane Casablancova sitting on the opposite side of the atrium, working on a tablet.

So they had five of the Seven: Doc, Memmie, Ariane, Beled, and Kath Two. The only two missing were the Dinan and, somewhat more problematically, the Aïdan.

Kath Two and Beled ran into Doc and Memmie later when they wordlessly agreed to go to the least expensive of the eateries and get some food. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Doc was not surrounded by students, scholars, and TerReForm bigwigs. He was just sitting at one end of the room carefully eating soup. Memmie was at his elbow, reaching in frequently to tuck his napkin back into his collar. Neither of them reacted when Kath Two and Beled took seats at the same table, but after a few minutes Doc said, “Lieutenant Tomov, it is good to see you again. Greetings,” and the two of them exchanged salutes in their respective racial styles.

Lieutenant, obviously, was a military and not a Survey rank, and so this confirmed the unsurprising fact that Beled’s relationship to Survey was, at best, ambiguous. Much more interesting was the fact that he and Doc had already met.

“I hope that this assignment will not prove an inconvenience,” Doc continued.

“All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”

“I was thinking more of the advancement of your career, Lieutenant. In your future dossier, this will stand out as a highly anomalous episode. Depending on who is reading that dossier, it might help you or hurt you.”

“I don’t concern myself with such matters,” Beled returned.

“Some would call that unwise, but I tend not to favor the company of such. You, on the other hand, will do nicely.”

“May I ask why I was so honored?”

Doc’s eyes moved briefly to Kath Two. “Kath here will be worried that it’s because she shared an indiscretion with you. Drew you into it. Or perhaps she is a little bit exasperated with you for having passed it on in your report.”

Kath Two shook her head no, but did not wish to interrupt Doc. Beled, however, seemed to take it in.

Doc continued. “None of that really counted. You are a known quantity, now, not only to me but also to Kath Two and to Ariane, which is somewhat useful. But even without all of that, you would have been a fine choice. Not everything must be for a reason. Never mind what our Julian friends say.”

He had noticed Ariane Casablancova approaching them, somewhat tentatively, with a tray of food. He made an almost subliminal gesture with his eyes toward Memmie, who stood up and fetched an extra chair from an adjoining table. Ariane joined them. Kath Two felt vaguely uncomfortable. A day earlier this woman had held and wielded power over her, had known things about her that would normally have been private matters. What was she to Kath Two now? Presumably an equal member of the Seven.

Ariane had, of course, worked this all out ahead of time, and prepared for it. “Kath Two and Beled,” she said, “our first meetings were in a formal bureaucratic setting that now leads to some awkward feelings. I look forward to reacquainting myself with both of you as a colleague.”

“Noted,” said Beled.

“Thank you,” said Kath Two. But if anything she felt even more awkward now. Ariane’s little speech had not been delivered warmly. More like she was ticking her way down a checklist. In that vein, she now turned her searchlight eyes toward the other two. “Dr. Hu. Remembrance.”

“Doc,” Doc said, “and Memmie.”

“It is good to make your acquaintances in person.”

These formal and somewhat chilly conversational gambits led nowhere, and so after an awkward silence Ariane tucked into her meal.

“Doc,” Kath Two said, “may we know what the hell we are doing? What is this Seven for?”

“It looks like a Five to me,” Doc said puckishly, somewhat breaking the tension. For Memmie, Ariane, and Beled had all aimed sharp looks at Kath Two, startled by the informal way in which she had just spoken to her old professor. Doc, who clearly didn’t care, continued: “When we are Seven — which will be in a few days, on Cradle — then I will explain it once, to everyone, at the same time.”

“Fair enough,” Kath Two said. “What should we be doing in the meantime?”

“All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time.”

It was a lovely thought. Kath Two tried to be duly appreciative of the generous sentiment behind it during the remainder of the journey. But nothing of the sort really happened. She read more than she had intended to of the books she had acquired on the Great Chain. At meals, and in the recreation center, she placed herself in Beled’s eye line, just in case he was in the mood. But things were different now. Their time together in the Q had been an ideal setup for a relationship of a casual and temporary nature. It had never gone beyond sleeping in the same bed, but it might have. The knowledge that they would probably never see each other again had made it easy to shack up for a couple of nights and enjoy each other’s company in a way that would have posed too many complications had they been working together.

Now they were working together. Beled had wisely pulled back. She understood, and considered a certain amount of sexual frustration an acceptable price to pay for being prudent.

She had two meals with Ariane, and in her spare time she made desultory attempts to learn more about the Julian from network searches. Kath Two assumed that all such search activity was being monitored and logged by someone — possibly someone who was in touch with Ariane through whatever agency Ariane worked for. As time went by, Kath Two was less and less certain that that was actually Quarantine. Or perhaps another way of saying it was that Quarantine’s public face — the people who talked to you when you were traveling between space habitats — was only one avatar of something that had to be much bigger and more complicated. In the same way that Survey and military were different things, and yet drawing a sharp line between them could be difficult, so it was with police and Quarantine. And once you broadened the scope to include police, you were talking about other things besides routine law and order work. At some level, intelligence and counterintelligence were under that umbrella. Kath Two had no way of guessing where Ariane fit into that system. Searching the network too avidly for personal details about Ariane Casablancova would have been noticed, and would have been a bad idea. Not searching at all would almost have been more suspicious. So Kath Two searched a little, and found less. Low-level Q officers might be mentioned on the network from time to time, as the result of a police report or a public relations initiative, but there was nothing of the sort for Ariane — assuming that this was even her real name.

A compulsion for privacy was hardly unusual for a Julian living and working in Blue. The Julian part of the ring, centered on the Tokomaru habitat, was the least populous of the eight segments. Ninety-five percent of it lay on the Red side of the turnpike. Only a tiny sprinkling of habitats projected east of Kiribati into the Blue zone, and in those the Julians had been diluted by the more numerous and aggressive Teklans, whose segment lay just on the far side of the Hawaii boneyard. Thus the Julians had maintained enough of a presence in Blue that they could live and work in it without being seen as aliens, or immigrants. Many of them were “dukhos,” playing approximately the same role in modern society as priests had done pre-Zero.

The destruction of Old Earth and the reduction of the human population to eight had done for the idea that there was a God, at least in any sense remotely similar to how most pre-Zero believers had conceived of Him. Thousands of years had passed before anyone, even in the most remote outposts of human settlement, had dared to suggest that religion, in anything like its traditional sense, might be or ought to be revived. In its place a new set of thoughtways had grown up under the general heading of “dukh,” a Russian word referring to the human spirit. Dukh-based institutions had developed under the general term of “kupol,” a word that harked back to the glass bubble that had served as a kind of interfaith chapel and meditation room on Endurance. Modern-day kupols all traced their origins back to that structure, which Dubois Harris had called the Woo-Woo Pod. When people nowadays watched scenes from the Epic that took place in it, they were in the backs of their minds thinking of their local kupols and the people who staffed them. A professional member of a kupol’s staff was generally called a dukho, a truncation of the Russian word “dukhobor,” meaning one who wrestled with spiritual matters. Kupols, like churches of old, were supported by contributions from their members. Some, as on the Great Chain, were richly endowed, magnificent buildings. Others, like the one in the Q, were just quiet rooms where people could go to think or to seek help from what amounted to social workers. Dukhos tended to trace their lineage back to Luisa, who had played a similar role during the Epic, and some of the better-educated ones drew explicit connections between their kupols and the Ethical Culture Society, where Luisa had gone to school in New York. But Luisa, of course, had not produced a race. The dukho profession had ended up being dominated by Julians. The Julian habitat of Astrakhan, which hovered anomalously in the middle of the Dinan segment, had become a sort of hothouse for the production of dukhos of various denominations. Kath Two was able to establish that Ariane had originated from there, but little else. It was fine. There were ample reasons for Ariane to keep to herself and lead a quiet life.

MOST OF THE GIANT NICKEL–IRON MOON CORE FRAGMENT NAMED Cleft had been melted down and reshaped into what was now the Eye. The engineers had not been able to bring themselves, however, to destroy the part of it immediately surrounding the place where Endurance had come to rest at the end of the Big Ride, and where the bodies of Doob, Zeke Petersen, and other heroes of the Epic had been interred directly into iron catacombs. That patch of the asteroid — the deep, shielded declivity where the first several generations of the new human races had lived out their entire lives — had come to be known as Cradle.

Everyone had, of course, seen the chapter from the Epic where Doob had gone out on his last space walk with Eve Dinah, looked up at the walls of iron rising from the valley floor, and foreseen that one day a ceiling of glass would be built over the top, turning the “Vale of the Eves” into a huge greenhouse where children would be able to float about unencumbered by space suits, eating fresh greens from terraced gardens. It was probably the biggest tearjerker in the whole Epic, and a perennial favorite. All of Doob’s predictions had, of course, come true. Cradle had ended up supporting a population of several thousand, until later generations had been obliged to push outward.

Cradle’s main defect had been a lack of simulated gravity, which had obliged those early generations to construct what amounted to glorified merry-go-rounds on which children could take turns being centrifuged in order to foster bone growth. Subsequent habitats — spinning tori mounted to the walls of the cleft — had actually been more crowded and confined than Izzy itself, and many generations had lived cramped lives in them with only occasional opportunities for R & R in Cradle’s sunny open volumes. In time they had learned to make bigger and better habitats, and Cradle had been abandoned for many centuries, an occasional destination for historians or curiosity seekers.

The construction of the Eye had, in effect, cut Cradle and its immediate surroundings loose from Cleft, and it had drifted in a boneyard for a while until the decision had been made to give it a new purpose. The original greenhouse, which was a wreck by that point, had been replaced by a new, bigger, retractable cover. The underside had been planed flat. The canyon walls had been terraced back, making them less steep, and not incidentally creating valuable, buildable real estate. A nickel-iron yoke had been arched over the whole thing so that it could be attached to the bottom end of the thirty-six-thousand-kilometer tether that dangled from the Eye.

The icon in the transit station — two hills enclosed in a bubble — was a simplified depiction of what Cradle actually looked like. Its total inhabitable footprint was a circular zone about two thousand meters in diameter, which put it on about the same scale as downtown Boston or the City of London. This was cleaved by the Vale of the Eves, whose walls had once been nearly vertical. Now this was true only of the bottom-most ten meters or so: a slot that snaked through the bottom of the town like a gully. It became a rust-brown river when there was heavy rain, and so they had maintained an island in the middle of the stream, exactly on the site where Endurance had touched down. Once, it had been possible to go there and touch the little nubs of steel where Eve Dinah had welded the ship into place. These, however, had since been protected under glass domes so that they would not rust, or get worn away by tourists’ fingers. The ship itself was long gone, of course; the survivors had begun dismantling it almost as soon as they had arrived, and what little they hadn’t used was radioactive waste, long since shipped away to carefully tended locations in boneyards.

It was therefore a city constructed on two dizzyingly steep hills that faced each other across a crevasse. A kilometer-long bridge, celebrated for its grace, arched across the gulf between the hills, a plunging wedge of air flocculent with grizzled crows.

It was a city of compounds. Some of these dated back to the early days of its construction, when the bubble had not yet been completed and there had been a need to make smaller inflatable domes over certain areas. Others had been built in imitation of those first ones. Neither the compounds — which, for structural reasons, tended to be circular — nor the overall topography lent themselves to a grid street pattern. Consequently the map was a chaos of switchbacks and meanders and streets that turned suddenly into stairways or tunnels. Limitations on building height led people to dig down into the underlying metal, rather than building upward, and so most of the city’s square footage was hidden. The buildings were like icebergs, larger below than above.

Above grade, stone was a popular building material. Older and less prestigious buildings used the synthetic rock known as moonstone, made from pieces of Earth’s former satellite. Newer and nicer buildings were made from marble, granite, or other rock quarried from the surface of the Earth itself. For the one resource that the shattered surface of Earth had been able to produce in abundance, even before it had an atmosphere, had been rocks. The city thus presented a hard face to pedestrians in its narrow streets. Those granted access to compounds would, however, find themselves in fragrant gardens under the shade of trees. Since Cradle was confined to the equator, green things grew there so luxuriantly that they had to be kept in check by hordes of little grabbs with pruning bill hands.

Atop each of the hills was a park. Rising above one of those parks was a roundish, domed building called the Capitol. Rising above the other was a squarish, pillared colonnade called the Change, short for Exchange.

At the time Kath Two and the other passengers arrived, Cradle was dangling two thousand meters above the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, being dragged due west toward where the equator cut across the reshaped coastline of South America. This movement reflected the fact that, thirty-six thousand kilometers above it, the Eye was traversing the habitat ring westward, or CASFON (Clockwise As Seen From Over the North pole). Being nothing more than a weight on the end of a long string, Cradle always followed the movements of the Eye. The city’s dome was open, with its baffles raised to reduce the windblast.

It was balmy and humid. This was almost always true on the equator, but altitude and the brisk movement of the air made it pleasant enough. The smell of that air, redolent of salt and iodine and marine life, was proof irrefutable that Kath Two was back in the atmosphere of New Earth.

It was an artificial atmosphere. The human races had bombarded the parched and dead surface of the planet with comet cores for hundreds of years just to bring the sea level up to where they wanted it. Then they had infected that water with organisms genetically engineered to produce the balance of gases needed to support life — and, having done that, to commit suicide, so that their biomass could be used as nutrients for the next wave of atmosphere-building creatures.

According to their measurements, the result was a nearly perfect reproduction of Old Earth’s atmosphere. No one who breathed it after a lifetime spent in habitats needed scientific data to back that up. Its smell penetrated to some ancient part of the brain, triggering instincts that must go all the way back to hominid ancestors living on the shores of Africa millions of years ago. As she knew from having traveled to Earth many times, it was a kind of intoxicant. It was the best drug in the universe. It made people want to be on Earth more than anything. It was the reason that Cradle — which was bathed in that air, being dragged through it all the time on the end of its thirty-six-thousand-kilometer string — was the most exclusive community in existence. And it was the reason that Red and Blue had twice gone to war over the right to live on the surface.

Cradle was hung from the end of the tether by a sort of bucket handle that arched high above the middle of the city. The bucket handle was hollow, accommodating a surprisingly ramshackle elevator system that took Kath Two and some other passengers down to a platform embedded in the city’s bedrock, or “bedmetal,” along its northern limb. From there a ramp took them up into the streets of the city itself.

The tops of the walls all around the exit were white with crow shit. Hundreds of birds were perched where they could view the faces of those emerging into the light and swoop down to deliver messages to ones they had recognized. Other new arrivals stretched their hands out to offer little snacks. A well-dressed Ivyn man, bustling along ahead of Kath Two, quickly attracted a grizzled crow by that strategy. With his other hand he held out a little tablet that, as Kath Two knew, must be showing someone’s photograph. “Coffee at the Change, dot seventeen,” the man said. The crow gulped the snack down in a move that looked almost like vomiting in reverse, then flapped away screaming the same words into the ether. Other grizzled crows, not hungry or not currently on errands, were keeping up a raucous murmur that, if you listened to it, might give you clues as to what was going on in the equities market or the political world.

At first the new arrivals moved together in a pack, visibly distinct from the ordinary foot traffic of the place, but within a few hundred meters this had dispersed, and Kath Two found herself alone, no different from anyone else.

She knew the general layout from schoolbooks. She had arrived on the north side — Change Hill. Perhaps a native would have known as much just from the attire of the people, the way they walked. These were comersants, working by day in subterranean offices, ascending to the surface for meals, recreation, and other means of enjoying their wealth. Commerce was, of course, spread all about the habitat ring, and the old centers of Greenwich, Rio, Baghdad, et al. had financial hubs that rivaled, and in some ways eclipsed, Change Hill. But nothing could ever compete with this place for prestige. The wealthiest and most powerful financiers, the up-and-coming traders in places like Greenwich, no matter how well they were doing for themselves, were forever haunted by the thought that they might be missing something on Cradle.

Because so much of that activity was taking place below the surface, the streetscape of Change Hill was deceptively quiet, a little like an old Spanish city during siesta. Soon lost, and resigned to the fact that doing so would make her look like a tourist, Kath Two took the piece of paper out of her pocket and reminded herself of the address. She already knew it was on the south side and that she would either have to cross the bridge — which was clearly visible, arcing high above the city — or descend all the way to the floor of the vale and cross the gully at its bottom. The latter tempted her, but she knew that she would want to spend a lot of time there, looking at the place where Endurance had touched down and where Eve Dinah had walked with Dubois Harris. That was best saved for later. So she climbed, winding her way through the streets, which were paved with a stone whose reddish-brown color hid the rust stains that streaked down from every exposed bit of bedmetal. She cut across the park beside the Change, where young traders in good clothes, out on snack breaks, were sitting on benches prodding their tablets, or sprawled in clusters on the grass laughing, or playing lawn sports with colored balls.

The bridge’s northern end met the park’s edge. From far below, the bridge had looked slender and graceful, belying what she now understood was its real bulk. Here it broadened to form a massive connection with Change Hill. Even at its apogee, however, it was broad enough for twenty people to walk abreast. After turning around one last time to admire the marble columns of the Change and to hear the roar of voices within, she faced south and began to ascend. In the early going the bridge was a stairway, but as the arch gradually flattened with height, it turned into a ramp, faced in white marble, broken with occasional landings. She had been informed that the real reason for these was to prevent wheeled objects from going fully out of control. If so that purpose had been artfully concealed by turning them into little sculpture gardens where bridge climbers could pause for refreshment beneath rose-covered bowers.

While not immune to such temptations, Kath Two was at bottom a serious walker who did not like to stop once she had gotten going. She was thinking, reviewing in her mind the journey on the elevator, which had been largely uneventful. This, as she had gradually realized, was a part of its charm and of its exclusivity. It was possible to reach Cradle quickly, if you had enough money to charter, or authority to commandeer, the right vehicles. Most people used the elevator, though. Thus Cradle was separated from the rest of the human world not so much by distance as by time. Spending that much time was a sort of luxury, afforded only to a few. Of course, passengers worked en route — this explained all of those expensive restaurants and bars around the atrium, with their private meeting rooms. But Kath Two hadn’t had any real work to do. She had gone for long hours without talking to another human at all, and had done a lot of reading and watching of entertainment on screens. She had slept normally, confirming that any epigenetic shift that might have gotten started last week had been aborted.

All of this just made her want to reach the meeting place so that she could at least have an explanation from Doc, meet the missing Dinan and Aïdan, and get started on whatever it was the Seven was supposed to be doing.

She maintained a brisk pace to the top of the arch but there permitted herself a few minutes’ pause. At the apex, the walkway broadened into a scenic overlook affectionately known as Hurricane Heights. The wind was so powerful here that it made her eyes water. She turned her back to it and toddled carefully over to the eastern railing, on the lee side. She blinked her vision clear and allowed herself a few minutes’ gawking down into the compounds and the streets and the Vale. The sun was setting behind her. Since they were on the equator it would set quickly. The Vale was already in shadow, but the stone walls of the compounds and the fronts of the buildings were emanating a magical pink-gold glow. Lights were coming on in windows along purple-shaded streets.

It was a real place. Not like the artificial environments of the habitat ring. Some of the larger habitats came close to possessing this quality — the sense that you were in something close to a real planetary environment. But it was always dispelled as soon as you looked up and saw the opposite side of the habitat hanging a few kilometers above your head. Here, you could look up and see endless sky, the stars coming out, the gleaming necklace of the habitat ring rising perpendicularly from the eastern horizon. The thing that made it real was the air, the sheer quantity of it, the endless variety of its movements and its smells. She wished she had a glider so that she could go dancing in it.

ACCORDING TO A LEGEND THAT WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY INCORRECT, the overlook where Kath Two was standing — the center of the bridge — was the location where Eve Dinah’s demolition charge had exploded after she had made her choice and tossed it into space.

The compromise that Dinah had forced by placing that bomb against the window of the Banana had seemed elegant and straightforward for about as long as it had taken for the bomb to go off.

In one sense, the gaming of the system had begun even before it was thought of, when Eve Julia had pointed out that she would have few babies and Eve Aïda had prophesied that she would have many.

It had not taken long for the other Eves to make similar calculations. As Arkies, picked in the Casting of Lots, Camila and Aïda were younger than the others, with two to three decades of fertility ahead of them. If they decided to become baby factories, and if they were lucky, each of them could conceivably bear as many as twenty children before menopause. Dinah, Ivy, Moira, and Tekla, all in their early thirties, might bear a few each. Roughly speaking, therefore, those four had as much combined childbearing power, if you wanted to think about it that way, as the younger pair of Camila and Aïda.

Julia, as she had pointed out, would be lucky to bear one child before menopause. And she had not needed Doob to explain the exponential math. The Julians were going to be swamped. They were going to be mere curiosities. People in the distant future, coming home from work, would exclaim to their partners, “You’ll never guess what I saw today — an honest to god Julian!”

Those were the mathematical rudiments of the new Great Game, and the roots of much of what had happened since then. The preponderance of later historical scholarship suggested that most of the Eves didn’t know that they were playing a game until they were a few years into it. Aïda, based on what she had said in her Curse, might have been the exception to that rule. But decisions made about one’s children were the most personal decisions that one could make, and no mother of sound mind would have admitted to herself, at the time, that she was playing a sort of game vis-à-vis the other mothers.

In a way it would have been simpler had they gone about it more cold-bloodedly.

Consciously or not, the Seven Eves sorted themselves into Four, Two, and One. The Four were Dinah, Ivy, Tekla, and Moira. The Two were Camila and Aïda. Arithmetic suggested that the descendants of the Four would be about as numerous as those of the Two. Existing friendships and affinities already linked the Four and created an unspoken compact, not articulated until they were long dead, to the effect that their children would embody complementary qualities. Dinans, in a sense, did not have to be complete humans as long as Ivyns were around to do some of the things they weren’t as good at. This was a blunt way of saying it, which was why it went unsaid for a long time, but hundreds of years later the descendants of the Four could look back and see that it had always been so. By that time it was so deeply ingrained in their DNA and their cultures that there was no going back.

The Two, by contrast, had no natural affinity with each other, and no existing relationship. Camila and Aïda had not met until shortly before the Council of the Seven Eves. All that they shared — and it wasn’t much to go on — was an aversion to Julia. Both of them had, at one point or another, fallen under Julia’s spell only to be disappointed by her. In Camila’s case the seduction had happened during a White House dinner. For her part, Aïda had been talked by Julia into joining the Swarm, only to end up leading the rebel faction that had deposed and mutilated her. Given the way that had all turned out, it was of course unlikely that Camila, or anyone of sound mind, would consciously align herself with Aïda. And yet the mathematics of the Four and the Two created a kind of gravity, invisibly drawing her that way. The breach that had opened between Camila and Dinah during the Council of the Seven Eves would not be forgotten.

Considered more calmly, Camila’s words had a persuasive power that couldn’t be denied. It simply was the case that their descendants would be living bottled up in confined spaces for many generations to come. As Luisa had demonstrated through her research, and as the people of the Cloud Ark had just finished proving in spectacular fashion, it wasn’t a good way for normal, unaltered humans to live. If the survival of the human race depended on rewiring their brains to make them better at such a lifestyle, then perhaps they had best get on with it.

In a way, that decision had been taken out of their hands by Camila, who had made her choice clear, and only needed to work out the details with Moira. She had, in effect, made the first clear move in the great genetic game. And contrary to her own stated principles it was, in a way, the most aggressive move possible: she had let them know that her descendants — who were likely to be quite numerous — would get along just fine in the conditions they would all be facing for the first ten, twenty, or hundred generations. The other six were left to follow her lead or to react against it.

Dinah, Ivy, and Tekla in essence reacted against it, with Moira eventually making another choice; but the historical fact was that Moira’s descendants had, more often than not, been part of the bloc of the Four.

Aïda had played the game more overtly. This had basically consisted of waiting the others out to see what they would do, and then making countermoves. The other Eves decided early, and stuck with those decisions. All of Dinah’s children — she ended up having five of them — were recognizably of a type. The same was true of Ivy’s three, and Tekla’s six. Julia only got to choose once. Camila’s sixteen offspring varied from one to the next, as she tinkered with her decisions based on behaviors she was observing among her first children. But she had never wavered from the general template that she had laid out during the Council of the Seven Eves.

Aïda’s seven children, however, were all different. Exactly what she was thinking was known only to Moira, the Keeper of Secrets, the Mother of Races. For the other Eves told Moira what they wanted in confidence, and she took those confidences to her grave. But it was plain enough — and in any event, it became the accepted version of history — that the first five children of Aïda had been conceived as reactions to what other Eves — all except Moira — were doing.

Aïda’s stance toward the others had been well articulated in the Curse. She knew that the other six Eves would always loathe her personally and that this feeling would inevitably be transferred to her offspring. Human nature being what it was, Dinan children, thousands of years from now, would be throwing rocks at Aïdan children on playgrounds and making jokes about cannibalism. They would never be assimilated into the society descended from the Four. Therefore, to the extent that Dinah was making choices about the virtues that her offspring would embody, and thereby making a move in the game, Aïda sought a countermove. Which might consist of conceiving a child that would be like Dinah’s, except more so. Or of inventing an anti-Dinan, a type of human uniquely suited to exploiting the weaknesses in the Dinan type.

Thus the first five children of Aïda. She had, however, been unable to employ the same strategy vis-à-vis Moira, for the basic reason that Moira knew exactly what Aïda was doing, down to the specific DNA base pairs that had been altered in her ova. If this were a game, then Eve Moira always had the last move. The failures of her first eight pregnancies had only deepened the mystery. Since she had never articulated her choice, no one really knew what she had done, which made Moirans an enigmatic race, not only to the other races, but to themselves. But it was plainly the case that Moirans were the only race capable of “going epi.” Kath Two’s genome, like that of every other life-form, was fixed. A copy of it lived in every cell in her body. But which of those genes were being expressed at a given time, and which were lying dormant, was changeable to a degree far beyond what humans were normally capable of. It would have amounted to a kind of superpower, had there been a way to control it. But, certain hoary old legends to the contrary, there wasn’t. Kath Two never knew when she might fall asleep for a week and wake up a different person named Kath Three. Sometimes the results were brilliant. Rarely they were fatal. Sometimes they were inconvenient, or downright embarrassing. Most of the latter cases had something to do with what happened, like it or not, when a Moiran fell in love. In any case, this was the choice that Eve Moira had made and the gift she had conferred on her daughter, Cantabrigia. And it was assumed that she had done so because she believed that this degree of plasticity would somehow bring the world back into balance against the choices that Aïda had been making.

Julia, the One, looked to make the best of a bad situation by endowing her offspring with qualities that would make them useful and important in spite of much smaller numbers. She had already expressed, during the Council of the Seven Eves, the idea that there was real value in the ability to envision possible futures. And she had linked it to leadership, or, failing that, to the ability to give useful advice to leaders. When that trait ran out of control and sought dark paths it led to depression, paranoia, and other forms of mental illness. The challenge then was to find a way of combining that trait with a more positive mentality. Julia’s research — and she did a lot of research — therefore tended to center on the history of sages, seers, ecstatics, shamans, artists, depressives, and paranoiacs throughout history, and the extent to which those traits could be localized to specific base pairs in their genomes and fostered by acculturation.

Historians had come along much later and developed their own vocabulary for telling the story of the succeeding five thousand years. The first pregnancies were called Gestations. Not counting the numerous miscarriages, there had been thirty-nine of them, distributed among the Seven Eves, before Camila, the last to stop bearing children, had finally gone through menopause. From these, thirty-five viable girls had resulted. Thirty-two had gone on to have children of their own. By then, Eve Moira had figured out how to synthesize Y chromosomes, and so some of the second generation had been male. The result, therefore, had been thirty-two Strains. Each of the seven new races had embodied more than one Strain. The Strains were recognizably different and yet clearly classifiable as belonging to one race or another, somewhat as East Africans differed from West Africans but still looked like Africans to Europeans.

“Correction” was the name given to the phase that had begun after the first round of Gestations, when Eve Moira had fixed errors that had led to several nonviable infants. In a sense, Correction went on continuously all through the first round of Gestations and began to taper off as the daughters of the Eves began to produce second-generation children. It faded into a next stage, Stabilization, which lasted through the following ten generations or so as Y chromosomes were patched up, lingering genetic mistakes were fixed, and members of different Strains began to interbreed to produce hybrids within their own racial groups. During this time the lessons of the black-footed ferret were put to use as various techniques were employed to increase heterozygosity.

In truth a vast library of human genetic sequences was available in digital form, and once they had survived the first few generations in Cradle, and trained hundreds of bright young people to be genetic engineers, they could, in theory, have resequenced the original human race from scratch. This was the sort of thing Eve Moira had done by synthesizing the first artificial Y chromosome. But it was not what they collectively chose to do. That choice was altogether cultural, not scientific. Decisions had been made in the Council of the Seven Eves. Races had been founded that were, by then, several generations old. They had begun to develop their own distinctive cultures. To undo those decisions by reverting to the “rootstock” human race was viewed almost as a kind of auto-genocide. The competition that had developed among the different races rendered it unthinkable. So the genetic records of rootstock humanity were put to work adding a healthy degree of heterozygosity back into the existing races, rather than trying to go backward.

Thus Stabilization, which had continued until about the twelfth generation, by which point even the Julian race had grown large enough to go on propagating through normal means without the need for lab-based adjustments.

Stabilization had blended into Propagation, the next phase generally recognized by historians, which was fairly self-explanatory: the descendants of the Seven Eves had continued to have sex with each other and make more babies. This had occupied much of the first half of the First Millennium and led to a condition of overcrowding so severe that it had made obligatory the formation of separate colonies away from Cradle. For there were other places, perhaps not quite so favored as Cleft, but still well suited for the building of new habitats. They had reached the point, by then, of being able to construct new machines for moving about in space. It was time. Or so insisted the descendants of the Four, who sensed that conditions had become inimical to them in the crowded precincts of Cradle. Camila had been frank about her strategy of making new humans well suited to life in confined spaces. She had succeeded in doing so. And once the early habitats of Cradle had grown crowded, her strategy had begun to look like a good one. Whether it was purely an expression of their own racial mythologies or a biological necessity, the Four had reached out and pioneered new habitats, at first in other locations on Cleft, later on other fragments of Peach Pit. The descendants of Aïda had done likewise, sometimes cohabiting with the Four, more often going it alone.

It wasn’t so much that Aïda had done things that couldn’t be undone as that she had said things that couldn’t be unsaid. In that sense her Curse had real effect. An individual Aïdan of the Second Millennium was the product of a mixed-race culture that was more than a thousand years old. He or she had grown up with persons of all races, loving some and hating others, getting on well, perhaps, with certain Teklans and Moirans while getting into fights with certain Aïdans. In terms of his or her own personal experiences, there was no reason to stick together with others of the same race. But each race did have an ineradicable narrative, by now encoded into a culture that had become ancient. The narrative of the Aïdans was that their Eve had spawned not just one race but a “race of races,” a mosaic, as proof that her children could do all that those of the other Eves could, and more. And if you were a descendant of Aïda, clearly endowed with genetic markers that she had chosen for that purpose, then the inexorable force of that narrative would drive you toward colonies populated largely or purely by other Aïdans.

As the Aïdans were less numerous than the descendants of the Four, their Second Millennium colonies had tended to be smaller and more Spartan, leading to a symbiotic relationship with the Camites, who tended to thrive in such environments. Aïdans built colonies but Camites made them work.

In any case, the formation of new colonies and habitats during the Second Millennium had led to a phase that the historians called Isolation: the formation of racially “pure” populations. Isolation led to Caricaturization: selective breeding, pursued consciously in some cases and unconsciously in others, that had the effect over many generations of intensifying racial differences. The example cited most often was a gradual change in eye color among Moirans. Eve Moira’s eyes had been hazel: relatively light in color by the standards of black people, but not all that unusual. By the end of the Second Millennium, many Moirans had eyes so pale in color as to appear golden in strong light. On the walls of the Great Chain’s fashion stores, blown up to ten times life size, Moiran fashion models still gazed at you through shockingly yellow, catlike eyes. Because pale eyes had been a distinctive characteristic of Eve Moira, it had become thought of as beautiful and desirable, and Moirans with pale eyes had found it easier to mate and reproduce, intensifying the trait over time, to the point of caricature. Kath Two herself, no model, was frequently complimented on the lightness of her eyes, which were closer to green than yellow. But modern, appearance-conscious Moirans were frequently startled when they saw photographs of their Eve with her eyes that were merely greenish-brown.

The shift in Moiran eye color was obvious and easily documented, but the same thing, mutatis mutandis, had happened with scores of other phenotypes among all the races. Selective mating had the power to wreak impressive changes over time, without any artificial meddling. In some cases, though, racial isolates had acquired genetic labs of their own. These had been used for many purposes, usually considered benign. In some cases, they had been used for Enhancement, which meant deliberate genetic manipulation for the purpose of rendering racial characteristics more pronounced — the artificial acceleration of what was happening “naturally” in the way of Caricaturization. Sometimes this led to freaks, monsters, and disasters. But often it worked. And when its results mated within isolated groups, those isolates became more and more pronounced embodiments of their races.

The end result of all this tended to be nonviable populations clearly identifiable as inbred. So, as often as Isolation, Caricaturization, and Enhancement had taken root and run their courses, they had led either to extinction of colonies or to an ameliorative process called Cosmopolitanization, wherein formerly isolated groups had remerged with their long-lost cousins of the same race and bred back in the direction of healthy and sustainable hybridized strains.

Not surprisingly, Cosmopolitanization had flourished as the habitat ring had been formed during the most recent millennium, suddenly creating a vast amount of new living space far more appealing than the cramped, dark tori in which people had been living for the last four thousand years. The isolates, some of whom hadn’t been heard from for centuries, some of whom could not even speak Anglisky (as the Russian-inflected English, now shared by essentially all humans, was called), emerged from their holes and recombined with their extended families in a population explosion the likes of which had not been seen since Old Earth’s twentieth century. Most of the population of most of the races had thus converged on a set of renormalized racial profiles, while preserving a few extreme tribal isolate strains, variously treasured, feared, or persecuted by others of the same race.

Or at least that was how it was in Blue. Red had exhibited the same general trends among its Aïdan mosaic, its hundreds of millions of Camites, and the roughly 80 percent of Julians who had decided to throw in their lot with Red. The current state of affairs between the turnpikes could only be speculated at, since no communication, other than stray signals intelligence and a propaganda channel that most people ignored, had been received from that part of the habitat ring for almost two hundred years.

FOR A FEW MINUTES THE LAST LIGHT OF THE SUN HAD BEEN STRIKING spires, statues, and carved stonework on the fronts of some fantastic old kupols mounted to the seemingly vertical cliff before her: the flank of Capitol Hill. But then suddenly it was near dark. Kath Two turned, accepting the windblast on her right side, and descended the south limb of the bridge. As much as she loved the power of the air, she felt herself scurrying the last few steps to get down into the shelter of the buildings. Capitol Hill was higher than Change Hill and so, rather than debouching into a park, as it did on its north end, the bridge here stabbed into the flank of the slope. Kath Two was plunged directly into a snarl of streets that were but indifferently illuminated by light spilling from occasional doorways and lamps that the owners of some compounds had decided to mount along the tops of their walls. “The streetscape of Bordeaux draped over the topography of Rio de Janeiro” was how the city had been described by its designer, a Julian/Moiran breed who had been born more than four thousand years after both of those cities had been annihilated.

She had a device in her pocket that knew her exact latlong. Those numbers were, of course, useless in a city that was being dragged through the air on the end of a rope. Her reluctance to pull the thing out and look at it, however, went deeper than that. Being here had plunged her into a sort of reverie none the less compelling for being obviously the product of fantasy: namely, that she was walking around in a city on Old Earth. She didn’t want to spoil it until she was well and truly lost. So she let her feet take her through the red stone streets, trying to go uphill as much as she went downhill, using the towers of great old kupols as landmarks, when unsure of herself circling back toward the abutment of the bridge. For she had been told that the meeting place was not far from the bridge. She might have asked for directions, but the temperature had dropped, the glittering arc of the habitat ring had been obscured by high clouds, and it had begun to rain, a hissing curtain of small, warm drops. Pedestrians had all disappeared into wherever it was they knew to go. She’d been warned that Capitol Hill was deserted after dark; this seemed doubly true when a storm was brewing.

Several times she had passed by the front of the same building, or seen it from down the length of a street. For it stood at a place where several ways angled together into a cramped asterisk of wet cobblestones, and so sudden views of it kept jumping into her peripheral vision as she ambled along the nearby alleys. That intersection was there because of a house-sized block of stone that jutted from the hillside and forced all the nearby streets to stretch around it. The stone, as she could guess, was a crumb of the moon’s mantle that had become embedded in its iron core. It might have been in there for a billion years, or it might have been a loose bolide that had slammed into red-hot Peach Pit shortly after Zero and gotten stuck in the congealing metal. Cleft and its siblings had many of those. They were usually treated as impurities in the melt. This one had been left in situ, presenting a rugged gray face to the streets that wrapped around it. Atop it, ten meters above street level, someone had constructed a round stone tower. Fanning out behind, like a ship’s hull behind its jutting prow, was a triangular building that she could guess had a nice compound in its center.

The third or fourth time Kath Two saw this tower it was from a distance of perhaps a hundred meters. She was gazing at it straight down one of those narrow streets. On its upper story it had a row of arched windows, looking out in all directions. Warm light was shining out of those windows, and she could see people sitting at tables, drinking and talking and eating and reading. All of those activities sounded good to her, and she entertained a hope that it might be some kind of public house — not a private club.

The entrance was not obvious, but she found it around to the right side, where a mousehole had been cut into the metal matrix in which the rock was embedded. The tunnel angled upward and curled around, becoming a spiral stair partly obstructed by rusticles the size of small trees. Actual candles burned in niches. One turn of the helix took her out of the metal and into the stone; two took her to an arch-topped door of real wood, unmarked except for a wrought-metal door knocker in the shape of a bird with a heavy curved beak. Hand-forged feathers of black iron and palladium made it grizzled. Through the door she could feel warmth and hear conversation.

She reached for the knocker, unsure yet whether the place was meant to be public or private. Then suddenly she was conscious of the scrap of paper in her hand. She stretched it out under the light of the nearest candle.

THE CROW’S NEST

SOUTH CRADLE

She pushed the door open and entered. The first thing that came into her view was a semicircular bar of old copper, a row of tap handles, a window behind looking into a busy kitchen. Music came out of a back room, not so loud as to interfere with conversation, but enough to make her nod her head slightly with its beat. She didn’t recognize the style, but she knew the type: something that had been cooked up by people isolated in a mining colony or an early habitat, people who knew how to dance.

Tending bar was a healthy-looking Dinan man in his forties. He seemed not to know that he was quite handsome. He was polishing a glass while scanning a piece of paper with handwritten numbers on it — a bar tab. Standing there alone, facing outward at the sweep of windows with its astonishing view of Cradle, he looked like the captain of an Old Earth ship.

A few moments after she had entered — neither so soon as to make her feel conspicuous nor so late as to make her feel neglected — he looked up at her and raised his eyebrows slightly. Or perhaps “eyebrow” was better since, as she now saw, one side of his face had taken serious damage.

“What are you drinking, Kath Amalthova Two?”

THE ORIGINAL NATS HAD BEEN DEVELOPED IN THE WORKSHOPS OF Arjuna Expeditions in Seattle and launched into space shortly before Zero, where they had crawled around on the surface of Amalthea under the eye of Eve Dinah. Later, during the first two years of the Epic, the original design had been modified to work on, and in, ice. Every child knew the story of how such nats had been used, first to bring Ymir to rendezvous with Izzy, then to merge those two objects into Endurance. As such, nats resonated more strongly in Blue culture than in Red, but they were used on both sides of the turnpikes. Or to be more precise, both cultures used a vast family tree of species and subspecies of nat, all descended from the first Arjuna model and all sharing, to a greater or lesser degree, the code base originally created by programmers like Larz Hoedemaeker and Eve Dinah. The number of different uses to which nats, and swarms thereof, had been put over the millennia was uncountable. They were as ubiquitous and as various as hammers and knives had been pre-Zero.

Like hammers and knives, they could be used for constructive or destructive purposes. In the latter category was a whole taxonomy of nats designed to be projected at high speed out of gunlike devices. Most of these were designed to fold up into a compact form, like a dart or bullet, so that they could be accommodated in magazines, bandoliers, and the like, and fed into the breeches of firing mechanisms.

Only a single gun, in the sense of a traditional pre-Zero firearm, had survived the Hard Rain and found its way to Cleft. This was, of course, the revolver that Julia had removed from Pete Starling’s shoulder holster and secreted on her person until the moment when she had attempted to shoot Tekla with it. Camila had interceded, probably saving Tekla’s life, and suffered burns that had left her scarred and in pain for the remainder of her days. Later, the same weapon had fallen into the hands of Aïda. She had issued it to a member of her band who had fired the Last Bullet from the Last Gun to kill Steve Lake. The weapon was now in the collection of the historical museum on the Great Chain. Whether and how it was put on public display was a reliable barometer of the state of Red-Blue relations.

Since the metalworking technology needed to make new guns had also been destroyed, and since many generations had passed on Cleft before anyone had even conceived a need for gunlike objects, the entire armaments industry, when it had finally gotten rebooted, had done so from a clean slate. The results owed more to Tasers, several of which had made their way to Cleft, than to traditional firearms. The latter had been designed to project a dumb lump of metal at high speed and been optimized over time to deliver high rates of fire. But spraying dumb lumps of metal around the cramped interior of a space habitat was not a good fit for any use that could be conceived of by the engineers who, hundreds of years after the arrival on Cleft, began to think once again about how to make projectile weapons. During the intervening centuries, violence had generally been a matter of grappling, punching, and the use of hand weapons such as metal rods, with really dangerous stuff like knives and swords used only in a few cases by people who had gone well off the political or psychological rails. The first new projectile weapons were made specifically for use against those. The maximum range was perhaps ten meters, so the projectiles didn’t have to travel with high velocity. They had to be smart in the sense that if they missed the target — if they struck anything that was not a human being — they should become as nondestructive as possible. This generally meant that they would deploy what amounted to tiny drag chutes and slow themselves down as quickly as possible, while preparing to fragment against, as opposed to penetrating, whatever they hit. On the other hand, any projectile fortunate enough to reach its target should try to do something useful, which generally meant incapacitating, injuring, or killing it. Clearly, all of these decisions were well above the pay grade of dumb lumps of metal and so nats were used instead. These were not as dense as lead, so they had a low ballistic coefficient and could not travel very far. Again, however, in the context of a space habitat this was a good thing.

After a sort of dark age during which the Cleft colony had lacked the resources needed to advance the art of robotics, and contented themselves with fixing, and making copies of, the original models, new engineering resources had begun going into this branch of technology. The bolder programmers were daring to meddle with code files that had last been checked in by Eve Dinah. Mechanical engineers were figuring out how to reboot ancient CAD software and examine the digital blueprints created by Larz. Their initial efforts were fairly simple, such as making a nat that would automatically throw out a drag chute after it had traveled a certain distance without hitting anything. More effort went into the projectors than the projectiles. Police and military users tended to be Teklans, whose Anglisky contained more Russian loan words than that of other races, and borrowed many characters from the Cyrillic alphabet. “Katapult” was their preferred term for the device that threw the projectile nats. They shortened it to various affectionate terms such as “kat” and “katya.” The second half of the word, “pult,” seemed to have a connection to “pulya,” pronounced with a long U as in “pool,” which was the Russian word for “bullet.” After a brief, awkward phase of trying to combine the term “nat” with “pulya” in various ways, meaning something like “bullet-robot,” they had just settled for “pulya,” which was sufficiently precise in a universe that no longer included any actual old-school bullets. Other words from the antediluvian gun world made it through unchanged, such as “shoot” and “shot,” but officers giving the command to shoot tended now to say “pul,” recalling what skeet and trap shooters had once called out when they wanted a clay pigeon to be thrown.

Use of the term “pulya” without any modification tended to irritate knowledgeable interlocutors in exactly the same way as pre-Zero gun nuts had reacted to laypersons who used the word “bullet.” This reflected the fact that pulyas came in an even vaster range of sizes and types than old-school ammo. There were only so many things that could be done with a lump of lead. A far wider range of options lay open to the pulya engineer. An alternative term, “ambot,” was also used. This was all context dependent. Grunts, who tended to see these things as necessary burdens to be hauled around in bulk, loaded into kats, unjammed from firing mechanisms, etc., tended to use “pulya,” but once the projectile had actually been fired and begun to execute its program, it tended to be called an “ambot.” When speaking of bulk supplies, people would say “botmo” in the same way that “ammo” had been used on Old Earth.

The sort of person who needed to be shot at by the authorities because he or she was committing violence, or threatening to, with edged weapons, was unlikely to submit meekly to advances in the technologies used to enforce civil order. Directly they began to develop countermeasures, which, of course, then needed to be surmounted by the engineers in turn. If an ambot, for example, could be fooled into believing that it had missed its target or struck something that was not a human, it could be rendered nearly harmless. Camouflage changed its purpose from fooling the human eye to fooling the electronic brains of ambots. Armor was no longer made to stop extremely fast pieces of lead. Its purpose now was to protect the wearer from the invasive strivings of ambots. Warriors became living, moving fortresses under siege of multiple ambots that often used swarm tactics to find a way inside before their batteries ran down. The old tactical calculus of projectile warfare changed in other ways too. Katapults and botmo that had been captured by the enemy, or that had simply fallen to the floor and been picked up, could be rendered inert and useless by digital means. Some of them would try to find their way back to their masters, and so battle zones in which a lot of botmo had been expended tended to look as though they were infested by army ants as spent ambots attempted to swarm back toward the combatants who had fired them.

In any event, the authorities had enjoyed a monopoly over the production and use of such weapons until sometime in the Second Millennium, when the number of widely separated habitats, and resulting political fragmentation, led to a situation in which the civil authorities from Habitat A might actually have cause to shoot at those of Habitat B. The number of different types of katapults and ambots, and of the defensive measures used against them, exploded. No complete catalog of types had existed for thousands of years. Here and there one might stumble across a museum display in which a few dozen or even a few hundred types of ambots had been rendered inert and mounted to a wall with explanatory plaques beneath them explaining in what millennium they had been invented, by whom, and in which habitat they had been used to prosecute this or that disturbance. But everyone knew implicitly that such displays only included samples that had at random made their way into a particular collector’s drawer.

“Disturbance” was used a lot more often than “war,” even for relatively large events such as the conflicts that had occurred over the last few centuries between Red and Blue. Because space habitats were so vulnerable, prosecuting an actual war in the sense of a twentieth-century, Old Earth total war was unthinkable. Nuclear weapons had not been reinvented because there was no need for them. A rock thrown across the ring at a space habitat would kill as many people as a hydrogen bomb. The same strategic calculus therefore applied as on Old Earth during and after the Cold War, namely that on no account would Red and Blue risk actual, open war with each other but that many small conflicts could happen in places where they might be passed off, by the majority of the news-reading populace, as too minor to worry about. The only two conflicts that were denoted, in retrospect, as wars were ones that had taken place the old-fashioned way, on the surface of the planet: the War on the Rocks, 4878–4895, and the War in the Woods, 4980–4985.

When Kath Two walked into the Crow’s Nest and was greeted by the Dinan with the damaged face, it was 5003, so about twenty years after the high-water mark of the War in the Woods. The Dinan looked to be about forty years old. The scars on his face had been there for a long time.

“One of those,” she said, nodding at a nearby tap handle adorned with a handwritten label identifying it as cider.

“Coming right up,” he said. “Since I have you at a disadvantage, my name’s Ty Lake.”

“Short for Tycho or. .”

“Tyuratam. Bit of a mouthful.”

His accent was that of an Indigen. So, from this brief exchange she was able to surmise quite a bit about his history. His parents had probably been Sooners, which was to say, people who had been so eager to escape from the settled life of space habitats that they had found ways of getting down to the surface of New Earth just as soon as the TerReForm had rendered it marginally inhabitable. Doing so was a violation of First Treaty, which had ended the War on the Rocks a few decades earlier, and so it was discouraged. Comings and goings from the bigger and older habitats of the ring were easily monitored by the authorities, and so Sooners tended to depart from liminal zones on the edges of boneyards and near the two turnpikes. On the Blue side, Dinans were strongly overrepresented among Sooners. Teklans tended to be the coplike authorities given responsibility for chasing them down and breaking up their human-smuggling rings, leading to stereotypical depictions in popular culture of Dinans as charismatic pirates and Teklans as humorless straight arrows. Or at least that had been the case until the Sooners’ transgressions had led to the War in the Woods, in which the predominantly Teklan armed forces had been obliged to rescue many Dinan adventurers. Depictions nowadays were a little more nuanced and made the older ones seem campy.

Thus Kath Two could reasonably guess that Ty’s parents had been Sooners and had established themselves on the surface long enough to have at least one native-born son. The connection back to boneyards meant that Sooners tended to be people with a certain amount of skill in making things, and so many of the early Sooner communities had been soundly constructed on an engineering level even if their political culture had been a little on the rough and ready side. Ty, presumably, had grown up in that environment and found himself, in his late teens or early twenties, embroiled in the War in the Woods. Some ambot of some type — no point in worrying about the details — had found its way through his armor (assuming he was even wearing any) and done damage to his face. This was the sort of thing ambots tended to be good at. In combat it was frequently more useful to disable than to kill, and so ambots fought like chimpanzees, aiming for the face, the hands, and the genitals. Faces were easy to recognize and hard to spoof, so those were a favored target. Ty might have suffered these injuries in many different circumstances, e.g., a Red-on-Blue raid between two rival Sooner communities, but there was something about his posture and his manners that suggested a connection to the military, and so she guessed he had been officially recruited to fight for the Blue side, and suffered his injury in a straight-up battle between organized military formations.

He obviously ran this place. This was clear from the way he was treated by staff and customers alike. In and of itself it wasn’t unusual for a retired veteran to open a bar. That was so normal as to border on stereotype. It was a little less easy to explain how such a person could end up in control of this particular bit of real estate, which was probably worth more than some entire space habitats.

The brand name on the tap handle, combined with the fact that it was handwritten, both implied that this beverage had been produced from apples plucked from trees growing in the soil of New Earth. Under the terms of Second Treaty, which had terminated the War in the Woods, the only people allowed to live on the surface and do things like tend orchards were the descendants of Sooners, now renamed Indigens. The fact of this cider’s being on tap here proved, or else was a very well-crafted marketing campaign intended to create the impression, that Ty Lake maintained close connections with at least one Indigen community and that he was importing its produce directly from its Registered Indigen Zone, or RIZ. This made it a desirable luxury good, since most food was produced, far more cheaply and reliably, in habitats. Drinking beverages or eating food produced in a RIZ was for wealthy connoisseurs. Perhaps to allay any concerns Kath Two might be having on that score, Ty said, “On the house,” as he set the glass on its coaster.

“That is kind of you,” Kath Two said, as her eye strayed to the black slate above the bar and noticed a shocking figure quoted in the way of price.

“On the contrary,” Ty said. “Normal courtesy for a fellow member of my Seven.”

So, Tyuratam Lake was their Dinan.

It made sense, if the Seven was going to be doing anything on the surface, anything that might involve a RIZ.

“You’re a bit early,” Ty said. “Some of the others are here.” He tossed his head back. This looked like one of those bars that went on forever, rambling into annexes and back rooms in a way that no architect would countenance, unless they were a very sly architect indeed. So, she inferred he was making reference to some kind of back room or snuggery that she would never be able to find on her own. “Came up the back way,” he added.

“There’s a back way?”

“There’s always a back way.”

“Doc?”

“Showed up half an hour ago.”

For the most important living architect of the TerReForm to walk into the front door of a crowded bar on Capitol Hill would be to create all manner of unnecessary distractions. Doc would be recognized. People would want to demonstrate how important they were by walking up to him and introducing, or reintroducing, themselves. It would become tiresome and it would wear him out. People would talk about it, perhaps even to the point of fouling up whatever mission the Seven was being organized for. Of course Doc had used the back way.

“Anyone else?” she asked.

“Besides the nurse? Just the big fella.”

So Beled had arrived too. Or so she guessed until several minutes later, when Beled walked in through the same door that Kath Two had used. He looked around the place in a manner that made it obvious he had never been here before.

Quickly he picked out Kath Two’s face. He did not react, but moved toward her directly. Kath Two had taken the last available bar stool, but Beled cut through the crowd, which was easy for him since people tended to get out of his way, and stood behind her, close enough that she could feel his warmth on her back. He ordered a popular brand of inexpensive beer from another member of the staff: a breed, probably Camite/Julian, female, somewhat exotic. Ty had drifted away and resumed whatever he’d been doing with the bar tab. Kath Two checked her timepiece and guessed that Ty was getting ready to clock out so that he could take them back to the room where they would have the meeting. As the woman behind the bar handed the beer from her tiny hand into Beled’s huge mitt, Kath Two pivoted toward him, tinked her glass against his, and said, “To the Seven.”

Beled was busy for a moment thanking the barmaid in somewhat over-formal style, but then nodded and joined Kath Two in a drink. Kath Two explained what she knew of Tyuratam Lake and Beled spent the next several minutes appraising the Dinan from a distance, drawing who knew what conclusions.

Presently Ty finished his paperwork and slipped around the corner of the bar, catching Kath Two’s eye as he did so. She could see that for him to extract himself from the society of the Crow’s Nest was no insignificant thing, since many knew him and wanted to say hello. But he seemed to have learned a sort of posture and gait that made him look too busy to brook interruption.

Kath Two found it hard to keep up with Ty’s meandering course through the various rooms and corridors, and ended up allowing Beled to step in front of her so that he could break trail. Because Beled was much taller and wider than she was, this made it difficult for her to see what was ahead of them. But at length she became conscious of being in a long down-sloping corridor with a stone floor, and stone walls paneled over with wood to make them seem warmer. Various doors led off of it, but one stood at the end, and this Ty opened for them. She saw warm light spilling out, glancing off the polished rock between Beled’s legs and the wood paneling around his shoulders.

“Welcome to the Bolt Hole,” Ty said.

Kath Two followed Beled into the room and then collided with his backside, bouncing off him and taking a step back. He had come to a dead stop upon entering and dropped into a slight crouch, one foot ahead of the other and pointed straight ahead. Sidling around him, Kath Two followed his gaze, and his toe’s azimuth, across the room.

The Bolt Hole was a cozy little place with an oval table just big enough for seven. Doc was seated nearest the door, flanked by Memmie and by his robot. Across from him was Ariane Casablancova. Seated at the far end of the table, facing the door, was the man that Ty must have meant when he had spoken of “the big fella.” Because of his position behind the table, all that was visible were his head, shoulders, and arms. The arms seemed long and quite heavily constructed. What really drew attention, though, was the architecture of the big fella’s skull. His head looked like the head that a normal person’s head would develop into if they kept growing beyond adulthood into some more pronounced phase of development. Thick reddish-brown eyebrows did little to conceal a prominent ridge of bone above the eyes. When Kath Two first saw him he was draining a pint glass, which looked even smaller in his hand than it had in Beled’s; but when he set it down to expose the lower half of his clean-shaven face, she saw the set of his jaw, and the size of his teeth, and understood that the seventh member of the Seven was not just any Aïdan but a Neoander.

EVE AÏDA HAD FOUNDED SEVEN STRAINS OVER THE COURSE OF THIRTEEN separate pregnancies. The failure rate had been so high because the alterations she had demanded from Eve Moira had been so extreme. She had been willing to accept some unsuccessful pregnancies, given that she saw herself as having plenty of time until menopause compared to all the other Eves save Camila. And Camila she did not see as a competitor, given that Camila wanted to raise a race of people who were not inclined to compete with anyone.

The Eves, confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them, at least until such time as the memory chips on which it was all archived began to fail: a decay that had begun on a small scale but that would take decades to have any serious effect.

Aïda began to research human genetics. To the extent that her genome was the final expression of a long historical process — a dense and cryptic encoding of everything that her ancestors had learned by managing to survive long enough to reproduce — this meant learning about the history of human evolution as well. Her genome, like that of all the other Arkies, had been sequenced and evaluated before she had left Earth. A copy of the report had been provided to her. It contained information as to what parts of the world her ancestors had come from. Much of this was what you would expect for an Italian woman, but there were details she hadn’t known, such as some genetic connections to Northern African Jews, to an isolated tribe in the Caucasus, and to the Nordic peoples. Based on certain genetic markers it was also clear that, like many Europeans, she was part Neanderthal.

Later analysis, by historical scholars, of the bread crumb trails left by Aïda in computer logs suggested that she had spent almost as much time studying the genomes of the Four, whom she saw as her direct competitors, as her own. And of the Four, she spent as much time learning about Moira’s genome as Dinah’s, Tekla’s, and Ivy’s combined. This was because Moira was of African descent, and Aïda had become fascinated by the idea that Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider. For every African who was a great athlete there was presumably another who was miserably uncoordinated, but no one paid any notice to the latter. Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that Aïda swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account. The very existence of Moirans, as a race, was a result. Rather than try to follow all of Aïda’s machinations in detail, base pair for base pair, Eve Moira had chosen to tinker with those aspects of the genome that controlled epigenetics, making her children into Swiss Army knives.

Tekla had been an easier target, where Aïda was concerned, since she had stated so forthrightly what she considered desirable in a future race. It was easy enough to see that the children of Tekla were going to be strong, disciplined, formidable fighters. And one did not have to be a military genius to understand that fighting, for the foreseeable future — several millennia of being bottled up in space colonies — was going to be up close and personal. To the extent that violence was going to be an ongoing factor in human history, it was going to be a style of violence that relied on size, strength, and toughness. If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else. Aïda was not about to see her children dominated by the sons and daughters of Tekla.

She might simply have done what Tekla did, and created versions of herself modified for certain traits associated with athleticism. Instead, having become fascinated by the odd detail in her genetic report, she had embarked on a program to reawaken the Neanderthal DNA that, or so she imagined, had been slumbering in her and her ancestors’ nuclei for tens of thousands of years. It was a somewhat insane idea, and in any case she didn’t have enough Neanderthal in her to make it feasible, but she did produce a race of people with vaguely Neanderthal-like features, and in later centuries the processes of Caricaturization, Isolation, and Enhancement — which had affected all the races to some extent — had wrought especially pronounced changes on this subrace. Gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth and sequenced before Zero, were put to use. Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wetware. The man sitting at the end of the table was the artificial product of breeding and of genetic engineering, but, had he been sent back in time to prehistoric Europe, he would have been indistinguishable, at least in his outward appearance, from genuine Neanderthals.

The creation of the new race had happened incrementally, over centuries. By the time Neoanders existed it was too late to bother with the trifling ethical question of whether it was really a good thing to have created them. During their slow differentiation from the other races they had developed a history and a culture of their own, of which they were as proud as any other ethnic group.

Not surprisingly, much of that history was about their relationship with Teklans, which was, as foreordained, largely combative. At its most simple-minded and stupidly reductionist bones, the Teklan side of the story was that Neoanders were dangerous ape-men brought into existence by a crazy Eve as a curse upon the other six races. The Neoander side had it that Teklans were what Hitler would have produced if he’d had genetic engineering labs, and that it was a damned good thing that Eve Aïda had had the foresight to produce a countervailing force of earthy, warm, but immensely strong and dangerous protectors.

Much of this combative relationship had become irrelevant as the tactical landscape had become dominated by katapults and ambots, and physical strength had become less important to the outcome of fights. But the old primordial animus remained, and explained why Beled’s immediate response, upon entering a room that contained a Neoander, was to make himself ready for hand-to-hand combat.

Doc chose to ignore this. If he even notices, Kath Two thought, but she was pretty sure Doc noticed everything. “Beled, Kath, I do not believe you have met Langobard.”

It was a fairly common Aïdan name.

“Bard for short,” Langobard offered.

“Langobard, may I present Beled Tomov and Kath Amalthova Two.”

Bard rose to his full height, which was not all that impressive, while performing the Aïdan version of the salute, which was done with both hands. He then reached out across a seemingly impossible distance with his right, offering to shake. Beled was still reluctant to move, and so Kath Two stepped forward and extended her hand. She had never made physical contact before with a Neoander. Even in Red they had become somewhat scarce, as many of the existing population had moved down to New Earth to become Indigens. In Blue they were rarely seen at all. Langobard took her hand with elaborate delicacy, swallowing it up in a meat paw with fingers the size of baby arms, and giving it the gentlest of squeezes. He was clean-shaven and carefully groomed, wearing a good suit of clothes that actually fit — prompting her to wonder where such a person would find a tailor. He had a slightly bemused look on his face, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Charmed,” he said, with a little nod that only emphasized the size and mass of his head. And after she had nodded back, he released her hand, no worse for wear, and stretched it out toward Beled. “Lieutenant Tomov? Pleasure to meet you. What’s it going to be? Punch in the face? Handshake? Or a big warm hug?” He swung his hand back while extending the other arm, displaying a wingspan much greater than his height, as though offering to embrace Beled across the table. This, at least, broke the tension enough that Beled finally collected himself into a less minatory posture, saluted, and extended his hand in return. The Teklan’s hand gripped the Neoander’s just a few centimeters away from Kath Two’s face. She could hear the knuckles cracking as they tested each other’s strength. Standing on the far side of this spectacle was Ty, watching it with an expression that was not all that easy to read, given that the damaged side of his face was toward her. But she thought she detected a certain level of wry amusement, perhaps a little dampened by awe.

Ty caught Kath Two looking, then shook his head and snorted.

“I hope I didn’t overdress,” Bard remarked, after he and Beled had finally let go of each other without incident. “I sometimes overcompensate when I come to Cradle.”

“Is that often?” Ty asked.

Kath Two understood that Bard’s remark had been a conversational gambit and not just a bald assertion. Ty, with the social reflexes of a Dinan bartender, had recognized it as such and was already following up.

“It’s actually surprising that you and I have never crossed paths before,” Bard said, addressing Ty but watching Kath Two out of the corner of his eye. Only after she had sat down in one of the available chairs did he resume his seat. He picked up the empty glass. “I noted on your drinks list that you cellar some surface produce. Thank you for the beer, by the way.”

“You’re most welcome,” Ty said.

“I have spent most of my life on the surface,” Bard explained, “where some members of my clan grow grapes. We produce wine. Our primary market is restaurants in Cradle, though we do ship a few cases up to private cellars on the Great Chain.”

“Well then, that’s one explanation for our not having met,” Ty said.

Kath Two interpreted this to mean The Crow’s Nest generally doesn’t stock such high-end wine, but Bard got a sly look on his face and, after a moment, returned, “Did you have another possible explanation in mind, Ty?”

“Where is your clan’s vineyard?” Beled demanded. Then, in a belated attempt to soften it, he added, “If you don’t mind.”

“Oh, it’s not a secret,” Bard said. “Antimer. Just near the line of demarcation.”

She didn’t know much about the place but she could visualize it: a crescent-shaped archipelago in the middle latitudes between the Aleutians and Hawaii. It was the rim of a huge impact crater. Some of the islands were fairly large. The largest of them straddled the antimeridian—180 degrees east or west of Greenwich — which was the origin of the name. But most of the archipelago lay to the east of there, stretching all the way across the longitude of 166 degrees, 30 minutes west. That was the location of one of the two turnpikes that the Aïdans had built across the ring. It was as far west as the Eye could travel, and so it served as a border between Red and Blue. Since it was in the middle of the Pacific, which, notwithstanding the best efforts of the Hard Rain, was still largely an empty expanse of water, there wasn’t much of a land border. 166 Thirty did cross through Beringia: the union of Alaska with the easternmost part of Siberia. A land border did, therefore, exist in that place as well as in the somewhat more climatically benign part of Antimer lying a few thousand kilometers due south. This was the “line of demarcation” that Bard had alluded to, carefully omitting mention of on which side of it the vineyard was actually located. The border was fuzzy. There was no need to bother with strict enforcement on a world so thinly populated. The much longer land border at ninety degrees east, above Dhaka, wandered all over the place as it rambled north across the broadest part of Asia, squirming this way and that to circumvent craters, Himalayas, and other complications.

The general picture that Bard had therefore conveyed, in just a few words, was something like this. His “clan”—whatever that meant — of Neoanders had gone down to the surface as soon as it had become livable. They might have been Sooners (which was what Kath Two had been assuming of Tyuratam Lake) but, given their race, it was more probable that they had been military, sent down to Antimer — which was a fairly inviting piece of real estate — to secure it. For most of the Antimer chain lay on the Red side of the line of demarcation and constituted a valuable possession. But it had this troublesome extension onto the other side where Blue could, if it chose, establish a beachhead. From there, military incursions might be made westward in the event that the treaty failed. All of these things had come to pass during the War in the Woods. During the treaty negotiations that had concluded it, Red had made efforts to claim all of Antimer for itself — effectively defining a little eastward excursion in the Line of Demarcation that would rid it of this particular thorn in its side. No agreement had been reached on that item, so it remained in dispute. Had more people been living there, there might have been a demilitarized zone, a no-man’s-land, and all the other apparatus of disputed Cold War boundaries. As it was, things were just fuzzy. A tacit agreement was in place not to stir up trouble. But on both sides it was heavily populated with military settlements, and/or Survey installations, just to keep an eye on things. The obvious explanation for a lot of Neoanders living there was that they’d been sent down as a military force and brought their families with them. Upon the expiration of their term of service, they had declined the invitation to return to whatever crowded space habitat had been their place of origin and had dispersed into the countryside, which was said to be a very nice place to live. This was technically illegal but Red authorities had probably looked the other way, figuring that seeding the place with Neoanders could only strengthen their hold on it.

Their Neanderthal heritage had been fabricated out of whole cloth, yet it was taken more or less seriously by everyone — it was a sort of consensual historical hallucination. Aïda and some of her more bloody-minded descendants might have hoped it would instill fear of, or at least respect for, the fighting prowess of this subrace. Some Neoanders reveled in that. Many of them, however, preferred a revisionist view of Neanderthal history that painted them as highly intelligent (their brains were larger than those of “modern” humans), artistically gifted, and essentially peaceful proto-Europeans. Neoanders of a more intellectual bent held seminars about it. More practical-minded ones tried to live it. There was no better place to live it, Kath Two had to admit, than Antimer, which had a temperate European-style climate. And so it was entirely plausible that a group of Neoanders who had been sent down by Red as shock troops would, within a generation or two, end up running vineyards in that fuzzily defined border zone near the line of demarcation and, once the vines had reached maturity, trying to sell wine on the ring. The early market would be high-end connoisseurs and restaurants and so they would need a member of the clan who cleaned up well, had good manners, and knew how to wear clothes, to establish commercial contacts in places like Cradle.

This entire picture, or something close to it, was summoned up in the minds of Kath Two and, presumably, Ty and Beled and the others as soon as the words were spoken. But Ty’s remark—That’s one explanation for our not having met—and Bard’s nonanswer—Did you have another possible explanation in mind? — were still lodged there awkwardly. Was Ty meaning to question Bard’s story? The look on Ariane’s face, as she regarded the Neoander, was not what you would call warm. But of course the Julian would be suspicious, would look for other explanations than what lay on the surface.

Ty seemed to have noticed this too; his eyes were jumping back and forth between Ariane and Bard.

Bard looked up at Ty and smiled, his huge upper lip pulling back to expose the row of yellowish enamel boulders planted in his upper jaw. “I’ll bet that as our Seven spends time together, Tyuratam and I will have all sorts of opportunities to tell colorful stories about what our families have gotten up to during their decades on the surface.”

Which didn’t answer the question. But it was charming, and it deflected the issue by making the point that Tyuratam Lake’s background, should he choose to discuss it with them, was likely to be at least as complicated as that of Langobard. Perhaps a bit of guilt-tripping there too, implicitly asking them why they were so curious about the Neoander when other members of the Seven might be worthy of some scrutiny too.

Ariane sat back in her chair and pretended to look at her fingernails. She was not the least bit satisfied. Trying for a minute to think like a Julian, Kath Two imagined how it must look to her: a creature selectively bred by crazy people to be capable of killing with his bare hands, who at the same time was extraordinarily crafty in his social interactions.

“I am what I am,” Ty said.

“And what is that?” Ariane asked.

“A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances.” He nodded at Bard. “Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty?”

No one admitted to being thirsty.

“For beverages, I meant,” Ty added. “I’m sure we are all thirsty for knowledge.”

Doc liked that. “Knowledge in general, Tyuratam?”

“Oh, I’d be living on Stromness if I were a knowledge-in-general man,” Ty said. “A collector of facts. No, I take a more utilitarian stance.”

“Meaning that you would like to know why we are here,” Doc said.

Ty seemed to find the question overly blunt, and raised the ridge of scar tissue that had once been a honey-colored eyebrow. “If you’d enjoy saying something about it, I’d enjoy listening,” he admitted. “If not, well, I’m willing to come along for the ride — up to a point.”

Doc now looked across the table toward Ariane, in a way that made tumblers click inside of Kath Two’s head. He was handing control of the meeting to Ariane. It might be going too far to say that she was in charge, but she was probably in communication with whoever was.

“Most of our operations will be on the surface,” she said. “You might have inferred as much from the fact that we have gone out of our way to involve Indigens”—she glanced at Ty and Bard—“and Survey personnel.” She nodded at Kath Two and at Beled. The last gesture elicited another one of those sardonic snorts from Ty — pointing out, apparently, just how implausible it was that a man fitting the profile of Lieutenant Tomov could possibly be taken seriously as a member of Survey. Ariane gave Ty a cool look, as if to say Don’t start, then continued: “And I need hardly belabor the longstanding connection with the surface embodied by Doc and Memmie.”

Conspicuously absent from the list, now, was Ariane herself, but if she was aware of the omission, she didn’t show it. Everyone was left to make what guesses and assumptions they might about how her career — whatever it might be — was connected with the surface.

“Discretion is important,” Ariane continued, “which is why we will tend to operate out of Cradle and use atmospheric or surface transportation.” Meaning airplanes and things that crawled on the surface of New Earth as opposed to rocket ships, bolos, and Aitken-Kucharski devices like giant whips. “Whenever possible, we will enter and exit Cradle on foot — via the subterranean passages that are afforded by sockets.”

“When’s the next—” Kath Two started to ask.

“Cayambe,” Ariane said. “Two days from now.”

“We are going to travel from Cayambe to Beringia on the surface?” Kath Two asked.

Ty and Bard both looked at her curiously.

“I haven’t said anything about Beringia,” Ariane pointed out.

“But it’s obviously where we’re going,” Kath Two said. “It’s where Beled and I — and a lot of other people — were sent on Survey. It’s where I saw what I saw, and told Beled about it. This whole thing was precipitated by that, wasn’t it?”

“It has been brewing for longer. Years,” Ariane said. “But you’re not wrong.”

“Ty’s from that part of the world — I can tell by his accent. Bard is from south of there, on Antimer,” Kath Two went on.

“We will head north from the Cayambe Socket, yes,” Ariane said.

“North a hell of a long way,” Ty pointed out.

“We are not prevented from using air transport,” Ariane reminded him.

“If we can get a big enough glider,” Kath Two put in, “the mountain wave will take us right up the Andes, the Sierras, and the Cascades in a day or two.”

“I am fairly confident,” Ariane said, “that we can get a big enough glider.”

THE UNDERSURFACE OF CRADLE, ONLY VISIBLE TO PEOPLE STANDING on the ground — more specifically, on the equator — looking up at it, was flat and generally egg-shaped, elongated in the direction of its east-west movement. On closer inspection its mostly smooth surface was interrupted from place to place by small hatches, carefully engineered protrusions, orifices, and other details. These were distributed around that otherwise featureless surface in a way that suggested orderly minds at work, addressing complications posed by the asymmetries of the city above.

In several places along the equator of New Earth, ground had been cleared and flattened, and reinforced concrete pads laid. These had the same size and shape as Cradle’s undersurface, and were equipped with their own hatches and orifices matching those on Cradle. Cradle could be neatly set down into one of these sockets whenever the Eye happened to be directly overhead. There it might reside for hours or days, taking on or discharging supplies, and otherwise communing with the surroundings. But it never stayed for long, since it had to follow the movements of the Eye, which always had urgent business elsewhere on the ring.

At such times, a traveler who knew nothing of orbiting tethers and the like, emerging from the woods or cresting some nearby hill, and coming into view of Cradle, would perceive it as a normal, which was to say stationary, city. The bucket handle arching high over its top was a heavy hint that something was a bit odd about it. Other than that, however, it would look, in that context, like a somewhat isolated hill fort.

Some of the more well-established sockets had begun to accumulate suburbs: ring-shaped towns that would come to life whenever Cradle was in residence. Most of them had the feel, and shared the purposes, of military bases, scientific installations, and frontier outposts. It had always been envisioned that many such would be built in time, creating a ring around the equator to match the habitat ring far above it, and that once New Earth was opened for general settlement they would grow into important cities. To visit one now, centuries before its glorious peak, was something of an acquired taste — a little like walking around a building site after foundations have been laid and a few walls framed. Builders, dreamers, and people of imagination enjoyed such places; others saw nothing.

Cayambe and Kenya had been the first two sockets, built in the most likely sites on South America and Africa respectively. Each numbered around ten thousand souls.

Cayambe’s namesake was a volcano at the intersection of the Andes and the equator, in what had once been the country of Ecuador. It had, of course, taken a beating during the Hard Rain, and resumed erupting for a while, but had now been dormant for about seven hundred years. In any case the Cayambe Socket had been built well clear of its most active vents, placing the volcano’s summit, which was once again snow covered, far enough away that it could be admired from any windows on Cradle that happened to be aimed in the right direction.

The Crow’s Nest’s tower afforded views in almost all directions, and so Tyuratam Lake, standing behind his bar two days later, polishing a glass with a towel, was able to look up between two tap handles and see the summit glide into view and then seemingly rise upward from the horizon as Cradle was lowered gingerly into its socket. Klaxons sounded all over Cradle and across the earthbound ring city that was now coming into view beyond its windscreens. Out of habit Ty stuffed the towel into the pocket of his trousers, letting it dangle down his leg, and reached out to steady himself against the bar. The underside of Cradle and the matching surface below it had been designed so that a disk of air would be trapped between them during the final meter of the descent, and act as a cushion. This was allowed to escape through a picket fence of vents, aimed upward around the periphery of Cradle, and so final docking was, as usual, signaled by a roar of escaping air and plumes of condensed humidity jetting upward into the blue sky over the Andes. The mildest of lurches caused stored glasses and tableware to clink together in cabinets all over the bar.

The klaxons and the vents went silent at the same time. Through the bar’s windows, which Ty had left cracked open, he could hear the customary smattering of applause rising up from the stony streets of Capitol Hill. He checked his timepiece. A few politicians and generals, who had leaned back from their breakfasts to observe the docking and admire the profile of Cayambe Volcano, bent forward again, picked up their forks, and resumed their conversations. Cradle had just become the largest city on New Earth, and was scheduled to remain so for twenty-four hours. Its system of windscreens, built to shield the city from the blast created by its movement through the atmosphere, now seemed more like a barbican, thrown up in some past age to defend an old city, but now merely a historical curiosity and a dividing line between neighborhoods.

Other than keeping a curious eye on all comings and goings through Cradle’s eight gates, Quarantine made no effort to control the mingling of populations. Cradle’s visits were so brief that to stop, examine, and question everyone passing between it and the sockets would have rendered the whole visit pointless.

Thanks to this relaxed policy, the time it took for an average pedestrian to get from the nearest of the eight gates to the Crow’s Nest was nine minutes. The first customer showed up in seven, breathing somewhat heavily, and requested a beer. Ty did not recognize him, but the next two faces that came in the door, thirty seconds later, were familiar. During the next quarter of an hour, the place filled up with a mixture of regulars (from Cradle and Cayambe alike) and curiosity seekers. Ty’s staff, well accustomed to these surges, began to open up back rooms. Extra cooks came up through one of the back entrances and began to make use of mise en place that had been prepped the night before.

Everything, in other words, ran smoothly. Which was how Ty liked it. The ability of the Crow’s Nest to accommodate a socket surge with no intervention from Ty, other than polishing a glass, was, in a sense, his life’s work. He had done every job it was possible to do in this place, from floor mopper on upward, and learned over time to select and delegate the work to others who could do it better. He had advanced, in other words, to higher levels of mental activity while always doing enough of the floor mopping and glass polishing to remain in physical contact with the business of the bar and in human contact with the staff. His real job — the job that the Owners paid him for — was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.

He was also a judicious manipulator of the human condition in the sense of occasionally throwing people out, telling others to settle down in a manner so smooth and humorous that they didn’t know they’d been told, and making certain others feel welcome when they seemed ill at ease. All of that was as fundamental to the operation of a bar as mopping the floor. Others on his staff could do such things almost as well as he. Ty had, in other words, developed the Crow’s Nest into a sufficiently healthy and robust organism that it was possible for him to disappear for weeks, sometimes even months, without inflicting serious damage. In some ways, his occasional “vacations” actually did more good than harm, in the sense that when he came back he would commonly find that certain members of the staff had risen to the occasion and become more complete and effective human beings in his absence. He was quite certain that he could walk away from the bar forever now and that it would not really miss him. But he was unlikely to do any such thing because it was literally his home — he lived in an apartment on the court behind it — and because the Owners preferred that he stay. And the Owners were among the very few members of all the human races about whose opinions Tyuratam Lake actually gave a damn. They had pointed out to him that even a year’s leave of absence, should he choose to take one, would benefit the Crow’s Nest, in the sense that he would return to it with fresh eyes and immediately see how beneficial changes might be made.

But he suspected that the true value of the business, in the eyes of the Owners, was not the return it delivered on capital. That was probably close to zero. They might even be running a huge loss, for all he knew. Every month Ty did the books and boiled all the numbers down to a single sheet of paper that he took to the Bolt Hole and slid across the table to the Owners’ representative. They never said much about it. Once a year, a question might be asked about one of the numbers, just as a way of letting him know that they were paying attention. But the Owners really valued the Crow’s Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.

He did not care for elaborate goodbyes, particularly in a professional context where a fussy leave-taking might suggest that his going away was a big deal — implying that the staff might not be up to the job of keeping the business running. And so after a few minutes had passed and he had exchanged looks, words, and jokes with a few leading citizens and well-known characters of Cayambe — just long enough to let it be known that he was here — he pulled the towel from his pocket, wiped his hands, and tossed it into the laundry chute beneath the bar. He lingered for a moment just to satisfy himself that the chute was not jammed. But it never was. Satisfied, he edged around the corner of the bar and walked to a table by the windows where Ariane, Kath Two, and Beled were pushing empty plates away, having just concluded a hearty breakfast. Ty himself had eaten light, an hour ago, as was his habit when he expected to spend a good part of the day airborne. “It’ll be taken care of,” he remarked, and got perfunctory thank-yous from the Moiran and the Teklan. Ariane gave him what he could only guess was meant to be some kind of penetrating look, and nodded. The busy minds of Julians exhausted Ty and he tried to avoid getting drawn into their labyrinthine ways of thinking. Perhaps this Ariane had used whatever connections she had in the intelligence world to investigate him and the Owners, and was drawing all sorts of conclusions — probably wrong ones — about what motivated him to give the Seven free drinks and meals. For it was obvious to Ty that Ariane worked in intelligence. He had seen many such people during the war and he knew their ways.

By now the others could navigate around the Crow’s Nest, but there was an expectation that he would lead the way. This derived partly from the fact that it was, after all, his establishment. But even had they been dropped into some completely random location on the surface they would have looked to him to take point because that, for better or worse, was what Dinans did. Answering to a similar racial expectation, Beled took up the rear. This was partly because his ingrained habits of courtesy and discipline obliged him to say “You first” to all the others, and partly so he would wheel about and engage any foes who might assault the rear of the formation.

Ty moved briskly to reduce the chance that he would be buttonholed by some prematurely drunk member of the Cayambe Chamber of Comersants. Within a few moments they had passed into a section of the bar that had not yet been opened to visitors, and thence proceeded down twisting stairways scarcely wide enough to accommodate Beled’s shoulders until they reached the triangular courtyard in the center of the compound. Its tropical flowers were glowing like gems in the hard white light of the Andes. Four small cabs awaited them near the big gate that gave out onto the street. Cradle was almost devoid of four-wheeled vehicles when it was aloft, but whenever it was socketed, the place was invaded within minutes by swarms of whatever rolling stock was skinny enough to negotiate its streets. Some of these moved goods, transshipping them from the Eye to customers on the surface, or importing the produce of New Earth to Cradle. Others carried passengers on errands to the ring city and its hinterlands. One of the cabs was already occupied by Doc and Memmie, as could be inferred by the cases of Doc’s support infrastructure strapped to its roof rack and the grabb poised to scuttle after it. Bard had climbed into the second cab and was slouched down low. Neoanders were rare enough to draw notice and arouse curiosity in a manner that Ariane quite clearly did not want. He had been keeping to himself in his private room. Ariane climbed into the cab with him. It went without saying that it would be easiest for all concerned if Beled took up a whole cab by himself, and so he did that. Ty and Kath Two got into the last one.

After Doc and Memmie’s cab departed, a few minutes passed before Ariane gave her driver the go-ahead. Ty shifted impatiently in his seat, slightly jostling Kath Two. Cradle-compliant cabs did not have a lot of shoulder room.

“What do you think she’s doing?” Kath Two asked. Just making conversation. They both knew perfectly well what she was doing.

“A caravan of four, leaving the Crow’s Nest and not coming back — too conspicuous for her taste,” Ty said.

“At least there’s no question of getting lost,” Kath Two remarked. She ducked her head low so that she could peer out the window and get a look at the northern sky beyond the city. The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown. She didn’t have the crazy yellow cat-eyes of some Moirans, but there was a bit of that in her ancestral tree. She knew Ty was looking at her but she didn’t let on to being self-conscious, which he approved of. She was looking, of course, at the Aitken loop that was their immediate destination. Assuming that it was still operating — and she’d have reacted differently had it gone down — it was rising up out of a mostly subterranean flynk barn on the town’s outskirts, surrounded by hangars and maintenance facilities for aircraft that ranged up and down the length of the Andes.

“You have everything you need?” Ty asked. “It’ll be a long day for you.”

“It’ll go by in no time,” Kath Two demurred, “because I’ll be busy. It’ll be long for you because you’ll be bored. Did you bring a book?”

“People are my books,” Ty said. “But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.”

It was meant as a light joke but he saw her face snag on it, wondering if he was trying to make a racial crack about Moirans. “An annoying habit that many people seem to have,” he added.

Apparently a mere two-cab caravan was not enough to trigger Ariane’s anxieties, and so the one carrying Beled and the one carrying Ty and Kath Two departed in tandem and began to work their way through streets crowded with pedestrians. They could have done the first part of it more quickly on foot, but when they passed out through the vehicular gate and into the streets of Cayambe, things opened up quite a bit and they were able to use streets that had been designed specifically for four-wheelers. The place seemed dustier than Ty remembered, or maybe he was just seeing it through visitors’ eyes. Cradle sophisticates would see its menagerie of robots as comically oversized and ramshackle, its people as a lot of jumped-up backwoodsmen. Ty’s kind of people, in other words. The sort of person whose ancestors had stayed in the habitat ring and played by the rules, patiently awaiting the moment when Doc, or some successor of his, would cut the ribbon on New Earth and allow settlers to flood in, had complicated feelings about Sooners and Indigens. On the one hand they were viewed as sharp operators. Tricksters. At the same time they were isolated bumpkins. Ty had learned early how to play both sides of the image. A stranger from the ring who took you for a wide-eyed rube would spill a lot of information before he came to understand the truth, and one who expected you to play tricks on him would let down his guard at the first show of honesty and plain dealings.

IF YOU TOOK A LARGE NUMBER OF FLYNKS — FLYING, AUTONOMOUS chain links — and joined them together into a long chain, and connected its ends to make it into a continuous loop, and then got the whole loop moving through the air like a train composed of little airplanes, each using its stubby winglets to generate its share of the lift, then you had a thing known as an “aitrain,” pronounced the way a resident of Old New York would have said “A train.” The concept was old enough that its etymology had been obscured by time. It might have been “air train” with the first r elided, or a contraction of “Aitken train.” Sometimes, as here, it was a captive aitrain, passing continuously through a fixed installation on the ground and rising from there to a considerable altitude before reversing direction and plunging back down for another circuit. But aitrains could also fly freely in the air: a technology crazy enough that it had become associated with the Aïdan big-brains known as Jinns, or Ghenis, and tended to be used only by Red.

Presumably at Ariane’s behest, they took a circuitous route to the aitrain station, swinging wide around the hangar with the big Q on its roof. The caravan collected itself in an unmarked hangar on the edge of the military zone, which Ty viewed as a classic example of the “not quite Survey and not quite military” style. There were no human personnel, just two copies of a specialized kind of grabb posted at each of the wingtips of a big glider, nominal capacity ten. Adequate room for a Seven, or so Ty thought until he climbed aboard and found it preloaded with mysterious equipment cases.

Kath Two made a slow walk around the glider and then climbed aboard, pulled the door shut, and crawled forward onto the couch where she would spend the journey resting on her belly. Everyone else looked away politely as she got her urine collection system squared away. In front of her was the glass dome, more than a meter in diameter, that served as the aircraft’s nose. Beled and Bard took opposite window seats in the back row of the passenger compartment. Doc sat in the front row, on the aisle, where he would have the best view forward over Kath Two’s backside and out the dome. Memmie sat in the window seat next to him and Ariane grabbed the seat across the aisle from him. Ty had his pick of a few seats in the midsection. He had noticed Ariane’s preference for always sitting next to Doc. Were he a jealous sort, or the kind of person who liked having long conversations with eminent scientists, he’d have resented the way she monopolized him. Instead he just found it kind of interesting, and wondered whether Doc would shoo her off at some point so that he could at long last talk to someone else.

The glider began moving around, presumably because Kath Two had told the grabbs holding its wingtips to take it somewhere. The nose tilted down as they descended a ramp into the flynk barn. This was a noisy warren in which thousands of identical robots were hustling around in a manner that looked chaotic and organized at the same time, much like the impression you’d get staring into a beehive. For an earthbound loop system like this one, the flynks had to be aerodynamic, so their inner skeletons were hidden beneath thin plastic fairings, making them into blunt-nosed cylinders, like large bullets, with a little waist in the midsection to give the universal joint freedom to bend this way and that. Each of these flynks was about half a meter in diameter and two meters long and weighed about twice what a large human weighed. Lying on the floor, they were helpless, and so grabbs moved them around by getting them aimed in the right direction and then rolling them about like barrels, creating a scene that looked a little like a swarm of dung beetles going about their work. The general point of the operation seemed to be to channel the flynks in the direction of troughs where they would naturally line up. This enabled them to couple themselves together into short segments of chain. The troughs had roller bearings that made it easy for chain segments to slide forward and back, like trains in a switching yard, and in this manner chain segments could be added to or subtracted from the aitrain while it was operating. Which was to say, while the system was shooting it straight up into the air at high velocity and sucking it back in on the down leg.

In one of those “easy for machines, inconceivable for humans” operations, a coupler on the glider’s nose ended up being snapped to the tail end of a flynk chain that presently got concatenated onto the up leg. Rapidly brought up to speed while still in the confines of the flynk barn, the glider pitched upward sharply as it emerged into the light. It began to rise vertically, drawn behind the chain. Nothing was connected to the glider’s tail — the loop had been deliberately severed — and so the system had ceased being an Aitken loop. It was now a vertical bullwhip, accelerating the glider to higher and higher velocity as the Knickstelle at its apex propagated skyward. Lying now on his back, staring straight up over Kath Two’s shoulders, Ty could see small aerodynamic vanes that had deployed from the fuselage of the flynk ahead of them. These, like all the other vanes on all the other thousands of flynks in the chain, effected tiny adjustments to keep the whip trimmed in just the right configuration. The result, a few moments later, was that the glider came snapping over the top just as its connection to the last flynk was severed. In a few seconds it had been hauled two thousand meters straight up and let go with a velocity of a few hundred kilometers per hour. Meanwhile, every other flynk in the chain had decoupled itself fore and aft, causing the entire chain to disintegrate into a linear cloud of identical fragments, each headed in a different direction. Each flynk, sensing that it was aloft and alone, automatically deployed large tail vanes that turned it from a bullet into a badminton shuttlecock. The flynks rapidly slowed down to their terminal velocity, turned nose down, and began to fall toward the ground. A slight canting of the vanes caused them to begin spinning like maple seeds, further slowing their descent, and in this manner the entire swarm began to descend in the direction of an empty lot adjacent to the flynk barn.

All of which had to be pictured in Ty’s mind’s eye, since they already had left it far behind. But he had seen it many times, as it was one of the basic operations carried out many times a day at any aitrain port. The same flynks, organized in a different way, might just as easily have effected a high-altitude rendezvous with an orbiting bolo, or collected an aircraft and drawn it back downward to safe haven in the barn.

The first half hour of the flight was a little unsettling to Ty’s stomach as Kath Two made a few sudden maneuvers, perhaps because she had sensed good air in one direction or bad in another. People who were accustomed to flight in powered aircraft frequently had trouble adjusting to the unpredictability of gliders, but Ty, who had done it before, understood that Kath Two was just hunting for the right way to inject them into the mountain wave hovering invisibly in the upper atmosphere above the Andes crest. He knew she had found it when the juking and jiving stopped and the back of the seat pressed him forward with palpable acceleration. They were in level, steady flight now, proceeding north at something like three hundred kilometers per hour. Kath Two’s task henceforth would be to look far into their future with her lidar-enhanced sensorium and make small adjustments needed to dodge pockets of rough air.

Everyone became somewhat listless and fell to reading books or napping. Sitting a couple of rows behind Ty, occupying most of a pair of seats, was Beled Tomov. He was in an attitude of repose, whitish-blue eyes half closed and unfocused, but aimed generally out the window. He was probably trying to maintain a visual fix on the horizon as a way to stave off motion sickness. In any case he did not look to be in a social mood.

Over a series of meals and drinks since the initial meeting of the Seven, Ty had been able to piece together a vague picture of the mission that Kath Two and Beled had recently completed in Beringia. Apparently, Beled had been trying to maintain some kind of threadbare cover story about being Survey. Fortunately, this had now been dispensed with and Doc was openly addressing him as Lieutenant Tomov.

Military were divided into three broad groups generally known as Button Pushers, Ground Pounders, and Snake Eaters. Beled clearly was no Button Pusher. That was the only branch of the service where Ivyns, and even Camites, were present in any numbers. That narrowed it down to Ground Pounder or Snake Eater. He seemed too elite to be a Ground Pounder: the sort of regular troops who would be deployed in large formations along borders on the surface. Oh, it wasn’t out of the question. He might simply have been an unusually big and strong GP. But more likely he was a Snake Eater, which was to say a former GP who had been promoted into one of a few special-purpose branches. Those had informal names too: Queeds (Quarantine Enforcement and Detention), Feelies (Forward Intelligence), and Zerks (a contraction of Berserkers). Queeds had by far the lowest status. They were looked at somewhat askance because of their status as what amounted to riot police, called in to quell domestic disturbances but more often just posted near gates to remind people not to make trouble. Popular estimates of their intelligence and moral fiber were none too generous. Ty could not see why such a person would have been chosen for the Seven, and so he deemed it unlikely. Forward Intelligence was a better fit, and an obvious guess since Ty already knew that Beled had very recently been called back from the surface, where he had been moving about on what sounded like a classic Feely kind of mission. Reference had been made to the fact that Beled had passed near at least one RIZ and observed its inhabitants without himself being seen, which was just the sort of thing Feelies were supposed to be good at. The only thing that prevented Ty from simply pigeonholing Beled as a classic Feely was his physique. Because of that, he must allow for the outside chance that Beled Tomov was a Zerk. But only an outside chance, because, contrary to their image in popular entertainment, Zerks were not all huge and muscular. Most of them looked reasonably normal, if unusually fit. The Zerks were not a single unitary force but a mosaic of small units, each of which was trained and equipped for a special type of activity such as fighting in space suits in zero gee, fighting underwater, being dropped from the sky in pods, or cloak-and-dagger urban shenanigans. Thus far Beled Tomov had not shown any clear signs of such specialization. The steps he was taking to avoid motion sickness suggested that he was not accustomed to airborne work. If Ty had to guess, he’d say that this man had started out as a Ground Pounder, spent a lot of time on the surface in a border zone, distinguished himself, been promoted from the ranks, and ended up in some kind of tiny Zerk unit that specialized in sneaking around on the surface.

The only one showing signs of life was Langobard. This stood to reason, since he had been confined to quarters for a few days. Ty moved back, sat next to him, and asked him about his clan’s vineyard in Antimer. It was a wholly reasonable line of inquiry from a Cradle bartender, but both men probably understood that it was just an icebreaker. Bard was more than happy to play along, and talked for a while about the volcanic soil of his homeland, how the TerReForm had converted it, in the last few centuries, from a dead mineral rubble to an ecosystem, and how his grandparents had smuggled grapevines down from various botanical gardens in both Blue and Red and suffered through various misadventures on their way to figuring out that certain soil amendments were needed to make it work. Implicit in that story was that they must have been working with some people who weren’t Neoanders. Smuggling unauthorized plant species down to the surface would have been dicey enough, for members of that race, if done entirely within Red. On the Blue side of things, Neoanders would have been absurdly conspicuous, liable to being detained and searched by the Q even when they weren’t engaged in illegal activity. When Ty pointed that out, Bard said yes while shaking his head no, as if to say, But of course, what you are saying is obvious. He went on to explain that his people, stationed for over a decade along a border that was entirely peaceful, had over time established cordial relationships with their opposite numbers on the Blue side of the line, which had begun with swapping supplies to enliven their respective diets and progressed to picnics, athletic competitions, and other ways of relieving the boredom. The Teklans (he reported with a glance toward the slumbering Beled) had been standoffish — but his people had always had good relations with Dinans.

Ty saw no reason to doubt the historical truth of this remark, but he understood that Bard meant it on another level as well: as an overture to Ty, which might lead to friendship. Certainly there were grounds, other than that, for the Dinan and the Neoander to understand each other. Both were Indigens who had found lives in the more sophisticated environment of Cradle but still maintained connections to the surface: connections that were second nature to them, but, in the context of the habitat ring at large, were fantastically unusual.

“Well, that’s good,” Ty said. “I was raised to be scared to death of your lot.”

“Of course you were. How far from the border did you grow up?”

By this, Bard meant the place where 166 Thirty cut across Beringia: a boundary zone similar to that farther south in Antimer. The west or Red side of it corresponded roughly to what had once been Siberia and the east or Blue side to Alaska. The irony being that the two continents had been rejoined by the Hard Rain but then sundered by an imaginary line.

“Oh, we moved about,” Ty said. “Remember, unlike your folk, we lacked a legitimate excuse for being there.”

The Neoander’s huge, highly expressive features reflected a bit of disappointment that his question hadn’t really been answered.

“Too close to the line, and we were at risk of being arrested by the Blues stationed there — or being cooked and eaten by Neoander raiding parties,” Ty cracked.

It was one of those jokes that was in such exceedingly poor taste that it could go either way: make Bard an enemy for life, or convince him that Ty really did understand. As a conversational gambit it was somewhat risky. But, on the other hand, Ty was cooped up on a glider with six strangers en route to a mission that hadn’t been explained yet. The cargo hold had been preloaded with unmarked cases, some of which obviously contained weapons. At least three of the Seven — Beled, Langobard, and Tyuratam — knew how to use them, and Kath Two’s Survey training had included a short course on how to use a kat in a pinch. It was not the time or the place for the sorts of elaborate conversational niceties and courtship dances that might be expected in, say, an old private club on Cradle. More important was to get things sorted in a hurry.

Bard laughed and shook his head. “Why not move farther east then?” he asked. “Get away from those threats altogether.”

“Because the early Sooner toeholds weren’t really sustainable and we had to trade with Blues for vitamins.”

“Under the table, I presume.”

“Of course.”

“What did you give them in return? Your women?”

It was fair payback for the “cooked and eaten” joke: Bard testing him in return. Ty took it in stride. “They were scared of our women.”

“Happy Dinahsday, by the way.”

“Is it Dinahsday? I’ve lost track.”

But it didn’t matter. Having made a crack about Dinan women, Bard had to pay respect to their Eve.

“No,” Ty continued, “to answer your question, it’s the same thing that led your ancestors to trade victuals across the line.”

“A craving for greater variety in the diet,” Bard said. “More powerful in the end than sex.”

“Yes. Early on we had nothing more to offer them than fresh vegetables.”

“Up there?!”

“Summer days are long — you can grow a lot in a crude plastic greenhouse. Later, as the ecosystem spun up, it was meat from small animals, berries, and a few luxury goods like furs.”

A thought occurred to Bard. “And how far would your people range in search for those things?”

He was referring, as Ty understood, to Kath Two’s story about the camouflaged Indigen in the trees. For she had by now shared this with the others.

“Not that far,” Ty said.

IN THE VAST AND ANCIENT UNDERTAKING CALLED THE TERREFORM, Survey was a small department, sometimes viewed as a receptacle for eccentric or troublesome personnel. Its outposts were small and, because they needed to be sited along rapidly changing frontiers, makeshift and temporary. TerReForm bases, by contrast, tended to be much larger and more permanent. As a rule they were sited on islands off the coasts of continents. There was a logical scientific reason for doing it thus, but as Doc himself freely admitted, the real reason was more aesthetic and symbolic. Most of the sophisticated genetic sequencing laboratories, and the staff needed to make them work, were up in the ring, where space was tight but brains were plentiful. TerReForm installations on the surface were of a more practical character, and they sprawled over territory in a way that looked extravagant and unruly to habitat dwellers. They combined the functions of botanical garden, experimental farm, arboretum, zoo, and microbiology lab. Small samples, cuttings, or populations of bugs, plants, or beasts that had been developed and nurtured on the ring were dropped in such places to be propagated and observed before being shipped in quantity to the biomes where they would be allowed to run wild. Placing the bases on islands was a simple method for limiting the spread of plants and animals that had escaped from their assigned habitats. It was very far from being foolproof, but it was simple, easy, and fairly effective: an easy fit, in other words, for the Get It Done school.

The TerReForm base for the Central American isthmus was Magdalena. This was a large island in about the same place as the former Islas Marías. Pre-Zero, this had been an archipelago off the west coast of Mexico, somewhat south of the tip of Baja California. The Hard Rain had reforged it into a single island with a few rocks and reefs scattered around, useful for propagating life that was designed to occupy shallow water and tidal zones. The lack of a moon meant that New Earth’s tides were caused entirely by the gravity of the sun, which made them weaker and more closely synchronized with the cycle of night and day. Because tidal zones were thought to have disproportionate importance to the ecosystems of land and sea alike, much TerReForm brainpower had been focused on them, and the low-lying banks of wave-washed rubble around Magdalena had become spawning grounds, not just for fish and birds and crustaceans, but for researchers with advanced degrees. Doc himself had spent ten years of his life here, sloshing through tide pools with buckets and shovels.

Ty would not have thought it possible, but Kath Two got them there with a little bit of daylight to spare, in a single day’s flying. Around midday she mumbled something about a noteworthy jet stream perturbation, and the possibility (which to her was apparently quite enticing) of catching a stratospheric wave. To Ty it might as well have been “eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.” Her next words, though, had been admirably clear: “Hang on.” Drinks were spilled and barf bags reached for all around the cabin. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling as the glider shot up through the tropopause, and the fuselage creaked and keened as Kath Two trimmed it to peel energy from some kind of fascinating upper-atmosphere anomaly. Several hours later, when, after another understated warning, she banked it nearly upside down and let it dive toward the faintly wrinkled blue water of the Pacific, they had covered many hundreds of kilometers beyond their original flight plan, and their only real problem was dumping energy so that they could make a landing, as opposed to a crater, on Magdalena. The place had a flynk barn, but the loop wasn’t operating at the moment, and anyway there was no reason to attempt a midair rendezvous with a flying chain when a simple airstrip was available nearby. An impressive whine sounded through the airframe as Kath Two turned on a pair of turbines in its belly that took in air through scoops and converted its energy to electrical power that was then stored. The next time the glider took off, the whole system could be run backward, driving the turbines as jets to provide some initial energy boost. It wasn’t necessary, but it was a way to slow the glider down, and it was a courtesy for the next pilot. Owing to some low banks of clouds, not much about the last phase of the flight made sense to its passengers, but at length the glider shot out the bottom of that weather system and suddenly Magdalena was below them, lit up on its west side by the last of the setting sun. On the purple skin of the sea, thin arcs of foam materialized as incoming wave fronts sensed the bottom or wrapped around submerged reefs. Doc had moved to a window seat so that he could peer down at his old stomping grounds, and in the suddenly quiet cabin Ty was able to hear him remarking on various installations along the shore. Most of these just looked to Ty like picket lines of pilings and ragged shanties of fishnet and plastic. But as Ty had been explaining to Langobard earlier, his Sooner ancestors had made a living from meaner tech than that, and so he did not think less of the scientists who had built them. The wildlife habitats, arboretums, and gardens tiling Magdalena’s western slopes looked a little closer to what a member of the general public might expect from a major TerReForm base, and the buildings clustered at the end of the airstrip were as respectable a town as it was possible to find anywhere on the surface. Ramps, stairs, and a long zigzagging road connected it to a harbor a couple of hundred meters below, where, at a glance, perhaps eight significant vessels, a giant flying boat called an ark, and many smaller boats were moored. They enjoyed a brief panorama of the waterfront before the final bank-around and approach took them out of view behind some hills. After the excitements of the flight, the landing was dull, and Ty suspected that Kath Two had just turned it over to an algorithm. The glider touched down on the single wheel that peeked out from the underside of its fuselage. Before it had slowed to the point where it might teeter sideways, a couple of specialized high-speed grabbs had caught up with it, moving in the somewhat disturbing prancing/scuttling gait that they used at such times, and caught hold of the wingtips. They escorted it to a field of tie-downs off to the side of the airstrip. Kath Two, relieved of responsibility, rolled over onto her back, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Ty was eager to disembark, but he knew that Doc would be the first out the door. He knew this because he could see a considerable welcoming party walk-jogging toward them.

Ariane was looking at the same thing. Ty did not understand why she would be so secretive on Cradle and in Cayambe, only to land them in the one location on the surface where Doc was most famous. He guessed she had her reasons, worked out in painstaking detail and never to be shared with the likes of Ty. They had to land somewhere en route to whatever their final destination was, and perhaps TerReForm was enough of a closed community that the buzz Doc would create by landing here would not extend much beyond Magdalena.

ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO — AROUND THE TIME OF HIS HUNDREDTH birthday — Dr. Hu Noah (like all Ivyns, he put his family name first, because it was somehow supposed to be more logical) had made a conscious decision to give up on trying to explain to younger people just how little he had actually changed with age. It didn’t really matter that these people were making all sorts of wrong assumptions about how his mind and his body were changing. What mattered to them, he had finally come to realize, was that they believed such things to be true. It was more important to them to believe it than it was for him to explain the facts of the situation, and so he had decided to let them think what they thought and to try to find constructive ways to use it. Sometimes this meant sitting so quietly that they forgot he was there and began speaking of him in the third person, using Remembrance as a sort of interpreter. Sometimes he could astonish by speaking up, making it clear that he had been following the conversation all along. Or he would stand up — an action that was always described later, by witnesses, as “springing to his feet” even though it was nothing of the sort — and begin to move about under his own power, which many who didn’t know him well seemed to consider miraculous. Because Remembrance was always by his side, and his grabb was always scuttling along beside him, giving him a sort of universal banister and grab-rail, people assumed he was more unsteady than was really the case. In fact, this support system was nothing more than a simple way of playing the odds. A fall could cripple or kill him; why not have the grabb handy? And Remembrance, though she was assumed by most to be a health care worker, was really more of a general-purpose aide de camp and, to put it crudely, a cowcatcher for turning human obstacles out of his path.

He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business — a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him — which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose. Remembrance carried in her head a list of all the people whom Doc might actually care to have a conversation with, and knew how to turn the others aside, typically by playing the age card. The list changed slowly over time, and certain people, some of whom were quite important, were occasionally discomfited to find that they were no longer on it. The list had been written down only once, twenty years ago, when Doc and Remembrance had established their relationship. She had committed it to memory and destroyed it. It now existed only in her — not Doc’s — head. Perhaps 10 percent of the original names remained. Many of them had died. The others had been crossed off, almost always without any volition from Doc. Remembrance stayed off to one side during his conversations, on the pretext that she might be needed to intervene medically. But what she was really doing was following the dialogue and monitoring Doc for signs, not that his heart was failing or his medication wearing off, but that he was bored. Sometimes, during their first decade together, he had gone so far as to glance in her direction and catch her eye for a moment while his interlocutor wasn’t looking, and this had been enough to eliminate that person from the list, but since then it had no longer been necessary. In many cases Remembrance had made what Doc had, at the time, considered to be mistakes in her performance of this duty, but on further consideration he had seen what she had seen quicker, and come to agree with her.

Exceptions had to be made for cases like this one, where they had to work with the five other members of the Seven. Some, but not all, of these might have made their way onto Remembrance’s list. He had tried to select people such as Kath Two whom he enjoyed talking to, but the others were strangers to him. Ariane Casablancova showed amusing pretention in sitting next to him whenever she could, acting as a gatekeeper between Doc and the remaining four. She took at face value Remembrance’s cover story. Had Remembrance not been a Camite, she might have taken it wrong, seeing it as an usurpation of her prerogatives. But that plus the fact that she had lifetime tenure — a sort of platonic marriage to Doc — made Ariane’s behavior at most a source of dry amusement.

The system worked beautifully at times such as this one, when a delegation of senior TerReFormers had gathered outside the door of Doc’s glider to belabor him with a welcome. It wasn’t that they were insincere, just that their quite genuine desire to greet him was all mixed up with other hopes and needs. One might want to get a photograph with him, but be bashful and tediously indirect about making the request. Another might feel that her life work had been unfairly slighted by her peers and would desire some sign of affirmation from Doc. Yet another might be embroiled in some internal political drama of TerReForm and would hope to gain some currency by being seen on Doc’s arm. None of it was wrong or unreasonable, but all of it was a waste of time where he was concerned, just further examples of that tax he didn’t want to pay anymore. Knowing this without being told, Remembrance exited the glider first. Doc watched out the window as the delegation huddled around her, leaning in close to hear her quiet voice, and furrowed their brows and made exaggerated nods as she explained to them just how exhausted Doc was. At some point she gestured back toward the glider and all of them looked up in unison and saw Doc’s face framed in the window. He made the faintest of waves and they all showed their teeth and saluted him in the various styles of their races: mostly Ivyn and Moiran. Once that was seen to, Doc “sprang to his feet” with a tug on the handle of his grabb, made his way to the door, stood framed there for a few moments so that they could take their pictures, and then made a great show of descending the stair that had folded down from the vehicle’s fuselage. The delegation tracked him across the apron of the airstrip, surrounding him in a great loose cloud but not subjecting him to the tiresome demands of polite social interaction. Ariane was right behind and the remaining four trailed at a distance, completely ignored. Ariane had gotten that right, at least: to the kinds of people who lived here, Doc’s arrival on Magdalena was such a sensation that even a Neoander went unnoticed.

After Remembrance had turned aside all invitations and offers of hospitality, he dined in his room with Ariane, who reveled in the attention. Tomorrow things would be different and she would have to begin adjusting. In the darkest part of that adjustment — which for a Julian could get very dark indeed — she would look back on this meal and understand it for what it really was: a gesture of respect from Doc that could not be gainsaid by any of the voices muttering away between her ears.

Doc asked her about her upbringing on Astrakhan, which was a smallish, almost pure Julian habitat at forty-eight degrees six minutes east, near the center of the Dinan part of the ring. This anomaly had come about as the result of a vision — in both the literal and figurative senses of that word — of a Julian man named Tomac, who had raised funds and established it as a quasi-religious outpost very early in the history of the ring. In those days, being three degrees and six minutes away from a capital such as Baghdad made it seem like a remote frontier outpost. Since then, of course, the Dinan segment had filled in around it, crowding it between much larger and more modern habitats. But Astrakhan, with a few modern improvements, continued to support some tens of thousands of souls, and was often alluded to by Julians as evidence that their race, though lacking in numbers, was as well established in Blue as any of the Four. It was frequently visited by scholars in the field of Amistics: the study of the choices made by different cultures as to which technologies they would embrace or spurn. This was because Tomac, who’d had peculiar ideas about everything, had made some unusual and instructive choices as far as that went. The isolation of Astrakhan made it a useful test case. For her part Ariane laughed off many of the quasi-religious aspects of the culture in which she had been raised, but Doc sensed that she was doing so because it was expected of her.

Later, as Remembrance was helping him into bed and getting him tuned up for the night, he told her that tomorrow he would begin getting to know the other four members of the Seven a little better, and that he would politely decline Ariane’s assistance in doing so. Ariane would have gloried in the opportunity to furnish Doc with dossiers full of statistics, and hours of personal gossip, about Beled, Kath Two, Tyuratam, and Langobard. But Hu Noah had always felt uncomfortable with such disclosures because they raised the obvious question of what was being disclosed, by the same person, to other curious minds, about Doc.

At five o’clock the next morning, Doc was in the recreation center, walking very slowly on a treadmill, when Beled Tomov came in for his daily workout. Beled’s double take was so amusing that even Doc, who had made an art form of appearing not to know what was going on, was hard-pressed not to laugh at the poor fellow’s expense. Even Remembrance, sitting nearby and reading, felt it best to interpose her book between her face and Beled’s startled gaze for a few moments.

“Lieutenant Tomov,” Doc said, “I thought you’d never drag yourself out of bed.”

Beled remembered his manners and saluted.

“I hope you won’t think me rude if I don’t reciprocate,” Doc said, and nodded down at the treadmill’s handlebars. “I have a death grip on these.”

Beled was looking around for Ariane. Doc decided not to make any comment. “Is it your practice to warm up first?” he asked.

“It is not considered necessary,” Beled answered.

“Ah, too bad, I was thinking we might go for a stroll together,” Doc said, nodding at the empty treadmill next to him.

“That can be done,” Beled allowed, “if I may stroll at a different pace.”

“Suit yourself!” Doc said. “There is a reason I did not attempt this in the wild.”

Within a few minutes the Teklan, now stripped to nothing but a pair of briefs, was running flat-out on the treadmill next to Doc’s, his hands blades, his arms scissoring, the soles of his bare feet skimming across the textured belt of the treadmill rather than pounding it. Engineered and bred to be a match for Neoanders, Teklans were at a genetic disadvantage because they were built like modern humans and did not partake of Neanderthal DNA. Bard could sleep in, eat and drink whatever he wanted, and still be as strong as the much larger Teklan. This was all perfectly academic, since no one seriously expected Beled and Bard to get into a fight, but it was a cultural habit of long standing that Teklans measured themselves against Neoanders, and used the comparison to spur themselves to even greater diligence than would have been their habit anyway.

In a calm and level tone of voice, as though he were sitting on a couch sipping tea, Beled said, “I never thanked you for sending me on the mission just completed. I assume it was your doing. But I had no way to reach you. I thank you now.”

Doc’s eyes strayed to a regularly spaced line of scars wrapping around the small of Beled’s back, some forming deep craters in the twin pilasters of muscle bracketing his spine. Bisecting that formation was a long vertical scar running right over the lumbar vertebrae, where surgeons had gone in and done something — Doc didn’t know the details — to repair damage to the spinal column and, he supposed, add some hardware or bone grafts.

“It was the least I could do,” Doc said. “And given what happened in Tibet, I thought you might be better qualified than most to address certain. . plausible complications that might arise.”

“So we will be operating near the border,” Beled replied. His tone said that he had long ago surmised this and only wanted final confirmation.

“We will go where the investigation takes us,” Doc said.

This surprised Beled slightly, producing a hiccup in his gait, which he spent a few moments resolving.

“These wanderers,” Doc went on, “do not seem to be great respecters of borders, or of anything to do with Treaty, and so I thought it best to construct the Seven of persons of like mind.”

“Is it to be Beringia, then? Or Antimer?”

“Probably both. Antimer, of course, is closer — a short hop from Hawaii, which is today’s destination. But as the trail is warmer in Beringia, I think we shall go there first.”

HAWAII THEY REACHED BEFORE NIGHTFALL, TRAVELING AS PASSENGERS on a colossal TerReForm vehicle, not really an airplane and not really a boat, that skimmed over the surface at an altitude of no more than four meters. Ground effect vehicles of this class were called arks. They had been designed to deliver massive quantities of plant and animal biomass, nurtured at big offshore TerReForm bases such as Magdalena, to littoral destinations, where they could be slammed down into their new homes or else transferred to other vehicles for shipment inland. Only ten of them had ever been built and only six remained in service. This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.

If their theme was to travel unobtrusively, then Ark Madiba was certainly the vehicle for it, being a cavernous, reeking warren of animal pens, fish tanks, bug boxes, and racked peat pots in which exotic plants were growing in stews of manure. A ship making the same run — five thousand kilometers due west — would have taken several days. Provisions would have been needed to feed the beasts, clean the cages, and water the plants. This howling, hammering monstrosity did it in twelve hours, a span brief enough that just about any living thing could survive it without victuals beyond water and perhaps a bit of a snack. In it, the Seven basically disappeared. As the ark’s dozens of turbofans roared into life and it began to chunder across Magdalena’s harbor, the noise level rose to the point where they could do nothing but insert the earplugs they’d been issued and distribute themselves around the cargo hold in places where the stink wasn’t too bad. Doc and Memmie were given special dispensation to enjoy the journey in a tiny capsule near the cockpit, where members of the flight crew could sleep and recreate during multiday flights. The rest of them just tried to make themselves as comfortable as they could and waited for it to be over.

TerReForm had come late to Hawaii. The place was small, idiosyncratic, far away, and complicated — best left for last, after major continents had been booted up. The Hard Rain had loosened the lid on the geological hot spot that had built the islands, reawakening dormant volcanoes on existing islands while causing a seamount southeast of the Big Island to develop, ahead of schedule, into a Bigger Island. This had merged, a thousand years ago, with the former to make a Bigger Island Yet, most of which was still too hot and toxic for TerReForm to bother with. But there was a cove on its north coast, called Mokupuku after a tiny island that had once stood approximately in the same place, around which things were cool and quiet enough to be worth seeding. There, around sunset, Ark Madiba effected a sort of controlled crash landing, skidding to a halt offshore of a small TerReForm installation of the sort that were now scattered all over New Earth.

Such as these were the epicenters of the ecological earthquakes that the human races had, for about three centuries, been unleashing on the surface. Sometimes they got their deliveries straight from the sky, other times, as in this case, from arks dispatched out of the larger surface installations. Older ones were clusters of hemispherical domes because they had been constructed before New Earth even had a breathable atmosphere. Newer ones, like this, had a somewhat more welcoming appearance. But their basic purpose was to work with beasts, bugs, and plants, and so their fragrance and the overall style of their operations lay somewhere on a continuum between farm and zoo, with the odd dash of science lab. None of it would have seemed remarkable, at least on an olfactory level, to the vast majority of human beings who had lived on Old Earth in the millennia leading up to the scientific revolution, but the people who endured that voyage in the cargo hold of the great plane/boat were fortunate that the fuselage wasn’t pressurized and that ocean air could therefore filter through it.

The staff were almost all Moirans, with a sprinkling of Camites and one visiting scientist who looked like a Dinan/Ivyn breed. Obvious to Kath Two, and probably to the others as well, was that her kin had slept long and hard after coming to this place, where they were cut off from the rest of their race while continually exposed to the pheromones, smells, calls, and behaviors of those animals and plants. Resulting epigenetic shifts had rendered them well qualified to do this kind of work, to do it all day long, and to live here indefinitely. This truly was the back of beyond — even more isolated than certain boneyard habitats that had become proverbial for remoteness — and the Moirans here all shared a kind of thousand-yard stare that was only intensified by the fact that they were predominantly green-eyed. They moved slowly, they appeared to think slowly, and they were always reacting to stimuli — auditory? olfactory? imaginary? — that Kath Two could not even detect.

The existence of seven distinct human races, as well as various Aïdan subraces, provided modern society with a rich fund of opportunities for socially awkward happenings. The few hours they spent on the beach at Mokupuku, watching the locals unload samples from the vehicle and hose the shit out of it with pressurized seawater, were long ones for Kath Two as she sensed other members of the Seven glancing back and forth between her and these, and wondering how long it would take Kath Two to go that way if she extended her stay. These people had created, and were self-aware and self-proud of having created, an original culture around the place where they lived. Which for all practical purposes was synonymous with the ecosystem that they were installing in it. Not for them scientific detachment. Was it really wise to station Moirans in a place where they could live as closely with epigenetic animal species as medieval Europeans had with their swine and their fowl? Were these animals scientific specimens, livestock, or pets to them? Kath Two watched their uncomfortably familiar interactions with those animals and they watched her watching them. They had woven into their dreadlocks the bright feathers of birds that on Old Earth would have been called exotic: a word that was useless here, since humans had made them, patterning them after the parrots, toucans, and cockatoos of long-extinct jungles on the theory that if colorful plumage had been useful to birds there, it would be useful to them here. “Inotic”? “Anthroötic”? Anyway, they were weird people, and they were lifers in the sense that no conceivable home could be found for them on the ring. Not unless they went back to sleep for a while and tried to roll back the changes that their environment had bent on them. But that was no easy thing. As long as a Moiran kept changing, she could keep changing, but if she stayed one way for too long she would “take a set,” as the expression went, and find it hard to change back. These, Kath Two suspected, had definitely taken a set. They were obviously interbreeding with the Camite staff, who in racially characteristic fashion had adapted to the place where they had found themselves and were looking for ways to make it work for the people surrounding them.

There was nothing wrong with that. So people on the ring kept saying, because it was the polite thing to say. Nothing wrong with breeds. But the truth of it was that breeds, like weeds, tended to be found in disturbed areas. A sprinkling was nice, especially in sophisticated places like Chainhattan, but seeing a lot of them in one community was a sign that everyone on the ring knew how to read, even if they knew it was impolite to say what they were thinking. The behaviors that these Moirans had invented around everyday things like the sunrise, mealtime, and the interpretation of dreams had a ritualistic quality that to Ariane was obviously fascinating and to Kath Two was a little mortifying. For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who’d spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on. It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people’s lives: a thing Kath Two had heard of, like rabies or Watergate, and she was fascinated to find it stirring in her own mind here of all places. But that was only a passing notion.

Presently her Survey mind kicked in and subsumed all under the scientific method. Here they were at a TerReForm outpost. Many thousands of these existed. Some were huddles of tents presaging more permanent works. Some, like this one, had been around for decades, others for centuries. Some were now abandoned, having served their purpose, and others had become nuclei of RIZes, campuses for gimmicky schools, prison camps, or scientific foundations. A weird culture, utterly nontransferable to the ring, had formed at this one. If it had happened here, something like it must have happened at others. How many? Was New Earth infested with bizarre cultural outliers centered on TerReForm installations? Could you go to what used to be Uzbekistan and find a miniature colony of Ivyn performance artists, developing their own idiosyncratic lichen-based cuisine on the rim of an impact crater the size of Ireland? To what was left of the Iberian Peninsula and visit a colony of Teklan juggernauts making babies with Julian mystics? How far could this go?

Kath Two felt some relief the next morning when, after a pleasant and uneventful campout on the beach, they got back into Ark Madiba, now 90 percent empty, and took off north.

The distance to the south coast of Blue Antimer was half what they had covered the day before. Around midday, when the sun was beating down on the deep eaves and shuttered windows of the military complex above, the ark plowed up the harbor there and settled with a vast sigh into a fresh, sparkling azure chop. A smaller TerReForm post, annexed to the military base, sported a single pier long enough to accommodate an ark. The pilots employed a variety of muttering and whining thrusters to get into its general vicinity. The rest was handled by robot tugs pulling on ropes wrapped around massive bitts. The five humans who’d been sharing the cargo hold moved forward to get out of the way of the local TerReForm staff, who boarded the ark, along with a couple of cargo-loading grabbs, to take charge of what little cargo remained: racks of cages housing large carnivores. It was a mix of canids and felids, with a few big snakes. They’d been stashed in different parts of the hold so that they wouldn’t wear themselves out menacing one another. Anyone who was connected with Survey, or, for that matter, who knew anything about the TerReForm at all, would understand what this meant: the ecosystem of Antimer was far more developed than that of Hawaii, and was now producing small fauna and herbivores at a pace that required the introduction of bigger predators to keep them in check.

The harbor was an almost perfectly circular impact crater with only a small outlet to the sea. Most of its circumference was claimed by the military base. From somewhere in that zone, a launch cut across the disk of blue water and came up alongside the ark’s cockpit door. The Seven descended to it by means of a folding stairway, and thus passed out of TerReForm jurisdiction without any formalities, or even contact with the local staff. Half an hour later they were eating lunch in a private officers’ dining room adjoined to a mess hall, and an hour after that they were aboard an airplane — a conventional, powered military craft — that took off from a runway blasted into the stony shore of the island a few miles away and banked northward after it had gained enough altitude to clear the snowcapped peaks along Antimer’s central ridge. From that height the eye was no longer beguiled by the peaks and valleys that, at a smaller scale, made the place seem like an Old Earth mountain range. Here it was possible, for those looking out the windows on the left side of the airplane, to see a thousand kilometers westward. The curvature of the archipelago’s spine made it obvious that this was the rim of a huge impact crater, created by a big chunk of moon that had come in on a somewhat northward trajectory and pushed a high arc of seafloor and ejecta up above sea level. To the south, a smaller archipelago, curved the opposite way, hinted at the crater’s lower rim. That, however, was not visible from the plane’s windows. Instead they all gazed west, tracing the arc of mountains as it grew higher and the land beneath it broadened. Somewhere along the way it was sliced by the invisible line of 166 Thirty. Bard pressed his heavy brow against the window and looked long and thoughtfully at his homeland, seeming to identify hills and bays that he remembered, thinking of vineyards. Then Antimer fell away behind and they flew for some hours over the featureless Pacific.

The water was too deep in these parts for the Hard Rain to have visibly reshaped anything, barring another hyperimpact like the one that had created Antimer, and so the general shape of things was little changed until they verged on the continental shelf, just a hundred kilometers or so south of what had once been Alaska’s coastline. In the shallows between that and the foothills of the coastal range — a strip of sea and land between one and two hundred kilometers wide — visible changes had been wrought. But the coastline was basically where it had always been. More effective than direct bolide strikes in the reshaping of the land had been the disappearance of the glaciers and the endless series of tsunamis that had been funneled into this broad bight over the millennia. The one hurled up by the Antimer impact had overtopped the mountains themselves, cresting over what had formerly been glacier-bound peaks and slamming down far inland to boil dry on the hot rocks. Since the beginning of the Cooling Off, about eleven hundred years ago, and particularly since humans had reconstituted the oceans by dropping comets on the surface, snow had begun falling on those peaks again. But it took a long time for glaciers to form, and it would be millennia more before cracked rivers of old blue ice oozed down the mountain valleys to touch the sea.

When that day came, the settlement of Qayaq would have to move out of the way. It was built on a heap of rubble on the western bank of a cold river that hurtled down out of the mountains, just at the place where it emptied into the Pacific. There was not enough space between sea and snow for an airfield of the size Qayaq required, and so they had constructed one out of the mix of fiber and ice known as pykrete. This floated just offshore, a perfectly flat slab laced with tubes through which refrigerated coolant was circulated to keep it solid — not a difficult task in a place where the temperature of sea and air alike was only a few degrees above freezing. Other than that, nothing was really here. Even the TerReForm presence was minimal, it being easier for TerReForm staff to operate from boats.

The Qayaq airfield had to exist because of the Ashwall. West of here, all the way to 166 Thirty and beyond, the chain of volcanoes formerly known as the Kenai and Alaska Peninsulas and the Aleutian chain were in a nearly continual state of eruption. Any pilot meaning to fly north or south across the sixtieth parallel, in the zone bracketed by 166 Thirty on the west and the Rockies on the east, had to make allowances in the flight plan for the likelihood that their path would abruptly be barred by a plume of volcanic ash hurled into the stratosphere by any of a hundred active volcanoes lying upwind. Airplanes were expensive, even more so than they had been on Old Earth. They were too large to manufacture in the ring and transport down to the surface and so they, and other large productions such as arks and ships, had to be built in factories on the surface. Typically these lay on the outskirts of Cradle sockets. In any case, planes had to be babied, given that high-capacity turbofan engines were extraordinarily difficult to make. Every flight plan had to include a possible emergency landing on the artificial floe of Qayaq, which in turn had to be fully capable of hosting big airplanes. So what had been conceived as an emergency landing site had become something of a hub, where planes tended to land just because it was convenient and predictable. In any case it happened to be the final destination of the military flight on which the Seven had hitched a ride, so they had to get off here anyway.

It was about as warm and welcoming as you would expect of a forward airbase constructed on a slab of ice. A low cloud layer kept it in eternal twilight and converted all colors to shades of gray. Across a strip of water, the town sprawled on its rubble pile like a dead starfish. Beyond that was a black wall that they understood to be the lower slopes of the coastal range, carpeted now with young trees but too obscured by mist and gloom to be identifiable as such. Higher up, just below the cloud ceiling, some of these were dusted with fresh snow, or perhaps just ice condensed directly from the fog. Had those clouds been absent, as they were for a few cumulative weeks out of each year, the Seven would have been able to look up above snowcapped peaks to a sky made black by the Ashwall. One of the big volcanoes on Kenai had been erupting copiously for two weeks.

The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong. Anything to escape the sense of being trapped between ice and sea below, fog and ash above, the Pacific to the south, and the mountain wall to the north. Instead of which Tyuratam Lake announced that he was going into the city to sample its drinking establishments. He did so in a manner so bluff as to make everyone else feel faintly idiotic for even thinking of doing otherwise. Kath Two, Beled, and Langobard said they were in. Doc demurred on grounds of wanting a nap, and Memmie, as always, stayed with Doc. Ariane seemed peeved and conflicted. The politics of race had been gradually coming into play during the journey from Cradle, and now Ty was pushing harder.

According to a five-thousand-year-old understanding shared by most who were not Aïdans, and some who were, Ty was going to be the leader of the group. This was partly because he was a native Beringian who knew his way around the place, but it was mostly just because he was the Dinan, and being the leader was a thing that Dinans did. Ariane had been organizing things — it was she who had somehow strung together the series of flights that had taken them from Cradle to Qayaq — and in the early going she’d had Doc’s ear. It had seemed impossible to talk to Doc without going through her. But since then Doc had made a point of spending time privately with the others, and Ariane, after a day or so of confusion and irritation, had accepted this. The natural constraints of group travel had kept them all together. Now Ty was mounting an unauthorized expedition to the mainland, and Ariane was perhaps torn between the desire for that private cup of noodles and the fear that she would miss something.

She ended up coming with them. They broke open one of the chests of gear that had been with them since Cayambe and found warm clothes. Then they hiked across the ice to some steps that led down to a little port for water taxis, and made the trip — just a few hundred meters — to the shore of Beringia. A rambling stair, carved into the rock by mining robots, took them from the water’s edge up to the place where the slope became gentle enough to walk on, and then they found themselves looking down a main street that ran inland for all of about a hundred meters before dead-ending against a vertical wall of rock: a boulder that had been forcibly embedded in the flank of a larger mountain. Even from here they could tell that the boulder was a piece of the moon. Efforts had been made to pep the place up by making use of various light-emitting technologies, which now festooned the fronts of the establishments and bled lurid, saturated colors into the translucent air. It could be inferred from the nature of their advertising that the typical customer was military and lonely.

“I SOMETIMES WONDER,” BARD SAID, GRIMACING AT THE TASTE OF the local cider, “whether the Eves, being women, really got the connection between the male visual system and sex drive.” He was looking sidelong at a naked lady at the opposite end of the room.

Kath Two had little interest in the naked lady, but she had turned her back on the rest of the group, a minute earlier, to watch a disturbance. Now she turned to face Bard. “Well, they were women. They had spent their whole lives under that gaze. Everything they’d ever been taught about how to dress, how to carry themselves—”

“Yes,” Ariane said. “On, if memory serves, Day 287 of the Epic, we have the ‘reality television’ conversation in which Ivy talks specifically about the importance of Dinah’s persona and its treatment in social media.”

“How can you remember shit like that?” Ty asked.

Kath Two gave him a somewhat reproachful look. “How can you not? That conversation took place only minutes before your Eve met the love of her life.”

Ty thought about it. “First bolo?” His eyes flicked away from the naked lady toward a screen above the bar, where a scene from the Epic had been playing with the sound off: Dinah in a space suit, going out on the exterior of Endurance to figure out what was wrong with a misbehaving robot. No one was watching it.

“Yes. First bolo,” Kath Two said, slightly mollified.

Bard, for his part, was focusing a little too hard on the tiny bubbles in his cider, the dents and scratches in the surface of the table, the electrical wiring bracketed to the ceiling. It was different for him. Ty and Beled could look all they want — that was, after all, the whole point of the establishment. For a Neoander, however, to stare in that way at a woman — she looked like a Dinan or perhaps a Dinan/Teklan breed — was a different matter. Not as far as the proprietors were concerned. The place was actually run, and presumably owned, by women. But there were other customers who had marked Bard when he had come in and who were devoting almost as much attention to him as to the dancers. Had he not been in the company of a larger than normal Teklan and a middle-aged Dinan man with a certain hard-to-pin-down “don’t fuck with me” vibe, there might have been trouble. A few of the other patrons might have joined forces to find out whether the stories about Neoanders were tall tales. As matters stood, the only thing Bard had to worry about was being glared at a lot, and possibly coming down with something because of whatever feral strain of yeast had infected the cider.

The template, and the general set of expectations, for communities of this type had been set beginning around five hundred years after Zero, when Cradle had become sufficiently crowded that there had simply been no choice but to spread outward from it. The first outlying habitats had been only a few kilometers away on Cleft. In fact, nearly all settlement had been confined to Cleft until early in the Second Millennium, when the industrial base had developed to the point where other rocks could be colonized. Many more such communities had been depicted in fictional entertainments than had actually existed. This didn’t matter, though. As the almost totally factitious and romanticized Old West had been to American culture of the twentieth century, so those yarns were to the people of the habitat ring. So in the rare cases when actual settlements of that type were constructed de novo, as here, they tended to be built so as to meet the expectations of people who their whole lives had been watching fiction serials about their Second Millennium precursors.

Even so, there were some surprises. Not so much the fact that it was female-owned. That wasn’t uncommon in the adult entertainment industry, and anyway some selection bias was at work — they had chosen to sit down in this place because it didn’t feel as creepy to Kath Two and Ariane as some of the others. More unexpected was the fact that as many as half of the people in there were Indigens. Those who weren’t — ones who had come across the water from the ice slab floating offshore — were identifiable by haircut, clothing, and bearing. But their numbers were matched by shaggier and more colorful characters whose professions and reasons for being in Qayaq could only be guessed at. It was safe to assume that many of these had come up the coast from a RIZ about twenty kilometers away to engage in trade or other forms of intercourse. But Qayaq itself was bigger and more crowded than they had expected, suggesting growth in population and commerce exceeding the limits set by Treaty. Sheltered by mountains and hidden most of the time under dense clouds, an illicit city was growing up here. If it was happening here, it was happening elsewhere in the Blue part of the world. Red had to know about it. Cloud cover alone couldn’t keep such a place secret. Why did Red not file diplomatic protests, then? Because Red was probably doing the same thing, perhaps on an even larger scale, and Red and Blue had come to a tacit agreement not to make trouble.

How many humans lived on the surface? The official numbers for the Blue part of it were about a million, mostly concentrated around Cradle sockets. Maybe the real numbers were much greater.

When they were finally approached, it was by a young Ivyn man with long hair and a wispy beard. Had he been spotted in the same location five thousand or, for that matter, ten thousand years ago, he would have passed for one whose ancestors had crossed from Asia over the original Beringia and flooded into North and South America. He had the wit to understand that the visitors were looking at him warily but the grit to walk to them anyway. He kept his hands casually down to his sides, palms slightly out, as if he had caught himself in the instant before throwing them up and exclaiming “What the fuck are you people doing here?” He was alert and mildly amused. As he drew closer it became clear that he was taller than he’d seemed at first; they’d been misled by his slight build and his stooped posture.

They might have asked the same question — what the fuck are you doing here? — of this young Ivyn. Judging from his clothes — five-year-old fashions from Chainhattan customized with bits of fur, bone, and animal skin — he was an Indigen with commercial links to Qayaq. Maybe the smartest kid in his RIZ, the child of eccentric Ivyn dreamers, looking for things to do with his brain. He’d been hanging out at the bar with some Dinan chums, but all of them had seemed more embarrassed than stimulated by the nude dancers.

“You guys headed over the mountains?” he asked. He had noted their clothing: brand new, high quality, extremely warm.

It seemed like a simple icebreaker to everyone except Ty, who said, “We don’t need a guide,” before any of the others could answer.

That set the kid back just a little. “A guide,” he repeated, as if Ty had just brought a peculiar but somewhat interesting idea into the conversation. “No, I didn’t really take you for people who would hire a guide.” Meaning adventurous — and, by Treaty, illegal — tourists from the ring.

This left open the question of what he did take them for, and so it was a little awkward until he went on: “If you’re going to the other side of the mountains, I could show you something.”

“Something special? One of a kind? Something you show to people all the time?” Ty asked.

The kid looked shy. “I have been there twice before. It’s interesting.”

“Been there with paying customers?” Ty asked. “Because—” but he was interrupted by a hand on his arm from Ariane.

“He called it interesting,” she said. “He is not motivated by money.”

“Very well,” Ty said.

“What is your name?” Ariane asked him.

The kid put up his deflector screens and said, “Einstein.”

Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer.

“What makes this thing so interesting?”

“It’s a fact,” Einstein said.

“I don’t understand,” Kath Two said. “It’s a fact that it’s interesting or—” but then she stopped, because she had figured it out. An apostrophe belonged before that word. He meant that it was an artifact. A surviving object from the pre-Zero world.

“I would go see that,” Ty allowed.

THEY UNDERSTOOD EINSTEIN A LITTLE BETTER THE NEXT DAY when Kath Two flew all of them over the mountains in a glider and they saw just how difficult it must have been for foot travelers like him to have reached the site of the artifact. It raised the question of how he had ever found it in the first place. “Blind luck after getting hopelessly lost in a whiteout” seemed the most likely answer, but perhaps his people had combed the inland slopes of these mountains in a systematic way.

They were traveling in the same type of glider they had used on the leg from the Cayambe socket to Magdalena. Because it had no engines, it could fly through the Ashwall without mechanical damage, and because it traveled more slowly than a jet, they didn’t have to worry quite so much about Kath Two’s windshield getting fogged by abrasion from microscopic bits of rock. They did have to be somewhat concerned about the fact that she could not see where she was going as they flew through the densest part of the cloud. But she knew the altitudes of the nearby peaks and stayed well above them. Once the view had cleared a little bit, she was able to take advantage of the ash, which worked in the air somewhat like a drop of ink in swirling water, making currents and vortices obvious.

Einstein seemed exotic to the Seven in that he had been born on the surface and had never left it. This was his first journey in an aircraft of any kind. Seeing the mountains from above demanded some mental adjustments, which he made quickly. And in any case he knew the latitude and longitude of the artifact. After they had passed over the crest of the mountains and gotten into clear air, he directed Kath Two toward a high valley slung between the coastal range and a subsidiary crest beyond. Its upper reaches were devoid of life, but farther down the slope, tundra and low scrub were beginning to take hold. That these had been seeded from space was obvious from their regular spacing. Robot pods had fallen out of the sky in precise geometric formations and slammed into the ground in a hexagonal array before breaking open to spill their seed on the ground. Some wag in the bureaucratic bowels of TerReForm had dubbed these things ONANs: Orbital Neo-Agricultural Nacelles. As the years went by and the ecosystem spread out from the ONANs, the hexagonal pattern disappeared into the natural chaos of life. But in a place like this where plants grew slowly it would still be visible centuries from now.

Kath Two made a few passes up and down the length of the valley and identified a stretch of smooth seasonal riverbed, paved with frozen ash-paste, where she thought she could land and take off. The glider’s energy storage devices had been charged up the night before and were still at 100 percent. So she made another long orbit to bleed off velocity and then landed while traveling in an uphill direction. She made a gentle touch first, just to verify that the riverbed was in fact frozen solid, then set the glider down decisively. The wingtips dragged at the very end and there was some concern that one of them might strike a protruding rock, but she was able to avoid this and bring the craft to a full stop without damage. Beled and Bard climbed out first, and jogged in opposite directions to the two wingtips. After picking these up off the ground they were able to rotate the glider by walking clockwise in a large circle. Kath Two told them when to stop.

Ty got out and opened a cargo hatch on the side, releasing a couple of siwis that began moving across the ground in their distinctive elbowing style of locomotion, as well as a couple of buckies that began rolling about seeking high ground from which to establish observation posts and communications links. Their main objective now was to get the glider tied down so it wouldn’t blow away in a stray gale. The siwis were essentially earth sciences robots, good at digging and tunneling. In a few minutes’ time, with a bit of guidance from Doc, they were able to plant anchors in some sturdy-looking boulders flanking the riverbed. Ty and Bard ran ropes from those to the ends of the glider’s wings and made it fast while Beled stalked restlessly around the perimeter. Kath Two and Ariane deployed the grabb that Doc used to get about in places like this. It served the same function as a wheelchair, only with legs, so that it could pick its way along terrain where even able-bodied humans would have difficulty making headway. Meanwhile Memmie got him bundled up and ready. Einstein watched it all and asked only a few hundred questions, most of which were cheerfully answered by Doc himself. Einstein would have seen much of this sort of technology on videos in the RIZ, but this was his first direct experience of it.

He knew better than to ask questions about the weapons. Kath Two, Ty, Beled, and Bard all had katapults of different descriptions. They did not arm themselves like soldiers going into war, but more in the precautionary style of Survey personnel venturing into places where large predators or even bad Indigens might be prowling around. Kath Two carried the same type of small katapult that she’d been packing on her recently concluded Survey mission: a sidearm that would use electromagnetic propulsion to hurl one particular kind of ambot toward a large, warm target. Steering itself toward the big infrared blob, the ambot would land on it, like a space probe touching down on an asteroid, and crawl around looking for ways to make it miserable. Any large animal with more than two or three of these things on its body would have other things on its mind than eating Kath Two. Tyuratam Lake had a somewhat older, heavier, and more battered version of a similar weapon. It had two magazines, one of which was exactly the same as Kath Two’s. The other presumably housed ambots of a different type, maybe for use against humans. Beled was slung with a considerably bigger two-handed katapult, whose long flexible magazine was draped about him like a bandolier. It was overkill, but it was what he had, and the weight didn’t bother him. Langobard, in a style traditional among Red Neoanders, simply had a menagerie of different ambots — perhaps a dozen all told — crawling around on his body, and a katapult strapped to the underside of his forearm, like a splint. When he told it to begin firing, which he would do by means of a control in the palm of his hand, the ambots would get word of it over their network and begin trying to find their way to his elbow so that they could insinuate themselves into the katapult’s projection mechanism. It seemed a bit indirect, but it had the advantage that when the ambots had nothing else to do they could patrol Bard’s body looking for foreign ambots that had been projected at him by the enemy, and join battle with them.

All of which, while fascinating to Einstein, and indeed to anyone who stopped to think about it, was so routine to the Seven that no one made any mention of it. The behavior of the ambots infesting Bard was somewhat novel and distracting at first to those who’d had little exposure to Red ways, but as they began their trudge down the valley it became clear that the ambots were all executing a program that cashed out in a few repetitive, stereotypical behaviors such as perching on his shoulders or running rings around his midsection. Sometimes a few would make a bid to form a train, but there weren’t really enough of them.

During spare moments in the trip from Cradle, Beled and Bard and Ty had sat down together in private rooms, opened up the equipment cases, and made efforts to get the different ambots accustomed to each other, so that the Blue-programmed ones that most of them were using wouldn’t identify Bard’s more Reddish ammunition as innately hostile, and vice versa. So far it seemed to be working. When the shape of the valley funneled them all together, as when squeezing through a passage between boulders, Bard’s ambots seemed to catch the scent of the ones reposing in Beled’s snaky bandolier, and would crawl around to that side of Bard’s anatomy and aim their sensors in that direction, but it did not seem as though hostilities were about to break out. Since any one communications system was likely to be jammed or hacked by the opposition, your more highly developed ambots communicated with one another in a number of different ways, including sound. Ultrasound was preferred, but all frequencies were used, and so it was occasionally possible to hear Bard’s botmo spewing noise as it tried to evaluate, or possibly just to confuse, the Blue botmo all around it. Sometimes it was a hiss and sometimes it was a mathematical tune played too fast for the human ear to process it. In any case, nothing — at least, nothing audible to humans — came back from Beled’s, Ty’s, or Kath Two’s arsenals. Broadly speaking, Blue armaments makers were biased toward the “lots of dumb ambots” philosophy while Red ones went the other way.

On broken terrain, Doc on his grabb made better time than anyone, with the possible exception of Einstein, who was a gifted scrambler. The two of them would surge ahead and then Beled would put on a loping burst and catch up, obeying some kind of instinct to take point. Langobard seemed more inclined to hang back and act as a rear guard, which meant he spent more time in the company of the slower Ariane. Sometimes he simply picked her up and carried her over rough patches. The valley had been flat higher up, but they had to negotiate a steeper transition down to the altitude where vegetation had been seeded by the ONANs. It then became easier going, though they had to find open trails among the dense low shrubs that had taken root in the ashy soil. Their feet and their noses told them that the ground had been preseeded with some kind of microorganism that had presumably been designed to convert volcanic ash — which tended to have toxic stuff like sulfur in it — to a more wholesome kind of soil.

Einstein had played his cards close to his chest until they had deplaned. Since then, he had been providing Doc, and anyone else close enough to eavesdrop, with his own kind of speculative backstory for the thing they were going to visit.

“You’ll see when we get there,” he said more than once, perhaps betraying some uncertainty as to the correctness of his theory — a word he knew but pronounced to rhyme with “story.”

The phrase “I looked it up” was in frequent use by Einstein. He had no idea who Doc was, and just saw him as a very old man who was willing to answer questions. To answer them, but also to ask them in a way that was challenging without being brusque.

“They had these wheeled vehicles—”

“Cars?”

“No, the big box-shaped ones.”

“Trucks, or lorries,” Doc said.

“My theory is that this ’fact used to be one of those.”

“But a minute ago,” Doc observed, in the mildest possible tone of complaint, “you were saying it got hurled over the mountains by a tsunami.”

“Yeah.”

“That would imply that it had been bobbing around somewhere in the ocean.”

“That’s my theory.”

“Would it not have sunk to the bottom? The boxes were not airtight. Sooner or later it would have filled up with water.”

“The inside of what used to be the box is all coated with black residue,” Einstein offered, also pronouncing that word incorrectly.

“What conclusion do you draw from that?”

“I looked it up, and these trucks were used to carry all kinds of goods. Not just heavy stuff but bags of potato chips, athletic shoes, toys. My theory is that this was one of those. It was near the waterfront when it got hit by one of the earliest tsunamis, a small one that dragged it out into the ocean. And it didn’t sink, see, because—”

“Because it was full of bags of potato chips or something,” Doc said.

“Right, and it didn’t burn, at least not right away, because it was in the water. But then later it got caught up in a really big tsunami, like the one that created Antimer, which heaved it right up over the mountains and slammed it down. . right over there. We should almost be able to see it.”

“Whereupon its contents burned, leaving the black residue,” Doc said, gently emphasizing the pronunciation.

“Yeah, and the paint burned off and the tires and all of the other stuff that wasn’t steel.”

“Would it not then have rusted away, during five thousand years?”

“I looked it up,” Einstein said. “The place was very dry. And this truck was probably buried. Yeah, it rusted some. But it was preserved until the Cloudy Century.”

Einstein must have looked that up too; the Cloudy Century was roughly 4300–4400, after the oceans had been reinstated but while everything was still quite hot.

“Then, after rivers began flowing again, erosion exposed it. And yeah, the exposed parts are rusted all right. Some parts are of a different metal though.”

“Aluminum,” Doc said.

But Einstein’s discourse was trailing off as he kept looking at the device that was supposed to tell them their latitude and longitude. He was giving every appearance of being lost.

Finally he made a decisive move about fifty meters down-valley, penetrating a bank of tall shrubs. The others followed him. Visibility was poor and so they heard his reaction before seeing the ’fact. “What the—?!”

“What is it?” Ty demanded.

“Someone dug it up!” Einstein exclaimed.

They found themselves standing around the rim of a pit perhaps half a dozen meters in diameter, and the same in depth. Marks in the soil made it obvious that this had been excavated with shovels, and vague footprints proved they had been wielded by humans and not robots. At the deepest part of the excavation, the gray soil had been stained red with rust. But the bottom of the pit was otherwise vacant; whatever had been rusting there was entirely gone. Only a few scraps of hard black plastic, and fragments of steel that had been altogether converted into rust, proved that Einstein hadn’t been lying to them all along.

Ty let himself down carefully into the hole, prodded in the wet, rusty mush with his toe, then reached into it and pulled something out. After shaking off lashings of mud, he underhanded it out of the pit to Beled, who picked it out of the air. It was a bent black cylinder.

“The day is not lost,” Ty announced. “All of us will get to handle an actual ’fact. That, my friends, is a five-thousand-year-old radiator hose.”

A few emotions were competing for the mental energies of the Seven: utter confusion about who had dug this hole, and why. Empathy for the deeply embarrassed Einstein, who had promised them an entire truck. Disappointment that the only things left of it were a rust stain and a radiator hose. A mild sense of alarm at the idea that inexplicable persons with shovels were somewhere about. Swamping all of these, however, like a tsunami cresting over the mountains, was the awareness that they were in the presence of a real artifact from before Zero. As they had established on the flight up here, Doc had seen such things three times in his life, not counting museum exhibits. None of the others had ever seen one at all.

And so they all stood there in silence for several minutes, passing it from hand to hand, thinking about it: the factory where it had been manufactured, the engineers who had designed it, the workers who had assembled the vehicle, the driver who had piloted it around, and the day that the Hard Rain had begun. As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.

Beled, after handling the ’fact for a minute and gazing at it inscrutably, handed it off to Kath Two. He withdrew from the edge of the pit and began circling it restlessly. After a minute he called out to the others, but not in a voice of alarm.

About ten meters away, at a break in the slope that afforded a bit of a view down the valley, a sort of totem had been erected: a length of aluminum tubing, white with oxidation, projecting vertically out of the ground to a height about equal to that of a person. At its top, lashed on with a few scraps of copper wire, a circular object: a steel hoop mostly obscured by marred and pitted black stuff, a crossbar through its middle with loose wires dangling from orifices.

“Steering wheel,” Ty said. “The plastic coating burned but the steel rim held it together.”

“Who put it here?” Ariane asked. She was the last to arrive, and had to insinuate herself among taller members of the Seven in order to get a clear view. As a result she nearly tripped over a long, low mound of disturbed earth. The steering wheel totem had been erected at one end of it.

“Whoever buried the driver,” Ty answered.

Doc looked at Einstein. “Were you aware of the existence of human remains?”

Einstein held his hands up. “You have to understand, the truck came down like a dart. Nose first.”

“Naturally,” Doc said. “All the weight was in the engine block. The box, as we have established, was filled with something light.”

“The only part that was sticking out was maybe this much of the bumper, and some of the box.” Einstein was holding his hands about a meter apart. “The place where the human was—”

“The cab,” Ty said.

“—was deep underground. You have to understand, all this digging—”

“Came as a complete surprise to you. Yes, we understand that,” Doc said.

“When were you last here?” Langobard asked.

“Two years ago,” Einstein said. “But you have to understand: if someone from my RIZ had gone up here with shovels and dug up a whole truck, I’d have heard about it.”

“Where’s the incentive?” Ariane asked.

Everyone looked at her.

“As it was — in situ — the truck was priceless. Legally or not, tourists would have paid any amount of money to come and view it. To dig it up makes sense — so that tourists could get a full view of it. But—”

“But instead it has been completely dismantled,” Doc said, “and everything of value taken away.”

“Of value?! I don’t understand what you mean by that word,” Ariane said.

“The Diggers were after the engine block,” Doc said, as if this would answer her question — which it by no means did. But after a few moments she had a thought.

“Ah,” Ariane said, “you think it was looters.”

Bard was right with her. “You think,” he supposed, “that the engine block is now sitting in a display case in the private gallery of some wealthy collector on Cradle.”

“That is not an unreasonable supposition,” Doc admitted, in a tone that, however, made it clear that no such idea had actually crossed his mind. “But it strikes me as unusual for looters to go to so much trouble to give a ceremonial burial to the driver.”

“If it was not valuable as loot — as a collector’s item — then what possible value could the engine block have had?” Kath Two asked.

“It was valuable,” Doc said, “as iron. As a several-hundred-kilogram sample of pure metal that could be melted down and cast into other shapes.”

“Is there anything in the universe less valuable than iron?” Bard scoffed. “We have been living inside of giant chunks of it for five thousand years.”

“We have,” Doc agreed, and with a small movement of his hand caused his grabb-chair to withdraw from the grave site and begin picking its way back toward the excavation. Remembrance threw an unreadable look over her shoulder and followed him.

They reconvened and viewed the pit through fresh eyes. Ty pointed out a place where the gray ash was freckled with tiny red-brown spots, and guessed that someone had worked there with a hacksaw, sprinkling iron sawdust on the ground, and that the tiny flakes had rusted. Slipping the ash between his fingers he produced a few bright sparks of clean metal. Bard found a scarred wedge of dense wood, battered on its fat end with many hammer blows, and guessed it had been used to part the engine block into pieces that could be more easily carried. Beled, continuing to circle the perimeter, came up with a pole of hard wood somewhat more than a meter long, neatly rounded at one end, snapped off sharp at the other. “They broke one of their shovels,” he said. Holding the pole before him, he rotated it until he was able to see an inscription that had been stamped into the wood. “Srap Tasmaner,” he announced.

“Let me see that,” Doc said.

Beled handed it to him. Doc gazed at it for a while without speaking. The longer he looked at this seemingly trivial piece of debris, the more he drew attention to himself, until the others were all standing there silently watching him. His deeply hooded eyes were downcast and it was difficult to tell whether he was focusing all of his mental powers on the thing, or fast asleep.

Finally he rotated the pole until its sharp end was pointed downward, and used it to scratch a letter into the dirt.

C

“You read this, Beled, as a letter S, but as you probably learned in school, it was once used to represent a number of sounds including the one we write as K.”

He wrote a K beneath the C.

“The next few letters are familiar and we write them the same way in Anglisky.”

CRA

KRA

“You misread the fourth letter as a defective P. A natural mistake since we no longer use the old glyph F, which it resembles. Instead we use the Cyrillic phi.”

CRAF

KRAФ

“The next two letters are TS, for which we have a more wieldy one-letter substitute in Anglisky.”

CRAFTS

KRAФЦ

“The next three are the same in English and Anglisky.”

CRAFTSMAN

KRAФЦMAN

“Craftsman,” Beled said, reading the bottom row. “But what of the R at the end?”

CRAFTSMAN ^®

“When it’s enclosed in a little circle, it’s not a letter to be pronounced at all, but a sign that this is a sort of commercial trademark. Or I should say ‘was.’ It was a trademark five thousand years ago, apparently.”

About halfway through this lecture on ancient and modern orthography, Ariane had become intensely focused, and for the last part of it had been holding one hand over her mouth. “I have seen its like in the Epic!” she exclaimed through her fingers. “New Caird’s landing on Ymir. Vyacheslav went out the airlock to clear ice from the docking port. He used a shovel just like this one.”

“You are saying—” Kath Two prompted Doc.

“I am saying that this shovel handle is itself a five-thousand-year-old ’fact that could fetch a high price on Cradle,” Doc said, lifting it up and brushing the dirt from its broken end. Ariane snapped a picture of it and thumbed at her tablet. “It was thrown away,” Doc continued, “because it was of no use to its owners, who knew that they could get wooden poles anywhere in Beringia just by cutting down a tree.”

“What sort of people think that iron is valuable and five-thousand-year-old artifacts are garbage?” Kath Two asked. She was interrupted by a faint high-pitched beeping sound that was emanating from all of them at once.

They had all been issued earpieces so that they could communicate if they became separated. Most had removed these and pocketed them, or simply draped them around their necks, but Beled still had his in. He pressed one hand to his ear and held the other in front of him, as if checking a timepiece. But he was actually looking at a small flat screen that was strapped to his wrist. He then pivoted to gaze up the valley in the direction from which they had come, but the view was blocked by foliage and terrain.

“Large animals moving in their vicinity have been detected by the buckies,” he said, “and one of them has gone silent.”

“Yesterday,” Doc said, “when young Einstein here proposed we make a junket into the mountains to have a look at an artifact, I was resistant to the idea at first. I saw it as a mere diversion, of a touristical nature. I gave my assent to the idea because I saw it as an opportunity to carry out a dry run for the procedures we would be using later, when we got started for real. I see now, however, that it is the main event.”

THE DIGGERS HAD ERECTED ANOTHER TOTEM NEXT TO THE GLIDER’S side door: a circular hoop of bent branches, thrust into the air on a pole made from a debarked sapling about five meters tall. The Seven recognized it as a more naturalistic version of the steering wheel totem that had been placed at the driver’s grave. Did it have some meaning to these people? It was difficult, now, not to read it as a glyph symbolizing the Agent’s penetration of the moon. But it also looked like the Greek letter phi, which had made its way into the Anglisky alphabet as a substitute for both F and PH. As such it could have been an initial for just about anything — Fire? Fear? Philosophy?

Before they had moved from the site of the dig, Bard, Beled, and Ty had scouted the vicinity, spiraling out from it in larger and larger circles until satisfied that no one was nearby. They had found footprints and other signs that someone had been through very recently — perhaps watching them as they had tried to make sense of the disappearance of the truck.

As they had retraced their steps up the valley, then, they had spied sentinels, perched in places that were meant to be conspicuous, atop boulders and rubble mounds flanking the streambed, leaning on lances whose steel heads gleamed softly in the blue-gray light sifting down out of the overcast sky. Others carried strange-looking contraptions of cables, pulleys, and bent steel, which Beled identified as powerful bows. From this distance it was difficult to say much about their appearance. More than a few were redheads; the men tended to be bearded; they wore clothing that in some cases was out-and-out camouflage, in others was just meant to blend in with natural backgrounds.

When they had passed between the first pair of sentries, Beled, on point, had held up his hand, signaling that they should stop. The obvious concern had been that by going any farther they would begin placing these people to their rear, effectively allowing themselves to be surrounded. But the sentries, apparently understanding this, now began to move up the slope abreast of them, leaving them a clear exit.

Or at least a clear pedestrian exit. By the time the Seven and their young guide came in view of the totem raised above the glider, it had been surrounded by perhaps two dozen Diggers. They had pulled all the equipment cases out of the cargo hatch, laid them out on the ground in neat rows, and begun going through their contents. Some of them were making lists of what they found, taking inventory of what they seemingly thought of as their new property.

“I take it you have never seen or heard of such people, Einstein,” Doc said.

“Rumors. But not this many. We just thought they were strays from other RIZes.”

“Well, as you can see, they are something else,” Doc said. He raised his voice slightly, addressing the whole group. “Now that we’ve had some time for the shock to wear off, I think you all understand what we are looking at. These people are not descendants of the Seven Eves. They are rootstock. Their ancestors survived the Hard Rain and somehow found a way to live belowground until quite recently. Most likely they are cousins of yours, Tyuratam Lake.”

It took Ty a few moments to understand that Doc was alluding to events five thousand years in the past. “By way of Rufus MacQuarie?” he said.

Doc blinked in assent. “Dinah’s father, as is well documented in the Epic, went belowground with some like-minded persons. Efforts have been made, during the last century, to find their underground home and learn what became of them. All unavailing.”

“Perhaps they didn’t wish to be found,” Ty said.

“How long have you known of this?” Ariane asked.

“How long have you known of it, Ariane?” Doc returned. “Did the unusual orders you were given not fill you with a certain amount of curiosity?”

“Of course! But I never—”

“Many of us have wondered, have speculated. The first solid evidence that I know of emerged about a year ago. Prior to that there were rumors, as Einstein says, but they could be more easily explained by supposing that some renegade Sooners were running around in the boondocks, living as they pleased. Or that they were forward scouts sent by Red to probe Blue territory. Indeed, Survey found examples of both.” Doc’s eyes strayed toward Beled, who met his gaze. “Red has made surprisingly deep incursions into central Asia, for example. Lieutenant Tomov may bear witness to that, if you can draw him out on the subject. Like many who have fought, he finds it tiresome to converse with ones who haven’t.”

“So you have been engaged in a systematic investigation for at least a year” was the only thing about all of that that Ariane seemed to find interesting.

“As have you, Ariane. It is just that you didn’t know it until now. I myself was not really sure until—” Doc looked over at Memmie, who had taken custody of the shovel handle and fallen into the habit of employing it as a walking staff. Doc got a faintly mischievous look on his face. “Until I held in my hands the Stick of Srap Tasmaner.”

“How much do we know about them?” Langobard asked.

“As of this moment,” Doc said, “the eight of us know a hundred times as much about these people as all other Spacers put together.”

“Spacers?”

Again the mischievous look. “In our discussions — our entirely hypothetical discussions — we found ourselves needing some term that we could use to denote the descendants of the Seven Eves — the inhabitants of the ring — as opposed to people like this. We settled on Spacers.”

“That makes it sound even more like all of this was foreordained,” Ariane said.

Her reproachful tone was getting on all of their nerves. Nonetheless they were surprised when it was Remembrance who said something. Perhaps the Camite felt emboldened by possession of a stick large enough to give the Julian a sound whack or two. More likely she was offended by Ariane’s accusatory tone, which hinted that Doc had been less than honest. Planting the Srap Tasmaner for balance on the uneven ground and turning to face Ariane, she said: “Of note here is that we are making first contact with a race of cousins hidden from us for five millennia. Some would find that remarkable.”

“And I do, Memmie!” Ariane said, after a few moments spent recovering from her shock at being spoken to this way by a Camite. “But in order to handle the situation well I think we need to know the larger context.”

“Any well-informed Spacer knows the context,” Memmie returned, sweeping her free hand up across the sky. “It is only a certain type of mind that scorns what is known by all and treats secrets as jewels.”

After this Ariane seemed to feel that further conversation would not be to her advantage. It was only the ten millionth such conversation that had taken place during the long, fraught, weirdly personal relationship between Julians and Camites, so Ariane knew her cue to shut up and look aggrieved.

There had been very little discussion, as yet, of the possibility of violence. Body language and shared glances among Ty, Bard, and Beled suggested that they had all been thinking about it. Einstein did them the favor of blurting it out: “What do you guys think? Can we take ’em?”

“Yes” was the answer from all three.

“But archery is a concern,” Ty added.

“A factor is how much they know about us and our armaments. Have they been scouting us for years?”

Beled aimed the question at Doc, as if he would somehow know. The look on Ariane’s face was something like See, I knew it! but Doc merely looked amused. “If so,” Doc said, “they have rarely if ever seen us use our weapons, and so they are unlikely to know how those work.”

“Well, they have taken all of our buckies offline,” Beled remarked, with another glance at the screen on his wrist.

“They appear to have retained some knowledge of how technology works,” Doc pointed out. “Even if they don’t have the ability to manufacture their own buckies, they can recognize them for what they are. So of course they would disable those.”

“It is a hostile act,” Beled muttered.

“If we let their archers come within range,” Ty pointed out, “then they will have us. We should consider that a hostile act.”

“Then we should not go much farther,” Bard said.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Ty replied.

They had approached now to within about a hundred meters of the glider and had the full attention of the Diggers surrounding it. Four of them had claimed the high places around it, where buckies had been stationed earlier, and two more had clambered up onto the tops of the wings. The strangely orderly looters had ceased their activities and pressed forward to see what was going to happen. At least three of them were children, and there were as many women as men.

“Mixed messages,” Bard said, and made a gesture that caused his fellow Spacers to stop where they were.

“Let me have a go at this,” Ty said, “if it’s true they are related to me.” He strode forward several paces beyond Beled, stopped, and then pantomimed drawing back an arrow and shooting it in a high trajectory. He then pointed at the archers.

Immediately one of the Digger men, near the center of the group, turned to face the others and backed several paces away from them, swiveling his head to get a picture of how the formation might look from the Spacers’ point of view. He shouted something that, from this distance, could not really be heard above the sound of the wind on the rocks. The archers and the sentinels eventually responded, though not crisply. They clambered down from the high places and, on further exhortation from the leader, set their bows down and backed away from them.

The leader turned to face Ty and held out his hands, palms up.

Ty set his katapult on a nearby rock.

A second man now separated himself from the Digger group and began making his way forward, making reasonable headway but steadying himself on a pair of walking sticks. His head was bald and his beard was gray. When he drew abreast, the leader, who was somewhat younger, began ambling forward, matching the older man’s pace.

Doc set his grabb chair into motion. Memmie, out of habit, paced him, but after she had taken several steps forward, he stayed her with a hand gesture. “I will take that, however,” he said, and extended his hand toward the stick. She gave it to him and he tucked it under one arm.

Ty waited for Doc to catch up, and then began to advance by his side.

Some of the Diggers seemed keen to follow the action and began to creep forward, touching off internal controversies, and prompting Beled and Bard to move ahead as well. Through a sort of nonverbal negotiation, the two sides arrived at a deal where a total of eight Diggers — the two out in front, plus six more trailing in an echelon behind — ventured out into the open space to match the eight Spacers. Among the Diggers were some warrior types, keeping a close eye on Bard and Beled, but women and a child too. On the Spacer side, Ty and Doc were out front, with Memmie a few paces behind. Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two maintained some distance while Bard and Beled, who were conspicuously armed, remained in the deeper background, split out to either side, respecting an unspoken agreement that they would stay out of weapon range as the Diggers’ archers were doing.

The two formations drew up within speaking distance, and looked at each other for a spell.

To the Spacers, the Diggers were familiar looking from old videos: they were rootstock humans such as populated the Epic. Genetically they were homogeneous. They were white people with blond or red hair, and eyes that seemed to have gone pale in the darkness of their caves. Their skin was fair by nature, but freckled by exposure to the aboveground sun. They were smaller than rootstock humans, but not so much so that any one of them would have seemed dwarfish on a busy street in the Chain. Except for Teklans and Neoanders, who had occupational reasons for needing to be large, the descendants of the Eves had also lost stature, particularly during the First Millennium. They had been slow to gain it back, even during the Fifth, when by and large they’d had plenty of room to stand up straight. These Diggers — at least the limited sample standing close enough for Ty to evaluate them — did seem uncommonly stocky, however.

For their part, the Diggers had more to gawk at, since it could be guessed from their reactions that they had seen little or nothing of Spacers. Ty looked unremarkable to them. Doc was interesting largely because of his age and his means of getting around. Kath Two, Memmie, and Einstein might have looked strange more because of their coloration than any genetic alterations. Something was definitely odd about Ariane’s facial structure. Beled, and particularly Bard, were to them monsters.

After a minute of sizing them up, the older Digger stomped forward a couple of paces and spoke in the pre-Zero English that all Spacers knew from the Epic: “Cowards who ran away, you are trespassing on a world that is no longer yours to call home. Begone.”

“This is going well,” Ty remarked to Doc.

“He is putting on a show of strength for the others,” Doc said. “Best let him. If you would, please?”

He issued a command that caused his grabb’s legs to fold, bringing it as low to the ground as it could go, and extended a hand. Ty took his arm and steadied him as he stepped off the robot and found footing on the ground. He planted the stick with his other hand, then cautiously let go of Ty. Then he advanced a step. All of these actions produced murmurs among the Diggers. Perhaps they had seen Doc initially as some kind of cyborg, but now understood that he was just a very old man. He walked several paces until he found a flat spot that suited him, then planted the stick.

“I may look five thousand years old,” he began, “but I am in truth a mere descendant of those you style cowards. Though I daresay you would take a more charitable view if you knew of the deeds that they performed during their long exodus. Do I have the honor of addressing one whose ancestor was Rufus MacQuarie?”

“We are all of that lineage,” the old man boomed.

“Then I think I have something that belongs to you,” Doc said. Moving deliberately, he pulled the stick out of its purchase on the ground and hefted it up until it lay horizontally across both of his outstretched palms. “Please accept my apologies for having borrowed it without your remit.”

Had the Spacers been able to watch all of the Diggers’ reactions at once, it would have yielded a bonanza of intelligence about the workings of their minds and of their society. That degree of mind reading was, in general, the sort of task assigned to Julians, so it could be assumed that Ariane’s moiling brain and avid senses were running full blast.

The young males seemed divided between a more vindictive group who wanted the stick of Srap Tasmaner confiscated immediately, and others of a more chivalrous turn of mind.

The group at large comprised a minority who were indignant about Doc’s expropriation of their shovel handle, but — more significantly — a majority who felt ashamed at the idea that they would take away an old man’s walking stick.

What those two groups had in common was that they took what Doc had said at face value. A smaller inner circle — the old man, the younger leader, and a woman of intermediate age who had stepped forward to confer with them — had the wit to understand that Doc was playing to the crowd, and not actually trying to initiate a conversation about the ownership of a piece of wood.

In other words, the Diggers were, as a whole, reacting much as any other group of humans might have done. Which was interesting and important data in and of itself, since much might have changed during five thousand years in the mines.

The discussion among the three leaders went on at some length and led eventually to an epidemic of head nodding. The old man squared off, sticks planted, his face set in judgment. The younger man and the middle-aged woman advanced toward Ty and Doc respectively. The man came to a halt two paces away from Ty, just out of the range where shaking hands or fisticuffs might become plausible. The woman kept on coming and took the stick out of Doc’s outstretched hands. This touched off a wave of fascinated reactions among the Diggers watching at a distance.

In a quiet but clear voice, the woman said, “Old man, you have shamed us with your words and obliged us to answer in kind. No hand shall be laid on you by virtue of your age.”

She stepped forward past Doc, sliding her hands together at the blunt end of the shovel handle, and began to whirl it around. Then with a decisive lunge forward she brought it down on the side of Memmie’s head.

Memmie collapsed to her knees and then to all fours, her head — already dribbling blood — sagging almost to the ground, exposing the back of the neck. And that was where the woman drove the sharp end of the stick, ramming it in several inches deep, well into the center of the thorax where it would strike lung or heart or both. Remembrance did not topple but rather deflated, settling gradually to a fetal position on the ground.

The younger man meanwhile launched himself at Ty. It was not clear whether his intention was to inflict damage or merely to restrain him while Remembrance was sacrificed. In any case his foot dislodged a stone as he made his move, creating a sound that gave Ty a bit of warning. He was able to turn so that the attacker rolled around him rather than striking him dead-on. The Digger’s downhill movement became a disadvantage, overbalancing him. Hooking the man’s ankle and kicking upward, Ty made him fall hard on his face. Both of his feet were projecting up in the air, soles of his moccasins exposed to the sky. Ty hooked a leg through the crook of a knee and then dropped his weight, bending the foot forward; the man’s heel would have gone all the way to his buttock had Ty’s lower leg not been interposed behind the back of his thigh and his upper calf muscle, where it threatened to rip the man’s knee apart. The man scrabbled at the ground and so Ty put more weight on it, the stink of the old moccasin in his nostrils, and felt a preliminary pop inside of the joint. The man screamed and stopped struggling.

All of this happened in the same moments as the woman was killing Remembrance, and so Ty did not really take that in until he had placed the man fully under his control. He was just drawing focus on Memmie and understanding how bad it was when he saw a movement in his peripheral vision and looked over to see Doc telescoping to a seated position on the ground. He had turned around and witnessed the attack on Memmie.

“I want evac. I want evac,” Ariane was saying. Ty had no idea to whom she was talking.

Strange high whistling noises came from the sky. Ty looked up and saw a flight of arrows arcing over his head. They passed as well over the heads of Ariane, Kath Two, and Einstein and thunked into the ground or skittered on the rocks at the feet of Beled and Bard, who had been advancing until then.

The woman with the stick had been in a sort of trance, but now drew focus on Ty and saw how it had gone with him and the younger man. Rage flashed over her face. She aimed the sharp bloody end of the stick at Ty and began to run at him.

Ty heaved his full weight onto the younger man’s foot and snapped his leg. Then he stood up, getting clear of the screaming and flailing Digger. He had come up with a rock in his hand, which he flung at the woman’s face. His aim was off, but still it forced her to falter and dodge, and gave him time to snatch up two more and advance one pace. Two more rocks, one of which struck home on her collarbone, and two more paces. On her back heel she aimed a thrust at him, but she telegraphed it and he parried it easily with his left forearm, snaking the full length of his arm around the shaft so that its bloody tip was trapped against his body. He reached out with his free hand, poked her in the eye with his thumb, grabbed her ear, and wrenched her away from the stick like a discarded wrapper. The older man was coming at him with his sticks a-flailing in both hands, and more formidably, several of the young warrior types were running with lances leveled. Ty walked straight at the old man, knocking his sticks away with controlled strokes of the shovel handle, spun him around so that the man’s back was against his chest, brought the handle up across the man’s throat, and locked it in place, crooked in his elbow, his hand pressing against the back of the man’s bald head. He then began dragging the man backward and downhill toward the remainder of the Seven. For this human shield might work to protect Ty’s front, but the boys with the lances were already moving to circle around behind him, and he had to hope that the others would protect his rear.

One of the equipment boxes up by the glider now seemed to explode. But it was a strange sort of explosion with no flame, and little sound. Rather, the crate seemed to dissociate into a dense, gritty cloud, which became translucent as it spread. A moment later the same thing occurred with a second crate nearby. Both crates ended up lying on their sides, empty.

The Diggers in the vicinity of the glider were all exclaiming in surprise, or just plain screaming. The nature of what was happening was not clear, even to Ty. It was enough to put the lancers into a more cautious frame of mind, as it gave rise to fears that they were being attacked from behind. Their advance faltered and they looked to see what was the matter.

A thin gray layer was skimming over the ground, headed downhill toward them. It looked a little like a spent wave as it washes and foams over a flat beach just before settling into the sand, parting around rocks and recombining in their lee. More like an avalanche, though, in that it gathered speed as it came on. As it rushed past Ty and the old man, parting around their feet, he was able to focus and resolve it as a swarm of ambots of two different types — one type from each of the crates that had emptied themselves. They were all mixed together. Once they chittered past Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two, they spread out across the flat open slope separating them from Beled and Bard. Those two were split out to the sides, just beyond arrow range. The swarm then forked as all the ambots of one type converged on Beled and all those of the other type made for Bard. The former group — the Blue-pattern ambots — were smaller, leggier, and quicker on broken ground. That swarm gathered itself together into a clicking, glittering, hissing firehose stream and leaped from the ground at Beled. Rather than striking him, though, it washed around him. In the interval of a few moments he was clothed from head to toe in an armor made of overlapping scales, each scale being the beetle-like back of an ambot. They had swarmed over him and locked themselves together. A few strays clambered over the others’ backs seeking, and plugging, holes.

Langobard’s swarm was a little longer in reaching him. During the final fifty meters or so it became ropy as it passed through a kind of phase transition. Where possible, ambots were copulating, jacking the couplers on their snouts into matching ones in the tails of those ahead of them, forming pairs, then strings of three and four that combined with others, so that by the time the swarm came close to its master it had converged into half a dozen long, whippy ropes, and as many shorter segments. These ambots were basically flynks, more at home flying than crawling. They had some limited ability to fly solo, but were much happier when combined into aerial trains. During their career down the slope they’d picked up a decent amount of energy just by losing altitude, and so in the last few meters they were able to rear up off the ground like cobras and leap into the air, shooting past Langobard but banking into tight turns behind him, curving round, nose seeking tail, until they had formed aitrains: closed loops, fully airborne, flying endless circles around his body, defeating gravity with the modest amount of lift provided by their stubby winglets. He gave them greater speed by the simple expedient of pawing at them from time to time, but they also drew energy from a field being generated by a power plant on his back. Perhaps a third of the flynks had failed to find their way into chains sufficiently long to form aitrains, and so a few shorter segments found his ankles and spiraled up his legs, like snakes climbing trees. There were also some singletons who had not been able to join even a short chain; these found their way to him and climbed as high as they could, competing noisily for perching space on his shoulders. As Bard now moved across space he looked like a combination of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, inscribed within a system of circles, and early depictions of the atom, surrounded by an array of circular orbitals. Each aitrain sang a different note as its flynks sawed through the air, the pitch rising as it absorbed energy and built velocity. He and Beled were moving to join forces, both edging closer to the Diggers as their defenses came online. A single exploratory shaft, fired at a high arc by the foremost of the archers, plunged toward Langobard, but was casually flicked out of the way by a momentary deflection of an aitrain.

It was nothing Ty hadn’t seen before, but it was nonetheless distracting. Forcing himself to attend to things nearer and more pressing, he saw that a warrior had advanced to Doc, who was lying on his side struggling feebly, and raised his lance as if to strike him dead with a single downward thrust. But he had paused. Perhaps he only intended to create a threat. Perhaps he was gobsmacked by what had just happened with the ambot swarms.

Ty was dragging the old Digger back toward Ariane and Kath Two and Einstein, who had prudently flattened themselves behind a brow in the slope that afforded some minimal protection against direct arrow shots — though none against plunging shafts. The next time he turned around to look downhill, Bard and Beled had vanished, and the only clue as to where they had concealed themselves came from the movements of a few straggler ambots striving to catch up with them. Part of him felt let down that they had not advanced in force and simply destroyed the Diggers. A better part of him understood that they were too smart and too professional for that; they would find cover, hang back, observe, and wait for cooler heads to prevail.

Ariane was darting back down the hill. She picked up Ty’s katapult from the rock where he had set it down. Good.

Excited sentries, posted up in the rocks that flanked the valley, were hollering news of Bard’s and Beled’s movements in the Diggers’ oddly biblical phrasings. It sounded as though the Teklan and the Neoander were moving rapidly to high ground.

One of the sentries blurted out a sharp cry and went silent. This distracted all the other Diggers for a few moments.

Ariane ran uphill a little past Ty, dropped to a knee, and pressed the muzzle of Ty’s katapult against the back of the neck of the woman who had killed Memmie. This woman had collected herself to a seated position on the ground and had been holding one hand over the eye that Ty had earlier poked.

Ariane’s gesture was a curious one, recognizable from pre-Zero filmed entertainment as the sort of thing you would do with the sort of firearm that projected dumb lead bullets at high speed. It made less sense with a katapult. But as nonverbal communication with the Diggers, it worked.

“Three hundred meters downhill of the glider,” Ariane was saying, presumably to the same imaginary friend she had addressed a little earlier. Then, to the woman, “Get up. One way or another, your mind is about to get blown.”

Ty heard himself let out a little snort of suppressed laughter. Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless. The way Ariane was moving, the things she was saying, were so out of character for her that Ty’s higher brain didn’t know what to make of it; in the meantime he was chuckling as if watching some sort of comedy sketch.

The woman got her feet under her. Ariane grabbed her by the hood of her parka and pulled her fully upright, then began marching her down the hill with the kat’s muzzle pressed against the side of her head. Ty stood there and watched her go by.

“Ariane,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“You don’t seem to realize,” she said, “that this changes everything.” She let the katapult drop away from the woman’s head for a moment, then swung it up and aimed it at Ty. It gave off the characteristic whang of an ambot being shot out of its muzzle and then she put it back against the woman’s head.

Ty felt the impact like a punch in the rib cage and recoiled from it instinctively. But even before he could recover from that, the ambot had entrenched itself in his clothes, extruded a couple of needle-sharp probes into his side, and begun jamming his nervous system. Having been hit by these before, he knew that the best he could hope for was to strike the ground with something other than his face, so he released his grip on the shovel handle, and on the old Digger, and went down.

Had he been able to speak, he’d have told Kath Two not to worry about him — to do something about Ariane. But his teeth were banging together too hard to form words, and it was all he could do to keep his breathing muscles working.

The old man staggered away, fell to his knees, and found the shovel handle on the ground right in front of him. He grabbed it with one hand, planted it, grabbed it with the other, and used it to lever himself back up. He advanced on Ty, who was just lying on the ground in spasms. Ty was then aware of a dark shape above him, and looked up to see Kath Two standing over him, facing the old man, raising an arm instinctively to defend herself. The shovel handle struck that arm with a thud and sent Kath Two stumbling away, crying out in pain. The man then raised the pointed end of the stick above Ty.

“Iniquitous mutant!” he cried. Then he added something that was drowned out by the whang of a katapult. Kath Two, using her own sidearm, had shot him in the belly from point-blank range. The stick dropped from the man’s hands and added to Ty’s inventory of minor aches and pains as it came down point first on his chest. The man toppled next to Ty, going down hard and banging his head on a rock.

Suddenly Ty was in the clear, at least neurologically. Einstein, kneeling above him with a bone-handled knife, had pried the ambot off him, and now used the knife’s steel pommel to smash it to bits against a rock.

Kath Two was down on one knee moving her damaged arm about in slow motion, her mouth frozen in the O of a suppressed scream.

Ty’s gaze was drawn to movement in the clouds above Kath Two’s head: a glowing rod levering down out of the sky. Visually it was a near match for what had just happened with the shovel handle, except that in this case the object was kilometers in length and incandescing as if it had just been pulled from the bed of coals at the foundation of a bonfire.

He understood now. He swiveled his head sideways so that he could look down the slope. In a clear patch a stone’s throw away — about three hundred meters downhill of the glider — the ground was glowing ruby red where it was being painted from above by lasers: three bright spots forming an equilateral triangle, and a grainy circle centered in that. The light washed briefly over Ariane’s head and shoulders as she shoved her hostage into the middle of the circle.

The glowing stick came straight down on top of them, enveloping them in its hollow end, and then sprang back up into the sky, leaving nothing save a trail of footprints that terminated in the center of a perfectly circular depression in the ground. Around that was a penumbra of vegetation that had been toasted by radiant heat. In the moments before the device was drawn back up through the cloud cover they were able to see the booth that had scooped up Ariane and her hostage, telescoping back up inside the red-hot tube in preparation for its departure from the atmosphere.

THE MECHANISM THAT ARIANE HAD SUMMONED WAS CALLED A Thor. It consisted of a big rock — the head of a god-sized maul — with a very long and lightweight “handle” capable of reaching all the way to the surface even while the “head” was just grazing the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The whole thing spun like a thrown hammer, which was to say that the long handle flailed in a large circle around the head.

At the end of the handle was the capture booth, large enough to accommodate three people if they stood close together. During descent and ascent it was enclosed within an outer shell designed to survive the rigors of passage through the atmosphere. The handle would stride down out of space in the same general style as the hanger bolo that Kath Two and Beled had recently used, except that instead of pausing in the upper atmosphere to collect aircraft, this one would spear all the way down to the surface and grab whatever happened to be standing in the target zone — which it would paint beforehand with lasers so that the passengers would know where to stand. The head of the hammer would subsequently pivot forward into the atmosphere, catch air, and slow down, levering the handle sharply upward and catapulting the payload into a much higher orbit. The head would detach itself and fall downrange as a meteorite. This, of course, made it a single-use device, used only in emergencies, and even then when the need was so extreme that it was considered worth the risk of dropping a bolide on some basically random spot downrange.

So it could be assumed that a fresh crater now decorated the interior of North America somewhere to the east of here, and that Ariane and her captive were en route to a safe haven in the Red segment of the ring. What awaited them there could only be guessed at, but for Ariane it was probably going to be a substantial reward, a medal, and a promotion to some high rank in Red’s military intelligence branch.

Doc never spoke another coherent word. Seeing what had happened to Memmie, he had suffered a stroke that had immediately rendered him aphasic. Swelling of the brain killed him an hour later. The Diggers buried him and Memmie together in the place where they had fallen.

The old Digger looked better after a few hours, aside from some symptoms indicative of a concussion. The younger one got his leg splinted. Both were in a murderous frame of mind toward the three remaining captives. But it seemed that the majority of the Diggers were taken aback by what had happened, and were advocating a more level-headed approach to future relations between their tribe and the sort of civilization that could produce things like Ariane’s Thor and Beled’s and Langobard’s weaponized ambot swarms.

As a way of demonstrating their own technological prowess, or perhaps simply to blow off steam, the Diggers detonated a lump of some kind of home-brewed explosive in the open space between the glider and the fresh graves. Evidently this was meant as a warning for Bard and Beled, who were presumed to be watching from nearby cover.

Ty, Einstein, and Kath Two were fitted with hinged collars of bent steel. When these were closed around the neck, loops in the free ends came into alignment so that a chain could be run through them, locking them shut while stringing all the captives together. At one end, the chain was terminated by an ancient padlock that was too large to pass through the loops on Kath Two’s collar. The other end was then affixed, by means of a bolt, to a large wooden stake that an especially burly Digger had pounded into the ground with a stone-headed maul that looked like a miniature Thor.

Just uphill of this, and out of the prisoners’ reach, other Diggers constructed a little cairn. They topped it with another lump of explosive. They attached wires to the lump for detonation and ran them down to the main Digger camp, which was under the wings of the glider some fifty meters away.

“What just happened?!” Einstein wanted to know, as soon as the Diggers had left them alone. “I mean, that was obviously a Thor. I’ve heard of them. But. .” and he threw his hands up in the air.

“Ariane is a mole,” Ty said. Then he corrected himself: “Was a mole. Now she’s probably a hero. A Red hero.”

“Red sent the Thor down to, what do you call it, extract her.”

“Yeah. Her and, more to the point, a living, breathing biological sample.”

Kath Two, at one end of the string, climbed into a sleeping bag and fell asleep. Ty did not expect her to wake up for a long time. He and Einstein moved down-chain as far as they could, to leave her in peace, and squatted on their haunches. The Diggers had left them firewood and kindling. Without discussion, they began laying a fire. It became clear that Einstein had done it before, and so Ty just let him do it. The young Ivyn had very particular ideas about fires.

“Where did you learn how to fight like that?” Einstein asked him. “Are you part Teklan or something?”

“Fighting isn’t about knowing how,” Ty said. “It’s about deciding to.”

“Well, I was frozen, man.”

“Look, these are times when the decisions that our Eves made five thousand years ago control our actions to a degree that renders us basically helpless. You were meant to stand back and observe and analyze.”

“And you were made to be a hero,” Einstein said.

“A hero would have saved Memmie.”

“But no one could have seen that coming! The way that woman just went crazy on her. .”

“We’ll be asking ourselves that for a long time.” Ty sighed and looked over to the encampment where the Diggers were going about life as if nothing had happened. Some of them were roasting kebabs that they had cut from the carcass of a big herbivore killed down in the woods. There were a lot of kids under ten years old, but few teenagers. Half of the women looked pregnant. “Play your role, Einstein. You’re the Ivyn in our group now that Doc’s gone. What do you see?”

Einstein seemed reluctant to speak, so Ty prompted him: “I see a population explosion.”

Einstein snapped into focus and nodded his head.

“You’ve never heard of these people,” Ty went on, “even though your RIZ is just on the other side of these mountains and your people patrol up here all the time.”

“Rufus MacQuarie’s mine was far to the north,” Einstein offered. “These people must have just come out into the open recently.”

“Look for the oldest child down there and that probably tells you the date.”

“But the atmosphere’s been breathable for three hundred years! Why would they wait until now?”

Ty nodded toward the center of the Digger camp: the big bed of coals, the meat roasting over it.

“Food?” Einstein said.

“Food and fuel,” Ty confirmed. “They’ve been down in their hole living on God only knows what — cave tofu or something — since the beginning of the Hard Rain. Every so often maybe they would sample the air outside. When it became breathable they probably went out and had a look around. But it was still a wasteland, not capable of supporting life. It’s only in the last few years that TerReForm has seeded that part of Beringia with animals big enough to be worth the effort expended in hunting them. That was the starting gun — the signal for them to come out.”

“And to begin having kids as fast as they could, apparently.”

“Apparently. Now, Einstein, what does that tell you about gender roles?”

“Well, to begin with, they don’t have an Eve, they have an Adam — Rufus — so it could easily be more pat — patree—”

“Patriarchal.”

“Thanks. And then if all the women are expected to make lots of babies—”

“That tells you something,” Ty said. “Now, here’s the big question that is kind of staring us in the face. You’re a Digger, okay? You’re not stupid. All you have to do is pop your head out of your cave on a clear night and look into the southern sky and you can see the habitat ring. And over time you can see the Eye moving back and forth across it and you can see new habitats lighting up as they are built. You can see bolos coming in low across the sky and TerReForm aircraft flying right overhead and showers of ONANs coming down straight from the ring. And you’re no ignorant savage. Your folk have maintained a reasonably advanced engineering culture. Those compound bows. That lump of explosive. So you wouldn’t have interpreted all of that as gods or angels or any of that.”

“They’ve known,” Einstein said. “From the first—”

“For centuries,” Ty said, nodding. “As long as they could breathe outside.”

“For that long, they have known that billions of humans were living in the sky,” Einstein said. “But they didn’t make any attempt to signal.”

“More than that. They hid from us!” Ty said. “Efforts were made, you know, to find the MacQuarie mine several decades ago. These people must have made some kind of decision that they didn’t want to be found.”

“Why would they do that?”

“That’s what I am asking. Fear? Anger?”

“The old guy really hates us. ‘Cowards who ran away’ is what he considers us.”

“It’s what he called us,” Ty allowed. “And he called us that really loudly. He wasn’t really talking to us, I think.”

Einstein nodded. “I see what you mean. He was talking to the people behind him.”

“If I’m squatting in my mine shaft eating cave tofu when I know perfectly well that there are lots of humans up in geosync living in better conditions, then I need some kind of powerful incentive to stay in my cave. To conceal my presence.”

“Some kind of dukh or I dee—”

“Ideology,” Ty said with a nod. “I should have seen all this. God damn me for not seeing it a few minutes quicker.”

“Seeing what?”

“That only a mind virus, a shared hallucination, could explain the suddenness of their appearance aboveground.”

“Doc didn’t see it either,” Einstein said. He was only trying to make Ty feel better, but then he looked slightly appalled at himself for having spoken ill of his dead kinsman.

“No,” Ty said, “he sure didn’t. Now, what have we learned about how these people think?”

“They have, what do you call it, a chip on the shoulder.”

Ty nodded. “It was supremely important to the leaders that they put on a show of dominance under the gaze of their flock. Which they did. Then Doc did the thing with the Srap Tasmaner. A gesture of reconciliation but also a way of shaming them for being such complete assholes. Maybe not a bad move when dealing with people who have been acculturated to be more reasonable, to get along with each other.”

“People like us. People who have had to coexist in habitats forever.”

“But to them it was a challenge to their authority in front of their flock and so they had to make an extreme reaction. To dehumanize us.”

“We are the aliens,” Einstein said.

“Yes,” Ty said. “We are the bug-eyed monsters now.”

“And the longer Bard and Beled are out lurking in the darkness—”

“The easier it gets for them to paint us as such,” Ty said. “And that’s why they have us isolated. The leaders don’t want us talking to their flock — letting them see we’re only human.”

“But hang on a sec,” Einstein said. “That means that the leaders must know we are not really bug-eyed monsters.”

Ty had no response. Certain aspects of the situation were not really adding up. He considered it as they got the fire going and let themselves be hypnotized by the flames.

After the beginning of the Hard Rain, no fire — in the sense of open burning of solid, carbon-rich fuel — had been constructed by humans — by Spacers, anyway — for 1,735 years. It had taken that long to build a habitat large enough to grow trees, with enough atmosphere to handle the oxygen demand of a fire and to absorb the resulting smoke. Ancient digitized Boy Scout manuals had been consulted. It had worked the first time. The four pyro-pioneers responsible — all Dinans — had stood around it, staring into the flames as Ty was doing now, and probably thinking about all that had happened since the last time humans had smelled woodsmoke.

He and Einstein had not even started in on the topic of Ariane.

She was the worst nightmare of any Julian trying to live an honest life in Blue: someone ostensibly Blue who turns out to be a Red mole. How long had she been insinuating herself into intelligence, working her way up the ranks? Or had she only just decided to switch sides? In either case, she was up in the Red part of the ring now with the woman she had abducted. What must the Diggers make of that? Did they even know that there were two kinds of Spacers?

And what was Red intelligence learning from that woman? Had Ty not watched her murder Remembrance in cold blood, he’d have felt sorry for her.

THREE PERSONS APPROACHED FROM THE MAIN DIGGER CAMP UNDER the glider’s wings: a warrior with a steel-headed lance; a middle-aged, prematurely grizzled man with a grim look about him; and another whom Ty took for a boy until they drew closer and he saw that it was a short-haired teenaged girl, even more diminutive than was typical among these people. She carried herself oddly, keeping her head tilted down and turned to one side, looking at the world through the corner of her eye, though this might have been necessitated by the fact that she was following close behind the grizzled man and needed to peek around his rib cage in order to see where she was going. Scampering over obstructions that he took in stride, she seemed to take two steps for his every one. She looked like nothing so much as a squirrel trying to keep pace with a dog.

As they drew within speaking range the graybeard stopped the spearman with a nod, then took another pace forward. The girl faltered. Noting this, the graybeard made a gesture that encouraged her to venture a bit closer. She cringed up against his backside and peered out through his armpit.

“I am Donno,” announced the graybeard. “To me you may speak, but no others save the Psych here.” Or at least that is what Ty thought he heard.

“I am Tyuratam Lake,” Ty said. “And this is Einstein. The woman there is Kath Two; she is unlikely to join the conversation.”

“Tyuratam,” said the Psych in a husky voice, “a city in Central Asia, close to the Soviet space launch facility of Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Einstein, a theoretical physicist of the early twentieth century, before Zero.”

Donno heard the Psych out but did not look at her or make any sign of recognition. His attention was fixed on Ty. The words of the Psych were just a buzzing in his ear. “When Kath Two awakens, you will tell her the rule I have just proclaimed,” Donno said, “and see to it that she abides by it.”

“I will tell her the rule,” Ty said, “and she will keep her own counsel as to abiding by it. Over her I wield no authority. It is not how our society is organized.”

Donno looked as though he didn’t believe a word of what Ty had just said. “You are Dinan.”

So, they knew about the Seven Eves. How had they come by that knowledge? Abducting stragglers, interrogating them? Or had they been in covert contact with some Spacer?

“Yes,” Ty said.

“You are the leader of the group.”

Ty said nothing. It seemed unlikely to work for him to explain that it was complicated.

“What did you do with Marge?” Donno asked.

“Who is Marge?”

“The woman who was taken up by the thing that reached down out of space.”

Ty was tempted to make the irritable point that Donno had just answered his own question. Instead he just stared back, wondering where to begin.

“The other mutant — a Julian?”

“Yes.”

“She attacked you with your own weapon. You were surprised.”

“Indeed I was, Donno.”

“She betrayed you?”

“Yes.”

“Is she of the western people?”

To Donno, that would suggest the Spacers living in the part of Beringia west of 166 Thirty.

“Red is what we call them.”

Donno nodded as if he’d heard it before. “You are Blue, then.”

“Yes, we are Blue. We avoid using Thors.”

“Thor: a Germanic deity of immense strength, associated with lightning, armed with a hammer,” the Psych said.

“Is your name short for Encyclopedia?” Einstein asked her.

Donno threw Einstein a killing look. Einstein was oblivious to it; he was looking at the girl with fascination and then some.

“Yes,” she answered before Donno could stay her by raising his hand. She dodged away as if expecting to be cuffed, then smiled back at Einstein.

Ty had just been rendered almost dizzy by a clear and sharp image from the Epic: a photograph that Rufus had emailed to Dinah shortly before the White Sky, depicting the library that he and his friends had assembled in their underground fastness. Proudly displayed in its center was a row of identically bound volumes called the Encyclopædia Britannica.

This girl — the Cyc, not the Psych — had read it. She had physically handled those old books. Or perhaps handwritten copies of them.

“He is Ivyn,” Donno said, nodding at Einstein. It wasn’t a question. Then, his initial flash of anger having cooled, he took a more careful look at the kid from the RIZ.

“His eyelids look that way because of epicanthic folds,” said the Cyc, who had been conducting an unnecessarily close inspection of the Ivyn’s face.

“Shut up,” Donno told her. Then he turned his attention back to Ty. “The Red Julian—”

“Ariane,” Ty said.

“She was a spy within your ranks?”

“So it would seem.”

“Interesting. Rufus’s library has some novels about such things, in the decades before Zero, but I never thought I would lay eyes on a real mole.”

It was an unusually long-winded and revealing statement from Donno, and seemed to invite a witticism about moles and living underground, but Ty thought better of following up in that vein.

“I never thought I would lay eyes on someone like you,” he tried.

“All these thousands of years, you’ve thought we were dead!” Donno said. “Well, you thought wrong.”

“Before everything went to hell down there,” Ty said, “the old man—”

“Pop Loyd.”

“Pop Loyd stated that we were not welcome here.”

“He spoke truthfully,” Donno said.

“I don’t mean to be stupid,” Ty said, “but this is important and so I am sure you will agree with me that it is something I need to understand very clearly. Your group — do you have a name for it?”

“The human race,” Donno said.

“Very well then, the human race is laying claim to this territory and doesn’t wish people like us — descendants of the Seven Eves — to be here at all.”

“Not without our remit. That is correct.”

“What is the territory you are laying exclusive claim to?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This valley? This mountain range? All of Beringia?”

“The entire land surface of the planet Earth,” Donno said, shaking his head and uttering the words very clearly and slowly. “Your people abandoned it. It’s ours.”

That was a bit of a conversation stopper, at least where Ty was concerned. Einstein, however, blurted out the inevitable adolescent-Ivyn question: “What about the oceans?”

“You will have to take that up with the Pingers,” Donno said.

“Pingers?”

Donno looked at Einstein as if he were some kind of imbecile.

“The sea people,” said the Cyc. “They live—” but Donno raised his hand again and she went silent.

So did everyone else. Which was how Donno seemed to prefer it. He now had a few moments’ leisure to look about. He nodded toward Kath Two. “Is she sick?”

“No,” Ty said. “Her kind sometimes sleep for long periods.”

“Moiran, judging from her coloration?”

Ty was dying to know how the Diggers had come by their knowledge, rudimentary as it was, of the Spacers. But this was no time to ask. “Yes,” he said.

Donno was now literally counting on his fingers. He got as far as five. “The two fighters?”

Ty nodded. “The big one is Teklan.”

“And the ape-man?”

“A subrace of the Aïdans, called a Neoander.”

Donno nodded. “We have seen his like in the west.” He extended two more fingers. “So in your group was one of each race — and?” He nodded at Einstein. “A spare Ivyn, for when the old one died?”

“A local guide,” Ty corrected him. “We were a Seven, yes. That is a grouping that we create on special occasions, when we need a formal delegation.” What he said next was guesswork, but he needn’t worry about being contradicted at this point. “The old Ivyn who is now dead — Doc, we called him — suspected that you were down here. He came down to investigate, and he did so as part of a Seven. Befitting its importance.”

This seemed to throw Donno off balance. Clearly he was not the sort of man who much cared what other people thought. But it had now entered his mind for the first time that the events of some hours ago could be seen in another light: one that was hardly flattering to the Diggers. He could see this but he was hardly receptive to it. “No doubt you see us as a bunch of savages. You do not even view your incursion on our lands as the aggressive act that it was. Coming here with your armed warriors, your glider, your Thor.”

“Donno, how many Spacers do you imagine are on the surface of Earth right now?”

“We are not ignorant. We know they are all over what you call Beringia.”

“They are all over the world,” Ty said.

“This, if it is true, does not change our position,” Donno said.

“Your positions are strong and firmly stated,” Ty said, after a longish interval during which he simply could not think of anything to say. “May I ask then why it is you have come here to parley with me?”

“Your warriors are taking ours,” Donno complained.

“As one who knows something of warriors,” Ty said, “you can well imagine how this all looks to them.” He closed his hand around the chain and gave it a little shake.

Again, it was the wrong thing to say. The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people. Ty needed to get that fact through his head.

“I understand that we are in a state of war,” Donno said, “and that there are prisoners of war on both sides.”

“How would you like to proceed, then?”

“Nonviolently,” Donno said, “which is more than I can say of some of the others.” He nodded across to the other campfire.

“I await your proposal, then,” Ty said.

“We await yours,” Donno spat back, and turned to stalk away so abruptly that the Cyc had to scamper out of his path. The big galoot with the spear likewise turned to go. The Cyc was a little slower to disengage, however. She stayed where she was, maintaining visual lock on Einstein’s epicanthic folds.

“What’s your name?” Einstein asked her.

“Sonar Taxlaw!” shouted Donno. “Come!”

“Now you know it,” she said. She turned away with some reluctance and scurried down toward the glider. But even after she had rejoined her kin around their campfire, they could see her face, a pale moon aimed in their direction.

“Where to start?” Ty asked.

He was really talking to himself. But it seemed to jar Einstein out of a reverie. Einstein sighed and somehow pulled himself together. “‘We have seen his like in the west.’ Donno said that. About Bard.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I guess the Diggers must have sent some scouts out across 166 Thirty. They would not have been aware that they were crossing a border. See, it is nothing more than an imaginary line.”

Ty couldn’t help laughing. “Einstein, if we ever get out of this, I’m going to send you to charm school.”

“Huh?”

“Etiquette classes for Ivyns. How to talk to people of other races.”

“Why?”

“Never mind. I interrupted you. Go ahead.”

“Those scouts must then have seen some Red border troops. Neoanders.”

“And if you were in their moccasins, what would you think when you first laid eyes on a Neoander?”

“Bug-eyed, no. Monster, yes.”

Ty nodded. “With due respect for Bard and his kin, it would have been better if the first Spacers they encountered had been Dinans.”

“What of the Neoanders?” Einstein asked.

It took Ty a moment to follow. “Hmm. If they saw the Diggers while the Diggers were seeing them, they’d have reported it.”

“Red knew about the Diggers. Maybe a long time ago.”

“Knew, or at least suspected,” Ty agreed. He could feel parts of his brain relaxing as the mystery dissolved. “They put their intelligence assets to work on it. Ariane started sniffing around for clues. Used her connections to Survey for all they were worth. Pulled strings to get assigned to the Seven. And brought home the prize.”

“If you want to think of Marge as a prize,” Einstein responded. Searching the boy’s face in firelight, Ty couldn’t tell whether this was deadpan humor or just more social cluelessness. It didn’t matter though.

“The Pingers!” Einstein called out, as if it were obviously the next topic.

“Sonar Taxlaw said they were sea people — before Donno shut her up,” Ty said.

“Do you think he beats her?” Einstein asked.

It was such an emotional can of worms that Ty considered it carefully before answering. Once in his life, before the war, he had fallen for a girl as quickly as Einstein had for Sonar Taxlaw. That one brief experience with stupid blind love sufficed to make it possible for him to acknowledge its reality and respect its power.

“I think,” he said, “that their society is comfortable with corporal punishment to the point where what keeps people like her in line is the fear of it. Not the reality. I think there’s nothing you can do about it and that if you do so much as look sideways at Donno he will kill you. But you can probably get away with small gestures of kindness toward the Cyc — assuming you’re ever allowed near her again. If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead.”

“Why?”

“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs. Now, let’s get back to the Pingers. Name mean anything to you?”

“No. You?” said Einstein. Ty’s peroration had affected him terribly and reduced him to monosyllables.

“I have a vague recollection,” Ty said, “but I would have to look it up to be sure.”

“‘Sea people’ suggests boats,” Einstein said. “But—”

“But we’d have noticed those.”

“Maybe it’s a contingent of Diggers that hides in the thick forests along the coast,” Einstein tried.

“Donno claimed all the land, though,” Ty said, “and said the Pingers had jurisdiction over the oceans.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I don’t have one,” Ty said. He was lying.

This ended the evening’s conversation. They rolled out sleeping bags and bedded down. Ty slept surprisingly well. He woke up once, to the howling of wild canids. The volcanic eruptions that had been making the Ashwall so thick seemed to have abated, for the stars had come out and the habitat ring was now visible in the southern sky, the Eye shining somewhere above the Galápagos. The canids had spied it too, apparently.

He crawled out of his bag to take a leak, then checked on Kath Two. She was shivering, her forehead hot, but not to a point that he considered alarming.

They had taken his timepiece away from him, but he guessed it was about three in the morning — twelve hours, perhaps, since the Thor had touched down. Ariane and Marge would be reaching a Red habitat around now. For according to the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics, transfer time to geosync was always about twelve hours. He wondered if they were going to the Red capital of Kyoto, or to some military habitat, or even to the Kulak, hovering above the Makassar Strait. The booth would be crowded with the two of them in it. He could only speculate on what Marge’s state of mind must have been. The confrontation over the Srap Tasmaner most people would have considered strange, and violent — the stuff of bizarre post-traumatic nightmares. She couldn’t have seen her gunpoint abduction by Ariane coming. But all that was perfectly normal compared to what had happened next. It was unlikely Marge had looked into the sky and seen the Thor approaching. All she would have known was that suddenly she was trapped in a small booth with an armed mutant and experiencing powerful gee forces for the first time in her life. A few minutes later she’d have known weightlessness. Probably not how Marge had seen her day shaping up when she had rolled out of the sack this morning. Had Ariane begun to interrogate her straightaway? Or played nice with her? Or perhaps just jabbed her with a dose of tranquilizer to tide her over for twelve hours?

To Marge, the Thor just would have been unutterably bizarre. To Ty or any other Spacer, it was clearly an act of war — the most egregious violation of Treaty that he had heard of in twenty years. Though, come to think of it, he’d picked up enigmatic snatches of conversation, exchanged between persons of import in the Crow’s Nest, hinting at dark doings in the South Seas. Presumably there was a reason that they — whoever they were — had chosen Beled Tomov as the Teklan member of the Seven. Beled whose back was cratered with scars that could only have resulted from pitched battle with whip-cracking Neoanders. Likewise there was apparently more to Bard than met the eye.

And Ty? He too was a veteran of ground combat with the scars to prove it. But there were many others who might have been chosen in his stead — ones better suited to leading an expedition and making first contact with what to the Spacers was an alien race from another planet. No, Ty had been chosen because of where he worked and who owned it. Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.

With all of that in his mind he somehow slipped back into sleep and did not awaken until the sun was up. The spear carrier came within range and tossed them three ration packets from the glider’s stores. Einstein woke up and consumed his as only a teenaged boy was capable of doing. Ty ate at a more measured rate while keeping an eye on Kath Two. She had awakened long enough to remove the lid from her meal and pick at some of the blander offerings. But this led directly to vomiting, dry heaves, and a return to sleep.

They passed the day in a desultory long-range staredown with the Diggers, who grew fewer and more aggrieved as the hours wore on.

“Do you have a theory yet?” Einstein asked him as they were consuming the midday ration-toss.

“About what?”

“The Pingers.”

Ty, having naught else to do, let his mouth run. “The girl’s name. Sonar. I can think of a weird coincidence related to that.”

“Yes?” Einstein was all ears for anything related to Sonar Taxlaw.

“It’s a technology they used before Zero. Undersea radar based on sound waves. They would send out pulses of sound called pings.”

“You think the Pingers live under the sea?”

“It all fits. Except. .”

“Except what?”

“Where the hell did they come from?”

“Survivors? Like the Diggers?”

“I don’t see how it’s possible,” Ty said.

None of the scouts who went out looking for Bard and Beled returned. It was beginning to raise the question of who was really holding whom hostage. The ones who’d gone missing had friends, parents, and children who soon became desperate to know what had become of them and began asking awkward questions of those in command. Late in the afternoon, the Diggers were reinforced by a band of some twenty additional warriors coming up the valley, carrying dead animals on long sticks. The Diggers all held a parley around their cookfire. After they had eaten their fill, Donno came up alone, using a short spear as a walking stick or a wizard’s staff. The sun had gone down, so Ty heard him before he saw him.

“We carry out an exchange,” Donno announced, “and you people get out of here without further casualties.”

Is that what you call murdering people? Ty wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Very well. How would you like to proceed?”

“Well,” Donno said, beginning to sputter a bit, “we need to be able to communicate with them! But everyone we send out disappears!”

“Would you like me to do it?”

“Then you’ll just run away.”

“It is not necessary to talk face-to-face,” Ty said.

“You have radios?” Donno asked suspiciously.

Radio. A queer old word. The Diggers had searched them all, made sure they had no communication devices.

“No,” Ty said. He leaned back and reached into an open ration pack, took out a piece of bread, tore off a bit of it. Dual sparks, all around, shone in the retinas of grizzled crows. They’d brought a dozen of them on the glider, in modular cages made for traveling. The Diggers had inadvertently released them, and they’d been hanging around the campsite ever since. They knew what Ty was doing and were already jockeying for position, smacking one another with their wings and squawking. Ty held out his hand with the piece of bread on it, and almost before he’d unfurled his fingers the morsel had been pecked out by a crow who was now regarding him intently. “Beled. Bard,” he said. The normal procedure was to display a picture of the recipient, but these birds had some ability to recognize names and map them onto faces, and during spare moments on the journey, the Seven had been training them. “Our hosts wish to negotiate an exchange of prisoners.”

Ty closed his hand and waved the bird away. It flapped off into the gloom screaming the message. He looked at Donno and enjoyed the consternation on the Digger’s face. “We should hear back soon,” he said.

Donno turned without a word and strode back to the Digger campfire.

Half an hour passed. It became fully dark. The canids began howling. Ty looked up into the sky expecting to see the habitat ring coming out. So did all the Diggers. But the ring was not the only bright thing in the sky tonight. There was also a meteor shower. A strangely orderly one. It seemed to be headed directly for them.

Donno came running back, accompanied by more spearmen, all in an ugly mood. “Is this an attack force?!” he demanded. “Coming to rescue you?”

“So,” Ty said, “you know what those are?”

“The pods you use to fall out of orbit, when you want to land a person quickly. Now, answer my question.”

“This is Blue territory,” Ty said, then held up a hand to suppress Donno’s inevitable protest. “According to Treaty. If Blue forces were coming to rescue us, they would simply fly over the mountains from Qayaq — much easier than dropping people forty thousand kilometers from the habitat ring.” He was willing himself to maintain eye contact with Donno and to keep his voice as relaxed and conversational as he could manage. The spearmen had fanned out to form a ring around their little camp, aiming the points of their weapons inward. Einstein really didn’t like that, and Ty could hear links of chain clicking through the loops on the younger man’s collar as he edged closer.

“Who are they, then?” Donno demanded.

“By process of elimination,” Ty said, “they are Red.”

“But you said you consider this Blue territory!”

“Yes. You might be interested to know,” Ty said, “that this makes it a breach of Treaty, and an act of war.”

Donno stood gobsmacked. Ty was tempted to say Welcome to the modern world! but instead he added, “You might wish to keep this in mind, if you sign a treaty with them.”

A grizzled crow landed on the ground nearby, and addressed Ty. “We are coming.”

THAT THESE DROP PODS WERE OF MILITARY DESIGN WAS OBVIOUS from the way they came in: fast. Each had a set of vanes, mounted near the top, that sprang out when it was a couple of thousand meters above the surface, slowing its fall. But not until the pod was just a few tens of meters above the ground did its retro-rockets come on: not just one but a circular array of thumb-sized solids that created a cylindrical piston of fire on which the pod eased to a stop, coming to light on a tripod of buglike legs that deployed themselves at the last possible moment and absorbed the shock of contact.

The first thirteen drop pods landed in a nearly perfect circular formation, about a kilometer down the valley. As soon as they touched down they sprang open. Their hatches faced inward. The pod-ring thus presented nothing but armored backshells to any foes outside of it. Any foes inside were in for a bad time.

Seconds later a fourteenth pod landed in the center and a man climbed out. On his signal, the thirteen somersaulted out of their pods and rolled sideways onto their bellies, looking outward into the space beyond, which was now well illuminated by blinding lights shining from the backshells. In actual battle the next procedure would have been to start killing anything they could see, but instead the leader shouted a command that caused all of them to stand up, holster their kats, and dust themselves off. Ten of the thirteen were Neoanders. Three others had the more normal modern-human look. Those, and the one in the middle, were likely B-types, or Betas: the most numerous of the Aïdan subraces.

The peloton — for that was the Aïdan term for a unit of this size — adopted a parade rest position, facing outward and resisting the temptation to watch as four more drop pods landed in the space they had just circumscribed. The occupants of these were a little slower to climb out. It seemed evident that they were civilians who hadn’t done it before. While they were doing so, another pod landed, this one outside the circle; it was of a somewhat different design, used to land cargo. The peloton moved forward to form a loose perimeter around this one. The civilians opened it and removed various items: most obviously, a few sections of tubing that they snapped together to form a pole. To the top of this, they affixed a circular hoop, creating a rather more stylish and high-tech version of the circle-on-a-stick totem that the Diggers favored. Below the hoop they tied on a red, fork-tailed streamer, known in Blue vernacular as the Serpent’s Tongue, frequently used as a Red emblem in battle or, more usually, athletic competitions. And below that they attached a large white flag.

The performance was so amusing that even Ty, who knew he should be attending to other things, was a little surprised when he noticed that the half-dozen Digger warriors surrounding their little camp were all lying on the ground twitching helplessly. This had occurred so recently that some of their handmade spears were still toppling to the ground. In one of those peculiar, focused insights that comes to one when things are happening very fast, he noticed that the leaf-shaped spearheads had been hand-forged, and wondered idly if the metal had been scavenged from the truck they’d excavated.

Naturally he looked toward the explosive device on the nearby cairn. He saw that the wires had been severed. A hand the size of a dinner plate appeared above the top of the cairn, scooped up the explosive charge, and hurled it into oblivion.

Beled had materialized near the wooden stake, which he was examining in something like wonder. After trying its connection to the end of the chain, he knelt down, gripped it with both hands, and began pulling. Langobard, now that he’d dispensed with the explosive, loped over to join him. Squatting, he scooped away some dirt to get better purchase, and added his strength. Half a meter of the stake suddenly emerged from the ground, causing both men to tumble back. From a semi-reclining position, Bard swatted at it with one hand, as if shooing away an insect, and snapped it off at ground level. Ty, Einstein, and Kath were still chained together, but free to move.

Since Bard was now operating in a more stealthy mode, he was not surrounded by a whining complex of aitrains; rather, he had gotten all of his flynks jacked together into a single long rope that was looped and draped around his torso in a complex pattern that Ty had seen before, and that he supposed had been developed by Neoanders over thousands of years.

Ty reeled the stake fragment in, hand-over-handing the chain through his neck collar, and grabbed it in both hands like a club. He used its free end to scatter the campfire and darken the encampment. Kath, still half in her sleeping bag, was up on all fours, vomiting. Beled strode over to her, scooped one arm under her midsection, hoisted her up, and slung her over his shoulder. He had not really broken stride, and so the other two prisoners were now obliged to go with him. Langobard trailed the group, impulsively snatching up a spear — as a keepsake?

It had not been the most surgical extraction in the history of warfare. It was very far from being the most cack-handed, however. More fighting might have ensued had the main encampment of Diggers not been utterly transfixed by the approach of the Red delegation. Ty was just allowing himself to believe that they’d gotten away clean when he heard a voice from out of the dark, only a few meters away:

“I found this.”

Directly the speaker was painted by a crossfire of red lasers from Beled’s and Bard’s katapults. In the dark it was impossible to see her face, but Ty had already recognized the voice. “Hold your fire,” he said.

The Cyc stepped closer. Bard risked illuminating her with a dim light. She was holding the lump of explosive in her hand. It must have rolled down the slope toward the main Digger encampment.

“Sonar Taxlaw,” Ty said.

“You remembered!” she exclaimed. Then, apparently as some sort of explanation, she offered: “Volume seventeen.”

“Okay, Sonar,” Ty said, “you are free to go. Or you can come with us. As much as I would hate to deprive your folk of their knowledge of the last part of the S topics and the beginning of the Ts, I recommend coming with us.” He was working out how to explain matters to Sonar without taking all night, but Sonar abruptly said “Okay!” and, in her scurrying way, fell into step with them.

“You can leave that,” Ty said, nodding at the lump of explosive.

“A mixture of RDX with beeswax and vegetable oil,” Sonar said helpfully. “It will not detonate without—”

“I know,” Ty said, “but we don’t need it.”

Sensing eyes upon him, he looked toward the massive silhouette of Bard. The Neoander’s face was in darkness, but Ty could guess that it bore an incredulous expression. “I’ll explain later,” Ty said.

They walked briskly uphill for several minutes, their view across and down the valley improving as they went. Far below them, the Red delegation had been ascending toward the glider encampment at a stately pace, following in the footsteps that the Seven had made yesterday. Quite clearly, they wanted to be as obvious as possible, and so they were advancing in a pool of brilliant illumination made by portable lanterns, which the members of the peloton were aiming toward the center. The same goal — not seeming to sneak up on the Diggers — might have been achieved simply by waiting a few hours and doing it in daylight. But that was just typical Blue thinking. They were doing it at night for the sheer drama and pageantry of it, this being the sort of thing that Red, by and large, was simply better at than Blue. Ty almost laughed out loud when they got to a place where they could get their first clear look at the approaching spectacle. He was comparing it in his mind to the pitiful show that the Seven had put on yesterday. Of course, the Seven had been surprised, so it wasn’t a fair comparison. But the Diggers would not be making allowances for fairness. What they were seeing was probably a lot closer to how their folk, stuck underground, might have been imagining this moment during the last five thousand years. A tall Aïdan with a mane of glossy black hair preceded the rest. He wore some kind of ceremonial robe that streamed in the cold wind draining down the valley and glowed warmly in the light shone on him by the peloton. Advancing with a measured tread, he held the hoop standard in an absurdly dramatic pose with his upper hand reversed so that the thumb was down and the palm faced forward. It was meaningless but it looked great. A few paces behind him walked an older man with gray hair swept back from his high brow and a neatly trimmed beard. His robes were more subdued but, one suspected, really smashing if you could see them up close. A gold chain around his neck supported a medallion on his chest. His right arm was extended to cradle the left hand of none other than Marge the Digger, whom he was escorting up the hill in the manner of a dad giving away the bride. She was wearing what she’d last been seen in, supplemented with a warmer garment thrown over her shoulders like a cape. It kept trying to fall off as she waved her free hand over her head, signaling to her Digger kin that all was well. When they recognized her, they shouted words of greeting and she waved the more vigorously; her cape fell off and was replaced by one of the uniformed Betas.

Even at a distance it was obvious that the standard bearer and the one escorting Marge were Aretaics, which was to say, Aïdans of the first line of descent, presumably conceived as competitors to the children of Eve Dinah. They were tall and long-maned, with magnificent noses and excellent posture.

A few paces behind Marge and the senior Aretaic were a Camite and one of the Betas, walking abreast. They were joined by a pole about two meters long; each of them supported an end in the crooks of her elbows. In the pole’s center was a gleaming lump about the size of a person’s head, which any Spacer would recognize as a small nickel-iron asteroid, as common in space as dead leaves were on the reforested surface. But rare down here, even after the Hard Rain. Ariane must have told her higher-ups about the truck, what the excavation of its engine block said about the lengths that the Diggers would go to in order to get their hands on a bit of metal, and how grateful they would be for such a gift. Or perhaps Ariane had been broadcasting the entire mission to Kyoto through some covert, encrypted channel. Anyway, it would make a better token of friendship than a busted shovel handle.

Two of the members of the peloton were musicians. At a certain point one of them began to beat a drum that was harnessed to his midsection, and another began to play a melody on a shiny horn. Ty was convinced he’d heard it in the Epic somewhere, but it took Bard to place it.

“‘Bread of Heaven,’” he said. “It’s what Rufus and company were singing when they welded themselves in.”

“Also known as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,’ or in the original Welsh, ‘Cwm Rhondda,’” added Sonar Taxlaw.

“Fuck, these people are good!” Ty exclaimed.

“How long do you suppose they’ve been preparing this?” Bard asked.

“They have been way ahead of us for months. Maybe years,” Ty said. “But having said that, there’s little in what we’re seeing that couldn’t have been thrown together in a few hours.”

“Confirmed,” said Beled. He had let Kath gently to the ground, where she now lay in a fetal position curled about his shin. He was looking at the procession through optics. “The ring at the top of the standard? It is an exercise hoop covered in silver tape. The white flag? A bedsheet.”

“Do we even need to bother watching how this goes?” Bard asked.

And then he looked to Ty to give the answer. It had not been a rhetorical question. He was awaiting orders.

Beled Tomov looked at him too.

“How is she?” Ty asked. “Pulse, respiration okay?”

“I think it is the usual,” Beled said with a nod. Meaning that abrupt hormone shifts in Kath’s system were giving her something akin to morning sickness. Her microbiome — the ecosystem of bacteria that lived in her gut and on her skin — had been thrown into disarray, and she was being colonized by any old germs, including ones from the Diggers that had never been exposed to a Moiran body.

“Can you put her on your back or something?”

Beled nodded and dropped to one knee. He had been carrying a pack on his back. He emptied its contents on the ground and began slashing leg holes in its bottom corners so that Kath could just be inserted into it, like an infant into a carrier.

“We can’t rule out that our guys will show up in force,” Ty said, referring to Blue military. He looked south over the mountains, but didn’t see anything coming. Nor would he, of course; anything headed their way from Qayaq would be running dark. “Have you been in touch with them?”

“Yes,” Bard said. During this little pause he had been rooting a multitool out of his belt. He approached Ty, who held out the broken stake. Bard got his tool clamped around the head of the bolt and began to twist it out.

Ty nodded wearily. On one level, he had just asked a stupid question. But the Diggers’ attack — hell, for that matter, their existence—had taken them by surprise, and since then he’d been preoccupied with being a prisoner under conditions so primitive as to verge on slapstick. He ought to have been thinking about the larger picture.

Blue might bomb this whole valley into the Stone Age. But probably not. It was already in the Stone Age.

Bard and Beled had gotten a message up to Denali, which was the closest major Teklan military habitat to 166 Thirty. Everyone of consequence in Blue would now be aware that the Diggers existed, that the initial contact had been botched, and that there was a hostage situation. The Thor would have made it clear that Red was a step ahead of them. The descent of those drop pods, a few minutes ago, would have made it clearer. The brilliant pool of light in which the Red delegation moved was as much for the benefit of long-lensed video cameras peering down from orbit as for the Diggers.

It was a fait accompli that Red would make formal contact, in about thirty seconds, with the Diggers, and that it would go a lot better than yesterday. Ariane would have prepped them, told them what to say: Yes, of course we accept your claim to the Earth’s surface. Its justice is self-evident. We have plenty of room in orbit. No need for habitations on the planet. Of course, as you’ve already learned firsthand, you can’t trust those people from Blue. We might be persuaded to install a discreet military presence just to keep them from encroaching on your territory. As long as we’re there, some cultural exchange programs might be in order. We could offer medicine. Dental care. Technical advice in rebuilding your civilization. How may we be of assistance?

“Blue isn’t coming tonight,” Ty said. “It would just play into their hands.” He nodded down at the procession, which was only a few meters away from making first contact with an equally sized group of Diggers. “But some members of that peloton might come after us. They’d look like heroes if they could march us back into camp in shackles.”

“Or carry our heads in on spikes,” Bard suggested in a casual tone.

“Shh!” Ty said, with a glance toward the newest member of their band. But the Cyc looked unconcerned.

“Sonar,” Ty said, “we are going to have to move. Get away from any patrols those guys might send out, while it’s still dark. Can you do that? Move rapidly over rough terrain, in the dark?”

“Sure,” Sonar said, a little too blithely for Ty’s taste. But before he could press her, she added: “Guess we’ll be going north then?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the main group is going south. Probably as soon as the sun is up.”

“How far south were they thinking of going?” As it was, they were less than a hundred kilometers from the southern coast of Beringia.

“To the sea,” Sonar said, as if this were self-evident.

“What’s going to happen then?”

The question seemed simple enough, but it led to an outburst of chuckles from Sonar. “They’re going to wonder what became of me, that’s what!” she said, when she could get her mirth under control.

“They’re probably wondering that already,” Einstein remarked.

“No, I mean they’ll be needing me then!”

“Why?” Einstein asked.

“It’s a riddle.”

The bolt had been removed now, freeing the end of the chain, which Ty pulled clear of his collar. He opened the thing up and tossed it on the ground. The gesture caught the eye of the Cyc, who probably saw it as a shocking way to treat valuable metal. Ty was now free, holding the massive stake fragment and managing to control a certain natural impulse to bash her head in. This was not a time for riddles.

Einstein got the chain out of his own collar, then carried it in the direction of Kath so that he could help her.

“The purpose of your expedition — before we blundered into your path, that is — was to go to the edge of the water and make contact with the Pingers,” Ty ventured.

“Pingers?” Bard asked.

Ty ignored him, maintaining his focus on the Cyc. “You, by virtue of your mastery of volume seventeen of the Encyclopædia Britannica, are the closest thing your folk have to an expert on the only technology capable of summoning them.”

“Oh, I’m an expert on other topics as well!” Sonar said. “Sophism, South Carolina, Pope Sylvester II. .”

Ty decided to let the witticisms go by without positive or negative reinforcement. “What were you guys going to say to them?”

“It’s they who want to talk to us!” Sonar said. “They left us a message — a cairn on the beach. We are coming to respond.”

The ensuing silence lasted a long time: long enough for the final stanza of “Bread of Heaven” to stop reverberating from the mountain walls, long enough for the Aïdan leader’s opening greeting — written and pronounced in flawless pre-Zero English — to move through a solid paragraph of awe-inspiringly sycophantic salutations. Long enough for Bard to get the unchained Kath socketed into his backpack.

“We move south,” Ty announced. “Bard, you keep pace with the Cyc. If she slows us down, carry her. I’m going to need your radio.”

“My what?!” Bard exclaimed.

“An electromagnetic communications device—” Sonar began, but Ty cut her off.

“The thingamajibber you use to talk to Denali. I’m going to tell them we have a second chance.”

“A second chance to do what?”

“To make friends with the natives of this planet.”

THEY CRESTED A PASS IN THE COASTAL RANGE THE FOLLOWING DAY and began making their way down toward the sea. When the going became easy enough to allow for something like normal conversation, Ty asked, “How many Cycs are there in total?”

Sonar’s little head snapped around, like a bird’s, to regard him curiously. She would never look you directly in the eye, but she would lurk in your peripheral vision and sneak peeks all day long.

“I know,” Ty said. “As many as there are volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But I don’t know what that number is, because we no longer have copies of it lying around.”

“Well, there are the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One,” Sonar said. “The Ten are the Micropædia. Many short articles. The Nineteen are the Macropædia: longer, more in-depth articles. The One is the Propædia, the Outline.”

“Which category do you belong to?”

Einstein, walking ahead of them down the slope, wheeled around. “She already told us she was volume seventeen!” Normally good-natured, he was being unusually chippy all of a sudden. He returned his attention to the rocky terrain in front of him, displaying a flushed neck beneath his ponytail.

“Excuse me,” Ty said. Then, turning back to the Cyc, he asked, “Is that just luck of the draw? Or—”

“No!”

Of course not.

“The older Cycs started me on smaller books, to evaluate me.”

“When? At what age did they start you?”

“When it was decided that I was not a breeder.”

Einstein turned around again, this time so suddenly that he lost his footing and fell on his ass. The reaction was so outsized that Ty had to look away from it lest he break out laughing. But this brought Langobard into his line of sight, and the Neoander was in similar trouble. The two men had to stop walking and turn their backs on each other for a few moments just to keep their composure.

“If I can just anticipate some questions that I believe may be uppermost in young Einstein’s mind,” Langobard said, “would it be untoward of me to inquire what, precisely, makes you ‘not a breeder’?”

The Cyc shrugged, staring down the mountain toward the Pacific Ocean as if she had not given the topic very much thought recently. “I know not. Of mean stature? Nothing special to behold? On the spectrum?”

“For context,” Ty asked, “how many young women out of ten are designated as breeders?”

“Four, maybe?”

“So being a nonbreeder is more common than being a breeder,” Ty said, for Einstein’s benefit.

“Of course, now that we have come out of the Hole, and we have more space, more people are breeding,” Sonar said. “I speak of how it was ten years ago.”

She had earlier told them that she was sixteen. “Okay. So they think they know enough about you at the age of six to make that determination. They start you out on easier books. Then what?”

“If you can read at all, you just start reading the whole Cyc.”

“And so that’s why you know stuff about radio, and epicanthic folds, and other topics not in volume seventeen.”

“Yes. You have to read the whole thing. By ten, they decide whether you are Micropædia or Macropædia quality.”

“Is one of those more prestigious than the other?”

“Of course!” Sonar exclaimed, without bothering to say which was which.

“I’ll bet the Micropædia is just like memorizing a bunch of trivia,” Einstein essayed. Somewhat dangerously, in case he guessed wrong. But love had made him impetuous.

“Yes, you have to be able to hold more in your head to be one of the Nineteen,” Sonar said, favoring Einstein with a warm gaze.

“So, did you have to kill the previous Sonar Taxlaw in single combat or something?” Ty asked, and immediately thought better of it, since in general Diggers did not seem to have a well-developed sense of humor. Einstein threw him a mean look.

“No, not in this case,” the Cyc said politely, leaving open the question of in what cases the Diggers did actually employ such methods. “My mentor was Ceylon Congreve.”

“Now, that is a lovely and distinguished name!” Langobard exclaimed. “Volume three?”

“Four,” she said, with a note of surprise in her voice, as if not quite able to believe that someone could not know this.

“Do the original paper copies still exist?” Ty asked.

“Oh, yes,” Sonar said, “but we handle them only on ceremonial occasions. We work with handwritten copies.”

“Rufus must have squirreled away a lot of paper.”

“Tons of it,” said the Cyc. “Acid-free, one hundred percent cotton.”

During their nighttime escape over the mountains, they’d had little time for such conversations, and so their knowledge of Digger culture was still spotty. Some reasonable guesses could be made simply from the known history of the Hard Rain. The phase known as the Cooling Off had not begun until some thirty-nine hundred years after Zero, when the human races’ efforts to police the lunar rubble belt had finally paid off with a sharp falloff in the number of bolides striking the surface. Until then, the Diggers had been obliged to maintain a small, steady population in the space that Rufus had provided. Expansion of the Hole had been limited by the fact that it was a sealed system, with no place to put spoil — the quantities of loose material created by digging. As anyone knew who had ever dug a hole in the ground with a shovel, the size of the dirt pile — the spoil — was always larger than the volume of the hole. They’d been able to dump some spoil down a deep and otherwise useless shaft, but once this had been filled, they’d been unable to expand their living space for as long as the Hard Rain had made a direct connection to the outside too dangerous to be contemplated. So during that phase — well over three thousand years — they had devoted all of their energies to maintaining a community of several hundred people. Hence the rigid controls on breeding. Thanks to their Cycs, they knew everything about contraception, but they had no ability to manufacture things like condoms and pills, so that lore was mostly useless. The limitations on breeding were enforced by moral strictures, by segregation of the sexes, and by surgical sterilization. This, like all of their surgery, was performed without chemical anesthesia once they’d run out of drugs, which occurred fairly soon after Zero. Apparently they had gotten rather good at acupuncture and at biting down on things.

The reduction in the intensity of the Hard Rain would have been obvious to them on one level, since they could hear the impacts through the walls of the Hole. On another level it was easy to miss, since even dramatic changes spanned generations. But they had kept meticulous records of the frequency and intensity of strikes and so they recognized the downward trend in the late Fourth Millennium. When it was adjudged safe, they drilled an adit — a horizontal tunnel — out the side of the mountain until it broke out of a slope that they guessed was steep enough to have shed ejecta, preventing the buildup of rocky debris that now covered most of Earth’s surface to a considerable depth. That much had been true, but the debris at the base of the mountain had piled higher than they had expected — almost high enough to block the opening of their adit. Anyway, it had worked well enough that they had been able to push spoil out of it and thus begin expanding the Hole. The atmosphere was still far from breathable, so they’d been obliged to keep it sealed when they were not actively dumping stuff out of it, to prevent fumes from seeping in and poisoning the atmospheric system that they had looked after so meticulously for nearly four thousand years. This system, it seemed, was similar in principle to those used on space habitats. Carbon dioxide was removed by a combination of chemical scrubbers and green plants. Both of these required energy: the scrubber chemical had to be heated to drive off the CO₂ it had absorbed, and the plants required light. Since they were cut off from the sun, they got their energy geothermally, using works that Rufus and the others of his generation had sunk deep into the roots of the mountain. The maintenance of this system had been the full-time occupation of everyone in the Hole for the entire time they’d been down there. When they had neared the end of their stock of light-emitting diodes they had revived the art of making lightbulbs, consulting the Cyc for particulars, blowing artisanal glass envelopes and winding the filaments by hand. Likewise with many other things they had found themselves in need of.

Ty, not really an expert on technology, made little headway in trying to imagine the particulars. Someone of a more technical bent might have devoted weeks to debriefing Sonar Taxlaw and extracting every last detail about how they had managed to get along with just the stuff available to them underground. More important for present purposes was to get a general understanding of the Diggers’ culture, and why they behaved as they did.

The requirement for a steel-spined authoritarian culture was obvious. Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable. Had these people been living in, for example, the agricultural paradise of the Nile Delta, they might have been able to get away with some mazy religious dogma as the basis for that system. But instead they had been trapped within a large machine that would kill them all if allowed to go on the fritz, and so they had been obliged to develop a culture in which engineering became their dukh. Their finite supply of tungsten, stockpiled by wise Rufus, had to be stretched and husbanded so that their descendants thousands of years in the future would be able to manufacture lightbulbs to grow plants to make food and air. And so on and so forth in every particular of how these people lived their daily lives. Thirty people — the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One — were, at any given time, Cycs. Another thirty were toiling as their apprentices. Others played specific roles such as breeder mom, glassblower, acupuncturist, filament winder, potato nurturer, pump fixer. Structurally, culturally, it was very like a Bronze Age theocracy, but without any trace of God or the supernatural.

To that point it was not radically different from the subcultures of many First and Second Millennium space habitats, which — at least for a little while — gave Ty the idea that he could get a quick handle on Digger culture. But that fantasy soon evaporated. Those early Spacers had been living in cramped conditions, yes, and they had been just as dependent upon technology as the Diggers in their Hole. So of course there were some common features in the two cultures. But Spacers had always been able to look outside to see what the situation was, and — at least after a couple of thousand years of hunkering down in especially large rocks — to venture forth and do something about it. Even in their most desperate hours they had always expected to reinherit the Earth. The Diggers’ only way of knowing their situation and their fate was to listen to loud noises, tally them on acid-free, 100 percent cotton paper, and, every few years, compare the tally with a similar one made by some ancestor a couple of hundred years previously. For the first four thousand years, hope of a better future must have been seen as sheer folly. Worse than that, as an active betrayal of Digger principles, since people with hopes were apt to become profligate in spending resources and taking risks.

Which all made for a picture of those first four millennia that was as clear as it was bleak. But change would come hard to a society like that one. What was most interesting to Ty was what had begun to go on within that society when they’d punched the spoil adit to the surface and begun to expand their underground domain. Their day-to-day lives would not have changed much, but they’d have had at least the abstract possibility that their civilization might expand, that more people might be able to breed.

All of that had occurred more than a thousand years ago. The Hole had grown to the point where it could support a population of two thousand; then, around 4700 when the atmosphere had become breathable, they’d been able to take it up to ten thousand. All still beneath the surface, however, since there’d been little for them above it.

At some point the Committee — which was what they called their ruling council — must have become aware that vast numbers of humans were living in space and actively prosecuting the TerReForm. They could simply have walked out onto the surface and sent out some kind of an SOS at that point. Instead they had made a positive decision to conceal themselves, to hide their spoil dumps, to shun communication with the Spacers. The central question, then, was why they had made such a choice. Sonar Taxlaw wasn’t much help in explaining it. When Ty or the others asked questions, she offered nonresponsive answers that told of a subterranean culture in which such things were never spoken of.

It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent.

BETWEEN EINSTEIN’S PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRAIN, GEOGRAPHICAL folklore stored in the Cyc’s encyclopedic mind, and Beled’s digital map, they knew generally where to go at any particular moment. What made it difficult was negotiating obstacles in the terrain and steering clear of large animals. The latter group might, in theory, include Red military patrols, but they had no reason to believe that they were being pursued yet. Why would Red bother? Marching some Blue prisoners back in chains might score them some points with their new Digger friends, but having chased them off into the darkness was nearly as effective. Perhaps more so given the importance to the Diggers of the meme of Spacers as cowards.

Ty considered explaining to the Cyc that if her group of Diggers had turned up on the west side of 166 Thirty making the same preposterous territorial claims, Red, instead of approaching them with music and nuggets of space iron, would simply have vaporized them. But burdening the poor girl with that awareness wasn’t going to help.

They holed up in a pocket of shelter beneath a leaf of rock about the size of a football field that had been driven like a blade into the southern slope of a coastal mountain. There they consumed a day recovering from their exertions and waiting out a snowstorm, while communicating in short bursts with a transmitter on the Denali habitat. Blue military dropped a pod through the storm. Kath awakened long enough to announce that it had landed just down the slope from them. Bard stomped out there, his huge feet acting like snowshoes, and returned a quarter of an hour later dragging it behind him. He then stood for a few minutes contemplating Kath. Her sickness had abated, but she woke up now only to eat, eliminate, or make delphic pronouncements.

The pod contained food, fuel, ammunition, robots, and equipment for snow travel that stood them in good stead during the next day, as they descended out of the mountains toward the southern coast. Much of this happened under cover of the heavy clouds that almost always blanketed this part of the world, and so if anyone was watching them, it had to be directly — by actually following them around — or with flying robots. But now they had flying robots of their own that could alert them to the presence of both. Since those remained quiet, they felt reasonably certain that they were not being tracked, except by large canids who tended to make their presence obvious by howling a lot. Because of them, the next night was a restless one, and led to an early departure and a final day of hiking that rapidly developed into a pell-mell descent out of the Alpine zone and toward the Pacific.

During their lunch break, they spied a trio of single-person gliders — inflatables like the one Kath Two had taken on her Survey mission — dipping and darting along the coast from the general direction of Qayaq. As these carried Blue markings and were transmitting Blue codes, Beled felt comfortable divulging their position. Minutes later the gliders had touched down in an expanse of heather a few hundred meters below them. Their occupants climbed out, eviscerated their cargo holds, and began to deflate their gliders so that they could be rolled up. Most of that work ended up being done by a Teklan, shorter and more lithe than Beled. This left the other two new arrivals free to approach. One of them was a Camite whose gait and posture were more expressive of male than of female characteristics, and so Ty made a mental note to employ male pronouns until and unless the Camite requested otherwise. He wore one of the utilitarian coveralls employed by Survey personnel, with red cross patches on the chest and shoulder, marking him as a medic. The other was a middle-aged Ivyn dressed in civilian clothes marginally more posh than might be expected in the wilderness of Beringia, but suited to the conditions.

Regarding them from a more sheltered position overlooking the meadow, Ty had mixed feelings. Any assistance was, of course, welcome. He had known better than to expect a thunderous show of force. Blue’s high political councils, having been caught badly off guard, and having lost the first round to their Red counterparts, would still be assessing the situation and thinking about their options. For public consumption, they were probably characterizing the Seven as a plain vanilla Survey team that had fallen victim to an ambush. They didn’t want to undercut that story now by sending in an undeniably military force.

The name printed on the Camite’s uniform was Hope, which probably meant that, like many Camites, he only used one name. Bent under a medical pack, he went directly to Kath. Beled and Bard were descending to the meadow to help the Teklan pack up the gliders.

The Ivyn singled out Ty from a distance and approached him. The family name on his uniform was Esa and he introduced himself as Arjun. The former was an acronym frequently seen in the background of shots in the Epic, standing for “European Space Agency.” It had become a common name. Ty considered asking Arjun flat out who he was and what he did for a living that caused him to show up in circumstances like these. But he knew it would get him nowhere. The man would have some bland answer cued up. He was probably some kind of high-powered intelligence analyst with five advanced degrees.

“How’s this all playing up on the ring?” Ty asked him. “Do I even want to know?”

The mere question caused Arjun to break eye contact and gaze out over the sea.

“That bad?” Ty prompted him.

“You know the Aretaics,” Arjun said.

“They made it into grand opera, eh?”

“That’s as good a description as any. I am still coming to grips with it. Of course, we rarely see content from the Red side of the ring.”

“Just the propaganda,” Ty said.

“Yes, and when we see that, we have a laugh at the overwrought style, the baroque production values, while harboring an inner sense of anxiety that some people within Blue might—”

“Might actually believe their shit?”

“Exactly.”

“So Red did broadcast it.”

Arjun nodded. “Live, to the whole ring.”

“Sorry I missed the show. We bolted before the actual contact. It seemed like as good a time as any.”

“That was a fine tactic,” Arjun replied, “and saved you a great deal of annoyance.”

“How do you mean?”

Arjun turned to look directly at him. “The Diggers,” he said, “were as receptive to Red’s overtures as they were hostile to yours.”

Ty felt something in his chest. The awareness that he had failed, and that people knew it. It was not a feeling to which he was accustomed, and he did not like it. “So,” he said, “the Diggers ate it up?”

“They signed an alliance with Red on the spot. Red recognized their claim to the entire land surface of Earth and urged Blue to follow suit.”

“Just as a matter of basic human decency,” Ty said sourly.

“Of course. The saber-rattling began the next day. .”

Esa Arjun broke off as he noticed, and focused on, Sonar Taxlaw, who was standing next to Einstein, who was telling her how the gliders worked. Ty had grown used to it; all those two did the whole time they were awake was explain things to each other. But it was new to Arjun.

“She’s the. .” Arjun said, and trailed off. Ty tried to put himself in Arjun’s shoes: laying eyes on a rootstock human for the first time in his life, seeing someone who was clearly human and yet not of any identifiable human race, thinking about all that her ancestors had lived through.

“Yeah,” Ty said.

Arjun managed to snap out of his reverie and looked back at Ty. “The narrative being put out is that you abducted her.”

“Of course.”

Einstein said something funny. The Cyc laughed and leaned into him affectionately. His arm found its way around her waist, the hand sliding down to the hip.

“Are those two. .” Arjun began.

“Fucking? Not yet. But only because we’ve been on the run.”

“The Diggers, from what intelligence we’ve been able to scrape together, believe in strict gender roles and. .”

“Not fucking. Yeah. I’ll talk to Einstein. Tell him to not fuck her.”

“But you didn’t. .”

“Abduct her? No, she just tagged along.”

Sensing doubt, or at least curiosity, from the Ivyn, Ty continued: “And more would do the same given the chance. The transition to surface life is putting their culture through a blender. Which is why their leaders are being so reactionary.”

Arjun nodded. “And how’s your Moiran?”

Ty sighed. “She saw Doc and Memmie die, and suffered a blunt- force trauma to her arm, and was forced to draw her kat, and to use it. As soon as it happened she went into what I’m guessing is a classic POTESH.” This was military jargon for post-traumatic epigenetic shift.

“That is confirmed,” said Hope, who seemed to have finished an initial scan of Kath’s vital signs. “Higher metabolism and hyperacute senses are observable. Her microbiome is a mess; I’m tuning it up with probiotic supplements that’ll be a better fit with her new phenotype. Suggested by the nausea are big hormone shifts. Possibly predictive of some future. .”

“Testosterone poisoning?” Ty suggested, finishing Hope’s thought. Hope responded with a diffident nod of the head.

Ty turned his attention back to Arjun. “So three billion people just learned that the Diggers exist. How are they taking it?”

“Well, obviously it is a sensational bit of news,” Arjun said. “People are intensely curious.” He turned his head again to study Sonar Taxlaw. “As am I. I admit it.”

“Does the general public know how badly the first contact went wrong?” Ty asked.

“None of the identities of your Seven are public knowledge. Certainly no one has the faintest idea that Hu Noah had anything to do with it.”

“So Red hasn’t been trumpeting that.”

“It wouldn’t be to Red’s advantage, as I see it,” Arjun said. “Now that they are allied with the Diggers, they want to make the Diggers out to be sympathetic. Revealing that they killed Hu Noah and his nurse would hardly serve that end.”

“So we are just being made out to be some sort of anonymous thug squad. The Diggers chased us off with help from Red. We abducted a hostage as we were running away.”

Arjun looked him in the eye. “No intelligent person in Blue believes that, of course.”

“But Blue hasn’t put out a countervailing narrative yet either.”

“It isn’t Blue’s strong suit.” Arjun sighed. “Never has been, right? We’re technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn’t always line up with what people imagine they want.”

“Are you speaking of Blue in general?” Ty asked. “Or Rio in particular?” Using the name of the Ivyn central habitat as synecdoche for its culture.

“Both. A Blue mentality that places us at the top of the decision-making pyramid. There’s a reason why the very few Aïdans who have become prominent in Blue have been musicians, actors, artists.”

“They’re supplying something our culture lacks,” Ty said.

“You were supposed to supply it,” Arjun said. Meaning, as Ty understood, the Dinan race. “And you did, during the heroic age.”

Ty could feel a not altogether cheerful smile on his face. “By actually doing things, you mean,” he said, “as opposed to pretending to do them in made-up entertainment programs.”

“You know what, though? It’s all entertainment. Real or made up. It’s stuff that people watch on screens or varps. Red gets that.”

“Well,” Ty said, “maybe we can continue the discussion in my bar if we get out of this. But the bottom line for now, if I’m hearing you right, is that, narrative-wise, Red is killing us.”

“We have been a little distracted,” Arjun said, showing a bit of defensiveness for the first time.

“By what Red did, you mean,” Ty said. He was referring to the insertion of the peloton, Marge’s glorious return, and the lovey-dovey stuff between their delegation and the Diggers.

Arjun did not out-and-out disagree, but the look on his face was a bit impatient, the smart teacher working with the slow pupil. “More by what they’ve been doing. For a while now.”

“Well,” Ty said, “as a mere bartender, I wouldn’t know about anything other than what is on the news feeds. So tell me. What have they been doing?”

“What do you know about the Kulak?”

“What any civilian lacking a security clearance would know,” Ty answered carefully. “People are assumed to be living in the fist part of it.”

“Kulak” was Russian for “fist.” In this context it denoted an irregular lump of nickel-iron some thirty kilometers across. A hundred and fifty years ago, Red had moved it from the Kamchatka boneyard to a position above the Makassar Strait, where it had orbited ever since. Like a loosely clenched fist, it had a cavity down the middle, a tunnel now presumed to be lined with rotating habitats. Red’s answer to the Great Chain.

“Then there’s the rigging and spars whatnot surrounding that,” Ty went on. For the fist, viewed from a distance, seemed to be tangled in a sparse web of cables, like a seed in a spiderweb. Above and below — to the nadir and zenith sides — these converged on hard points to which the long cables extending down to Earth’s surface and up to the counterweight — the Antimakassar — were attached.

Sonar Taxlaw, a few meters away, had been engaged in a public display of affection with Einstein, but withdrew slightly and turned her head to listen.

Ty had grown accustomed to her ways. It was because he had said “spars.” That was between Sonar and Taxlaw in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and thus belonged to her domain of knowledge. During their hike over the mountains and down the other side, she had turned out to be well informed, at least by troglodyte standards, about space exploration and the sun. So it had been easy to bring her up to speed on the last five thousand years’ off-planet developments. She now began to drift toward Ty. Einstein followed her as if his eyes were connected to her butt cheeks with fishhooks.

Oblivious to all this — for he had his back to it — Arjun was regarding him coolly, expecting more. Ty went on: “The part on the surface — their answer to Cradle — we don’t know much about. They’ve been building it under the sea.”

“They call it the Gnomon,” Arjun informed him. Then he spelled the word out.

“What does it mean?”

“It used to be the thing that stood up in the middle of a sundial, to cast the shadow. Aligned with the Earth’s axis.”

Ty considered it. “Interesting choice of words.”

“It’s big, Ty. Much bigger than Cradle. There’s a reason they’ve been building it in the ocean. Partly to hide it from us. And partly because it’s too large to construct on terra firma.”

“How big are we talking about exactly?”

“There is only so much I’m at liberty to say,” Arjun said. Then he drew out a tablet and began tapping at it, pulling up a world map, panning and zooming toward the mess of islands between Southeast Asia and Australia. “But just look at this and tell me what you see.” He handed it to Ty.

“Southeast Asia!” exclaimed the Cyc, who had drawn close enough to see all of this over Arjun’s shoulder. “Is there anything you would care to know of it? Or of Sulawesi? Or of Sri Lanka?”

The Ivyn regarded her with fascination.

“I don’t need to look,” Ty said. “I know what’s there. The equator runs through all of that and rarely crosses over the land, and Red never stops whining about it.”

“Not true! Sumatra. .” said the Cyc.

“A big island to be sure,” Ty said, “but not a continent. Do you remember, Sonar, what I told you about how the Eye works? What Cradle does?”

“Touches the equator,” she returned.

“And only the equator. Which is great if you control Africa and South America. Which Blue does. But most of Red’s territory lies north or south of the line.”

Sonar wasn’t going to be talked down so easily. “Singapore is close,” she said, “and that is connected to Asia.”

“The former location of Singapore is close, yes. But not on the equator. It’s one or two degrees north. Cradle can’t dock there.”

“And that one detail, more than anything else, is what infuriated the Aïdans about the design of the Eye and Cradle,” Arjun put in.

Sensing Einstein behind her, the Cyc leaned comfortably back against him and started rattling off facts — her default mode of social interaction. “Aïdans,” she said. “The ABC hierarchy. Aretaics, Betas, Camites.”

“Camites are a different race,” Einstein reminded her.

“Oh yeah. The relationship of the A and the B to the C is more akin to Symbiosis.”

Ty and Einstein exchanged a wry look.

Oblivious, Sonar Taxlaw gazed down the hill toward Langobard. “Neoanders. And two more. The smart ones and the crazy ones.”

“Jinns and Extats,” Einstein said. “They don’t get out much.”

Arjun’s fascination with seeing a rootstock human had given way to impatience. He focused on Ty again. “This is old history, of course,” he said, “but never forgotten by some people. Way back when the Eye was being designed — I’m talking a thousand years ago — there were alternative schemes proposed. The one we ended up with was simplest, easiest to build with what people had back then. The Eye, the Big Rock, and a small Cradle with sockets on the equator. Great for access to South America and Africa. Almost useless, however, in the stretch of the equator under the habitats where Aïdans, half of the Camites, and most of the Julians lived.”

“What later became Red,” Einstein put in, for Sonar Taxlaw’s benefit.

“One of the reasons Red later coalesced, and built such a strong counteridentity to Blue, was their sense of grievance over this decision. We should have waited, they said. We could have had something much more useful than Cradle.” Arjun zoomed in on Indonesia and dragged out a skinny rectangle, straddling the equator and spanning most of Red’s latitudes. “If instead of Cradle we had made something in the shape of a long arc, spanning a greater distance north-south, it might have connected with Asia down here, where Singapore used to be. And here it could touch the northern cape of New Guinea. And New Guinea could be connected to Australia by dropping enough rocks into the shallows between them.”

“A long arc. Aligned with the Earth’s axis, casting a shadow on the ground,” Ty said, nodding. “A Gnomon.”

“It would have to be huge!” Einstein exclaimed.

Arjun nodded. “Plans for it were drawn up. Studies commissioned on how it might be constructed, in orbit or on the surface. It was deemed too ambitious. So wiser heads prevailed,” said Arjun, “or so it seemed at the time, and we built what we built. We can always make something bigger later, they said. But it didn’t turn out that way. Blue forgot about it. Red didn’t. Their Jinns put as much effort into thinking about it as our Ivyns put into epigenetics. As soon as they closed the border and put up the two turnpikes, they went to work. What have they been doing that whole time?”

“Smiting the Torres Strait with an unceasing storm of bolides,” said Sonar Taxlaw, pointing to the narrows where Australia’s northern cape almost poked New Guinea in the belly. “Filling it in. Damming the currents. Making a wall against those that swim in the sea.”

Arjun nodded.

Then his head snapped around to focus on the Cyc.

He stared at her intently for a moment, then looked at Ty. “Did you. .” he began.

“Not a word,” Ty said.

“Einstein, did you tell her about Red’s illegal terraforming operation here?” And he tapped the same place on the map.

“First I’ve heard of it,” Einstein said.

“Sonar,” Arjun said, “how did you know about that?”

“The Pingers told us,” Sonar said.

“Who the hell are the Pingers?”

“The people we are going to talk to,” Sonar said.

Beled and Bard had been assisting the Teklan. Those three now approached, carrying the glider packs. They set them down and began camouflaging them under such foliage as was available in this place: scrubby brushes that had been socked into the brow of the slope to stabilize it and provide refuge for small animals. Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan’s physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater. When it became evident to the Teklan that the two larger men were better than he was at uprooting plants and moving dirt, this man left them to finish the task and approached. Tucked under his left arm was a container matching the general size and shape of those still used, in Chainhattan, to transport pizza. Dangling from that hand was a roughly cubical equipment case. With his free right hand he exchanged salutes with Ty and identified himself as one Roskos Yur. He then set the two parcels in front of Ty and backed away from them.

“Thank you,” Ty said.

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“Why,” Arjun asked, “did you want those? Do you have any idea what it cost to get them here?”

“The Cyc can explain along the way,” Ty said.

Arjun held his gaze on Ty for a moment, then glanced away with a diffident nod. Roskos Yur, by contrast, looked hard at him, and wouldn’t stop looking. After a few moments of this, Ty felt obliged to meet the Teklan’s eye. Now that Ty could scan this man’s insignia more carefully, he could see that he was part of a unit stationed at Nunivak: one of the forward Blue outposts, right up against the border. It was a byword for remote and isolated. It made Qayaq seem like a metropolis. Full of Snake Eaters always being sent off on crazy missions.

“That’s not really what he’s asking, sir,” said Roskos Yur. “He’s really asking, who the fuck are you?”

“Sergeant Major Yur—” Arjun said, in a tone of protest.

But Yur would not be stopped. “And don’t tell us you’re a bartender, sir.”

“The late Dr. Hu handpicked Mr. Lake for inclusion in the Seven,” Arjun pointed out.

“And now he’s ramrodding this—” Yur looked about at the group and gave out an incredulous snort. “I don’t even know how to describe it. ‘Ragtag’ makes it sound like more than it is.”

“He led them out of a difficult situation,” Arjun said.

“A difficult situation for which he’s partly responsible, sir,” Yur shot back.

“And at the moment he knows more about the Diggers, and the situation on the ground, than anyone. I assume he requested those objects for a reason, which will be explained as we go.”

Ty held up a hand. “Sergeant Major Yur doesn’t trust me because my allegiance isn’t clear to him. Fair enough.”

Yur’s face softened a little, and his gaze flicked to one side for a moment. Taking advantage of this break in the staredown, Ty turned to face Esa Arjun.

The Ivyn made the tiniest movement that was still recognizable as shaking his head no. Once he was certain that Ty had caught it, he looked at Roskos Yur. “Sergeant Major,” Arjun said quietly, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Yur snorted. “Is that a fancy way of saying it’s above my pay grade, sir?”

“Yes.”

“I just want to know if it’s some kind of fucking dukh shit, sir.”

“Oh, is that all?” Ty asked. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“No,” Arjun said, the tension suddenly gone from his voice. “There’s no dukh involved.”

“Because that bar he works for—”

“It’s not connected with any established kupol.”

“Then who the hell is it connected with, sir?” Yur demanded. “I made some inquiries with friends of mine in intel. That bar makes no fucking sense as a business proposition. Its ownership structure is. . unusual. Connections to Red, I’m told.”

“One of the Owners happens to be of part Aïdan ancestry,” Ty admitted, “but be careful of making unwarranted assumptions about where his loyalties lie.”

“Does this have something to do with the Purpose?” Roskos Yur demanded.

Neither Ty nor Arjun answered. After a few moments of this silence, Yur heaved a sigh, then continued in a more moderate tone: “Never mind. I see it now. It’s some kind of Purpose thing. Above my pay grade. You should have just told me.” He drew himself up and saluted. “What are my orders, sir?”

“We march to the sea,” Ty said, “following the Cyc’s directions. And moving as fast as we can. Complicating matters is that our Moiran may have to be carried.”

“Actually,” said Langobard, who had been loping in their direction and was now in earshot, “we may have to work rather hard to keep up with her.” He extended one long arm, pointing down the slope of the meadow.

The first thing they all saw was the huge form of Beled, charging downhill at the near-sprint that, as they all knew, he could maintain for hours. Far ahead of him, then, they saw Kath Amalthova Three, moving even faster.

HOPE’S DRUGS AND PROBIOTICS HAD SETTLED KATHREE’S MOOD A bit and reduced the nausea to the point where she could almost ignore it. This had been resolving on its own, but she was glad of any pharmaceutical assistance she could get; her body had become ravenous and she needed to keep her food down. But the most important drug in her system right now — so important that Hope had strapped a little pump to Kathree’s arm, the better to keep dribbling it in — was one designed to home in on her amygdala and put the brakes on any slow neurological train wreck that might be under way there in reaction to the trauma she had seen four days ago. As such it was reaching her brain a few days too late — but apparently it was one of those “better late than never” things. It might help interrupt a vicious cycle in which her brain would keep replaying that little horror movie over and over, deepening the damage a little bit each time. The fact that she’d spent so much time asleep might also be helping her in that regard. Some tangible and biologically measurable benefit might have accrued to her as a result of having spent most of that time physically strapped to Beled, her cheek on his shoulder, all but sucking him into her nostrils. For his part the Teklan had shown no particular reaction to having an indolent, vomit-scented coma patient on his back during the day, and curled up against his belly during the night. The two of them had still never had sex, but she feared now that once she was cleaned up and feeling better she would be on him like a succubus. It was a well-known POTESH symptom, which had produced colorful and legendary results in Moiran communities that had survived collective trauma.

But since having rampant sex with everything that moved wasn’t really an option today, she sought other outlets for her surging physical energy. The hike from the meadow down to the sea was longer than it had appeared and she ended up ranging far in front of the others, obliging Beled to push himself hard just to keep her in sight. She could not see him because he was behind her, but she could sense his footfalls through the ground. She could hear his breathing and the faint clicking of the ambots that he carried on his person, and when the wind was from behind she could smell the institutional wipes that he had been using for hygiene, and the detergent that had been used to clean his uniform, the lubricant in his kat, his most recent meal. Her ranging so far out in front of the others was partly a way to burn off a physical energy that threatened to make her crazy but as much an effort to get into a place where she was not taking in an equal amount of sensory data from everyone in the group. One was enough.

She stormed through a hedge of whippy plants that had been seeded in a dune above the beach and broke out onto the wet sand. Waves were breaking half a kilometer out and washing up toward her in fizzing sheets. The smell in her nostrils spoke of an incalculable density of marine life, akin to what she had scented when she had stood on the top of the bridge in Cradle, but much more finely resolved now. This despite the chemically induced suppression of her amygdala. Without Hope’s drugs in her system she might have spiraled into a sort of panic attack. As it was she felt her body overheating and looked down at her bare arms as if expecting them to crack open like sausages on a grill. Dropping from a run to a stride, she marched straight down the beach peeling off clothes as she went and depositing them in a ragged career over her footprints. Soon, but not soon enough, the surf was washing her ankles, then her shins. She dropped to her knees and let herself topple forward into an onrushing wave that caught her fall and let her down easy. Naked, she was floating facedown in the water, whose icy cold only made the exposed parts of her skin — buttocks and shoulder blades — feel as if they were under a broiler.

Pressed for a rational explanation of why she was lying facedown in the Pacific, eyes open, gazing at a starfish, she could not have answered. But it was having an effect. Her heart, which had been thumping out of control, dropped to something much closer to a normal rate, and a surprising amount of time passed before she felt obliged to plant her hands and knees in the sand, push herself up on all fours, and suck in a breath of air.

She got her legs under her and squatted, then pivoted so that her back was to the sea. Her legs and buttocks were still submerged, cooling off from the run.

Beled Tomov was standing a few meters away, surf washing around his ankles, breathing heavily, looking as though a dip in the icy Pacific might do him some good. But this was not his intent. He had been ready to pull Kathree out if she had gone too long without breathing.

They looked at each other, Kathree’s gaze saying I would do you right now, right here and his saying I know and hers saying I know that you know.

“Did you hear anything?” he asked.

That was unexpected.

“Just now,” he explained, “when your head was under.”

“You mean, in the water?”

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“You haven’t been listening, have you?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been listening so hard it’s driving me out of my mind.”

“To the conversation, I mean.”

“No. Everyone talks too loud.”

He considered it. Then he turned a little to one side and stretched out one arm, drawing her attention to a rocky headland that interrupted the beach a few hundred meters away. “There,” he said.

The thermal spike in her body had finally subsided, so she pulled her clothes back on and they walked along the beach toward the headland: an abrupt, almost artificial-looking rampart of shattered rock, held together by the roots of trees and scrub. It divided the beach like the blade of a shovel.

She did not even know why they had been going to the sea. Was someone going to pick them up there? Was there even a plan? Or had they simply run away until they could run no farther?

“The Diggers believe,” Beled said, “in the existence of people who live beneath the sea. The Pingers. Supposedly there have been contacts. At specific places along the coast of Beringia.” He nodded in the direction they were going.

“As in face-to-face contacts?”

Beled shrugged: a movement that, given the size of his shoulders, could almost be picked up on a seismograph. “I fancied you might have heard something while your head was under the water,” he said. “They use a tech called sonar.”

Her disordered brain was a little while putting this all together. She knew a little about sonar. Survey used it to map the bottoms of lakes and to count fish. “No coincidence that we are traveling with someone of that name?”

Beled nodded. “She has been telling us about them, but much of it sounds more legend than fact.”

“Where do they live? Submarines?”

He shrugged again. “No one seems to know. Apparently they are good at holding their breath.”

The headland could not be skirted without a boat. They ended up cutting back inland so that they could get past it. This required gaining a couple of hundred meters in altitude and bushwhacking through vegetation that had grown thick on the south-facing slope.

When they reached a place from which they could look down toward the sea, it became obvious that they were on the edge of an impact crater a kilometer or so in diameter. The headland that had blocked their passage down the beach was part of its rim; this curved out into the Pacific, forming one side of a bay. A mirror image of it, as they could now see, formed the opposite side. The bolide that had formed the crater had struck very close to the shore. The central impact peak was a sharp rocky islet just a stone’s toss from the beach, precisely centered between the twin headlands. It was easy enough for the eye to fill in the missing shape of the rim. Out in the water between the headlands, it must be slung in a submerged arc. And indeed it was possible to see waves breaking as they tripped over it. On the landward side, the rim blended into the natural slope. The impact had hollowed out a bowl whose steepness now forced Beled and Kathree to make an awkward, skidding descent into the cove below. The beach there was more rocky than sandy, and many of the rocks had the translucency of wave-worn beach glass.

They could hear the remainder of the party on the slope high above, catching up with them.

The middle of the beach — just opposite the sharp little island — seemed like the natural place to make camp. A little heap of glassy stones had been made there — just big enough to make it clear that this was no natural deposit, but an intentional act. “Their signal,” Beled explained. “We should build a fire now.” He began ranging along the beach picking up driftwood. Kathree, drawn somehow by the cairn, squatted there to wait for the others. She could hear Sonar Taxlaw chattering as she negotiated the slope above, running circles around the others, whose footfalls and breathing were audible.

“Their history is divided into three Deluges. The First Deluge was of rock and fire. It chased them into the deepest trenches of the sea, where it never fully dried out, even after the rest of the oceans had boiled off. They bred a race capable of living in confined spaces. The Second Deluge was of ice and water.”

“The Cloudy Century!” Einstein said.

“Yes, when you dropped comets on them for hundreds of years. They noticed that seas were expanding, growing away from the trenches where they had been holed up, expanding their range. They transformed themselves into a race that could swim in the sea.”

“When you say they transformed themselves,” asked Arjun, “do you mean genetic engineering or—”

“Selective breeding,” Sonar insisted. “If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a need! They began to explore the seafloor. They found a lot of industrial junk that had been washed into the oceans during the Hard Rain and sunk to the bottom. There is nothing of metallurgy that is a mystery to them.”

“Which is why you trade with them?” Ty ventured. “Because you are short on metal?”

“And they are short on things we have,” Sonar affirmed.

“You said there were three Deluges,” Einstein reminded her. “The Third Deluge?”

“Is now,” said the Cyc. “A Deluge of life, beginning with microorganisms and culminating with you.”

“Meaning, the Spacers,” Ty guessed.

“Yes. And the only Spacers they know about are the ones who dropped a lot of rocks into the Torres Strait and built the thing at Makassar.”

“How is all of this being imparted to you?” asked Arjun.

“Imparted?”

“Have you, Sonar, actually had face-to-face conversations with Pingers?”

“Me personally?!” she asked, sounding amazed and horrified by the very idea. “Oh no, just looked down on them from up here.”

“So you lurk up above while more senior members of your clan go down to the beach and talk to the Pingers.”

“Talking is difficult. Communication is mostly through the written word. They didn’t have paper until we gave them some of ours. We use slates and chalk.”

Kathree’s eye went to a detail she had noticed a minute ago: an unnatural-looking deposit of flat black rocks half buried in wave-driven sand. As the remainder of the party made their final descent to the water’s edge, she used a piece of driftwood to scrape sand and gravel away from these until she could worry one loose. Though it was rough around the edges, it had clearly been shaped by humans: a slab of black rock about as thick as her finger, big enough to hold in the crook of an arm, smooth enough to write on. Scattered in the muck around it she’d seen lumps of calcium carbonate: chalk. Traces of it were still visible on the slates. Not writing but a fragment of a diagram, a map perhaps, and a few numbers.

PROJECTING FROM ONE SIDE OF THE ISLET, JUST BELOW THE TOP OF it, was a snarl of driftwood: the stump of a tree that a storm had torn from the edge of a cliff somewhere along the coast and later hurled up here. As soon as he arrived, Ty dropped his pack, emptied his pockets, and picked up the boxy equipment case that Roskos Yur had delivered in his glider. Holding this up above his head to keep it dry, he waded out to the islet, cursing at the intensity of the cold. At its deepest, the water came up to his waist, with occasional waves clipping him under the chin. He tossed the case up onto the flank of the islet and then clambered up after it.

After gazing curiously at the stump for some moments, he squatted down, gripped it by a couple of protruding roots, and overturned it, causing it to tumble into the surf. He then edged back out of the others’ sight line to reveal what had been hidden beneath it: a vertical section of stout steel pipe, about a hand’s breadth in diameter, rising to the height of a person’s knee, topped with a flat disk of battered steel the size of a dinner plate. The pipe wasn’t rooted to the boulder itself. It was part of a longer object that extended out into the sea. The part above the waterline was lashed to spikes that had been driven into crevices in the rock, in a style that they had already learned to recognize as typical Digger improvisation.

Ty’s attention strayed to something he had noticed at his feet. He bent down and heaved it up so that all on the beach could see it: a sledgehammer improvised from a length of pipe and a chunk of steel. Then he looked at the Cyc. Looking back at Ty she held her hands out, palms toward the gray sky, as if to say: See? Just like I said.

Ty turned away from them, gazing down into the sea before the boulder. After a few moments he turned back around. “How far does it extend?” he shouted.

“The pipe? A few score yards,” answered the Cyc. “The crater is as a horn, channeling the sound out into the deep.”

She had scarcely finished the sentence before Ty hauled off with the sledgehammer and brought it down with all his might on the steel plate. The result was a blindingly loud metallic ping, drowned out, as it faded, by a scream from Kathree, who sank to her knees in the sand with her hands clamped over her head.

“Better get her out of here,” Ty said — she could hear him through her hands. She felt Beled reaching around her from behind, crooking her in one arm below her breasts, heaving her to her feet. Which was welcome on one level. But she was tired of being the one who had to be carried, and so she unwound herself from him, turned her back on the sea, and marched up toward the belt of scrub that marked the limit of the beach. Ty gave her a respectable head start before shouting, “Plug your ears.” She did so, and a moment later felt another ping go through her like an icicle jammed into the base of her skull. A moment later came another and another, not in a steady rhythm, but sporadic. And by the time she had climbed up to a place where she could look down over the cove, fingers in her ears, and not suffer pain from each stroke of the hammer, she had made sense of what Ty was doing.

Each of the human races had its own set of cultural traditions that it traced back to its respective Eve. These were propagated from one generation to the next by social rituals, school curricula, and youth groups. Young Teklans learned zero-gravity gymnastics with a martial arts flair, competing on obstacle courses that reproduced specific maneuvers that Tekla had performed during the Epic. Julians competed on debate teams and went on lengthy retreats intended to symbolize their Eve’s exile and ordeal in the Swarm. And so on.

Young Dinans learned Morse code. It was used very rarely.

Moirans most certainly didn’t learn it, and so Kathree had no idea what message Tyuratam Lake was banging out into the deep.

Everyone, of course, had watched the scene in the Epic, at the beginning of the Hard Rain, where Eve Dinah had made her final transmission to Rufus. This had trailed off with many repetitions of the code QRT, which — especially after Dinah had dissolved in sobs, and slowed her transmission speed to a crawl — had a kind of solemn fanfare-like rhythm to it, beginning with pahm, pahm, pa-pahm. The letter Q. Kathree recognized that pattern, at least, more frequently than you would expect in normal English sentences. So, Ty was using ancient Q codes to shorten his message. But she hadn’t a clue what he was actually saying. He belted it out over and over again, a syncopated phrase of long and short strokes that started to get under her skin after a while. He stopped when Sonar Taxlaw waded out to the rock and assured him that, if the Pingers were about, they would surely have heard the message by now.

“How long now?” he asked. He was shouting over the rush of the surf and because he had probably gone deaf.

“Depends on how far away they are,” said Sonar Taxlaw. “Maybe a day. Maybe three.”

“Great,” Ty said, and looked up to catch the eye of Roskos Yur, who, following a timeless military instinct, pushed his sleeve back to check his timepiece.

Ty unlatched the lid of the box and began to take out pieces of equipment and to peruse instructional brochures. Kathree was too far away to see the details, and in any case it was getting dark. As the sky faded, she could see Ty sitting on the shore of the islet, facing out toward the sea, occasionally flicking on a small light and fussing with equipment. Perched next to him, swaddled in sleeping bags that Einstein had brought out to her, was the Cyc. She wore a bulky pair of headphones, occasionally turning her head toward Ty in an alert birdlike way to make some sort of comment. Esa Arjun paced slowly back and forth on the beach, just out of the waves’ reach, passing occasionally near Einstein, who just stood there gazing fretfully at his beloved. Hope had gone to ground in a small tent pitched a few meters higher up, on drier sand; a bluish flicker through its walls suggested he was working with a tablet, maybe trying to learn something about POTESH management.

So much for the lower camp where Hope, Ty, Einstein, Sonar Taxlaw, and Arjun had made themselves at home. Beled had followed Kathree uphill. Langobard and Roskos Yur later followed him. Spreading out, bushwhacking in all directions, they identified a curved brow in the slope: the line of demarcation between the crater’s inland edge and the preexisting landscape from which it had been blasted. Above it, the slope was much gentler. Indeed, the first thing one saw upon cresting the rim was a slight drop in altitude. Before them, as they stood with their backs to the sea and their faces to the mountains, was a bog a few hundred meters in extent, with a pine forest rising up on its far side. They backpedaled a few paces and set to work establishing an upper camp just below the summit of the rim. Few words were spoken, but it was obvious that its purpose was to defend the beach if and when Red forces approached. If the foe came straight down out of the mountains, they would have to cross the bog. If they came along the beach, they would have to scale or circumvent a prong of the crater’s rim. Either way, they would be clearly visible from this vantage point.

It could be guessed that an ONAN had struck the ground somewhere nearby, several decades ago. Seed-packed siwis had slithered out of it, roaming about, mapping elevations and soil moisture, comparing notes over a mesh network. The collective had noticed the break in the slope leading down to the sea. Following a program drilled into it by some coder up on the ring, it had decided that the coastline might be stabilized here by planting some seeds that would grow up into tough, low, scrubby vegetation. And so it had all come to pass. Siwis that happened to wander away from the beach had found the flat ground beyond the rim and planted it with different species that would thrive in a wet environment. The vegetation had created a bit of a natural dam, holding back water coming down out of the mountains above them. One day it might be a lake, but for now it was a black bog, squishy and knee-deep and screened with grasses and reeds that favored that sort of ground.

Kath Two had not been a fighter. Her weapons training had given her the bare minimum of skill needed to discharge a katapult in the direction of a hungry canid. Kathree didn’t know, yet, whether that was one of the things that had shifted. In a sense it did not matter. No matter how good she might turn out to be at combat, she would never be as effective as Beled, Bard, and — judging from appearances — Roskos Yur. She was, however, finding them to be a dull, slow bunch. They failed to notice much that was obvious to her. And it was clear that they were tired and fading toward sleep. After it had gotten fully dark, Kathree consumed three consecutive full meals from the rations that Roskos Yur had brought with him, then slipped away and climbed a short distance farther up, to the very top of the rim, from which she could look and listen inland.

When she returned, she startled Roskos Yur, whose steady breathing had been audible from a thousand paces away. He’d been asleep, or close to it.

“You should warn me when you are approaching, Kath Two!” he hissed.

“She’s dead.”

“Kath Three, then.”

“No one is coming,” she said, “at least not for a few hours.”

“Not unless they drop from the sky,” he retorted.

Langobard, ever sociable, had approached. “They will not come by air,” he said. “If they can take us out quietly, they will do so — and never say a word of it. But to make a full assault? That would clash with the narrative that they are building for the consumption of the people of the ring.”

“When are we going to begin writing our own fucking narrative?” Yur said. And there the conversation stalled.

But his question was answered an hour later when Kathree, then the rest of them, discerned a whine and a rumble coming from the direction of the water. Running lights appeared over the horizon, coming from the south over the limit of the world, but then winked out as the pilot made the decision to run dark. It was clear from the sound, and from the way it hugged the water, that this thing was neither an airplane nor a ship but the in-between thing known as an ark. They heard it sough into the water a kilometer away and switch over to the chugging engines it used to maneuver on the surface. It dropped anchor several hundred meters offshore: well away from the land, so as to respect the hair-trigger sensibilities of the Diggers, but close enough that people and gear could be ferried to and fro on small boats. It opened its big rear cargo ramp, allowing the sea to flood its interior and float a collection of small boats and barges that had been packed aboard. On one of these, a small party came ashore. Kathree heard them conversing, mostly with Ty and Arjun, though Einstein as usual found a way to make himself part of the action.

A barge from the ark had been towed into the open water between it and the shore, and anchored. The sounds coming from it spoke of complex mechanical internals. After a few minutes it began to rumble and hum, and a fountain of glittering flynk chain, an upside-down U, grew out of its top and began to extend skyward as its velocity built and its sound sharpened into a steady keening note. Within a few minutes the aitrain had elevated to a height of perhaps a hundred meters and begun to give off a soft light, filling the cove and the beach with enough illumination for people to move about easily and read documents. Kathree could now read the name of the ark, blazoned on its fuselage near the nose: Darwin. It must have been sent out from a big TerReForm base — most likely Haida, which served the northern Pacific coast.

The aitrain that they had deployed on the barge was a common enough military device. As such it was probably radiating in other wavelengths besides just visible light. It was a sort of all-in-one communications hub that was interconnecting everything that had line of sight to it, as well as uplinking to Denali and other installations in the ring.

Sleep was now out of the question for Kathree, and so she made her way down the crater to the beach. When she emerged from the brush she discovered Einstein and the Cyc, standing next to each other in a crossfire of lights, facing a camera. To one side, sorting through notes, was a new arrival, a tall Moiran woman with the posture, the self-possession, and the golden eyes of a fashion model. She wore clothing suited for the chilly, damp coast of Beringia. It hung on her slender but strong frame in a way that suggested it had been made for her, probably by a clever designer on the Great Chain.

Kathree didn’t have to get any closer to understand what was happening: the tall Moiran woman was producing just what Roskos Yur had asked for. She began by talking directly into a camera for some time, then interviewed Einstein and the Cyc. It was all being beamed live to the ring.

Kathree sat alone on the beach, hugging her knees and watching the woman do what she did and wondering what events in her life had caused her to shift into what she was now, so tall, so lovely, so watchable. She did not have the manner of one who had been born beautiful, which made Kathree suspect that she had come by it through some kind of personal disaster. After she was finished doing her interviews, she shut down the lights and the cameras, approached Esa Arjun, and stood face-to-face with him for a while, just talking. Both of them had put on varps and Kathree got the idea that they were conversing about whatever it was that the devices were projecting into their eyes.

Kathree became certain that Kath Two had seen the woman broadcasting from trouble spots around the ring: habitats where general strikes or civil disorder had gotten out of hand, where Quarantine Enforcement or police had been called in to break things and hurt people.

The mere fact that Kathree was sitting still long enough to make such observations and to string such thoughts together was indicative of a coming crash — the inevitable result of how she had spent most of the day. It was about halfway between midnight and dawn, and Kathree felt herself plummeting toward sleep with the same power and inevitability as Endurance diving into her final pass through perigee.

Instead of which she found herself gazing at, and being gazed at by, the tall Moiran woman, who had silently drawn almost to within arm’s length of her. Kathree jumped to her feet and nearly fell over.

“Kath Amalthova Three,” the woman said, “I am Cantabrigia Barth Five.”

Five. Wow. “You must have seen some crazy shit,” Kathree said. “I hope for your sake you have taken a set in your current form.”

Cantabrigia Five made a tiny movement of her golden eyes, by way of acknowledging the remark, but let it pass without comment. “I am what amounts to the commanding officer here,” she said.

It was neither the craziest nor the least crazy thing Kathree had heard lately, so she took it impassively. By outward appearances, Cantabrigia Five was a video journalist. But it made sense that, in a world where no police or military action could be judged successful unless it looked good to ordinary persons watching it on video screens, she was also a general.

Arjun had approached from behind Cantabrigia Five and now took up a position just to one side, peering over her right shoulder. He caught Kathree’s eye briefly and nodded.

“Over the wireless,” said Cantabrigia Five, “I just now spoke to Sergeant Major Yur and Lieutenant Tomov and Langobard, and gave them their instructions. These are yours. A small Red military force is approaching. They are still some hours away. We have intelligence that they are being guided this way by two Diggers familiar with the route. When they get here, there may or may not be a fight. If there is, do not enter into it directly. Stay clear of our buckies. Look for the Diggers. If you can prevent them from doing harm, by all means do so. But dead Diggers on a video screen is a thing we can-not afford.”

Kathree nodded. “I understand.”

Arjun apparently felt that some explanation was required. “We don’t know when, or if, the Pingers will show up. So we need to buy time.”

“Okay,” Kathree said. “What are we hoping to buy it with?”

The look on Arjun’s face suggested that the question had been impertinent. But Cantabrigia Five responded by reaching up to remove the varp she had perched atop her head. She swept it off and handed it to Kathree, who arranged it carefully on her own face. The fit was imperfect and so she had to hold it in position with one hand to get the right focus.

“You’ll want the sound track,” said Cantabrigia Five. “It’s just not the same otherwise.”

“Sound track?” Kathree said. But a faint shift in the set of Cantabrigia Five’s face hinted that some deadpan humor was at work and that she should just play along. Groping along the sides of her head, she found the earbuds and flipped them down into position.

The varp was causing her to see a number of imaginary objects, most of which were grayed and/or blurred — it had figured out that Kathree was not its owner and so it had disabled anything personal or private. Hanging in space between her and Arjun, however, was a softly glowing red token having the apparent size of a table tennis ball, with a dimple in one side. He reached out and gave this a light tap and it flew in her direction. “Be my guest,” he said. She caught it in her hand and put her thumb into the dimple, then swooped it around in a big oval in front of her face. This caused a flat screen to make itself visible. She then drew the red ball toward her, sweeping the screen through a third dimension to define a volume about the size of a laundry basket.

Cantabrigia Five hadn’t been kidding about the sound track. It was a full orchestra, comprising some instruments that would have been familiar to Mozart and others that had been invented thousands of years after Zero. It, and a large choir, poured a three-dimensional ocean of sound into her ears, performing the Red national anthem. Not the peppy, truncated version heard at sporting events but the symphonic arrangement, calculated to make people sit still and be awed.

A nickel-iron fist seemed to be hanging in the volume of space she had just swept out above the beach. The Kulak. Stout spars jutted from it here and there: anchor points for hair-thin lines of rigging that extended in various directions, seeming to disappear in the vast distance. Moving carefully lest she turn an ankle on a cobble, Kathree circled around it until she could peer down the hole in the center. There, she saw movement: rings of light, each of them similar to the Great Chain, stacked up the interior, each spinning at a different rate, but all protected within the lumpy shell of the asteroid, many kilometers thick. This triggered a programmed camera movement that took her by surprise and obliged her to plant her feet and steady herself by laying a hand on Cantabrigia Five’s forearm. The povv, or point of virtual view, took a slow dive down the center of the Kulak, which had now expanded far beyond the basket-sized volume to surround her. She could not control the speed of the movement but she could gaze in all directions and see through the glass roofs of the ring-shaped cities, picking out green fields where youngsters were kicking balls, blue ponds around which lovers strolled hand in hand, bustling high-rise districts, residential utopias, cozy schools, and military bases where Betas and Neoanders practiced martial arts and marksmanship under the billowing red flag.

“Is this all real, or—”

“A mix,” said Arjun, “of stuff they’ve actually built and renderings of what they imagine.”

“And has this actually been made public or—”

“Broadcast six hours ago,” he said. “It is a huge reveal.” Never before had Red divulged any pictures — real or imagined — of the inside of the Kulak.

By now the fly-through had reached the far end, and she could see space opening up around her as the povv exited from the Kulak’s maw. The familiar sight of the habitat ring became visible, sweeping around in both directions to enclose the blue Earth in its jeweled embrace. From the system of rigging woven around the iron fist, a cable descended straight to the equator. Slowly at first, then building speed, the povv descended, achieving in a few seconds what would have taken several days in any kind of realistic elevator. Even through a screen of bright clouds Kathree could pick out the complex landforms of Southeast Asia to the north and, to the south, the huge dun slab of Australia, now joined to New Guinea by a lumpy gray-green tendril. The povv chose to zoom down on that first, coming close enough that it became possible to see a road traversing the land bridge. Then it veered and banked onto a northwesterly course, following the green, steaming spine of New Guinea to the cape at its end, where it nearly touched the equator. There, construction was visible: cleared land, buildings, excavations, a hazy web of infrastructure, glimpsed but not lingered on. The povv soared out over a turquoise sea cluttered with landforms she recognized vaguely from having seen them on maps. But after a few moments her eye was drawn to something that was flagrantly unnatural, looking as if it had been drawn in with a ruler and a pencil: the tether from the Kulak, plunging vertically into the ocean between two big islands. These, she realized, had to be Borneo and Sulawesi, and the water between them the Makassar Strait. The povv’s movement slowed, then stopped. The symphony and the choir were laboring through a slow crescendo. A change, more felt than seen, came over the display: the programmed camera movement was finished and the varp was now responding once again to Kathree’s movements. Like a giantess bestriding the strait, she could move around and look at it from different angles. For a moment nothing really happened. Then her eye picked up turbulence in the sea, around where the tether stabbed into it. The surface was welling up and foaming. The tiny wrinkles of normal surface waves were erased, replaced by vast green whorls and galactic arms of swirling foam. Bending forward she saw angry gulls wheeling about. That detail convinced her that what she was seeing was real — not a rendering. The disturbed region grew north and south, spreading away from the cable — which she knew to be on the equator — without growing east-west. The cable forked, then forked again, becoming a fan that broadened north and south to support the full length of whatever was roiling the strait.

It erupted from the surface first at the equator, then proceeded to rip a gash in the sea that spread up and down the meridian with immense velocity. The object could hardly be observed at first for all the water draining from it, plunging in multiple Niagaras back into the sea and hurling up a storm front of spray that rose higher than the structure itself. But in a minute the Gnomon became visible. Kathree had to back away to get a picture of the whole length of it. She extended her left hand and made a counterclockwise knob-twiddling gesture, reducing the volume of the Kyoto Philharmonic’s brass section before the bass trombones and kettledrums imploded her skull.

If the designers of the Gnomon had intended to make the anti-Cradle, they could hardly have done better. It had the long wicked curve of a katana — the better to follow the curvature of the Earth — combined with the translucent delicacy of an insect’s exoskeleton. Indeed, it seemed to be unfolding, reshaping itself as it rose into the air, an origami praying mantis molting into a larger body. Its manifold corrugations and arching carapaces spoke of a million Jinns toiling in cubicles for centuries to build the strongest thing they could imagine with minimum weight.

“What’s it made of?”

“Carbon and magnesium, mostly,” said Arjun. “Two light, strong materials that can be extracted from ocean sediments.”

“Is that how they did it?”

“Yes,” said Cantabrigia Five.

“Energy intensive,” Arjun remarked. “They ran power down the tether to a production facility on the ocean floor.”

“They had workers living on the ocean floor?”

“Robots.”

“And therein lies an opportunity,” said Cantabrigia Five.

The producers of this spectacle had once again seized control of the povv and begun taking Kathree on a forced march up the length of the Gnomon, slowing down to linger on the good bits and zooming past what was repetitive. She got the idea, which was that it had a sort of carriage that could move north-south on a giant rail and connect with the ground along a range of latitudes. That it had its own internal train lines connecting residential pods, military installations, luxury resorts for the whole family, and so much more. It was obviously rendered — stuff that hadn’t actually been built yet. Her inability to control what the povv was doing made her a little queasy. She levered the earbuds up, closed her eyes, and carefully pulled the varp away from her face. Then she opened her eyes on reality: the beach, the islet, her two interlocutors. She handed the varp back. “What sort of opportunity?”

“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”

Kathree pondered that one for a bit. “Ah,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So there’s a reason they were so keen to make nice with the Diggers.”

“Having fucked it up spectacularly with the Pingers. Yes.” Cantabrigia Five stared at her for a little while. Her silence and her gaze were impressive, yet Kathree did not feel wholly uncomfortable.

Finally she went on: “Actions taken here today will cast long shadows into the future of New Earth. With more resources here, we might have effected a more elaborate strategy, with less uncertainty. But the mere fact of having had more would have spoiled it.”

“HOW DID YOU GUYS COME UP WITH ALL THIS?” TY ASKED.

He was squatting on the islet next to the Cyc, who was still swaddled in sleeping bags, only her hands and head exposed. She was holding an instruction manual, angling it toward the light of the flynk chain. This was still illuminating the cove, but the crew of Ark Darwin had dimmed it so that people could sleep. She had to focus intensely to read the words, many of which must be unfamiliar to her. Her lips moved slightly as she parsed unfamiliar Cyrillic characters sprinkled through almost every word. Headphones buried her ears in great donuts of foam. She hadn’t heard Ty, didn’t know he was looking at her. So he had his fill of looking for a minute. She wasn’t his type, and anyway she was very young. But he was beginning to see what Einstein saw in her. Einstein had to know that there was nobody for him on his RIZ, no Indigen girl he could have an interesting conversation with. And yet if he were to somehow find his way to the habitat ring, he’d be looked on by all the smart girls there as a hillbilly.

The device in the box was a portable sonar rig. It was capable of sending out pings, but that wasn’t how they were using it. They were using it to listen. Sonar Taxlaw had virtually wrenched it from Ty’s grasp and mastered it. The arrival of Ark Darwin and the movements of the boats and the barge had caused her no end of annoyance, but with a little encouragement from Ty, she’d begun to see it as an interesting science experiment, a way of understanding what those technologies must sound like to Pingers and other mammals that frequented the deep.

Moving carefully on the steep, glassy surface of the islet, he edged into her peripheral vision and gave her a light tap on the shoulder. He hated to break her out of her reverie, but there were questions he needed answered. She was stunned for a moment, as if she’d just been teleported into this location from a thousand miles away, but rapidly she came around and pulled one of the headphones away from her ear. “Come again?”

“All of this.” Ty rested a hand on the battered plate atop the pipe, nodded toward the makeshift sledgehammer. “How did you come up with it? How do the Pingers know that when they want to talk to you they should build a cairn on the beach at such-and-such place?”

“We began sending out scout parties as soon as the atmosphere became breathable,” Sonar said.

“That’d be three hundred years ago,” Ty said.

“Two hundred and eighty-two.”

“Just making the point that this is old history.”

“Not that old.”

Ty heaved a sigh. “Not within living memory.”

“It is not merely an oral tradition, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Sonar said. “We maintain written records.”

“On one hundred percent cotton paper. Yes. Go on.”

“There was nothing for the scouts to eat, of course. So they could only range as far as they could go with food that they carried on their backs. But in time they discovered edible seaweed and bivalves along the coast.”

Ty nodded. “Once TerReForm’s engineered algae had done its job of building the atmosphere, it needed to be held in check. TerReForm seeded the coasts with filter feeders and the oceans with krill.”

“Those clams were the first meat anyone had eaten in forty-seven hundred years,” said the Cyc. “Scout parties that hugged the coast could stay out as long as they wanted, and roam for months or years, eating better than the Diggers who stayed in the Hole.”

“Being a scout must have been popular.”

“Too popular. Some went rogue, and had to be hunted down and subjected to the discipline of the Committee.”

“That sounds. . unpleasant.”

“It was not a good time. A lot of what you see that is bad in our culture started in those years.”

“Anyway, the scouts would emerge from the Hole,” said Ty, “and make a beeline for the nearest coast.”

“Exactly, and this route we have been traveling is like a game trail for us — we know it backwards and forwards. Well, at some point, after discipline had been reestablished, a scout party was exploring the coast a few kilometers from here, making camp up in the trees. One of them looked down and saw a person just walk up out of the sea. This person carried a little shovel like you might use to dig clams, and had a basket, but no clothes. He or she dug some clams and tossed them into the basket and then strolled back down into the ocean and disappeared.”

“No scuba gear. No wet suit.”

“Correct, just a belt with a knife. Well, word of this got back to the Hole and they talked to a predecessor of mine.”

“A previous Sonar Taxlaw, you mean.”

“Yes. A scout party went back down to the same place the next year and set up a contraption like this one, except not as good, and used it to send signals out into the deep. Nothing. Years, then decades went by. All they had to go on was the one sighting. Some old Digger who had been on a lot of scouting parties came up with the idea of building a bigger and better noisemaker here — he reckoned that the shape of the crater would act as a horn, channeling the sound outwards. To make a long story short, it worked. Contact was made.”

“How recently?”

“About fifty years,” Sonar said. “Then it was broken off around the time that you had your war. Five years ago, though, we began to see cairns.”

KATHREE WAS AWAKENED MUCH AS KATH TWO HAD BEEN ON THE morning when she had seen the Digger from her glider: by a certainty that something was out there, supported by no real evidence. This time, she was responding to sound: something she’d heard while still asleep, accessible only through a memory that eluded her the harder she reached for it. She rolled over onto her belly, propped herself up on her elbows, aimed her face uphill, closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and froze. For the first few minutes she wasn’t trying to hear anything, just taking in the ambient soundscape so that she could detect any noises that did not belong in it. The flynk chain on that barge was still operating, producing a steady note that could be filtered out by the mind’s neural circuitry. She was aware that Bard too had suddenly become very quiet, but she didn’t know whether he had heard something or was simply following her cue. Kath Two might have been bookish and unobtrusive, but Kathree was the sort of person who kept nearby men on their toes.

She heard it again: the same sound that had probably awakened her in the first place. And this time she knew what it was: hand-forged steel arrowheads clinking faintly in a quiver, like coins in a pocket. The dilemma of the Digger hunter being that those shafts had to be held loosely enough to be fluidly drawn and nocked, but not so loosely that they jangled with each footfall. In measured strides across level ground, their kit might make no noise, but in a breathless predawn descent of an uneven slope, things might work themselves loose. As that aural picture sharpened in her mind, she could sense footfalls too, and hear bodies pushing through brush. The party, she guessed, was more numerous than the jangling quivers.

Another Kath Two memory connected: preparing for Survey work in areas with a lot of Indigens, she had read ancient histories of the American West, where white men had made use of aborigines as scouts and guides.

Langobard was hearing things too now, and had begun knuckle-walking along the little picket line that they had established below the rim of the crater, quietly waking Roskos Yur and Beled Tomov. Kathree followed him, going to each man in turn and saying in a low voice: “Maybe two Diggers with bows and arrows, guiding a small unit of Neoanders.”

“How small?” Beled asked.

“Probably not a full peloton. I will guess it is half of the group we observed landing.”

“Go and notify Ty,” Beled said. “Tell him to turn the light on.” And since it was too dark to see anything, he put a hand on the top of her shoulder, just where it curved up toward the neck, and gave the muscle there a pleasurable squeeze. Then he flattened his palm against her shoulder and gave her a firm shove downhill.

A minute later she was down on the beach. Sonar Taxlaw was still sitting out on the islet wearing headphones. Einstein was snoring in a sleeping bag. Ty was sleeping in one of the little pop-up shelters that had been supplied by the people from Ark Darwin, which was still anchored offshore, detectable by the slap of waves against its hull. As for Esa Arjun, she nearly collided with him, for he was simply standing there on the beach, robed in a sleeping bag. Odds were fifty-fifty that he was silently meditating, or that he had gotten up to take a piss. Ivyns could be a little funny when their brains got the better of them. Either way — whether he was pissing or thinking — he was temporarily useless, and so she went straight to the shelter and awoke Tyuratam Lake. That took a bit longer than she had been hoping for, which frustrated her greatly since it was now so obvious to her that something was happening up above: she could hear the building whine of the body-orbiting flynk chains that Neoanders employed as both armor and weapons, but could not tell whether this was Langobard getting ready to mount a defense, or the interlopers coming down the hill. The latter she could easily hear now; they had abandoned stealth in favor of haste.

“They’re coming,” she said. “Two Diggers, some Neoanders.”

Ty reached for his katapult, then remembered yet again that it had been taken by Ariane.

“Beled says to turn the light on.”

She was expecting him to use some sort of electronic device — the sort of thing the Diggers lumped together under the heading of “radio”—but instead Ty rolled up to a seated position, bolted out of the shelter, and simply walked down the beach, hopping and cursing as his bare feet unerringly found stones. “Turn the light on!” he shouted. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey! Turn the light on!” In this quiet cove, his words were loud as dynamite. Kathree heard some kind of answering shout from the direction of the barge. And from the boulder, a hissing noise. “Shh! Shh!” She thought it was waves surging against the stone until the flynk chain began to glow, illuminating Sonar Taxlaw, who had stood up and turned around to face them. She was shushing them with a finger pressed against her lips. “Shh, be quiet!” she insisted.

“Full blast!” Ty shouted. “All you got.”

“They’re coming!” said the Cyc. And seeing that no one else cared, she caught the eye of Arjun, who had dropped his robe on the beach like a puddle and was advancing toward her — striding directly into the surf. “We’re hurting their ears.”

She heard shouting up above: fighters who had dropped all pretense of stealth and were closing for combat. The timbre of their voices was that of Neoanders. Suddenly feeling a desperate need to be up there in the fray, Kathree spun on her heel, getting ready to sprint back up the slope. She nearly collided with Cantabrigia Five.

“You are going back up?”

“I feel like I have to,” Kathree said.

“Godspeed. Remember. No damaged Diggers.”

Cantabrigia Five pivoted away from her in a manner that made the long skirts of her warm cloak flare beautifully, and gave Kathree a last look at her regal profile, her excellent posture emphasized by close-cropped hair.

As Kathree scrambled back up she reviewed the more detailed instructions that Cantabrigia Five had given her some hours ago: Stay clear of our buckies. Those would be camera-carrying buckies, shooting video of whatever was about to happen. They’d be programmed to look for clear, high ground.

Kathree dropped to a low crouch perhaps fifty meters shy of Langobard. She could not see him, but she could hear the flynks careering around him as they whacked into small branches.

Above and to her right, a boulder projected from the slope. It was too hard and too steep to support anything except moss. The pale stone was prominent in the directional light of the big aitrain below. A sapling had found a perch on its top, grappling the rock with a mostly exposed root system, and reaching toward the sky with a few straggly boughs that had been sculpted by the wind from the sea. Near it she saw movement, which she identified as a bucky rolling into position atop the boulder. She could see it, so it could see her. She flattened herself behind a particularly dense knot of shrubs and grass, and used her ears, which was about all she had to go on just now.

Clink, clink. There it was. The sound, again, of those hand-forged Digger arrowheads jostling in their quiver. Drowned out by the building whine of a nearby flynk chain, reconfiguring itself under the command of its owner.

She risked looking up and saw a Neoander coming out into a place from which he had clear air to that bucky on the boulder. It wasn’t Bard. It was a Red grunt in military kit. He reached out and closed his right hand on one of the chains flying around him, arresting its movement. At the same time the chain parted on the opposite side of his body and turned into a whip. It lashed out directly at the bucky on the boulder. Its shape and course were visible at first. Then it accelerated through the sound barrier and became invisible, known only by its results: a sonic bang, the complete disintegration of the bucky, and the toppling of the little sapling, cut clean through. The whip slowed as it arced back in the general direction of its owner, and, like a snake in space, reorganized itself into another flying aitrain spinning in the opposite direction from before. Having thus eliminated a robotic sentry on what to him was the left flank, the Neoander drew back toward the center of the action and disappeared from Kathree’s view.

Kathree moved toward the boulder. The destruction of one of Cantabrigia Five’s video buckies made it a good place for her to be. She was churning headlong toward the base of the rock, wondering how she was going to find her way to the top, when movement above caught her eye. She stopped and looked steeply upward at a Digger who had just emerged onto its crown to claim the vacated high ground. He had come down the slope so impetuously that he nearly overran the top of the boulder. He had to plant a foot just short of disaster and wheel his arms backward to regain his balance. As he did so the arrowheads clinked together in his quiver. Kathree froze and crouched, watching him regain his equilibrium. Had he looked straight down he’d have seen her, but he had eyes only for what was going on to his right: judging from sounds, the beginnings of a confused fight in a cluttered place. The Digger reached back, drew out a single shaft, and nocked it to his steel bow, looking out over the scene of the action below. He was thinking about choosing a target when Kathree’s ambot hit him in the shoulder and sent him down twitching.

Shooting the man had been easy. Not in the physical sense — that would have been easy in any case, since he was standing right there, and the ambot was largely self-aiming. It had been psychologically easy. Days ago, when she’d been in the worst part of her shift, barely conscious, she’d overheard Ty speaking to Einstein: Fighting isn’t about knowing how. It’s about deciding to. Even in her delirium she had understood that the decision Ty spoke of wasn’t an intellectual one. It was an overcoming of the emotional barrier that, in any civilized society, prevented people from doing damage to each other. She knew that because, hours earlier, she had done it. During that shocking initial combat between the Seven and the Diggers, she had stepped in to protect Ty after Ariane had shot him, and the old Digger had struck her on the arm with the Srap Tasmaner, bruising the bone, and something about that intense physical contact had pushed her through the barrier, made it easy to aim her katapult at the man and fire it. Since then, well-meaning members of the group had approached her to offer their sympathies. All they’d wanted to talk about was Doc and Memmie, and what a shock it must have been for Kath to lose them so suddenly. Implicit was that Kath had gone epi because of their deaths. A reasonable-seeming assumption. But wrong. It had happened, rather, in the moment when the old man had attacked her and she had fought back. Doc, at the time, had still been alive, and Memmie, though mortally wounded, had still been breathing. So Kath Two had actually been the first member of the Seven to die.

Anyway, she was now the sort of girl who shot people. Useful to know.

This all happened on what Blue would consider its right flank and Red would call its left. As aboriginal scouts supporting regular forces, the Diggers would stay on the wings or out in front. Which would imply that the other Digger — she was increasingly certain that there were exactly two of them — was likely to be on the opposite flank.

The boulder itself was too steep to climb, but ashy talus had spilled to either side of it, forming loose ramps. She churned up one of these and gained an altitude where she could flatten herself against the slope and peer across the battleground. It was contained within a broad, shallow sump where water finding its way down from the slopes of the coastal range was dammed up against the outer wall of the crater. It was heavily grown over, and so its boggy nature was not evident until one set foot in it. Bard, Beled, and Roskos Yur had moved aggressively forward, made a show of force, then withdrawn to let the Red force get literally bogged down. Acting in Blue’s favor were difficulties in communication between, on the one hand, tightly organized, high-tech Red troops and, on the other, aboriginal scouts who only knew about wireless communications because a long line of Cycs named Proboscidea Rubber had memorized the “Radio” entry.

Anyway Kathree was now well forward of her compatriots, off to what they would call the right side of the bog. In order to reach its opposite flank she could try going straight across, but this would bring her directly into the envisioned path of the Red grunts as well as trapping her in the marsh. She could cut back toward the sea and run along the camp where they’d slept last night, but she already knew that most of the buckies were stationed there. Or she could proceed farther inland and run through the pine forest that rose above the uphill side of the bog. That would take her directly across Red’s line of advance, which seemed like a bad idea on the face of it. But the Reds were just an isolated hit squad, not the vanguard of a larger force. They did not have lines of communication back to their rear. Once they had put ground behind them, they had no claim to it, no power there. Given that she could move over rough ground faster than even Beled, and given that she could hear the Neoanders a mile away, she liked her chances. So she kept moving uphill, rather than down, staying well off to the flank until she had gained a bit of altitude, then turning her attention inward.

The Red Neoanders were clearly audible. All but one of them were below her, and as she paused and waited, she heard the thudding footfalls of the straggler going by her. They were getting orders from their B, or Beta, as per racial stereotype. To her credit, the B was not hanging back and commanding from the rear; she seemed to be in the thick of things, which placed her downslope just where the going started to get marshy enough to give them second thoughts about the way they were heading. They must have noticed by now that the native scout on their left had disappeared, which might encourage them to steer toward the right. In any case, they were briefly stymied. They were all downhill of Kathree. And they were all facing the other way.

Looking directly across the slope she saw nothing but tall pinelike trees, forming a canopy that had stifled development of undergrowth. It would be easy going. A traversing run would take her rapidly to the opposite side of the field of battle, where she ought to be able to follow the other Digger’s trail down to wherever he’d stationed himself and zap him with an ambot before he was able to do anything heroic and stupid.

The bang of a Neoander’s flynk whip sounded from below, and she heard someone cry out and a clamor of whanging noises as ambots were projected toward targets.

Feeling suddenly very late, she began to run through the trees, moving openly now. When gaps appeared, she looked down across the bog. The vantage from here was excellent.

Which explained why she nearly collided with a lone man who had stationed himself in one of those clear places, perfectly situated to overlook the bog and the cove below. His only company was a robot: a siwi with a video camera for a head, capable of rising up out of its coils like a cobra from a basket and aiming its lens in any direction. The man was standing with his back to the fight, facing his siwi, which was shooting down the hill. Kathree was quite close to that siwi when she stumbled upon this, and so, when she first took it all in, she understood the setup exactly, just as a billion Red viewers would be doing in a few minutes: in the foreground, the man, framed in rugged rocks and trees that would fill habitat dwellers with that aching need to come down here and colonize the surface. In the near background, the bog where the fighting was under way. Beyond that, the cove nestled between the pincers of wave-beaten rock, the flynk barge with its column of light making the whole scene into day, Ark Darwin farther out, rocking slowly on low seas, and the sky adding some light of its own as the dawn approached.

The man wasn’t expecting her. She got the impression, somehow, that he’d been rehearsing, going over his lines, clearing his throat, preparing for a performance. So she had a few moments in which to stare at him.

The three incarnations of Kath Amalthova had, in their collective lifespan, only laid eyes on live Aretaics a few times, and then only from a distance. So she had no clear measure of what counted as impressive or handsome among that race. But this one had to be one of the finer specimens. He must be over two full meters in height. His long raven hair was swept back from his forehead to make the most of a high noble brow, a strong prominent nose, large, jet-black, deep-set eyes. A few creases on his face gave him an air of sober maturity.

Five thousand years ago, aristocracy had died, along with almost everything else, and yet the idea of aristocracy — the aspirations that it, at least in an idealized form, drew out of the human psyche — lived on in everything about this man’s appearance, his attire, his posture, and the way in which he gazed upon Kathree when he had recovered from his astonishment and understood what was happening. The look on his face said that this unexpected encounter was fascinating, as well as slightly amusing, the sort of twist of fortune that happened from time to time to sophisticated persons, and that, political differences notwithstanding, the two of them might one day discuss the whole affair wryly over a glass of fine red wine from Antimer. Or at least that was the case until Kathree’s ambot struck him right in the middle of his forehead.

Sensing movement and hearing the discharge of her katapult, the siwi — which apparently had some rudimentary ability to follow what was interesting — swiveled in her direction, but she stomped at its neck from behind. It gave way beneath the impact of her heel and made a creditable effort to remain standing, but was forced to uncoil itself so as to effect a soft landing on the ground. From there it might have pursued her into the trees, had it been programmed for pursuit. But it was really nothing more than a moderately smart camera platform, and so it stayed where it was, doggedly trying to center the face of the Aretaic in the middle of its frame. Since the Aretaic was rolling and writhing like a man on fire, this gave its algorithms a vigorous workout.

Kathree resumed her headlong run through the trees. She bent her course back toward the sea, entering the final leg of a U-shaped career around the bog. She slowed down. If her conjecture was correct, she must be drawing close to the other Digger. And unlike Bard, Beled, and Roskos Yur, she had nothing to protect her from those steel-headed arrows.

She heard a creaking noise from uphill — behind her. She turned around to see a redheaded, blue-eyed Digger, no more than five meters away, holding an arrow at full draw, aimed right at her. The freshly sharpened edges of its hand-forged steel warhead made bright arcs as they reflected the light from the cove. She had holstered her katapult to leave both hands free for scrambling. She had nothing.

Cantabrigia Five hadn’t exactly commanded her to incapacitate both of the Digger scouts. Just to prevent them from doing harm, and to prevent their dead bodies from showing up on video screens around the ring.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” she said.

The Digger didn’t move, but he did blink slowly. She took it as assent to keep talking. “Those people — the Reds — are only pretending to be your friends so that they can piggyback on your claim to the surface. They want to take it all for themselves.”

“And you?” he asked.

“Blue is no better, in some ways.”

“Then why should we heed your counsel?”

“You should heed no one’s counsel blindly. Neither mine — nor his.” She made a little movement of the head toward the Aretaic.

Silence as he considered it.

“Do you know Ceylon Congreve?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Has Ceylon Congreve spoken to you of chess?”

“We do not need a Cyc to tell us of chess,” the Digger said. “We play it all the time.”

“Then you know that pawns are weak — except for when their position on the board gives them power. Early in the game they are sacrificed freely. Late in the game they may checkmate the king.”

She was interrupted by another whipcrack from below, followed by two more in rapid succession. She fought the temptation to turn around and look. The Digger’s blue eyes strayed toward the battlefield, took something in, then returned to her. At no time did the arrowhead waver.

Kathree continued: “You are pawns. You can’t begin to imagine how small and weak you are compared to the forces above. If you allow yourself to be played as such by Red, you will be sacrificed as soon as it suits their purposes. If you play a longer game, though, you can yet grow powerful. As powerful as the other human races.”

With a suddenness that made Kathree flinch, the Digger raised his weapon and relaxed the arm that had been drawing the arrow back. He plucked the nock off the string and placed the arrow back in his quiver.

“I take your words with a grain of salt,” he said.

“Good.”

“But some of what you say confirms suspicions that I have harbored in my breast since the coming of the Red people, and so I have made up my mind to go back and speak to the others of these matters.” And then he simply turned his back on Kathree and began hiking back up into the mountains of Beringia.

“I KNOW YOUR STORY, TYURATAM LAKE,” SAID CANTABRIGIA FIVE, “OR at least the portions of it that have made their way into official records.”

“Half of it, then.”

“Be that as it may, I sense how distracting this must be for you.” She made the tiniest suggestion of a glance up the slope. Even though her eyes were screened by the lenses of a stylish varp, their golden hue magnified the gesture. “Part of you wishes to join the battle. That’s commendable, but I need you — the Purpose needs you — here.”

“Fine. You have my attention,” Ty said. Inappropriately, irrelevantly, he was wondering how old this woman was. Epigenetic shifts could roll back many of the visible effects of aging. At least one Moiran, Jamaica Hammerhead Twelve, had lived to the age of two hundred. Ty’s estimate of Cantabrigia Five’s age increased by a decade every time he interacted with her. Currently he was thinking that she might be eighty years old.

“What do you know of the Pingers?” she asked.

“In all honesty, they sound more myth than fact.”

“Myth carries more weight anyway, in times like these.”

“What do you know of them?” Ty demanded.

For once, Cantabrigia Five seemed a little off balance. She looked at him sharply, lifted her varp, rested it on the top of her head.

“I need to know,” Ty said, “whether they came out of some Red gene lab.”

“Red doesn’t even know they exist,” said Cantabrigia Five.

“Did we make them?”

“Blue? No, your hypothesis was correct, Ty.”

“And how would you know what my hypothesis was?”

Her eyes strayed to the pizza box, which was leaning against a boulder that protruded from the beach. “I know what is in there.”

“Thank you,” Ty said. He turned away from her and began striding in the direction of a tall young Ivyn, standing on the beach and gazing up nervously toward the sounds of battle. “Einstein! Eyes on me. Time for you to make history.”

CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies conducted within Blue military research labs had concluded that, on average, it was somewhat less effective than the more obvious procedure of just shooting individual ambots out of katapults. A dissenting opinion held that such studies were flawed because they failed to take into account two factors that were important in actual battle: One, the psychological impact on a defender who knew that the attack might literally whip around and come at him from any direction, including around corners or over barricades. Two, the element of skill, which was difficult to measure scientifically; the test subjects wielding those things in the lab were unlikely to have the same knack for it as Neoanders who had grown up using them and who had access to an ancient body of lore — a martial art, in effect — that they were disinclined to share with anyone else. If the whip was allowed to dissociate in midcrack, then its component ambots would be flung toward the target at supersonic velocity, which was as good as could be achieved by shooting the same objects out of a katapult. If it made contact with the target, direct physical damage would be inflicted and the ambots that had inflicted it could decouple themselves and carry out their usual programs. And if the whipcrack was off target, the chain could be recovered in full with no waste of ammunition. All the ambots came back for another attempt: something that certainly could not be said of ones that had been fired out of kats.

On Kathree’s list, if they ever got out of this, was to sit down over a glass of pinot noir with Langobard and ask him where he had picked up his skills in this department, since, until recently, he had been sustaining a fairly credible cover story about being a peaceful wine merchant in Cradle. She already suspected that he would deflect any such questions by saying that the Antimer Neoanders, like many cultures throughout human history, had a tradition of teaching martial arts to their young ones.

A skeptic might remark that fighting with whips made of little robots might be all well and good in the clean and well-ordered confines of a space habitat or a hollowed-out asteroid, or when dueling in space suits in a vacuum, or in relatively uncluttered places, such as deserts and icecaps on the surface. But in a bog full of dense, head-high vegetation it was simply a mistake. Kathree’s ears were taking in vast amounts of data that her brain didn’t know what to do with. Someone who had grown up practicing these arts, as Langobard apparently had, might have been able to hear nuances in these repetitive bangs. A crack that landed on its target would sound different from one that dissociated into a burst of flying ambots, which in turn would sound different from one that had whipped back toward the attacker or gotten fouled up in vegetation. Instead of which, all she could tell was that they were fighting down there. By the time she had completed her circuit of the bog and returned to their original line of defense above the cove, they had been fighting for rather a long time, which she interpreted as good news. She was trying to think like Cantabrigia Five, who probably wouldn’t worry so much about trivial matters like casualties and the control of the battlefield. More important was the narrative of the battle. And so far what it looked like was that a small Blue group, conducting Treaty-approved survey operations on their side of the Treaty-defined boundary, had been pursued by bloodthirsty Red Neoanders until trapped against the ocean, where they were now putting up a heroic and surprisingly prolonged last-ditch stand to protect a few noncombatants. Ka-three didn’t wish to be this cynical, for Cantabrigia Five really was a fantastically appealing and charismatic person, but she suspected, at some level, that a Blue fatality or two, up in the bog, and perhaps an on-camera interview with a maimed and bereaved survivor, might be the perfect counter for the propaganda coup that the Aretaics had scored a few days ago.

Thoughts such as those were luxuries she did not afford herself until she had reached a position above the cove, well behind the battle zone. And — no coincidence — also behind the line of camera-carrying buckies recording the heroic rearguard action.

She looked down at the lower camp. A sunrise, in weather like this, was too much to ask for, but the sky was getting brighter all the time, and was now illuminating the beach more effectively than the towering Aitken loop on the barge. Perhaps in response to the sounds of battle, half a dozen or so inflatable boats had emerged from the flooded hull of Ark Darwin and begun making their way in, each carrying a few people who appeared to be wearing helmets. Good. But, annoyingly to Kathree, they were maintaining some distance. Sonar Taxlaw was standing on the boulder waving them off. She’d been joined by Einstein, who was doing likewise. That was about to become an intolerably crowded boulder, because Tyuratam Lake was wading out to join them with that pizza box under one arm. He had managed to equip himself with a dry suit, which probably made the experience a good deal more comfortable for him.

Cantabrigia Five and Arjun were on the shore, facing out to sea, as if there were not a pitched battle going on a few hundred meters above them.

Two of the buckies dislodged themselves from their positions above Kathree and began rolling down the slope like wire-frame boulders. At first this seemed uncontrolled, like an avalanche, but then they began to stretch and deform in a way that accommodated the rocky ground rushing beneath them, and slowed to a mincing style of descent. One of them perched on a spot where it could get a clear view of the entire cove and the other picked its way down to the sand, angling for close-ups, apparently. Cantabrigia Five turned toward it and advanced a few steps. Facing squarely into its camera, she began speaking words that Kathree had no hope of hearing at this distance.

Kathree saw all of this while leaning back against the steep pitch of the inner crater wall. Just above her was a line of vegetation that had taken root along its brow, where the ground was level and the sunlight was as plentiful as it would ever get in these parts. It spread for some tens of meters to her left and to her right, walling off the cove from the bog and the high country above.

Some loud grunting noises, and the sound of a lot of little sticks getting damaged, caused her to look sharply to her left just in time to see two large men, locked together, erupt through the wall of brush and tumble out into the open. Since the slope below was steep, they rolled together for several meters down toward the beach before the larger one — Beled — was able to lash out with one foot and plant it downslope, bringing both of them to a stop. At the same time he pushed up with both arms, shoving his opponent — a Neoander — completely off the ground, in a bid to flip him backward and send him tumbling down even farther. But the Neoander seemed to anticipate this and made his much longer arms whip around Beled’s torso, scrabbling for purchase on his rib cage.

Perhaps 50 percent of Beled’s body was still covered by ambots locked together to form a patchy carapace. The Neoander’s right hand came down on a cluster of them that was protecting Beled’s armpit, and those obliged their owner by delivering a clearly audible shock into the offending hand. This disrupted whatever grapple the Neoander had been attempting. Still, Beled’s gambit had basically failed, and he ended up toppling backward as his opponent’s momentum overthrew him. When he understood this he stopped fighting it and bent his knees, turning what might have been an ungainly sprawl into something more like a back somersault that employed the Neoander’s stomach as an impact cushion. Kathree heard a snapping noise but was a little slow to understand it as a rib being broken. The Neoander, on his back, involuntarily tried to contract into a fetal position, bringing his head up into Beled’s descending fist. The contact between the delicate structures of the modern hand and the massive bone arches of the Neanderthal skull was unequal and there was more cracking, to Beled’s disadvantage. Still, the blow gave the Neoander a jolt, which was enough time for Beled finally to draw a knife from a sheath and press it against the other’s throat. He kept pressing until the Neoander’s head was against the ground.

The fighting — at least that part of it — was over and Kathree was able for the first time to process a full image of Beled’s state: bloody, half-naked, spitting teeth, breathing much faster than he ever did when sprinting flat out on a treadmill. Anyway he was alive, and the fight was over for him, unless he chose to neutralize this opponent by cutting his throat. Which seemed inadvisable since he was now under the direct coverage of a bucky with a camera in it. The ancient Teklan-Neoander fights of asteroid mining lore might have ended with throat cutting, but not this one.

Other things happened in the bog that she did not see. Langobard emerged with Roskos Yur slung over his back in a fireman’s carry, and began tromping down the slope in some haste, not looking back. Beled, watching, called out a warning to him. In the same instant Kath heard movement from the bog and saw a human silhouette — not a Neoander — vault through the gap that had been torn in it by Beled and his opponent, and begin running after Bard. She was a squat woman with close-cropped hair, in military kit — a classic B. Kathree aimed her katapult at her and fired an ambot, then two more, but all of them somehow missed — the B was evidently wearing some kind of armor that was good at spoofing this particular model, and so she could stand there all day shooting at her and nothing would happen. Still, the B heard the katapult go whang and sensed the ambots zipping around her, which was enough to stall her for a moment. She turned toward Kathree. The look on her face suggested that she had not expected to see a female Moiran. As she was taking in this extraordinary spectacle, a fist-sized rock struck her on the downhill side of her head and, to all appearances, killed her.

Kathree looked down the slope to see Beled following through from having thrown the rock. He had transferred his unbloodied knife to his broken hand, and now shifted it back. Nearby was Bard, who had paused in his headlong sprint toward the beach and turned around to see what Beled was throwing rocks at. Blood seemed to be draining out of him.

On second thought, it was draining out of Sergeant Major Yur.

The Neoander that Beled had been restraining rolled up to his feet. Just as rapidly he went down again, and a katapult whang traveled up to Kathree’s ears. When Langobard turned around, she saw that Roskos Yur, badly mauled but still conscious, had brought his weapon into play with his free hand.

If there were other Red forces to be accounted for, they were either dead, unconscious, or in retreat toward the mountains.

For the first time in what seemed like a while — but had probably been just a few seconds of elapsed time — Kathree directed her attention to what was going on below.

The rubber boats from the ark had made a decision to avoid the middle of the cove. Instead they were splitting to either side to make landfall on the prongs formed by the crater’s rim. From there, they could hike around if need be.

A person was walking out of the water.

TY HANDED THE PIZZA BOX UP TO EINSTEIN AND TOLD HIM TO OPEN it and to keep what was inside of it dry and near to hand. The dry suit was doing a fine job of keeping his legs warm and so he decided to remain below, thigh deep in the water next to the islet. His time in the war had left him with distrust, bordering on disgust, with people like Cantabrigia Five who were always thinking about the narrative. But that way of thinking was infectious. He saw the little scene on the islet through the eyes not of Tyuratam Lake, but of a video camera beaming coverage to the ring. And he thought it looked perfect the way it was: the small conical spike of glass, grubby around the waterline with wave-washed sand, supporting two people: Einstein with the pizza box, and, standing next to him with a finger hooked through his belt loop, the Cyc with one headphone on and the other off. In fact he attended so closely to the image that he almost missed the main event. The look on the others’ faces told him he had best turn around and look out to sea.

Only the head and shoulders were protruding above the waves. The Pinger was trudging up the sloping floor of the crater as if returning from a casual underwater stroll. He or she breathed loudly and deeply for a little while, apparently reoxygenating, but then settled down to a more normal respiration. Where did they live? Where had this person come from? They must have diving bells, or something, that moved about underwater.

The Pinger was hairless and sleek, and, as soon became evident, lacked external genitalia. So, a woman? But if so it was a woman without breasts; and as far as Ty knew, these were still mammals.

A few paces behind was a roundish object that presently turned out to be supported by a neck, which turned out to be anchored in a sloping pair of shoulders. This one did have breasts. And behind her was yet a third person of the same general description.

As the first one ascended into shallower water, the shape of his body became clearer: round, and, in general, sort of projectile-like. Some part of Ty’s brain wanted to identify him as a fat man. And maybe he was fat, in the same way that an otter or a seal is: a thick layer of subcutaneous fat held in beneath taut, rather thick-looking skin. But in no way did he seem flabby or jiggly. His overall style of movement suggested heavy musculature hidden beneath that smooth jacket of, for lack of a better word, blubber. Basically naked, he did have a kind of web harness strapped around his torso, with a sufficient number of odds and ends attached to it to make it clear that he was a technological being. At first the Pingers had seemed black, but as they came out of the water it became clear that their skin was dark gray, and mottled with patches of lighter gray, shading toward blues and greens. Their bellies were of lighter hue than their backs, and the mottling tended to run up their sides.

Ty didn’t like to stare. But he couldn’t help it. Nothing was visible between their legs save a system of concentric folds within which, Ty assumed, a fairly normal set of genitalia must be hiding. Perhaps just awaiting a suitable invitation to present themselves.

They were drawing close enough now that their faces could be looked at. The underlying skulls probably looked the same as those of rootstock humans. But eyes, ears, and nostrils were guarded by systems of muscled flaps that were always in some amount of motion. Sonar Taxlaw’s earlier remark about breeding wolves into poodles had been a bit indelicate. But the analogy held up. These people were to more ordinary humans as bulldogs were to hounds. All the same stuff was there. You just had to look for it a little harder.

Ty turned back to look at Einstein and Sonar. Understandably, they had eyes only for the approaching Pingers. “Einstein,” he said. Then, louder: “Einstein!”

Startled, Einstein nearly fell into the water, then focused on Ty. “Do you want it?” he mouthed, nodding at the rectangle gripped in his hands.

“No,” Ty said, “it has to be a child of Ivy.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

Einstein gripped the thing’s bottom corners in his hands and held it up above his head so that the approaching visitors could get a clear view of it.

It was a picture, blown up to about half a meter square. Any Spacer would recognize it as an iconic image from the Epic. It was the last photograph that Ivy’s fiancé, Cal Blankenship, had texted to her from the conning tower of his submarine, moments before closing the hatch and diving to escape from the opening salvo of the Hard Rain. The image was dominated by two concentric circles: in the middle distance, the aperture of the open hatch, framing a disk of sky already split in two by the fiery trace of a bolide. Surrounding that, much closer to the camera, the engagement ring that he had just removed from his finger.

The question was whether Cal’s descendants would recognize it. The lead Pinger’s face unfolded a little, his gray eyes seeming to become larger, his ears blooming from mere slits into something more resembling normal human ears, except smaller and sleeker. He stopped trudging in knee-deep water. The other two drew abreast of him. All three were gazing up at the picture held aloft by the shivering Ivyn. Ty’s ears were tickled by high-pitched vocalizations that were almost recognizable as English words. The Pingers were talking to one another, turning their heads to exchange remarks, pointing at the picture, gesticulating broadly. Of course, people who spent a lot of time underwater would become good at talking with their hands.

The female Pinger said something emphatic, getting the attention of the other two. Ty couldn’t understand the words, but the tone and the body language were emphatic: “Shut up. Listen. I know what this is.”

She held her left hand in front of her body. The palm was elongated. The fingers were stubby and, when she spread them apart, slightly webbed. With her right hand she enclosed the ring finger of the left and pantomimed sliding a ring off. She held the imaginary ring aloft, then brought her left hand up to her face and twitched her index finger once, pretending to take a picture.

KATHREE FELT HERSELF, AS SHE WATCHED ALL OF THIS, SLIDING down the slope on her ass in a semicontrolled manner, almost afraid that she might scare the Pingers away with a sudden movement. Bard had reached the lower camp quicker and laid Sergeant Major Yur out on a sleeping bag, where Hope was attending to him, already hooking up an intravenous tube. Kathree passed by Beled, who was straddling the helpless Red Neoander, putting huge plastic ties on his ankles and wrists.

She made it down to the beach, keeping well clear of Cantabrigia Five, who was speaking into a camera, and Arjun, who was just watching and mumbling into his varp.

Several more Pingers had waded up into the shallows. One of them — a male, strapped with more gear than the others — had approached Ty, and seemed to be trying to communicate with him. Ty was grinning, but he kept cupping a hand around his ear and shaking his head. The Pinger reached out, gently took Ty’s wrist, and plucked at the black stuff of his dry suit. Ty responded by mimicking the same gesture on the slick skin of the Pinger’s arm. Both of them laughed. The Pinger’s teeth were white and they were sharp.

The first three Pingers had come ashore on the islet and were inspecting the photograph, which Einstein was holding now in front of his chest, part invitation and part shield. Sonar Taxlaw, not so encumbered, faced off uncertainly against the female Pinger, who suddenly stepped forward and embraced her.

On the beach, Cantabrigia Five exchanged a satisfied look with Esa Arjun and glanced toward the sky.