Earth

PLANET

The Earth’s most permanent feature was the Pacific Ocean. Its shape might change with the passing eons, islands rising and falling as its plates collided, merged, and broke apart again. But the great basin remained.

Not so the Atlantic, which opened and closed many times. Slow heat built underneath a sequence of huge, granite supercontinents, splitting them asunder along bursting seams. Then, tens of millions of years later, the now cool center would sink again to halt the rivening and begin drawing the sleeves together again.

The cycle continued — breakup followed by remerging followed by breakup again. And this had important effects on the progress of life. Species that had roamed across broad ranges found themselves divided into subpopulations. Separated bands of cousins went their diverging genetic ways, adapting to new challenges, discovering diverse techniques for living. When the dispersed relations finally were reunited eons later by reconverging continents, these descendants of a common ancestor often could no longer interbreed. They met not as cousins, but as competitors.

As it happened, there came a later period when the vagaries of plate tectonics thrust up two huge mountain ranges — the Himalayas and the Rockies — which virtually

blocked the flow of low, moist air across the Northern Hemisphere. This had dramatic consequences on the weather, which in turn isolated still more species, driving them to adapt.

Ebbing, flowing. Inhaling, exhaling. The cycle kept driving changes, improvements.

Eventually, dim flickers of light began to glow on the planet’s night side, flickers in the dark that weren’t forest fires or lightning.

All this heating and cooling, stirring and recombining had finally brought about something completely new.

• CRUST

No one congratulated Crat for saving his drowning crewmate. Nobody spoke much about the incident at all. Things happen, was the philosophy. So there were a few more widows back on one of the floating towns? Too bad. Life was short; what more could you say? Still, Crat apparently wasn’t a “go-suck Yankee sof-boy” anymore. There were no more sour looks at mess, or strange objects found swimming in his gruel. Silently, they moved his hammock out of the steamy hold and up to the anchor room with the others.

Only one fellow actually commented on the misadventure with the fishing net. “Jeez, Vato,” he told Crat. “I never seen no bugger hold breath so long as you!”

To Crat, who had no idea how long he’d been underwater, the remark seemed like a signal from Providence. An experience that might have turned some men away from swimming forever, instead pointed him to an unexpected talent.

The story of his life had been mediocre plainness at best, and all too often less than that. His image of himself was slow and thick as a stone. The thought of having any unusual abilities astonished Crat. And so, at the very moment he had won acceptance aboard the Congo, he renewed his vow to leave first chance — to act on his earlier loose talk about going into salvage.

Not that there was much he’d miss about this old tub. Life on a frontier didn’t offer many luxuries. Forced to live here for a week, the average American would never again complain about his own restricted water ration, which in some states topped a lavish hundred gallons a week.

Or take another necessity — Data-Net privileges. Here you simply didn’t have them.

Crat used to despise old folks back in Indiana for relying on so many electronic crutches… globe-spanning access to news on every topic, to every library, to every dumpit research journal even, instantly translated from any obscure language for mere pennies. Then there were the hobby lines, special interest groups, net-zines, three-vee shows.

Until emigrating, Crat never realized how much he depended on all that, too. Aboard Congo, though, they had this strange, once-a-day ritual — mail call. Each man answered if his name was shouted, and swapped a black cube with the bosun. You were allowed to pipe two message blips, no more than fifty words each, through the ship’s single antenna, ruled dictatorially by the comm officer, a one-eyed, one-legged victim of some past oceanic catastrophe, whom everybody, even the captain, treated with utter deference.

Standing in line, waiting humbly for your miserable blips, was almost as humiliating as evening vitamin call, when a bored U.N. nurse doled each man his pressed capsule of “Nutritional Aid” — the sum total of the world’s sense of obligation to the pariah state of refugees. No wonder the great powers were even less generous with the world’s true lifeblood, information.

Now and then, during mail call, Crat caught himself wondering why Remi and Roland never wrote to him. Then he remembered with a sudden jerk. They’re dead. I’m the last. Last of the Quayle High Settlers.

Strange. Believing he was destined for a short life, Crat had long ago decided to live one with no compromises. He’d always been the one getting into jams, which his friends always reliably, sensibly got him out of.

Now Remi and Roland were gone, while he still lived. Who could figure it?

Roland, for some reason, had willed Crat his bank balance, augmented by a hero’s bonus. There was supposed to be a medal, too. It was probably still out there somewhere, following him around the world in the unreliable tangle of real-matter post. As for Roland’s money… Crat had blown it all in card games and buying rounds of drinks to his friends’ memory. But he did want the medal.

After mail call, off-duty crew retired to the aft deck, where three enterprising Annamese sold a pungent home brew from clay pots. While the flotilla sailed southward from the debacle with the green raiders, Crat discovered he could now stomach the foul-smelling beer. It was a milestone that showed he was adapting.

The evening was dark, with a heavy overcast cutting off most of the stars. A pearly opalescence in the west became a blaze whenever the clouds parted briefly to spill moonlight across the smooth water.

At the fantail, two sets of meditators seemed to square off for a silent, contemplative showdown. Sufis on the portside and neo-Zen adepts to starboard. Beginners in both groups were wired to brain-wave monitors the size of thimbles, which led to earplug button speakers. Using identical, inexpensive techno-aids, each side nevertheless claimed it was true tradition, while the other taught mere dazing. Whatever. Like the majority of the crew, Crat preferred more honest, traditional forms of intoxication.

“… Commodore bloody misreads his charts—” someone said in the darkness beyond the rear hatch. “That El Nino thing… It’s’pozed drive all them fish over here Wes’ Pacific side, every ten-’leven year so. But bloody dammit commodore, he miss them sure.”

“It come more often than every ten year now, I hear,” someone else replied. Idly, Crat wondered who they were. Their English was better than average for this barge.

“Dey got de eco-loggy all fucked sure,” said someone with a Caribbean accent. “Evryt’ing all change. So I say don’t listen to UNEPA bastards, not at all. Dey don’ know no’t’ing better than we do.”

Someone else agreed. “Ach, UNEPA. They wants us dead, just like greeners do, ’cause we mess up they stinking planet. Might catch wrong type dumpit fish. Ooh, bad thing! So better we just die. Maybe put something in vitamins. Do us cheap an’ quiet.”

That was the steady gossip of course, even when Sea State chemists — university-trained men and women from lands now drowned under the rising tides — went from boat to boat reassuring crews and urging them to take the pills, rumors nevertheless spread like viruses. Crat himself sometimes wondered. His tiredness no doubt came mostly from hard work. That probably also explained the low ebb of his sex drive. But if he ever did find out somebody was slipping something into the food…

The old rage flickered momentarily and he tried to nurse it. But it just damped out, ebbing of its own accord. He lifted his head to glance over Congo’s prow at the night lights of the floating town, up ahead. The old Crat would have already been pacing — eager to prowl the red-light district or find a good brawl. Now all he could think of were the clean if threadbare sheets of the transients’ barracks and then tomorrow’s visit to the meat market.

“Ah, I find you at last. Sorry. I was lost.”

Crat looked up. It was his new friend, the elderly Zuricher, Peter Schultheiss. Peter’s was the one face Crat would miss when he transferred off this misbegotten tub. He grinned and held out a full jar. “Got you another beer, Peter.”

“Goot. Thanks. Took me some time to find my notebook with the name of my comrade at the market. But I found.” He held up a heavy black volume. To Crat’s surprise, it wasn’t a cheap store-and-write plaque, such as even the poorest deckhand owned, but a binder fat with paper pages! Schultheiss murmured as he flipped the scratchy sheets. “Let’s see. He’s in here somewhere. This fellow should, if you mention my name, be able to get you jobs in salvage… maybe training for the deep-sea work you so desire. Ah, here, let me write it down for you.”

Crat accepted the slip of paper. Nearing his rendezvous with the recruiters, he had grown a little less sure he really wanted to try nodule mining — diving far below the reach of light encased in a slimy bubble, sifting mud for crusty lumps. Though well paid, such men tended to have short lives. The alternative of shallow dredging in drowned villages was beginning to sound attractive after all.

Schultheiss looked toward the town lights and sighed.

“What’cha thinkin’ about?” Crat asked.

“I was just remembering how, when I was a boy, my father took me with him on a business trip to Tokyo. As our plane came in at night, we saw an amazing sight. The ocean, around every island as far as you could see, was alight! So many lights I could not count them. The water seemed to be on fire. White fire.

“Such a spectacle, I asked my father what festival this was. But he said, no, it was no oriental holiday. It was like this every night, he said. Every night at sea around Japan.”

The idea of such extravagance made Crat blink. “But, why?”

“Fishing lights,” Peter answered plainly. “At night the ships would run big generators and draw in fish by millions. Very effective, I heard. Efficient, too, if you trade energy for food and don’t worry about tomorrow.”

Schultheiss paused. His voice seemed far away. “My father and his comrades… they prided themselves on future-sightedness. Unlike the Yankees of those days — no offense — he thought he was thinking about tomorrow. While the Yanks bought toys and spent themselves poor, my father and his compeers saved. He invested prudently other people’s funds for them. Took their money with no questions asked and made it grow like vegetables in a garden.”

The old Helvetian sighed. “Maybe it only shows there are many kinds of shortsightedness. Did it ever occur to the Japanese, I wonder, that evolution might change the species they called with their great lights? The easy, stupid ones would die in nets, certainly. But meanwhile those who stayed away would breed future generations. Did they ponder this? No, I think not.

“Likewise it never occurred to my father that the world might someday tire of all its bad men having nice safe places to stash their loot. He never dreamed all the nations might drop their bickering, might get together and say enough, we want our money back. We want the names of those bad men, too… men who betrayed our trust, who robbed our treasuries, or who sold drugs to our children.

“How could my poor father imagine the world’s masses might come pounding on his door someday to take back in anger what he’d invested so carefully, so well?”

The lights of the floating village now glittered in the old man’s moist eyes. Stunned by the depth of this confession, Crat wondered. Why me? Why is he telling me all this?

Peter turned to look at him, struggling with a smile. “Did you see Pikeman, when she came to rescue us from the greeners? How beautiful she was? People used to joke about the Swiss navy. But only fools laugh now! Ton per ton, it gives Sea State — our adopted nation — the best fighting fleet in the world! So we adapt, in that way and so many others. We Helvetians find new roles in the world, performing them with pride in craft.”

Crat noticed the old man’s English had improved. Perhaps it was the passion of sudden memory. Or maybe he was letting down a mask.

“Oh, we and our allies were arrogant before the war. Mea culpa, we admit that now. And history shows the arrogant must always fall.

“But then, to fall can be a gift, no? What is diaspora, after all, except an opportunity, a second chance for a people to learn, to grow out of shallow self-involvement and become righteous, deep, and strong?”

Schultheiss looked at Crat. “Pain is how a people are tempered, prepared for greatness. Don’t you think so, fils? That wisdom comes through suffering?”

Crat could only blink in reply, moved, but not knowing what to say. In truth, he wasn’t sure he understood what Peter was talking about.

“Yes,” the old man agreed with himself, nodding firmly, both guilt and stark dignity evident in his voice. “My people have been chosen for some future, unknown task. Of that I’m sure. A task far greater than perching on safe mountaintops, high and aloof, living high off other people’s money.”

Peter stared into the night, much farther than Crat felt he himself could see.

“The world’s folk will need us yet. Mark my words. And when that day comes, we will not leave them wanting.”

At night it had been no more than a sprinkle of lights, rocking gently to rhythmic tides. By day, however, the barge-city came alive with noise and commerce. And rumors. It was said that no place, not even the Net, spread gossip as swiftly or erratically.

Crat had no way of picking up most of the hearsay, though. Unlike the working ships, where discipline required a common language, floating towns were a chaos of tongues and dialects, whispered, murmured, bellowed. All the sea towns were the same. Miniature babels, sprawled horizontally across the nervous ocean.

Night-soil collectors called as they rowed the narrow canals between multistoried housing barges, taking slops lowered down by rope in exchange for a few devalued piasters. Competing to deliver odorous fertilizer to the garden boats, they regularly sped down unbraced passages at risk of being crushed between the rocking, bobbing hulls.

Clothing, washed in sea water, hung from cluttered lines alongside banners proclaiming ideologies and gospels and advertisements in a dozen alphabets. Each district was topped with flat arrays of solar cells linked to broad, winglike rainwater collectors, all tended by small boys who climbed the swaying frames like monkeys. Kite strings angled up into the sky toward generators dipped into high stratospheric winds. By this melange of artifice and gadgetry, the barge city managed to stay alive.

Crat hungrily inhaled the smells of cooking over seaweed fires. The aromas changed from one neighborhood to the next. Still, he kept his hands out of his pockets. His dwindling cash might be needed for bribes before the day was out.

Other aromas were even harder to ignore. Women — workers and mothers and daughters and wives — could be glimpsed through windows left open to catch a stray breeze, dressed in costumes native to countries that no longer existed, sometimes smothered in far too much clothing for these humid climes. Crat knew not to stare,- many of them had menfolk who were jealous and proud. Still, at one point he stopped to watch a girl’s nimble fingers dance across a floor loom, crafting holo-carpets for export. It was a valued profession and one she had apparently mastered. In comparison, Crat knew his own hands to be clumsy things that couldn’t even knot a jute rope properly.

The young woman glanced over at him, her scarf framing a lovely oval face. Crat would have given his heart gladly when she smiled. He stumbled back, however, when another visage suddenly intervened, a crone who snarled at him in some strange dialect. Crat spun away to hurry forward again, toward the Governor’s Tower and the Admiral’s Bridge, twin monoliths that overlooked the center of town.

In a city rife with odors, the shaded bazaar was an especially pungent place where the fish was generally fresh but everything else was second hand, including the whores beckoning from a provocatively carved wooden balcony along the aft quarter.

Likewise the religions that were pitched from the opposite side, where a dozen midget temples, churches and mosques vied for the devotion of passersby. Here at least one was safe from one all-pervading creed, Gaia-worship. The few NorA ChuGa missionaries who tried preaching in Sea State were glad to depart with their lives. The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet.

Other types of outside recruiters were tolerated. The Resettlement Fund’s kiosk offered a third form of redemption, equidistant from sex and faith. Queued up there were men, women, whole families who had finally had enough… who would sign any document, have any surgery, swear any oath just to set foot on land again — in the Yukon, Yakutsk, Patagonia — anywhere there’d be steady meals and a patch of real ground to farm.

For Sea State this wasn’t treason. It was a population safety valve, one far less disturbing than another Crat had witnessed one dim twilight during his first stay on this drifting island-city.

He’d been lazing by one of the sidestream canals, picking away at a roast squid purchased from his shrinking purse, when a dark figure appeared slinking behind one of the shabbier apartment barges. It was a woman, he soon saw, wrapped in black from head to toe. The noise of clattering pots and shouting neighbors covered her stealth as she made her way to where the current was strongest.

Crat faded into a nearby shadow, watching her look left and right. There was a momentary flash of string as she tied two articles together, one heavy, the other wrapped in cloth. Crat had no inkling what was going on, though he thought for a moment he heard a faint cry.

The heavier object splashed decisively as it hit the water, instantly dragging the other bundle after it. Still he didn’t catch on. Only when he glimpsed the woman’s tired, bleak face and heard her sob did the light dawn. As she hurried away he knew what she had done. But he could only sit in stunned silence, his appetite quite gone.

He tried to understand, to grasp what must have driven her to do such a thing. Crat remembered what old prof Jameson used to say about Sea State… how most families who fled there came from societies where all decisions were made by men. In principle, Crat saw nothing wrong with’ that. He hated the arrogant, independent way girls were taught to act in North American schools, always judging and evaluating. Crat preferred how a thousand older, wiser cultures used to do it, before Western decadence turned women into not-women-anymore.

Still, for weeks he was haunted by the face of that anguished young mother. She came to him at night, and in his dreams he felt torn between two drives — one to protect her and the other to take her for his own.

Of course no one was asking him to do either. No one was exactly clamoring to make him a chief.

It was in the bazaar’s fourth quadrant, beyond the fish stalls and junk stands and traders hawking enzyme paste, that Crat came at last to the “Meat Market.”

“There are opportunities in Antarctica!” one recruiter shouted, near a holo depicting mineshafts and open-pit works, gouging high-grade ores out of a bleak terrain. Icy glaciers loomed in the background.

The images looked stark and honest — showing hard work in a harsh environment. Still, Crat could feel the holo’s subsonic music cajoling him to see more than that. The men depicted in those scenes grinned cheerfully beside their towering machines. They looked like bold men, the sort who tamed a wilderness and got rich doing so.

“The greeners have been given their dumpit parks and preservation areas now.” The speaker cursed, causing the crowd to mutter in agreement. “Half the bloody continent of Antarctica was set aside for ’em, almost! But the good news is, now the rest is open! Open wide for brave souls to go and win with their own strong hands!”

The recruiter sounded like he truly envied such gallant heroes. Meanwhile, the holos showed spare but comfortable barracks, hot meals being served, happy miners counting sheaves of credit slips.

Huh I Maybe company men get to live like that. They can recruit for those jobs anywhere.

In fact, Crat had applied for positions like those before finally falling back on Sea State. And if he hadn’t been up to the companies’ standards in Indiana, why would they accept him here? You don’t fool me. I can just guess what kind of work you’ll offer Sea State volunteers. Work a robot would refuse.

Even the poorest citizens of the poorest nations were protected by the Rio Charter, except those whose leaders had never signed, such as Southern Africa and Sea State. That gave them a queer freedom — to volunteer to be exploited at jobs animal rights groups would scream about if you assigned them to a pig. But then, every member of the Albatross Republic supposedly had chosen his own fate rather than accept the world’s terms. Rather than give up the last free life on Earth, Crat thought proudly. He departed that booth with aloof pride, preferring honest crooks to liars.

Over by the Climate Board, passersby scrutinized the fortnight forecast, of life-or-death interest to all floating towns. Two weeks was just long enough to evade bad storms. The Climate Board was also where the gamblers gathered. Whatever other exotic games of chance were fashionable, you could always get a bet on the weather.

Nearby, a small band played the style known as Burma Rag — a catchy mix of South Asian and Caribbean sounds with a growing following on the net, though naturally little profit ever made it back to Sea State. Crat tossed a piaster into the band’s cup, for luck.

The booths he sought lay near the gangway of a sleek little ship, obviously new and powerful and rigged for deep running. In front of the submersible a table lay strewn with rocky, egg-shaped objects, glittering with spongelike metallic knobs. Together, the vessel and ore nodules were probably worth half the town itself, but not many citizens loitered near the well-dressed company solicitors standing there. The real crowd clustered just beyond, where men in turbans jabbered into note plaques while bearded doctors poked and prodded would-be volunteers.

No holos proclaimed the virtues of life in the various Sea State salvage cooperatives. But everyone knew what it was about. It’s about dragging a frayed air hose behind you while you walk the sunken streets of Galveston or Dacca

or Miami, prying copper wires and aluminum pipes out of tottering ruins.

It’s working in stinking shit-mud to help raise blocks of sunken Venice… hoping a chunk will come up whole so it can be sold off like St. Mark’s Square was… to some rich Russ or Canuck theme resort.

It’s hauling dredges up the bloody Ganges, hired by the Delhi government, but shot at by the local militia of some province that doesn’t really exist anymore, except on hilltops.

Crat fingered the note Peter Schultheiss had given him. He edged alongside one queue and tapped a turbaned interviewer on the shoulder. “Can… can you tell me where…” he peered at the writing. “… where Johann Freyers is?”

The man looked at Crat as if he were some loathsome type of sea slug. He shouted something incomprehensible. Undeterred, Crat moved to another station. Again those in line watched him suspiciously. This time, though, the gaunt, sunken-chested fellow in charge was friendlier. Clean shaven, his face showed the stigmata of many long hours underwater — permanently bloodshot eyes and scars where breathing masks had rubbed away the skin.

“Freyers… over at…” He stopped to inhale, a desperate-sounding whistle. “… at…” With amazing cheerfulness for one who couldn’t even finish a sentence, he smiled. Snapping his fingers brought a young boy forth from under the table. “Freyers,” he told the boy in a wheeze.

“Uh, thanks,” Crat said, and to his surprise found himself being dragged away from the recruiting booths, toward the gangway of the sleek submersible. There, two men in fine-looking body suits conversed quietly with folded arms.

“Are you sure… ?” Crat started asking the boy.

“Yes, yes, Freyers. I know.” He snatched the note out of Crat’s hand and tugged the sleeve of one of the men, whose sandy hair and long face made Crat think of a spaniel. The mainlander looked bemused to receive such a token, turning the paper over as if savoring its vintage. He tossed a coin to the little messenger.

“So you were sent by Peter Schultheiss, hmm?” he said to Crat. “Peter’s a landsman known to me. He says you’ve good lungs and presence of mind.” Freyers looked at the note again. “A Yank, too. Have you a full reliance card, by any chance?”

Crat flushed. As if anyone with a card would emigrate to this place. “Look, there’s some mistake…”

“Well, I assume you at least have high school.”

Crat lifted his shoulders. “That’s no plishie. Only dacks don’t finish high school.”

The long-faced man looked at him for a moment, then said in a soft voice. “Most of your fellow citizens have never seen high school, my young friend.”

“Of course they have—” Then Crat stopped, remembering he wasn’t an American anymore. “Oh. Yeah, well.”

Both men continued regarding him. “Hm,” the shorter one said. “He’d be able to read simple manuals, in both Common and Simglish.” He turned to Crat. “Know any written Nihon or Han? Any kanji?”

Crat shrugged. “Just the first hundred signs. They made us learn simple ideo, uh—”

“Ideograms.”

“Yeah. The first hundred. An’ I picked up some others you guys prob’ly wouldn’t care about.”

“Hmm. No doubt. And silent speech? Sign language?”

Crat couldn’t see the point to this. “I guess, grade school stuff.”

“Tech skills? What kind of Net access did you use at home?”

“Hey, you an’ I both know any tech stuff I got is just pissant shit. You wanted someone educated, you wouldn’t be here, for Ra’s sake. There must be three fuckin’ billion college graduates out there, back in the world!”

Freyers smiled. “True. But few of those graduates have proven themselves aboard a Sea State fishing fleet. Few come so well recommended. And I’d also guess only a few approach us with your, shall we say, motivation?”

Meaning he knows I can’t say no to a job that pays good. And I won’t complain to no union if they give me tanks with rusty valves or an air hose peeling rubber here an’ there.

“So, can we interest you in coming aboard and taking some refreshment with us? We have cheese and chocolates. Then we can talk about getting you tested. I cannot promise anything, my boy, but this may be your lucky day.”

Crat sighed. He had long ago cast himself to fate’s winds. People looked at him, heard him speak, and figured a guy like him couldn’t have a worldview — a philosophy of life. But he did. It could be summed up in five simple words.

Oh, well. What the fuck.

In the end, he let hunger lead him up the gangway after the two recruiters. That and a powerful sense that he had little choice, after all.

• MANTLE

Sepak Takraw finished his third circuit of the ASEAN perimeter that day and verified that there was still no way out of the trap. Elite Indonesian and Papuan troops had secured this little plateau deep in rain-drenched Irian Java. Nothing got in or out without sophisticated detectors tracking and identifying it. Actually, Sepak was impressed by the troops’

professionalism. One hardly ever got to see military craftsmanship up close, except the presidential band on Independence Day. It was fascinating watching the sentries meticulously use pocket computers to randomize their rounds, so what might have become routine remained purposely unpredictable.

The first few days after finding his own rat-hole path to the surface, Sepak had his hands full just keeping out of the soldiers’ way. But then, for all their sophistication, they weren’t exactly looking for anyone already inside their perimeter. That meant George Hutton’s techs had kept mum about him, damn them. Their loyalty planted an obligation on him in return.

So once a day he squirmed through his tiny rocky passage to check up on the Kiwis. For the first few days things looked pretty grim. The boys and girls from New Zealand slumped against the limestone walls, staring at their captors, speaking in monosyllables. But then things changed dramatically. Inquisitors were replaced by a swarm of outside experts who descended on the site in a storm of white coats, treating the New Zealanders with utter deference. Suddenly, everything looked awfully chummy.

Too chummy. Sepak didn’t want any part of it. He especially took to avoiding the caverns during meal times, when he’d have to peer over a high gallery and smell civilized cooking. He, meanwhile, had to make do with what his grandfather had taught him to take from the forest itself.

By the bank of a trickling stream, Sepak dabbed streaks of soft clay across his brows, renewing the camouflage that kept him invisible to the soldiers… so far… and just so long as he didn’t try to cross those unsleeping beams at the perimeter. He chewed slowly on the last bits of a juvenile tree python he’d caught yesterday. Or the last bits he intended to eat. Grandfather had shown him how to prepare the entrails using some obscure herbs. But he’d been too nauseated to pay much attention that time. Reverence for your heritage was fine. Still, some “delicacies” pushed the limits.

The forest hadn’t been hunted this way for several generations. Perhaps that explained his luck so far. Or maybe it was because Sepak had left a cluster of bright feathers and butterfly wings at the foot of a tall tree, as sacrifice to a spirit whose name he’d forgotten, but who his grandfather had said was strong and benevolent.

I’m doin’ all right, he thought. But bloody ocker hell I wish I could take a bath!

Sepak caught his reflection in the shallow water. He was a sight, all right. Kinky hair greased back with marsupial fat. Dark skin streaked with pale, muddy tans and dabs of leaf sap. Only when he grinned was there any semblance to a twenty-first-century man, whose teeth suddenly seemed too white, too well ordered and perfect.

All around he sensed life slither and crawl, from tiny beetles scrabbling through the forest detritus all the way to the high canopy, where he glimpsed quick patches of fur, the glint of scales, the flash of eyes. Branches rustled. Things slowly stalked other things. You had to be patient to see any of it though. It wasn’t a skill you learned in school.

For the most part, the main thing you noticed was the quiet.

Suddenly, the calm was interrupted by a mob of foraging birds, which spilled into the tiny clearing in a storm of feathers. They swept in from the right, a chirping, rowdy chaos of colors and types. After that instant of startlement, Sepak kept perfectly still. He’d read about this phenomenon before, but never seen it until now.

Small, blue-feathered birds dove straight into the humus, flinging leaves and twigs as they chased fleeing insects. Above these, a larger, white- and yellow-plumed species hovered, diving to snatch anything stirred into sight by the bold blue ones. Other varieties swarmed the trunks and looping tree roots. It was amazing to witness how the species cooperated, like members of a disciplined jungle cleanup squad.

Then Sepak noticed some of them squabbling, fighting over this or that squirming morsel, and revised his first impression. The white-and-yellow birds were opportunistic, he now saw, taking advantage of the smaller ones’ industriousness. He watched a black-tailed root hopper swipe a tidbit already wriggling between the jaws of an irate bird in bright orange plumes. Other breeds did the same, warily keeping an eye out for each other while they worked over the trees’ lower bark, gobbling parasites and protein-rich bugs before any competitor could get at them.

This wasn’t teamwork, then. It was a balance of threat and bluster and force. Each scrounger fought to keep whatever it found while taking advantage of the others.

Funny. Why do they keep together, then?

It seemed to Sepak the white-and-yellows could have harassed the smaller birds more than they did. They missed opportunities because they were distracted, spending half their time scanning the forest canopy overhead.

He found out why. All at once, several yellows squawked in alarm, triggering a flurry of flapping wings. Faster than an eye-blink, all the birds vanished… taking cover a bare instant before a large hawk flashed through the clearing, talons empty, screeching in frustration.

The yellows’ warning saved everybody, not just themselves.

In moments the raptor was gone, and the multispecies mob was back again, resuming its weird, bickering parody of cooperation.

Each plays a role, he realized. All benefit from one type’s guarding skill. All profit from another’s talent for pecking…

Clearly none of them particularly liked each other. There was tension. And that very tension helped make it all work. It united the entity that was the hunting swarm as it moved out of sight through the towering trees.

“Huh,” Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society. Perhaps, he considered, there might be advantages to this adventure, after all.

Then his stomach growled. All right, he thought, rising and picking up his crude spears. I hear you. Be patient.

Soon he was loping quietly, scanning the branches, but not as a passive watcher anymore. Now he set out through the trees — listening with his ears, seeking with his eyes — hunting clues to where on this little plateau he might find that next meal.

• MESOSPHERE

The paleogeologists wanted to know what was going on. “All these strange events, Stan… holes in China, pillars of smoke at sea. Do you have any idea what it’s about?” Even if there hadn’t been a cordon sanitaire of Danish and NATO soldiers around the Tangoparu dome, Dr. Nielsen and the others would certainly have suspected something was happening. The whole world suspected, and Stan had never been much good at poker.

“There are rumors, Stan,” Nielsen said shortly after the military arrived. “Have you seen today’s noon edition of the New Yorker* There’s a correlated survey linking many of these bizarre phenomena into a pattern.” Stan shrugged, avoiding the blond scientist’s eyes. But that only intensified suspicion, of course. “Do you know something about all this Stan? Your graviscan program, those troops, the strange quakes… it’s all connected, isn’t it?”

What could he say? Stan started avoiding his friends, spending his few free moments out on the moraine instead, walking and worrying.

He’d been in constant touch with George Hutton, of course, ever since Alex and Teresa made good their escape from New Zealand. And he had to admit the logic behind the uncomfortable alliance with Colonel Spivey. What else could they do? It was Trinity site all over again — Alamogordo in 1945. The genie was out of the bottle. All they could do now was try to manage it as well as possible.

That was the ScaniaPress headline after one more zine exposi. A whistle blower inside the EUROP mission to the U.N. told how private negotiations among the great powers had been going on for over a fortnight. Outrage roiled through the World Data Net. What were governments doing — actually keeping people in the dark about a crisis? How dare they?

In absence of solid information, a myriad of rumors flew.

… It’s the melting of the ice caps that’s making the Earth shake…

… It’s secret weapon testing. Treaty violations. We’ve got to call in the tribunals before it’s too late…

… These aren’t earthly phenomena at all. We’re being softened up by UFOs…

… It’s an alignment of the planets. The Babylonians were right predicting…

… Overpopulation — ten billion souls can’t stand the pressure. The psychic strain alone…

… Could we have awakened something ancient? Something terrible? I caught sight of a dragon, snooping a public memory file. Have others out there seen it too?…

… Gaia, it is our Mother, shivering in her sleep, at the pain we’ve caused her…

… I don’t have any idea what it is! But I’ll bet there are people in high places who do. They have a duty to tell us what’s going on!

More headlines on ABC, TASS, Associated Press—

Holos of departing diplomats are analyzed by professionals and amateur hackers, who enhance every face, every pore, and publish speculative analyses of flesh tones, blink rates, nervous ticks—

… the Russ ambassador was scared…

… the EUROP team knew more than they were telling…

… clearly there’s collusion between NATO and ASEAN…

Stan was impressed with the creative energy out there. Data traffic soared, straining even the capacious fiber cable channels. Reserve capacity was brought on-line to cope.

A holopop group, Space Colander, produced a new number called “Straining Reality” — an instant hit. Underground poets sent paeans to strangeness migrating from computer node to computer node, circuiting the globe faster than the sun.

Stan did not participate, of course. Except for his rare walks, he spent most of his time conversing over military lines with Alex and with Glenn Spivey’s physicists, piecing together the secrets of the gazer. Some were starting to fall into place, such as how the beams coupled with surface matter. It seemed they had discovered a whole new spectrum, completely at right angles to the colors of light. With these discoveries, science would never be the same.

His darkest premonitions were like the ones those physicists in New Mexico must have felt, nearly a century ago. But those men had been wrong in their worst fears, hadn’t they? Their bomb, which might have wrought searing Armageddon, instead proved to be a blessing. After scaring everyone away from major war for three generations, it finally convinced the nations to sign covenants of peace. Perhaps the same sort of result would come of this. Humanity didn’t always have to be foolish and destructive.

Perhaps we’ll show wisdom this time, as well. There’s always a chance.

Hours later Stan was still hard at work, predicting beam-exit points so that Spivey’s teams could get there in advance to study the effects, when he found himself blinking at his work screen with a weird picture still planted in his brain. It came and went before he could focus clearly, and now the display showed nothing abnormal. Perhaps it was just a figment of fatigue. Nevertheless, he retained a distinct afterimage… of a glittering smile set in a lizard’s face, and behind that a whipping, barbed and jeweled tail.

• IONOSPHERE

Mark Randall could almost feel all the telescopes aimed at him. The sense of being watched caused a prickle on his neck as he maneuvered Intrepid, toward the strobing flash of the instrument package. Naturally, the great powers were observing his ship.

And the ninety-two news agencies and the Big 900 corporations and probably thousands of amateur astronomers whose instruments were within line of sight.

Some probably have a better idea what I’m chasing than I do, he contemplated.

“That thing wasn’t put there by any rocket,” Elaine Castro told him as she peered over his shoulder at the spinning cylinder caught in the shuttle’s spotlight. “This orbit is too weird, And look. The thing doesn’t even have standard attachment points!”

“I don’t think it was launched… normally,” Mark answered. Neither of them was saying anything new. “Need any help prepping for EVA?” he asked his new partner. “You’ve updated your inertial units?”

The stately black woman laid a space-gloved hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Yes, Mommy. And I promise, I’ll call if I need anything.”

Mark blinked with a sudden wave of deja vu, as if someone else were reading his lines in a play. Since when was he the worrywart, the double-checker, the fanatic for detail?

Since his last partner had been taken from him by something unfathomable, of course. “Well, give me a suit integrity readout from the airlock anyway, before pumping down.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.” She saluted, primly and sarcastically. Elaine fastened her helmet and left to fetch the beeping mystery they’d been sent chasing round the world to claim.

How did you get there? he silently asked the spinning object. There were laws of dynamics that had to be bent just to reach this bizarre trajectory. No record showed any rocket launch during the last month that might have sent that thing on such a path.

But there are other records than those released by NORAD and SERA… records of inverted tornadoes and columns of vacuum at sea level… of vanishing aircraft and rainbows tied in half hitches.

His panels shone green. Happy green also lit where Elaine’s suit proclaimed itself in working order. Still, his eyes roved, scanning telemetry, attitude, life support, and especially navigation. Mark whistled softly between his teeth. He sang, half consciously, in a toneless whisper.

“I yam where I yam, and that’s all where I yam…”

His crewmate emerged into sight, waving cheerfully as she jetted toward the shining cylinder. Mark watched like a mother bear as she lassoed the spinning object and reeled it behind her to Intrepid’s stowage bay. Even as Elaine cycled back inside, Mark kept alert, watching not only his instruments, but also the Earth… which had once seemed such a reliable place, but of late had seemed much more twitchy, and prone even to sudden fits of wrath.

• EXOSPHERE

inside a locked spaceship, she wasn’t expecting anybody. And yet, there came a knock at the door. Teresa had been wriggling through a cramped space, using a torque wrench to tighten a new aluminum pipe. She stopped and listened. It came again — a rapping at the shuttle’s crew access hatch. “Just a minute!” Her voice was muffled by the padded tubing around her. Teresa writhed backward out of the recess where she’d been replacing Atlantis’s archaic fuel-cell system with a smaller, more efficient one stripped out of a used car. Wiping her hands on a rag, she stepped across rattling metal planks to peer through the middeck’s solitary, circular window.

“Oh, it’s you, Alex! Hold on a sec.”

She wasn’t certain he could hear her through the hatch, but it took only a few moments to crank the release and swing the heavy door aside. Repairing and cleaning the hatch had been her first self-appointed task, soon after arriving on this tiny island of exile.

Alex waited atop the stairs rising from the pediment of the Atlantis monument. Or the shuttle’s gibbet, as Teresa sometimes thought of it. For the crippled machine seemed to hang where it was, trapped, like a bird caught forever in the act of taking off.

“Hi,” Alex said, and smiled.

“Hi yourself.”

The slight tension elicited by June Morgan’s visit was quite over by now. Of course she shouldn’t have felt awkward that her friend’s lover happened to pass through from time to time. Alex carried heavy burdens, and it was good to know he could relax that way on occasion. Still, Teresa felt momentary twinges of jealousy and suspicion not rooted in anything as straightforward as reason.

“Thought it time I dropped by to see how you’re doing.” Alex raised a sack with the outlines of a bottle. “Brought a housewarming present. I’m not disturbing, I hope?”

“No, of course not, silly. Watch your step though. I’ve torn up the deck plating to get at some cooling lines. Have to replace a lot of them, I’m afraid.”

“Urn,” Alex commented as he stepped over one of the yawning openings, staring at the jumble of pipes and tubing. “So the catalysts June brought you helped?”

“Sure did. And those little robots you lent me. They were able to thread cabling behind bulkheads so I didn’t even have to remove any big panels. Thanks.”

Alex put the sack down near the chaos of new and old jerry-rigging. “You won’t mind if I ask you a rather obvious question?”

“Like why? Why am I doing this?” Teresa laughed. “I honestly don’t know, really. Something to pass the time, I guess. Certainly I don’t fool myself she’ll ever fly again. Her spine couldn’t take the stress of even the gentlest launch.

“Maybe I’m just a born picture straightener. Can’t leave an honest machine just lying around rusting.”

Peering into the jumble of wires and pipes, Alex whistled. “Looks complicated.”

“You said it. Columbia-class shuttles were the most complex machines ever built. Later models streamlined techniques these babies explored.

“That’s the sad part, really. These were developmental spacecraft. It was dumb, even criminal, to pretend they were ‘routine orbital delivery vehicles,’ or whatever the damn fools called them at the time… Anyway, come on. Let me give you a tour.”

She showed him where NASA scavengers had stripped the ship, back when the decision had been made to abandon Atlantis where she lay. “They took anything that could be cannibalized for the two remaining shuttles. Still, there’s an amazing amount of junk they left behind. The flight computers, for instance. Totally obsolete, even at the time. Half the homes in America had faster, smarter ones by then. Your wristwatch could cheat all five at poker and then talk them all into voting Republican.”

Alex marveled. “Amazing.”

Teresa led him up the ladder to the main deck, where South Pacific sunshine streamed in through front windows smudged and stained by perching seagulls. The cockpit was missing half its instruments, ripped out indelicately long ago, leaving wires strewn across dim, dust-filmed displays. She rested her arms on the command seat and sighed. “So much love and attention went into these machines. And so much bureaucratic ineptitude. Sometimes I wonder how we ever got as far as we did.”

“Say, Teresa. Is there a way to get into the cargo bay?”

She turned around and saw Alex peering through the narrow windows at the back of the control cabin. It was pitch black in the bay, of course, since it had no ports to the outside. She herself had been back there only once, to discover in dismay that midges and tiny spiders had found homes there, lacing the vast cavity with gauzy webs. Probably they used cracks Atlantis had suffered when she fell onto her 747 carry-plane, ruining both ships forever. The Boeing had been scrapped. But Atlantis remained where she lay, her cargo hold now home only to insects.

“Sure. Through the airlock on middeck. But—”

He turned. “Rip… There’s a favor I have to ask.”

She blinked. “Just name it.”

“Come outside then. I brought something in the truck.”

The crate had to be winched up the pediment steps. From there it was a tight squeeze through the crew-egress hatch.

“We can’t leave it here,” Teresa said, panting and wiping her brow. “It blocks my work space.”

“That’s why I asked about the bay. Do you think we can get it through?”

Just left of the toilet cubicle stood the shuttle’s airlock, now the only way into the cargo bay. Teresa looked, and shook her head dubiously. “Maybe if we uncrate your whatever-it-is.”

“All right. But let’s be careful.”

She saw why he was so nervous when they peeled away the inner packing. There, resting inside a gimbaled housing, lay the most perfect sphere Teresa had ever seen. It glistened almost liquidly, causing the eye to skip along its flanks. Somehow, vision flowed on past, missing the thing itself.

“We’ll have to carry it by the housing,” Alex told her. Teresa bent to get a good grip on the rim as he took the other side. It was very heavy. Like a gyroscope, the silvery ball seemed to stay oriented in exactly the same direction, no matter how they shifted and jostled it. But then, that might have been an illusion. For all Teresa knew, it was spinning madly right in front of her. No ripple in the convex reflection gave any clue.

“What… is this thing?” she asked as they paused for breath inside the airlock. There was barely room for the globe and its cradle, forcing them to squeeze side by side to reach the opposite hatch. The close press of Alex’s shoulder, as they sidled together, felt at once familiar and warm, recalling times not so long ago of shared danger and adventure.

“It’s a gravity resonator,” he told her, caressing the sphere with his gaze. “A completely new design.”

“But it’s so small. I thought they had to be big cylinders.”

“They do, to generate a broad spectrum of search waves. But this one’s a specialist. This one’s tuned. For Beta.”

“Ah,” Teresa commented, impressed.

They resumed wrestling the shimmery globe into the bay, now lit by three small bulbs. “So why… do you want to store a tuned gravity resonator… inside a broken space shuttle?”

“I… thought you’d ask. Actually, I’m not… so much setting it up here as hiding it.”

As they rested for a moment, Teresa mopped her forehead. “Hiding? Do you mean from Spivey?”

Alex nodded. “Or his ilk. You know those Maori guards Auntie Kapur insisted on sending us? Well they’ve already caught spies trying to sneak into the compound. One Nihonese, another pair from the Han. And I’m sure Spivey’s got people on the island as well. Auntie’s sending reinforcements, but even so I’d rather keep my ace in the hole well concealed.”

He rubbed his palms on his trousers to dry them and grabbed the housing again. Together they resumed lifting.

“Hidden up…” She grunted as they hauled the resonator over a rib longeron into a stable position near one of the payload attachment points. “Hidden up my sleeve.” Teresa straightened. “No, that’s okay, Alex. I approve. It’s not just Spivey. I don’t trust any of them, not farther than I could spit.

“So,” she continued as Alex fastened the machine down. “Was that a bottle I saw in your hand earlier, I hope?”

Still short of breath, Alex grinned back at her, eyes glittering in the spotlights and their reflection off the perfect superconducting sphere. “Yeah. I know you Yanks like your beer cold. But once you’ve tasted this I’m sure you’ll give up that beastly habit.”

“Hmph. We’ll see about that.” Teresa brushed a wisp of cobweb from her eyes. As Alex turned to go, she paused to watched the tiny shred of spider silk flutter, descend to touch the round globe, and instantly disappear.

It was, indeed, a potent, bitter brew, and Teresa rather liked it. Still, for appearances she said the stuff explained a lot about Englishmen. It obviously stunted your emotional growth. He only laughed and leaned over to refresh her glass.

Teresa sat in the shuttle’s command chair while Alex perched cross-legged in the copilot’s seat. Neither of them felt any particular need to fill the long silences. So it often was, in Teresa’s experience, between people who had faced death together.

“You’re worried,” she surmised at last, after one extended pause. “You don’t think the deal can hold.”

“It was hopeless from the start.” Alex shook his head. “In retrospect, I can’t understand why it took so long for Spivey to find us. But at least we were a small conspiracy, operating on a shoestring. Now? Our beams are producing detectable phenomena all over the globe. The alliances can’t keep a thing like this under wraps, not with everyone on Earth prying to find out what’s going on.”

“Then why did Spivey and Hutton agree to try?”

He shrugged. “Oh, it seemed a good idea at the time. Take care of Beta, get the situation stabilized, then present the world with a fait accompli. And of course it’s giving us a chance to characterize the singularity, to prove its origin. Our technical report should let the science tribunals extend inspection to the Earth’s core, preventing any new arms race over gazers and such. Then, in an open debate, it could be decided whether to keep Beta around, as a possible planetary-defense weapon, or try to expel it forever.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Teresa nodded, grudgingly.

“The only problem is, that time’s already come! Beta’s relatively stable, I have data for a full report, and I’m certain the other great powers have already started clandestine graviscan programs of their own. There was a pulse from Nihon, yesterday—” He shook his head. “I wish I knew what Spivey was waiting for.”

“Did you hear about the meeting at the U.N.?” Teresa asked. “Everyone, all the delegates, were talking in parables and double-entendres. Moralizing and posturing, and saying nothing any of the reporters could sink their teeth into.”

“Hm.” Alex frowned. She sensed him begin to say something, stop, and then start again.

“I… I’ve started fighting him, you know.”

“Fighting who?” Then she stared. “You’re fighting Spivey! But how?”

“I’m tweaking the beams from South Africa and Rapa Nui, the ones I still control. Using them to pump Beta’s orbit higher… out to where it’ll lose mass faster. And also where the damn thing doesn’t leave those weird tracks in the lower mantle anymore—”

She interrupted. “Has he reacted? Has Spivey noticed?”

Alex laughed. “Oh has he! Got George to send me a telex. Here’s a copy.” He pulled the flimsy sheet from a breast pocket. “They’re both urging me to go along… not to let the side down. You know? All hang together or we’ll surely hang separately?

“Then, this morning, New Guinea fired three microseconds late on a routine run.”

“What did that do?”

He shook his head. “It pulled energy from Beta’s orbit, Rip, letting it fall a little lower. Seems our colonel isn’t about to let his mirror lose mass. Not while there are more experiments to run.”

Silence reigned for many heartbeats, their only measure of time’s passage. Finally, Teresa asked, “What can Glenn be trying to do? Surely he can’t be planning to use it as a weapon? His superiors can’t be that mad!”

Alex stared out through the streaked windshield, beyond a stretch of black-topped runway to a bluff of scrub grass growing scraggly out of the thin volcanic soil. Beyond lay the foam-capped waters of the ash-gray Pacific.

“I wish I knew. But whatever he’s after, I’m afraid you and I are mere pawns.”

• HOLOSPHERE

Jen remembered what a wise man told her long ago when she was similarly obsessed with the problem of consciousness. It had been an astronomer friend of Thomas’s, a very great mind, she recalled, who listened patiently for hours as she expounded the hottest new concepts of cognition and perception. Then, when at last she ran out of steam, he commented. “I’m uneducated in formal psychology. But in my experience, people generally react to any new situation in one of four ways:

Aha!… Ho-hum… Oy Vey!… and Yum, yum…

“These illustrate the four basic states of consciousness, dear Jennifer. All else is mere elaboration.”

Years later, Jen still found the little allegory delightful. It made you stop and ponder. But did those four “states” actually map onto human thought? Did they lead to new theories that might be tested by experiment? She recalled the astronomer’s smile that evening. Clearly he knew the deeper truth — that all theories are only metaphors, at best helpful models of the world. And even his clever notion was no more real than a mote in his own eye.

There are one hundred ways to view Mount Fuji, as Hokusai showed us. And each of them is right.

Jen wished she had someone like that old astronomer to talk to now.

Today I’m the aged professor with no one to talk to but a bright high school dropout. So who is there to give me reality checks? To tell me if I’m off on a wild goose chase?

She was treading a narrow path these days, skirting all the pitfalls of pure reason — that most seductive and deceptive of human pastimes. Jen had always believed philosophers ought to have their heads knocked repeatedly, lest they become trapped in the rhythms of their own if-thens. But now she was hardly one to cast stones. While crises roiled on all sides, the compass of her own existence contracted, as if her once far-flung reach were drawing inward now, preparing for some forthcoming contest or battle.

But what battle? What contest?

Clearly she wasn’t equipped to participate in the struggles being waged by Kenda and her grandson. Likewise, the ferment surging through the Net would go on unaffected by anything she offered. By now it was starting to reach stochastic levels. A billion or more anxious world citizens had already been drawn from their myriad endeavors, hobbies, and distractions toward a single strange attractor, one gnawing focus of angst. Nothing like it had been seen since the Helvetian War, and back in those days the Net had been a mere embryo.

Messages piled up in her open-access mailbox as numberless correspondents sought her opinion. But rather than get involved, Jen only retreated further into the circumscribed world of thought.

Oh, she left the catacombs regularly, for exercise and human contact. In Kuwenezi’s squat, fortresslike ark she spent ninety minutes each day with her only student, answering his eager questions with puzzlers of her own, marveling at his voracious mind and wondering if he’d ever get a chance to develop it.

But then, walking home under the merciless sun, she would pass near towering termite mounds, built by patient, highly social creatures at regular intervals across the dry hills. They hummed with unparsed commentary, a drone that seemed to resonate inside her skull, even after the rickety lift cage started descending into the cool silence of the abandoned mine, gliding past layer after gritty layer of compressed sediments, returning her to those caverns where hard-driven men labored like Homeric figures under her grandson’s long-distance guidance, wrestling for the fate of the world.

Their efforts mattered to Jen, of course. It was just that no one seemed to need her at the moment. And anyway, something even more important had to be attended to.

Her train of thought. It was precious, tenuous. A thread of concentration that absolutely had to be preserved… not for the world, but for its own sake. It was a self-involved, even selfish attitude, but Jen had long known she was a solipsist. Except during the years when her children had been growing, what had always mattered to her most was the trail cf the idea. And this was a very big idea.

From the Net she drew references stretching back to Minsky and Ornstein, Pastor and Jaynes — and even poor old Jung — examining how each thinker had dealt with this peculiar notion… that one could somehow be many, or many combine to make one.

Her young student Nelson Grayson had really hit on it with his fixation on “cooperation versus competition.” The dichotomy underlay every human moral system, every ideology and economic theory, from socialism to free-market libertarianism. Each tried to resolve it in different ways. And every attempt only dredged up more inconsistencies.

But what if it’s a false dichotomy, after all? What if we’ve been seduced by those deducers, Plato and Kant and Hegel? By the if-and-therefore of linear logic? Perhaps life itself sees less contradiction than we do.

The motto on the old American coin haunted her. “From many, one.”

Our subselves usually aren’t distinct, except in multiple personality disorder. Rather, a normal person’s drives and impulses merge and cleave, marry and sunder, forming temporary alliances to make us feel and act in certain ways.

So far so good. The evidence for some form of multimind model was overwhelming. But then came the rub.

If I consist of many, why do I persist in perceiving a central me at all! What is this consciousness that even now, as I think these thoughts, contemplates its own existence?

Jen remembered back when Thomas had tried to interest her in reading novels. He had promised that the best ones would prove enlightening. That their characters would “seem to come alive.” But the protagonists were never realistic to Jen. Even when portrayed as confused or introspective, their thought processes seemed too straightforward. Too decisive. Only Joyce ever came close to depicting the real hurricane of internal conflict and negotiation, those vast, turbid seascapes surrounding an island of semi-calm that named itself “me.”

Is that why I must imagine a unitary self? To give the storm a center? An “eye” to revolve around? An illusion of serenity, so the storm might be ignored most of the time?

Or is it a way to rationalize a semblance of consistency? To present a coherent face to the outside world?

Of one thing Jen felt certain. The universe inside a human mind was only vaguely like the physical one outside, with its discrete entities, its species, cells, organs, and individuals. And yet, the mind used those external entities as metaphors in the very models it used to define itself!

Today, Nelson had gotten worked up about one such model. Government, he said, consists of a nation’s effort to settle the differences amongst its component parts — its citizens. In olden times, the resolution was a simple matter of the imposition of fiat by a king or ruling class.

Later still, majority rule improved matters a little. But today even small minorities could make bombs and death bugs, if they got angry enough! (The blueprints were all there in the net, and who dared claim the role of censor?)

So compromise and consensus were absolutely essential, and governments could only tread carefully, never imposing solutions. Serving instead as forums for careful rapprochement.

In other words, the ideal government should be like a sane person’s conscious mind! It was a fascinating comparison. Almost as interesting as the next one Nelson spun out.

The World Data Net, he said, was the ultimate analog. Like a person, it too consisted of a myriad of tiny subselves (the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and alliances merged and separated… sometimes by nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special interest groups that leaped all the old borderlines… all waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world’s agenda and to affect their lives in the physical world.

Astonishing, Jen thought. The boy had made a major metaphorical leap.

Of course, the government analogy was a little overextended. But the notion that consciousness is out way of getting all our secret selves out into the daylight, so they’ll either cooperate or compete fairly — that’s the important part. It explains why a neurosis loses most of its power once it’s known… as soon as all the mind gets to see those dark secrets one isolated part had kept hiden from the rest.

Walking past the busy technicians, Jen sat down at her display and resumed working on her model, modifying it along lines inspired by Nelson’s insight. The subvocal was the only input device fast enough to follow her driving pace. Her teeth clicked and her larynx bobbed as she almost spoke words aloud. The machine skimmed those phrases faster than she could have pronounced them, and it extrapolated, drawing from its capacious memory bits of this and that to fit into a growing whole.

Those bits were mostly object blocks taken from the very best intelligence-modeling programs around. That cost money, of course, and over in one corner Jen saw her personal account dip alarmingly. But each of the programs had something to recommend it. Each had been slaved over by teams of talented researchers with private theories they wanted to prove — each ostensibly contradictory, incompatible with the others.

At that moment, however, it had ceased mattering to Jen whose doctrine was closer to correct. Suddenly, it made perfect sense to merge them, combine them — to try to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

By the Mother… what if they’re all right? What if self-similarity and recursion can’t typify a living system without yet a third attribute — inclusion?

There was certainly a precedent for such a melange… the human brain, the physical organ itself, was built in layers. Its newest evolutionary innovations hadn’t replaced earlier sections. Rather, each in turn was laid over older parts, joining and modifying them, not canceling or superseding.

Most recent were the prefrontal lobes, tiny nubs above the eyes which some called the seat of human personality… the latest floor of rooms added to a skyscraper of mind. Underneath lay the mammalian cortex, snared with man’s closest cousins. Lower then, but still useful and functional, the brain portions appropriate to reptiles still performed useful chores, while under those pulsed a basic reflex system remarkably like that found in primitive chordates.

So it would be with her model. Gradually pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The Berkeley Cognition Scheme, for instance, mated astonishingly well with the “emotional momentum” models of the Beijing University behaviorists. At least it did if you twisted each of them a bit first, in just the right way.

Of course, whenever she ventured into the net to seek these and other programs, she had to experience firsthand what was going on out there. It was utter chaos! Her early ferrets got completely lost in the maelstrom. She had to write better ones just to reach the big psychology library clearinghouse, in Chicago. And even then it took several tries before the emissaries came back with what she needed. The latest retrieval had taken seven whole seconds, causing her to smack the console in irritation.

By now Jen realized — with perhaps a pang of jealousy — that her own grandson had achieved unrivaled heights in the art of stirring people up, far exceeding her own modest accomplishments. The Net spumed with ferment over events Alex Lustig had set off. Somewhere, sometime soon, len figured the whole Rube Goldberg contraption had to blow a fuse.

Watch it, old girl. Your own metaphors give away your age.

Okay then, let’s try a few similes.

The chaos in the Net was like spray blowing over a small boat. All sorts of unwanted material accompanied the subroutines her ferrets brought back. Jen was both alarmed and amused when some bits of software dross actually fought not to be tossed out! They clung to existence in her computer like scrabbling little life-forms and had to be tracked down lest they scurry into some corner and use up scarce memory, or maybe even breed.

On impulse she looked to the small screen where she’d exiled the cartoon creatures called up by her own free associations. In the foreground, for instance, shimmered a teetering house of cards and spent, smoking electrical fuses, clearly extrapolated from recent surface mumblings.

Then there was the tiger symbol, which had lain in that same spot all these weeks. The simulacrum purred lowly, lounging on a nest of what looked like shredded paper.

She told the snippet of herself. If you insist on hanging around, then it’s time I put you to work.

The tiger yawned, but responded when she tapped two teeth together decisively — asserting the dominance of her central self over its parts. Subvocally she gave it instructions, to go hunt those spurious flurries of unwanted software — all the scampering, chittering irrelevancies that kept swarming into her work space from the Net’s chaos, disturbing her work.

The weather’s high, she realized. At times like these, any mobile thing will seek shelter, anywhere it can.

With that thought, flecks of rain seemed to dampen the tiger’s fur, but not its mood. With another yawn and then a savage grin, the cat set forth to clear away all interlopers, to give her model room to settle and grow.

• CORE

He was shaving when the telephone rang. Alex wasn’t happy with the new razor he’d bought after the escape from New Zealand. Its diamond blade was far too sharp, unlike his old one, which had worn down nicely over the years since his sixteenth birthday. That wasn’t the only thing he missed. Stan and George also — their steadiness and calm advice. Communications were supposed to be safe from the rising noisiness on the Net, but despite military assurances, they had worsened for days.

Were Spivey’s peepers conspiring to keep them apart? Or might George and Stan be snubbing him because of his growing campaign against the colonel’s control?

Alex prepared to run the blade over his face again, wondering if maybe it was time to quit being so old — fashioned and get his face depilated, like most other men.

A shrill chirping made his hand jerk. “Bloody hell!”

Alex tore off a sheet of toilet paper to stanch the wound. He recalled seeing a can of coagulant enzyme in the medicine cabinet and pulled aside the mirror to start rummaging for it.

The phone chirruped again, insistently. “Oh… all right.” He slammed the mirror shut. Applying pressure to stop the bleeding, he stepped into the tiny bedroom, sifted through the clutter on the nightstand for his wristwatch, and pressed the ^{_{ACCEPT CALL}} button. “Yes?”

The person on the other end paused and then realized there would be no picture. “Tohungal Is that you?”

From the Maori honorific, it had to have been one of the newcomers Auntie Kapur had sent to watch over Alex and his team. “Lustig here,” he affirmed. “What is it?”

“Better come quick, Tohunga. We caught a saboteur trying to blow up the lab.” The voice cut off with a click. Alex stared at the watch. “Cripes,” he said concisely. Grabbing a shirt off the dresser, he dashed out the door trailing shaving cream and tiny specks of blood.

“I guess we’re not needed anymore.”

“Come on, Eddie. We don’t know the bomb was sent by Spivey. What about a hundred other countries, alliances, agitation groups… Hell, even the boy scouts must have some idea where the focal resonators are by now.”

His chief engineer grimaced. “I served in the ANZAC Special Forces, Alex. I know standard issue demolition charges when I see them.” The big, red-headed Kiwi hefted a tennis-ball-sized contraption. “The casing’s been altered to make it look like Nihon manufacture, but I just did a neutron activation scan, and I can tell you exactly which factory in Sydney made it. Even the lot number.

“Bloody sloppy of the bastards, if you ask me. They must have been confident we couldn’t stop ’em.”

Alex glanced over at the would-be saboteur, a nondescript Polynesian. Possibly a Samoan, whose appearance would presumably blend in with the natives of Easter Island. Except that the Pasquans of Rapa Nui were a breed apart and proud of it.

What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him?

Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.

The bomber smiled nervously at Alex.

He knows the way things ought to go now. According to the rules, we’d have to hand him over to Chilean authorities. Then, in the fullness of time, his masters will cut a deal for him.

Only what rules apply when everyone’s talking about the end of the world? Alex’s hands balled into fists. The saboteur seemed to read something in his eyes and swallowed hard.

Across the room, Alex saw Teresa watching him, arms folded in front of her. So what do we do now? he wondered. More than ever, he wished he could gather old friends and tap their wisdom.

“I agree. I’d lay odds it was Colonel Spivey who sent the bomb.”

Everybody turned to see who had spoken with such authority, in a rich, confident basso. “Manella!” Alex cried out. Teresa gasped.

Standing in the doorway, the Aztlan reporter smiled and carried his bulk gracefully into the chamber. Resting one arm on the guardrail of the gravity resonator, he smiled all around. “It’s good to see you remember me, Lustig. Hello, everybody. Captain Tikhana. Sorry to abandon you back in Waitomo. But I really was indisposed.”

“You choose convenient moments to come and go,” Teresa said bitterly. “What makes you think we’ll have any interest in what you have to say now, Pedro?”

Manella smiled. “Come come. I’m sure Colonel Spivey’s told you how much he respected whoever ran interference for our project, before he finally found us.

Didn’t he admit that? Doesn’t that imply whose side I was on… am on?”

Alex frowned. Pedro was implying that even now he had his own tap into the Waitomo complex. Which was plausible enough. He’d had plenty of time to plant bugs. One fiber, as thin as silk, was all you needed.

“All good things come to an end, though. Eventually it was some hacker out on the Net who tracked us down. I got the warning only an instant before those peepers arrived.” Manella tapped the heavy-duty data watch on his left wrist. “No time to warn anybody, and I knew if I took Teresa along, the manhunt would sweep us both up in a trice anyway. But I bet Spivey wouldn’t think me worth the bother.”

“He hardly mentioned your name,” Teresa said, both confirming Manella’s split-second decision and emphasizing how little anybody cared about him.

He took the mixed insult with good grace. “Anyway, I’ve been keeping tabs on things, while maintaining a thin profile—”

Teresa interrupted. “Hah!”

“ — but I had a feeling something like this was in the works. That’s why I called your security chief this morning with a little tip.”

Alex swiveled to look at Auntie Kapur’s man. The big Maori shrugged. “Must’ve been him, tohunga.”

Teresa objected. “How do we know he didn’t send the saboteur, just so he could tip us off and win back our trust?”

“Oh, Captain.” Manella sighed. “Don’t you think I’m persuasive enough on my own account, without having to use tricks and legerdemain? Besides, I have no access to bombs and such. You just heard this wise man say the thing was ANZAC military issue.

“No, I just used this.” He tapped the side of his ample nose. “Lustig can tell you it never fails. I knew something was up. Had to be. Spivey can’t afford to leave you in operation any longer.”

“But… why?” one of the woman techs complained. “Just because we’ve been nudging Beta a little higher, so it evaporates a bit?”

Another engineer agreed. “It can’t be to keep things secret any longer, either. Private SIGs are correlating data from nearly every gazer beam, tossing out bad theories and zeroing in on the truth. Anyway, last night the NATO president said he’ll be making a big statement Tuesday. It’ll all go to the tribunals…”

“Which makes time all the more crucial to Spivey,” Pedro answered. “Tell me something, Alex. Are there signs of other resonators coming on line? Other than your original four?”

Oh, he’s good all right, Alex admitted in his thoughts, whether Manella had guessed this or discovered it by spying on them.

“We’ve seen traces for several days now. Two in Nihon GEACS territory, one Russ and a Han also.”

“And?”

“And six more… much better ones. They’re being set up at the face centers of a cube, a better arrangement than our tetrahedron.”

“Just as I expected.” Manella nodded. “And who else, other than yourself, is capable of building such an array? Who else has such a head start over Russ and Han and even Nihon?”

Silence was his only answer. The answer was obvious.

“So there’s supposed to be an announcement in four days? So the tribunals are to be invoked and all revealed? I must then answer, so what? What happens afterward will still depend on who has the best information and expertise. That is who will be in control. He’ll set the agenda. Rule the world.”

“Spivey,” Teresa said, though clearly she did not want to.

Manella nodded. “He’s almost got a monopoly on data about these breathtaking, intimidating new technologies. But who knows even more about singularities and gravity lasers than his tame physicists?”

They looked at each other. No one in the world understood the gazer phenomenon better than the people in this room.

This is no good, Alex decided. Manella might be right. Dammit, he probably is. But I’m not letting him hypnotize my team.

“Clever, Pedro,” he told the newsman. “Have you also worked out what I’ve decided to do about it?”

“Is that all?” The big man grinned. “You forget that I know you, Lustig. I’d bet my tooth-implant radio and half a year’s pay you intend showing Colonel Spivey just who he’s dealing with.”

Damn you, Alex thought. But outwardly he only shrugged. Looking at the others, he announced — “Anyone who chooses to leave the island may do so now. All civilians will be warned away from a two-kilometer radius.

“As for me, though, I don’t plan taking this—” he hefted the bomb ” — lying down.”

He looked again at Teresa, who nodded. She understands. The next few days will decide the future of everything.

Alex watched as the assembled workers, one by one, stepped toward him and the great swiveled bulk of the resonator. Their silent vote was unanimous. “Good,” he said, feeling a wave of warmth toward his comrades. “Let’s get to work then. I had a dream not long ago, and it gave me an idea. A possible way we just might get the good colonel’s attention.”

• MESOSPHERE

Goldman didn’t have much to do anymore. Others ran the scans now, reduced the data, constructed ever-subtler models of the inner Earth, even traced the involute geometries of that refulgent, renitent entity below… the thing called Beta. A midget town had sprung up around the lonely

Tangoparu dome on a rocky plain below the vast Greenland ice sheet. High-powered tech types bustled with armloads of data cubes, arguing in the arcane new language of gazerdynamics. Of the original team, only he remained now, the others having gone home to New Zealand long ago.

The NATO scientific commander had specifically asked him to stay. So Stan sat in on all the daily seminars, struggling to keep up with younger, more agile minds, even though his understanding grew more obsolete with each fast-breaking discovery. No matter. They all treated him with utter deference. Hardly a moment passed without hearing the name Alex Lustig spoken with an awe customarily lavished on the shades of Newton and Einstein and Hurt, and as the great one’s former teacher, Stan shared in that glory.

Singularities. There was a lot of talk about singularities, by which the bright young men and women meant the kind you made inside a cavitron — micro black holes and those newer innovations, tuned strings and cosmic knots. Of late, though, Stan had found himself thinking about another kind of “singularity” altogether. It was on his mind as he passed a saluting sentry and left the bustling encampment, swinging his walking stick across the moraine-strewn valley.

In mathematics, a singularity is a sudden discontinuity, where one expression suddenly ceases being valid, and a completely different one takes its place.

You got the simplest kind of singularity — a delta function — by dividing any real number by zero. The result, converging on infinity, was actually undefined, unknowable. That’s where we’re at right now… a singularity in the life history of mankind.

It wasn’t just the present crisis. Oh, certainly he was worried. Would the world’s institutions — or the planet itself — survive the next few hours or days? Stan was as concerned as the next man. Still, even if tomorrow the spectre of reborn international paranoia evaporated like a bad dream, and all the gorgeous, terrifying new technologies were tamed, nothing would ever be the same.

Earlier today, some of the youngsters had been discussing notions about gravitational circuits… equivalent, in collapsed mass and stressed space, to capacitors and resistors and transistors, for heaven’s sake! To Stan it was proof the time had come. The moment he’d secretly been waiting for all his life.

There’s another kind of singularity… having to do with society, and information.

Technological breakthroughs had happened before — when farming was invented, for example. Or metallurgy. Or writing. Each time, men and women gained new power over their lives, and thinking itself changed. With each such naissance, human beings were in effect reborn, remade… reprogrammed.

In early times, change came slowly. But each breakthrough laid a foundation for those that followed. And with the Western breakout of the sixteenth century, it became self-sustaining. Inventions bred wealth, which spread education and leisure to broader masses. Printing dispersed literacy. Transport distributed food. Food meant more people.

He paused near a sandy bank in the wind-shadow of a boulder, and used his walking stick to trace a rough figure. It was the standard doom scenario, depicting the fate forecast by Malthus for any species that outbreeds the carrying capacity of its niche.

The curve portrayed human population over time, and it rose very slowly at first. All through the late Stone Age — when Stan’s ancestors had chipped flint, scratched fleas, and thought fire the final terror weapon — there were never more than five million homo sapiens at a time. This changed with agriculture, though. Human numbers doubled, then doubled again every fifteen hundred years or so — a rapid climb — until they reached five hundred million around the time of Newton.

Impressive progress, achieved by people who had hardly a glimmer of what the laws of nature were, let alone concepts like ecology or psychology or planetary history. But then it accelerated even faster! New foods, sanitation, emigration… babies lived longer. Humans reproduced copiously. The next doubling, to a billion souls, took only two hundred years. The next, less than a century. Then, from just 1950 to 1980, two billions became four. And still the curve steepened. Stan recalled the elegant, symmetrical projections proclaimed by pessimists when he was young. No population boom can be sustained forever on a finite world. There must inevitably come crash.

[INSERT IMAGE HERE]

The curve never reached infinity after all. It peaked. Then, like a spent rocket, it turned over and plummeted. The great die-back, that’s where we seemed headed. After all, it happens whenever anchovies and deer breed beyond their food supply.

And we did have little die-backs. But so far we’ve escaped the big one, haven’t we?

So far.

He scratched another rude figure, identical to the first until it reached the top of the curve. At which point the population stopped growing all right, but neither did it fall! Instead of plummeting, this rocket turned sideways.

This is what they say can happen if you add intelligence and free will to the formula. After all, we aren’t deer or anchovies!

[INSERT IMAGE HERE]

Two graphs. Two destinies. Malthusian calamity and the so-called S-curve. On the one hand, utter collapse. And on the other, a chain of last-minute reprieves… like self-fertilizing corn, room-temperature superconductors, and gene-spliced catfish… each arriving just in time for mankind to muddle through another year, eking out a living from one brilliant innovation to the next.

We thought these were the only two possible futures:

— if we prove selfish and short-sighted — mass death,

— and if we bend all our efforts, working together, applying every ingenuity — then a genteel decline to a sort of threadbare equilibrium.

But was there a third choice? Another type of social singularity? Stan’s stick hovered over the sand. When each generation owns more books than its father’s, the volumes don’t accumulate arithmetically or even geometrically. Knowledge grows exponentially.

Stan recalled the last time he and Alex and George had gotten drunk together, when he had complained so about the lack of new modalities. Now he laughed at the memory. “Oh, I was wrong. There are modalities, all right. More than I ever imagined.”

Those youngsters back in the encampment were talking about making gravitational transistors! It was enough to make a man cry out, “Stop! Give me a minute to think! What does it all mean?”

Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.

A third type of social singularity, then, would be a true leap, some sudden, jarring shift to a completely undefined state — where changes manifest themselves in months, weeks, days, minutes… Still climbing, the rocket attains escape velocity.

With a sigh, Stan wiped away the rude figures. We’re caught up in our own close view of time. A human life seems so long. But try on the patient outlook of a glacier.

His eyes lifted to the white continent of ice, only a few kilometers away and stretching from horizon to horizon. Ice ages are geologically rapid events. And yet we’ve flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children’s children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.

Stan sat down on the convenient boulder, which had been dragged hundreds of miles only to be dropped here by the retreating glacier. It was a good place to watch late autumn’s early twilight usher onstage the gauzy curtains of the aurora borealis. He loved the way the colors played across the glacier, causing its rough corrugations to undulate in time to the sizzling of supercharged ions high above. It was starting to get chilly, even in his thermal coat. Still, this was worth savoring for a while.

Stan heard a soft clunk and saw a stone roll across the sand, coming to rest near his foot. Not far away, two other rocks quivered.

Well, I guess we’re at it again.

But it was more than a typical tremor. He realized this as a deep groan seemed to fill the air… apparently strongest toward the ice. He started to rise, but changed his mind when a sudden trembling made it hard to gain his feet. Whether it was in the ground or his legs, Stan decided to stay put.

After all, what can harm me out here in the open?

Sparkling fireflies were the next phenomenon, dancing within his eyes.

This must be what it’s like to be near a beam when it exits, he thought bemusedly. A level-six harmonic at about twenty kilowheelers should do it, coupling with my own body’s bag of salty fluid. If the frequency dispersion isn’t too…

But then Stan blinked, remembering. No beam was scheduled to exit so near—

He didn’t finish the thought. For at that moment the glacier began to glow directly opposite him, and not from any outside illumination this time. Deep inside the vast ice flow a fierce luminance throbbed. Shapes and dim outlines warped what seemed to be a series of columns, set far back in the frozen mass.

Shafts of brightness pulsed…

Then the east exploded with light.

• EXOSPHERE

Teresa stared at the display, watching a vivid simulation of events taking place halfway round the world.

Glowing numbers told how much mass had suddenly departed the planet. She had to swallow before speaking.

“H-how did you do that?”

Alex looked up from his controls. “How does a musician play?” He cracked his knuckles. “Practice, practice.”

Teresa knew better. Alex grinned, but he had a tremor under his left eye and a pale, bloodless complexion.

He’s scared half out of his wits. And who wouldn’t be, after what he’d just pulled off?

“Telemetry coming in,” a tech announced. “Our beam emerged on target, missing the settlement by six point two klicks, with a surface coupling impedance of eighteen kilowheelers… at point oh niner Hawkings, metric. That’s a ninety-eight hundredths match with water ice of surface thickness…”

Another voice cut in. “Beat frequencies on the sixth, ninth, and twelfth harmonics, dominant. Very gentle. Maximum dynamic load during each throb-pulse never exceeding six gees…”

“Target trajectory calculated,” a third worker announced. “On screen now.”

A spot glowed on the map-globe, near the west coast of Greenland. From that point a thread of light speared radially into space. Arrow straight at first, it eventually curved as Earth’s more sedate gravitostatic field grabbed the small mountain their beam had ripped from the ancient glacier. The dot representing the hurtling iceberg still moved very fast, though, and the planetary sphere had to shrink in compensation.

As if impatient with even this fleeting pace, a dashed line rushed ahead of the dot, tracing the frozen missile’s predicted path. Earth diminished toward the lower left corner of the tank and into view, at the upper right, a pearly globe sedately swam onstage.

Teresa let out a cry. “You can’t be serious!”

Alex tilted his head. “You object?”

“Whatever for? There’s no one living on the moon.” Teresa clapped her hands. “Do it, Alex! Get a bull’s-eye!”

He grinned up at her and then turned back to watch as their projectile passed the halfway mark and sped on toward its rendezvous. Teresa unselfconsciously laid a hand on Alex’s shoulder.

No one had ever tried to manipulate the gazer on such a scale. Sure, Glenn Spivey’s people had lain instrument packages where beams were scheduled to emerge. But no one had ever made a beam couple so powerfully and purposely with surface objects. Others were sure to note how closely the beam had missed one of Spivey’s resonators. They’d also notice how accurately Alex had thrown his snowball.

“Phone call from Auckland!” The communications officer announced,

Not far away, Pedro Manella made a show of consulting his watch. “The colonel’s late. They must have dragged him out of bed.”

“Let him wait a few minutes longer then,” Alex said. “I’d rather talk to him after he’s mulled things over.”

Spivey must be watching a display like this now. So, no doubt, were his bosses. The dashed line filled in as the glowing pinpoint converged toward the familiar cratered face of Earth’s dwarf sister. No one breathed as it accelerated and then struck the moon’s northern quadrant, vanishing in a sudden, dazzling glitter of molten spray.

Manella, of course, was the first to recover his voice, though even he took some time to get around to speaking.

“Um, well, Lustig. That ought to give them pause for a day or so.”

Under her hands, Teresa felt the tightness in Alex’s muscles. But outwardly, for the others, he maintained an air of confident calm.

“I expect. For a day or so.”

• HYDROSPHERE

I hear you, Daisy McClennon thought, as she brought together the elements she needed implements bought, stolen, coerced, or designed herself during the last several hectic, sleepless days. I hear you, she mentally told the voices vibrating, ringing, echoing across the vast chaos of the Net. And intervene is certainly what I’m about to do. Oh there were those who still thought she was their tool… as a dog might think a man’s sole purpose in life is to throw sticks and operate the can opener. But just as their schemes neared culmination, so would hers. And always, under buried levels and deceptions, there lie layers deeper still.

Soon, she told those who prayed electronically. Soon you’ll have release from all these worries that beset you.

Soon you shall know truth.