"Listen to me. Listen. Feel me. Love. Love. Commitment, pure and honest commitment-forever-and-ever-till-death-us-do-part. Feel me."
"I feel you. We are one."
She had eaten, only to bring it back up. But her jailer was persistent. He was not going to let her die.
"Would it be any better if you got inside with me?"
"No. I can't. I'm half gone. It would be no good. Where is Equinox?"
"I told you I don't know. And I don't know where your children are. But you won't believe me."
"That's right. I don't believe you. Murderer."
She listened groggily as he explained how she came to be in this room with him. She didn't believe him, not for a minute.
He said he had found her by following a radio beacon signaling from a point outside the plane of the Rings. He had found a pseudosymb there; a simplified Symb created by budding a normal one without first going through the conjugation process. A pseudo can only do what any other plant can do: that is, ingest carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from its inner surface. It cannot contract into contact with a human body. It remains in the spherical configuration. A human can stay alive in a pseudosymb, but will soon die of thirst.
Parameter had been inside the pseudo, bruised and bleeding from the top of her head and from her genitals. But she had been alive. Even more remarkable, she had lived the five days it had taken to get her to the Conser emergency station. The Consers didn't maintain many of the stations. The ones they had were widely separated.
"You were robbed by Engineers," he said. "There's no other explanation. How long have you been in the Rings?"
After the third repeat of the question, Parameter muttered, "Five years."
"I thought so. A new one. That's why you don't believe me. You don't know much about Engineers, do you? You can't understand why they would take your Symb and leave you alive, with a beacon to guide help to you. It doesn't make sense, right?"
"I... no, I don't know. I can't understand. They should have killed me. What they did was more cruel."
No emotion could be read on the man's "face," but he was optimistic for the first time that she might pull through. At least she was talking, if fitfully.
"You should have learned more. I've been fighting for a century, and I still don't know all I'd like to know. They robbed you for your children, don't you see? To raise them as Engineers. That's what the real battle is about: population. The side that can produce the most offspring is the one that gains the advantage."
"I don't want to talk."
"I understand. Will you just listen?"
He took her lack of response to mean she would.
"You've just been drifting through your life. It's easy to do out here; we all just drift from time to time. When you think about the Engineers at all, it's just a question of evading them. That isn't too hard. Considering the cubic kilometers out here, the hunted always has the advantage over the hunter. There are so many places to hide; so many ways to dodge.
"But you've drifted into a rough neighborhood. The Engineers have concentrated a lot of people in this sector. Maybe you've noticed the high percentage of red rocks. They hunt in teams, which is not something we Consers have ever done. We're too loose a group to get together much, and we all know our real fight doesn't begin for another thousand years.
"We are the loosest army in the history of humanity. We're volunteers on both sides, and on our side, we don't require that individuals do anything at all to combat the Engineers. So you don't know anything about them, beyond the fact that they've vowed to paint Ring Beta red within twenty-five thousand years."
He at last got a rise out of her.
"I know a little more than that. I know they are followers of Ringpainter the Great. I know he lived almost two hundred years ago. I know he founded the Church of Cosmic Engineering."
"You read all that in a book. Do you know that Ringpainter is still alive? Do you know how they plan to paint the Ring? Do you know what they do to Consers they catch?"
He was selective in his interpretations. This time he took her silence to mean she didn't know.
"He is alive. Only he's a she now. Her 'Population Edict' of fifty years ago decreed that each Engineer shall spend ninety percent of her time as a female, and bear three children every year. If they really do that, we haven't got a chance. The Rings would be solid Engineers in a few centuries."
She was slightly interested for the first time in weeks.
"I didn't know it was such a long-term project."
"The longest ever undertaken by humans. At the present rate of coloring, it would take three million years to paint the entire Ring. But the rate is accelerating."
He waited, trying to draw her out again, but she lapsed back into listlessness. He went on.
"The one aspect of their religion you don't seem to know about is their ban on killing. They won't take a human or Symb life."
That got her attention.
"Equinox! Where..." she started shaking again.
"She's almost certainly alive."
"How could they keep her alive?"
"You're forgetting your children. Five of them."
The last thing anyone said to Parameter for two years was, "Take this, you might want to use it. Just press it to a red rock and forget about it. It lasts forever."
She took the object, a thin tube with a yellow bulb on each end. It was a Bacteriophage Applicator, filled with the tailored DNA that attacked and broke down the deposits of red dust left by the Engineers' Ringvirus. Touching the end of it to a coated rock would begin a chain reaction that would end only when all the surface of the rock was restored to its original color.
Parameter absently touched it to her side, where it sank without a trace in the tough integument of Equinox's outer hide. Then she shoved out the airlock and into fairyland.
"I never saw anything like this, Equinox," she said.
"No, you certainly haven't." The Symb had only Parameter's experiences to draw on.
"Where should we go? What's that line around the sky? Which way is it to the Ring?"
Affectionate laughter. "Silly planteater. We're in the Ring. That's why it stretches all around us. All except over in that direction. The sun is behind that part of the Ring, so the particles are illuminated primarily from the other side. You can see it faintly, by reflected light."
"Where did you learn all that?"
"From your head. The facts are there, and the deductive powers. You just never thought about it."
"I'm going to start thinking a lot more. This is almost frightening. I repeat: Where do we go from here?"
"Anywhere at all, as long as it's away from this awful place. I don't think I want to come back to the Ringmarket for about a decade."
"Now, now," Parameter chided her. "Surely we'll have to go back before that. Aren't you feeling the least bit poetic?"