Gravity Dreams

16

Right in itself has no authority, but follows might as the smoke the wind.

When golden starbursts flared through my brain, recalling again the memory of those first days of nanite possession, I looked out the window at the hillside. The winter green of the conifers was pallid compared to the golden fires, weak compared to the more vivid greenery of a garden in Hybra.

I turned at the knock on the door. 'Come in.'

'Time for an educational experience,' Cerrelle said.

'Like the walk in the snow?'

'This won't be as enchanting. We're going to some adjudication adjustment hearings.'

Adjudication adjustment hearings? I scarcely liked the sound, and I racked my new stocks of knowledge. Adjudication adjustment hearing: the procedure by which an individual's self-responsibility is assessed to determine whether specific actions merit permanent adjustment.

'It's necessary so that you know how seriously we take personal responsibility. Like many things you get in the nanosprays, this is something that needs the reinforcement of personal experience. It may not be pleasant, but it's not yours. So don't worry.'

How did the demons measure self-responsibility? And why was that a societal procedure? I stood up and followed

Cerrelle. There wasn't any point in protesting, especially since it was clear she thought what I was going to see was in my best interest. I wasn't sure that what the demons felt was good for me was what I would have chosen, but until I knew more, I just accepted what arrived and did as she asked. In a fashion, I felt dead anyway, and it was easier.

We walked from the front foyer outside and up a low hill, then down another set of stairs from what appeared as a small building holding nothing but a staircase. There was, surprise of surprises, a tunnel platform and what looked to be a covered glider.

'Yes, we use gliders. Why wouldn't we? We believe in appropriate technology.'

I sat on the padded bench seat beside Cerrelle, conscious for the first time of a faint floral aroma as she closed the permaglass canopy. Scent? From my prodding, demanding keeper?

The glider slipped into the darkness of the tunnel, except that I could see the outlines and sense the speed - far swifter than any glider in Dorcha.

Cerrelle turned on the seat to face me. 'You've been here for weeks, and you still act as though you were in some sort of afterlife, like a nanite zombie. The diagnostics say you're metabolically and chemically extraordinarily well-balanced. I'm sure adjusting isn't easy, but you have to work on it. You keep acting as if nothing really affects you, and it does, whether you like it or not.'

'It's difficult to believe any of this is real' I pointed out.

'It is real, Tyndel. Your Dzin should tell you that. Doesn't Dzin state that you have to begin by being aware of what is?' She gave me a sardonic smile.

Her use of Dzin bothered me. 'It's still hard to adjust to a whole new culture.'

'It is,' she acknowledged. 'It isn't easy, but there are others who've gone through a lot more than you have. If I were a little more sadistic, I'd give you a solid slap on the side of your face to let you feel some reality.'

'You really don't like me, do you?' I asked.

'Actually, I do like you. That's what makes it difficult. You're intelligent, perceptive, and hurting. I think you have a lot to offer. That's why I keep pushing you. I think you're wallowing in self-pity. No matter how bad the transformation was for you, no matter how upsetting the past weeks have been, you have to live in the present. You have the ability to do well in Rykasha, and you keep shoving away the opportunity.'

'I didn't ask for the opportunity.'

There was a long deep breath from Cerrelle before she spoke again. "None of us ask for some things. We don't ask to be born where we were. We don't ask for those things which limit us. We have to do the best we can with what we have where we are. And we can try to change things, but you can't do any of that if you refuse to accept where you are.' She paused so briefly that it almost wasn't a pause. 'At least as a place to begin.'

What if I didn't want to start again?

'Tyndel,' she answered my unspoken question, 'if you want to live, you don't have a choice.'

'Can everyone read my thoughts the way you do?'

'First,' she said patiently, 'think about why you don't want to face reality. And second, the thought reading has been explained. You were injected with what might be called neural transmitter nanites. They form a network and broadcast, but only those people who have similar sets of nanites in their systems can receive your thoughts. They have to be close to you and attuned to you. Those nanites have a tendency to decay, and in a year most who are attuned to you now won't sense a thing.'

'Most?'

'If you form an emotional bond with one of them it's possible the effect will last longer.'

'That's hardly likely.' I smiled crookedly in the dimness, and my smile had barely faded when the glider emerged into the light of another platform.

'The way you're pushing people away from you, I'd have to agree, but you never know.' She stood as the glider came to a halt. 'We're here.'

Everything Cerrelle said made sense, but I was still having trouble with what she said.

We climbed four flights of steps from the glider tunnel platform. The stairwell was smoothed rock, polished to a luster and showing grains of stone I didn't recognize. Like every structure I'd visited in Rykasha, the adjudication chamber smelled clean, with the faintest hint of pine in the air. Despite the clouds outside, the indirect glow strips had the room bright.

At the far end of the stone-floored room was a dais. Two women and a man sat in a wooden-paneled enclosure on the left side of the dais. Each wore a lightweight headset. Below the dais were chairs, only about two dozen, a dozen on each side of a cleared space approximating an aisle.

A single woman wearing a deep black robe sat behind a white oak desk in the center of the dais.

'She's the adjudicator,' whispered Cerrelle as she guided me into one of the empty chairs on the right side of the center aisle.

On the right side of the dais was a single wooden armchair. In it was slumped a blond man in a dark blue tunic and trousers.

'Are you Lartrel?' asked the black-haired woman in the adjudicator's robe. The man in the low chair nodded slowly.

'Do you live in the dwelling you have called Remarque, below the Kangamon Slopes?'

'Yes.'

'Do you have a daughter named Aberla?' Yes.'

I glanced at Cerrelle, but she didn't look at me. So I watched the questioning.

'Please tell the panel what happened on the afternoon of five Decern.'

'We were walking up the old log trail toward the quarry. We were below the upper ledge. I stopped to frame the scene. Beside being a tech, I also paint. Aberla kept walking. I told her to stop because there's a drop-off.' Lartrel's voice slowed.

'Then what happened?' prompted the adjudicator.

'She didn't stop.' He looked at the floor tiles. 'She didn't listen to me.'

'How old is Aberla?'

'She's four.' Lartrel swallowed. 'I told her to stop. I even yelled. She didn't listen.'

'That isn't the question of this hearing. Did you willfully neglect your daughter's safety?'

'I didn't know she was that close to the edge.'

'How close was she?'

'I had no idea that ...' The man's face contorted, then smoothed. 'She was about four meters - I think it was closer to three - from the drop-off when I called to her.' Tears began to roll down his cheeks. 'I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I didn't think. I... hoped that everything would be all right. I called the med-techs.' He looked up at the adjudicator through reddened eyes. 'They say she'll recover. They say that she'll be all right.'

'Lartrel. Did you willfully neglect your daughter's safety?'

His eyes went to the panel, then to us. 'I love my daughter. It's not as though I hurt her.'

'Did you willfully neglect your daughter's safety?' The panicked look intensified, and he looked down. 'Answer the question.'

'Yes.' The words were barely audible. 'Is this the first time you have let your own considerations jeopardize her?'

'I'm sorry?'

'Is this the first time you have neglected her safety?' The panicked look reappeared, even more intensely, the look of a trapped animal with no way out. Finally, the answer came. 'No.'

The adjudicator turned toward the panel. 'Do members of the panel have any additional questions?'

The brown-haired man with a headset gestured, and the adjudicator nodded.

'Would you clarify why you are the primary caregiver?' asked the man.

'Her mother is a third officer on Web runs. My studio is at home.' Lartrel did not look at either the questioner or the adjudicator.

'Another hearing is pending the mother's return,' the adjudicator added. 'Any other questions?'

'No.'

'No.'

Silence filled the room, and I waited along with the others. Perhaps five minutes passed before the adjudicator's eyes refocused and she turned to the blond man.

'Lartrel, you have been found lacking in supervisory care for your daughter. You will be adjusted, to ensure her safety, immediately following the conclusion of this hearing.'

The blond man looked at the dais, then at the polished stone floor.

Two men in plain dark gray uniforms stepped through a door behind the adjudicator and walked toward the artist.

The lower sleeves of the uniforms were black. The artist stood slowly. The two escorted him out. 'What... ?'

'Search your own data,' whispered Cerrelle.

Adjudication adjustment? How was it carried out? I mentally scrolled through the volumes of data I'd received. That was the way it felt. Then I nodded. Each individual for whom adjustment was deemed necessary received a set of nanites programmed with an expanded code of behavior covering every eventuality. The same nanites administered a neural shock at any time the individual's actions violated the code.

I shivered.

Cerrelle said nothing.

I looked up as two more gray-uniformed figures - a man and a woman - escorted a blond woman to the chair. She glanced around the adjudication room.

'Please take the seat,' ordered the adjudicator.

'No. It isn't right!' The blonde turned and started to walk off the dais and toward the door through which we had entered. Then she froze and slowly toppled to the stone floor.

I winced.

The man and woman in the black-sleeved singlesuits reappeared and picked up her form and carried her back to the chair, where they held her upright.

After a moment, the woman staggered, but the two officials caught her arms and eased her into the chair.

'You don't have any right...'

'This is an adjudication hearing, and under the laws of Rykasha we have every right to determine whether you require adjustment.' The adjudicator leaned forward. 'Do you wish to be released to the customs and laws of the nearest non-Rykashan nation? That would be Dorcha.'

'That's a death sentence.'

'Do you wish to be released to the customs and laws of the nearest non-Rykashan nation?'

'No.'

The blonde's voice was suddenly resigned. 'Are you Laranai?'

'Yes.'

'You have been charged with corrupting an individual into violence through a repeated series of actions.'

'He struck me! I didn't do a thing.'

'Veyt faces adjudication under another adjudicator. Your actions are the issue of this hearing.'

'I'm innocent! I didn't do anything.' Laranai's eyes went to the three individuals with the headsets and then to Cerrelle. 'You! This isn't right. I didn't do anything. Tell them I didn't do anything.'

Cerrelle said nothing.

'Please recount what happened on the afternoon of eight Decern,' ordered the adjudicator, ignoring the blonde's outburst.

Laranai's face smoothed. 'Veyt wanted to make love, and I said no. He insisted, and I told him I wasn't in the mood. He said I was never in the mood, and then he tore off my clothes and forced himself on me.'

'Why do you think he did that?'

'I don't know.'

'Please answer the question.'

The blonde's face twisted. After a silence, she answered. 'He thought I would be in the mood.'

'Why would he think that?'

'I'd told him I would be.'

'When was that?'

'Earlier in the day. I was trying to get the house cleaned up. I told him I'd be more in the mood when things were cleaner.'

'And what was his reaction to your statement?'

'He helped clean things up.'

And then he took off your clothes and forced you? Right after the house was clean?'

'No. We had something to eat, and he had two glasses of wine. I had one. It was after that.'

The adjudicator looked toward the three with the headsets. Any questions?'

'Had this sort of behavior happened before?' asked the red-headed woman.

'It happened a week before. It was at night. We'd come back from the concert.'

'What concert?'

'There was a string quartet - the Pollai Force.'

'And he wanted to have sex?'

'Yes.'

'Did he strike you?' Yes.'

'Did he tell you why he was angry?'

The blonde, surprisingly, looked at the floor, and I got the strong impression that there was more, far more, to the questioning than was being vocalized.

'What did he say?'

After a long moment, Laranai finally answered. 'He said I promised.'

'Was that correct? Did you make some sort of promise?' There was another silence.

'Yes.'

'What did you promise?'

Laranai looked toward the adjudicator, then toward Cerrelle. 'He hit me. He kept hitting me. What does it matter what I said?'

'What did you promise?' asked the adjudicator again. 'I told him - I'd told him earlier - that I'd be more in the mood after the concert.'

The man with the headset spoke. 'Did you say or suggest that you would be more receptive to his advances if he took you to the concert?'

'I don't know. I might have.'

'Did you make such a suggestion?' asked the adjudicator. I had the feeling that the black-robed woman was having difficulty keeping her voice impartial. 'Maybe I did.'

'Did you make such a suggestion?'

'Yes.' The word was almost mumbled.

'What happened after you had sexual contact?' asked the adjudicator. 'How did Veyt react?'

'He cried. He promised he wouldn't do it again. Then ... he did it again the very next week. And he hit me again.'

'How long has this been happening?' asked the adjudicator.

'Since the beginning of summer.' The blonde sniffed.

Beside me, Cerrelle snorted quietly.

'How much has Veyt contributed toward your household, either in effort, or food, or capital goods?' asked the redhead with the headset.

'I'm sorry. I don't understand... he's been hitting me more and more.'

'Please answer the question,' said the adjudicator tiredly. 'What sort of things or help has Veyt given you?'

'Well... he's good with his hands. He built a console for Sylena, and he refmished the fresher walls ...'

'He takes you places?' prompted the man.

'Sometimes.'

'What do you do for him?' asked the redhead. The blonde glanced at the floor. 'Please answer the question.'

'I... try to be nice to him ...'

'In what way?'

Laranai glanced down at the floor again. 'Do you offer him sexual favors?' More silence. 'Do you?'

'Yes.' The word was almost choked out. 'Do the monitors have any additional questions?' asked the adjudicator.

'No, Adjudicator.'

'No.'

'No.'

There was distaste in all four voices.

You will wait while we review the record and your responses,' the adjudicator announced.

This time, the wait was considerably less. The adjudicator's eyes focused on the blonde woman.

'Laranai, you have been found lacking in personal responsibility, as well as engaging in antisocial and deceptive behavior. You will be adjusted immediately following the conclusion of this hearing.'

'No! You're all against me. Veyt hurt me! Don't you see!' Laranai lurched to her feet, then froze.

The two men in the gray-and-black uniforms stepped through a door behind the adjudicator and walked toward the frozen figure, easily lifting her and carrying her out.

'Today's hearings are complete,' announced the adjudicator. She adjusted her robe and stood, and the three monitors followed her through the door on the dais, leaving Cerrelle and me alone in the empty chamber.

'I don't understand,' I whispered to Cerrelle, fearing that I did. 'She never did anything.'

'But she did. She promised sexual favors in return for certain actions. Then she didn't offer those favors after he carried out his end of the bargain. That's deception and a form of theft. His violence isn't excusable, but that's a separate question, and he'll be adjusted as well.'

I frowned. In a way it made sense, but it also turned sex into ... into what? Another item of commerce?

'Why not? All actions between humans are transactions. Why should fraud between individuals - especially fraud that leads to violence - be less a concern than a public fraud?'

It made sense, but it bothered me.

'We don't make an artificial distinction between those who create violence and those who carry it out. That woman was evil,' snapped Cerrelle. 'She was pretending to trade on sex, and being totally dishonest about it.'

I swallowed. 'Would it have bothered you if she had ... paid off?' I stumbled through the sentence.

'No. We all provide services for others. What services are an individual choice. I wouldn't offer sex. I try to help ex-mites like you.'

At that point, I felt very much like a mite. 'What will happen to her? And to the man?'

'They'll be rehabilitated.' Cerrelle shrugged. 'You know that. Each will receive a set of nanites programmed with an expanded code of behavior covering every eventuality we can think of. It's not perfect. There's some loss of higher reasoning and discrimination, but they'll be able to go on with their functions, and most people won't even notice.'

'So ... why ... don't you do that with me? Wouldn't it be easier than your having to spend all this time with me?' I could hear the bitterness in my voice.

'You don't have a very high opinion of yourself, do you?'

'What does that have to do with ... all this?'

'You have a well-trained mind. You're in good physical condition. You could offer a great deal to Rykasha and benefit personally as well. We're trying to keep those choices open for you. That's one reason why I brought you here.' Cerrelle offered a slight smile, not exactly open, as she stood.

I wanted to shiver. Just what did the demons have in mind? Something even worse than what I had just seen?

'No. We can't coerce you into a positive action, and we wouldn't want to.' Cerrelle stood and motioned toward the door through which we had earlier entered.

We can't coerce you ... But what were they doing if not coercing by showing me the adjudication? Or was it that it just didn't matter to me?

'You thought a Dzin master would change his mind?' I asked after a time of silence as we stood in the empty chamber.

'I thought you had some potential for intelligence. True intelligence changes as it learns.' The words were mild, but the piercing eyes were not.

'Why is it that you demons think that intelligence equates automatically to your point of view? Or that I would change to accept that?'

You're a demon, too,' she pointed out.

'It wasn't my choice.'

You chose to live. You didn't stay in Dorcha to be starved to death in one of your mite deathtraps. You ran to Rykasha.'

Because of Foerga ... I couldn't waste that sacrifice. I just looked at the redhead for a time, not avoiding the piercing green eyes. For the first time, I realized that Cerrelle looked at me, and at the world, in the same way Foerga had. I hated it. She had no right to be alive while Foerga, who had hurt no one, was dead.

'I didn't kill Foerga. Your friends the mites did,' Cerrelle said quietly. 'Maybe you should have weighted yourself with stones and drowned yourself in that damned Deep Lake of yours.'

Maybe I should have.

You don't need that lake. You're still carrying around enough self-pity to drown everyone in Lyncol.'

'If I have so much self-pity ... if I'm so worthless ... why do you bother?'

'You could contribute a great deal. You could be worth more than you know, but you're still as stubborn as ever. You'd rather bathe in self-pity than face the hard and the unfamiliar.'

There was more than anger in her words. Pity, perhaps, and I didn't need that. 'I didn't ask for you to look after me. I didn't ask that of anyone.'

'I know that. You wouldn't. You're a Dzin master, self-contained. You have all the answers.' Although the words were harsh, her voice was almost soft.

'I don't have all the answers. You don't, either.'

'None of us have ever said we did. You keep insisting that we do. That's because you don't like our answers, and you can't come up with any that comfort you. You're looking for old-fashioned truths of the sort that Dzin masters pounded into you, and they don't exist in the real universe. Not once you've left those ancient stone walls that hold a history that has taught you nothing.'

'Truth always exists. We may not see it, but it is here.'

'Then perhaps you had better look harder, Tyndel.' Her voice was almost a whisper. 'Much harder.'

'You seem to forget that I didn't ask to be rescued.'

She looked at me as though my words were the babbling of a child protesting going to school. I'd found that expression on my own face in Hybra when Foerga had called it to my attention, ever so gently, as only she could.

'You ran into the middle of Rykasha ... just to die?'

I had to look away.

'Don't you understand?' asked Cerrelle, her voice that of a teacher to a very young student. 'No child asks to be born. No member of any society is given that choice. The only choice you have - the only real choice any of us has - is whether you will be a productive member of society. Society doesn't owe you anything. Neither do you owe society other than your share of the cost of maintaining that society.' She shrugged. 'You either pay your debts or you can go back to Dorcha or Dhurra, or the Toze Confederacy. Or you can become a Follower.'

I chose not to ask what a Follower was. The distaste in her voice made it clear I wouldn't get an objective answer. I didn't want to be indebted to her for anything more, either. 'Some choices.'

'They're the same in any society that survives. Do you have a better answer? One that works?' she asked.

How could I answer that? I didn't even know how their world worked, and I was supposed to come up with a better system?

'You haven't exactly worked at learning our system,' she pointed out. 'It's all inside your skull, and I'll be happy to answer any questions.'

I couldn't think of any ... or didn't want to.

'Come on, we might as well head back.' Her voice reverted to a tone of professional cheerfulness.

I followed her, my thoughts churning.

17

As soon as a thing is named, its essence is limited, if not lost, for nothing is limited to its name.

The next morning, Cerrelle took me on another subterranean glider trip, to Runswi, a place supposedly holding the transport complex. This trip lasted much longer.

'If Lyncol is the local administrative center; why is the transport center so far away?' I finally asked as the dim-lit glider slid swiftly through the darkened tunnel.

'The arrangement's not ideal, but Lyncol is too mountainous. Also Runswi is far enough from Dorcha that most mites ignore the lights and dismiss it all as the work of the inscrutable demons - if they say anything at all.'

Certainly, I'd been one of those mites, half aware that Rykasha existed but not really focusing on the boundary with the unknown. Why didn't people think that much about Rykasha?

'Because through the last millennium, the curious ones either migrated to Rykasha or were eliminated by other mites. All the mite cultures have great and hidden restraints, restraints so powerful that no one even talks about them.'

I got tired of Cerrelle answering my unspoken questions, even as her answers demonstrated yet another facet of the nanite superiority, and I hoped it wouldn't be too long before the nanites degenerated enough so that she couldn't sense every strong thought I had.

'How long will you keep reading my thoughts?' The faintly spicy scent she wore tickled my nose, and I rubbed it.

'It's getting harder. Unless you get another injection of the heavy-duty types we use for adjudication... not much longer than another few months. By then, though, unfortunately, I probably won't need them.'

'My thoughts aren't that bad.'

She laughed ... once. 'Did you notice that you didn't even want to question my statement about your hidden restraints?'

'What statement?' I couldn't resist teasing her. 'That's another humorous way of avoiding the issue.'

'Humor helps.'

'So long as you don't use it to avoid facing things. That's merely humorous dishonesty.'

'Why are we going there?'

'To get you evaluated. To see what your potential might be.'

'You haven't been exactly supportive of my potential,' I pointed out.

'I've been supportive of your potential, but not of your efforts to avoid acknowledging it.'

'Can I say something?' I kept my voice even.

She nodded. 'You're suggesting I've missed something. Maybe I have. Maybe I've judged you too harshly.'

I wanted to swallow. She hadn't fought me, and the words felt honest. For a moment, that unhostile directness reminded me of Foerga.

'I'm not Foerga. I think she was probably a better person than I am.'

I did swallow, but managed to get out the question. 'Why are you so against Dzin and yet keep telling me that it's trained my mind well?'

The redhead frowned, but I could tell the frown wasn't directed at me. Finally, she spoke. 'That's a good question. I'm not sure I can answer it all the way, but let me try. Dzin is a tool, a way of perceiving reality. We don't dismiss the effectiveness of the tool, but we have problems with the way Dorcha uses the tool. The way Dzin is used in Dorcha isn't just to develop awareness of the world but to emphasize an acceptance of what is.'

'Dzin isn't like that at all,' I protested.

'Dzin isn't,' she agreed, 'but the way in which Dzin is used to teach students is a means of conditioning. Look at you, Tyndel. You know that. As soon as you realized what you had become, you ran. You understood that there was no place in Dorcha for you.'

That wasn't quite true. I'd sought Foerga first.

Cerrelle smiled sadly, and I hadn't the faintest idea why. 'You understood, subconsciously, that without you, she might not fit in Dorcha, that she was too much of an artist.'

'Too much of an artist?'

'Artists are dreamers. They seek beauty, perfection, an artistic expression beyond their culture. And Dzin is used to promote acceptance and understanding of what is, not how to transcend what is.'

I really wanted to find the words to cut down her argument, without even knowing why I needed to, but I couldn't. And that bothered me. So did the fact that Cerrelle understood Foerga, in a way, better than I had. What did that mean? That Cerrelle understood me better than I wanted her to?

When the covered glider came to a stop and the canopy slid back, we stepped out onto an embarking/disembarking platform and walked along the tunnel to a single set of steps. At the top of the stairs was a small glass-walled structure perhaps four meters square. A single carved and high-backed pine bench stood in the otherwise vacant and spotless space.

I wondered how they managed to keep everything so clean. I'd never seen anyone scrubbing or wiping.

'Cleaning technology is easy, comparatively,' Cerrelle said as she opened the door.

I had to stretch my legs to catch her. She marched along the stone-paved lane toward a rambling structure perhaps two hundred meters north of the largely subterranean glider station.

Runswi consisted of a series of scattered low structures spread on a low plateau that overlooked a marsh that extended to the eastern horizon. The lane paralleled the western shore. In the midday light, tall stalks of browned grass bent in the light breeze that carried the odor of the sea.

'Ocean?' I gestured vaguely in the direction of the marsh.

'Ten kilos east. That's far enough that our shuttles are above normal radar scan patterns of the ocean shipping lanes.'

Shuttles?

Cerrelle gave me a disgusted glance, and I began to ransack my stored and not-too-well-assimilated knowledge. Shuttles, magshuttles, orbital transporters ... vehicles that carried people and equipment off earth.

'You see?' she said. 'Although you have all this knowledge, you subconsciously shy away from recognizing it or using it. That's because it's outside the framework of your Dzin. You could use Dzin to understand and accept it, you know? We've pointed this out to you. It's not new.'

Why? Despite her explanations, I had to wonder why my thoughts skittered away from demon technology and the ancients. Was it the Dzin conditioning? Or some other sort of conditioning? Genetic selection? My own lack of interest?

Cerrelle said nothing, and the only sounds were those of our steps on the stones and the whispering of the marsh grasses in the light wind. I took a deeper breath, gathering in not only the smell of distant salt but of fish, and mudflats, and the faint hint of decaying vegetation.

The leather soles of our boots scuffed the polished surface of the lane. Cerrelle's heels hit harder than mine.

We drew nearer to the long rambling building, its low mortared rock walls surmounted by glass windows and then by a gray slate roof that shimmered almost silver in the winter morning light.

'That's the medical center.'

It didn't look like one, not like the tall structures in either Mettersfel or Halz. Esolde - what sort of evaluation would she have given me? Probably a fatal one, I concluded morosely.

'Tyndel ... you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I know it's not easy, but it isn't doing you any good, and I don't think you want to end up before an adjustment adjudicator.'

I had to agree with that as I followed the redhead into the building and down the glass-windowed corridor almost to the end, where Cerrelle knocked on a wooden door, then entered without waiting for a response.

The small room was spare, with two chairs, a wooden cabinet that was taller than I was, and something similar to a console with an iconraiser's screen, except the screen displayed an image of mountains and a river falling through a cleft.

The sandy-haired man stood from behind the console and nodded as we stepped forward.

'This is Bekunin. He's a medical specialist,' Cerrelle said to me before turning to the thin-faced doctor. 'Tyndel is the one we discussed.'

Bekunin nodded to her. Til run the tests.'

Then she was gone, and I was standing there with Bekunin.

'Apparently, you were a Dzin master. You might have what it takes to be a needle jockey.' Bekunin nodded toward a straight-backed chair. 'Sit down.'

I sat. 'Needle jockey?'

'Interstellar pilot. It was in your briefing sprays. It's a challenging and rewarding profession.'

'Thank you.' I paused. 'And if I don't want to be a needle jockey?'

'Then you'll become a cargo handler on the most distant and unpleasant stellar outpost we have.' Bekunin smiled, a cold expression, so unlike Cerrelle's smile. 'And don't make some comment about it not being fair. The way mites treat anyone different, including you, is even less fair.'

He was right about that, but I wasn't certain I didn't expect a higher standard from Rykasha, and my face certainly showed that.

'We do expect a higher standard. We expect everyone to be a contributor to society over a lifetime, and this is where we start. Without us, you'd either have starved to death in a stone cell or be dying of cellular burnout. It takes resources to deprogram those old nanotech reformulators, and we need to see what you're fitted to do. Anyway, you need a systemic audit. Please lean back in the chair. This is going to be rough. Not physically, but it's going to be disconcerting mentally.'

'Wait a moment'

Bekunin paused. 'It's physically painless, and you'll have to go through it sooner or later.'

'What am I going through?'

'It's a complete physical diagnosis.' He went over to the wooden cabinet and pulled out a gray metal canister with a spray nozzle. 'Sit still, right there.'

'What...'

'Just a trillion or so diagnostic nanites. They'll scan every cell in your body and report back. If that's positive, then we'll go for the higher function assessment.'

Matters were once again flying past and around me, but I tried to concentrate. Why was I having such trouble? Every time we got to nanites and what they could do, my thoughts skittered sideways. Cerrelle had warned me that mites ... Dorchans, whatever I was or had been ... had a tendency to react rather than to anticipate, but I was having trouble even understanding my own reactions. I wondered if I'd ever be able to anticipate.

Bekunin touched the stud on the side of the canister, and a mist swirled toward me and then vanished - inside me, although I couldn't feel anything. I just sat as he held a sheet of metallicized plastic in front of me and waited, looking at a screen. After a time, the scene on the screen vanished and a grid structure appeared.

Bekunin set aside the sheet and sat at the console, studying the information. I waited. Then he stood and went to the cabinet. 'First stage is good. Excellent. Cerrelle has good senses about these things.' He took out a smaller canister, one that was a pale green, and turned back toward me. 'This could be disorienting, but it should be temporary. You'll understand more later when you get your in-depth briefings.'

He pressed the stud on the green canister.

Another mist fogged around me, then vanished. Sparkles flared across my field of vision, growing into dazzling stars that left me as blind as I'd been in the truffler's cave.

The darkness faded into green, veils of green that marched down an unseen hill and past me. Then came a squall line of purple hail that smashed through my thoughts.

More darkness. I squinted, but the darkness remained.

A line of fire arched before me, followed by a second, and then a third ... a fourth ... until a fountain of golden red rose and fell in the blackness.

Later... later ...

Both the words and the fire fountain faded, and a series of gauzelike red veils swirled before and around me. In time, they vanished.

I blinked, trying to focus my eyes on the doctor, or evaluator, or whatever he was.

His image slowly swam into focus.

'Excellent.' He frowned. 'Almost too good. Very high sensitivity, and there were some residuals from the earlier engee probes, but you suppressed them nicely, almost instinctively. Necessary for a needle jockey... very necessary. It goes with the Dzin background.'

I blinked again. 'Engee probes? Someone mentioned engee someplace. I don't remember where. What's that, and why is this sensitivity necessary for a needle jockey—'

I broke off at the disgusted look on his face and began to rummage through my own recently acquired knowledge. I was getting to hate that look, the one that said 'Dumb mite, use your brains!'

He waited quietly while I scrambled to put it together. Interstellar transporters ... overspace ... the Web ... the pilots called needle jockeys... who threaded the narrow and constantly shifting wormholes on the upper plane... guiding their ships around the energy vortices. Nanotechnology didn't solve all problems, as Cerrelle had pointed out. Subatomic transmutation was beyond the capability of nanotech. And it still took massive energy concentrations to lift anything out of a gravity well and send it across stellar distances ... even using overspace and the Web. My knowledge was limited enough that I couldn't follow the math exactly, but my assessment was probably close enough.

I licked my lips before I finally spoke again. 'Why does having been a Dzin master improve the success of a would-be needle jockey?'

Apparently that was a fair question, because I didn't get 'the look' again.

'It has to do - we think - with your conscious and subconscious reality acceptance and assessment. Needle jockey talent runs to about ten percent of the Rykashan population and about five percent of mite baselines. The historical sample is too small to be significant - statistically speaking - but over the past half millennia between fifty and sixty percent of mites who'd had Dzin or Toze training have possessed the raw outlook talent.' Bekunin shrugged. 'That's one reason why the center in Lyncol was willing to spend the extra effort to deprogram and deactivate those old nanites in your system.'

'And what about engee?'

'Right now ... we don't know too much about the ... phenomenon. You can think of engee as an energy field that permeates known space and broadcasts ... signals ... that can affect sensitive individuals such as you. That kind of sensitivity is also necessary for a needle jockey.'

'Mental signals?'

Bekunin shook his head. 'We don't know exactly their basis. They affect certain people in a relaxed state, and sometimes in a highly emotionally disturbed state. We can duplicate the signals and read your reactions, but the signals mean nothing in any way we can discern. They're definitely discrete energy patterns, and they stimulate visual signals ...' He shrugged.

I had the feeling that everything he said was true ... and very incomplete, but I couldn't find enough information quickly enough to ask an intelligent question.

The door opened, and Cerrelle stepped inside.

'He's as good as you suspected.' The doctor nodded to the redhead.

'Good for what?' I wish I hadn't spoken. Bekunin had just told me.

Cerrelle shook her head, but she didn't say anything. 'I—' I decided more words wouldn't help. It was just that questions about some things didn't come easily. In a way, I felt it was grossly unfair. The Rykashans expected me to pick up information and concepts instantly when they'd grown up with them.

'You're right,' said Cerrelle. 'But we're working to give you the information and the skills to make the effort, and you keep resisting. Don't you understand? The universe doesn't really care about fairness. It responds to actions. Your survival depends on you, your understanding, and your actions. Rykashan society isn't structured to baby-sit adults. We're trying to make the transition as easy as we can, but you have to help. Otherwise, you'll end up adjusted or dead or in the nastiest and dirtiest scut job we can find you.'

I couldn't help nodding. Her words weren't even a threat -just an absolute cold statement of fact. I tried not to shiver.

Bekunin nodded gravely. 'I think you finally impressed him, Cerrelle.'

'It's hard for him. I know how hard. It was—' She shook her head abruptly and cut off her own words, looking directly at me. 'Let's go. There's nothing more Bekunin can do, and we need to get you new quarters. Then we could use something to eat. I could, anyway.'

I was ready to leave, leave Rykasha, but where could I have gone? And what could I have done? I took a deep breath. And I'd thought Master Manwarr had been difficult.

18

Truth is one, although the sages call it by many names.

As usual, Cerrelle wasted no time, marching me to another lodge or dwelling area - except this time I got two rooms and a refresher, and an introduction to Thaya - a blocky young woman in charge of transient quarters and a lot more, I gathered, in Runswi.

'Tyndel, here,' concluded Cerrelle, 'is still having trouble with using nanite-implanted information. He's at the stage where his first impulse is to look to others for the answers.' She smiled. 'Please don't you do it. He's got to learn to be his own Rykashan.'

Til try not to,' said Thaya with a warm smile under her blond thatch. She turned to me. 'The basics are simple. The Authority pays for your training, and that includes lodging, clothing, and food here at Runswi, plus a basic stipend ...'

She kept talking, but my mind scattered around the word 'Authority.' Central decision-making body of Rykasha, composed of five senior controllers ... The demons just accepted that kind of power in the hands of five people?

'... use your personal code for such things as links, food elsewhere, special clothing, transport - you'll get it figured out. It's on the screen in your quarters, under "Candidate Basics" ...'

Just like that - given once, and I was supposed to recall it all.

'Any questions?' Thaya finally asked.

'I'm not going to remember all that. Is there somewhere I can look that up?'

The two exchanged glances, and, again, I felt stupid. Why? Why was I still asking stupid questions, reacting ... not thinking?

'Everything I just told you is on the screen in your room. Look for the icon for "Candidate Basics." You use your personal code. I'll write it out for you.' Thaya found a yellow card and wrote out something and handed it to me.

I looked at what she had written: 'Tyndel-IP-red-95.'

'That's your personal code,' Thaya repeated.

You're reacting because that's the way you were conditioned,' Cerrelle said gently. 'This training will help you change that ... if you work at it. Also, your blood sugar's low, and your system's not used to the extra energy demands of the nanites. Low energy levels don't exactly help with thinking.'

'Get him something to eat before he falls over,' Thaya suggested.

'That's where we're headed, off for some old-fashioned nourishment.' Cerrelle whisked me right out of the transient lodge and back onto one of the ubiquitous polished stone lanes under the clear blue winter sky.

You take advantage of her good nature, Tyndel, and I'll make you wish you'd never been born or that you were back in a stone cell in Dorcha.'

Even though Cerrelle had offered the words humorously, I felt she would have.

She then dragged me through a gymnasium with exercise rooms and then along the side of a black-tiled pool where one man swam back and forth endlessly, watched by another tall bronze man who could have been an ancient gladiator. That kind of swimming was a form of physical conditioning that seemed both masochistic and futile.

We kept walking, past a series of two-storied long structures with smoothly finished stone half walls topped with metal-and-glass window panels and glistening gray slate roofs. Several had odd-shaped metal devices mounted above the roofs - devices that my internal information bank identified as antennae.

This is orbital operations... and there's logistics.' Cerrelle's voice was clipped and rapid, as though she were trying to ensure she pointed out everything to me. To try to help me integrate the knowledge thrown into my brain by nanites? 'That's where you show up tomorrow morning at zero nine hundred - they use old-style military time here.'

Logistics? Why?

'Someone has to plan cargo distribution over the Web. It just doesn't happen. And that's where your training starts.'

'I understand that.' I did understand trading and transport. It was just hard to imagine that the Rykashans so matter-of-factly shipped goods between the stars.

'We don't ship that much - usually the few items that can't be replicated or the machines and technology necessary to set up replication facilities.'

I wasn't sure I wanted training to start, but did I have that much of a choice?

'There's where we're headed now.' She pointed at another stone and gray metal-and-glass and slate-roofed building half sunk into a low hill - or perhaps the hill had been formed around the side of the building. Who knew with the demons? 'It's one of the lounges. There are almost a dozen in Runswi. Sooner or later, you'll find those that are most comfortable to you. They all have food formulators, and the menus are similar.'

Once through the wooden doors and the empty foyer, we entered a room where one side was entirely windows. 'Let's sit down for a moment.'

I looked out at a brown-grassed meadow when we sat, waiting in the small lounge that held five tables widely spaced. The tables were a dark oak, polished, bound at the edges in shimmering brass. The dark oak chairs also were brass bound, with a dark gold-and-blue brocade over the upholstered seats.

'I'll be leaving later today. You scarcely need me around for your basic training.' Cerrelle's eyes went to the doorway, then back to me.

I paused, searching through the information already fed to me. 'I don't seem to have anything on basic training for interstellar pilots.'

You looked. That's good. To begin with, you'll probably be given exercises to help integrate all that data. Then more information and more complex exercises. Then the first round of physical training...' The redhead shrugged. You'll get the pattern.' Her eyes went to the doorway again.

I wondered if I wanted to understand the pattern.

'Good. They're here.'

With Cerrelle's words, my eyes turned to the couple even as they entered. She was dark-haired, slender, well endowed, and moved with almost an erotic grace. He was red-haired, tall, broad-shouldered, and athletic. Both were obviously young.

'An attractive pair, aren't they?' asked Cerrelle.

Yes,' I answered warily.

The two walked easily toward us. I decided to stand. Cerrelle did also.

'I appreciate your coming,' said my keeper. 'This is Tyndel.'

Alicia deSchmidt.' The name came with a smile.

I repressed a frown. I hadn't ever heard anyone call someone by a double name in either Dorcha or in Rykasha. Only the ancients had possessed the population density and the mobility that had made such conventions necessary.

'And this is Tomas Gomes,' added Cerrelle, sitting again herself.

'I am pleased to meet you.' The red-haired man had an accent - faint, but a definite accent. Tomas - or was he Gomes? - slipped into the chair to the left of Cerrelle, while Alicia deSchmidt sat to my left.

'Tomas and Alicia,' Cerrelle whispered, although the whisper had to have been a courtesy, since any demon could have heard.

'You're the latest refugee from Dorcha, aren't you?' Alicia's girlish voice carried an accent of sorts, one I couldn't exactly place. Perhaps she was from one of the Rykashan interstellar colonies?

'I'm definitely a refugee,' I said. 'I don't know about being the latest.'

'He's the first Dzin master we've had in a while,' added Cerrelle.

'In time, we are all refugees. Strangers finding our way in a world that grows ever less familiar.' Alicia grinned girlishly.

I blinked at the conflict between the girlish voice and the philosophical tone, between the almost childlike sensuality and the weariness of the words.

'Don't play with the boy, Alicia,' said Tomas almost languidly. His tanned skin seemed to glitter, even in the indirect light of even intensity that cast no shadows.

Boy?

'Dzin master or not, he still places too much emphasis on appearances,' added Alicia.

I still couldn't place the accent. It didn't seem like any Dhurr or Toze, or like any of the demons I'd met.

'Time for tricks?' A hint of weariness infused the young man's voice as he glanced at Cerrelle.

'It's easier,' answered Alicia.

'As you see fit,' agreed Cerrelle.

I didn't know what to think, and suspected that was exactly what the three had in mind.

The dark-haired girl slipped out of the chair and stood beside the heavy wooden table, then abruptly jumped straight up - turning the impossibly high jump into a dive that ended with her balanced in a handstand on the middle of the table. I looked again. Alicia's entire figure was balanced on one finger. Unwavering, she balanced on the center of the table, then improbably flipped herself back to the floor - off a single finger.

I wanted to shake my head. Were they playing with my vision, my perceptions?

'Is the table expendable?' asked Tomas.

'Don't waste it,' suggested Cerrelle.

Tomas nodded, then picked up one of the knives laid out in place settings. His arm blurred. The knife was buried to the hilt in the heavy oak.

'Try to remove it,' he suggested politely.

I couldn't. Instead, I ended up snapping it in half, leaving several centimeters of metal protruding above the table.

Alicia stepped up to the table. This time it was her arm that flashed, her flattened palm driving the ragged metal flush with the table. She smiled and turned her unmarked hand to me. 'Would you like to try it?'

'No, thank you.' I paused and added, 'I know my limits.'

'They won't be what you think they are,' said Tomas mildly, the softness of his voice emphasizing the accent. He picked up a fork and a spoon. His hands blurred, as though he were rolling them together, and steam - or smoke - rose from them. He extended his hand - then flipped the cylinder onto the table, where the finish blistered under the hot metal that had been separate utensils moments before.

'I am sorry,' he said to Cerrelle. 'It is harder to minimize the collateral damage.'

Collateral damage? His words, soft as they were, chilled me.

'Tomas always has been tenderhearted,' said Alicia in the same girlish voice. 'Will that do?'

'I hope so,' said Cerrelle.

My eyes flicked from her to Alicia to Tomas. Tomas shrugged apologetically.

Alicia stood. 'We're outbound again. Halcyon Four. There's been a rash of democratic heresies.'

'Democracy,' snorted Cerrelle. 'Mob rule.'

'It's slightly better than a despot.' Tomas stood.

'Only slightly,' said Cerrelle. 'Thank you and good luck.'

I watched as Alicia smiled bemusedly, and the two turned and made their graceful way from the lounge. What could I have said? Instead, I walked slowly to the built-in counter in the corner where the reformulators waited and got myself a mug of tea, very hot tea. Arleen tea. After a moment, I added a plate of Dorchan spiced pork.

Then I sat and ate and sipped the tea. The food and sipping helped the emptiness in my stomach and the lightheadedness, but not the questions that kept piling up in my mind.

Tomas and Alicia - who could bend and shape metal barehanded, balance on tabletops with one finger, and drive steel through hardwood. Tomas and Alicia, younger than I, seemingly, with an accent I had never heard. Tomas Gomes and Alicia deSchmidt, with two names in a world - human and demon - where people had but a single name.

Then there was the almost casual application of force with the hint of incredible restraint, a hint that was equally casual, matter-of-fact, so matter-of-fact that what it implied should have been obvious.

It should have been, but it wasn't, as so often had happened since I'd left Dorcha. Cerrelle had assured me that, shortly, I'd notice the lack of focus on such things as demon technology and new information less and less. But I was acutely aware of my sluggish thoughts at that moment. After finishing all the pork, I sipped the tea to the dregs and still could not focus my brain.

'We send Alicia and Tomas to where there are problems,' Cerrelle said. 'Usually that's Halcyon Four. It's the only out-system colony with multiple governments - and that's meant trouble for a long time.'

'They apply brute force?' I asked, recalling Tomas's comment about it being hard to minimize collateral damage. 'Colonies?'

'Once - well before my time - we sent them to Mettersfel to raze the old guildhall there.'

Before her time? I pursed my lips.

'It's in the records. You'd find it. That was almost seven hundred years ago.' She sipped whatever she was drinking.

'They can't be ...'

'Why? Because they look so young?' Cerrelle snorted. 'Have you seen anyone in Rykasha who looks old? Or who is physically old? What do you think nanites do for humans?'

'But... can you drive a steel knife through a table?'

'No. You might be able to someday. I don't know how they balanced your system. I wouldn't try it now. You'd drive the steel through your palm.'

'Would you explain?' I finally asked.

'They're from the days of the ancients,' the redhead said. 'We've lost a lot of that technology, although we're slowly regaining some of it. They're just about invulnerable to almost all mite technology, except a bank of high-powered lasers, and they can move fast enough that no one could keep the focus on them.'

'To be so young for so long ... so powerful ...'

'What do you think you'll look like in a century or two?' I hadn't thought about it.

'You'll look like they do. Have you seen any old-looking Rykashans?'

'No,' I answered after a moment. 'I don't know about this ... immortality, isn't it?'

'Not for most of us. Tomas and Alicia are the exceptions. They're close to five thousand years old. Things fell apart before the ancients could modify nanites on a personal basis for more than a handful of individuals. Theirs are intertwined with their gene structure.'

'I thought you said—'

'No. Yours, mine - they have to be compatible, but there's a difference between actual link-ties and compatibility. We don't have to worry about growing old or disease, but we're not immortal'

'Accidents?'

'Usually. Or starvation or asphyxiation.'

Starvation? I couldn't see any of these people getting trapped in a mite stone cell.

'From accidents. Say there's a malfunction on a needle ship. Your nanites will protect you so long as there's any oxygen anywhere and so long as you have any food or fat cells left to cannibalize. But space is big. We've had the same thing happen to people exploring. Once in a while, some needle jockey ends up mistranslating and the ship goes into a stellar mass. Nanites won't protect you from that. The probabilities are low ... but they mount up over several millennia.'

I was supposed to become a needle jockey, a Web-ship pilot. My thoughts scrambled back through my information bank.

'Don't bother,' said Cerrelle. 'We all die of accidents - or suicide. The only question is when.'

I pursed my lips, wanting to shake my head but not wanting to enough to endure any more comments from Cerrelle.

'It's time for me to go,' she said. 'You need to get settled so that you can get on with your training.'

We stood, and I wondered if I would regret her departure.

19

To the work alone are you entitled, never to its fruit.

Beginning the next morning, things got harder.

I followed Cerrelle's instructions and appeared in the logistics building at 0855 the next morning. One thing I had learned was that Rykashans didn't repeat themselves - not often, anyway, from what I'd seen.

You're Tyndel,' observed the round-cheeked and hollow-eyed woman who met me in the corridor. 'I'm Andra. Along with long-range logistics planning, I also handle preliminary indoc and training.'

I wondered how many needle jockeys there were.

'Not just potential needle jockeys, but everything from the basics of maintenance to muscle-powered cargo lugs. Especially with nanites, the human body is the most adaptable equipment there is, and we try not to waste it' She offered a flat smile, a smile that should have told me more than it did. 'In here.'

I followed her into a small room flooded with light from windowed walls on two sides. There were half a dozen wooden chairs with upholstered cushions. Each cushion had a different design. I sat on a bluebell.

Andra sat backward on the chair across from me, her trousered legs curled around the chair back, her arms crossed and resting on the squared off wooden frame. The mid-toned green tunic and trousers set off her strawberry hair and pale freckled complexion.

'If you were one of our youngsters, I wouldn't bother with the verbal part, just start you on the education and let it run, but... you're not. Your payback for being reclaimed is ten years of being a needle jockey. That's ten years personally experienced elapsed time, not earth standard objective time.'

I still wanted to wince at the thought of being an interstellar cargo pilot. The ancients had gone to the stars, and the result had been total disaster.

'Forget that business about the ancients and the stars. We know what you're thinking, Tyndel. You've got enough telemetered nanites in your gray cells to let me - and Cerrelle - know what your inclinations are before you know. The ancients barely got to the gas giants. They had to invest too much in capital structures for those who didn't pay their way. You'll get more information on that as you go along. What you need to know is that we have colonies in the dozen or so systems with habitable or potentially habitable planets that we can reach through the overspace Web. They're all out from Galactic Center - we're pushing to reach the rim and cross the void, but that may be a while, and it's hard to do it all in weightlessness. All of this requires transporting infrastructure goods - essentially power systems and basic nanite equipment and structures, as well as specialized biologic templates. That's where you and the other needle jockeys come in.'

'Aren't the ships infrastructure, too?' I asked, trying to elicit more information or statements that would tie to what had been poured into me.

'You're right. They're the most expensive and hardest to replace. That's why good and motivated needle jockeys are important. That's why your payback is only ten years if you make it to be a needle jockey.'

Only ten years?

'Cargo handlers or ship support types - that would be fifteen years, at times more.'

'What about regular demons?' I asked.

'Everyone has an initial obligation. It's twenty to forty years for someone born here in Runswi. Forty years if you stay planetside. Then there's an additional obligation every century of personal elapsed time. You don't think we just dumped this on you because you're an outsider, do you?'

That was exactly what I had thought. I looked down at the polished and shimmering golden oak planks.

You former mites don't like to think through anything that's unpleasant or at variance with your belief systems.' Andra looked at me without compassion, without anger. You're going to have to get over that.'

Easier said than done, I thought.

A needle ship,' continued the strawberry blonde, 'what is it? It's basically a long chunk of composite filled with stored energy that jockeys thread through the Web of overspace. Overspace isn't, but it can be thought to be, the magnification of normspace to the degree necessary to magnify natural and artificial wormholes and quantum chinks to the size where a needle can be threaded through such passages.' She smiled dryly. 'Or, I suppose, the analogy could be that overspace shrinks needle ships enough to let them penetrate such quantum passages. Either way, the effect is the same.'

Some of it I understood. Composite was used as much as possible because metal tended to make the control fields that drove the ships unstable or less controllable or both. The same was true for operating fusactor power plants.

Some of it I didn't, even after scrambling through the still-disorganized information piled in the corners of my brain.

'Any questions?'

I had lots, and scarcely knew where to begin. Finally, I sputtered out some words, as much to keep things going as anything.

'You seem to imply that a lot of cargo needs to be carried. Why so much, when nanotechnology can create materials—'

'Nanites are very good at rearranging existing materials, but not every place in the universe holds the diversity of elements that earth and our solar system do - or in places that can be easily reached.' She shrugged. 'As for transmutation, that doesn't work. Quantum mechanics still applies. To locate and move a lepton precisely enough to rearrange a subatomic structure does horrendous things to its velocity, not to mention a few other properties ... and you don't want to do that, especially if a top quark's involved.'

Even with all the information funneled into me, her words made little sense beyond the fact that there was a mechanical and/or practical reason why nanite technology couldn't be applied.

'As a matter of fact, using quantum mechanics that way has been suggested as the basis for another doomsday weapon. We haven't done it because we have more than enough in the arsenal. The ancients were good enough at that to create destructive systems for a dozen races.'

'But exactly how does ... a needle jockey do this?'

'You'll be coupled into the ship, into the fields, and you'll feel and experience what all the ship's sensors register. By reacting and willing, you move the ship as if it were your own body. In a way it is - while you're in overspace. Being a needle jockey is like dodging three-dimensional blocks fired at you by a cannon, except that the blocks you try to weave the ship through are blocks of colored sound, sounds that run from ... say, the most beautiful and harmonic music you ever heard - do you know Beethoven?' Another name I'd never heard.

Andra's mouth smoothed into a neutral smile before she spoke. 'For a supposedly educated people ... Never mind. Cargo pilots go under the Web and into overspace - that's explained, too - and it feels like you're dodging blocks of harmonic or jagged sound. Those blocks have edges sharper than a laser scalpel. Add to that the complexity of high-speed, three-dimensional chess and you have an idea of the job. It sounds impossible, but it's not, not with reflex boost and the training. You've certainly got the raw ability, and we can provide the training, if you'll just stick with it. What can make it hard is that you can never relax, not when you're under the Web.'

I had the feeling that none of the demons ever relaxed anyway, but I mused, almost absently, about the emphasis on pilots when they obviously had both nanotechnology and computers that made the iconraisers' screens antique toys by comparison.

'Computers? Nanite implants? They can't feel their way above the now. They make it all possible by translating the inputs, but being a needle jockey is reflexes, perception, and feel. No machine can feel and sense the way a trained jockey can.'

In a way, her words told me little more than that the demons needed trained pilots because pilots couldn't be replaced by technology, but I couldn't verbalize any more comments, not at that moment.

'All right. Let's get started. You've got a great deal to assimilate.' She stood and walked through another door into a small room. On one wall was a rack of canisters, the kind the doctor had used to spray me with nanites to evaluate my physical condition. On the opposite wall, less than two meters away, was a large metalicized plastic screen - presumably for collecting the nanites. Andra closed the door, and we stood in the small room.

'This is basic technology.' The canister Andra lifted had a scoop - almost shaped to fit a human face. 'Not really even technology, but the theory behind the technology you'll need to be using.'

She eased the scoop almost against my skin and pressed the stud. A mist rose around me, then vanished. I thought I felt thousands of tiny needles penetrating my skin, but that had to have been my imagination.

What came next wasn't imaginary, but a rush of phrases, images, terms, and interrelated equations, information ...

... xenon discharge... elevates atoms... wave forms above the quark level ... releasing additional energy in photonic form, tuned to a specific frequency, which replicates the effect ... creating two phased photons and a cascade effect down a crystalline channel... parallel wave forms pass through openings the same size as their wavelengths ... diffraction occurs ... intensity drops inversely as the square of the distance ... color does not exist except as a perception of different wavelengths ... failure of initial fusactor technology lay in unstated assumption that no wavefield interference would occur from plasma and magfields, despite superconductivity ... deuterium and tritium resonance on the quantal level ... maximum span potential directly proportional to the strength to mass/weight ratio of materials ... disregarded superconductivity and gravfield variations ... galactic oscillations reverberate through overspace at frequencies inversely proportional to the age of the specific galactic center ... supercooling phenomena can create harmonic vibrations on the supraquark level with the superposition of two coherent-state wave packets, thus creating a dual presence of a specific single atom.. .from within overspace incorporates a complete embedded minimal surface of finite topology ... requiring subjective superposition navigation ...

I wanted to scream as the weight of all that information flooded through me. If I'd thought the information that Cerrelle had fed me was concentrated, I hadn't understood what intensive really was.

Although I swayed on my feet, I managed to stay erect.

Another image blasted through me, like a starburst that came and went - the golden fire fountains, but that faded almost as it streaked through my thoughts, somehow above and beyond all the images and words that sloshed through my information-soaked synapses.

Andra watched a small screen beside the plastic collector, then nodded. 'Good.'

Good? I wondered about that.

She opened the second door and gestured for me to follow her into another small room. This one had windows and was warm and bright. Andra's arm extended to a small console with a keyboard. 'Sit down there. The instructions are written on the panel. It's simple enough. A question will scroll onto the screen. You search through the information you received and press the key that represents the most nearly correct answer. This will help you integrate what you've just received.'

She looked at me, nodded, and left.

Except it wasn't that simple - not at all.

Take the first question: 'Light can most nearly be described as which of the following?'

I just thought about light, and the flood of information slammed through me. Drowning in phrases and ideas, I was trying to sort out old ideas and newly acquired information. What was light?

Visible radiant energy ranging from 3,900 to 7,700 angstroms? Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of between 400 to 800 nm? Quanta of photons following geodesies in four-dimensional space-time? Radiation in semicoherent wave form approximating chaos in five or more space-time dimensions?

I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. That was just the first question, and sections of supporting texts and background information flooded over me.

Never ... never had I felt I knew so little. I tried to think about what Foerga would have done, but trying to call up her memory just left me asking why I bothered.

With a slow exhalation, I opened my eyes and looked at the screen. I had to get on with the exercise. Hoping that every question didn't generate the same reaction, I finally punched out the key that indicated all of the answers were correct. They seemed to be, and that gave me a headache as well.

A second question appeared: 'What are the properties of a star?'

My head began to ache and split simultaneously, and I wondered how many questions the console held before I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. However many it happened to be, that number was far too many.

That much I did know.

20

Every individual's face is no more and no less than a mask.

The silver brume swirled around the hedge, thickening ... rising out of the very ground, out of the grass, out of the stones of the walk ... a silver as cold as Deep Lake in the depths of winter, as impersonal as a Dzin master, as unforgiving as a demon.

I bent down, trying to reach Foerga's still face, and the mist deepened so much that I could see neither her face nor even my own hands. The misty chill seeped through my face and hands and into my bones.

I kept groping, and my hands dipped into the grass, and through it, and through the stones, but I could touch nothing, and her dark hair writhed and turned silver, and she was the brume. And then she was gone.

'The demon is loose!'

SSSSSssss. The susurration of the demon gun shivered the leaves and branches of the boxwood hedge above my kneeling figure. The leaves shriveled into fragments and then powder as I rose, then dove at the dun-red of the Shraddan.

My fingers twisted around his neck, then found each other, as the constable faded into silver mist, as had Foerga. I straightened, and all around me was the brume, silver, cold, and endless. I wriggled my fingers, and they glistened silver, then seemed to meld into the encircling brume.

I tried to open my mouth, but no sound issued into that endless silver that swirled ever closer.

Was everything fading into the mist, everything from my life?

'No ...'

I bolted awake in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed, sweating and shivering simultaneously.

Had it been Andra's descriptions, or Cerrelle, or the adjudication hearings? Something had bothered me more than I'd thought.

I realized I was breathing fast, panting, and the sweat was rolling off my forehead. After a moment, I eased back the sheet and blanket and swung my feet onto the cool wood of the floor.

Then I stood and padded to the window.

A few points of light glittered across Runswi, few indeed under the endless stars, and the flat of the sea marsh stretched toward the dawn that would come - must come.

I just watched the stars for a time, letting my breathing return to normal, trying to organize my thoughts.

Item: Not only could the demons ingest vast quantities of information, they expected me to do the same.

Item: Through nanites and headsets, Cerrelle and Andra could determine absolutely whether I was telling the truth.

Item: The demons attempted to ensure personal responsibility, whether or not the individual wished to assume such responsibility.

Item: They had virtually no sympathy for the human failing of self-deception, and they attacked that disease with particular virulence.

Then, they attacked every weakness with virulence. But why?

I wiped my forehead again as I discovered that even that brief analysis had speeded my breathing and started my sweating again.

Why? Why anything?

Because the nanite technology had granted humans powers beyond the average human's design capability for responsible action? Because humans were essentially irrational creatures gifted with the power of rationality?

I didn't have answers. Or if I did, I couldn't seem to find them. Did I want to? That was another question I couldn't answer.

In time, I went back to bed, lying on top of covers too heavy and too warm for my body to bear, and, eventually, I drifted back into an uneasy sleep, a sleep that seemed filled with blackness.

Then ... there was neither blackness nor fog, but the arching fountains of fire filled my dreams. Fountains of fire rising out of a point of light set in endless darkness. Was that point of light a star? An unimaginably powerful star?

I sat up shivering again, shivering and sweating.

Why would I dream of points of light or stars? The Rykasha had gotten rid of the mismatched nanites ... hadn't they?

I sat up and put my head in my hands, and the after-image of fire fountains faded. Who or what could I believe?

After a time in the darkness that had begun to turn to the gray that preceded dawn, something else struck me.

I didn't care. I didn't care if I repaid the Rykashans for saving my life. After all, it had been their technology that had taken away my old life. I didn't care if I disappointed Cerrelle. I didn't care if I lived up to my 'responsibilities' as a newly enlisted demon.

I just didn't care. Why should I care? Foerga was gone. The certainty of Dzin was gone. I wasn't ready for suicide. That would have made things too easy for Cerrelle, and it would have been a betrayal of Foerga. But there was no reason to strive endlessly and mindlessly for a goal I hadn't set, but had been demanded of me without anyone even asking me.

No reason to strive that way at all.

Whether I got to be some sort of interstellar cargo pilot or not seemed immaterial, like the silver brume that had filled my dreams. Like the images of fire fountains in a niellen darkness. Like approval from Cerrelle or Andra. Like anything else that might benefit Rykasha.

21

Symbolic forms have always been the supports of civilizations, their laws, and their morality. Since symbolic forms are illusions, and illusions sustain civilization, those who rule must maintain illusion.

The next morning, back in the logistics building, I didn't even let Andra get out another set of canisters or set up console exercises. 'I don't care if I would make a good needle jockey. I don't care if I owe a debt to Rykasha. Don't you see? I don't care!' My words were so forceful that I had to pause and take a deep breath.

'It doesn't matter whether you care or not,' said Andra, putting aside the green-shaded canister that she had held and setting it back on the shelf. 'You owe a debt. You will repay it one way or another.' She didn't smile, and she didn't frown, and every one of her words was cool, as if she were discussing the weather or the technology of food formulators. She just stood there in front of the shelf rack.

'You really don't care how I feel, do you?'

She turned and studied me. 'Cerrelle should have gone over this with you, but maybe she didn't, or maybe you were too upset to take it in. We try to avoid illusions. That everyone should care about someone who is upset is an illusion. Yes, we care to the extent that we try to solve problems, but not to the extent that individual concerns overwhelm the functioning needs of society. That was a critical problem for the ancients. They always wanted everyone to feel good, and in the end, perceptions of personal welfare influenced decisions more than hard facts. It wasn't the cause of the Devastation, but it was one of the things that made any early recovery impossible.' Andra carried her trim figure toward the window, then stopped and turned. Behind her, beyond the glass, a wide-winged gull flapped over the edge of the marsh. 'In a working high-technology society, adherence to basic principles comes first. We try to design and operate those principles so that they represent the greatest good for the greatest number, but any set of principles will impact someone more adversely than another. You're upset, on a deep level, perhaps subconsciously, that we won't all recognize your pain and grant you some special consideration. But we do, and we have. First, you have a far lighter obligation than someone born here. Second, you're being offered specialized training that will make you a highly respected and responsible member of Rykashan society.'

'I understand that, but you haven't given me any choice.'

You can refuse the training,' she pointed out. 'We offered you the most rewarding and quickest way to repay your obligation, but you don't have to take it. You do have to repay the obligation, though.'

'That's it. The obligation means more than I do. People mean nothing to you. I'm not the only one who feels this way. I saw that in the adjudication hearings.'

'I'm sure you did. That's why those people were in adjudication.' Andra smiled faintly, then glanced back through the glass, her eyes on another seabird.

'It's all an illusion, all this caring... you just need another needle jockey.'

'Of course we do. Did we lie to you about that? We told you that it was a hard job to fill, and that was how you could fulfill your obligation with the least time commitment. The training and the job would have benefited both society and you. Is that wrong?'

'You make it so cold ... that's wrong. People aren't just numbers.'

'Every human being who ever lived who wasn't a hermit has been a nanite in his or her society. Some have been important nanites; some have been almost superfluous. The greatest danger to a developing society, one that hopes to progress and improve itself and its members, is pandering to self-idolatry. Fostering an illusion of caring is a form of self-idolatry, and it's been tried, and it fails, unless you're talking about a static society where the idolatry is used to reinforce the status quo.'

Cerrelle had said something similar, but I'd passed it off.

'She was probably too gentle with you,' Andra said. 'She was trying to be honest without dropping you into the cold vacuum of reality.'

'Reality? Caring is real. People do care. Why do you insist that's wrong?'

'Tyndel... you're twisting my words. People should care about others. But when you talk about the survival of a society or the human race, you don't change principles that work because of one individual. Each individual believes his or her circumstances are unique, and they are. If we threw out our principles every time they impacted one individual harder than another, then we'd have no society. In a way, that was what happened in Amnord. I won't retell that, but if you're interested you can find it in the histories available through your screen. Even Dzin follows our principles. Don't tell me that you don't create the impression that acceptance of the way of Dzin isn't necessary. Isn't that just another form of saying that society's principles, even in Dorcha, come ahead of an individual's needs and pain?'

I looked down at the polished gray stone floor tiles.

'You can go back to Dorcha at any time,' Andra reminded me.

I recalled hearing the same words at the adjudication hearings. 'I won't be a needle jockey,' I said firmly.

'That's your choice. If you don't want to go through training, then you'll be a low-level technician and cargo handler on one of the more dangerous orbit stations.'

'What if I won't do that?'

'We'll find another way for you to repay your debt. That would mean adjudication. Do you really want that?'

'No.' I didn't have to think about that. The last thing I wanted was another batch of nanites in my head, monitoring and regulating everything I did or didn't do.

'There might be some hope for you... someday.' Her eyes strayed once more to the window, to the free-flying seabird unchained by digits and cold reason.

Hope? Not if it meant being like Cerrelle and Andra, there wasn't.

That I knew already.

22

To oppose is to maintain what one opposes.

Andra wasted no time.

That afternoon I was escorted toward a long paved strip -permacrete, insisted my recently acquired database before I pushed the term away - that ran for more than two kilos eastward from behind the logistics area and partly out into the marsh. The winter-browned grasses that flanked the strip swayed in the cold breeze that carried the odor of salt and mud. From my left hand swung a single small duffel bag, pale green, not even half full.

There's your orbit shuttle,' the strawberry blonde announced, gesturing toward a sleek gray craft with stub wings that stood on the tarmac. Magshuttle - the identification came unbidden.

The craft was scarcely mine, not even by desire. I followed Andra to the ramp that extended from behind the stub wings, and then up it, noticing the pitted and browned gray of the fuselage.

'Take one of the seats in the last two rows. Those are for low-techs, and you're definitely low-tech now. Put your duffel in one of the lockers in the back.' Andra's tone continued to hold that mixture of sadness, frustration, and regret, as if she'd failed to make me understand something basic.

My lack of understanding wasn't the problem. I understood. I just couldn't accept being pushed around for my own good. I couldn't accept that Foerga was gone and no one even cared but me. I couldn't accept that the Rykashans just expected me to go on as if nothing had happened.

I nodded at Andra and left her there. After I slipped my minimal belongings into a locker, I sat and strapped the harness around me.

Andra reappeared beside my seat. 'There will be other passengers. Someone will meet you at orbit station to get you on the right needle. You're headed for Omega Eridani on the Tailor.'

'Thank you,' I managed. There wasn't much more to say, and I didn't.

'Some real thinking wouldn't hurt, Tyndel. It would be a shame for you - not for Rykasha, but for you - to waste all that ability on self-pity.' With an abrupt nod, Andra turned and walked forward and out the shuttle door.

Self-pity? I was considered self-pitying because I was angry over losing Foerga? Because I wasn't slavering gratitude and saying Of course I'll take your needle jockey job? Just to be alive, I'll do anything you want? No matter how impossible and dangerous? I snorted to myself. I'd repay them, but more on my terms than theirs.

The section where I sat was windowless, even at the front where the apparently more desirable couch-seats were. The sides of the craft rose and joined in a seamless gray curve overhead, perhaps a meter and a half above my head. I could smell a faint odor of oil and metal mixed with the salt air that drifted through the open door.

After a time, a slender man wearing a shimmering one-piece black coverall entered and sat in the front couch-seat. Then a woman in red trousers and tunic sat across from him. Neither spoke to the other.

A man and a woman in dark gray - both well muscled - literally lifted a small, dark-haired woman into the shuttle and carried her toward me. Her hands and feet were bound with clear shimmering straps. Silently, the two strapped the woman into the seat across the aisle from me.

The female guard looked at me. 'Please don't unstrap her. You both could get hurt. They'll release her at her destination.'

'Bastards ...' hissed the bound woman to the backs of the two guards as they left. 'Think they can order folk to slave for them.'

From what I'd seen, the Rykashans could do just that. I could be a low-level slave, a high-level slave, or dead. I didn't want to die. That would still have negated everything Foerga had done. But I didn't want to reward the Rykashans by becoming a needle jockey. That left being a low-level slave, not that I was pleased with that option, either.

'They seem effective at that,' was my response.

'Bastards, all of them.'

Five people in gray-and-green uniforms trooped into the shuttle and deposited themselves in the seats behind the more colorfully dressed two in the front. One woman glanced in my direction, then at the bound woman, before shaking her head.

'Them, too,' added the bound woman.

Almost silently, the door slid shut, leaving the shuttle cabin illuminated by a pearly light diffusing from the gray walls.

'Please make sure your harnesses are fastened. We will be lifting shortly.'

The warning was not repeated, and almost immediately the craft shivered slightly and then began to slide forward, perhaps to rise as well. The silence of the craft's hover, and the smoothness of its acceleration, prompted me to search my mental dustbin of information until I confirmed the earlier unbidden identification - magfield drive.

Based on the sketchy yet voluminous information poured into me earlier, I tried to sort out an understanding. From what I could deduce, a magfield drive was a further adaptation of the glider principles, the tapping of the planetary magnetic field and its use as a basis for some form of induction propulsion - I thought.

In the silence, and to take my mind off the disturbing feeling that my stomach was going to turn itself inside out, I looked over to my left. 'I'm Tyndel. Who are you?'

'I can't believe you're sitting there.'

'Why not?'

'Do you think you'll ever come home?'

'No.' Even if I returned to earth, it wouldn't be home. Home had vanished with Foerga and the mad truffler. 'That doesn't bother you?'

'I can't do much about what can't be changed,' I pointed out.

'You sound like the rest of them.' The bound woman snorted and turned her head away from me and toward the blank shuttle wall. 'Real courage in men vanished with the ancients.'

The whining outside the shuttle continued into higher and higher frequencies, until it felt like my teeth would shatter. I tried closing my eyes, but that was worse, with images of Shraddans and demon guns flickering through my mind, followed by endless canisters of nanosprays and nanites weaving invisible and unseen webs around me, webs that pushed me in one direction, then another.

I opened my eyes and waited.

How long before there was a clunk that signaled docking at Orbit One, I didn't know, not until my internal demons observed forty-three standard minutes since liftoff.

I could feel myself drifting upward against the restraining harness, my stomach seemingly climbing faster than the rest of me. I swallowed down acid and fear, but it took several gulps. I wanted to burp, but dared not. My eyes flicked to the bound woman.

She glared at me, and I asked, 'What did you do to end up here?'

'Questioned the wisdom of Rykasha. They know not the greatness of the True God. Nor do you, although you could, if you would but look.'

If she happened to be so insane, why was she being shipped off earth like a package for delivery? Why hadn't she been adjusted?

'They can't adjust Believers. We are the Angels and the Followers of the True Lord.' She laughed. 'The old demons won't tell you that, but adjustment doesn't work on us. So they have to send us home.'

'Home?' I blurted.

'The home of God, among the nearer stars.'

I did not answer. What could I have said? My internal data store offered no suggestions or answers. All I had absorbed contained nothing on angels or followers or gods. I frowned. Cerrelle had mentioned the Followers, with great distaste, but even with that insight I could find nothing. Then, I didn't know for what exactly I was searching. That was half the problem with nano-implanted knowledge. Without the right referents or key words, a lot of it was useless.

Instead, I waited for the various uniformed figures to pull themselves out of the shuttle, partly out of stubbornness and partly because my stomach wanted to turn itself inside out, and I was fighting it on that, mostly from pride, calling on old Dzin muscular control techniques.

Suddenly, the bound woman retched a spray of stuff that drifted up and toward me. Hastily, I unfastened the harness and bumbled my way back toward the lockers, banging my shoulder into the corner of the lockers. My fingers felt like thumbs as I fiddled with the locker latch, glancing toward the nauseating mess in midair. Tyndel?'

I tried to turn and found the motion bounced me off the opposite bank of lockers. I grabbed the back of the last shuttle seat and swallowed to try to quell a rebellious stomach before turning toward the voice.

A slender dark-haired woman in a dark blue singlesuit gestured. 'Stop flailing around. Use the overhead guidelines. That's what they're for.'

The purpose of the lines against the shuttle ceiling was obvious - after she had pointed them out and explained - like everything else put together by the Rykashans, except half the time they didn't bother with the explanations. Duffel in one hand, I pulled myself toward the open lock door, past the white-face bound woman, avoiding the mess she had made.

'Bastards ... God will smite them ...' So these true believers couldn't be adjusted? Interesting ... if true.

The guideline ended short of the shuttle door, and I looked around, then grasped a railing and pulled myself down until I was approximately level with the woman who had called me.

She extended a hand. One of her boots was somehow attached to a metallic-looking strip in the tubular tunnel that melded with the shuttle portal.

I took her hand. It was cool, long-fingered, and muscular - like Foerga's.

'There. Use the bulkhead handholds until we get to the transition lock. I'm Martenya. Cerrelle told me you've had trouble adjusting to some of the requirements of Rykashan society. So she asked me to see that you got to the Taibr.'

'Cerrelle?' Why had she made the arrangement and not Andra?

'She can be hard on people from whom she expects a lot.' Martenya shrugged. 'Some people won't use their potential, and she's never accepted that, even though she understands that it happens.' She turned and pulled herself along the tubular tunnel, leaving me behind in the grayness that from appearance could as easily have been drilled through the cliffs overlooking Deep Lake or set anywhere underground in Lyncol - just rough gray walls with handhold bars at waist height.

Martenya waited at the transition lock - scarcely more than an oversized barrel big enough for three people. When she touched a stud, the portal through which we had entered closed. Then, after a moment, the lock shivered and seemed to move. Abruptly, I could feel myself reorienting, and my feet swinging down. We left the lock at right angles to the way we had entered, stepping into a narrow corridor lit indirectly. These walls glistened a muted metallic blue.

My knees tended to go up too far, and I felt like I had to take steps that were nearly babylike to keep from bouncing into the ceiling or whatever it was called.

'The overhead.' supplied Martenya. 'Walls are bulkheads. Enjoy the gravity while you can. We don't bother engineering for spin forces on the smaller outstations, and you're headed for one of the smallest.'

I almost asked why, but forced myself to go through the mental sorting process to see if I could discover the reason buried in the mass of data I'd been force-fed. 'The highest payback for unskilled interstellar labor?'

'Exactly.'

A man passed us going in the opposite direction, using a long gliding stride, with his feet barely leaving the dark gray carpet underfoot. I tried to imitate his gait. The motion seemed to help keep my knees from rising so high.

'That's better,' observed Martenya. 'We still have another quarter of the wheel to go to reach the locks to the upper transition ring. You don't have that much time before the Taibr leaves. You can use the canteen on board while the ship's on ion boost.'

She offered nothing more, and I asked nothing.

The second transition lock was like the first, except that the gravity - or centrifugal force - was markedly less by the time we reached it.

The passenger section of the Taibr was less than half that of the orbit shuttle, if more luxurious, with eight rows of upholstered couches, two in a row, each with wide straps, and each seemingly formed out of a solid block of some sort of plastic. Synthcomposite, my internal demons supplied. Above each couch was a shell-like block that apparently descended over the couch to form a monolith around the passenger.

'Gee-foam and restraints - they're all nanite-based. While the needle's accelerating or between insertion and exit, you'll be unable to move at all. A good thing, too, since you'd be jelly on the bulkhead if you could.'

'Ah... what... how?' I didn't like that idea at all, and what knowledge I'd been nano-fed didn't explain why. Or perhaps I didn't know how to access what would explain it.

'Try thinking about Hawking wormholes for starters,' suggested the dark-haired woman. And take one of the front couches. You could sense the differentials.'

What kind of differentials? As I pulled myself along the handholds I found my mind scrolling through all the half-mentally-filed information that still felt unfamiliar and awkward.

You'll figure it out. You Dzin types do - eventually. Have a good trip to Omega Eridani.' With a brisk wave, she was gone.

I half slid, half pulled myself down into the front couch and studied the wide straps, then tugged them into place, shifting my body until I was as comfortable as I could be. I looked up at the shell-like block poised to mate with the couch assembly - with little room for my body. Looking up at that massive restraint block, my body trying to expand in all directions, I was even more certain that I wanted nothing to do with being a needle jockey.

My stomach growled, but I wasn't sure whether it was from hunger or protest at the null gravity.

A man in a uniform that was somehow both silver and green half-glided through a hatch at the front of the compartment, and the entry lock irised shut. 'You're the only passenger on this run. Not many go this far out' A wry smile crossed his face. 'What did you do?'

'Refused to be a needle jockey.' I kept my voice level.

'You'll change your mind. If you're lucky and smart enough to live to do that.' He shook his head. 'Now... we'll be going on ion boost for about a standard quarter hour to get clear. Stay in your couch until the bells sound. The small gee-force, like gravity, will go on for ten to fifteen minutes, and you can walk around - if you want. It's a better time to eat, and it's best to eat early.'

I could definitely understand that, the way I was still half fighting my stomach's desire to invert itself.

'There's a head aft, and a small canteen. When the bells sound the second time, you have five minutes to get strapped in. If you don't make it, you're dead. The captain can't change the insertion envelope at that point, not without destroying the ship. So ... you're out of luck. Understand?'

I understood. It was like everything else the demons did. How could it have been otherwise?

23

Enlightenment shatters the illusory realities of the world.

There is but the slightest hiss before all the force lines shift.

A tug... there. A twitch there ... and I and the ship - we shiver through a shower of gilded mist, clawing up a cliff of violet. A carillon of trumpet chimes cascades from the violet. A long straight channel of red beckons to my right, regular and even ... sharp and hard beats on twin tympanies.

I ignore it, for regularity means solid matter, not the swirling of vacuum and gases between the stars, and the channels are traps.

Along the footlighted strands I dance, each strand the strobe of a quasar that flashes across the overspace, singing lyric notes that Dzin never recognized. Silently, for the ship and I are unheard against and amidst the waves of sound, I edge farther upward across the linked lines of stars visible only in powder blue puffs that vanish as I stretch-and-fly across each, and violins vibrate in long strings against my back.

Flame burns at my fingertips as I push away from a black wall that echoes the heavy tempo of kettledrums rumbling ever lower. I search for a gap, any gap on the far side of the star-stage, grasping the strands that reach above me and stretch before that black wall.

Two channels open - red and green - on each side of the wall. I hesitate, then leap, grasping, digging fingers into the diaphanous fabric of the Web, letting the fire sear through me, for I am being dragged down by the leaden spines in my guts, as a chorus of tympanies marches up my backbone.

Another leap, another grasp, showered with cerise explosions and discordant polyphony from at least two unseen harpsichords, and we totter edgewise up the strands and across the high wire of yet another stage, a circus ring, our feet poised on hot coals. The scarlet fumes circle inward, twining to the tinny silver of a tambourine snapping out a flamenco beat.

I sense the deep white of the beacon, the faintest of clear lights in a swirling universe, centered in a smaller whitened web.

Three black spears loom from beneath, exploding upward toward my guts, lead-copper rock, punctuated with the reverberating twanging of massed steel-strung and hard-twanged guitars.

I point-toed leap, and drop, whirl, and dodge, lunging around the spears and toward the clear amber light, toward the soft and golden harp strings. One spear slashes across my laggard back, but I totter onward, stifling the scream.

Lilacs and the perfume of spring explode around us, silver strings soothing the chaotic polyphony below, and, while I breath deeply, we dance upside east, the pattern carrying us around a cliff of violet, past a red channel, and over a green ditch. A single, longing high C rides over the harp. Somehow, my feet stay upon the strands of the Web which suspend me above the now, dark and solid below, even as my back burns.

And I stretch and grasp the handle of the old-fashioned kerosene lantern, ringed in a circlet of lilac, centered in that smaller web. We are almost there, almost to ...

24

No society that places the individual above itself will survive; but neither will any society that places the individual below itself

The unnamed crewman and Martenya had both been right. Had I not been in the solid, gee-foamed, and nanite-restricted monolithic cocoon, my body would have been less than a thin film of jelly spread across the walls - bulkheads, rather. Beyond what I felt, I could sense the forces, almost like blocks of music somehow solid and massive or knifelike and deadly.

Then, after another twisting, screaming wrench, the music and the forces vanished. Shortly, following an initial acceleration, we decelerated. The cocoon opened, and I found that I had sweated so much that my greenish singlesuit was soaked through.

Using the faint 'gravity' provided by the deceleration, I made my way to the head, and then to the canteen, but I only drank some mixed fruit juice and ate an orangemond pastry. I knew that total null gravity would return soon enough.

'Return to your couch. Approaching destination station.' The words were clipped, as if an afterthought.

I strapped in and waited.

Even after the clunk that announced the needle ship's docking somewhere, the passenger compartment remained sealed, and, while I loosened the restraints, I did not remove them. I preferred not to fight the null gee when I had nowhere to go. So I sat under the loosened padded restraints until the ship's hatch or lock irised open and a figure appeared.

'I'm Gerbriik, and I'm the maintenance officer of the station.' The thin man who floated in the needle ship's open portal had a long square face, clean-shaven and large in proportion to a body even smaller and slighter than mine. He wore a shimmering silver one-piece suit. 'You're Tyndel, and you once were a mite Dzin master. None of that matters. What matters is that you're here for a ten-year tour. That will repay two thirds of what you owe.'

I'd known I owed; I'd recalled something about ten or fifteen years, but I'd never pursued it. It didn't matter. So I waited.

'Unstrap. No sense in wasting time.' He glanced around the compartment, then sniffed. 'Good thing you didn't make a mess.' A laugh followed. 'You'll appreciate that more and more.'

His eyes raked over me as I pulled myself along the guideline toward the portal. 'Green, eh? Here, you wear dull gray. Nothing else.'

Aquacyan, blue, green, gray - what did it matter? I nodded.

'See how accepting you are in a year.' Gerbriik snorted. "You call me ser, just like any other station officer. That's anyone in solid blue or black. In fact, anyone in a solid-colored uniform.'

'Yes, ser.'

'Let's go. Sanselle will be coming through here.' Gerbriik turned in a single effortless motion.

I pulled myself after him, conscious of my awkwardness, with one hand on my small duffel, the other grasping along the lines. There were no transition locks, just the ship lock, a tube, and a second lock leading into the station proper. The corridors of OE Station were small, barely wide enough for two people abreast, and smelled of humanity and new materials simultaneously. The walls were brownish gray and reeked of age, though I doubted they were near so old as they felt or looked.

We had traveled no more than fifty meters when he stopped by a green-rimmed hexagonal-shaped hatch. 'All the levels are connected by transverse shafts. There's more on that in your briefing spray. The double hatches are nanite-sprung to stay closed.' Gerbriik nodded and slipped inside the door, pulling one thin door toward him and pushing through another that swung in the opposite direction.

I followed, finding myself in another tubular corridor perpendicular to the one we had just left. Gerbriik was already ten meters above me, past one hexagonal hatch and floating opposite a lower one. Then he pulled the inner door and pushed through the outer one.

It took me longer, because my duffel caught on the inner door and jerked me backward, practically back across the corridor.

Gerbriik's face was blank when I finally emerged. Once I was clear, he pushed off down the corridor, stopping less than thirty meters from the shaft hatch door. I didn't stop and swung past him. I finally managed to grab a guideline on the wall - bulkhead - and slow myself. Weightless I might have been, but my body retained all its inertia, as my hand and fingers testified with the strain of slowing and stopping me.

The maintenance officer pointed to another hatch - a smaller hexagon. 'This is mid-deck three, space four. Remember it. This is your cube. You're not important enough to rate space. You get it because it's more convenient for everyone else. There's one space that's yours to keep spotless, and you will keep it spotless, Dzin master, all by yourself, with your multiple talents. It has an inside latch for privacy, but that's it.' He pushed the hatchlike door inward and open. 'Go ahead. Look.'

I wondered at the inward-opening design until my demons supplied the answer - protection against depressurization. If the station were holed the internal pressure of the cube would keep the door almost welded shut against the seals.

'Go ahead. Look inside.'

'Yes, ser,' I managed. The space beyond the door was small, no more than three meters by two, with built-in drawers and a narrow closet on one side. There was nowhere to sleep -just six rough gray surfaces.

'You don't need a mattress in null gee, but you get a sleeping net with a pallet pad on one side. It's rolled up inside the closet. Use it. Otherwise you'll be working with bruises and cuts, and those sting in your gear. Oh, there should be two gray work coveralls in there, too. They're nanite reinforced. You should be able to move a good two hundred kilograms, even in full gee. You can move more here, but stopping that mass would be something else. I have a few more things to show you. Leave your duffel.'

Lifting two hundred kilograms or more on a routine basis?

Before I could extricate myself from the small cube, the maintenance officer was a good twenty meters down the tubular corridor. I shut the hatch door and scrambled out of the cube to follow, catching up while he waited by another hatch, this one rimmed in blue.

'Here's the low-tech canteen. It's big enough for all three of you. That's Sanselle, Fersonne, and you.' Gerbriik laughed. 'Same food replicator as in the officers' mess. Same menu. Even has traditional Dorchan dishes. You can eat as much as you want, whatever you want, and whenever you want so long as you're not working.' The long-faced maintenance officer handed me two nanite-spray cans. 'These hold all the station info you'll need. Go back to your cube and take them two standard hours apart - unless you want a splitting headache. Report to the maintenance office at zero eight hundred station time tomorrow. Eat first.' He laughed again. 'Enjoy your time off.'

With that, he glided away, leaving me floating by the canteen.

My stomach had barely settled, and I didn't want to risk upsetting it again by eating immediately. So I began to ease myself back the few meters to what amounted to my own private, and very gray, casern.

The gray walls were as depressing as the mad truffler's cave had been, even more depressing than the cellars and caserns scattered through old Henvor. The gray bulkheads offered even less hope of early escape. Abandon hope ... Those words came from somewhere, but I didn't recall them. There was much I knew now that I did not recall. I looked down at the nanite-spray cans. There would be more of those as well.

25

Those who err without understanding shall die without comprehending.

Even two hours apart, the two nano-sprays had split my skull, as more figures, charts, diagrams, and specifications flooded through my brain and synapses. Some of the knowledge would be helpful, such as the plans of the station's decks and the various lock locations, but what did I care about the various moduli of elasticity of shear for the bearing truss joists? Or the decompression pressure stress bright lines? Or the acceptable atmospheric pressure variances? It wasn't as though I would be in any position to do anything about them. Not as a maintenance laborer or low-level tech.

The jolts to my brain hadn't helped my stomach or my adjustment to null gravity, either. Or my attempts to sleep. The sleeping net - even tethered at four points - swayed all night long with every motion I made. At times, I felt like I was choking in my sleep. I didn't sleep, but dozed, or so it felt. Learning to sleep in null gravity was going to take some learning. Then, what else did I have to worry about besides learning to sleep and be a high-level laborer at the end of the universe?

I didn't think about clocks, or timepieces, but I didn't need to worry.

My briefing spray included something along those lines. Internal demons jolted me out of my dozing state. Zero seven hundred. Zero seven hundred.

The null grav shower was also a joy, but at least the food formulator delivered, and I ensured that I was in the maintenance office before eight hundred. The space was perhaps five meters by ten, and one wall was nothing more than covered bins of various sizes and shapes. Built into the wall to the right of the entry hatch was a desk space, above which were mounted various screens like those of the iconraisers of Henvor. I could not help but wonder about the amount of electroessence they required and how they were powered. Null gravity fusactor, design beta-one. Nuclear fusion - a form rejected by the ancients?

Gerbriik pushed himself away from the various consoles, turning in midair as he did so. 'Good morning, Tyndel.'

'Good morning ... ser.' I barely managed to tack on the honorific.

'We'll start you out on something simple but necessary. You all work twelve standard hours. That's really fourteen, because you work four, then get an hour break.' Gerbriik pointed toward the equipment floating on a bulkhead tether - a cylinder three meters long with an attached hose. 'That's yours, Tyndel.'

I paused, trying to rack my memories and ill-sorted knowledge. Nothing. There was nothing about shiny cylinders with flexible brown hoses.

'That's a SARM - separator and recovery module. It's just a nanite sorter with an intake suction feed powered by a blower.'

That didn't leave me any wiser.

Gerbriik smiled condescendingly. 'In short, former Dzin master, it scoops up elemental dust and gas molecules and sorts them into bins in the cylinders. Understand?'

Even with my aborted recent reeducation, I knew enough to know that was possible, since essentially it was a modification of the food formulator principle. But what was I supposed to do, and why was it necessary?

'No.'

'No, ser!' snapped Gerbriik. 'If you don't show respect, I can recommend your exile, your physical exile to one of the borderline colonies, like Nabata. There's no place for disrespect on an orbit cargo station.'

Yes, ser,' I answered, recognizing, belatedly, the authority in his voice, that and the desire for power that the maintenance officer barely kept in check. I doubted he had that kind of authority, but my doubts had been wrong before about the demons, and now wasn't the time to test my judgment.

That's better.' He offered another condescending smile. 'We have nanite housekeepers here. Two kinds - the microscopic disassemblers and the collector-scrubbers installed in the ventilation system. The disassemblers are programmed to break down certain molecular chains into constituent atomic structures, and most of those chains are waste materials. The disassemblers are ten-micron-sized, and they go anywhere in the station. The scrubbers collect and store everything that the air returns pick up. Now, do you understand?'

'I think so. Ser,' I added hastily. 'Materials too heavy to get carried, or those trapped in coiners and too big for the disassemblers—'

'Exactly. Your job is to put on a breather mask and poke that hose into every square millimeter between deck one and deck two. Tomorrow, you'll do the same thing on the next interdeck.'

I waited, then asked. 'Is there a manual or instructions? I have some questions.'

'Ser.'

'Yes, ser. Does it signal if it's full or not working?'

'When any of the bins are full, it buzzes, and you bring it to maintenance. Sanselle will empty and clean it. No brains or instructions necessary, Tyndel. Eventually, you might learn enough to do that.' He handed me a purplish mesh with a clear faceplate and a heavy squarish lump on the bottom. 'That's your breather hood. We could use a more sophisticated nanite system, but they have to be tailored individually, and they're costly. This works almost as well, and it's just fine for you. All you do is pull it on and make sure it fits flush against your maintenance suit.'

'Yes, ser.'

'Here are your work gauntlets.' He extended a thin gray pair of gloves.

I looked dubious.

They're nanite-reinforced. You'll need a maintenance belt and tool kit. This one's checked out to you.' He extended a dark gray belt with several flat pouches fastened to it.

I slipped it around my waist and then took the gloves, heavier than they appeared at first, and pulled them on. They went halfway up my forearms.

Gerbriik pointed to a flat screen on the wall. 'I've called up the interdeck schematic. That shows where you'll be. Study it, and then haul yourself to entry port two and start cleaning from there.'

I stepped forward and looked at the interdeck schematic, trying to memorize it or something, but the effort called up a similar map in my mind, and I tried to integrate the two, looking for entry port two.

'You got it?'

'Yes, ser.'

'Then take the SARM and your hood and get to work.' Gerbriik twisted back to the consoles as if to indicate he'd said all that was necessary.

I wondered, but I clipped the hood to the belt that had come with the dark gray coverall and towed the SARM along the corridor outside the maintenance space to the access shaft that would bring me closest to entry port two.

Entry port two was another type of hatch. I recognized it belatedly from the information that had been dumped on me through the latest nanosprays. Not only was it double-sealed, but it contained a third sliding metal panel between the outer and inner hatches. The middle panel required a maintenance wrench. I thought, and then fumbled out the wrench from the small tool packet fastened to my belt. It was the wrong one. After three tries with various wrenches, one worked; I had the middle door open.

Then I tried to ease the SARM module through. The SARM power staid banged on the side of the hatch, and a whining started up immediately. When I scrambled to turn it off, I ricocheted off the side of the hatch with my ribs, then put up a gloved hand to stop myself.

The nanites in the glove protected my fingers by stiffening, but that threw me sideways in the other direction and slammed my thigh against the door. I had to duck to keep my head from getting mashed on a girder that flanked the other side of the portal.

For a long moment, after finally stabilizing myself by clutching the plasteel beam, I hung in the gloom, sucking in deep breaths, realizing that I was seeing mostly by nanite-enhanced vision. Moving gingerly, I closed the portal. The built-up odors told me why Gerbriik had sent the breather hood.

After locking one leg around a support beam, I pulled the hood over my head and sealed it. While I could breathe without gagging, I began to sweat almost immediately.

Slowly, I levered myself down to where I could recover the SARM. Then I began to thread my way toward the far corner between the two air return ducts that dwarfed me. The cleaning pattern suggested by the briefing nanites started there, and I felt less than terribly creative with sweat coating my face and hair while pushing a three-meter cylinder that massed half what I did.

With the restricted view through the faceplate, I didn't see the conduit for some type of cable that protruded from the lower deck, and the toe of one boot caught. I spun, and trying to avoid crashing the SARM into the diagonal girder to my right, found my hooded head banging into another brace. The hood reduced the impact to a jar, but I bounced sideways. The SARM hose twisted around one leg, and my other hip scraped something.

I finally managed to stop colliding with sections of the station, but I'd barely started, and I had bruises along both legs, a twisted calf muscle, sore ribs, and other bruised muscles in places I'd probably rediscover over the next few hours and days. I'd never thought about how difficult not having gravity would be, and wondered if I'd dream longingly of full gravity in the days and years to come.

In time, I managed to figure out how to move the equipment and myself with a minimum of effort, and thus a minimum of reaction. But I kept sweating.

After about a standard hour I found myself squinting through the faceplate as I pointed the nozzle of the SARM in the direction of an enclosed metal rectangle with nodules on it. A jolt ran through my system. Restricted equipment! Restricted equipment! I shivered and wanted to shake my head, beginning to understand, once more, just how effective nanotech conditioning could be. No wonder I hadn't gotten that much of a briefing. The briefing sprays had just applied the warnings to my nervous system somehow.

While I was recovering from that jolt, the SARM canister rebounded against my left calf, giving me what would be another bruise.

I had swept out most of the crevices and hidden areas on the inboard section of the interdeck when my internal demons announced twelve hundred hours.

Almost simultaneously, another figure in a breather mask tapped on my shoulder, then reached down and flicked the power stud on the SARM. The other person also wore dark gray and gestured back toward entry port two.

Outside the port, I followed the other's example and pulled off the breather hood. Sweat still streamed down my face and down the back of the coverall singlesuit, leaving it an even darker gray than when I had started that morning.

'Time to eat. We get a standard hour to eat and rest each four hours. I'm Fersonne.' She was angular, and as tall as I, with brown hair not much longer than mine.

I followed Fersonne, pulling myself after her through the tube down to mid-deck three and the canteen, a gray windowless space that would have fit into a prehistoric castle, except for the formulator. The spiced orange pasta and chicken dish was good. But I was certain that was only because good food cost no more than bad with a nanite food reformulator. Fersonne had something else, something that was mostly rice, and she ate without talking.

The sticktites on the chair seat held me in place. I wondered why they even bothered with seats in null grav, but supposed it was part of the effort to re-create the familiar ... or something. There was nothing on the reasons for anything in the briefing sprays, just facts, figures, and schematics.

'Tyndel?' asked Fersonne, her mouth half full.

'Yes?'

'Why are you here?'

I shrugged. 'Because I wouldn't be a needle jockey.'

There was a definite silence before she spoke again.

'They offered you that kind of chance? And you turned them down? Do you know what kind of life needle jockeys have?'

'No. No one explained very much of anything.'

Fersonne looked at me with those wide brown eyes, and, for some reason, I wanted to duck under the table.

'I'm on an extra two years' objective here, Tyndel. You know why?'

'No. I don't know much, I've discovered.' I followed the words with a shrug.

'I'm adjusted. That means I can't do much on earth. More on an outplanet, maybe. A year's station stipend here is almost ten years what I could earn anywhere else, and they'll let me choose any open outplanet after station duty.'

Fersonne shook her head. 'A needle jockey gets ten times that, or more, I hear.'

After the first years, I suspect.'

'They live well even then.' She dropped her eyes.

There was little enough I could say without making matters worse. I took another mouthful of the pasta, wondering how long before the gray bulkheads would start to close in on me, if I ever would regard OE Station as anything more than the demon equivalent of a Dorchan stone demon trap with food.

Fersonne's guileless brown eyes studied me. Meeting them was hard, and I didn't know why. Or was it that I didn't want to think about why? I sipped Arleen tea that was already lukewarm from a squeeze bottle, as much to avoid speaking as from thirst.

26

Freedom and ignorance are incapable of long coexistence.

I half glided, half scrambled toward the maintenance office as my internal timepieces warned me - zero seven fifty-five ... zero seven fifty-five.

Every muscle ached from the maintenance details of the preceding five days. I never would have thought how muscles could ache in null gravity, especially with the extra strength provided by both personal nanites and the nanite-reinforced coveralls. Gerbriik found ways to use every bit of that strength.

Beyond that strength, as a Dorchan I still sometimes had trouble believing that the demons had returned to space and the stars, apparently so easily. That was inconceivable, yet, as a Dzin master, I could see that it had happened. The conflict between what my Dzin training and perceptions told me had happened and what my upbringing had told me couldn't have happened sometimes gave me a headache if I thought about it for long. Why? Because all my early upbringing had emphasized that the return to space was inconceivable? Because my Dzin training had also conditioned me to accept what obviously was? Because the ancients' dream of the stars was considered impossible? But if the demons had the stars ... what was the next dream? Was there one beyond just stars and more stars? Somehow, conquering the Void didn't seem like a real dream.

I wasn't ready to think more about that, and I didn't. Instead, I slid into the maintenance office and closed the hatch behind me. Gerbriik waited by the large wall screen, drifting in midair in the null gravity. Fersonne floated beside the maintenance officer, her wide brown eyes expressionless.

'Tyndel,' began Gerbriik, pointing to the image on the screen, 'this is a cargo sled. Fersonne and Sanselle will help you practice with it. That practice is not because I'm babying you. That's because of all the jump-credits it takes to get one out here. I don't want one of our sleds damaged. Neither do you, because I can charge the damage to your contract time.'

'Yes, ser.' I looked at the image of the sled - nothing more than an open-topped box with dark gray reinforcing beams on the bottom and both ends, and with netlike webbing on the front, back, and top.

'How do you think it works?'

Rather than ask, I searched the briefing data, a mental chore that continued to feel like rummaging through piles of unread papers in my skull. 'Magnetic induction, ser?'

'What does that mean, O former Dzin master?'

'The sled centers itself on the guides on the left side of the cargo spaces and transit corridors.'

The maintenance officer nodded abruptly toward Fersonne, in a motion that was swift and effortless, the kind of movement that created no reaction in null gravity. 'Have him run it up and down Beta Corridor - quick stops, turns, shifts to the opposite rails.'

'Yes, ser,' answered my brown-haired colleague.

'Tyndel, you do exactly what Fersonne says. Do you understand?'

'Yes, ser.'

'Good. Over the next few months we're scheduled Jo get three ships' worth of cargo for the terraforming project. You'd better be as good as Fersonne by then.'

'Yes, ser.'

Gerbriik turned in his usual manner to signify he was through with us.

I followed Fersonne to the transit shafts and then all the way to the bottom - where I'd never been before.

'Lower level's all cargo stuff,' she announced as she opened the three-door hatch from the shaft. Her fingers were deft with the wrench key for the middle door.

'Does the station get much?'

'No. Just supplies and stuff for the projects.'

'Gerbriik mentioned terraforming ...'

Fersonne gave me another of those wide-eyed looks that made me feel embarrassed that I hadn't searched my internal knowledge before opening my mouth, and I began to rack my brains once more.

After a moment, I nodded. The whole point of the out-stations was terraforming - for those stations in systems without habitable planets, and that was more than half of the dozen-plus systems linked by the needle ships. Nanotech made general trade uneconomical, and none of the outcolonies had the education and resources yet to develop technology or knowledge superior to that of the Rykashan demons of earth.

The idea was simple enough - spread people far enough that no single catastrophe could wipe out the human race. I frowned. Which human race? The one from which I had sprung or the demons? Or were they one and the same?

'Cargo handling's better in some ways,' Fersonne said after my continuing silence. 'Sometimes you get to talk to the crews or the super or even a passenger.'

'Other people.'

'You notice no one on station talks to us except to give an order? Or information necessary to carry out an order?'

I hadn't, but I took her word for it. She led the way down the dimly lit cargo corridor with the gliding movement everyone but me seemed to have mastered. The corridor was a good three times as wide and high as the tubular corridors on the other station levels and gave me the impression of a vaulted basement of an ancient building, for all that the walls were seamless gray, shaded slightly with brown.

Fersonne eased to a graceful stop. Behind her were three bays or hangars with closed doors. She touched a stud, and all three doors rose. The cargo sleds were just as pictured on the screen, except smaller than I expected, only about four meters long and two high. Each was inside its own enclosure, tethered to heavy bolt anchors from six points. The tether lines didn't seem that strong-looking, but who knew what kind of nanite reinforcing they had?

Fersonne pulled a square box from a strap pouch at one end of the leftmost sled. The box was attached by an electroessence cable to the sled. 'Here is the control box. Same as on the small sled. You seen that?'

'I didn't even know there was a small sled.'

'Use that for moving stuff around the station, but it's self-powered. Could really rip things up if it got out of hand.'

For a moment I had to think, and run through what I knew but really hadn't assimilated once more before it became clear. The big cargo sleds only ran on the cargo corridor and were held by the energy fields that bounded the corridor. The little sled was self-contained, with far less mass but with no external restraint. I blinked and looked down at the box in Fersonne's hand.

The sled controls looked simple enough - four arrow-shaped studs surrounding a circular stud. Outside the arrow studs were two square studs - one glowing green, one red.

'The power switch is under the toggle cover.'

I hadn't even noticed the shielded cover in the corner. I nodded.

'Center button is the stop button.' Fersonne smiled. 'Only works if the sled's within range of the guiderails. Use the others to move the sled. Green is up; red is down. Others mean direction.'

'If I push up and the side arrow ... ?'

'Don't. Only want to move in one direction at a time.'

I nodded.

'We'll untether it first. Don't want to pull out the anchors.'

Another example of the demon outlook. The sled had enough power to rip out the anchors, but they wouldn't use the materials or effort to reinforce the hangar. They expected the users to be careful. When the maintenance officer could recommend someone's exile, they could expect care.

I followed Fersonne's lead and undid the tethers on the left side, then returned to stand beside her while she eased the sled out of its bay and into the corridor. Once it was well away from the others, she handed me the control box. 'Remember, it keeps going in whatever direction you move it. The controls are supposed to feed back so it doesn't, but don't trust them all the way.'

Trust? What could one trust? How much? I took the control box, wondering if I'd ever be able to trust Rykashan society's rules as much as I once had trusted the way of Dzin to make my way in Hybra.

27

Those who reward vain attempts encourage such and discourage true accomplishment.

Sanselle glanced across the narrow canteen table at me. Her green eyes seemed overlarge in the pinched face, and her short, sandy hair was strawlike. 'Fersonne says you could have been a needle jockey. That true?'

I finished the last mouthful of Dorchan mushroom pasta before answering. 'I had a chance. I do not know if I would have been successful.'

'You'd 'a been.' She took a swig of a dark brown beer from the squeeze bottle. 'When you're not around, Gerbriik says you're worth two of most lugs. So how'd you get here?'

How had I? It had seemed so simple. Was it? I could feel myself somewhere else, somewhere with red arcs of flame, golden-red flames in a niellen night...

'Tyndel? You all right? Your eyes ...' I shook myself. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean ...'

'We all got pasts. You want to talk, I'll listen. You don't, that's fine.'

'Things ... I'm still not sure.'

'Whatever.' Sanselle laughed easily. You being here makes things easier for us. Nathum - fellow before you - he broke two SARMs and jammed a sled. Tried hard, he did, but trying's not doing.'

Simple as they were, those last words echoed in my thoughts. Trying's not doing ... Trying's not doing ... 'How did he jam a sled?'

Sanselle shrugged. 'Somehow got it crossways going into its bay, then tilted it. Mite-damned job to unwedge it. Ended up taking out some panels and one of the guiderails.'

That explained why Fersonne had suggested I not attempt multidirectional commands with the big cargo sled controls.

'Ready for the orgnopaks?' asked Sanselle.

'Ready as I'll ever be.' Carting replacement materials paks for all the food replicators from the storeroom to each mess wasn't nearly so onerous as cleaning the between-decks spaces, but it was nearly as tedious and time-consuming.

Theoretically, the replicators could have been built able to shift molecules of any structure, but the side effect was that such full-range replicators took a great deal more electroessence and generated far more heat, and heat dispersion was more of a problem on orbit stations than heat retention. So the maintenance crews replaced the materials paks with new ones containing trace elements, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, as well as other elemental forms necessary for food synthesis. The paks weren't labeled with the actual contents - just with the class of replicator they fitted.

I loosened the sticktites and let myself drift toward the disposal slot below the replicator. It wasn't a disposal slot, since the waste material was shifted by nanites into a separate waste-orgnopak and reused as it could be. After shoving in my plate and cup, I turned in midair to follow Sanselle.

'Fersonne says the small sled is acting up.' She lifted her eyebrows.

That didn't surprise me, either. Little in my ambit had, not even OE Station, not since the comfortable world of Dzin had vanished when the Shraddans I'd trusted and justified in my teachings had killed Foerga and sent me running.

Was I still running? I tried not to shiver at that thought as I followed Sanselle.

28

The shape of a container is not the nature of that which is contained.

I pushed the SARM canister around the gently curving corner that followed the arc of the station's hull. Ahead was a mist, fulgurant and full. I tried to slow the heavy SARM, but I couldn't halt it before it plunged through the mist, its inertia dragging me through the curtain of pinlights. Each tiny light seared, cutting like a white-hot needle.

Beyond the sparkling curtain I stood amid a black nothingness. The orbit station corridor had vanished. Arcs of golden-red fire webbed a sky blacker than any I had ever seen, a heaven whose stars shimmered so brightly that I had to slit my eyes.

The fire arcs sprayed out from a pinwheel that sputtered before me, except it was a star twirling ever so slowly in the darkness. A face slowly swam from the center of the spinning and sputtering fire into the center of that light. Short black hair framed a thin face, and out of that face shone deep blue eyes.

Then the light brightened even more. I had to close my eyes against the glare, and I found myself unable to breathe, unable to move, with fire coursing through my closed eyes, hot winds desiccating the skin of my face.

I lurched up in the sleeping net, still squinting. I found myself coated in sweat and shivering. My face was burning, my body chill.

I could not swallow, so dry was my throat. After opening one side of the sleeping net and slipping out, I floated to where I could reach the squeeze bottle. The coolish water helped - some.

So did a towel, to dry my sweaty face. Then I eased back into the net and reclosed it. I needed more sleep. Perhaps I would dream of gravity, where I would not be lost in the aimlessness of null gee.

My eyes wouldn't stay closed, nor my thoughts quiet.

Foerga's face in the middle of a spinning star? The arcs of golden-red fire. I had seen them before. Where?

Why would they return to a dream now?

Stars? Now that I thought about it, I hadn't seen a single star since I'd left earth, and yet I was on a station orbiting a planet circling one of the most distant stars to which the demons had sent their needle ships.

A laugh started within me but died away, cold and distant, as I recalled the insight in Foerga's face. Foerga's face, and penetrating deep azure eyes and niellen hair.

I shivered again, cold all over now. Hybra seemed far away, much farther than mere stellar spacing, an infinitely distant land of auspexes, lithoidolators, and dzinarchists.

29

The passion for analysis does not reflect upon the accuracy of the analyzer.

Eventually, even on a demon orbit station as far from Rykasha as possible, as low as a maintenance tech was, I settled into a routine. Gerbriik's voice became bored when he issued me orders, as it was with Fersonne and Sanselle. I began to recognize the names and references to the needle ships that called, and their officers, even though none of them ever looked at maintenance crews as more than high-level AIs with organic limbs designed to off-load cargo and carry out simple tasks.

I developed a consistent exercise routine in the gym and the full-gee spin chamber, even if I never exercised when the station officers or Sanselle did.

Finally, for lack of anything else to do, I began to study again - this time what there was on the background of nanite development and engineering. And I did it the way that seemed to work for me - by reading the information from the station's databanks on a portable screen.

The Rykashan history that had been pumped into me had never made much sense, nor did the additional bits and pieces I overheard. Initially, the history of nanite technology implementation made just as little sense. Whole sections of the text referred to events that were not in my basic indoctrination history. Nor did they correspond in more than vaguely general terms with the history I had learned in Henvor.

Sorting all that out required more research to fit historical developments together with nanite technology evolution. Even so, seemingly rational passages made little sense, especially when I was tired after three straight shifts. But I persisted, after a fashion.

In the dimness of my cube, I blinked at the words on the screen clipped to one side of my sleeping net, then blinked again.

... the implementation of the first nanite-based psychohistory projects (circa 530 A.S.) in the Amnord nation precursors to Dorcha and Toze established the applied feasibility of accurate projection of political behavior on the first true microaggulatinated-socio-economic basis ... despite the so-called Free Action massacres that followed ...

... although uncontrolled nanite-based organic rehabilitation developed by Dretias and Kestmayer (see Prehistory of Nanosystems) was cited as the cause of the Demon Gluttony Famines (515 A.S. and 510 A.S.)... analysis indicates that climate readjustments caused by industrial greenhouse offgasing played an equally pivotal role ... such changes ... led first to global geoponic restructuring, to silval reengineering, and to the forced development of advanced low-cost formulator technologies ...

... Dorchester compact rejected use of formulator-derived nutrition ...

... of nanite-fisheye invisibility was deployed by the Risen Shin (?) Empire against the Chungkuo Republic in approximately 490 A.S. (2060 AD or old era measurement) ... led to the sterilization of the archipelago ... reclamation was not begun until 200 PSE ...

I clicked off the screen. The information was too detailed and created too much conflict for me to digest more than a few thousand words at a time - and there were many thousands of words written about the technology that had created my world and then thrust me from it.

As my eyes closed, the blackness was filled with red-golden arcs of fire, arcs that cascaded across a starlike pinwheel circling in blackness. I opened my eyes quickly, and the fire arcs and pinwheel vanished into the dull blackness of my cube, fuzzy and indistinct compared to that niellen-backed tableau of stars and flame.

Sleep came less easily - far less easily - as my facility with maintenance duties improved.

30

When the complexity of social patterning is reduced, so is individual freedom.

One of the continuing menial duties of the maintenance crews was to cart up linens and supplies for the transient guest quarters on the upper station levels. The job wasn't onerous, merely menial, and often a welcome relief from tasks such as using a SARM between decks, or unloading needle ships, or patching scars in corridor bulkheads too large for the maintenance nanites.

I was halfway though unloading the clean linens for the guest suites on the uppermost level of the station when

Gerbriik appeared at my elbow. It wasn't Gerbriik, but a nanite-generated image from my own commpak, but he might as well have been there, square-faced, sharp-nosed, black-haired. Would that Manwarr had seen such iconraising. I held in an amused smile, thinking how he would have called Gerbriik far worse than a cophrologer.

'Tyndel.'

'Yes, ser?'

'You should have finished by now.'

The maintenance officer scowled. 'Yes, ser.'

Gerbriik's eyes seemed to go to the small sled - two-thirds empty - tethered loosely on one side of the corridor. You'll have to finish later, and you will finish it before you go off-shift.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Glide your corpus down to lock three. Hay Needle's on final approach. You and Sanselle need to unload it quickly.'

Quickly? What difference did it make with all the time dilation involved whether we took a few minutes or hours longer? It would still be weeks or months before the Hay Needle returned to one of the earth orbit stations. So much hurrying was because people thought that haste saved time for something more valuable. The Hay Needle was likely to lose more time from a poor insertion than from a few more minutes spent unloading.

'There's a big singularity in the overspace Web, and it's angling toward us. The pilot wants his cargo off. Otherwise, he'll be here for a long time.' Gerbriik smiled coldly. You wouldn't want a needle jockey mad at you. Or me.'

'No, ser.' I tightened the tethers on the small sled and refastened the straps over the linens I hadn't unloaded. The transient guests needed linens because their beds were more like pallets into which they were netted. Towels we all needed to mop up the water around us after null grav showers, as well as what clung to us that wasn't recovered by the nanite collectors.

'You'd better get moving, hadn't you, Dzin master Tyndel?'

'Yes, ser.'

As I glided toward the transit shaft, I tried to access what I knew about singularities. Singularity - a region of space-time where one or more components of the nonstandard curvature tensor become infinite. Singularity - a discrete but dimensionless discontinuity in the supra-wave-vector space. Singularity - the result of an object collapsing with a mass of S(^s-V and with a gravitational radius greater than its physical radius. Were they all the same? Or were there three kinds of singularities? The second one sounded like what Gerbriik was talking about, but I wasn't in any position to ask.

Sanselle had the sled waiting by the big cargo lock by the time I got there. While the station's lock was open, the ship's cargo lock had not opened. Snowlike crystals fell away from the outside of the hatch as the station's air roiled over the dull surface like a miniature storm. The crystals melted as they struck the warmer sides of the cargo corridor beyond the one open lock.

'Is there someone in charge of the cargo - for the ship?' I asked as we waited for the chill to abate.

'The junior officer - most ships only have a crew of three,' Sanselle said. 'Needle jockey and two others. They handle everything else. Don't want anything worrying the pilot.'

With a hiss, the ship's lock opened. After a moment, the greenclad third officer looked down at the pair of us and the cargo sled. 'Captain Adgar wants all this clear as soon as you can. Stack it in the corridors if you have to, but get it off.'

'Tell the officer that the mass is too great.' Gerbriik's voice was in my ear.

'Ser,' I said respectfully, 'the cargo mass is too great for the station to do that. We'll move it as fast as we can, but we can't put it all here.'

'Is that from you, crewman?'

'No, ser. The maintenance officer.'

'Do what you can.' The red-haired third officer nodded reluctantly. 'We've already started inspecting for departure. I'll check back in a bit. Start with the red cases.'

Sanselle had eased herself into the hatch opposite the officer. 'Those? The spines?'

'Right.'

I followed Sanselle's gesture and made my way to the heavily tethered containers set within a braced semienclosure comprised of composite beams.

'See,' murmured Sanselle. 'Gerbriik used you.'

'That's because he's following me. You know what you're doing.'

'You do, too. You've been here near-on a year.'

A year personal objective? Had it been that long? Or longer? Eleven standard months, two weeks and one day, announced my personal demons, as if to confirm something, perhaps no more than I was no longer a true follower of Dzin.

The containers in the enclosure were small - small and massive - no more than a meter long and ten centimeters by ten in cross section. For the first time since I'd come to OE Station, I could feel the effort to move one of them - one single container - and Gerbriik had assured me that the combination of personal nanites and the coveralls could handle well over two hundred kilos with no strain at all.

'What are these?' I eased the first one onto the cargo sled - most carefully.

Sanselle, moving more easily than I, slid hers beside mine, bracing herself against the corridor wall to kill the container's inertia. 'Fusactor spines, I'd guess.'

I winced. Fusion power? The different kind of demon that had led to the wars of destruction? Images flashed across my mind - the old illustrations from Manwarr's library showing glowing shells of stone that had failed to hold the nucleonic devils, the images of undersea warships whose metallic hulls glowed enough to illumine the lightless depths of the Summer Sea millennia later. Those old images from Henvor conflicted with others more recently nanite-implanted, fought with the Rykashan assertions that fusactors had supplied the environmentally beneficial power necessary for the great cleanups. For a moment, I froze.

'You all right, Tyndel?' asked Sanselle softly, the green eyes gentler and suddenly more concerned.

'I'll be fine.' I forced a smile. 'Image conflicts.' I'd had them all along, but I really hadn't quite understood them. I supposed that was part of what Cerrelle had tried to warn me about with the bits about honesty. Honestly - or accurately -addressing the images seemed to help, once I'd understood the problem. Not all accuracy reflected the Rykashan viewpoint, either, I'd decided.

'We'd better get moving, or Gerbriik and that third will both be yelling at us.'

I slipped back into the hold of the Hay Needle. While the needle ship's hull was thick, a third of a meter or more, it was nonmetallic - a sophisticated form of high-level composite. I studied the hold for a moment, noting that almost everything seemed to be nonmetallic, confirming what I'd learned.

We kept at the unloading, but I let Sanselle move the sled once all the fusactor spines were unloaded. With that much mass on it, the more experience the better, even if I had been using the sled for almost half a year.

I did maneuver the second sled into place and began to remove the other containers - everything from a handful of orgnopaks to odd-sized and individual shipping packs that could have contained anything from station system replacement components to supplemental terraforming supplies and equipment. I wouldn't have known.

I had the second sled half loaded by the time Sanselle returned the first one empty.

'Had to store those,' she said. 'Gerbriik said we can pull everything else off, stack it along the corridor if we need to.'

I looked at the half-loaded sled.

'After this one is loaded and moved,' she added.

The redheaded officer reappeared. He did not speak to us, but looked through the hold and then vanished again, frowning.

'Worried,' murmured Sanselle.

We had the second sled loaded to mass limits far more quickly than the first. Again, I let her move it. After she left, for a moment, I studied the lock and the empty first sled. Then I eased the back of the sled practically into the lock, the way Sanselle had. Using the sled would still be faster, even if we only guided it thirty meters down the cargo corridor.

Sanselle returned far more quickly this time. 'Just tethered it at the other side of the station. Gerbriik said the mass would balance. Have to unload it later.'

We both worked on the sled, and when it was full, we both were soaked in sweat. I rode on the back while she guided it fifty meters beyond the sled bays, where we stacked everything on one side of the corridor. We repeated the process three more times before we had emptied the needle ship's cargo bay.

The third officer watched as we stacked the last, and very irregular, containers on the sled and started to ease it away from the cargo lock.

I wiped my forehead with the back of my sleeve.

'You got that clear faster than the captain hoped,' the third officer said. 'He's recommending a bonus. So am I.' His grin was one of relief. 'Stand back. We're sealing. He wants clear of here now.'

As the Hay Needle's lock hissed shut, so did the station's lock door.

'Must be in a real hurry,' said Sanselle. 'They usually stay and rest ten, twenty hours, anyway.'

Within moments of the closure, there was a scraping thump of sorts followed by a slight vibration that ran through the station. Gerbriik's image appeared between us. The maintenance officer was smiling. 'Captain Adgar was pleased. You'll get the bonus he recommended, but you still have to store all that cargo. The station's partly out of balance.'

'Yes, ser,' we said together, keeping our faces expressionless.

At that moment, I could sense Sanselle's thoughts, or closely enough, and mine were the same. Nothing ever satisfies Gerbriik.

Was that why he was maintenance officer? Were the demons using his continual dissatisfaction to assure better maintenance on a distant orbit station that had to be more costly to maintain? Was every person judged and fitted for such a slot in demon society? But had it been any different in Dorcha? Had the Shraddans come after me because I had become a demon or because demons were different and did not fit the pattern?

That question echoed something that Cerrelle had asked, and not for the first or the last time. Had I feared her honesty and perception because I needed it and didn't want to accept that? I shivered within myself, then glided along the composite gray walls toward the masses of cargo that remained to be stored for station use or transshipment.

31

Be not afraid of the universe.

One day on OE Station was much like another, and time passed, sometimes quickly, sometimes not so quickly. One one of those slow days, Gerbriik's silver-clad image appeared in the canteen, where I was finishing my break meal. 'Tyndel. Meet Fersonne by passenger lock three - gauntlets and breather hoods. Now!'

'Yes, ser.'

The image vanished like brume under a summer sun. I gulped down the last of the nanite-produced, fresh-tasting orange juice. Gerbriik's tone had been more than enough. I hurried along the corridor and down the number three transverse, but both Fersonne and Gerbriik were waiting by the time I glided to a halt outside the number three upper lock.

Fersonne had brought the small sled, and it was loaded with gear. Some of it was initially unfamiliar, and I had to search my nanite information bases. The green-striped drum with the flexible nozzle was a sealant system. It created a nanite barrier against atmospheric loss. The yellow-striped canister was a composite-bonding unit.

I frowned. Shouldn't we have had the equipment by the cargo lock?

'We have a problem,' Gerbriik's long face was drawn - the first time I'd seen any sign of concern. 'You two wait here. The Costigan ran too close to a singularity. Pilot managed to bring it in most of the way ... before they lost power. We're using the bugs to drag it close enough to lock. The ship's overstressed - the bugs have been pumping air into it, and the outside crew is hooking up a direct feed. It's still leaking. So as soon as the crew's out, you two need to start patching. Tyndel, you'll be spraying anything that looks like a stress fracture in the hull.' Gerbriik gave me a grim smile. 'Better call up everything you got briefed on. You won't have much time.' He said nothing to Fersonne. He must have talked to her before I had reached the passenger lock deck, just above the cargo locks.

A dull clunk shivered through the corridor, and Gerbriik twisted away from us, his eyes glazing over as he linked into the commnet on levels not open to either Fersonne or me.

A medtech I didn't know appeared beside Gerbriik. Tvlaalorn will be here in a minute or so, ser.'

Gerbriik offered the smallest of nods, eyes still half glazed. He barely nodded when the second medtech arrived. His eyes did snap open when a blond man in blue appeared. 'Commander Maestros.'

I'd heard the name but had never seen the station commander in person.

Maestros was tall and lanky, almost wispy, but his eyes were as hard as any demon's. 'Officer Gerbriik. Your crews did a good job of wrestling her in.' The station commander's round and unlined face looked more drawn than did Gerbriik's.

'Thank you, ser.'

'I'll go aboard with the medtechs. Your crew ready to seal her?' Maestros's eyes examined me and then Fersonne before glazing over into the haze of someone on a commnet.

'Yes, ser.'

The only sounds were those of breathing and the hissing of the corridor ventilators. Both Gerbriik and Commander Maestros continued to wear the glazed look of men whose thoughts - and concentration - were elsewhere.

Holding our breather hoods, Fersonne and I waited outside the front lock of the needle ship. Gerbriik floated before us, the two medtechs beside him. My thoughts were on the sealer system: nanite-to-nanite shuttle bond... effective for eight standard hours ... maximum coverage per unit... five thousand square meters ... At that thought, my eyes went to the sled. There were four of the green-striped units on the left side.

'There aren't enough for the whole ship,' Fersonne said. 'That's why you spray where you think there are leaks. I'll try to bond the big gaps. Need to work fast. Cold in there.'

Commander Maestros loosely, absently, grasped the holdbar beside the lock as the inner door slowly opened. A blast of chill air burst from the opening, followed by a cascade of ice flakes that billowed out across us as the station's atmosphere boiled across the exposed sections of the Costigan's outer, mostly retracted lock. That breath of winter reminded me of Lyncol, even of Cerrelle, but only for a moment.

The man in blue and the medtech were first through the lock. When they vanished into the darkness of the ship's lock, Gerbriik turned in midair to face us. 'There's more damage than we thought to the ship. You'll have to work fast if we're to save the cargo.'

'What's the cargo?' asked Fersonne.

'Gene templates, nanite modules for planoforming - the usual.' Gerbriik shrugged. 'Could be some datablocs for the station.' His attention went back to the lock, where mist still churned around the edges. The warmer station air blew past us into the ship, and the ice clouds swirled around the inside of the ship's lock.

I shivered and pulled on the gray gauntlets. Fersonne already had hers on, and she was doing something with the composite bonder. I eased myself over to the first green-striped sealing unit.

The medtech or Commander Maestros or both were returning. The voices were loud, but the words were indistinct -and then very clear.

'Music! The music—'

'It's quiet here. Take it easy ...'

Fersonne and I looked at each other, then back to the lock, where the medtech and the commander floated out a figure - a man - strapped to a stretcher of some sort.

'The music! So loud - think! Think!' The man's head jerked from side to side in the restraints despite the calming and quiet words from the medtech. What had been the whites of his eyes showed a yellow-green cast, a color clear enough from the three or four meters between us and the stretcher.

'That has to be the second officer, or the third,' murmured Gerbriik. 'Captain Adara is a woman.'

Behind the commander came the second medtech with another stretcher, one bearing a dark-haired and pale-faced woman.

'That's Adara,' Gerbriik supplied. 'Good jockey.'

Good jockey or not, she was unconscious, and two nanopaks - each barely fist-sized - rested against her neck.

'Music! Too loud ... too loud!' the second officer yelled from behind us as he was floated toward the transverse shaft.

Gerbriik waited, and so did we.

Singularities? Closeness to a singularity had left the second raving and the captain unconscious? My own nanite demons responded. The disruptions caused by a singularity's discontinuity follow the path of least resistance along pre-established transits of the supra-wave-vector space. Pre-established? Event horizons already existing constitute pre-establishment. The overspace trajectory of a supra-wave-vector craft exists simultaneously with entry and also constitutes pre-estabUshment.

Not even all the words made sense. Their meaning was beyond me, except I had this feeling that it meant somehow singularities were drawn to needle ships, or worse, the other way around.

The first medtech returned with an empty stretcher and eased himself back inside the Costigan. Station air kept whistling past us and into the leaking ship. The temperature in the passenger lock area continued to drop.

'Go!' snapped Gerbriik. 'Survivors are clear.'

Before I had my breather hood down and the first sealer to the edge of the ship lock, the medtech shoved out the covered stretcher. Someone hadn't survived.

'Start forward with the cockpit, Tyndel,' Gerbriik ordered. 'Get a fast coat on everything. Then the passenger cabin. Take the rear hatch down and get the cargo holds. I'm putting the other sealer units inside the Costigan, just inside the ship lock. We're sealing the lock again. You'll need to hurry.'

Sealing the lock? I suppose they had to in order to keep from losing too much air, but that didn't reassure me much.

Gerbriik made it sound matter-of-fact. Sealing the Costigan wasn't quite that easy.

Clouds of swirling ice crystals rained around me from everywhere. Frost coated every surface, and my boots slipped off everything - bulkheads, decks, overheads. The sealer unit was more massive than a SARM, and the reaction from the nanites streaming from the nozzle kept pushing me back from where I needed to go.

It was cold. Before I managed the ten meters from lock to cockpit, I was shivering, despite the heating elements in the heavy gray coveralls. Frost began to fringe the breather hood's faceplate, and gusts of departing atmosphere tugged at me. The coveralls began to bulge, and that meant the air pressure in the Costigan was continuing to drop.

Then the pressure from the nozzle wasn't pushing me back. I looked down and could see a red light flashing. Empty - unit is empty. Back to the lock for a second sealer. I couldn't feel much in the way of air currents in the passenger section. So I gave the place a quick treatment and headed down to the cargo area.

Cold! The cargo hold made the upper level feel like Deep Lake in full summer, and the coveralls stiffened so much it was hard to move, even in null gee. My gauntlets were freezing and stiff, too, as though they had turned to the cold-hammered bronze of a statue to be set on a pedestal along the riverway in Henvor.

Fersonne was already in the cargo hold, had been all along. She was using the bonding unit to weld and fill a stress fracture that had to have been more than twenty meters long when she started. She was working on the last few meters. Back from the five centimeter-wide fracture itself, a line of frost had built up. The area closest to the fracture was clean, sucked clean by escaping atmosphere.

I started spraying where it felt coldest and kept spraying until that unit was done. I went for another, and finished it. I was working on the fourth unit when Gerbriik's voice broke through my shivers. My fingers and hands trembled inside the gauntlets.

'You've got the Costigan sealed. Get back to the ship's forward passenger lock, but stand back. We're going to open it and get you out.'

'Yes, ser.' We bolted up from the hold and waited by the Costigan'?, inner lock door. I stamped my feet to keep them from freezing.

More cold mist and ice crystals erupted once the cargo lock opened, but the gusting winds that had been there before were absent.

'Get back into the corridor,' ordered the maintenance officer.

We did, taking off the damp and frigid breather hoods -coated with frost and ice. Then Fersonne and I hung in midair outside the cargo lock, somehow sweating and shivering at the same time.

Gerbriik's image appeared between us. 'Good job. Commander Maestros wasn't sure you could seal that much damage, but you did. You two take off the rest of the shift. Get some rest. Sanselle and I will unload the cargo before the seals go.'

'Yes, ser.'

Yes, ser.' Fersonne's voice was as ragged as mine.

I wanted to grin - for a moment. If Gerbriik and Sanselle were unloading cargo, then we had to have done a good job.

'This cargo had some unique biologicals,' the maintenance officer added. 'Could have taken years to get them replaced. Commander Ferstil on Alaric will be very pleased. Your telltales say you need to get warm and eat. Do it.' Gerbriik's image vanished.

Neither Fersonne nor I said much as we pulled ourselves back through the shaft to mid-deck three. We found ourselves outside our quarters and canteen, still shivering.

The heaters in the gauntlets had begun to warm my hands, if slowly, too slowly.

'Tyndel?' Fersonne's voice was gentle, as gentle as I had ever heard it.

'Yes?'

'Know there must be someone else ... out there. Seen your face at times.' She swallowed, then moistened her lips. 'I won't ask.'

I waited.

You see something like that. The Costigan, I mean. You do something like that... gets you cold all over.'

'I know.' I thought I understood. I was cold all over inside, as well. I eased toward the brown-eyed woman and put my arms around her, just held her, and let her hold me, taking comfort in being close to another soul, and being alive.

That closeness, so welcome, led to a greater joining in her sleeping net, more of a full-body bare-skinned embrace than mere relief or carnality - lust limited partly by physics and weightlessness and by the need to comfort and be comforted ... and by old and hidden memories of a darker-haired woman who had also loved me and given to me.

In time ... we eased apart.

Fersonne looked at me, the brown eyes deep, not asking for more, not rejecting - just there. 'Thank you.'

I embraced her again, clinging to her, to her acceptance of the now, to the moment she represented, for both that moment and the understanding that, while the past could not be changed, or eliminated ... I had to take another step forward into the present.

In a sense, she was almost Dzin-like, while I had been required to learn Dzin.

After another long interval, she brushed back my hair. A gentle but warm smile preceded her words. 'We'd better eat'

We did. More than I would have thought possible.

32

To see what is, make your mind like a mirror, to reflect what is as it is, not as your heart or mind would see it.

On another slow day, after we'd serviced an inbound needle ship the day before, I had just refilled the linen storage closet on the uppermost level when the man and the woman in shimmering blue singlesuits glided and floated awkwardly toward the guest quarters. Blue usually meant senior controllers -those who made the decisions that guided Rykashan society. I had never met anyone in blue, only those in green - like Cerrelle - or silver, like Gerbriik. Or the medical types, in red.

I slipped to one side of the corridor as they neared, paying no attention to me.

'I hate null gee, Ermien.' The woman was short-haired and dark-skinned, and her voice was firm but not loud. 'You'd think someday we could master artificial gravity.'

'Not in our time, I think. Not while the physicists still come up with inconsistent and anomalous measurements for gravitons.'

'That's only in the engee fields.'

'Where else would you better measure them?'

'Engee doesn't follow the rules for anything else. Why would graviton measurements conform there? Or bosunic condensate density?'

My internal demons informed me about gravitons - particles defined as the quantum of a gravitational field with a postulated, if unmeasured, rest mass and charge of zero and a spin of two. I understood every individual word of the definition, and the definition not at all. I had no idea what bosunic condensate density might be, and even my nanite-provided knowledge base was silent or empty on that definition or set of definitions. Again, I wondered about engee ... the mysterious ... something ... that wasn't in the databases, or not the ones I could access.

'Like it or not, we're here,' the man replied. 'Someone has to oversee and evaluate the project's results.'

'Should we really have expended all the resources necessary to reach the stars? Do we need all these planets? Have you ever thought that some other intelligent organic life might evolve there? Ever?'

'That's why you're here,' he pointed out, scraping a knee on the side of the corridor and rebounding awkwardly, stopping himself with a hand - a dangerous move in null gee. 'To raise and answer questions like that. We're only talking about a dozen worlds, or less, and all are Vee-type - highly unlikely to develop any kind of life for billions of years, if ever.' The man laughed. 'We won't be around then, one way or another.'

Their voices faded, even from my enhanced hearing. Neither had so much as looked in my direction, but their words in passing had raised more than a few questions. Where exactly was engee ... where the rules of physics didn't exactly apply? How could they casually raise the types of questions I had raised and not be sent off to some outplanet station?

I half laughed, realizing as the question crossed my mind that we were all on the same outplanet station in the middle of nowhere - except they could leave and I couldn't, not for another eight years or so. The only gravity I'd feel would be in the exercise centrifuge, and in my dreams.

I looked down at the half-unloaded small sled, then shrugged. Where would I go? Back to the stone demon traps of Dorcha? Or the faithfully fanatic Shraddans of Hybra? I smiled wryly at my own rhetorical questions.

33

Life is merely a succession of appearances.

Gerbriik gave me a curt nod as I finished reassembling the SARM. 'You do that well, Dzin master. You could have been a maintenance officer ... or a needle jockey. If you'd shown more common sense. You still could be. You wouldn't have to sweat and grub between decks. You wouldn't have to fight inertia unloading needle ship cargos.'

Yes, ser. That's probably true, ser.' Infrequent as it was, unloading needle ships was more interesting than such duties as pushing SARMs between decks or carting supplies from one point in the station to another or accomplishing low-level repairs here and there. Most years, according to the station records, OE Station saw about one interstellar ship every third or fourth objective station month, if that.

'At the very least, you could be a junior engineer out there putting the Costigan back together.'

I'd seen the engineering types using lock number one, but I didn't feel like responding directly. I nodded.

'Or reloading stuff to the local vacuum boats.' Gerbriik offered a wide, yet sneering, smile.

'Yes, ser.' I replaced the last of the SARM cover clips, then eased the unit toward its stowage bin. Far more frequent were the local ships from planets two and three - Alaric and Conan, respectively, named after some ancient figures no one had ever heard of - there wasn't even anything in the station's library base on the origin of the names.

'If every mite you knew is going to die before you finish your duty here, you might as well be doing something that challenges you, Dzin master. Or do you intend to delude yourself for the rest of a long and boring life?'

I ignored Gerbriik's overstating of the time dilation. 'Ser, I have not found life boring.' Hard, unfair, difficult, but not boring. At times, it was hard to believe that close to four years had elapsed on earth, or would have if I had started back at that moment. Overspace detoured the limits of real-space, near-light travel, but there was still a time dilation effect. There was also the space-time curve effect. While I hadn't bothered to explore all of that mass of data, one of the last that Andra had pumped into me in Runswi, I understood the general effect without much effort. Time was relative to mass and the curvature and the closeness of overspace to real space. That meant objective time flows differed slightly in different parts of the Galaxy or universe. Not a lot in most locales, but measurably. Black holes, singularities - there time differed much more.

Like much of what the Rykashans thought important, I wasn't sure it was. To get from one part of the Galaxy to another required travel. The dilation from needle ship travel was so much greater than other factors that locale time flow differences were insignificant by comparison.

'For a Rykashan, you're young. The boredom will come.'

He laughed mockingly. 'Perhaps your outmoded Dzin will keep it at bay.'

Dzin outmoded? What did nanotechnology have to do with outmoding Dzin? Or Toze? Or any belief system? Except Dzin wasn't a belief system. I frowned, realizing that was what I'd been trying to put into words. There was a difference between using Dzin and accepting the Dorchan history of Dzin.

'Tyndel ... don't you understand yet?' Gerbriik's voice had turned softer. 'Dzin was designed to restrict human aspirations and human accomplishments. That's why it's outmoded. It's a mite crutch, and you're not a mite anymore.'

'No.' Even Gerbriik didn't understand. Dzin wasn't the problem. It was a tool, and could be misused, like any tool. The problem was that I wasn't a demon in heart and spirit, either, and I didn't know what I was except that being a demon in body had taken everything I had been. I could recall two children kissing in the shadow of the cataclypt of Dyanar, walking the ancient stones of Henvor, holding Foerga in her workshop beside the heat of her furnace, even trimming the hedge by the walk in the brume of late fall. All that had been taken, and I had no dreams. Then, did any demon? If so, what?

'Why don't you study the schematics for the sleds?' suggested the maintenance officer. 'When Fersonne leaves, you'll have to help Sanselle with them.' He turned fluidly in midair and glided back to his console.

When Fersonne leaves ... Logic told me she would. Dzin told me I'd accept it. And I felt that, even if it were years, she'd be gone before I ever really knew her.

34

The ancients sought their gods in temples, in worldly goods, in the technology they created, and lastly in the stars. They found neither gods nor enlightenment in the materials of the universe, nor will any wise soul find aught in such but the reflection of sorrow.

Fersonne pointed to the oversized coverall, helmet, and boots floating beside her in the maintenance bay. Behind them were a green cylinder and some other items I couldn't see behind the silvered and bulky coverall. 'This is the outside suit. It's like a breather and coveralls, but heavier,' Fersonne said. 'We don't even try to have someone use it until they've been on station more than a year.'

'Because of the null grav adaptation?'

'Mostly.' Fersonne's smile was warm. 'Gerbriik also likes to see how maintenance types do. Never did put Nathum in one.'

'Would have lost him and the suit,' added Gerbriik from the other side of the maintenance bay. 'Too much explaining, then, and too much work for the rest of us.'

I had to wonder why the suits were necessary. Theoretically, from what I had studied, a nanite-based unit could have held atmospheric pressure around anyone without the suit at all.

'You're wondering why you need the suit?' asked Gerbriik. Yes, ser.'

'Heat. Mostly. Also, the suit form confines the nanites to a barrier area. That reduces the power needs. Besides, how could you do anything out there?'

The answer to that question took me a moment - before I realized what the long-faced maintenance officer meant, and I flushed, realizing once again I'd already known the answer from my experience with the Costigan. Nanites could hold an atmospheric field around someone, but they wouldn't do much for heat loss - especially if you had to use tools or touch something. I'd breathe for about as long as it took to take the few breaths before I froze solid.

You need to try this on, to see if it fits.' Fersonne eased the suit forward. It shimmered more than coveralls, was heavier, bulkier, and, once I had it on, considerably hotter, even without pulling on the gauntlets attached to the sleeves, the headpiece, or the boots - overlarge and puffy.

'Except for now, you don't put this on until you're ready to go out,' Fersonne said. 'Try on the headpiece, then take it off for now.'

'Heat retention?'

She nodded. You'll get cold anyway, chill enough after a time to freeze a mite.'

I returned her nod and reached for the headpiece - more like a soft helmet, not like the more free-form and clinging breather hood, and the faceplate was almost wraparound. I could feel the heat building up and the sweat starting to flow. I removed the helmet and suit quickly.

'See? It's not terribly heavy.' She brought forward two other items. 'Here's the rebreather tank and a reaction pistol.'

The rebreather tank was small, a cylinder not more than fifty centimeters long nor fifteen in diameter. The reaction pistol - hand-held, free space, gas-powered propulsion device - had a bulky grip and a barrel that tapered to a fine nozzled point. Like so many Rykashan devices, its dull gray finish appeared antique and weathered.

'You'll have a broomstick outside, but the reaction pistol is for emergencies - if everything goes wrong.'

'If it does,' commented Gerbriik, 'the pistol probably won't do much good. But there's a chance.'

I understood. Anyone who made enough mistakes to need the pistol probably would be so flustered that he couldn't use it soon enough or correctly enough.

'Unless your problem is caused by a mechanical failure,' added Fersonne. 'They don't happen often.'

'Have you ever had one?' I waited for her reaction.

'No. Sanselle did once.'

My eyes studied the equipment and the suit. Bulky as it was, it scarcely seemed enough to protect one against the chill of space, not after I'd seen the thick composite hulls of the needle ships.

'Take him out,' Gerbriik said. 'Give him the long tour.' His eyes went to me. 'Pay attention. You owe that to Fersonne, even if you don't care that much about yourself.'

I had no doubts he knew we took comfort from each other, but beyond that, as well, he was right. 'Yes, ser.'

Fersonne dragged out her own suit from somewhere, circled it with a net, and waited while I found a net to hold all my newly acquired equipment. Then she inventoried mine again before we took one of the transverse shafts all the way down to the cargo level. The equipment-filled net kept bumping me all the way down. Non-rigid things always had a tendency to oscillate in null grav. Even though I'd adapted, I missed gravity. Why hadn't the demons ever mastered gravity control?

Because it would effectively require the creation of a gravitional geon, and translation of other energies into those which affect, create, or modify gravitons ... while theoretically possible, practical translations have never been successful ... I wasn't sure what all that meant, and pushed it aside as I followed Fersonne.

She led me to the personnel lock between cargo locks two and three, tabbing the entrance plate.

'There are locks on the upper levels,' I noted as the composite door retracted into the side wall of the cargo corridor. 'We could take the passenger locks.'

'All ESAs are from the lower locks, except in emergencies.'

My autonomous database called up the fact that there were no quarters on the lowest level - and automatic seals on the shafts, and that the lower levels were more heavily braced, even the passenger level right above the cargo corridors.

The lock was like a cargo lock, but smaller. Grayish brown composite bulkheads melded into composite decks and overheads, the simple right angles where they met still fusing together in a way that left the eye wondering. Was it the identical coloring? The even and indirect lighting from the glow strips?

Broomsticks - five of them - were clipped in brackets on the left wall, each holder about a meter from the one beside it. They appeared as little more than a hard composite seat and a flat panel before the seat, both mounted upon a long tube. According to my briefings, they were effectively nanite-enhanced, gas-propelled, low-power rockets.

'Look at the panel.' Fersonne gestured. 'See the big rheostat thing. That's the power control. When the red stud is out, you get power from the back. Push it in, and you get power from the front.'

I waited.

'There's a spring in the tubing. If you're moving too fast, let the tube hit the hull' She offered a crooked smile. 'It's designed to absorb that kind of inertia. Your hands aren't.' After a pause, she added, 'We'll go over that again when we're outside.'

After I had everything on but the soft helmet, Fersonne checked over all the seals - between boots and suit, and suit and gauntlets. 'The nanites can maintain suit pressure without perfect seals, but there's no point in making them work harder.'

Work harder? Fersonne talked as though the nanites had intelligence. Could micron-level constructs manifest intelligence? Then, we were like nanites compared to the suns that were stars. Poor comparison ... But was it?

For a moment, that half-forgotten, half-familiar cascade of golden-red flames arced across my vision, flame arcs against a spangled darkness edging the fires, then blurring the brown-gray bulkheads before the momentary vision vanished.

Fersonne clipped a small reel to my equipment belt. 'Safety tether. A quarter kilo of monomer. First thing you do outside the lock is clip on, before you let go of anything.'

Like all demons, she didn't repeat the warning, but donned her helmet. She checked mine after I put it on, then eased two of the broomsticks from their racks. They also had tethers, and I found myself tethered to a broomstick, holding on to a safety bar as the inner lock door closed. Ice crystals swirled around us, then vanished. The indirect light from the glow strips lost its diffusion, and, while I could see the lit panels, the only illumination they cast was on the deck itself, giving it a barred appearance, except where broken by my shadow or Fersonne's.

Then the outer door opened, and I followed Fersonne's example, hand-over-handing my way through the open outer lock door. In the darkness outside, I clipped the end of the tether to the half-circular ring protruding from the station hull beside the door.

'Good,' murmured Fersonne. 'Get on the broomstick.' Her words relayed through the helmet were soft, yet close enough that her lips might have been touching my ears. My skin tingled as though it recalled when her lips had touched my ears.

I managed to slide onto the broomstick by concentrating on moving as little as possible and holding on to the tether ring with one hand. Finally, sitting on the seat of the broomstick, I looked out away from the station to the endless spangled points of light that were the first stars I had seen since leaving Runswi. I found myself taking a long breath and holding it, my eyes on those points of brightness and at the depth of the blackness between each.

'Above' us and a kilo away was the hull of the Costigan, where lights flitted intermittently, presumably from the engineers finishing up the de facto refit of the overstressed needle ship.

After a time, Fersonne spoke. 'You all right, Tyndel?'

'I was looking at the Costigan ... and the stars.'

'Takes your breath away.' After a moment, she added, Your broomstick is slaved to mine, until you get the knack of riding it. I'll show you what I mean. I'll unslave it for a bit.'

An amber light on the panel before me winked out.

All right. Give the broom the tiniest bit of thrust... just move the dial a bit, then move it back.'

I did and could feel the broomstick move ever so slightly under me - or try to move away from me, and I began to drift away from Fersonne.

'Now ... remember the red button?'

'Yes.'

'That's reverse thrust. You push that in until it stops, and the dial controls the thrust from the front of the broomstick instead of the back.'

Very simple - and very easy to get in trouble. I could feel that even more hanging in the darkness beneath the wall that was the station.

'Try to stop yourself.'

I punched the red button, then repeated the movement with the dial. I could tell I'd overdone it because I found myself headed backward past Fersonne toward the station. Another correction found me moving back away from the station, if at a slower rate. That required a smaller brake. That led to yet another micro puff of gas ...

Despite the chill that seeped in from outside the suit, I was sweating by the time I hung motionless beside the other maintenance tech.

'Not so easy as it looks.' She laughed gently. 'Like a few other things in null gravity.'

I blushed in the privacy of my helmet.

Fersonne did something to the panel in front of her. 'You're slaved back to me now.'

My broomstick's being slaved to hers made me feel helpless rather than relieved. The station loomed over us like a dull dark gray wall, its edges fuzzed where composite met the darkness of space and the pinlights of stars. Logic said that without atmosphere the station should stand out clearly. Logic was wrong.

My fingers began to feel cold, and I flexed them.

'Better show you what you need to see.' Fersonne guided us along the lower level past the three large cargo locks. 'Three cargo locks are all we have, but we could use the personnel locks if we needed them. Or the emergency locks on the upper levels.'

'The locks all look the same, and both locals and needles use the same locks. But the local ships are built differently.'

Their holds were larger, for one thing. I could have ransacked my internal database that still didn't seem fully integrated, though more and more often I was finding I knew things without really knowing where I had obtained the knowledge.

'Gerbriik says it's easier on the station. Local ships are built bigger and not nearly so tough as a needle ship. They need the dampers to protect them. The needle ships are tougher than the station - to survive the Web. So we need the dampers to protect us.'

Every reference to needle ships confirmed my feeling about the dangers involved. I nodded within my helmet.

Fersonne eased the broomsticks 'up' toward the higher levels of the station. I felt like a hummingbird in the dusk and beside the great precipice of Deep Lake, the one that dropped into the depths that held the eels.

Deep Lake ... Foerga ... such a short time ago, even as lives go, and yet so far away. My eyes burned, and I could do nothing, not in an outside suit and a helmet. That distant yet unforgotten loss coupled with guilt to silence me once more, for Fersonne guided her broomstick less than three meters from me, Fersonne, who had also given without demanding. Fersonne, who had suffered more than I knew, who would never have the chance to be a needle jockey or to return to earth except as a submenial. Yet she had given, asking nothing, hoping for human comfort and little else.

I felt as though I had given nothing, demanded without words, accepted without gratitude, and understood giving not at all.

In the silence, in the star-splotched darkness, I swallowed wordlessly, ignoring the cold dampness on my cheeks, the dampness with the bite of forming ice crystals, almost welcoming that bitter chill.

35

There is no 'truth, 'for the very term requires both conformity with physically verifiable reality and adherence to the underlying belief system of the 'truth-seeker.' Belief systems, by definition, place faith in the unknowable above factual verification, while facts stand independent of faith.

I should have been getting some sleep, but I was restless, and turned in my sleeping net, still reading a Rykashan history of the postcollapse period and the building of Rykasha. I didn't know how much to take figuratively and how much as literal truth.

Clunnnk! Someone pounded on my hatch.

I clicked off the small screen, far less satisfying than the honest paper and cloth of a real book - not that I had seen such since I had left Hybra - and turned in the darkness toward the hatch to my cube. Who sought me? If Gerbriik had needed me to help Sanselle and Fersonne unload the needle ship that had been scheduled to dock during my off-swing, he would have used my beltcomm to alert me. His image would have been glowering over my shoulder in the dimness of my cube.

'Yes?'

There was no answer, and I slipped out of the net, half clad, and flicked myself toward the hatch. Thrap! 'I'm coming.'

A half-familiar face appeared as I eased open the hatch. Her hair was red and short, the face and body thin, and the eyes green and as piercing as ever. I blinked, just hanging in space in the open hatch.

'Hello.' Cerrelle's voice was soft.

I just floated there, speechless.

'Aren't you going to welcome me?' she asked.

'Ah ... I wasn't exactly expecting you.'

'You're wondering why you should.'

'I didn't say that...' What could I say?

'I've stepped out of my life for a year to check on you. You were always saying that no one cared. I'm here, Tyndel.' A faint smile, warm but uncertain - or something - appeared and vanished. She had ship boots on, and her foot braced to hold her in place in the corridor, showing a certain competence in null gravity.

You came all this way because you ... why? I didn't think you cared, except to make sure I became a productive member of Rykashan society.' As I finished the words, I wished I hadn't ever uttered them.

'I do care,' Cerrelle said. 'I cared enough to treat you as an adult. I cared enough to tell you what is instead of offering you comfort through falsehoods and inaccuracy. You respected your poor Foerga for her honesty, and you need honesty, and yet you rejected it when I offered it. I cared enough to travel light-years and then some to see how you are faring.' Her lips tightened momentarily.

I could feel the numbness encase me, and I didn't even know why. 'Is it part of your duties as guide?'

Cerrelle's face blanked for a moment, even as she met my eyes, not flinching, not attacking. Somehow, she reminded me of Fersonne, though they looked not at all similar. That bothered me, too. Was I creating partial replicas of Foerga out of all women?

'Would it matter? You wanted Rykasha to care about you. Not me.'

There was something there, something I knew was there but couldn't find.

'I told you that I cared, that it wasn't Rykasha's job to care.' She paused. 'And I'm here. How are you doing?'

'I'm fine.' Why had she come all the way to OE Station? It made no sense ... unless she did care, but no individual could afford that. So ... someone had sent her. I could feel myself tightening inside.

'You've been here a year and a half - personal objective time. Are you willing to try training again? Or are you ready for eight more years on OE Station?'

I knew she wanted me to go back, to accept training as a needle jockey. But I couldn't. Not with a whole society pushing the idea. I just couldn't. I looked at her, trying to be honest. 'I can't.'

Hanging there in the middle of the corridor outside the hatch to my cube, she smiled sadly, a sadness that faded into melancholy, then pity. 'I'll see you in eight years . . .' After a moment, she added, 'You have a lot of thinking to do, Tyndel. I hope you do it. Do you really think that just because you see things as they are that means you have to accept them as unchanging? Or unchangeable?'

She turned and glided down the corridor, never looking back.

I said nothing, half waiting for her to turn. When she didn't but disappeared into the transverse shaft, I finally shut the door, sliding back into my cube, where I floated beside my sleeping net, looking blankly beyond it at the dull composite bulkheads and the even duller deck that seldom felt the force of boots. Why had she come?

I had wanted to follow her down the corridor, but I couldn't. Not so long as I could not accept being a needle jockey. Yet my eyes burned.

How could I believe she didn't care? But why had she asked that last Dzin-like question? Because I was accepting a current reality as an eternal one?

Somewhere, deep inside, I could almost feel a mirror shattering, and I didn't know even what image had been held on the unseen glass. Even though I turned off the dim light and climbed back into the net, I did not sleep. Too many faces floated through the darkness, and the only one I did not recognize was mine.

36

The world is a mirror lit by consciousness: in the darkness it is empty.

Both Fersonne and Sanselle took me on outside orientations twice before I started joining them on outside repair tasks. First, I did simple things - like inspect the station's hull. I understood that nanite-enhanced human vision could see more than all but the best scanners and interpret what was seen better than any AI available. It seemed anachronistic in one way, and in total accord with Dzin in another. That provided me with a rare chuckle, as I considered what Manwarr would have thought to have one of his pupils standing on a dull gray hull in the middle of a field of stars studying the composite with demon-aided eyes.

After the two other techs determined that I wasn't hopeless, I was pressed into service replacing the dampers and cradles on the center cargo lock, the number two lock. That took the three of us - and Gerbriik - nearly a standard week.

I didn't know what Gerbriik had in mind when he next summoned me down to the station's number one cargo lock. Sanselle was waiting, but the maintenance officer wasn't there. Nor was Fersonne. I stepped through the open inner door.

The sandy blonde waited until I was well inside the lock before she spoke. 'Every other station objective year, we resurface the hull. This time, you get to help.' Sanselle grinned, not quite maliciously. She gestured toward the big cylinder webbed to the deck of the number one cargo lock. 'This is one of the outside bonders. We're behind schedule some because the engineers needed both bonders to finish the repairs to the Costigan!

I looked at the dull composite of the cylinder's exterior - more like a small barrel with a snout at one end and an attached seat at the other end. Mounted on the blunt end of the barrel facing the seat was a control panel.

'The skin gets scratched by every stray micrometeor. Some impacts aren't so small. Rebonding makes sure that the only way the station gets destroyed is by something large and swift' Sanselle's thin lips curled away from the even teeth.

All demons had perfect teeth. Mine were as well, though they had not been when I had been the Dzin master of Hybra.

'The outside repair bonders are like SARMs,' she continued. 'The controls are more complex; they're more massive, and you have to anchor them ...'

As she continued the explanation, I wondered why someone couldn't just put the bonders on tracks or channels and let them circle the station endlessly. Instead of asking, I searched all the knowledge, useless and otherwise, that had been poured into me since I had left Dorcha. The answer was simple enough. The bonders - undirected - would fill every crack they perceived, including lock edges and joints for exterior mounted equipment. The sensors and AI capabilities necessary to direct the bonders were too costly and too sensitive to transport by needle ships except with special handling and packing. In short, we were far cheaper.

I had to shake my head at that. I could repay my debts to demon society by working fifteen years in high-level menial labor - a repayment rate nearly three times or more the norm from what I could calculate. And I was cheaper than the transport of mid-level AI equipment and sensors, or the kind that could operate in vacuum.

'... because of the reaction force of the bonding, what we do is weld a track in place on the surface and run the bonder along the track. First, we'll weld three lines of track onto the station's hull. Then you run the bonder down the first. While you're running the bonder, I'll lay out the fourth and fifth tracks. Then I'll shift the bonder to the second track, and you weld down the fourth and fifth tracks.'

I'd read about tracks and the ancient steam-powered locomotives, but those weren't what Sanselle had in mind.

'Here's the track we'll start with.' The sandy-haired blonde pointed to the pallet webbed down on the far side of the bonder. Each section of track was a length of gray composite three meters long with the cross section of an inverted trapezoid.

I wondered how the track was welded.

The nanite-based composite spot-welder she thrust at me must have massed twenty kilograms. 'I lay out the track. You weld it.'

Instead of asking how, I called up the knowledge from the briefing spray. Theoretically, it was simple: Put the not-quite-right-angled welding head adjacent to hull and track and press the welding stud.

In practice it proved more difficult.

Sanselle tacked each rail in place with a nanite-based space glue, and each was set parallel to the first, exactly point seven-five meters between rail edges, as measured by the marking laser she employed. She moved easily along the tether line stretched between two rings, using the line as a brace.

I still didn't move that easily. The outside gauntlets were bulkier than the inside ones, and my fingers didn't feel quite where I thought they were. Then I had to line up the welding head mostly by feel, and I was a visual person. The stickpads on the outside boots didn't grip unless I set them down squarely, and I'd never walked quite squarely.

I tried to ease the welding head down in place, ever so gently, but my boot slipped, and so did the spot-welder. Cold and salty sweat ran into my eyes. Some felt like it had pooled in my boots, and I sweated and shivered simultaneously.

'Are you still on that first section, Tyndel?'

I was still on the first spot-weld of the first section. The track wanted to bend up from the hull because the glue didn't hold much once I banged the track with the welder. When I pressed the stud, the energy from the welding head wanted to push me away from the track and the hull, despite the pads of the boots and the tether line.

Just short of halfway through the shift, I had managed to weld down the first line of composite track - all of eighteen meters - six segments. I got a second line down in a third of that time.

'Let's get the bonder. You can run it while I weld.' Sanselle's orders were half amused, half disgusted. 'It's getting faster.'

'I'm freezing.'

'How do we get this up when we're done?' I pulled myself along the tether line after her and toward the number one cargo lock, one hand on the spot-welder.

'We don't. The machine fuses it into the hull. It's part of the composite feedstock.'

Sanselle guided the bonder out of the lock, and I pulled myself back along the tether, wondering why I'd bothered, feeling dwarfed by the bulk of the bonder and minimized by Sanselle's crisp expertise. After she settled the bonder in place on the ridge of composite, she took the spot-welder from me.

'Watch. You just strap in and follow the monitors. This one on the top right is for composite supplies in the bins. The track only supplies about a third of what's used. This is available power ...'

I sat in the control seat and watched as the bonder vibrated along its predestined way. The hard work was welding the track. The bonding operator really just sat there and watched to see that nothing went wrong. Riding the bonder was easier, but it was colder, far colder, and I went back to welding another section of track after the bonder finished smoothing and flattening track and composite into the hull along the first less-than-meter-wide strip of hull, a strip but fractionally smoother than the untouched hull on either side.

We alternated once again, and after four standard hours my coveralls were filled with cold clammy sweat, despite the best efforts of the scavenger nanites, and the sweat that had pooled in my boots and extremities had begun to turn to ice.

'It's time for a break,' Sanselle announced. 'Move the bonder down to the end of this run. We'll ease it over and tie it down on the next section of track.'

She watched as I sat and monitored the bonder. It lumbered and vibrated the last half meter of track, then hung on tethers above the hull after bonding the last centimeters of composite track. We switched places, and she guided it onto the next section of track, where we added tie-downs. Then we pulled ourselves along the tethers and back to the open number one cargo lock, standing there and shivering as the air filled the space and ice crystals swirled around us.

The cargo locks took longer to warm up than passenger locks, and more ice crystals formed. I was shuddering, rather than shivering, by the time we had our soft helmets off and floated out of the lock and into the lower corridor.

'Everything comes off, Tyndel. Send it all through the cleaning unit and put on fresh stuff before you eat or shower. You'll need it dry and clean after the next shift.'

I wondered if I'd survive the next shift.

The null grav shower was a cylindrical tube with water jets all around. The nanites scavenged the water after it bounced off skin or walls. Usually I didn't care much for the steamy mist, but after a shift in an outside suit, this mist was more than welcome.

My sandy-haired coworker and supervisor was already eating when I reached the canteen.

I glanced at the dish before her, the food trapped under the shield that was transparent to the null grav fork. Then I sniffed. Coriander, saffron ... curry? 'That's a Dhurr dish.'

'My mother was Dhurr. Always liked food with taste.'

I nodded, my mind trying to grasp the idea that there were Dhurr demons. 'Did she come from Dhurra?'

'No. Great-grandmother did. She just walked across the border and announced she was tired of being a Dhurr and wanted to be a demon.' Sanselle laughed. 'She tells the story to anyone who will listen - when she bothers to stop working.'

I had to force a swallow after the casual references to someone three generations older who was still active. My mind accepted the idea; my emotions and conditioning didn't. 'What... who does she look like?'

'My cousin Eldroth says we could be sisters. Great-grandmother and I look more alike than Ellsinne and I do.' Sanselle laughed. 'Once she wore a festival dress - back from the old traditions - and when Isjant came to pick me up, he thought she was me and began to flirt with her. She still jests about that. She'll make some comment about young Isjant within minutes after I come home.'

Sanselle had a home of sorts.

'How did you get here?'

'I chose it. I'm lazy. I could spend fifty years paying my debts to Rykasha for the next three centuries - or I could spend ten. My debts are high.' Sanselle smiled. 'That's the first personal thing you've asked.'

Had I been that cool? 'Adjusting to demon ... Rykashan ... life has been hard.'

'Fersonne said you were a Dzin master.'

'I was a Dzin-trained teacher. I hoped I'd get to be a master.' After another bite of the hot Dorchan riced shrimp, I added, 'Matters didn't work out that way.'

'They never do.' She frowned. 'I didn't think I'd be back here.'

'Back here?'

'This is my second time. I do free rock climbing. Most climbers don't make three centuries.'

I managed not to swallow as I considered to what lengths the Rykashans had gone in enshrining athanasia. 'You don't sound like you want to last three centuries.'

'I don't want to live hoarding my life. Do you?'

Hoarding my life? Was that what I'd been doing? Or denying it?

'Oh ... they always talk about how the forebearers sacrificed to create what we enjoy, but they didn't hide in dwellings or avoid the stars.' After a pause, she added, 'I like working the outside better than inside the station. It's another way to live, but it is living.'

I sipped the last tea from the squeeze hot bottle and asked, 'Is it always like this? The hull rebonding?'

'We started with the easy sections. Wait till you have to weld track around the cargo locks. Or the upper emergency locks.'

I nodded solemnly, but my thoughts remained on the sacrifices of the forebearers - and another sacrifice, one far more personal and closer.

'Do this for a tour on a station,' Sanselle muttered, 'and it's near as dangerous as being a Web jockey. But you don't get the pay or the perks. Or the company.' She slipped the sticktites and pushed away from the canteen table. 'I've got another shift. You've got two.'

I followed her down to the number one lock and the rebonding that awaited us both, idly considering how much easier the job would have been with any sort of gravity.

Amazing how what you didn't have kept coming to mind.

37

When you seek a cause, you have already created a result.

I was back on the top level of the station, hurriedly replacing the ballast for one of the glow strips outside the guest quarters. Glow strips lasted for years, but the one I was replacing had chosen to gutter out just as a needle ship with unexpected passengers had popped out of overspace and sent a comm announcing its arrival.

Gerbriik's image appeared beside me. 'As soon as you finish, head down to cargo lock three. The Reichmann has more cargo to transship.'

I eased the edge louver back in place, eased the old ballast into the flap pocket of the tool pack, and glided down the corridor to the lowest level. Sanselle had the sled out when I got there, but the lock door was closed. The Reichmann hadn't yet docked.

'Took you a bit,' she commented from beside the cargo sled.

'Fixing a glow strip on the upper level. For our passengers.'

Gerbriik's image appeared. 'The captain's about to blow the lock. You're to unload all the cargo that has a violet lumntag on it. Nothing else to begin with. Then take that sled down to lock one and secure it there. Use one of the other sleds for the rest of the cargo - it goes in the transshipment bay.'

'Yes, ser.'

Sanselle nodded, and we waited as the lock door opened and the scaturient ice crystals billowed out and around us in their transitory glory. Two figures in green with silver bands across their sleeves were in the cargo hold, watching as we surveyed the stowage before beginning the muscular work of moving it all up the shaft from the hold and through two locks onto the sled.

After an initial silence, the two began to talk, inaudibly at first, their voices slowly rising, perhaps to be heard over our efforts.

'... still think there's something wrong on Thesalle?' The angular woman glanced toward me. 'Be careful with the green-striped case.'

I nodded without looking directly at her and eased the case toward the sled, netting it high on the side frame. I wouldn't secure it firmly until all the other lumntagged cargo was off-loaded.

'There's not a thing in all the data. This is the fourth full survey, and not a one has shown anything,' replied the round-faced man in green. 'T-type planets are so rare that everyone rushed the surveys, and Thesalle is pretty, not like Actean or Halcyon Four.'

'Pretty, yes,' agreed the angular woman. 'The holos don't show everything ... couldn't believe what—was like. Vegetation ... that green ... everywhere, and I felt like I was moving in a dream.'

'Nembret says that the air has an unidentified hallucinogen.' Those words came from another man in green. 'Here! I'm taking this with me.' He looked at Sanselle, who was reentering the ship's hold, and gestured toward the oblong container.

'If you would let me scan the tag number ...' Sanselle's voice was polite.

'Of course.' He eased the meter-long container past the half-webbed cargo cube I'd been working to sort through.

Sanselle scanned the tag, and he floated awkwardly back into the main section of the Reichmann, leaving the other two.

'... could be some inroads by engee ... on the same side of the Arm.'

That was yet another reference to engee ... but I still had no idea to what the term referred. There was nothing anywhere in all the nanite-loaded information I had absorbed, nor in the station's data banks.

'Who cares? We've got to recheck Alaric ... something about polar ammonia dispersion reinforcing the greenhouse effect. Qualcon's worried about an imbalance ...'

I muscled the last lumntagged crate onto Sanselle's cargo sled, then began to web everything in place, strapping the green-striped case on the top.

'You get the other sled,' she suggested.

So I did, and I had it locked in place before she returned.

'Not bad, Tyndel.'

'I learn.'

Only the Reichmann's third stayed around to watch us unload and stow the remainder of the cargo. She was angular in a way that reminded me of Cerrelle. Her eyes were muddy brown, not the deep blue of Foerga's or the piercing green of Cerrelle's or the honest full brown of Fersonne's.

Neither Sanselle nor I spoke much. In ways I did not try to analyze, the presence of the officials in green had damped our normal interest in unloading. We wanted to get the job done and return to other duties.

'That's it,' the third finally said. 'We'll close up.'

We nodded.

Then we had to unload the sled in the transshipment bay. It was easier without anyone looking over our shoulders, although we both knew that Gerbriik monitored us periodically. He didn't trust anyone. That was why he was maintenance officer - and why he'd never be more.

Afterward, when we got to the canteen, I stuck myself to the seat and glanced across at Sanselle. I preferred to ask her questions where I might look stupid, rather than Fersonne or Gerbriik. Sanselle took everything evenly, and I hoped she could help.

'Sanselle ...?'

'Another question?' Her eyebrows arched. 'I was fixing the glow strip. The Reichmann came in with those passengers Gerbriik didn't expect.'

'Right.'

'They were talking when they kept looking over our shoulders.'

'I didn't care much for that. They couldn't do any better.'

'No, they couldn't.' I paused. 'They used a term I've never heard, and I can't find it anywhere.'

Sanselle's blond eyebrows rose. 'You couldn't find it anywhere?'

I flushed. 'I searched the station database, and the library's, and all the information that's been pumped into me.'

She half grinned. 'You think I'll know?'

'You know more than you ever say.' That was true enough.

'What's this mysterious term?'

'Engee ... or something like that.'

Her visage clouded momentarily, before another grin appeared, shakier. 'That's what some folk called the Anomaly. The Believers think their God created it and lives there. Engee is short for nanite-god or something like that.'

Anomaly? The angle between the radius vector to an orbiting body from its primary (the focus of the orbital ellipse) and the line of apsides of the orbit ... That wasn't it. I tried searching my personal data stocks again. Deviation from rule, irregularity ...

'Why isn't there any reference to it?'

'There isn't any evidence,' she pointed out. 'They teach that in all the early histories. That's what brought down the early system nets - all sorts of information that wasn't even true in some cases. Anyone can get anything, just about, off a net, but you have to know the protocols to add stuff. Adding stuff without clearance is cause for adjustment.'

Just adding information to a data system could get a demon adjusted?

A main system. You can put anything you want in a local system, but it can't be lifted by outside access. There are ways around it.' She grinned, but the grin faded. 'Most wouldn't try it. Not worth the risk.'

Another hidden and cold aspect to Rykashan controls. I pushed on with my first line of inquiry. If I didn't, it would get lost in all the other questions for which I had yet to find answers. 'I've heard people talk about the Believers. I met one on my way here. She was absolute about going somewhere ... where this engee ... was the true God. Something like that, anyway.'

'They have a deep-space colony somewhere. They have to go by slow boat. Photon drive all the way. That takes years objective, but only weeks subjective.'

'Near this Anomaly that no one recognizes?'

'That's what they say.' Sanselle's words were wry and flat simultaneously.

I laughed, but I wondered.

'They also think free rock climbers are suicidally antisocial. We have to carry a positive societal balance at all times.' My laugh stopped. 'Or we face adjudication adjustment.'

'Because ... ?' Because what? I wasn't sure even how to frame the question.

'It's costly to rescue a climber who's stranded or injured. 'A waste of scarce resources' I believe is how the adjuster put it.' She shrugged. 'I'm inhibited from climbing unless my resources are sufficient to cover rescues and medical disasters.'

'You build up a credit base ... ?'

'Exactly. Then no one can say anything. Or do anything. Not even the little monitors they stuffed inside me.'

I did shiver at that.

'It's better not to be adjusted, Tyndel.'

I'd known that already, if not so strongly.

38

Desire always seeks to deceive pure thought.

Fersonne slipped onto the seat at the canteen table across from me, a canteen as dim as the caserns of the soldiers of five millennia earlier. She readjusted the sticktites, then smoothed her dull gray coveralls and took a sip of the hot tea from the bottle. A spheroidal droplet floated sideways, an extravasion propelled toward the gray composite walls, where it would be ensnared by the housekeeping nanites and added to the other wastes for molecular recon-stitution.

Fersonne's brown eyes studied me before she spoke.

'Gerbriik offered me a bonus of another full year's credit if I'd stay for a half year more.'

'Are you thinking about it?'

'I could leave on the next outbound, or the one after that if I don't stay.' She took another sip of tea from the squeeze bottle.

'What will that mean for you?'

'It's not that anyone's waiting. When he didn't renew the contract, I decided I'd do something. I wanted to earn enough to have my own place on Thesalle or Actean - a bigger place, I mean.'

Fersonne had never mentioned, even when we were close, who 'he' had been, and I'd never asked. She had never asked about anyone in my past. I was grateful for that.

'Where you owed no one askance?'

She nodded briskly. 'Had enough of that at home.'

'You're from Runswi or ...'

'Vanirel, north of the mite Thule.'

Are the Rykashan lands always in cold places?' I shook my head, realizing that I could have phrased it another way. 'Or maybe it's because the Rykashan lands are in cold places that the older folk are in the warmer lands?'

You're not a mite, Tyndel.' Fersonne looked at me. 'Not sure you ever were. You look at things different-like. Bet some of them knew it, too.'

'I'm not a Rykashan.'

You are. You don't want to admit it.'

Why did I have such trouble admitting what was so clearly a fact? I didn't even want to call it 'truth.' Was that because if I acknowledged such a truth I had to give up my past? But my past was mine, no matter what I became. I had to accept that. 'Do you want to stay here any longer, or is it the idea of a better place?'

'A better place. I want to see the stars without looking through a faceplate. I want to run again, and not in a station treadmill that smells oily and sweaty.' After another sip of the tea, she studied me again. 'Why do you stay here?'

'Do I have a choice?'

'You could leave on the next needle ship if you agreed to train as a Web jockey.'

'You think so?'

'Gerbriik's as much as said that. Rykashans are stubborn, too, Tyndel. No one's going to beg you to be a Web jockey.'

'I didn't ask to be a Rykashan. Or a Web jockey.'

'Why don't you do it because you want to - not because you're opposing them?'

'I don't know. Maybe because I don't want to.'

'What good does it do to keep refusing? If you want to change things, Tyndel, you have to do something!

'Why? Anything I do benefits them.'

'Anything any of us do that's good is good for someone. Do you hate everyone so bad that you won't do something good?'

That was the sort of question Foerga would have asked. Or Cerrelle. I didn't answer.

'Do you still think of me as one of "them"?'

'No. You know that.'

'A lot of folks are just like me, Tyndel.' A soft smile went with the words. 'Most of us aren't Gerbriiks or Web jockeys or planoformers.'

'I understand.'

'You don't act like you do.'

'You're hard to lie to, you know.' A muttered laugh went with my words.

'You have trouble lying to yourself. I didn't have anything to do with that.'

But she did. I swallowed silently at what I had refused to see. Foerga, Cerrelle, and now Fersonne. Fersonne wasn't brilliant, but she was honest, and I'd always needed honesty - and never wanted to acknowledge that need. By pressing me to be honest, Cerrelle had angered me, and it hadn't been her fault. Neither Foerga nor Fersonne had pressed me ... and that said what? I wasn't sure.

'Are you going to stay?' I finally asked. 'For the extra half year?'

'I'd never have to come back.' Fersonne looked down at the table. 'I could go to Actean, even.' She didn't look at me. 'I'll probably tell Gerbriik I'll take his bonus. It's at least doing something.' The brown eyes met mine, and she smiled ... faintly.

'You don't have to ...'

'I know. It's for me, Tyndel.'

Her smile bothered me, despite the denial, long after she'd gone back onto her shift and I to my cube, where I climbed into my sleeping net alone ... wondering. Anything good benefits someone ... do you hate everyone so bad...?

39

Illumination cannot be communicated.

After my work shifts, before I slept, I continued to try to read something. I'd located an antiquarian text in the station library base, one that hadn't been accessed in decades from what the records showed. The title had intrigued me - The

Nanite Perspective - as had the opening sentences framed in the reading screen clipped to my sleeping net.

... once worlds have changed, those who live in the new world fail to understand the perspective of those lost in the old ...

I certainly empathized with that, for I still felt lost in the old even while being forced to live in the new, and half hoped that the words of the forgotten author might help - somehow.

... all the changes in the world were as nothing compared to the Nanotech Revolution ... While some few saw the seeds of destruction, early obstructions to implementing the technology were seen as final barriers beyond which few peered ... Greatest of the bars to widespread implementation of nanite technologies was the early difficulty in developing a usable scanner technology. After the Heylstron scanner was developed ... escalating economic dislocation corroded the very fabric of society ... economic disintegration was rapidly followed by military applications of nanite technologies in an effort to halt the restructuring of cultures and societies ...

That made sense. Even in Dorcha, the sealords had first claim on the taxes of the state and resources necessary to maintain the fleets. The Dzin masters came last, for all that they taught the coming generations and the next set of sealords.

Despite the banality of the opening, I kept reading, my eyes fixed on the screen in the darkness of my cube.

... first recorded deployment of nanite disassemblers occurred in 505 A.S. with the attempted reconstitution of the Mogul Hegemony... casualties on both sides reached eighty percent...

I winced at that, long ago as it had been. No wonder the masters of Dzin and Toze and the Dhurr genchiefs opposed the demonic weapons. After swallowing and paging ahead, I settled into a section on the arts, except that it didn't quite stay on the arts.

... the impact of nanite replicators effectively destroyed the economic use of fine art as a means of storing wealth, since a nanite-scanned and reproduced replica is indistinguishable from the original by any nondestructive test...

Art as a way of storing wealth? Not to be used and enjoyed, the way Foerga's crystal was? Or my mother's paintings? The ancients had actually done that?

... values of previously precious metals and gems also declined precipitously, especially those of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires ...

I closed my eyes for a moment, images crossing my mind, figures in stained silks and satins, or ancient fabrics once rare, wearing gold chains, their faces gaunt, their eyes sunken, their limbs shriveled from hunger.

Dorcha and the rest of the mite world still relied on the economics of the so-called natural world - prices of goods determined not just by their composition but by their scarcity, a scarcity repealed in Rykashan society. A nanotech culture changed all that in more than the most obvious ways. Almost any substance could be duplicated through electroessence and nanites, except the most rare of elements, and such were not a good basis of a currency or an economic system.

I rubbed my forehead, wishing I could chase away the images.

So what was the basis of the Rykashan economy? Skill and applied dedication. The power requirements for a food replicator were far less than those for organically grown materials, and if the replicators were programmed correctly there was no difference in terms of nourishment. The replicated food also had less chance of contamination. So what happened to the trufflers and eelers, the gardeners? Anyone could duplicate credit notes perfectly, undetectably. What happened to currency? Nanotechnology had been demonstrated to produce horrific casualties in battles. What happened to war? Those without nanotechnology are destroyed or contained. Those with it develop a system without war or perish. What kind of system?

I wanted to shake my head, but that wouldn't have helped. In hindsight, so much seemed so clear, but that sight had been a long time in coming, because I had known, had fought the understanding, that nothing indeed would be the same.

I flicked off the reading screen. I had already absorbed too much history and background.

When I finally drifted toward sleep, the arcs of fire were pure gold - not golden-red. They were like golden chains, spinning out through black space to ensnare me, to shackle me to ... I didn't know what.

'NO!'

I sat up in the net, shaking it against its anchors, and bounced from the bottom to the top and back again, feeling like a beaker of alcardia shaken so long that it foamed tastelessly.

I was beginning to understand, beginning to comprehend why I had not wanted to understand - and now I felt as though something were trying to ensnare me. The new world in which I was caught?

After a time, I slept - fitfully at best - in a dim darkness so unlike the niellen depths through which arcs of fire had reached toward me.

40

All life is sorrow.

After a quick shower and a change into clean coveralls, I sat in the canteen alone, eating curried Dorchan strip beef and noodles, and sipping orange tea.

Sanselle's image appeared beside me in the canteen. She seldom called up an image from my commpak. Her face was pale, her eyes slightly swollen. 'Tyndel ... cargo lock three ...'

The image vanished.

I pulled free of the sticktites and quickly disposed of the remains of my meal, then flung myself into the corridor toward the transverse shaft - number four - that would drop me closest to lock three. I was supposed to be off-shift, but the strain in Sanselle's voice negated that.

What could have upset her? Why had she called, instead of Gerbriik? Had something happened to the maintenance officer?

Whatever it had been, it wasn't Gerbriik, because he and Sanselle stood anchored in the corridor by the lock. A cold tension flowed between them.

The lights on the lock control panel, and the dull and muffled thud, confirmed that an inbound ship was docking.

Both faces blanked as they saw me. Gerbriik's visage remained impassive, unlike Sanselle's. The darkness remained behind her eyes, and her cheeks were blotchy.

'I'm sorry,' she said softly.

Sorry? For what? 'What happened?'

'There's been ... an accident,' Gerbriik answered, his voice edged. 'Fersonne - she was hit by the Hook's braking blast.'

Sanselle nodded slowly, her eyes preternaturally bright.

'How... ?' I didn't understand how it could have happened. ESAs weren't allowed with incoming ships. Fersonne? She was so careful, more so than either Sanselle or me.

'The usual for something like this.' Gerbriik didn't look at me. 'The Hook arrived early, with less than five minutes' notice. She came in too hot. I called Fersonne to get inside. I told her to leave everything and get in. She torqued up the thrust on her broomstick to hurry. She was on her tether and tried to use it to swing her in toward the open lock. The Hook was hot and had to brake later and longer. Fersonne tried to kill her thrust, but she'd been out more than half a shift, and the gas reservoir of the broomstick was low and gave out. She tried to reel herself back in, to shorten the arc. She wasn't fast enough, and the shorter arc sped up the swing - right into the Hook's blast.' He shrugged. 'A few degrees either way and nothing would have happened.'

A few degrees ... a few moments ... if I had been a few moments faster in Hybra, Foerga might have lived. If Fersonne hadn't extended for the bonus. Or for me? If ... but ifs don't change death.

I glanced around, half expecting to see the brown eyes looking at me, accepting me. I just saw the gray of the cargo corridors and lock doors. My eyes went back to Gerbriik.

'Even an outside suit won't protect you from the ion exhaust of a needle ship's thrusters.' Gerbriik's voice was flat. 'There's nothing ...'

Sanselle shook her head.

So did I. It didn't make sense - but it did. The unexpected, combined with a lot of little errors... and Fersonne was dead. The least likely to be killed that way. Perhaps the best person I knew on the station, or since I'd left Dorcha. Dead.

I could feel the chill beyond the thick composite of the hull, and the chill rising within me, like the brume off Deep Lake just before it froze.

'I'm getting the sled,' Sanselle offered as she glided away down the corridor.

'The sled?'

'You still need to off-load the Hook,' Gerbriik said slowly.

Fersonne was dead - she'd just been killed - and we needed to off-load the incoming needle ship. Life - even demon life -went on.

'Yes, ser.' My voice was flat.

'I couldn't have known,' Gerbriik said quietly. 'I wish I could have.'

'I know, ser.' I was angry, but I wasn't angry with the maintenance officer. How could I have been? Gerbriik was a perfectionist. That might have been what killed Fersonne. Because he worried, he'd asked her to hurry. Because she'd hurried ... That was the awful irony. Because he had been concerned, he'd set up the coincidences that had killed her, and he'd worry the situation to death, perhaps his own death, over the years ahead. 'I know,' I repeated, not knowing where to direct that formless rage that seethed within me. 'I know ...'

The faint hum of the cargo sled rode over the silence. Sanselle guided it along the side of the cargo corridor and brought it to a halt less than three meters from me.

'Still waiting for them to unlock?' she asked.

I could almost read her thoughts from her face. They've messed up everything else ... what else should we expect?

The lock hissed open, and we were showered with ice crystals and hull-chilled air. The nanite fields that completed the seals didn't stop heat loss. Not much.

The Hook's third stood amid the swirling ice mists that cleared from the open cargo lock, waiting expectantly, as if he expected us to move to him. After a moment, Gerbriik did. Sanselle and I followed.

'Treat this off-load carefully. It's special equipment they need at the Alaric orbit station. They pulled us in to bring it out.' He winced. 'There's a great deal of metal there. It's expensive metal.'

Gerbriik nodded as if the fact that the cargo contained expensive metal explained everything, justified Fersonne's death. I knew he didn't feel quite that way, but I wouldn't have been surprised if the third officer did. We all felt the deaths of those close to us, but merely regretted and justified the deaths of those we did not know. Only in small communities was it different ...

At that thought, I wondered. Hybra had been a small community, and I doubted there had been much slowing of the town from my disappearance and Foerga's death.

The third returned the nod, then eased back from the lock door. I wanted to grab him and stuff him outside without a suit. Life goes on, and the careless ones don't even know the loss they create.

'It's all yours.' Gerbriik looked at the two of us, then turned in midair and glided away without another word.

'He isn't going to say anything about Fersonne?' My eyes flicked sideways to Sanselle.

'Commander Maestros already let the Web jockey know over the comm.'

'And no one said anything?'

'What could they say? It wasn't their fault, not exactly, anyway,' pointed out Sanselle. 'They never would have picked her up on their sensors ... not quickly enough.'

I swallowed. Personal responsibility again. Fersonne had been responsible for her own safety, and she had failed. I wanted to hammer the bulkhead with my bare fist.

Instead, I followed Sanselle through the lock and into the hold.

The third waited. 'This bay first.'

My eyes were colder than the space beyond the ship's hulls, and the junior ship officer looked away from me quickly.

Sanselle began unwebbing the bay, then eased a cubical container about a half meter square toward me. 'Careful -more mass than it looks like.'

My hands and arms recoiled at the seemingly inexorable inertia. I glanced at the description stenciled on the side of the small and heavy cubical container: 'Section two (b), for-mulator analysis microflakes.' The words slid off my mind, and I forced myself to concentrate on them. Why were such microflakes so important? Or was any cargo more important than the life of a maintenance technician?

Sanselle followed with a matching cube. All in all, the first bay contained two dozen of the identically labeled cubes.

When we had finished, the third gestured toward the next bay, avoiding my eyes.

The second bay held oblong containers with the appellation: 'High pressure microvessels [Spec. A-4c].'

More cargo bays and more not totally comprehensible labels followed, until we reached the fifth or sixth bay.

'Aerostat frame assemblies' - I murmured the words as I eased the three-meter-long container toward the cargo sled.

Sanselle helped ease it under a flexible web, and we went back for more.

Filling the rest of the hold were thin sheets of material roughly a meter square, webbed into sets of ten, so light

I could move three bundles easily. Those were labeled: 'Insulation, High-Temp [Spec. 5-XXX].'

Aerostat frames, high-temperature insulation, high-pressure microvessels, special formulator microflakes - and none of it could be built or created around Omega Eridani? So special that it required diverting a particular needle ship?

'What's the matter?' Sanselle studied me. 'Besides the obvious.'

'The obvious,' I said. 'Nothing changes that.'

'There's more ...'

'All this cargo.' From what I knew, the cargo didn't make sense, but in the mood I was in, I didn't want to ask anyone. I had questions, questions I should have thought about months or years earlier, except I hadn't cared.

'Not much different from what we've been unloading all along. Heavier, and more of it, that's all.' Sanselle shrugged. 'Don't want to take all shift, either.'

I agreed with that, but I hadn't wanted to touch anything on the Hook, not once I'd reached the cargo lock.

After a deep breath, I forced myself back toward the Hook's lock - and the few containers remaining, trying to ignore the questions seething through me.

Why did the Rykasha have three orbit stations off Omega Eridani? That answer came from within me easily. One outer system main station and two planetary stations minimize interstellar transit power requirements and maximize needle ship cargo efficiency. In short, send one needle ship to the system, and let the locals unload it on their time.

What did nanite formulators have to do with planoforming? And why did they need special equipment shipped interstellar distances rather than build from plans in-system?

And why did it have to be Fersonne?

There wasn't any real answer, just as there hadn't been for Foerga's death. Or I couldn't find an answer. Not for me.

I eased the sled's webbing around the last container.

An image of Gerbriik, monitoring our actions, appeared between us. 'Don't unload the sled. Just tie it down in lock one. The cargo boat from Alaric will be here in thirty hours, and there's nothing else inbound.'

'Yes, ser.'

I followed the sled to lock one, then helped Sanselle anchor it in place.

'We're done,' Sanselle finally announced. You'd better get some sleep. We're going to be working shorthanded for a good while.'

I hadn't even thought about that.

As I made my way back toward my cube for a very short rest - I wasn't likely to sleep - I thought about needle ship cargos and death. What was in the cargo that was so special? Or were certain types of planoforming equipment so complex that they could only be created and built on earth? So complex that Fersonne's death meant almost nothing? Meant nothing personal to anyone but me, and perhaps Sanselle ... and maybe Gerbriik.

The ancient economists would have theorized that death would have meant more in Rykashan society - because there were fewer people and because those people lived longer. And they would have been wrong. Except for the occasional great person or hero, or tragedy, death has always been personal, affecting one individual and the handful of people who cared about that dead individual. The rest of society went on, and that had been true as far back as the ancient pyramids and great walls, and remained true, and would doubtless remain so into the far future.

Death had two meanings - the loss of resources to society and the personal grief of the few who cared. Fersonne's value was less than that of one cargo, and this time, I was one of the few who cared, and I wanted there to be some meaning behind

Fersonne's death ... and there wasn't Unless you create that meaning ... unless you do ...

As I tossed in the sleeping net, another thought drifted through my fevered reveries. We all need meaning... and it's different for each of us, but what gives meaning to society?

Dzin gave meaning to Dorcha ... Toze to Klama ... what provided a dream or a meaning to the Rykashans? Did they have one?

I lay in the darkness in my sleeping net for what seemed like a long time, too many questions yet unanswered, too many feelings churning.

41

Pride is a dim lamp on a dark road.

Over the next standard week, I kept asking questions about death, and about what mattered, but the answers never changed. Death was personal, and society went on.

I did figure out an answer to one question: What would give Fersonne's death some meaning? It was a very small answer, but it was the best I could do. So I finally swallowed and went to Gerbriik at the end of my last shift for that day. He looked up from the main maintenance console with eyes as dark-rimmed as mine or Sanselle's.

'Ser?'

'Yes, Tyndel? I can't change the shifts. I know you're being worked too hard, but with Fersonne's death ...'

'It's not about that, ser.'

'I'm sorry about Fersonne. I am. I know you two were close.' His face was impassive, the eyes blank, waiting. 'There's something else, ser ...'

Gerbriik raised his eyebrows. 'You're beginning to understand?'

I hated the faint tone of pity, but my feelings weren't important this time. As a former Dzin master, I should have found it easy to keep my feelings out of things. I never had, and that might have been why I'd been sent to Hybra. Might have been? Yes, ser. If it is possible, I'd like to request training as a Web pilot.'

'If it's not?'

'Then I keep working here. Doing as well as I can. Until my obligation is complete.' What other choice did I have?

'Whether they accept you - that's up to the authorities in Runswi.' He nodded. 'I thought you might. I'll send the request with the next ship.'

'Thank you, sen'

'I am sorry about Fersonne.' He nodded and looked back down at the console. 'I am, more than you know ...' The last words weren't really for me. That I knew.

I glided back to the transverse shaft and down to my cube. I didn't even try to sleep ... or read. I lay there, in darkness that wasn't black enough to shut out everything that swirled around me, hoping that I'd found one solution, hoping I wasn't deceiving myself.

42

When facts are combined into an assemblage of verifiables, their illusion becomes reality.

Sanselle and I had just finished unloading the Hay Needle's cargo and getting it stored in the transshipment bay. She was guiding the cargo sled back to its storage bay.

I glided beside her, wiping my forehead with the back of my forearm, then stifling a yawn.

'Tired?' she asked.

'Aren't you?'

'I've adjusted.' She laughed. 'No reading. No exercise except maintenance. Just work and sleep. Time passes.'

'That's really not true.' I raised my eyebrows, then smiled.

'No ... but it feels that way sometimes.'

Even as I understood the feelings, I wasn't sure I'd adjusted even that well. Both on-shift and off-shift were lonely, and after two years plus on the station, with nearly eight to go, they would probably get more lonely. At that moment, Gerbriik favored us with his image.

'The maintenance bay, as soon as you're free,' he said before his visage faded.

'Yes, ser.'

We looked at each other.

'Replacement for Fersonne,' suggested Sanselle.

'If it is, they didn't waste much time.' It had been ten standard months, and with overspace dilation - far better than photondrive slowboat but far from instantaneous - that meant that if Gerbriik had a replacement they'd sent someone by return ship.

Sanselle handed me the control box. 'You can stow it'

I took the controls and edged the sled into the bay. After two years, I could do it as well as she did.

'Do that well, Tyndel.'

'Thank you.'

Then we went up the shaft and along the upper mid-level corridor to the maintenance bay. Gerbriik had a muscular black-haired woman beside him, bigger than any of the three of us. 'This is Seriley. She's the new maintenance tech. She spent a year already on earth orbit station, waiting for an outspace billet.' He gestured toward Sanselle, then me. 'The sandy-haired one is Sanselle. She's the head tech. The brown-haired fellow is Tyndel. They're both glad to see you. So am I.'

Seriley smiled more than politely, but not effusively. 'It's good to meet you.'

'We are glad to see you,' Sanselle replied.

I smiled and nodded. Seriley didn't seem all that pleased to be on OE Station, for all that Gerbriik had said.

'After I finish showing her around, Seriley will work with one or the other of you until she knows all the duties,' Gerbriik concluded with a vague smile.

'I'm looking forward to it,' added the muscular new tech. 'I really am.'

Looking forward to what? I gave a last smile.

'You hungry?' asked Sanselle as we left the maintenance bay.

'Yes.'

In the canteen, Sanselle had the formulator prepare another of the spicy Dhurr dishes - a type of fish packed with chilies and then deep-fried and covered with a plum sauce. I had a truffle cream beef with steamed almond beans.

'You like the bland stuff, don't you?' she asked.

'I don't find it that bland, but you burned out your taste buds and olefactors with those chilies years ago.'

That got a grin from her. 'Used to think you were so stiff, Tyndel.' She brushed back the short-cut straw-colored hair.

'I am.'

'Not so much. Quiet.' She paused for a mouthful of the chilied fish. 'Wondered what I'd have to talk about if no one knew the things I grew up with.'

'Work. After a time, you share that.' That was what had happened. The longer we had worked together, the more common experiences we had, and the more to talk over. I missed talking things over with Fersonne. That loss made me even more aware of how much I missed the quiet evenings with Foerga. In a way, I even missed Cerrelle, even if I couldn't quite say why ... except she'd traveled out to OE Station, and it hadn't been just to recruit a pilot. I'd not seen a lot of things, but I'd been so numb ... how much had I missed?

'Some things, about you, no one will understand. We didn't live as mites. Some things about us, they'll take you years to understand, Tyndel.'

'I can see that.' I could - at last.

'You'll understand them. Won't feel them. That's why they'll make you a Web jockey.'

I was afraid I understood what Sanselle said all too well, even if I could not have articulated the logical basis for her words. I'd heard nothing about my request, and doubtless wouldn't, not for a while. Considering my request, even for Rykashans, apparently took longer. It might take eight years, although I doubted that from what I had seen on OE Station.

Sanselle was right, and I knew it. I didn't know enough about Rykashan culture, and parts of it I'd never feel. Like what hopes drive Rykashans or what dreams hold Rykasha together? Or those dreams that even Rykashans do not realize they dream?

Later, I stretched out in the sleeping net, yawning. Some things were beginning to make sense. Seriley had been waiting to get an outspace billet. If they were so rare, why had they thrown me into one so quickly? Why were the stations so meagerly staffed? With fusactor power and food and oxygen replicators they could easily support more people. How could they repair a complex needle ship at OE Station but have to ship certain fabricated equipment across long interstellar distances? Why could they act as though I were valuable, and yet replace Fersonne without even a tear or a sigh, except from Sanselle and me?

I was all too afraid I did understand, and I still wasn't sure I wanted to.

I finally closed my eyes.

43

A shadow in darkness reveals more than it conceals.

'You can give Seriley her outside orientation,' Gerbriik told me, barely gliding back from the maintenance console, his eyes half glazed as he remained partly intermeshed with some part of the station. 'She's been outside off earth orbit station.

So it's more of a familiarization with the differences.'

Between us, Seriley nodded, her short and shining hair bobbing.

The maintenance officer's eyes glazed over fully. Taking that as a dismissal, I looked at the muscular new tech. 'We might as well start.'

'That's fine with me.'

I eased out of the maintenance bay and started along the corridor. She caught up without being flustered or even looking hurried.

At the top of transverse shaft number four, the black-haired Seriley looked at me. 'You're not like the others.'

'No.' I shrugged, starting down the shaft.

'Are you an outie?' She kept up with me.

'No. I've never set foot on one of the colony planets.'

'You will. Gerbriik says you're going to be a Web jockey.'

'I don't know,' I admitted. 'They asked. I refused. They sent me here. I reconsidered. Now they're considering.' I braked at the bottom of the shaft, reaching for the handhold beside the hatch.

The black eyes softened. 'You must be a convert - one of the mites who got infected with an old nanovirus.'

'It happened. Not quite like that. What about you?'

'I used to be a Follower. Or I thought I was. I know better now. Delusional break, that's all it was, but I didn't want to spend the rest of the next sixty years repaying the treatment.' Her words were even, but the pain behind the words said I shouldn't ask more.

I didn't. Were all of us who were furcated across the Web misintegrals of one sort or another? From religious delusionals to obsessed perfectionists? But what was it about engee that inspired such delusional faith? Was engee real? Some sort of ancient relic venerated by the unbalanced? An alien intelligence?

Shaking myself mentally, I had to smile. In a way, it mattered little. Engee was whatever it was. Then I caught myself. That ... that is the difference! Dzin taught one to discover and be aware of what was. The Rykashans sought to advance and improve, but not necessarily to become fully aware. Dzin-instinctively, to me, outside of my personal curiosity, it didn't matter what engee was, but I had a responsibility to become aware of what he/she/it might be had I ever the chance.

I opened the triple hatch and gestured for Seriley to follow me toward the bays that held the cargo sleds. There I stopped. 'Based on the specifications, these are larger than any used in the earth orbit stations, but they stay down here. There's the smaller sled that can fit in the transverse shafts and doesn't require the heavy guides that these three do.' I kept walking. 'We do all ESAs from the lowest level. The passenger locks are on the level above, but we only use them for receiving, and there are emergency locks higher on every upper level.'

'That's standard in all stations. The lowest level is the most heavily braced.'

I almost asked if she'd studied them all before I realized that I already knew it myself. I just hadn't looked. Or remembered? That was the trouble with nanite-carried information. After a time, you didn't - or I didn't - know what you knew or didn't know.

Since no ships were docked or off-loading, I took her to the middle personnel lock. We pulled on outside suits and soft helmets, checked the supporting fields, checked each other. Remembering Fersonne, I checked the pressures on both broomsticks a second time before I pressed the evacuation stud.

Momentary swirls of minute ice crystals flew, then the chill followed. We slipped through the bars of light thrown by the glow strips and out past the lock dampers. Seriley didn't have to be reminded to clip her tether.

When first I swam out from the light of the lock, again, the rampart that was the station reared upward and outward like a wall of the ancients. The featureless expanse stretched endlessly toward the starry pinlights that cut the niellen blackness like tiny knives. Somewhere, if my visions and dreams were accurate, behind all those stars lay arcs of golden-red fire that burst from a spiral of stars ... somehow linked to the mysterious engee.

If they weren't ... then I was the delusional one. I eased the faintest puff of gas to the broomstick. Then I turned on the stick's seat and gestured. 'We replaced the dampers on the cargo locks about fifteen standard months ago. Gerbriik thinks they'll be good for another five years.'

'They only last two years or so on the earth orbit stations.'

'Higher traffic,' I pointed out. 'Much higher,' she added.

I gestured toward the brightest star in the sky, a pin-disc. 'There's Omega. You can't even see discs of Conan or Alaric from here. Dust density's higher than normal. They put the station farther out, well beyond the VeeTee range.'

'The hull's pitted already. Earth orbit stations are smoother.' She laughed. 'But we're hit with more junk.'

'Remnants from history?'

'Some of that. Also the comet belts are more erratic and denser. Something to do with the placement of gas giants in the earth system.'

We slid past the end cargo lock, past the personnel lock, and around toward the back side of the station, the dark side where the coolant fins from the fusactors melded into the darkness of space, not even lit by the photons from distant Omega.

Every station has a dark side. So does every life, even that of a demon, and I was a demon, no matter how long I had resisted accepting that.

44

Your concern alone is the action of duty, not the judgment of that duty.

From the depths to my left, to the massed pipe organ sounds of a march orchestrated by an ancient Baroque composer, gallop cavalry troops of rectangles - bright blue - arrayed in rows not quite symmetrical. Underneath the music is the weight of something - something massive, and yet being flung swiftly - and behind the rectangles and their accompaniment come the words. Even the mighty are limited ...

That's a tautological paradox,' my mind replies, concentrating as I am on avoiding the deadly rectangles that threaten me/us. True mightiness would have no limits.'

Any being within a universe is limited by that universe. Any ordered action in any universe results in a total increase in disorder.

I have no answer, swooping to my right, maintaining the gradient I need, knowing that to flee downward will allow the rectangles to pierce and bury us/me.

Even gathering and creating information is an ordered action, and as such, there is no way even a god can create more information than is destroyed through the creation process. Golden-red starfire punctuates the words.

'Then how can any being increase knowledge?'

By linking two universes, by using the energy from a collapsing high-entropy antimatter universe to power the creation of order within this universe.

'That would take more than a god.' I dismissed the thought and concentrated on the white/black warmth of the beacon ahead, mustering my last energy to control the descent that would bring us back to Sol from the greenness of Thesalle, that greenness I pondered, as had who knew how many scientists ... and all without an answer.

45

All beings have gods to worship: not all gods respect those who offer worship.

The end of my third year on OE Station was rapidly approaching. Seriley was pleasant enough, but I missed Fersonne. I even missed Cerrelle.

One shift break, Sanselle, Seriley, and I sat restrained by sticktites in the canteen, finishing meals of great diversity. The way the schedules rotated, the three of us seldom ate at once. The odor of Dhurr spiceroll drowned out the mild basilic flavor of my chicken creamed truffles and whatever Seriley had been eating.

'How long will you be here, do you think?' Sanselle asked me.

'I don't know. Another three months, another eight years. I haven't heard.'

'What about you?' The sandy blonde turned to Seriley.

'I'm here for five. Six if I want, if I can take it.' The muscular woman shrugged.

'You'll wear out the exercise area by then.'

I could understand that, lax as I had been. The nanites helped, especially on the cellular level, but we'd all been briefed on the fact that after two years we'd need nearly six months of intensive physical reconditioning to regain full gravity well ability, more as the years off-planet built up.

'I don't want to lose too much muscle tone.' Seriley sipped something from a bottle, then asked Sanselle. 'How long for you?'

'I've been here four years - this time - and I need another two.'

The slightest frown crossed Seriley's face.

Sanselle massaged the back of her neck with her right hand. 'I'm one of those suicidal risk-taking free rock climbers. I've got a place in the White Peaks, do some work for the ecology restoration folks. Working here is for rescue and medical rehab.'

'Have you ever needed it?' asked Seriley.

'That's why I'm back. Got careless on a trip to the Old Rockies. Took a flitter to get me out - and two years of spinal rebuilding.'

I held in the wince, taking a last mouthful of the truffles.

You're going back there again,' said Seriley.

'Of course.' Sanselle laughed. 'Next time, I won't be so careless.'

'Why do you do it?'

To be alive. Life has to be more than just existing.'

'Life doesn't insist on that.' I finally spoke. 'We do. Most creatures do little more than exist and perish.'

'That isn't exactly Dzin, is it?' A wry smile crossed Sanselle's lips.

'Hardly. Dzin says that the concern is the perfection of the work, not the perfection of the worker.'

'Like termites.' Sanselle laughed. 'The nest is all'

'There's not much difference in Rykashan society,' I pointed out. The nest is bigger and more complex, but look at you ... us.' I realized that I was no longer insisting that I wasn't a Rykashan. 'To find the meaning you want from life, you have to work twice as hard to ensure your freedom doesn't endanger the nest or waste its resources.'

'What if there isn't... meaning, that is?' asked Seriley.

I shrugged.

'I mean it.'

'I know.' I shifted my weight against the restraint of the sticktites. 'I'd say the universe doesn't have a meaning or a purpose. Throughout history, people kept inventing gods because they couldn't conceive of or imagine that creation and existence were an accident or occurred as a result of purely natural processes.'

'Dzin ... does it... ?' Sanselle shook her head.

'Dzin avoids the issue,' I admitted. 'It provides a set of rules for a meaningful life within a society and assumes that the meaning is provided by the continuation of an orderly society. Society is, in effect, God.'

'I'll bet that would get you readjusted, or whatever mites do,' suggested Seriley.

'Executed or exiled,' I said.

Tm glad I'm not a mite.' Seriley tossed her head.

'Rykasha isn't that much different.' I grinned at Sanselle, then smothered it and waited. 'Society still makes the rules.

We don't call it God, but, so far as controlling us, we might as well. What with nanotechnology and micronics, we either live by the rules or get readjusted one way or another to live by the rules.' I smiled. 'The difference is that we can talk about it.'

'What if there is a god?' asked Seriley.

'He hasn't shown much interest in us,' answered Sanselle. 'Human beings have been building cities for something like ten thousand years, and it's been a long time since anyone's documented a god's presence.'

'Why would a god care? Would anything that mighty worry about our opinion?' I asked.

'Probably not.' Sanselle finished her bottle of whatever Dhurr beverage she'd been drinking.

'The Believers say engee is a god,' offered Seriley. 'There's something out there. Even the astrophysicists say so. They just won't say what.'

'Except that it sends forth signals that affect some people,' I added.

'That something doesn't change things here or anywhere else,' countered Sanselle. 'We still have to play by the rules that people set up.'

Gerbriik's image appeared in the space between Sanselle and me, his lower extremities cut off by the canteen table. 'I beg your pardons for interrupting your theological discussion, but the Tailor is coming in. Sanselle and Seriley need to get ready to off-load.'

'Yes, ser.'

'Yes, ser.'

'There's God,' said Sanselle after Gerbriik's image vanished. 'For now, anyway.'

Seriley frowned but did not speak.

I let them go, then slipped back to my cube and the reading screen. What really was the point of discussing

God - or gods? Discussion wouldn't determine the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being. Nor had any such supreme being ever directly affected the conditions under which we lived, not in any scientifically demonstrable way.

Yet, even in the rational culture of Rykasha, people believed - some, anyway - in a god called engee. Yet in what seemed an unlimited universe, far more was possible than Rykashans or mites had envisioned.

But if the improbable occurred, the proof of a god, an alien intelligence, a cosmic catastrophe, a great many people would overreact, as if the merely unknown or improbable had been heretofore impossible.

What did that say about people? That most don't understand the universe? Or Dzin? Or themselves?

I knew all that already, including the fact that I didn't know as much about myself as I once had thought, and I laughed to myself as I climbed into my sleeping net, flicked on the reading screen, and called up more history - hard history.

46

The universe has no destination.

I had just climbed out of sleep, four hours after the Tailor's arrival, awakened by my internal timekeeping demons, and was stowing the sleeping net, when Gerbriik's image appeared.

'Once you're cleaned up and ready for duty, see me first.' The image vanished as quickly as it had come.

I showered, put on clean coveralls, grabbed an egg-cheese pie from the canteen formulator, washed it down with lukewarm tea, and scrambled up to the maintenance bay.

The area was empty, except for the maintenance officer himself. Gerbriik's eyes snapped from their glaze - totally -when he turned from the console. 'The Tailor brought back the response to your request.'

'Yes, ser?' Was I to remain on OE Station for another seven years? Or two? Three? I waited for the cold words.

'You're returning to Runswi for training as a Web pilot. On the Tailor. Immediately. Apparently, we need Web pilots more than maintenance techs.' Gerbriik smiled, one of the few times he'd done so. And we'll see you in a few years.'

'I hope so, ser.' I paused. 'I'm sorry ... if you're short-handed. I don't want the others to work too hard.'

A second smile crossed Gerbriik's face. 'They did send a replacement. So Sanselle and Seriley won't be muttering imprecations at your hasty departure.'

'Sanselle wouldn't.'

'No ... but I might have.'

I didn't have a ready answer, but Gerbriik went on. 'Don't waste any more of your life, Tyndel. You have more to offer than you realize.'

'The time here wasn't wasted, ser.' It had been necessary, all too necessary, because it had taken the time on OE Station for me truly to learn how to apply Dzin.

'I hope not. You were a good tech, even if you took some educating.'

'Thank you.'

'We'll look forward to seeing you bring a ship in. Good luck. You need to hurry. The Tailor will be sealing locks in less than two hours. I let you sleep because you'll need it.' His eyes were on me, fully on me, until I left the maintenance bay.

In the end, I didn't bring back as much as I had brought, and I wore dull gray coveralls, not the greens I had worn out to OE Station. I'd earned the grays.