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TWO

I invited Tom and Shelley to my home in upstate New York. I wanted them to help me try to get my head around the problem of gas hydrates.

I gave Tom a bald summary of my private consultation with Gea. I left out the wu-wu stuff, the mixing up of past and future, Gea’s vague hints about my own cosmic destiny. I definitely said nothing about Morag.

But even this sanitized version was enough to send Tom’s antennas twitching. “One of the world’s finest artificial sentiences said this to you?”

“Why not me?” I snapped back. “Gea has to start somewhere. I do have access to some of the world’s most advanced technological capabilities, the Higgs engines. And I have you, Tom. You were right in the middle of that hydrate blow-off in Siberia. Maybe Gea is a good judge of character. Maybe she thinks that as your father I will be motivated to do something about this, to take her seriously.”

“You really think she’s capable of that kind of manipulation?”

“You didn’t meet her,” I said fervently. “Besides, you said yourself she’s one of the world’s most advanced minds. But she doesn’t have any kind of formal power in the human world. She doesn’t even get to vote. She can only get things done through people, by persuasion. If you think about it, she’s behaving exactly the way you’d expect her to.”

He looked doubtful — in fact he looked at me as if I were crazy. But in the aftermath of Siberia we had agreed, kind of, that we would try to work together on stuff, rather than use our interests and motivations as a way to pull apart from each other. So he agreed to fly over to New York, at John’s expense. But, he said mysteriously, he wanted to bring a guest of his own.

My visitors converged on my house, by plane and train and bus, for my amateur brains-trust session.

I’d been here a little over five years. The place was only an hour’s commute out of Grand Central Station, so I was hardly remote, but I was happy enough to be away from the stretched-to-the-limit overcrowding of the city itself.

My house was the modern kind, a big weatherproof concrete brute, suffused with intelligence. With solar cell arrays, a wind turbine I could unfold from the roof, and fuel cells in the basement, I was pretty much self-sufficient in electricity. There was a big chest freezer, and a cellar I kept stocked with cans and dried food. I had deep foundations and high sills and doors that sealed shut; I could have ridden out a meter-deep flood. And so on. I was no survivalist, but you had to think ahead. I’d insisted on puncturing the walls with windows, though — real windows, despite the architect’s complaints. Inside I’d faced many of the walls with wood panels. It was still a home, not a spaceship.

Tom, though, had always seemed to disapprove of the place.

He had never lived here. After Morag’s death the two of us had never really been comfortable in the old family home; it had room for the larger family Morag and I had always planned, and now it was too big for us. I took a smaller apartment in New Jersey, but it never felt like home, and was of such old building stock it became increasingly costly. When Tom started college I was happy enough to move out and take this place, a house built to modern specs.

Also I’d hoped my new place was different enough that both Tom and I would be spared any unpleasant memories. But Tom said it reminded him of my family home, my mother’s house in Florida where I’d grown up. It was “a nostalgic facsimile in concrete and gen-modified wood,” as he acutely said.

“Well, I think it’s cozy,” Shelley said to me when she arrived. “A kind of cozy bomb shelter, but cozy nonetheless.” Shelley was a pleasure, as always, a bustling knot of sanity and intelligence who brought light into my sometimes darkened life.

My greeting from Tom was more guarded. And I was surprised when Tom produced his guest: Sonia Dameyer, the American soldier who had helped him out in the first hours after his injury.

It turned out that she and Tom had formed a relationship during his recuperation. She said, “I know it’s a little sad for the only two Americans in a foreign country to glom onto each other. But there you go. I had some furlough due, and a free plane ticket from Uncle Sam. So when Tom said you’d invited him over here, I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be good to meet you in person, Mr. Poole. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Michael. Why should I mind?”

She was in civilian clothes, a neat, attractive jumpsuit. But she was one of those soldier types who always looked military, even out of uniform; her posture was upright, her manner correct, her intelligence obvious, her attention focused. I hadn’t seen any hint of her relationship with Tom when I’d met her during my VR jaunt to Siberia — though maybe I should have. I liked her, as I had immediately in Siberia, but I found her a bit formidable.

We gathered on the living room sofas with mugs of coffee, heaps of cookies, flipcharts, scratch pads and softscreens, and got down to business.

“So,” said Tom. “The world is going to flip its icy lid. What are we supposed to do about it?” He meant to be ironic; he just sounded out of his depth.

To my surprise Sonia leaned forward. “Can I make a methodological suggestion?…” She began to outline an approach to problem-solving she said she’d used many times before. “We’ll break the day into two halves. It’s eleven A.M now. We’ll work until lunch — one, say, or one-thirty. And we’ll use that time to open up the problem. We’ll just throw in everything we know, and anything else we come up with — any suggestion or idea, however tentative.”

Tom said dryly, “And are we allowed to laugh at other people’s dumb suggestions?”

“The whole point is to develop ideas. But there are two rules. One is that everything gets recorded. And the second is, before lunch anyhow, that if you do comment you do it in a positive way. You have to start by saying what you like about the idea. We’re trying to find ideas and build on them, not destroy them. After lunch we’ll pull it all together more coherently and critically.” Tom laughed, but Sonia said firmly, “Those are the rules.”

Shelley grinned. “Fine by me.”

I was impressed. For sure, if I had suggested this, Tom would have shot it down in flames at the get-go. I imagined Sonia working like this out in the field, pulling together her own motivated, trained-up,

overbright staff with a few unhappy or angry locals, to fix whatever was broken. Now she was using those same management skills to handle our awkward father-son dynamic.

Shelley leaned to me and whispered, “I think we’re going to be glad she’s here.”

So we began pool what we knew about gas hydrates.

Tom had his personal experience, and what he’d picked up on the ground in Siberia. I had what I’d learned from Gea, and in follow-up studies since. Sonia for now acted mostly as a recording angel.

The most interesting new facts came from Shelley, who, typically, had been doing some burrowing. She’d found that the end-Permian extinction, through which Gea had walked me so painfully, wasn’t the only instance in which gas hydrate releases had made a mess of Earth’s climate. She displayed graphs of temperature and atmospheric composition. “This spike is known as the ‘initial Eocene thermal maximum.’ It happened about fifty-five million years ago, ten million years after the dinosaurs died off.”

There had been a sharp increase of global temperatures, a hike of five or ten degrees in a “geological instant” — a time so short it couldn’t be distinguished in the rock record, perhaps as fast as decades, maybe even just a few years. And at the same time there had been a big pulse of carbon dioxide injected into the air. It had been a major gas-hydrate release, just like the end-Permian event.

Just as the end-Permian had been kicked off by the immense Siberian traps volcanism, so in the Eocene, volcanism had again, it seemed, been the trigger. Off the coast of Norway, in deep sediments under the ocean, lava had funneled up from deep magma chambers and seeped into the hydrate layers along the continental slopes. The lava hadn’t even broken the surface; this was minor as volcanic events go. But as the lava had dumped its heat, the icelike crystals that contained the gases had melted, and the lid had come off the hydrate deposits. We stared at images of layers of sediments that had collapsed over emptied-out hydrate layers, and at great vertical ruptures, the remains of conduits where the released gases had forced their way to the surface.

The methane had reached the ocean floor, bubbling up in immense spouts like the one that Tom had lived through, and causing, no doubt, plenty of local damage. But that was just the start.

Once the methane reached the ocean and the air there had been a complicated series of chemical reactions. The methane cheerfully reacted with oxygen, a process that itself released heat. The products of the reactions were more hydrocarbons, water — and carbon dioxide, gigatons of it, more greenhouse gas.

“And the rest,” Shelley said, “is history. The event wasn’t nearly so severe as the end-Permian catastrophe, because only a fraction of the global hydrate load was released. But it was a huge sloshing, a perturbation of the entire carbon pool of Earth’s surface. You can still see traces of it in isotopic imbalances and the like. Eventually the excess carbon dioxide was drawn back down out of the atmosphere by Earth’s systems — photosynthesis, weathering. But that took millennia, maybe megayears. And in the meantime there was a spike of warming.”

Sonia said, “So in the Eocene the trigger was this undersea volcanism. But in the present day—”

“In the present day,” Shelley said, “the trigger is anthropogenic global warming. Gea is right, as far as I can tell, Michael. The carbon dioxide and other crud we’ve dumped into the air has done the damage, more than enough to replicate the volcanic perturbations of the past. The anthropogenic warming of the climate we have already induced will cause the hydrate deposits to become unstable. At least we know what’s coming,” she said sepulchrally. “Different causes but same effects: the fossil record can teach us that much.”

Tom said, “And the timescale—”

“As Gea said,” Shelley told us. “A decade or less. In fact the destabilization is already happening — as you know.”

We let this sink in.

As she went about her self-appointed task of recording all this Sonia’s small face was pursed into a frown. The practical soldier was having some trouble with thinking about these huge scales in space and time, I thought. “OK,” she said. “So we can’t afford to let these hydrates go up. That’s the consensus, right? So what do we do about it?”

We all looked at each other warily. This was the crucial question — and the tricky part.

We were a guilt-ridden generation. President Amin and the Stewardship had taught us we had to change our ways; now we all lived a lot cleaner, and had stopped fouling the pond. But a legacy of the new thinking was that one of the worst insults was to be called an instrumentalist, in jargon that dated from Amin’s time: a meddler. To imagine that we could actively fix planet-sized problems seemed as hubristic and arrogant as the mind-sets that had got us into this mess in the first place. So to ask Sonia’s question — what do we do? — was to confront a modern taboo square in the face.

Shelley said reasonably, “Look at it this way. We don’t trust ourselves not to make a mess even worse. But those gas hydrates have no conscience, no soul, no sympathy; they will blow however we feel about it.”

Tom surprised me. “All right, so let’s play the instrumentalist game. If the crud we’re injecting into the atmosphere is going to cause the hydrates to tip over into instability, let’s just stop doing it.”

I caught Sonia’s eye and remembered her rules. I said, “What I like about that is that in the long term it has to be the right solution. To remove the root cause of a problem has to be a better strategy than to tinker with the symptoms.”

Tom said cautiously. “Let’s hear the but—”

“But it’s too late.”

Shelley backed me up.

We’d already done a great deal by eliminating most of the automobiles. But even if we shut down all the factories and power plants tomorrow, carbon dioxide would still be injected into the air from, for instance, rotting deposits on the dying seabeds. We were dealing with planet-sized systems; the vast inertia of Earth’s processes would ensure that the rise in carbon dioxide content continued to rise for decades, and the warming with it.

Sonia recorded all this. “So it won’t help if we stop putting the stuff into the air. Why don’t we try taking it out again?”

Shelley said, “That’s such a good idea that people are already doing it.”

It was true; there were “geoengineering” projects going on in various corners of the globe — tentative, deeply unfashionable. Most of them focused on modest efforts at what was called “carbon sequestration,” drawing down carbon dioxide from the air faster than natural processes could manage.

“So we just accelerate those programs,” Sonia said. “Maybe we should make the carbon dioxide snow out, like it does on Mars.”

That was one from left field, the kind of wacky idea that I imagined Sonia’s own process was supposed to generate. We played around with it a bit. The difficulty was that Mars is much colder than the Earth. You’d have to reduce the global temperatures to make carbon dioxide freeze, which was precisely the problem we were dealing with anyhow. Or maybe you could somehow tinker with the atmosphere, add some kind of freeze factor to the air… None of us knew enough chemistry to come up with a plausible way of making this happen.

Tom clasped his hands behind his head and sat back in his chair. “I hesitate to say this in front of an arch-instrumentalist like you, Dad, but maybe we’re thinking too big here. After all we aren’t interested in cooling down the whole damn planet. Just stabilizing the hydrate sediments would be enough — wouldn’t it? So why don’t we just think of a way to refrigerate the poles?”

Shelley said, “Actually there have been a lot of schemes proposed in the past for cooling down selected portions of the Earth’s surface.” She ran through this quickly, what she could remember or retrieve through her softscreen, and we chewed it over.

Most of these ideas involved shadowing a chunk of Earth’s surface, thus cutting it off from the sunlight. You could inject crud into the air, aerosols of various kinds to screen out the light. Or, even more simply, you could send fleets of planes over the poles dropping shards of some silvered material onto the ice or the water. If you made the material smart, we thought, you could make it self-assembling, a self-knitting, self-repairing mirrored cap. You could even program it to break up on command. It was quite a thought, to wrap a significant chunk of the world in silver foil.

Or, we thought, you could put some kind of solar-shield system into orbit. The Russians had played with this idea in the past. You would get a lot more control over the light you let through than with systems in the atmosphere or on the ground. For a few minutes Shelley and I disappeared into happy elaborations of this idea. You would be looking at a massive, unprecedented program of space launches, but we knew that if we turned our minds to it our Higgs-energy engines could fuel the booster fleet required. But the dynamics of positioning a shield so as to provide an effective screen to the poles would be tricky. The equator would be comparatively easy to protect; there you could throw your shield up to geosynchronous orbit where, orbiting once every twenty-four hours, it would seem to hover over a single point on the surface of the turning Earth. Geosynchronous wasn’t the only solution, though; Shelley dug up some esoteric material on complex orbital patterns the Russians had once used to provide twenty-four-hour comsat coverage to their scattered, far-from-the-equator domains.

Eventually Sonia timed us out. We were getting too deep into specifics, she said.

“OK,” Shelley conceded. “But we must get in touch with some of those geoengineering groups, whatever we decide to do. They have got to have experience of these megaprojects we can tap into.”

Tom was shaking his head, in a world-weary way I’d seen too often as he was growing up. “Geoengineering. Terraforming. Wet dreams.”

I snapped, “What use is it to sneer, Tom? And besides it was you who suggested we cool the poles.”

“I didn’t say cool, ” he said. “I said refrigerate. ”

Shelley jumped in between us, damping down the fire before it started. “You’re quite right, Tom.” She thought it over. “A refrigerator is a machine for extracting heat from a volume. So how does it work? You pass your working fluid, your refrigerant — ammonia, say — around the volume you want to chill. The refrigerant is vaporized with heat from your target volume, so extracting the energy. As a gas the refrigerant is passed to a condenser, where it is returned to liquid form and so gives up that heat. And then the liquid is pumped around the loop again to suck more heat out.”

Sonia made notes, but she looked dubious. “How could you refrigerate the hydrate deposits? They are buried deep, and they cover millions of square kilometers.”

“It needn’t be so difficult,” I said, thinking fast. “You’d pass a network of pipes into the substance of the hydrate deposits themselves. It wouldn’t take long to build up a functioning network.” I sketched rapidly, producing a sketch that looked a little like a road network, with big arterial routes and smaller side roads branching off. “Your working fluid needn’t be ammonia, of course. In these volumes it probably couldn’t be. Liquid nitrogen, perhaps — you could just draw down the nitrogen from the air…”

Tom was shaking his head again, and I was on the point of snapping back at him, and I knew that despite all Sonia’s hard work we were falling into the elephant traps of our relationship.

But Sonia and Shelley seemed to come to the same conclusion simultaneously. We needed a break. They both stood up. “Lunchtime,” Shelley said. “Michael, you’re the cook.”

“Fine,” I said with bad grace. Tom clambered out of his chair looking as grumpy as I felt.

Sonia made one last note. “Refrigerate.Hold that thought.”

Lunch was a buffet, plastic-wrapped plates of stuff I’d prepared earlier in the day: smoked snake meat, a green salad with big, bright leaves of out-of-season gen-enged lettuce. We filled our plates and our glasses. I had some of those little clip-on drink holders that you fix to the side of your plate, and I let my guests wander around the house.

Shelley said to me around a mouthful of snake meat, “It’s going well, don’t you think?”

“The session? We’re coming up with some ideas, I guess. I think you’re right, we ought to contact those geoengineers if we’re going to start treading on their turf—”

She shook her head. “Not that. The important stuff. You and Tom. You seem to be getting on OK. The real reason, the only reason you’re interested in saving the world is because it gives you something to talk to your son about. Isn’t that true?”

Just as George had said, I remembered. “I guess so. But why else would anybody do it? Anyhow we’re both on our best behavior with you two around.”

“Sonia is quite a find, isn’t she?”

“You like her?”

“I think she’s terrific,” Shelley said. “Smart, obviously competent, healthy — what more could you want? She’ll be good for Tom. How close do you think they are?”

“I can’t tell. I never could…” I’ve always had a complicated view of relationships — either subtle or confused, depending on your point of view. It seems to me that there is a whole spectrum of possibilities between the poles of platonic and lover, whole levels of intimacy, sharing, degrees of distance. When I was younger I always enjoyed the early days of a new romance as you both reach out to explore, trying to understand what you had, where on that spectrum of possibilities you sat.

I tried to explain this to Shelley.

“ ‘A spectrum of relationship types,’ ” she said. “Even when you talk about love you sound like an engineer.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Looking from the outside Tom seems to be just the same,” I said. “Maybe he’s at the early stages still with this Sonia, you think?”

“Oh, I think they’ve gone further than that.”

“How do you know?”

“The way they look at each other — or rather the way they don’t. The way they sit together. They’re aware of each other, but in an accustomed way, they don’t need to check. They’re used to each other, Michael.”

Now that I thought it over, I saw she was right. “I hope they’ll be happy.”

“Oh, I think they will be. So where do you think we are on your spectrum?”

I was taken aback; I’d never thought of Shelley that way.

She squeezed my arm. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Don’t worry, Michael. I do understand, you know.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Because for you, the spectrum isn’t there anymore, is it? For you there is only Morag, and that’s all there can ever be. Morag, wrapped in a rainbow cloak. But I’m here anyhow.”

“I—”

“You don’t know what to say? So don’t say anything.”

Tom, followed by Sonia, came walking through from the lounge. His face was ominously hard. “Dad, you had a message. I took it for you. Sorry, I obviously wasn’t meant to hear it.” His tone dripped with insolence, or contempt.

“What message?”

“From Rosa in Seville. My aunt,” he explained to Shelley and Sonia. “Another bat in the family belfry. She said your immigration checks have been completed, and she’s been passed as a suitable personal mentor for you while you’re in Spain. Oh, and she said she looks forward to ‘swapping ghost stories’ with you.” His anger was obvious, cold.

Shelley took a step back from me and sighed. “Oh, Michael.” And Sonia avoided my eyes. She was a sane person giving a nut some space. My embarrassment deepened.

“I thought you were done with this stuff, Dad,” Tom said bitterly. “Didn’t we have a deal?”

“I’m sorry.”

“But you’re going over there even so.”

“I have to.”

Shelley sighed again. “I thought we had you back, too, Michael. But you were fooling us, weren’t you?” Somehow her disappointment in me hurt more than Tom’s reaction. She dumped her plate on the table. “OK, that’s enough bullshit — and enough of this rabbit food, thanks all the same, Michael. Let’s get back to work.” She put an arm around Tom’s shoulders. “I want to follow up this idea of yours. Refrigeration…”

She led him into the lounge, and Sonia followed, without so much as glancing at me. I was left alone in the kitchen.

I took a few minutes scraping garbage into the recycler and stacking dishes, time I needed to calm down. I found myself trembling. It might have been easier if Tom had actually screamed at me.

Then I followed them all back into the lounge, where they had started to work again, filling pages and screens with sketches and notes, as, slowly, an inchoate dream of a refrigerator system big enough to encompass the pole of a planet took shape. But for the rest of the day I felt excluded, as if I had committed an awful transgression, a ghost in my own home.

For the third part of her training, the Implication of Emergent Consciousness, Alia was to be brought to a world at the heart of the Galaxy. She was dismayed at the thought of being taken to yet another dull mass of pointless geological stasis. And like so many others this world seemed to have no name, only a number assigned to it in the vast, growing catalog of the Commonwealth.

But this, Reath said, was a world of Transcendents.

To Alia’s relief, during the journey on board Reath’s austere Commonwealth ship the Campocs kept to themselves, and didn’t try to discuss their strange obsession with Witnessing and the Redemption. They seemed ashamed of how they had treated Drea. Bale kept out of her way, and made no attempt to revive their physical relationship. Drea spent most of the journey asleep. She seemed to have been wounded on some deep level. Alia tended her sister with a complex mix of concern and shame.

And during the journey Reath continued his coaching of Alia.

He seemed irritated by the presumption of the Campocs in trying to figure out the motives of the Transcendence — even trying to manipulate it, through Alia. “The Transcendence is not a human mind at all,” he said testily. “It is already far, far greater than that. And it has ambitions reaching still further.”

At the heart of the Transcendents’ project was what he called entelechy, a belief that humans contained a potential, a stupendous possibility, that could be realized in full only through unity. “What is the purpose of the great churning of human history — all our striving, our wars and our peace, our colonizing and our retreats? Surely it is to explore ways in which humans can become the best we can possibly be. And the Transcendence is the highest expression of that deep ambition.”

For now the unifying of mankind was a process, Reath said, a gathering in, a connection and sharing. But that process was not simple, not linear. It was believed that when the interconnection of the community of Transcendents reached a certain level of complexity, a critical mass, it would go through a phase change.

“A phase change?” That didn’t mean much to Alia. “What will it be like?”

Reath looked absent. “I am not a Transcendent. I can’t imagine. But it will be a different order of reality, Alia.

“Think of a cone. Imagine taking slices through that cone, higher and higher, approaching the apex. You make circles, don’t you? They shrink as you get higher — but then when you reach the tip itself, those circles transmute suddenly into a point, a quite different geometrical entity. It is a discontinuity, a step change.

“So it is with the Transcendence. It will proceed from its present scattered imperfection to a new level of awareness, a totality that will be a crystallization of mind, a full comprehension of the universe, and of ourselves. When it goes through its phase change, the Transcendence will become infinite, and eternal. Literally. Already it is planning on such scales.”

This sounded wonderful to Alia, if scary, but baffling. “How can you plan to be infinite?”

“What do you know of infinities, Alia?”

“What do you think?…”

“Infinity is a way of thinking, not so much a number as a process.” And the processes of infinity shaped the way the Transcendence was laying its plans for the future,” he said. “Infinity gives you room.

“Imagine this. Suppose you owned a starship, bigger than the Nord, an immense ship with an infinite number of cabins. You number the cabins one, two, three… You have one passenger in each of the cabins — an infinite number of passengers. But now another ship docks, with a second infinite set of passengers, all of whom want lodging. What do you do?”

“Turn them away. I’m already full up.”

“Are you? Try this. You work along your infinite corridor. You tell the passenger in room one to move to room two. The passenger in room two goes to four. The passenger in room three goes to six…”

“Everybody shuffles up,” she said. “To the cabin with the number twice their old one.”

“Is there room for them all?”

She thought it over. “Yes. Because I have an infinite number of even-numbered cabins.”

“And how many cabins have you freed up?”

“All the odd ones.” She thought about it. “An infinite number of them, too.”

“So what do you do with the new set of passengers?”

“Welcome them aboard…”

He smiled. “You see? Infinity plus infinity equals infinity. Infinity lets you do things finitude would forbid. Infinity is a mapping; it is a way of doing things, a way of thinking, apparently paradoxical. The Transcendence is not yet infinite, but after its singularity it plans to be. So this is the way the Transcendence thinks, Alia. And if you wish to understand the Transcendence, it is the way you must think, too.”

“There isn’t an infinite amount of room in my head. So how can infinity fit in there?”

He held up his thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart. “How many real numbers are there between zero and one?”

“An infinite number?”

“An uncountably infinite number, in fact… There are many orders of infinity; we won’t go into that. So you can cram infinity into a finite space.”

“All right. But this is the real universe! What about the granularity of space and time, of matter and energy? What about quantum uncertainty?”

He winked at her. “I won’t worry about that if you don’t.”

They arrived in a spectacular sky.

They had come some distance into the Core, the Galaxy’s central bulge, and there were stars everywhere, stars and turbulent clouds of gas and dust. You could still see a curtain of darkness hanging behind the stars, a black sky not completely obscured by the light. But toward the center itself there was a still denser crowding. In that bath of light and sleeting radiation thousand-year battles had once been fought, and trillions of humans had lost their lives.

Against such an astounding background, the world of the Transcendents, as it loomed out of the crowded light, was unprepossessing. It wasn’t even a planet, really, not much more than an asteroid, even though inertial generators buried in its heart gave it a gravity close to standard, and a layer of air thick enough to breathe.

Reath’s shuttle swept over a landscape crowded with buildings that clustered in craters and ravines. Many of the buildings were massive, with walls of blown asteroid rock fixed on foundations that dug deep into the dirt. But the buildings were mostly dark, unadorned, with only small clusters of lights within their hulking shadows.

In a sky full of stars this worldlet didn’t even have a sun of its own. Alia learned that orphaned worlds were in fact common here, for the stars crowded so close that close encounters and even stellar collisions were frequent, and planets were often torn away from their parent systems.

But this nameless, homeless fragment had its own history. Huge energies had been spent in turning it into a munitions factory — and even vaster energies expended on flattening it again. The modern buildings were built into the relics of those long-vanished days, structures so massive and solid it was likely the asteroid itself would erode away before they did, leaving the blocky buildings to drift away.

And now these buildings once devoted to killing had been rededicated as the temples of a new god.

As the shuttle descended Alia grew increasingly uneasy.

With her new faculty for listening beyond the confines of her own head, she reached out, tentatively. She could see the bright minds of the Campocs, and she could read their poignant emotions as clearly as if they were her own — their apprehension at being here, their strange, complex concerns about the Redemption, and their muddled guilt over their treatment of Drea. In the foreground, too, were the minds of Reath and Drea. They were still mostly closed to her, like silvered spheres drifting in her mental sky; it would take her some time to build up her skills before she could see into the minds of non-adepts. But she glimpsed what lay within when a particularly strong emotion disturbed the surface of one of their minds — especially Drea’s love and concern for her sister, Alia saw with shame.

And beyond all that, she began dimly to hear, there was a greater roar, inchoate and confused. It was as if ten thousand voices were calling at once, their words merging into a roar as meaningless and as thunderous as the crashing of the waves on a shore. This was the Transcendence, the churning of multiple interconnected minds. And it was terrifying.

She recoiled, trying to shut out what lay beyond the walls of her mind.

The shuttle came down at the edge of a township, small and very quiet. Nobody was in sight. And after they landed, nobody came to greet them.

They clambered out of the shuttle and took a walk. It was a strange experience. This battered world was very small, with a horizon as close as the curve of a hill; you could have walked all the way around it in a couple of days. The gravity was artificial, and felt like it; Alia could feel lumpiness, subtle discontinuities, as she passed from the influence of one Higgs-control inertial field to another. Even the clouds that littered the cramped, dark blue sky were orderly, artificially formed. Though stars glared this worldlet had no sun of its own, and lamps hovered in the lee of buildings to dispel shadows.

It was a drab, shabby place. Dwellings had been built into the ancient ruins without much sense of beauty or elegance or individual style — nothing but functionality. There was no art anywhere, Alia noticed, just like the Rustball.

They came upon people, but the people ignored them.

Everybody from the children upward wore clothes of a dull, machine-manufactured uniformity. They passed a kind of refectory, a public eating place. Few people even prepared their own meals, it seemed. Everywhere was quiet, lifeless. Nobody even seemed to talk.

In one shallow rubble-filled crater, a group of children played a game with a bat and ball. They ran and threw and caught, working hard enough to sweat. But their faces were empty, and they ran without calling out, or laughing, or clapping, or bickering over dropped balls and missed swings. And their movements were oddly coordinated. You could see there was something higher about them, Alia thought, something that distracted them — or controlled them, she thought uneasily. But there was something missing in them, too. They flocked like birds, somehow less than human.

“Most of the children are Transcendents, too, of course,” murmured Reath. “From before they were born, the moment of conception. Many Transcendents breed true, though not all. They play only because of the needs of their growing bodies; it is more a structured exercise than a game as you would understand it.”

“Everybody goes around as if they are in a dream,” said Drea. “Even these kids.”

Bale said, “Wouldn’t you?”

Drea said at last, “What a dull place! Is this really how superhumans live their lives?”

Reath muttered something about how the richness of a Transcendent’s individual life was as irrelevant as the cultural milieu of a liver cell.

Alia walked on stiffly, uneasy, a complex shadow cast before her by Galaxy-center light.

Drea said dryly, “Your imminent godhood doesn’t seem to be improving your patience.”

“Wouldn’t you be churned up? I keep waiting for it to happen.”

“What, exactly?”

“For them to come get me. The Transcendents.”

Reath laughed, not unkindly. “It isn’t going to be like that. There are no teachers, no guides. This is the Transcendence, remember, a manifestation of the group, not of individual actions.”

“Like a Coalescence,” Drea said.

“Like a Coalescence, yes — although a Coalescence is a mindless machine, and the Transcendence is the essence of mind. There’s nobody in charge. Alia, I called this a ‘Transcendent world,’ but that’s just a simplifying label. It isn’t a headquarters, or a capital. It’s just that many of the population here happen to be Transcendents. But there are Transcendents all over the Core — indeed all over the Galaxy. Just as individuals don’t matter, nor do places; the Transcendence is everywhere, or nowhere… Even I’m not in charge; I’m only here to point out your choices. It’s always been up to you.” He sounded wistful — even envious, she thought.

They walked on until they came to a kind of compound. Here, behind a low fence, was a group of very old people. Though dressed in the same dull robes as everybody else, they were bent, slow — most of them were in fact immobile, on chairs or beds set out on a scrubby lawn. They looked small to Alia, as if they had sublimated with age. Younger attendants walked among them, adjusting blankets and offering them bland-looking food. But the attendants seemed as distracted as everybody else.

Then, for a moment, the old people, those who walked, seemed to move in a coordinated way, blank faces lifting, twiglike limbs moving, a ghost of the energetic flocking of the children. Alia thought she could see the spirit of the Transcendence move through them, as it had through the children. But the moment passed, and all she saw were old people, muttering and stumbling in the dirt.

“The undying,” said Reath softly. “Survivors of history, and now the heart of the Transcendence, a new form of mankind altogether… Nobody knows quite how old some of these people are. That immortality pill works wonders, Alia!”

Drea asked, “But who wants to live forever if it’s going to be like this?”

Still nobody approached them, or even acknowledged their presence. Drea said that the Transcendence might be superhuman, but it wasn’t very polite.

Tired, disappointed, deflated, they trailed back to the shuttle.

Another flight, more airports and processing and online booking-system therapists. But I got through it.

From the air Seville looked like a jewel glittering on the breast of a desert. A river, the Guadalquivir, cut through the city, but its waters were low, brown, sluggish. The city itself, much of it gleaming silver with Paint, seemed oddly static, even for these traffic-free days, like a vast movie set. As the plane banked for its final descent I glimpsed the countryside stretching off to the east, across southern Spain toward the true desert of Almeria. Its barrenness was broken by patches of gray-green, maybe olive groves. Further out I saw dazzling silvery rectangles that might have been greenhouses, or solar farms — and one spindly needle shape that must have been the famous Sundial, all of a kilometer tall. But these signs of life were sparse in a huge empty landscape.

The airport terminal was a big box of glass and concrete, turn-of-the-century chic, but the concrete was cracked and stained. Spidery cleaning bots clambered stiffly over the windows, but they just seemed to be pushing the dirt around. Even inside the terminal building there was reddish dust on the floor, like fine-grained sand, swept carelessly into the corners in tiny dunes.

The debarkation processing was straightforward enough. My exit interview from the plane took only thirty minutes, with the usual blood, DNA and retina scans, psychological profiling and neural probes. But there was a lot of walking to be done from one stage of the induction to the next, and only a dribble of us passengers to do it. I felt I was in the guts of a vast machine, devised to process herds of humans that had now vanished.

Once I’d collected my bags, I made it through customs. And there was my aunt Rosa to greet me.

She was a small, compact old woman, her shoulders rounded, her movements stiff. She looked solid, though, slow-moving, oddly muscular. Her face was a disc of rumpled flesh, tanned like leather, but her eyes were pale and clear, tiny gray stones. She looked like my uncle George, far more than my mother had. Her hair was a scattering of gray threads, roughly cut. She was in the uniform of her profession, a black shirt, black slacks, and a cardigan of black wool, heavy-looking despite the heat of the afternoon. Even her shoes were black, brightly polished on her small feet. And around her neck she wore a pale slip of stiffened cloth.

She looked me up and down, her gaze critical; after the long flight I felt murky, crumpled. “So you’re Michael. Gina’s boy.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Aunt Rosa.”

“Aunt.”She snickered. “Great heavens, you must be fifty years old. What kind of word is that to use?”

“Actually I’m fifty-two—”

“ ‘Rosa’ will do, I think.” Her accent was odd, British-tinged English rather than American, but with unfamiliar cadences.

We stood there facing each other. I felt awkward, uncertain. In the end I bent to kiss her. She didn’t flinch; she looked amused. I kissed her on her left cheek, and then her right, in the European style. Her skin was hot and very dry.

She stepped back. “So we got that over with. You have all your luggage? Good. Follow me…” She led me out of the terminal building.

When we stepped out of the air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall. I’d never felt anything quite like it, a dry, heavy heat that seemed to drag every bit of moisture out of my skin, and the air had a dusty, almost aromatic tang. It was almost like my jolting virtual-Permian experiences.

Rosa just stomped her way through the heat, oblivious. I struggled to follow.

She brought me to a rank where a cab waited for us, an empty white pod with tinted glass. I touched the metal handle of the trunk, and was zapped by a static shock that made my hand jerk backward.

Rosa raised almost invisible eyebrows. “It’s the dryness of the air,” she said. “Occupational hazard.

You’ll get used to it. Or not. Get in.”

Rosa lived in an area called La Macarena, in the north of Seville. It was a jumbled area, crowded with tiny, baroque churches and tapas bars. But even here, as our cab wormed its way through narrow streets, there was nobody around. Many of the bars and shops were boarded up, and the only signs of motion were insects and cleaning robots.

The place was clean, the streets free of litter and the walls scrubbed clean of graffiti. A few of the grander residences, behind high walls and railings, showed signs of life. Some of them had trees growing, olives or oranges, or even scraps of lawn; the heads of sprinklers showed everywhere. But there was a general feeling of decay. It was as if the city were populated only by machines, robots who mindlessly, pointlessly, scrubbed the streets and the walls, but all the while everything was rotting away, slumping back into the dry ground. And despite the obvious efforts of the cleaning bots, everything was covered with a fine patina of orange dust.

Spain was losing its people. Its population had halved since the beginning of the century, and by the end would halve again. I had known all this, that here was an extreme case of the general depopulation of the west. But I hadn’t expected it to be so obvious, the city to feel so empty.

We reached Rosa’s apartment. It was a small, rather poky place on the third floor of a tenement block, close to an avenue called the Calle del Torneo that followed the line of the river. The tight security was opened up by a sweep of Rosa’s palm and the sacrifice of a few cells from her fingertip to a DNA tester. Even within the building I saw nobody around, as if Rosa was Seville’s last resident left standing.

The apartment’s conditioned air was cool, moist, fresh. Rosa had a small kitchen with a dining area that opened onto a balcony with a view of the city, and a spare bedroom, where she allowed me to make camp. A couple of bots crawled around the place, equipped to cook, clean. Her support equipment seemed much simpler than George’s — but then, I could see, Rosa had aged better than George. And she seemed to have disengaged some of the higher sentience functions in her various machines. There was no backchat from this lot, and nothing like George’s faintly irritating toy robot companion.

The bathroom was tiny. I showered, in a trickle of water that got steadily more lukewarm. Orange-red dust washed out of my hair and skin, and pooled at my feet. Later I learned that water was inordinately expensive here — which was why those grander residences, the homes of the rich, made such a show of its conspicuous consumption.

With Rosa’s blessing I lay down for an hour and napped. My dreams were turbulent, and I woke unrefreshed.

Rosa prepared me a meal. We sat at her table, near the window that looked out over the city. A sunset towered into the sky, a smear of dusty light. The buildings before me were silhouetted by the setting sun, making a lumpy, cluttered skyline, but lights showed in only a handful of them.

Rosa’s food was surprisingly good. They were local dishes, she said. She served me a fish soup with bread and twists of bitter orange peel; she called it carrochenas. Then we ate bowls of broad beans with chunks of cured meat, habas de la rondena. But the meat was gen-enged ham, chunks hacked from some brainless, cubical, undying mass in a factory somewhere; I found it a little bland, watery.

We exchanged small talk about the family. Rosa didn’t seem very interested. In that she was more like my mother than George. But she knew about Tom, and his escapade in Siberia.

And she knew all about Morag. She raised the subject even before we’d finished the beans.

“Let’s get this out in the open before we go any further.” She tapped her dog collar with a bent finger. “Is this what you’re looking for, Michael? Bell, book, and candles?”

“I came because George thought it would be a good idea.”

“Ah, George, my dear long-lost brother. The ultimate family man. This is his instinct, you see; when faced by a problem, you should wrap it up in the clinging webs of family. Maybe if he’d had children of his own the antics of his siblings and nephews wouldn’t matter so much to him — not that I’m one to talk. Well, perhaps he’s right. If I take what you say at face value, we’re dealing with a haunting here. Who better to come to than a priest?

“And where better to come than such an old country as this?” Columbus himself had a tomb here, she told me, in Seville’s cathedral, which was itself built on the site of a mosque erected by the Muslims who had once occupied southern Spain. “We’re soaked in history, drenched in ghosts. Why, once Seville was known as a center for necromancy, which is the art of calling up ghosts deliberately, to gain information about the future. Queen Isabella put a stop to that! Now the crowds of history have receded, and we have new populations of ghosts to deal with. Millions of them.” She leaned toward me, staring, and a deeper silence seemed to seep into the room. “Can’t you feel it? The stillness of an empty city?”

I felt claustrophobic, resentful. I sat back and pushed my food away. “Look,” I said. “I’m grateful for your hospitality. The food. But—”

Her eyes glittered. “But you don’t feel I’m being respectful enough about your precious experience.”

“Precious?” I shook my head, my irritation growing. “Do you imagine I’m some neurotic old fool? Believe me, I don’t want this to be happening to me.”

“I think you’d better tell me about Morag,” Rosa said quietly.

I calmed down. “I met her, oh, twenty-seven years ago. She was a couple of years younger than me. She was actually a friend of John, my brother.”

Rosa raised an eyebrow at that.

“She was a bio-prospector then. She spent her time searching for new species of ascomycete fungi. Do you know the significance? The ascomycetes have yielded about ninety percent of our antibiotics, even though, up to then, we’d only identified around twenty percent of the species thought to exist…”

Rosa said, “A very modern vocation.”

Anyhow we’d married, and we were very happy, and we had Tom. After that my work had kept me away from home a lot, but Morag had got pregnant again even so. And then — well, Rosa knew the rest.

I told Rosa all this in fragments, but she listened patiently. That skill was the result of forty years as a priest, no doubt, but it was effective nonetheless.

I felt uncomfortable, though, when I talked of Tom and Morag. I knew how unhappy he was that I had come here; I felt I could sense his hostility all the way across the Atlantic.

“And now she’s come back to you,” Rosa said.

“So it seems.”

“Why, do you think?”

“I don’t know! I wish I did.”

“And do you want it to stop?”

I could answer neither yes or no; either would have been true, either a lie. “I want to understand,” I said at last.

She reached out. When her dry fingers touched the back of my hand I felt a jolt, almost like the static shock I felt earlier. “Try to be calm,” she said. “I just needed to be sure you were sincere.”

“Of course I’m sincere.”

“Well, now we both know that, don’t we?”

While she learned about me, I found out about her. Uncle George had told me something of Rosa’s story. During that meal I began to learn a little more.

She had been born in Manchester, England, as George had been, nearly ninety years ago. But when very small she had been sent to Rome, and given into the care of a Catholic fringe group called the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins — the Order, as George referred to it. George himself had been so young he had forgotten he even had this second sister, until by chance he came across a photograph in the effects of his deceased father.

The Order was a teaching group. Among other things. Rosa had been raised by them, and when she grew up had gone to work for the Order.

When he was in his forties, George had discovered Rosa’s existence, and he went to Rome to look for her. This had coincided with some kind of crisis in the Order. The sequence of events had resulted in Rosa being expelled from the group, and for a time she faded from George’s life again.

It turned out that after her expulsion from the Order Rosa had stayed within Catholicism. She had gone to a seminary and eventually taken holy orders to become a priest. Now, I learned, she served a scattered parish that covered much of the northern suburbs of Seville, and poorer communities outside the city boundaries. She had been here for three decades, and she was still working, with no intention of retiring as long as her strength held out.

Her story struck me as strange, in those first tellings. The Order had been prepared to take her in because, it seemed, there was some deep and old family connection between the Pooles, my mother’s little nuclear family in Manchester, and the Order in Rome. But for a family to send away a child, for good, was a bafflingly painful thing to do. And then for the parents to lie about it to George, their son, to keep secret the very existence of a sister, seemed a terribly cold and calculating deception.

And then my own mother, that bit older than George, probably remembered it all. Had she never thought to tell George about Rosa, before he stumbled across the secret for himself? But my mother had never discussed any of this with me either. Generations are like that, I suspect; even though I was in my fifties my mother still kept her problems from me, as if I were a child.

Still, Rosa’s account of herself was a hollow story, I thought, a listing of events without real heart. I wondered how much more of it I would have to learn before I was done — and how much I really wanted to know.

“Are you a believer, Michael?”

“In the Christian God? I guess not. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not sure if I am, despite this.” She flicked her collar. “But I’m convinced that everything we humans do has some evolutionary purpose, or else we wouldn’t do it. And I believe that priests, and the witch doctors and shamans that came before them, have a crucial role to play, regardless of their theological justification.

“When I first came out of the seminary, and accepted my first post at a parish here in Seville, I imagined I would be strong enough to cope with what the job threw at me. After all I had been through some grueling experiences myself.” Her face worked briefly, but she didn’t elaborate. “I was wrong. I was shocked.

“I found I was a conduit, Michael. That was my role. A conduit into which people were able to flush their pain and their fear. And, believe me, there is plenty of that, even in this place where there are hardly any people left. I was nearly overwhelmed, a mote in a dust storm. But my seniors counseled me, and I came to understand my duty, which was to stand firm in the face of that great flooding of misery.”

I said cautiously, “And — experiences like mine? You’ve come across such things before?”

“My faith teaches us that the world is a subtler place than is revealed by our blunt senses, Michael. You have to believe that much, whether or not you buy the Christian explanation. And, yes, sometimes I have been exposed to experiences that you would describe as beyond the natural. You’re an engineer, aren’t you? You are probably uncomfortable that something so irrational is happening to you. ”

I never liked being pigeonholed. “I like to think I’m broader-minded than that,” I said.

“Well, perhaps you are. You’re here, after all. And now that I’ve met you I’m quite prepared to believe that you aren’t mad, or delusional, or a liar; something really is happening to you. What we must work out is what it means.”

“So what do we do?”

“Why, nothing. You say that Morag comes to you, without your choosing it. Then let her come to you again, and we will see what we will see.”

“And if she doesn’t come?”

She smiled; I thought I detected a trace of contempt in her expression. “Then you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?”

We had been drinking wine. It was fortified, a kind of sherry, but light and very dry, with a strange salty tang. Rosa took hers with a little water. She said the wine was called manzanilla, and was matured only in a town to the southwest, where the Guadalquivir met the Atlantic Ocean, which perhaps explained the subtle saltiness.

Rosa opened the glass doors to her balcony, and we walked out. We were looking west, where the sky was still stained by the dusty sunset, but at the zenith bone-white stars were starting to appear. The air was cooling, but it was still so dry it burned my throat. There were few lights to be seen in the darkened landscape of buildings, homes and shops, restaurants and bars, and a kind of dense silence settled over the town, a silence so rich it seemed to roar, dully, like the blood in my ears.

Rosa had brought a little jug of water with her, and now and again she tipped some into her wine. “You are sure you don’t want any of this?… Customs are changing, you know. In some houses these days good fresh water is presented as the finer drink. You wine your water rather than the other way around!” She held up the jug to the sky, peering into the water; it was slightly cloudy. “But this wouldn’t pass muster in the best households. Desalinated ocean water, pumped up here from Almunecar on the coast.”

“Water’s scarce here.”

“Of course. It’s the same all around the planet. A midlatitude, midcentury blight,” she said. “Spain is a big square box of land and mountains, and for twenty years, I suppose more, it has been drying out, desiccating. Luckily for the Spanish they already had extensive experience of water conservation, desalination, all the other disciplines of drought. I remember when I first came here there was a vast scheme to water the Almeria, the desert region to the east. It would be the world’s greatest tourist resort, greater than Florida, with golf courses and holiday homes by the tens of thousands. And they promised to make plants and grasses so salt-resistant you could irrigate them with untreated seawater. Ha! Now it is all gone, and we are plagued by dust.”

“I noticed it today.”

She ran her finger over the balcony rail; the pad of her finger came away pink with grime. “The cleaning machines polished this only this morning.” She rubbed her fingers together, and the dry dust trickled to the floor. “There it is,” she said. “All those golf courses and holiday homes, and the salt-resistant rice and alfalfa and corn, all blown up into the air… Hush.” She raised a finger and peered into the dark.

I heard a rustling, coming from the alley below me. “What is it? A mouse, a rat?”

“Possibly. Though there isn’t much for them to eat anymore. It may be a robot, another of our guardian-angel machines, earnestly keeping the streets safe for old folk like me. I sometimes wonder — I’m told that the machines are as smart as dogs, or even some cats. When they have run out of vermin to eliminate, what will they do for sport? Will they turn on each other?…”

“Why is Spain so empty? What caused this depopulation?” I was faintly ashamed of my ignorance.

“The drought hasn’t helped,” Rosa said. “But the change has come from humanity, Michael, from inside us.”

Some time around the turn of the century, people all over the world just stopped having so many children. For a while the effect was masked; the end of the last century saw the biggest population bulge in human history, and as that vast cadre grew to childbearing age they flooded the world with yet more kids. But the bulge soon worked its way through the demographics, and the decline cut in.

Rosa said, “In Spain, the government became alarmed. It was thought at first that it was simply a choice of women taking control of their own bodies, on a mass scale perhaps for the first time in history. Spain, along with other countries, put in place more civilized child-care facilities — robots helped with that. More subtly, they tried to renegotiate gender roles, the unspoken contract between men and women. I watched all this from outside, of course. Quite a spectacle! Some of this social engineering worked, for example in the United States. But not in Spain, Italy, Greece, the more conservative, patriarchal countries. There, traditions are too deeply rooted to be shifted, even in the face of population collapse.

“But I think it’s all a lot deeper than a simple matter of stay-at-home fathers and day-care nurseries — don’t you? After all profound instincts are being defied here: the instinct to propagate the tribe, to fill the world with your brood, all the antique Iron Age drives that have enabled us to cover the planet. But now some other, more mysterious motivation is taking hold. Once people came here in great waves, the Romans and the Visigoths, the Moors and the Christians. And now they are leaving again — not going anywhere, just disappearing into lost potentialities. And when they’ve gone, there will be nothing but this aching emptiness. But it feels right. Don’t you think? It suits the times.”

“I’m surprised you’re happy to live alone like this.”

“At my age, you mean? Oh, I’m safe enough. I’m surrounded by machines, as we all are. Pointlessly intelligent, all of them. Machine sentience is now omniscient and omnipresent, just as we once imagined God to be — ha! I am sure they would not let me come to any harm.”

“What about crime?”

“I have no fear of that. Criminals prefer crowds, too. If I ever really feel I need people, I go to the more popular parts of town — El Arenal by the river, where the Plaza de Toros still stages fights between men and robot bulls, or Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter. And that is where the criminals go, too. And the crows and the rats…”

“But you prefer to stay here,” I said. “Away from the lights, the people.”

“I go where they need me,” she said. “But, yes, I prefer the silence. Sometimes you can feel it rise up around you, the emptiness, coming out of a thousand abandoned buildings, a million rooms empty of everything but garbage. I feel as if I’m in a tiny lifeboat, adrift in emptiness.”

“And you like to feel that way?”

“Where I grew up was rather different,” she said. “Somewhat crowded. Perhaps, late in life, I am enjoying the contrast.”

“Aunt Rosa, I think you spend too much time on your own.”

That won me a laugh. “Perhaps I do. Am I morbid, do you think? But I still have work to do here. You asked me about experiences beyond the natural…”

She told me a story.

She said that the city authorities were working their way through the depopulated districts, trying to make them safe. There was some demolition, but usually, more wistfully, what was called “mothballing,” as buildings were secured and sealed against the day when the people would return. And sometimes, in this patient cleaning-out, they found things that induced the firefighters or police officers or environment managers to call on the services of a priest like Rosa.

“In one case, as they approached a ruined old house, the workers thought they heard children singing, in harmony, like a school choir. But there were no children there. Then they found a cellar. It turned out that it had been used by a man who had taken children over a period of years. You don’t need to know the details. His crimes had never been discovered, not until now.

“The workers would not, could not enter that cellar. It wasn’t because of rot or decay or the danger of disease; their equipment would take care of that. But there was a deeper blight which they hoped I would confront, with my prayers.” She paused. Her small, closed-in face was quite unreadable now. “Have you ever been in the presence of evil, Michael?”

“I don’t think so—”

“You would know. In fiction, evil is portrayed as stylish, clever. The devil is a gentleman! But in fact evil is banal. In that cellar, the dirt, the blood, the bits of hair and clothing, even the scattered toys — it was nauseating, literally revolting, in a way a place of animals could never be.” She turned to me; her body stayed motionless while her head swiveled like an owl’s. “Your ghost. Your Morag. Is she evil, Michael?”

“No,” I said with certainty. “Whatever it is, she’s not that.”

She seemed to relax, subtly. “Good. At least we will not have to face that. Then we must seek out another explanation, a different interpretation. Perhaps you are a necromancer, Michael, in this capital city of necromancy; perhaps you are a man who speaks to ghosts to discern the future — what do you think?”

I thought I needed some more of that seawater wine.

Rosa had promised me that the next day she would take me to see the sights of Seville. We would climb La Giralda, a Moorish tower stranded in the middle of a Gothic Christian cathedral, and view the city. Or, better still, perhaps we would ride up the Sundial, the symbol of Spain’s number one export industry, electrical power. I thought it was interesting that Rosa’s ideas for a day out were all about going to high places. She sought out isolation and height, a contrast, it seemed, to her strange early life, which, as far as I could make out, had been in conditions of crowding, and deep underground.

I looked forward to seeing the Sundial, though. It was a solar-power tower a kilometer tall, rising from gleaming hectares of solar-cell farms, a modern wonder. Air heated at its base rose up through the tower and drove turbines. It was a simple design, if horribly inefficient — but who cared about efficiency when the sunlight was to be had for free?

But in the end we didn’t go anywhere, for the next day was a “dust day.”

I was woken by a rumble of traffic that wouldn’t have seemed unusual save that it was here. It wasn’t long after dawn. Looking out through the closed balcony windows I saw robot water lorries rolling down the street, spraying water over the street surface. They were broadcasting warnings in precise, clipped Spanish. In the middle distance the whole skyline was obscured by an orange-red haze, and the rising sun was a pale disc that threw only faint shadows on the empty road surface. We would likely be stuck indoors for the day, Rosa said.

We had breakfast, watching the storm. I sat beside the closed window, with cups of coffee made of desalinated ocean water, and watched the dust roll in. It was coming on a wind from the north, from out of the peninsula’s desiccated interior, blowing the last of the country’s topsoil into the sea. When it hit us we were sunk in darkness.

The day after that, the dust still lingered. Holed up in Rosa’s apartment, we heard the buzzing of planes. They were seeding clouds over the reservoirs, Rosa said, spraying liquid nitrogen and silver iodide, trying to magic up some rain. Rosa was cynical. She said the planes were just a stunt, designed to reassure the populace that the government was doing something. There was a regional election coming, she said; that was why they were seeding the clouds.

At times it got so dark it was like being under the sea. I looked up at waves gathering and breaking on top of the layer of dust that overwhelmed the city, vast waves towering between earth and sky.

There was no true night on this world of Transcendents.

Enclosed within the opaqued walls of her cabin, with her sister sleeping soundly nearby, Alia was restless. In the silent dark, with no distractions, it was even harder to shut out that unending roar outside the shuttle, and outside her own head.

But as she drifted between sleeping and waking, she found at last what she had been brought here to discover.

It was like a dream. She was aware of herself, lying comfortably on her pallet. She even knew that her sister lay still in the corner of the room, her body a warm mass, her mind folded over on itself.

But the nugget of consciousness that always lodged behind Alia’s eyes seemed to have dislodged, to float freely through the rooms of her mind. And the walls of those rooms were porous — flimsy, translucent — so that a brighter light shone through them, and she heard voices, many of them. It wasn’t the formless clamor that had upset her before, but like distant singing, a massed choir perhaps, the merged voices sweet but scattered by the winds. The glow out there was warm and welcoming, the voices gentle and harmonious.

With an effort of will she pushed her way out through the walls of her head.

Her mind threw up analogies for what she experienced.

She was floating over a landscape. It was dark, but over that velvet ground lay patterns of light, like a system of roads, a glowing threadwork in multiple colors that connected a multitude of brilliant points.

She wanted to see more. She rose up effortlessly.

The floor below was like a starry sky, but inverted, with a vast constellation map written over it. Here and there the links gathered more closely around tightly connected clusters of nodes, which glowed like cities. She saw that the map was not infinite. It closed on itself — not like a sphere, that would be much too literal for this dreamy vision, but with every point connected to every other. The map was dynamic, the links sparking, twisting, reconnecting, and changing constantly. The constant flux was part of the pattern, too; this was a map in time as well as space.

And though the topology of the network changed constantly, none of those shining points was ever left isolated. Each was always joined by two, three, four links to its neighbors, and through them to the totality.

This was the Transcendence,the shining nodes human minds, the links that joined them channels of shared thought and memory. This visual map was a crude analogy, and incomplete, for the merged mind was greater than a simple aggregate of individuals. And yet it helped her to begin to see. Reath had been right: location in space or even time was irrelevant to the Transcendence. This abstract realm was where the Transcendence existed, this no-place, and it was governed not by time or distance but merely by an effort of will.

She saw nothing threatening in this warm interconnectedness. Suddenly she longed to be one of those nodes, to be joined forever in the tremendous friendliness of that topology. She sank down, out of the invisible sky. She passed into the netting, through layers of it, until she was surrounded by glowing mind-nodes. Tendrils of interconnection reached out, probing at her from all sides.

She felt unexpected fear, and for a moment she was back in her body, which turned and twisted on her pallet.

But then the metaphor changed.

There were no more stars and laser-beam threads. Faces turned to her. They were all smiling. And they all looked like Drea, her sister, she thought — or even like Alia herself. As those familiar eyes shone, hands clasped hers, or rubbed her back, her neck, her arms. They moved in closer, until she was surrounded by a comfortable warmth. It was briefly suffocating, and she thrashed again, but the pressure eased. And that slow, reassuring approach began again.

Different metaphors now: hallways opened up all around her, as if doors were flung open to reveal them receding into the distance. Every way she chose to go was open, and every way looked inviting.

She picked a direction. She went that way — not walking, not even Skimming, simply traveling.

Now she was in a kind of library, a place where shelving and stacks receded in every direction as far as she could see, side to side, up and down. People worked here patiently, consulting records, moving them from one corner of this vast archive to another. The librarians’ forms were undefined, their attention devoted to their work. She couldn’t see how they moved about, as there was no floor to walk on — but that was irrelevant; it was only a dream. And though the archive stretched off to infinity in every direction, she could somehow see other archives beyond its remote walls, other centers of knowledge, remembrance, wisdom.

This was another obvious metaphor, constructed by her mind as it struggled to interpret the flood of new information it was receiving. This was memory, the pooled memory of the Transcendence. And all of it would be accessible to her, as accessible as her own memories always had been, whenever she willed it.

Now there was a change in the way the patient librarians were working, she saw. Some were making a space in one block of shelves, and others were bringing in a new stack of material, its details too remote to make out. She knew what they were doing. That was her own pitiful heap of memories, her whole life of a mere few decades dwarfed by the great banks of knowledge here. And yet she would be given a place here; she would be cherished. Others would be able to access her memories as easily as she could, just as she could reach the memories of others — and even the greater collective experiences of the Transcendence itself, which she perceived now as shadowy mountains of information looming beyond the bounds of the archive.

And, constantly remembered, the memories that defined her need not die with her — and so she need not die, not ever. She had no need of Reath’s “immortality pill”; in this chill, remembered sense, she was already an undying.

She rose again, lifting up through some impossible dimension, so that the whole of the Transcendence opened up around her. Now in her metaphoric perception it was as if she was in a starship, in a hold so vast she could barely make out its walls. Huge, dimly seen masses drifted through the receding gloom. But even this space was not the full extent of the ship, for corridors and walkways led away, receding in every direction, all around her, leading to hollow, silent spaces she could never reach, not if she explored for many lifetimes. This was the mind of the Transcendence. But all she saw was merely a fraction of the vastly complex infrastructure of this place, this mind.

Even now she was still outside the Transcendence, in a sense. She was still herself, still small and closed-over and complete. But there was a place for her here in this immense cathedral of mind. All she had to do was take one last step.

She had a final moment of doubt. It was as if she looked back at herself, her body lying peacefully now on its pallet.

And then she let the embrace of the Transcendence enfold her at last.

The Transcendence was a body. She could feel its limbs, the bodies of its human host already counted in the billions and scattered over thousands of worlds. And yet in another way she was barely more aware of the individual bodies that made up this great host than she was of the cells of her own tiny form.

And its consciousness was not just a network of pooled minds. It arose from that network, like a frost pattern emerging from the interactions of ice molecules. She, the spark that was still Alia, felt bewildered by the scope and grandeur of its thoughts. The Transcendence was a symphony orchestra overwhelming her with its mighty themes — and yet own lone piping was an essential part of the whole.

She didn’t lose herself. She was still Alia. She was even aware of her own body, lying in its pallet. When she became more adept she would be able to function normally, live a fully human life, while still engaging in the greater community of the Transcendence. It was like — more metaphors, Alia! — it was like doing two things at once with different levels of awareness, like walking and holding a conversation at the same time. It would be a life lived on two levels, just as she had seen of the Transcendents on this worldlet.

And now she glimpsed the mighty purposes of the Transcendence, the design behind this grand architecture. She felt its tremendous ambition of joining every human mind into its own grand confluence of thought, a gathering into the ultimate embrace of the Transcendence. Then would come the day when the Transcendence, arising out of humanity, would become the highest form of this cosmic age, and it would apprehend the form of the whole universe. This was the dream of a young, unformed god — a dream of power, but not what to do with it, not yet. There would be time enough, a literal eternity of it.

And in the meantime there was reflection.

She found memories. There were the firefly sparks of individual lives — she sensed birth, death, love, sex, tragedy, triumph. Rising above these small rememberings were the vaster memories of the young mass mind itself, as it emerged from a misty unawareness to a cognizance of itself. The most striking note was a huge joy, surprisingly simple, a joy to be alive: a triumphant shout of I am!

And yet there was a grace note of sorrow, she saw, a trill of regret.

She became aware again of the host of bodies, the heads from which the mass mind had sprung. The awareness of the Transcendence lay over those minds like dew on blades of grass. But she saw that there were knots in the distribution of minds — knots of density, of resistance, of a kind of stubbornness, of age. They were the undying, the ancient core of the Transcendence. And it was here that the regret was centered. Alia was drawn to the pain, wary but curious, like the tip of a tongue probing an aching tooth.

And suddenly she was bombarded by blood, by screams, trillions upon trillions of terrified and anguished voices calling out together. She screamed in response.

Even in her torment she knew what this was. This was the Redemption, the Witnessing of the blood-soaked past. This dark pit, right at the heart of the Transcendence itself, was the place to which all those carefully retrieved memories drained. It was superhuman. It was unbearable. She spun and thrashed. The Campocs were right. This was wrong, terribly wrong -

She was awake, only Alia again, lying on a sweat-soaked pallet. A face hovered over her like a lantern, full of concern. It was Drea. Her sister brushed her brow, and Alia felt her hair plastered to her forehead.

Drea said, “You were yelling! Was it a nightmare? Are you all right?…”

Alia grabbed her sister and held her close.

Morning came.

Beyond the walls of the shuttle the worldlet looked even drabber, the people even more dull. There may have been fire in their heads, Alia thought, but their bodies were impoverished. It was impossible to believe that such complex magnificence as the Transcendence could arise out of the shabbiness of this thinly populated rock.

Nobody spoke to her, not Reath, not even Drea. They all seemed frightened of her. She had touched the Transcendence, but it didn’t seem to be making anybody happy.

Alia went to her Witnessing tank. It lit up to show her the wormlike thread of Poole’s whole life. At least he wouldn’t turn away from her. Impulsively she picked out a single moment.

Here was Poole, with his son, in a hospital ward. Their faces slack, they sat side by side, holding hands, subtly distant from each other, frozen in time. Seconds ago they had received the news that Poole’s baby had died, after only moments of life, and that Morag, Poole’s wife, had died with him. Alia believed that this was the crux of Michael Poole’s whole life — his personal singularity, his moment when the conic sections diminished to a point, a new quality. The moment when he lost everything.

In Michael Poole’s time, you were born alone and you died alone, but you spent your life trying to get through to others, through love, through sex — or even through violence, the bloody intimacy of killing. In his love of Morag, in the oceanic few months in which their baby had come to term, Poole had come as close as he ever would to reaching through the barriers to another human. But with the deaths he was already falling back into himself, even now, just heartbeats after hearing the dreadful news. And Alia, with her unwelcome knowledge of his future, knew he would never recover, never get so close to anybody ever again.

What would Michael Poole make of the Transcendence?

What would he have thought of her, as she sat hiding in the cabin of a shuttle, cowering from her destiny? Would Poole envy her this opportunity to reach out to the Transcendence, and to allow it to embrace her? Would he have longed to touch other people so closely? Or would he understand her deepest, most fundamental fear, which she hadn’t even been able to express to Drea — that in joining so closely with others, she would ultimately lose herself?

And what would he make of the terrible, obsessive, self-inflicted pain of the Redemption?

Absently she let the image in the tank run on. Poole and his son sat side by side, heads down. But now he looked up vaguely, as if searching for something in the air, a disturbance in his world that somehow broke through to his consciousness even at this terrible moment. Again Alia had the strange impression that somehow he knew she was watching him.

She waved her hand, and the images dissolved.

Reath approached her cautiously. “How do you feel?”

Alia frowned. “It’s as if I’m trying to remember a dream. But the harder I try, the more elusive it is.”

Reath said gently, “It was a superhuman experience. Literally.”

Or it was like being drugged, Alia thought uneasily.

“You have fulfilled the three Implications. You’re one of the Elect now, Alia. You have entered the outer circle of the Transcendence itself.” Reath’s expression was complex, full of pride and longing. “I envy you.”

“Then why don’t you join me?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, but that’s impossible. There are some of us who can never join the Transcendence, no matter how we try — or how much we might long to.” He tapped his skull with his forefinger. “Something missing in here, you see. The defect occurs on worlds scattered across the Galaxy, following patterns we can’t make out. Is it genetic? Or perhaps there are more subtle determinants of human destiny than genes.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We have our place, we eunuchs. Do you know that term? We can serve the Transcendence in a unique way. We are useful — for we are no threat to it, you see.”

She frowned. “The Campocs were right.”

“About what?”

“It’s full of regret. The Transcendence. That’s why it’s driving the Redemption. It’s as if it is tortured… But I had thought all that regret arose from the Transcendence itself.”

“It doesn’t?”

Alia remembered now, a bit of her dreamlike experience becoming more lucid. She had glimpsed those deep dark knots of folded-over awareness, like pellets buried in a loaf of bread. And from those pellets, poison leaked. “Not from all of it. From the undying. ”

Reath said, “Remember the undying initiated the joining in the first place. They are the foundation stones of the edifice of the Transcendence. And so, of course, they are shaping it. The Campocs are afraid of the impulse to Redemption. But you’ve seen it now. Are you afraid?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know enough to be afraid. The Transcendence may be like a god. But even as it is being born, it is a wounded god. Isn’t it rational to be afraid of that?” And maybe, she speculated now, somewhere in its deepest, secret heart the Transcendence was developing its obsessive Redemption in new and strange ways she had yet to understand.

Reath said, “Will you go back? You must, you know. It must be difficult — I can’t even imagine! But the only way to cope with it is to try, to grow—”

“I want to know more about the Redemption,” she said briskly. “Perhaps that way lies a deeper truth.” Perhaps, she thought, a truth not even known to the Transcendence itself. In which case, it was surely her duty as a good Transcendent-Elect to increase its own self-awareness.

Reath nodded gravely. “Then,” he said, “if that is your feeling, we must take you to the engine of the Redemption.”

The dust storm cleared, and the forecasters said we could expect a clear twenty-four hours. At least I thought they said that; the forecasts were littered with unfamiliar symbols and novel dust-storm jargon. In a Spain slowly turning into a bit of Mars, the weather forecasters had to learn new tricks.

In that clear slot, Rosa offered to take me on a jaunt out of the city, to “a kind of outer suburb,” she said. “It’s become the heart of my mission here. Even though you won’t find it on any map.”

“What’s it called?”

She treated me to a little Spanish. “The locals call it the Reef. ”

I was puzzled. “Sounds like a theme park.”

“Not quite,” she said dryly. “Oh — you’d better take this.” She handed me a pill.

I studied it dubiously. “What is it?”

“Protection. General-spectrum. Some gen-enged antibiotics, a little nanotinkering, that sort of thing. The U.S. Consulate insists you’re covered before you get within five kilometers of the Reef. Probably overcautious, but why take a chance?”

After three days with Rosa her ghoulish humor irritated me. And I was starting to feel nervous about this new leap into the dark. I took the damn pill.

A small cab pulled up outside Rosa’s apartment building. A sleek, silent bubble of plastic and ceramic, its hydrogen engine emitting the subtlest puffs of white water vapor, it was done out in papal yellow and adorned by a stylized Christian cross. We clambered inside. The air-conditioning was cool, crisp, and moist, the seats were soft and deep, and there was a fragrant new-carpet smell.

The pod slid silently away. The streets of Seville were empty as usual, and I was childishly disappointed; I don’t think I’d ever ridden in such luxury, and I would have been pleased to have an audience. This pod was actually a private vehicle, fabulously expensive, owned and run by a consortium of the local churches, to whom this Reef was evidently important.

As we moved out into the city’s hinterland I looked back. All but the grandest buildings were coated with Paint, silver or gold; in the harsh Spanish sunlight Seville shone like a gaudy movie set. Rosa told me that the photovoltaics attached to all those empty buildings garnered more energy from sunlight than the Sundial itself; even empty the city made a profit for the nation.

Traveling north, we left the city proper and headed into a landscape that opened up around us, bare and flat. Our road, modern, surfaced with silvertop, arrow-straight and quite empty, cut across the dirt.

We passed abandoned farms, where the dust had overwhelmed low walls or piled up in the lee of the buildings. There were signs of past dust storms, drifts like dunes that had been bulldozed from the road. In some places there had been attempts to stabilize the dunes with grass, but the grass looked yellow, sparse, dry. Along one stretch of road the dunes had been entirely coated with pitch. They looked very unearthly, like huge, oddly graceful black sculptures.

I saw a plume of smoke rising up from beyond the north horizon, where we were headed.

“Methane burn-off,” said Rosa simply. “Been burning for decades. Don’t worry about it. Your pill should protect you.” She tapped a small pack at her waist. “Or if not, I brought masks.”

We began to pass buildings. They were just shacks, boxy constructions with unglazed windows and chimneys, strung out beside the road. Spindly TV aerials poked at the sky. Some of the plots even had little gardens, where stunted olives or orange trees struggled for life. As we drove past children came running out of the houses to stare. Some waved, or made coarser gestures at us, sealed in our high-tech bubble.

When I looked more closely I saw that the shanties and shacks were made of ceramic and metal, sheets of it shaped and battered: material obviously sliced from the carcasses of automobiles. Those “windows” bulged, too; they were windscreens or side windows. One woman in her front yard ground some kind of corn on a metal bowl that had obviously once been a hubcap. A group of children ran by, playing with a kind of cart that ran on “wheels” made of sliced-up bits of an exhaust manifold.

The buildings were constructed almost entirely of bits of dead car.

As we drove on the shantytown shuffled closer to the edge of the road. Some of the shacks became shops and stalls with open fronts. I could see rows of bottles, and food cooking, meat turning on spits and skewers. There were still a few kids giving us the finger as we passed, but here they were crowded out by adults. Shopkeepers yelled at us and held out samples of their wares, unidentifiable bits of meat on sticks. They seemed to be of all races, as far as I could see, a real melting pot. And many of these people were young, it struck me now; there were plenty of teenagers, adolescents, young adults. Compared to the antique stillness of the traditional city, it was like being driven through a vast nursery.

Safe in our glass cocoon, we could touch, smell none of this. Even the voices were muffled. It didn’t seem real, like a VR theater arranged for our benefit.

“Don’t be afraid,” Rosa said. “Many of them know me. Anyhow surveillance here is pretty good these days.”

“I’m not afraid. Spooked, maybe.”

“Perhaps you haven’t been in Seville long enough. Even I feel disturbed sometimes by the crowding here. The children running around… Ah. We’ve nearly reached the center.”

We passed over a low ridge and began to descend into a broad, wide valley. From this elevation I could see how the shantytown spread out for kilometers around me, the rough shacks carpeting the earth. Smoke rose up in isolated threads, from fires or methane burn-off. Here and there, though, I saw a few better-constructed buildings, blocks of concrete studded among the rubble shacks. Perhaps they were clinics, schools, police stations, welfare offices. And overhead drones flew, like glittering insects hovering over this plain of garbage. I felt reassured by these signs of governance. I guess I’m really not terribly brave.

Our road cut through all this, following its own dead straight line like a Roman road passing through medieval clutter. But a kilometer or so ahead of us the road came to a dead end. A ridge pushed up out of the plain, terminating the road and blocking our way, stretching to left and right as far as I could see. It glittered and sparkled, as if the land was covered in broken glass.

Rosa was watching my reaction. “Thatis the Reef,” she said. She leaned forward and tapped the pod’s windscreen. “I think this jalopy has some imaging facilities…” A disc of the screen showed us a magnified image of what lay ahead.

I saw that the Reef wasn’t natural at all. It was man-made. It was a heap of automobiles.

Cars upon cars upon cars, piled up, crushed down on each other, glittering with bits of smashed windscreen and gaudy paintwork, the whole thing laced together by a patina of orange rust: there were so many cars they were beyond counting. It was like a vast heaping of dead beetles. And as I learned to work the controls of our pod’s imaging system and turned my gaze, godlike, I saw people crawling, digging, climbing, working at the Reef, everywhere I looked.

The pod rolled to a stop. Its blister popped open, and the Reef rushed in on me. Suddenly the pod was full of a clamor of voices. You could hear individual shouts close by, and beyond that massed voices like the cries of gulls — and then a wider roar, like waves breaking, the sound of a million voices merging into one.

Then there were the smells. It smelled like a road. I smelled tar and asphalt and rubber and carbon monoxide, and a sharper stink that might have been tires burning somewhere. I felt immediately nauseous, but I tried to hide it.

Rosa sniffed up this toxic mix with a look of pleasure. “Ah, bliss. Once the whole world smelled like this, of car. A few hours of it won’t do you any harm.” She was watching me. “I know it’s all somewhat overwhelming.”

I felt uncomfortable to be under the protective wing of a bent old woman close to ninety. I insisted, “I’m fine.”

“Just remember, I have masks.” She clambered out of the car, and I had no choice but to follow.

Away from the smart road surface the ground was just dirt. But it gave slightly as I stepped out onto it, and beetles and spiders and even a few brown-skinned rodents fled from my feet. And the ground was warm, warm beneath my feet. I was standing on the crust of a vast midden, I realized. It was profoundly uncomfortable to walk over that soft, moist, warm surface.

Now we were out of the pod, some of those vendor types crowded closely, yelling, competing for our attention. Most of them bore sticks and skewers with bits of broiled meat. I didn’t like to think about where that meat had come from, but its smell wasn’t as bad as the general old-car stink. I was taller than almost everybody here, even the adults. The people were dressed in rags, but looked healthy enough, well-fed. But the crowding people brought a secondary smell of sweat and body odor that washed over me. I could hear that some of the vendors’ cries were yells of greeting for my aunt. “Mama Rosa!” She replied in a guttural Spanish; I wondered if this place had its own dialect.

And over this swarm of human activity the Reef rose up. We were only in its foothills here, and the constituent cars, crushed, mangled, and stripped, were pressed into the dirt, but its shoulder rose mountainously above us all.

Rosa glanced back at me, grinning, and pushed on into the crowd. There was a danger I would lose her, even in this diminutive mob. I hurried through the sweat and the waving sticks of meat.

We came to a kind of staircase cut, astoundingly, into the heaping of dead cars. Rosa started to climb. I tried to copy Rosa’s brisk strides, but I stepped gingerly on beaten-flat wings and doors and hoods, and crunched over patinas of broken glass.

Above my head I heard a confident cawing. A line of big, black, powerful-looking birds peered down at my slow toil with silent menace.

“Crows,” Rosa said. “They’re a hazard here. They’ll mostly leave an adult alone, but if they see a child they will sometimes try to cut it off. They fly at your head. They herd you.”

“I never heard of crows behaving that way.”

“This is a novel landscape, Michael,” Rosa said. “You adapt or die. Keep an eye on the birds.”

“Oh, I will.”

Maybe a hundred steps above the ground we arrived at a kind of cave, walled by bits of car, cut into the steepening face of the Reef. There were chairs, tables, and a rough-cut doorway leading through to more chambers within.

Rosa entered the cave and, with relief, threw herself down on a chair. I followed suit. My legs were stiff from the climb; I thought Rosa had done remarkably well.

Even the chairs here were old automobile seats, heavily patched with duct tape.

A woman came bustling from the back chambers. She was dressed in an ancient, shapeless smock, and she was healthily fat, though her face was streaked with grime. When she saw Rosa she fussed over her immediately. “Mama Rosa! Mama Rosa!” They exchanged a few words, and then the woman receded to her back room, to come bustling out with a tray of glasses and a bottle.

As she poured, Rosa said to me, “I took the liberty of ordering ahead. The dish of the day, so to speak. The water’s local stuff but don’t worry, it’s clean; engineered bugs see to that.” She held up a glass. “Look, it even sparkles.”

“Rosa, I don’t believe it. Is this is a restaurant?”

“I don’t think I’d give it as grand a description as that. But they serve good food. The best on the Reef!…”

As we waited for the food to arrive, me nervously, Rosa with anticipation, we talked about the Reef, and its strange history.

In the late 2020s, as the Americans had ended their long love affair with the car, the Spaniards had followed suit.

In those pre-Stewardship days Seville had already reached a garbage crisis, and had dumped millions of tons of the stuff in vast overflowing landfills. So for the people of Seville there was only one logical place to get rid of their suddenly useless cars, and that was in the foul-smelling, rat-swarming trash city just over the horizon. The dumping had caught on, and soon cities in the rest of Spain were paying Seville to take on their own refuse, too. “An early example of negotiating for ecological credits,” Rosa said dryly.

Eventually the detritus of the automobile industry of a modern nation had drained here, gathered up by the mechanical muscles of grinders, diggers, and crushers into this great ridge of dead cars. And all the time garbage had continued to pile up around it.

“So the Reef was born. People were already here, picking over the garbage, trying to make a living out of it. But then there was a flood of newcomers. In the 2020s southern Spain was wide open to refugees, especially from Africa. At the Gibraltar Straits you only have to cross a few kilometers of water…”

The final days before the Stewardship had been a time of increasing panic, of a sense of helplessness as problems spiraled out of control. Among the worst was the spread of infectious diseases out of the tropics, like dengue fever, encephalitis, and yellow fever. Uncle George used to say it had been bound to happen. We were tropical animals, he said, who had found a way to live out of the places where we had evolved, all the way to the poles, so it was no surprise that the diseases that had evolved with us should eventually follow. He was right. As the world warmed up and mosquitoes and ticks were able to survive at higher latitudes, the diseases spread out of their traditional ranges, driving human populations before them.

Floods of refugees had broken into Spain and headed for the cities of the south, seeking work, succor, help. “And of course the refugees brought with them the diseases they had been trying to flee,” Rosa said grimly. “The authorities couldn’t keep these plague-ridden undesirables out of the country. But they could keep them out of the towns.”

In the Seville area the refugees had gathered here on the Reef, for there was no other place for them to go in the desiccating countryside, nowhere they were welcome. They slept in the warmth of the vast rotting heaps of garbage, and they had begun to burrow into it, alongside the rats and gulls and the crows and the beetles, a whole community of scavengers who had got there before them.

“And, of course, the scavengers began to eat other scavengers,” Rosa said. “Before long a kind of food chain established itself.”

“With the people at the top?”

“Not necessarily,” Rosa said. “Remember the crows.”

They survived, or some of them. People bred young and died early in such a situation. Soon there were children running around, whole generations of them who had known nothing but this garbage-world.

But the city had kept on dumping its trash here regardless. It was a vast denial of reality, that the citizens of a still-prosperous city like Seville could simply ignore the gigantic heaps of rot they continued to create, and the hapless people who now lived there. And this wasn’t the only garbage-dump city on the planet; there were others near Lagos and Manila, Beijing and Vladivostok — even a few, Rosa told me to my surprise, in the U.S.A.

Rosa had been one of the first local priests to try to make contact with the inhabitants of the Reef. “In those days it was like a circle of hell,” she said. “There was famine and disease, and no government, no control, no policing. The police and army just fenced the place off, and left whoever and whatever was inside the perimeter to consume themselves, and rot. So crime was rife. The bad guys from Seville used this place as a mine of human flesh to do what they wanted with — even just target practice, sometimes. Imagine that.”

Things had changed in the late 2030s when the Stewardship money had started to flow. Suddenly people discovered they had a conscience after all.

Seville turned its attention to the vast blister on its doorstep. But those early do-gooders, following in the steps of Rosa and others, found their efforts were not welcome. “The Reef had become a home,” Rosa said, “a way of life.” After that the authorities had taken a more subtle approach. The police had worked more carefully to establish a presence, and Stewardship money was used to establish a basic human infrastructure, schools and hospitals and the like.

“But the local economy is still the same,” Rosa said, almost proudly. “And the ecology. People live off the garbage — and not just by barbecuing rats, either.”

She said that gen-enged bacteria had been loosed on the Reef. Bugs that could eat oil were working their way through the contents of the leaking engine blocks and fuel tanks in the mound beneath me, cracking waste oil and gasoline into more useful hydrocarbons and other chemicals. Other bugs devoured polyurethane plastics and other “non-biodegradable” components of the car corpses. Even hydrogen could be harvested, she said. Collection plants had been set up around the base of the Reef, at the outlet of systems of drainage pipes through which all this reclaimed treasure was collected. “All very modern, don’t you think? We live in an age of margins, where there is money to be made from reprocessing the garbage of richer times.”

As the population of Spain continued its precipitous decline there had been an obvious motive to open up this community: the families of the Reef were unusually fecund for the time and there were lots of kids running around, kids who might be employed usefully to keep the nation functioning.

By now, Rosa said, the Reef was integrated into Spanish society. It even had zip codes. After a vast citizenship program, some Reef babies had grown up to become lawyers and doctors and engineers and politicians. Many had gone to live and work in more salubrious parts of the country, or even abroad — but not all; some had stayed to work for the strange community that had fostered them.

Something scuttled over my foot, startling me. It was an insect. I bent down and grabbed it between my thumb and forefinger. It looked like a beetle, but it had an unfamiliar blue-green sheen to its carapace; I’d never seen anything like it. I showed it to Rosa.

“Keep it. It might be a new species.”

“Really?”

“Garbage tips are the modern crucibles of evolution. And we created them.” She clenched a fist over her heart, ironic. “It gets you right here, doesn’t it?”

I tried to make out Rosa’s fascination with this place. “You keep talking about the Reef — ecology, evolution, food chains — as if it’s one big ecosystem. And you talk as if the humans here are just part of the ecosystem themselves, just another kind of scavenger.”

For a moment, as she peered out over the metallic slopes of the Reef, she was silent. I had time to smell the food cooking, an aroma of hot butter and seafood.

Rosa said slowly, “An ecosystem. So it is. In a way, now that the government has moved in, the place has lost some of its fascination for me. It’s safer, yes, and life expectancy has shot up. But not so interesting…”

Even when she had first come here, she said, the place hadn’t been as lawless as she had feared.

“I imagined either simple chaos, or gangsters and warlords, chieftains wielding crude power based on threats and intimidation. There was some of that, of course. But from the beginning the Reef was simply too big to be governed in such a way. And the refugees were not a homogenous mass; they trickled here from all over. Chances were you could talk to your neighbor, but not to somebody on the other side of the mound. Without communication centralized power was impossible. Nobody knew what was going on; nobody was in overall charge.”

Instead, she said, the nascent community had organized itself.

If you worked on the Reef, struggling to survive, your best bet was to do what your neighbor was doing. If you saw her digging, you dug; if you saw her fleeing, you fled. “And that way,” Rosa said, “through local interaction and feedback, a community emerged, evolving bottom-up.

“When the government first began to open up the place, they sent in sociologists and complexity specialists to study what was going on. They found a collective organization that made almost maximally efficient use of the resources of the Reef as a whole. And this was achieved by groups who shared no common language. They just worked it out as they went along.”

“Like an ant colony,” I said, with faint disquiet.

“And it worked almost perfectly. A perfect human machine.” She actually sounded wistful.

It was a tone of voice I had heard from her before, when she had hinted at aspects of the Order in Rome that had taken her in. I put together the little I had gathered about it: Crowding. Underground. Swarming with people. I wondered what the Order truly was — and why it had expelled Rosa. Whatever the truth, it was evident to me that she had spent her life since seeking its reflection in other things, even in this extraordinary place, the Reef: she had spent her life longing to go back.

Our lunch arrived, heaps of steaming food served on clean hot plates by our grubby-faced landlady. Rosa told me it was a local variant of paella, called fideos a la malaguena, peppers and shellfish, with spaghetti rather than rice. The pasta and peppers were fine. But the shellfish, mussels and clams, were dark and gritty. I wondered from what dark ocean they had come, and pushed them aside.

Our lunch was cut short by an alarm. It was a mournful siren that sounded from far away, like the cry of some immense beast raising its head from the sea of garbage. The landlady came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands. She peered up at the sky and muttered.

Rosa and I stepped outside the cavelike restaurant. The cause of the alarm was obvious. Coming from the north was a murky red cloud that towered high above the glinting shoulder of the Reef; its upper levels thrashed and writhed, purple. The light was already failing.

“This wasn’t forecast,” Rosa said.

Looking down the slope of the reef I saw people running for shelter, the shopkeepers and stallholders battening down and grabbing their wares. They swarmed everywhere, racing over their garbage heap like the ants Rosa seemed to think they were.

In one open area, some youngsters were whooping it up. There were maybe fifty of them. Bottles and cigarettes were passed around; it was quite a party. They started jumping up and down and yelling at the approaching storm cloud, as if defying it. Beyond them I made out a line of police, la policia, clumsy in heavy gear. Some of them were fiddling with heavy-looking weapons, like batons, that hung from their waists. It was obvious the kids’ antics were making the police nervous. There were very few young people in Seville, and it could be these cops had never dealt with a drunken, high-spirited mob of kids like this before.

The sky grew darker. Bits of loose garbage began to blow about on the surface of the Reef.

And then, as the light failed, I saw her. She was standing at the foot of the Reef proper, where the lowest stratum of doomed cars was sinking into the ground. She was staring up at me.

I had never seen her so close. It was her, no doubt about it; I could make out her eyes, her nose, the laugh lines around her mouth. I could even hear her voice, though I could make out no words. It was typical of her to come to me now, in the storm, in a time of confusion.

Rosa stood beside me. I dared take my eyes off Morag for a second — I was fearful she would just vanish back where she had come from if I looked away — but I saw that Rosa was staring in the same direction as me, her small mouth open.

“Rosa — you see her,don’t you?”

Rosa took my hand; her leathery grip was reassuring. “I think so.”

I was overwhelmed. It was the first time anybody else had shared my visions. “Can you make out what she’s saying?” All I could hear was a kind of jabber, very rapid; Morag almost sounded like a speeded-up recording.

Rosa listened closely. “No words,” she said. “But it sounds like information. Structured. Very dense. We should have brought a recorder.”

“Yes…”

Morag turned away, took a step further down the slope, and looked back at me. I thought her expression was pleading.

“I have to go to her.” I looked down, seeking the staircase. It was getting very dark now, and windblown sand scraped the back of my neck, a premonition of what was to come.

The landlady gabbled agitated Spanish.

Rosa said, “She says we must go inside. The storm—”

“No! Morag’s down there. Let me go!”

But they were surprisingly strong, especially the landlady, and they began to drag me back toward the shelter of the restaurant.

Morag was walking away, her hair whipping around her face. Still she looked back at me. But she was blurring into the darkness, becoming indistinct again, and I could no longer hear her voice.

Further down those kids seemed to be getting more excited as the storm approached; they were dancing and jumping and whooping, some of them stark naked. One cop drew his weapon. Laser light flashed, charging the air, and then lightning-like bolts gushed. Kids fell, convulsing. The other revelers’ exhilaration turned to anger, and they closed on the police.

But I saw no more of the battle, or of Morag, for the dust descended on me. Suddenly it was everywhere, in my eyes, mouth, ears, hair, and the world was full of the wind’s stupendous bellowing. Rosa and the landlady hauled me backward into the cave, and a door slammed, shutting out the storm.

We sat in that darkened cave, illuminated only by a lamp that burned Reef methane. The landlady gave us water to wash the dust out of our hair and mouths and off our skin, and we drank a hot, flavorless tea.

Rosa had to pay for all this, of course.

“So,” Rosa said gently. “I feel privileged. I’ve encountered many ghost stories, Michael. I told you that. But I’ve never seen somebody else’s ghost before.”

I felt powerful, confused emotions. I was disoriented to be in the Reef at all, and disappointed to have lost Morag, when she had seemed so close. But I clung to that electrifying understanding that Rosa had seen what I had seen: whatever was going on, I wasn’t crazy or delusional. I was relieved, I guess. But I was even more scared of the whole thing than before.

“I have to get this straight in my head, Rosa. It’s in the way.”

“In the way? — ah, yes. Your gas hydrate project.” She touched my hand. “You are trying to balance your own needs, the issue of Morag, with the wider needs of us all. You feel confused. But that’s because you are a good man, Michael.”

I snorted. “Good? Me?” I thought of my relationship with Tom, that terrible flawed mess. “Believe me, I don’t feel it.”

“You don’t need to. Saint Augustine said that if you don’t feel you are good then you must pretend you are so. You practice, you do good things. And then, one day, you wake up and find you are good after all.”

The landlady nodded, muttering; perhaps she picked up some of Rosa’s childlike sermonizing.

“I don’t want to lose Morag again,” I said. “Not if I don’t have to. But I need to understand.”

“Well, since I saw her, too, I now need to understand also,” Rosa said. “Let me do some research.”

That surprised me. “Research? I expected you to say you’d pray for me.”

“I will, if it will help.” She tapped her forehead. “But God didn’t give us brains for nothing. Let me see what I can figure out.”

The landlady, muttering, opened the door a crack. But the storm was still howling, and a scattering of sand hissed on the floor.

This time Alia and her uneasy crew traveled more than a thousand light-years away from the center of the Galaxy, and returned to the plane of the spiral arms, where the sky’s equator was a thick band of light, the compressed glow of the disc seen edge-on, and the Galaxy center itself was a huge sun that glowered behind scattered stars.

They had come in search of the engine of the Redemption, Reath said enigmatically.

They approached a world, another world with no name but only a number in the Commonwealth’s catalog. It was just another rust-red globe, a scrap of desert folded over on itself, calmly circling a shrunken sun.

This world was old, far older than Earth. The whole stellar system was old. Billions of years of collisions had scoured it clean; it was a long time since even the sparkling flowers of comet impacts had disturbed the slumber of this world’s worn plains. It was all a bit depressing to Alia, but she was learning it was typical.

Reath’s shuttle slid low through dust-laden air. The landscape was unprepossessing, worn away — and dominated by mounds that pushed out of the sand, low but neatly circular. They were just heaps, the same dull crimson color as the rest of the landscape, but they were regular, like perfect spheres buried in the dirt. The mounds were everywhere, peppering the shadows of worn-down continents, the filled-in seas. Some of them were kilometers across.

Life had never advanced far on this shrunken world. But humans had come here, of course; in time they had been everywhere. Those low mounds were their signature.

Reath said, “Water is the key to our kind of life — and most kinds of post-human life, too. On a world like this any surface water or ice has long since been lost, disassociated in the higher atmosphere. When the first colonists came, only the very deepest aquifers remained — so deep they hadn’t been dug out even by asteroid impacts, and so very difficult to reach — and there was more water bound into the mineral structures of the deeper rocks, perhaps hundreds of kilometers down.”

“So if you wanted to live, you’d dig,” Drea guessed.

“And that’s what the colonists did. Their settlements were mostly subsurface, with deep stalks going down hundreds of kilometers in search of water. Such settlements are always going to be cramped, confined…”

They all knew the story, the fate of such enclosed societies. And they knew what the mounds must conceal.

The shuttle hovered over one of the larger mounds. Commonwealth monitoring posts ringed it in a loose circle. There were no landing facilities, no docks, but Alia could see the scars of previous landings splashed over the dirt. The breeze of the shuttle’s descent blew sand in snaking ripples over the surface of the mound. Alia thought she saw hands, small human hands, push out of the mound to pat the dirt back into place.

“This mound will do,” Reath said. “Coalescences are different in detail, but all essentially the same. I don’t think it makes any difference which we pick.” To Alia’s surprise he started handing out face masks. “You’ll need these.”

Alia had never worn such a thing; she had to be shown how to put it on. “Why? The Mist—”

“The Mist doesn’t work in a Coalescence,” Reath said. “The air in there is special. Many Coalescent types use the air to communicate. Biochemicals. Scents, pheromones.”

Bale adjusted Drea’s face mask for her, making sure it fit snugly all the way around. “And you don’t want stuff like that in your lungs,” he said, his voice muffled by his own mask.

They faced each other, Alia and her sister, Reath, the three Campocs, their faces obscured by their translucent visors. Drea said, “We look like bugs!”

They stepped out onto dirt that crunched softly under their feet. The gravity was low, only about a third standard, and Alia felt comfortably light on her feet. The pale brown sky was cloudless, and the stale air didn’t stir. Alia had the impression that there was little weather here. Theirs were the only footsteps to be seen.

The mound rose up before her, as if growing out of the dirt; the Commonwealth monitoring stations, boxes of bright blue and yellow, sat impassively before it. “How do we get into this thing?”

Reath said, “I don’t imagine it’s hard.” He faced the mound, spread his hands, and called into the empty air, “This is Alia, a Transcendent-Elect. You are here to serve her. She wants to speak to you.”

For long heartbeats nothing happened. Then the curved surface of the mound dimpled, and sand hissed away. A doorway opened up, a low archway, revealing a corridor that led off into darkness.

Reath glanced at Alia. “Will you take the lead?”

Alia could think of nothing she’d rather do less than walk into that mouth of strangeness. But she had her duty — or maybe it was just that she didn’t want to lose face.

She stepped forward, into the archway. Loose sand trickled down over her, pattering on her faceplate.

The dark corridor led to an inner door, like an airlock. When all five of them were inside the outer door closed. Alia glanced back at the closing door; she saw nothing but sand shifting into place, an unobtrusive technology.

For an unpleasant heartbeat the six of them were locked in darkness, the silence broken only by the scratch of their breathing behind the masks. Then the inner door slid open. They all crowded through the hatch.

They emerged into another corridor, low-roofed and with rounded walls of what looked like ceramic. Illuminated dimly by lamps inset into the walls, the corridor curved out of sight. They had to duck to avoid the low ceiling, even the squat Campocs.

A few paces from the door a figure was waiting to greet them.

Alia stepped forward. This was a woman, she thought — but slim and sexless, and dressed in a bland white robe. She was without hair; the naked skin of her face and scalp was blotchy. It was hard to tell how old she was, though her smallness and a certain delicacy about her features made her look young. Her eyes were her most striking feature, large, watery orbs with wide, watchful pupils: eyes adapted to twilight, Alia thought. She was expressionless.

Reath nudged Alia. “Ask her who she is.”

“I am Alia. Tell me your name.”

The woman had to think it over. “My name is Berra.” Her accent was strong, but easily comprehensible. But she spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable separately: Be-rra. It was as if it were the first time she had heard the name herself. “You are the Transcendent-Elect.”

“Yes. My companions are—”

Berra wasn’t interested. “I am an Interface Specialist,” she said. “I will answer all questions.”

“I’m sure you will—”

“Please do not speak to anyone else you meet. Or any thing.Please speak only to me. You need not doubt my veracity.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“What is it you want to know?”

Alia took a breath. “I want to learn about the Redemption.”

Berra nodded. “Ah, yes. We all serve that mighty cause. Then you will want to see the Listeners.”

“I will?”

“Please come.” Berra turned and led them away, along the corridor.

Reath walked beside Alia and Drea. The Campocs clustered behind. Curious, watchful, they seemed to be enjoying the adventure.

“Power must be scarce,” Bale said. “Not too warm, not too bright, cramped corridors.”

Seer whispered, “And it’s been this way a long time. You see how small she is? And those big pupils: she is adapted for these dingy passages.”

Denh asked, “What do you think the power source is?”

Bale shrugged. “Geothermal? But on a planet like this you’d have to dig deep.”

Reath looked back. “The details don’t really matter. Every Coalescent colony is like this, more or less. And the crowding isn’t just for economy. It’s purposeful. You stay cramped; that way you stay locked into the eusociety.”

“Yes, but—”

Reath snapped, “Stop your chattering!”

Alia said to Reath, “We can only speak to her, she will only speak to me. I suppose it’s fair.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Reath said. “This is not a human society, Alia. The protocol here has nothing to do with human manners.”

Berra led them deeper into the complex. The corridors were all empty, save for themselves; there was no noise, no disturbance — no dirt. Most of the walls were unbroken by doors. The corridors branched and bifurcated at forks and T-junctions and complex intersections. The party even changed levels, climbing ladders and descending down staircases. It was a three-dimensional maze through which Berra led them confidently.

The Campocs started to seem lost: “Have we just come around three sides of a square?” “Haven’t we been here before?…”

But Alia and Drea, born on a starship, shared a good innate sense of direction. Alia always knew where she was in relation to the outside; it was a comforting thought that she and Drea could Skim out of there in an instant, if need be.

And she could picture the path they were following; though tortuously, Berra was leading them deep into the heart of the mound.

At a confluence of corridors they came upon activity. High on one wall a recessed light was flickering. Creatures clung to the wall, a tangle of long limbs, three or four of them evidently working on the light. Berra clearly wanted to go on, but all the visitors slowed to a halt, staring up curiously, and she had to wait.

In the dim light Alia had trouble seeing the workers clearly. Their hands and feet had five splayed digits each, but each finger or thumb was tipped by a broad pad that clung easily to the wall’s smooth surface. Their limbs were very long and thin, longer than their skinny bodies, giving them the look of spiders. They seemed to be licking the broken light, with long pink tongues that unrolled from their mouths.

Their skulls were small, their brain pans shrunken, Alia thought. But their faces, especially their eyes, were their most human feature, and even as their tongues worked at the lamp they glanced down at the visitors with fear.

Bale said, “Remember, we aren’t supposed to speak to them.”

Reath snorted. “I doubt if they would understand you if you did.”

Drea asked, “What are they?”

“Specialists,” Reath said. “Like everybody here. Post-humans adapted to their roles in keeping the whole functioning.”

Berra was growing anxious. Mutely she walked back and forth along the corridor she wanted to take, away from this junction.

At last Alia took pity on her. With backward glances at the workers on the wall, she led her party away.

After another hundred paces, Berra halted. They were in a stretch of corridor as bland and featureless as the rest. But Berra patted the wall with her small hand, and a door opened up like lips parting.

Fetid air gusted out into the corridor. Hot and moist, its stench was unmistakable, even filtered by the face masks. They all recoiled, save Berra.

“Lethe,” Drea said. “That’s shit!”

Berra waited patiently by the door, her eyes locked on Alia’s face.

Alia asked, “What’s through here?”

Berra said, “The way to the Listeners.”

Reath said firmly, “Come on.” He stepped forward through the door.

Alia reluctantly followed — and was immersed in a fog of stinking air. For the first time she was grateful for her face mask.

The chamber was huge, its far walls lost in a mist of humidity. But the room was dominated by a tank of some fluid, so large it was almost a lake. The water was cloudy, brownish, and warm enough for steam to come coiling up from its surface. Small waterfalls erupted from the walls, spilling more fluid into the brimming pond, and big low-gravity ripples washed with low gurgles against the walls of the tank.

A head pushed out of the water. Alia glimpsed a low brow, startled blue eyes, and a wide mouth set in a monstrous face. That mouth gaped open, so the water washed into it with its cargo of sewage, and then the mouth clamped closed. A muscular back broke the water surface, with knobbly vertebrae and short hairs folded flat. As the creature swam away, vast slow bubbles broke the surface behind it.

Seer laughed coarsely. “Rocket propulsion!”

Now Alia made out a whole school of the swimmers pushing languidly back and forth through the dense mess, chewing, farting, shitting. There were breaks in the far walls through which the swimmers passed.

Perhaps this chamber was just one of a whole network that laced through the mound.

Reath smiled at Alia. “You’re starting to see it, the purpose of the place?”

“I think so. This is a sewage treatment works, isn’t it? But they don’t use machines, but people. ”

The waste of the mound community poured into chambers like this. The swimmers chewed it up, shat and pissed it out, and chewed it down again. Their organs were specialized to filter and separate organic material from water, waste from recyclable goodies.

Reath said, “It isn’t so strange if you think about it. Human mothers have always produced milk for their babies. Animals predigest food for their young — and some even eat excrement to extract minerals. The details change, but to do things with humans rather than machines is the way of communities like this. Somewhere in this mound there must be big-lunged air recyclers, waste removers, builders and demolishers, drones for carrying and fetching — even for disposing of the dead. And after all a human sewage processor isn’t likely to break down.”

“Drones,”said Bale, with an expression of disgust.

“So,” said Seer, incredulous, “if these guys keep on paddling around this toilet bowl long enough they’ll turn it into soup?”

Alia leaned down, ducked her hand at the surface of the water, and raised it toward her lips. “Needs salt, I think.”

Drea recoiled. “Oh, you didn’t. ”

Alia grinned and showed her a clean hand.

Reath said, “It would probably have been safe. Shall we go on?”

Berra led the way through the chamber and out to another corridor. Before they had walked much further they were taken through another door.

They found another lake, but this was of a white substance like milk. Through this paddled more swimmers. They were not big-mouthed and hairy-backed like the shit-eaters of the sewage lake, but more delicate, with thin limbs and big watchful heads. They had webbed fingers and toes.

And every one of them had a swollen belly.

Drea walked forward curiously. The swimmers reacted nervously, paddling away through their lake of milk.

Reath said quickly, “Check your face masks. Any pheromones in the air will be concentrated here.”

Drea asked, “What is this place?”

“Can’t you tell?” Alia pointed.

In the middle of the lake a woman leaned back, supported by two others. She lifted her bare hips out of the milky fluid, spread her legs — and babies slid out — two, three of them. The newborns swam around confidently, eyes open. They seemed to have no umbilical cords, no placentas. One of the babies seemed to be laughing, just heartbeats old.

The attendants who had helped with the delivery had bellies as swollen as everybody else here: they were all female, and they were all pregnant. And it was no particular coincidence that this woman had given birth the moment the visitors had walked in the door, Alia thought: no doubt there were births here all the time, every second of every day. This, of course, was the very heart of the mound.

“These are the mothers,” Berra said simply.

Alia understood. This was not really a human society at all. It was a Coalescence: it was a hive.

I got a call from Shelley Magwood.

She said she had fixed a meeting with Earth Inc., the nation’s largest private geoengineering concern. The purpose would be to explore ways we could leverage their expertise in macro-projects to get our nascent hydrate stabilization scheme off the ground — “Actually into the ground,” as Shelley quipped. It was a crucial step for us.

But the meeting had to be face-to-face, Shelley said. The two of us had to go out to EI’s headquarters in the Mojave Desert.

I dreaded the thought of yet more flying. I complained, “Given that these guys aspire to rebuild the Earth, demanding a meeting face-to-face is a bit twentieth century.”

Shelley, projected virtually to Rosa’s apartment, just shrugged. “Primate politics still works. Look, we need to follow EI’s lead. These guys know how to get these big projects accepted and done, and being shy about their methods at this stage isn’t going to help.” She grinned, the lively-minded engineer, curious. “Anyhow I hear they have some spectacular stuff out there.”

“Yeah, a regular save-the-world theme park,” I groused.

“Oh, come on. It’s an adventure. Anyhow they have a point. Did you know that you can’t fool a chimp with a VR? They just wave their hands through the images. They are too dumb to be taken in.”

“Or too smart.”

She reached out, as if to ruffle my hair. I flinched, I couldn’t help it. But when it hit my flesh her VR hand just broke up into pixels, little cubes of light that scattered in the air. She laughed. “Isn’t real life better? I’ll meet you at JFK. We can fly on together from there.”

I said my good-byes to Rosa.

Of course our business was unfinished, but I had caught her attention with my ghost. Rosa was a much darker character than Shelley, much more cynical and remote, and so much older, of course. But when she focused on a problem that interested her she was bright, sharp, curious, intense, just as Shelley was. They had a lot in common, I saw — even though Shelley the rationalist engineer would have been suspicious of the arcane strangeness of Rosa’s life.

I endured the hours of the flight into JFK, where Shelley met me. We only had a couple of hours on the ground before we set off again on another immense seven-league-boots jaunt to LAX, and Shelley gently coaxed me through the airport processes. Already jet-lagged, I managed to sleep on this flight, but by the time we were vomited out at LAX I felt even worse.

And after that yet another flight, this time a local hop aboard a small dozen-seater passenger jet, owned and operated by EI themselves. The plane was adorned with the corporation’s somewhat tasteless logo, of an Earth cupped in the palm of a human hand — “like a wrestler illegally squeezing a testicle,” as Shelley aptly said. Shelley and I were the only passengers, and our drinks were served by a little rubber-wheeled bot.

From LAX I had expected us to cut inland toward the Mojave, but to my surprise we headed west, out to the coast and over the ocean.

The plane was a very modern design, a shell of glass and ceramic full of light and air, and I could barely hear the discrete thrumming of its hydrogen-burning engines. It felt as if we were in a bubble, suspended over the sea. The afternoon sun was low, and the water looked like it was on fire. When I looked back toward the coast, L.A. was a carpet of streets and buildings, a rectangular grid like circuitry coating the contours of the land. Over the city the air was discolored, but the vast orange smog dome I remembered from trips out this way when I was a kid had pretty much dissipated.

Shelley noticed something in the ocean. “Look at that.” A city-size area of the water was stained a deep green. “What do you think that is? An algal bloom, maybe a sewage outlet?” But the area was a neat straight-edged square, artificial.

“Actually we’d call it a plankton bloom.” A VR popped into existence on a seat facing us. It was a man, aged maybe fifty, blond, blue-eyed, trim, his skin pale and healthy-looking. He was dressed in a neat, nondescript business suit of a style that can’t have changed significantly for a century and a half. He smiled in a sensible sort of way. “EI welcomes you to California.”

Shelley scowled; she was notoriously intolerant of such VR stunts. “Who the hell are you?”

“Forgive me. My name is Ruud Makaay…” He was a senior executive at Earth Inc., he said, responsible for what he called “outreach.” “Of course this is a VR projection. I, the flesh-and-blood Ruud, will be your host today at EI — in person, once we land.” His English was smooth; later I learned he was actually Dutch.

Shelley asked, “And that algal bloom in the ocean?”

“It is a demonstration of one of our simpler techniques. The productivity of the ocean can be stimulated with the judicious injection of certain iron compounds; the ‘bloom’ you see is the result. The purpose is to draw down carbon dioxide in the air into the microscopic bodies of the little creatures that make up the plankton. If it’s down there, ” he said, grinning, “it can’t be up here in the air contributing to the greenhouse effect. To increase the effectiveness of the take-up we are experimenting with various gen-enged developments of plankton species — of which there are many, it’s a whole ecology down there, you’d be surprised. Now, look over there.” He pointed to his right.

Peering down I made out a row of structures, vast but skeletal, floating on pontoons on the surface of the ocean. Each was an upright hoop within which long windmill blades turned in the wind off the sea: each a hundred meters tall, they looked like vast egg whisks. As the plane dipped over the turbines, I saw that a pale mist, like a bank of fog, lingered around the machines. Close up, the sheer scale of these lacy engines was stunning, and their shadows, cast by the setting sun, were long and graceful.

“Spray turbines,” Makaay said. “Another of our simpler ideas. You just spray seawater into the air, to make clouds.”

“Why?” Shelley asked. “To trigger rain?”

“Actually the opposite,” he said. “The purpose is to stimulate the production of the clouds themselves, and so to make them more reflective…” Water droplets formed in a cloud when vapor gathered around seed particles, “dust condensation nuclei” in Makaay’s terms. The idea was to load so many nuclei into a cloud that the droplets multiplied, but none got big enough to fall as rain. So the cloud got whiter, and kept out the sunlight.

Leaving the spindly spray turbines behind we returned to the coast and flew inland, heading for EI’s headquarters in the Mojave Desert.

The geoengineering solutions promoted by Earth Inc. could be vast in scale, Makaay said, but were based on two simple principles. Earth intercepted heat from the sun; and an excess of carbon dioxide in the air trapped too much of that heat. So EI solutions were based either on reducing the amount of solar energy the planet soaked up in the first place, by making the Earth, or its atmosphere, more reflective — “albedo manipulation,” Makaay called it — or reducing the amount of heat trapped by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air, “carbon sequestration.”

“And here, in one glance, you can see two of our solutions at work, on a demonstration scale anyhow. This is why we do our best to bring people out here in person. There is nothing like seeing things with one’s own eyes to make an impression.”

Shelley eyed me. “Primate politics,” she said. “I told you.” She turned on Makaay. “Even you. You’re a great big tall man in a suit. Even now, all the guys at the top are just like you. When I started my working life I got a crick in my neck from looking up at my bosses all the time. It was like being in a forest.” She seemed a little out of tune to me, a touch over-aggressive, even rude. But she had never been very tolerant of managers, bureaucrats, and marketeers.

Anyhow I knew what she meant. Makaay was a tall, bulky man, his sheer physical presence impressive, and his broad, heavily boned face seemed to ooze control. He was like my brother, John, or my father — one of the competent-looking big men who make serious waves in the world. Not me, though. I somehow always knew I wouldn’t turn out that way.

Makaay didn’t seem insulted; he even seemed amused. “Ms. Magwood, I know very well I’m a walking clichй. But you have to understand I spent half my working life inside the Beltway, or in the UN and Stewardship complexes in New York or Geneva. And there, believe me, you have to wear a uniform like this” — he indicated his body — “to be taken halfway seriously. By looking like I work for IBM, I’ve won half the argument already.

“It also helps that I’m Dutch, by the way. We Dutch have been geoengineers since the Middle Ages, ever since we reclaimed half our own country from the sea, and we’ve been exporting our expertise for as long. These days we’re somewhat in demand, to help bail out drowning countries from the Pacific Islands to Bangladesh.”

We were silent for a moment. It helped his moral authority, of course, that in our lifetimes Holland itself had given up its own centuries-long battle against the sea, and the Dutch had become a nation of exiles.

“You’re quite a package, Mr. Makaay,” Shelley said dryly.

“But, you know, it’s not me who’s the throwback,” he said mischievously. “It’s the pols and bureaucrats I have to deal with who have some serious evolving to do.”

Even Shelley smiled at that.

Once we were over the Mojave we flew a circuitous route that took us over more of EI’s pet projects, set up on a demonstration scale across the face of the desert. There were windmill-like factories lined up in a row; Makaay said these were designed to strip the wind of carbon dioxide by passing it over absorbing chemicals, such as calcium hydroxide. Then, following the line of a canal, an arrow-straight lane of blue cut into the desert, we flew over patches of green fields and forests, all neatly squared off and contained. I learned later that this was a land-based analog of the plankton bloom we’d seen in the ocean; these virulently green grasses, shrubs, and trees were gen-enged to soak up a lot more carbon dioxide than their wild, unmodified ancestors. The key, it seemed, was to enhance the lignin content.

The most impressive constructions were domes, each coated in a filmy coat of geodesic silver, sitting in patient rows like vast golf balls. More carbon sequestration, Makaay said. The principle here was simple: just to freeze carbon dioxide out of the air, thousands of tons at a time, and then coat it in an insulating cladding — and, well, just leave it sitting there in the desert. “Hardly attractive, but it works,” he said.

Shelley argued with VR Makaay about the practicalities. Running a vast refrigeration plant to freeze down all that carbon dioxide was itself going to inject more heat into the atmosphere, wasn’t it? Yes, but if you took a longer view, over a decade or more, the net effect was a reduction of the atmosphere’s heat load through removal of the greenhouse gas. And then, no matter how efficient your insulation there would always be some leakage, wouldn’t there? So in the end you weren’t actually removing the carbon from the air but just adding a time lag. Yes, admitted Makaay, but this was a simple method to apply large-scale, and at least you were buying some time while you figured out a better solution…

I switched out of the conversation. As we dipped over one of those domes I could see the plane’s reflection, a moth that slid across a curving face of sky blue.

We had all fallen into a skeptical habit of mind, I thought, even Shelley, perhaps even myself. Geoengineering solutions always tended to brush over the complexity of the real world, notably the tangled intricacy of the biosphere — and so it was easier to do nothing than to do something big and risk making things worse. But Shelley and I were here to ask for help with some macro-engineering of our own, on a scale that would make these silver-clad golf balls look like toys.

Before it began its landing approach the plane banked, to head into the wind from the coast. Briefly we left the EI facility behind, and looped over an arid landscape populated by nothing but scrub and Joshua trees.

And suddenly the ground blazed with reflected light. I made out cars, neatly parked, a carpet of glass and brightly painted metal. They looked perfect, intact and unmarked, row upon row of them.

After the Amin policy announcements that had effectively robbed the gasoline automobile industry of its future, there had been years of adjustment and bailout. In Detroit and other motor cities the assembly lines had continued to roll like a tap nobody could turn off, pumping out vehicles for which there was no longer a market. The federal government had simply bought up the excess stock and shipped them to such places as this. And here these exquisitely engineered vehicles sat, rust-free in the dry air, as if in expectation that the great smog-choked days of the twentieth century might somehow return once more. Some of the later models were very smart, I knew, smart enough to be self-aware. I wondered if they knew where they were, if they were waiting like abandoned pets for owners that never came.

We emerged from the plane into a flat blistering heat; it was worse than Seville. I was even more impressed that EI had managed to turn bits of this desert green.

Ruud Makaay met us in person at the foot of the airplane steps. He seemed oddly bigger than his VR representation, and his handshake was firm.

EI’s buildings, at the edge of the smart tarmac of the small airfield’s runway, were just boxy white blocks, unimpressive. They were air-conditioned, though, and we stepped indoors with relief. Makaay led us through what looked like a regular office environment, an open-plan clutter of partitions and desks and people working at softscreens and terminals of various kinds. Most of them seemed to be here in the flesh, though one or two had the fake sheen of VRs.

“Your place is smaller than I expected,” I ventured.

“Well, this is only the head office,” Makaay said. “Corporate HQ. We have design facilities, labs, manufacturing plants all over the country — all over the world, in fact. And we kept this place low-key by design. We didn’t want to make the mistake of having our visitors distracted by the place itself, by fountains and pot-plants and statues of the founder. Have you even been to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London? The tomb of Wren, the architect, has a Latin epitaph: ‘Visitor, if you seek my monument, look around you.’ Something like that. It’s the same with us. We want to make sure that what’s out the window is more interesting than what’s in here.”

He brought us to a small office. We sat; Makaay poured us both coffee.

“So,” I said, “do you think you’ll be able to help us?”

“Too early to say. Your proposal’s a little thin right now,” he said dryly. “But we’ll get to that. However, now you’ve seen something of us, what do you think — do we look as if we can make your project fly?”

I thought that over. “You’re certainly bigger than I expected. Wealthier.”

“Actually I wouldn’t say so.” He frowned. “We’re not rich yet, not given the size of the operation we run. It’s just that we play big. Everybody is surprised we have achieved any success at all, however. I think we have all got locked into a mind-set that says there is no way to make money in this contracting world of ours.

“Look at it from the point of view of an industrialist in, say, 2020. The shift to hydrogen, the need for new power generation systems, the dislocation of getting rid of the automobile — even if you could get your head around such vast changes, you didn’t have the infrastructure in place, the raw materials, the patents to exploit them; you didn’t have things sewn up the way your daddy used to. So it was better to resist change, to keep your head down, hoping it would all go away, or at least hope the storm wouldn’t break until you had finished your own career.

“It was Amin’s administration that changed all that.” He smiled fondly. “I was in business school at the time, at Harvard. Amin’s policies laid the foundation of new growth industries, in bio-infrastructure, compensation, environmental mitigation. There was money to be made in saving the world! When people realized that you saw a flurry of patents to protect technologies that were going to be key in the new political, legislative, and economic environment. At Harvard our instructors told us we were privileged to be living through a shifting in the economic paradigm, perhaps the most profound since the Industrial Revolution. And people started to get rich.”

“Like EI,” Shelley said.

“Look, this company has greened an area of the Sahara the size of Texas. You only need to siphon off a little of the proceeds from such an enterprise to bring in some major sums. But it’s nothing to what we could be achieving, I believe.”

There was a still skepticism about EI’s work, he said. The carbon-sequestration projects had generally proven more readily acceptable because it was relatively easy to make money out of them, by earning carbon credits, or reducing your liability to carbon taxes. But, he said, the schemes appealed because they were essentially passive. “You are fixing, not changing. Of course it’s true that the risks of changing things are more unknowable, and therefore greater.”

Shelley said, “Such as Cephalonia.”

Makaay leaned forward, passion showing in his pale eyes. “I was on the clean-up team. I haven’t forgotten. We are engineers, the three of us; you understand. Things go wrong. We learn from mistakes. We fix them. Nothing like Cephalonia has happened again, or will. And it mustn’t stop us from trying again.

“But we do need to reassure people, I accept that. Our lawyers are trying to agree to a code of conduct for geoengineers at UNESCO. A kind of Hippocratic oath, if you will, a pledge that we will use our powers responsibly. If that is accepted perhaps we can start to build trust once and for all. And then we can really get on with the job.”

Shelley said, “OK. But do you think we’ve a chance of getting the support we need for the hydrate-stabilization project?”

He sat back. “It’s not impossible. It’s a question of how you sell it. Your project is vast in scale, and that will instinctively repel a lot of people. But it’s essentially passive, like our carbon-sequestration programs. You aren’t meddling; you’re simply trying to maintain an equilibrium, to prevent a loss. So perhaps we can avoid a few philosophical obstacles on the way. We have a lobbying firm we use in Washington; they’ll be able to advise.”

At his use of the word lobbying I quailed; the world of high politics was not one where I would feel comfortable.

Shelley noticed this and smiled. “We have to do this, kiddo. We’re talking about a major international effort here — billions of dollars of investment. We have to deal with the big boys.”

Makaay’s expression was friendly, engaged, but reserved, consummately professional. “I can’t say yet if we’ll support you. Our board has to make the decision. It’s a big task for us. But I do believe that your project is exactly what EI was founded to do in the first place.” He stood and paced around the little office. “I see an opportunity, for all of us. We need a success. And once we have shrugged off our anxiety about ‘meddling,’ the opportunities are vast.

“Look — call me a progressive. I want to build a world with room for as many happy, well-fed, and healthy people as we can cram in. What’s wrong with that? But obviously I also want to do it without wrecking the environment in the process.” The two levers of geoengineering, he said, carbon sequestration and albedo control, were actually independent of each other. “Now, an increase in carbon dioxide has some beneficial effects: plant growth is stimulated, for example. So suppose we let the carbon levels rise, but kept the temperature under control with albedo modification? That might be the way to advance our civilization to a new optimum, while protecting the planet.

“And we can go further,” he said. “This Bottleneck will teach us to cooperate on a planetary scale. Then we will be able to reach beyond the Earth altogether. We can reserve the Earth simply for doing what it is best at, to support the most complex biosphere we know, and use the resources of space to escape the constraints of closed planetary economics…”

Shelley stood up to stop his flow. “Terrific. But in the meantime, do you have an office where we can set up?”

He grinned, self-deprecatingly. “Quite right. Let’s get to work.”

As we followed him out of the room Shelley whispered to me, “Call him Prospero.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you remember your Shakespeare? The Tempest. Prospero called down a storm; he was an early geoengineer.”

“Didn’t he cause a shipwreck?”

Shelley raised her eyebrows, and we walked on.

Eusocial living was nearly as old as mankind. The first human eusociety, the first hive, had in fact been born on old Earth, in the days before spaceflight.

It was a solution to the dilemmas of cramped living, which tended to emerge when a community was isolated, when resources were short, when it was difficult to strike out away from home. Reath said, “Anywhere you can’t get away from Mom, this is the way you end up living. It’s a feature of our neural processing, I believe — some would say a deep flaw. But it’s undoubtedly a part of the human story.”

It always began with social pressures. If adult children stayed home, they would compete with their parents for resources. So a mother bullied her daughter into having fewer children, or none at all, and made her devote her energies to her sisters. Families extended into great conflations of sisters and cousins and aunts, all childless, all tending the needs of the children of a single mother.

Ultimately all this served the needs of the genes, or it would never have worked at all. A human was more closely related genetically to her daughter than to her niece. But if by living eusocially you could preserve more nieces than you would have had daughters, you could give your genes, though indirectly, a greater chance of survival.

And then, when the social pressures were locked in, natural selection took over.

As the generations ticked by, as a drone you adapted to the environment you found yourself trapped in: the environment of the Coalescence. Individual creatures, the building bricks of a higher organism, were modified in different ways to serve the needs of the colony as a whole for nutrition, physical support, locomotion, excretion, even reproduction. And why waste energy on the vast bodily reengineering of puberty if you were never going to have a child? Daughters were born in whom the ability to reproduce was postponed — or never cut in at all.

And then there was intelligence. Eusociality required a tight central organization. With the mother and her precious babies at the heart, concentric circles of childless workers served the mother and infants, constructed and maintained the colony, gathered food, fended off predators. There was no command structure. Workers picked up cues from those around them and acted accordingly, and out of this network of endless local interactions the global structure of the colony as a whole emerged. This was emergence: from simple rules, applied at a local level and with some feedback, large-scale structures could emerge.

Minds were not necessary for this. Indeed, it was better not to know what was going on globally; the colony, emergent from everybody’s small-scale actions, simply worked more effectively that way.

Better not to know that you were in a hive.

Alia gazed at the swimming mothers. “All this in half a million years. What will they become in five million years — or fifty, or five hundred?”

Reath said, “Up to now no human hive has become more closely integrated than a colonial organism. But the evolutionary process has barely begun. Alia, in a sense you are a hive! You are a composite of perhaps a hundred trillion cells, each of them one of several hundred different specialist types — muscle, blood, nervous. You are the ultimate outcome of an evolutionary decision of the ancestors of your cells, which were once individual entities, to cooperate some six hundred million years ago… I suppose there is no limit to the integration which is possible with time.” He shook his head. “The end result is unimaginable.”

“I don’t understand why we’re here.”

“Alia, hives are repulsive things. But they are useful.”

Eusocieties were stable, and very long-lived, typically enduring many multiples of the life spans of their members. And that made Coalescents good archivists, recordkeepers of all kinds. A Coalescence was a mound of natural clerks and librarians. “Coalescences have been used as information processors and stores for most of human history. That’s why they are so useful for the Redemption project.”

Bale and the other Campocs were more skeptical. Bale faced Alia. “Hives are useful, yes. And if you want to know what it feels like to be a drone, go back to the Transcendence.”

Alia was shocked by Bale’s comparison of the mindless fecund swarming of the Coalescents with the lofty ambition of the Transcendence. There was no similarity — was there?

Berra took them to the mound’s deepest levels, to the chamber of the Listeners.

This chamber was low and flat. Its floor was empty save for a few low constructions, and it was lit by lanterns studded at random in the roof. But as Alia peered around she saw that these dim constellations went on and on, blurring in the distance into a single band of light. This one chamber had to be kilometers wide, perhaps more.

Bale stared at the ceiling. “I wonder what’s holding up the weight of the mound?”

Drea snorted. “You’re very literal, aren’t you, Rustie?”

Alia walked forward to the nearest of the low structures on the floor. It was a box no more than waist-high. She found a disc of some translucent substance set in its wall. When she passed her hand before the disc a spot of light, a very faint blue, showed up on her palm. She asked, “Lasers?” Glancing around, she imagined a network of the beams criss-crossing the huge chamber.

And now she heard a scuttling, glimpsed a hunched form. It ran through the shadows, hurrying from the cover of one of the laser boxes to another. It had huge eyes, eyes like saucers.

Drea said dryly, “I take it that was a Listener. Another specialist drone type?”

Alia said, “I suppose so. But what do they listen to?”

Berra said, “To the echoes of time.”

The Transcendence did not see itself as an end for which the desolation of past lives had merely been a necessary means. It believed it must somehow redeem the past, if it were to be cleansed — if it were to be perfect.

But once the goal of Redemption had been formulated, the nascent Transcendence had had to face profound questions. How was the past to be redeemed? Throughout the Commonwealth, Colleges of Redemption were established to address this question. At the very least, it was soon realized, the Transcendence — and indeed the mankind from which it arose — must be aware of the past, so that the past could be taken into the awareness of the Transcendence, a part of its eternal whole.

In the first attempts, vast museums were established. Many of them were virtual, shared between worlds, with no single physical presence. And in these museums immense dioramas were shown, great events of the past brought before the eyes of the present, based on the best reconstructions of the historians and archaeologists.

But it was not enough.

For one thing the present was an imperfect window of the past. Human records were always incomplete, and often full of lies anyhow. Of course there were physical traces to be retrieved, and legions of new archaeologists descended on all the worlds of mankind, and especially Earth. Some elements of the past were recorded in the genetic legacy of mankind itself, still carried within human bodies, even though they had been scattered across the Galaxy, morphing and changing as they went. But various catastrophic events, natural or otherwise, had left huge blanks in all such records.

And no matter how complete the records might be, there was still the question of interpretation — of the meaning of the events, the motivations and intentions of the characters of the times, many so remote from the Transcendents as to be practically another species. A new generation of historians sprang up, arguing over differences of meaning great and small.

It was all very unsatisfactory. So, even as the first dioramas were established, efforts continued to deepen and widen the Redemption. And at last a new way to excavate the past was discovered.

On the Nord, only very small children thought the universe was infinite. Just because it looked that way didn’t make it so, any more than the apparent flatness of a planet meant it had to be an infinitely flat plane. The universe was finite: closed, folded over on itself. To Alia the finiteness of the universe was as obvious and intuitive as, to an Earthborn child, it was obvious that the sun was a star.

And it was useful. As the Transcendence had sought ways to recover its past, it had fallen on the closure of the universe. For time and space were not separate entities but merged into one unity, spacetime. And so in a finite universe the closure must be complete in time as well as in space. Just as one side of the universe was connected to the other, so the very far future was connected to the very remote past.

And that was how you could detect the past: by listening for its echoes.

The finite universe had a topology, a connectedness imposed at the Big Bang, the instant of the initial singularity. Sitting inside the universe, you couldn’t see that topology directly. But there were ways to sense its presence.

Alia had once had a toy, a virtual game. It was like a slab of sky inside a cubical box. Battling spacecraft,

black alien bad guys and heroic Exultant greenships, would slide through the sky, firing cherry-red beams at each other. But the game wasn’t confined to the walls of the box. If a ship hit a wall, it would disappear — but would reappear on the other side of the box, heading the same way. So, even though they were separated in space, the points on each wall mapped precisely onto the corresponding points on the opposite wall. It was as if the whole of the universe were tiled, filled with identical copies of the game, joined side to side. Once you got used to it you could use the strange folded-over property as part of your tactics; you could send your greenships to sneak around the universe’s “curve” and fall on the aliens from behind.

And you could play other games. You could imagine setting off an explosion somewhere in the box. A spherical shock wave would set off in all directions. It would stay a simple sphere until the front passed through the walls of the box, after which it would fold around and intersect itself, forming circular arcs all over the place. Alia could see that if you sat in the middle of the box and watched those shock-circles blossoming all over your sky, you could use the pattern to figure out the geometry of your box-cosmos. It was just as you could figure out the lattice structure of a crystal by studying the patterns in the way electrons were diffracted passing through it. The whole of spacetime was a lens, shaping the radiation that washed through it.

The Listeners’ purpose was to explore this tremendous diffraction. They mapped gravity waves, ripples in spacetime itself, deep and long, spreading at light speed from the universe’s most titanic events: the explosive deaths of stars and galaxy cores, the collisions of black holes and galaxies. Gravity ripples passed further than any other, and they offered, indirectly, the clearest possible map of the universe, its structure, and its contents. “Remarkable,” Reath breathed. “And so these ‘Listeners’ watch the laser light with those big eyes of theirs. These long light beams are sensitive to disturbance by the gravity waves which wash through the core of the planet.” Strangely, some gravity wave frequencies were in the rages of a few thousand cycles per second: converted to sound waves, they were audible to human ears. The Listeners actually heard the chirp of colliding neutron stars, the warble of one black hole absorbing another.

The gravity-wave echoes washed around the closed universe, from pole to pole — and from future to past. The information the Listeners sought from their gravity waves wasn’t just about the great physical events of the universe. It was about the history of mankind.

The Transcendence had conceived a great project. It would build a probe that it would send into the furthest future, and thereby hurl it into the deepest past. And there, hiding in the dark at the rim of Sol system, this monitor from the future would witness the unfolding of mankind’s deepest history — and it would send the whole complex story back around the curve of the universe to the great entity that had constructed it. The Listeners recorded these whispers, sent from the deepest past to the furthest future. Once retrieved, the news from history was analyzed and stored in Coalescent archives, and disseminated to form the basis of the Witnessing.

Thus the past was brought into the present of the Transcendence. And, buried somewhere in that immense lode of data mined from the past, was the wormlike thread of Michael Poole’s biography.

Reath disturbed Alia from her absorption. It was as if she came back to herself, back to the dismal cavern of the Listeners, from a dream of cosmic unity.

Reath studied her, analytical but uneasy. “Have you learned enough?”

She frowned, thinking. “I’ve learned how we recover the past. But I’ve yet to learn how we use that information. It isn’t over yet, Reath.”

“Then what next?”

“I don’t know.”

He sat beside her. “So we go on. Alia, I’m concerned you’re becoming sidetracked from your true purpose.”

She returned his gaze blankly. “What does it matter to you? I thought you said it’s up to me to find my own way into the Transcendence. Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?”

“You have tasted the Transcendence, but you are still alone, still Alia. And it is Alia’s curiosity you are indulging. If you only gave yourself up to the Transcendence, all your doubts and questions would wash away. I’ve seen it many times before.” He clearly meant that to be reassuring, and perhaps it would have seemed so once, but now his bland assurances chilled her. “And besides,” he went on, “are you sure these questions you have come from your own heart? Don’t forget these Campocs blackmailed you into this whole line of questioning about the Redemption.”

She said coldly, “The Campocs’ methods were primitive. Brutal. But the questions they raised are valid. Reath, I want to resolve all my doubts before the Transcendence swallows me up. Is that so hard to understand?”

Reath frowned. “Your language of ‘swallowing up’ is inappropriate. The Transcendence is an augmentation, not a diminishing.”

But I’d rather be alone and sane, Alia thought darkly, than conjoined into a vast insanity. I have to be sure. But she couldn’t possibly say that to Reath, of course.

“We go on,” she said firmly.

“Yes, but where to?” Drea asked uneasily.

The Listeners seemed to be getting used to the visitors’ presence. They scuttled back and forth across the floor of their chamber, their huge eyes capturing the flickering of their light beams.

Drea stared at them in disgust. “This is a terrible place.”

Suddenly Alia felt confined, trapped, buried under this great mound of tunneled-through dirt. She turned to Reath. “Let’s get out of here—”

Berra gasped. She staggered and reached out to Alia, who recoiled.

Reath took Alia’s arm. “Try to be calm,” he murmured. “Don’t alarm Berra further. We need her guidance to get out of here before—”

“Before what?”

“Before she fulfills her final duty to the hive.”

“What final duty? What’s wrong with her?”

“Why, don’t you see? She needs to keep us here, as long as she can. She needs you, Alia.”

Berra had been born with the potential for intelligence. But she had probably never been fully conscious,

self-aware — not before Alia arrived.

“Because,” Alia said slowly, “it’s best if a drone doesn’t know she’s a drone.”

“Yes. Which is why in most hives, drones shed their higher cognition. But there are circumstances when intelligence is too useful to lose altogether — when the Coalescence is attacked, for example, or has to be moved.”

“Or when a Transcendent-Elect comes asking questions,” Alia said.

“Yes. Alia, Berra lucked out. She was just the interfacer who happened to be closest when we came calling. She may not even have known our language before she was needed. She probably didn’t even have a name before, because it was better that she didn’t. It was as if she woke up, for the first time in her life, the moment you walked through the door.”

“But now we’re leaving,” Alia said. “She can go back to the way she was. Can’t she?”

Reath shook his head. “Alia, Berra has served the hive well. But now she knows too much: she knows who she is, that she is a drone. And she has nowhere else to go. Alia, she will be dead before we leave the planet.”

Alia stared in horror at Berra. The little drone seemed to be folding over on herself, as if imploding, still staring at Alia.

Alia couldn’t stand it. She Skimmed away, right out of there, out of the heart of the hive. She found herself standing on the rusty plain once more. She ripped off her face mask and sucked in the dusty air.

While we worked with Ruud Makaay on fleshing out EI’s involvement in our gas-hydrates project, Shelley and I stayed in Palm Springs.

We were guests of EI in a grand, somewhat faded hotel. Its outer shell had been Painted so that it glittered silver in the dry sunlight like a vast, complicated Christmas-tree bauble. Inside there was a gigantic pool, and an even bigger bar, where a robot pianist gently played Chopin. But no guests.

Shelley had a lot of work to do, as always. She worked eight or nine hours in every day, some of it with Makaay and the EI staff. But she also kept in contact with clients, suppliers, and contacts all around the world, and those nine work-hours were scattered randomly through each twenty-four. She worked in the hotel’s small computer-aided-design booth, in her swimsuit or a fluffy hotel bathrobe, surrounded by VR visitors, or ghostly circuitry plans, or mock-ups of intricate mechanical assemblies. She had an admirable capacity to function well at three in the morning, and catch up with a catnap at four in the afternoon.

So I spent some time alone. It was close to midsummer and off season, but even so Palm Springs had an echoing, empty feel. The twentieth-century wealth and ease of transportation that had built the place had drained away, leaving a glittering bubble in the desert air. It wasn’t so bad for me. I felt as if I’d been through a lot, and Palm Springs, big and depopulated, was a good place to let the tension drain away. If only I played golf the place would have been perfect, I thought.

Shelley and I did spend our spare time together. We ate, swam, walked, talked. I was always extremely fond of Shelley. Competent, engaged, humorous, at ease in her life and her work, she was the kind of human being that I’d always aspired to be. And I think she was fond of me, too, even though compared to her I was a no-hoper — never reliable, always inclined to flakiness. But I was “never short of ideas,” she would sometimes say. You needed somebody around to come up with the impulse to do things, and I was a source of that — as witness our hydrate stabilization project itself.

For sure a life with Shelley, who was sane, engaged, and alive, would have been good for me — if not always for her. But it was never going to happen, because, as she had said herself, Morag was always there, for better or worse as attached to me as my right arm, and there was no point behaving as if it wasn’t so. I sometimes regretted that fact. I think Shelley did a little, too. But our relationship had its place in my notional spectrum of possibilities. So it goes.

I talked to Rosa in Seville a few times. She was “digging up old ghost stories,” she told me a bit mysteriously. Sometimes she spooked me herself: behind her small face, so accurately reproduced by the hotel’s VR systems, I felt I glimpsed the shadowy conclaves of the Vatican, great mounds of knowledge that had accumulated for two millennia — and, perhaps, even stranger archives still.

After seven days Ruud Makaay called us back to his Mojave headquarters, where, he said, he would be organizing a seminar on our proposals.

We gathered in a conference room in the EI compound. The room itself was a clear-walled cube. There was a long table with a dozen chairs, evidently a mix of real and VR seamlessly joined. That was all there was; the room felt unfinished, a sketch. But in a virtual economy you flaunted your wealth by showing less.

Makaay, Shelley, and I were the only flesh-and-blood attendees. Tom and Sonia Dameyer projected in from England. I took a seat beside Tom, real and unreal side by side at the same table. I was inordinately glad to see him; I still hadn’t got over that Siberia experience, if I ever would. Tom looked uncomfortable to be here, though.

Vander Guthrie from the Global Ecosystems Analyzer facility in Oklahoma materialized out of the air. He looked as awkward as ever, his hair’s sky-blue tint ridiculous, and he grinned nervously at me. And he carried a little toy robot that he set on the tabletop. The robot rolled experimentally back and forth, friction sparks emanating from its plastic belly. In a tinny space voice it proclaimed, “A little slippery, but I think I can cope.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Tom groused. “Dad, what is this, a freak show?”

“Gea is supporting us. It’s significant, Tom.”

“It’s ridiculous, is what it is. What am I doing here?”

I longed to touch his hand. “If not for you none of us would be here. Just take it easy and follow your heart.”

Tom snorted, but sat still.

On his other side, Sonia caught my eye and smiled faintly. He’ll be OK. I was grateful for the wordless message, and glad she was there, sane and calm. Sanity and calmness do seem to be in short supply in my bloodline.

Ruud Makaay, sleek and competent as ever, pinged the water glass in front of him with his fingernail. “May I call us to order? Thank you all for being here, one way or another…”

Our purpose, he said, was to review the work done so far on fleshing out the hydrate-stabilizer scheme, and to decide on next steps.

Tom was immediately suspicious, even hostile. “Next steps? Such as you taking the whole thing over so you can get rich drilling fucking great holes in the North Pole?”

I said quickly, “Tom, take it easy. The EI people are helping us out here.”

“Oh, sure. ”

If Makaay was perturbed by this unpromising opening he didn’t show it. “We’re here to review the work we’ve done on a problem we all accept as serious. So for now let’s build on what we have in common, rather than focus on our differences. Can we agree on that much?”

The Gea robot rolled back and forth. I wondered what she made of all this interpersonal, typically human bullshit. And yet, I supposed, she depended absolutely on people, with all our imperfections, to get things done; she had to put up with us.

Shelley took the cue. “Shall I start?” She stood, walked to the head of the table, and with waves of her hands began to conjure up VR images of complicated bits of engineering, gleaming and flawless. The core of it was a device shaped something like a bullet, with a complicated tracery of flanges and ducts engraved on its nose. At its heart I saw a spark, a soul in the machinery.

Shelley produced a variety of representations of this thing, some transparent, cutaway, or exploded. “We call this a mole,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of our design. But each mole will be small, no larger than a clenched fist…”

To stabilize the hydrate strata it would be necessary to thread it with coolant pipes, just as in our original back-of-the-envelope sketch. The teams Shelley had gathered to flesh out the idea were adhering to that basic design. And they were still assuming that liquid nitrogen, drawn down as a gas from the air and then cooled and liquefied, would be the working fluid. You’d pass the nitrogen through the underground pipes where it would evaporate back to a gas, in the process drawing in heat from the hydrate layers, and then it would be passed out of the pipes for recondensing. That way you would effectively pump heat out of the ground.

But to stabilize a band of hydrates that passed right around the pole of the planet we would need hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pipe. It just wasn’t practical to fabricate and implant so much.

“Which is where the mole comes in,” Shelley said. “It will be like a self-propelled drill bit.” The flanged nose on the most solid representation whirred, its function obvious. “And it will lay tunnels, not pipes. It will simply burrow its way through the ground, just like a mole. But the tunnel it digs out won’t be allowed to collapse.” She indicated a range of little devices attached to the side of the mole. “We will shore up the tunnel as we go, using local materials. The precise technique will depend on what we find down there, which is going to vary according to the local geology… The walls of the tunnel will themselves be smart, of course, and capable of some limited self-repair, though in case of major breaches such as through seismic movement we can always send down more moles.

“We will send in hundreds of moles, thousands maybe. Each mole will make most of its own decisions down there, learning as it goes. But we can communicate with it through the pipe it leaves behind. We’re also experimenting with sonar and electromagnetic pulses, so the moles can communicate with each other even without a direct connection.”

Sonia said, “So they will hear each other digging away in the rock. A whole community, tunneling,

tunneling.”

“That’s the idea,” Shelley said. The overall design was straightforward. The moles wouldn’t be going terribly deep, and wouldn’t face challenging temperatures or pressures; the materials technology we needed was well within the envelope of experience of the mining industry. “And the smartness, of course, is trivial.”

Makaay asked, “And what about power?”

Shelley nodded at me. “That’s where Michael’s expertise comes in.” She tapped that glowing spark at the heart of her conceptual mole. “This is a Higgs-energy reactor, the most concentrated energy source we have. The mole’s heart will be a cube the size of a sugar lump, which will deliver it enough energy to tunnel through ten thousand kilometers — that’s our design goal, we may achieve more.”

Tom turned to me. “You can build such things, the sugar lumps?”

I said, “We can take them off the shelf, almost. We’ve been working toward such devices for a long time, Tom. For a while we’ve been good at making very small, very smart gadgets. So if you can make a power source equally compact you have a powerful technology…”

Now that power supplies were catching up with miniaturization, the agencies and companies I consulted for were developing, among other things, miniature robotic engineers designed to go places humans couldn’t, such as to check out undersea pipes and cables, or the interiors of antiquated nuclear reactors. The space community was designing a new generation of unmanned exploratory robots, swarms of them the size of oranges or smaller, which could be scattered on the surface of Mars, or in the clouds of Venus or Jupiter, or sent swimming in the ice-cloaked seas of Europa. These tiny probes would work for years, individually and cooperatively, smart enough even to design their own science programs on the spot. Even on Earth tiny distributed sentiences were even making new kinds of science possible. You could spray smart motes around a forest, let them self-organize, and begin to gather data, in three dimensions and real time, on the detailed behavior of macro-climates and macro-ecologies across a significant volume. All of this would be enabled by Higgs technology, by grains of an energy field that had once caused the universe itself to expand, each providing years of power.

Tom seemed impressed despite himself. Perhaps he did have some engineer’s genes in him after all.

With most components coming off the shelf, Ruud Makaay thought it would be possible to have some kind of field trial up and running within mere weeks. Earth Inc. took on immense projects, but it was a nimble organization, it seemed, capable of reacting quickly.

The discussion descended into technicalities.

Vander, prompted by Gea, pressed Shelley with some tough questions.

Shelley handled most of it, though we had to flag some issues to resolve later. Most of the problems Vander and Gea raised came from the fact that the design was still at a conceptual level, and Shelley just didn’t have the depth of detail yet. I couldn’t see that any showstoppers emerged, however.

Vander, as he spoke, had a strange way of sitting, alternately lounging then coming bolt upright, startling you. It was the way you might behave if you were alone, not in company. And that shock of blue hair made him hard to take seriously, despite the sharpness of his mind.

I suspected that Vander’s problem came from that ill-advised genetic engineering, performed long before he was born. Changing the color of his hair was one thing, but I was pretty sure Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie had taken the opportunity to upgrade little Vander’s IQ as well. The problem with that was what the neuro-anatomists and behavioral geneticists called pleiotropy: most genes perform more than one function, and that’s certainly true of the complexes of genes that seem to control levels of intelligence. So you could boost IQ, but we still weren’t smart enough to avert unwelcome side effects. It was an irony that only parents not smart enough to be able to grasp this in the first place would inflict such risky genetic meddling on their unborn children. Poor Vander.

Tom seemed fascinated by Vander, his peculiar, twitchy manner, his uncertain voice. I thought he ought to be grateful Morag and I hadn’t been so dumb as to do this to him.

When the technical questions ran down, Sonia leaned forward. “You said these moles will be smart enough to make their own choices. How smart?”

Shelley checked a softscreen. “Each mole will be three times as smart as a human. But in a narrow way. Specialized.”

Sonia said, “But smart machines have a way of thinking for themselves, don’t they? Military systems are generally kept dumb, you know. Everybody jokes that they are even dumber than the brass. But you can see why they have to be that way. You don’t want a weapon system or a piece of armor to be thinking about what it should do; you want it to do what you tell it, the instant you tell it. And now we’re going to let loose a swarm of these super-smart moles into the crust of the planet? How do you know they will do what they’re supposed to do?”

Shelley said evenly, “Because it will be in their own best interests. A mole is designed for burrowing, for laying tunnels, for talking to its fellows. It will be as natural as walking, talking, hugging a child is for you. The mole won’t want to do anything else. And as for the greater goal, each mole will be smart enough to understand the greater mission, the impelling problem. We’ll put each one through an education program to make sure.”

Sonia said, “OK, but they can still make choices, can’t they?”

“Sonia, I understand your concerns, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shelley said. “To us this is a detail. Motivation engineering is a well-established discipline — in fact a subset of animism, Vander’s speciality.”

Sonia couldn’t have looked less reassured. But I knew Shelley was right. There were actually philosophical arguments that endowing our machines with all this sentience and self-awareness was morally wrong, especially since their choice was usually limited, their freedom illusory. And I remembered my own helpless suspicions when first confronted with Gea. But there was nothing to fear from our artificial sentiences: despite our innate worries, the ghost of Frankenstein was laid long ago.

Makaay called a bio break. We pushed our seats back from the table and dispersed.

Tom and Sonia approached me. Tom had a mug of coffee; the vapor curled up convincingly from his virtual mug, and it struck me as odd that I couldn’t smell the cinnamon.

Tom said, “Dad, these are seriously scary people you’re dealing with here.”

“You mean EI?”

“Have you never heard of Cephalonia?”

I repressed the urge to snap back. “Of course I have. But they’re on our side here, Tom. Potentially anyhow.”

“Oh, sure.”

Actually I understood his suspicion of EI, even if it struck me as naПve. Now that the old oil companies had been defanged and the nuclear power industry had cleaned up its act, the geoengineers had taken the place of those traditional mad-scientist bad guys in the popular imagination. How could their huge projects be made accountable? Couldn’t the accumulation of such power be an end in itself for the unscrupulous? And so on. I sympathized. Maybe at heart I was still a twentysomething rebel myself. The trouble was, I couldn’t see any other way to save the world than to deal with the devil.

“We live in complicated times, Tom.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ruud Makaay touched my arm. “Michael, I’m sorry to take you away from your son. But there’s somebody here who wants to meet you…”

It was another VR presence, of a bulky, business-suited man, sweating heavily. “Hey, Mike. I bet you don’t recognize me.”

I did, but he was such an incongruous presence I took a moment to place the name. “Jack Joy. The Swimmer.”

He made a shooting-the-gun gesture at me with one fat hand. “We shared a plane journey together.”

“How could I forget?”

“Listen, you’re surprised to see me here, right?”

I shrugged. “Of course I am.”

“After our talk on the plane, you never used that card I gave you.” I tried to apologize, but he waved it away. “No matter. I’m a curious guy,” Jack said. “And you interested me. You told me about your kid in Siberia, remember. After that I looked up about those gas deposits, and the danger, and all of that. And then I heard from a friend of a friend that you were involved in some kind of scheme to stabilize them. I was intrigued. So I found you.”

“How?”

“Through your brother John.” He grinned. “I never met him before, but he’s a Swimmer, too. Did you know that?”

Lethe.“I suppose I suspected.”

“Anyhow, through him, to you, and here I am. And I’ve been watching the show. Very interesting.”

“I hope you don’t mind me inviting Mr. Joy,” Makaay said, but he had nothing to apologize for. He had warned us in advance that we would be monitored by others in his organization, and by representatives of potential supporters and sponsors and the like.

I said, “It’s fine. But I don’t see what interest the Swimmers have in a project like this.”

Jack shook his head. “Oh ye of little faith. You really should look us up, Mike. I’m here to see if we can help, we Swimmers.”

“You?You want to support the stabilization project?”

He shrugged, as if graciously accepting my gratitude. “Any way we can, if we think it’s the right thing to do. We have deep pockets, actually. You might be surprised.”

“But why would you want to?”

“Because it’s serious, if you’re right about these damn gas deposits blowing their stack. We’re pragmatists, OK? We don’t believe in denial. Your brother is a pragmatist, too. And also we may be able to act long before our various governments and intergovernmental bodies and all the rest of the bureaucratic mound on top of us get their thumbs out of each other’s asses. You may need us, Mike,” he said with a kind of overweight persuasiveness.

“Michael,” I said. “Call me Michael.”

“Actually Mr. Joy may be right,” Ruud Makaay said smoothly. “We are critically short of funding. We need money to develop the concept to the point where the governments will give us money to develop the concept…” He shook his head. “It’s a vicious circle, an old story, I’m afraid.”

VR Jack said, “We want to be your friends, we really do. I’ll be waiting.” And with a nod to both of us he disappeared.

Tom approached me. “More complications, Dad? How long a spoon do you need to sup with the likes of him?”

Makaay called us back to order. Confused by Jack’s intervention I took my seat again.

Shelley presented the next logical level of our tentative design.

She showed how moles, inserted into the earth and dispersing from some central point, would fan out, spreading their narrow tunnels behind them as they did so. Some of the moles would move around circumferential arcs as well as radially, so that a multiply connected network, rather like a three-dimensional spiderweb, would develop within the hydrate beds.

“The network will grow incrementally,” Shelley said. “We have to follow a phased approach, simply because it’s going to take time to ramp up the industrial capacity to churn out all those moles, all those condensers and collectors. And besides, nobody has ever run a pipe network on anything like this scale before. The moles will take some time to figure out the best way to do it.”

This was the modern approach to engineering. You let your machines, loaded with as much smartness as possible, figure things out for themselves, and then learn from the way they did it. That way, not only was there a good chance you’d end up with an optimal design at the finish, but you could expect that at every stage you would move from one optimum configuration to another. It was like climbing a hill, Shelley said, in such a way that you didn’t just aim for the peak but at every stage took the best path available.

“So in the end,” Tom said, “it will all merge together into a single vast cap of silicon brain embedded in the floor of the polar ocean. Talk about hubris!”

Ruud Makaay said ruefully, “Believe me, that word is already carved on my tombstone. All I can say is that we geoengineers would never take on a project like this if there was any choice.”

“But there is no choice,” Gea said in her small, absurd voice.

Tom said, “There’s still something I don’t get. I’m no engineer, but I do recall some high-school thermodynamics. You’re keeping those hydrate deposits cool; you’re pumping all the heat out with your liquid nitrogen. But where is all that heat going to? It can’t just disappear, can it?”

“It certainly can’t,” said Shelley.

Shelley patiently explained that our mechanism would end up dumping its heat into the ocean, and the air.

“This will be the hardest part of the sell, I fear,” Makaay said. “Because it is going to be very hard for our paymasters to understand.”

“Well, there’s no magic involved,” Shelley said. “All that heat has to go somewhere.” But the net injection of heat into the environment would be trivial compared to the catastrophic rise in temperature that would result if the hydrates’ vast store of greenhouse gases were released to do their worst. And anyhow we could always mitigate the effects of any heat injection with albedo control… It was a necessary evil, Shelley said.

Sonia said, “I don’t think I understand.”

Tom laughed. “They’re going to pump all that heat out of the hydrate layers and into the air. The whole point is to stop the world from heating up. But to do that we’re going to have to make the problem worse. What a joke.”

The Gea robot said, “There are many aspects of the present predicament of mankind that are ironic. It is indeed all a vast joke. Ha ha.” And she rolled back and forth, friction sparks cascading.

Alia, seeking a way forward, sought the Transcendence.

When she called, the strange constellation of minds gathered around her. To rejoin the Transcendence was easy, even here, on the hive-world. Once you had been a part of the Transcendence, you never really left it; it was always in the background of your life, always waiting to take you in once more.

It was exactly like an addiction, Alia thought uneasily.

But now she sensed a kind of restlessness. The Transcendence, aware of its own imperfections and incompleteness, struggled to be born — and laced through it all was that nagging guilt over the bloodiness of the past from which it was emerging.

She looked back at herself, Alia, her own nuggetlike awareness embedded in the greater whole. To be part of the Transcendence was to be overwhelmed by perspectives, human and superhuman, that overlapped and clashed. On one level she struggled to maintain her sense of identity and purpose, and to unravel her doubts about the Redemption — but at the same time she was faintly ashamed of herself. Who was she to question the mass mind around her, which had been gracious enough to accept her, and which was in turn founded on the wisdom of others far older and wiser than she was? Even now, unready as she felt, she could simply give herself up to the greater whole. She could put aside Alia, like a memory of childhood; she could immerse herself in the Transcendence, and never surface again…

Which was what it wanted, she realized. For her nagging questions, lodged deep within its own consciousness, made the Transcendence uncomfortable. She couldn’t take credit for causing this conflict within the Transcendence, but her questions were opening wounds, sharpening a conflict that already existed.

But she clung to herself, like a defiant child who wouldn’t say sorry. This was a genuine dilemma for the Transcendence, and she had a duty to keep asking her questions: What is the true purpose of the Redemption? What is its ultimate goal? What does it cost? And — how far will you take it?

The constellations of pinpoint minds seemed to swim around her — and then they came together with a shocking rush. She saw a human face, a small, round, worn face, with eyes like bits of diamond.

And she heard a voice, resounding inside her head. “You won’t give up, will you, child?”

“I only want—”

“What you want doesn’t matter. What the Transcendence wants is for your doubts to be replaced by certainty. For, you see, it seeks certainty itself. You know that the impulse for Redemption comes from the communities of the undying. And so you must meet the undying, the oldest of all. You must meet me. My name is Leropa. Find me.”

“Where?”

Suddenly Alia surfaced from the Transcendence.

She was back in her own body, back on Reath’s shuttle. She lay on a couch. Reath and Drea hovered over her, concerned. But the three Campocs had backed against a partition, huddled together like frightened children. It struck her that joining the Transcendence was like being ill.

And that strange face, Leropa’s face, hovered in the air before her. Alia cried out. It was as if she had woken, but her nightmare still haunted her.

It, she, Leropa, glanced dismissively at the Campocs. “They can hear me, with their little web of minds. I’m invisible to the others.”

Alia struggled to sit up. “Where must I go? Tell me.”

“Earth,” the woman said.

And then the face was gone — not broken up or dispersed, simply gone from Alia’s field of view, as if she had turned her head away.

Had any of it happened? Had this strange woman Leropa really come swimming out of the Transcendence to address her? Had she really talked of Earth?

The Campocs remained jammed up against each other, trembling, watching her fearfully, and Drea stared at her, baffled, concerned.

I spoke to Rosa again. She told me, “There has been an upsurge in sightings — hauntings, poltergeist phenomena, you name it — all over the planet.”

“Really? I had no idea.”

She snorted. “Why would you? You would not look in the places where you might discover such things. Nor would I, in normal times. But, prompted by your experiences, I have been researching. You aren’t alone, Michael, for better or worse. The whole world is suddenly haunted! And this has happened before. History shows it; there have been previous plagues of ghosts. Now, what do you suppose this means?”

I had no idea. I didn’t know whether to be reassured or terrified.

I felt guilty about working on this stuff in the middle of the hydrate project. I kept it a secret from Tom, Shelley, and the others. It was like I was looking at porn. But I did it. I summoned Rosa, like raising a VR ghost, to my Palm Springs hotel room.

In the flimsy gaudiness of the room, with its late-twentieth-century American tourist chic, Rosa was a dark, sullen mass, small and hunched, her priest’s robes so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. When she first appeared she seemed disconcerted. She looked around as if finding it hard to focus. Then she saw me, and nodded, unsmiling. “Michael.”

I asked, “Are you OK? You look a little travel-sick.”

Her mouth twitched, a characteristically minimal expression from Aunt Rosa. But her response came a discernible fraction of a second after the cue, enough to remind me that this was not real, that we were not together separated by light speed delays. “I’m fine. But the older I get the harder it is for my system to accommodate multiple realities. As you will learn.” She looked down at her black eroded pillar of a body, spread her liver-spotted hands. “Just think! I do not actually need to look like this. I could have materialized as Marilyn Monroe — have you ever heard of her?”

“Perhaps we should sit down.”

Rosa rested her hands on something — it materialized when she touched it, a light, high-backed chair — and dragged it toward my table. “We may as well look as if we share the same universe,” she said.

I walked to the table and sat stiffly. I described EI’s conference room to her. “It was a hell of a lot better than this. Really, you wouldn’t have known who was really there and who wasn’t, the interfaces were that good. Of course the illusion relies on the human factor, on protocols. You have to make sure you don’t break the rules, do things that are impossible in the consensual reality—”

“Like this?” She reached out of shot and picked up a mug. Like the chair, it appeared out of nowhere, captured by her imaging system as a contiguous part of her extended self. “As a Catholic priest I spend an awful lot of my time on protocols, of one kind or another. I don’t imagine we could run our lives, or manage our souls, without them. I wonder if your apparitions follow their own protocols. Are they systematic, confined by rules?…”

And so we were getting to the point.

Rosa conjured up a VR reconstruction of those strange moments in Spain, as the dust storm had closed in. A miniaturized slab of the Reef coalesced out of the air over my tabletop, and I cleared the water jug and other junk off the table to save confusing the system.

Lumpy and massive, the virtual Reef looked like the papier-mвchй hillsides I used to build as a kid to drive my toy cars over. But the representation was finely detailed. I could see the glittering of crushed automobile hoods and smashed windscreens, and I picked out the crudely hewn stairs that led up to the cave where Rosa and I had eaten. And when I bent down to peer into the mouth of the cave, I saw two little figures sitting at a table. Each the size of my thumbnail, they were charming, like toys in a doll’s house; I had an impulse to pick up the tiny model of me and examine it more closely.

“This is a reconstruction,” Rosa said. “The records are sparse. The Reef is thinly monitored, relatively. This is the best we can do, for now.”

The projection ran forward. The dust storm descended, a crimson cloud descending in silence, like weather on Mars.

Then she appeared — Morag, the visitor, on the slope of the Reef. I saw that toy representation of myself throw back his chair and dart out of his metal-walled cave in pursuit. The little Rosa and the burly landlady dragged him back, and Morag retreated into the dark shadows of the storm. All this was played out in silence. As Morag was on the cusp of vanishing into the dust cloud, Rosa froze the image.

“Can you magnify this thing?” I touched the doll image of Morag; my finger brushed her, scattering tiny pixels.

The image ballooned, but as it enlarged it became increasingly fuzzy. When the face expanded it was no more than a sketch, a default female-human. It could have been anybody. I was crushingly disappointed.

“This is based on the available records, and on what I saw,” Rosa said. “My eyes are good, better than I deserve at such an age. But the figure was simply too far away, the dust swirling and obscuring.”

“You are painfully honest,” I said.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary validation.”

“So you can’t be sure it was Morag.”

“I’m sorry.” The magnified image of Morag dissipated. “And I wasn’t able to capture any of her speech — that strange high-speed monologue we heard.”

I rubbed my chin. “So this is all we have. If only the surveillance density had been greater! Bad luck she showed up in a place like this.”

“That might not have been a coincidence at all,” Rosa said. “If she, or whoever is behind the apparition, is determined to remain obscure — to tantalize rather than to reveal — then she would naturally do it this way, in a place where surveillance is sparse, in glimpses through dust clouds, retreating.”

“Why do you call it an apparition? It’s a ghost — isn’t it?”

She sat back in her chair. “Not necessarily. Michael, I’m afraid to deal with this we will have to delve into the pseudo-science of the supernatural…”

Humans stick words on things, like bright yellow labels. It is our way of dealing with the universe. And even phenomena that are not part of our consensual reality have accumulated a vocabulary of their own.

“An apparition is just that, an appearance of something, ” Rosa said. “If you want an even broader label for what is happening here, you can talk of a haunting as an interaction between an agent and a percipient — your Morag-figure is the agent, you see, and you the percipient. The agent could be some external phenomenon, either natural or supernatural, or maybe something emanating from inside your own head: all of these are agents, you see. The language is nonjudgmental. Now, a true ghost is something more specific: a ghost is one class of apparition, a manifestation of somebody deceased.”

“Morag is dead.” Absurd how difficult it was to say that, even after all these years.

“Yes,” Rosa said. “But we don’t know if this is Morag in any sense. And there are other types of apparitions.”

You could also have visions of people who were still alive: there were “wraiths” and “crisis ghosts,” manifestations of living people going through some trauma. You had ghosts of the specialized kind, like poltergeists. You had animal ghosts. And so on.

Hauntings of all kinds had a long history, she said. Arguably you could trace the idea of ghosts all the way back to the tale of Gilgamesh, four thousand years back. The ancient Greeks and Romans told each other ghost stories, and the more rational of them tried to investigate hauntings and other spooky phenomena.

“The early Church accepted the idea of ghosts, of spirits that could be detached from the body. This was bound up with competing theories of the nature of our immortal souls. In the end the early Church fathers came up with the notion of Purgatory, a place somewhere between Heaven and Hell, where restless souls could lodge. Such ideas were attacked by later thinkers — during the Reformation, for instance. But they, or rationalized versions, remain part of the Church’s corpus of beliefs.

“And the apparitions seem to keep up with technological advances,” she said with her characteristic dry humor. “As soon as photography was invented ghosts started showing up in images — never clear enough to be used as proof of the ghosts’ existence, of course.”

Thomas Edison had tried to invent machines to detect apparitions. I was intrigued by that; after all it seemed no more fantastic a thing for Edison to try than other astonishing things he had succeeded in doing, such as lighting up cities with electricity, or capturing human voices in wax.

“When the Internet spread that was immediately haunted, too; people received spectral e-mails from senders who never existed.”

“And now they show up even in virtual reality,” I said ruefully.

“But still leaving no trace,” Rosa said.

Talking this way helped me deal with the whole issue, I think. It wasn’t so much that Rosa took me seriously but the reassurance I derived from her patient analytical probing. As Rosa analyzed and classified, and picked apart cause and effect, motive and design, she was breaking open the mystery and arbitrariness that had baffled and distracted me from the start. This needn’t be overwhelming, a nightmare: that was the subtext of her dialogue with me.

But I felt more uneasy to be discussing ghosts and hauntings in that gaudy Palm Springs hotel room than I had in Spain. A place like Seville, steeped in millennia of blood-soaked history, was a place where it had felt right to contemplate deeper orders of reality. Palm Springs, bless it, was a monument to the trivial, the sensual; defiant in its own shallow reality it seemed to consume the whole universe, leaving no room for mystery.

Or maybe I was just feeling guilty about spending time on all this “spooky stuff,” as Tom persisted in calling it.

“Complicated thing, guilt,” Rosa had said when I tried to tell her about this. “We Catholics have been thinking about it for two thousand years, and we still have not figured it out. My advice is to embrace it,” she said dryly. “Good for the soul.”

Now she told me that whatever was happening to me, I evidently wasn’t alone.

There had been a huge upsurge in sightings of apparitions of all kinds, all over the world. The trend had been upward since the first few decades of the century, and was now going “off the scale,” she said.

“Even if each and every one of these sightings, including yours, is in some way bogus, their simultaneity is surely telling us something.”

I shrugged. “Yes. But what?”

She waggled a finger at me. “You are making progress, Michael, but you still have some way to go. If this were an engineering problem you would not be so helpless in your thinking. You would be looking for lines of attack, wouldn’t you? Such as seeking out more data.”

“And that’s what you’ve been doing?”

She had been digging into historical records, she said. She had hoped to find records of incidents there which might shed light on what was happening in the present.

And she had succeeded.

There had been similar waves of “hauntings” in the past. In the crisis of the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century, when perhaps a third of the population was lost, there were many accounts of hauntings, visitations, and other manifestations. Earlier, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols had erupted out of central Asia, plundering and massacring as they drove into China, Southeast Asia, and Europe — and, it seemed, they had driven a wave of ghost sightings and supernatural events before them.

Some of her examples were drawn from the archaeological rather than the historic record. “Take the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas,” she said. “In the few decades after Columbus’s first landfall they suffered a massive implosion of population numbers, through disease and overwork, massacre and dislocation at the hands of the colonists.”

“And they saw ghosts?”

“Recent archaeology shows a huge rising in occult symbolism and practice — and this in societies obsessed by the occult anyhow. Carvings on doors. Sacrifices. Corpses dug up and reinterred.”

“The Spaniards scared the hell out of them. Maybe it was some kind of mass hysteria.”

She shook her head. “This occurred before Columbus landed. In those last decades there was a crisis coming, certainly, a terrible, culture-terminating, genocidal crisis. But they couldn’t have known it yet — not by any causal chain as we understand it.”

She quoted more examples, still more obscure to me.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “I never heard of most of this.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said tartly. “But then I have access to records which are not available to the general public…”

I wondered what she was talking about. The Vatican and its old, deep libraries? Or perhaps, even more sinister, she meant the strange community that had brought her up, the Order; I wondered what records were kept there.

But I could come up with confirming examples of my own. I vaguely remembered uncle George’s talk of UFO scares. Born in 1960, he had actually missed the crest of that particular wave of witnessing of preternatural visitations, but he had been briefly fascinated by the lore of it all when he was a teenager. But when the Berlin Wall fell, when the threat of massive nuclear war faded, the UFOs went away. The pattern was the same, I saw uneasily. It was another wave of visitations in advance of an impeding crisis, if interpreted in twentieth-century terms, in a science-fiction-informed language of aliens and spacecraft rather than specters and ectoplasm. It just happened that in this case the feared crisis, the glare of the Bomb, hadn’t come about.

Rosa said, “And if you accept the premise that waves of apparitions occur when mankind faces a bottleneck—”

“Then there should be a wave about now, as we face the Warming.”

“Yes. With the hydrate release, perhaps, as the killer punch. A wave of haunting — a world full of experiences exactly like yours — is exactly what one should expect.”

“OK,” I said. “Suppose I accept your argument that I’m in the middle of some kind of global presaging of disaster. What I can’t see is why. What’s the point?”

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “Now that is an engineer’s question. What’s the function of all this? Oh, I can think of a whole range of interpretations… Try this. Everything about us, from our toenails to our most advanced cognitive functions, is shaped by evolution. You’ve heard me argue this way before. If a feature didn’t give us some selective advantage it wouldn’t have emerged in the first place, or would have withered away long ago. Do you accept that?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “Go on.”

“If that’s true, and if these visitations, and their timing coinciding with great crises, are real phenomena, then one must ask — what’s the evolutionary advantage? How can these visitors help us?”

“By providing continuity?”

“Perhaps. A linking of the better past to a hopeful future, through a desperate present… Perhaps an intelligent species needs some kind of external memory store, an external mass consciousness, to help it ride out the worst times.”

“That sounds very fishy to me,” I said. “I thought selection wasn’t supposed to work at the level of the species, but the individual, or the kin group.”

“Maybe so. But wouldn’t it be an advantage if it did emerge? If there were lots of bands of intelligent animals running around the planet — and a global crisis hit — wouldn’t the pack with the cultural continuity offered by a halo of ghosts, no matter how imperfect the information channels, have a clear advantage?”

She was smiling. I could see she was enjoying the speculation. But right now I felt I was floundering.

“So Morag could be a ghost of some kind. But not a ghost from the past. A ghost from the future. Is that what you’re saying? But how is that possible?”

Rosa said, “A Catholic thinker would have no real trouble with that idea. Theologians don’t believe in time travel! But we do imagine eternity, a timeless instant outside time altogether, like the constant light that shines through the flickering frames of our movie-reel lives. So a visitor from eternity, an angel, can intervene at any time, historically, she chooses, because it’s all the same — it is all one to her, all in one moment, like a reel of movie film held in your hand. There is no difference between past and future to God.”

“You think big, don’t you?”

With her right hand she pointed up to Heaven. “There’s nowhere bigger than Up There.”

We were disturbed by a chime, the VR equivalent of a knock on the door. I was almost relieved to take a break from all this spookiness.

It turned out to be my brother, John, who had logged on to give me a hard time.

Projected from his office in New York, John’s VR was of an altogether higher quality than Rosa’s. It was the middle of his working day, and he was dressed in a dark business suit. I was struck by how big and solid he looked, just like Ruud Makaay.

John greeted Rosa civilly enough. He even cracked a joke. “If you shared my VR protocols I could give you a kiss.” But their manner with each other was watchful.

I realized that I had no idea what contact there had been between the two of them. After all she was John’s long-lost aunt as well as mine. Was it possible this was the first time they had “met”? But I felt intimidated even to ask.

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, VR or otherwise. Two brothers and an aunt, suspicious, wary, facing each other down like rival gangland bosses: what a cold family we were, I reflected, what a damaged bunch.

“What do you want, John?”

He sighed. “It’s a little tricky. I saw you were logged on, and I saw who you’re speaking to. I don’t mean to snoop but I am paying for the calls. Can I speak freely?”

Rosa said sharply, “As long as you get to the point, fine.”

“Michael, people are concerned about you.” He waved a hand. “About all this. You know what I mean.”

“And they spoke to you, right?”

“Don’t be resentful,” he snapped. “I’m trying to help.”

“But I am resentful, you asshole. Who spoke to you?”

“Shelley Magwood, if you must know. And through her, Ruud Makaay.”

Of course I had to expect that John would hook up with a man like Makaay. They were of a type.

John said, “All this is a distraction. You have work to do, Michael. Responsibilities. This hydrate-stabilization proposal you’ve initiated seems to have some genuine merit. I think there’s every chance it will gain some support, and maybe even do some real good, if presented in the right way.”

“But if I disappear up my own backside in pursuit of the spooky stuff, I’ll be harming that process. Right?”

“Of course you will,” he said irritably. “You’re talking about a very expensive engineering project here; it’s a hard enough sell as it is without hints of flakiness from its initiator.”

Rosa watched us both. “You two really do have a deep-seated rivalry, don’t you?”

I said, “You have to remember that when we were kids John was a couple of years older than me. Now we’re in our fifties, and he’s still a couple of years older than me.”

Rosa laughed softly.

John glared at us. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t forget who’s been bankrolling you. And look, Michael, it’s not just the project.” He clearly tried to soften his tone; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You have to think about the effect you have on others. Tom, particularly. Your pursuit of this” — he waved a hand — “this chimera is hurting him. She was your wife, but she was his mother, you know.”

“You’ve got no right to talk about my relationship with my son.”

He held up his massive hands. “OK, OK.”

Rosa had an air of amused suspicion. “What is really going on here, John?”

“I’m concerned for Michael.” He glowered back.

“Oh, perhaps there is truth in that. But I am pretty sure you would be quite happy to see your little brother take a pratfall, as long as no permanent harm was done. So why are you interested in this business of Morag?”

Characteristically he went on the attack. “And what’s your angle, Rosa? What’s your motive in messing with my brother’s head?”

“Will you believe me if I say I actually want to resolve this issue, to help my nephew, that I have no higher motive? Other than simple curiosity, of course; I always did like a good ghost story… No, you probably won’t, will you?”

I was obscurely pleased that she wasn’t fazed.

John stared at her. “Do you actually believe in ghosts?”

It was a simple question that, in our increasingly sophisticated pursuit of the mystery of Morag, I’d never quite framed that way, and I was interested in her answer.

She thought for a moment. “Do you know what Immanuel Kant said about ghosts? ‘I do not care wholly to deny all truth to the various ghost stories, but with the curious reservation that I doubt each one of the sightings yet have some belief in them all taken together…’ As a priest you soon learn that there is a whole spectrum of credulity, that the poles of total acceptance and utter denial are merely two poles, two choices among many.” She smiled. “Or to put it another way, I have an open mind.”

John seemed angered by this. He stood up. “You’re full of shit.”

I said, “John, watch your mouth. She’s your aunt, and a priest. She’s a priest who’s full of shit.”

He turned on me. “You really ought to get your head clear of this garbage, Michael. For your own sake,

and the rest of us.” He clapped his hands and disappeared, like a fat, business-suited genie.

Rosa stared at the space where he had been. “So many issues, so many conflicts. Even for a Poole your brother is unusual.” She turned to me, her gaze direct, probing. “Michael, I think your brother is hiding something from you — something that’s troubling him about all this more than he’s telling you. You have to resolve this, the two of you, whatever it is. You are stuck with him, you know. Stuck with each other for life. That is the doom of family.”

I stared, surprised. I’d had this feeling about John before; it was disturbing to hear it confirmed. But in this dense, dark tangle of me and Morag, Tom and a ghost, what secret could John possibly hold?

Rosa stood up. Her chair vanished in a haze of pixels. “Perhaps that is enough for now.”

“OK. But our ghost story — what next?”

“I am sure you will agree that we need more data. I suggest you wait for another visitation. Or, if you have the courage, seek one out, as you did in York. But this time, make sure you record everything you can — especially that strange rapid speech.”

“I’ll try,” I said dubiously. “I don’t know how easy it will be.”

She smiled. “You’ll have help. Another of your friends contacted me.”

I frowned. “I really hate the idea of everybody talking behind my back. Who this time?”

“Gea,” Rosa said simply.

Even given the context of the conversation that surprised me. “So a sentient artificial intelligence is investigating the ghost of my dead wife. Could my life get any weirder?”

She leaned forward. The VR illusion of her presence was so good I thought I could smell her musty, exotic scent, a mix of old lady and priest, perhaps through some synesthetic confusion in my muddled head. “But we are all on your side, Michael. You are the hub of a wheel, you see. We are all connected to you. Even if we bicker among ourselves.” She stood straight and tucked her hands into her black sleeves. “We will speak shortly.” And she disappeared.

Alia had never cared much where she was. She grew up on a ship, sailing on an endless journey; she had been born in transit. And through Skimming she had learned that all differences in space could be banished with an act of will.

But now she was coming to the one place in the Galaxy where she couldn’t help but know exactly where she was. As Sol itself loomed out of a sparse Galaxy-rim dusting of stars, she was already seeing a sky Michael Poole himself might have recognized, even though the constellations had shifted and morphed since his day, and the stars themselves showed signs of the passing of mankind: some of them greened by orbiting shells of habitats, others lined up in rings or belts, still others detonated and scattered in the course of one war or another.

And soon she would come to the very center of it all: Earth, the home world of mankind — the place where, it was said, in the end all the undying flocked.

Reath’s ship cut across the plane of Sol system, like a stone rolling across a plate. The sun’s planets, so significant in memory and legend across the Galaxy, were scattered in their orbits about their star. Alia was disappointed; she had no instinct for the dynamics of planetary systems, and somehow she had expected all the solar worlds to be lined up in a neat row ready for inspection.

One world did swim by to become bright enough briefly to rival the still-distant sun. They all crowded to the windows to see. The planet remained a mere point of light to an unaided eye, but they used the ship’s enhancement features to see better.

It was a giant, a ball of murky gas that swathed a rocky core larger than Earth. The planet’s color was a dull, washed-out yellow-brown, but you could see streaks and whorls in the cloud tops, sluggish storms curdling that thick blanket of air. Reath pointed out moons, balls of rock and ice that were minor worlds in their own right. And, strangest of all, the planet was circled by a ring, a band of light centered on the planet.

This planet, Reath said, was called Saturn. It was the system’s largest surviving gas giant; there had been one larger, but that had long been destroyed, and was anyhow hidden on the far side of the sun. Saturn had once been central in the planning for the defense of Earth itself. “It’s a fortress,” Reath said, “a vast natural fortress circling on the boundary of the inner system.”

Alia asked, “And what about the rings?”

“Orbital weapons systems, very ancient. They break down, collide, smash each other up. In time their fragments have been shepherded into those ring systems by the perturbation of the moons’ gravity. It’s odd,” he said. “Once Saturn was one of Sol system’s most spectacular sights, for it had a natural ring system — fragments of water ice from a shattered moon. When mankind came here, bringing war, those rings didn’t last long. But now Saturn’s rings have been reborn in these bits of smashed-up weaponry.”

On the planet itself, huge machines of war had been constructed beneath the cover of the eternal clouds. But the war had never come here; those immense machines had never been activated.

“But the machines are still waiting for the call to arms,” Reath said.

Bale said, “I wonder if they will know who to fight for, after all this time. Would they recognize us as the heirs of their builders?”

None of them, not spindly Reath or the squat Campocs or furry, long-limbed Alia and Drea had an answer. Saturn swam away into the dark.

It was half a million years since mankind had first ventured to the stars. For much of that time humanity had been locked in war — and although in the end a Galaxy had been won, it had always been Sol system, even Earth itself, that had been the principal mine for the resources for that war. So the system was left depleted.

Once, between Jupiter and the inner rocky worlds, there had been a rich asteroid belt: now it was impoverished, mined out, and scattered. The iron of the innermost world, Sol I, called Mercury, had been dug out and shipped away for so long that the little world had been left misshapen by quarries and pits. Earth’s two neighbors, Sol II and IV — Venus and Mars — had been used up, too. Mars had been stripped of what volatiles it had retained from its chill birth, and even Venus’s thick air had been transformed to carbon polymers and removed. Now, abandoned, both worlds looked remarkably similar, two balls of rust-red dust, naked save for only a thin layer of air, and with no signs of life save the abandoned cities of a departed mankind. It was a strange thought, Alia reflected, that in a mere half-million years after the humans arrived, all these worlds had suffered a greater transformation than any in the vast ages since their births.

At last the ship made its final approach to Sol III: Earth.

Even from afar the planet didn’t look quite as it did in Poole’s time. The planet’s crisp horizon was blurred by a deep, structured layer of silvery mist: in this age, Earth was surrounded by a cloud of life.

The ship cut through this community. Alia watched, bemused, as translucent animals, all amorphous bodies and clinging tentacles, attached themselves to the ship, spraying acid to get at whatever lay inside. The ship was forced to charge its hull to repel these swarming, vacuum-hardened creatures.

This unlikely community was an unintended consequence of mankind’s long colonization of near-Earth space. Once, many engineering structures had lifted up out of Earth’s atmosphere to provide access to space. There had even been a bridge that had spanned many times Earth’s own diameter to reach to its Moon — but the Moon itself was lost now. All those mighty engineering projects had long since fallen into ruin, but they had lasted long enough to provide a route for Earth’s tenacious life-forms to clamber out of the atmosphere and at last to leak out into space, where, hardened and adapted, their remote descendants still remained.

At last the ship descended toward the planet itself.

The world that came spinning up out of the dark was still recognizably Earth. Alia could even name the continents, so familiar from Poole’s maps. She knew that the continents were rafts of rock that slid around the surface, but even half a million years was but a moment in the long afternoon of Earth’s geology, and the essential configuration was unchanged.

The continents’ shapes had subtly altered, though, she saw. The land had pushed out to sea, and where the great rivers drained into the oceans, fat deltas crowded into the water. The oceans, steel gray, had receded since Poole’s time. Not only that, there was no trace of ice, at either North or South poles; in the north there was a cloud-strewn ocean, and the southern continent, Antarctica, was bare green and gray. A good fraction of Earth’s water must have been lost altogether.

In the temperate regions most of the lowland was inhabited. The ground was coated by a silver-gray broken by splashes of vivid green. The habitation was so widespread, crowding from mountain peaks to river valleys, it was hard to distinguish individual cities or communities. But in the sprawl of urbanization there were distinctive patterns — circles, some of them huge, which shaped the development around and within their arcs. Roads like shining threads cut across the plains of habitation, linking the circular forms, and Alia could make out the sparks of flying craft.

Reath pointed to the ground. “See those circular forms? In the time of the Coalition, they built all their cities that way, low domes on circular foundations. Conurbations, they called them.”

“They were copying alien architecture,” Drea said. “And they gave their cities numbers, not names. They didn’t want anybody to forget that Earth had once been occupied.” It was a familiar story, a legend told to children across the Galaxy.

When the Coalition fell the great domes had been abandoned, mined for materials, left to rot. But the first post-Coalition cultures had established their towns and cities inside the old circular foundations. That was half a million years ago, and since then Earth had hosted a thousand cultures, and had fought numberless wars; the people thronging its streets probably weren’t even the same species, strictly speaking, as the folk who built the Coalition. But still the circular patterns persisted. On Earth, Alia thought, everything was ancient, and everywhere reefs of a very deep antiquity pushed through the layers of the present.

The only exception to the general pattern of habitation and cultivation was South America. On its descent toward its landing site in Europe, Reath’s shuttle cut south of the equator and swam across the heart of this continent. The land was covered from mountain peak to shore by a bubbling carpet of crimson-red; only the bright gray stripes of great rivers cut through the dense blanket.

Alia pointed this out to Reath. “It looks like vegetation,” she said. “Like wild vegetation. But there’s no green. ”

Reath shrugged. “It probably isn’t native. Why should it be? Earth is the center of a Galactic culture. For half a million years life-forms from all across the Galaxy have been brought here, by design or otherwise. Some of them found ways to survive.”

Bale said, “So it’s an alien ecology down there. Why don’t they clear it away?”

“Maybe it’s too useful,” Reath said.

“Maybe they can’t, ” Seer said with a cold grin.

The shuttle cut across the Atlantic, sweeping from south to north. In the last moments of the flight Alia peered down into a great valley that she found hard to identify from her memories of Poole’s maps. Then she realized it was the basin of the sea once called the Mediterranean, now drained of water. As elsewhere the urbanization crowded down from the higher lands, but much of the basin floor was colonized only by wild greenery. Here and there she made out lenticular shapes, stranded in the dried mud and grown over by green. They might have been the remains of sunken ships, she thought fancifully, wrecks that had outlasted the sea that had destroyed them.

The shuttle left the basin and flew north over the higher land. They were somewhere over southern Europe — Alia thought it was the area Poole would have called France. They came to a densely developed area that straddled a river valley. Here those circular patterns of development crowded closely, and the ground was textured with buildings and roads, as if carpeted by jewels. The shuttle descended, and Alia found herself falling through a sky that was full of buildings — impossibly tall given Earth’s gravity, surely saturated with inertial-control technology.

Drea peered out in awe at one vast aerial condominium. “Look at that. It’s bigger than the Nord!”

Bale said dryly, “They don’t believe in economizing on energy, these Earth folk, do they?”

The shuttle found a clear area to land, and dropped without ceremony to the ground. They all clambered out and stood still a moment, allowing Earth’s Mist to interface with their bodies’ systems.

This landing pad was just a clear, shining floor. There were no facilities, nothing like a dock or replenishment station. The nearest buildings looked residential — and, further away, more buildings floated, huge and glittering.

Bale sniffed. “Funny air. Not much oxygen. Lots of trace elements, toxins.”

Reath said, “This is an old world, Campoc…” He fell silent.

The little party was being studied. A small girl had popped into existence a few paces from Alia — literally popped, Alia could hear the small shock of the air she displaced. She was wearing a jumpsuit of some substance so bright it shone. She stared at Alia, then disappeared again.

Alia whispered to Drea, “Skimming?”

“I think so—”

Another visitor Skimmed in, this time a man, grossly fat. He glanced at them all, spied Drea, and walked up to her. He leered at her breasts and said something Alia couldn’t hear. Drea snapped, “No.” He shrugged and disappeared.

But he was soon replaced by another, a younger man who gazed at them curiously for a few seconds before disappearing. And then another, an older woman — and then a party, a family perhaps, adults and children hand in hand, who Skimmed in as one.

All around the shuttle people flickered in and out of existence. Alia could feel the air they displaced washing gently over her face. The party clustered together nervously.

“They’re just curious,” Reath said. “Come to see the visitors — us.”

“They have no manners,” Seer said nervously.

“Or attention span,” Denh said.

“Then ignore them,” Alia said.

“Quite right.”

The voice was a dry scratch. Alia turned.

One of the visitors remained while others flickered around her, evanescent as dreams. It was a woman, though her figure was all but masked by a shapeless brown robe. She was small, dark, somehow very solid, Alia thought, as if she were made of something more dense than mere flesh, blood, and bone. She walked through the shimmering throng toward Alia. Her face was round and worn, and her head was hairless, with not so much as an eyelash.

Alia said, “You’re Leropa.”

“And you’re Alia. I’ve been waiting to meet you,” said the undying.

It took Ruud Makaay and his people only a few weeks to set up a prototype test rig of the stabilizer technology. He summoned us all to Prudhoe Bay, on the Arctic coast of Alaska, for a trial demonstration.

I was impressed with the speed with which we had got to this point. But then Makaay had insisted from the beginning that EI was going to use off-the-shelf technology wherever possible. Even the moles weren’t entirely new: in the dying days of the oil industry, smart mechanical critters much like our moles had gone burrowing into the earth and beneath the seabeds all over the planet in search of the last reserves. Similarly the big condensation and liquefaction plants we were planning to set up would, in principle, have been immediately comprehensible to a Victorian engineer: “Gaslight-era technology,” Makaay said. It was just the scale of what we would be attempting that was new — the scale, and the intrinsic smartness of the system.

As well as its technical goals this trial demonstration would be a “bonding session” for us, the project’s champions, Makaay said. And, more seriously, it would give us a chance to rehearse, he said, to begin developing the case we were going to have to make to the world’s serious power brokers if our project was ever to get off the ground.

But for now we were still in development mode, and Makaay was keeping the press out. It was all a question of perception. In advanced engineering, you expected failure; you learned as much from failures as from successes — indeed if you never suffered a failure you probably weren’t pushing the envelope ambitiously enough. But Makaay, after half a lifetime spent trying to sell the unsellable, knew that the public, media, and politicians rarely understood these truths. So, for now, only the core team would be present.

Plus one potential ally, he told me.

“TheEdith Barnette? You’re serious? She must be eighty if she’s a day.”

Barnette had been vice president in the momentous Amin administration. She had been deeply unpopular at the time, and had taken much of the flak for the pain of Amin’s mighty economic restructuring; she never followed Amin to take the White House herself. But historians had come to recognize Barnette as a key architect of the whole Stewardship program, and as a driving force in getting the necessary policies through Congress and into international governance. Of course all that was a long time ago.

“She has no formal power, of course. But she has contacts all over the Hill, and in the UN, and of course the Stewardship councils.” Makaay smiled, his VR image flawless. “In my world, Michael, opinion is currency, worth far more than gold — far more even than conventional political power. And if we can get Barnette on our side we will go a long way to swinging the debate our way, believe me.”

“But what if we fail?”

“If it isn’t a showstopper Barnette will forgive us. She’s one of the few of her breed smart enough to do so. And she’s always had her heart in the right place, Michael. She understands what we’re trying to do here — or she will by the end of the big day.”

Even though Barnette would be there, personally I would much rather have stayed home. I had had my fill of traveling, and had no desire to haul my weary ass all the way up to Alaska, the roof of the world. But Shelley talked me into making the journey. We had to trust Makaay’s instincts, she said again. Otherwise why work with him?

So I acceded; I traveled to Alaska.

But as I slogged through my long journey, a whole series of more or less dreadful plane hops, I kept in mind my other agenda, the mysterious and spooky business of Morag. The whole issue was upsetting, and was isolating me from my family and friends, but I couldn’t wish it away. I had a deep gut instinct that my strange contact with Morag was just as important as anything else in my life. I was determined not to let it drop — though I had no real idea how I was going to pursue it. Somehow, I knew, Morag would come to me.

It turned out I was one hundred percent right.

The plane flew in over a vast brown plain, and the ocean was a steel sheet across which waves rippled tiredly. There was not a speck of blue or green to be seen on land or sea.

Prudhoe Bay was one of a series of oil fields spread along the northern coast of Alaska: the North Slope, as the locals call it. The complex of drilling facilities stretched for about two hundred kilometers along the coast. There were scores of drilling pads, marching off across the land. In each pad you could see the central rig facility, a gaunt dinosaur-skeleton of rusted iron, surrounded by small boxy buildings. The ground between the pads was cut through by straight-line roads, now disused, the tarmac crumbling and coated with mud. It was a very strange sight from the air, an alien forest of iron and tarmac.

I was stunned by the scale of it. Once, I knew, this had been the largest single industrial facility on Earth. The rigs had sucked up oil from kilometers down, and as in those days the sea coast had been ice-bound for most of the year, the oil had been sent south through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline across more than a thousand kilometers. It was a complicated irony that the Warming, by causing the final retreat of the sea ice, had opened up the north Alaska ports all year round; if only the Warming had come a little earlier they wouldn’t have had to go to all the trouble of building that thousand-kilometer pipeline — but the oil shipped through that immense pipe had itself contributed to the Warming.

Now, of course, the rigs were obsolescent, but the rumps of the old oil companies still owned these facilities, and were loath to abandon decades of infrastructural investment. And so the area had become a kind of adventure playground for large-scale industrial experimentation: that was why the EI engineers had chosen to come here for their trials. Plus it was American soil, which made a big difference in permissions, administrative support, and other bureaucracy. Makaay told me it was a lot easier to attract visitors to American territory than abroad, even to a place as remote as this.

I landed at an airstrip outside a small town called, unpromisingly, Deadhorse.

My automated cab from the airport gave me a profoundly irritating commentary, as if it imagined it was a tourist bus in Manhattan. Once, the cab told me, the hotel I was heading for had been the only accommodation available to visitors. But now that the oil industry had imploded there was plenty of accommodation to be had on the old drilling pads. There were even theme parks, where you could play at being a rigger, with grubby jeans and a hard hat.

Outside the town, the ground was churned-up mud where nothing grew. Once this area had been a vast swathe of tundra, like Siberia. But as the permafrost melted, the delicate tundra ecosystem had just melted away, too, and just as in Siberia the people had gone, the subsistence-hunter types who had endured here for millennia.

Deadhorse turned out to be barely a town at all; grim, functional, it was like an industrial yard. Many of the small, boxy buildings were abandoned altogether, their roofs collapsed, concrete walls cracked. As we drove in through this decay and abandonment along a thin strip of silvertop, the light was failing, the day ending. It felt as if the walls of the world were closing in around me.

The hotel was basic, just a series of two-story blocks. There were long corridors of rooms that stretched on and on, like a prison, and the flat heavy light of the fluorescent strips embedded in the ceilings washed out any color, any vitality.

The automated reception facility told me a fault had developed with the systems in my room, where an oversensitive chemical toilet had developed a habit of spitting unwelcome waste back out at its unlucky user. An animist had been summoned from Fairbanks to administer therapy, but wouldn’t be here until the morning. In the meantime I could take a chance with the angst-ridden toilet, or switch to a room with a shared bathroom.

The hell with it. I took the switch.

My room was just a box. It was clean and reasonably bright, with a little alcove where you could make coffee. But everything was old, the pipes rusted, the plaster and skirting boards crudely repaired, and dirt and grease had accumulated in cracks in the walls.

I threw my clothes into the small cupboard, and headed down the corridor to find the shared john. The toilet was none too clean, the shower just a nozzle over a stained bath. The water looked clear, but smelled suspiciously of chlorine.

Back in my room, I used the very basic VR facilities to contact my party.

Everybody was here in Alaska, Tom and Sonia, Ruud Makaay and his people, Shelley and some of her colleagues, even Vander Guthrie. I was too tired to do any business that evening, but would have enjoyed company, I guess. I longed to see Tom again, a deep cell-level impulse. But he knew I’d been with Rosa “telling ghost stories,” as he put it, and he was pissed with me, and I didn’t feel up to any more rows. Meanwhile Shelley was finalizing details for the demonstration due the next day. Everybody else was working, or had crashed out. A bit wistfully, we all promised to meet up in the morning.

I rolled into bed and watched some news. There was actually a relevant item: more instances of localized hydrate release around the Arctic Circle, more water spouts and clouds of lethal gases. I guessed it was local interest up here.

I was dog tired, my eyes felt like they were coated with sand, but I found it hard to rest. My muscles ached from all the long hours of sitting around on planes, and I felt tense, full of energy that needed burning off. And though it was close to midnight the sun was still up; this was Arctic midsummer. The light that leaked around the edge of my curtains was bright, not quite like daylight, enough to throw off my body clock.

I just lay still, eyes closed. I tried to talk myself into sleeping. I felt myself drift inward, away from the poky reality of that dismal Alaskan hotel. But as my conscious mind receded I only seemed to uncover a deeper layer of anxiety, like a beach exposed by a low tide.

I needed the john.

I pushed my way out of bed, pulled on my pants, and fumbled my way in the dark to the door.

The light in the corridor was briefly dazzling. I stumbled along one wall. The only sound was the padding of my feet. There was an odd quality about the light. It was a dead and colorless glow, lacking any of the photosynthetic goodness of sunlight. Barefoot, shambling along alone, I felt like a convict.

The corridor seemed to stretch on, longer than I remembered. I wondered if I had come the wrong way, if I was somehow getting lost. But I kept on, figuring I had to get somewhere eventually.

At last I came to the bathroom. I pushed my way inside, used the facility, came back out. Again the corridor stretched away to either side of me, infinitely long, identical whichever way you looked. For a second I had to think which way I had come. My thinking seemed stuck in my head like glue in a pipe. I turned right. I figured that was the way. I began stumbling back down the corridor.

Then I saw her.

She was a slim figure, far off down the corridor. I heard her voice. She was speaking rapidly, just as she had at the Reef. But the thick-painted walls jumbled up her voice into whispers and echoes.

I ran, of course. I felt absurd running in my bare feet, with my pajama pants flapping around my legs, my belly heaving under my vest. But I ran anyhow, as I had run before, as I knew I always would run after her.

I kept my eyes fixed on Morag. I had the feeling she wanted me to reach her. She was just standing there. But though I ran as hard as I could, I didn’t get any closer. I felt no fear: none of that awful sucking banal cold of evil that Rosa had described. She was there for me. But I couldn’t reach her, no matter how hard I struggled to run down that endless corridor. She looked helpless, her hands spread.

She turned away from me and stepped into a room.

I tried to count, to remember which door she had chosen. Twenty, twenty-five down? I counted off the doors as I passed.

But a wall loomed before me.

I had to stop. I stood there panting, staring at the wall blankly. It was just a hotel wall; it had small arrowed signs pointing me to reception, and to a fire exit. It had seemed to come out of nowhere, materializing like a VR and cutting off the corridor.

I turned and looked back. The corridor didn’t seem so long now. I could even see the bathroom door I’d left open.

I knew I wouldn’t see Morag again that night. I stumbled back down the corridor, looking for my room. I longed to call Tom, but I knew I must not.

In the morning I was up early. I checked at the hotel reception for any records of last night. There were a few surveillance cameras dotted around the building, but none in the rooms, and only one to cover the length of that corridor.

After some electronic arm-twisting I persuaded the hotel’s sentience to show me images. I saw myself stumbling, running, staggering down that corridor. I had been half-asleep; I looked almost drunk. But there was no clear image of Morag. The cameras’ fields of view never quite stretched far enough, and the sound pickups were overwhelmed by noisy air-conditioning fans. Perhaps there was a shadow — a fleeting shape, a glimpse of ankle, a trace of voice on the audio recording. That was all.

Once again Morag had come and gone leaving scarcely a trace.

The day after Alia landed on Earth, Leropa arranged to meet her in a township built out of a ruined Conurbation that she referred to by an old number, “11729.” It was apparently a place of great historical significance. Alia knew nothing of this, and didn’t ask. Buried at the heart of the solar system, she was beginning to choke on age and mystery.

When morning came, Alia flew alone in Reath’s shuttle. The little craft confidently skimmed north, and circular-plan cities fled endlessly beneath the shuttle’s prow. The sky was a washed-out blue, and in the day no stars were visible. There was no Moon in the sky either. Alia wasn’t sure if the Moon, so familiar from her viewings of Michael Poole’s time, had ever been visible in the daytime. And now, of course, the Moon was gone, detached as an accident of mankind’s endless wars. She wondered if Michael Poole could have got used to a sky without a Moon.

At last something altogether more grand began to loom over the horizon.

It was a framework, an open skeletal structure. It was pyramidal — no, tetrahedral, Alia saw, with three mighty legs plunging toward the ground. It was colored blue-gray, though its true shade may have been masked by the mist of distance. Streaks of cloud curled languidly around the apex of that immense tripod, but its base was still hidden by the horizon — the whole must have been kilometers tall.

As the shuttle swept closer this structure loomed ever taller in Alia’s sky, until at last her shuttle was flying through the vast open space cradled by the framework. At the heart of the triangular floor over which the tetrahedron loomed was a city: Conurbation 11729 itself. This city retained some of the ancient domed architecture, but the domes had been worn by time, cut through and patched up, over and over.

The shuttle descended. On the ground Leropa was waiting to meet her.

“So,” Leropa said, “you are the young Elect who has caused so much trouble.”

“I’m sorry,” Alia stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“And I’m grateful that you, the Transcendence, is giving me time.”

“Oh, you don’t need to be grateful. The Transcendence can’t help but devote its attention to you. Don’t you understand that? Perhaps your tuition hasn’t been as thorough as I imagined. Child, you are already part of the Transcendence. So your doubts and questions are its doubts. Do you see?”

“I think so—”

“And so the Transcendence must deal with you, to set its own mind at ease.” Leropa closed her eyes, and nodded, as Alia had seen Reath bow his head when naming the Transcendence.

Leropa’s face was very strange, small, round, her nose and cheekbones so shallow she was all but featureless, like a crater eroded to smoothness by great age. Her lips seemed without a drop of blood, and her eyes were gray orbs dry as stones. Alia wondered how old this person was — if she could still be called a person at all. In Leropa’s presence Alia felt transient, transparent. Leropa smiled at her; it was a cold grimace, inflicted on the muscles of her face by an act of will.

Together they walked through the great circular courtyards of the domes. From the ground the domes were peculiarly dull to look at: they were simply too big to be taken in, for Alia could only see to a dome’s horizon, and could make out nothing of its true scope. But over it all the great struts of the tripod, from here a vivid electric blue, swept up until they penetrated the sky.

Alia grew increasingly uncomfortable in Earth’s heavy gravity. She kept trying to break into a run, forgetting the economy of walking — and besides her body, no longer truly bipedal, was not designed for walking. After a time she settled on a compromise, taking some of her weight on her curled fists as she loped along.

Leropa smiled at Alia as she knuckle-walked through the ruins of Earth.

Leropa spoke, in a voice like dry leaves rustling. The tetrahedron was a ruin, too, of a sort, she said. It dated from the time after the fall of the Coalition. A religious group called Wignerians or Friends, having arisen illegally in the military colonies at the center of the Galaxy, had emerged as a unifying force in the aftermath of political collapse. In its glory days it returned here, to Earth, where it had erected the mightiest of all cathedrals over the ruined capital of the Coalition that had once banned it. In the end the Friends’ creed had become the most powerful and magnificent of all mankind’s religions; it converted a Galaxy, revealed and explored the depths of humanity’s soul, and now it was quite vanished.

Leropa said now, “At the heart of the religion of the Wignerians was a belief that all of history is contingent — that all possible world lines will be gathered together at the end of time, where history will be resolved in favor of the good, and all pain wiped away.”

“A Redemption,” Alia said.

“Yes. The Wignerians’ was a vision of entelechy that has perhaps influenced the thinking of the Transcendence.” She looked up at the cathedral’s skeleton, squinting in the light. “But everything passes, Alia. Once this was the capital of a government which ruled the Galaxy. Eventually nothing remained of the Coalition but the religion it had tried to ban, and in the end nothing remained of that but this one idea, a dream of entelechy. That and a few ruins.”

This was an appropriate place for the undying to gather, Leropa said. In time the cathedral had been looted, its walls crumbled — but not this central framework which, made of something called exotic matter, defied entropy itself. “The undying have contempt for mere stone, which in time rots in your hand. This deserves respect.”

Alia, faintly repelled, said nothing.

Then, in the shadows of the broken domes, they came on the undying.

There were few of them to be seen. They moved slowly, cautiously, each rounded figure surrounded by a cloud of servitor machines. But each walked alone. They had empty faces, blank expressions. They didn’t even speak, though some of them seemed to be mumbling to themselves. Just as she had glimpsed on that other Transcendent world in the Galaxy Core, the undying were weighed down by the huge burden of the past, Alia saw, they were each locked into a separate world.

It struck Alia how Leropa was different. Of all this shuffling crowd of ancients, it was only she who seemed even aware of Alia’s presence.

“What are you thinking, Alia?”

“All I see is what’s missing. There is nothing here. No art. No music—”

Leropa grimaced. “Can you imagine a single piece of art that wouldn’t appal you after a hundred viewings, a piece of music or verse of poetry that, after a thousand years of listening, wouldn’t sicken you with boredom? The very abstract endures longest, I suppose. Cold, voiceless music; pale inhuman art. But in time everything wears away, Alia. Everything visible turns to dust — and so you turn to what remains, the invisible.”

“What’s inside you.”

“Yes. The present is just a surface of sensation surrounding a great bubble of memory. You forget how to see, to hear; you forget how to talk to people. You forget other people even exist. You just sink inward into yourself, thinking about the past. Living on and on, without end.”

“And yet you do live on.”

“Oh, yes.”

These ancient figures, and the wisdom they had accreted, were the treasures of mankind, in a sense, and the foundation of the Transcendence, and so they were cherished. But not envied.

Leropa said, “I understand this repels you. I have seen such a reaction many times before — an instinctive loathing, the rejection all young feel for all old. It is the natural order of things. But you will come round. The alternative to living on and on is, after all, death. And we do have some value, you know.”

Leropa reached out and, without warning, touched Alia’s forehead. Her touch was cold.

And suddenly Alia was standing on top of a mountain, drenched in cold air that dragged at her lungs. She stumbled and wrapped her arms around her body.

Leropa watched her dispassionately. “You’ll be fine,” she said.

Alia’s systems, suffused by Mist, adjusted to the shock. The feeling of cold, of vertigo, went away. She stood straight, composing herself.

She was on a plateau no more than a hundred paces across, smoothly cut from the summit of this steep-sided mountain. Walls of granite fell away to valleys far below, and the ground was folded into more mountains on all sides. The rock was slippery underfoot; there might be no ice left at Earth’s poles, but there was ice up here.

An immense barrel of some cold blue metal pointed up out of the rock of this summit, straight up at the sky. It was monumental, many times her own height. It was obviously a weapon.

“Where am I?”

“Does it matter?” Leropa’s thin lips pulled back into a smile. “Ah, but you have Witnessed the career of Michael Poole, haven’t you? In his day these mountains were known as the Pyrenees.”

“Did we Skim here?”

“Everybody Skims everywhere, on Earth. The people continue to burn up the planet’s energy store as if it were inexhaustible. You must have seen the floating buildings, the way the whole planet glows from space. Earth has always stayed strong, you know. Even when the Coalition fell it was the capital of the strongest of the successor states. And through all the wars and vicissitudes since, it stayed safe, unharmed. We ensured it did.”

“We?” But Alia knew who she meant. The undying.

Leropa said, “And by staying strong, its people naturally became rich — even if the planet was bled of its own substance in the process. Those who have inherited the Earth live exotic lives, Alia. More exotic, more fantastic, more rich than a ship-born waif like you can imagine.”

Alia resented that. “Maybe. But if they have such rich lives how come they needed to come look at me?”

Leropa laughed, a dry, eerie sound, quite without humanity. “Perhaps you’re right. They caper on the wealth of ages. But they are bored; they are too ignorant not to be. And they are spoiled rotten.”

Alia looked up at the barrel of the weapon. “And what is this?”

“A weapon of war,” Leropa said. “In fact an ancient starbreaker cannon. It is at least three hundred thousand years old, but fully functional. It will probably last as long again.”

“What’s it doing here? Defense?”

“In a sense. Its sentience is programed to seek out and destroy any impactors — asteroids, comets — that might threaten the planet.”

Alia frowned. “Is that likely? This system’s asteroid belts are depleted.”

“True. An atmosphere-penetrating impact sufficient to cause significant damage is likely only once every million years: in Poole’s time it would have been once a century. And there are more defense perimeters in space.” Leropa glanced up at the weapon. “But this guardian is here even so. Of course the worst case would be a strike that took out this defender, and a second strike that would, undefended, do even more harm.”

“Surely that sort of multiple accident is almost vanishingly unlikely.”

“But a real risk nonetheless,” Leropa said. “And so I like to check this installation over, from time to time. This is why I showed you this installation; this is the protection we undying offer to the people of Earth. You understand, don’t you?”

“I think so…”

It was an elementary insight for a student of the Implication of Indefinite Longevity. The biggest difference in the perception of an undying was time itself. If you were an undying, you could expect to live so long that risks statistically negligible on the timescale of a normal human lifetime became significant. So a once-a-megayear risk of an asteroid strike in this cleaned-out, heavily defended system became worth thinking about, planning for.

If the species were to survive into the very far future, of course, such thinking was necessary. Mankind needed the undying, or at least their instincts for very long timescales. But it was a deadening, fearful perspective.

“And you feed all this caution into the Transcendence,” Alia said cautiously.

“The undying founded the Transcendence. The undying have always shaped it. How could it be otherwise?”

“But you old ones bring other baggage, don’t you?”

Leropa smiled. “Baggage? Ah, you mean regret — the driver behind the Redemption. At last we are getting to the point. You have doubts about the Redemption, don’t you, child? You think it is perhaps unhealthy. Obsessive. And you suspect there is more to it than mere Witnessing, don’t you?”

Alia felt weak before the force of personality of this ancient creature. But she gathered her courage. “I think there must be. Because Witnessing isn’t enough for atonement. ”

Leropa nodded approvingly. “Your intuition is sound. Witnessing is in fact only the First Level of Redemption, as defined by the Colleges. And, no, it isn’t thought to be sufficient. How could it be? Witnessing is for children.”

“What is the Second Level?”

“It is called the Hypostatic Union, ” Leropa said. “A union of substances, of essences. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“Then learn.” She reached out and once more, with a fingertip that was colder than ice, touched Alia’s forehead.

Alia fell into a bloody dark.

In the morning we gathered outside the hotel’s main entrance, ready to be taken to Makaay’s demonstration. The weather was cold but clear, the sky a pale blue. Tom was here with Sonia, and Shelley and her people, Makaay, and a number of EI workers, most of whom I hadn’t met before. Vander Guthrie was here. His blue hair, protruding out from under his fur cap, looked frankly ridiculous.

We huddled together, wrapped up in heavy fake-fur coats and Russian-style hats provided for us by EI. “We all look like bears,” Shelley joked, although there had been no bears in this area, polar or otherwise, for decades.

Awkwardly Tom and I embraced, father and son reunited in this industrial wasteland. Tom didn’t have much to say to me. I was still in the doghouse for daring to speak to Aunt Rosa, and I refrained from telling him about my nocturnal pursuit of his mother’s ghost. Business as usual. I got a kiss on the cheek from Sonia, however.

A pod bus came to collect us. At the coast we all piled out into a chill wind that swept in off the sea and cut right through our clothing. We looked around.

The core of our stabilization plant had been built into the hulk of an offshore oil rig. We could see the rig from here, a blocky monochrome shape that loomed maybe a couple of kilometers from the shore. On a scrap of low, badly eroded cliff, a marquee had been set up, a brightly lit dome of some transparent fabric. The marquee had a good view of the offshore rig. Here we would witness the ceremonial start-up of the facility. And then, assuming the whole thing didn’t blow itself sky high, we would be flown out by chopper in small groups for a hands-on inspection. It was all good showmanship.

We pushed into the marquee through a kind of airlock, past the scrutiny of massive EI security guards. We dumped our coats; I was grateful to get into the warmth. A hovering bot offered me alcohol or hot drinks. I accepted a nip of Scotch, and a big mug of steaming latte. I wandered away from the rest, taking in the scene.

Maybe fifty people milled in that marquee, most of them EI employees or colleagues of Shelley’s. The accountants and other administrative types wore crumpled suits, but the engineers tended to be more casual, in jackets and jeans. The place was brightly lit and surveillance-rich, with football-size drones that floated in the air, and a finer mist of micro-drones, just a glittering dust that you only noticed if you focused closely.

“An impressive setup. And all for my benefit.” The liquid female voice was very familiar.

I turned to see Edith Barnette standing at my side, with Ruud Makaay at her elbow, beaming proudly.

Barnette wore a mid-length black dress; her legs were thin and pale, her feet clad in heavy-looking shoes. She was surprisingly tall, and her face was big-boned, her jaws heavy. Her skin, deeply wrinkled, was tanned pale gold, and her hair, sprayed into a dense helmet, was an uncompromising white. But she stood straight, her eyes were bright and alert, and when she spoke her voice was as mellow as it had always been.

At the side of today’s sole VIP, Makaay was in his element. His blond hair shone sleek in the bright lights. “Not entirely for your benefit, Madame Vice President.” He outlined his plans, and his intention that today should serve as a rehearsal before we encounter more unforgiving audiences.

Barnette said, “Then I will be sure to give you plenty of feedback.”

“I’ll welcome it. Forgive me, I’m due on stage.” He ducked out, bowing.

“So, Mr. Poole,” Barnette said to me. “All this was your idea, the stabilization project?”

“I guess so. It was me who asked the right questions. But it was in the air, the community I work with. Sooner or later somebody would have seen the need to—”

“Oh, don’t wiffle, man, I’ve no time for that.” She fixed me with a pointed finger, slightly crooked. “Your brainchild. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“It seems we will all owe you a debt of gratitude.”

I felt increasingly uncomfortable. Like Barnette the world tended to have a simple view of such projects; the media always looked for the chief engineer, the unsung double dome behind it all. But it wasn’t a role I was going to be comfortable playing, even if the project went well.

“I guess so,” I said. “If it works.”

“If?”

“We can’t be sure. We think we’ve modeled all the consequences.”

“You consulted Gea, didn’t you?”

“Gea has supported us from the start… You know her?”

“Never met it. Her? But I was responsible for major tranches of her development funding.”

I nodded, impressed. “But even with Gea on board, all we have are theoretical models. We can’t be sure what will happen.”

Barnette surprised me with her understanding. “I’m told some scientists believe the biosphere may be algorithmically incompressible. Is that the right phrase? — it literally can’t be modeled, for its intrinsic complexity is simply too great. The biosphere is its own unfolding story.”

I was impressed. “I’ve seen that, too.”

“Do you believe it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it makes a difference. The biosphere is bigger than we can manage confidently right now, so it doesn’t matter how big it is, ultimately.”

She smiled. “Spoken like an engineer. I always liked engineers, you know, though I was a philosophy major. You are pragmatists! Though I suspect many of you couldn’t even spell the word. Despite the unfathomable complexity of the world, we must pragmatically tinker with it because of this hydrate destabilization business, mustn’t we?”

“I believe so.”

“Well, I hope you’re right. About everything.”

She was interrupted by a soft chiming. Ruud Makaay had mounted a low stage and in his customary fashion was gently tapping a glass with a pen.

“Madam Vice President, everyone, thank you for joining us here on this exciting day. Of course most of you are paid to be here, and mostly by me, but thanks for showing even so…” Expert stuff, laughter easily evoked. “We’re here to witness the first full-scale end-to-end integrated trial of the hydrate stabilization system prototype,” he said, to a few whoops from his engineers. “But I think we should begin with some context.”

Makaay snapped his fingers, and a screen appeared in the air behind him. To my surprise it showed an image of what looked like an oasis in the desert, a splash of green against pale yellow, with a clear blue pool at its center. “The polar hydrate deposits, a massive store of greenhouse gases, are unstable. But they are not the Earth’s only instability…”

The images he showed us were of the Sahara Desert. As everybody in the marquee knew, one twist to the general global pattern of climate change was that the Sahara was greening. It had happened before, Makaay said. Five thousand years before an extended drought had caused an environment of woodland and marshes full of crocodiles to flip over to a parched plain with only a few scattered oases, with crocodile bones left under the drifting sands for paleobiologists to puzzle over. The Sahara appeared to be on a permanent knife edge, flipping between dry desert and wet woodland. It was thought such astounding transformations could take just twenty years — maybe less. This fundamental instability was why it had been possible for EI to hurry the process in selected parts of the desert, with its immense artificial lakes back-filled with Mediterranean water.

This was one example, Makaay said, of a common feature of Earth’s climatic evolution. If you forced it, for instance by injecting greenhouse gases in the air, it tended not to respond smoothly, like rubber deforming under pressure. Instead it tended to snap, like the Sahara, switching abruptly from one stable state to another. The world was full of systems, which if pushed too far, might undergo “abrupt and irreversible change,” as Makaay put it: he listed the possible failure of the Gulf Stream, and the creation of a permanent El Niсo storm that might dry out rainforests and create deserts across the tropics.

“We know we have to stabilize the hydrate deposits,” Makaay said. “But this will not be the last time we will have to intervene on a massive, indeed global scale, if we are to ensure that the Earth’s systems do not transition into a condition that makes the planet uninhabitable for us. We must learn to manage the Earth, our home, even while we cherish it…”

Edith Barnette leaned down to whisper to me, “Nice presentation. I enjoyed the focus on the green Sahara — nothing wrong with an unexpectedly positive image. But now he sounds like an EI corporate report. I suggest in the future he cuts to the chase.”

Now Makaay showed us blow-up images of our new baby, a glistening, complacent-looking mole. The moles had been trialled individually, but today was the first integrated trial of the system as a whole. A dozen moles would be dropped down defunct oil boreholes to begin the construction of an interconnected network, spreading out through hydrate strata, chattering to each other through sonar and other comms channels, and closing the complex loops around which the liquid nitrogen would flow.

For now the condensation plant and liquefaction gear would be based on the central oil platform. But that was only a stopgap design for this proof-of-concept pilot; in the future, working out “in the wild,” as Makaay put it, submersibles would install liquefaction and condensation gear on the seabed, to link up with the moles’ tunnels beneath. And so the network would grow, spreading across the ocean floor, until the pole was encircled.

Now we were shown live images of the old oil rig a couple of kilometers offshore where our nitrogen liquefaction plant had been installed. Big liquid-nitrogen tanks glistened in the sun, frost sparkling on their surfaces. A countdown clock appeared in the corner of our image and started to tick away the seconds before the insertion of the first moles. A hush fell over the room, as the show took on the feel of a space launch, a fond memory of my childhood. Makaay was never one to miss a trick, I thought respectfully.

There were about five minutes to go on the clock when Morag appeared to me again.

I could see her through the translucent wall of the marquee, out on the cold, dead ground: that slim, tall figure, the unmistakable shock of strawberry blond hair.

I left the vice president for dead and ran for the exit. Behind me, ignored, Ruud Makaay was still talking. Heads turned as I passed, concerned.

Tom caught up with me before the doorway. “Dad. What the hell are you doing?”

I pointed. “Can’t you see her?”

“I see — something. A woman out there. So what?”

“You know who it is.Come on, Tom. I just have to deal with this.”

“You mean I have to.”

I felt cold, determined. “Yes. You have to. Because if you see her, she’s haunting you, too.”

At the exit I found myself facing an EI security guard, a slab of muscle. The guard looked confused, but her job was to keep people out, not shut them in. She stood aside. I pushed out through the airlock, and into the fresh air outside, dressed in nothing but my flimsy suit. It was bloody cold. There were drops of rain in the air, or maybe it was salt spray off the sea.

I glanced around, getting my bearings. To get to where Morag had been standing I would have to cut around the base of the dome-shaped marquee, to my right. I ran that way, not bothering to check if Tom was following. I had to jump over guy ropes and skirt around blocks of equipment, generators, and heaters. More security guards watched me go by, and I saw them speak into the air. But I wasn’t impeded.

Around the limb of the marquee I stumbled to a halt. Tom came up beside me, breathing hard.

There she was: Morag, standing in an open area beside the wall of the marquee, looking back at me. She was dressed in a plain blue smock, her favorite color, the color that brought out her eyes, she always said. She didn’t seem cold, despite the Arctic breeze. She was no more than fifty meters from me, just fifty paces. She had never been so close. And she wasn’t running away, not drifting mysteriously down corridors, or disappearing into dust or mist. She just stood there. She was smiling at me. Her hands were open, as if to show me she meant me no harm.

For a heartbeat I drank in every detail of her, the hair that flopped over her brow in the breeze, the way the dress clung to her slim figure like a flag draped around a pole.

“It’s her,” said Tom. “It really is.”

“You do see her,” I breathed.

“Yes. Dad — what do we do?”

“I don’t know. It’s never been like this before.”

I spread my hands, mirroring her gesture. I took a step toward her, then another, cautiously. I was like a police officer approaching a suicide bomber, I thought. Still she didn’t recede from me, as in all those nightmare pursuits of the past. She just watched me approach, smiling.

A part of me was aware of glowing motes that danced before my eyes. We were saturated by surveillance by EI’s security systems. There could be no doubt that there would be a record of this encounter, full and clear. And there was no doubt in my mind that Morag was allowing this to happen, that this was her choice, to break through whatever barriers there were between us. She was just as I had remembered her before her pregnancy, the labor that had killed her. It had been seventeen years since her death, but she hadn’t aged a day. Oddly it might have seemed stranger to me, at that moment, if she had aged.

Now I was so close I could see the details, the tiny flaws in her skin, the beauty spot on her cheek, the small scar on her forehead. She seemed full of mass, somehow, dense with matter and light; she stood out of the background, as if patched into a faded photograph. And still she didn’t go away.

Ten paces from her I stopped. I feared what might happen if I pushed this too far. If I got too close, if I tried to touch her, would she pop like a bubble? And I wondered why she was doing this now, here. Was she here because of the hydrate project? Was Rosa right, that she was somehow an angel from the future, drawn to significance?

“Morag. Can’t you speak to me? What do you want?…”

She smiled, encouraging. Then she spoke. It was her voice, undoubtedly, light, airy, salted with a trace of her Irish background. But her words were a rapid gabble, just as they had been on the Reef, in the hotel corridor. Her tone was wistful, her eyes bright, her gaze fixed on me. I couldn’t bear to look away. But as the moment stretched, and as her only words were that strange compressed pseudo-speech, a kind of anxious sadness filled me.

A siren clamored, echoing across the flat sea. It was coming from the oil rig, out on the ocean. Distracted, I looked that way, and saw vapor venting into the air. I knew that the siren had been the signal for the start of the trial — and cheering from inside the dome, slightly muffled, told me it had been a success, that the moles had been launched and were doing their job. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less.

I turned back to Morag. And she was gone, gone, in that instant. Perhaps there was a trace of her, a profile of her figure in dancing dust, hanging in the air, sparkling; but even that dispersed on the wind. I was oppressed by guilt, for it felt as if it had been my fault that she had gone, as if I had broken the rules by looking away.

There was a soft whirring at my feet, a crackle of friction sparks. I looked down. The little Gea-robot rolled back and forth on the concrete at my feet.

“Gea, did you see all that? Did you see her?”

“I recorded everything, Michael,” the robot said. “But for now I think you should consider your son.”

Tom. I had forgotten him. I whirled around. Tom was hunched over on the ground. His whole body heaved as he wept. I ran toward him, but Sonia Dameyer got there first, and wrapped him in her arms.

And in that vignette you have the whole story of our two lives.

Alia was immersed in some deep, dark, viscous ocean. She tried to struggle — but she could not, there was nothing to fight with. She tried to concentrate on her fingers, to move her toes, but there was no sensation. She felt no pain, nothing but a cushioning, cradling warmth.

She had no idea what had happened to her, where she was — if she was anywhere in any meaningful sense. Of course it was all something to do with Leropa, and her strange projects. Was this another hideous Skimming — or something stranger still? And what could it have to do with Redemption?

She couldn’t even feel herself breathe, she realized suddenly. She panicked. She looked deep inside herself, but she had no sense of her own pulse, the deepest rhythms of her body. Even her sense of her body, her arms and legs, her torso and head, was dissipating. She cowered, even more terrified. She was like a prisoner, she thought, unexpectedly released after years of captivity, longing to remain confined.

But a kind of acceptance began to steal over her. She floated, without her body, a mote adrift in this strange sea.

Was this mood of resignation itself part of the process? Without a bloodstream fizzing with adrenaline, perhaps it was impossible for her to feel fear: perhaps there was too little left of her even to be afraid. And if she had no body, did she have a self anymore?

She felt herself spreading out. If the edges of her body had been erased, now so was the boundary of her mind, her very self. She was merging with this wider sea, she thought, like a drop of coloring dropped into a bottle of water, spreading out, growing more and more dilute. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just a subtle dissolving. It was like falling asleep.

Or it was like joining the Transcendence, she thought, like being immersed in that vast panoply of linked minds. But the Transcendence was something higher than mind. This bloody ocean was different; it was something lower than the body, lower than biology itself. Still she tried to fight it, to reflect back on herself.

It was her last conscious thought. After that, for an unmeasured time, there was only an endless, formless, oceanic dreaming.

And then something new.

Separateness.

There was no detail, nothing to be said about this which was separated from that. There was only the separateness itself, a relation between abstracts, beyond analysis or understanding. But that was something to cling to, a source of a deep formless pleasure — an exultance that I am.

Then something more. A kind of growing. Splitting, budding, a complexifying of the I, of whatever it was that had separated out of the rest. The growth was geometrical: two, four, eight, sixteen, a doubling every time, rapidly exponentiating away to large numbers, astronomical numbers. Cells: they were the units of the dividing, specks of biological matter each with their walls and nuclei and complicated chemical machinery.

The cluster that was growing out of the doubling cells was an embryo.

But that was a wrong thought, an inappropriate thought. It was not something the I should understand, not now, not yet. And that realization of wrongness was itself wrong. A recursion set in, a feedback loop that multiplied that awareness of wrong. Here was another sudden separating, a distancing. Within the I — or around it, or beside it — was another point of view, separated from the I by an awareness that could never be part of the I itself. The viewpoint was a witness to this growing thing, this budding coalescing entity. It felt everything the I felt; it was as close to it in every sense as it was possible to be. And yet it was not it.

The separated viewpoint was Alia. She knew herself, who she was. She even had a dim, abstract awareness of her other life, like a half-remembered dream.

And meanwhile the I, the subject of her inspection, continued to grow.

That relentless budding was not formless. In the final body there would be more than two hundred different kinds of cells, specialized for different purposes. Already an organization was emerging in this growing city of cells. Over there was a complicated cluster that might become a nervous system, with terminations flowering into what might become fingers, eyes, a brain. And over there were simpler clusters, blocks that might become kidneys and liver and heart.

This was a wondrous process, for there was nothing here to tell the cells how to organize themselves in this manner. As the cells split and grew and split again, they communicated with their neighbors through salts, sugars, amino acids passed from one cell’s cytoplasm to another’s. In this way the cells formed collectives, each dedicated to developing a special function — to become an eardrum or a heart valve — and, through a clustering of the collectives themselves at a higher level, to ensure that ears and hearts, arms and legs, all developed in the right place. Out of this mesh of interaction and feedback the organization of a human body developed.

The whole process was an emergence, an expression of a deep principle of the universe. Even the I, the wispy unformed mind that was lodged in this expanding, complexifying cluster, was itself an emergent property of the increasingly complex network of cells. And yet already there was consciousness here, and a deep, brimming, joyful consciousness of growth, of increasing potential, of being.

Now, strangely, death came to the differentiating cluster of cells. Succumbing to subtle pressures from their neighbors, cells in the shapeless hands and feet began to die, in waves and bands. It hurt, surprisingly, shockingly. But there was purpose to this dying; the scalpel of cellular death was finely shaping those tiny hands and feet, cleaving one finger from another.

The growing child lifted its new hand before its face. Not its, Alia thought — his.Already the processes of development had proceeded that far. His fingers were mere nerveless stumps yet, and could not be moved; and in this bloody dark nothing could be seen, even if the child had eyes to see. And yet he strained to see even so, motivated by a faint curiosity.

His curiosity, not Alia’s.

This union was not like Witnessing. She was embedded deeply in the machinery of the child’s shaping body; she felt everything he did, shared every dim thought, every sensation. But she was somehow, subtly, separated from him, and always would be. She was a monitor, a watcher; she shared everything the child lived through — and would throughout his whole life — but not his will, his choice.

And there was something wrong, a note out of place in this great symphony of manufacture and assembly. There was something not quite right with the heart, she saw, a place where the mindless self-organization had gone awry. Nothing was perfect; this was not the only flaw in the growing body. Perhaps it would not matter.

As his body and nervous system developed, the child’s mind continued to evolve.

At first there had been no sense of time, or space. There were only abstractions like separateness, one thing from another, and only events, disconnected, acausal. Time gradually emerged as a sense of events in sequence: first the hands, then the cellular Die-back, then the separating fingers, one after another. Space came after that, as the body itself grew in extent and emerged from formlessness into a tool that he could, in a limited fashion, use to explore the space around him. It was a passive exploration at first, not much more than a dim realization that the universe had to be at least big enough to encompass his body. But then he had fingers to stretch out, legs to kick with. Soon he could feel the sac that contained him, could kick against its walls, and he began to get the sense that even beyond this sac was a wider universe, perhaps including beings more or less like himself.

That sense deepened when sight arrived. He could make out a dim ruddy glow, that waxed and waned. Sometimes, when the light was at its brightest, he could even make out the pale fishlike shape that was his own body, the rope that anchored him to the walls around him.

But the light would dim and return, dim and return, and a new sense of time imposed itself on him: not a time dictated by the events of his own body, but a cycle that came from a wider world outside him. There were processes that went on independently of him, then; he was not the whole universe — even though it still felt like it.

Then there were sharper sensations, brought to him in a rich stream of blood. The nourishment he received could be rich or thin, familiar or strange. Sometimes it was even intoxicating, mildly, so that he thrashed uncomfortably in his tank of flesh. This came from the mother, he knew on some deep level.

For the child in the womb, here was still another lesson to learn. Not only was there a universe outside this womb of his, but there were creatures out there who imposed their will on him: even his mother, who lived her own life, while cradling his. It was a gathering awareness of separateness that presaged the child’s ultimate ejection from this crimson comfort into the harsher, much less sympathetic world beyond the walls of the womb.

But now came the pain.

It was extraordinary. It flooded the child’s still-developing nervous system as if hot mercury had been injected into it. The walls of the womb flexed, pressing at the helpless body, overwhelming his struggles. There was a new taste on his soft pink tongue, a taste he could not recognize, was not supposed to know, not yet. But Alia recognized its iron tang. It was blood.

Something was badly wrong.

The pain passed. The child relaxed, exhausted. Groping in the dark he pushed one tiny thumb into his mouth and sucked. Alia, floating with him, longed to comfort him. But the memory of the pain clung deep, and nothing was quite as it had been before, or ever could be.

Now there was another intrusion into this amniotic refuge. It was something sharp, and it was cold, unbelievably so in this little universe of soft, cushioning flesh. A probe, Alia thought, pushed in from outside. Was it possible somebody out there was trying to help this damaged child? But if so, how crude a way to do it! The child thrashed, distressed down to the core of his being. The probe sucked away some of the child’s flesh and withdrew. The child folded over on itself, scrabbling at its small face with its hands. Again peace returned, like an echo of the endless tranquillity from which the child had been separated at its conception. But it did not last long.

And when the pain came back, Alia knew that there would be no respite. Again the child shrieked silently, but there was nobody to hear him; again the womb walls flexed helplessly, as if trying to crush the child out of existence.

There was another sharp intrusion from outside. But this was much more drastic than the earlier probing. A blade slashed uncompromisingly through the wall of the womb, and light poured in. The child thrashed and grasped; it was as shocking as if the sky itself had cracked open. Huge forms descended and something smooth and cold closed around his torso — hands, gloved perhaps? And now, in the ultimate horror, he was lifted up, pulled away from the womb into a sharp coldness, a new realm of bitter light. But he could feel the cord in his belly tugging him back to the womb.

Amidst all this unimaginable horror the pain returned again. It was even worse now. It seemed to emanate from the core of his being, his chest and belly, and flooded out through his limbs to his tiny fingers, the thumb he had sucked. It was as if some immense hard object was slamming against his chest, over and over.

He was aware of motion, a smooth surface under him; he had been laid down. Then came a sharp pain at his belly as the cord was cut. Immense objects, perhaps fingers, dug into his mouth. But that pain flooded through him still, a new burst with every impact of those invisible fists on his chest.

He could see only a blur, only light, smeared with a crimson film of blood and amniotic fluid. But objects floated through that blur, looming down. They were faces, human faces. Even as the terrible pain continued, the child struggled to make out the faces — a first reflex of his nervous system, Alia knew. He looked for smiles, for welcoming. But there were no smiles here. And one of those faces, even though it was just a moonscape of patches and blurs, looked oddly familiar to Alia.

It was Michael Poole.

But now the faces receded, and darkness washed over the child’s vision. That pounding pain continued, and he thrashed feebly, even now fighting. But he was tiring quickly. There was a kind of question in his mind, Alia realized, an expression of a deep longing. This new darkness — was it the womb? Was he being returned to the place he belonged?

Alia could not answer him. She was only an observer. And yet she replied: Yes. There is nothing to fear. Lie still.

The darkness rose up around him now; the faces had gone, vanished forever. The miracle of biological self-organization and emergent awareness was dissipating, crumbling, and so was his mind.

At least the pain stopped.

The day after that first integrated test was launched, Edith Barnette returned to her home in DC.

She took with her good wishes from our confused little crew. It meant a lot that such a grand old lady had hauled ass all the way to Alaska to see it, for she had demonstrated concretely that there was support for our work out there, if only we could tap into it. We were a somewhat fragile alliance of partners, with both Shelley’s concerns and EI always having their eye on the need to make an eventual profit. Barnette’s endorsement would help keep their boards and shareholders happy — or anyhow nobody was talking about pulling out yet.

In the days that followed, we dug into the work once more.

What Barnette had witnessed was only the beginning of the integration trials, the first tentative burrowings of our moles into shallow sea-bottom sediments. It had mostly gone well. Around ten percent of the Higgs-field power packs had suffered glitches of one sort or another, but as Higgs was the one really novel technological element, you had to expect unpleasant surprises.

Most of the smart moles had behaved much as expected, but the tentative network they had begun constructing hadn’t been of quite the quality we’d hoped for. Small-world networking: a useful, robust network should be designed around a number of key nodes with plenty of links between them, so you can get from one point to another with very few steps, and yet the whole thing is robust to failure. As we wanted our refrigerant network to be working from the moment we put it in the ground, we were seeking a kind of rolling optimum, with it being as good as it could be at every stage of its extension. In those first few hours of work, what we built was good, but not quite as good as that.

Some of the moles seemed to have forgotten the wider goal, and had gone burrowing off according to their own agenda. We speculated that maybe the unusual environment of the moles led to a kind of mechanical solipsism, as if each mole was tempted to believe that it was alone, the center of a cramped, dark universe of cold and sediment. We were going to have to pull some of the moles back for therapy, we decided. This was twenty-first century engineering, where you wielded TLC rather than a spanner.

The plan beyond that was for the moles’ drillings to extend out to about a kilometer from the central rig. Then an array of condenser stations would be established across the seafloor to complete the logical closure of our refrigeration loops. After that the first liquid nitrogen would be pumped through our lined tunnels, and we should begin to demonstrate actual cooling over a significant chunk of the seafloor, and deep beneath its surface. All this, Ruud Makaay hoped, would be achievable in a few more months.

It was at that point, when we were able to demonstrate significant temperature reductions, and we were sure about the heat flows and efficiencies and other parameters of the whole process, that we would go public, we had decided.

It would be a sales pitch, and would have to be carefully choreographed. We hoped to be able to use Edith Barnette as a lever to bring us some attention from the world’s decision makers. Gea’s projections of how well our refrigerant technology would work, and the difference it would make to the state of the planet, were going to be crucially authoritative. Then, so the best-case scenario went, with endorsement from the Stewardship, the U.S. federal government, and various other agencies of governance, we would begin the roll-out of the technology around both poles of the planet, tweaking the design and learning all the way. We might be at that point in as little as a year from now.

And at this point, the business analysts suggested, serious money would start to roll into the coffers of EI and the other private agencies involved. Even I would be getting a consultancy fee, I was assured. Capitalism would save the world, but only so long as it showed a profit.

That was the plan. To achieve it there was still a hell of a lot of work to do, for all of us. Even Tom and Sonia had carved out a role as a kind of watching brief on the project, which was turning out to be surprisingly useful. They couldn’t contribute much technically, but they had a good sense of the impact our project was going to have on the high-latitude communities on which its infrastructure was going to be “imposed,” in Tom’s word. They added a degree of cultural sensitivity which our little engineering community perhaps lacked.

And while all this was going on we had to deal with the fallout from the Poole family circus-show.

On the day itself, Ruud Makaay explained the Morag incident away to Edith Barnette as a personal issue for me and Tom. She clearly didn’t buy this, but her only comment was that it was a good thing there had been no press here to see it. After all the center of the incident was me, who everybody knew was the originator of the whole project in the first place; it couldn’t have been more high-profile.

As for everybody else, Deadhorse was a pretty desolate and uninspiring place, and I was suddenly a valued source of scuttlebutt. Makaay was irritated at the way his people were distracted by “this stupid sideshow,” as he called it; it was “getting in the way” when there was already too much work to do. Shelley was more circumspect. She didn’t say much, and I knew she would support me in trying to resolve this knot of strangeness in my life. But I think she, too, wished it would all just go away.

As for Tom, he avoided me for days.

I took Shelley’s advice not to push him. He had a lot to absorb, after all: this was the first time he had been haunted, too. And besides, as Sonia confided in a discreet moment, his pride had hurt. Whatever the cause, a thousand people had seen him crushed and weeping on the frozen ground. So I tried to give him space.

But I had to follow it up myself. I parceled up the records of that day and beamed them over by high-bandwidth link to Rosa, my wizened, black-clad aunt in Seville, to see what she made of them.

A week after that strange day, Rosa called me back.

Ruud Makaay, bowing to the inevitable, gave us one of his conference rooms to take Rosa’s call. Tom and Sonia were there — though I gathered that Sonia had had to twist Tom’s arm. I could understand his reluctance, but my son was no coward, and I knew he would face up to all this strangeness.

However I asked Shelley Magwood to attend, too. I had often observed that we Pooles behaved better toward each other when outsiders were present. Or maybe I just felt I needed an ally. Gea, my strange artificial companion, was there, too.

So we sat around a simple circular table, Gea’s little toy-robot avatar rolling back and forth on the tabletop.

And Rosa materialized among us, a dark, brooding presence in her black priest’s garb. The VR facilities were functional rather than corporate-luxurious, and you could see a ghostly second surface where the projection of Rosa’s table was overlaid on ours.

“So,” Rosa smiled at us. “Who’s first?”

It was actually Gea who started us off. She had been analyzing the surveillance records of the day. She conjured up a snippet of the visitation, played out by manikins on the tabletop, ten-centimeter-high models of me, Morag, Tom, and Sonia. The resolution was good, far better than Rosa’s image of the Reef; the whole area around the marquee and the offshore rig had been drenched with sensors. And the data went beyond human senses. Gea was able to show us an X-ray image of Morag, for instance; we saw bones, a regular-looking skeleton, the ghostly images of internal organs — a brain, a heart.

“Whatever this creature is,” Gea said dryly, “the body of ‘Morag Poole’ responds to our sensors, every one of them. It has mass, volume, an internal structure. It is in our universe. It is no hallucination, and no ghost, in the sense of the word as I understand it. It is really there. ”

But who was this? Gea snipped out a little volume around Morag’s head and blew it up until it was life-size, a disembodied head with a serene, somewhat vacant expression. Gea overlaid this with an X-ray image of the skull within, and she compared it to images of Morag from her medical records and my own personal archive. Rapidly we were taken through a point-to-point matching of facial structures, of the deeper bones. All this was completed in seconds. The implication was clear: any forensic scientist would have concluded that the face in our image was indeed Morag.

“But,” Gea said, “there are anomalies.”

The Morag creature was dense, massive, in fact about twice my weight. Gea had been able to measure that by studying seismic echoes of her footsteps. The sense I’d sometimes had that Morag was somehow more real than me and the rest of my world seemed to be borne out. But Gea’s sensors had detected only flesh and blood and bone, and it wasn’t clear what form her invisible mass took.

For all her intense reality, the sensors had no clear record of where Morag had come from, or where she had gone to. It was as if the myriad artificial eyes just looked away, and she was gone.

As Gea went through all this, Rosa watched Tom carefully. She seemed fascinated by his reaction, his emotional state. Tom was expressionless, but even that was eloquent, I thought.

Rosa said at last, “Whatever we are to make of all this, one thing is clear. The visitations are now part of our consensual reality. Michael may indeed be crazy, but we can’t explain away his experiences that way anymore.”

“Thanks,” I said warmly.

“Well, personally I’m awed,” Sonia said. “Scared.”

“Me, too,” Shelley said. “It’s a ghost story suddenly coming true.” But she didn’t sound scared, or particularly awed, and neither did Sonia; they sounded curious. I was impressed by the resilience of their minds, the minds of a soldier and an engineer. It wasn’t just their professions that gave them such strength, I suspected, but a deeper robustness of the human psyche.

I said, “There’s no reason to be afraid. If strangeness spooked us we’d still be competing for gazelle bones with the hyenas out on the savannah. We’ll deal with this—”

Tom turned on me. “That’s typical of your bullshit, Dad. What we’re trying to deal with here is my mother. Or rather, that thing that looks like my mother. And all you can come up with is some fucking pep talk about walking out of Africa.” His voice was controlled but brittle.

Rosa said evenly, “We all need ways of coping with this, Tom. You must find your own path, as your father is finding his. This is a reality Michael has accepted for some time, I think. But now suddenly this isreal for you. You were even able to approach your mother—”

“It wasn’t my mother,” he snapped.

Rosa nodded. “Very well. You were able to approach the visitor closely, to inspect her, as I hadn’t been able to in Seville. What did you feel?”

Tom wouldn’t reply. He shot me a resentful, pitying glance.

As for me, I truly believed that this visitor was, on some level, Morag, it really was her. I had always believed that. So how was I supposed to feel? I had never known that, not since my first visitations as a child. My reaction was to figure it out, try to make sense of it. But maybe I was the weak one; maybe the true, strong reaction was actually Tom’s, his devastated weeping on the plain; maybe he felt the reality of this return, its strangeness in ways I was incapable of.

Shelley’s hand crept over mine.

Rosa had been concentrating her own studies on Morag’s speech. She played us a sample. Once again a disembodied head floated over our tabletop; once again I saw that beautiful face, those full lips. But Morag spoke strangely and quickly, a string of syllables too rapid to distinguish, her tongue flicking between her lips.

Rosa froze the image. “There is no known human language detectable in this signal. And yet we can detect structure…”

She told us, somewhat to my surprise, that there was a flourishing discipline in the study of nonhuman languages.

It had originated in questions about animal communication. The songs of whales and whistles of dolphins were obvious case studies, but so were the hoots and screeches of chimps and monkeys, the stamping of elephants — even the dull chemical signaling of one plant to another. But how much information was contained in these messages? Even if you couldn’t translate the language, even if you didn’t know what the whales sang about, were there ways of determining if there was any information in there at all — and if so, how much, how dense? This was a discipline that in latter years had been useful in helping us figure out the sometimes cryptic utterances of our more enigmatic artificial intelligences — and, I thought, it might be useful someday if we ever encountered extraterrestrial intelligences.

Rosa waved a hand, and the air filled with graphs. It was all to do with information theory, she said, the mathematics of sequences of symbols — binary digits, DNA bases, letters, phonemes. “The first thing is to see if there is any information in your signal. And to do that you construct a Zipf graph…” This was named after a Harvard linguist of the 1940s. You broke up your signal into its elements — bases, letters, words — and then made a bar graph of their frequency of use. She showed us examples based on the English alphabet, presenting us with a kind of staircase, with the usage of the most commonly used letters — e, t, s — to the left, and lesser usages represented by more bars descending to the right. “That downward slope is a giveaway that information-rich structure is present. Think about it. If you have meaningless noise, a random sequence of letters, each one is liable to come up as often as any other.”

“So the graph would be flat,” Sonia said.

“Yes. On the other hand if you had a signal with structure but no information content — say just a long sequence of e, e, e, like a pure tone — you’d have a vertical line. Signals containing meaningful information come somewhere between those two extremes. And you can tell something about the degree of information contained by the slope of the graph.”

Sonia asked, “What about the dolphins?” She glanced apologetically at Tom. “I know it’s nothing to do with your mother. I’d just like to know.”

Rosa smiled. “Actually the analysis is a little trickier in that case. With human languages, it’s easy to see the breakdown into natural units, letters, words, sentences: you can see what you must count. With nonhuman languages, like dolphin whistles, it’s harder to see the breaks between linguistic units. But you can use trial and error. Even dolphin whistles have gaps, so that’s a place to start, and then you can expand the way you decompose your signal, looking for other trial break markers, until you find the breakdown that gives you the strongest Zipf result.”

Sonia asked, “And the answer?”

Rosa waved a hand, like a magician. A new line on the graph appeared, below the first and parallel to it. “Dolphin whistles, and whale songs and a number of other animal signals, contain information — in fact they all show signs of optimal coding. Of course knowing there is information in there isn’t the same as having a translation. We know the dolphins are talking, but we still don’t know what they are talking about.”

“We may never know,” said Sonia, her voice tight. “Now that the oceans are empty.”

Gea rolled back and forth, friction sparks flying. You wouldn’t think a tin robot could look so judgmental.

Rosa said brightly, “As far as Morag is concerned we aren’t done yet. There is a second stage of analysis which allows us to squeeze even more data out of these signals.”

As I’d half-expected, she began to talk about entropy. The Zipf analysis showed us whether a signal contained information at all, Rosa said. The entropy analysis she presented now was going to show us how complex that information was. It makes sense that information theoreticians talk about entropy, if you think about it. Entropy comes from thermodynamics, the science of molecular motion, and is a measure of disorder — precise, quantified. So it is a kind of inverse measure of information.

Rosa showed us a new series of graphs, which plotted “Shannon entropy value” against “entropy order.” It took me a while to figure this out. The zero-order-entropy number was easiest to understand; that was just a count of the number of elements in your system, the diversity of your repertoire — in written English, that could be the twenty-six letters of the alphabet plus a few punctuation marks. First-order entropy measured how often each element came up in the language — how many times you used e versus t or s. Second-order and higher entropies were trickier. They were to do with correlations between the elements of your signal.

Rosa said, “If I give you a letter, what’s your chance of predicting the next in the signal? Q is usually followed by u, for instance. That’s second-order entropy. Third-order means, if I give you two letters, what are your chances of predicting the third? And so on. The longer the chain of entropy values, the more structure there is in your signal.”

The most primitive communications we knew of were chemical signaling between plants. Here you couldn’t go beyond first-order Shannon entropy: given a signal, you couldn’t guess what the next would be. Human languages showed eighth — or ninth-order entropy.

We talked around the meaning of this. The Shannon entropy order has something to do with the complexity of the language. There is a limit to how far you can spin out a paragraph, or even an individual sentence, if you want to keep it comprehensible — though a more advanced mind could presumably unravel a lot more complexity.

Sonia asked, “And the dolphins?”

Sadly, the dolphins’ whistles showed no more than third or fourth-order Shannon entropy. They beat out most primates, but not by much.

“I guess they were too busy having fun after all,” Sonia said wistfully.

Tom had glowered all the way through this. Now he asked, “And the signal from the mother-thing? What does your analysis tell us about that?”

“It passes the Zipf test,” Rosa said. “And as for entropy—”

She laid a new line on her graphical display of plant, chimp, dolphin, human languages. Sloping shallowly, it tailed away into the distance of the graph’s right-hand side, far beyond the human.

“The analysis is uncertain,” Rosa said. “As you can imagine we’ve never actually encountered a signal like this before. Human languages, remember, reach Shannon order eight or nine. This signal, Morag’s speech, appears to be at least order thirty. We have to accept, I think, that Morag’s speech does contain information, of a sort. But it is couched in a fantastically abstruse form. As if it contains layers of nested clauses, overlapping tense changes, double, triple, quadruple negatives, all crammed into each sentence—”

“Jeez,” Shelley said. “No wonder we can’t figure it out.” She sounded daunted, even humbled.

It wasn’t a comfortable thought for me either. The bright new artificial minds, such as Gea, would surely have scored more highly than us on a scale like this — but at least we made them. This was different; this was outside humanity’s scope altogether. Suddenly we were going to have to get used to sharing the universe with a different order of intelligence than us.

“And,” I said, wondering, “it’s coming out of the mouth of my dead wife.”

Again my words sparked Tom off. He stood up, pushing back his chair. “No,” he shouted. “It’s not her.That’s the point — can’t you see? Whatever is animating that fake shell, whatever is producing these alien words, it is not her. ” And he stormed out of the room, without looking back.

Sonia hurried after him, with a mouthed “Sorry” to me.

The meeting broke up. I was left with the patient VR image of Rosa, and the graphs that scrolled in the air around her.

I apologized for Tom.

“Give him time,” Rosa said. “After all it is a strange business. His mother is trying to talk to you…”

“If it is Morag.”

“You believe it is, don’t you? But we face this odd mixture of emotional power — she is your wife, after all, and Tom’s mother, there can hardly be stronger emotional bonds — coupled with this strange symbolic overcomplexity. She has something she needs to tell us, that seems clear, but she doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

I had no answer. I just sat there, my head and limbs heavy; I felt simply overwhelmed by all I had learned.

Rosa watched me carefully. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. It’s all a lot to take in.” I rubbed my temples. “So much is going on, so fucking much. I’m trying to push forward the hydrate project. I’m trying to deal with Tom, and John, and everybody else. Even Shelley. Even you. And I have this business of Morag, which only seems to get stranger and stranger. I don’t want to hurt anybody, Rosa. Especially not Tom.”

“I know that,” Rosa said gently. “You think you are weak. Don’t you, Michael?”

I shrugged. “What else should I think?”

“You are buffeted. You are surrounded by epochal events in our history; you are at the center of an extraordinary storm. And at the same time you are being subjected to these extraordinary manipulations and messages.”

I forced a smile. “Messages from beyond the grave?”

“From somewhere else, certainly. We may yet learn there is some connection between all these different sorts of strangeness in your life, and things will get more complicated still.”

Just as her brother had hinted, I thought uneasily. But I had enough conspiracy theories in my life.

Rosa said, “But in the middle of the storm you keep going, Michael. You keep trying to do your best for everybody. You know, you remind me of Saint Christopher.”

I tried to remember my Catholic lore. “The patron of travelers?”

“Yes. The story is he offered to carry the Christ child across a river. But the child got heavier and heavier. The child told Christopher it was because he was carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. And yet Christopher kept on going, one foot after another, until he completed the crossing. That is exactly what you are doing, Michael, and you will continue to do so, until you reach the other side.” She smiled. “I don’t think you are weak at all.”

There was a soft chime. Evidently Rosa heard it, too, for she was disturbed in her sanctum in Seville, as I was.

The call was from John. My uncle George, Rosa’s brother, was dying.

When Alia emerged from her Hypostatic Union, Reath brought her away from the claustrophobic antiquity of Earth and back to the comparatively familiar confines of his ship, which patiently followed its slow orbit about the old planet. The six of them, Alia, Drea, Reath, and the Campocs, sat in a huddle in Alia’s cabin, as she tried to describe her experience.

“How fascinating,” Reath said. “You begin even without a sense of self. Then comes a feeling for events, disconnected in your awareness. You have to learn sequence, order, separation. How remarkable that time comes before space! Does phylogeny recapitulate cosmology?”

Drea had her arm around her sister. “Reath, can’t you shut up? Alia, you say you saw Michael Poole’s face?”

Alia sighed. “I think so. But I was looking out from inside a prematurely born baby’s head. A dying baby.”

Reath said, “In Poole’s era even very young babies were innately programmed to respond to human faces. An evolutionary relic of obvious utility. It’s not impossible you made out his face.”

“I recognized the event,” Alia whispered. “The birth. I’ve seen it many times, in the tank. I even Witnessed it again after I came out, to check.”

“The child was Poole’s,” Drea prompted.

“His second son. Killed by a heart defect. The mother died, too — Morag. It was an incident that shaped Poole’s whole life, subsequently. I’ve seen it many times.”

“But never from the inside,” Reath said grimly.

“No. Not that way…”

Alia understood now. She had lived out the child’s life, its whole life from conception to death. She felt as if she had been away for eight months — though only eight hours had passed for the others. This was the Second Level of the Redemption. At this higher level, you didn’t watch a life from the outside, unlike the conceptual simplicity of Witnessing; you saw it from the inside. You lived it through heartbeat by heartbeat from the moment of conception to the finality of death, and you shared every scrap of sensation, every feeling, every thought. All you didn’t have was will.

“It wasn’t much of a life,” Alia said. “Less than eight months — not that time meant much at first. But I lived through it all.”

Drea shook her head. “What’s the point of going through all that pain? It’s so morbid. ”

“I think I can see the theory,” Reath said. “At the heart of the Redemption is a desire for atonement, bringing the past into oneself. Perhaps that can be achieved through a reconciliation, a unification of oneself with a figure from the past. Witnessing was a first step. But by going to this Second Level, by suffering with that figure, by living through such a life, the anguish of the past can be” — he waved a hand — “internalized sufficiently.”

Bale said skeptically, “Sufficiently for what?”

“To make this strange superhuman guilt go away.”

Seer laughed. “So is that the truth behind our glorious Transcendence, our superhuman future? It’s all just a grim nostalgia for the womb?”

“I still say it’s morbid,” Drea said.

After a day in orbit Alia descended to Earth. She met Leropa once more in the attenuated shadows of the ruined cathedral.

“Reath speaks of atonement,” Alia said. “He says that perhaps by joining with a figure from the past you can expiate its pain.”

“Reath is a wise man,” Leropa said.

“So I was united with Poole’s lost son.”

“Yes. The Second Level is a Hypostatic Union with the past, a union of substances beneath external differences, the trivialities of locations in space and time. You felt that poor child’s small joy, his pain. And you will never forget, will you?”

“No,” Alia said fervently. “And this is the redeeming?”

“It is the beginning,” Leropa said.

Alia frowned. “I have to do this again?”

Leropa seemed surprised by the question. “Of course—”

“I have to live through a whole human life, again?”

“It isn’t so bad,” Leropa said. “Subjective time, the time of the hypostasis, passes more rapidly than externally. To join with Michael Poole himself, for example, a life spanning nearly a hundred years, would take only a few days.”

“But a hundred years,” Alia said, “for me. A hundred years of being trapped, helpless, in some tormented body of the past. How could I survive that?”

“Oh, but you would. You’re strong, I can see that. And then of course—”

Alia saw it immediately. “I would have to do it again. Another life to be endured. And again and again.” But the present was a surface surrounding a great ocean of past; the dead far outnumbered the living. “How many lives must I live through, Leropa?”

Leropa frowned. “If you have to ask that, as I told you, you don’t understand the nature of the Transcendence.”

“How many?”

“All of them,” the undying said simply.

It was the ultimate logic of Redemption. The purpose was atonement not for some of the past, for some of the human suffering it contained, but for all of it. And how could that be achieved piecemeal? So Alia, like every witness, would have to live through every human life that had preceded hers: Michael Poole, his second son, his family, his ancestors, and their ancestors all the way back to the point where humanity was lost, perhaps a hundred billion of them — and, looking forward, all his descendants, to the mighty Galaxy-spanning Exultant generation and beyond. And in the future, all those watchers would themselves have to be watched — and then there would be watchers to watch the watchers — on and on, a recursive chain of watchers upon watchers.

The ultimate logic was that every human being, undying, should live through the lives, and absorb the pain, of every other.

“No doubt the process will be made more efficient,” Leropa said, unperturbed. “But the number of encounters is always finite. And finitude withers to nothing in the face of infinity.”

Alia remembered Reath’s grave, sad voice: To understand the Transcendence, you must understand infinity, Alia. “But all that pain, multiplied over and over, combinatorially, forever—”

Leropa spread her hands. “This is atonement. Atonement must hurt. To a creature of infinite capacity like the Transcendence, what can serve as atonement but to pay an infinite price?”

Alia backed away. This is insane, she thought, but she dared not say it. “I don’t want this.”

Leropa’s frown deepened. “You choose death over life? Smallness over infinity? Are you sure?”

“I’m not ready.”

Leropa bowed her head. “Take all the time you need. But I will be here, waiting for you. Forever. And remember,” she called. “Redemption has more Levels you’ve yet to glimpse…”

Alia turned and ran for the shuttle.

It was a huge relief once more to get back to orbit. But Drea had some news from the Nord — bad news.

We got together to discuss what to do: George’s surviving family, John, Tom, my mother, me, even Rosa, all huddling like VR witches, muttering behind his back.

We’d been told that none of us were to fly out to England. George made it abundantly clear that us all going to such a fuss and expense would embarrass him. He didn’t even want VR visitors, he said. We all had our own lives to lead, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t think it fooled anybody. But then the guy was eighty-seven and he was dying; I guess he had a right to a little muddle.

We had to see him, of course, virtually at least. John agreed to dig into his pockets once more. But we decided we weren’t going to go over in a mob, VR or not, like a presaging of the funeral the doctors were saying wouldn’t be more than a year away. We would visit one at a time, or in pairs. Tom went first, with Sonia. George would surely want to meet her, but he had his pride; we knew he would feel happier about facing her while he was still able to put on a show.

While Tom visited I carried on with my work in Alaska, on the hydrate project. Rosa and Gea continued to analyze the Morag visitations, but for a while I spent no more time on that. The Morag business had always tended to make us fight, me against John, Tom against me; it drove us apart. At such a time as this it all seemed trivial, a sideshow, whatever its astounding implications.

Then, a week after Tom’s visit, I went over myself.

George was glad to see me. That was obvious, gratifying, painful.

He wanted to take another walk, which surprised me. So we stepped out of his house, trailed once more by his Gea-robot care assistant. George guided me away from the maintained silvertop roads, and I soon found myself walking down the greened center lane of one half of an immense dual carriageway, as they call them in England.

The road was a mighty ribbon that curled between banks of houses, shops, and factories. Traffic lights and road signs, the clutter of the roadside, mostly survived, but the green and white paint of the signs had long faded to illegibility. The tarmac itself was giving way to green. For long stretches it was broken up by weeds, grasses, and a few bright wildflowers — “pioneer species,” George said, nuzzling into the pores of the road surface.

It was the middle of the night for my body in Alaska, and I felt dislocated, faintly jet-lagged. The experience of that fresh English day, the quality of the virtual sunlight on my virtual cheeks, was enough to make my body respond, to wake me up. But it was strange to see that carpet of green unrolling before me like a long, thin stretch of parkland, completely empty, save for ourselves.

George was in a nostalgic mood. “Sometimes I miss the traffic,” he said. “When I was a kid — why, when you were a kid — the towns and cities were full of cars day and night, and there was this dull, continual roar. I used to think about the roads, how they joined up the country. You could drive your car out from your own garage, and then expect to be able to roll all the way to wherever you wanted to get to, from Cornwall to Scotland, without your tires ever leaving the tarmac. It was as if some great volcanic eruption had flooded the whole country with asphalt. And then it went away, just like that. Christ, Spaghetti Junction is a world heritage site now.

“All that noise went away, the roar of the rushing cars, the honking of horns, the sirens, brakes squealing, music blasting. I miss the noise, I think. I miss it the way I miss the smell of the stale cigarette smoke my parents would leave around the house; you know it’s bad for you, but it still reminds you of home. You know, if you’d told me as a kid that in my lifetime people would give up the car I’d have laughed at you, that would have seemed much more fantastic than going to Mars…”

Green kilometers slowly piled up behind us. George seemed to have plenty of energy, but he walked stiffly, in an ungraceful, asymmetric way. Walking had become an awkward, mechanical action he had to think about.

There was a tumor in his belly “the size of a tennis ball,” he said.

It might have been caught earlier if George had allowed the medics to insert the appropriate implants and nano-monitors. Like many people his age, though, he had a deep distrust of having such gadgetry inside his body; he had lived through an era in which technology had betrayed as much as it had delivered. So he lived, and died, with the consequences of his choices. “But at least they are my choices.”

He had been gratified by Tom’s VR visit, and he had been glad to meet Sonia. “She’ll be good for Tom. We need somebody to inject a little sanity in our lives, we Pooles… Speaking of which, how’s this business of Morag coming along?”

He knew about the language analysis, as far as it had got.

“We’re still trying to break down the encoding of Morag’s signal,” I said. “We meaning Gea and Rosa. It’s a scary thought that the combined resources of the top biosphere-modeling software suite and one of our most ancient religions are being devoted to figuring out my little ghost story.”

“And do you still think it’s just a ghost story?”

I thought it over. “No. I don’t think I ever did. Not even from the beginning.”

“What beginning?”

So, walking along the empty road, I told him about the prehistory of my haunting, back to when I was a kid in Florida. I think he felt hurt I’d never shared this with him at the time. But then I’d never told anybody about it at all before confiding in Shelley, only a few weeks ago, and he got over that quickly.

“George, I believe that in some way this is Morag, it really is. Of course I fully accept she died, all those years ago. So something is going on here which isn’t normal, rational. It’s acausal for one thing. But I don’t believe she’s a ghost, with all the connotations of that word. There is no quality of—” I hesitated, unwilling to finish the sentence.

“Evil?” George asked softly.

“None of that, no. And it is Morag. Does that make sense?”

“No. But then, rainbows would make no sense if you had never seen one. If she’s not a ghost, then what is she, do you think? That language is obviously not human — or at least, not twenty-first-century human.”

“No.”

“Then what? Some kind of alien?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It seems a strange way for them to communicate, though.”

He shrugged. “What’s a good way? I’ve speculated about this stuff over the years. Look at it this way. I still cut my lawn.” It was just a scrap, overgrown by clover and weeds, but George seemed to like it that way. “Now, my evolutionary divergence from the grass is, what, half a billion years deep, more? And yet we communicate. I ask it if it wants to grow, by feeding it phosphates in the autumn and nitrogen in the spring. It answers by growing, or not. It asks me if I want it to grow over five centimeters, or if I want it to start colonizing the verges. It tells me this by doing it, you see. I say no, with my mower and my strimmer. So we communicate — not in symbols, but with the primal elements of all life forms, space to grow, food, life, death.”

“And you think it might be that way with intelligent aliens?”

“If there is no possibility of symbolic communication, maybe. But if they have the capability to reach us then they will be the ones with the lawn mower…”

“I don’t think aliens have anything to do with this,” I said firmly. “It feels too human for that.”

“Then there seems only one possibility left,” he said.

We both knew what he meant: that my Morag, with her high-density speech, was a visitation, not from the past, and not from some alien world, but from the future — our human future. In some ways I found that the most terrifying prospect of all, because it was the least comprehensible.

“Rosa guessed this,” I admitted. “Even before we recorded and analyzed Morag’s speech.”

“Well, she is a Poole.”

We could only speculate; we didn’t know enough. George changed the subject. He asked me if I still flew Frisbees.

When I was a kid, growing up on the Florida coast, I became fascinated with Frisbees. Everybody played with them. But try as I might I couldn’t find anybody, any book, to explain to me convincingly how the damn things actually flew — and especially how come they were so hard to fly right, why they dipped and flapped the way they did.

So, aged about ten, I used to buy up old Frisbees to experiment with them. At first it was just kiddie stuff, painting them or adding spectacular, useless fins. But then I tried a more systematic series of modifications. I cut chunks out, or added strips of plastic to the rim to change the weight distribution, or scored the flat surfaces with new patterns of grooves to change the flow of air. I didn’t really know what I was doing, of course, but I was instinctively systematic. I kept logs and even little movies of how my Frisbees flew, before and after the modification. It didn’t last long — kid fads never do — but when George had visited in those days he had always shown an interest.

“But what you don’t know,” I said to him now, “is that playing with Frisbees got me one of my first career breaks…”

In my final year at college I happened to look up Frisbees on the Net. I found to my surprise that still nobody had figured out how a Frisbee flew. Not only that, there would be practical applications of such knowledge, for planetary probes targeted at airy worlds like Mars and Venus and Titan would be spun for stability — they were high-tech, hugely expensive Frisbees sailing into unfamiliar atmospheres, sent to their fates on the basis of a scary lack of knowledge of how they actually flew.

“So I dug out my ten-year-old hobby,” I said to George. “And I looked up the theory, such as it was. A Frisbee gets its lift like a wing, but the front of the disc tends to get more lift than the back, which makes it unstable. But unlike an airplane wing it’s spinning, so that uneven lift is like a finger prodding a spinning gyroscope; it deflects a Frisbee’s course rather than making it flip completely. But I found that nobody had got beyond rough rules of thumb.

“Anyhow I started trying to figure out how a Frisbee really flies,” I said. “I went beyond what I could do as a kid. I scrounged some parts from my college lab, and gave a Frisbee a black box recorder.” I had installed a small accelerometer to measure the forces on the disc, and a magnetometer and light sensor so I could track its position compared to the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field, and a computer chip. Soon I was able to record all the essentials of a flight, and reproduce it at leisure in a simple VR environment. Later, when my professors got interested in what I was doing, I went further, such as by coating a Frisbee’s upper surface with sensors to measure the pressure and flow in detail.

“I quickly figured out the gross aerodynamic coefficients,” I said. “To optimize your flight you have to match your spin rate to your forward speed and angle of attack. But more important, I started to get an understanding of how pressure was distributed over the surface of the spinning disc, and was able to model ways how you might control this optimally, for instance with small flaps and holes to direct the airflow. NASA was doing the same sort of study, of course, but using spinning models in wind tunnels. I was able to get better results far more cheaply, just by smothering a Frisbee in sensors and flying it outdoors.” In the end the study turned from a hobby into a term paper, which NASA took up and sponsored. It was a great line on my CV when it came time for me to look for a job.

“I didn’t know all that,” George said. He grinned. “So you managed to combine career advancement with throwing Frisbees all day. I’m even more impressed.”

I shrugged. “You got to enjoy yourself.”

“Absolutely.”

I knew what I had to say next, even though it was difficult for both of us. “George — you always took an interest in my stuff, a proper interest, back when I was ten or eleven.”

We both knew what I meant. My dad was always faintly bemused by such stunts as experimenting with Frisbees. He would always throw a Frisbee or two with me. But he always spoke to me as a kid, if you know what I mean, which wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, even if I was a kid. George spoke to me as a junior engineer; he took me seriously.

“It made a difference. To my whole life.”

George just nodded; he knew what I meant, and he knew it had to be said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “I guess you were never going to be a Steve Zodiac. But you would have made a good Matthew Matic.”

“Who?”

“Fireball XL5… Something else that will disappear from the world with me. Never mind.”

George started to tire, so I called for a pod bus, and we found a bench and sat. Sitting there, breathing hard, I thought he looked ill for the first time during the visit. I could see the skull under his flesh, I thought, the skin drawn tight beneath his cheekbones, his mouth drawn in, his eyes perhaps creased in pain. A row of blank-walled modern houses, eyeless without windows, loomed before us, uncaring.

To my surprise George said he was thinking of selling up and moving away from England altogether.

“I’m going back to Amalfi,” he said. This is a small town on the Sorrento coast of Italy. “I went there after Rome, you know, after I went in search of Rosa. Once I found her I needed some time to recover, to get myself together again. The weather is still better there than here. I know it will be hard to sell up. Hell, it will be awful having to fly again. But I think I will be able to rest there, you know? That’s the way I’ve always thought of Amalfi, a place I could rest.”

Maybe that was true. Or maybe he simply wanted to be that bit nearer to Rosa, the sister he had lost for so long.

The pod bus arrived, sighing smoothly over the silvertop, its tiny noise a ghost of the roar of the monstrous torrents of traffic that had once poured this way.

When I emerged from the VR it was early morning, Alaskan time. I napped, showered, ate, worked for a few hours.

Then I put in a call to John. We had got into the habit of talking more regularly, after the George situation landed on us. It seemed the right thing to do.

John predictably thought a move to Amalfi was a bad idea. “It will kill him,” he said bluntly. “What’s the point? It’s a waste of time and money.”

“He’s dying anyway, John! Now he’s got this idea in his head, he has an ambition, a plan. It gives him things to do, arrangements to make. What else is he supposed to do with his time, dig his own grave? And as for the money, he’ll have more than enough when he sells the house. He isn’t asking anything from us, John. Let him do what he wants.”

John, a massive-shouldered VR looming in my Deadhorse hotel room, shrugged his shoulders. “OK. I doubt if we could stop him anyhow.”

As so often, John was subtly off-key in his dealing with George’s illness, to my ears anyhow. I appreciated his emptying his pockets to reunite us all in glorious VR immersive detail, but he also had a habit of reminding us constantly that he was doing it. He always lacked something in these situations, as if he didn’t quite feel what the rest of us were feeling.

I didn’t want to say any of this to him, but he saw some of it in my face, I think. Sour, deflated, I didn’t want a fight. “I said I would go back tomorrow. That is, tonight. I think there’s something else he wants to talk over.”

“Fine. I’ll alert the service provider.”

I stood up, meaning to break the connection. But John still sat there, on a crudely sketched upright chair, watching me.

I sat down again. “Is there something else?”

He glowered at me. “I’m wondering if you’ve done any more thinking about the other business.” By which he meant, of course, Morag.

“Gea and Rosa are progressing it. I guess I’ll get back to it later.”

“I still think you should give it up.” His face was always more massive, more obviously strong than mine; his expression had never looked so intense, I thought.

Suddenly it was obvious that he cared a lot more about the business of Morag than George’s illness. “John, why?”

“We’ve been over why. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for Tom. It’s bad for all of us. I don’t know what’s going on, the meaning of those strange recordings. But it’s morbid, Michael. You must see that. It’s like a hole you’re digging yourself into, deeper and deeper. Morag is dead. Whatever is happening with these images isn’t going to change that.”

I stared at him, trying to figure him out. I remembered what Rosa had had to say, that John seemed to have his own agenda in this — that he was hiding something. “Images.What images? This visitor, whatever she is, is real, John. She left footprints in the dirt! She’s real, and we have to deal with her.”

“Whatever she is, she’s not Morag.”

“Now, how would you know that? Why are you so concerned, John? Why do you want me to keep away from this?” Fishing, I said at random, “What are you scared of?”

That got a reaction. He stood up, knocking back his chair, which disappeared once it wasn’t in contact with his body. “I’m scared of nothing.”

“Then tell me what’s on your mind.”

For a moment he hesitated, as if on the verge of spilling something. Then he drove a fist into his palm. “Damn it, I wish I hadn’t sent you over to Rosa. That old witch is responsible for all this.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Just drop it,” he said now.

I said coldly, “Why should I do what you tell me? And if you think you can somehow pull the plug by cutting off the money, it won’t make a difference. Other people are involved now. Gea is funding the studies now from her own resources. Rosa, too. It’s out of your control, John.” I took a step toward his image, deliberately trying to provoke him. “It can’t be stopped, no matter what either of us wants. Is that a problem for you, John? What are you afraid of? ”

“You really are full of it, Michael,” he said with disgust. “You’ve blighted my entire life, do you know that? Are you going to keep this up until one of us is in the grave? Ah, to hell with you.” He waved a hand, cut the connection, disappeared.

He left me alone in my room, staring at empty space, shaking with anger, utterly baffled.

I have come to stay in Amalfi. I can’t face going back to Britain — not yet — and to be here is a great relief after the swarming strangeness I encountered in Rome.

I’ve taken a room in a house on the Piazza Spirito Santo. There is a small bar downstairs, where I sit in the shade of vine leaves and drink Coca Light, or sometimes the local lemon liqueur, which tastes like the sherbet-lemon boiled sweets I used to buy as a kid in Manchester, ground up and mixed with vodka. The crusty old barman doesn’t have a word of English. It’s hard to tell his age. The flower-bowls on the outdoor tables are filled with little bundles of twigs that look suspiciously like fasces to me, but I’m too polite to ask…

“You don’t have to read it if you want to,” George said.

We were sitting in his living room, my VR presence expensively projected so my ass seemed to nestle gratefully into one of George’s slightly overstuffed armchairs. The room had some mementos, photos and ornaments. Maybe that kind of clutter is inevitable when you get older, as the years pile up. But the equipment, the softscreens and the like, was modern, the furniture not too decrepit. There was little of the old man about the room.

George had given me a manuscript, a heap of six, seven hundred pages of word-processed text, dog-eared, bound together by bits of string. I couldn’t touch it, of course, or turn its pages. George said he had already sent me a data file with its contents, but he wanted me to see the manuscript itself. After I was gone he’d throw it in the fire.

I glanced again over the first page. “Who’s the I? You?”

“Of course. I wrote this out in Amalfi. One reason I stayed there so long. I wanted to get it all off my chest, to tell the story, even if it was only into the memory of a computer.”

“It’s the story of how you tracked down Rosa, to Rome.”

“Yes. And what I found there.”

“You’ve never shown this to anybody?”

“No. Who was there to show it to? But I don’t want it to disappear into the dark.” He shrugged, his shoulders like bony wings under a loose woolen sweater. “Do with it as you will.”

I could tell this meant a lot more to him than his casual tone implied. “George — what did you find, in Rome?”

“It’s all in here,” he said.

“I know. But I want to hear what you felt about it. You tracked down Rosa to the Order, I know that much…”

He had found his way to Rosa, who had taken him into the headquarters of the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins. The Order ran a vast subterranean complex, located beneath the Catacombs, the ancient underground Christian tombs on the outskirts of Rome. “It was nuclear bunker and Vatican crypt rolled into one,” George said.

It was in this environment that Rosa had been brought up.

“They called themselves sisters.”

“Like nuns?”

“No. Sisters. ” The Order had been like one vast family, he said. They were mostly women in there, very few men. “Everybody was everybody else’s sister or cousin, aunt or niece.”

“Or mother or daughter,” I said.

“Oh, everybody was a daughter. But there were very few mothers. I called them the queens. Not that that was the language they used. Matres — that was the word.”

One advantage of reading too much old science fiction is that your head becomes stocked with concepts to help make sense of such obscure hints. Suddenly I saw it. “Shit,” I said. “You’re saying that the Order was a hive mind. Is that it?”

“There wasn’t much mind about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell it was. I’m no sociobiologist. But I can tell you this. It wasn’t a human community. ” He tapped his manuscript again. “It’s all in there. And you know what? It was all an off-shoot of our family, from a deep root that seems to go back to the time of ancient Rome itself. Our family. That’s how Rosa got drawn into it. That’s how I did, I guess.”

No wonder Rosa had been intrigued by the strange collective organization of the Reef, I thought. I forced a grin. “You do always say we’re a funny lot.”

“And so we are.” His face was dark. “And now it’s happening again.”

“What is?”

“I once had a friend who helped me figure this stuff out. It’s in here.” He leafed through the manuscript, looking for a passage toward the end. “Here it is. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that the future has echoes in the present, too?… I thought I saw the future of mankind in that hole in the ground in Rome, Michael. Or a future. I can’t say I liked what I saw. And maybe now it’s happening again, with you and Morag. Echoes of the future in the present.”

“But why now? Why us?” I didn’t quite want to say, why me?

“Maybe because we seem to be at a dangerous time in our history, Michael.” He looked at the back of his hand, poked at skin stained brown by age. “You know, when I was a kid I think I never believed I would grow old, like this. I was never interested in gardening, because I thought I would never live to see a tree grow tall. You know why? The threat of nuclear war, of extinction in a flash. It hung over my whole childhood like a black cloud. But the hard rain never fell, and eventually the cloud went away.

“Now a new cloud has gathered over us, every bit as dark and threatening as before. We’re at another tipping point in human history. And who is here trying to show us how to keep our balance? You are, Michael. A Poole. Who else?”

“And you think that’s why I’m getting these visitations?”

He reached out to touch my hand, but my VR presence made that impossible, and he pulled back. “Think about it. If you’re right about this hydrate threat — and if you manage to lead the drive to stop it wiping us out — then you will be remembered as one of the most important humans who ever lived. Now, if I was a time traveler from the future, this would be exactly the kind of era I would be drawn to, and you would be exactly the kind of person I’d long to meet.”

“Shit.” I remembered that Gea had said something similar, so had Rosa — so had George himself, when he talked about the strange circumstances of my birth, the coincidence of the discovery of the Kuiper Anomaly. Suddenly I felt extraordinarily self-conscious, as if a corridor a thousand centuries long had opened up before me, and a million eyes were fixed greedily on my every move.

“George, if this is true, what should I do about it?”

He shrugged. “Just accept it. I mean, it makes no difference. You just have to do your best even so, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

We just sat for a while. Then I said, “It’s morning in Alaska. I ought to go to work.” I stood. “Can I come visit tomorrow?”

“Of course.” As my VR broke up, as his room turned transparent around me, I saw him in his chair, smiling, waving a gaunt hand, his fingers bent over and stiff.

As it happened the next day we hit a problem with the Higgs-field power plant of the moles, and I was kept too busy to get away. The following day was worse. By the third day I was putting off going to see George; I didn’t want to get immersed in all that difficulty again. Tomorrow, I told myself. Or the day after that.

I never saw him again. A week after that last visit, John called to tell me George was dead.

Even at full speed the journey back to the Nord took two full days.

The sisters spent their time alone, shut away from the Campocs and from Reath. Alia didn’t want to talk to anybody else but Drea. She didn’t want Bale; she couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her. And she certainly didn’t want to join in the Campocs’ group consciousness, that pale echo of the Transcendence. She didn’t even want Poole, in his Witnessing tank.

To get through this, she felt, she had to retreat into herself, become again the woman she had once been. She had to be Alia. So the sisters sat together, limbs entwined, as they used to when they were small.

But her feelings were complicated.

Alia found herself thinking that if Drea had not been here, then her sister would surely have been on the Nord and shared the still unknown fate of her parents. And if that had happened, Alia would be alone. Then she was wracked by guilt that she seemed to spend so much time thinking of herself, rather than about those who had been hurt. If she was so shallow, so self-obsessed, then how could she possibly imagine she could deal with a Transcendence?

It made it worse that they had no real news. The fragmentary reports from Nord were little more than a cry for help. As the long hours wore on, that uncertainty was impossible to bear.

Drea thought Alia could ask the Transcendence.

“You could talk to the Campocs,” Drea whispered. “They might be able to contact Leropa. Or Reath might have a way to contact another Transcendent community, nearer to the Nord. For all I know there might even be a Transcendent or two on the Nord… ”

Alia knew that was too simple. Drea still thought of the Transcendence as a kind of comms network, as if the Transcendents themselves were nothing but monitoring stations, their eyes cameras. But the Transcendence was more than that. The Transcendence was literally beyond human imagination. Indeed Alia herself didn’t have the words to express it. The only way to understand the Transcendence, she thought sadly, was to be part of it, as she had been, and even if she never went back to it again, there would always be a gulf between herself and her sister.

But, she felt instinctively, the Transcendence was not a place to seek help at a time of human crisis.

At last Reath alerted them that their journey was over.

The ailing Nord was surrounded by a multitude of craft, compact or slender, robust or delicate. The crowding visitors had come to give aid, Reath assured the sisters. “Your Nord has many friends.”

“But at least one enemy,” Drea said bleakly.

As they approached, cautiously picking their way through the crowd of ships and darting shuttles, their view became clearer. And even from a distance, Alia could see the Nord had been grievously harmed. The squat cylinder that was the core of the Nord’s architecture had survived — it would take the outright demolition of the ship to destroy that — but huge energies had been splashed against the hull, leaving blackened scars and deep notches cut into the Nord’s blunt symmetry. Away from the ancient core the superstructure of habs, antennae, sensors, and manipulators was tangled, as if a great wind had torn through that fragile artificial forest.

Some of the Nord’s ports were still functioning, at least. The semi-sentient machinery of the dock interfaced with the shuttle routinely, but a bit hesitantly, Alia thought. Perhaps machines could suffer shock, too.

The shuttle wouldn’t let them out until they donned face masks and gloves. Inside the Nord there were stretches of vacuum, and even where there was air it was likely full of toxins. With dread Alia pulled on her mask, the mask she had once worn to go into a Coalescence; it was terribly hard to have to don protective gear to enter your own home.

At last the hatches and locks slid open. A smell of burning washed over them, unfiltered by their face masks. And in the corridors, people in masks and gloves swarmed everywhere, cutting, patching, moving bits of equipment. The place was unrecognizable.

The sisters clutched each other. Alia had been determined to be brave, but even in that first moment her strength seemed to drain away. Drea was wide-eyed, unnaturally still, not even trembling — in shock, Alia thought.

There was no welcome for Alia and Drea: no message, no news, no words of reassurance, or confirmation of their fears. It was as if this damaged place had forgotten they even existed.

Reath tried to keep them focused. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “The Nord’s in chaos. It’s only three days since the disaster. People are just too busy… Don’t worry. I know the way. Just follow me.” As he made his way out of the shuttle he stumbled and drifted until he got hold of a rail: his body plan was designed for planet-living, not for this microgravity scramble. But he gamely got his orientation, beckoned to the sisters, and began to make his way through the corridors.

Alia followed. Drea moved mechanically.

The damage inflicted on the Nord had been internal as well as external. Corridor walls had been sliced through and rooms had burst open, their contents scorched and smashed. Great energies had been loosed here, Alia saw with a sense of outrage, vast clumsy mechanical energies poured out in this fragile human place. And if it was distressing now, it must have been a lot worse before, she saw from the ripped-open walls, the splashes of blood on the floor: those first few hours must have been dreadful indeed.

But she was being selfish again, she thought with a stab of shame, thinking only of herself, and how she had been spared the worst of it. If she had been here, where she was supposed to be, perhaps more lives could have been saved.

They clambered up through the Nord’s levels, heading for their home. Activity throbbed through the ship as partitions were patched, debris removed, fresh goods brought in. In emergency hospitals the wounded were arrayed in stacks, through which medic machines and human nurses drifted. The ship was badly hurt, Alia thought, but it was already recovering. But there were mortuaries, too, more arrays of bodies but full of ominous stillness.

Reath murmured, “I admit this is beyond me. I’m planet-born, an earthworm. Even on a planet the odd catastrophe strikes — an asteroid impact, a volcanic eruption, a quake. But at least the world survives; you can rely on that. Here, though, on this fragile ship, even while you were trying to save those around you, and cope with your own injuries, you had to try to stop the very fabric of your environment from unraveling around you. For if you failed…”

If they had failed, Alia thought bleakly, the Nord might have cracked open altogether, and tens of thousands of humans would have been sent scattering into the vacuum dark.

“You can see the patterns,” Drea said suddenly.

“What patterns?”

Drea pointed to an irruption through the roof of this corridor, a hole surrounded by smashed and distorted panels, and a matching hole at the angle of floor and wall. If you looked into one of those mighty gashes you could see how a crude tunnel had been cut through deck after deck, in rough straight lines. Peering down Alia thought she could make out the green of the Farm, even the hulking machinery of the Engine Room, far below.

Drea said, “They just came blasting through here, right through the fabric of the Nord. ”

Reath said, “The Nord must be riddled with these wounds. The scars of energy weapons, perhaps?”

“No,” said Alia. “Oh, weapons were surely used. But these tunnels are too wide.” Any ship-born, in any ship across the Galaxy, would have recognized such signs.

“The Shipbuilders,” Drea whispered.

For ship-born children across the Galaxy, the Shipbuilders were bedtime monsters. But they had at last come here. And in their voracious machines they had eaten their way through the soft body of the ship.

Reath watched this exchange, excluded from their tradition, his eyes narrow.

At last they arrived at the upper level, just beneath the hull, where their home had been. The delicate superstructure of the Nord had taken even more of a battering than its robust interior. Alia and Drea picked their way through a tangle of melted and snapped struts, fragments of smashed dome, bits of broken furniture and machinery. Debris floated about, unrestrained in the absence of artificial gravity, contained by an emergency force shield that shimmered over everything like a huge soap bubble. People picked their way through the rubble, searching, inspecting. The regular light globes had failed, and the few emergency lanterns cast long shadows everywhere, making the place even more of a visual jumble.

When the sisters reached their home, their worst fears were confirmed.

The ship’s hull had been smashed open here, leaving only a few drifting bits of translucent ceramic. The sisters pulled themselves through the wreckage, searching. Alia felt fragile, edgy. The conjunction of all this wreckage with shards of the familiar, with bits of stuff, fragments of furniture she thought she recognized, made this whole experience seem unreal.

On one section of floor she found a splash of dried blood, not yet cleaned up. It looked exactly as if a sack of the sticky stuff had been dropped and splashed open here. A sack about the size of a baby. Her stomach clenched. Suddenly she was vomiting. She got her face mask out of the way just in time to keep it clear of the bile that spewed out of her mouth.

A voice called her. “Alia…” She looked around wildly.

It was her father. He was waiting for her just outside the broken hull. Drea was already with him, her face buried on his shoulder. Alia launched herself up through the murky air.

Surrounded by a constellation of debris fragments, the wreckage of his home, Ansec lifted his arm around Alia. The three of them floated together, their arms wrapped around each other.

Gently Alia disengaged herself. “My mother—”

“She’s dead,” Drea said. “Bel is dead. ” Her voice was raw with weeping.

Suddenly all Alia could see was her mother’s face, its fading beauty, sometimes weak, always full of helpless love. “And the baby?”

“Gone, too,” said Ansec. “It happened so quickly…”

More conflicting emotions swirled in Alia. You drove me away so you could have this kid. And now you’ve lost him anyhow. It was a hard, savage thought that deeply shocked her. What kind of monster am I? But as she stared at her sister and her father, the complex muddle of these emotions washed away, leaving only regret, and an elemental anguish.

Reath touched her face, his long fingers useless for climbing but gentle and sensitive. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll cry later,” she said. It was true. She clung to thoughts of Michael Poole, whose family had been ripped apart by a similar tragedy. Not for the first time in her life, she sought comfort from his endurance.

Reath said grimly, “I think you’d better tell me what you know about these Shipbuilders.”

The Shipbuilders, like Alia’s own people, were relics of the deepest past.

In those early days, even after the discovery of the earliest faster-than-light drives, generation starships had been a common way to reach for the stars. Sailing on into the dark, traveling much slower than light, these ships were worlds closed over on themselves, with whole generations living out their lives between launch and landfall. Alia knew this lore well, for it was the heritage of her own people. But it wasn’t a reliable way to travel.

Most generation ships failed en route — or so it was believed, for many of them simply vanished into the dark. It wasn’t hard to see why. Since most generation ships had been launched at a time when mankind was still better at taking ecologies apart, rather than building and managing them, it wasn’t a surprise that so many expired long before their intended journeys were complete.

There were other hazards. Alia’s own ship had been overtaken by a friendly bunch of FTL travelers, and reconnected to the worlds of mankind. Other ships were not so lucky. Fat, helpless, resource-rich, they had fallen foul of pirates and bandits; there had been terrible tragedies, massacres in the silence between the stars.

But there were other sorts of survivor.

Sometimes, by accident or design, a ship would simply plough on into the dark, never making landfall. Things might go well for centuries — even after the deaths of the original crew, when nobody was left alive who could remember the point of the mission. Much longer than that, though, and things started to drift.

Over millennia languages changed, ethnic compositions drifted. Those few ships that lasted so long became like monasteries, with cowed, constrained crews laboring endlessly over tasks they barely understood, seeking to preserve a purpose set down by unimaginably remote ancestors, all for the benefit of descendants who would not be born for millennia more.

And some ships went on even longer.

Given enough time the brutal scalpel of natural selection cut and shaped the ships’ hapless populations, as always working to make its subject populations fit for their environment. And in the closed spaces of a generation starship there was always one common sacrifice, cut away by that pitiless scalpel: mind.

After all, on such a ship, what did you need a mind for? The ship would manage itself, more or less, or it wouldn’t have made it so far anyhow. With mind, the crew would only get restless, start to wonder what was beyond the walls — or, worse, start to tinker with the plumbing. In the first generation such activity would be against ship’s rules. In the hundredth it would be a sin, a taboo. By the thousandth generation it would be a selection pressure.

This was the origin of the Shipbuilders. Their ships had sailed on, even though the descendants of the first crew had long lost the intelligence that had enabled the ship to be launched in the first place. They maintained their ships’ essential systems, if only by rote. They even grew inventive over such fripperies as external superstructure. Their ships became gaudy, impossibly impractical creations, their purpose being to attract other such crews — and to mate.

And they remembered how to make weapons, for piracy — or rather, since piracy implies a conscious purpose, parasitism. It was necessary. No closed ecology was perfect; any starship required some replenishment. The Shipbuilders simply took what they needed.

“They are brutal,” Alia said to Reath, “because they are mindless. They launch themselves on missiles that just rip through the fabric of their targets, scooping up stuff indiscriminately.”

“And so they shot up your Nord, ” Reath said.

Alia said, “The Shipbuilders are the stuff of nightmares to us.”

“Because they might come out of the dark to attack you at any time. An arbitrary horror.”

“Not just that. The Shipbuilders come from the same place as us. We could have fallen, as they did. They are like us. ”

Unexpectedly Reath folded Alia in his arms. “No,” he said. “They are not like you. Never think that.”

For a heartbeat she was rigid with shock. Then she softened against his musty robe, and the tears came at last.

She spent the night with Drea, in a small compartment in Reath’s shuttle, orbiting the wreck of the Nord. They shared a bunk. Sometimes they held each other, and sometimes they just lay together, back to back, or nestling.

Alia wasn’t sure if she slept at all. Her head was full of pain, of inchoate longing and guilt and regret. She was still working through her muddled feelings about her mother and brother, the pain of the loss, her guilt over not being able to resolve their final argument. Underlying it all, though, was the simple flesh and blood reality of the loss. A family was never a fixed thing, she thought, but a process. Now that process had been cut short, leaving nothing but a bloody splash on the floor. It wasn’t just her mother who had died, not just a brother, but her family, too.

It seemed strange that such things could happen in a Galaxy governed by a superior form of consciousness. And while the Transcendence agonized over the loss of all the ancestors of mankind, here she was trying to grieve over her own mother. Perhaps, in her anguish and muddled pain, she felt some ghost of the higher, more exquisite regret that had impelled the Transcendence to attempt the Redemption.

And of course, she thought reluctantly, the Transcendence must be cognizant of the disaster, as it was of all of the past. The Transcendence must already, in principle, be seeking to redeem the suffering inflicted on her, as they did every scrap of pain and anguish right back to the dawn of human consciousness.

If she wished, Alia could Witness the Nord’s disaster. She could, through Hypostatic Union, live through it. She could even ride around inside her own mother’s head, for instance, and live out her death. But this was her family, her own mother. Even the idea of delving into the Transcendence and using its superhuman powers to inspect their suffering made her recoil.

And it wouldn’t be enough, she saw immediately. It could never be a true atonement for her, no matter how many times she lived through her mother’s life. For her mother’s suffering would still exist, for all Alia’s minute inspection of it.

This must be the heart of the Transcendence’s dilemma over Redemption, she realized. But if it was not enough to watch the past, not even to live it out through Hypostatic Union, not even if that process were driven to infinity — then something more must be sought.And the Transcendence must know it, too. But what more could there be? Curiosity burned in her, and a vast longing for a relief from her own pain.

Drea stirred in her half-sleep. Shame laced through Alia. In her Transcendental scheming she had once again forgotten her simple humanity. She held her sister, until Drea was still.

At the start of the next day the six of them — the three Campocs, Reath, Alia, and Drea, gathered in Reath’s shuttle, and shared hot drinks.

“Just like old times,” Seer ventured. Nobody responded.

They talked desultorily of the menace of the Shipbuilders.

“It’s hard even to resent them, hard to hate them,” Alia said dully. “Because they have no minds, no purpose. This is just what they do. But the menace is getting worse.”

“It is?”

“This is a time of peace, Reath. Once the Galaxy was full of warships; in those days the Shipbuilders were kept in their place. But now there aren’t so many weapons around.”

“They will have to be dealt with,” Bale said.

Drea said coldly, “Or welcomed into the family of mankind, to become a part of the awakening of the cosmos. Isn’t that how your friend Leropa would put it, Alia?”

Alia studied her sister, shocked. Alia had never seen such a hard expression on her sister’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”

Drea stared at the Campocs; they avoided her eyes. Drea said, “I’ve been doing some thinking. Alia, doesn’t it strike you as strange that just as you swim off into the Transcendence, this horror should be inflicted on the Nord?”

“I don’t understand—”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Drea said.

Bale put down his drink and leaned forward. “Drea, you’d better say what you have to say. Are you accusing us of something?”

“You bet I am,” Drea said fervently. “You set up Alia’s election to the Transcendence so you could use her as a tool to study the Redemption. Then you kidnapped me and threatened my life to force her to go on. And now she wanted to come home; you knew she was thinking about abandoning the whole cosmic mess. So you acted again, in your clumsy, vicious way—”

Alia put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Drea, please.”

Drea turned to her. “Don’t you see? The Redemption is about regret, about loss. So the Campocs have engineered this whole incident. They wanted to inflict loss on you, Alia. They wanted to give you something to regret. They took away your mother and your brother, to make you go back into the Redemption.”

Alia felt bewildered. “But how—”

“The Campocs led the Shipbuilders to the Nord.”

It seemed unbelievable. Alia looked to Reath for support, but his face was expressionless. If it were true -

Rage exploded in Alia. She stood and loomed over Bale, her fists bunching. “Is she right? Tell me. Lethe, I took you into my bed. If you have done this for your own twisted purposes, the truth is the least you owe me.”

Bale met her gaze calmly. She thought he seemed calculating, but his thoughts were seamlessly closed to her. “Maybe we did, maybe not. You’ll never know, will you? If I tell you it’s true, you might think I’m just trying to manipulate you. And if I deny it, you won’t believe me.”

Alia turned to Reath. “Do you think they did it? Did they lead the Shipbuilders here?”

“I don’t know,” Reath said reluctantly. “But whether they did or not, they have worked out how to use it against you, haven’t they?”

Bale said heavily, “But, whichever way — this is all your fault,Alia.”

She gasped; she felt as if she had been punched. “My fault?”

“You are the Transcendent-Elect. We are mere instruments. If not for you, none of this would have happened.”

She remembered her own musings of the night before, her own deep hunger to know what might be found at the higher levels of the Redemption. Surely Bale saw this in her; all his scheming wouldn’t work unless there was something in herself that wanted this, too.

She already knew far more about the Redemption than Bale ever had. She had seen the ultimate logic of the Restoration, the madness of infinity: if Bale was concerned that the Redemption would consume the resources of mankind in a vast but futile quest, he was right to doubt the Transcendence. She doubted, too. She was driven by curiosity and doubt — and, perhaps, by a hunger to know if the Redemption was possible after all, if it could somehow be achieved. And so she knew that she would do as Bale planned; she had no choice. She hated him for it.

“You are monsters,” Drea said to the Campocs.

Seer actually grinned. “Ah, but we’re charming monsters. Don’t you think?”

Alia loomed over Bale. “Very well. If the Transcendence is what you want, let’s call it now.” He quailed, but she descended on him. With a strength fueled by anger she grabbed his shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

And she slammed her awareness into his mind. He cried out, but he could not escape. Her force of will poured along the interconnections to his relations’ consciousnesses, and they screamed and writhed. Peripherally she was aware of Reath and Drea pulling away, shocked.

With the minds of the Campocs wrapped around her own like a cloak, she called for Leropa. “Take me back. I need you now. Oh, take me back!”

A month after George’s funeral, Ruud Makaay announced that he believed that the trial hydrate stabilization project off Prudhoe Bay was “mature” enough to be presented to the world’s decision-makers. A day was set.

It would be a key moment for us. After weeks of construction and development we now had a properly interconnected prototype network, dug out by the moles and extensively tested. All that remained to do was to start pumping liquid nitrogen through the veins we had burrowed into the methane-laden sediments of the seafloor: all we had to do, in other words, was switch on, and we ought to be able to reduce the temperature of Arctic seafloor strata across a rough circle kilometers across. “Serious chilling,” as Shelley Magwood said.

And we were going to do it in the full glare of media attention, and in the presence of every key agency of governance from the state government of Alaska up to the Stewardship itself. I tried to be confident. I’d pored over EI’s test results, analyses and modeling. I saw no reason why anything serious should screw up. I was optimistic; I usually am. And I expect people to behave rationally and for the common good. John always said I was an idealist, and he meant it as an insult; he was probably right.

For sure I was wrong to be confident, that particular day.

In a way, it all started to go wrong the moment I saw Morag.

On the morning of Makaay’s sales pitch I was late rising. Still staying in that dreadful sanatorium-like hotel in Deadhorse — and now plagued by visitations — I hadn’t slept well. Alone, I took a pod bus from the hotel, and rode in silence to the coast.

The layout at Prudhoe Bay was much as it had been before, when Makaay had tentatively launched the project’s integration stage before a crowd of engineers, employees, and one former vice president. You had the rig out at sea, clearly visible under a very pale, very cold blue sky, and on the shore once more EI had set up a marquee for the visitors. But the marquee was much larger and grander than the tent they had put up the last time. When I stepped inside into dry air-conditioned warmth, I was immediately immersed in a pleasant buzz of noise, of crowds. Somewhere music discreetly played, a warm bath of sound.

The marquee was actually several stories tall, like a transparent apartment block, its walls so clear you could barely see them except when the wind off the sea made them ripple. There was a fine view of our rig, and of the other old oil facilities that littered this part of the coast. The floor was carpeted wall to wall with a pale green-brown weave, colors sympathetic to the tundra colors of the North Slope. Above my head flags hung, a Stars and Stripes, the UN flag, banners bearing the EI logo and the cradled-child symbol of the Stewardship. All very classy: the EI folk had a lot of experience of this sort of event, and they knew how to impress without overwhelming.

There were cameras, microphones, and other sensors everywhere, and as I walked in big drones descended on me, and an animated cloud of electronic dust swirled around. Given there were plenty of VIPs, it was faintly disturbing such a chunk of that electronic attention was turned on me. I was one of the movers of the project, one of the faces that EI had presented to the public, so I suppose I should have expected it. But it was an eerie feeling to be so watched, as if I was stuck inside a giant eyeball.

And I tried not to think about George’s speculations that I might be under even more intense scrutiny by a curious future.

We had attracted quite a crowd. Throughout the marquee expensively dressed people mingled confidently, and there was a hubbub of loud conversation as acquaintances were made and renewed,

and, no doubt, deals were done, few of which would have anything to do with our hydrate project. Serving bots hovered in the air, bearing trays of drinks and exotic-looking snack foods. Here and there I saw subtle imaging imperfections: expensively shod feet suspended mysteriously a centimeter or so above the carpet, a gown billowing in a non-existent breeze, a shadow across a beautiful face cast by an invisible light source. I imagined only ten percent or so of these movers and shakers were here in person.

Here was the other side of the vast collapse in transportation infrastructure which Edith Barnette had, in part, overseen. Few governmental agencies, few corporations or other organizations actually “existed” anywhere meaningfully, except in cyberspace; and few crowds were ever as populous as they seemed. Well, on this occasion it was probably just as well that people projected rather than traveled. If so many VIPs had descended on Prudhoe Bay in the flesh, that dismal hotel in Deadhorse would have been overwhelmed, temperamental en suite bathrooms and all.

However, somewhere in that crowd, Edith Barnette was here in person once more. And so was my brother John, and Tom and Sonia, and Shelley, and Vander Guthrie — all the core team who had driven the project, in their different ways, from the beginning. I walked through the crowd, trying to pick out familiar faces, and to hold my nerve.

That was when I saw Morag.

She was moving through the crowd, some distance from me. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I helplessly turned that way, as I always did. I thought she was turning toward me, I thought she smiled — but before I was even sure it was her, I lost her behind a knot of gabbling VIPs.

I didn’t want this to be happening. In the last few days I had suffered this kind of visitation over and over — and suffered is the word. There had been no repeat of that close encounter out on the tundra I had had before, when she had smiled, and let us take her picture, and record her words, even if we couldn’t understand what she had to say. I was back to a world of glimpses, a flash of strawberry blond hair in my peripheral vision, a soft voice. And there were more of these visitations than ever before, many more of them, sometimes more than one a day. I didn’t want to deal with her, not this way, not if I was going to be so tantalized, and certainly not on a day like today.

But then I saw her again, on the far side of the marquee this time. And when I looked away, there she was again, this time close to the small podium at the front of the marquee. It was as if she were teleporting around the place.

I grabbed a vodka and tonic off a floating bot’s tray and downed it quickly.

John approached me, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. A small, dark, intense figure was at his side: Jack Joy, I recognized after a moment, the Lethe Swimmer. John seemed uncomfortable to be tailed by the guy. But he had got Jack involved in the first place, and since the Swimmers had put money into the project Jack had a perfect right to be there.

Jack Joy held out a hand, but his unreal fingers just brushed my sleeve; he grinned apologetically. “Sorry I couldn’t haul my ass here in all its glory. Commitments, pressures — you know. Actually I really am sorry. Look around, the sky is full of free booze!…”

Distracted by the glimpses of Morag, I wasn’t interested in anything the man had to say. I looked at John. It was the first time we had been together in person for weeks. I felt that usual complicated emotional tug toward my brother, a mix of rivalry and helpless love.

“So here we are,” I said.

John shrugged. “We’re a strange family. We gather in person for a function like this, but we send VR projections to a funeral.”

I shrugged. “George always said, We Pooles are a funny lot. ”

“If you say so. Anyhow you’re the Poole, I’m a Bazalget, remember.” He stared at me hard, and I thought I knew what was on his mind: Morag, the whole phenomenon that had become such an issue between the two of us. But we couldn’t talk now, not with Jack Joy there.

Jack said to me, “I was just saying to your brother — don’t you think it’s an impressive place? Prudhoe Bay, the whole oil complex. I mean, look around. For the United States it was a historic achievement to be able to establish an oil industry up here, in a place of Arctic dark and cold and thousands of kilometers from civilization. You may as well have had to develop an oil industry on the Moon. In fact it might have been easier on the Moon, because here you have all this fucking tundra all around. You know, you make a wheel track on that stuff and it’s there forever…” His tone was clipped, his speech rapid, and he kept flashing nervous grins. He was sweating, a small virtual incongruity in the air-conditioned comfort of the marquee.

I said, “So you don’t approve of all that eco-protection, Jack.”

“Approve, disapprove, it was the flavor of the times. It still is.” He bunched a fist. “In this day and age, a person who wants to achieve something is hedged around by bleats about don’t hurt this, don’t disturb that. I always say, if God hadn’t wanted us to shake up the planet He wouldn’t have given us the mechanical excavator.” He nodded, as if trying to convince himself. “And in the end it’s all bullshit.”

“It is?”

“Of course! Look at the precious tundra that those roughnecks weren’t allowed to take a piss on. When the permafrost melted it just became a swamp! So what difference did all that effort to preserve it make? None. It just got in the way of getting the job done, is all.”

I turned to John. “So is this the way all Swimmers think?”

He looked increasingly uncomfortable. This guy isn’t with me. “The Swimmers are a broad church, Michael. We live in complex times, with challenging, interconnected problems that may demand out-of-the-box thinking. You have to have a forum where radical opinions can be expressed…” But all this sounded like a party line; he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself.

Jack Joy said, “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mike. I see some people I know. I’ll catch you later. This is your day, enjoy it, I wish you success, et cetera et cetera.” Sweating and grinning, he sidled away from us.

John eyed me. “I’m sorry if that guy upset you.”

“He didn’t.” I found Jack Joy faintly disturbing, I guess, but I didn’t take him seriously. How wrong I was.

John was studying me. “You look like shit.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“You haven’t been sleeping.” He stepped closer to me, and said more quietly, “You’ve been seeing Morag, haven’t you?”

I glanced around, at the hovering dust drones, the crowding VR VIPs. “Keep your voice down, John. All right. Yes, I see her. I keep seeing her. It’s driving me crazy. Even if I fall asleep, I hear her voice, smell her breath, she’s there, but when I wake she’s gone, and I can’t sleep again.”

“But she isn’t speaking to you,” he said. “Not like that one time.” He stared at me intensely, hungry.

In that moment I was struck by how he had aged — the thickened neck and jaw, the burly body, the flesh of his face slowly crumpling, the marks of a man in middle age. But there was a passion in his eyes I had rarely seen before. My brother didn’t do passion. “This really matters to you, doesn’t it? The whole business with Morag. Why, John?” And I made another leap of intuition. “Do you think you know what she’s trying to tell me?Is that it?”

I expected him to deny this, but he just stared at me, that strange, vulnerable mix of anger and longing all over his face. He said grimly, “We have to get this resolved.”

“Fine,” I said, scared, bewildered.

I think we were both relieved when we heard a soft chiming, much amplified; it was Ruud Makaay rapping a pen against an empty glass, calling us to attention.

Barnette and Makaay stood alone on a plain stage, with a view of the offshore rig framed in the big clear wall behind them.

Technicians performed last checks on the big nitrogen-liquefaction plant we’d installed on the rig. And, more importantly, we saw maps of the network of tunnels the moles had already dug out through cubic kilometers of the fragile seabed strata. Now the wall began to fill up with images from the project. We saw a mole’s eye view of a tunnel being dug into the undersea rock. “Although actually,” Shelley had pointed out to me, “since the tunnel is being constructed behind the mole as it burrows along, that’s actually a mole’s-ass view…”

Makaay said, “We call this project the Refrigerator. It isn’t a fancy name, but then I’m not a fancy guy, just an engineer who likes to get the job done — and I’ve never worked on a job of more significance than this. I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved so far, and I hope to persuade you to support us in the future, as we seek to extend our technology through all the threatened hydrate strata around both the north and south poles…”

As Makaay spoke, John and I drifted through the crowd toward the podium. Here we found Shelley, with Vander Guthrie, Tom and Sonia, other project people. There was no seating plan, no front row — in fact there were only a few seats of any kind. Ruud Makaay, an expert at crowd manipulation, didn’t like obviously stage-managed events. He believed in what he called “choreographed informality.” He was aiming for a human warmth that would belie the usual accusations of arrogance that stuck to projects like this. There would come a point when I, like the other key players on the project, would be invited to come forward to be presented to Barnette, like the winner of some VR-soap award. But, happily, I wouldn’t be called on to make any kind of speech.

“Of course we can give you any technical detail you want,” Makaay was saying. “Our analysis of the network in terms of connectivity and robustness has assured us that every functional parameter has been addressed, and all local geological conditions accommodated — and all this put together by our moles, working solo and in cooperation. Those little critters have done a good job.” Behind him a blown-up image showed a mole pushing its whirling snout up out of the ground, and it waggled this way and that, as if seeking our approval. It was a shameless bit of anthropomorphism, but it worked, and won Makaay a smattering of laughter and applause.

The crowd, evidently enjoying the show, were sympathetic for now — though whether they would be when they went back to their offices, and we started to ask for serious funding for the roll-out, was another matter. But we project types were all tense, agitated, sipping drinks and grinning nervously at each other. Even Tom grasped Sonia’s hand so hard their knuckles were white. John seemed distracted, though. I thought he looked at me as much as at the presentation. Even now, at this crucial moment, the Morag business was obviously on his mind.

To a little more applause, Makaay yielded the floor. Edith Barnette stepped forward, utterly at ease, as always wearing her years well.

“I’m not qualified to talk to you about the majestic engineering we’re here to witness today,” she said. “I’m not even qualified to talk about methane hydrate reservoirs, which are causing such concern to those who monitor our climate for us, friendly minds both human and artificial. But I can, I think, grasp the wider implications of what is happening here today. For I understand heroism.” Her voice was soft, but it carried to every corner of that big marquee, and the faces of our guests, important or self-important, intelligent or merely self-obsessed, were locked on her. “A new kind of heroism,” she said. “A heroism that seeks to save, not merely oneself, not just one’s friends or family, not even one’s nation or creed. It is a heroism that seeks to save the planet itself, and all its fragile cargo of living things. It is a heroism that seeks to save the very future…”

Standing there with the vodka coursing through my blood, her words took me back to the hopeful days when President Amin had woken us all up from our nightmare of oil dependency. Amin’s own story was a mixture of meritocracy and openness. She was the child of Iraqi refugees, and her journey, if not quite log cabin to White House, was pretty much the twenty-first century equivalent. Amin had had a simple vision, comprehensible to all, and by asserting it she managed a national, indeed global transformation.

Of course the demons fought back. Amin’s assassination had been a great punctuation mark. And then had come 2033, the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing.

It had been a HANE, as the counter-terrorists called it, a high-altitude nuclear explosion, a bomb not much bigger than the Hiroshima device, lofted a couple of hundred kilometers high aboard a small tourist spaceplane. X-rays cooked all but the most hardened low-Earth-orbit satellites, while gamma rays battered the upper atmosphere, releasing high-energy electrons that disabled any sensitive electronics in line of sight, and charged particles made the Earth’s magnetic field oscillate so that electric surges ruined cables and circuits. And a bloodred aurora had spread across the skies of a hemisphere, a sight you would never forget. The developed world was paralyzed for eight days.

It was one hell of a strike. But even now, fourteen years later, nobody knew for sure who had delivered it. An anonymous message called the “Happy Anniversary” note was sent to the FBI. It was thought perhaps it referred to the two-thousandth anniversary of Jesus’ crucifixion. Perhaps anti-Christians were responsible, then — or they may have been a Christian splinter sect — or perhaps it was just mischief-making by terrorists determined to stir up as much trouble as possible.

There were plenty of people who had problems with the Stewardship. Abroad, there were many who resented the sudden about-turn of America from the world’s worst polluter to a new conscience of the planet. And at home, many groused at our new engagement with the world: America was “a giant submitting to fleabites,” as one opponent put it. For sure there had been plenty of people who wanted to lash out in inchoate rage, at somebody or something. It could have been anybody.

But the United States and the world had recovered. The bombing was treated as a wake-up call. The years of national introversion were over, and America began to take a lead in the wider program Amin had always envisaged. Barnette now spoke of how the Stewardship drew on deeper traditions of American environmentalism, dating back to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and landmark pieces of environmental-protection legislation like the Endangered Species Act.

And Barnette, speaking quietly but calmly, seemed to summon the ghost of Amin with every word.

“I hear much talk of despair, these days. We are in a Bottleneck, a time of maximum danger. Well, perhaps that’s so. But I don’t counsel despair. For all the ages to come will stand in the shadow of what we do today, and their people will look back on our generation, and they will say, they were heroes. And they will envy us…”

I was distracted. I thought I saw Morag again, out of the corner of my eye, sliding through the group of VIPs as silent as a fish in deep water.

And then everything started to unravel.

Barnette kept talking. But Gea appeared at my feet, a little robot rolling quietly on the green carpet. “Do not be alarmed. Nobody can see me but the project team. We have a problem on the rig.”

I hissed, “What kind of problem?”

She conjured up a VR image. It appeared in a glowing cube at our feet, a box of light like an aquarium. A young man stood on a metal platform. His image, ten centimeters high, was finely detailed; I could see the rivets in the plates beneath his feet, like pinheads. He was holding a cylinder from which wires protruded. The man in the fish tank was nervous; you could see his sweat. He was no more than a kid, I realized, younger even than Tom. We stood around in a circle and peered down at this thing, me, Shelley, John, Tom, Sonia, Vander.

Others were distracted by our behavior. Jack Joy came sidling up from nowhere and joined our group. He was watching us suspiciously, but I was confident he couldn’t see the fish tank. But Barnette kept talking, in bold, bright colors, and kept most people’s attention focused; perhaps she, too, had heard what was going on, and was doing her part in keeping everything together.

Tom whispered, “I don’t get it. What’s that he’s holding?”

“It’s a mole,” I said. “Partially disassembled. It’s lacking its nose cone, the spiral bit.”

Sonia was glaring down, her eyes sharp. “I don’t know anything about the technology, but the setup’s obvious. I’ve had to deal with it a dozen times. You can see it in his posture, his body language. He’s a suicide bomber.”

I think we all knew it, on some deep level. But having Sonia say it out loud in her precise soldier’s tones was something else.

Shelley whispered, “He’s one of our technicians. I suppose we weren’t hard to infiltrate. And you can see how he’s made his bomb. That mole might be lacking its nose, but it still has its Higgs-energy heart.”

I stared at her. “The Higgs pod?” I had been intimately involved in the design of the pods; they were intrinsically safe anyhow, and were laden with security factors. “I can’t imagine how he’s rigged it.”

“Then he’s more imaginative than you, Michael. Say good-bye to innocence.”

Tom asked, “What happens if it goes up?”

“Like a small nuke,” Shelley said.

Sonia glanced around. “How close are we?… Too close, I guess. We ought to think about evacuation.”

“It’s already in hand,” Gea said quietly. And, looking around, I saw that people were quietly being led out of the back of the marquee. Gea said, “The worst may not happen. There are measures in place.”

Sonia didn’t say anything, but she looked dubious.

I felt bemused, battered. I was aware of my heart beating slowly, steadily. It was all happening too quickly for me to take in. I didn’t even seem to be concerned that my son was standing with me here at ground zero. I just stood there, waiting to see what happened next.

John tugged my sleeve, and drew me aside. “You saw her again, didn’t you?” he hissed.

“What?”

“Morag. You saw her. Just before Gea showed up. Listen, Michael.” He was conflicted, I saw, bursting with whatever he had to say, but still hesitant. He glanced back at Tom, to make sure he couldn’t hear. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

I almost laughed. “Now? Can’t it wait?”

“It’s to do with Morag,” he said heavily, painfully. “Michael, if we don’t get through this — or if Morag shows up again, and she tells you herself — Lethe, I can’t believe I’m talking about a fucking ghost—”

His intensity broke through my numbed detachment. “Tell me what, John?”

He took a breath. “About me. Morag and me. Something you never knew. We meant to tell you — we didn’t want to hurt you — but we always waited, waited, and then she died, and I couldn’t bear to hurt you again.”

“You had an affair.” Suddenly I saw it. Of course she had been a friend of John’s first. Even after our marriage they had worked together, she and John, the bio-prospector and the environmental-compensation lawyer, immersed in complex and urgent twenty-first-century issues. “All those times I was working, when travel was just impossible and I had to stay away, when Morag and Tom stayed with you—” In my head the events of those years shivered into fragments, whirled like kaleidoscope pieces, and came down in a different pattern.

“We didn’t mean for it to happen,” John said, more defensive now. “All right? It wasn’t deliberate. But we were thrown together, and you weren’t there. You weren’t there, Michael. And then the baby…”

“The baby who died,” I said stupidly. “The baby whose birth killed my wife. What about the baby?”

But of course I knew the answer. The baby had never been mine.

Tom was looking at us both through the crowd. His face was empty of expression. He knew something was wrong between us, but he didn’t know what.

“I knew I had to tell you sometime,” John said desolately. “I never had the guts. And then Morag showed up. What if that’s why she’s come back, Michael? That’s what I keep asking myself. What if she’s come back to tell you what we did, me and her?”

I don’t remember throwing the punch.

People scattered around us, shocked. Suddenly John was on the floor, blood streaming from his mouth, and my fist felt as if I had slammed it against a wall.

Shelley Magwood grabbed my arm and dragged me away. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on with you two, but we’ve got enough trouble here.”

Around us the flow of VIPs out the back of the marquee was becoming noticeable. Barnette was still talking, but her message was now one of reassurance, admonitions to keep calm. And in the little fish tank, the tiny figure of the bomber was gesticulating, shouting tinnily at unseen negotiators.

John slowly got to his feet. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I said, “All right. I’m calm. Are they getting anywhere with the nut?”

“He’s a suicide bomber,” Shelley said, her voice full of anger and despair. “What do you think?”

“Can’t we just disable his trigger?”

“Not remotely. He’s got it figured out pretty well. And he has a dead man’s switch.” She laughed, hollow. “The kid’s a good engineer. Our only hope is to talk him down. But we can’t even figure out what he wants.”

“He probably wants many things.” Jack Joy stood beside me, sweating harder than ever. “Some even contradictory. But we all act for many reasons, don’t we?”

I stared at him, trying to figure him out. “What the hell do you want?… Can you see this?”

He tapped his ear. “I have my own channels.”

Shelley glared at him. “Who are you? Have you got something to do with this?”

He wouldn’t answer. He said mournfully, “It isn’t personal. Please believe that. I as an individual in fact sympathize with your goals, on this specific project; the hydrates are clearly a menace. But it’s what you represent, you see. The movement of which you have become a part. The philosophy behind your actions. The futile attempt to resist a change in the world’s natural order, when we should be relishing the opportunities opened up to us. The curtailing of our liberties in the process. The accruing of power by unelectable and unaccountable organizations and individuals.”

It was a type of argument I had heard many times before. But this wasn’t the time for bullshit. I tried to grab his collar, but he was a VR; my hand passed harmlessly through his shirt, scattering flesh-colored pixels. I snapped, “If you’ve got some information, say so.”

“I apologize,” he said almost formally. “Sincerely. I like you, Mike. I do, really!” He winked out of existence.

And, two kilometers out to sea, the bomber pressed his trigger.

“Awareness is the core of the Transcendence,” Leropa said to Alia. “Think of it as an awakening. In sleep you are aware only of yourself, your dreams and hopes and fears. It is consciousness of a sort, an awareness of self. But as you awake from sleep, you become more aware of yourself, and of a wider universe beyond your own head — and of other consciousnesses like your own, your parents, your siblings. It is essential. You must see the universe through their eyes, understand how they feel, before you can care. ”

“It is more than care,” Alia said. “It is love.”

“Love, yes! Love is the full apprehension of another soul, and the cherishing of her. And through love you awaken to a new level, a full awareness of others, so your own consciousness expands further. This is a deep root of our very humanity,” Leropa said. “It is believed that consciousness evolved as a way to deal with other consciousnesses. So full self-awareness is not possible in isolation, but only through an engagement with other minds. And the deepest such engagement is through love.

“Thus the Transcendence is built on awareness. On love as you have experienced it. But it is more than that, for the Transcendence is more than human.

“The Transcendence reaches across all of space. Each new soul drawn into the Transcendence, like yourself, enriches the whole. And each new form of humanity, each with its own unique way of perceiving the universe, deepens and widens our apprehension of the universe. All of this is brought into the center and shared among all. It is no coincidence that the Transcendence’s political presence is called the Commonwealth, for this merged awareness is the true common wealth of mankind.

“And there is more still. By reaching around the curves of time, the Transcendence is awakening to the past, too, awakening to the rich experience of every human who ever lived. This is an extension of the Commonwealth in time as well as space, to kinds of people who once existed, as well as those who exist now. In the end the universe will be like a jewel held in the palm of the hand, its every facet and glimmering refraction — yes, and every flaw — fully known and understood. This is the ultimate prize.

“Why must the Transcendence aspire to this? Because it is essential if we are to survive. Alia, the more awake you become, the more control of your environment you acquire, and the more power over your destiny you acquire. We must escape from our long dreaming if we want to live!

“And then there is our greater fate. Beyond the walls of time there are greater minds still, Alia. We call them monads. Our universe might not have been; there were other possibilities. Why our universe? Because of us — because of our potential to grow into a full apprehension of the cosmos, an expression of the objective cosmos in subjective awareness. So you see, Alia, we humans, through the Transcendence, will become the consciousness of the universe itself — and we will, we must, fulfill the great project of the monads.

“And all of this is built on love!”

Once more Leropa had met Alia on Earth, beneath the ruin of the ancient Wignerian cathedral. After the intensity of emotions on the Nord, it was dismaying to return to the drab, subdued community of undying. Even Leropa was like a shadow. The undying aspired to something higher, but it was as if they had forgotten what it was to be human, Alia thought.

It was almost a relief to plunge once more into the mysteries of the Transcendence.

Now, with Leropa’s guidance, she thought she could see its immense transhuman ideas like vast clouds in the dark, and the thoughts that crackled like lightning between those clouds. And in every direction she could see the awareness of the Transcendence elaborating, multiplying, exponentiating, its vast intellect growing as she watched.

But as they floated through this sky of consciousness, Leropa was not literally a guide for Alia, her words not a literal whisper in Alia’s ear. This was the Transcendence; Alia and Leropa were both parts of a greater whole, and yet expressions of it, as Alia’s own consciousness might briefly be focused on a bruised finger. But the mote that had been Alia found it helpful to cling to the metaphor of novice and guide.

And now, here in the dark, Alia had come to learn the truth about Redemption, and she listened to Leropa speak of love.

“The Transcendence loves you. The Transcendence loves every human. It must, for love is the full apprehension of another, and so of oneself. Love is the foundation of everything, Alia. Can you see that? And it is love, the cherishing even of the unhappy past, that has led to the Redemption. For the Transcendence to become complete we must redeem the suffering of the past — we must — and we can only do that by apprehending it, loving it.

“First there is the Witnessing — a trillion tiny viewpoints like yours, Alia, each studying some corner of the past, some tiny lost life, and integrating it into a greater awareness of the whole. The next level of awareness is the Hypostatic Union, in which your consciousness is merged with your subject in the past — and you express your love for her by sharing every particle of joy in her life, absorbing every morsel of pain. A full Hypostatic Union of every soul in past and future with every other, the ultimate logic, would require an infinite effort. But the Transcendence will be/is infinite and eternal; for such an entity an infinite recursion is possible, and so it will/ mustcome to pass. You understand that now.

“But all of this, even the fully realized Hypostatic Union, is a mere viewing. And even when viewed the suffering will still exist out there in the past.”

“Yes,” Alia said. She was on the verge of understanding — almost thrilled by the intoxicating ideas. “Even Hypostatic Union is not enough. We must do more.”

“Yes,” Leropa said. “And we can do more.

“It is as if, up to now, we have viewed the past as a magnificent tapestry. We follow every thread, every life, as it weaves its unique way through the tremendous patterns of the whole. But we have seen the past as a fixed thing, frozen; we have never allowed ourselves to tamper with it, to change the slightest detail in the weave — not even to repair the most obvious flaws, or to amend the most grotesque suffering.”

Suddenly Alia saw what the next level of Redemption must be — what the Transcendence had done.

“We have touched the past,” she whispered.

“Yes.” Leropa’s eyes glittered.

Leropa showed her Michael Poole, in a glittering crowd of people, an explosion some distance away, out to sea, frozen in time like a deadly flower.

“Watch now,” Leropa said.

The flash came first. The curtain-wall of the marquee turned black, saving my eyesight. For a fraction of a second we all stood there in the dark.

Then the shock wave hit us. Bam.

The marquee was whipped away in the wind. Under the sudden sky the whole world was full of immense energies that roared over me, oblivi-ous to my presence. Around me VIPs fell like skittles, or went whirling away into the air. It was like being overwhelmed by some immense wave.

When the shock passed I found myself on my back, all the air smashed out of my lungs, staring up at a racing sky. I struggled to sit up.

Over the sea, a mushroom cloud was gathering. Small, perfect, symmetrical, it was a return of a twentieth-century nightmare. Around its base great streamers of fire gushed up out of the water. I guessed that we had managed to destabilize some of the very hydrate deposits we were supposed to secure, that the flames came from the ignition of some of the released methane. Now a wind began to rush the other way, at my back, as the huge blast of heat over the ocean began to push the air skyward, and suck colder air in from the land.

I was surrounded by wreckage, scattered people. I couldn’t see Tom, or John, or Shelley, or any of the others. I had no idea what had become of Makaay and Barnette. There wasn’t a trace left of the low stage where they’d been standing.

A camera drone hovered before my face, not five centimeters from my nose. The camera was a spinning sphere the size of my thumb. A tiny portal dilated open and a jewel-like lens glinted down at me. I stared back, bemused.

I didn’t seem to be functioning. I was having trouble breathing, as if iron bands had been clamped around my chest. I couldn’t seem to feel anything, not even the hard ground under my back, or the Arctic chill, and I could hear nothing but a vague, dull roar. It was almost comforting to sit there, while running people, spinning drones, bits of ripped-apart marquee flapped all around me.

And Morag was beside me.

She sat on the ground, not a hair out of place despite the wind. But her face was creased with anxiety. “Are you OK?”

I could hear her, but I couldn’t hear any other damn thing. I answered her question. I flexed an arm, testing the joints. “I think so.”

And then the meaning of our mundane exchange hit me. She was here. I could even make out her words. I stared at her. “Shit. Morag.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it?”

We sat there for one more heartbeat. Then I reached up, and suddenly she was in my arms, warm and real.

I think I blacked out.